Language documentation
Template:Language Documentation Language Documentation is the process by which a language is described in terms of its linguistics and its collected oral and textual literatures. Language documentation seeks to create as thorough a record as possible of the speech community for both posterity and language revitalization.
Typical steps involve the creation of a dictionary and grammar of the language.
Types of Language Documentation
Language documentation, as a task within linguistics, may be divided into separte areas of specialization, including:
- Phonetics, the study of the sounds of human language
- Phonology (or phonemics), the study of patterns of a language's basic sounds
- Morphology, the study of the internal structure of words
- Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
- Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
- Historical linguistics, the study of languages whose historical relations are recognizable through similarities in vocabulary, word formation, and syntax
- Stylistics, the study of style in languages
Related Research areas
- Descriptive linguistics
- Syntax
- Orthography
- Lexicography
- Lexicology
- Phonetics
- Phonology
- Pragmatics
- Semantics
- Etymology
- Anthropological linguistics
- Writing systems
Representation of speech
- International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a system used to write down and reproduce the sounds of human speech.