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A set of symbols and rules used to convey information. See machine language, programming language, graphics language, page description language, fourth-generation language, standards and user interface.

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Language may be the most appropriate trait by which to classify humans within the order of nature, even more so than rationality (Homo sapiens) or technology (Homo faber) — and not only because language is less honorific than rationality and more intrinsic than technology. In a sense Homo loquens trumps all other terms, since the very act of definition is itself a move within language. Speculation that all three species-specific capacities — reasoning, tool use, and language — were bound together in an evolutionary nexus is supported by recent paleoanthropological evidence that the beginnings of language were linked to the sociability of hominids and the growth of co-operative tool production. Localized brain mechanisms correlate with the lateralization of the neo-cortex and are common to both speech and manual skills.

Evolution of language

There is now more scholarly interest in the origin of language than at any time since the eighteenth century, although among linguists, anatomists, and anthropologists no consensus has emerged as to its timing and nature. When over the course of the nineteenth century no evidence of any ‘primitive’ languages was found, discussion of origins was for a long time officially proscribed. One current view has it that an explosion of cave art and symbolic behaviour some 40 000 years ago coincided with the abrupt extinction of Neanderthals, and was causally related to the emergence of language. But this is probably based on an illusion of synchronicity. The adaptation of the vocal tract for speech production — in particular the lowering of the larynx — seems to have been complete at least 125 000, and perhaps 200 000 years ago. This would seem to support a much earlier origin for language; some form of proto-language may well have been present in the earliest hominids.

The question — which exercised Charles Darwin — as to whether there is evolutionary continuity between animal signalling systems and human language, has prompted, over the last thirty years, a number of widely publicized experiments involving attempts to teach human language to apes. Some of the early efforts foundered on the fact that other primates do not have the anatomy necessary for human speech production; later attempts using sign language seemed to fare better. The enduring ambiguity of the results lies not only in the slippage around definitions of language, but also in the tendency of primatologists, as linguistic creatures, to impute sense to their subjects, and to project the human world onto the realm of nature. The assumption of cross-species continuities and homologies with respect to language, implicit in the methods of ethologists and behaviourists working on very old associationist principles, was flatly rejected in a notorious 1959 polemic by the linguist Noam Chomsky, who argued that human language was based on entirely different principles from animal communication. Some detected, in this unqualified assertion of the absolute uniqueness of the human language faculty, an echo of the Victorian geologist Charles Lyell's remark, when he told Darwin that, despite being a supporter, he was unable ‘to go the whole orang’.

The power of the language faculty, however it came to be part of the species endowment, is acknowledged across all human cultures. The first words of a child are universally recognized as a momentous threshold; for an adult to have speaking privileges, or to decide who may talk or not, is a sure sign of social power. Those without language, infants (from the Latin infans: ‘non-speaking’) and domestic animals, as well as those denied language — the shunned, the gagged, the silenced — are in real ways disabled members of a community. Speech impairment typically results in discrimination; despite the partial success of the disability rights movement and the recognition that signing is no less a linguistic system than spoken language, ‘dumb’ is still widely unchallenged as a term of abuse.

It has often been claimed that in gesture lies the origin of language, but, if so, speech very early achieved primacy, perhaps because a vocal-auditory system had crucial advantages: no mutual visibility was necessary between speaker and audience, the mouth was otherwise unoccupied except when eating, and the hands were freed for other employment. The language faculty co-opted brain and body structures (mouth, ear) that had been developed for other functions (breathing, eating, balance). Spoken language makes use of sound carried on out-breathed air from the lungs, which is modulated by articulators (tongue, lips, etc.) to produce the vocal repertoire of a natural language. No single language uses anything like the full range of sounds of which humans are capable, and certain classes of sound — for example, clicks and implosives, where the airstream is reversed and moves inwards — are rare in the world's languages.

Grammar and the body

The discovery and analysis of the fundamental unit of spoken language, the phoneme (which had been intuited in antiquity by the Levantine inventors of the alphabet, and which corresponds roughly with the letter) was facilitated by formalist experiments in the disintegration of sound and meaning in certain centers of European modernism following World War I, in particular Moscow, Prague, Paris, and Geneva. Notwithstanding the interest of avant-garde poets in the sounding body, the legacy of Cartesian rationalism and the privileging of mind cast a long shadow far into the twentieth century. Indeed, the dominant traditions of inquiry into language continue to discount the body by way of an implied hierarchy in which speech is only the (more or less) imperfect performance of an abstract system, whose formal and logical structure it is the task of linguistic science to reveal. Such abstraction, idealizing away to a genderless speaker-hearer and relegating gesture, posture, and expression to the limbo of ‘paralanguage’, has led to far-reaching insights into grammatical theory. But the body lay hidden in the closet. That is to say, after all the abstraction, there remains a residue — or rather a core — of human language that cannot be reduced to context-free formulation. The phenomenon that linguists call ‘deixis’ (‘pointing’ in classical Greek) sets limits to the decontextualization of language; even so austere a logician as Bertrand Russell acknowledged that the body could not be eliminated in the analysis of language, and that ‘deictic’ categories such as personal pronouns (I, you), demonstrative (this, that), and adverbs (here, now) depend for their interpretation upon the relative, and reflexive, positioning of bodies in space and time.

The body and meaning

Anthropocentrism is deeply embedded in the fabric of language, which reflects the shape and properties of the body, which in turn grounds the linguistic encoding of social relations — from empathy and solidarity to politeness and deference. The physical experience of gravity and the asymmetries of the human anatomy establish the meaning, for example, of ‘up’ and ‘down’, ‘front’ and ‘back’, ‘right’ and ‘left’. (More than one science fiction plot has turned on the problem of conveying the concepts of ‘right’ and ‘left’ to an alien being whose body does not share with humans the necessary asymmetry.) Nor is it arbitrary that ‘up’ and ‘front’ tend to be positively valued relative to ‘down’ and ‘back’, since upright, confronting encounters are taken as the norm for humans in speech situations. Modernity's array of communications media — radio, film, television, video, the internet — are greatly extending what the invention of writing first set in train, namely, the uncoupling of language in complex ways from its primordial face-to-face matrix. It is hardly clear what will be the outcome of the new relations of virtuality, but human meanings will necessarily continue to rest on embodied understandings, however much they are mediated. Indeed, such is the power of gesture that a wink or a sarcastic intonation inevitably reframes and inverts the ‘literal’ meaning. The classic studies by the sociologist Erving Goffman of the management of daily encounters show how centrally the body is involved in the making of meaning; they reveal the significance and complexity of sight and touch in the business of opening, organizing, and closing conversations — synchronizing turns at speaking by gesture and gaze, assessing one's reception through visual back-channel cues, and helping to ‘perform’ talk.

More recently, the linguist George Lakoff, collaborating at the intersection of cognitive linguistics, computer science, and neurology, likewise contends, from a quite different perspective, that meaning is grounded in the body. He makes a radical break with the rationalist tradition of his teacher, Noam Chomsky, by asserting the centrality of metaphor and by claiming that it is only through the body that concepts can be formed, since the human conceptual system grows out of the sensorimotor system.

