thumb|right|220px|[[Cuneiform is one of the first known forms of
written language, but
spoken language is believed to predate writing by tens of thousands of years at least.]]
A
language is a system for encoding and decoding
information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "
natural languages" — the forms of
communication considered peculiar to
humankind. In
linguistics the term is extended to refer to the
human cognitive facility of creating and using language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic
creation and
usage of systems of
symbols—each referring to linguistic
concepts with
semantic or
logical or otherwise
expressive meanings.
The most obvious manifestations are spoken languages such as
English or
Spoken Chinese. However, there are also
written languages and other systems of visual symbols such as
sign languages.
Although some other animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems, and these are sometimes casually referred to as
animal language, none of these are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use to define language in the strict sense.
When discussed more technically as a general phenomenon then, "language" always implies a particular type of human
thought which can be present even when communication is not the result, and this way of thinking is also sometimes treated as indistinguishable from language itself.
In
Western philosophy for example, language has long been closely associated with
reason, which is also a uniquely human way of using symbols. In
Ancient Greek philosophical terminology, the same word,
logos, was used as a term for both language or speech and reason, and the philosopher
Thomas Hobbes used the English word "speech" so that it similarly could refer to reason, as discussed below.
Properties of language
A set of commonly accepted signs (indices, icons or symbols) is only one feature of language; all languages must define (1) the structural relationships between these signs in a system of
grammar, (2) the context wherein the signs are used (
pragmatics) and (3) dependent on their context the content specificity, i.e. its meaning (
semantics). Rules of grammar are one of the characteristics sometimes said to distinguish language from other forms of communication. They allow a finite set of signs to be manipulated to create a potentially infinite number of grammatical utterances. However, this definition is self-circular. The structural relationships make sense only within language; the structure of language exists only in language. It is impossible to have a logically correct definition of a noun or verb. And logic itself concerns itself with propositions which are closely linked with content specificity i.e. semantics.
Another property of language is that its symbols are
arbitrary. Any concept or grammatical rule can be mapped onto a symbol. In other words, most languages make use of sound, but the combinations of sounds used do not have any necessary and inherent meaning – they are merely an agreed-upon convention to represent a certain thing by users of that language. For instance, the sound combination
nada carries the meaning of "
nothing" in the
Spanish language and also the meaning "
thread" in the
Hindi language. There is nothing about the
word itself that forces Hindi speakers to convey the idea of "
thread", or the idea of "
nothing" for Spanish speakers. Other sets of sounds (for example, the English words
nothing and
thread) could equally be used to represent the same concepts, but all Spanish and Hindi speakers have acquired or learned to correlate their own meanings for this particular sound pattern. Indeed, for speakers of
Slovene and other
South Slavic languages, the sound combination carries the meaning of "
hope", while in
Indonesian, it means "
tone".
This arbitrariness even applies to words with an
onomatopoetic dimension (i.e. words that to some extent simulate the sound of the token referred to). For example, several animal names (e.g.
cuckoo,
whip-poor-will,
katydid) are derived from sounds the respective animal makes, but these forms did not have to be chosen for these meanings. Non-onomatopoetic words can stand just as easily for the same meaning. For instance, the katydid is called a "bush cricket" in British English, a term that bears no relation to the sound the animal makes. In time, onomatopoetic words can also change in form, losing their mimetic status. Onomatopoetic words may have an inherent relation to their referent, but this meaning is not inherent, thus they do not violate arbitrariness.
Origin of language
Even before the theory of
evolution made discussion of more animal-like human ancestors commonplace, philosophical and scientific speculation casting doubt on the use of early language has been frequent throughout history. In modern Western philosophy, speculation by authors such as
Thomas Hobbes and later
Jean-Jacques Rousseau led to the
Académie française declaring the subject off-limits.
The origin of language is of great interest to philosophers because language is such an essential characteristic of human life. In classical
Greek philosophy such inquiry was approached by considering the nature of things, in this case
human nature.
Aristotle, for example, treated humans as creatures with reason and language by their intrinsic nature, related to their natural propensities to be "political," and dwell in
city-state communities (
Greek:
poleis).
