Crash Course Linguistics

Language is everywhere. Linguistics is the study of language, but what does that even mean? In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we'll begin talking about some of the features and levels of structure of language, and introduce some of the other topics we'll be covering throughout this series.

What even is a word? Well… linguists don’t really know! But that’s ok! When linguists want to get super specific, we don’t even talk about words, we talk about morphemes instead. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’re diving into the topic of morphology and what makes up these things we call words.

Grammar sometimes gets a bad reputation, but we're actually doing grammar all the time! And we're pretty good at it! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we'll begin our discussion of syntax by learning how we can take words and morphemes and turn them into sentences, questions, stories, and even videos like this!

There are many theories of syntax and different ways to represent grammatical structures, but one of the simplest is tree structure diagrams! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll use tree structure diagrams to keep track of words and groups of words within sentences, and we’ll break down what roles different types of words and phrases play within a sentence.

If you want to know what a word means, all you have to do is look it up in the dictionary, right? Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. This episode of Crash Course Linguistics is all about semantics, or the area of linguistics concerned with meaning. We’ll learn about different types of semantic relationships, and how different languages define these relationships, as well as different approaches to semantics. And we’ll discover that the humble definition may be more complicated than we think.

We don’t always say exactly what we mean, and yet we’re still pretty good at understanding each other. That’s because we don’t just use meaning to figure out what’s going on, we also use context. This episode of Crash Course Linguistics is all about pragmatics, the area of linguistics that deals with context. We’ll cover the four main assumptions we make about context in language, also known as Grice’s Maxims, as well as the ways that languages can use grammar to convey politeness, and the different types of conversational styles within and between languages.

Language is an important part of our identities, and the ways we feel about how others use language is influenced by society. The study of the social element of language, and how it forms part of our identity is sociolinguistics. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about linguistic differences between and within languages based on factors such as location, education, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and how our perceptions of these differences affect our society.

The letters in a word don’t always match the sounds they represent, and people can pronounce words in different ways. Lucky for us, linguists have tools to help understand and communicate speech sounds. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll begin our discussion of phonetics, the study of speech sounds, by talking about consonants, and we’ll also get an introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA.

In English, we have 5 (well, sometimes 6) vowel letters, but way more vowel sounds. That’s where the IPA can help us! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about vowels, those sounds you can sing with your mouth open, and how we can represent them clearly using the IPA

All of the sounds or handshapes in a language can be pronounced differently depending on the context, but in different languages, these differences may be significant, or not. The study of these patterns and variations is known as phonology. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn all about phonology and the different phonological systems we see in different languages, and we’ll begin to retrain our brains in order to gain a better understanding and appreciation for phonological patterns.

We couldn't have language without the brain, but our brains are a bit harder to study than other parts of the body that we use to make languages like our mouths and hands. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we'll learn about the field that studies where and how language happens in the brain, called psycholinguistics. We'll cover old and new research in the field, classic studies, and the methods psycholinguistics use to uncover the connections between language and the brain.

Babies have to learn a lot of language stuff before they can even say their first word. Exposure to language as infants doesn’t just help us say those first words but gives us the tools we need to acquire advanced language skills and learn more languages later on in life. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about language acquisition and how the process differs for babies and adults.

Language is constantly changing. Today’s small changes could lead to entirely new dialects or languages in the future. We can’t predict how these changes will occur, but we can better understand the path a language has taken through historical linguistics. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about how and why languages change, what happens when languages come into contact with each other, how linguists piece together the history of a language, and more!

If you ask a linguist “How many languages are there in the world?” the answer most will give you is “around 7000”. We say “around” because there are several factors that make it difficult to determine what exactly counts as a language, including the difficulty of distinguishing between languages and dialects, various political factors, and the fact that not all languages have the same degree of resources and records. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll explore these 3 factors to learn about world languages and linguistic diversity, as well as the inequities that these factors can create.

Computers are pretty great, and we use them for different language tasks every day. But teaching computers to understand language is surprisingly difficult! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about programming computers to process human language, which is called computational linguistics, or natural language processing. We’ll look at the types of language tasks computers can and can’t do, how natural language processing works, as well as the different types of biases that exist in machine learning.

All societies have spoken or signed language, but not all languages have a written form. Since writing developed in different ways in different places, writing systems differ greatly around the world. In this final episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about writing systems, also called orthographies, the different components that make up a writing system, the development of different writing systems over time, and more!