Okay kiddo, so let me explain the history of linguistics to you!
Linguistics is the study of language, how it works, and how people use it. People have been interested in studying language for hundreds and maybe even thousands of years!
One of the earliest known linguists was a guy named Pāṇini, who lived in India over 2,000 years ago. He wrote a book called the "Aṣṭādhyāyī," which was about Sanskrit, a language spoken in India.
Over time, other people became interested in language study too. In the Middle Ages, people were really interested in studying languages to help them understand things like the Bible. But they also started to study language just for the sake of understanding language itself.
In the 1700s and 1800s, people really started to get into the idea of studying language as a science. One famous guy from this time was a man named Ferdinand de Saussure. He talked about something called "structural linguistics," which means studying the structure of language to understand how it works. People also started to study historical linguistics, which is about how languages change over time.
Today, linguistics is a big field with lots of different areas of study. People still study the structure of language and how it changes over time, but they also study things like how language is used in different cultures, how people learn language, and even how our brains process language! It's a really fascinating subject, don't you think?