Why Do Linguistics?: Reflective Linguistics and the Study of Language

What do we need to know about language and why do we need to know it? This book shows how viewing the world through a linguistics lens can help us to understand how we communicate with each other and why we do it in the ways we do. Above all this book is about noticing. It is about encouraging readers to pay attention to the language that surrounds them.

The book addresses fundamental linguistic questions such as: Where do people's beliefs about language come from? Who decides what language...