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Language
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language
Key People: Noam Chomsky Rudolf Carnap Gottlob Frege Lorenzo Valla Max Müller

language: a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by

Definitions of language

Many definitions of language have been proposed. Henry Sweet, an English phonetician and
language scholar, stated: “Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds
combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of
ideas into thoughts.” The American linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager formulated the
following definition: “A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social
group cooperates.” Any succinct definition of language makes a number of presuppositions and
begs a number of questions. The first, for example, puts excessive weight on “thought,” and the
second uses “arbitrary” in a specialized, though legitimate, way.

A number of considerations (marked in italics below) enter into a proper understanding of

Every physiologically and mentally typical person acquires in childhood the ability to make use, as
both sender and receiver, of a system of communication that comprises a circumscribed set of
symbols (e.g., sounds, gestures, or written or typed characters). In spoken language,
this symbol set consists of noises resulting from movements of certain organs within the throat
and mouth. In signed languages, these symbols may be hand or body movements, gestures, or
facial expressions. By means of these symbols, people are able to impart information, to express
feelings and emotions, to influence the activities of others, and to comport themselves with
varying degrees of friendliness or hostility toward persons who make use of substantially the
same set of symbols.
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Different systems of communication constitute different languages; the degree of difference needed
to establish a different language cannot be stated exactly. No two people speak exactly alike;
hence, one is able to recognize the voices of friends over the telephone and to keep distinct a
number of unseen speakers in a radio broadcast. Yet, clearly, no one would say that they speak
different languages. Generally, systems of communication are recognized as different languages
if they cannot be understood without specific learning by both parties, though the precise limits
of mutual intelligibility are hard to draw and belong on a scale rather than on either side of a
definite dividing line. Substantially different systems of communication that may impede but do
not prevent mutual comprehension are called dialects of a language. In order to describe in detail
the actual different language patterns of individuals, the term idiolect, meaning the habits of
expression of a single person, has been coined.

Typically, people acquire a single language initially—their first language, or native tongue, the
language used by those with whom, or by whom, they are brought up from infancy. Subsequent
“second” languages are learned to different degrees of competence under various conditions.
Complete mastery of two languages is designated as bilingualism; in many cases—such as
upbringing by parents using different languages at home or being raised within a multilingual
community—children grow up as bilinguals. In traditionally monolingual cultures, the learning, to
any extent, of a second or other language is an activity superimposed on the prior mastery of one’s
first language and is a different process intellectually.

Language, as described above, is species-specific to human beings. Other members of the animal
kingdom have the ability to communicate, through vocal noises or by other means, but the most
important single feature characterizing human language (that is, every individual language),
against every known mode of animal communication, is its infinite productivity and creativity.
Human beings are unrestricted in what they can communicate; no area of experience is accepted
as necessarily incommunicable, though it may be necessary to adapt one’s language in order to
cope with new discoveries or new modes of thought. Animal communication systems are by
contrast very tightly circumscribed in what may be communicated. Indeed, displaced reference,
the ability to communicate about things outside immediate temporal and spatial contiguity,
which is fundamental to speech, is found elsewhere only in the so-called language of bees. Bees
are able, by carrying out various conventionalized movements (referred to as bee dances) in or
near the hive, to indicate to others the locations and strengths of food sources. But food sources
are the only known theme of this communication system. Surprisingly, however, this system,
nearest to human language in function, belongs to a species remote from humanity in the animal
kingdom. On the other hand, the animal performance superficially most like human speech, the
mimicry of parrots and of some other birds that have been kept in the company of humans, is
wholly derivative and serves no independent communicative function. Humankind’s nearest
relatives among the primates, though possessing a vocal physiology similar to that of humans,
have not developed anything like a spoken language. Attempts to teach sign language to
chimpanzees and other apes through imitation have achieved limited success, though the
interpretation of the significance of ape signing ability remains controversial.

In most accounts, the primary purpose of language is to facilitate communication, in the sense of
transmission of information from one person to
another. However, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies have drawn attention to a range of
other functions for language. Among these is the use of language to express a national or local
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identity (a common source of conflict in situations of multiethnicity around the world, such as in
Belgium, India, and Quebec). Also important are the “ludic” (playful) function of language—
encountered in such phenomena as puns, riddles, and crossword puzzles—and the range of
functions seen in imaginative or symbolic contexts, such as poetry, drama, and religious
expression.

