Fun, future, and linguistics

Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials, Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription

It is just like you. It tells you that it is as emotional, messy, dynamic, strategic, and perfectly imperfect as any human being. Whatever you are, linguistics becomes. Why? Because linguistics watches you. It watches you with the same clinical precision of a surgeon. It watches you speak and communicate, how your speech changes over time, how you chaotically mix languages, make up new words formally or for funsies, follow rules and patterns, rebel even, and at the end of it all, how these stem ardently from within you and not apart. So yes, it is just like you and will not go away.

Instead of looking at things going around with languages, linguistics looks directly at it. It questions why water is called water in English and paani in Hindi, what pattern of sounds make up the word, how sentences are structured in different languages, how dialects can change those structures, how slangs change with social groups and with age, why we say things the way we say it, and the list just goes on.

Formally, the elements can be classified as word order (syntax), grammar, semantics (meaning), phonetics (sounds), culture, pragmatics (relationship between language and its speaker), and so on.

Subdisciplines inside the field include sociolinguistics (study of relationship between language and society), psycholinguistics (study of interrelation between linguistics factors and the brain), computational linguistics (uses computer science and maths to model languages) and more.

IIIT Hyderabad’s Linguistics professor Parameswari Krishnamurthy says that what constantly excites her most about the discipline is that “it’s both creative and logical”. It’s like mathematics and literature marrying each other when on a normal day, people regard them as two sides of a coin that do not see eye to eye. “We use language every day and you unconsciously know that there are certain facts about the language which you don’t know why but you still use it”, she describes. Starting to uncover those facts or truth is what happens when you get into linguistics for the first time.

We use language to communicate and so “anything that happens in human lives is reflected in language.” For instance, with internet slang, a lot of our active speech vocabulary includes its usage and thus, reflects how the internet has become so integral to our lives.

“Anything that happens in human lives is reflected in language.” | Photo Credit: Biswaranjan Rout/The Hindu

All these languages are inherently creative, so bringing a scientific lens to them unveils patterns and problems that spike up your curiosity.

“As long as humans live, the study of language lives.” Prof. Parameswari Krishnamurthy

This year, IIIT Hyderabad-backed Indian team won multiple medals at the International Linguistics Olympiad conducted in Romania. Krishnamurthy, who was part of it and led the team, explained how these patterns and problems are truly like puzzles. In a linguistic olympiad, it is just full puzzle mode.