The ULTIMATE Linguistics Guide for Beginners!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
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In this video, I'll be talking about all the various subfields of linguistics. This is perfect for people who are curious to know what linguistics is all about! From Phonetics, Phonology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics and more!
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Written, Produced, and Edited by @TheLingOtter
Otter Drawings by @millicamacho_
As a big computer and math nerd, the more I learn about language, the more I realize that programming and mathematics are themselves much more linked to language than I could ever imagine
I gawked when he said “syntax tree”… that’s literally how programming languages are parsed!
ironically those are my only 3 hyper interests. im now realizing it may be innate. what else do you enjoy?
Perfect timing LingOtter, I'm going into my first year of college to study linguistics!
Good luck!!!
im ending my first year of it and im struggling to not get expelled because its so far just been pointless subjects unrelated to linguistics, and whatever is related to linguistics was taught so poorly that i immediately lost interest. I just failed my latin exam lol......
@@catritonixI hope you’re fine with a random stranger saying this but I believe in you. You’re human, which means that you will experience setbacks and failures galore. But it also means that those failures have absolutely nothing on you. Because as long as you are alive, you’re winning.
@@TikSkygd thx.,....
oh to be young again.
The cute otter is the only reason I can focus 😭
ADHD vibes.
@@kakahass8845 Trueeee
I need this Otter to teach me everything now
@@Salikino Reallll an APEuro ottewr would be my savior
Wut
The cool thing about semantics to me is how semantic ambiguity is almost the core of philosophy. People use loaded terms like 'justice' and 'freedom' quite haphazardly for rhetorical means, when obviously most people have different ideas of what 'justice' and 'freedom' means. Politics and philosophy can almost literally be considered a 'semantics of loaded terms'.
This video has the best otter so far
linguistics student here!
to add to what the otter (i agree with everyone that the otter is indeed cute) has said:
- there are many ways to study syntax beyond syntax trees! syntax trees mostly follow the theorizing of noam chomsky
0:24
The word ‘praat’ is the Dutch word for ‘talk’
Oh wow, I had no idea! That makes so much sense since the creator of Praat is a linguist from The Netherlands
it's the same in Afrikaans too! 🇿🇦
@@matt9999makes sense, since afrikaans comes from dutch due to their colonization
@@TheLingOtter u said it in dutch like pret with a english r
Is this word the source of the English word "prattle"?
Thanks for sharing an overview and detailed examples
of linguistics! I just graduated with my Master's Degree in Linguistics! My specialty is SLA; TESOL specifically. I can't stress how incredibly fulfilling and excited I was just attending linguistic courses. Along the way, I learned that I picked up more than one field of strength/interest in linguistics: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, etc. Since modern linguistics is still such a "young"/ somewhat "new" field (iirc it's popularity resurfaced in the 18th century), there are so many things that have yet to be explored but not enough people in the field to explore. I can't recommend the program enough!
I'm trilingual (English, Hebrew, Russian), and have noticed a lot of interesting things, thus leading my down the linguistics rabbithole. Interesting video, and I really like your channel, keep it up! :))
Welcome to the linguistics rabbit hole! I assure you your fascination with how the world connects through linguistics won't stop any time soon
שלום!!
thus leading “me” down - slow down!
Speaking satans language
@@ravinmarokefJEW!!!! GET HIM!!!!
Phonetics = the study of the physiological production of speech sounds.
Phonology = the study of the psychological perception of speech sounds.
Love this being my degree. Great video getting people into this! I'm personally focused on dialectology, language change, and sociolinguistics, but I'm also currently doing a lot of phonetics and phonology.
I've always seen linguistics as boring, but this channel's _actually_ made me interested in this topic. Very cool
posted in just perfect time .. im getting back into linguistics again
I’ve always had a soft spot for linguistics. Thank you for the amazing video!
