To what extent can Linguistics be considered a science?
Introduction
The term “linguistics” was first used in the mid-nineteenth century. It is a very broad field that encompasses grammar, phonology, and semantics. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, this field was known as philology and that is why the simplest definition of Linguistics is that it is the science of language. To put it differently, it is the scientific study of human language.
Proximity to natural sciences
The proximity of linguistics to other natural sciences such as mathematics, physics, physics, biology, zoology, etc. is proof of its scientific nature. It touches on zoology through the comparative study of physics through phonology, physiology through the structure of human vocal organs, and the communication systems of living things.
Empirical observations
The scientific way of thinking about a language involves making systematic, empirical observations. All scientists make empirical observations: botanists observe how plants grow and reproduce. Chemists observe how substances interact with other. Linguists observe how people use their language.
The descriptive approach
The descriptive approach is consistent with a scientific way of thinking. Think about an entomologist who studies beetles. Imagine that scientist observes that a species of beetle eats leaves. She’s not going to judge that the beetles are eating wrong and tell them that they’d be more successful in life if only they eat the same thing as ants. No — she observes what the beetle eats and tries to figure out why: she develops a theory of why the beetle eats this plant and not that one. In the same way, linguists observe what people say and how they say it, and come up with theories of why people say certain things or make certain sounds but not others.
Differentiating in a scientific way
There are plenty of species that communicate with each other in an impressive variety of ways, but in linguistics, our job is to focus on the unique system that humans use.
First, what we call the articulatory system: our lungs, larynx & vocal folds, and the shape of our tongue, teeth, lips, and nose, all enable us to produce speech. No other species can do this in the way we can, not even our closest genetic relatives the chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans.
Second, our auditory system is special. Our ears are sensitive to exactly the frequencies that are most common in human speech. There are other species that have similar patterns of auditory sensitivity, but human newborns pay special attention to human speech, even more so than synthetic speech that is matched for acoustic characteristics.
And most important of all, our neural system is special: no other species has a brain as complex and densely connected as ours with so many connections dedicated to producing and understanding language.
Static and inventive
Like any scientific discipline, linguistics is not static. Viewpoints and theoretical methods in the field, change even in fundamental ways from time to time and different aspects come to revive the primary focus at different times. Linguistics has more than its share of unresolved controversies and unsolved questions which is a part of its fascination and challenge.
Conclusion
Humans’ language ability is different from all other species’ communication systems, and linguistics is the science that studies this unique ability.
