language

Dictionary: lan·guage   (lăng'gwĭj)

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1. 1. Communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols.
   2. Such a system including its rules for combining its components, such as words.
   3. Such a system as used by a nation, people, or other distinct community; often contrasted with dialect.
2. 1. A system of signs, symbols, gestures, or rules used in communicating: the language of algebra.
   2. Computer Science. A system of symbols and rules used for communication with or between computers.
3. Body language; kinesics.
4. The special vocabulary and usages of a scientific, professional, or other group: “his total mastery of screen language—camera placement, editing—and his handling of actors” (Jack Kroll).
5. A characteristic style of speech or writing: Shakespearean language.
6. A particular manner of expression: profane language; persuasive language.
7. The manner or means of communication between living creatures other than humans: the language of dolphins.
8. Verbal communication as a subject of study.
9. The wording of a legal document or statute as distinct from the spirit.

[Middle English, from Old French langage, from langue, tongue, language, from Latin lingua.]

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.

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

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

For more information on language, visit Britannica.com.

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.

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

For other uses, see Language (disambiguation).

This article is about the properties of language in general. For the use of language by humans, see natural language.

Cuneiform is one of the first known forms of written language, but spoken language is believed to predate writing by tens of thousands of years at least.

A language is a system for encoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation and usage of systems of symbols—each referring to linguistic concepts with semantic or logical or otherwise expressive meanings.

The most obvious manifestations are spoken languages such as English or Spoken Chinese. However, there are also written languages and other systems of visual symbols such as sign languages.

Although some other animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems, and these are sometimes casually referred to as animal language, none of these are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use to define language in the strict sense.

When discussed more technically as a general phenomenon then, "language" always implies a particular type of human thought which can be present even when communication is not the result, and this way of thinking is also sometimes treated as indistinguishable from language itself.

In Western Philosophy for example, language has long been closely associated with reason, which is also a uniquely human way of using symbols. In Ancient Greek philosophical terminology, the same word, logos, was used as a term for both language or speech and reason, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the English word "speech" so that it similarly could refer to reason, as will be discussed below.

Contents 1 Properties of language 2 Origin of language 3 The study of language 3.1 Linguistics 3.2 History 4 Human languages 5 Artificial languages 5.1 Constructed languages 5.2 International auxiliary languages 5.3 Controlled languages 6 Formal languages 6.1 Programming languages 7 Animal communication 8 Lists 9 Notes 10 References 11 Further reading 12 See also 13 External links

Properties of language

A set of commonly accepted signs (indices, icons or symbols) is only one feature of language; all languages must define (i) the structural relationships between these signs in a system of grammar, (ii) the context wherein the signs are used (pragmatics) and (iii) dependent on their context the content specifity, i.e. its meaning (semantics). Rules of grammar are one of the characteristics sometimes said to distinguish language from other forms of communication. They allow a finite set of signs to be manipulated to create a potentially infinite number of grammatical utterances. However, this definition is self-circular. The structural relationships make sense only within language, the structure of language exists only in language. It is impossible to have a logically correct definition of a noun or verb. And logic itself concerns itself with propositions which are closely linked with content specificity i.e. semantics.

Another property of language is that its symbols are arbitrary. Any concept or grammatical rule can be mapped onto a symbol. In other words, most languages make use of sound, but the combinations of sounds used do not have any necessary and inherent meaning – they are merely an agreed-upon convention to represent a certain thing by users of that language. For instance, the sound combination nada carries the meaning of "nothing" in the Spanish language and also the meaning "thread" in the Hindi language. There is nothing about the word nada itself that forces Hindi speakers to convey the idea of "thread", or the idea of "nothing" for Spanish speakers. Other sets of sounds (for example, the English words nothing and thread) could equally be used to represent the same concepts, but all Spanish and Hindi speakers have acquired or learned to correlate their own meanings for this particular sound pattern. Indeed, for speakers of Slovenian and other South Slavic languages, the sound combination carries the meaning of "hope", while in Indonesian, it means "tone".

This arbitrariness even applies to words with an onomatopoetic dimension (i.e. words that to some extent simulate the sound of the token referred to). For example, several animal names (e.g. cuckoo, whip-poor-will, katydid) are derived from sounds the respective animal makes, but these forms did not have to be chosen for these meanings. Non-onomatopoetic words can stand just as easily for the same meaning. For instance, the katydid is called a "bush cricket" in British English, a term that bears no relation to the sound the animal makes. In time, onomatopoetic words can also change in form, losing their mimetic status. Onomatopoetic words may have an inherent relation to their referent, but this meaning is not inherent, thus they do not violate arbitrariness.

Origin of language

Main article: Origin of language

Even before the theory of evolution made discussion of more animal-like human ancestors commonplace, philosophical and scientific speculation casting doubt on the use of early language has been frequent throughout history. In modern Western Philosophy, speculation by authors such as Thomas Hobbes and later Jean-Jacques Rousseau led to the Académie française declaring the subject off-limits.^{[citation needed]}

The origin of language is of great interest to philosophers because language is such an essential characteristic of human life. In classical Greek philosophy such inquiry was approached by considering the nature of things, in this case human nature. Aristotle, for example, treated humans as creatures with reason and language by their intrinsic nature, related to their natural propensities to be "political," and dwell in city-state communities (Greek: poleis)^[1].