Language interacts with every aspect of human life in society, and it can be understood only if it
is considered in relation to society. This article attempts to survey language in this light and to
consider its various functions and the purposes it can and has been made to serve. Because each
language is both a working system of communication in the period and in the community wherein
it is used and also the product of its history and the source of its future development, any account
of language must consider it from both these points of view.

The science of language is known as linguistics. It includes what are generally distinguished as
descriptive linguistics and historical linguistics. Linguistics is now a highly technical subject; it
embraces, both descriptively and historically, such major divisions
as phonetics, grammar (including syntax and morphology), semantics, and pragmatics, dealing
in detail with these various aspects of language.

Historical attitudes toward language

As is evident from the discussion above, human life in its present form would be impossible and
inconceivable without the use of language. People have long recognized the force and
significance of language. Naming—applying a word to pick out and refer to a fellow human being,
an animal, an object, or a class of such beings or objects—is only one part of the use of language,
but it is an essential and prominent part. In many cultures people have seen in the ability to name
a means to control or to possess; this explains the reluctance, in some communities, with which
names are revealed to strangers and the taboo restrictions found in several parts of the world on
using the names of persons recently dead. Such restrictions echo widespread and perhaps
universal taboos on naming directly things considered obscene, blasphemous, or very fearful.

Perhaps not surprisingly, several independent traditions ascribe a divine or at least a supernatural
origin to language or to the language of a particular community. The biblical account,
representing ancient Jewish beliefs, of Adam’s naming the creatures of the earth under God’s
guidance is one such example:

So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and
brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living
creature, that was its name. (Genesis 2:19)
Norse mythology preserves a similar story of divine participation in the creation of language, and
in India the god Indra is said to have invented articulate speech. In the debate on the nature and
origin of language given in Plato’s Socratic dialogue Cratylus, Socrates is made to speak of the
gods as those responsible for first fixing the names of things in the proper way.

A similar divine aura pervades early accounts of the origin of writing. The Norse god Odin was
held responsible for the invention of the runic alphabet. The inspired stroke of genius whereby
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the ancient Greeks adapted a variety of the Phoenician consonantal script so as to represent the
distinctive consonant and vowel sounds of Greek, thus producing the first alphabet such as is
known today, was linked with the mythological figure Cadmus, who, coming from Phoenicia, was
said to have founded Thebes and introduced writing into Greece (see Phoenician language). By a
traditional account, the Arabic alphabet, together with the language itself, was given to Adam by
God.

The later biblical tradition of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) exemplifies three aspects of
early thought about language: (1) divine interest in and control over its use and development, (2)
a recognition of the power it gives to humans in relation to their environment, and (3) an
explanation of linguistic diversity, of the fact that people in adjacent communities speak different
and mutually unintelligible languages, together with a survey of the various speech communities
of the world known at the time to the Hebrew people.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Tower of Babel

(…)

In Christian Europe the position of Hebrew as the language of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)
gave valid grounds through many centuries for regarding Hebrew, the language in which God was
assumed to have addressed Adam, as the parent language of all humankind. Such a view
continued to be expressed even well into the 19th century. Only since the mid-1800s has linguistic
science made sufficient progress finally to clarify the impracticability of speculation along these
lines.

When people have begun to reflect on language, its relation to thinking becomes a central
concern. Several cultures have independently viewed the main function of language as the
expression of thought. Ancient Indian grammarians speak of the soul apprehending things with
the intellect and inspiring the mind with a desire to speak, and in the
Greek intellectual tradition Aristotle declared, “Speech is the representation of the experiences
of the mind” (On Interpretation). Such an attitude passed into Latin theory and thence
into medieval doctrine. Medieval grammarians envisaged three stages in the speaking process:
things in the world exhibit properties; these properties are understood by the minds of humans;
and, in the manner in which they have been understood, so they are communicated to others by
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the resources of language. Rationalist writers on language in the 17th century gave essentially a
similar account: speaking is expressing thoughts by signs invented for the purpose, and words of
different classes (the different parts of speech) came into being to correspond to the different
aspects of thinking.

