Jetset Linguist

Innocent, well-meaning, new acquaintance: So what do you study? Me: Linguistics Them: Oh! How many languages do you speak? Me: *mentally picturing lasers darting out of my eyes* This conversation is well-known to virtually everyone who has ever studied the misunderstood topic of linguistics. To be fair, it's not a very popular one, so I don't expect people to know all of its intricacies. But I'd prefer it if people asked questions about it instead of assuming. To put it another way: asking a linguist how many languages they speak is like asking someone majoring in journalism which newspaper they study, or asking a doctor how many diseases they have. A bit odd, no? My goal is to make the conversation at the beginning of this post just as odd.  So - what is linguistics??? In the shortest definition, linguistics is the study of language. Note how that's singular. Linguists can  study a particular language or group of languages, but more often than not, ...

The time has come again for another travel chapter to close. After spending 10 weeks in Barcelona, I figured it was time for me to catch up on what exactly I've been doing here and what I think of the city. First of all, my time in Barcelona was to fulfill the internship component of my master's program. 10 weeks, full time linguistics fun. Contrary to what some of you may be thinking, my motivation to come here wasn't just to be in a different city, or to escape a bit of the Dutch winter; it was because I found a professor who was working on a project that was right in-line with my academic interests (all the other stuff was just a happy bonus!). The project I've been working on is investigating how babies are able to recognize different languages. We're talking like 4 month-olds here, and you'd think they wouldn't know too much, but babies are language machines . Even after just a couple months, babies can tell the difference between languages based on...