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Study of language.
| Photo Credit: Unsplash Images
It is just like you. It tells you that it is as emotional, messy, dynamic, strategic, and perfectly imperfect as any human being. Whatever you are, linguistics becomes. Why? Because linguistics watches you. It watches you with the same clinical precision of a surgeon. It watches you speak and communicate, how your speech changes over time, how you chaotically mix languages, make up new words formally or for funsies, follow rules and patterns, rebel even, and at the end of it all, how these stem ardently from within you and not apart. So yes, it is just like you and will not go away.
Instead of looking at things going around with languages, linguistics looks directly at it. It questions why water is called water in English and paani in Hindi, what pattern of sounds make up the word, how sentences are structured in different languages, how dialects can change those structures, how slangs change with social groups and with age, why we say things the way we say it, and the list just goes on.
Instead of looking at things going around with languages, linguistics looks directly at it.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images
Formally, the elements can be classified as word order (syntax), grammar, semantics (meaning), phonetics (sounds), culture, pragmatics (relationship between language and its speaker), and so on.
