linguistikk

Linguistics, or linguistikk in Norwegian, is the scientific study of language. It seeks to describe how languages are structured, how they are used in social contexts, how they change over time, and how people acquire and process language. Linguistics treats language as a system of patterns in sounds, words, and meanings, as well as a set of rules for combining them.

Linguistics is traditionally divided into core areas and many specialized subfields. Core areas include phonetics and phonology (sounds), morphology (word formation), syntax (sentence structure), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (language use in context). Other branches examine language in society, cognition, and computation, such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, historical or comparative linguistics, typology, and computational or corpus linguistics.

Researchers employ descriptive methods and fieldwork to document languages, as well as experimental techniques, corpus analysis, and formal modeling. Data may come from recordings of speech, elicited responses, written texts, or large text and audio datasets. The aim is to describe language structure, variation, and processing, and to build theories that generalize beyond a single language.

Linguistics has roots in philosophy and philology and has influenced many practical domains, including language education, speech-language pathology, language policy, and natural language processing. It engages with questions about how languages encode reality, how children learn language, and how technologies can understand and generate human language.