Sprachwissenschaft

Sprachwissenschaft, literally "language science," is the scientific study of human language. It encompasses the description, analysis, and theory of language structure, use, and acquisition across languages and communities. In German-speaking academia, the term covers what in English are usually called linguistics, together with related applied work in education, translation, and language policy.

Core subfields include phonetics and phonology (speech sounds and their organization), morphology (word structure), syntax (sentence structure), and semantics (meaning), with pragmatics focusing on language use in context. Additional branches include sociolinguistics (language in society), psycholinguistics (cognition and language processing), neurolinguistics (language and the brain), historical and comparative linguistics, and typology (cross-linguistic comparison). Applied strands, sometimes grouped as angewandte Sprachwissenschaft, address language education, translation, terminology, and language planning.

Methods range from descriptive and theoretical analyses to experimental and corpus-based research. Data sources include fieldwork, recorded speech, text corpora, and longitudinal studies. The field employs formal models, computational tools, and interdisciplinary approaches drawing on psychology, neuroscience, computer science, anthropology, and philosophy.

Historically, Sprachwissenschaft evolved from philology and grammar in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the Neogrammarians shaping the regularity of sound change, followed by structuralist, generative, and cognitive approaches in the 20th century. Today it encompasses both foundational theory and empirical study, supporting language preservation, education, and policy.