LINGUISTICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

(A)-1. Linguistics
(A)-2. Some basic linguistic terms: Language, Indo-European languages,
Langue-Parole, Tongue, Lingua Franca, Dialect, Slang, Jargon,
Register, and Idiolect.
(B) Classical and Modern Languages
(C) The English Language: Current Status; History; Classification;
Characteristics (Inflection, Flexibility, and Vocabulary); Varieties of
English.

(A)-1. Linguistics

Each human language is a complex of knowledge and abilities enabling

speakers of the language to communicate with each other, to express
ideas, hypotheses, emotions, desires, and all the other things that need to
be conveyed to other individuals.

Linguistics is the study of these knowledge systems in all their aspects:

how is such a knowledge system structured, how is it acquired, how is it
used in the production and comprehension of messages, how does it
change over time?

Linguists consequently are concerned with a number of particular

questions about the nature of language:
 What properties do all human languages have in common?
 How do languages differ, and to what extent are the differences
systematic, i.e., can we find patterns in the differences?
 How do children acquire such complete knowledge of a language
in such a short time?
 What are the ways in which languages can change over time, and
are there limitations to how languages change?
 What is the nature of the cognitive processes that come into play
when we produce and understand language?

The part of linguistics that is concerned with the structure of language is

divided into a number of subfields:

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  Phonetics – deals with the description and classification of speech
sounds, particularly how sounds are produced, transmitted and
received.
 Phonology – focuses on the study of the speech sounds used in a
particular language. The distinctive accents that many learners of
English have are due to differences between the phonological
system of their language and that of English. From birth, and
possibly before, we learn to recognize and produce the distinctive
sounds of our own language. We do not need to give any thought
to how to have the lips, tongue, teeth, etc. working together to
produce the desired sounds. The physical structures of parts of the
sound system are adapted to produce native-language sounds.
 Morphology - the study of the formation of words
 Syntax - the study of the formation of sentences
 Semantics - the study of meaning
 Pragmatics - the study of language use: pragmatics looks beyond
the literal meaning of an utterance and considers how meaning is
constructed as well as focusing on implied meanings. It considers
language as an instrument of interaction, what people mean when
they use language and how we communicate and understand each
other.

Aside from language structure, other perspectives on language are

represented in specialized or interdisciplinary branches:

 Historical Linguistics: is the study of not only the history of

languages, as the name implies, but also the study of how
languages change, and how languages are related to one another.
 Sociolinguistics: is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all
aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and
context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on
language. It differs from sociology of language, which focuses on
the effect of language on society.
 Psycholinguistics: is the study of the mental aspects of language
and speech. It is primarily concerned with the ways in which
language is represented and processed in the brain.
 Ethnolinguistics (or Anthropological Linguistics): is a field of
linguistics that studies the relationship between language and
culture and how different ethnic groups perceive the world.
 Dialectology: is the study of the way sounds, words and
grammatical forms vary within a language. The term is usually
used to describe the study both of accents (the varying sounds used

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 within a language) and dialects (the differing grammatical
structures and words used).
 Computational Linguistics: explores how human language might
be automatically processed and interpreted. Research in this area
considers the mathematical and logical characteristics of natural
language, and develops algorithms and statistical processes for
automatic language processing.
 Neurolinguistics: is the study of how language is represented in the
brain: that is, how and where our brains store our knowledge of the
language (or languages) that we speak, understand, read, and write,
what happens in our brains as we acquire that knowledge, and what
happens as we use it in our everyday lives.

Linguistics has intellectual connections and overlaps with many other

disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.
Some of the closest connections are with Philosophy, Literature,
Language Pedagogy, Psychology, Sociology, Physics (acoustics),
Biology (anatomy, neuroscience), Computer Science, Computer
Engineering, Health Sciences ( Speech Disorders, Speech Therapy).

