History of Linguistics

The term linguistics is a product of the nineteenth century, as are the academic field and the form of enquiry that it designates. This enquiry is however continuous with modes of analysis that date back to ancient times, as practiced in various traditions in Asia and Europe (together with the African parts of the Alexandrian Empire). The History of Linguistics itself has mid-19th-century beginnings and has taken its scope as ranging over the whole of this ancient-to-modern continuum. Given that language and its analysis have played a part in every academic area, and that modern linguistics has interests that overlap with those of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, informatics, legal theory, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, semiotics, sociology, and other subjects, it is not obvious where the boundaries of the History of Linguistics lie, and scholarly disputes over where to draw them are not uncommon. This bibliography will focus on the prototypical areas of language analysis, while not excluding those areas that, if more peripheral, have nevertheless had a considerable impact on what linguists think and do.