Linguistics

Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. (Lay people sometimes use the term linguistician, but as Aitchison 2003 points out, this is "too much of a tongue-twister to become generally accepted.")

Speech versus writing

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken language is more fundamental, and thus more important to study than written language. Reasons for this perspective include:

Related Topics:
Spoken language - Written language

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• Speech appears to be a human universal, whereas there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication;
• People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing;
• A number of cognitive scientists argue that the brain has an innate "language module", knowledge of which is thought to come more from studying speech than writing, particularly since language as speech is held to be an evolutionary adaptation, whereas writing is a comparatively recent invention.

Of course, linguists agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For linguistic research that uses the methods of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically used in transcriptional form anyway.

Related Topics:
Corpus linguistics - Computational linguistics - Transcriptional

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Furthermore, the study of writing systems themselves falls under the aegis of linguistics.

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