What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language.  Linguists (experts in linguistics) work on specific languages, but their primary goal is to understand the nature of language in general by asking questions such as:

• What distinguishes human language from other animal communication systems?
• What features are common to all human languages?
• How are the modes of linguistic communication (speech, writing, sign language) related to each other?
• How is language related to other types of human behavior?

The main goal of linguistics, like all other intellectual disciplines, is to increase our knowledge and understanding of the world. Since language is universal and fundamental to all human interactions, the knowledge attained in linguistics has many practical applications.  Linguists, with some training in other appropriate disciplines, are thus prepared to seek answers to questions such as:

• How can a previously unstudied language be analyzed and written?
• How can foreign languages best be taught and learned?
• How can speech be synthesized on a computer or how can a computer be programmed to understand human speech?
• How can the language problems of people with speech abnormalities be analyzed and rectified?
• How are linguistic issues in legal matters to be handled? 

  Phonetics

  The study of speech sounds.  Phoneticians study both the production of speech sounds by the human speech organs (articulatory phonetics) and the properties of the sounds themselves (acoustic phonetics). 

  Morphology

  The study of word structure. 

  Syntax

  The study of how linguistic units larger than the word are constructed.

  Semantics

  The study of meaning 

  Historical linguistics

  The study of how languages change over time, addressing such questions as why modern English is different form Old English and Middle English or what it means to say that English and German are “more closely related” to each other than English and French.

  Sociolinguistics

  The study of how language is used in society, addressing such questions as what makes some dialects more “prestigious” than others, where slang comes from and why it arises, or what happens when two languages come together in “bilingual” communities.

  Psycholinguistics

  The study of how language is processed in the mind, addressing such questions as how we can hear a string of language noises and make sense of them, how children can learn to speak and understand the language of their environment as quickly and effortlessly as they do, or how people with pathological language problems differ from people who have “normal” language.

  Neurolinguistics

  The study of the actual encoding of language in the brain, addressing such questions as what parts of the brain different aspects of language are stored in, how language is actually stored, what goes on physically in the brain when language is processed, or how the brain compensates when certain areas are damaged.

  Computational linguistics

  Learning and understanding a language involves computing the properties of that language that are described in its phonology, syntax, and semantics.  The challenge of describing this process connects linguistics with computational issues at a very fundamental level.  How could syntactic structures be computed from spoken language, how are semantic relations recognized, and how could these computational skills be acquired?