Linguists investigate how people acquire knowledge about language, how this knowledge interacts with other thought processes, how it varies between speakers and geographic regions, and how to model this knowledge computationally. They study how to represent the structure of various aspects of language (such as sounds or meaning), how to theoretically explain聽different linguistic patterns, and how different components of language interact with each other. Many linguists employ聽statistical analysis, mathematics, and logical formalism to account for the patterns they observe.聽

Linguistics is a major that provides聽insight into one of the most intriguing aspects of human knowledge and behavior. Majoring in linguistics means learning about many aspects of human language, including sounds聽(phonetics,聽phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax), and meaning (semantics). It can involve looking at how languages change over time (historical linguistics); how language varies from situation to situation, group to group, and place to place (sociolinguistics,聽dialectology); how people use language in context (pragmatics,聽discourse analysis); how to model aspects of language (computational linguistics); how people acquire or learn language (language acquisition); and how people process language (psycholinguistics, experimental linguistics).