language and linguistic

Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. In the philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written. Natural language is distinguished from constructed languages and formal languages such as computer-programming languages or the "languages" used in the study of formal logic, especially mathematical logic.
Today’s science of linguistics explores:
the sounds of speech and how different sounds function in a language
the psychological processes involved in the use of language
how children acquire language capabilities
social and cultural factors in language use, variation and change
the acoustics of speech and the physiological and psychological aspects involved in producing and understanding it
the biological basis of language in the brain
Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure (grammar) and the study of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into phrases and sentences) and phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. Other sub-disciplines of linguistics include the following: evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language; historical linguistics, which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and functioning of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at the representation of language in the brain; language acquisition, which considers how children acquire their first language and how children and adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent languages; and discourse analysis, which is concerned with the structure of texts and conversations, and pragmatics with how meaning is transmitted based on a combination of linguistic competence, non-linguistic knowledge, and the context of the speech act.
Linguistics is narrowly defined as the scientific approach to the study of language, but language can, of course, be approached from a variety of directions, and a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to it and influence its study. Semiotics, for example, is a related field concerned with the general study of signs and symbols both in language and outside of it. Literary theorists study the use of language in artistic literature. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics.
Within the field, linguist is used to describe someone who either studies the field or uses linguistic methodologies to study groups of languages or particular languages. Outside the field, this term is commonly used to refer to people who speak many languages or have a great vocabulary.
History
History of linguistics
The historical record of linguistics begins in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BCE grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, known as the Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी) and with Tolkāppiyar, the 2nd century BCE grammarian of the Tamil work Tolkāppiyam(தொல்காப்பியம்).[9] Pāṇini’s grammar is highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root; Western linguists only recognized the phoneme some two millennia later.[citation needed] Tolkāppiyar's work is perhaps the first to describe articulatory phonetics for a language. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowels, and elements like nouns, verbs, vowels, and consonants, which he put into classes, were also breakthroughs at the time. In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh (سیبویه) made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 CE in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book, he distinguished phonetics from phonology.
Later in the West, the success of science, mathematics, and other formal systems in the 20th century led many to attempt a formalization of the study of language as a "semantic code". This resulted in the academic discipline of linguistics, the founding of which is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure.[citation needed] In the 20th century, substantial contributions to the understanding of language came from Ferdinand de Saussure, Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson,[10] which are characterized as being highly systematic.[10


Names for the discipline
Before the twentieth century, the term "philology", first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus. Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition," especially in the United States, where it was never as popular as it was elsewhere (in the sense of the "science of language").Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641, the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847. It is now the usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.
Fundamental concerns and divisions
Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language. Relevant to this are the questions of what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how human beings come to know languages. All humans (setting aside extremely pathological cases) achieve competence in whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of signed languages) around them when growing up, with apparently little need for explicit conscious instruction. While non-humans acquire their own communication systems, they do not acquire human language in this way (although many non-human animals can learn to respond to language, or can even be trained to use it to a degree). Therefore, linguists assume, the ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically-based potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk. There is no consensus, however, as to the extent of this innate potential, or its domain-specificity (the degree to which such innate abilities are specific to language), with some theorists claiming that there is a very large set of highly abstract and specific binary settings coded into the human brain, while others claim that the ability to learn language is a product of general human cognition. It is, however, generally agreed that there are no strong genetic differences underlying the differences between languages: an individual will acquire whatever language(s) he or she is exposed to as a child, regardless of parentage or ethnic origin.[11]
Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form; such pairings are known as Saussurean signs. In this sense, form may consist of sound patterns, movements of the hands, written symbols, and so on. There are many sub-fields concerned with particular aspects of linguistic structure, ranging from those focused primarily on form to those focused primarily on meaning:
Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech (or signed) production and perception
Phonology, the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning
Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts, and the role played by context and non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)
Many linguists would agree that these divisions overlap considerably, and the independent significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged. Regardless of any particular linguist's position, each area has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.
Alongside these structurally-motivated domains of study are other fields of linguistics, distinguished by the kinds of non-linguistic factors that they consider:
Applied linguistics, the study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.)
Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals, compared to human language.
Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology.
Computational linguistics, the study of computational implementations of linguistic structures.
Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.
Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent development of language by the human species.
Historical linguistics or diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time.
Language geography, the study of the geographical distribution of languages and linguistic features.
Linguistic typology, the study of the common properties of diverse unrelated languages, properties that may, given sufficient attestation, be assumed to be innate to human language capacity.
Neurolinguistics, the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication.
Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.
Sociolinguistics, the study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.
Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.
The related discipline of semiotics investigates the relationship between signs and what they signify. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation



