Definition:-


Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The word 'language' here means language in general, not a particular language. If we were concerned with studying an individual language , we would say "i am studying French.....or English," or whichever language we happen to be studying. 
But linguistics does not study an individual language, it studies 'language' in general.
According to Robins:- Linguistics is concerned with human language as a universal and recognizable part of the human behaviour and of the human facilities perhaps one of the most essential to human life as we know it, and one of the most
 far-reaching of human capabilities in relation to the whole span of mankind's achievements. 




Linguistics does not emphasize practical knowledge or mastery of a particular language. 
Linguists may know only one language, or may know several, or may even study a language they do not know at all. They try to study the ways in which language is organised to fulfil human needs, as a system of communication. 
There is a difference between a person who knows many languages called a Polyglot and a Linguist, who studies general principles of language organization and language behaviour, often with reference to some actual language or languages.
We can say that linguistics is learning about language rather than learning a language. This distinction is often explained as the difference between learning how a car works and learning how to drive a car. When we learn how to drive a car, we learn a set of habits and do some practice------this is similar to learning how to speak a language. When we learn how the car works, we open up its mechanism, study it and investigate the relationship of its parts to one another. This is similar to what we do in a scientific study of language, or linguistics. We investigate the mechanism of language, its parts and how all these parts fit together to perform particular functions, and why they are arranged or organised in a certain manner. Just a while driving a car we are using its various components , while speaking a language we are using the sounds, words etc of that language; behind these uses is the mechanism which enables us to do so. We study language because it is important for us to understand this mechanism.
So finally we can say that in earlier times, the study of language was considered to be the study of the grammar of some prestigious or classical language such as Latin or Greek. Today we consider all languages as fit objects of language study.


Linguistics has 6 primary subfields and many integrated subfields. The primary subfields are phonetics and phonology which describe the sounds of language, morphology and syntax which describe the structure of language, and semantics and pragmatics which describe how meaning and how meaning is communicated in language. Examples of the integrated subfields which combine with other fields are psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics.