What is linguistics?
What follows is a broad overview of the study of human language. Please explore the specific lesson playlists to learn more.
What is linguistics? We can use it as a term for nothing less than the study of language. So, how to we define human language? And how can we study it? That leads to a number of questions both ancient and modern, from the time of Panini's Sanskrit grammar to modern computational linguistics.
What are the building blocks of human language and how can we model, explain or account for natural language? Answering these questions leads directly to theory. Theoretical linguistics explores the sound structure of individual languages (phonology), how speakers build words (morphology), the way speakers put sentences together (syntax), the role of meaning in language (semantics), word choice and vocabulary (lexis), and meaning and use in context (pragmatics).
But do we study speech or writing in our effort to explain human language? Modern disciplines focus on spoken language, as it's more spontaneous and universal, but we can also learn and theorize about writing systems (graphemics).
What if we focused on describing human language (descriptive linguistics) instead of modeling its structure more abstractly or theoretically? From here, we can compare languages and show how they change over time, and how one language relates to another genetically (historical linguistics). Linguists can describe the real-life spoken languages indigenous to peoples across the globe from a wide range of cultures (anthropological linguistics), the social variation of language within a single culture (sociolinguistics), and even how humans make speech sounds (phonetics) and form marks on the page to write (graphetics).
What if we ask instead how language is relevant to everyday life (applied linguistics)? Language is learned and taught (language acquisition), processed by computers (computational linguistics), relies on human biology (evolutionary linguistics), is intertwined with the role of the brain and its functions (neurolinguistics & psycholinguistics) and has many other applications.
Let's take one last angle: what tools do we use to study human language? Tools include field notes, grammar books, parse trees, dusty manuscripts, statistical models and datasets, derivations, spectrograms, and just plain mental analysis & questioning (as in logic). Those are just a few linguistic tools drawn in random order.
There are many questions to ask about natural language, and many ways to talk and think about languages. I hope this top-level slice gives you a taste of the variety of approaches available to you.
