Etymology of the word language

English[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

• enPR: lăngʹgwĭj, IPA^(key): /ˈlæŋɡwɪd͡ʒ/
  • (General American, Canada) IPA^(key): (see /æ/ raising) [ˈleɪŋɡwɪd͡ʒ]
• Rhymes: -æŋɡwɪdʒ
• Hyphenation: lan‧guage

Etymology 1[edit]

From Middle English langage, language, from Old French language, from Vulgar Latin *linguāticum, from Latin lingua (“tongue, speech, language”), from Old Latin dingua (“tongue”), from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s (“tongue, speech, language”). Displaced native Old English ġeþēode.

Noun[edit]

language (countable and uncountable, plural languages)

Examples
The English Wiktionary uses the English language to define words from all of the world’s languages. This person is saying «hello» in American sign language.

1. (countable) A body of words, and set of methods of combining them (called a grammar), understood by a community and used as a form of communication.

   The English language and the German language are related.

   Deaf and mute people communicate using languages like ASL.

   • 1867, Report on the Systems of Deaf-Mute Instruction pursued in Europe, quoted in 1983 in History of the College for the Deaf, 1857-1907 →ISBN, page 240:

     Hence the natural language of the mute is, in schools of this class, suppressed as soon and as far as possible, and its existence as a language, capable of being made the reliable and precise vehicle for the widest range of thought, is ignored.

   • 2000, Geary Hobson, The Last of the Ofos, →ISBN, page 113:

     Mr. Darko, generally acknowledged to be the last surviving member of the Ofo Tribe, was also the last remaining speaker of the tribe’s language.

2. (uncountable) The ability to communicate using words.

   the gift of language

   • 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 15:

     Language is the articulation of the limited to express the unlimited; it is the ultimate mystery which is the image of God, for in breaking up infinity to create finite beings, God has found a way to let the limited being yet be a reflection of His unlimited Being.

3. (uncountable) A sublanguage: the slang of a particular community or jargon of a particular specialist field.

   • 1892, Walter Besant, “Prologue: Who is Edmund Gray?”, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC:

     Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language, he expressed the important words by an initial, a medial, or a final consonant, and made scratches for all the words between; his clerks, however, understood him very well.

   • 1991, Stephen Fry, The Liar, London: Heinemann, →OCLC, page 35:

     And ‘blubbing’… Blubbing went out with ‘decent’ and ‘ripping’. Mind you, not a bad new language to start up. Nineteen-twenties schoolboy slang could be due for a revival.

   legal language;   the language of chemistry

4. (countable, uncountable, figurative) The expression of thought (the communication of meaning) in a specified way; that which communicates something, as language does.

   body language;   the language of the eyes

   • 2001, Eugene C. Kennedy; Sara C. Charles, On Becoming a Counselor, →ISBN:

     A tale about themselves [is] told by people with help from the universal languages of their eyes, their hands, and even their shirting feet.

   • 2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 231:

     Birding had become like that for me. It is a language that, once learnt, I have been unable to unlearn.

5. (countable, uncountable) A body of sounds, signs and/or signals by which animals communicate, and by which plants are sometimes also thought to communicate.
   • 1983, The Listener, volume 110, page 14:

     A more likely hypothesis was that the attacked leaves were transmitting some airborne chemical signal to sound the alarm, rather like insects sending out warnings […] But this is the first time that a plant-to-plant language has been detected.

   • 2009, Animals in Translation, page 274:

     Prairie dogs use their language to refer to real dangers in the real world, so it definitely has meaning.

6. (computing, countable) A computer language; a machine language.

   • 2015, Kent D. Lee, Foundations of Programming Languages, →ISBN, page 94:

     In fact pointers are called references in these languages to distinguish them from pointers in languages like C and C++.

7. (uncountable) Manner of expression.
   • 1782, William Cowper, Hope

     Their language simple, as their manners meek, […]

8. (uncountable) The particular words used in a speech or a passage of text.

   The language used in the law does not permit any other interpretation.

   The language he used to talk to me was obscene.

9. (uncountable) Profanity.

   • 1978, James Carroll, Mortal Friends, →ISBN, page 500:

     «Where the hell is Horace?» ¶ «There he is. He’s coming. You shouldn’t use language.»

Synonyms[edit]

• (form of communication): see Thesaurus:language
• (vocabulary of a particular field): see Thesaurus:jargon
• (computer language): computer language, programming language, machine language
• (particular words used): see Thesaurus:wording

Hypernyms[edit]

• medium

Hyponyms[edit]

• See Category:en:Languages

Derived terms[edit]

[edit]

Translations[edit]

Verb[edit]

language (third-person singular simple present languages, present participle languaging, simple past and past participle languaged)

1. (rare, now nonstandard or technical) To communicate by language; to express in language.

   • 1655, Thomas Fuller, James Nichols, editor, The Church History of Britain, […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), new edition, London: […] [James Nichols] for Thomas Tegg and Son, […], published 1837, →OCLC:

     Others were languaged in such doubtful expressions that they have a double sense.

Interjection[edit]

language

1. An admonishment said in response to vulgar language.

   You’re a pile of shit!
   Hey! Language!

See also[edit]

Etymology 2[edit]

Alteration of languet.

Noun[edit]

language (plural languages)

1. A languet, a flat plate in or below the flue pipe of an organ.

   • 1896, William Horatio Clarke, The Organist’s Retrospect, →ISBN Invalid ISBN, page 79:

     A flue-pipe is one in which the air passes through the throat, or flue, which is the narrow, longitudinal aperture between the lower lip and the tongue, or language. […] The language is adjusted by slightly elevating or depressing it, […]

References[edit]

• language at OneLook Dictionary Search
• language in Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by The Keywords Project, Colin MacCabe, Holly Yanacek, 2018.
• “language”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.

French[edit]

Noun[edit]

language m (plural languages)

1. Archaic spelling of langage.

Middle English[edit]

Noun[edit]

language (plural languages)

1. Alternative form of langage

Middle French[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

• langage, langaige, languaige

Etymology[edit]

From Old French language.

Noun[edit]

language m (plural languages)

1. language (style of communicating)

[edit]

• langue

Descendants[edit]

• French: langage (see there for further descendants)

Old French[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Vulgar Latin *linguāticum, from Classical Latin lingua (“tongue, language”).

Pronunciation[edit]

• (archaic) IPA^(key): /lenˈɡwad͡ʒə/
• (classical) IPA^(key): /lanˈɡad͡ʒə/
• (late) IPA^(key): /lanˈɡaʒə/

Noun[edit]

language f (oblique plural languages, nominative singular language, nominative plural languages)

1. language (style of communicating)

[edit]

• langue, lingue

Descendants[edit]

• Bourguignon: langaige
• Middle French: language, langage, langaige, languaige
  • French: langage (see there for further descendants)

Borrowings: (some possibly from O.Occitan lenguatge instead)

• → Middle English: langage, language, langag, langwache
  • English: language
• → Friulian: lengaç
• → Ladin: lingaz
• → Romansch: linguatg, lungatg; lungaitg; linguach

Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time.^[1] Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.

Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects.^[2] Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, writing, whistling, signing, or braille. In other words, human language is modality-independent, but written or signed language is the way to inscribe or encode the natural human speech or gestures.

Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, «language» may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral, manual and tactile languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.

The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Critical examinations of languages, such as philosophy of language, the relationships between language and thought, how words represent experience, etc., have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greek civilization. Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) have argued that language originated from emotions, while others like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) have argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought. Twentieth century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) argued that philosophy is really the study of language itself. Major figures in contemporary linguistics of these times include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.

Language is thought to have gradually diverged from earlier primate communication systems when early hominins acquired the ability to form a theory of mind and shared intentionality.^[3][4] This development is sometimes 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 and social 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 by approximately three years old. Language and culture are codependent. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language has social uses such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as use for social grooming and entertainment.

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 in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family; in contrast, a language that has been demonstrated to not have any living or non-living relationship with another language is called a language isolate. There are also many unclassified languages whose relationships have not been established, and spurious languages may have not existed at all. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100.^[5][6][7]

Definitions

The English word language derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s «tongue, speech, language» through Latin lingua, «language; tongue», and Old French language.^[8] The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers, and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as formally defined computer languages used for computer programming. Unlike conventional human languages, a formal language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. This article specifically concerns the properties of natural human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics.

As an object of linguistic study, «language» has two primary meanings: an abstract concept, and a specific linguistic system, e.g. «French». The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined the modern discipline of linguistics, first explicitly formulated the distinction using the French word language for language as a concept, langue as a specific instance of a language system, and parole for the concrete usage of speech in a particular language.^[9]

When speaking of language as a general concept, definitions can be used which stress different aspects of the phenomenon.^[10] These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they also inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory.^[11] Debates about the nature and origin of language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers such as Gorgias and Plato debated the relation between words, concepts and reality. Gorgias argued that language could represent neither the objective experience nor human experience, and that communication and truth were therefore impossible. Plato maintained that communication is possible because language represents ideas and concepts that exist independently of, and prior to, language.^[12]

During the Enlightenment and its debates about human origins, it became fashionable to speculate about the origin of language. Thinkers such as Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder argued that language had originated in the instinctive expression of emotions, and that it was originally closer to music and poetry than to the logical expression of rational thought. Rationalist philosophers such as Kant and René Descartes held the opposite view. Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers began to wonder about the role of language in shaping our experiences of the world – asking whether language simply reflects the objective structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that in turn impose structure on our experience of the objective world. This led to the question of whether philosophical problems are really firstly linguistic problems. The resurgence of the view that language plays a significant role in the creation and circulation of concepts, and that the study of philosophy is essentially the study of language, is associated with what has been called the linguistic turn and philosophers such as Wittgenstein in 20th-century philosophy. These debates about language in relation to meaning and reference, cognition and consciousness remain active today.^[13]

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 to produce and understand utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans, and it emphasizes the biological basis for the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain. Proponents of the view that the drive to language acquisition is innate in humans argue that this is supported by the fact that all cognitively normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible will acquire language without formal instruction. Languages may even develop spontaneously in environments where people live or grow up together without a common language; for example, creole languages and spontaneously developed sign languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This view, which can be traced back to the philosophers Kant and Descartes, understands language to be largely innate, for example, in Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar, or American philosopher Jerry Fodor’s extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied in studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.^[14][15]

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 that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings.^[16] This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure,^[17] and his structuralism remains foundational for many approaches to language.^[18]

Some proponents of Saussure’s view of language have advocated a formal approach which studies language structure by identifying its basic elements and then by presenting a formal account of the rules according to which the elements combine in order to form words and sentences. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, the originator of the generative theory of grammar, who has defined language as the construction of sentences that can be generated using transformational grammars.^[19] Chomsky considers these rules to be an innate feature of the human mind and to constitute the rudiments of what language is.^[20] By way of contrast, such transformational grammars are also commonly used in formal logic, in formal linguistics, and in applied computational linguistics.^[21][22] In the philosophy of language, the view of linguistic meaning as residing in the logical relations between propositions and reality was developed by philosophers such as Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, and other formal logicians.

