Lingüístics

Lingüístics is the scientific study of language and its properties. It seeks to describe how languages are structured, how they are used in real communication, how children acquire them, and how languages vary and change across communities and over time.

The field covers core components such as phonetics and phonology (sound systems), morphology (the structure of words), syntax (sentence structure), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (language use in context). It also studies how societies influence language (sociolinguistics), how language is processed and learned (psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics), and the historical development and typology of languages. Methods include fieldwork and elicitation, corpus linguistics, experiments, and computational modeling in computational linguistics.

Historically, modern linguistics emerged from early descriptive and comparative traditions and gained prominence in the 19th and 20th centuries with scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure and, later, Noam Chomsky. Today, the field embraces diverse theoretical perspectives, from structural and functional analyses to cognitive and probabilistic models; it is interdisciplinary, connecting with psychology, anthropology, computer science, and education.

Applications of linguistics include language teaching and assessment, language policy and preservation, and speech-language pathology, as well as the development of language technologies such as speech recognition, machine translation, and natural language processing. The field also informs debates about language rights, multilingualism, and literacy.