If questions such as the following interest you then you should consider taking Linguistics, either as a first-level credit or as a major:

• How important is the socio-cultural context in which children, or adults, learn languages?
• Why should people be disgruntled if they can't be gruntled?
• How do individuals, and groups, use language to secure and hold on to power?
• How can we describe the structure of a language? How can we describe the differences between English and isiZulu? or French, or Afrikaans, or Tamil?
• Do animals have language?
• Why do children learn their first language with so little effort, while most adults struggle to learn a second language?
• What is a ''foreign accent''?
• How is language built into the brain?
• How many Englishes are there in South Africa? In the world? Is English killing indigenous languages? Should we care?
• What exactly is a ''grammar'', and are there languages that don't have one?
• What is the difference between a language and a dialect?

The major in General Linguistics in the School of Language, Literature and Linguistics offered by staff in Linguistics on the Howard College campus consists of two discipline-specific 16-credit module at 1st level, two discipline-specific 16-credit modules at 2nd level and two discipline-specific 32-credit modules at 3rd level.