Practice English Speaking&Listening with: What is linguistics? Department of Language and Linguistic Science

Norman Yeo: Many students come in not really knowing what linguistics is.

I mean,

they read the prospectus and they find it exciting, but they actually

don't know what it involves and several students find it challenging but

very rewarding when they actually get it at the end of the day.

That's the really fun bit.

Samuel Wood: Before I came to York studying linguistics I didn't really have an

exact idea of what it was. I knew it was the study of language and that

general area, but I was really coming here for the French mainly,

but since I've been here yeah, definitely linguistics is kind of my main focus now.

Emily Higson: I mean it was a bit different. It was a bit more scientific

than I think I had maybe been expecting, but I personally really liked that.

Sam Hellmuth: Linguistics is one of those hybrid subjects. It's officially an

arts and humanity subject and that's appropriate because you're studying

human language spoken by human beings, but it's also kind of a social science as well.

Traci Walker: One of the special things about the way language and

linguistics is taught at York is that you get experience in a variety of

different methodologies for studying linguistics. We have people coming

from a very formal approach where you'll learn things like syntactic trees

and formal logic and also you can learn things about, you know,

socio-linguistics and interactional linguistics. How people put structures of

language to use for them to actually do things and get on with other

people, or have fights with other people, and do all the kinds of things

that language needs to be used to do.

George Tsoulas: Almost every speciality in linguistics is represented and what

is most exciting is the fact that there's an interaction between different

areas. There's always something new to learn from colleagues that look at

things from completely different perspectives, and that is something that

students always find particularly exciting and rewarding and also of course

very challenging, because they are the ones that have to integrate all the

different insights that they get from various perspectives.

Maria Muradas-Casas: I think what brought me to the Department of Linguistics was

the idea of complementing linguistics with languages and that was quite

attractive reason which I came to York.

Norman Yeo: The kind of knowledge you get from linguistics which teaches you

about the structure of a language and its various components like sound,

meaning, and syntax can be very, very helpful. It's not essential to learn

the language while you do linguistics or to even speak a second language,

but it would be fun.

Dominic Watt: The value of studying language and linguistics at the same time is

that the one benefits the other so you'll understand a lot more about the

language that you're studying, the languages, plural, if you also know

something about linguistics; and understanding what linguistics is about is

also massively assisted by studying a language.

Samuel Wood: Even if you don't know what linguistics is I would say definitely

look it up a little bit, but you know let it surprise you. Don't come with

a preconceived idea of whether it will be difficult or whether you'll find

certain things interesting in it because it surprised me.