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This article is about the properties of language in general. For the use of language by humans, see
natural language. For the linguistics journal, see
Language (journal).
Cuneiform was the first known form of
written language, but spoken language is believed to predate writing by tens of thousands of years at least.
A language is a dynamic set of visual, auditory, or tactile symbols of communication and the elements used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon.
Language is considered to be an exclusively human mode of
communication; although other animals make use of quite sophisticated
communicative systems, none of these are known to make use of all of
the properties that linguists use to define language.
Properties of language
A set of agreed-upon symbols is only one feature of language; all
languages must define the structural relationships between these
symbols in a system of grammar.
Rules of grammar are what distinguish language from other forms of
communication. They allow a finite set of symbols to be manipulated to
create a potentially infinite number of grammatical utterances.
Another property of language is that its symbols are arbitrary.
Any concept or grammatical rule can be mapped onto a symbol. Most
languages make use of sound, but the combinations of sounds used do not
have any inherent meaning – they are merely an agreed-upon
convention to represent a certain thing by users of that language. For
instance, there is nothing about the Spanish word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to convey the idea of "nothing". Another set of sounds (for example, the English word nothing)
could equally be used to represent the same concept, but all Spanish
speakers have acquired or learned to correlate this meaning for this
particular sound pattern. For Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian/Kosovan or Bosnian speakers on the other hand, nada means something else; it means "hope".
The study of language
Linguistics
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Main article: Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific and philosophical 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
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The historical record of linguistics begins in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BCE grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, known as the Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी) and with Tolkāppiyar, the 3rd century BCE grammarian of the Tamil work Tolkāppiyam. Pāṇini’s 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 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.[citation needed] In the 20th century, substantial contributions to the understanding of language came from Ferdinand de Saussure, Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson,[1] which are characterized as being highly systematic.[1]
Human languages
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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 a living language, that is, it is in a continuous state of change, is known as a modern language.
Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible.[2] 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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A programming language is an extreme case of a formal language that
can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a
computer, to perform specific tasks.[3] 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
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The term "animal languages" is often used for non-human languages. Linguists do not consider these to be "language", but describe them as
Classical
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