Health linguists

Palm"What are the opportunities for studying Linguistics?" This is the most common question parents, siblings, and friends ask us when we declare, with the joy of having passed the university entrance exams and the light in the eyes of youth, that we want to pursue these studies. This also applies to any philology. We always tend to think of teaching (it's the most common option, let's not fool ourselves), but we will find philologists and linguists in bookstores, publishing houses, libraries, in language correction services of many public and private entities, not to mention radio or television. Many people tend to think: "Of course, they're a literary person."

We're talking about an emerging career path that has been gaining increasing traction in recent years: clinical linguistics. It seemed that this noun and that adjective couldn't go together, but they did, and in fact, for more years than we think, a small group of linguists has been dedicated to studying language from a clinical perspective. That is, what happens when a clinical factor affects a person's language? It's true that these studies were initially driven by psychiatrists and psychologists, but the lines between linguistics and psychology have become blurred, and in recent years, we've seen more and more people trained in general linguistics or a specific philology dedicating themselves to this field.

Broca's Area

In the 19th century, the doctor Paul Broca identified an area related to language, precisely because one of his patients had it affected and his language ability was impaired. Today we know it as Broca's area, and it is related—among other things—to a speaker's ability to structure what they say. At the same time, the psychiatrist Carl Wernicke located an area related to word comprehension (and yes, today we know it as Wernicke's area). These were two of the main pillars that have led linguistics to ask questions such as the following: In which regions of our brain is language found? Aside from these areas, are there more? How do they relate, how do they work with each other?

Many more years would pass before access to the modern neuroimaging techniques sometimes seen on television, whether in films, series, or documentaries, became available. But this didn't stop them from continuing to investigate how language developed in children's brains so extraordinarily rapidly. Many parents commented that "from one day to the next" their child was already saying words and, suddenly, sentences, with hardly any fear. Other linguists, following the path pioneered by Drs. Broca and Wernicke, were interested in which aspects of language are affected with age, or which are affected when a person suffers a stroke. Linguists are not (for the most part) experts in biology, physics, or anatomy. But they can be very precise when observing how a person expresses themselves. For example, there are cases in which a person, after a stroke, understands what people are saying, but when they want to speak, they do so in a disorganized manner. Some do so disorganized, but they choose the wrong words. Others make mistakes with the sounds in words. Still others say words, but not all kinds. It has been detected that there are words that function as linking words, which join other words and make the sentence well-formed. But certain pathologies can affect precisely these words.

David Crystal published one of the most influential books on this area of ​​research. And, furthermore, the title gave a name to the field: Clinical Linguistics. Today, clinical linguistics is gaining momentum as a line of research for several reasons. Linguists wonder how language works, and for centuries they have described hundreds of different languages. But now our society has access to the workings of the brain, and that's why interdisciplinary teams are formed: neuropsychologists with linguists, with psychiatrists, with geneticists, and biologists. That prejudice about whether a person is a "literary" or "scientific" person has been abandoned. This artificial division of people has vanished, and we can find people from different fields investigating how certain pathologies affect language. For example, Antonio Benítez Burraco, a geneticist, also studied linguistics and now researches—among many other things—the genes related to language. Along the same lines, others are interested in how certain genetic alterations affect specific aspects of language. Psychologist Albert Costa—who unfortunately left us too soon, in 2018—conducted impressive research on how language works in the brains of bilingual people.

Clinical Linguistics

Currently, you can find undergraduate programs that include subjects such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and biolinguistics. There are master's degrees in Europe specializing in clinical linguistics.

Clinical linguistics has become a meeting point for many areas of science, with an increasing number of participants who have initially trained in general linguistics or a specific philology. Delving deeper into how language is affected in a given clinical situation can later help other specialists produce more specialized teaching support materials. Or it can help a neurologist better understand what is happening in their patient's brain.

We never know where life will take us. Most philologists and linguists currently researching in the clinical field didn't even think about it when they were just beginning their studies. For all these reasons, it seems appropriate to put aside the labels of "humanities" and "sciences" and open our minds to new horizons where multidisciplinary work is the norm.