Linguistics: Past, present and future

Linguistics is a discipline that is concerned with the study of languages. Linguistics is an aspect of learning that has gone through different phases. The framework under which this paper is discussed is, Historical Revisionism. Historical Revisionism is an approach to study which aid’s one in tracing the history of a thing in order to be able to explain its present status. Some of the objectives of this paper are: to give a brief insight into the developmental stages of Linguistics, to comment on the present state of Linguistics and to project into the prospects of Linguistics. Information for this paper was gotten from textual materials. Some of the findings of this paper are: that Linguistics as an academic enterprise was confronted with a lot of challenges at the developmental stages as seen in the controversy between the analogists and anomalists, that translation began in the Medieval era of traditional grammar with studies in semantics, that the comparative study of language was done through the study of changes in sound, that Linguistics can help in the documentation, preservation and revitalization of the cultures of many people and their languages ( both endangered and non-endangered languages), and that Linguistics has helped in the development of the orthographies of undeveloped languages. This paper is thus, beckoning on individuals and governments to aid studies in Linguistics towards the development and use of all the languages of the world to prevent the extinction of many languages. It is also calling for the development of the human persons to continue the research in linguistic studies.