Language (general)

A language is a system for encoding and decoding information. Determining what kinds of signals or symbols constitute language is not always a straightforward matter. Does the blossoming of a flower, whose color or scent signals to bees or birds to come and pollinate it, constitute a form of language? Does a skunk spraying constitute language, since it can certainly be said to be a form of communication? Are communications that involve, say, chemicals or pheromones part of some kind of language? Can we say that signaling behavior that is learned, rather than wired in, is language, whereas signaling behavior that is instinctive is not language?

The following article concerns language in all of its aspects. The definition of language - what counts as a language and what doesn't - is a difficult philosophical topic, deserving an article in its own right.

Human languages (Natural languages)

Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science of studying them is linguistics, but linguistics is not the only scholarly area with an interest in human languages. The discovery of the oldest evidence of language, primarily via vestiges of early writing, falls under the pervue of archaeology and also history. The mechanisms related to learning of human languages may be of interest in psychology and medicine due to its exercise of higher brain function. Computer scientists have been engaged in the study of human languages for the purpose of machine translation between different human languages.

Properties of natural languages

Linguistic scholars have described human languages as a system of symbols (sometimes known as lexemes) and the grammar (rules) by which the symbols are manipulated. The assignment of meaning to a symbol in a human language is arbitrary. 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 nada 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 nada means "hope". Not all mappings of symbols to concepts are entirely arbitrary, however; spoken language may assign meaning to symbols because the spoken sound is imitative of a natural phenomenon. Thus for example, the word "meow" sounds similar to what it represents (see Onomatopoeia).

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 versus dialect classification

From the point of view of historical comparative linguistics, two natural languages with noticable difference in pronunciation but which are still mutually intelligible may be classified as being two dialects of the same language. However, the decision to term a particular regional language as its own language, versus a dialect of another language, is sometimes also the result of political divisions, cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or other factors. Max Weinreich is credited as saying that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy". For instance, some dialects of German are mutually intelligible with some dialects of Dutch. The transition between languages within the same language family is usually gradual (see dialect continuum). The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.

Study of grammar

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 Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी). Pāṇini’s 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.

Where do Wittgenstein and Quine argue this? Philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine, and Jacques Derrida have disputed the possibility of such a rigorous study of language by questioning many of the assumptions necessary for such a study, and have put forth their own views on the nature of language. There is no end in sight to this debate.

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

Humans have also deliberately contructed artificial languages such as Esperanto, Lojban, Ido, Interlingua, and Klingon. Esperanto is a well-known artificial language that 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.

Do animals have language?

Some animals communicate in a system which might be considered language, consisting either of calls or body postures used consistently for certain purposes and which are learned behavior. There are examples of multiple signals existing within one species, but signals are also sometimes used across species, such as when birds respond to chattering and tail waggles made by squirrels to warn of the presence of a predator.

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.

Formal, mathematical, and computer languages

The activity of computer engineering has produced numerous computer programming languages, and in fact they have created several subfields of scholarly research relating to them, such as formal languages and compilers. Mathematicians have expressed various mathematical formalisms that they describe as languages.

See also

• Linguistics
• Deception
• Philology and Historical linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Sign language

External links

• Language: Origin and Meaning by John Zerzan
• Distribution of languages on the Internet
• Speech accent archive
• Listen to online radio of the world's languages
• Learning Global Languages
• 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
• Language & Communication at The Psychology Wiki