Language, it is widely understood, both sets us apart from our fellow creatures and identifies us as uniquely human. We use language to establish and maintain group membership, to express our emotions, to amuse ourselves and to entertain others, to convey information serious and trivial and exist in a world populated by others. Linguistics is the discipline which studies the structure and functions of both individual languages and the phenomena of language itself. In spite of early efforts by ancient and medieval scholars, most of our progress in understanding language has come only within the last century, and much of this scholarship is very recent indeed.
