The science of language

It makes sense to start by asking what the term linguistics actually means. The following definition is taken from Collins English Dictionary:

‘Linguistics, n. (functioning as sing.) The scientific study of language’

As a working definition, ‘scientific study of language’ will probably do, but the word ‘scientific’ might appear problematic in this context, because language doesn’t seem to belong to the realm of science in its conventional sense. One certainly doesn’t imagine linguists in laboratories wearing white coats, and it isn’t immediately obvious how one could undertake experiments on language, something that resides ultimately in the head of a native speaker.

It might help if we construe ‘scientific’ here to mean something like ‘objective’, but achieving ‘objectivity’ in linguistics is far from a straightforward task, not least because speakers’ judgements about the same data can differ hugely, making reliable conclusions difficult to draw. For example, while most British English speakers would probably reject the sentence ‘I didn’t do it though but’, it’s perfectly acceptable in some British dialects. Likewise, many English speakers accept ‘innit?’ as a contraction of ‘isn't it?’ but reject it (often vehemently) as a tag question in sentences like: ‘We’re seeing him on Saturday, innit?’ – now commonly used in some varieties of British English. Even for a question as apparently innocuous as ‘Do you speak language X?’, native speaker intuitions may be contradictory or difficult to interpret: responses may be influenced by informants’ attitudes to the language in question (‘Do I approve of X, or even think of it as a proper language? Would I want people to think I use it?’) or to their understanding of the question, which might range from: ‘Do I speak this language every day?’ to ‘Can I understand it, even if I don’t speak it?’, or even ‘Can I manage a few words if the need arises?’ So linguists need to be especially careful when claiming ‘scientific’ objectivity for their findings.

To approach their subject matter objectively, linguists need first to shed a number of everyday assumptions, or ‘language myths’: we’ll be looking at some of these below. The good news is that learning to think like a linguist isn’t difficult: in a real sense, it’s a bit like releasing your inner child, as we’ll see later. A further piece of good news is that, as a native speaker of any language, you’re already in possession of some ‘expert knowledge’! But before you start, you need to grasp two fundamental principles that underpin everything linguists do and that go some way to explaining what ‘scientific’ means for the study of language.