Such a view of language continued to be accepted as generally adequate and gave rise to the sort
of definition proposed by Henry Sweet and quoted above. The main objection to it is that it either
gives so wide an interpretation to thought as virtually to empty the word of any specific content
or gives such a narrow interpretation of language as to exclude a great deal of normal usage. A
recognition of the part played by speaking and writing in social cooperation in everyday life has
highlighted the many and varied functions of language in all cultures, apart from the functions
strictly involved in the communication of thought, which had been the main focus of attention for
those who approached language from the standpoint of the philosopher.

To allow for the full range of language used by speakers, more-comprehensive definitions of
language have been proposed on the lines of the second one quoted at the beginning of this
article—namely, “A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social
group cooperates.” Despite the breadth of this definition, however, its use of the
word vocal excludes all languages that are not vocalized, particularly manual (signed) languages.

A rather different criticism of accepted views on language began to be made in the 18th century,
most notably by the French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac in “Essai sur l’origine des
connaissances humaines” (1746; “Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge”) and by Johann
Gottfried von Herder. These thinkers were concerned with the origin and development of
language in relation to thought in a way that earlier students had not been. The medieval and
rationalist views implied that humans, as rational, thinking creatures, invented language to
express their thoughts, fitting words to an already developed structure of intellectual
competence. With the examination of the actual and the probable historical relations between
thinking and communicating, it became more plausible to say that language emerged not as the
means of expressing already formulated judgments, questions, and the like but as the means of
thought itself, and that humans’ rationality developed together with the development of their
capacity for communicating.

The relations between thought and communication are certainly not fully explained today, and it
is clear that it is a great oversimplification to define thought as subvocal speech, in the manner of
some behaviourists. But it is no less clear that propositions and other alleged logical structures
cannot be wholly separated from the language structures said to express them. Even the
symbolizations of modern formal logic are ultimately derived from statements made in some
natural language and are interpreted in that light.

The intimate connection between language and thought, as opposed to the earlier assumed
unilateral dependence of language on thought, opened the way to a recognition of the possibility
that different language structures might in part favour or even determine different ways of
understanding and thinking about the world. All people inhabit a broadly similar world, or they
would be unable to translate from one language to another, but they do not all inhabit a world
exactly the same in all particulars, and translation is not merely a matter of substituting different
but equivalent labels for the contents of the same inventory. From this stem
the notorious difficulties in translation, especially when the systematizations of science,
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law, morals, social structure, and so on are involved. The extent of the interdependence of
language and thought—linguistic relativity, as it has been termed—is still a matter of debate, but
the fact of such interdependence can hardly fail to be acknowledged.

Ways of studying language

Languages are immensely complicated structures. One soon realizes how complicated any
language is when trying to learn it as a second language. If one tries to frame an exhaustive
description of all the rules embodied in one’s language—the rules by means of which a native user
is able to produce and understand an infinite number of correct well-formed sentences—one can
easily appreciate the complexity of the knowledge that a child acquires while mastering a
native vernacular. The descriptions of languages written so far are in most cases excellent as far
as they go, but they still omit more than they contain of an explicit account of native users’
competence in their language, whether that language is English, Swahili, or Japanese Sign
Language (nihon shuwa). Likewise, ongoing work in the study of language has underscored just
how much effort is needed to bring palpable fact within systematic statement.

This article proposes simply to give a brief outline of the way language or languages can be
considered and described from different points of view, or at different levels, each contributing
something essential and unique to a full understanding of the subject. A more detailed treatment
of the science of linguistics can be found in the article linguistics.

