wɛlkəm!

 Were you able to read the word above?

It says 'welcome' but it is written using unusual letters. These letters are called IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). These are a special kind of letters that are used by linguists and they are used to represent the sounds of the words.


Hello and welcome to my blog. This blog is is dedicated to my journey with linguistics, and how it is in Qatar. Is linguistics big in Qatar? what are the challenges that linguists have in Qatar? are questions that I will be answering in this thread.

Who am I?

 But first let me introduce myself, my name is Aya Jaafar and I am an Iraqi born and raised in Qatar. I am a student at Qatar University, majoring in linguistics and minoring in translation. I majored in linguistics because of my passion in languages and cultures. I developed this passion through my years of living in this culture. I live in a multicultural country where people from different cultures and speakers of variety of languages live together and interact with each other. And because I live in this country I meet and communicate with a variety of people, and this made me curious about their languages and cultures. That is why I made a lot research about majors related my interest and I found linguistics and translation, thus I decided to major and minor in these two disciplines. 

My Career Goals:

 I decided to walk through the path of linguistics because of my passion, but this is not the only reason. One of my personal goals is to always be helpful to people, I like to help people to overcome their challenges and to make them feel a little bit more happier in their lives. And I kept thinking about how I can keep working on this goal in both my personal and professional lives until I found out that I can use my profession and passion to achieve this goal. Learning linguistics has helped me understand how language works in our minds and in our societies, and how meaning  is not a simple matter, which made me be more careful about my choice of words while speaking. And by using the language skills that I learned I will be able to be a better communicator, which is my second goal, and to help people and be a better person in my society.

  In addition, my other career goal is to develop my leadership skills. I have always been scared of taking a lead in a group project or assignment because I never thought that I can be a good leader, but I took some leadership in some projects and I turned out to be better than expected. And because I know that in the workplace the person needs to have some good leadership skills I want to develop mine further through my job and through my university life.

picture from www.weheartit.com

Linguistics in Qatar                

  A linguist living in Qatar might not have the easiest life because of the challenges that he or she faces here. Linguistics is not widely known in this country and unfortunately there are  not many jobs that need or want graduates with a linguistics degree only. In other words, there are not many applications for linguistics in Qatar, and this is the challenge that I face. A linguistics professor in a university is probably the only job where a linguist can use linguistics directly in his or her job, by teaching it and its sub-disciplines to future linguists. However, there are jobs that require the person or the employee to have some background in linguistics, like translation. Translators need to have some linguistic knowledge about the languages he or she uses to translate from and into. Also, speech therapists need to know about how language is processed in the mind because it helps them to treat patients with different diseases like Dementia and Aphasia. This shows that linguistics is a discipline that branches out to different fields, from medicine to translation.Thus, even though being a linguist in Qatar is not easy we can get around it and still use it in different professions because language is used in almost every job in the world.    

Linguistics and Qatar's 2030 vision

  Qatar cares a lot about education and health and it thrives in its 2030 vision to have the best education and health in the world, and I believe that linguistics will be a part of the education and health development in the country. One of the goals that Qatar wants to achieve by the year 2030 is to have an educated society, where there will be a world-class education system that helps with the educational needs for the citizens of the country. And because of this goal linguistics will be more known to the people, and will be more developed in the country. That is why I can say that there will be bigger opportunities for linguists and linguistics students in Qatar because of the development that is happening in the education sector. In addition, Qatar wants to have the best health system, and linguistics will play a role in that because linguistics interlocks with medicine. As mentioned before speech therapists need to know linguistics in order to do their jobs, that is why Qatar will definitely pay attention to this aspect because it will provide better education of linguistics for the people who want to pursue speech therapy as a career. And it will provide a well developed health system that helps speech therapists. 

Therefore, I truly believe that there is a bright future ahead for linguistics  in Qatar.