Linguistics is the scientific study of language and its structure. It explores how languages are formed, how they change over time, and how they are used in communication. Linguists examine various aspects of language, including phonetics (the sounds of speech), syntax (the rules that govern sentence structure), and semantics (the meaning of words and sentences). Additionally, linguistics looks at how language interacts with society, culture, and the brain. This field includes sub-disciplines like sociolinguistics, which studies how language varies among different social groups, and psycholinguistics, which investigates how we process and understand language in our minds.