What Is Applied Linguistics?

Applied linguistics, which covers a wide range of subjects such as literacy, speech therapy, media and communication, translation studies, lexicography, forensic linguistics, language teaching, language acquisition, is one of the most important sub-fields of linguistics that explores how we can solve real-life problems by understanding and solving problems.

Lexicography, which is a field of study mentioned above and which can be considered much more important than the others, is a sub-branch of applied linguistics that examines the characteristics of the words in any language in question, all kinds of semantic relations such as synonyms / antonyms, and vocabulary with all its features. However, lexicography has been heavily influenced by today’s age of technology, which in itself has caused several radical changes. E.g; Many dictionaries that we use frequently have been digitized thanks to the resources brought by the internet age and have been made available to people all over the world. Thanks to the potential offered by digital resources, we can say that e-lexicology, a sub-branch that we can benefit from whenever we want, is an up-to-date and constantly renewing field for us.

We can understand the importance of language teaching, which is another sub-branch of applied linguistics, because applied linguistics and language teaching are synonymous in most of the history. To explain briefly, language education is the process of applying and teaching any foreign or second language. Although it is interpreted as an interdisciplinary field, it is possible to say that language teaching is a sub-branch of applied linguistics. Just like lexicography, language teaching has undergone radical changes thanks to the age of technology and has shown us that learning a new language is possible thanks to computers and software. However, there is a teacher who facilitates the process on the basis of language education, which has been going on for centuries until recently.

Language acquisition, sometimes called language learning, is another important sub-branch of applied linguistics, but it often appears as second language learning/acquisition. The primary way to give the learner the maximum impact on language acquisition is to expose them to the language as much as possible. This is why applied linguistics is so closely related to language acquisition, which is one of its sub-branches. The more we keep the learner in contact with the features such as syntax, translation, morphology, vocabulary and phonetics of the language they want to acquire, the more successful the language acquisition will be.

As can be seen, applied linguistics is encountered in many fields, especially in the acquisition process in our mother tongue or the foreign/second language we are learning. Applied linguistics, which is one of the most important sub-branches that come to mind when it comes to linguistics and has many branches of study such as lexicology, language education and language acquisition, will always help us with the contributions of the developing technology to the language.