Explain linguistic chawlism

Linguistics aims to understand how the language faculty of the mind works and to describe how language itself works. Linguists observe patterns within a language and across languages to try to understand what principles drive our brains’ comprehension and production of language.

There's a quote by Lynne Murphy that "asking a linguist how many languages s/he speaks is like asking a doctor how many diseases s/he has had". As linguists, languages (and language) are our objects of study. We learn to look at languages as data and recognize their patterns, just as doctors learn to recognize signs and symptoms of diseases. Whether they have had the disease before or not is irrelevant. Many people come to linguistics from other areas: math, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science, just to name a few popular related fields.

Linguistics spans a large number of subfields, each dealing with a different part of the language faculty.