Language
A language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation and usage of systems of symbols—each referring to linguistic concepts with semantic or logical or otherwise expressive meanings.
The most obvious manifestations are spoken languages such as English or Spoken Chinese. However, there are also written languages and other systems of visual symbols such as sign languages.
Although some other animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems, and these are sometimes casually referred to as animal language, none of these are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use to define language in the strict sense.
When discussed more technically as a general phenomenon then, "language" always implies a particular type of human thought which can be present even when communication is not the result, and this way of thinking is also sometimes treated as indistinguishable from language itself.
In Western Philosophy for example, language has long been closely associated with reason, which is also a uniquely human way of using symbols. In Ancient Greek philosophical terminology, the same word, logos, was used as a term for both language or speech and reason, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the English word "speech" so that it similarly could refer to reason, as will be discussed below.
Definition of Language
Language is common to all humans; we seem to be “hard-wired” for it. Many social scientists and philosophers say it’s this ability to use language symbolically that makes us “human.”
Though it may be a universal human attribute, language is hardly simple. For decades, linguists’ main task was to track and record languages. But, like so many areas of science, the field of linguistics has evolved dramatically over the past 50 years or so.

 a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols; "he taught foreign languages"; "the language introduced is ...
 speech: (language) communication by word of mouth; "his speech was garbled"; "he uttered harsh language"; "he recorded the spoken language of the streets"
 lyric: the text of a popular song or musical-comedy number; "his compositions always started with the lyrics"; "he wrote both words and music"; "the song uses colloquial language"
 linguistic process: the cognitive processes involved in producing and understanding linguistic communication; "he didn't have the language to express his feelings"
 the mental faculty or power of vocal communication; "language sets homo sapiens apart from all other animals"
 terminology: a system of words used to name things in a particular discipline; "legal terminology"; "biological nomenclature"; "the language of sociology"

Language is the official peer reviewed journal of the Linguistic Society of America, published since 1925. It is published quarterly and contains articles and reviews on all aspects of linguistics, focusing on the area of theoretical linguistics. Its current editor is Prof. Gregory Carlson (University of Rochester).
Formal language

A formal language is a set of words, i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens. The set from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar (also called its formation rules); accordingly, words that belong to a formal language are sometimes called well-formed words (or well-formed formulas). Formal languages are studied in computer science and linguistics; the field of formal language theory studies the purely syntactical aspects of such languages (that is, their internal structural patterns).
Formal languages are often used as the basis for richer constructs endowed with semantics. In computer science they are used, among other things, for the precise ssdefinition of data formats and the syntax of programming languages. Formal languages play a crucial role in the development of compilers, typically produced by means of a compiler compiler, which may be a single program or may be separated in tools like lexical analyzer generators (e.g. lex), and parser generators (e.g. yacc). Since formal languages alone do not have a semantics, other formal constructs are needed for the formal specification of program semantics. Formal languages are also used in logic and in foundations of mathematics to represent the syntax of formal theories. Logical systems can be seen as a formal language with additional constructs, like proof calculi, which define a consequence relation.[1] "Tarski's definition of truth" in terms of a T-schema for first-order logic is an example of fully interpreted formal language; all its sentences have meanings that make them either true or false.