Names for the discipline

Before the twentieth century, the term "philology", first attested in 1716,^[5] was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus.^[6] Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted^[7] and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition," especially in the United States,^[8] where it was never as popular as elsewhere in the sense of "science of language".^[5]

Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641,^[9] the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847.^[9] It is now the usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.