The main purpose of the study of Linguistics in an academic environment

is the advancement of knowledge.
However, because of the centrality of language in human interaction and
behavior, the knowledge gained through the study of linguistics has many
practical consequences and uses. Graduates of undergraduate and
graduate programs in Linguistics apply their training in many diverse
areas, including language pedagogy, speech pathology, speech synthesis,
natural language interfaces, search engines, machine translation,
forensics, and of course all forms of writing, editing, and publishing.
Perhaps the most widely appreciated application was contributed by
UCSC (University of California, Santa Cruz) Linguistics alumnus Marc
Okrand, who invented the Klingon language for the Star Trek series.

(A)-2. Some basic linguistic terms:

Language: 1. The way human beings communicate using words, whether
written or spoken. 2. It is also used for the particular system of
communication prevailing in a specific country, nation, or community.
Indo-European languages: family of European and Asian languages: a
family of languages conventionally divided into the following branches:
Balto-Slavonic, Germanic, Italic/Romance, Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Greek,
Albanian, Armenian, Anatolian, and Tocharian. This language family,
now spoken from India to Western Europe, includes many modern

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languages, for example, English, French, German, Spanish, Russian,
Hindi, and Urdu.
Langue: the system of language.
Parole: real-world language.
Tongue: the particular language used by a specific country, nation, or
community.
Lingua Franca: a language or mixture of languages used for
communication by people who speak different first languages.
Dialect: the specific way a language is used in a particular area of a
country or among those in a particular part of a community when this is
distinct in some way from the language spoken generally in that nation or
community.
Slang: the words, expressions, and turns of phrase used by a particular
group of people, especially when these are considered nonstandard.
Jargon: the words associated with a particular specialized activity or
group or used in a particular situation, especially in order to suggest that
they are technical or difficult for an ordinary person to understand.
Register: language of a type that is used in particular social situations or
when communicating with a particular set of people (e.g.: formal,
informal).
Idiolect: the particular language or speech habits of an individual.

(B) Classical and Modern Languages: Latin, Ancient Greek, Hebrew,

Sanskrit, Classical Chinese; languages currently spoken in the world
(e.g.: Modern Greek).

(C) English

1. Current Status: de facto or de jure (55 sovereign states and 27 non-

sovereign entities) presence:
 The United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New
Zealand.
 One of the two official languages of Canada.
 Asia: English as a secondary official language in India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan.
 Africa: English is one of the official languages in Botswana,
Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Uganda, and
Kenya, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia.
 The largest global lingua franca in use in our “global village”
(billions of speakers).
What facilitated the spread of English all over the world? (to be
discussed in the seminar)

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2. History
 Celtic: Celts
 Latin: Romans (1st century BC); conversion to Christianity in the
6th and 7th centuries AD.
 Germanic dialects (5th century AD): Germanic tribes: Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes.
 Norse (8th century): Vikings.
 Norman French (1066): The Norman Conquest; the “nanny” effect.
 Old English (or Anglo-Saxon): Northumbrian, Mercian, West
Saxon, and Kentish dialects spoken from 449 to 1100 AD.
 Middle English: from about 1100 to 1450 AD. The Statute of
Pleadings (1362) made English instead of French the official
language of Parliament and the courts.
 Modern English

3. Classification
 As a Germanic language, English belongs to the Indo-European
family of languages.

4. Characteristics:

4.1. Inflection
German, Latin, Russian, Greek, French and Romanian are inflected
languages. This means that many words undergo changes of spelling -
and often of pronunciation - to mark changes in tense of verbs, gender of
nouns, case or plurality of nouns, mood of verbs, agreement of adjectives,
and other distinctions.
English is relatively uninflected.
 Adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are invariable.
They are spelled the same way no matter how they are used.
 Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs, however, are inflected. Most
English nouns show a plural by adding an s or an es: cow, cows; box,
boxes. Some nouns have what are called mutated, or changed, plurals:
man, men; woman, women; foot, feet; tooth, teeth; goose, geese;
mouse, mice; louse, lice. A very few nouns - for example, ox, oxen -
have plurals ending in en. A few nouns remain unchanged in the
plural: deer, sheep, moose, and grouse.
 Five of the seven personal pronouns have distinctive forms for subject
or object use: I, me; he, him; she, her; we, us; and they, them. And
there are also distinctive possessive pronouns: mine, his, hers, ours,
theirs.

