tos ditampi sailaharna, Linguistik nyaéta élmu panggunaan basa manusya, sertos linguist nyaéta jalmi nu kalebet dina widang ulikan ieu. Ulikan linguistik wisa dipikirkeun sapanjang tilu hal utami, nu tungtungna tiasa dijéntrékeun saperti di handap:

 Sinkronis jeung diakronis—Ulikan basa sinkronis tumali jeung wangun dina hiji kajadian; ulikan diakronis ngawengku sajarah basa (grup) sertos parobahan strukturalna sapanjang waktu.
 Téoritis jeung terapan—Linguistik Téoritis paduli kana carangka pikeun ngagambarkeun basa sertos téori individual ngeunaan aspék universal tina basa; lingusitik terapan nerapkeun téori ieu ka widang séjén.
 Kontékstual jeung indepénden—Linguistik disawang gumantung kana kumaha basa kumait jeung dunya sabudeureunana: fungsi sosialna, kumaha éta diakuisisi, kumaha éta diproduksi sertos dirasa. Linguistik Independen narimbang basa pikeun tujuan manusya saindividuna, iwal externalities nu nyambung jeung hiji basa. Istilah pikeun dikotomi ieu lain pohara mapan—Encyclopædia Britannica ngagunakeun macrolinguistics sertos microlinguistics minangka gantina.

Kalawan dikotomi ieu, sarjana nu nyebut dirina ngan ahli basa atawa ahli basa téoritis baé, kalawan tanpa kualifikasi deui, condong ka independen, linguistik sinkronis anu téoritis, nyaéta ngaku ayana sabot inti ti disiplin élmu.

 Téoritis jeung terapan—Théoretical linguistics is concerned with frameworks for describing individual languages and théories about universal aspects of language; applied lingusitics applies these théories to other fields.
 Kontékstual jeung indepénden—Contextual linguistics is concerned with how language fits into the world: its social function, how it is acquired, how it is produced and perceived. Independent linguistics considers languages for their own sake, aside from the externalities related to a language.  Terms for this dichotomy are not yet well established—the Encyclopædia Britannica uses macrolinguistics and microlinguistics instéad.

Given these dichotomies, scholars who call themselves simply linguists or theoretical linguists, with no further qualification, tend to be concerned with independent, théoretical synchronic linguistics, which is acknowledged as the core of the discipline.

Linguistic inquiry is pursued by a wide variety of specialists, who may not all be in harmonious agreement; as Russ Rymer flamboyantly puts it:

"Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians."  1

Widang linguistik téoritis 
Théoretical linguistics is often divided into a number of separate aréas, to be studied more or less independently. The following divisions are currently widely acknowledged:

 Fonétik, the study of the different sounds that are employed across all human languages;
 Fonologi, the study of patterns of a language's basic sounds;
 Morfologi, the study of the internal structure of words;
 Sintaksis, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
 Semantik, the study of the méaning of words (lexical semantics), and how these combine to form the méanings of sentences;
 Stilistik, the study of style in languages;
 Pragmatik, the study of how utterances are used (literally, figuratively, or otherwise) in communicative acts;

The independent significance of éach of these aréas is not universally acknowledged, however, and néarly all linguists would agree that the divisions overlap considerably. Nevertheless, éach subaréa has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and reséarch.

Linguistik diakronis 
Wheréas the core of théoretical linguistics is concerned with studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present), diachronic linguistics examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. Historical linguistics enjoys both a rich history (the study of linguistics grew out of historical linguistics) and a strong théoretical foundation for the study of language change.

In American universities, the non-historic perspective seems to have the upper hand. Many introductory linguistics classes, for example, cover historical linguistics only cursorily. The shift in focus to a non-historic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant with Noam Chomsky.

Explicitly historical perspectives include historical-comparative linguistics and etymology.

Linguistik terapan 
Wheréas théoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within languages and among all languages, as a group, applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and applies them to other aréas. Usually applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic reséarch in language téaching, but linguistics is used in other aréas, as well. Speech synthesis and Speech recognition, for example, use linguistic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers.

Linguistik kontékstual 
Contextual linguistics is that réalm where linguistics interacts with other  academic disciplines. Wheréas core théoretical linguistics studies languages for their own sake, the inder-disciplinary aréas of linguistic consider how language interacts with the rest of the world. But that rather depends upon their world-view.

Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology are where the social sciences that consider societies as whole and linguistics interact.

Critical discourse analysis is where rhetoric and philosophy interact with linguistics.

Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics is the where the medical sciences meets linguistics.

