Linguistics For Dummies Cheat Sheet

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguists gather information about sounds and signs and how they pattern, about words and how words pattern. They look at how words form sentences and how language is used to communicate.

Linguists who focus on the form of language look at phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. Linguists also look at how form changes over time (historical linguistics), compare the languages of the world to each other (language typology), and also compare writing systems (orthography).

Many linguists look at how language connects to meaning (semantics and pragmatics), cognition (language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics), and society (anthropological linguistics and sociolinguistics). Computational linguists talk to computers and try to get them to talk back.

Some big names in linguistics

If you’re into linguistics, you may want to know how the field got to where it is now. Here are some of the big thinkers — and some of their important ideas — from ancient times to today:

• Pāṇini (around the 5th century BCE): This linguist is famous for developing the earliest known comprehensive grammar of a language. His Sanskrit grammar is the first known attempt to provide a complete description of a language — he logged almost 4,000 rules! But more important than the individual rules was his analysis of how Sanskrit words are formed. using a formal rule system that has often been compared to modern grammatical theory.
• Aristotle (4th century BCE): You may associate Aristotle more with philosophy, but he also made major contributions to linguistics! He lived in Greece and thought a lot about how words relate to their meanings. Aristotle developed a system of categories that continues to influence the way linguists approach the question of how language carries meaning.
• Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913): Saussure is widely recognized as one of the founders of modern linguistics. He was one of the founders of structuralism. At a very young age, he applied principles of structural analysis to solve a problem concerning the reconstruction of the Indo-European language family. Saussure’s great insight was that the relation between sound and meaning is arbitrary and that all languages are systems built around structural relationships.
• William Stokoe (1919–2000): Stokoe’s work on American Sign Language is well-known. He worked at Gallaudet University, which is a university in the US that is focused on the education of the deaf and hard of hearing. Stokoe developed a notation system to transcribe sign languages, which influenced other notation systems used today in sign language research.
• William Labov (1927–2024): In modern linguistics, Labov is a household name. He is most well-known for bringing the social side of linguistics to the foreground and making foundational contributions to the field of sociolinguistics. Labov suggested that rather than sideline variation in language, it should be explored and understood.
• Noam Chomsky (1928–…): While he is well-known for his political views, Chomsky’s thinking on language has influenced linguistics, computer science, mathematics, and psychology. He’s best known for the idea that knowledge of language can be modeled by a formal generative grammar that uses a finite rule system to generate an infinite set of sentences and for universal grammar, which is the idea that some aspects of linguistic knowledge are innate.
• ChatGPT (2022-…): Although computational linguists have been working on solving language problems for most of the 20th century, it’s only recently that they “cracked the code”, and created a tool that could talk back.  OpenAI released the first version of ChatGPT in late 2022, and the AI revolution had begun.

Using linguistics to make up languages

There are about 7,300 spoken and sign languages currently used. You would think that would be enough, but some brave souls feel the need to make up new languages from scratch. These constructed languages are sometimes called conlangs and are especially popular in fantasy and science fiction writing, shows, and moviemaking. In recent years, there have been many examples floating around of conlangs in films, shows, online, and in books. Linguists may have even helped develop aspects of the conlangs or created the languages themselves. Some conlangs are so popular that people have written grammars — their linguistic rules — on them.

Language inventors need to know the principles of linguistic analysis to build such languages, which is where linguistics comes in. Here are two more famous ones from the past:

• Esperanto was invented in the late 1800s by Ludwig Zamenhof to foster harmony between people of different countries. It’s the most widely spoken constructed language in the world and is used in more than 100 countries. Esperanto is based on Western Indo-European languages — the sound system is mostly Slavic, the vocabulary is mostly Romance and Germanic. It’s been used as a background language in the movies Gattaca and Red Dwarf; it features in a conversation in Blade: Trinity, and is even the main language in Incubus.
• Klingon is the language of the Klingons, used in the Star Trek series. The Klingon language was developed by Marc Okrand, a linguist who previously worked with Native American languages. Klingon has a complete grammar and vocabulary — books have been translated into Klingon, and you can select Klingon as your language of choice in Google.

What do linguists do?

Many linguists are academics — studying languages for their own sake — but a lot of others work for government organizations, including the military, or for nonprofits documenting and revitalizing languages. Still others work for corporations that use linguistics to solve technical problems.

Linguists explore all areas of human language. Some major branches of linguistics include:

• Anthropological linguistics: Looks at how language and culture are connected.
• Language acquisition: The process by which kids learn a first language or older folks learn a second language. Learning two languages at the same time from childhood is called bilingual language acquisition.
• Historical linguistics: The study of the origins and evolution of language, especially the study of how languages change over time.
• Language revitalization: The process of bringing languages that are no longer widely spoken or signed back to life. Linguists don’t revitalize languages on their own, but they work closely with communities who seek to revitalize their languages.
• Language typology: The study of the systematic patterns found in the world’s languages.
• Morphology: The study of how meaningful parts of words combine with each other.
• Neurolinguistics: The study of how language is related to brain function.
• Phonetics: The study of the sounds and parameters for signs and how you make them.
• Phonology: The study of how the contrasting units of a language systematically combine to form patterns.
• Pragmatics: The study of how language is used in interactive contexts such as conversation, email, and teaching.
• Semantics: The study of how meaning is expressed through language.
• Sociolinguistics: The study of language production and perception across social contexts.
• Syntax: The study of how words and phrases combine to form sentences.

Some tough questions associated with linguistics

The problems posed by linguistics can make you notice really cool things about language. You may have asked yourself these questions without even realizing they’re linguistic questions.

• Why can learning a second language be so difficult?
• Why do French and English have so many words in common?
• Why do dialects exist?
• Why can’t all the sentences of a language be listed?
• Why doesn’t everyone use the same language?
• Why is it possible to translate from one language to another?
• Why do some conversations get off-track?
• Why is it harder to understand someone when you use the phone or video call?
• Why are some speech sounds or sign parameters more difficult to produce and perceive than others?