Linguistics is the scientific[1] study of language.[2]There are three aspects to this study: language form, language meaning, and language in context.[3] The earliest activities in the description of language have been attributed to Pāṇini (fl. 4th century BCE),[4] with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi.[5]
Linguistics analyzes human language as a system for relating sounds (or signs in signed languages) and meaning.[6] Phonetics studies acoustic and articulatory properties of the production and perception of speech sounds and non-speech sounds. 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 to manage and resolve ambiguity. While the study of semantics typically concerns itself with truth conditions, pragmatics deals with how context influences meanings.[7]