Linguistics

Linguistics as a Liberal Art

The following is a statement prepared by a group of faculty who teach linguistics at liberal arts colleges throughout the country, at a meeting at Swarthmore College in October 2009. Jill and Peter de Villiers attended from Smith College, along with two Smith College linguistics students.

Having a basic knowledge of how language works is fundamental to understanding self and society. Such knowledge is as critical to making sense of ordinary, daily linguistic data as knowledge of addition, multiplication, and basic algebra is to making sense of daily quantitative data. For centuries, logic, rhetoric and grammar were considered the foundation of knowledge. All of them converge in linguistics. Bottom line: linguistics should be taught to all undergraduates.

Language is the major cognitive ability that distinguishes human beings from all other animals. As such, the study of language offers crucial insight into many cognitive activities, including information organization, memory, and reasoning. Linguistics examines all aspects of language, though the core of the discipline is often considered the following:

Because language touches on so many areas of human action and interaction and machine-human interaction, linguistics encourages students to pull together strands from multiple disciplines in the study of language and to bring newly gained knowledge back into those other disciplines, such as anthropology, cognitive science, computer science, education (including bilingual education and ESL), languages and literatures, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, as well as area studies and women/ethnic/gender studies. Linguistics simultaneously belongs to the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences, and it is unique in that the data surround us (instant availability) and do not demand specialized equipment for their analysis: the world is a linguistics lab.

Knowledge in the core of linguistics progresses largely via argumentation, so the study of linguistics develops analytical skills, helping one to learn how to organize large masses of data into paradigms, how to uncover assumptions and test them, how to make hypotheses and to test and revise them accordingly, and how to construct logical arguments. Students often work together in a collaborative fashion on problem sets and other projects, thus learning teamwork and discovering for themselves the synergy in working constructively with others. In these ways linguistics provides strong and valuable intellectual habits and skills central to the study of the liberal arts and excellent training for a range of disciplines, including law and business.

The student who takes even a single introductory course in linguistics will be disabused of misconceptions about language that surround us every day and will be equipped to make sensible and responsible decisions about language in private and societal life. Lack of such basic knowledge can have detrimental effects on both the individual and society, for this ignorance plays a significant role in bigotries of many types, in the failure to properly educate children whose home language falls outside the mainstream, in the denying of civil rights to many who use languages outside the mainstream, and in the almost assured loss over the next couple of decades of thousands of languages around the globe and the accompanying knowledge encoded in and cultural wealth embodied in those languages. Studying linguistics makes one a better global citizen.

The student who does considerable work in linguistics will be able to find employment in many areas, including the computer industry, counseling and diplomacy and other areas where sensitivity to language is essential, documenting endangered languages, teaching languages and/or linguistics, government work such as in the Foreign Service, interpreting and/or translating, language consulting for professions such as law and medicine, language therapy such as speech therapy and rehabilitative work with accident victims and with hard-of-hearing or deaf people, lexicography, marketing work such as advertising and product-naming, the publishing industry with respect to editing and journalism and technical writing, testing agencies as in preparing and grading national exams and helping conduct and assess research on those exams, training actors on dialects and accents or being an actor who can authentically play characters who speak in a non-standard way, and on and on.

In sum, linguistics is an ideal discipline of study at a liberal arts college for the matters that it covers, for the intellectual habits it develops, for the ways in which it contributes to one's ability to be a responsible member of society, and for the practical purposes of employment. Indeed, linguistics should be taught to all undergraduates.