Welcome to the Linguistics Portal!

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves analysing 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 Pini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Adhy?y?.

Related areas of study include the disciplines of semiotics (the study of direct and indirect language through signs and symbols), literary criticism (the historical and ideological analysis of literature, cinema, art, or published material), translation (the conversion and documentation of meaning in written/spoken text from one language or dialect onto another), and speech-language pathology (a corrective method to cure phonetic disabilities and dis-functions at the cognitive level).

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Swedish is a North Germanic language spoken predominantly in Sweden, part of Finland, and on the autonomous Åland islands, by a total of over 9 million speakers. Standard Swedish is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well-established by the first decades of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties still exist, influenced by the older rural dialects, the spoken and written language is uniform and standardized, with a 99% literacy rate among adults. Some of the genuine dialects differ considerably from the standard language in grammar and vocabulary and are not always mutually intelligible with Standard Swedish. These dialects are confined to rural areas and spoken by a rather limited group of people of low education and social mobility. Swedish is distinguished by its prosody, which differs considerably between varieties. It includes both lexical stress and some tonal qualities. Swedish is also notable for the voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, a sound found in many dialects, including the more prestigious forms of the standard language.

Did you know...

From Wikipedia's "Did You Know" archives:

The number 605 in Khmer Numerals

... that the world's largest mathematical experiment, designed by Brian Butterworth, found women to be faster than men at subitizing?
... that Khmer numerals were the first material evidence of the figure zero as a numerical figure?
... that in the English plural, the letter -s is pronounced differently in words like "cats", "cabs", and "buses", because of a phonological rule?
...that the 2005 movie The Interpreter by film director Sydney Pollack was based on real-life conference interpreters from the United Nations Interpretation Service?
... that Samuel Taylor Coleridge spelled William Shakespeare's last name as "Shakspere"?