General Linguistics

To the layperson, the concept of linguistics is the ability to speak a number of languages. If you tell someone you are studying linguistics in the university, you will be asked, “How many languages do you speak? However, linguistics has nothing to do with the number of languages a person can speak. As a linguist, you may be competent in only one language. But you are familiar with the rules that govern language in general, and have linguistic knowledge about aspects that are common (linguistic universal) to most languages. On the other hand, your ability to speak more than one language means that you are a ‘polyglot’ or ‘a multilingual’, and not a ‘linguist’.