Hobbes, followed by
John Locke and others, claimed that language is an extension of the "speech" which humans have within themselves, which in a sense takes the classical view that
reason is one of the most primary characteristics of human nature. Others have argued the opposite - that reason developed out of the need for more complex communication. Rousseau, despite writing before the publication of
Darwin's theory of evolution, claimed that there had once been humans who had no language or reason and who developed language first—rather than reason—the development of which he explicitly described as a mixed blessing, with many negative characteristics.
Since the arrival of Darwin, the subject has been approached more often by scientists than philosophers. For example, neurologist
Terrence Deacon in his
Symbolic Species has argued that reason and language "
coevolved."
Merlin Donald sees language as a later development building upon what he refers to as
mimetic culture, emphasizing that this coevolution depended upon the interactions of many individuals. He writes that:
A shared communicative culture, with sharing of mental representations to some degree, must have come first, before language, creating a social environment in which language would have been useful and adaptive.
The specific causes of the natural selection that led to language are however still the subject of much speculation, but a common theme which goes right back to Aristotle is that many theories propose that the gains to be had from language and/or reason were probably mainly in the area of increasingly sophisticated social structures.
In more recent times, a theory of
mirror neurons has emerged in relation to language.
Ramachandran has gone so far as to claim that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments". Mirror neurons are located in the human inferior frontal cortex and superior parietal lobe, and are unique in that they fire when completing an action and also when witnessing an actor performing the same action. Various studies have proposed a theory of mirror neurons related to language development .
The study of language
Linguistics
Linguistics is the
scientific study of language, encompassing a number of sub-fields. At the core of
theoretical linguistics are the study of language structure (
grammar) and the study of meaning (
semantics). The first of these encompasses
morphology (the formation and composition of
words),
syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into
phrases and
sentences) and
phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units).
Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (
phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and
perceived.
Theoretical linguistics is mostly concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. The fields that are generally considered as the core of theoretical linguistics are
syntax,
phonology,
morphology, and
semantics.
Applied linguistics attempts to put linguistic theories into practice through areas like
translation,
stylistics,
literary criticism and
theory,
discourse analysis,
speech therapy, speech pathology and
foreign language teaching.
History
The historical record of
linguistics begins in
India with
Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of
Sanskrit morphology, known as the
(अष्टाध्यायी) and with
Tolkāppiyar, the 2nd century BC grammarian of the
Tamil work
Tolkāppiyam(தொல்காப்பியம்). grammar is highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the
phoneme, the
morpheme, and the
root; Western linguists only recognized the phoneme some two millennia later. Tolkāppiyar's work is perhaps the first to describe
articulatory phonetics for a language. Its classification of the alphabet into
consonants and
vowels, and elements like nouns, verbs, vowels, and consonants, which he put into classes, were also breakthroughs at the time.
In the
Middle East, the
Persian linguist
Sibawayh (سیبویه) made a detailed and professional description of
Arabic in 760 AD in his monumental work,
Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو,
The Book on Grammar), bringing many
linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book, he distinguished
phonetics from
phonology.
Later in the West, the success of
science,
mathematics, and other
formal systems in the 20th century led many to attempt a formalization of the study of language as a "semantic code". This resulted in the
academic discipline of
linguistics, the founding of which is attributed to
Ferdinand de Saussure. In the 20th century, substantial contributions to the understanding of language came from
Ferdinand de Saussure,
Hjelmslev,
Émile Benveniste and
Roman Jakobson,
[Holquist 1981, xvii-xviii] which are characterized as being highly
systematic.
Human 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, then written, and then an understanding and explanation of their grammar is attempted.
Languages live, die, move from place to place, and change with time. Any language that ceases to change or develop is categorized as a
dead language. Conversely, any language that is in a continuous state of change is known as a
living language or
modern language.
Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible. For instance, there are a few
dialects of
German similar to some dialects of
Dutch. The transition between languages within the same
language family is sometimes gradual (see
dialect continuum).
