Hiii I'm thinking about doing a bachelor's in general linguistics or cultural & Social studies, and I'm wondering if I'll be able to find a job once I graduate, I plan to do part time jobs related to the major during the bachelor, but I still am worried about finding a job, I'd appreciate you sharing your personal experience or giving any advice u think useful. Thanks in advance
This uhh, is very surface level and most of it is explanation of popular opinions among linguists. Props to you for learning so much, but I would highly suggest to anybody that's interested in linguistics to go learn in a structured environment. You always think you know everything but academia changes how you think. Speaking to people who have literally the same or double my lifetime's worth of experience in the field has really broadened my perspective on the field and the world in general. There's really no other way to learn to do linguistic analysis without practicing and learning the conventions is invaluable for being able to take something you don't know (like many phonologists saying spirantization) and understanding what it means (in this case fricativization because spirants is what linguists used to call fricatives). There really is always something more to learn in this field that maybe hasn't even been studied before!
The concepts of phonetics and phonology also apply to sign languages - meaning that it does not Only apply to sound, but also the gestural components of signs. (I really think that at least some sign language sound be part of a all linguistic education, as the difference between spoken and signed languages is quite informative.)
Agreed with the sign language part. I think it's important to understand that not all languages are oralized! And to look into those languages that aren't ^^
Very informative. I have two degrees in a field related to linguistics (Japanese Studies) and I think this video summarizes pretty well the basics. It's worth sharing!
I mean, if by related to linguistics you mean that you studied a language, then I guess? But you probably never had to do semantic derivations or draw syntax trees.
@@caseygreyson4178 I mean English majors like to brag about being required to take entry level linguistics courses, so I'm sure a field about studying a different language would require one to learn at least some amount of linguistics. I may be wrong, but I do believe OP was talking about the study of the Japanese language, not studying Japanese as a second language. So like lingusitics but only for one language?
@@Enerjy English majors at my university don’t take any linguistics courses, so I’ve never heard of this bragging phenomenon. Linguistics for only one language seems very strange and limited. I go to one of the top universities for linguistics and even then we only have some languages that have a linguistics class dedicated to them (French, AAVE, and Portuguese). I’m not discrediting them, but I am saying that studying a language, even on a linguistic level, is very different from studying linguistics itself. It can be frustrating saying you studied linguistics and someone says “me too!” And you ask them what their favorite sub field was and they go “what are you talking about? I studied Spanish.”
@@caseygreyson4178 Actually I agree with you. Most of the time for me it's just a language barrier thing. Like a lot of time, people who speak English as a second language have told me they studied lingustics, and then don't even know what the IPA is. I guess this is just our life in such a niche science lol About the English thing, I've heard multiple English majors (much older than me) talk about how they had to learn the IPA in school. I have a feeling Intro to linguistics was a requirement at least at their schools. Vocal performance/musical theater majors have also told me they had to learn some introductory phonetics. How did you find out what the top university for Linguistics is? I gave up when searching because everything website said something different lol. My university has a Japanese linguistics course, not sure about other languages.
Everything you mentioned is stuff I used to teach to my linguistics undergraduates. I also taught aspects you didn't mention including about sociolects, the basics of structuralist and cultural semiotics, lexical and truth conditional semantics and also pragmatics. I also taught functional grammar to Masters students. I retired in July and I really miss teaching. Oh, and before I was a lecturer, I was a cop for 30 years - with a linguistics PhD.
Nice video, I hope it's informative to people who know very little about linguistics. My only gripe is calling Chomsky the most respected linguist. He really isn't! The ratio of people praising him and criticising him is shifting more and more towards the critical side. And for very good reason.
@@RhythmAddictedState UG has been a conjecture from the start, there was never any strong evidence. However, within theoretical linguistics, UG was essentially assumed to be the only correct view, and it affected the way research was being done for decades. Think of biased research questions and data interpretation. Furthermore, the assumption that all languages have the same underlying structure made linguists undervalue linguistic diversity. Any criticism or even healthy doubts about UG were met with attitudes that can almost be called hostile. Chomsky himself really does bear part of the blame in creating that environment due to his arrogant attitude. For example towards Daniel Everett and Burrhus Skinner. Chomsky was very pleased with his unquestioning followers. Meanwhile, however, he has had to make concession after concession regarding the actual content of UG. First UG was rich in structure, then there were principles and parameters, and later still there was only Merge, i.e. the process of combining the elements from two branches in a tree and being able to do so recursively. Of course, there is still no guarantee that something like Merge exists in the way that it's conceptualised, but even if it did, it is not self-evident that it is specifically a linguistic process rather than a more general cognitive capacity. I would briefly also like to point out Chomsky's groundless conjectures on the origin of language. And recently (this year) on..... alien language...... I don't hate Chomsky. In fact, I usually agree with his political views. I find his consistency on condemning Israelian colonialism admirable, for example. But his legacy as a linguist can be said to ultimately be a negative one. Despite valuable contributions like SPE and the Chomsky hierarchy.
