Definition of linguistics
: the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language
Updated on: 23 Mar 2018
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Recent Examples of linguistics from the Web
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The confusion has been so great that, in a major Supreme Court case, linguistics professors submitted a brief providing the justices with lessons on the punctuation and grammar.
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Her father, who retired as a linguistics professor from Hong Kong Baptist University, is an independent researcher in Washington focusing on sociolinguistics and Sudanese languages.
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That witness was Roger Shuy, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University.
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Kidd says Florian Jaeger, a linguistics professor at the New York university's cognitive sciences department who was one of her academic advisers in 2007, pressured her to rent a room in his apartment for a year.
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Shortly after finishing a linguistics Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1980, Ken Whistler was frustrated by the inability of mainframe computers to print the specialized phonetic symbols that linguists use.
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There’s plenty of amusing political material in Annihilation, particularly a bit that compares his ascent to the presidency to Van Halen's garbled lead singer David Lee Roth taking over a university linguistics department.
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The Bloomington man, whose parents are Indiana University linguistics professors, tried picking the padlock with a paper clip to no avail.
These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'linguistics.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Did You Know?
Any analysis of language, including 8th-grade grammar, can be called linguistics. As recently as 200 years ago, ordinary grammar was about the only kind of linguistics there was. Today a linguist may be a person who learns foreign languages, but the term usually refers to people who devote themselves to analyzing the structure of language. Many linguists concentrate on the history of a language; others study the way children learn to speak; others analyze the sounds of a language—and still others just study English grammar, a subject so big that you could easily spend your entire life on it.
First Known Use of linguistics
circa 1837
Other Language Terms
LINGUISTICS Defined for English Language Learners
Definition of linguistics for English Language Learners
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: the study of language and of the way languages work
LINGUISTICS Defined for Kids
Definition of linguistics for Students
: the study of human speech including the nature, structure, and development of language or of a language or group of languages
Learn More about linguistics
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See words that rhyme with linguistics Spanish Central: Translation of linguistics Nglish: Translation of linguistics for Spanish speakers Britannica English: Translation of linguistics for Arabic speakers Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about linguistics
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