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 Verb forms, while inflected, are not as complicated as they are in
Latin, Greek, German or Romanian. The one English verb with the
most forms is "to be" (be, am, is, are, was, were, been, and being).
Regular verbs have only four forms: talk, talks, talked, and talking, for
example. Irregular verbs have five forms: sing, sings, sang, sung, and
singing. A few verbs that end in a t or d have only three forms: cut,
cuts, cutting. These verb inflections are in marked contrast to Old
English, in which ridan, or "ride," had 13 forms, and to Modern
German, in which reiten has 16.
What is the explanation of this evolution and what are the consequences
of this linguistic process?
- Absence of a language academy which could control the changes
in the language.
- Before the U.K. government established free, compulsory
education toward the end of the 19 th century, a large portion of the
population was illiterate and the natural drive towards
simplification was allowed to happen, generating the reduced
inflection we recognize today in the functioning of the English
language.
- The consequence of this reduced inflection is an increased
importance of word order in English language use.

4.2. Flexibility
 It is possible to "run a race" (noun usage) or "race someone to the
corner" (verb usage).
 It is also possible in English to use nouns as adjectives: automobile
show, state fair, hot dog stand.
 Pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can also function as nouns.
- The royal “we:” "I'm using the royal ‘we’ here…”
- The poor; when the going gets tough, the tough gets going.

4.3. Vocabulary
There were 1,057,379.6 words in the English language according to an
estimation issued on January 1, 2020. Currently, there is a new word
created every 98 minutes or about 14.7 words per day.
Nearly half of the borrowings are of Germanic (or Teutonic) origin, and
nearly half were absorbed from the Romance languages (languages of
Latin origin--such as French, Spanish, and Italian--or Latin itself). There
also have been generous borrowings from 350 other languages, including
Greek, Dutch, Modern German, and Arabic.
 Germanic: the nouns father, mother, brother, man, wife, ground, land,
tree, grass, summer, and winter.

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 French: constitution, president, parliament, congress, and
representative; city, place, village, court, palace, residence, domicile,
cuisine, liberty, veracity.
 Spanish: cigar, armada, guerrilla, matador, mosquito, and tornado.
 Latin: malnutrition, transfer, circumference, supernatural, submarine,
suburb, substantial, contemporary, multilingual, conjunction,
compassion.
 Greek: alphabet, geometry, geology, photography, psychology,
psychiatry, pathology, biology, philosophy, telephone, logistics, and
metamorphosis.
 Arabic: alcohol, alchemy, algebra, almanac, arsenal, assassin, cipher,
elixir, mosque, sugar, syrup, and zero.
 coffee (Turkish); gull (Cornish); flannel (Welsh); clan, and plaid
(Gaelic and Irish); mammoth, soviet, and vodka (Russian); robot
(Czech); paprika (Hungarian); jungle, thug, shampoo, loot, pajamas,
and polo (Hindi); paradise, lilac, bazaar, caravan, chess, shawl, and
khaki (Persian); marmalade, flamingo, and veranda (Portuguese);
ketchup, bamboo, and orangutan (Malay); taboo and tattoo
(Polynesian).

Other sources enriching the English vocabulary? (to be discussed in the

seminar)

The expansion of the English vocabulary determined the Oxford English

Dictionary editors to abandon publishing complete print editions of their
work and made them rely completely on the online solution, providing
access to the OED if you buy a £90/$90 annual subscription until 31st
March 2021.

5. Varieties of English
 British English, American English, Australian and New Zealand
English.
 Asia: English as spoken in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,
Nepal, and Bhutan.
 Africa: English as spoken in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland,
Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Uganda, and Kenya, Gambia, Sierra
Leone, Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia.
 General English and English for Special Purposes (e.g.: English for
Academic Purposes; English for Medicine; English for MBA).