There's a 1980's debate between Chomsky and Piaget where Piaget, while acknowledging UG and Generative Grammar etc as valid language models, correctly poses the fundamental question that there's no evidence whatsoever that what Chomsky's theories describe is what is really going on in the brain/mind of a speaker when they are speaking a language. Decades later, I think linguists all over the world have realized you still need empirical evidence to corroborate a theory 😅
@@clankb2o5 His theory on UG is also blatantly Eurocentric; most of the arguments he proposed lead to the conclusion that the UG is somehow Indoeuropean. He clearly lacked (or didn't care to include) references to Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, etc. For example, he claimed that Comparative Linguistics lead to the assumption in the UG there're three genders that certain languages "cancel". That's precisely what English and many other European languages did. But taking into account the rest of the world languages data, one would be prone to believe the opposite, that there were originally no genders, and then, some languages developed them.
About that language tree in 0:39 To what extend is it a simplification? This model works perfectly for stuff like genetics (evolution of species, family tree), but since language is social and communicative wouldn't there be like pidgin languages and such along the way?
Cool video! I will say that although I'm not a linguist, I don't think Noah Chomsky is unanimously considered the most respected linguist. Highly influential, yes, but there are definitely people that take issue with what he says, most notably how many dismiss his idea of an inborn universal grammar as pseudoscientific or a post-hoc justification based on observations of existing languages.
@@selladore4911 The relations between language families are all messed up. It starts well tho, with Anatolian being separated first and then Tocharian but then it gets everything mixed. The order should be something like this: first Greek and Armenian forming the so called "Proto Balkanic" languages, then Indo Iranian, then Balto Slavic, then Germanic and then Italo Celtic (they got this right at least). This is the most "popular" order at least, sometimes they put Germanic as more closely related to Italic than Celtic, sometimes Albanian is put in Proto Balkanic and sometimes with Indo Iranian languages, etc.
What are the outcomes of this major? Currently I’ve been taking biomedical science; I loved biology and I’m miserable. I’ve been learning Japanese for 3 years now, and I wrote a paper on the bilingual brain last semester, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had. I don’t know what to do
Interesting I thought something was up when Latin was becoming a dead language. When people often talk about the past and twist words. When at times you can go to the source and the meaning of the word at the time. As we all seen in our own lifetime how much the meaning of words have changed and be stretched to make them unhelpful in any context.
Anyone can have an opinion about how "pretty" a language sounds but there is no objective standard for that and absolutely no way to logically quantify it.
@@rennebright5886 Wow, I’m sure you feel so incredibly smart making that statement. Love can’t be objectively measured. Does love exist? Does beauty exist? Beauty can’t be measured. Is a finger painting done by a 2-year old equally as valuable as a Van Gogh? You can’t objectively quantify such things, as you say. You go and enjoy your soulless materialistic universe. And I’ll stick with mine, where beauty exists.
@@todesque YO, CHILL! That's just a typical response you would get from someone in a scientific field. No fun at parties, but it prevents things like eugenics (thinking people of certain races, for example whites, were automatically better at certain things) from happening again. I will say language doesn't really work like art. There isn't really a standard for "the beauty of a language" among the world. People in the US for example will probably say French, but people in China will saying something completely different. IIRC there was a study that found people tend to think a language sounds "worse" if they have a bad opinion about the people who speak it.
@@todesque I did not post that to be smart, I posted it because the idea that any language can be quantified as inherently 'prettier' comes close to dangerous ideas about eugenics. A language can sound prettier to you than another, but the idea that a language can be objectively 'better' than another is ridiculous pseudoscience (though after a look at your channel, I've come to the understanding that you seem to be the kind of person who would likely subscribe to such a belief system, so I am not particularly optimistic about my chances of changing your mind.) This all being said, I definitely feel smarter now after reading your frankly stupid response. The fact that you thought to compare a finger painting to a human language in the first place displays your ignorance and lack of knowledge. You are in the comments of a video made by someone who has spent years of their life studying Linguistics as an academic field - have some shame and dignity before seeking to insert yourself into a conversation that you are clearly not equipped to participate in.
