What is linguistics? What does this science do, what problems does it face? This book tells the history of linguistics from ancient times to the present day and shows how science tries to answer three main questions related to language - how it is structured, how it changes over time and how it functions.

Many even educated people think that linguists are polyglots who simply know many languages. This misconception is understandable - the expression "study a language" can be interpreted in different ways, but has nothing to do with reality. Vladimir Alpatov's book tells what linguists actually do and what interests them. Why do they read ancient manuscripts, go on expeditions to the jungle and write computer programs. How linguistic theories appeared and how they help solve practical problems: teach languages, develop writing systems, create machine translation algorithms.