Explaining Linguistics the Easy Way

Of course, that is a large part of language, but linguists study so many other things. I’ll divide these different aspects of language into a few categories here to make it easy, and I’ll avoid using the terminology of linguists so that it’s easier to understand.

Without the sounds of language, our only communication would be written (and spoken language came first, so we would probably run into a bit of trouble figuring out how to write). Oftentimes, spelling doesn’t line up with sounds.

Native English speakers joke about this all the time with words like thorough, thought, and tough. So when linguists analyze the sounds of a language, they don’t look at spelling and focus entirely on the sounds being made.

Another reason for this is that different languages use different writing systems, so focusing on the sounds makes it easier for linguists to analyze. If you’re an English speaker, it’s much easier to analyze Mandarin if you’re looking at the sounds and not the written words.

The sounds we make and how we use them are one of the most important parts of language. In fact, there is an entire chart that linguists have made to distinguish different sounds called the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).

There are a lot of places where you make a sound you probably don’t even realize you’re making. For example, if you have certain American accents (like mine), then when you say butter, the sound you make in the middle of the word is actually a d sound and not a t sound. This happens as a result of the sounds around it.

These changes in sounds, as well as how we actually produce sounds anatomically, are the primary subject of study for many linguists, who often analyze how these sounds can change over time, between groups, the ways different sounds can fit together (you can’t form an entire word very easily with just vowel sounds, for example), and more.

Words and their component parts play a very specific role in grammar. This part of language is studied extensively in linguistics to explore how different languages modify words in order to change their meanings. In English, adding an s to the end of a word makes it plural (usually). This is an example of what linguists call morphology, which is the study of these chunks of meaning.

We see chunks of meaning added to the beginning or end of words much like we would see two LEGO pieces be put together.

What’s interesting is that there are many other ways this can be done in other languages. In Indonesian (as well as many other languages), they make something plural by repeating it. For example, buku means book while buku-buku means books. There are some other meanings that people make with this like intensifying a description, but I won’t get too into that here. (If you’re curious about Indonesian, I wrote a traveler’s guide to the grammar!)

Some languages also add new bits of meaning into the middle of a word, or on both sides of it. The only example we have of the former in English is in something like un-freaking-believable. This lets us add emphasis to the word while keeping the meaning intact.

Even contractions like don’t or you’re would fall into this category, since they combine the meaning of two words together.

In linguistics, this is often studied to analyze how different languages utilize these meaning chunks. Linguists categorize languages by how many of these pieces they can combine and what purpose they serve. They also look at how people use these bits of meaning to make new words. Compound words (like fire truck or car wash) fall into this category too.

Everyone knows what a sentence is: a group of words that contains meaning and ends with punctuation. But there’s more to it than that, and other languages do different things with the layout of their sentences. For example, Spanish puts adjectives after nouns, which is the opposite of English. This makes sense if you think about it, because then you know what’s being described before hearing the description.

Sentence structure, the order of words in a sentence, sometimes changes between languages. In English we place the thing that does the action first, followed by the action, then the recipient of the action. I’ll make it easier with an example sentence. Let’s take something simple, like “The boy catches the ball”. In a language like Irish (also called Irish Gaelic), this changes to “Catches the boy the ball”. In Latin it would be “The boy the ball catches”. These sentences all have the same meaning, they just place things in a different order.

Of course, when we’re learning grammar in school we learn all of the basic concepts I’ve mentioned in this article. Analyzing these grammatical patterns can tell us a lot about a language and the people that use it.

This is one of my favorite parts of linguistics. Often called sociolinguistics, this looks at the ways that we use language in social and cultural contexts. Where the rest of this has been about the structure of language, this is about the perceptions of language.

When I mention a language like French, German, or Japanese, you probably have certain perceptions of them. One might sound beautiful while another sounds angry or seems complicated to learn. You might have similar ideas about different accents or dialects in your own language. So, a standard British accent might sound different to you than an American Southern accent, but they are both English and can understand each other (usually).

Any special words made for a new purpose, like a slang term used only in NYC, or a word only used in “legalese”, are part of this category of linguistics. These are usually a part of a dialect, like I mentioned above. Someone in England would use the word lift, while Americans would say elevator, yet they can still understand each other. If I used linguistics terminology in this article it would be more difficult for people who don’t know those terms to understand what I’m saying. Dialects and specialized language are everywhere once you know how to look for them.

Also, languages often borrow words from each other. It’s why we have words like rendezvous and denouement. They come from French, which had a significant influence on English about 1000 years ago. This happens all the time, sometimes intentionally, and other times not. It all depends on the social perceptions and interactions between one language and another.

Linguists studying this are studying the intersections between language and culture. Since these terms and their use constantly change, there is always more to be studied. Usually, though, linguists analyze these more generally, looking at how and why we get these words.