If you’re starting without any previous experience in Linguistics, then a great place to start is Crash Course Linguistics. Students have also recommend Universiteit Leiden’s Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics.
For us, one of the most important subfields within Linguistics in phonetics, because that gives us a basis to develop applications including automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. However, many other subfields are important for speech and language processing. Syntax, semantics, and morphology have long had close ties with computational approaches to understanding language (and also computer science theory!). As we see more and more language technologies in the world, sociolinguistics and pragmatics have come to the forefront.
You can find many more free resources for learning about linguistics on Gretchen McCullough’s All Things Linguistic website.
Here are a few introductory books on linguistics and the wonders of human language:
- Deutscher, G. (2010). The unfolding of language. Random House.
- Evans, N. (2011). Dying words: Endangered languages and what they have to tell us. John Wiley & Sons.
- Hurford, J. R. (2014). Origins of Language: A Slim Guide. Oxford University Press.
Still hungry for more? Then browse this site, and if you have an account then please use the forums to ask questions.
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