Designed to introduce students to the formal and functional study of language, this course will provide a background in several core areas of linguistics: phonetics and phonology (sound structure and patterns), morphology (word structure), syntax (sentence structure), and semantics (word meaning). In addition, students will examine language variation and change, language contact, language and culture, and topics in sociolinguistics (language and gender, language varieties associated with specific ethnic and socio-economic identities). This course is taught in English, but students will use and analyze datasets from many different languages in order to compare linguistic features.