What is applied linguistics?

Applied linguistics is the branch of linguistics concerned with practical applications of language
studies, for example language teaching, translation, and speech therapy.

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to
language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are
education, psychology, communication research, anthropology, and sociology.

Applied linguistics’ is using what we know about (a) language, (b) how it is learned and (c)how it is
used, in order to achieve some purpose or solve some problem in the real world.

Difference between Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

The key difference between linguistics and applied linguistics is that linguistics is the scientific study of
the structure and development of language in general or of particular languages whereas applied
linguistics is the branch of linguistics focusing on the practical applications of language studies.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language and its structure. It has many branches such as
sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, dialectology, comparative linguistics, and
structural linguistics. Applied linguistics is also a branch of linguistics, which study language as it
affects real-life situations.

What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves language form, language meaning, and
language in context. Basically, it studies how language is formed, how it functions and how people use
it. Linguistics also explores various language-related phenomena such as language variation, language
acquisition, language change over time and, language storage and process in the human brain.
Although some people assume that linguistics is only about the study of a particular language, this is
not so. Linguistics deal with the study of particular languages, as well as the search for common
properties observable in all languages or large groups of languages.

There are various subareas in linguistics as follows:

Phonetics – studies speech and sounds

Phonology – studies the patterning of sounds

Morphology – studies the structure of words

Syntax – studies the structure of sentences

Semantics – studies the literal meaning

Pragmatics – studies language in context

What is Applied Linguistics?

Applied linguistics is a branch of linguistics that focuses on practical applications of language studies.
In other words, it involves the practical application of linguistics-related concepts. Moreover, this is a
field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related problems. Thus, it
helps linguists to gain insight into practical problems such as what are the best methods to teach
languages or what are the existing issues in language policy formulation.

Applied linguistics covers a vast number of areas such as bilingualism, multilingualism, discourse
analysis, language pedagogy, language acquisition, language planning and policy, and translation.
Furthermore, applied linguistics is related to various other fields such as education, communication,
sociology, and anthropology.

Early history of Applied Linguistics.

Interest in languages and language teaching has a long history, and we can trace thisback at least as far
as the ancient Greeks, where both ‘Plato and Aristotle contributed to the design of a curriculum
beginning with good writing (grammar), then moving onto effective discourse (rhetoric) and culminating
in the development of dialectic to promote a philosophical approach to life.

If we focus on English,major attempts at linguistic description began to occur in the second half of the
eight-eenth century. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his ''Dictionary of the English Lan- guage'',
which quickly became the unquestioned authority on the meanings of English words. It also had the
effect of standardizing English spelling, which until that time had been relatively variable (for example,
the printer William Caxton complained in 1490 that eggs could be spelled as‘eggys’or ‘egges’or
even‘eyren’ depending on the local pronunciation).

About the same time, Robert Lowth published an influential grammarbook,'' Short Introduction to
English Grammar''(1762), but whereas Johnson sought to describe English vocabulary by collecting
thousands of examples of how English words were actually used.

Lowth prescribed what ‘correct’grammar should be. He had no specialized linguistic background to do
this, and unfortunately based his English grammar on a classical Latin model, even though the two
languages are organized inquite different ways. The result was that English, which is a Germanic
language, was described by a linguistic system (parts of speech) which was borrowed from Latin,which
had previously borrowed the system from Greek.

The process of prescribing,rather than describing, has left us with English grammar rules which are
much too rigid to describe actual language usage:

 no multiple negatives (I don’t need no help from nobody!)

 no split infinitives (So we need to really think about all this from scratch.)

 no ending a sentence with a preposition (I don’t know what it is made of.)

These rules made little sense even when Lowth wrote them, but through the ages bothteachers and
students have generallydisliked ambiguity, and so Lowth’s notions of grammarwere quickly adopted once
in print as the rules of ‘correct English’.

Applied linguistics during the twentieth century

The field of applied linguistics started from Europe and the United States, the field rapidly flourished in
the international context in the late 1950s.

In Europe

1 Applied linguistics first concerned itself with principles and practices on the basis of linguistics.

2 In the early days, applied linguistics was thought as “linguistics-applied”.

3 In 1956 it was first founded at the university of Edinburgh ''School of Applied Linguistics''.

4 In 1960s Applied linguistics was expanded to include language assessment, language policy, and
second language acquisition.

5 In 1967 The British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) was established. Its mission is "the
advancement of education by fostering and promoting. BAAL hosts an annual conference, as well as
many additional smaller conferences and events organised by its Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

6 In n1970s, applied linguistics became a problem-driven field rather than theoretical linguistics,
including the solution of language-related problems in the real world.

7 By the 1990s, applied linguistics had broadened including critical studies and multilingualism. Research
in applied linguistics was shifted to "the theoretical and empirical investigation of real world problems in
which language is a central issue.

In America

In the United States, applied linguistics also began narrowly as the application of insights from
structural linguistics—first to the teaching of English in schools and subsequently to second and
foreign language teaching.

1 The ''linguistics applied'' approach to language teaching was promulgated most strenuously by
Leonard Bloomfield, who developed the foundation for ''the Army Specialized Training Program'',
2 Charles C. Fries, who established the English Language Institute (ELI) at the University of Michigan in
1941.

3 In 1946, Applied linguistics became a recognized field of studies at the University of Michigan.

4 In 1948, the Research Club at Michigan established Language Learning: A Journal of Applied
Linguistics. For the first time ''the term applied linguistics'' was used.

5 In the late 1960s, applied linguistics began to establish its own identity as an interdisciplinary field
of linguistics concerned with real-world language issues.

6 In 1977 (AAAL) The American Association for Applied Linguistics was founded. AAAL holds an annual
conference, usually in March or April, in the United States.