Tool for communication

Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans to exchange verbal or symbolic utterances. 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 understand the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which grammar was «tailored» to serve the communicative needs of its users.^[23][24]

This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive, and interactive frameworks, as well as in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as dynamic phenomena, as structures that are always in the process of changing as they are employed by their speakers. This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, or the classification of languages according to structural features, as it can be shown that processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology.^[22] In the philosophy of language, the view of pragmatics as being central to language and meaning is often associated with Wittgenstein’s later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as J.L. Austin, Paul Grice, John Searle, and W.O. Quine.^[25]

Distinctive features of human language

A number of features, many of which were described by Charles Hockett and called design features^[26] set human language apart from communication used by non-human animals.

Communication systems used by other animals such as bees or apes are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited, number of possible ideas that can be expressed.^[27] In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. This is possible because human language is based on a dual code, in which a finite number of elements which are meaningless in themselves (e.g. sounds, letters or gestures) can be combined to form an infinite number of larger units of meaning (words and sentences).^[28] However, one study has demonstrated that an Australian bird, the chestnut-crowned babbler, is capable of using the same acoustic elements in different arrangements to create two functionally distinct vocalizations.^[29] Additionally, pied babblers have demonstrated the ability to generate two functionally distinct vocalisations composed of the same sound type, which can only be distinguished by the number of repeated elements.^[30]

Several species of animals have proved to be able to acquire forms of communication through social learning: for instance a bonobo named Kanzi learned to express itself using a set of symbolic lexigrams. Similarly, many species of birds and whales learn their songs by imitating other members of their species. However, while some animals may acquire large numbers of words and symbols,^{[note 1]} none have been able to learn as many different signs as are generally known by an average 4 year old human, nor have any acquired anything resembling the complex grammar of human language.^[32]

Human languages differ from animal communication systems in that they employ grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun and verb, present and past, which may be used to express exceedingly complex meanings.^[32] It is distinguished by the property of recursivity: for example, a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase (as in «[[the chimpanzee]’s lips]») or a clause can contain another clause (as in «[I see [the dog is running]]»).^[4] Human language is the only known natural communication system whose adaptability may be referred to as modality independent. This means that it can be used not only for communication through one channel or medium, but through several. For example, spoken language uses the auditive modality, whereas sign languages and writing use the visual modality, and braille writing uses the tactile modality.^[33]

Human language is unusual in being able to refer to abstract concepts and to imagined or hypothetical events as well as events that took place in the past or may happen in the future. This ability to refer to events that are not at the same time or place as the speech event is called displacement, and while some animal communication systems can use displacement (such as the communication of bees that can communicate the location of sources of nectar that are out of sight), the degree to which it is used in human language is also considered unique.^[28]

Origin

Theories about the origin of language differ in regard to their basic assumptions about what language is.^[35] Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one cannot 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 suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. These theories can be defined as discontinuity-based. Similarly, theories based on the generative view of language pioneered by Noam Chomsky see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, whereas functionalist theories see it as a system that is largely cultural, learned through social interaction.^[36]

Continuity-based theories are held by a majority of scholars, but they vary in how they envision this development. Those who see language as being mostly innate, such as psychologist Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition,^[15] whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as psychologist Michael Tomasello, see it as having developed from animal communication in primates: either gestural or vocal communication to assist in cooperation.^[37] Other continuity-based models see language as having developed from music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. A prominent proponent of this view is archaeologist Steven Mithen.^[38] Stephen Anderson states that the age of spoken languages is estimated at 60,000 to 100,000 years^[39] and that:

Researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it plausible to suggest that language was invented only once, and that all modern spoken languages are thus in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered … because of limitations on the methods available for reconstruction.^[40]

Because language emerged in the early prehistory of man, before the existence of any written records, its early development has left no historical traces, and it is believed that 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. Early human fossils can be inspected for traces of physical adaptation to language use or pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour. Among the signs in human fossils that may suggest linguistic abilities are: the size of the brain relative to body mass, the presence of a larynx capable of advanced sound production and the nature of tools and other manufactured artifacts.^[41]

It was mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general. However, a 2017 study on Ardipithecus ramidus challenges this belief.^[42] Scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of the genus Homo some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) 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 anatomically modern Homo sapiens with the Upper Paleolithic revolution less than 100,000 years ago.^[43][44]

Chomsky is one prominent proponent of a discontinuity-based theory of human language origins.^[36] He suggests that for scholars interested in the nature of language, «talk about the evolution of the language capacity is beside the point.»^[45] Chomsky proposes that perhaps «some random mutation took place […] and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain.»^[46] Though cautioning against taking this story literally, Chomsky insists that «it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language.»^[46]

Study

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, after the development of the Brahmi script. Modern linguistics is a science that concerns itself with all aspects of language, examining it from all of the theoretical viewpoints described above.^[47]

Subdisciplines

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, theoretical linguistics develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of language 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, computational linguistics builds on theoretical 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.^[48]

Early history

The formal study of language is often considered to have started in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. However, Sumerian scribes already studied the differences between Sumerian and Akkadian grammar around 1900 BC. Subsequent grammatical traditions developed in all of the ancient cultures that adopted writing.^[49]

In the 17th century AD, the French Port-Royal Grammarians developed the idea that the grammars of all languages were a reflection of the universal basics of thought, and therefore that grammar was universal. In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by British philologist and expert on ancient India William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics.^[50] 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.^[17]

By introducing a distinction between diachronic and 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 fundamental in many contemporary linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm, and the Langue-parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system (langue), from language as a concrete manifestation of this system (parole).^[51]

Modern linguistics

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 is universal for all humans and which underlies the grammars of all human languages. This set of rules is called Universal Grammar; for Chomsky, describing it is the primary objective of the discipline of linguistics. Thus, he considered that the grammars of individual languages are only of importance to linguistics insofar as they allow us to deduce the universal underlying rules from which the observable linguistic variability is generated.^[52]

In opposition to the formal theories of the generative school, functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, its structures are best analyzed and understood by reference to their functions. Formal theories of grammar seek to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations, while functional theories seek to define the functions performed by language and then relate them to the linguistic elements that carry them out.^{[22][note 2]} The framework of cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms of the concepts (which are sometimes universal, and sometimes specific to a particular language) which underlie its forms. Cognitive linguistics is primarily concerned with how the mind creates meaning through language.^[54]

Physiological and neural architecture of language and speech

Speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures. The production of spoken language depends on sophisticated capacities for controlling the lips, tongue and other components of the vocal apparatus, the ability to acoustically decode speech sounds, and the neurological apparatus required for acquiring and producing language.^[55] The study of the genetic bases for human language is at an early stage: the only gene that has definitely been implicated in language production is FOXP2, which may cause a kind of congenital language disorder if affected by mutations.^[56]

The brain

The brain is the coordinating center of all linguistic activity; it controls both the production of linguistic cognition and of meaning and the mechanics of speech production. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the neurological bases for language is quite limited, though it has advanced considerably with the use of modern imaging techniques. The discipline of linguistics dedicated to studying the neurological aspects of language is called neurolinguistics.^[57]

Early work in neurolinguistics involved the study of language in people with brain lesions, to see how lesions in specific areas affect language and speech. In this way, neuroscientists in the 19th century discovered that two areas in the brain are crucially implicated in language processing. The first area is Wernicke’s area, which is in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere. People with a lesion in this area of the brain develop receptive aphasia, a condition in which there is a major impairment of language comprehension, while speech retains a natural-sounding rhythm and a relatively normal sentence structure. The second area is Broca’s area, in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. People with a lesion to this area develop expressive aphasia, meaning that they know what they want to say, they just cannot get it out.^[58] They are typically able to understand what is being said to them, but unable to speak fluently. Other symptoms that may be present in expressive aphasia include problems with word repetition. The condition affects both spoken and written language. Those with this aphasia also exhibit ungrammatical speech and show inability to use syntactic information to determine the meaning of sentences. Both expressive and receptive aphasia also affect the use of sign language, in analogous ways to how they affect speech, with expressive aphasia causing signers to sign slowly and with incorrect grammar, whereas a signer with receptive aphasia will sign fluently, but make little sense to others and have difficulties comprehending others’ signs. This shows that the impairment is specific to the ability to use language, not to the physiology used for speech production.^[59][60]

With technological advances in the late 20th century, neurolinguists have also incorporated non-invasive techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrophysiology to study language processing in individuals without impairments.^[57]

Anatomy of speech

Spoken language relies on human physical ability to produce sound, which is a longitudinal wave propagated through the air at a frequency capable of vibrating the ear drum. This ability depends on the physiology of the human speech organs. These organs consist of the lungs, the voice box (larynx), and the upper vocal tract – the throat, the mouth, and the nose. By controlling the different parts of the speech apparatus, the airstream can be manipulated to produce different speech sounds.^[61]

The sound of speech can be analyzed into a combination of segmental and suprasegmental elements. The segmental elements are those that follow each other in sequences, which are usually represented by distinct letters in alphabetic scripts, such as the Roman script. In free flowing speech, there are no clear boundaries between one segment and the next, nor usually are there any audible pauses between them. Segments therefore are distinguished by their distinct sounds which are a result of their different articulations, and can be either vowels or consonants. Suprasegmental phenomena encompass such elements as stress, phonation type, voice timbre, and prosody or intonation, all of which may have effects across multiple segments.^[62]