Discourse and the body

Conversely, understandings of the body and its conduct are largely mediated through language and metaphor. Metaphors, moreover, are never innocent; they have cognitive, affective, and political import. The human body is truly the trope of tropes; body parts (‘head’, ‘foot’, ‘face’) are everywhere mapped onto nature's body — head of the river, foot of the mountain, face of the deep. Bodily functions are a universal reservoir for terms of profanity and scatological abuse. When the body is in distress, the power of language to organize its experience is attested in those healing traditions where speech is focal; ‘a disease named is a disease half cured’. In all cultures linguistic taboos circumscribe the body; where the naming of certain body parts in front of doctors may involve a loss of ‘face’, figurines have been used, allowing the patient to point to the affected part without showing or naming it.

The deportment of bodies in social space, and the gearing of language into the infinite variety of improvised and ritual encounters, show that humans converse as ‘communities of co-movers’. But no community is homogeneous, and speaking takes place in a discursive forcefield constituted through a pragmatic negotiation that registers asymmetries of power in the bodily movements and speech of those co-present. ‘Voice quality’, for example, is an unavoidable accompaniment to the act of speaking, and conveys culturally coded, and often finely textured, meanings about the speaker's identity in multiple intersecting dimensions — age, class, sex, gender, region, subculture, ethnicity, nationality, and so forth. The existence of etiquette and elocution manuals, and the importance of diplomatic protocols, suggest that such ‘signs’ are partly, but only partly, under the control of the speaker. Reading (and writing upon) the body has taken on fresh meaning in the late twentieth century, with the penetration of advertisements onto personal clothing, and the related vogue for inscriptions on the body surface itself.

The language animal

The practice of inscribing the body is at least 40 000 years old — no surprise, perhaps, for the primate that speaks. Language seems to have been the evolutionary Rubicon for Homo sapiens, though the Berkeley paleolinguist Johanna Nichols rejects the notion of linguistic monogenesis implicit in the image of a single crossing over into language. She believes it happened many times, and that hundreds of distinct languages were already being spoken in the Rift Valley of East Africa — as many as are spoken today in Papua New Guinea — before humans had fanned out on the way to planetary hegemony, armed with the mythomanic power of speech. The scandal of representation once prompted the critic Kenneth Burke to summarize the species in his own wry definition: ‘the symbol-using animal, inventor of the negative, separated by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, and rotten with perfection’.

— Iain Boal

Bibliography

• Foley, W. (1997). Anthropological linguistics. Blackwell, Oxford.
• Lakoff, G., Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh. Basic Books, New York.
• Lieberman, P. (1984). The biology and evolution of language. Harvard, Cambridge MA

See also evolution; human; gesture; speech; voice.

noun

1. A system of terms used by a people sharing a history and culture: dialect, speech, tongue, vernacular. Linguistics langue. See words.
2. Specialized expressions indigenous to a particular field, subject, trade, or subculture: argot, cant², dialect, idiom, jargon, lexicon, lingo, patois, terminology, vernacular, vocabulary. See words.

The essence of politics is argument between principles and theories of society. Thus language is to politics as oxygen is to air, its vital and distinct ingredient. Perception of the realities of politics is shaped by the structure and emotional power of language. Words do not merely describe politics, they are part of the politics they describe. It can be argued that almost every choice of word, in most of the discourse we engage in, is a political act. The academic study of politics has almost entirely failed to develop the kind of agreed, ‘neutral’ vocabulary which exists in the physical sciences and, to a degree, in economics. The study of politics, like politics itself, is thus in large part a contest over words, a language game. Even Mao Zedong, who said that ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’, saw the ‘little red book’ of his thoughts as more important than bullets in achieving his communist objective.

Much feminist theory claims that existing language embodies forms of patriarchy or male power: we talk of our species as mankind and refer to God as a male. These forms of language arguably inculcate or maintain the acceptance of a dominant role for the male in social institutions. It is extremely difficult, though, to demonstrate the effects of such usages or to refute the allegation that they are trivialities. It is even more difficult to show them to be forms or tools of ‘power’ in any workable sense that allows us to attribute control over society. Orwell offers us, in 1984, a vision of a society in which the state does control people through its deliberate manipulation of language, by introducing a turgidly jargonistic form of English, ‘Newspeak’, which blurs almost all significant moral and philosophical distinctions. This largely drew on Orwell's knowledge of totalitarian dictatorship, but it can also be taken as a satire on almost any political propaganda and speechifying, since politicians invariably try to manipulate people through their use of language and engage in ‘doublespeak’.

Most states have more than one linguistic group within their borders. This situation persists because, although there is a tendency for ‘big’ languages (of which English is the biggest on a global scale), to eradicate smaller ones, this tendency is offset by both migration and deliberate policy. To some degree there is always a ‘politics of language’ in a multilingual society, because questions of educational resources, the language of bureaucratic and legal procedures, and the control of the mass media are bound to arise. In Malta, a long struggle between English and Italian as potential ‘official’ languages ended with the elevation of the Maltese dialect into a full-blown language. In Israel, Hebrew has been successfully revived and is an important dimension of national unity. Black children in South Africa successfully revolted in the 1970s against education in Afrikaans, itself an African dialect of Dutch elevated into a written language as a ‘Boer’ nationalist project. The Canadian federal government has struggled to establish bilingualism (English and French) throughout Canada. In Belgium the struggles between French- and Flemish-speaking populations have led to an extreme form of federalism, and the establishment of strictly defined boundaries within one state, that determine the appropriate official language. A similar system has been operated in Switzerland, where a German-speaking majority coexists with French-, Italian-, and Romansch-speaking minorities, though the issue has never been so bitterly contested as in Belgium.

The political dimension of language raises complex and, ultimately, mysterious questions. Questions of culture, identity, and manipulative power are inseparable from linguistic structures. Language sometimes seems definitive of identity, at other times almost irrelevant. One must beware of simplification or generalization about language and politics, yet always remain aware that language is not separate from political reality, but part of that reality.

— Lincoln Allison

The history of American English can be divided into the colonial (1607-1776), the national (1776-1898), and the international (1898-present) periods. During nearly four hundred years of use in North America, the English language changed in small ways in pronunciation and grammar but extensively in vocabulary and in the attitude of its speakers.

English settlements along the Atlantic Coast during the seventeenth century provided the foundation for English as a permanent language in the New World. But the English of the American colonies was bound to become distinct from that of the motherland. When people do not talk with one another, they begin to talk differently. The Atlantic Ocean served as an effective barrier to oral communication between the colonists and those who stayed in England, ensuring that their speech would evolve in different directions.

