"Applied linguistics has highlighted how linguists can contribute to society"

"Applied linguistics, due to its interdisciplinary nature, has highlighted how linguists can be of service to society." This is how Miguel Casas, director the Institute of Applied Linguistics at the University of Cádiz, described the "spectacular" development linguistics has undergone in recent decades. This expert emphasized that the growth of this discipline be seen in the increase in employment opportunities, the transfer of knowledge social, technological, and business), and the cross-disciplinary nature of many of its subjects.

The professor and researcher the University of Navarra, where he presented a discussion paper the speech interdisciplinary speech of linguistics to researchers at the Institute for Culture and Society and, on the other hand, led a session on employment opportunities Philology students Philology the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

According to Casas, linguistics approaches language through its many and varied manifestations. As a result, innovative fields such as computational and digital linguistics, clinical linguistics, and forensic linguistics have emerged, with a clear impact beyond the academic world. For example, he highlighted the role of the latter discipline to criminal cases, such as in the identification of the terrorists responsible for the March 11 attacks through voice recognition and variationist records, such as language styles language dialects (in this case, Arabic).

In this regard, the researcher how this discipline the connections between many scientific fields and fosters partnership inter- and transdisciplinary approaches. He cited his own institute as a real-world example, where four departmentshave been established : advisory service , language industries(with research units research terminology, neology, and corpus linguistics), clinical linguistics and forensic linguistics, as well as three cross-disciplinary laboratories : computational and digital linguistics, phonetics and acoustic engineering, and experimental linguistics—a unit that investigates topics such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, acoustic phonetics, and the treatment of patients with communication deficits or rare and degenerative diseases using electroencephalography and eye-tracking techniques.
 

“Artificial intelligence has elevated the role of the linguist”
One of the most productive fields for experts today is computational linguistics, where linguists work alongside computer scientists to development natural language processing systems and language models. “Artificial intelligence has elevated the role of the linguist,” he noted. Linguists must be involved both in the preliminary phase—with the creation and formalization of these large language models—and throughout their development, ensuring the traceability of the human-machine interface through their intervention, based on continuous preparation and training of the artificial intelligence.

“One of the major challenges still facing artificial intelligence centers on improving language models applied to specialized discourse,” he noted. The fact is that the terminology is another field where linguistics has developed the most in recent years as discipline and interdisciplinary discipline . In the field of business communication, terminology of great relevance to their work; for example, multilingual dictionaries have been created to facilitate work specialized terms in a globalized world. In this regard, Casas praised the work terminologists and translators in this field, noting that“artificial intelligence faces no small number of obstacles and challenges in the specialized translation of technical and scientific texts and discourse.”

Finally, the researcher conclude by highlighting the social, professional, and, above all, scientific recognition of linguistics as a field of knowledge. In this regard, over the past twenty-five years, it has not only experienced significant growth as discipline in terms of employment opportunities, but has also recently been included in the new Catalog scientific fields under the new Royal Decree of the Organic Law on the University System (LOSU), with a status of recognition on par with the major fields of knowledge .