Hobbes, followed by John Locke and others, claimed that language is an extension of the "speech" which humans have within themselves, which in a sense takes the classical view that reason is one of the most primary characteristics of human nature. Others have argued the opposite - that reason developed out of the need for more complex communication. Rousseau, despite writing^[2] before the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution, claimed that there had once been humans who had no language or reason and who developed language first--rather than reason--the development of which things he explicitly described as a mixed blessing, with many negative characteristics.

Since the arrival of Darwin, the subject has been approached more often by scientists than philosophers. For example, neurologist Terrence Deacon in his Symbolic Species has argued that reason and language "coevolved." Merlin Donald sees language as a later development building upon what he refers to as mimetic culture,^[3] emphasizing that this coevolution depended upon the interactions of many individuals. He writes that:

A shared communicative culture, with sharing of mental representations to some degree, must have come first, before language, creating a social environment in which language would have been useful and adaptive.^[4]

The specific causes of the natural selection that led to language are however still the subject of much speculation, but a common theme which goes right back to Aristotle is that many theories propose that the gains to be had from language and/or reason were probably mainly in the area of increasingly sophisticated social structures.

In more recent times, a theory of mirror neurons has emerged in relation to language. Ramachandran ^[5] has gone so far as to claim that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments". Mirror neurons are located in the human inferior frontal cortex and superior parietal lobe, and are unique in that they fire when completing an action and also when witnessing an actor performing the same action. Various studies have proposed a theory of mirror neurons related to language development ^{[6] [7] [8]}.

The study of language

Linguistics

Main article: Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, encompassing a number of sub-fields. At the core of theoretical linguistics are the study of language structure (grammar) and the study of meaning (semantics). The first of these encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into phrases and sentences) and phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.

Theoretical linguistics is mostly concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. The fields that are generally considered as the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics. Applied linguistics attempts to put linguistic theories into practice through areas like translation, stylistics, literary criticism and theory, discourse analysis, speech therapy, speech pathology and foreign language teaching.

History

Main article: History of linguistics

The historical record of linguistics begins in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BCE grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, known as the Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी) and with Tolkāppiyar, the 2nd century BCE grammarian of the Tamil work Tolkāppiyam(தொல்காப்பியம்).^[9] Pāṇini’s grammar is highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root; Western linguists only recognized the phoneme some two millennia later.^{[citation needed]} Tolkāppiyar's work is perhaps the first to describe articulatory phonetics for a language. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowels, and elements like nouns, verbs, vowels, and consonants, which he put into classes, were also breakthroughs at the time. In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh (سیبویه) made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 CE in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book, he distinguished phonetics from phonology.

Later in the West, the success of science, mathematics, and other formal systems in the 20th century led many to attempt a formalization of the study of language as a "semantic code". This resulted in the academic discipline of linguistics, the founding of which is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure.^{[citation needed]} In the 20th century, substantial contributions to the understanding of language came from Ferdinand de Saussure, Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson,^[10] which are characterized as being highly systematic.^[10]

Human languages

Main article: Natural language

Some of the areas of the brain involved in language processing: Broca's area(Blue), Wernicke's area(Green), Supramarginal gyrus(Yellow), Angular gyrus(Orange), Primary Auditory Cortex(Pink)

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, 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 usually impossible.^[11] 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.

Artificial languages

Constructed languages

Main article: Constructed language

Some individuals and groups have constructed their own artificial languages, for practical, experimental, personal, or ideological reasons. International auxiliary languages are generally constructed languages that strive to be easier to learn than natural languages; other constructed languages strive to be more logical ("loglangs") than natural languages; a prominent example of this is Lojban.

Some writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, have created fantasy languages, for literary, artistic or personal reasons. The fantasy language of the Klingon race has in recent years been developed by fans of the Star Trek series, including a vocabulary and grammar.

Constructed languages are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by natural languages.

This part of ISO 639 also includes identifiers that denote constructed (or artificial) languages. In order to qualify for inclusion the language must have a literature and it must be designed for the purpose of human communication. Specifically excluded are reconstructed languages and computer programming languages.

International auxiliary languages

Main article: International auxiliary language

Some languages, most constructed, are meant specifically for communication between people of different nationalities or language groups as an easy-to-learn second language. Several of these languages have been constructed by individuals or groups. Natural, pre-existing languages may also be used in this way - their developers merely catalogued and standardized their vocabulary and identified their grammatical rules. These languages are called naturalistic. One such language, Latino Sine Flexione, is a simplified form of Latin. Two others, Occidental and Novial, were drawn from several Western languages.

To date, the most successful auxiliary language is Esperanto, invented by Polish ophthalmologist Zamenhof. It has a relatively large community roughly estimated at about 2 million speakers worldwide, with a large body of literature, songs, and is the only known constructed language to have native speakers, such as the Hungarian-born American businessman George Soros. Other auxiliary languages with a relatively large number of speakers and literature are Interlingua and Ido.