On the one hand, changes in the English of England were slow to reach America, and some never made the crossing, so American English became in certain respects old-fashioned and eventually archaic, from the standpoint of the British. But on the other hand, the colonists were forced to talk about new physical features, flora, and fauna. For example, an Americanism early noted (and objected to) by British travelers was the use of bluff for the steep, high bank of a river. British rivers usually do not have such banks but are nearly level with the surrounding land, so when the colonists encountered the new fluvial topography, they had no name for it. Consequently, they pressed into service a word that means "steep" in naval jargon.

Americans also came cheek-to-jowl with Amerindians of several linguistic stocks, as well as French and Dutch speakers. They had to talk in new ways to communicate with their new neighbors. Moreover, the settlers had come from various districts and social groups of England, so there was a homogenizing effect: those in a given colony came to talk more like one another and less like any particular community in England. All these influences combined to make American English a distinct variety of the language.

Despite such changes, the norm of usage in the colonies remained that of the motherland until the American Revolution. Thereafter American English was no longer a colonial variety of the English of London but had entered its national period. Political independence was soon followed by cultural independence, of which a notable Founding Father was Noah Webster. As a schoolmaster, Webster recognized that the new nation needed a sense of linguistic identity. Accordingly he set out to provide dictionaries and textbooks for recording and teaching American English with American models. The need Webster sought to fill was twofold: to help Americans realize they should no longer look to England for a standard of usage and to foster a reasonable degree of uniformity in American English. To those ends, Webster's dictionary, reader, grammar, and blue-backed speller were major forces for institutionalizing what he called Federal English.

The language preserved its unity through the challenge of the Civil War (1861-1865); it assimilated immigrant languages and dialects, such as Spanish, German, and Irish, and replaced aboriginal Amerindian languages. The extension of American English and the preservation of its relative uniformity as the country expanded westward were aided by the railroads spanning the continent, the invention of the telegraph and telephone, and the explosion of journalism and popular education, all of which broadened communication.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Manifest Destiny of American English had been achieved, along with that of the territorial expansion of the nation. Because the domestic frontier had been exhausted, the nation had to look abroad if it was to continue to expand, territorially and linguistically. The Spanish-American War in 1898, though lasting barely four months, was a turning point in the history of the language. Before that war, American English played no more than a walk-on role on the world stage; foreign influences usually had to come to it. Afterward, international activity sharply increased, and the prominence of American English around the globe became proportionately greater.

In the course of war or commerce American English spread to Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, China, Panama and other countries in Latin America, the Virgin Islands, and nations throughout the world. To the consternation of some, American popular culture followed. Through music, films, recordings, television, computers, aeronautics, multinational companies, and the military, the second half of the twentieth century became the Age of America, for good or for ill. The linguistic consequences have been profound--both on the use of English internationally and on the language itself.

As American English has been institutionalized and used internationally, the nature of its relationship to British English has changed. From the national period until the present day, there have been two opposing attitudes: Americanizing and Briticizing. The Americanizing attitude recognizes American usage as independent of British, not inferior to it; at its most extreme it seeks to exaggerate the differences. The Briticizing attitude emphasizes the connections between American and British; at its most extreme it regards American as subordinate to British. Exemplifications of the Americanizing versus Briticizing are Noah Webster's dictionary versus Joseph Worcester's; Mark Twain versus Henry James; H. L. Mencken's The American Language versus George Philip Krapp's The English Language in America, and Robert Frost versus T. S. Eliot.

If Americans have been divided on their view of the relationship between American and British English, few Britishers have had any doubt, and their confidence is widely shared by continental Europeans. To them English means British English, and American is a dialect, if not an aberration. The international prestige of British English has been maintained by both the geographical proximity of continental Europe to the British Isles and the residual influence of the British Empire around the world. It is also supported by England's reputation as a source of high culture. America, in contrast, is seen as a source of technology, commercialism, and pop culture.

Today, however, there are two main branches of English in the world, both including several national varieties: British English in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere; and American English in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. Although British English is more widely distributed, American English is spoken by nearly three times as many persons. That numerical preponderance has as an inevitable consequence that American English is now the principal representative of the English language and the major determinant of its future.

American English, although remarkably uniform considering that over 230 million people speak it, is by no means monolithic. It varies by location, social level, ethnic group, and other factors. There are four primary regional dialects in the United States: Southern or Coastal Southern, South Midland or Southern Mountain, North Midland or Lower Northern, and Northern or Upper Northern. The boundaries between them, which are traceable to the earliest settlements, are clearest in the eastern part of the country, where settlement came first. They become less distinct and more overlapping in the West.

The dialect regions are distinguished mainly by differences of pronunciation and vocabulary and only to a small extent by grammar. Pronunciation differences include the sounding or nonsounding of r in words like mother and mirth; the quality of the "aw" vowel in words like lawn and caught; the use of an "s" or "z" sound in greasy; and many other such features. Vocabulary differences include choices among faucet, spigot (spicket), and tap; downtown and uptown for a main business district; soda, pop, Coke, tonic, and soft drink for a carbonated beverage; and many other variations, including more restricted ones, such as schlepp for "mosey" or "lug" in the New York area or arroyo in the Southwest.

Ethnic dialects have phonological and grammatical characteristics, but they are most easily recognized by vocabulary. Many ethnic communities have contributed to the general American word stock: Louisiana creole gumbo and lagniappe, New York Dutch cookie and boss, Yiddish schnook and chutzpa, Mexican-Spanish lasso and ranch, Irish shebang and blarney, African-American jazz and goober, and many others.

Black English, one of the most prominent ethnic dialects, is the subject of great controversy concerning its history and present use. There are two opinions about its origin. One holds that slaves came from many tribes in Africa; they had no common language and therefore learned English from whites. In this view, Black English is a historical evolution of forms of nonstandard English that can be traced to the British Isles. The other holds that sailors and natives along the African coast used an English-based pidgin (or reduced language used for communication among persons speaking no other common tongue). Slaves brought to America knew this pidgin or soon learned it, and on the plantations it developed into a creole (a full language of mixed origins). In this view, Black English is a remnant of an independent language that has been gradually assimilating to general English, so that it now appears to be only a dialect. There is evidence for both opinions; it is impossible to say which is nearer to the historical reality.

The other controversy over Black English concerns its use and social status today. Some view it as a "home dialect" whose speakers need also to learn standard English to live effectively in the dominant society. Others regard that position as linguistic imperialism. They believe that the dominant society should respect minority cultures, including dialects, instead of expecting minorities to do the adapting. In practical terms, those who hold the second view would use Black English as a medium of instruction in the schools and would provide pedagogical materials written in it. Among the strong opponents of the second view are older-generation, middle-class African-Americans, who believe this would limit opportunities for social and economic advancement among blacks.

Hispanic English, another major ethnic dialect in the United States, exists in several subvarieties, notably Puerto Rican English in New York City, Cuban English in south Florida, and Chicano English in the Southwest. The main issue about Hispanic English (and other immigrant languages with sizable numbers of speakers) is that of bilingualism. It is parallel to the issue of the use and status of Black English. Specifically, the question is, should those who do not speak English be provided with schools, public services, legal proceedings, and so on in their native languages or should they be expected to learn English quickly and be linguistically disadvantaged until they do? In a larger sense, the question is whether non-English ethnic cultures should be preserved and fostered in Anglophone America or assimilated as quickly and completely as possible.

