Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves analysing language form language meaning and language in context. The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pa?ini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his A??adhyayi.

Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning. Phonetics is the study of speech and non-speech sounds and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties. The study of language meaning on the other hand deals with how languages encode relations between entities properties and other aspects of the world to convey process and assign meaning as well as manage and resolve ambiguity. While the study of semantics typically concerns itself with truth conditions pragmatics deals with how situational context influences the production of meaning.