Always a strong interest of mine, this course was taught for the first time at OC in Fall, 1997 - to a disappointingly small group (by administration standards) but an academically fascinating one (by teaching standards).

Linguistics is one of the four subfields of anthropology, the others being biological anthropology (genetics and evolution), archaeology (the study of the prehistoric past), and cultural anthropology (ethnography and folk studies).   Doctoral candidates in anthropology receive extensive training and testing in all four of these subfields and usually major in one or two.  Linguistic methods (like archaeological ones) underpin the entire field of anthropology, whether one is a linguist or not.

In popular speech, "linguist" means someone who speaks a lot of languages.  Two of the linguistics we're studying this semester (Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenburg, both of Stanford University and both considered foundational members of historical linguistics) know a lot of languages.  Years ago, graduate students in linguistics focused on learning unusual or nearly extinct languages (they still do) and then learning as many as possible.  This doesn't necessarily mean speaking in the usual sense.  It means being able to read the language, pronounce it, and know its grammar.  Most linguists do a pretty good job at conversing in the many languages they study, but they are not "bilingual" or qualified as real-time translators in all their languages.  When you consider that they know languages like Proto-Indo-European (a now-extinct root language of all the European languages, spoken near the Black Sea thousands of years ago), it isn't surprising.

But many linguists study things besides languages themselves.   Child language acquisition, multilingualism, how language works inside the mind, various forms of grammars:  these are the things linguists work with.

There are strong linguistics components in all of my classes, so stay tuned to this page for further info on languages.

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