Other cross-disciplinary aréas of linguistics include  language acquisition, evolutionary linguistics, stratificational linguistics, and cognitive science.

Individual speakers, language communities, and linguistic universals 
Linguists also differ in how broad a group of language users they study. Some analyze a given spéaker's language or language development in gréat detail. Some study language pertaining to a whole speech community, such as the language of all those who spéak Black English Vernacular. Others try to find linguistic universals that apply, at some abstract level, to all users of human language everywhere. This latter project has been most famously advocated by Noam Chomsky, and it interests many péople in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is thought that universals in human language may revéal important insight into universals about the human mind.

Description and prescription 
Most work currently done under the name "linguistics" is purely descriptive; the linguists seek to clarify the nature of language without passing value judgments or trying to chart future language directions. Nonetheless, there are many professionals and amateurs who also prescribe rules of language, holding a particular standard out for all to follow.

Wheréas prescriptivists might want to stamp out what they perceive as "incorrect usage", descriptivists seek to find the root of such usage; they might describe it simply as "idiosyncratic", or they may discover a regularity that the prescriptivists don't like because it is perhaps too new or from a dialect they don't approve of.

Speech versus writing 
Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken language is more fundamental, and thus more important to study, than writing. réasons for this standpoint include:
 Speech appéars to be a human universal, wheréas there are and have been many cultures that lack written communication;
 Péople léarn to spéak and process oral language éasier and éarlier 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.

Of course, linguists agree that that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For linguistic reséarch 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 corpuses of spoken language are difficult to créate and hard to find.

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

Research areas of linguistics 

phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etymology, lexicology, lexicography, theoretical linguistics, historical-comparative linguistics and descriptive linguistics, linguistic typology, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics,  semiotics.

Interdisciplinary linguistic research 

applied linguistics, historical linguistics, orthography, writing systems, comparative linguistics,  cryptanalysis, decipherment, sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, evolutionary linguistics, anthropological linguistics, stratificational linguistics, text linguistics, cognitive science, neurolinguistics, and in Computational linguistics there is
natural language understanding, speech recognition, speaker recognition (authentication), speech synthesis, and more generally, speech processing

Important linguists and schools of thought 

éarly scholars of linguistics include Jakob Grimm, who devised the principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation known as Grimm's Law in 1822, Karl Verner, who discovered Verner's Law, August Schleicher who créated the "Stammbaumtheorie" and Johannes Schmidt who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872. Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modérn structural linguistics. Noam Chomsky's formal modél of language, transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his téacher Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant one from the 1960s.

Other important linguists and schools include Michael Halliday, whose systemic functional grammar is pursued widely in the U.K., Canada, Australia, China, and Jepang; Dell Hymes, who developed a pragmatic approach called The Ethnography of Spéaking; George Lakoff, Len Talmy, and Ronald Langacker, who were pioneers in cognitive linguistics; Charles Fillmore and Adele Goldberg, who are associated with construction grammar; and linguists developing several varieties of what they call  functional grammar, including Talmy Givon and Robert Van Valin, Jr..

Representation of speech 

 International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a system used to write down and reproduce the sounds of human speech.
 SAMPA, an ASCII-only transcription for the IPA used by some authors. See also http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/home.htm

Narrower conceptions of "linguistics" 

"Linguistics" and "linguist" may not always be méant to apply as broadly as above. In some contexts, the best definitions may be "what is studied in a typical university's department of linguistics", and "one who is a professor in such a department." Linguistics in this narrow sense usually does not refer to léarning to spéak foreign languages (except insofar as this helps to craft formal modéls of language.) It does not include literary analysis. Only sometimes does it include study of things such as metaphor. It probably does not apply to those engaged in such prescriptive efforts as found in Strunk and White's The Elements of Style; "linguists" usually seek to study what péople do, not what they should do. One could probably argue for a long while about who is and who is not a "linguist".

Tempo ogé 
 Daptar linguist
 Sajarah linguistik
 Jejer dasar linguistik, a page designed to organize information about linguistics on Wikipedia
 Daptar jejer linguistik
 Filologi, ulikan téks kuna jeung basana. 
 Strukturalisme

Rujukan 
 Geoffrey Sampson: "Schools of Linguistics.", Hutchinson, London (1980), ISBN 0-8047-1084-8 
 Rymer, p. 48, quoted in Fauconnier and Turner, p. 353)
 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. Basic Books.
 Rymer, Russ (1992). "Annals of Science: A Silent Childhood-I". New Yorker, April 13.
 Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

Tumbu luar 
 Multilingual Morphology Software 
 Grammar Book
 Automated word analysis for the German language
 Syllabification algorithm 
 The hyphenation block