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Linguistic way to lucrative career
A linguist is a person who engages in such studies. A linguist is interested in all aspects of language, and in all languages of the world, but he is not necessarily a multilingual person. He is concerned with language variation according to social setting, geographical regions, time period, relationship between language and mind and many such issues. Linguistics can be said to cover three major areas: Synchronic and diachronic Theoretical and applied Contextual and independent Theoretical linguistics: This is often divided into a number of separate areas, to be studied more or less independently. The following divisions are currently widely acknowledged. Phonetics: the study of different sounds that are employed across all human languages. Phonology: the study of patterns of a language’s basic sounds. Morphology: the study of the internal structure of words. Syntax: the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences. Semantics: the study of the meaning of words, and how these words combine to form grammatical sentences. Stylistics: the study of style in languages. Pragmatics: the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts. Diachronic linguistics: Whereas theoretical linguistics is concerned with studying languages at a particular point of time, diachronic linguistics examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. Applied linguistics: Since theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within a language and among all languages, as a group, applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and applies them to other areas. It not only covers the area of language teaching, but the area of speech synthesis, speech recognition and speech/language pathology as well. Contextual linguistics: It is that realm where the linguistics interacts with other academic disciplines. Whereas core linguistics studies languages for their own sake, the inter-disciplinary area of linguistics consider how language interacts with the rest of the world. Some of these are: Socio-linguistics and anthropsophy interact with linguistics. In discourse analysis, philosophy interact with linguistics. Psycholinguistics and neuro-linguistics are a meeting of medical sciences and linguistics. Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include language acquisition, evolutionary linguistics and cogitative sciences. Job prospects In recent years, there has been surge of demand in various sectors for competent linguists. There are several areas in which a linguist can work. He can work as an audiologist; communication disorder specialist; broadcaster/ news reader; copy writer; editor; grant/proposal writer; interpreter; language planner; lexicographer; professor/ instructor/teacher; psycholinguist; and researcher. Publishing, public relations, translation and technical writing are other fields in which a linguist can work. Areas of specialisation Teaching is the one of the best options for linguists. There are openings in school, colleges and other institutions that carry out foreign language training/teaching programmes. Several government agencies hire linguists to supervise language training programmes. Linguists are also hired to carry out research on various languages, or to work in specialised fields such as the determination of geographical names for mapping and other purposes. Lexicographers are involved in the publishing of dictionaries. They are concerned with matters such as pronunciation, the definition of grammatical terms or various languages’ dialectical variation. In publishing, linguists are involved with producing foreign language text books, editing, consulting and planning elementary and secondary programmes of curriculum design. The role of linguists in speech pathology and audiology is varied. Through research efforts, they have improved ways of analysing and such as aphasia, dyslexia, etc. Linguistic researches have also provided valuable information about the stages normal children go through after the first word appears, enabling the evaluation of child language disorders and the design of intervention programmes. Linguists play a major role in solving certain criminal cases. Even the CBI has to take the help of a linguist in cases which involve speaker identification. Acoustic phonetics is one of the significant courses of linguistics. BPO boom Linguists can ride the BPO wave. Call centres not only utilise the services of linguists to prepare training modules but also to get their employees trained professionally. A linguist is trained in translation techniques, which makes him/her eligible for translator’s posts both in public and private sectors. Bank on it A new upcoming field for linguists is banking and financial services sector, where more and more multinational companies are hiring linguists for providing effective phonetics, language input, culture and customer service training to delegates, etc. Eligibility Almost all Central universities in India offer Masters and M.Phil/Ph.D in linguistics. The eligibility for taking up the course is graduation in any stream.
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THE
word ‘linguistics’ has been derived from the Latin lingua (tongue)
and istics (knowledge). Therefore, linguistics is the scientific study
of languages. Linguistics deals with the structure and development of
particular languages and their relationship to other languages. It is
the study not of one particular language but of human language in
general, its sound, structure, meaning and function. It studies language
as a universal and recognisable part of human behaviour.