I know you guys are out there, so if you read this…could you tell me, do you have as much trouble as I do explaining to polite innocents what it is that you do with your life? I’m just wrapping up a bachelor’s in Linguistics and I’m going on to do my PhD in the fall. Over the past three years it’s become increasingly clear to me that most people, through no fault of their own, haven’t got a clue what the field is all about, and whenever I try to explain things just get confusing. I’m assuming that an ability to satisfy people’s curiosity and not put them to sleep will probably be a Valuable Life Skill, so if you’ve been fairly successful, could you tell me how you do it?
I started studying computational linguistics last october and I can’t remember one person who had no immediate connections to the subject and had any idea what it is about. Most people recognize linguistics as vaguely language-related, and that’s about it. Before that I studied computer science for three years and for some reason the reactions towards my new subject are even less informed, but very positive in comparison.
Computational linguistics has the advantage that there are well known applications although those cover only a part of the spectrum of the subject.
So I tell people about machine translation, grammar checking, dialog systems for their cars, smarter search engines…
A few days ago I got a new job as a student assistant in a project on a corpus for lexical semantics (annotation slave), but I haven’t figured out yet how I should explain that to people.
Hm. Well, yes, it’s true, most people dig up some associations when I tell them what I study. But the follow-up question tends to be something like “So how many languages do you speak?” While this is a fine question for some linguists, I’m into socioling (critical discourse analysis), and so after I tell them that I only really know English, the conversation kinda dies. Maybe I’m just particularly ham-fisted in this department…
Linguists at a loss for words? There’s a joke in there someplace…
I confess, I don’t really know what linguistics is. But at one time, I said I wanted to be a linguist, because I was interested in language-in-general, & that seemed like the word. I finally gave up on studying languages when I realised I was interested in syntax & structure, not vocabulary. I was 25, could still only speak English, & suddenly realised I didn’t want to learn any other language well enough to speak it. I have no patience for vocabulary past 100 words or so.
The best answer I’ve ever heard to this question is “None!”
You might try something like “I study how languages work” or “I study how people use language.” This probably won’t seem terribly interesting or worthwhile to many people, but it might give them a better idea of what you do.
What you describe is actually the close to the way I got into linguistics–I was looking for a major because my parents wouldn’t pay for a degree in psychology, and I thought, “Well, I like words and learning languages.” And that was that. I had no idea what to expect.
To a certain extent people are right to think of linguists as knowing tons of languages–it’s a common and useful trait. I will never be that kind of scholar. I get intimidated by the number of languages the people around me seem to know, but the truth is that you can get by just fine on only one or two…I myself plan to do work mainly or only with English. (I enjoy learning new languages, but have exactly the same problem as you, foolsguinea–lately I get more and more frustrated by the need to study vocab when I’d much rather be looking at structural elements.)
I’m not exactly sure where I was going with this tangent, but I figure I’ll post it anyway. There must have been a point. (As one of my profs sheepishly admitted at a Q&A event held in the hopes of attracting more students to the fold, studying linguistics doesn’t necessarily do anything to improve your communication skills.)
Oh, my. That was not intentional. Please forgive me.
That’s awesome. I’ll have to start using it. 
It’s a start, anyway. I don’t even try to convince anyone that it’s worthwhile at this point.