Phonetics and phonology

The most obvious aspect of language is speech. Speech is not essential to the definition of an
infinitely productive communication system, such as is constituted by a language. But, in fact,
speech is the universal material of most human language, and the conditions of speaking
and hearing have, throughout human history, shaped and determined its development. The
study of the anatomy, physiology, neurology, and acoustics of speaking is called phonetics; (…)

What is distinctive in one language may not be distinctive in another or may be used in a different
way; this is an additional difficulty to be overcome in learning a foreign language. In Chinese and
in several other languages loosely called tone languages, the pitch, or tone, on which a syllable is
said helps to distinguish one word from another: ma in northern Chinese on a level tone means
“mother,” on a rising tone means “hemp,” and on a falling tone means “to curse.” In English and
in most of the languages of Europe (though not all—Swedish and Norwegian are exceptions),
pitch differences do not distinguish one word from another but form part of the intonation tunes
that contribute to the structure and structural meaning of spoken sentences.

Languages differ in the ways in which consonant and vowel sounds can be grouped
into syllables in words. English and German tolerate several consonants before and after a single
vowel: strengths has three consonant sounds before and three after a single vowel sound
(ng and th stand for one sound each). Italian does not have such complex syllables, and in
Japanese and Swahili, for example, the ratio of consonant and vowel sounds in syllables and in
words is much more even. Speakers of such languages find English words of the sort just
mentioned very hard to pronounce, though to a native speaker of English they are perfectly
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natural, natural in this context meaning “within the sounds and sound sequences whose mastery
is acquired in early childhood as part of one’s primary language.”

All these considerations relating to the use of speech sounds in particular languages fall under the
general heading of phonology, which may be defined as the sound system of a language;
phonology is often regarded as one component of language structure.

Grammar

Another component of language structure is grammar. There is more to language than sounds,
and words are not to be regarded as merely sequences of syllables. The concept of the word is a
grammatical concept; in speech, words are not separated by pauses, but they are recognized as
recurrent units that make up sentences. Very generally, grammar is concerned with the relations
between words in sentences. Classes of words, or parts of speech, as they are often called, are
distinguished because they occupy different places in sentence structure, and in most languages
some of them appear in different forms according to their function (English man, men; walk,
walked; I, me; and so on). (…)

Traditionally, grammar has been divided into syntax and morphology, syntax dealing with the
relations between words in sentence structure and morphology with the internal grammatical
structure of words. The relation between girl and girls and the relationship (irregular)
between woman and women would be part of morphology; the relation of concord between the
girl [or woman] is here and the girls [or women] are here would be part of syntax. (…)

Grammar is different from phonology and vocabulary (see below Semantics), though the
word grammar is often used comprehensively to cover all aspects of language structure.(…).

Grammatical forms and grammatical structures are part of the communicative apparatus of
languages, and along with vocabulary, or lexicon (the stock of individual words in a language),
they serve to express all the meanings required. Spoken language has, in addition, resources such
as emphatic stressing and intonation. (…)

Semantics

Language exists to be meaningful; the study of meaning, both in general theoretical terms and in
reference to a specific language, is known as semantics. Semantics embraces the meaningful
functions of phonological features, such as intonation, and of grammatical structures and the
meanings of individual words. It is this last domain, the lexicon, that forms much of the subject
matter of semantics. The word stock of a language is very large; The Oxford English Dictionary, for
example, consists of some 600,000 words. When the lexicons of specialized, dialectal, and global
varieties of English are taken into account, this total must easily exceed one million. The lexicons
of less widely used languages can be just as large.

Among the many examples of investigation for study within semantics are the sense relations
between words (such as synonymy and antonymy), the nature of “semantic features” of word
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meaning (e.g., woman = [adult, female, human]), and the ways in which words group themselves
into domains (“semantic fields”). (…)

Language variants

The word language contains a multiplicity of different designations. Two senses have already
been distinguished: language as a universal species-specific capability of the human race and
languages as the various manifestations of that capability, as with English, French, Latin, Swahili,
Malay, and so on. There is, of course, no observable universal language over and above the various
languages that have been or are spoken or written, but one may choose to concentrate on the
general and even the universal features, characteristics, and components of different languages
and on the ways in which the same sets of descriptive procedures and explanatory theories may
be applied to different languages. In so doing one may refer to language (in general) as one’s
object of study. This is what is done by linguists, or linguistic scientists, persons devoting
themselves to the scientific study of languages (as opposed to the popular sense of linguists as
polyglots, persons having a command of several different languages).