Declaration

After two years of living like a linguistics student, I finally took the initiative to declare to the University what I've been declaring to the world for the past year: I am a Linguistics student! It feels so good to log into the class registration system and see my major plan right there along with the GE's, instead of seeing that despised Communication Disorders plan.

Along with finally feeling like a real, official student, both of the University and the Linguistics department, declaring my major yesterday made me reevaluate just how much I love what I do. I'd obviously been thinking along these lines for a while, ever since I realized that it was a good time for me to declare my major. As a result, I've learned a few things I'd never noticed before. I realized just how long I've been in love with words and language. It hasn't been just since I took the Intro course, nor since I was just barely realizing how much humans fascinated me and wrote this post as a consequence. It began long before I created this blog and named it Syntactic Entities, and even before I was nicknamed a certain syntactic entity, Adverb. I could maybe say that it started back in 2001 when I watched my dad fight for language rights. That's when I started forming ideas about language policy. But even before that, I'd realized just how beautiful and powerful language could be.

As a child, language was my only friend. My parents taught me to read when I was still very young, and instead of going to preschool, I would read books and visit the Peabody Museum. After changing elementary schools multiple times and finally settling into one that was as unfriendly as could be, I turned to books and words as companions. I didn't feel like I was missing anything when I could read and write. Those words had power to change what I saw as reality. And ever since then, I've loved language.

Over time, I've grown curious about how people work and think, as I wrote in that blog post shortly after starting college. What better way to figure out how human minds work than by literally examining the language with which they think? I'm in love with Linguistics, and now I've made it official.