Philosophy of language is the study of philosophical issues that arise
due to the language based nature of discourse and argument. It is
dominated by philosophical analysis, the branch of philosophy that
occupies itself with what the structures of language tell us about the
concepts we deploy in communicating. Philosophical analysis dates
back to the Pre-Socratics , and was first made systematic in
Aristotle's Organon, but it was with the revolutionary new
developments in mathematical logic inaugurated by Frege that
philosophical analysis assumed the central importance in philosophy
that it does today.

Analytical philosophy is the school of philosophy which ascribes
most importance to the philosophy of language, and it is in analytical
philosophy that the so-called `linguistic turn' took place: this is
the idea that long standing controversies in philosophy about the
nature of the world and of knowledge can be settled by attention to
the use of the relevant concepts in language. But even outside
analytical philosophy, philosophy of language is important: linguistic
issues take centre stage in the philosophical hermeneutics of
Heidegger and Gadamer and in Derrida's Deconstruction, in
phenomenology issues about privacy best formulated in linguistic terms
are of crucial importance, whilst in cognitive science the debate
about the nature of concepts revolves about matters of content that
originated in the philosophy of language.