Both Black English and bilingualism are highly emotional issues with political overtones. The English First movement, which arose in opposition to other languages' achieving official status within American life, seeks the constitutional establishment of English as the only official language. Although seen by its opponents as xenophobic, the movement is a contemporary version of Noah Webster's Federal English--that is, an effort to provide a distinctive standard language for all citizens of the United States.

The very existence of a standard language has been called into question, but several things are clear. First, there is a standard written form of the language, extensively described in dictionaries and grammar books and used for most printed matter and public discourse. Second, this written standard is by no means monolithic but has a good deal of variation in it. Third, most arguments about what is or is not "good" English are concerned not with differentiating standard from nonstandard use but with variations within the standard. Fourth, standard English is chiefly a matter of grammar, spelling, and word choice; being primarily a matter of written English, it has little to do with pronunciation. Fifth, there is no standard pronunciation in the United States comparable to the Received Standard (or bbc English) of the United Kingdom.

Some particular pronunciations have low prestige ("ax" for ask or "liberry" for library), but pronunciation has not been institutionalized--there is no standard American accent. Recent presidents have spoken the easily identifiable regional accents of Massachusetts, Texas, and Georgia. What is called "General American" is a myth. Persons who deal with those from other regions may modify their pronunciation to eliminate phonetic features that are most readily identified as local dialect, but the result is not a unified, consistent accent. Rather, it is a pronunciation that has been "smoothed out" by avoiding easily recognized regionalisms.

Today English is an international language, widely used as a second and foreign language as well as a primary one. Although British English is more prestigious, American English is increasingly used. But in fact, the differences between them, especially in their written forms, are not great. In the foreseeable future, the unity of English--internationally and nationally in the United States--seems assured.

Bibliography:

Dennis E. Baron, Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (1982); Charles A. Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath, eds., Language in the USA (1981); H. L. Mencken, The American Language, ed. Raven I. McDavid, Jr. (1963).

Author:

John Algeo

n.

The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

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Quotes:

"Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense." - Benjamin Franklin

"We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language." - Mal Pancoast

"The eyes have one language everywhere." - George Herbert

"I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization." - Frantz Fanon

"The language of truth is unadorned and always simple." - Marcellinus Ammianus

See more famous quotes about Language

A defined set of characters that is used to form symbols and words and the rules and connections for combining these into meaningful communications.

• Software, Languages, and Programming - language: arbitrarily designed and coded syntax and vocabulary that allows user to communicate with computer
• Linguistics and Writing Systems - language: system using combinations of vocal sounds, written symbols, or gestures with accepted meanings to express thoughts and feelings common to one people of specific region or culture; communication using such a system

This article is about the properties of language in general. For other uses, see Language (disambiguation).

Arnold Lakhovsky, The Conversation (circa 1935)

Cuneiform is the first known form of written language, but spoken language predates writing by at least tens of thousands of years.

Language diversity. Red: the eight countries that together hold more than 50% of the world's languages. Blue: areas of great diversity.^[1]

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication. The scientific study of language in any of its senses is called linguistics.

The approximately 3000–6000 languages that are spoken by humans today are the most salient examples, but natural languages can also be based on visual rather than auditory stimuli, for example in sign languages and written language. Codes and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as those used for computer programming can also be called languages. A language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. The English word derives ultimately from Latin lingua, "language, tongue", via Old French.^[2] When used as a general concept, "language" refers to the cognitive faculty that enables humans to learn and use systems of complex communication.

Language as a communication system is thought to be fundamentally different from and of much higher complexity than those of other species as it is based on a complex system of rules relating symbols to their meanings, resulting in an indefinite number of possible innovative utterances from a finite number of elements. Language is thought to have originated when early hominids first started cooperating, adapting earlier systems of communication based on expressive signs to include a theory of other minds and shared intentionality. This development is thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently when they are around three years old. The use of language has become deeply entrenched in human culture and, apart from being used to communicate and share information, it also has social and cultural uses, such as signifying group identity, social stratification and for social grooming and entertainment. The word "language" can also be used to describe the set of rules that makes this possible, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules.

All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate a sign with a particular meaning. Spoken and signed languages contain a phonological system that governs how sounds or visual symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are used to form phrases and utterances. Written languages use visual symbols to represent the sounds of the spoken languages, but they still require syntactic rules that govern the production of meaning from sequences of words. Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had for the later stages to have occurred. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family. The languages that are most spoken in the world today belong to the Indo-European family, which includes languages such as English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi; the Sino-Tibetan languages, which include Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and many others; Semitic languages, which include Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew; and the Bantu languages, which include Swahili, Zulu, Shona and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout Africa. Forty per cent of the world's languages are endangered and likely to become extinct.^[3]

Contents 1 Definitions 1.1 Mental faculty, organ or instinct 1.2 Formal symbolic system 1.3 Tool for communication 1.4 What makes human language unique 2 The study of language 3 Language and its parts 3.1 Semantics 3.2 Sounds and symbols 3.3 Grammar 3.3.1 Grammatical categories 3.3.2 Word classes 3.3.3 Morphology 3.3.4 Syntax 4 Language acquisition 5 Language and culture 6 Origin 7 Natural languages 8 Artificial languages 9 Animal communication 10 See also 11 Notes 12 References 13 Further reading 14 External links

Definitions

The word "language" has at least two basic meanings: language as a general concept, and "a language" (a specific linguistic system, e.g. "French"). Ferdinand de Saussure first explicitly formulated the distinction, using the French word langage for language as a concept, and langue as the specific instance of language.^[4]

When speaking of language as a general concept, several different definitions can be used that stress different aspects of the phenomenon.^[5] These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory.

Mental faculty, organ or instinct

One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and produce and understand utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans and the biological basis of the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain.^[6][7] This view often understands language to be largely innate, for example as in Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, Jerry Fodor’s extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied by studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.

Formal symbolic system

Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses the fact that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, and his structuralism remains foundational for most approaches to language today. Some proponents of this view of language have advocated a formal approach to studying the structures of language, privileging the formulation of underlying abstract rules that can be understood to generate observable linguistic structures. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, who defines language as a particular set of sentences that can be generated from a particular set of rules.^[8] The structuralist viewpoint is commonly used in formal logic, semiotics, and in formal and structural theories of grammar, the most commonly used theoretical frameworks in linguistic description. In the philosophy of language these views are associated with philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, early Wittgenstein, Alfred Tarski and Gottlob Frege.

Tool for communication

Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans to cooperate. This definition stresses the social functions of language and the fact that humans use it to express themselves and to manipulate objects in their environment. Functional theories of grammar explain grammatical structures by their communicative functions, and understands the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which grammar was "tailored" to serve communicative needs of its users. This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive and interactional frameworks, as well as in socio-linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as a dynamic phenomenon, as structures that are always in the process of changing as they are employed by their speakers. This view leads to the study of linguistic typology being of importance, as it can be shown that processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology. In the philosophy of language these views are often associated with Wittgenstein’s later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as G. E. Moore, Paul Grice, John Searle and J. L. Austin.