Consonants and vowel segments combine to form syllables, which in turn combine to form utterances; these can be distinguished phonetically as the space between two inhalations. Acoustically, these different segments are characterized by different formant structures, that are visible in a spectrogram of the recorded sound wave. Formants are the amplitude peaks in the frequency spectrum of a specific sound.^[62][63]

Vowels are those sounds that have no audible friction caused by the narrowing or obstruction of some part of the upper vocal tract. They vary in quality according to the degree of lip aperture and the placement of the tongue within the oral cavity.^[62] Vowels are called close when the lips are relatively closed, as in the pronunciation of the vowel [i] (English «ee»), or open when the lips are relatively open, as in the vowel [a] (English «ah»). If the tongue is located towards the back of the mouth, the quality changes, creating vowels such as [u] (English «oo»). The quality also changes depending on whether the lips are rounded as opposed to unrounded, creating distinctions such as that between [i] (unrounded front vowel such as English «ee») and [y] (rounded front vowel such as German «ü»).^[64]

Consonants are those sounds that have audible friction or closure at some point within the upper vocal tract. Consonant sounds vary by place of articulation, i.e. the place in the vocal tract where the airflow is obstructed, commonly at the lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, palate, velum, uvula, or glottis. Each place of articulation produces a different set of consonant sounds, which are further distinguished by manner of articulation, or the kind of friction, whether full closure, in which case the consonant is called occlusive or stop, or different degrees of aperture creating fricatives and approximants. Consonants can also be either voiced or unvoiced, depending on whether the vocal cords are set in vibration by airflow during the production of the sound. Voicing is what separates English [s] in bus (unvoiced sibilant) from [z] in buzz (voiced sibilant).^[65]

Some speech sounds, both vowels and consonants, involve release of air flow through the nasal cavity, and these are called nasals or nasalized sounds. Other sounds are defined by the way the tongue moves within the mouth such as the l-sounds (called laterals, because the air flows along both sides of the tongue), and the r-sounds (called rhotics).^[63]

By using these speech organs, humans can produce hundreds of distinct sounds: some appear very often in the world’s languages, whereas others are much more common in certain language families, language areas, or even specific to a single language.^[66]

Modality

Human languages display considerable plasticity ^[1] in their deployment of two fundamental modes: oral (speech and mouthing) and manual (sign and gesture).^{[note 3]} For example, it is common for oral language to be accompanied by gesture, and for sign language to be accompanied by mouthing. In addition, some language communities use both modes to convey lexical or grammatical meaning, each mode complementing the other. Such bimodal use of language is especially common in genres such as story-telling (with Plains Indian Sign Language and Australian Aboriginal sign languages used alongside oral language, for example), but also occurs in mundane conversation. For instance, many Australian languages have a rich set of case suffixes that provide details about the instrument used to perform an action. Others lack such grammatical precision in the oral mode, but supplement it with gesture to convey that information in the sign mode. In Iwaidja, for example, ‘he went out for fish using a torch’ is spoken as simply «he-hunted fish torch», but the word for ‘torch’ is accompanied by a gesture indicating that it was held. In another example, the ritual language Damin had a heavily reduced oral vocabulary of only a few hundred words, each of which was very general in meaning, but which were supplemented by gesture for greater precision (e.g., the single word for fish, l*i, was accompanied by a gesture to indicate the kind of fish).^[67]

Secondary modes of language, by which a fundamental mode is conveyed in a different medium, include writing (including braille), sign (in manually coded language), whistling and drumming. Tertiary modes – such as semaphore, Morse code and spelling alphabets – convey the secondary mode of writing in a different medium. For some extinct languages that are maintained for ritual or liturgical purposes, writing may be the primary mode, with speech secondary.

Structure

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 the process of semiosis, 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.^[68]

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.^[68]

The rules by which signs can be combined to form words and phrases are called syntax or grammar. The meaning that is connected to individual signs, morphemes, words, phrases, and texts is called semantics.^[69] 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.^[70]

Semantics

Languages express meaning by relating a sign form to a meaning, or its content. Sign forms must be something that can be perceived, for example, in sounds, images, or gestures, and then related to a specific meaning by social convention. Because the basic relation of meaning for most linguistic signs is based on social convention, linguistic signs can be considered arbitrary, in the sense that the convention is established socially and historically, rather than by means of a natural relation between a specific sign form and its meaning.^[17]

Thus, languages must have a vocabulary of signs related to specific meaning. The English sign «dog» denotes, for example, a member of the species Canis familiaris. 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.^[71]

All languages contain the semantic structure of predication: a structure that predicates a property, state, or action. Traditionally, semantics has been understood to be the study of how speakers and interpreters assign truth values to statements, so that meaning is understood to be 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.^[71]

Sounds and symbols

Depending on modality, language structure can be based on systems of sounds (speech), gestures (sign languages), or graphic or tactile symbols (writing). The ways in which languages use sounds or signs to construct meaning are studied in phonology.^[72]

Sounds as part of a linguistic system are called phonemes.^[73] Phonemes are abstract units of sound, defined as the smallest units in a language that can serve to distinguish between the meaning of a pair of minimally different words, a so-called minimal pair. In English, for example, the words bat [bæt] and pat [pʰæt] form a minimal pair, in which the distinction between /b/ and /p/ differentiates the two words, which have different meanings. However, each language contrasts sounds in different ways. For example, in a language that does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants, the sounds [p] and [b] (if they both occur) could be considered a single phoneme, and consequently, the two pronunciations would have the same meaning. Similarly, the English language does not distinguish phonemically between aspirated and non-aspirated pronunciations of consonants, as many other languages like Korean and Hindi do: the unaspirated /p/ in spin [spɪn] and the aspirated /p/ in pin [pʰɪn] are considered to be merely different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme (such variants of a single phoneme are called allophones), whereas in Mandarin Chinese, the same difference in pronunciation distinguishes between the words [pʰá] ‘crouch’ and [pá] ‘eight’ (the accent above the á means that the vowel is pronounced with a high tone).^[74]

All spoken languages have phonemes of at least two different categories, vowels and consonants, that can be combined to form syllables.^[62] As well as 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.^[75] Some languages have only a few phonemes, for example, Rotokas and Pirahã language with 11 and 10 phonemes respectively, whereas languages like Taa may have as many as 141 phonemes.^[74] In sign languages, the equivalent to phonemes (formerly called cheremes) are defined by the basic elements of gestures, such as hand shape, orientation, location, and motion, which correspond to manners of articulation in spoken language.^[76][77][78]

Writing systems represent language using visual symbols, which may or may not correspond to the sounds of spoken language. The Latin alphabet (and those on which it is based or that have been derived from it) was originally based on the representation of single sounds, so that words were 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,^[79] and will generally bear no relation to the sound of that word in spoken language.

Because all languages have a very large number of words, no purely logographic scripts are known to exist. Written language represents the way spoken sounds and words follow one after another by arranging symbols according to a pattern that follows a certain direction. The direction used in a writing system is entirely arbitrary and established by convention. Some writing systems use the horizontal axis (left to right as the Latin script or right to left as the Arabic script), while others such as traditional Chinese writing use the vertical dimension (from top to bottom). A few writing systems use opposite directions for alternating lines, and others, such as the ancient Maya script, can be written in either direction and rely on graphic cues to show the reader the direction of reading.^[80]

In order to represent the sounds of the world’s languages in writing, linguists have developed the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to represent all of the discrete sounds that are known to contribute to meaning in human languages.^[81]

Grammar

Grammar is the study of how meaningful elements called 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 study of the rules for the internal structure of words are called morphology. The rules of the internal structure of phrases and sentences are called syntax.^[82]

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.^[83] Languages differ widely in whether they 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.^[84]

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 denotes things and concepts and a group of words that prototypically denotes actions and events. The first group, which includes English words such as «dog» and «song», are usually called nouns. The second, which includes «think» and «sing», are called verbs. Another common category is the adjective: words that describe properties or qualities of nouns, such as «red» or «big». Word classes can be «open» if new words can continuously be added to the class, or relatively «closed» if there is a fixed number of words in a class. In English, the class of pronouns is closed, whereas the class of adjectives is open, since an infinite number of adjectives can be constructed from verbs (e.g. «saddened») or nouns (e.g. with the -like suffix, as in «noun-like»). In other languages such as Korean, the situation is the opposite, and new pronouns can be constructed, whereas the number of adjectives is fixed.^[85]

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.^[86]

Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions like «and» that serve to join two sentences, articles that introduce a noun, interjections such as «wow!», or ideophones like «splash» that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have positionals that describe the spatial position of an event or entity. Many languages have classifiers that identify countable nouns as belonging to a particular type or having a particular shape. For instance, in Japanese, the general noun classifier for humans is nin (人), and it is used for counting humans, whatever they are called:^[87]

san-nin no gakusei (三人の学生) lit. «3 human-classifier of student» — three students

For trees, it would be:

san-bon no ki (三本の木) lit. «3 classifier-for-long-objects of tree» — three trees

Morphology

In linguistics, the study of the internal structure of complex words and the processes by which words are formed is called morphology. In most languages, it is possible to construct complex words that are built of several morphemes. For instance, the English word «unexpected» can be analyzed as being composed of the three morphemes «un-«, «expect» and «-ed».^[88]

Morphemes can be classified according to whether they are independent morphemes, so-called roots, or whether they can only co-occur attached to other morphemes. These bound morphemes or affixes 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». This process is called ablaut. Furthermore, morphology distinguishes between the process of inflection, which modifies or elaborates on a word, and the process of derivation, which creates a new word from an existing one. In English, the verb «sing» has the inflectional forms «singing» and «sung», which are both verbs, and the derivational form «singer», which is a noun derived from the verb with the agentive suffix «-er».^[89]

