- brief history of linguistics

linguistics The scientific study of language. There were significant

traditions of language study in ancient India, in ancient China, in
ancient Greece and Rome, among the medieval Arabs and Jews,
and elsewhere. Most of these investigations, though, were solely
confined to studying the local prestige language. Modern
linguistics does not derive from these older traditions; instead, it
grew up from fresh beginnings in Europe and the USA.
By the seventeenth century, a few European scholars and
philosophers were beginning to interest themselves in general
questions about the nature of language, and between the
seventeenth and nineteenth century, scholars like Descartes,
Locke and Humboldt made a number of significant contributions.
KEY CONCEPTS IN LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS 113 But, with a
few exceptions, these men typically knew nothing about any
languages other than the major languages of Europe, and their
work suffered from a lack of data, with the result that much of it
was speculative and a priori.
By the end of the eighteenth century, historical linguistics had
begun to be firmly established, and throughout the nineteenth
century the historical study of language was for many people
synonymous with the scientific study of language. Towards the
end of the century, though, a number of linguists began turning
their attention to the serious study of the structure of language
from a non-historical point of view. Prominent among them were
von der Gabelentz, Kruszewski and Baudouin de Courtenay. But
the most influential figure, by far, was the Swiss linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure.
Though he had been trained as a historical linguist, and though he
had made major contributions to historical studies, Saussure
began to focus on some more general questions of language
structure and to reach some profound conclusions. He failed to

publish this work, but, after his death, his former students edited
their lecture notes into a book, which was published under
Saussures name in 1916: this book is the famous Cours. So great
has been the influence of the book that Saussure has been
dubbed the father of linguistics. The European linguistic
tradition, with its heavy theoretical bias, largely derives from
Saussures work, though in Britain Bronislaw Malinowski and
(especially) J.R.Firth independently developed a more strongly
data-oriented descriptive approach born of anthropological
fieldwork.
Meanwhile, in the USA, anthropologists were undertaking the
study of the dying native American languages. This study was
keenly promoted by Franz Boas, who is often regarded as the
founder of the American linguistic tradition; Boass successors,
such as A.L.Kroeber and (especially) Edward Sapir, went on to
develop linguistics as an independent discipline in the USA.
Butthe single most influential figure was Leonard Bloomfield,
whose 1933 textbook Language effectively defined the field and
set the agenda for American linguists. Bloomfields successors,
the American structuralists (or post-Bloomfieldians), drew their
inspiration from Bloomfield, and they created a brand of
linguistics which stressed hands-on experience with real data and
often dismissed the contemporary European tradition as mere
armchair theorizing.
This is how things stood in the 1950s: a highly theoretical
tradition in Europe, a highly antitheoretical tradition in the USA,
and something in between in Britain. But, in 1957, the young
American linguist Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures,
a brief and watered-down summary of several years of original
research. In that book, and in his succeeding publications,
Chomsky made a number of revolutionary proposals: he
introduced the idea of a generative grammar, developed a
particular kind of generative grammar called transformational

grammar, rejected his American predecessors emphasis on the

description of datain favour of a highly theoretical approach
based upon a search for universal principles of language (later
called universal grammar) proposed to turn linguistics firmly
towards mentalism, and laid the foundations 114 KEY CONCEPTS
IN LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS for integrating the field into the
as yet unnamed new discipline of cognitive science.
Chomskys ideas excited a whole generation of students; since
American universities were expanding rapidly in the early 1960s,
these students quickly found jobs and began preaching the new
doctrines, and within a few years Chomskyan linguistics had
become the new orthodoxy in the USA. Before long, Chomskys
ideas had crossed the Atlantic and established themselves also in
many parts of Europe.
Today Chomskys influence is undimmed, and Chomskyan
linguists form a large and maximally prominent cohort among the
community of linguists, to such an extent that outsiders often
have the impression that linguistics is Chomskyan linguistics, that
linguistics is by definition what the Chomskyans do. But this is
seriously misleading.
In fact, the majority of the worlds linguists would acknowledge no
more than the vaguest debt to Chomsky, if even that.
Investigators of historical linguistics, of sociolinguistics, of
anthropological linguistics, of psycholinguistics and
neurolinguistics, of language acquisition, of dialectology (see
dialect), of semantics and pragmatics, of the analysis of
conversation (see conversation analysis), discourse and texts, of
computational linguistics, and of a dozen other areas, all have
their own agendas and priorities, and they are making progress
sometimes dramatic progresswithout paying any attention to
Chomskys contributions. Indeed, it can reasonably be argued that
the greatest advances in our understanding of language in recent
years have come from the new field of sociolinguistics, in which

pioneers like William Labov, Peter Trudgill, and Jim and Lesley
Milroy have transformed our whole perception of what it means to
speak a language.
Linguistics today is surely as lively a discipline as any on earth. In
the last forty years or so we have probably learned more about
language than our ancestors managed in 2000 years, and there is
no reason to believe that things are slowing down now.
The Source: Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics for Trask
(2007)

