Humanities
Linguistics & Language
Language as a natural object — structured, learnable, and far stranger than it looks.
10 fields · 81 topics · 10 curated works
Fields within Linguistics & Language
Phonetics & Phonology
8The sounds of speech and the systems behind them.
Articulatory Phonetics · Acoustic Phonetics · The IPA · Phonemes & Allophones · Syllable Structure
Morphology & Syntax
9How words and sentences are built.
Word Formation · Inflection & Derivation · Parts of Speech · Constituency & Phrase Structure · Generative Grammar
Semantics & Pragmatics
8Meaning, literal and otherwise.
Lexical Semantics · Compositional Semantics · Reference & Deixis · Implicature · Presupposition
Historical & Comparative Linguistics
9How languages change and how relatedness is proved.
Sound Change · The Comparative Method · Proto-Indo-European · Language Families · Etymology
Sociolinguistics
9Language as a marker of identity and power.
Dialects & Variation · Register & Style · Code-Switching · Language & Class · Language & Gender
Psycholinguistics & Acquisition
8Language in the mind and how it gets there.
First Language Acquisition · Second Language Acquisition · Critical Period Hypothesis · Sentence Processing · Speech Perception
Writing Systems & Decipherment
8The technology of recording speech.
Origins of Writing · Alphabets · Logographic Systems · Abjads & Abugidas · Decipherment of Lost Scripts
Computational Linguistics
7Language processed by machine.
Corpus Linguistics · Parsing (Linguistic) · Machine Translation (Linguistic) · Speech Recognition · Language Models as Linguistic Evidence
Language Learning & Translation
8The applied side.
Language Learning Methods · Comprehensible Input · Vocabulary Acquisition · Pronunciation Training · Translation Theory
Endangered & World Languages
7What is being lost, and what it contains.
Language Death · Language Documentation · Revitalisation Efforts · Linguistic Diversity · Indigenous Languages
Reading in Linguistics & Language
10Start here
No prior grounding assumed.
- BookThe Language InstinctSteven Pinker, 1994
Language is a biological adaptation with universal structure, not a cultural invention learned like arithmetic.
- BookIs That a Fish in Your Ear?David Bellos, 2011
Translation is not substitution of equivalents — there are none — but a reconstruction of effect, and it works anyway.
Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
- BookThe Decipherment of Linear BJohn Chadwick, 1958
The inside account of cracking a script with no bilingual key, and the best available case study in how decipherment actually proceeds.
- BookA Course in PhoneticsPeter Ladefoged, 1975
The standard text on how speech sounds are produced and described, and on how much of a language is inaudible to its own speakers.
- BookLanguage DeathDavid Crystal, 2000
A language disappears roughly every two weeks, and what is lost is a distinct system for organising experience, not just vocabulary.
Go deeper
Primary sources and full treatments.
- BookSyntactic StructuresNoam Chomsky, 1957
Establishes generative grammar and shows that statistical models of the day could not account for syntactic competence.
- BookThe Social Stratification of English in New York CityWilliam Labov, 1966
Showed that variation in pronunciation is socially structured and measurable, and founded quantitative sociolinguistics doing it.
- EssayLogic and ConversationH. P. Grice, 1975
Conversation runs on a cooperative principle, and most of what we communicate is implied by deliberately flouting it.
- BookThe Horse, the Wheel, and LanguageDavid W. Anthony, 2007
Combines linguistics and archaeology to locate the Proto-Indo-European homeland, and shows how a reconstructed language constrains prehistory.
- BookFoundations of Statistical Natural Language ProcessingChristopher Manning & Hinrich Schütze, 1999
The text that established corpus statistics as the basis of language processing, a decade before the field admitted it had won.