Have you ever thought about how amazing language is? It's something we all use effortlessly every day, yet it's one of the most complex human abilities. Just like other natural phenomena, language can be observed and investigated in a scientific way. But the unique thing about language is that everyone has their own personal and infinite data set living inside their brain, their own private laboratory for testing all sorts of hypotheses about how language works. Spoken languages are made up of complex sequences of carefully produced sounds and an exploration of these sounds will be our first task. We will go from phonetics, the way sounds are produced to phonology, the way these sounds are put together to form words. We will also examine the formational components of sign languages. Next, we will examine morphology and syntax, or how we build complex words and put words together to form sentences. Finally, we will turn to meaning, examining semantics or the study of how we interpret the meaning of sentences. Every aspect of the way you use language provides potential insight into how language works. Together, we will puzzle over different aspects of language, uncovering things that you didn’t know you knew about the language(s) you use every day, as well as discovering things about a variety of other languages. So come learn how Linguistics, the science of language, relates to you.

Human languages are more complex than most people think. What do you actually know when you speak/sign a language? Do you have a memorized list of words/phrases in your mind, or do you have some type of computational system of mental rules? What can studying language scientifically tell us about the human mind? This class will serve as a crash-course introduction to central questions in the field of linguistics and to the scientific methods that linguists use. In this class, you will learn about the various aspects of language that linguists study — sentence structure, sound formation, meaning, and more — and think through some puzzling aspects of language you may have never thought about before. Together, we will see firsthand how intricate, beautiful, and diverse human language is!