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   is the scientific[1][2] study of natural language.[3][4] Linguistics encompasses a number of

sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure (grammar) and the
study of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Grammar 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. Other sub-disciplines of linguistics include the
following: evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language; historical linguistics,
which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic
variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and functioning of
language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at the representation of language in the brain;
language acquisition, which considers how children acquire their first language and how children and
adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent languages; and discourse analysis, which is
concerned with the structure of texts and conversations, and pragmatics with how meaning is
transmitted based on a combination of linguistic competence, non-linguistic knowledge, and the
context of the speech act.

Linguistics is narrowly defined as the scientific approach to the study of language, but language can be
approached from a variety of directions, and a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to it
and influence its study. Semiotics, for example, is a related field concerned with the general study of
signs and symbols both in language and outside of it. Literary theorists study the use of language in
artistic literature. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as psychology,
speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy,
neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics.

Within the field, `
  is used to describe someone who either studies the field or uses linguistic
methodologies to study groups of languages or particular languages. Outside the field, this term is
commonly used to refer to people who speak many languages or have a great vocabulary.

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 is the vocalized form of human communication. It is based upon the syntactic combination of
lexicals and names that are drawn from very large (usually >10,000 different words) vocabularies.
Each spoken word is created out of the phonetic combination of a limited set of vowel and consonant
speech sound units. These vocabularies, the syntax which structures them, and their set of speech
sound units, differ creating the existence of many thousands of different types of mutually
unintelligible human languages. Human speakers (polyglots) are often able to communicate in two or
more of them. The vocal abilities that enable humans to produce speech also provide humans with the
ability to sing.

A gestural form of human communication exists for the deaf in the form of sign language. Speech in
some cultures has become the basis of a written language, often one that differs in its vocabulary,
syntax and phonetics from its associated spoken one, a situation called diglossia. Speech in addition to
its use in communication, it is suggested by some psychologists such as Vygotsky is internally used by
mental processes to enhance and organize cognition in the form of an interior monologue.

Speech is researched in terms of the speech production and speech perception of the sounds used in
spoken language. Other research topics concern speech repetition, the ability to map heard spoken
words into the vocalizations needed to recreated that plays a key role in the vocabulary expansion in
children and speech errors. Several academic disciplines study these including acoustics, psychology,
speech pathology, linguistics, cognitive science, communication studies, otolaryngology and computer
science. Another area of research is how the human brain in its different areas such as the Broca's area
and Wernicke's area underlies speech.

It is controversial how far human speech is unique in that other animals also communicate with
vocalizations. While none in the wild have compatibly large vocabularies, research upon the nonverbal
abilities of language trained apes such as Washoe and Kanzi raises the possibility that they might have
these capabilities.

The origins of speech are unknown and subject to much debate and speculation.

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is a process whereby information is enclosed in a package and is

channeled and imparted by a sender to a receiver via some medium. The receiver then
decodes the message and gives the sender a feedback. All forms of communication require a
sender, a message, and an intended recipient, however the receiver need not be present or
aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication in order for the act
of communication to occur. Communication requires that all parties have an area of
communicative commonality. There are auditory means, such as speech, song, and tone of
voice, and there are nonverbal means, such as body language, sign language, paralanguage,
touch, eye contact, through media, i.e., pictures, graphics and sound, and writing.

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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 the linguist Max Weinreich is
credited as saying that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy". Constructed
languages such as Esperanto, programming languages, and various mathematical formalisms
are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by human languages.

Bernard Luskin, UCLA, 1970, advanced computer assisted instruction and began to connect
media and psychology into what is now the field of media psychology. In 1998, the American
Association of Psychology, Media Psychology Division 46 Task Force report on psychology
and new technologies combined media and communication as pictures, graphics and sound
increasingly dominate modern communication.

 
 



Nonverbal communication is the process of communicating through sending and receiving

wordless messages. Such messages can be communicated through gesture, body language or
posture; facial expression and eye contact, object communication such as clothing, hairstyles
or even architecture, or symbols and infographics, as well as through an aggregate of the
above, such as behavioral communication. Nonverbal communication plays a key role in
every person's day to day life, from employment to romantic engagements.

Speech may also contain nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality,
emotion and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation and stress.
Likewise, written texts have nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial
arrangement of words, or the use of emoticons. A portmanteau of the English words emotion
(or emote) and icon, an emoticon is a symbol or combination of symbols, such as :), used to
convey emotional content in written or message form.

Other communication channels such as telegraphy fit into this category, whereby signals
travel from person to person by an alternative means. These signals can in themselves be
representative of words, objects or merely be state projections. Trials have shown that humans
can communicate directly in this way[3] without body language, voice tonality or words.

  



Visual communication is communication through visual aid. It is the conveyance of ideas and
information in forms that can be read or looked upon. Primarily associated with two
dimensional images, it includes: signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration,
colour and electronic resources. It solely relies on vision. It is form of communication with
visual effect. It explores the idea that a visual message with text has a greater power to inform,
educate or persuade a person. It is communication by presenting information through visual
form.

The evaluation of a good visual design is based on measuring comprehension by the audience,
not on aesthetic or artistic preference. There are no universally agreed-upon principles of
beauty and ugliness. There exists a variety of ways to present information visually, like
gestures, body languages, video and TV. Here, focus is on the presentation of text, pictures,
diagrams, photos, et cetera, integrated on a computer display. The term visual presentation is
used to refer to the actual presentation of information. Recent research in the field has focused
on web design and graphically oriented usability. Graphic designers use methods of visual
communication in their professional practice.