Sign languages are languages, so probably? That said, there's a lot less of them. There's about 300 sign languages, but around 7,000 spoken languages. Also a lot of them have probably been lost, like the indigenous sign languages of north america. There's probably a lot of information about sign languages specifically on youtube if you're interested. They can be pretty interesting.
so is a linguistics major worth it? I know these are just the basics but would any of this be helpful in after graduating? can someone tell me what jobs you can get with a degree in linguistics? confused teenager here please help 😄
After graduating you would already know all of this (most you might even know after first year). Propably one of the biggest questions in linguistics is what you can do with a lingustics degree :'). In real talk though because of the rise of AI and large language models, computational linguists (or even just linguists with knowledge of AI/programming) are making big bucks so I've heard.
So let's assume that one gets a major in Applied Linguistics, being a native speaker of English. And then an employer appears, demanding that you take a "language proficiency" test, which proves that the level of your English (!) proficiency can be estimated as "somewhere between pre - intermediate and intermediate". Yup, having your language proficiency tested by someone, who have had NOTHING to do with linguistics/philology in their life sucks like a vacuum cleaner.
I get this so hard. I swear people always say I don't speak the "correct way" just because my mental grammar is different from theirs. Linguists never say I talk weird...
@@Enerjy Because it's the linguists' job to understand people, as well as to make people understand the others. It does not matter if you have a wide range of vocabulary, it only matters if the person you are talking to knows what you mean. If they don't, linguists are there to help you. Why do i paint such a rosy picture of people dealing with linguistic matters? Maybe it's because I'm a linguist myself :)
Yup linguistic discrimination is real. Furthermore it's inevitable. So if you want to set your students or children up for failure teach them to believe that all dialects have equal worth
Frfr, The worth of a dialect is inherently related to its culture and impact. Not that we shouldn't respect small cultures but some dialects and their cultures are smaller than some conlanging communities. They might even be stooled on human rights violation, idk, like sacrifices. Could be interesting sure, but their "worth" is definitely influenced by those factors and none are equal
Or, if your students or children are going to have brains, teach them that all language varieties are equally legitimate *and* teach them that linguistic discrimination exists anyway.
@@eritain "Everybody has won and all must have prizes." the Dodo Bird in "Chapter 3: The Caucus Race and a Long Tale" of ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
this is barely 1 semester of sociolinguistics. you should be given your money back. also noam chomsky lol this is early 2000s high school myths, dont tell me thats what they still teach you in college in the US????!!!!
Can't say I disagree about the first point, but I'm sure there's some pretty old school professors teaching similar stuff about Noam Chomsky in other parts of the world.
Are there any sounds that are inherent to being human/driven by instinct? The word "God" comes to mind: seeing something all-powerful would produce a tightening of the muscles for "g", then an opening of the mouth for the vowel, etc.
Idk about God, but words for 'mom' all around the world tend to include an m sound, simply because it's one of the easiest and earliest sounds babies make
@@hannah-esmeraldafigueras7629: Maybe there’s a connection between “Mom” and “God” /s jk…. They’re just words with the letter “O” in the center. But the letter is pronounced the same in each. Coincidence.
"God" is a very bad example to use imo. First of all, it isn't a universal concept (many cultures have several gods or none). Secondly, not all the cultures that do worship a god call it "god", which is an English word of Germanic origin. A simple translation of the word into other Indo-European languages shows that the "o" sound of "god" isn't universally associated with the concept. "Mum" or "mama" would be a far more appropriate example. My theory is that "ma" is much easier to pronounce for toddlers than any other sound, and their mother is the first thing they see, their first link to ever form (usually), so they use the first sounds they manage to utter for the entity they're the most familiar with their mother/nurturer).
There's actually a lot of sounds that are inherent to human language (to some degree at least). Humans have an elongated vocal trakt so we can shape the sound from our vocal chords in a lot of ways compared to many other animals. The only disadvantage is that we can't breathe at the same time as we eat or the food will fall down our windpipe lol. But then there are also species of parrots being able to copy people exactly. P.S. The sound [g] isn't really a tightening of the muscles because every sound is a tightening of the muscles, even the vowel "o" which is actually [ɑ] in "god". The tongue is a muscle so there is a tightening for every sound besides [ə] (which you still have to raise your velum and tighten the vocal folds for).
