Editing Language (section)

===Subdisciplines===
The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to linguistics. For example, [[descriptive linguistics]] examines the grammar of single languages, [[theoretical linguistics]] develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of language based on data from the various extant human languages, [[sociolinguistics]] studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in turn the study of the social functions of language and grammatical description, [[neurolinguistics]] studies how language is processed in the human brain and allows the experimental testing of theories, [[computational linguistics]] builds on theoretical and descriptive linguistics to construct computational models of language often aimed at processing natural language or at testing linguistic hypotheses, and [[historical linguistics]] relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the [[comparative method]].<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Trask|2007}}</ref>