Dude, thanks. I watch millions of language related videos but for some reason never actually sat down and figured out what all the linguistics terms meant. I had a rough understanding by context but this was a fucking GREAT video. You nailed it.
cool animation, frequent posting, good topics with good, simple explanations, cute otter; you've got a new sub!
I definitely find sociolinguistics most interesting. I've always enjoyed researching how words meanings have changed throughout time and space. And when I finally began using slang frequently in high school it was a whole new world to explore the meaning and societal impact on language
If only every career path had someone explain the pathways and options with a cute otter. Seriously though this was a fun and informative video that makes me wish I would’ve looked more into taking linguistics as a major.
I love to see SLP mentioned. I’m studying it and because of that got interested in linguistics. Love this video and love to see more 💕
Fantastic video, very clear and concise. Great to see so many new linguist content creators (especially Chicanos!). Sociolinguistics is always my favorite branch. Keep up the great work, guey.
The quality of this video is astonishing, keep it up
Fantastic video, absolutely loved it. Your content is AMAZING and you deserve a lot more subscribers & views!
Thank you so much!
im just finishing up my masters degree in linguistics so i already knew all of this but i stayed for the cute otters anyway ❤️ love what you're doing, keep it up!! it's always great to see people passionate about the field and eager to bring others in
This is a video I'd actually recommend for those unfamiliar to linguistics. You earned a like.
This was perfect! I've always been interested in linguistics but never really went into the basics, oddly enough, so this video has been so helpful! It's so concise and you explain everything so well. Thank you!
I think History Linguistics is also my favourite. I live in pacific country and linguists who came here a long time ago around the time of Captain Cook were able to figure out that my Melanesian people were related to people in South East Asia through Austronesians language. Wayyyyy before DNA testing was a thing and that's why its awesome 😁
Phonetics 0:08
Phonology 1:02
Syntax 2:02
Semantics 2:40
Pragmatics 3:44
Historical linguistics 4:38
Typology 5:15
Language development 5:48
Psycholinguistic 6:38
Adorable doodles and a very comprehensive view on the basics of the field! Thank you :)
I really like how this video looks and how informational it is.
You should keep this style for your longer videos like this, and use the other style for the shorts and tiktoks.
please keep making videos you are amazing
One emerging subfield that's great is Revivalistics/Language Revival! In a way strongly linked to socioling, it tries to understand and explain language endangerment case by case and how these languages can be saved by their communities
It's quite new, and so not really a subfield yet ig, but very important
Thank you. i've accidentally started learning four languages at the once for the last few years and I've honestly been looking for something like this
Second Language Acquisition or Historical Linguistics are definitely the most interesting to me as I’ve been learning Spanish for a couple years at this point and I’ve seen a variety of teaching methods and seeing which ones work and which ones don’t as well as learning all new techniques.
These videos of yours are very well made and I really can't wait to see you post more! I'm also planning on making a similar type of content on a separate channel and would like to hear any tips on doing so from you or anyone reading this comment
This channel is a gem.
yo this kinda helped me a lot 😭 im sort of freaking out because i wanna do something in the future that involves languages in college- either translating or becoming a speech therapist- so its good to know that i have some other options
There’s also a podcast called The Linguistics Careercast, which is all about applied linguistics, IE linguistics that isn’t just pure academia. There are SO many applications out there, translation and speech language pathology like you said, but also things like language policy, revitalization work, and more
Omg i love that otter it is soo cute!!!!
Your voice is soo soothing
Ive been learning more languages besides Japanese and Trad Chinese, so this channel really helps😂
Also love the otter btw x3
Please never stop uploading 🙏
Awesome! By the way, you wrote "underserving" but pronounced it as if you thought it was "undeserving" which is a different meaning and pronunciation from "under-serv-ing".
I'm pretty sure he wrote undeserving and then un-deserv-ing
@prywatne4733 Look again, starting at the 1:46 point. It's written as "underserving" and then as "un-derserv-ing."