Languages differ widely in how much they rely on morphological processes of word formation. In some languages, for example, Chinese, there are no morphological processes, and all grammatical information is encoded syntactically by forming strings of single words. This type of morpho-syntax is often called isolating, or analytic, because there is almost a full correspondence between a single word and a single aspect of meaning. Most languages have words consisting of several morphemes, but they vary in the degree to which morphemes are discrete units. In many languages, notably in most Indo-European languages, single morphemes may have several distinct meanings that cannot be analyzed into smaller segments. For example, in Latin, the word bonus, or «good», consists of the root bon-, meaning «good», and the suffix —us, which indicates masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. These languages are called fusional languages, because several meanings may be fused into a single morpheme. The opposite of fusional languages are agglutinative languages which construct words by stringing morphemes together in chains, but with each morpheme as a discrete semantic unit. An example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or «from your houses», consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. The languages that rely on morphology to the greatest extent are traditionally called polysynthetic languages. They may express the equivalent of an entire English sentence in a single word. For example, in Persian the single word nafahmidamesh means I didn’t understand it consisting of morphemes na-fahm-id-am-esh with the meanings, «negation.understand.past.I.it». As another example with more complexity, in the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksatengqiggtuq, which means «He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer», the word consists of the morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, «reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative», and except for the morpheme tuntu («reindeer») none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation.^[90]

Many languages use morphology to cross-reference words within a sentence. This is sometimes called agreement. For example, in many Indo-European languages, adjectives must cross-reference the noun they modify in terms of number, case, and gender, so that the Latin adjective bonus, or «good», is inflected to agree with a noun that is masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. In many polysynthetic languages, verbs cross-reference their subjects and objects. In these types of languages, a single verb may include information that would require an entire sentence in English. For example, in the Basque phrase ikusi nauzu, or «you saw me», the past tense auxiliary verb n-au-zu (similar to English «do») agrees with both the subject (you) expressed by the n— prefix, and with the object (me) expressed by the – zu suffix. The sentence could be directly transliterated as «see you-did-me»^[91]

Syntax

Another way in which languages convey meaning is through the order of words within a sentence. The grammatical rules for how to produce new sentences from words that are already known is called syntax. The syntactical rules of a language determine why a sentence in English such as «I love you» is meaningful, but «*love you I» is not.^{[note 4]} Syntactical rules determine how word order and sentence structure is constrained, and how those constraints contribute to meaning.^[93] 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 the 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. Conversely, in Latin, both Dominus servos vituperabat and Servos vituperabat dominus mean «the master was reprimanding the slaves», because servos, or «slaves», is in the accusative case, showing that they are the grammatical object of the sentence, and dominus, or «master», is in the nominative case, showing that he is the subject.^[94]

Latin uses morphology to express the distinction between subject and object, whereas English uses word order. Another example of how syntactic rules contribute to meaning is the rule of inverse word order in questions, which exists in many languages. This rule explains why when in English, the phrase «John is talking to Lucy» is turned into a question, it becomes «Who is John talking to?», and not «John is talking to who?». The latter example may be used as a way of placing special emphasis on «who», thereby slightly altering the meaning of the question. Syntax also includes the rules for how complex sentences are structured by grouping words together in units, called phrases, that can occupy different places in a larger syntactic structure. Sentences can be described as consisting of phrases connected in a tree structure, connecting the phrases to each other at different levels.^[95] To the right is a graphic representation of the syntactic analysis of the English sentence «the cat sat on the mat». The sentence is analyzed 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.^[96]

The reason sentences can be seen as being composed of phrases is because each phrase would be moved around as a single element if syntactic operations were carried out. For example, «the cat» is one phrase, and «on the mat» is another, because they would be treated as single units if a decision was made to emphasize the location by moving forward the prepositional phrase: «[And] on the mat, the cat sat».^[96] There are many different formalist and functionalist frameworks that propose theories for describing syntactic structures, based on different assumptions about what language is and how it should be described. Each of them would analyze a sentence such as this in a different manner.^[22]

Typology and universals

Languages can be classified in relation to their grammatical types. Languages that belong to different families nonetheless often have features in common, and these shared features tend to correlate.^[97] For example, languages can be classified on the basis of their basic word order, the relative order of the verb, and its constituents in a normal indicative sentence. In English, the basic order is SVO (subject–verb–object): «The snake(S) bit(V) the man(O)», whereas for example, the corresponding sentence in the Australian language Gamilaraay would be d̪uyugu n̪ama d̪ayn yiːy (snake man bit), SOV.^[98] Word order type is relevant as a typological parameter, because basic word order type corresponds with other syntactic parameters, such as the relative order of nouns and adjectives, or of the use of prepositions or postpositions. Such correlations are called implicational universals.^[99] For example, most (but not all) languages that are of the SOV type have postpositions rather than prepositions, and have adjectives before nouns.^[100]

All languages structure sentences into Subject, Verb, and Object, but languages differ in the way they classify the relations between actors and actions. English uses the nominative-accusative word typology: in English transitive clauses, the subjects of both intransitive sentences («I run») and transitive sentences («I love you») are treated in the same way, shown here by the nominative pronoun I. Some languages, called ergative, Gamilaraay among them, distinguish instead between Agents and Patients. In ergative languages, the single participant in an intransitive sentence, such as «I run», is treated the same as the patient in a transitive sentence, giving the equivalent of «me run». Only in transitive sentences would the equivalent of the pronoun «I» be used.^[98] In this way the semantic roles can map onto the grammatical relations in different ways, grouping an intransitive subject either with Agents (accusative type) or Patients (ergative type) or even making each of the three roles differently, which is called the tripartite type.^[101]

The shared features of languages which belong to the same typological class type may have arisen completely independently. Their co-occurrence might be due to universal laws governing the structure of natural languages, «language universals», or they might be the result of languages evolving convergent solutions to the recurring communicative problems that humans use language to solve.^[23]

Social contexts of use and transmission

While humans have the ability to learn any language, they only do so if they grow up in an environment in which language exists and is used by others. Language is therefore dependent on communities of speakers in which children learn language from their elders and peers and themselves transmit language to their own children. Languages are used by those who speak them to communicate and to solve a plethora of social tasks. Many aspects of language use can be seen to be adapted specifically to these purposes.^[23] Owing to the way in which language is transmitted between generations and within communities, language perpetually changes, diversifying into new languages or converging due to language contact. The process is similar to the process of evolution, where the process of descent with modification leads to the formation of a phylogenetic tree.^[102]

However, languages differ from biological organisms in that they readily incorporate elements from other languages through the process of diffusion, as speakers of different languages come into contact. Humans also frequently speak more than one language, acquiring their first language or languages as children, or learning new languages as they grow up. Because of the increased language contact in the globalizing world, many small languages are becoming endangered as their speakers shift to other languages that afford the possibility to participate in larger and more influential speech communities.^[6]

Usage and meaning

When studying the way in which words and signs are used, it is often the case that words have different meanings, depending on the social context of use. An important example of this is the process called deixis, which describes the way in which certain words refer to entities through their relation between a specific point in time and space when the word is uttered. Such words are, for example, the word, «I» (which designates the person speaking), «now» (which designates the moment of speaking), and «here» (which designates the position of speaking). Signs also change their meanings over time, as the conventions governing their usage gradually change. The study of how the meaning of linguistic expressions changes depending on context is called pragmatics. Deixis is an important part of the way that we use language to point out entities in the world.^[103] Pragmatics is concerned with the ways in which language use is patterned and how these patterns contribute to meaning. For example, in all languages, linguistic expressions can be used not just to transmit information, but to perform actions. Certain actions are made only through language, but nonetheless have tangible effects, e.g. the act of «naming», which creates a new name for some entity, or the act of «pronouncing someone man and wife», which creates a social contract of marriage. These types of acts are called speech acts, although they can also be carried out through writing or hand signing.^[104]

The form of linguistic expression often does not correspond to the meaning that it actually has in a social context. For example, if at a dinner table a person asks, «Can you reach the salt?», that is, in fact, not a question about the length of the arms of the one being addressed, but a request to pass the salt across the table. This meaning is implied by the context in which it is spoken; these kinds of effects of meaning are called conversational implicatures. These social rules for which ways of using language are considered appropriate in certain situations and how utterances are to be understood in relation to their context vary between communities, and learning them is a large part of acquiring communicative competence in a language.^[105]

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 sign or oral languages.^[106] 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».^[15]

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. Studies published in 2013 have indicated that unborn fetuses are capable of language acquisition to some degree.^[107][108] 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, he or she will produce two-word utterances, and within a few more months will begin to produce telegraphic speech, or 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.^[109][110]

Acquisition of second and additional languages can come at any age, through exposure in daily life or courses. Children learning a second language are more likely to achieve native-like fluency than adults, but in general, it is very rare for someone speaking a second language to pass completely for a native speaker. An important difference between first language acquisition and additional language acquisition is that the process of additional language acquisition is influenced by languages that the learner already knows.^[111]

Culture

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 speaks them. Languages differ not only in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, but also through having different «cultures of speaking.» Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group as well as 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.^[112]

Linguists use the term «varieties» to refer to the different ways of speaking a language. This term includes geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood within a particular culture.^[113]

Because norms for language use are shared by members of a specific group, communicative style also becomes a way of displaying and constructing group identity. Linguistic differences may become salient markers of divisions between social groups, for example, speaking a language with a particular accent may imply membership of an ethnic minority or social class, one’s area of origin, or status as a second language speaker. These kinds of differences are not part of the linguistic system, but are an important part of how people use language as a social tool for constructing groups.^[114]

However, many languages also have grammatical conventions that signal the social position of the speaker in relation to others through the use of registers that are related to social hierarchies or divisions. In many languages, there are stylistic or even grammatical differences between the ways men and women speak, between age groups, or between social classes, just as some languages employ different words depending on who is listening. For example, in the Australian language Dyirbal, a married man must use a special set of words to refer to everyday items when speaking in the presence of his mother-in-law.^[115] Some cultures, for example, have elaborate systems of «social deixis», or systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means.^[116] In English, social deixis is shown mostly through distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, and 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 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.^[116]

Writing, literacy and technology

Throughout history a number of different ways of representing language in graphic media have been invented. These are called writing systems.

