The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phonemes or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either:
Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by way of a text corpus. Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a given linguistic variety. Today, corpora are generally machine-readable data collections.
Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical linguistics involves several key areas of study, including the reconstruction of ancestral languages, the classification of languages into families, and the analysis of the cultural and social influences on language development.
African-American English is the umbrella term for English dialects spoken predominantly by Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to more standard forms of English. Like all widely spoken language varieties, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically, in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary and accent features, AAVE is employed by middle-class Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum. However, in formal speaking contexts, speakers tend to switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the non-standard accent. AAVE is widespread throughout the United States, but is not the native dialect of all African Americans, nor are all of its speakers African American.
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness.
Larry M. Hyman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in phonology and has particular interest in African languages.
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation, lexicon, grammar, and other features. Different communities or individuals speaking the same language may differ from each other in their choices of which of the available linguistic features to use, and how often, and the same speaker may make different choices on different occasions.
Stefan Th. Gries is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, and since 1 April 2018 also Chair of English Linguistics in the Department of English at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen.
Shana Poplack, is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American vernacular English. She founded and directs the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.
Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax, semantics (meaning), morphology, phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics. Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics and psycholinguistics bridge many of these divisions.
Willem Leo Marie (Leo) Wetzels is a full professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Directeur de recherche at Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (LPP), CNRS/Sorbonne-Nouvelle in Paris. He is Editor-in-Chief of Probus International, the Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics.
Jennifer Sandra Cole is a professor linguistics, Director of the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab, and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University. Her research uses experimental and computational methods to study the sound structure of language. She was previously Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Cole served as the founding General Editor of Laboratory Phonology (2009–2015) and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
William Hubbard Baxter III is an American linguist specializing in the history of the Chinese language and best known for his work on the reconstruction on Old Chinese.
Proto-Karenic or Proto-Karen is the reconstructed ancestor of the Karenic languages.