History of linguistics

The history of linguistics traces how people have analyzed language, built linguistic theories, and organized the study of language across cultures and periods.

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Pāṇini: An ancient Indian grammarian whose Aṣṭādhyāyī gives a highly systematic account of Sanskrit. His formal rules exemplify the sophistication of early South Asian grammatical analysis.
Franz Bopp: A German philologist who helped establish comparative Indo-European grammar in the nineteenth century. His comparative work made systematic relations among languages central to historical linguistics.
Comparative method: A procedure for reconstructing linguistic history by comparing systematic correspondences among related languages. It provided a method for inferring ancestral languages from surviving evidence.
Prescriptive grammar: Rules and recommendations that prescribe how language should be used according to a chosen standard. Its social judgments differ from linguistics’ descriptive analysis of actual language use.
Linguistic typology: The comparison and classification of languages according to their structural features. Typology broadened comparison beyond the historical study of language families.
Aṣṭādhyāyī: Pāṇini’s concise Sanskrit grammar, organized as rules describing the language’s forms and derivations. It is a landmark text in the early history of grammatical theory.
Rasmus Rask: A Danish linguist whose comparisons of languages helped establish methods for identifying historical relationships. His sound comparisons helped make language history a discipline grounded in regular correspondences.
Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change over time and how languages are historically related. It is the field whose methods and theories form a major thread in this history.
Descriptive linguistics: The systematic analysis of how people use language, without prescribing forms as correct or incorrect. Its aims distinguish modern linguistic inquiry from traditional rule-setting.
Sociolinguistics: The study of relationships between language and social life, including variation and change. It expanded linguistic inquiry to social variation often excluded from earlier models.