Linguistics is the scientific study of language.[1] It involves the analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context.[2] Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning.[3] Linguistics also deals with the social, cultural, historical, and political factors that influence language, through which linguistic and language-based context is often determined.[4] Research on language through the sub-branches of historical and evolutionary linguistics also focuses on how languages change and grow, particularly over an extended period of time.

The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini[5][6] who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī.[7]

Related areas of study include the disciplines of semiotics (the study of direct and indirect language through signs and symbols), literary criticism (the historical and ideological analysis of literature, cinema, art, or published material), translation (the conversion and documentation of meaning in written/spoken text from one language or dialect onto another), and speech-language pathology (a corrective method to cure phonetic disabilities and dis-functions at the cognitive level).

Basic concepts[edit]

What basic concepts / terms do I have to know to talk about linguistics?

• Morphology

  • morpheme, inflection, paradigm, declension, derivation, compound

• Phonology

  • phoneme, allophone, segment, mora, syllable, foot, stress, tone

• Grammar

  • tense, aspect, mood and modality, grammatical number, grammatical gender, case

• Syntax

  • phrase, clause, grammatical function, grammatical voice

• Lexicology

  • word, lexeme, lemma, lexicon, vocabulary, terminology

• Semantics

  • meaning, sense, entailment, truth condition, compositionality

• Pragmatics

  • presupposition, implicature, deixis