Language is at the centre of human everything human. We talk, we think, we read, write, and listen. Language allows us to express what is in our brains and persuade other people to adopt our thinking. Language is what sets us apart from other animals.

An important field of study is linguistics. A frequent, irritating misunderstanding from those who do not study linguistics is that studying linguistics means acquiring languages. Whenever I tell them my discipline, people often follow it up with, “Ooh, what languages are you learning?” And I have to respond that, despite learning languages, linguistics does not mean that we learning a language for communicative purposes. This misconception must be made clear.

Linguistics is the scientific study of languages, studying how languages work, how they are used, how they are acquired, represented in the brain, and evolve over time. Linguists study many different aspects of language, such as:

Phonetics – study mechanisms of speech production, and analysing sounds waves produced in speech. This examines the physical production of speech, how we produce sound waves that we interpret as consonants and vowels.

Phonology – study of the organization of speech sounds, and governing rules of where they appear and what happens when adjacent to other sounds.

Syntax – study of sentence structure

Semantics – study of meaning

Morphology – study of grammar concerned with words and word formation

Historical Linguistics – study of language evolution and languages no longer in existence. It looks at, for example, how Vulgar Latin became the many Romance languages, and what changes took place.

Language Acquisition – study of how language is acquired in infancy
Second Language Acquisition/ Bilingualism – how a second or multiple languages are acquired, either simultaneously with another language in infancy or later on as an older child or adult.

Sociolinguistics – study of language variation

Dialectology – study of dialects

Psycholinguistics – study of how language is organized in the brain, and how it is recalled.

Neurolinguistics – study of the neurological aspects of language, including language disorders created by damage to the brain. (Hint: language is left lateralized, meaning it is in the left hemisphere.)

Writing Systems – study of the different scripts used by languages
And many more!

This field is ever important as we become more and more aware of the diversity of languages currently spoken on this planet. Despite there being about 200 countries, there are currently nearly 6,900 currently spoken today! Unfortunately, not every country recognizes their languages or uses them in the government, so many languages are falling out of use, and going extinct. Language extinction means that the language ceases to be spoken, in any dialects of languages descended from it. For example, while Latin has not be spoken in about a thousand years or so, it is not considered extinct because it evolved into languages like French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. On the contrary, Dalmatian, a Romance language spoken in Croatia is extinct because it has no current speakers and no languages descended from it. It is estimated that 90% of languages will go extinct by the end of the century, leading to nearly 6,300 disappearing. On average, one language goes extinct every two weeks. The lost of linguistics diversity is alarming because it does not mean that a way of communicating is disappearing, but the culture and knowledge encoded in the language will be lost to the world! In order to preserve this knowledge, many linguists are going out into the field to study languages that have not been recorded, as well as worked with governments to recognize and set up programs to slow the decline.

Every so often, I will post new information in various threads so that you can get a basic understanding of languages, some of which might help you when trying to learn new languages.

I hope you enjoy these threads and learn a bit more about the fascinating field that studies the worlds languages.

Some references:
An Introduction to Contemporary Linguistics Analysis – William O’Grady, John Archibald Title

A Course in Phonetics - Peter Ladefoged, Keith Johnson