Linguistic description

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In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community.^[1]

All academic research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other scientific disciplines, it seeks to describe reality, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be.^[2][3][4][5] Modern descriptive linguistics is based on a structural approach to language, as exemplified in the work of Leonard Bloomfield and others.^[6] This type of linguistics utilizes different methods in order to describe a language such as basic data collection, and different types of elicitation methods.^[7]