What is linguistics, or linguistics? What does this science do, what problems does it face? This book talks about the history of linguistics from ancient times to modern times 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 quite understandable - the expression “learn 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 into the jungle and write computer programs? How linguistic theories appeared and how they help solve practical problems: teaching languages, developing scripts, creating machine translation algorithms. Readers of the book are people who are far from linguistics, but who want to know how and why people learn their language.