What makes human language unique

Human language is unique in comparison to other forms of communication, such as those used by animals, because it allows humans to produce an infinite set of utterances from a finite set of elements,^[9] and because the symbols and grammatical rules of any particular language are largely arbitrary, so that the system can only be acquired through social interaction. The known systems of communication used by animals, on the other hand, can only express a finite number of utterances that are mostly genetically transmitted.^[10]

Human languages also differ from animal communication systems in that they employ grammatical and semantic categories such as noun and verb, or present and past, to express exceedingly complex meanings.^[11] Human language is also unique in that its complex structure serves a much wider range of functions than any other known communication system.

Language is also unique in that it has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in "the chimpanzee's lips") or a clause to contain a clause (as in "I think that it's raining").

The study of language

Main articles: Linguistics and History of linguistics

The study of language, linguistics, has been developing into a science since the first grammatical descriptions of particular languages in India more than 2000 years ago. Today linguistics is a science that concerns itself with all aspects relating to language, examining it from all of the theoretical viewpoints described above.

The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to linguistics.: For example, Descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single languages so that people can learn the languages; theoretical linguistics develops theories of how best to conceptualize language as a faculty, based on data from the various extant human languages; sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in turn the study of the social functions of language and grammatical description; neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain, and allows the experimental testing of theories about the language faculty; computational linguistics builds on thoretical and descriptive linguistics to construct computational models of language often aimed at processing natural language, or at testing linguistic hypotheses; and historical linguistics relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the comparative method.

Ancient Tamil inscription at Thanjavur

The formal study of language began in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics.^[12] The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Early in the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them. By introducing a distinction between diachronic to synchronic analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline of linguistics. Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still foundational in many contemporary linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm, and the Langue- parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system (language), from language as a concrete manifestation of this system (parole).^[13]

In the 1960s Noam Chomsky formulated the generative theory of language. According to this theory the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that are universal for all humans and which underlies the grammars of all human languages. This set of rules is called Universal Grammar, and for Chomsky describing it is the primary objective of the discipline of linguistics. For this reason the grammars of individual languages are only of importance to linguistics, in so far as they allow us to discern the universal underlying rules from which the observable linguistic variability is generated.

In opposition to the formal theories of the generative school functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, it is reasonable to assume that its structures are best analyzed and understood with reference to the functions they carry out. Functional theories of grammar differs from formal theories of grammar, in that the latter seeks to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations, whereas the former defines the functions performed by language and then relates these functions to the linguistic elements that carry them out.^[14] The framework of Cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular language, which underlie its forms.^[15] Cognitive linguistics is primarily concerned with how the mind creates meaning through language

Language and its parts

When described as a system of symbolic communication, language is traditionally seen as consisting of three parts: signs, meanings and a code connecting signs with their meanings. The study of how signs and meanings are combined, used and interpreted is called semiotics. Signs can be composed of sounds, gestures, letters or symbols, depending on whether the language is spoken, signed or written, and they can be combined into complex signs such as words and phrases. When used in communication a sign is encoded and transmitted by a sender through a channel to a receiver who decodes it (a signal).

Some of the properties that define human language as opposed to other communication systems are: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, meaning that there is no predictable connection between a linguistic sign and its meaning; the duality of the linguistic system, meaning that linguistic structures are built by combining elements into larger structures that can be seen as layered, e.g. how sounds build words and words build phrases; the discreteness of the elements of language, meaning that the elements out of which linguistic signs are constructed are discrete units, e.g. sounds and words, that can be distinguished from each other and rearranged in different patterns; and the productivity of the linguistic system, meaning that the finite number of linguistic elements can be combined into a theoretically infinite number of combinations.^[16]

The rules under which signs can be combined to form words and phrases are called syntax or grammar. The meaning that is connected to individual signs, words and phrases is called semantics. The division of language into separate but connected systems of sign and meaning goes back to the first linguistic studies of de Saussure and is now used in almost all branches of linguistics.

Semantics

Languages express meaning by relating a sign to a meaning. Thus languages must have a vocabulary of signs related to specific meaning—the English sign "dog" denotes, for example, a member of the genus Canis. In a language, the array of arbitrary signs connected to specific meanings is called the lexicon, and a single sign connected to a meaning is called a lexeme. Not all meanings in a language are represented by single words-often semantic concepts are embedded in the morphology or syntax of the language in the form of grammatical categories. All languages contain the semantic structure of predication— a structure that predicates a property, state or action. Traditionally semantics has been understood as the study of how speakers and interpreters assign truth values to statements, so that meaning is understood as the process by which a predicate can be said to be true or false about an entity, e.g. "[x [is y]]" or "[x [does y]]." Recently, this model of semantics has been complemented with more dynamic models of meaning that incorporate shared knowledge about the context in which a sign is interpreted into the production of meaning. Such models of meaning are explored in the field of pragmatics.

Sounds and symbols

Main article: Phonology

The ways in which spoken languages use sounds to construct meaning is studied in phonology. The study of how humans produce and perceive vocal sounds is called phonetics. In spoken language meaning is constructed when sounds become part of a system in which some sounds can contribute to expressing meaning and others do not. In any given language only a limited number of the many distinct sounds that can be created by the human vocal apparatus contribute to constructing meaning.

Sounds as part of a linguistic system are called phonemes. All spoken languages have phonemes of at least two different categories: vowels and consonants that can be combined into forming syllables. Apart from segments such as consonants and vowels, some languages also use sound in other ways to convey meaning. Many languages, for example, use stress, pitch, duration and tone to distinguish meaning. Because these phenomena operate outside of the level of single segments they are called suprasegmental.

Writing systems represent the sounds of human speech using visual symbols. The Latin alphabet (and those on which it is based or that have been derived from it) is based on the representation of single sounds, so that words are constructed from letters that generally denote a single consonant or vowel in the structure of the word. In syllabic scripts, such as the Inuktitut syllabary, each sign represents a whole syllable. In logographic scripts each sign represents an entire word. Because all languages have a very large number of words, no purely logographic scripts are known to exist. In order to represent the sounds of the world’s languages in writing, linguists have developed an International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to represent all of the discrete sounds that are known to contribute to meaning in human languages.

Grammar

Main article: grammar

Grammar is the study of how meaningful elements (morphemes) within a language can be combined into utterances. Morphemes can either be free or bound. If they are free to be moved around within an utterance, they are usually called words, and if they are bound to other words or morphemes, they are called affixes. The way in which meaningful elements can be combined within a language is governed by rules. The rules obtaining for the internal structure of words are called morphology. The rules of the internal structure of the phrases and sentences are called syntax.^[17]

Grammatical categories

Grammar can be described as a system of categories, and a set of rules that determine how categories combine to form different aspects of meaning.

