Lingüístiques

Lingüístiques is the systematic study of human language, exploring its structure, use and evolution. It covers how languages are organized, how they are learned and processed, and how they vary across communities and over time. The field studies both spoken and signed languages, aiming to uncover universal features of human language as well as language-specific phenomena. It is generally empirical and interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such as psychology, anthropology, computer science, philosophy and neuroscience.

Its core subfields include phonetics and phonology (sounds and sound systems), morphology (word formation), syntax (sentence structure), and semantics (meaning), with pragmatics (language use in context) often treated as an integral component. Other important branches are sociolinguistics (language in society), psycholinguistics (cognitive processing and acquisition), neurolinguistics (brain basis of language), historical or diachronic linguistics (language change over time), typology (cross-language comparison), and computational or corpus linguistics (data-driven models and language technologies).

Research methods range from fieldwork and language documentation to controlled experiments, corpus analysis and computational modeling. Data may be collected from native speakers, recorded corpora, or existing texts, and analysis aims to build theories of linguistic structure, processing and acquisition. Applications include language education, preservation of endangered languages, natural language processing, speech recognition and translation, and forensic linguistics.