The use of writing has made language even more useful to humans. It makes it possible to store large amounts of information outside of the human body and retrieve it again, and it allows communication across physical distances and timespans that would otherwise be impossible. Many languages conventionally employ different genres, styles, and registers in written and spoken language, and in some communities, writing traditionally takes place in an entirely different language than the one spoken. There is some evidence that the use of writing also has effects on the cognitive development of humans, perhaps because acquiring literacy generally requires explicit and formal education.^[117]

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.^[80]

Change

All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be «decay» or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable.^[118]

Changes may affect specific sounds or the entire phonological system. Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound or phonetic feature by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound in a place where there had been none. Sound changes can be conditioned in which case a sound is changed only if it occurs in the vicinity of certain other sounds. Sound change is usually assumed to be regular, which means that it is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of any non-phonological factors. On the other hand, sound changes can sometimes be sporadic, affecting only one particular word or a few words, without any seeming regularity. Sometimes a simple change triggers a chain shift in which the entire phonological system is affected. This happened in the Germanic languages when the sound change known as Grimm’s law affected all the stop consonants in the system. The original consonant *bʰ became /b/ in the Germanic languages, the previous *b in turn became /p/, and the previous *p became /f/. The same process applied to all stop consonants and explains why Italic languages such as Latin have p in words like pater and pisces, whereas Germanic languages, like English, have father and fish.^[119]

Another example is the Great Vowel Shift in English, which is the reason that the spelling of English vowels do not correspond well to their current pronunciation. This is because the vowel shift brought the already established orthography out of synchronization with pronunciation. Another source of sound change is the erosion of words as pronunciation gradually becomes increasingly indistinct and shortens words, leaving out syllables or sounds. This kind of change caused Latin mea domina to eventually become the French madame and American English ma’am.^[120]

Change also happens in the grammar of languages as discourse patterns such as idioms or particular constructions become grammaticalized. This frequently happens when words or morphemes erode and the grammatical system is unconsciously rearranged to compensate for the lost element. For example, in some varieties of Caribbean Spanish the final /s/ has eroded away. Since Standard Spanish uses final /s/ in the morpheme marking the second person subject «you» in verbs, the Caribbean varieties now have to express the second person using the pronoun tú. This means that the sentence «what’s your name» is ¿como te llamas? [ˈkomo te ˈjamas] in Standard Spanish, but [ˈkomo ˈtu te ˈjama] in Caribbean Spanish. The simple sound change has affected both morphology and syntax.^[121] Another common cause of grammatical change is the gradual petrification of idioms into new grammatical forms, for example, the way the English «going to» construction lost its aspect of movement and in some varieties of English has almost become a full-fledged future tense (e.g. I’m gonna).

Language change may be motivated by «language internal» factors, such as changes in pronunciation motivated by certain sounds being difficult to distinguish aurally or to produce, or through patterns of change that cause some rare types of constructions to drift towards more common types.^[122] Other causes of language change are social, such as when certain pronunciations become emblematic of membership in certain groups, such as social classes, or with ideologies, and therefore are adopted by those who wish to identify with those groups or ideas. In this way, issues of identity and politics can have profound effects on language structure.^[123]

Contact

One important source of language change is contact and resulting diffusion of linguistic traits between languages. Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact on a regular basis.^[124] Multilingualism is likely to have been the norm throughout human history and most people in the modern world are multilingual. Before the rise of the concept of the ethno-national state, monolingualism was characteristic mainly of populations inhabiting small islands. But with the ideology that made one people, one state, and one language the most desirable political arrangement, monolingualism started to spread throughout the world. Nonetheless, there are only 250 countries in the world corresponding to some 6000 languages, which means that most countries are multilingual and most languages therefore exist in close contact with other languages.^[125]

When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Through sustained language contact over long periods, linguistic traits diffuse between languages, and languages belonging to different families may converge to become more similar. In areas where many languages are in close contact, this may lead to the formation of language areas in which unrelated languages share a number of linguistic features. A number of such language areas have been documented, among them, the Balkan language area, the Mesoamerican language area, and the Ethiopian language area. Also, larger areas such as South Asia, Europe, and Southeast Asia have sometimes been considered language areas, because of widespread diffusion of specific areal features.^[126][127]

Language contact may also lead to a variety of other linguistic phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification (replacement of much of the native vocabulary with that of another language). In situations of extreme and sustained language contact, it may lead to the formation of new mixed languages that cannot be considered to belong to a single language family. One type of mixed language called pidgins occurs when adult speakers of two different languages interact on a regular basis, but in a situation where neither group learns to speak the language of the other group fluently. In such a case, they will often construct a communication form that has traits of both languages, but which has a simplified grammatical and phonological structure. The language comes to contain mostly the grammatical and phonological categories that exist in both languages. Pidgin languages are defined by not having any native speakers, but only being spoken by people who have another language as their first language. But if a Pidgin language becomes the main language of a speech community, then eventually children will grow up learning the pidgin as their first language. As the generation of child learners grow up, the pidgin will often be seen to change its structure and acquire a greater degree of complexity. This type of language is generally called a creole language. An example of such mixed languages is Tok Pisin, the official language of Papua New-Guinea, which originally arose as a Pidgin based on English and Austronesian languages; others are Kreyòl ayisyen, the French-based creole language spoken in Haiti, and Michif, a mixed language of Canada, based on the Native American language Cree and French.^[128]

Linguistic diversity

Language	Native speakers (millions)[129]
Mandarin	848
Spanish	329 [note 5]
English	328
Portuguese	250
Arabic	221
Hindi	182
Bengali	181
Russian	144
Japanese	122
Javanese	84.3

SIL Ethnologue defines a «living language» as «one that has at least one speaker for whom it is their first language». The exact number of known living languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of one’s definition of «language», and in particular, on how one defines the distinction between a «language» and a «dialect». As of 2016, Ethnologue cataloged 7,097 living human languages.^[131] The Ethnologue establishes linguistic groups based on studies of mutual intelligibility, and therefore often includes more categories than more conservative classifications. For example, the Danish language that most scholars consider a single language with several dialects is classified as two distinct languages (Danish and Jutish) by the Ethnologue.^[129]

According to the Ethnologue, 389 languages (nearly 6%) have more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94% of the world’s population, whereas 94% of the world’s languages account for the remaining 6% of the global population.

Languages and dialects

There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding a famous aphorism attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that «a language is a dialect with an army and navy».^[132] For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages or dialects. Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin are, for example, often classified as «dialects» of Chinese, even though they are more different from each other than Swedish is from Norwegian. Before the Yugoslav Wars, Serbo-Croatian was generally considered a single language with two normative variants, but due to sociopolitical reasons, Croatian and Serbian are now often treated as separate languages and employ different writing systems. In other words, the distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or degree of mutual intelligibility.^[133]

Language families of the world

The world’s languages can be grouped into language families consisting of languages that can be shown to have common ancestry. Linguists recognize many hundreds of language families, although some of them can possibly be grouped into larger units as more evidence becomes available and in-depth studies are carried out. At present, there are also dozens of language isolates: languages that cannot be shown to be related to any other languages in the world. Among them are Basque, spoken in Europe, Zuni of New Mexico, Purépecha of Mexico, Ainu of Japan, Burushaski of Pakistan, and many others.^[134]

The language family of the world that has the most speakers is the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world’s population.^[135] This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu). The Indo-European family achieved prevalence first during the Eurasian Migration Period (c. 400–800 AD),^{[citation needed]} and subsequently through the European colonial expansion, which brought the Indo-European languages to a politically and often numerically dominant position in the Americas and much of Africa. The Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by 20%^[135] of the world’s population and include many of the languages of East Asia, including Hakka, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and hundreds of smaller languages.^[136]

Africa is home to a large number of language families, the largest of which is the Niger-Congo language family, which includes such languages as Swahili, Shona, and Yoruba. Speakers of the Niger-Congo languages account for 6.9% of the world’s population.^[135] A similar number of people speak the Afroasiatic languages, which include the populous Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew language, and the languages of the Sahara region, such as the Berber languages and Hausa.^[136]

The Austronesian languages are spoken by 5.5% of the world’s population and stretch from Madagascar to maritime Southeast Asia all the way to Oceania.^[135] It includes such languages as Malagasy, Māori, Samoan, and many of the indigenous languages of Indonesia and Taiwan. The Austronesian languages are considered to have originated in Taiwan around 3000 BC and spread through the Oceanic region through island-hopping, based on an advanced nautical technology. Other populous language families are the Dravidian languages of South Asia (among them Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu), the Turkic languages of Central Asia (such as Turkish), the Austroasiatic (among them Khmer), and Tai–Kadai languages of Southeast Asia (including Thai).^[136]

The areas of the world in which there is the greatest linguistic diversity, such as the Americas, Papua New Guinea, West Africa, and South-Asia, contain hundreds of small language families. These areas together account for the majority of the world’s languages, though not the majority of speakers. In the Americas, some of the largest language families include the Quechumaran, Arawak, and Tupi-Guarani families of South America, the Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Manguean, and Mayan of Mesoamerica, and the Na-Dene, Iroquoian, and Algonquian language families of North America. In Australia, most indigenous languages belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, whereas New Guinea is home to a large number of small families and isolates, as well as a number of Austronesian languages.^[134] Due to its remoteness and geographical fragmentation, Papua New Guinea emerges in fact as the leading location worldwide for both species (8% of world total) and linguistic richness — with 830 living tongues (12% of world total).^[137]

Language endangerment

Language endangerment occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an extinct language. While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they have been disappearing at an accelerated rate in the 20th and 21st centuries due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages.^[6]

The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. Of the between 6,000^[5] and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, between 50 and 90% of those are expected to have become extinct by the year 2100.^[6] The top 20 languages, those spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world’s population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with less than 10,000 speakers.^[6]

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) operates with five levels of language endangerment: «safe», «vulnerable» (not spoken by children outside the home), «definitely endangered» (not spoken by children), «severely endangered» (only spoken by the oldest generations), and «critically endangered» (spoken by few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers). Notwithstanding claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common lingua franca, such as English or Esperanto, there is a consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world. It is a common belief, going back to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament, that linguistic diversity causes political conflict,^[34] but this is contradicted by the fact that many of the world’s major episodes of violence have taken place in situations with low linguistic diversity, such as the Yugoslav and American Civil War, or the genocide of Rwanda, whereas many of the most stable political units have been highly multilingual.^[138]

Many projects aim to prevent or slow this loss by revitalizing endangered languages and promoting education and literacy in minority languages. Across the world, many countries have enacted specific legislation to protect and stabilize the language of indigenous speech communities. A minority of linguists have argued that language loss is a natural process that should not be counteracted, and that documenting endangered languages for posterity is sufficient.^[139]

The University of Waikato are using the Welsh language as a model for their Māori language revitalisation programme as they deem Welsh to be the world’s leading example for the survival of languages.^[140][141] In 2019 a Hawaiian TV company Oiwi visited a Welsh language centre in Nant Gwrtheyrn, North Wales to help find ways of preserving their Ōlelo Hawaiʻi language.^[142]

See also

Notes

References

Works cited

Further reading

• Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Cysouw, Michael; Good, Jeff (2013). «Languoid, doculect and glossonym: Formalizing the notion ‘language’«. Language Documentation and Conservation. 7: 331–59. hdl:10125/4606.
• Swadesh, Morris (1934). «The phonemic principle». Language. 10 (2): 117–29. doi:10.2307/409603. JSTOR 409603.

