The Different Subfields of Linguistics

Speech is a particular manifestation of language. Language can be instantiated in speech, but they're not the same. Being a linguist or knowing about linguistics doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being able to speak lots of different languages. You could be a perfectly good linguist and still be a monolingual and there's one language. They're quite different things. Let me now introduce you to the various subfields of linguistics which we're going to look at in turn throughout this episode or probably two episodes.