You know that slintВ could be an English word, while sbintВ and lsintВ could not be. You also possess knowledge about the sounds of your language-for example, which consonants can go together in a word, and how they go together. In addition, you understand that asking a wh-question ( who, what, where, etc.) calls for a somewhat different strategy (compare the rising intonation in the question above to the falling intonation in Where are you going?). However, if you speak French, you might add est-ce queВ at the beginning, and if you know American Sign Language, you probably raise your eyebrows during the question. You know that when you ask a yes-no question, you may reverse the order of words at the beginning of the sentence and that the pitch of your voice goes up at the end of the sentence (for example, in Are you going?). Perhaps without even knowing it, you understand that Sarah admires the teacherВ is grammatical, while Admires Sarah teacher theВ is not, and also that The teacher admires SarahВ means something entirely different. For example, as a speaker of English, you possess knowledge about English word order. Speakers of all languages know a lot about their languages, usually without knowing that they know it. If you studied a foreign language later on, itвЂ™s likely that you discovered that it was not nearly as easy. During those first few years of your life, you accumulated a wide range of knowledge about at least one language, probably with very little conscious effort. In short, you had become a fluent native speaker. But by the time you were five or six, you were able to produce sentences, make jokes, ask questions, and so on.

When you were born, you were not able to communicate with the adults around you by using language.

how language influences the way in which we interact with each other and think about the world.

the structure of language in general and of particular languages.

the unconscious knowledge that humans have about language.

At the heart of linguistics is an understanding of: Linguistics is the scientific study of language.В Many topics fall under this umbrella. And they may be right: you may, in fact, be a polyglot! But while many linguists do speak multiple languages-or at least know a fair bit about multiple languages-the study of linguistics means much more than this. However, you may find it hard to answer people who ask you, 'What exactly is linguistics, and what does a linguist do?' They might assume that it means you speak a lot of languages. If you are considering becoming a linguistics major, you probably know something about the field of linguistics already.

A linguist studies