The way I see linguistics
It is, in retrospect, a funny thing I chose linguistics and placed it at the very top of my JUPAS list – although it is a common humanities subject in schools and universities overseas, which I only learnt later, it is seldom heard of or mentioned in Hong Kong (in fact, if you do mention it, you will most likely be greeted with this uncanny, if not absurd, response: “Hmm … is it like learning a bunch of different languages?”, which you eventually become too used to). It was a moment of serendipity when I saw it on the prospectus – linguistics, and its brief description. Recalling the excitement and satisfaction I experienced from teaching myself foreign languages in my spare time, I thought to myself this could be what I want to do in university. A visit to the department and conversations with their students and even professors confirmed my aspiration – I knew I wanted to do it, nothing but linguistics. It was a risky choice because it was a very competitive subject with a low intake quota, so when I learnt I got in – when I saw under my name the code 4070 on the computer screen – I let out a triumphant cry. That was the sense of achievement for a F.7 graduate / university student-to-be.
It is a choice that I never regreted making. Three solid years of undergraduate study in linguistics was a very pivotal stage in my young life – it was a real eye-opener, a very intense intellectual challenge, and a satisfying quest for everything I could possibly find out about language.
Linguistics is, as is described in the programme booklet, “among the most scientific of the arts and the most humanistic of the sciences” – what a brilliantly and succinctly phrased description, which I memorized and found myself saying during the admission interview, hoping to impress other interviewees. What could be more scientific than scrutinizing a spectrogram in, as Professor Mok called it, a “mystery spectrogram reading” exercise – puzzling out what the word behind a nondescript sound wave diagram is? Or more scientific than studying the anatomy of the human brain and determining how damage to certain areas leads to language impairment? What could be more humanistic than musing on how language shapes the mind, which is what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis concerns, and perhaps vice versa, or simply pondering on the origin of human language? From theoretical to practical, from tree drawing to speech synthesis, from language lab to school classroom, the linguistics programme is, with the breadth of branches it covers, as fascinating as looking into a kaleidoscope – at least to me as an undergraduate student, who only came to understand that the study of language was so much more than I had thought. It is no doubt that linguistics is a truly interdisciplinary subject because it forms such inextricable links with a myriad of other humanities and science subjects. In this sense, linguistics is not an end in and of itself – rather it is a means that ultimately leads students to the core essence of humanity and better understanding of the human race, i.e., ourselves.
I didn’t want to confine myself to the study of one particular language, which is rather like an ecologist studying a single species without bothering to find out how it interacts with other species in the same ecosystem. Being the equivalent of this narrow-sighted ecologist wouldn’t allow me to examine language as a universal human capacity that is endowed on all human beings regardless of their origins. With this in mind, I knew that the linguistics programme was the best place where I could make comparative study across languages – indeed we did find ourselves working with unfamiliar, if not exotic, languages in order to discover a range of cross-linguistic patterns, especially in syntax and phonology classes (they are really fun, by the way). With this cross-linguistic exposure by which the similarities and differences across languages are revealed, I came to develop a monochromatic view of language whereby the world’s languages become different hues that differ to varying extents on the spectrum but are all run through by a common thread, which is the faculty that resides in and defines the human mind.
If attending linguistics lectures is the subject of a sentence, then learning a foreign language is the subject complement – it completes the study of linguistics, suffice it to say. Luckily for us linguistics majors, taking foreign language courses is a compulsory component of the programme, and exposure to a new language means providing a context where you see how a number of linguistic theories and principles come into play. Knowing a foreign language, in addition, is of course always an advantage since globalization is now the name of the game, and the extra language you know will in one way or another allow access to more information and more opportunities. I decided to build on my smattering of French and do a minor on it, and on a personal note, I couldn’t have enjoyed more the thrill of being able to speak a new tongue and unlocking the cultural enrichment that came along with it. I enjoyed every single French lesson I had, and I couldn’t be more grateful to my French teachers to whom I wish to give my heartfelt thanks: Christèle, Christophe, Catherine, and the late Philip.
Despite everything positive I’ve said, here’s the rub: what am I going to do after I graduate? What career choices do I have being a linguistics graduate? This is the issue that probably plagues many linguistics students or even students-to-be. I’ll spare the litany of career options here – the programme booklet suggests quite a good list of them – but I truly believe that the value of the linguistics programme as well as tertiary education at large lies in the development of a range of generic skills, including analytical, research, communication, and presentation skills, and so on. The programme provides a particularly effective means of sharpening these skills with its requirements of constant analysis of language data in different forms, giving presentations and writing academic papers. For myself, being a language teacher is an ideal job because I’ve always valued languages as tools of communication as well as the lifelong benefits that the mastery of a language brings. The courses I took on language acquisition and learning were also an important inspiration.
Now maybe I wasn’t right: do I have any regret? Yes, I do regret graduating without having gained more than I already have. Although I still try to read as much as I can in linguistics when I can afford the time, I believe that there is nothing exhaustible with the study of language – although language has forever been with us, there will always be new directions in the field and endeavors from linguists of different expertise will always be called for, such as in speech synthesis (to the point of precision, if not perfection), preservation of endangered languages, or even Internet linguistics.
I hope linguistics continues to gain popularity among local students, and future students of linguistics will find the study in this discipline as enriching, engrossing, and enlightening as I have always found it.