linguadharma

A very astute friend of mine, who's applying to graduate school in another field, asked me a very important question about linguistics that I've found very difficult to answer: "Why does it matter?" As I'm applying for graduate programs to start this fall (in phonetics/phonology and historical linguistics, with an eye towards endangered languages and possibly Tibeto-Burman languages), I've been noticing just how relevant this question is for choosing a graduate program. We often get caught up in our own little topics and just following our interests that we neglect this bigger picture. Some answers I've come up with include: - Pure science as its own good, curiosity, etc - Language is a lens through which to learn about how big and diverse our world is, and how arbitrary our national affiliations are - Possible applications for communities with endangered languages - Applications in technology and education... though not so much with the kinds of research I'm headed towards Corollary to these, though, are some additional obligations. The first two require that linguists actively work to popularize the findings of our discipline among non-linguists, and the third requires that at least some of the materials we produce about endangered languages actually benefit those communities. So for you, why does linguistics matter?