Contents › Section 7: Theory, terminology and disciplinary question › answer 14 of 39
Is linguistics limited to natural languages?
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The simple answer to your question is YES - linguistics is NOT limited to 'natural' languages. While professional linguists mostly deal with naturally occurring languages spoken by people for daily communication, the field of linguistics is concerned with all symbolic systems used to express meaning for some sort of a communicative purpose.
So there are linguists who study signs, linguists who study chimps and other communicating animals, linguists who study artificial languages (from Esperanto to Klingon), linguists who study art and literature. If it's symbolic with a communicative purpose, it's fair game for linguistics.
I don't know of any linguists who study computer languages (partly because of their very specialised communicative purpose) but they could certainly be studied linguistically in very fruitful ways.
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).