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What is Applied Linguistics?

Applied Linguistics

Major Fields of Applied Linguistics

What is Applied Linguistics?

Applied linguistics is the study that places its emphasis on the application of the concepts and findings of linguistics to a variety of practical tasks. The study relates to other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, mathematics, education, and anthropology.

What is Applied Linguistics? (cont.)

It is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems.

Major Fields of Applied Linguistics

Sociolinguistics Psycholinguistics

1. Sociolinguistics
It studies how linguistics can be related to society and communities because language is a part of culture and society. Language plays an important role to the society and vice versa.

Educational Linguistics Mathematical Linguistics / Anthropological Linguistics

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Sociolinguistics (cont.)
Sociolinguistics mainly focuses on the study of how a language(s) is significant and different according to its social variables. Topics include language and age, gender, education, career, regional languages, standard language, bilingualism.

Examples of Study
Language of males and females Language of Chinese and Indian immigrants in Thailand

2. Psycholinguistics
It studies the relationship between language and psychology. It mainly focuses on language acquisition, language learning, language and the brain,

Examples of Study
The development of language found in infants to two-year-old children.

The development of language of three-month infants to eighteen-month infants.

3. Educational Linguistics
This field of study is the application of linguistics to the practical tasks of education. Teaching Thai language to foreigners Teaching English language to Thai speakers Training of pronunciation

4. Mathematical Linguistics
This field of study is the connection between mathematics and language such as the statistics of word use. The qwerty keyboard is typical of statistics of alphabet used in typing. This field of linguistics sometimes is referred as computational linguistics.

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Mathematical Linguistics (cont.)

Computers have become the tool for linguists in the investigation of language. Computational linguists create artificial language to communicate and use the computers. They arrange language information into systems which will be processed and stored in the computers.

Mathematical Linguistics (cont.)

Computational linguistics arose since the World War era which originated in the United States and Russia. Translation Machine was the main use of translating Russian to English since 1936.

5. Anthropological Linguistics
It studies the relationship between language and anthropology. Its main focus is on language and traditions and cultures of human beings in some particular areas as the structure of a language is studied which is believed to bring about a relationship between languages. Sometimes it is referred as Ethnolinguistics.