Language
From Encyclopædia
Language is a system of
communication specific to the human
race. It is primarily oral-aural, in that all naturally evolved large-scale linguistic systems have as their fundamental medium orderly patterns of sound produced by the human voice (oral) and perceived and processed by the ear (aural).While nothing approaching solid knowledge about the development and evolution of language is available to contemporary scholarship, there is some
evidence that humans have been speaking for at least 40 of the roughly estimated 100 millennia since our species (Homo sapiens) emerged. Some believe that the development of language may in fact have been coterminous with that of the species itself. In either eventuality, it is also widely held that the ability to speak may have evolved synchronously with the use of tools, perhaps in a spiraling process of reciprocal reinforcement as
cooperative behavior among humans grew more effective and complex. Whatever the details of the first emergence of language, and whether that emergence was a unique event (monogenesis) or took place in various subpopulations of the species (polygenesis), diversification over the millennia has led to somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 distinct languages being spoken in the
world at present. The discrepancy in count is attributable to such factors as differing definitions of language versus dialect.Though language is primarily oral-aural, there are important extensions and manifestations of language that are supplementary or even alternative to the aural-oral. On the one
hand, several SIGN LANGUAGES are based on gesture-vision rather than voice-audition; on the other, various epicommunicational systems transcode language itself into other media than the oral-aural. The best-known of these is writing, in which
speech sounds or other linguistic elements are represented as visual symbols, which are then perceived and processed visually (reading). Writing itself may be represented yet again into tertiary systems such as the touch-based code of the
braille system used by the blind. (See also WRITING SYSTEMS, EVOLUTION OF.)Despite the great variety of languages spoken throughout the
world, and a superficial impression of bewildering differences among them, most linguists agree that all languages are essentially similar in structure and function, and most particularly in communicative and expressive power. This power is in part to be accounted for by the phenomenon known as duality: the preponderantly arbitrary relation between the meaning of a morpheme (a simple meaning-bearing unit) and its sound. Thus one and the same creature may be called dog, perro, chien, Hund, sobaka, kelev, mbwa, animush, or inu. Duality, which creates a virtually unbounded capacity for new concept-bearing forms, is one of the properties that sets human language clearly apart from the
communication systems of even the most intelligent higher
primates. (See also [[animal
communication|animal communication]].)While languages appear to be most similar--some would argue even identical--in their semantic and logical structure, and most disparate in their sound systems, the structural and organizational uniformity in the latter far outweighs the differences. This striking uniformity across languages doubtless attest to the essential physiological and cognitive parity of the human
race, despite other, relatively superficial, differences among peoples.The study of universals--properties common to most or all languages--holds a prominent place in the contemporary study of language. One surprising result of research in this area is that relatively few similarities across languages are apparently attributable to the sharing of "absolute" universals. Most similarities are rather to be accounted for in terms of implicational universal (if a language has
property P it will also have
property Q) or parametric universals (not that all or most languages have some absolute
property P, but that a language will select a variant of such a
property from a universally fixed set. Despite the comparative paucity of absolute universals in the strict sense, however, it would not be difficult to compile a lengthy list of properties shared by most or all languages. For example, all languages have words that combine in syntactic patterns to convey meanings through the use of
speech sounds; all languages have among their words types that correspond at least roughly to nouns and verbs in English; all languages form syntactic word groupings roughly comparable to sentences, and differentiate in one way or another between statements, questions, and commands.Human linguistic uniformity is also dramatically attested in language acquisition. All physiologically and psychologically normal children, differences in physical and cultural type notwithstanding, manage to become proficient speakers of their native language by the age of four or five, even without instruction. Moreover, this startling special ability for language acquisition tends to drop off around the onset of puberty, again irrespective of linguistic, cultural, or physical differences. Such universal uniformity in language acquisition is taken by many as indicative of a species-specific language faculty largely independent of other cognitive-intellectual endowments.While language has been the subject of philosophical and even religious speculation since ancient
The Times origins of modern language scholarship are most directly traced to the
Renaissance, with subsequent tremendous
growth resulting from the development of comparative
grammar and
historical linguistics in the 19th century. Today the most
Central language dis?ipline is
linguistics. Related fields include
anthropological linguistics,
applied linguistics,
geographical linguistics,
psycholinguistics, SOCIOLINGUISTICS, and the various specific language-
literature disciplines. The practice in many modern universities is to consolidate the formal study of language under the transdisciplinary
umbrella or cognitive
science, supported by the auxiliary fields of computer
science and artificial
intelligence.
Joseph L. MaloneBibliography: Akmajian, Adrian, et al.,
linguistics: An Introduction to Language and
communication, 3d ed. (1990); Finegan, E., and Besnier, N., Language: Its Structure and Use (1989); O'Grady,
William, et al., Contemporary
linguistics: An Introduction (1989).
