ABSTRACT
Linguists to a large extent are involved in seemingly mundane, if often formally complex, matters of description, and to outsiders the subject matter often seems dry and detached. But linguistics – overtly or covertly – also reflects the wider intellectual obsessions of the surrounding culture. Ideas promoted by linguists about form and meaning, human and ethnic origins, homelands and migrations, community and communication, put them in the company of mystics and dreamers, social visionaries and utopian theorists. For linguistics is fundamentally a search for transcendence, for insight into the language system in its purest state, and the subject matter of linguistics – language(s) – resists easy ontological categorization, complicating the relationship between linguistics and the ‘hard’ sciences on the one hand, and the human and social sciences on the other.
