Language
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A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. |
A
language is a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures or written symbols which communicate thoughts or feelings.
Human spoken and written languages can be described as a
system of
symbols (sometimes known as
lexemes) and the
grammars (
rules) by which the symbols are manipulated. The word "language" is also used to refer to common properties of languages.
Language learning is normal in human childhood. Most human languages use patterns of
sound or
gesture for symbols which enable
communication with others around them. There are thousands of human languages, and these seem to share certain properties, even though many shared properties have exceptions.
There is
no defined line between a language and a
dialect, but
Max Weinreich is credited as saying that "
a language is a dialect with an army and a navy;" in other words, the distinction between a language and a dialect of a language is as much due to political divisions as it is because of cultural differences, distinctive
writing systems, or
mutual intelligibility.
Humans and computer programs have also constructed other languages, including
constructed languages such as
Esperanto,
Ido,
Interlingua,
Klingon, programming languages, and various mathematical formalisms. These languages are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by human languages.
Languages are not just sets of symbols. They also often conform to a rough
grammar, or system of rules, used to manipulate the symbols. While a set of symbols may be used for expression or communication, it is primitive and relatively unexpressive, because there are no clear or regular relationships between the symbols.
For example, imagine going on a walk with a person who only knows individual symbols. If you saw a dog, he might say, "Dog not scare" or "Not scare dog". Although any English speaker would have some notion of what he was talking about, the relationship between the words is unclear. Is he scared of dogs? Or just that dog? Or does he want to scare the dog off? Does he think the dog is scared? But if you respond, "I'm not scared of dogs", the relationship between "dog" and "scare" is quite apparent and hence the meaning of the utterance.
Another property of language is the arbitrariness of the symbols. Any symbol can be mapped onto any concept (or even onto one of the rules of the grammar). For instance, there is nothing about the
Spanish word
' itself that forces Spanish speakers to use it to mean nothing. That is the meaning all Spanish speakers have memorized for that sound pattern. But for Croatian speakers ' means "hope".
However, it must be understood that just because in principle the symbols are arbitrary does not mean that a language cannot have symbols that are iconic of what they stand for. Words such as "meow" sound similar to what they represent (see
Onomatopoeia), but they could be replaced with words such as "jarn", and as long as everyone memorized the new word, the same concepts could be expressed with it.
Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science studying them is
linguistics.
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 usually gradual (see
dialect continuum).
Some like to make parallels with
biology, where it is not always 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.
Origins of human language
No one yet agrees on when language was first used by humans (or their ancestors). Estimates range from about two million (2,000,000) years ago, during the time of
Homo habilis, to as recently as forty thousand (40,000) years ago, during the time of
Cro-Magnon man.
Language taxonomy
The
classification of natural languages can be performed on the basis of different underlying principles (different closeness notions, respecting different properties and relations between languages); important directions of present classifications are:
* paying attention to the historical evolution of languages results in a genetic classification of languages—which is based on genetic relatedness of languages,
* paying attention to the internal structure of languages (
grammar) results in a typological classification of languages—which is based on similarity of one or more components of the language's grammar across languages,
* and respecting geographical closeness and contacts between language-speaking communities results in areal groupings of languages.
The different classifications do not match each other and are not expected to, but the correlation between them is an important point for many
linguistic research works. (There is a parallel to the classification of
species in biological
phylogenetics here: consider
monophyletic vs.
polyphyletic groups of species.)
The task of genetic classification belongs to the field of
historical-comparative linguistics, of typological—to
linguistic typology.
See also
Taxonomy, and
Taxonomic classification for the general idea of classification and taxonomies.
Genetic classification
The world's languages have been grouped into families of languages that are believed to have common ancestors. Some of the major families are the
Indo-European languages, the
Afro-Asiatic languages, the
Austronesian languages, and the
Sino-Tibetan languages.
The shared features of languages from one family can be due to shared ancestry. (Compare with
homology in biology.)
Typological classification
An example of a typological classification is the classification of languages on the basis of the basic order of the
verb, the
subject and the
object in a
sentence into several types:
SVO,
SOV,
VSO, and so on, languages. (
English, for instance, belongs to the
SVO language type.)
The shared features of languages of one type (= from one typological class) may have arisen completely independently. (Compare with
analogy in biology.) Their cooccurence might be due to the universal laws governing the structure of natural languages—
language universals.
Areal classification
The following language groupings can serve as some linguistically significant examples of areal linguistic units, or
sprachbunds:
Balkan linguistic union, or the bigger group of
European languages;
Caucasian languages. Although the members of each group are not closely
genetically related, there is a reason for them to share similar features, namely: their speakers have been in contact for a long time within a common community and the languages
converged in the course of the history. These are called "
areal features".
