Linguistics

The study of languages is very interesting. It reveals a lot about our Culture and the way humans think.

Language is a system of Symbols that is key to cultural transmission.

• Provides a social / shared past, future
• Perception may be shaped by language $\to$ How Language Shapes the Way People Think,

The following are languages that I know how to speak.

• Mandarin
• Cantonese
• English
• French
• Spanish
• German

Diagram shows the # of native speakers for each language. More people speak a dialect of Chinese than speak English natively

Advantages of being good with languages

• Connecting with more people

Language as seen in PSYCH101

We achieve our conversational coordination by virtue of our ability to interactively align each other’s actions at different levels of language use: 

• lexicon (i.e., words and expressions)
• syntaxRules by which words are strung together to form sentences (i.e., grammatical rules for arranging words and expressions together)
• speech rate
• accent