Phonetics—We’re just really into mouths.

Phonology—We argue abstractly about representations of systems that might have some relationship to the sounds you make. (No, we don’t care what you think.)

Optimality Theory—Whatever doesn’t kill you might make you more faithful.

Morphology—Why, when and how words and words; words are bits of words; words are two or more words; or words are a whole sentence. Or any combination of these.

Morphophonology—Sound tweaks when morphs meet.

Syntax—Smashing up strings of words into little bits, then sticking the bits back together again with different kinds of glue.

Syntax, redux—We classify the different types of nothing.

Theoretical Linguistics—Data? Where we’re going, we don’t need any data.

Stratificational Linguistics—Our lines have the tactics to find their way through anything.

Relational Grammar—It’s grammatical relations all the way down.

Semantics—Coming to terms with the fact that always doesn’t always mean “always”.

Cognitive Semantics—Is a hot dog a sandwich?

Semiotics—“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign, blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind.”

Pragmatics—Context: don’t leave home without it.

Deixis—It’s here and now and we love it.

Syntactico-Semantics—Deciding what the term meaning means, deciding what the term form means, picking a structure to analyze, deciding which of meaning or form is more important for that structure, producing a tight, neat, clean and entirely satisfactory analysis of chosen structure.

Conversational Analysis—Listening Recording, writing transcribing, coloring in color-coding.

Sociolinguistics—It’s all significant, no matter how it hurts your ears. In fact, that’s why it does.

Sociolinguistics, redux—Making going down the pub count as work.

Politeness Theory—Sorry, it’s not about the right way to say, “please”.

Descriptivism—Can you say that?

Prescriptivism—You can’t say that.

Typology—The search for universal patterns that kinda-sorta hold across all languages, or at least some percentage thereof.

Historical Linguistics—Saying weird stuff about what your momma’s momma said since the 19th century.

Historical Linguistics, redux—Making the dead speak again...at the level of fluency of two-year-olds who really haven’t learned much of their grammar and who might have speech impediments.

Etymology—Nice (14thC). Nice (16thC). Nice (18thC). Noice (B99)!

Toponymy—Using place names to infer something about all those people we conquered hundreds of years ago.

Onomastics—Making an entire sub-field out of leftovers from etymology.

Philology—We don’t do anything new.

Contact Linguistics—The neighbors made us do it.

Grammaticalization—Every word is like a phoneme, and any context could strip its features.

Paleolinguistics—Finding out what brontosaurus said about yo mama.

Old English Studies—The principled and well defined examination of a disparate collection of various kinds of sometimes undateable texts in different lects of a diverse and fast changing heterogenic population who may or may not have lived here and there, done this or that, or considered themselves English or not.

Old English Studies, redux—Boats, dialects, various texts; vikings, Alfred, 1066.

Fieldwork—Rare diseases + biting mosquitos = your very own data.

Applied Linguistics—Useful? Really? You’re kidding!

Interpreting Studies—If we borrow another theory from another vaguely related field, it will make things much clearer. Spoiler alert: it did not.

Forensic Linguistics—Legalese counts as a foreign language.

Text Linguistics—Reading with style.

Computational Linguistics—We turn words into numbers and hope someone pays us for it.

Automatic Speech Recognition—“Talk to a customer service representative... No, talk to a CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE... NO! TALK. TO. ... Bloody hell. [click]”

Psycholinguistics—Like linguistics, only more sciencey!

Neurolinguistics—We like making people get into the big scary tube.

Linguistic Philosophy—What if language?

Conlanging—What if we learned everything that real linguists know but did something [even] less useful with it all?

Esperantology—The study of why the users of an easily learnable language designed to promote peace, a) can’t speak it properly; b) don’t get on with each other.

Idology—The exact same thing as Esperantology but perceived as totally different by its practitioners. Possibly derived from and synonymous with ideology.

Xenolinguistics—It’s out of this world.

Universal Grammar—Trying to explain every language without learning any language.