External links

• World Atlas of Language Structures: a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages
• Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a comprehensive catalog of all of the world’s known living languages

Last Updated:
10 Apr 2023
— Updated example sentences

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

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. This metaphoric relation between language and the tongue exists in many languages and testifies to the historical prominence of spoken languages.^[1] When used as a general concept, «language» refers to the cognitive faculty that enables humans to learn and use systems of complex communication.

The human language faculty is thought to be fundamentally different from and of much higher complexity than those of other species. Human language is highly complex in that it is based on a set of rules relating symbols to their meanings, thereby forming an infinite 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. 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.

Definitions

The word «language» has two basic meanings: language as a general concept, and «a language» (a specific linguistic system, e.g. «French»). Languages other than English often have two separate words for these distinct concepts. French for example uses the word langage for language as a concept and langue as the specific instance of language.^[2]

When speaking of language as a general concept, several different definitions can be used that stress different aspects of the phenomenon.^[3]

A 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.^[4][5] 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.

A 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. Some proponents of this view of language, such as Noam Chomsky, define language as a particular set of sentences that can be generated from a particular set of rules.^[6] 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.

A 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. This view of language is associated with the study of language in a functional or pragmatic framework, as well as in socio-linguistics and linguistic anthropology. 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,^[7] 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.^[8] Human language is also unique in that its complex structure has evolved to serve a much wider range of functions than any other kinds of communication system.

The study of language

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.

Language can be studied from many angles and for many purposes: For example, Descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single languages so that people can learn the languages; theoretical linguistics develops theories how best to conceptualize language as a faculty; sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes, such as differentiating regional or social groups from each other; neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain; computational linguistics builds computational models of language and constructs programmes to process natural language; and historical linguistics traces the histories of languages and language families by using the comparative method.

Early grammarians

The formal study of language began in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. Pāṇini’s systematic classification of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants and vowels, and word classes, such as nouns and verbs, was the first known instance of its kind. In the Middle East Sibawayh (سیبویه) made a detailed description of Arabic in 760 AD in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), the first known author to distinguish between sounds and phonemes (sounds as units of a linguistic system).

Western interest in the study of languages began as early as in the East,^[9] but the grammarians of the classical languages did not use the same methods or reach the same conclusions as their contemporaries in the Indic world. Early interest in language in the West was a part of philosophy, not of grammatical description. The first insights into semantic theory were made by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue, where he argues that words denote concepts that are eternal and exist in the world of ideas. This work is the first to use the word etymology to describe the history of a word’s meaning.

Around 280 BC one of Alexander the Great’s successors founded a university (see Musaeum) in Alexandria, where a school of philologists studied the ancient texts in and taught Greek to speakers of other languages. This school was the first to use the word «grammar» in its modern sense, Plato had used the word in its original meaning as «téchnē grammatikḗ» (Τέχνη Γραμματική), the «art of writing,» which is also the title of one of the most important works of the Alexandrine school by Dionysius Thrax.^[10]

Throughout the Middle Ages the study of language was subsumed under the topic of philology, the study of ancient languages and texts, practiced by such educators as Roger Ascham, Wolfgang Ratke and John Amos Comenius.^[11]

Historicism

In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics.^[12] Bloomfield attributes «the first great scientific linguistic work of the world» to Jacob Grimm, who wrote Deutsche Grammatik.^[13] It was soon followed by other authors writing similar comparative studies on other language groups of Europe. The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt, of whom Bloomfield asserts:^[13]

«This study received its foundation at the hands of the Prussian statesman and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767—1835), especially in the first volume of his work on Kavi, the literary language of Java, entitled Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts (‘On the Variety of the Structure of Human Language and its Influence upon the Mental Development of the Human Race’).»

Structuralism

Early in the 20th century, de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a «semantic code.»^[14] Substantial additional contributions similar to this came from Louis Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson,^[15] which are characterized as being highly systematic.^[15]

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 that has truth value, i.e. it can be true or false about an entity, e.g. «[x [is y]]» or «[x [does y]].»

Sounds and symbols

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

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 contributes to producing meaning by encoding semantic distinctions in forms that are systematic. The predictability resulting from systematization allows language users to produce and understand new words and meanings by applying their knowledge of the language’s grammatical categories.

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

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 and culture

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 ways of using language is a part of the community’s culture, just as other shared practices are, it is 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.^[19]

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.^[20] 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.^[20]

Origin

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.^[21] 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’.^[22] 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.^[23]

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.^[24]

Natural languages

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, polymorph, 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. It is for these reasons that the biggest challenge for a speaker of a foreign language is to remain immersed in that language in order to keep up with the changes of that language.

Making a principled distinction between one language and another is sometimes nearly impossible.^[25] 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

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 bring fiction or an associated constructed world to life; 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.

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

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,^[26] 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.^[27] 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.^[28]

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

• World Atlas of Language Structures: a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages

Theories of the origin of language are first discussed from a linguistic point of
view in secular writing. Evolution had less effect on linguistics than on other
social sciences, yet history shows that secondary effects were felt. No true link
has ever been found with animal communication. The work of Noam Chomsky brought
linguists back to uniquely human origins for language, but the question is so complex
that little headway can be made without investigation of mental factors. This survey
concludes that the creative, miraculous element must be invoked, and the Bible itself
gives hints of important features in the understanding of linguistic processes.

---

iStockphoto

In discussing linguistic origins, people with some biblical background will often
confuse language and languages. In such a discussion, thoughts often settle first
on the Tower of Babel. However, the Bible indicates that there were two distinct
miraculous events: the original creation of Adam as a talking and understanding
being; and the subsequent division of humanity into language groups as a judgment
on the rebellion of the descendants of Noah. This article is concerned with the
former.

But first, the question of pre-programming for language, as against a learning process,
is not strictly relevant to the question of the creation of a linguistic ability.
However, the Lockean assumption of a “clean slate” before learning went
to extremes with behaviourists like B.F. Skinner, who dominated language learning
in mid-century. The arrival of the linguist Chomsky on the scene restored a balance,
in that it favoured a pre-programming prior to learning.

This pre-programming represented the universal human linguistic gift, quite distinct
from whether someone is a “good linguist”, meaning that they are good
at learning foreign languages. All humans have a “linguistic gift”,
given, I believe, at creation, but only some can operate in more than one specific
language easily. Our English language is deficient in that we cannot in argument
terminology distinguish between these two uses of the term “linguistic gift”.
In this article I deal with the ability to speak a “mothertongue”, which
is all I am referring to, and not to the additional gift of being what popular jargon
calls a “linguist”.

It was Noam Chomsky who restored interest in human universal ability to speak coherently,
and he restored the balance by criticising the “empty slate” stance
of Skinner and others, saying that this was insufficient to account for all the
facts. It is significant that Chomsky, though an agnostic, still regarded human
language as “miraculous”, distinguishing humans from animals. To that
extent he departed from some evolutionist assumptions. Naturally, a human exposed
to a specific language would not speak coherently, so there must be an environmental
catalyst. It is not true that feral children have no programmed ability to understand
any future language to which they would become exposed, as will be seen by reference
to evidence later in this article. It may be, of course, that if a feral child managed
to reach adulthood without ever contacting a language environment, such an ability
might have atrophied by the time of post-puberty, as hypothesised by some of the
Chomsky school.

But my chief aim in this article is to exult in the wonder of the signs of God’s
creative gift, as witnessed in the human mind.

Most secular writers have avoided the question during most of the twentieth century.
This attitude can be traced to the changed interests of linguists consequent on
the seminal work of Ferdinand de Saussure, especially the proposition that “states
of language” are far more significant to linguists than the history of language.¹ His terms were “synchronic”
(non-historical) as opposed to “diachronic” (historical) studies.

This was a reaction against the nineteenth century preoccupation with what used
to be called “philology”, in which etymology and the establishment of
boundaries between language families were key ingredients. The pendulum is slowly
swinging back to the study of language in history, partly through interest in the
way pidgins and Creoles come about, and in language change.

From animals to humans?

As regards the origin of language per se, it should be noted that when
evolution was first applied to linguistics, early attempts at linking human language
to animal communication were the chief subjects of debate. How could chattering
ape-folk transform a needs-motivated set of habits into the phonological complexity
we now call language? The animals can on their own terms communicate, but not in
the positive sense of reading the communicator’s mind or intentions, though
in those days “mind” was itself a taboo word. Most animal cries relate
to distress, belonging to the pack, mating approaches or antagonism.

After Darwin, most evolutionist linguists made the assumption that the Babel event
recorded in Scripture never really took place, or if it did, not in a miraculous
manner.² One might say that,
while evolutionists reject a literal Genesis anyway, in terms of emphasis:

• evolutionist linguists reject the Babel account
• evolutionist geologists reject the Noahic Flood account
• evolutionist biologists reject the account up to the creation of humans
• evolutionist astronomers reject Genesis 1:1–16

For example, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov claim that linguists can work backwards in the
way that microbiologists try to go back to understand the evolution of life. Linguists
have, they say, “reconstructed the vocabulary and syntax of the postulated
Indo-European protolanguage with increasing confidence and insight”.³ I would agree about the confidence,
but I’m not so sure about the insight! Study of the phonology, grammar and
lexis of ancient languages can do no more than associate diverse languages, or very
broadly identify language families. Study of vocabulary usually includes semantics,
through which it is hoped to understand non-linguistic features of ancient societies
and so assist anthropologists.

