ABSTRACT
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Language is the association of the combination of sounds, words, and sentences to conventional meanings used and understood by a community of speakers. Scientific means the “investigation [of language] by means of controlled and empirically verifiable observations and with reference to some general theory of language structure” (Lyons, 1968:1). Linguistics is a social science because its primary focus is on language as a human behavior, although some of its descriptive and analytical methods reflect those of mathematics and the natural sciences.
