Michael A. Harrison
Formal language theory was fist developed in the mid 1950's in an attempt to develop theories of natural language acquisition. It was soon realized that this theory (particularly the context-free portion) was quite relevant to the artificial languages that had originated in computer science. Since those days, the theory of formal languages has been developed extensively, and has several discernible trends, which include applications to the syntactic analysis of programming languages, program schemes, models of biological systems, and relationships with natural languages.
Introduction to Formal Language Theory