A linguist in the academic sense is a person who studies natural language (an academic discipline known as linguistics). Ambiguously, the word is sometimes also used to refer to a polyglot (one who knows several languages), a translator/interpreter (especially in the military), or a grammarian (a scholar of grammar), but these uses of the word are distinct (and one does not have to be multilingual in order to be an academic linguist).
A linguist in the academic sense is a person who studies natural language (an academic discipline known as linguistics). Ambiguously, the word is sometimes also used to refer to a polyglot (one who knows several languages), a translator/interpreter (especially in the military), or a grammarian (a scholar of grammar), but these uses of the word are distinct (and one does not have to be multilingual in order to be an academic linguist).
Source: Wikipedia "List of linguists" · CC BY-SA 4.0
Share this article: X · Bluesky