Indeed. Her claim that all dialects are equal is stupid. It ignores sociolinguistics. And Chomsky a jerk. And it’s not true that modern linguistics has only existed for 150 years.
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I thought this was going to be a meme, but this was honestly entirely accurate to my experience getting a B.S. in Applied Linguistics.
Hiii I'm thinking about doing a bachelor's in general linguistics or cultural & Social studies, and I'm wondering if I'll be able to find a job once I graduate, I plan to do part time jobs related to the major during the bachelor, but I still am worried about finding a job, I'd appreciate you sharing your personal experience or giving any advice u think useful. Thanks in advance
mfw being autistic caused me to learn almost all of this without even majoring in linguistics
same af
literally me
This uhh, is very surface level and most of it is explanation of popular opinions among linguists. Props to you for learning so much, but I would highly suggest to anybody that's interested in linguistics to go learn in a structured environment. You always think you know everything but academia changes how you think. Speaking to people who have literally the same or double my lifetime's worth of experience in the field has really broadened my perspective on the field and the world in general. There's really no other way to learn to do linguistic analysis without practicing and learning the conventions is invaluable for being able to take something you don't know (like many phonologists saying spirantization) and understanding what it means (in this case fricativization because spirants is what linguists used to call fricatives). There really is always something more to learn in this field that maybe hasn't even been studied before!
The concepts of phonetics and phonology also apply to sign languages - meaning that it does not Only apply to sound, but also the gestural components of signs. (I really think that at least some sign language sound be part of a all linguistic education, as the difference between spoken and signed languages is quite informative.)
Agreed with the sign language part. I think it's important to understand that not all languages are oralized! And to look into those languages that aren't ^^
Very informative. I have two degrees in a field related to linguistics (Japanese Studies) and I think this video summarizes pretty well the basics. It's worth sharing!
I mean, if by related to linguistics you mean that you studied a language, then I guess? But you probably never had to do semantic derivations or draw syntax trees.
@@caseygreyson4178 I wrote two theses on Japanese phonetics, so yeah, I don't have expertise in semantics and syntax
@@caseygreyson4178 I mean English majors like to brag about being required to take entry level linguistics courses, so I'm sure a field about studying a different language would require one to learn at least some amount of linguistics. I may be wrong, but I do believe OP was talking about the study of the Japanese language, not studying Japanese as a second language. So like lingusitics but only for one language?
@@Enerjy English majors at my university don’t take any linguistics courses, so I’ve never heard of this bragging phenomenon. Linguistics for only one language seems very strange and limited. I go to one of the top universities for linguistics and even then we only have some languages that have a linguistics class dedicated to them (French, AAVE, and Portuguese). I’m not discrediting them, but I am saying that studying a language, even on a linguistic level, is very different from studying linguistics itself. It can be frustrating saying you studied linguistics and someone says “me too!” And you ask them what their favorite sub field was and they go “what are you talking about? I studied Spanish.”
@@caseygreyson4178 Actually I agree with you. Most of the time for me it's just a language barrier thing. Like a lot of time, people who speak English as a second language have told me they studied lingustics, and then don't even know what the IPA is. I guess this is just our life in such a niche science lol
About the English thing, I've heard multiple English majors (much older than me) talk about how they had to learn the IPA in school. I have a feeling Intro to linguistics was a requirement at least at their schools.
Vocal performance/musical theater majors have also told me they had to learn some introductory phonetics.
How did you find out what the top university for Linguistics is? I gave up when searching because everything website said something different lol. My university has a Japanese linguistics course, not sure about other languages.
This is a fantastic video!
Fantastic!!!
Everything you mentioned is stuff I used to teach to my linguistics undergraduates. I also taught aspects you didn't mention including about sociolects, the basics of structuralist and cultural semiotics, lexical and truth conditional semantics and also pragmatics. I also taught functional grammar to Masters students. I retired in July and I really miss teaching. Oh, and before I was a lecturer, I was a cop for 30 years - with a linguistics PhD.
Very cool!
subscribed! great content
"probally not ! but maybe..?." 😂, you´re too funny and informative, subscribing right now
Also structuralism and functionalism, postmodernism and deconstruction, meaning and semiotics, and semantics.
