Linguistics is the scientific and academic study of language. It tries to answer basic questions such as

• What is language?
• How is language represented in the mind?
• How does language work?

The underlying goal of linguists is to discover the underlying rules of all languages; that is, the common elements which form a language.

Of course, the person who studies linguistics is known as a linguist.

Areas of Study

General Linguistics is the study of

• grammar – the rules which govern how language is put together
• semantics – the meaning of words & language
• morphology‏‎ – how words are formed
• syntax – how sentences are formed
• phonology‏‎ – sound patterns in language
• phonetics‏‎ – the production/perception of sounds

Applied Linguistics is the study of the way in which language is used and looks at areas such as

• teaching methodologies – different approaches to teaching language
• second language acquisition‏‎ – how languages are learnt
• speech therapy and pathology

In addition, there are specialist fields such as:

• computational linguistics – studying language using technology
• corpus linguistics – the study of language by comparing corpora (usually with computers)
• psycholinguistics – the psychology involved in language