lingvistika

Lingvistika, or linguistics, is the scientific study of language and its structure, use, acquisition, and variation. It aims to describe how languages are formed, how they differ, and how they change over time, as well as how language is stored and processed in the mind and used in social contexts. It intersects with anthropology, psychology, computer science, philosophy, and cognitive science.

Core subfields include phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, as well as discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. Other major branches are psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, and historical and typological linguistics, which study language change and family relationships among languages.

Methodologically, linguists describe languages, test hypotheses, and build theoretical models. They use fieldwork to document under-described languages, data from corpora and elicitation, and experimental and computational methods. Techniques range from phonetic transcription to corpus analysis, statistics, and machine learning for language technologies.

Historically, linguistics emerged from grammatical tradition and philology and became a modern science in the 19th and 20th centuries, with Saussure shaping structuralism and later developments in generative, functional, and cognitive approaches. The field covers most languages and emphasizes descriptive rather than prescriptive analysis.

Applications include language teaching and assessment, natural language processing and speech technology, clinical linguistics and speech-language pathology, forensic linguistics, and language planning. Advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence continue to broaden understanding of how language is represented and processed.