语言学学士学位

在普通话语中，语言学家是精通多种语言的人，语言学家会很快习惯于被问到他们会说几种语言。但是在学术界，语言学家学习语言并不是因为他们希望能说一口流利的语言，而是因为他们希望总体上理解语言的本质。人类具有非凡的学习语言的能力：到五，六岁时，我们大多数人都能说一口流利的语言。但是正是由于语言对我们来说如此自然而然，所以我们对语言如何或为什么以这种方式工作没有明确的了解：我们觉得我们只知道怎么说。语言学家努力发现人类语言的隐藏结构，并通过结合几十种基本声音来解释人类如何讨论任何可以想象的话题。语言学课程的核心是对
In ordinary discourse, a linguist is a person who has mastered many languages, and linguists quickly get used to being asked how many languages they can speak. But in academia, linguists study languages not because they wish to speak them fluently, but because they wish to understand the nature of Language in general. Human beings have a remarkable ability to learn languages: most of us are reasonably fluent speakers by the time we are five or six. But precisely because language comes so naturally to us, we have little explicit understanding of how or why language works the way it does: we feel that we just know how to speak. Linguists strive to uncover the hidden structure of human language and to explain how we humans can discuss any imaginable topic by combining a few dozen basic sounds. The core of the Linguistics program is the study of the form language takes. We examine how words are built up from sounds, how sentences are built up from words, and how all this structure manages to communicate meaning. Linguistics takes a scientific approach to the study of language and develops skills in data analysis and scientific experimental methods. Linguistics students may or may not speak many languages, but they will definitely learn how to collect and analyze data about languages in an effort to answer these questions.