<p>Yes, obviously I know it depends on school etc, but GENERALLY speaking, how difficult of a major is linguistics (compared to other humanities majors like english, history, and philosophy)?</p>
<p>I was a linguistics major. Then I switched to English. It’s not hard if you put a lot of effort into it AND really, really enjoy learning the subject. There aren’t tons of papers for you to write like an English or History major, but you do read a lot of theories.</p>
<p>First note, being a linguistics major doesn’t mean that you will be learning a lot of languages. This is a big misconception. However, many people who do major in linguistics, especially if they plan to go on to graduate school for it, might also learn a language or two (or more). You learn about the structure and formation of words and languages and seek to find any patterns in grammatical structures. You’ll take classes such as language acquisitions, phonetics, phonology, syntax, pragmatics, semantics, and morphology.</p>
<p>The way I would describe linguistics is that it is the scientific study of language. If you hate doing TONS of problem sets, hate theory, hate proofs, hate using weird symbols like brackets and Greek letters to represent words, then you shouldn’t major in linguistics. </p>
<p>My best advice to you is to test it out. If your school offers an introduction to linguistics course, take it. If you hate the course or find yourself struggling in it, don’t become a linguistics major.</p>
<p>Linguistics is very logic based–meaning, you can’t b.s. your way through problem sets and you actually have to know your stuff. Just from my observations (andthis is only a LING 101 class), math majors tend to do a lot better than their English/History/etc. major counterparts.</p>