Crash Course Linguistics

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. We 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.

We learn about programming computers to process human language, which is called computational linguistics, or natural language processing. We 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.

We learn about these factors - 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 - that make it difficult to determine what exactly counts as a language.

Language is constantly changing. Today’s small changes could lead to entirely new dialects or languages in the future. We 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.

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. We learn about language acquisition and how the process differs for babies and adults.

We couldn't have language without the brain, but our brains are a bit harder to study than other parts of the body. We learn about the field that studies where and how language happens in the brain, called psycholinguistics. We uncover old and new research in the field, classic studies and the methods psycholinguistics use to make connections between language and the brain.

All of the sounds or handshapes in a language can be pronounced differently depending on the context. The study of these patterns and variations is known as phonology. We 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.

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

The letters in a word don’t always match the sounds they represent, and people can pronounce words in different ways. We 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.

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. linguistic differences between languages are based on factors such as location, education, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

We don’t always say exactly what we mean, and yet we’re still pretty good at understanding each other. It's because we use context and meaning to figure out what's going on. We cover the four main assumptions we make about context in language, also known as Grice’s Maxims, and different times of conversational styles.

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 learn about different types of semantic relationships, and how different languages define these relationships.