Some like to make parallels with
biology, where it is not possible to make a well-defined distinction between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the
interactions between languages and
populations. (See
Dialect or
August Schleicher for a longer discussion.)
The concepts of
Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.
Artificial languages
Constructed languages
Some individuals and groups have constructed their own artificial languages, for practical, experimental, personal, or ideological reasons. International auxiliary languages are generally constructed languages that strive to be easier to learn than natural languages; other constructed languages strive to be more logical ("loglangs") than natural languages; a prominent example of this is
Lojban.
Some writers, such as
J. R. R. Tolkien, have created fantasy languages, for literary,
artistic or personal reasons. The fantasy language of the
Klingon race has in recent years been developed by fans of the Star Trek series, including a vocabulary and grammar.
Constructed languages are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by natural languages.
This part of ISO 639 also includes identifiers that denote constructed (or artificial) languages. In order to qualify for inclusion the language must have a literature and it must be designed for the purpose of human communication. Specifically excluded are reconstructed languages and computer programming languages.
International auxiliary languages
Some languages, most constructed, are meant specifically for communication between people of different nationalities or language groups as an easy-to-learn second language. Several of these languages have been constructed by individuals or groups. Natural, pre-existing languages may also be used in this way - their developers merely catalogued and standardized their vocabulary and identified their grammatical rules. These languages are called
naturalistic. One such language,
Latino Sine Flexione, is a simplified form of Latin. Two others,
Occidental and
Novial, were drawn from several Western languages.
To date, the most successful auxiliary language is
Esperanto, invented by Polish ophthalmologist
Zamenhof. It has a relatively large community roughly estimated at about 2 million speakers worldwide, with a large body of literature, songs, and is the only known constructed language to have
native speakers, such as the Hungarian-born American businessman
George Soros. Other auxiliary languages with a relatively large number of speakers and literature are
Interlingua and
Ido.
Controlled languages
Controlled natural languages are subsets of natural languages whose grammars and dictionaries have been restricted in order to reduce or eliminate both ambiguity and complexity. The purpose behind the development and implementation of a controlled natural language typically is to aid non-native speakers of a natural language in understanding it, or to ease computer processing of a natural language. An example of a widely used controlled natural language is
Simplified English, which was originally developed for
aerospace industry maintenance manuals.
Formal languages
Mathematics and
computer science use artificial entities called formal languages (including
programming languages and
markup languages, and some that are more theoretical in nature). These often take the form of
character strings, produced by a combination of
formal grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.
Programming languages
A programming language is a formal language endowed with
semantics that can be used 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 used to facilitate communication about the task of organizing and manipulating information, and to express algorithms precisely. Some authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms; sometimes the term "computer language" is used for artificial languages that are more limited.
Animal communication
The term "
animal languages" is often used for non-human systems of communication. Linguists do not consider these to be "language", but describe them as
animal communication, because the interaction between animals in such communication is fundamentally different in its underlying principles from human language. Nevertheless, some scholars have tried to disprove this mainstream premise through experiments on training chimpanzees to talk.
Karl von Frisch received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his proof of the language and dialects of the bees. Current research indicates that signalling codes are the most fundamental precondition for every coordination within and between cells, tissues, organs and organisms of all organismic kingdoms. All of these signalling codes follow combinatorial (syntactic), context-sensitive (pragmatic) and content-specific (semantic) rules. In contrast to linguists, biolinguistics and biosemiotics consider these codes to be real languages.
In several publicized instances, non-human animals have been taught to understand certain features of human language.
Chimpanzees,
gorillas, and
orangutans have been taught hand signs based on
American Sign Language. The
African Grey Parrot, which possesses the ability to mimic human speech with a high degree of accuracy, is suspected of having sufficient intelligence to comprehend some of the speech it mimics. Most species of
parrot, despite expert mimicry, are believed to have no linguistic comprehension at all.
While proponents of animal communication systems have debated levels of
semantics, these systems have not been found to have anything approaching human language
syntax.
Lists
- Ethnologue - list of languages, locations, population and genetic affiliation
