Linguistics

Definition of Linguistics as it relates to Education, Foreign Language Education, Language Immersion Programs

Linguistics is the scientific study of language and its structure. It involves analysing language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally divide language study into several different areas, such as phonetics (the study of physical sounds in human speech), phonology (the study of abstract sound systems), morphology (the study of word structure), syntax (the study of sentence structure), semantics (the study of meaning), and pragmatics (the study of language in context). Linguistics also includes the study of language acquisition, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics (the study of language in society), psycholinguistics (the study of language and mind), neurolinguistics (the study of language and the brain), and computational linguistics (the study of computer processing of human language). Education, foreign language education, and language immersion programs are all areas that intersect with linguistics as they involve teaching and learning languages. Linguistics provides theoretical frameworks and empirical research that can inform language teaching methods and materials, and help to understand how people learn and use language in different contexts.

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