How will studying linguistics enhance your future? You’re sitting in class, rapt at the presentation your professor is giving…when suddenly you’re jolted out of your reverie; you realize they said something you didn’t quite catch. What was that term they just used?

It makes you think about how you even got to this point. Your professor’s speech is, at its simplest, a continuous series of sounds, which your brain has automatically done the work of parsing into recognizable words. And not just that – you’ve also placed these words into a coherent structure, a series of sentences from which you’re able to glean even the most complicated of meanings. While all this is happening, you’ve also been attuned to the surrounding environment, so you can tell that your professor is serious about when the next assignment is due, but joking about how long your final exam will be.

How are you doing all of this, without actively thinking about it? And how do speakers of the thousands of different languages in the world go about their days doing exactly the same thing? How did any of you even learn to do this, if you were never actually taught to?

A College of Science education equips you with the tools to explore the answers to such profound questions – to better understand the striking complexity of linguistic knowledge, to appreciate the remarkable diversity of linguistic structure, and, along the way, to unravel a bit of the mystique surrounding this critical facet of the human experience.