Nice video, I hope it's informative to people who know very little about linguistics. My only gripe is calling Chomsky the most respected linguist. He really isn't! The ratio of people praising him and criticising him is shifting more and more towards the critical side. And for very good reason.
What are the reasons Chomsky's theories are facing criticism? Pardon my ignorance, I'm from a field that's more favourable to him (NLP).
@@RhythmAddictedState UG has been a conjecture from the start, there was never any strong evidence. However, within theoretical linguistics, UG was essentially assumed to be the only correct view, and it affected the way research was being done for decades. Think of biased research questions and data interpretation. Furthermore, the assumption that all languages have the same underlying structure made linguists undervalue linguistic diversity. Any criticism or even healthy doubts about UG were met with attitudes that can almost be called hostile. Chomsky himself really does bear part of the blame in creating that environment due to his arrogant attitude. For example towards Daniel Everett and Burrhus Skinner. Chomsky was very pleased with his unquestioning followers.
Meanwhile, however, he has had to make concession after concession regarding the actual content of UG. First UG was rich in structure, then there were principles and parameters, and later still there was only Merge, i.e. the process of combining the elements from two branches in a tree and being able to do so recursively. Of course, there is still no guarantee that something like Merge exists in the way that it's conceptualised, but even if it did, it is not self-evident that it is specifically a linguistic process rather than a more general cognitive capacity.
I would briefly also like to point out Chomsky's groundless conjectures on the origin of language. And recently (this year) on..... alien language......
I don't hate Chomsky. In fact, I usually agree with his political views. I find his consistency on condemning Israelian colonialism admirable, for example. But his legacy as a linguist can be said to ultimately be a negative one. Despite valuable contributions like SPE and the Chomsky hierarchy.
@@clankb2o5 Thank you so much for going into detail! It's terrible what ego and a lack of questioning can do.
There's a 1980's debate between Chomsky and Piaget where Piaget, while acknowledging UG and Generative Grammar etc as valid language models, correctly poses the fundamental question that there's no evidence whatsoever that what Chomsky's theories describe is what is really going on in the brain/mind of a speaker when they are speaking a language. Decades later, I think linguists all over the world have realized you still need empirical evidence to corroborate a theory 😅
@@clankb2o5 His theory on UG is also blatantly Eurocentric; most of the arguments he proposed lead to the conclusion that the UG is somehow Indoeuropean. He clearly lacked (or didn't care to include) references to Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, etc. For example, he claimed that Comparative Linguistics lead to the assumption in the UG there're three genders that certain languages "cancel". That's precisely what English and many other European languages did. But taking into account the rest of the world languages data, one would be prone to believe the opposite, that there were originally no genders, and then, some languages developed them.
wow, i wish i had majored in linguistics!
About that language tree in 0:39 To what extend is it a simplification? This model works perfectly for stuff like genetics (evolution of species, family tree), but since language is social and communicative wouldn't there be like pidgin languages and such along the way?
If I had unlimited time and money I would've loved to get a degree in linguistics as well.
That sounds about right.
🔥🔥🔥
3:20 "Probably not, but maybe!"
Cool video! I will say that although I'm not a linguist, I don't think Noah Chomsky is unanimously considered the most respected linguist. Highly influential, yes, but there are definitely people that take issue with what he says, most notably how many dismiss his idea of an inborn universal grammar as pseudoscientific or a post-hoc justification based on observations of existing languages.
Chomsky 💀
Only complain is the absolute blasphemous linguistic tree you showed at 0:27
Most linguists I've read don't consider that correct phylogenetically
Sorry but I really died when you showed that God forsaken phylogenetic tree
Hahaha you are absolutely correct - that’s my mistake lol idk how I didn’t notice that
what specifically is wrong with it?
@@beccalevy1 No prob, the good thing is that you recognize it lol
@@selladore4911 The relations between language families are all messed up. It starts well tho, with Anatolian being separated first and then Tocharian but then it gets everything mixed. The order should be something like this: first Greek and Armenian forming the so called "Proto Balkanic" languages, then Indo Iranian, then Balto Slavic, then Germanic and then Italo Celtic (they got this right at least). This is the most "popular" order at least, sometimes they put Germanic as more closely related to Italic than Celtic, sometimes Albanian is put in Proto Balkanic and sometimes with Indo Iranian languages, etc.
Subscribed
Information theory and all of computer science is built on top of linguistics!
