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What are the characteristics of language?

Updated: 4/26/2024
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Cadburymonster

Lvl 1
8y ago

Best Answer

Ok, well the characteristics of languages....is that, you know every language has a character to its self and the people that speak that language. When you have your own language it's special to you. Also a language may sound funny although they are saying things that you say too just in a different way

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Wiki User

8y ago
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1w ago

Language has characteristics like arbitrariness (the lack of inherent connection between words and their meanings), productivity (the ability to create and understand infinite new sentences), displacement (the ability to communicate about things not present), and cultural transmission (language is learned from the environment). It also has properties such as duality of patterning (the combination of discrete units to form complex structures) and creativity (the ability to generate and understand novel utterances).

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13y ago

Charles Hockett's proposed design features of a languageinclude the following 6 qualities that have been agreed upon almost universally among linguists:

  • Arbitrariness
  • Semanticity
  • Discreteness
  • Displacement
  • Productivity
  • Duality of Patterning

Nearly every spoken language:

  • has a grammar
  • has phonemes (the smallest unit of a spoken word)
  • has morphemes (smallest language unit that has meaning)
  • has syntax (the order and rules of a language)
  • has semantics (the meaning of words or phrases in context)
  • has a spoken version
  • is social in context
  • is symbolic and arbitrary
  • is systematic and describable (as in descriptive linguistics)
  • is unique and diverse
  • is learned
  • is phonetic (pertaining to acoustic properties or pronunciation of speech sounds)
  • has phrases (structures containing more than one word but lacking subject-predicate typical of clauses
  • is a network between words and expressions in a sentence
  • is dynamic; it changes constantly. Words and meanings may even vary from one generation to the next
  • is intellectual in nature
  • is conventional and non-instinctive

These are characteristics of MANY languages, but does not relate to some African languages, and non spoken languages such as American Sign Language.

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