What's Linguistics about anyway?

Linguistics - a field that has held a lifelong fascination for me. But I do catch some flack from family members and friends for pursuing my interest in this somewhat esoteric subject!  ( A few typical comments from them include, "Linguistics, what's that?", "Spare me the details!", and "Get a life!")

Allow me, if you will, to attempt to convince you that Linguistics is an essential part of our everyday lives, because Linguistics is, simply put,  the scientific study of language. Unfortunately, the more expanded definition of Linguistics is a bit more intimidating.

The first four topics in the definition, morphology, syntax, phonetics and semantics, all seek to explain the workings of your mind when language is created or comprehended. You may never stop to consider what is happening internally with language, but then we seldom analyze what is happening when we walk down the street, wave to a friend, or open the car door . All of these activities are, under normal circumstances, automatic.  

Let's get the basic topics of Linguistics out of the way.  Morphology deals with how words are formed in the mind, for example, how we acquire the mental rules for forming plurals. (Did you know that plurals are more complicated than just putting an "s" at the end of words?) Syntax deals with how words are put together to form sentences.  ("Man bites dog" is more newsworthy than "Dog bites man."  How do we comprehend the difference?)  

Phonetics deals with the sound systems of languages. (My English speaking upbringing did not allow me to develop the Spanish trill sound, unfortunately!) And semantics deals with meaning. Ah, now there's a deep philosophical subject.  I can understand why a friend of mine once observed, "Linguistics is a bit dense, isn't it?"  Dense yes, but I still say well worthy of the effort to study.

For the less masochistic learner, the specific branches of linguistics named in the definition have more of an interface with ordinary life. Have you observed that people speak differently when chatting with friends than when giving a formal presentation? (Sociolinguistics)  Are you fascinated by different varieties of English?  Scottish dialect is one of my favorites. (Dialectology) 

Are you a mom or dad observing your child acquiring language? (Psycholinguistics)  Are you fascinated as I am by  Isaac Asimov's talking robots?  (Computational linguistics) Do you wonder why you have trouble reading The Canterbury Tales in the original English?  (Historical-comparative linguistics)  And would you like some guidelines about how best to acquire a second language?  (Applied linguistics).  Is the field of Linguistics sounding any more appealing now?

 I think I can prove that I am not alone in my interest in language.  I have a very useful app on the iPad called Flipboard that allows me save articles of interest to me in my own digital magazines.

And since I have chosen to share my Linguistics magazine with the world, these are today's statistics:  3,227 viewers, 57,452 page flips, 1,029 followers and 154 articles.

Someone else besides me is a  Linguistics nut!  That feels really good.