Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. Linguistics covers two main areas: theoretical and applied linguistics.

Theoretical (or general) linguistics tries to systematically describe language by exploring its structure, or grammar, and its meanings, or semantics.

In the study of semantics, autonomous linguistics explores the nature of language abstracted away from the many aspects of its day-to-day usage and contextual linguistics combines linguistics with other fields, such as philosophy or sociology, to explain language's social functions.

Linguistics also compares languages and explores their histories, in order to find universal properties of language and to account for its development and origins. Slightly separate from general linguistics are the sub-fields of phonology, which studies the role of language's sounds in particular languages, and phonetics, the study of how sounds are produced and perceived.