Linguistics is the study of language structure, which means grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary and meaning. Anyone who thinks about how language is organized is doing linguistics.

By this definition, linguistics is a very old discipline indeed; in fact, it's almost as old as written language itself. (Wikipedia: ‘Linguistics’.) The earliest linguists may have been the grammarians who covered clay tablets with verb forms in Babylon in the second millenium bc (Gragg 1994).

More recently, the Ancient Greeks built the foundations on which our modern grammars rest, and during the Middle Ages grammar was one of the three main parts of the school curriculum (part of the ‘trivium’, or ‘three ways’, from which the modern word trivial is unfortunately derived). More recently still, we (in the UK) still have some ‘grammar schools’, many of which date back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century.

Description

Much of the early work on language structure was brilliantly insightful and survives in modern linguistics, though the study of language has always run the danger of attracting its fair share of dogma, ignorance and thoroughly bad science.

For example, one popular activity among the educated is to complain about the ‘mistakes’ made by the uneducated, such as using ‘double negatives’ like I didn't say nothing. Such ‘prescriptive’ comments are simply wrong because the forms in question are not mistakes any more than an English sentence is a ‘mistake’ compared with its French translation. (Wikipedia: ‘Linguistic prescription’.)