- The beginning of Sociolinguistic:

Sociolinguistics as an academic field of study, as a discipline if
you like, only developed within the last fifty years, in the latter
part of the last century. Certainly, an interest in the social aspects
of language, in the intersection of language and society, has been
with us probably as long as mankind has had language, but its
organized formal study can be dated to quite recently; 1964 is a
good year to remember as you can find out when you read Roger
Shuys chapter. The word sociolinguistics was apparently coined
already in 1939 in the title of an article by Thomas C. Hodson,
Sociolinguistics in India in Man in India; it was first used in
linguistics by Eugene Nida in the second edition of his Morphology
(1949: 152), but one often sees the term attributed to Haver
Currie (1952), who himself claimed to have invented it. When
sociolinguistics became popularized as a field of study in the late
1960s, there were two labels sociolinguistics and sociology of
language for the same phenomenon,

the study of the intersection and interaction of language and

society, and these two terms were used interchangeably.
Eventually a difference came to be made, and as an
oversimplification one might say that while sociolinguistics is
mainly concerned with an increased and wider description of
language (and undertaken primarily by linguists and
anthropologists), sociology of language is concerned with
explanation and prediction of language phenomena in society at
the group level (and done mainly by social scientists as well as by
a few linguists). But in the beginning, no difference was intended,
as no difference is intended in the essays by Shuy and Calvet.
Sociolinguistics turned out to be a very lively and popular field of
study, and today many of its subfields can claim to be fields in
their own right, with academic courses, textbooks, journals, and
conferences; they include pragmatics, language and gender
studies, pidgin and creole studies, language planning and policy
studies, and education of linguistic minorities studies. The two
articles here by Roger Shuy and Louis-Jean Calvet do not attempt
an analysis of the history of thought of sociolinguistics; rather
they describe and document the genesis, the origin, of
sociolinguistics. There is to date no history of the entire field of
sociolinguistics; it has after all only been around for about fifty
years. Tucker (1997) summarizes five cross-cutting themes that
he found salient, based on 23 autobiographical sketches by the
major founding members of sociolinguistics. First, these
recollections describe an interdisciplinary field whose beginning
can be pinpointed with reasonable accuracy (the major fields
contributing to sociolinguistics were lin- guistics, anthropology,
sociology, and social psychology, with an occasional political
scientist).

- The deference between Linguistic and

sociolinguistic:

- What is sociolinguistic?
A language is not only studied from the internal viewpoint but
also from the external one. Internally, it is studied based on its
internal structures; whereas, externally, it is based on the
linguistic factors in relation to the factors beyond the language.
A study of internal language structures (or, it is based on the subsystems of a language) will result sub-discipline of linguistics such
as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. It is
conducted through theories and procedures belonging to the
discipline of linguistics; it is not related to the problems beyond
the language.

When a study of language in which the linguistic factors are

related to the factors beyond the language, such as language use
that is done by its speakers in a certain speech community, it
refers to sociolinguistics. According to Fishman, for instance,
socially, the language use involves Who speaks, what language,
to whom, when and where Fishman, 1972:244).. When some
aspects of sociology are adopted in studying a language, this
means it presents an interdisciplinary study; and its name
represents a combination of sociology and linguistics. In this
relation, some experts call it as sociology of language; and some
others call it as sociolinguistics.
The definition:
A term sociolinguistics is a derivational word. Two words that form
it are sociology and linguistics. Sociology refers to a science of
society; and linguistics refers to a science of language. A study of
language from the perspective of society may be thought as
linguistics plus sociology. Some investigators have found it to
introduce a distinction between sociolinguistics and sociology of
language. Some others regard sociolinguistics is often referred as
the sociology of language. Sociolinguistics is defined as:

- The study that is concerned with the relationship between

language and the context in which it is used. In other words,
it studies the relationship between language and society. It
explains we people speak differently in different social
contexts. It discusses the social functions of language and
the ways it is used to convey social meaning. All of the
topics provides a lot of information about the language
works, as well as about the social relationships in a
community, and the way people signal aspects of their social
identity through their language (Jenet Holmes, 2001)

- The study that is concerned with the interaction of language

and setting (Carol M. Eastman, 1975; 113).
- the study that is concerned with investigating the
relationship between language and society with the goal of a
better understanding of the structure of language and of
how languages function in communication ( Ronald
Wardhaugh, 1986 : 12)

- Language vs. dialect