 Are you thinking about studying linguistics at university? In this video I'll go over five reasons that make linguistics a great subject to study. And I'll also talk about five reasons that may mean that it's not the right choice for you. In any event, by the end of this video, you'll have a much better idea of what to expect when you enter a linguistics program. My name is Martin Hilpert, I'm a professor of English linguistics at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Since you clicked on this video, my guess is that you're thinking about linguistics, but you're still trying to figure out if it's the right choice for you. So first of all, that's not unusual. Linguistics is not a subject that is taught at school, so it can be difficult to figure out what exactly to expect from a university program in linguistics. Just to make it clear, linguistics, that is the scientific study of language. It's not just learning foreign languages, although that is an important part of it. Linguists try to figure out how the human capacity for linguistic communication actually works in the brain, in society, in the development of children, across cultures, and across different time periods. So you probably knew that already, so let me get into the five reasons that make linguistics a great choice for your study plans. Reason number one is that you will gain a fuller understanding of language and how it is used. Think of all the things that we do with language. We read and write, we argue, we educate, we give compliments, we negotiate, we apologize, we hint at things, and so on and so forth. Studying linguistics will help you understand how all of this hangs together and how all of this works. Languages have been investigating how language is used, how it is learned, how it is structured, and how it changes over time. So this is knowledge that you can actually put to use every time that you're speaking or listening. So there are lots of things at university that you can study that are not exactly practical. Language is a tool that you use all day, every day, so linguistics lets you understand how that tool actually works. Reason number two, you will learn what makes us human. There's only one species on the planet that has language, and that will be us. Now very importantly, animals communicate. Animals can even learn to use a large number of symbols, but animals don't communicate in order to wish you a happy birthday or crack a joke or tell a story from back in the day. They don't walk in on you and tell you, hey man, I like your haircut, that's nice. So that doesn't take anything away from the inherent dignity and value of animals. It's just an observation that human language has structures and functions that are absent from animal communication systems. Linguists have studied the similarities and differences between human language and animal communication systems in great depth, and the results actually give us a greater appreciation, both for the incredible sophistication of animal communication and for the wonders of human language. And not least, we learn a thing or two about the evolution of human language. Reason number three, you will be able to follow your own interests. So because language is relevant for basically every aspect of our lives, linguistics is incredibly diverse, so much so that you'll be able to follow your own interest and simply go deeper into those areas that fascinate you the most. So for example, if you're interested in the way the human brain processes language, there's a branch of linguistics that deals with that. It's called neurolinguistics. If you want to find out how babies learn their first words, you can study first language acquisition. If you can't stop thinking about dialects and how people use their language in different ways, well, good news. There is a branch of linguistics called sociolinguistics. If you like working with computers, well, there's computational linguistics and so on and so forth. The list goes on for quite a bit. So if you study linguistics, I can guarantee that you will find at least one area that corresponds closely to the ideas that you care about the most. Reason number four, you will get an access to different ways of doing science. Linguistics is quite unique in the way it's connected to other sciences, in the humanities, in the social sciences, in engineering, and in the natural sciences. So think about the many other fields that are working with language and literature and history or in philosophy. Those fields are dealing with the interpretation of linguistic texts. Psychology deals with the processing and production of language. In computer science, researchers retrieve information from large databases of text. Biologists study communication in primates and other species. So linguistics is really connected to all of these fields. And the result is that studying linguistics gives you the insight that there are many scientific approaches that share the goal of understanding the world a little bit better. But at the same time, these fields use very different methods to get there. So in short, you acquire some scientific literacy, but that's not all. There's an important lesson here, namely one of humility. You learn that there is no single best way to approach language. There are different communities of researchers that develop different habits with different benefits. So science is about collaborating and about combining the best ideas from different traditions. And linguistics puts you in a unique position to be part of that enterprise. Reason number five, when you study linguistics, you will not just learn about linguistics. You will actually learn how to do linguistics. Now, in many fields, specifically in the humanities, studying means that you read texts, you try to understand them, and then you talk about them. I'm not criticizing that. That certainly has its place, but it's not quite what happens in linguistics. When you study linguistics, you actually learn how to carry out linguistic analyses. So you will collect your own data. That is, you will perhaps make recordings of conversations or you will retrieve examples from a linguistic database. And then you will analyze the data and you will draw your own conclusions. At no point will you sit in front of your computer with an empty word document trying to think of something to write. So linguistics has been developing quite rapidly with regard to its research methods. So linguists carry out experiments. They work with video data. They use statistical and computational modeling and many more methods. So when you study linguistics, you will become familiar with methods that are applied in similar form in other fields, such as