You're surprisingly the first person to notice that mistake,,,I hadn't seen it until now lol
Great explanation, clear and fast-paced. This would have been useful in my first months of university 🤣.
This man is two things:
- A great expert in linguistics
- A really cute otter, who is probably a gay furry behind the scenes
Great video!
the perfect combination
2:24 The dog is named Barks.
I was hoping this would help me clarify which field of linguistics to do my capstone project on. I personally was leaning towards computational linguistics, however, now im cooked because of how epic socio, historical, neuro and semantic linguistics are to me. I am so glad this is my major (i am a freshman so i was still a bit unsure)
I'm gonna have to go with pragmatics as the most interesting to me :) linguistics is amazing
8:47 "We finally have reached the last subfield that I wanted to talk about in this video" - "finally" is way incongruous here, you could go another 10 minutes and I'd be very happy with it.
Got this in my recommended, love the otter ❤
Beautiful snake, buddy
Despite how many videos about this topic are out there, I always would love to see an otter one
When you was explaining pragmatics I instantly thought of Japan, and then you put it on screen😂
wow, Praat takes me right back. cool they still use it, i mean its free after all. Used it in my university too.
4:32 “Nice job!” Could also mean a way of earning money is nice
I do conversation analysis, so sociolinguistics is my favorite^^
Welcome back!
Advance Syntax is crazy. The themes and decrypting foreign language is god dam hard. Even in some language I know , I cannot produce a rigorous rule.
You are my only hope for this English semester
Can you make guides going in deeper and a guide for making conlangs?
you use an otter take my sub
Historical linguistics is not necessarily just diachronic it can be synchronic too.
Which ciao did you use? Chao, Ciao, or Tchao?
This is an awesome video, I’m 12 and have always loved linguistics. I’m Brazilian, so I would say Tchao.
I have 2 ideas in minds:
1. I assume you know Japanese or more due to your examples, I want to know if Japanese linguistics is similar to English lingustics. Of course its different but how different, how similiar between them, and can a different part that linguistics be applied to English? If not Japanese than others maybe cool to talk about.
2. The computing one, I know Nature Language Processing (NLP) that show how ChatGPT works, is both in linguistics and computer science field. I want to know how much more, other than this guide, we CS should know in linguistics in order to test NLP. I heard many linguists want to do it only need to know basic coding and theories about how AI works, while computer scientists know programming, math and AI, but dont know anything about NLP, would have to learn lingustics from scratch. 😢😅
For question 2 it really depends on the type of work you're interested in. The vast majority of ML (machine learning) and NLP work can be done without linguistics knowledge. I studied linguistics and was disappointed that little of my background in the field was applicable; my math and CS knowledge was way more relevant/useful. It can be helpful to have a base understanding of the main fields of linguistics when doing multilingual work, but I'd still say it isn't entirely necessary. If anything I'd say linguistics is helpful for CS and math folks because it teaches you how to think about and analyze things in a way you may not have been taught/considered previously.
wow a full video
Barks, the dog. Like, that's his name. Makes perfect sense.
nice drawings
!
Comparative, etymology, writing systems +
Thank you so much
This was such a good video
Based on the description given for phonology, what are phonotactics? I previously heard a language's phonology was what phonemes a language uses, but I'm open to be proven wrong!!
So, Phonotactics is a subcategory of Phonology. Since this is a beginner's guide, I didn't wanna go too complicated on the topic, so I just made a generalization of what Phonology is all about
I am a linguistics major myself, so perhaps I can add to this.
Broadly speaking, phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with the restrictions a language applies to combinations of phonemes/sequences of segments. These restrictions on combinations of phonemes/sequences of segments themselves are called phonotactic constraints. They are primarily based on syllables and vary from language to language.
For example, in the English language, two stops cannot begin with a syllable. In a second example, the Twi language, a word can only end in a vowel or a nasal consonant.
Historical linguistics for me. Who doesn't want to crack them stringy writings?!
Barks, the dog.
