What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the study of language.
Not just learning a specific language, but the principles behind all languages.
A language is a system of connections between forms (sounds, shapes, gestures) and meanings (ideas and expressions).
Understanding linguistics can help you to learn any language, improve communication, and investigate human nature.

Linguistics includes:

• Phonetics
  The study of the full range of human language sounds and their pronunciation. How sounds are produced in any language.
• Phonology
  The study of sound patterns, how sounds combine and influence each other. How a native speaker thinks about a language’s sounds.
• Morphology
  The study of words and how their many forms are constructed and modified. Related to lexicology and lexicography, the compiling of words into dictionaries.
• Syntax
  The study of grammar, how words are combined and ordered into sentences. The principles behind the grammar of every language.
• Semantics
  The study of meaning patterns. How languages build meaning through words and sentences. Related to logic.
• Pragmatics
  The study of how languages are used in the real world. The principles behind concepts like “reading between the lines” and “you had to be there to understand”. Includes rhetoric, elocution, stylistics, text linguistics, discourse analysis, and communication studies.
• Sign language linguistics
  The study of languages based on visual gestures and body movements rather than sounds.
• Semiotics
  The study of signs and sign systems, including language but also nonverbal (body language), animal, and machine communication.
• Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology
  The study of the social patterns of language and the links between language and society. How different people use language differently, and how our use of language connects to our sense of identity and social life. Includes dialectology, the study of local dialects, language ideology, people’s beliefs about language and its significance, and ethnolinguistics or cultural linguistics, the relationship between language and culture.
• Paralanguage or paralinguistics
  The study of the many subtle and secondary factors accompanying language, like tone of voice and nonverbal cues, indicating emotion or the intent of the speaker. Includes metacommunication.
• Writing systems
  The study of how languages are visually recorded. The structure and principles behind all writing systems, from Chinese characters to Egyptian hieroglyphs to the English alphabet. Includes orthography, which itself includes spelling and punctuation.
• Translation
  The tricky art of converting messages from one language to another. Includes transliteration of writing systems.
• Field linguistics / descriptive linguistics / language documentation
  The recording and description of languages, especially those in danger of disappearing.
• Historical linguistics / diachronic linguistics / language change / archaeolinguistics / paleolinguistics
  The study of how languages change over time. The patterns and principles behind how, for example, Latin evolved into the modern Romance languages, and how Old English evolved into modern English. Includes comparative linguistics, the organization of language families, and etymology, the history of words.
• Philology and palaeography
  The study of language through historical sources, including historical method, textual criticism, and the decipherment of mysterious documents.
• The origin of language / evolutionary linguistics / biolinguistics
  The study of the mystery of the very beginnings of language, long before any historical record.
• Linguistic typology / language variation / linguistic universals / linguistic diversity / contrastive linguistics
  The study of similarity and variation between the world’s languages. What is universal across all languages, and in what ways languages differ.
• Language geography or geolinguistics
  The geographic patterns of languages and dialects. Includes toponymy, the study of place names.
• Cognitive linguistics
  The study of language from the perspective of cognitive science, the study of thought. How language fits into the overall world of human thought.
• Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics
  The study of how the human mind shapes language. The psychological and neurological factors influencing how we understand and use language.
• Corpus linguistics
  The study of language through corpora, collections of real-world writings or recorded conversations, the largest numbering in the billions of words.
• Computational linguistics
  The application of computer technology to language, including natural language processing, speech synthesis (text-to-speech), and speech recognition (speech-to-text). Also includes computer languages.
• Forensic linguistics or legal linguistics
  The application of linguistics to legal and criminal matters, such as author or speaker identification through analysis of linguistic features.
• Philosophy of language
  The study of language’s connection with philosophy. How language fits in to issues of philosophy, such as nature vs nurture and the meaning of meaning.
• Speech-language pathology or clinical linguistics
  The study of language disorders, how medical factors can affect our ability to use language, and how to help.
• First-language acquisition or language development
  The study of how a baby becomes a native speaker. How a babbling 1-year-old becomes a complex-story-telling 5-year-old, with remarkable similarities across all languages.
• Second-language acquisition / language education / language pedagogy
  The study of how anyone older than a baby learns a language, and how to help the process. The principles and best practices for learning or teaching any language.
• Language policy
  The role of language in politics and law. Includes language planning, also known as language engineering or interlinguistics.
• Endangered languages and language revitalization
  The study of the 1000+ languages that are in danger of extinction, as well as efforts to preserve and strengthen them.
• History of linguistics
  The story of linguistics itself, from the ancient Sanskrit grammarians and Aristotle’s Organon through Early Modern philosophical languages, 19th-century comparative philology, the 20th-century theory wars, into the frontiers of computational linguistics.
• Constructed languages (“conlang”)
  The creation of artificial languages, from Esperanto to Elvish, Klingon, and Dothraki. How to create your own language for philosophical exploration, fictional world-building, stealth communication, or just the fun of it.
• Astrolinguistics and xenolinguistics
  The design of messages to send into deep space as part of the search for extraterrestrial life, and the as-yet-hypothetical study of what messages we might get back.
  
  List of unsolved problems in linguistics