psychology, sociology, economics, computer science and data science. OK, so there we have it. Five reasons that make linguistics a great subject to study at university. Now, before you send off that envelope with your application materials, let me discuss five more points about linguistics. And this time, critical ones. What are the reasons that linguistics might not be the right choice for you? Reason number one, studying linguistics is not a vocational training. One question that you're going to get a lot from your parents and friends is this one. Well, what are you going to do with it afterwards? Sure, there are many fields where having some knowledge of linguistics is helpful or even required. If you want to be a schoolteacher for foreign languages or a translator, an interpreter, an editor, in all of these fields, a degree in linguistics is a good thing to have. But let's be honest, you might not know at this point what it is that you want to do after university. And even if you do, a degree in linguistics will typically be just the first step towards the qualification that you're going to need eventually. So is a university course in linguistics a waste of time? No, the way I see it is like this. The point of getting any basic degree at university is to acquire general skills and good working habits. So you learn to organize yourself. You learn to work with complex ideas. You learn how to work in a team. You learn how to do your homework without anyone telling you to. The subject matter of your studies. That is there to make this exercise worth your while. It's a ton of work that you're doing and that work is a lot more bearable if it's about something that you care deeply about and that you find fascinating, like, for instance, language. So even though studying linguistics is not a vocational training, once you've completed a degree in linguistics, you're actually ready to take on new challenges that may be quite different. Reason number two, linguistics has internal conflicts. So one thing that you're going to find out when you study linguistics is that there are very different ways of doing it. So much so that there are conflicts between different schools of linguistics that are trying to discredit whatever it is that the other group is doing. For example, there is a major divide in linguistics between what is called formal linguistics on the one hand and functional linguistics on the other. So what could happen is that you end up with a professor of linguistics who's convinced that there's only one correct way of doing things. Now, is that a problem? Not necessarily, because I think that you can really learn from everybody. However, I would encourage you to look out for professors who try to show you the merits of the theories that they don't like and who are at the same time honest enough to point out and acknowledge the shortcomings of their own theories. So coming to terms with the many different theoretical frameworks in linguistics, that is a challenge for students and there is no easy way around it. So if you decide to study linguistics, you really should have a reasonably high tolerance for ambiguity and unresolved ideas. Reason number three, linguistic terminology is a mess. Linguists love to create technical terms for concepts that are often very abstract. What this means for you is that during your first classes, you will have to understand and memorize a whole bunch of these terms so that you've got all your morphemes, adjuncts, allophones, relativizers, compounds, evidentials, umlauts, fricatives, complementizers, homonyms, passives, palatal statives, and suprasegmentals in order. And what's great about many of these is that they have more than just one definition. Wouldn't that be boring if everything just had one definition? Linguists love arguing and what better way to spend your day than arguing over the definition of a term such as intersubjectification, yeah? So the problem, however, goes even deeper. Some very basic terms like word or sentence, they don't even have definitions that all linguists would agree on. It's a hot mess and if you have two professors who ask you to define the same term in two different exams, you might find that the same answer gets you full credit in one exam and a lot of red marks in the other one. So just don't say I didn't warn you. Are you ready for reason number four? It's that most linguistic texts are terrible to read. Now, it would be unfair of me to say that all linguists are terrible writers but what I can say is that many of the foundational texts that you'll have to read are just plain awful. I mean, you would think that people who study language all day would somehow get their act together and write in a way that makes it easy to understand or even pleasurable but clearly some people haven't gotten the memo. So my piece of advice for students who are just starting out would be whatever textbook your professor assigns, be sure to get a second one that you can read in parallel. So if one textbook is completely incomprehensible, you can still turn to the second one and try to figure things out and then you can go back and forth between the two and eventually you'll get there. Second pro tip and this relates to the previous point, get a dictionary of linguistic terminology. So if the textbook starts using a word that you've never seen before and they don't bother explaining to you what it is, then you can look it up and you still have a fighting chance. Reason number five, linguistics combines the worst of the humanities with the worst of the natural sciences. What do I mean by that? Well, if you have 10 minutes, Google a linguistics department that lists the titles of their students' masters and PhD thesis and then read a few of those titles and tell me if those titles actually make sense to you. I'm willing to bet that at least some of them will make you wonder what the actual point of that thesis was and that is putting it mildly. Now, some humanities are sometimes unjustly ridiculed by people who don't know much about them and I certainly don't condone that, but if you study linguistics and you end up writing a thesis, you will have to explain to your friends and family why you are so crazy about studying those e-vowels in a dialect that nobody knows and nobody cares about. And I'm just asking whether you're prepared to do that and also you should know that studying those e-vowels will require the use of sophisticated statistical methods that, for example, students in economics learn so that they can get their highly paid jobs. So my question would be, do you love language enough so that you're willing to learn all that and get a linguistics degree at the end? Again, I'm just asking.