page_title: Linguistics
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Linguistics / History
context_page_description: Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves the analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning. Linguistics also deals with the social, cultural, historical, and political factors that influence language, through which linguistic and language-based context is often determined. Research on language through the sub-branches of historical and evolutionary linguistics also focuses on how languages change and grow, particularly over an extended period of time.
  The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī.
  Related areas of study include the disciplines of semiotics, literary criticism, translation, and speech-language pathology.
caption: Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884) was a linguist who made long journeys collecting and compiling lyric poems and folk ballads from different parts of the land (mainly in Karelia) into an epic collection called the Kalevala,[61] which is later known, for example, to have partly inspired the author J. R. R. Tolkien to create his own legendarium.[62]
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