History of Linguistics
While language and speech has been written about and considered for thousands of years, the scientific study of linguistics is a fairly recent development. Linguistics is believed to have formed in the 19th century when it was determined that there were identical sounds in many different languages in different parts of the world. This led to the … Keep Reading → conclusion that all of these languages must have had a common language that they originated from. Most of 19th century linguistics was focused on the determination of the origin of those languages. In the 20th century the field of linguistics moved toward the study of the structure of language; the rules that describe what the process of language looks like. It was determined that most of the languages of the world share similarities in the way they are structured. Many of these studies, no doubt, influenced Noam Chomsky in creating his innateness theory. Chomsky claimed that the process of language is hard-wired into our brains much like a computer program. Some recent trends in linguistics include exploring geographical and social variations in language construction.
