Linguistics

Linguistics is the science that studies language. Scientists who study language are called linguists.

An important part of the field of linguistics divides language into many levels to study it. The smallest part of any language is the phoneme, which are sounds in language. Speech is studied in the field known as phonetics. This is followed by the structure of sounds in words, studied under phonology. The structure of words is studied in morphology and the structure of sentences is studied as part of syntax. The study of meaning in language is known as semantics, and finally the study of meaning in context is known as pragmatics. Discourse analysis is the study of entire conversations or texts.

Linguistics studies one language next to another to find similar properties. Doing that makes it possible to find things shared by all the languages of the world. Linguists who study how languages are structured and how they work are said to study theoretical linguistics.

Another part of linguistics is involved in understanding how languages are used in society or in the world. Sociolinguistics studies how language is used in society, and historical linguistics studies how languages change over time and how languages were in the past. One part of historical linguistics is known as etymology where people study the history of word.

The part of linguistics which aims to find out how languages works in the mind is known as psycholinguistics.