As a child, I spent pretty much all of my free time reading anything I could get my hands on, from books to magazines to newspaper comics and cereal boxes. Getting lost in pages of words was an endless adventure that I never grew tired of. The rules and order of language was something I took for granted, but at the time I was simply too young to have an appreciation for the intricacies of language.
In grade school, we began to study the rules of grammar, which at first seemed monotonous and pointless, just something designed to fill up the space between math and lunch. As time passed and everyone grew even more bored with grammar lessons, I became fascinated with them. Instead of taking the time to memorize the rules, I instead wondered why those were the rules and why they worked. Who decided that English was only proper in one precise format, and did someone really come up with all those rules or are they just inherent to language? Eventually, I started playing my own word games, trying to pronounce words backwards to see how they sounded, and breaking words down to their prefixes, suffixes, and roots to find similarities and the meaning of each component.
The fascination with words and language never went away, but rather gave way to writing. I'd spend hours trying to phrase things properly, in ways that best captured the essence of what I wanted to say. For a long time, I wanted to pursue English and creative writing, never really considering linguistics.
My first semester of college, however, I took Latin and I started noticing similarities between Latin, English, and Spanish, and I was consumed by an interest in etymology and morphology - word origins and word composition, respectively. That interest in the inner workings of language reemerged practically overnight, and the next semester I enrolled in the Intro to Linguistics course, fell in love, and declared a major in Linguistics at the end of that spring.
People always ask me why I chose to study linguistics, especially since my post-grad plans don't have anything to do with the field and instead include my other major, and no one seems to believe that a person could take on a second major for fun. For years I have wondered what makes language work, how it works, and why it works, and suddenly, at my fingertips, I have the opportunity to unlock almost all of the answers I spent years searching for, whether I realized it or not. I chose to study linguistics because it allows me to explore a side of language that most people don't know about or simply don't care about, and it allows me to have a deeper understanding of the language I use to write and communicate with other people. It allows me to experience childlike wonder as we break down specific sounds in phonology and I realize that my tongue falls in a different place depending on what consonant I'm pronouncing, and it gives me a sense of accomplishment when I finally finish a complex tree diagram in syntax. Studying linguistics makes me happy, and I think that's enough of a reason to continue studying it.