Languages differ widely in whether categories are encoded through the use of categories or lexical units. However, several categories are so common as to be nearly universal. Such universal categories include the encoding of the grammatical relations of participants and predicates by grammatically distinguishing between their relations to a predicate, the encoding of temporal and spatial relations on predicates, and a system of grammatical person governing reference to and distinction between speakers and addressees and those about whom they are speaking.

Word classes

Languages organize their parts of speech into classes according to their functions and positions relative to other parts. All languages, for instance, make a basic distinction between a group of words that prototypically denote things and concepts and a group of words that prototypically denote actions and events. The first group, which includes English words such as "dog" and "song," are usually called nouns. The second, which includes "run" and "sing," are called verbs. Other common categories are adjectives, words that describe properties or qualities of nouns such as "red" or "big".

The word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically verbs are used to construct predicates, while nouns are used as arguments of predicates. In a sentence such as "Sally runs," the predicate is "runs," because it is the word that predicates a specific state about its argument "Sally." Some verbs such as "curse" can take two arguments, e.g. "Sally cursed John." A predicate that can only take a single argument is called intransitive, while a predicate that can take two arguments is called transitive.

Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions that serve to join two sentences and articles that introduces a noun.

Morphology

Many languages use the morphological processes of inflection to modify or elaborate on the meaning of words. In some languages words are built of several meaningful units called morphemes, the English word "unexpected" can be analyzed as being composed of the three morphemes "un-", "expect" and "-ed". Morphemes can be classified according to whether they are roots to which other bound morphemes called affixes are added, and bound morphemes can be classified according to their position in relation to the root: prefixes precede the root, suffixes follow the root and infixes are inserted in the middle of a root. Affixes serve to modify or elaborate the meaning of the root. Some languages change the meaning of words by changing the phonological structure of a word, for example the English word "run" which in the past tense is "ran". Furthermore morphology distinguishes between processes of inflection which modifies or elaborates on a word, and derivation which instead creates a new word from an existing one - for example in English "sing" which can become "singer" by adding the derivational morpheme -er which derives an agentive noun from a verb. Languages differ widely in how much they rely on morphology - some languages, traditionally called polysynthetic languages, make extensive use of morphology, so that they express the equivalent of an entire English sentence in a single word. For example the Greenlandic word "oqaatiginerluppaa" "(he/she) speaks badly about him/her" which consists of the root oqaa and six suffixes.^[18]

Syntax

Main article: syntax

Languages that use inflection to convey meaning often do not have strict rules for word order in a sentence. For example in Latin both Dominus servos vituperabat and Servos vituperabat dominus mean "the master was cursing the slaves", because servos "slaves" is in the accusative case showing that they are the grammatical object of the sentence and dominus "master" is in the nominative case showing that he is the subject. Other languages, however, use little or no inflectional processes and instead use the sequence of words in relation to each other to describe meaning. For example in English the two sentences "the slaves were cursing the master" and "the master was cursing the slaves" mean different things because the role of grammatical subject is encoded by the noun being in front of the verb and the role of object is encoded by the noun appearing after the verb.

Syntax then, has to do with the order of words in sentences, and specifically how complex sentences are structured by grouping words together in units, called phrases, that can occupy different places in a larger syntactic structure. Below is a graphic representation of the syntactic analysis of the sentence "the cat sat on the mat". The sentence is analysed as being constituted by a noun phrase, a verb and a prepositional phrase; the prepositional phrase is further divided into a preposition and a noun phrase; and the noun phrases consist of an article and a noun.

Language acquisition

Further information: Language acquisition and Second-language acquisition

All healthy, normally-developing human beings learn to use language. Children acquire the language or languages used around them – whichever languages they receive sufficient exposure to during childhood. The development is essentially the same for children acquiring signed or spoken languages.^[19] This learning process is referred to as first-language acquisition, since unlike many other kinds of learning it requires no direct teaching or specialized study. In The Descent of Man, naturalist Charles Darwin called this process, "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art."^[7]

First language acquisition proceeds in a fairly regular sequence, though there is a wide degree of variation in the timing of particular stages among normally-developing infants. From birth, newborns respond more readily to human speech than to other sounds. Around one month of age, babies appear to be able to distinguish between different speech sounds. Around six months of age, a child will begin babbling, producing the speech sounds or handshapes of the languages used around them. Words appear around the age of 12 to 18 months; the average vocabulary of an eighteen-month old child is around 50 words. A child's first utterances are holophrases (literally "whole-sentences"), utterances that use just one word to communicate some idea. Several months after a child begins producing words, she or he will produce two-word utterances, and within a few more months begin to produce telegraphic speech, short sentences that are less grammatically complex than adult speech, but that do show regular syntactic structure. From roughly the age of three to five years, a child's ability to speak or sign is refined to the point that it resembles adult language.^[20]

Language and culture

See also: Culture

"The Tower of Babel" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Oil on board, 1563.
The Tower of Babel symbolises the division of mankind by a multitude of tongues provided through divine intervention.

Languages, understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speak them. Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group and difference from others. Even among speakers of one language several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups within a larger culture. Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities.

A community's way of using language is a part of the community's culture, just as other shared practices are; it is a way of displaying group identity. Ways of speaking function not only to facilitate communication, but also to identify the social position of the speaker. Linguists use the term varieties, a term that encompasses geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures, to refer to the different ways of speaking a language. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood within a particular culture.^[21]

Languages do not differ only in pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar, but also through having different "cultures of speaking". Some cultures for example have elaborate systems of "social deixis", systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means.^[22] In English, social deixis is shown mostly though distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, but also in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy", "Doctor" or "Your Honor", but in other languages such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. For instance, in several languages of east Asia, such as Thai, Burmese and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest.^[22]

Origin

Skull of Homo Neanderthalensis discovered in La Chapelle Aux Saints, France. It is unknown whether Neanderthal humans had language.

Main article: Origin of language

Theories about the origin of language can be divided according to their basic assumptions. Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one can not imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These theories can be called continuity based theories. The opposite viewpoint is that language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared fairly suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. These theories can be defined as discontinuity based. Similarly some theories see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, while others see it as a system that is largely cultural, that is learned through social interaction.^[23] Currently the only prominent proponent of a discontinuity theory of human language origins is Noam Chomsky. Chomsky proposes that 'some random mutation took place, maybe after some strange cosmic ray shower, and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain'. While cautioning against taking this story too literally, Chomsky insists that 'it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language'.^[24] Continuity based theories are currently held by a majority of scholars, but they vary in how they envision this development. Those who see language as being mostly innate, for example Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition, whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as Michael Tomasello see it as having developed from animal communication, either primate gestural or vocal communication. Other continuity based models see language as having developed from music.^[25]

Because the emergence of language is located in the early prehistory of man, the relevant developments have left no direct historical traces and no comparable processes can be observed today. Theories that stress continuity often look at animals to see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be seen as analogous to what pre-human language must have been like. Alternatively early human fossils can be inspected to look for traces of physical adaptation to language use or for traces of pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour.

