Linguistik

Linguistik, the German term for linguistics, is the scientific study of language. It investigates the nature of human language, how it is structured, how it is used in real communication, and how languages differ and change over time. The field is descriptive rather than prescriptive, aiming to document and explain linguistic patterns rather than prescribe rules for correct speech. Core areas include phonetics and phonology (sound systems), morphology (word formation), syntax (sentence structure), and semantics (meaning). Pragmatics studies language use in context, while semantics covers truth-conditional and semantic relationships. Other major branches examine language in society (sociolinguistics), language acquisition (how children and adults learn language), psycholinguistics (cognitive processes underlying language processing), neurolinguistics (brain basis of language), historical and comparative linguistics (language change and relatedness), typology (cross-language structural classification), and computational and corpus linguistics (computational models and large-scale language data).

Researchers use fieldwork, elicitation, transcription, and phonetic analysis; experimental and psycholinguistic methods; corpus data; and computational modeling. Data from many languages, including endangered languages, contribute to typology and documentation. Linguistics informs language teaching, speech-language pathology, and language technology such as natural language processing and speech recognition. Historically, the discipline has evolved from early descriptive grammar traditions to modern theoretical frameworks, including generative grammar and usage-based and functional approaches.