linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, encompassing its structure, use, acquisition, and variation. It aims to describe how languages are organized and how they are learned and used by people. Linguists analyze sounds, words, sentences, and meanings, and explore how languages change over time and differ across communities. The field covers all human languages and seeks general principles that apply across languages.

Major subfields include phonetics and phonology, which study speech sounds; morphology, which examines word formation; syntax, which analyzes sentence structure; and semantics and pragmatics, which address meaning and use in context. Other branches focus on sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, historical and typological linguistics, computational linguistics, and corpus linguistics, each approaching language from different theoretical or practical angles.

Key concepts include grammar as the tacit rules underlying language use, competence versus performance, and the search for universal features of language. Descriptive linguistics models language as it is spoken, while prescriptive norms judge how it ought to be used. Languages vary by phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon, yet share common structural constraints.

Methods range from fieldwork and elicitation of native speaker data to experimental studies, corpus analysis, and computational modeling. Data are often annotated and stored in corpora for large-scale analysis. Interdisciplinary work connects linguistics with psychology, computer science, anthropology, and neuroscience, informing technologies such as speech recognition, machine translation, and language education and policy.