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Oral communication is a process whereby information is transferred from a sender to receiver;

in general communication is usually transferred by both verbal means and visual aid
throughout the process.. The receiver could be an individual person, a group of persons or
even an audience. There are a few of oral communication types: discussion, speeches,
presentations, etc. However, often when you communicate face to face the body language and
your voice tonality has a bigger impact than the actual words that you are saying.

A widely cited and widely mis-interpreted figure, used to emphasize the importance of
delivery, is that "communication is 55% body language, 38% tone of voice, 7% content of
words", the so-called "7%-38%-55% rule".[5] This is not however what the cited research
shows ± rather, when conveying „


 if body language, tone of voice, and words   „„
then body language and tone of voice will be believed more than words.[6][
` 



„„„ ] For
example, a person saying "I'm delighted to meet you" while mumbling, hunched over, and
looking away will be interpreted as insincere.  „  


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You can notice that the content or the word that you are using is not the determining part of a
good communication. The "how you say it" has a major impact on the receiver. You have to
capture the attention of the audience and connect with them. For example, two persons saying
the same joke, one of them could make the audience die laughing related to his good body
language and tone of voice. However, the second person that has the exact same words could
make the audience stare at one another.[



„„„ ]

In an oral communication, it is possible to have visual aid helping you to provide more precise
information. Often enough, we use a presentation program in presentations related to our
speech to facilitate or enhance the communication process.

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is a term most commonly used to refer to so-called "natural languages" ² the
spoken forms of communication ubiquitous among humankind. By extension the term also
refers to the type of thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both
meanings is the systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of symbols, which
dynamically reference concepts and assemble according to structured patterns to form
expressions and communicate meaning. The scientific study of language is called linguistics.

A language is a system of signs (symbols, indices, icons) for encoding and decoding
information. Since language and languages became an object of study by ancient grammarians,
the term has had many different definitions. The English word derives from Latin `
,
"language, tongue." "Tongue," as a physical organ of speech, is also used in English and other
languages apart from Latin as a metaphor.[1]

In modern times, a large number of artificial languages have been devised, requiring a
distinction between their consciously innovated type and natural language. The latter are
forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. 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 the properties that
linguists use to define language.
The term ³language´ has branched by analogy into several meanings.[1] 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. In
cognitive science the term is also sometimes 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 pairing a specific sign with an intended meaning,
established through social conventions.[2]

In the late 19th century Charles Sanders Peirce called this pairing process semiosis and the
study of it semiotics.[3] According to another founder of semiotics, Roman Jakobson, the latter
portrays language as code in which sounds ( 

 ) signify concepts ( 
).[4] Language
is the process of encoding  
 in the sounds forming the  

  and decoding from
 

  to  
.

Concepts themselves are  

  for the objective reality being conceived. When discussed
as a general phenomenon then, "language" may imply a particular type of human thought that
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, 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, `

, was 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 presented below.

     

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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 and then written, and then an understanding and
explanation of their grammar is attempted.

Languages live, die, polymorph, 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 ` 
`
„ or modern
language. It is for these reasons that the biggest challenge for a speaker of a foreign language
is to remain immersed in that language in order to keep up with the changes of that language.

Making a principled distinction between one language and another is sometimes nearly
impossible.[25] 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.

A sign language (also signed language) is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed
sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns (manual communication, body
language) to convey meaning²simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and
movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's
thoughts. Hundreds of sign languages are in use around the world and are at the cores of local
Deaf cultures.

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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 was created by Marc Okrand for
the Star Trek movies and a number of translated works have been released by fans.

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 be designed for the
purpose of human communication. Specifically excluded are reconstructed languages and
computer programming 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

 ` 
 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 ophthalmologist

Zamenhof. It has a relatively large community roughly estimated at about two 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.
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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.

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` is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor,
called the proto-language of that family. The term comes from the Tree model of language
origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to
people in a biological family tree or in a subsequent modification to species in a phylogenetic
tree of evolutionary taxonomy. All the apparently biological terms are used only in the
metaphoric sense. No real biology is included in any way in the metaphor.

As of early 2009, SIL Ethnologue catalogued 6,909 living human languages.[1] A "living
language" is simply one that is in wide use as a primary form of communication by a specific
group of living people. The exact number of known living languages will vary from 5,000 to
10,000, depending generally on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in
particular on how one classifies dialects. There are also many dead and, distinct from dead,
extinct languages.

Membership of languages in the same language family is established by comparative

linguistics. Daughter languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship; the
former term is more current in modern times, but the latter is equally as traditional.[2] The
evidence of linguistic relationship is observable shared characteristics that are not attributed to
borrowing. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the
proto-language (or reflexes of such features) that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing
(convergence). Membership in a branch or group within a language family is established by
shared innovations; that is, common features of those languages which are not attested in the
common ancestor of the entire family. For example, what makes Germanic languages
"Germanic" is that they share vocabulary and grammatical features which are not believed to
have been present in Proto-Indo-European. These features are believed to be innovations that
took place in Proto-Germanic, a descendant of Proto-Indo-European that was the source of all
Germanic languages.
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