About Linguists
Linguists are anthropologists who study how languages work. There are many sub-disciplines within linguistics like phonetics, phonemics, syntax, grammar and etymology. Linguists usually subscribe to one of three philosophical schools. There are structural linguists like Noam Chomsky, functional linguists like Ken Pike, and cognitive linguists like Edward Sapir.
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Function
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Linguists work with languages but there are many elements that make up every language. The study of which of the 110 human speech sounds and their symbols a language uses is the area of phonetics. When linguists study the ways that these individual sounds combine to make syllables and words, their area is phonemics. The rules by which the words can be ordered to form phrases and sentences is the study of grammar and syntax. Since languages change when the people who speak them need to identify new inventions and when the people who speak one language encounters people who speak another language for whatever reason, linguists also study the historical and sociological developments of words and languages. This branch of linguistics is called etymology.
Identification
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An example of a linguist whose work involved learning, analyzing, and describing a single language was the Persian Sibawayh who lived in the late seven hundreds A.D. He tackled the Arabic language. This involved recognizing the grammatical rules of Arabic, developing a list of Arabic words and their meanings, and a pronunciation guide to Arabic. Every language can be described by its grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. Knowing how a language works, however, does not necessarily correlate with knowing how to speak it fluently.
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Types
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Knowing how a language is structured has become one school of linguistic theory. The nineteenth century Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure wrote the first widely acclaimed textbooks of structural linguistics. Its thesis is that any language can be described in terms of how its elements inter-relate. The theory of transformational linguistics that Noam Chomsky produced is in this same tradition of structural linguistics.
Features
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Another school of linguistic thought is cognitive linguistics. Edward Sapir, who died in 1939, was a linguist who worked in cognitive linguistics. Along with a colleague, he came up with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. This suggests that speakers of different languages actually think using different thought patterns.
Expert Insight
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Ken Pike is an example of a functional linguist. He developed a way to train individuals to acquire enough information about a previously unknown language to describe it even when there was no one who spoke any language in common who could be a translator. This was important because Pike worked for the Wycliff Bible Translators. His linguistic theory, tagmemics, allowed people with three semesters of graduate level training to enter remote tribal areas, learn the language, and then translate portions of the Bible into the language. While more functional than anything else, tagmemics also employs the tools of both structural and cognitive linguistics.
Potential
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People who love learning languages may find a career in linguistics quite satisfying. It requires the study of linguistic theory as well as ancient languages including Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Proficiency in more than one modern language also helps. Then, following a bachelor's degree in anthropology or foreign languages, linguists usually go on to earn master's and doctoral degrees before entering a field that usually involves academia, research, writing and teaching.
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