History of Language

Linguistics is a discipline that has been cut into many different approaches. There have been three primary directions in the field of linguistics in the past centuries: historical linguistics, descriptive linguistics and generative linguistics.

      September 27, 1786 is regarded as the birthdate of linguistics. Sr. William Jones discovered that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic had many structural similarities. Since this discovery many scholars started to make hypothesis and attempted to find the common ancestor of today’s modern languages. It was stated that Proto-Indo-European is the ancestor from which all these languages were split. During the last quarter of the century, a group of scholars known as the ‘Young Grammarians’ claimed that language change is regular.

      In the 20^th century the focus of the study of language shifted from language change to language description. Linguists began to concentrate on describing single languages at one particular point in time. The responsible for this change of emphasis is the Swiss Scholar Ferdinand de Saussure, sometimes labeled as 'the father of modern linguistics’. His insistence that language is a carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated a new era, the era of structural linguistics

      In the mid 1950s a young linguist named Noam Chomsky transformed linguistics with his attributions. He published a book called Syntactic Structures, which created a quick revolution in the linguistics field. Chomsky is considered the most influential linguist of the century and his works have been studied not only by linguistics but also by psychologists, philosophers, and anthropologists.

      A grammar which consists of a set of statements which specify which sequences of language are possible, and which impossible, is a generative grammar. Chomsky initiated the era of generative linguistics. He theorized that human beings may be preprogrammed with a basic knowledge of what languages in general are like and how they work. As a result, many scientists begun to take a greater interest in language and linguistics.

      The descriptive approach was initiated by de Saussure and it was later developed in the United Stated with Franz Boas. Descriptive grammars developed from corpus data used as a reference material by may researchers.

      Certain anthropological linguists expanded their research interests to study the discourse uses of language in various contexts, as well as the study of language change resulting from contact among languages and dialects. And later a new research field was born, now known as sociolinguistics.

      Throughout the last century many subfields within linguistics emerged ( e.g., phonetics, morphology, syntax, etc.) and each approach has made a significant contribution in the application of linguistics. The application of linguistic disciplines is nowadays known as applied linguistics.

Bibliography

Aitchison, J. (1992). Linguistics. Chicago: Hodder General Publishing Division.

Grabe, W. (1992). An Introduction to applied linguistics. Publishing, Co.