It is mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general, but scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of Homo some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis, while others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago) and the development of language proper with Homo sapiens sapiens less than 100,000 years ago.

Linguistic analysis, used by Johanna Nichols, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, to estimate the time required to achieve the current spread and diversity in modern languages today, indicates that vocal language arose at least 100,000 years ago.^[26]

Natural languages

Main article: Natural language

Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science of studying them falls under the purview of linguistics. A common progression for natural languages is that they are considered to be first spoken and then written, and then an understanding and explanation of their grammar is attempted.

Languages live, die, move from place to place, and change with time. Any language that ceases to change or develop is categorized as a dead language. Conversely, any language that is in a continuous state of change is known as a living language or modern language.

Making a principled distinction between one language and another is sometimes nearly impossible.^[27] For instance, there are a few dialects of German similar to some dialects of Dutch. The transition between languages within the same language family is sometimes gradual (see dialect continuum).

Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not possible to make a well-defined distinction between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the interactions between languages and populations. (See Dialect or August Schleicher for a longer discussion.)

The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.

A sign language (also signed language) is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns (manual communication, body language) to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts. Hundreds of sign languages are in use around the world and are at the cores of local Deaf cultures.

Artificial languages

The first book ever published about Esperanto, the world's most widely spoken constructed language.

An artificial language is a language the phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary of which have been consciously devised or modified by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally. There are many possible reasons to construct a language: to ease human communication (see international auxiliary language and code); to add depth to a work of fiction or an associated constructed world; for linguistic experimentation; for artistic creation; and for language games.

The expression "planned language" is sometimes used to mean international auxiliary languages and other languages designed for actual use in human communication. Some prefer it to the term "artificial" which may have pejorative connotations in some languages. Outside the Esperanto community, the term language planning means the prescriptions given to a natural language to standardize it; in this regard, even "natural languages" may be artificial in some respects. Prescriptive grammars, which date to ancient times for classical languages such as Latin, Sanskrit, and Chinese are rule-based codifications of natural languages, such codifications being a middle ground between naive natural selection and development of language and its explicit construction.

The ASCII Table, a scheme for encoding character strings.

Mathematics, Logics and computer science use artificial entities called formal languages (including programming languages and markup languages, and some that are more theoretical in nature). These often take the form of character strings, produced by a combination of formal grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.

A programming language is a formal language endowed with semantics that can be utilized to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer, to perform specific tasks. Programming languages are defined using syntactic and semantic rules, to determine structure and meaning respectively.

Programming languages are employed to facilitate communication about the task of organizing and manipulating information, and to express algorithms precisely. Some authors^[who?] restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms; sometimes the term "computer language" is applied to artificial languages that are more limited.^{[citation needed]}

Animal communication

Main article: Animal language

Figure-Eight-Shaped Waggle Dance of the Honeybee (Apis mellifera) indicating a food source to the right of the direction of the sun outside the hive. The abdomen of the dancer appears blurred because of the rapid motion from side to side

The term "animal languages" is often used for non-human systems of communication. Linguists and semioticians do not consider these to be true "language", but describe them as animal communication on the basis on non-symbolic sign systems,^[28] because the interaction between animals in such communication is fundamentally different in its underlying principles from human language. According to this approach, since animals aren't born with the ability to reason, the term "culture", when applied to animal communities, is understood to refer to something qualitatively different than in human communities. Language, communication and culture are more complex amongst humans. A dog may successfully communicate an aggressive emotional state with a growl, which may or may not cause another dog to keep away or back off. Similarly, when a human screams in fear, it may or may not alert other humans of impending danger. Both of these examples communicate, but both are not what would generally be called language.

In several publicized instances, non-human animals have been taught to understand certain features of human language. Karl von Frisch received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his proof of the sign communication and its variants of the bees.^[29] Chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have been taught hand signs based on American Sign Language. The African Grey Parrot, Alex, which possessed the ability to mimic human speech with a high degree of accuracy, is suspected of having had sufficient intelligence to comprehend some of the speech it mimicked. Though animals can be taught to understand parts of human language, they are unable to develop a language.

While proponents of animal communication systems have debated levels of semantics, these systems have not been found to have anything approaching human language syntax.^[30]

See also

Study of language Synchronic analysis Sentence processing Types of language Oral language and sign language Extinct language Endangered language Language relationships Historical linguistics Language family Language isolate Dialectology Coded language Spoken language and written language Whistled language Drum (communication) Drum languages Word game Origins of language Evolutionary linguistics Biolinguistics Proto-Human language FOXP2 - gene implicated in cases of specific language impairment (SLI) Bow-wow theory

Religion and mythology Adamic language Myth Logos Verbum Education and public policy Language education Language school Language policy Language reform Linguistic purism (protectionism) Official language Standard language Multilingualism Reading comprehension Readability Communication with other species Great ape language Semiotics Nonverbal communication Visual language Symbolic linguistic representation Metacommunicative competence Musivisual Language

Language portal Book: Language Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print. Lists Category:Lists of languages Ethnologue - list of languages, locations, population and genetic affiliation Outline of linguistics List of language regulators Lists of languages List of official languages Other Translation Second language Phonetic transcription Dyslexia ISO 639 - 2- and 3-letter ID codes for languages