Controlled languages

Main article: Controlled natural language

Controlled natural languages are subsets of natural languages whose grammars and dictionaries have been restricted in order to reduce or eliminate both ambiguity and complexity. The purpose behind the development and implementation of a controlled natural language typically is to aid non-native speakers of a natural language in understanding it, or to ease computer processing of a natural language. An example of a widely used controlled natural language is Simplified English, which was originally developed for aerospace industry maintenance manuals.

Formal languages

Main article: Formal language

Mathematics 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.

Programming languages

Main article: Programming language

A programming language is an extreme case of a formal language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer, to perform specific tasks.^[12] Programming languages are defined using syntactic and semantic rules, to determine structure and meaning respectively.

Programming languages are used to facilitate communication about the task of organizing and manipulating information, and to express algorithms precisely. Some authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms; sometimes the term "computer language" is used for artificial languages that are more limited.

Animal communication

Main article: Animal language

The term "animal languages" is often used for non-human systems of communication. Linguists do not consider these to be "language", but describe them as animal communication, because the interaction between animals in such communication is fundamentally different in its underlying principles from human language. Nevertheless, some scholars have tried to disprove this mainstream premise through experiments on training chimpanzees to talk. Karl von Frisch received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his proof of the language and dialects of the bees.^[13] Current research indicates that signalling codes are the most fundamental precondition for every coordination within and between cells, tissues, organs and organisms of all organismic kingdoms. All of these signalling codes follow combinatorial (syntactic), context-sensitive (pragmatic) and content-specific (semantic) rules. In contrast to linguists, biolinguistics and biosemiotics consider these codes to be real languages.^[14]

In several publicized instances, non-human animals have been taught to understand certain features of human language. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have been taught hand signs based on American Sign Language. The African Grey Parrot, which possesses the ability to mimic human speech with a high degree of accuracy, is suspected of having sufficient intelligence to comprehend some of the speech it mimics. Most species of parrot, despite expert mimicry, are believed to have no linguistic comprehension at all.

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

Lists

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Learning resources from Wikiversity

• Category:Lists of languages
• Ethnologue - list of languages, locations, population and genetic affiliation
• List of basic linguistics topics
• List of language academies
• List of languages
• List of official languages

Notes

1. ^ Politics 1253a 1.2
2. ^ Second Discourse
3. ^ Evolutionary Origins of the Social Brain. In O. Vilarroya and F. F. i Argimon (eds.), Social Brain Matters: Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition. Rodopi, 2007, 18: 215-222.
4. ^ Imitation and Mimesis. In S. Hurley and N. Chater (eds.), Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science, Volume 2: Imitation, Human Development, and Culture. MIT Press, 2005, 14:282-300.
5. ^ http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html
6. ^ http://psycserver.psyc.queensu.ca/donaldm/reprints/evolutionaryOrigins18.pdf
7. ^ http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=uJTc5wlAYAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA229&dq=Arbib+From+grasping+to+complex+imitation:+mirror+systems+on+the+path+to+language&ots=-b6u5FyQbC&sig=yupQRSaXgn43CcBKuJImHqXspwg
8. ^ http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~junwang4/langev/localcopy/pdf/christiansen03trends.pdf
9. ^ Zvelebil, Kamil. 1973. The smile of Murugan on Tamil literature of South India. Leiden: Brill. - Zvelebil dates the Ur-Tolkappiyam to the 1st-2nd BCE
10. ^ ^{a b} Holquist 1981, xvii-xviii
11. ^ "Language". The New Encyclopædia Britannica: MACROPÆDIA. 22. Encyclopædia Britannica,Inc.. 2005. pp. 548 2b. 
12. ^ "What is programming language?". Webopedia. http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/programming_language.html. Retrieved on 2007-11-23. 
13. ^ Frisch, K.v. (1953). 'Sprache' oder 'Kommunikation' der Bienen? Psychologische Rundschau 4. Amsterdam.
14. ^ Witzany, G. (2007). The Logos of the Bios 2. Bio-Communication. Helsinki, Umweb

References

• 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.
• Holquist, Michael. (1981) Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. xv-xxxiv
• Kandel ER, Schwartz JH, Jessell TM. Principles of Neural Science, fourth edition, 1173 pages. McGraw-Hill, New York (2000). 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.
• Zvelebil, Kamil (1973). The mile 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. 

See also

Study of language Linguistics Historical linguistics Synchronic analysis Philology Philosophy of language Universal grammar Types of language and language relationships Dialect Language family Extinct language Word game Non-spoken forms of communication Written language Sign language Whistled language Drum languages Non-verbal communication Origins of language Origin of language Evolutionary linguistics Biolinguistics FOXP2 - gene implicated in cases of specific language impairment (SLI)

Religion and mythology Adamic language Education and public policy Language education Language school Language policy Language reform Linguistic protectionism Official language Language and culture Linguistic relativity - (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) Communication with other species Great ape language Semiotics Symbolic communication Symbolic linguistic representation Metacommunicative competence Other Translation Second language Phonetic transcription ISO 639 - 2- and 3-letter ID codes for languages

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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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