• What is linguistics?
• Objective of linguistics
• Fields of linguistics
• Areas of work of a linguist
• Applied Linguistics
• Historical linguistics

We explain what linguistics is, its objective, fields of study and the areas of work of a linguist. Also, historical linguistics.

Linguistics studies everything that refers to languages, both current and ancient.

What is linguistics?

Linguistics is the science that studies the language. This implies studying its origins, its evolution, its foundations and its structure with the objective to understand the dynamics of living (contemporary) and dead languages ​​(the ancient ones from which they come).

Of all the systems created by the human being, none is as complex, vast and powerful as language. Among the many Sciences who study language, stand out:

• Philology. It focuses on the historical study of language and its manifestation in written texts, mainly philosophical and literary, and since its appearance in the 19th century.
• Linguistics. It is more oriented to the spoken language and the ways in which it operates at a certain moment of the history (although he also studies written texts).

Both philology (older) and linguistics (more modern) are daughters of the old grammar, cultivated by classical cultures, such as Greco-Roman.

However, linguistics was born at the beginning of the 19th century, when linguistic change and the possibility of studying it scientifically became evident. Even so, the greatest founding milestone in linguistics appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, and was the publication of the famous General linguistics course by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) in 1916.

Objective of linguistics

Linguistics is both a social-scientific discipline and a branch of psychology. This is because its object of study, language, involves two types of processes: a series of mental processes (the acquisition of the language, its implementation, its link with the thought) and other social ones (the evolution of language, pragmatics, its role in identity formation).

Therefore, the main objective of linguistics involves the formulation of a general theory of natural languages ​​and the cognitive system that makes them possible. Of course, each of the branches of linguistics has its own objective, framed in this goal general of the discipline.

Fields of linguistics

In semantics and pragmatics, linguistics studies the meaning and meaning of words.

Linguistic study can be divided into a set of fields or levels, depending on what specific aspect of the language is of your exclusive interest:

• Phonetics and phonology. He is interested in sounds from verbal language, that is, both by the physical emissions of each articulated sound (such as the configuration of the speech apparatus of the human body), to the acoustic images that these sounds form in our mind and that we associate with a specific reference.
• Morphosyntax. Union of morphology and syntax, this field is concerned with understanding the dynamic formation of words (how the significant pieces that compose them are put together, how they are modified to obtain new meanings) and the dynamics of formation of words prayers (How the words are organized and how they are associated depending on their sentence role).
• Semantics and pragmatic. This field focuses on the meaning of words and their modes of association, loan of meanings and other dynamics that involve the lexicon, together with the extralinguistic elements that affect said meaning, accompanying it to modulate it, suggest another meaning, etc.

Areas of work of a linguist

Linguistics offers its professionals numerous approaches to the study of language, among which the following stand out:

• Theoretical linguistics. He reflects on the nature of language from a philosophical, abstract and general point of view, often close to the philosophy of language, to try to formulate a valid theoretical approach.
• Applied Linguistics. It focuses on more tangible aspects of language, such as its acquisition dynamics (speech therapy), teaching of languages, or their role within the societies (sociolinguistics).
• Comparative linguistics. It consists of the comparison of the forms of use of language between two regions, communities or traditions human beings, to find the existing similarities and differences.
• Synchronous linguistics. Study the functioning of language at a given moment in history, without being interested in its origin or future. It is generally the most descriptive approach and is often limited to a specific community of language users.
• Diachronic linguistics. It studies the functioning of language understood as a historical evolution, that is, keeping the perspective of the past, present and future to understand the changes suffered and those that could undergo.
• Computational linguistics. It deals with aspects of language that could be inherited by computer systems to artificial intelligence, that is, it deals with cybernetic languages.

Applied Linguistics

Applied linguistics is an area of ​​linguistics that draws on other scientific disciplines, that is, it is essentially interdisciplinary, since it is interested in social aspects that concern the functioning of language.

Its development as a linguistic discipline occurred during the 20th century, especially in Anglo-Saxon-speaking countries and in Europe. It revolved around the teaching of English; but from the 1950s onwards, it assumed an approach more linked to education, the psychology, the anthropology, the pedagogy and the sociology.

It has a veritable multitude of approaches, which can be organized into the following main fields of action:

• The acquisition of language. Study how individuals acquire their mother tongue and how much of it is natural to our species and how much influence of the culture.
• The teaching of languages. It studies the processes of understanding and adoption of new languages ​​by individuals already endowed with a linguistic identity.
• The problems of the communication. It studies the way in which language operates within a given social environment: economic, legal, political, etc.

Historical linguistics

Historical or diachronic linguistics is one that understands language as the fruit of an incessant historical process of change, still underway.

It requires an understanding of the language's past in order to shed light on the present and the future. Its main thematic axis is the linguistic change and for this it is common that it also goes to other areas of knowledge, such as history, the archeology wave genetics.