Skip to navigation | Skip to content

Share your knowledge. Make a difference.

Linguistics

1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic (by 3 people)   Your rating: 1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic

Ranked #4665 in How-To, #46736 overall

Rated G. (Control what you see)

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics is a wide topic with varying topics from the development of our current day languages to how we learn languages ourselves.

Types of Linguistics 

  1. Theoretical linguistics describes theories about universal aspects of language and their basic framework.
  2. Applied linguistics is using linguistic theory to address real-world problems.
  3. Synchronic study of a language is concerned with its form at a given moment.
  4. Diachronic study covers the history of a language or family of languages and structural changes over time.
  5. Contextual linguistics is concerned with how language fits into the world.
  6. Autonomous linguistics considers languages for their own sake, aside from the externalities related to a language.

Language To Study 

Variety of useful languages.

  1. English English will give you a broad perspective on Germanic and Latin based languages, with its wide variety of words and grammatical rules borrowed from other languages.
  2. Spanish/French/Italian These Romance languages are very similar, all dervived from Latin.
  3. Russian Rusian is the most spoken Slavic language. Other Slavic languages include Polish, Czech, and Slovenian.
  4. Swedish/Norwegian/Danish/Icelandic These four North Germanic, Scandinavian languages have strong similarities and show similarities to English's past.
  5. German A widely spoken language, with similar roots as English.
  6. Japanese As an isolated country, Japan's language is of unknown origin with multiple written forms.

Theoretical Linguistics 

Wikipedia: Theoretical Linguistics
Wikpedia's entry on theoretical linguistics.
Language Acquisition
How do we learn a new language?
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
HPSG is a constraint-based, lexicalist approach to grammatical theory that seeks to model human languages as systems of constraints.

English Etymology 

Study of words.

Online Etymology Dictionary
Great dictionary containing entries for most Latin and Greek dervived words in English.
Etymologically Speaking
List of odd word origins in English from other languages.
World Wide Words
Website investigating international English from a British perspective.

Linguistics Books 

Course in General Linguistics (Open Court Classics)

Amazon Price: $11.76 (as of 12/02/2008) Buy Now

Contemporary Linguistics 5e & Study Guide

Amazon Price: $83.81 (as of 12/02/2008) Buy Now

Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication

Amazon Price: $38.27 (as of 12/02/2008) Buy Now

X
ethan

About ethan

Ethan is a web programmer and columnist from the sunny state of Florida, and is the Editor in Chief of Lowter.com. Ethan still attends high school, although is working towards a linguistics major.

ethan's Pages

See all of ethan's pages

X

Happy holidays!

The red bow is special. Whenever you see a red bow on a Squidoo page, it means the page is raising money for charity.

Buy something from the page, and we'll automatically make a donation to charity, thanks to you.