It is impossible to separate language from literature, or politics, or most of our everyday human interactions. In this article, though, discussion is centered on language structure rather than how it is put to use in human society. Accordingly, language is treated almost exclusively from the point of view of linguistics, and the article concentrates on what we have learned about language from that discipline over the last two centuries.

Language, being a human activity, is social in nature; hence, linguistics is usually classified as a social science. There are many ways to study language scientifically. The most traditional, with its roots going back thousands of years to the Classical Greek and even Classical Sanskrit grammarians, is called Descriptive Linguistics. Its goal is to provide an explicit description of a language (often called a grammar), either in whole or in part (for example, a description of the sound system of Swahili).Often, a descriptive linguist, especially one working on one of the many less-studied languages, will spend considerable time in the field, learning from the speakers of the language and sometimes writing the language down for the first time. Theoretical Linguistics, of which there are many varieties, seeks to provide explicit general principles that are applicable to all languages, often drawing on descriptive grammars. Within both descriptive and theoretical linguistics, historical linguistics is devoted to the study of how languages change over time. Sociolinguistics treats the broad question of language in society and includes the study of dialects. Psycholinguistics uses the methods of experimental psychology with language as the primary source of data. Child Language Acquisition is devoted to learning how children acquire language early in life. Neurolinguistics addresses the relationship between language and the brain. Computational Linguistics deals with the interaction of computers and language, for such purposes as Speech Synthesis, the production of artificial speech from written text, or Speech Recognition, the conversion of speech to text, or parsing, the automatic description of the grammatical structure of a text.