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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
- Theoretical linguistics describes theories about universal aspects of language and their basic framework.
- Applied linguistics is using linguistic theory to address real-world problems.
- Synchronic study of a language is concerned with its form at a given moment.
- Diachronic study covers the history of a language or family of languages and structural changes over time.
- Contextual linguistics is concerned with how language fits into the world.
- Autonomous linguistics considers languages for their own sake, aside from the externalities related to a language.
Language To Study
Variety of useful languages.
- 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.
- Spanish/French/Italian These Romance languages are very similar, all dervived from Latin.
- Russian Rusian is the most spoken Slavic language. Other Slavic languages include Polish, Czech, and Slovenian.
- Swedish/Norwegian/Danish/Icelandic These four North Germanic, Scandinavian languages have strong similarities and show similarities to English's past.
- German A widely spoken language, with similar roots as English.
- 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) 
Contemporary Linguistics 5e & Study Guide
Amazon Price: $83.81 (as of 12/02/2008)
Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication
Amazon Price: $38.27 (as of 12/02/2008)