Shevoroshkin argued that language reflects a people’s social and practical
concerns and that this would be an improvement on conventional archaeology, which
cannot “speak” to us.⁴
In trying to reduce the number of distinct language families (and so avoid the miracle
of Babel), Shevoroshkin introduced the label “Nostratic” for the “reconstruction”
of a protolanguage linking five or six major language families. He focused on pronouns,
body parts and major features of the environment. But this is extremely speculative,
and depends on the researcher’s individual semantic interpretations.

However, the problem is that we have no absolute information to tell us how word
meanings had changed before the arrival of dictionaries, and even when lexicons
are available

1. they have to be dated from extra-linguistic artefacts and
2. other than obvious labelling, which is rare in ancient times, the exact meanings
   of words and expressions are still relatively inaccessible.

Lewin argued that

“unlike biological species, languages change at an astonishing rate, as anyone
who has struggled with Chaucer will attest. As a result, most historical linguists
agree that going back more than 5,000 to 7,000 years is a futile enterprise.”⁵

Even during the evolution-dominated years, leading linguists, wishing to move away
from nineteenth century naiveté, have steadfastly refused to investigate
possible links with animal communication. The best-known linguist of the twentieth
century, Noam Chomsky, though an evolutionist, has consistently maintained that
there is no connection;⁶
and that, as Descartes (not surprisingly) insisted long before him,⁷ language is “species-specific”,⁸ and must have originated in humanity through
some genetic input. To this extent, trans-speciate evolution seldom came into the
picture in linguistics.

In fact, Chomsky insists that mid-century studies based on the evolution of language
from apes to humans only “bring out more clearly the extent to which human
language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the
animal world.”⁹

Karl Popper proposed “stages” from vocal gestures used to express emotion
and onwards, but Chomsky sees no continuity in this,¹⁰ and certainly no mechanism is even suggested.
W.H. Thorpe even pointed out that from physical characteristics one might regard
birds as a more likely source for language than mammals! Nevertheless, he regarded
human language and animal communication as having three features in common: both
are “purposive”, aiming to change another’s behaviour; “syntactic”,
that is, having internal structure; and “propositional”, transmitting
information.¹¹ To a creationist,
even if such terms are appropriate, this merely indicates a common Creator. As for
Chomsky, he commented by pointing out that walking could also be said to have these
three characteristics, so that Thorpe’s propositions seem to lead nowhere.¹²

Strange labels were given to nineteenth century attempts to formulate some credible
basis for language arising from primitive communication in social contexts. Some
such were:

1. the “bow-wow” theory, suggesting that ejaculatory noises began to acquire
   specific meanings, much in the way that dogs may radiate pleasure, aggression, etc.
   through different barking styles;
2. the “ding-dong” theory, with calls for help, as in today’s world
   of sirens, triggering off messages with specific content; and
3. the “yo-heave-ho” theory, suggesting that combined labour encouraged
   comments and directions to emerge.

Still others have exhaustively examined child language in the hope of finding a
progression which might in some recapitulatory framework mirror the first human
attempts at communication.^13,14 But this theory has the
same drawbacks as those of Haeckel’s embryonic recapitulation theories, except
perhaps that we can trace no deliberate forgery in its presentation.

Chomsky insists that grammar is not learnt in the child by trial and error, or else
children could not make new grammatical sentences which they have never heard before.¹⁵ That this takes place is
shown by experiments using nonsense words and asking the child to respond to questions
which they must process.¹⁶
In connection with Columbia University’s experiments with apes, Chomsky stated
that “saying apes can acquire language because they can learn some simple
signs … is like saying humans can fly because they can jump”.¹⁷

Lenneberg studied language impairment in the 1960s and said this shows that when
recoveries occur they can be sudden, indicating a species-specific ability.¹⁸ Such recovery also depends
on having acquired language during a critical period of development in childhood.
Children unconsciously process their parents’ language in order to work out
the grammar. But “hearing is an essential part of language, because by its
very nature language has to be a shared code”.¹⁹

Linguists are agreed that a distinction must be preserved between conditioning through
learning by imitation and learning by rules applied to incoming signals. The second
of these theories of language development points strongly to a divinely bestowed
genetic gift to humans.

In this connection, Carroll was one of the first to distinguish “language
acquisition” (learning the mothertongue) from foreign or second language learning.²⁰ He asks whether first language
learning is learning at all, or whether perhaps it is rather a biological process
of growth, or as Chomsky would say, “genetic maturation” or “linguistic
competence”.²¹ Most
today would say that first language learning is a mixture of genetic maturation
and social learning.

What is remarkable (and miraculous) is that it begins spontaneously in the normal
child, and that adults do not in any formal sense “teach” language.
When they correct children it is usually on matters of truth or appropriateness.
Only a minority with interest in language will bother to correct the language itself.
Despite this, children stubbornly learn to communicate. They also react differentially
to different voices and, in bilingual societies, to different languages.

Chomsky often uses the term “creative” when referring to the ability
of the child to acquire a grammar.^22,23 He also insists that “a
description of what an organism does and a description of what it knows can be very
different things”.²⁴
Menyuk concluded that the average child gets its grammar by age three, though Chomsky
is more cautious and merely regards it as very early acquisition.²⁵

Thought and language

In addition to interests in child language, philosophers have often written articles
on the relationship between thought and language, in an attempt to unravel the mechanisms
of language production. Language is, mysteriously, at the same time both physical
and mental, and the two modes must meet somewhere. Yet in a sense, the establishment
of this relationship is both pointless and obscure. Pointless, because mere humans
cannot fathom the true depths of such a relationship, and obscure, because “thought”
is impossible to measure scientifically or even to illustrate by any adequate metaphor
or model.

Many scientists who are Christians rightly sing the praises of God when describing
the human body. Indeed, much can be said scientifically about the wonders of the
human ear. Yet this knowledge is overtly describable, whereas the link between brain-thought
and mouth-speech is much more ineffable and recondite.

What is the use of humans having a wonderful and most delicate aural system, if
you cannot link it to a brain that can understand language? Many animals, doubtless,
can be shown to have remarkable hearing, but animals cannot talk, neither can they,
in the accepted linguistic sense, understand speech. They may respond to noise and
even voice-tone, but, so far as we can discover, they do not act in any non-programmed
way, such as is characteristic of human use of language. We therefore assume that
language is unique to humans.

Some thirty years ago Chomsky referred to “the particular branch of cognitive
psychology known as linguistics”,²⁶
thus placing thought squarely in the centre of linguistic capacity. Indeed, the
use of language cannot begin to be understood until some connection is made between
processes of thought and processes of speech. That’s why language is so miraculous.
It just has to be a gift from God. The study of language is really the study of
mind, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 is a crude representation of what happens in the two stages we might call
communicating and understanding. It will be seen that this representation includes:

1. mental events,
2. physiological events, and
3. physical events,

and so incorporates the non-living world, the biological world and the world of
the invisible within the functions of the brain. In that sense, one might say “language
is everything”. Who is able to investigate such an amalgam?

Granted that early behaviourist psychologists like Watson tried to show parallels
between physical and mental phenomena, no experiment they produced was able to establish
true correlates with the processes of thought through mechanical measurements. According
to Chomsky:

“What is involved is not a matter of degree of complexity but rather of quality
of complexity. Correspondingly, there is no reason to expect that the available
technology can provide significant insight or understanding of useful achievements
[or] any significant advance in our understanding of the use or nature of language.”²⁷

Indeed, he insists that this was known in principle in the seventeenth century:

“The Cartesians tried to show that when the theory of corporeal body is sharpened
and clarified and extended to its limits, it is still incapable of accounting for
facts that are obvious to introspection and that are also confirmed by our observation
of the actions of other humans.”²⁸

There is more to it, then, than the physical, and we are hard put to it to find
anything equivalent in the animal world. This is what Chomsky calls “the creative
aspect of language use”.²⁹
Descartes wrote that normal language use is a certain sign that there is a reality
we know as “mind”, and that linguistic ability “cannot be detected
in an animal”.³⁰
In the late sixteenth century a Spanish doctor, Juan Huarte, wrote a study of human
intelligence, stating that its best evidence is language use, imparting a creative
capacity.³¹

In a trivial sense it may be argued that there is a creative element in understanding
as well as in speaking, if indeed the “matching” theories are correct.
Some linguists have argued for an internal generation of speech to match incoming
signals as part of the process of understanding. This would explain why Lashley,
as far back as 1951, performed a linguistic experiment on his audience at a conference.
To make this experiment work for the reader I have had to misspell the second word,
to give something like the effect of “hearing” the following sentence
read out, roughly as Lashley read it out from a novel:³²

“Rapid riting with his left hand proved difficult, but successful in saving
from further damage the fixtures in the capsized canoe.”³³

Lashley’s audience wrote it down as “writing”, and then by the
end of the sentence something “clicked” and they had to delete this
and substitute “righting”. This, according to Chomsky, showed that the
understanding of language is not merely a mechanical linear process but has a re-creative
element sometimes brought into play even when the language has been fully “learnt”.

If creativity is involved in understanding as much as in the production of language,
this helps us to accept the fact that we understand more than we can produce. In
both first and second language learning it is clear that in exchanges we understand
more than we produce, even in the matter of learning new sounds.

Berko and Brown record an interview with a toddler who had not yet managed to produce
the English sound represented by the letters “sh”. The interview went
something like this:

Adult: Is that your fish?
Child: Yes, my fis.
Adult: Oh, I see It’s your fis?
Child: No, not my fis. My fis.³⁴

It is obvious that the child recognised the distinction of consonants, but could
not produce the actual distinction physically.

The creative aspect of language use itself involves:

1. innovation, which is beyond mere analogy and embraces concordant analogy;
2. freedom from detectable stimulus; and
3. positive suitability to the situation in which it is used.³⁵

The famous Port-Royal Grammar summarised this threefold description by
stating:

“[human language is a] marvellous invention by which we construct from twenty-five
or thirty sounds an infinity of expressions which, having no resemblance in themselves
to what takes place in our minds, still enable us to let others know the secret
of what we conceive and of all the various mental activities that we carry out.”³⁶

Chomsky’s most common description of language is that it is “rule-governed
behaviour”. This reminds us of God’s command to humans in Genesis 1:28 to “have dominion” over the animals
and over the entire physical world. Without becoming irreverent we could say that
it is part of the “image of God” placed in humans, even though most
Christians would relate that only to what is “spiritual”. Yet it seems
that, without a conscious mind, spiritual abilities cannot properly be exercised.

