What has linguistics ever done for us, really?

Late 19th century:
Tracing the origins of nations

The first people who engaged with language with scholastic rigour were the Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker). These were a group of predominantly German 19^th-century scholars, who were interested in understanding how languages change over time. By comparing words from different points in history, the neogrammarians managed to formulate several phonetic laws. They also showed how their contemporary language connected to the languages of forgotten ages. Such an interest in the past connects to the overarching zeitgeist of “romantic nationalism”, that is, the attempt to trace the roots of emerging nation-states to a forgotten past. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that these endeavours shortly followed literary work such as the re-discovery of manuscripts like Beowulf (1818) and the Chanson de Roland (1832), which provided the nation-states with a heroic origin story.

Early 20th century:
Focusing on contemporary usage

The study of ancient, and long-forgotten, language forms, however, also revealed an uncomfortable truth, namely that the European nations shared a common linguistic past. This was a finding that proved hard to reconcile with the nationalist sentiment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such awkwardness might, in part, explain the turn in linguistics, from Ferdinard de Saussure onwards, which now focused on contemporary (or synchronic) description. When Saussure wrote that “the interference of history does nothing but cloud judgment” (Course in General Linguistics, p. 117 in the original French edition), this was intended as a politically neutral statement of linguistic fact. But it was a proclamation that would resonate widely at a time when the visible differences between neighbouring peoples seemed more important than forgotten similarities.

Late 20th century:
In search of universals

After World War II, the focus of linguistics shifted once more. The study of the syntactic structures of language, pioneered by Noam Chomsky, aimed to find the ‘universal’ features of language. Language universals were postulated shared features and deep structures that we all draw on when we make meaning through language. These exist, according to the theory, regardless of which individual language we speak. By way of analogy, when we buy a new telephone, we set our language preferences, and from that point onwards, this is the language in which we interact with the device; but there is still a deeper, unseen code that all telephones of the same model use. By shifting focus on the features of language that are universal and underly specific languages, the universal language programme aimed to find what united, rather than what divided humanity.

Not much later, systemic-functional descriptions of language again shifted attention away from specific linguistic types (which differ from language to language) and focused on the act of communication itself. Different languages, and indeed different varieties in the same language, may have diverse ways of asking a question; but the social function that these utterances enact (i.e., asking a question) is common to all. Again, the reorientation of linguistics, which turned away from language-specific forms towards shared elements could be seen as an attempt to heal the wounds inflicted by nationalistic fragmentation.

Early 21st century:
Searching for an identity

What about today, though? Some of the ongoing debates in linguistics these days attempt to answer questions such as “how might a group define itself through language?”, “what’s the relationship between language and identity?”, “what happens when an individual or a society speaks or thinks in several languages?” and “how does language mediate the construction of reality?”. This social turn likely relates relates is to the general retreat of certainties and constants through which we defined ourselves in the past and their replacement by what Sigmund Bauman calls “liquid modernity”.

So then, what’s linguistics for?

If one were to ask a linguist at different times in history what the purpose of linguistics is, one might get different answers each time. At a deeper level, however, the warrant of linguistics has remained constant. It is a self-reflective attempt of the human intellect, such as it expressed across time, to understand and to constitute itself through the language in which it is manifested.

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