I’m an archaeologist who is interested in historical linguistics, i’d love to incorporate the two fields somehow
I clicked on this instead of an entire crash course because of the cool diagram
Great video!
Thank you, I love your videos!
is 1:54 supposed to be undeserving? bc otherwise underserving would be broken down by under-serv-ing
Thanks. Which one helps me learn new languages faster?
You need to do merch, I need the otter
Cool
6:17 One wug. Two wugen.
I came here for the otter
6:15
It isn't that surprising that children put the commonly placed "s" that indicates plural in the English language?
Was the test conducted in Spanish, Russian and other languages in which the children also placed the respective plural suffixes?
Was it "wugи" in Russian?
Was it "wugos" in Spanish?
as a dialectologist I feel sad, great video btw
2:22 Barks the dog: nevermore!
What a beautiful video 😊 ...also, you can get great language audio input here on youtube with bilingual stories, they will read a sentence of a story in English then read the same sentence in target language. Polyglot Beats on youtube does that well for multiple languages and there other channels for specific languages... its been helping me get passive listening and learning when going on walks... time is by FAR hardest obstacle in language learning - anything that can get us some passive learning is a plus... I hope 2025 is everyone's best year yet for language learning!!! 😊💛💛👏💯
Any good book recommendations on Linguistics?
Nice video I like it
Today I learnt that the Official Linguistics Post's (a linguistics-themed blog on Tumblr) profile picture is actually the logo of Praat, lol
Wait, am I the only one thinking "barks the dog" still makes sense? I know in French books in order to have a little bit of "langage soutenu" (yeah can't remember the word in English) we can use that word order after dialogue tags but still
Pragmatics and semantics ?
genuine question, how does your description of phonology differ from phonotactics?
what about etymology?
is etymology considered as a part of linguistics?
this is cool video
are you studying linguistics in uni?
Yes! I'm about to graduate actually
@@TheLingOtter yooo congrats !!
you should make a vid about uh what wrote to graduate. your paper? thesis? whats it called?
Can Praat do (or, be augmented to do) automatic phonetic transcription, then? Or, is it used in making phonetic transcriptions?
With Praat, you have to do phonetic transcription manually. I don't think we are at the point yet where automatic phonetic transcription is viable. One of the main reasons is that each research project has their own guidelines on how to annotate words. Also, when you begin studying phonetics, you realize just how much phonemes blend with one another, making it really hard to make solid segmentations. For example, sounds like /j/ blend really well into a vowel so a researcher will have to decide how they want to segment the two phonemes depending on the goals of their study
@@TheLingOtterSomeone on linglist just said they have an automatic transcriber (to GenAm IIRC), and it comes with examples of its work that look pretty impressive. It’s not public, and looks like they’ll be charging it as a service unfortunately when it is, so that sucks
This is succesfly video for beginners .
you forgot lexicology (and other, related branches such as dialectics)
The only other major fields of linguistics you left out that I can think of are Linguistic Anthropology, which I had a class in as an undergraduate, linguistics major; and also classes dealing in the intersection of linguistics and philosophy. I’ve forgotten if this branch of linguistics has its own special name.
Linguistics has so many sub fields, and reaches into so many different disciplines; I used to think that no matter what area of academic study you could think of, there would be an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics to complement it.
What other things does computational linguistics do, besides AI / LLM?
What about cognitive linguistics
Otters are my favorite animal
I should get a degree in phonology some day.
Counter point to 2:20
'Barks the dog' is grammatical in English, when using it in the context of speech. For example, the sentence '"I'm hungry," barks the dog' is correct
Edit: this otter is so cute!
My interpretation was that it's a dog called Barks.^^
@@derpauleglot9772 Then it'd just be a noun phrase though
@@derpauleglot9772not a bad name for a dog
@rowboat10 Yeah, and I agree with Lingotter that just the three words "Barks the dog" don't work as a sentence. I just found "a dog called Barks" mildly amusing and wanted to share that^^