What is linguistics? What is a language? What do we know when we know a language? This course is an introduction to linguistics, the scientific study of human language. We will learn about various subfields of the discipline by focusing on phonetics and phonology (the study of speech sounds), morphology (the study of words and word formation) and syntax (the study of how sentences and phrases are formed and structured). Students will learn to analyze linguistic data from a broad range of languages and to think critically about what human language is, how it is learned, and how it communicates meaning.