What are the outcomes of this major? Currently I’ve been taking biomedical science; I loved biology and I’m miserable. I’ve been learning Japanese for 3 years now, and I wrote a paper on the bilingual brain last semester, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had. I don’t know what to do
Me trying to review for finals
the dogmatic prescriptivism of linguistic descriptivism (oh the irony)
If I could learn this stuff maybe I can get my dad to reply to my texts
send voice notes
audio needs normalizing otherwise wonderful video!!
Interesting I thought something was up when Latin was becoming a dead language. When people often talk about the past and twist words. When at times you can go to the source and the meaning of the word at the time. As we all seen in our own lifetime how much the meaning of words have changed and be stretched to make them unhelpful in any context.
oh, Noam Chomsky. I dont know if he is the most well respected linguist. I sure dont.
Fr, a genocide denier and much more. Always baffles me when professors praise him as THE linguist.
@@relishschofield3924 What does that have to do with his linguistic acumen? Separate the man from the views.
Irony on: oh, what a great improvement for generations of future language teachers, Generativism was! 🤢🤢🤢
@@relishschofield3924 which genocide enlighten me
1@@ugwuanyicollins6136
No language is better than another? Really? Can we say that some languages sound prettier than others?
Anyone can have an opinion about how "pretty" a language sounds but there is no objective standard for that and absolutely no way to logically quantify it.
@@rennebright5886 Wow, I’m sure you feel so incredibly smart making that statement. Love can’t be objectively measured. Does love exist? Does beauty exist? Beauty can’t be measured. Is a finger painting done by a 2-year old equally as valuable as a Van Gogh? You can’t objectively quantify such things, as you say. You go and enjoy your soulless materialistic universe. And I’ll stick with mine, where beauty exists.
@@todesque YO, CHILL! That's just a typical response you would get from someone in a scientific field. No fun at parties, but it prevents things like eugenics (thinking people of certain races, for example whites, were automatically better at certain things) from happening again.
I will say language doesn't really work like art. There isn't really a standard for "the beauty of a language" among the world. People in the US for example will probably say French, but people in China will saying something completely different. IIRC there was a study that found people tend to think a language sounds "worse" if they have a bad opinion about the people who speak it.
@@todesque I did not post that to be smart, I posted it because the idea that any language can be quantified as inherently 'prettier' comes close to dangerous ideas about eugenics. A language can sound prettier to you than another, but the idea that a language can be objectively 'better' than another is ridiculous pseudoscience (though after a look at your channel, I've come to the understanding that you seem to be the kind of person who would likely subscribe to such a belief system, so I am not particularly optimistic about my chances of changing your mind.) This all being said, I definitely feel smarter now after reading your frankly stupid response. The fact that you thought to compare a finger painting to a human language in the first place displays your ignorance and lack of knowledge. You are in the comments of a video made by someone who has spent years of their life studying Linguistics as an academic field - have some shame and dignity before seeking to insert yourself into a conversation that you are clearly not equipped to participate in.
i think you know what you''re sayin''
why hasnt chomksy come up yet. isnt he god after all?
does that include sign languages?
I believe they're less of a focus for many linguists, but they are generally considered to be languages as well.
Sign languages are languages, so probably? That said, there's a lot less of them. There's about 300 sign languages, but around 7,000 spoken languages. Also a lot of them have probably been lost, like the indigenous sign languages of north america. There's probably a lot of information about sign languages specifically on youtube if you're interested. They can be pretty interesting.
Subtitles pls 😭
There's auto-generated English subtitles. They seem pretty spot on, I watched the whole video with them on.
lol
so is a linguistics major worth it? I know these are just the basics but would any of this be helpful in after graduating? can someone tell me what jobs you can get with a degree in linguistics? confused teenager here please help 😄
A speech pathologist but you need to have a masters but they make a good amount of money and are always in demand!
@@Askechad Most SLP masters require psych though so they have to make sure they take it even if it's not required for a linguistics degree.
After graduating you would already know all of this (most you might even know after first year). Propably one of the biggest questions in linguistics is what you can do with a lingustics degree :'). In real talk though because of the rise of AI and large language models, computational linguists (or even just linguists with knowledge of AI/programming) are making big bucks so I've heard.
So let's assume that one gets a major in Applied Linguistics, being a native speaker of English. And then an employer appears, demanding that you take a "language proficiency" test, which proves that the level of your English (!) proficiency can be estimated as "somewhere between pre - intermediate and intermediate". Yup, having your language proficiency tested by someone, who have had NOTHING to do with linguistics/philology in their life sucks like a vacuum cleaner.
