The 36 lectures of Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language—taught by acclaimed linguist, author, and Professor John McWhorter from the Manhattan Institute—are your opportunity to take a revealing journey through the fascinating terrain of linguistics. You focus on the scientific aspects of human language that were left out of any classes you may have taken in English or a foreign language, and you emerge from your journey with a newfound appreciation of the mysterious machinery built into all of us—an appreciation likely to surface time and again in your everyday life.

Course Lecture Titles
1. What Is Linguistics?
2. The Sounds of Language—Consonants
3. The Other Sounds—Vowels
4. In the Head versus On the Lips
5. How to Make a Word
6. The Chomskyan Revolution
7. Deep Structure and Surface Structure
8. The On-Off Switches of Grammar
9. Shades of Meaning and Semantic Roles
10. From Sentence to Storytelling
11. Language on Its Way to Becoming a New One
12. Recovering Languages of the Past
13. Where Grammar Comes From
14. Language Change from Old English to Now
15. What Is an Impossible Language?
16. How Children Learn to Speak
17. How We Learn Languages as Adults
18. How You Talk and How They Talk
19. How Class Defines Speech
20. Speaking Differently, Changing the Language
21. Language and Gender
22. Languages Sharing the World—Bilingualism
23. Languages Sharing a Sentence—Code-Switching
24. The Rules of Conversation
25. What Is This Thing Called Language?
26. Speech as Action
27. Uses of Talk from Culture to Culture
28. Does Language Channel Thought? The Evidence
29. Does Language Channel Thought? New Findings
30. Is Language Going to the Dogs?
31. Why Languages Are Never Perfect
32. The Evolution of Writing
33. Writing Systems
34. Doing Linguistics—With a Head Start
35. Doing Linguistics—From the Ground Up
36. The Evolution of Language

About the Author: John Hamilton McWhorter V (1965– ) is an American linguist and political commentator. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. He received a master's degree in American Studies from New York University and a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1993 from Stanford University. After graduation he was an associate professor of linguistics at Cornell University from 1993 to 1995 before taking up a position as associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1995 until 2003. He left that position to become a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and a columnist for the New York Sun. Since 2008, he has been a lecturer at Columbia University.

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