Notes

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ "language". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1992. 
3. ^ the world's endangered tongues retrieved 9 February 2012
4. ^ Lyons, John. 1981. Language and Linguistics. p. 2
5. ^ Lyons, John. 1981. Language and Linguistics. pp. 1–8
6. ^ Marc D. Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch (2003). "What are the uniquely human components of the language faculty?". In M.H. Christiansen and S. Kirby. Language Evolution: The States of the Art. Oxford University Press. http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/hauser03whatAre.html. 
7. ^ ^{a b} Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Perennial. 
8. ^ Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic Structures. the Hague: Mouton. 
9. ^ Hauser,Marc D.; Noam Chomsky & W. Tecumseh Fitch (2002). "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?". Science 22 298 (5598): 1569–1579. 
10. ^ Tomasello, Michael (2008). Origin of Human Communication. MIT Press. 
11. ^ Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-31754-1
12. ^ Bloomfield 1914, p. 310
13. ^ Clarke, David S. (1990). Sources of semiotic: readings with commentary from antiquity to the present. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 143–144. 
14. ^ Nichols, Johanna (1984). "Functional Theories of Grammar". Annual Review of Anthropology 13. "[Functional grammar] analyzes grammatical structure, as do formal and structural grammar; but it also analyzes the entire communicative situation: the purpose of the speech event, its participants, its discourse context. Functionalists maintain that the communicative situation motivates, constrains, explains, or otherwise determines grammatical structure, and that a structural or formal approaches not merely limited to an artificially restricted data base, but is inadequate ven as a structurala ccount. Functional grammar, then, differs from formala nd structural grammar in that it purports not to model but to explain; and the explanation is grounded in the communicative situation." 
15. ^ Croft, William and D. Alan Cruse (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 1. 
16. ^ Lyons, John (1981). Language and linguistics. Cambridge University Press. pp. 17–24. 
17. ^ Lyons, John (1981). Language and linguistics. Cambridge University Press. p. 103. 
18. ^ Rischel, Jørgen. Grønlandsk sprog.[2] Den Store Danske Encyklopædi Vol. 8, Gyldendal
19. ^ Bonvillian, John D.; Michael D. Orlansky and Leslie Lazin Novack (December 1983). "Developmental milestones: Sign language acquisition and motor development". Child Development 54 (6): 1435–1445. 
20. ^ O'Grady, William; Cho, Sook Whan (2001). "First language acquisition". Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (fourth ed.). Boston: Bedford St. Martin's. 
21. ^ Clancy, Patricia. (1986) "The acquisition of communicative style in Japanese." In B. Schieffelin and E. Ochs (eds) Language Socialization across Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
22. ^ ^{a b} Foley 1997 p??
23. ^ Ulbaek, Ib (1998). "The Origin of Language and Cognition". In J. R. Hurford & C. Knight. Approaches to the evolution of language. Cambridge University Press. pp. 30–43. 
24. ^ Chomsky, N. (2000). The Architecture of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 4.
25. ^ The Economist, "The evolution of language: Babel or babble?", 16 April 2011, pp. 85-86.
26. ^ Bower, Bruce (11 June 1994). "Talking back in time; prehistoric origins of language attract new data and debate - language evolution". Science News on Bnet (Technology Industry). CBS Interactive News Service. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n24_v145/ai_15517386/?tag=content;col1. Retrieved 29 September 2010. 
27. ^ "Language". The New Encyclopædia Britannica: MACROPÆDIA. 22. Encyclopædia Britannica,Inc.. 2005. pp. 548 2b. 
28. ^ Cobley, P. 2010. Routledge Companion to Semiotics. London.
29. ^ Frisch, K. v. 1953. 'Sprache' oder 'Kommunikation' der Bienen? Psychologische Rundschau 4.
30. ^ Sebeok, T. A. 1996. Signs, bridges, origins. In: Trabant, Jürgen (ed.), Origins of Language. Budapest: Collegium Budapest, 89–115.

References

• Bloomfield, Leonard (1914). An introduction to the study of language. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 
• Baepler, Paul (2003). "White slaves, African masters". The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 588 (1): 90–111. doi:10.1177/0002716203588001007. 
• Chakrabarti, Byomkes (1994). A comparative study of Santali and Bengali. Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Co. ISBN 81-7074-128-9. 
• Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• Crystal, David (2001). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• Gode, Alexander (1951). Interlingua-English Dictionary. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company. 
• Hobbes, Thomas (2008) [1651]. Leviathan. Forgotten Books. http://www.forgottenbooks.org/info/9781605069777. 
• Holquist, Michael (1981). "Introduction". In Bachtin, Michail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exbakdia.html#ex1. 
• Kandel, ER; Schwartz, JH; Jessell, TM (2000). Principles of Neural Science (fourth ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-8385-7701-6. 
• Katzner, K (1999). The Languages of the World. New York: Routledge. 
• McArthur, T (1996). The Concise Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
• Nöth, Winfried (1995). Handbook of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University press. 
• Saussure, Ferdinand de; Harris, Roy, Translator (1983) [1913]. Bally, Charles; Sechehaye, Albert. eds. Course in General Linguistics. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. ISBN 0-8126-9023-0. 
• Zvelebil, Kamil (1973). The smile of Murugan on Tamil literature of South India. Leiden: Brill. 

Further reading

• Deacon, Terrence William (1998). The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-31754-4. 
• Polinsky, Maria; Comrie, Bernard; Matthews, Stephen (2003). The atlas of languages: the origin and development of languages throughout the world. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 0-8160-5123-2. 
• Luca Corchia, La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia, Genova, Edizioni ECIG, 2010, ISBN 978-88-7544-195-1.

External links

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Common misspelling(s) of language

• laguage

Dansk (Danish)
n. - sprog

idioms:

• bad language    at bande, bruge bandeord
• language acquisition    sprogtilegnelse
• language laboratory    sproglaboratorium
• speak the same language    tale samme sprog, forstå hinanden

Nederlands (Dutch)
taal, taalgebruik, taaltje, (literaire) stijl, spraak, woordenschat elkaar goed begrijpen

Français (French)
n. - langage, langue, (gén, Comput) langage

idioms:

• bad language    gros mots
• language acquisition    apprentissage de la langue
• language laboratory    laboratoire de langues
• speak the same language    (fig) parler la même langue

Deutsch (German)
n. - Sprache, Ausdrucksweise, Sprachfähigkeit

idioms:

• bad language    Schimpfwörter
• language acquisition    Spracherwerb
• language laboratory    Sprachlabor
• speak the same language    die gleiche Sprache sprechen

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - γλώσσα, λαλιά, διάλεκτος, λεκτικό, φρασεολογία

idioms:

• bad language    αισχρολογίες, βρομόλογα
• language acquisition    πρόσκτηση γλώσσας
• language laboratory    γλωσσικό εργαστήρι
• speak the same language    μιλάμε την ίδια γλώσσα, μπορούμε να συνεννοηθούμε

Italiano (Italian)
lingua, linguaggio

idioms:

• bad language    linguaggio sboccato
• language acquisition    studio di una lingua
• language laboratory    laboratorio linguistico
• speak the same language    parlare la stessa lingua

Português (Portuguese)
n. - língua (f), idioma (m), linguagem (f)

idioms:

• bad language    palavrão
• language laboratory    laboratório de línguas
• speak the same language    falar a mesma língua

Русский (Russian)
язык, речь, слог

idioms:

• bad language    сквернословие
• language acquisition    овладение языком
• language laboratory    кабинет технических средств обучения языку, методика обучения языку с помощью технических средств
• speak the same language    понимать друг друга

Español (Spanish)
n. - lengua, idioma, lenguaje, habla

idioms:

• bad language    lenguaje indecente, palabrotas
• language acquisition    aprendizaje de una lengua
• language laboratory    laboratorio de idiomas
• speak the same language    hablar el mismo idioma

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - språk, tungomål, sätt att uttrycka sig

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
语言, 措辞, 文字

idioms:

• bad language    骂人的话
• language acquisition    语言习得
• language laboratory    语言实验室
• speak the same language    说同样的语言

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 語言, 措辭, 文字

idioms:

• bad language    罵人的話
• language acquisition    語言習得
• language laboratory    語言實驗室
• speak the same language    說同樣的語言

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 국어 , 언어 , 어학 , 문체, 욕

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 言語, 国語, 術語, 専門語, 伝達手段, 伝達記号, 語法, 文体, 言葉遣い, 語学, 言語学

idioms:

• language acquisition    言語の取得
• language laboratory    語学演習室, ラボ

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) اللغه, اللسان يتكلم نفس اللغه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮שפה, לשון‬

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