I get this so hard. I swear people always say I don't speak the "correct way" just because my mental grammar is different from theirs. Linguists never say I talk weird...
@@Enerjy Because it's the linguists' job to understand people, as well as to make people understand the others. It does not matter if you have a wide range of vocabulary, it only matters if the person you are talking to knows what you mean. If they don't, linguists are there to help you. Why do i paint such a rosy picture of people dealing with linguistic matters? Maybe it's because I'm a linguist myself :)
I speak a half dozen foreign languages fluently. Chomsky is wrong and i am sooo glad i did not study linguistics.
What point is there of preserving !Xóõ when we will all speak American in 1 million years.
American isn't a language.
@@Lensynth Stop speaking it then
@@lame6810 You mean English?
You wish; we will all speak Chinese or Hindi.
@@isamukim1693 Hopefully we will never all speak only one language. All languages are beautiful, at least to me.
Wait is this all?
If you want to talk about anything other than linguistics while still sounding like a linguist, this is more than enough to pull it off.
Yup linguistic discrimination is real. Furthermore it's inevitable. So if you want to set your students or children up for failure teach them to believe that all dialects have equal worth
Frfr, The worth of a dialect is inherently related to its culture and impact. Not that we shouldn't respect small cultures but some dialects and their cultures are smaller than some conlanging communities. They might even be stooled on human rights violation, idk, like sacrifices. Could be interesting sure, but their "worth" is definitely influenced by those factors and none are equal
Or, if your students or children are going to have brains, teach them that all language varieties are equally legitimate *and* teach them that linguistic discrimination exists anyway.
@@eritain "Everybody has won and all must have prizes." the Dodo Bird in "Chapter 3: The Caucus Race and a Long Tale" of ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
I liked your video! But the "but" at colonialism damage to indigenous languages kinda hurt :p
this is barely 1 semester of sociolinguistics. you should be given your money back. also noam chomsky lol this is early 2000s high school myths, dont tell me thats what they still teach you in college in the US????!!!!
Can't say I disagree about the first point, but I'm sure there's some pretty old school professors teaching similar stuff about Noam Chomsky in other parts of the world.
Good 👍
But Noah Chomsky? No 👎 Overrated. I do know older Ph.D. holders in linguistics who agree 👍 with my claim.
Are there any sounds that are inherent to being human/driven by instinct? The word "God" comes to mind: seeing something all-powerful would produce a tightening of the muscles for "g", then an opening of the mouth for the vowel, etc.
Idk about God, but words for 'mom' all around the world tend to include an m sound, simply because it's one of the easiest and earliest sounds babies make
@@hannah-esmeraldafigueras7629:
Maybe there’s a connection between “Mom” and “God” /s jk…. They’re just words with the letter “O” in the center. But the letter is pronounced the same in each. Coincidence.
"God" is a very bad example to use imo. First of all, it isn't a universal concept (many cultures have several gods or none). Secondly, not all the cultures that do worship a god call it "god", which is an English word of Germanic origin. A simple translation of the word into other Indo-European languages shows that the "o" sound of "god" isn't universally associated with the concept. "Mum" or "mama" would be a far more appropriate example. My theory is that "ma" is much easier to pronounce for toddlers than any other sound, and their mother is the first thing they see, their first link to ever form (usually), so they use the first sounds they manage to utter for the entity they're the most familiar with their mother/nurturer).
There's actually a lot of sounds that are inherent to human language (to some degree at least). Humans have an elongated vocal trakt so we can shape the sound from our vocal chords in a lot of ways compared to many other animals. The only disadvantage is that we can't breathe at the same time as we eat or the food will fall down our windpipe lol. But then there are also species of parrots being able to copy people exactly.
P.S. The sound [g] isn't really a tightening of the muscles because every sound is a tightening of the muscles, even the vowel "o" which is actually [ɑ] in "god". The tongue is a muscle so there is a tightening for every sound besides [ə] (which you still have to raise your velum and tighten the vocal folds for).
so nothing
Proud prescriptivist here.
Indeed. Her claim that all dialects are equal is stupid. It ignores sociolinguistics.
And Chomsky a jerk.
And it’s not true that modern linguistics has only existed for 150 years.
@@TP-om8of If you're a linguist, I'mma guess that you haven't been in a university linguistics class in awhile lol. This is like LING 101