Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves the analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest known written records of languages date back to around 3400 BC, though the origins of linguistics itself extend much further back in time.
The main goals of linguistics include:
To describe and explain the observed patterns in a language; To predict new patterns that have not been observed yet; To provide insights into the workings of the human mind (cognition); And to understand how communication works.
Linguists typically specialize in one or more areas of linguistics, such as phonetics (the study of sound), phonology (the study of sound systems), morphology (the study of word structure), syntax (the study of sentence structure), semantics (the study of meaning), or pragmatics (the study oflanguage use). There are also many subfields within linguistics, such as sociolinguistics (which studies how languages are used in social contexts) and psycholinguistics(which studies how people acquire and use language).