Prerequisites:

Description:

    Linguistics is the study of languages.  Since people tend ot "think in" a particular language, and fundamentally different languages impose different thought patterns on their speakers, the study of languages native to your species might allow the development of synthetic languages that cause their speakers to think in new and useful ways.  In this way, custom languages could be developed for different fields of science.
    Since improved communications associated with industrialization tend to kill off local languages at the expense of only a few more widely spoken languages, the number of languages spoken by your species will constantly decrease until you develop Linguistics sufficiently to see the use in creating a Language Bank to accurately record the lexicon and literature/oral tradition of infrequently spoken languages in a more permanent form.  A large language bank is also useful for Exolinguistics.
    Exolinguistics is the study of languages of species other than your own.  Since no such language has been definitely discovered in the real world (with the possible exception of the vocalizations of dolphins and whales; we really don't know for sure whether those are fully fledged languages or not yet) we don't yet know how hard it will be to translate them.  As such, the difficulty of Exolinguistics development will be unpredictable (vary from universe to universe).  Since other species are almost guaranteed to have thought processes very different from our own, exolinguistics cannot be easy.  Development of Exolinguistics allows more accurate translations of communication in another species language to be done with less infrastructure.  For example, early development might only allow translaitons to be made at a major planet with several years' effort.  Later, it might be done with only a few officers aboard a space ship.  Finally, it could be confined to a small mobile computer that simply translates.  Note, however, that the understanding of a particular foreign language may improve beyond the general understanding of exolinguistics.  Continued development of Exolinguistics once a particular foreign language has been thoroughly translated will require examples of new languages.