George Miller claimed that

“talking and understanding language do not depend on being intelligent or
having a large brain. They depend on ‘being human’ … [a child]
acquires [language] from parents who have no idea how to explain it to him. No careful
schedule of rewards for correct or punishments for incorrect utterances is necessary.”³⁷

J.L. Austin further investigated what might be called the “power of words”.
This must not be confused with some of today’s heretical views on so-called
“faith” speaking. But it is true that we do perform mental assurance
through words.³⁸ One example
of this is the way we use ceremonies to make marriage valid, using set wordings.
Another is the way a prominent figure launches a ship saying: “I hereby name
this ship … ”

The biblical perspective

Can we learn something about the origin of language from a direct approach to Scripture?
The first example of language used in Genesis 1:3 is significant. God “says” (Hebrew
‘amar). At this stage there is no human present to hear it, though
we shall argue that its appearance in the written record means that we “hear”
it in a sense today in our own language, so it certainly has a message for us.

One spiritual message is that in God’s mouth speech is powerful and creative.
After all, God “made man’s mouth”.³⁹ Such a passage assures us that there is power
in “the Word”, the name Scripture gives to the Bible itself, and to
messages based on Scripture given by God’s true messengers. There is a whole
theology here, somewhat beyond our current concerns.

For example, why does this word ‘said’ occur so early in the piece,
before the creation of humans? Is it that, for humans to have meaning as creatures,
it was necessary for the concept of language to exist even in the Godhead? In what
sense is the Lord Jesus Christ called “the Word of God” through the
Apostle John and others?

Coming now to physical creation, the first occurrence of language where humans are
recorded as already created is in Genesis 1:28: “Then God blessed them, and God said
… ”. In Scripture “blessing” is always connected with words,
so here we have one of Austin’s “performatives”. But this also
takes us out of the mystic use the word has been acquiring in some churches at this
time, a usage which is of very doubtful validity, since “blessing” has
no necessary connection with feelings, but with an understanding of God’s
love.

God gives commands to Adam and Eve (for Eve’s creation is assumed here through
the plural “them”, even though the manner of creation is not specified
until Genesis 2:22 in the recapitulation of this one and only
creation of woman). Thus we see that God expresses His love in blessing them even
before giving them the laws for their life on the perfect Earth He has created for
them.

From Genesis 1:28 we have to assume that Adam and Eve could understand
language, for God never uses any methods purposelessly. This human pair were equipped
with a highly complex aural system, behind which was an even more complex brain
and thought system. By now we are into one of the greatest and most controversial
arguments of linguistically inclined academics. Some say with Locke that the mind
is a tabula rasa (empty tablet) on to which language impinges in childhood.⁴⁰ Others say there is a genetic
ability to understand before any meaningful language is addressed to the young child.
The Bible appears to support the latter, since

1. God’s words must not be fruitless, and
2. shortly after this we find Adam engaging in dialogue with God.⁴¹

Note that the programming is only concerned with the ability to understand and not
with any automatic responses to what is understood.

But before that we find Adam speaking unprompted before God in Genesis 2:23. He speaks poetically. And here we come up
against the nineteenth century idea that poetry is more “primitive”
than prose, for which there is surely no evidence linguistically. In fact, rhythmic
or semantically parallel utterances are obviously more advanced than plain speech.
However, we know that the idea of the “primitive savage” came from minds
like that of the unbeliever Rousseau, later to be taken up by the evolutionists.

We are not saying that Adam was pre-programmed with God’s language, because
we do not understand such things, not having been present. Adam as a functioning
adult must have had some special programming, but we cannot say to what extent this
directed his speech. He would presumably thereafter learn from his linguistic environment,
just as we do.

Scripture nowhere condemns talking to oneself. In fact, most people understand David
to be doing just that in Psalm 103:1–5. Of course, Adam’s poem could
have been addressed to Eve, and “this” may have been his original word
for “you”, in the manner of an I-not I relationship, since he had never
before seen a human being. Thus it’s not clear in Genesis 2:23 for whom Adam is speaking. Most likely it was
in thanks to God anyway, since anything the sinless Adam did in this perfect world
must have been to God’s glory. I doubt if it was mere soliloquy.

From the above we note that the Bible gives evidence of “receptive”
communication, followed by what linguists call “productive” communication.
Although this is the agreed order of things in child language development, the case
with Adam is an adult situation and should not be compared, in case we are led into
theories of physical recapitulation of events. God had, with the miracle of bodily
creation, also given Adam a miraculous gift, which we call “language”.
Thus the Bible describes no age-long practice prior to the establishment of normal
adult linguistic ability.

To complete the picture, Scripture shows a discussion between God on the one hand
and Adam and Eve on the other, indicating that by this time certain quasi-logical
elements were present in human language. We have to remember that this element,
though undoubtedly within God’s power to bestow, was not necessarily in His
perfect will at that time. After all, another voice, that of a fallen angel, had
intervened in Genesis 3:1. This intervention introduced the question form
into human thought and language.

Now the question itself is not a sinful form. God Himself is recorded as using it
on numerous occasions. But this is a far different matter from the mental and indeed
spiritual act of questioning the integrity of God’s character. Here we have
gone beyond language into morality and Divine-human relationships.

Conclusion

Returning to the physical, we see that practically all the known functions of language
are in evidence right from the creation. We can therefore say with confidence that
God created language and that language is a perfect gift, powerful but therefore
dangerous in a sinful world. Yet the wonder of the gift remains, and I am continually
amazed as I ponder the remarkable way in which such an apparently unrelated set
of events as we have in our bodies becomes a vehicle for complex and, if we allow
the Holy Spirit to teach us, uplifting thoughts.

Posted on homepage: 25 February 2011

References

1. de Saussure, E, Course in General Linguistics, in
   English, 1959, p. 102, 1916. Return to text.
2. Greenberg, J.H., a specialist in historical linguistics, is
   typical. He speaks of “the Babel legend” in “The linguistic approach”
   part of “Three approaches to language behavior”. In: Osgood,
   C.E. and Sebeok, T.A. (eds.), Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research
   Problems, p. 16, 1965. Return to text.
3. Gamkrelidze, T.V. and Ivanov, V.V., The early history of Indo-European
   languages, Scientific American, 262(3):82–89, 1990.
   Return to text.
4. Shovoroshkin, V., Linguists have the first word, New Scientist,
   128(1722):28, 1990. Return to text.
5. Lewin, R., Ancestral voices at war, New Scientist,
   128(1722):25, 1990. Return to text.
6. Chomsky, N., Language and Mind, p. 9, 1968. Return to text.
7. Chomsky, N., Cartesian Linguistics, as cited in Chomsky,
   Ref. 6, p. 8, 1966. Return to text.
8. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 9. Return to text.
9. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 59. Return to text.
10. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 60 (both references).
    Return to text.
11. Chomsky, Ref. 6. Return to text.
12. Chomsky, Ref. 6, pp. 60–61. Return
    to text.
13. Lewis, M.M, Infant Speech: A Study of the Beginnings
    of Language, 1951. Return to text.
14. Black, M., The Labyrinth of Language, p. 15, 1968
    (1972 edition). Return to text.
15. Chomsky, N., Syntactic Structures, passim,
    1957. Return to text.
16. Fishbein, J. and Emans, R., A Question of Competence,
    pp. 46, 48, 54, 55, 1972. Return to text.
17. Horgan, J., Profile of Chomsky, Scientific American,
    262(5):17, 1990. Return to text.
18. Lenneberg, E., Understanding language without ability
    to speak: a case report, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,
    LXV:419–425, 1962. Return to text.
19. Pinker, S., An instinct for language, New Scientist,
    142(1931):30, 1994. Return to text.
20. Carroll, J. B., 1960. Language development in children; in:
    Encyclopaedia of Educational Research, AD
    loc. Return to text.
21. Chomsky tends to stress maturation in psychological works,
    and competence in linguistic writing. Return to text.
22. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 6. Return to text.
23. Chomsky, N., Current Issues in Linguistic Theory,
    pp. 8f, 111, 1964. Return to text.
24. Chomsky, N., Formal properties of grammars; in: Nagel, E.
    et al. (eds.), Handbook of Mathematical Psychology, pp.
    328–418, 1963. Return to text.
25. Menyuk, P., A preliminary evaluation of grammatical capacity
    in children, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2:346–351,
    1963. Return to text.
26. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 1. Return to text.
27. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 4. Return to text.
28. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 5. Return to text.
29. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 6. Return to text.
30. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 6. Return to text.
31. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 9. Return to text.
32. Lashley, K.S., The problem of serial order in behaviour;
    in: Jeffress, L.A. (ed.), Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, pp. 112–136,
    1951. Return to text.
33. Most people on hearing this spoken think first of rapid writing,
    but then towards the end of the sentence have to change the whole meaning to fit
    the complete sentence. This involves a grammatical and semantic shift.
    Return to text.
34. Berko, J. and Brown, R., Psycholinguistic research methods;
    in: Mussen, .H. (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods in Child Development,
    pp. 517–557, 1960. Return to text.
35. Chomsky, Ref. 6, pp. 10–11. Return
    to text.
36. Chomsky, Ref. 6, p. 18. Return to text.
37. Miller, G.A., The Psychology of Communication, pp.
    86, 87, 1968. Return to text.
38. Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words, 1962,
    which is the seminal book on “performative” verbs and expressions. Return to text.
39. Exodus 4:11. Return to text.
40. John Locke (1632–1704) was the best-known Western proponent
    of the empirical idea that humans begin life with an “empty slate” on
    to which all we learn is “written” during our lifetime.
    Return to text.
41. While it is true that God spoke to the sea creatures in Genesis 1:22, there is no indication either in Scripture or
    from science that animals understand language in the way humans do. Certainly they
    may “respond”, and they may have been more sensitive before the curse
    arrived, but in any case the matter is not relevant to this discussion.
    Return to text.
42. Perhaps the only feature of child language acquisition on
    which all linguists agree is the fact that, whether in teaching or testing circumstances,
    humans always show a greater ability to understand than to produce language.
    Return to text.

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