My Motivation To Study Linguistics And Language At An Undergraduate Level

Did you know that from an etymological perspective the word ‘disaster’ means ‘ill-starred’ or ‘bad star’? Both beautiful and fascinating at the same time. I remember asking my father at a young age something along the lines of “Why do you say ‘table’ for a table and why not ‘beetle’?”. That is probably when my interest in linguistic phenomena clicked and why it continued to develop in later years. I have found great enjoyment in linguistics and language learning and my curiosity for the English language has led me to will to pursue a university degree in the subject.

I have been fortunate enough to live in a linguistically rich country that has enabled me to grow up in a bilingual environment, speaking both Spanish and Catalan, as well as gaining proficiency in English and an intermediate level in German. Some time ago, I became attracted to the Chinese language and went on to teach myself the basics of the grammar and syntax. Overall, I have had the opportunity to become acquainted with different languages, not just the Romance ones, and to compare their similarities and differences.

Moreover, I have also been instructed in Latin, which has helped me widen my knowledge on the etymology of my native languages, Catalan and Spanish, and realise the influence it has had in many cultures and languages.

I consider myself a versatile, dynamic and hard-working person. I have developed several projects involving programming, computational linguistics and NLP (Natural Language Processing). While at secondary school, I designed and programmed an app, along with some classmates, that was awarded a prize by the Mobile World Capital Barcelona organization and I participated in a programming contest organised by Hewlett and Packard. When studying for the baccalaureate, I applied this existing knowledge to my final-year research project, which I am currently in the process of finishing. I have been able to work with the Python NLTK library to extract Latinisms in the complete works of Shakespeare to, then, analyse their occurrences and compare their translations in Catalan. All these experiences, I believe, have provided me with practical skills that can be applied to linguistics and can prove useful in the future.

Having been taught in depth about syntax and morphology, as well as some lessons on semiotics and semantics at school, I was keen to read further works on the subject, including ‘The Etymologicon’ by Mark Forsyth, ‘How Language Works’ and ‘The story of English in 100 words’ by David Crystal, ‘The Language Instinct’ by Steven Pinker and ‘Course in General Linguistics’ by Ferdinand de Saussure. It was fascinating to be able to open up my mind to so many different conceptions about language and its different facets and also to realise the scientific/philosophical-dependent nature of linguistics.

Studying linguistics at an undergraduate level will offer me a broad interdisciplinary knowledge and doing so in the UK will certainly provide me with a first-rate education, while immersing myself in the global lingua franca. All in all, I hope to be able to thrive in such an academically-enriching environment that Cambridge University would provide and, hopefully, give an answer to the questions I asked back then to my father.