N.B.: one should be careful about the underlying classification principle for groups of languages which have apparently a geographical name: besides areal linguistic units, the
taxa of the genetic classification (
language families) are often given names which themselves or parts of which refer to geographical areas.
Constructed languages
Some individuals have constructed their own artificial languages, for practical, experimental, personal, or ideological reasons. For example, one prominent
artificial language,
Esperanto, was created by
L. L. Zamenhof as a compilation of various elements of different languages, and was intended to be an easy-to-learn language for people familiar with similar 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, and
Christopher Paolini, have created fantasy languages, for literary,
artistic, or personal reasons.
The oldest surviving written grammar for any language is believed to be the
Tolkāppiyam (தொல்காப்பியம்), a book on the grammar of the
Tamil language, written around
200 BC by Tolkāppiyar. Its classification of the alphabet into
consonants and
vowel was a breakthrough. The historical record of the study of language begins in
North India with
Pāṇini, the
5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of
Sanskrit morphology, known as the
(अष्टाध्यायी). grammar is highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the
phoneme, the
morpheme, and the
root; the phoneme was only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later.
In the
Middle East, the
Persian linguist
Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of
Arabic in 760 CE in his monumental work,
Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو,
The Book on Grammar), bringing many
linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished
phonetics from
phonology.
Later in the West, the success of
science,
mathematics, and other
formal systems in the 20th century led many to attempt a formalization of the study of language as a "semantic code". This resulted in the
academic discipline of
linguistics, the founding of which is attributed to
Ferdinand de Saussure.
The term "
animal languages" is often used for non-human languages. Most researchers agree that these are not as complex or expressive as
human language; they may better be described as
animal communication. Some researchers argue that there are significant differences separating human language from the communication of other animals, and that the underlying principles are unrelated.
In several publicised instances, non-human animals have been trained to mimic certain features of human language. For example,
chimpanzees and
gorillas have been taught hand signs based on
American Sign Language; however, they have never been successfully taught its grammar. There was also a case in 2003 of
Kanzi, a captive bonobo chimpanzee allegedly independently creating some words to mean certain concepts. While animal communication has debated levels of
semantics, it has not been shown to have
syntax in the sense that human languages do.
Some researchers argue that a continuum exists among the communication methods of all social animals, pointing to the fundamental requirements of group behaviour and the existence of "
mirror cells" in
primates. This, however, may not be a
scientific question, but is perhaps more one of
definition. What exactly is the definition of the word "language"? Most researchers agree that, although human and more primitive languages have
analogous features, they are not
homologous.
Mathematics and
computer science use artificial entities called formal languages (including
programming languages and
markup languages, but also some that are far more theoretical in nature). These often take the form of
character strings, produced by some combination of
formal grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.
*
List of languages*
List of official languages*
List of common phrases in various languages*
Ethnologue " a fairly complete list of languages, locations, population and genetic affiliation
*
Official language*
Extinct language*
Symbolic communication*
Translation*
Whistled language*
Computer-assisted language learning (a historical perspective)
*
Deception*
Language education*
Language reform*
Language policy*
Language school*
Linguistic protectionism*
Linguistics basic topics*
List of language academies*
Visual language*
Intercultural competence*
Metacommunicative competence*
Naming*
Non-verbal communication*
Non-sexist language*
Orthography*
Philology and
Historical linguistics*
Philosophy of language*
Profanity*
Psycholinguistics*
Sign language*
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis*
Slang*
Speech therapy*
Terminology*
Tongue-twister*
ISO 639 (2- and 3-letter codes for language names)
*
ISO 639-3 (3-letter codes attempting to cover all languages)
*
FOXP2 (gene that has been implicated in cases of SLI)
*
ILR scale (defines five levels of language proficiency)
* Crystal, David (1997).
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
* Crystal, David (2001).
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
* Katzner, K. (1999).
The Languages of the World. New York, Routledge.
* McArthur, T. (1996).
The Concise Companion to the English Language. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
*
Kandel ER, Schwartz JH, Jessell TM.
Principles of Neural Science, 4th ed., pp.1173. McGraw-Hill, New York (2000). ISBN 0838577016
*
Language: Origin and Meaning by John Zerzan*
Animal sounds in different languages*
Distribution of languages on the Internet*
Speech accent archive*
Listen to online radio of the world's languages*
Linguaphone official site*
English as a foreign language*
The Animal Communication Project*
The World's Most Widely Spoken Languages*
"Languages " Bridges and Walls to Communication", from
Awake! magazine
