Defining language

The Nature of Language and

Linguistics                                                                                                    
                       

      Language is God’s special gift to mankind. Without language human civilization, as we

now know it, would have remained an impossibility. Language is ubiquitous. It is present
everywhere––in our thoughts and dreams, prayers and meditations, relations and
communication. Besides being a means of communication, and storehouse of knowledge, it is
an instrument of thinking as well as a source of delight (e.g. singing). It transfers knowledge
from one person to another and from one generation to another. Language is also the maker or
unmaker of human relationships. It is the use of language that ‘Italics a life bitter or sweet.
Without language man would have remained only a dumb animal. It is our ability to
communicate through words that makes us different from animals. Because of its
omnipresence, language is often taken for granted.

Since linguistics is the study of language, it is imperative for linguist to know what language is.
Language is a very complex human phenomenon; all attempts to define it have proved
inadequate. In a nut-shell, language is an ‘organized noise’ used in actual social situations. That
is why it has also been defined as ‘contextualized systematic sound ‘.

In order to understand a term like life, one has to talk of the properties or characteristics of living
beings (e.g. motion, reproduction, respiration, growth, power of self-healing, excretion, nutrition,
mortality, etc. etc.). Similarly, the term language can be understood better in terms of its
properties or characteristics. Some linguists, however, have been trying to define language in
their own ways even though all these definitions have been far from satisfactory. Here are some
of these definitions:

1. Language is a symbol system based on pure or arbitrary conventions... infinitely

extendable and modifiable according to the changing needs and conditions of the
speakers.

(Robins)

According to this definition, language is a symbol system. Every language selects some

symbols for its selected sounds. The English sound /k/ for example has the symbol k for it.
These symbols form the alphabet of the language and join in different combinations to form
meaningful words.

The system talked of here is purely arbitrary in the sense that there is no one to one
correspondence between the structure of a word and the thing it stands for. The
combination p.e.n., for example stands, in English, for an instrument used for writing. Why could
it not be e.p.n. or n.e.p.? Well, it could also be e.p.n. or n.e.p. and there is nothing sacrosanct
about the combination p.e.n. except that it has now become a convention—a convention that
cannot be easily changed.
As stated here, language conventions are not easily changed, yet it is not impossible to do so.
Language is infinitely modifiable and extendable. Words go on changing meanings and new
words continue to be added to language with the changing needs of the community using it.

2. Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas,

emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.

(Sapir)

There are two terms in this definition:

Human and non-instinctive. Language, as Sapir rightly said, is human. Only humans possess

language and all normal humans uniformly possess it. Animals do have a communication
system but it is not a developed system. That is why language is said to be species-
specific and species-uniform.

Also, language does not pass from a parent to a child. In this sense it is non-instinctive. A child
has to learn language and he/she learns the language of the society he/she is placed in.

3. Language is the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each
other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols.

(Hall)

This definition rightly gives more prominence to the fact that language is primarily speech
produced by oral-auditory symbols. A speaker produces some string of oral sounds that get
conveyed through the air to the speaker who, through his hearing organs, receives the sound
waves and conveys these to the brain that interprets these symbols to arrive at a meaning.

4.   A language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and
constructed out of a finite set of elements.

(Noam Chomsky)

Chomsky meant to convey that each sentence has a structure. Human brain is competent
enough to construct different sentences from out of the limited set of sounds/symbols belonging
to a particular language. Human brain is so productive that a child can at any time produce a
sentence that has never been said or heard earlier.

The origin of language

 Darwin started thinking about the origin of language in the late 1830s. The subject
formed part of his wide-ranging speculations about the transmutation of species. In his private
notebooks, he reflected on the communicative powers of animals, their ability to learn new
sounds and even to associate them with words. “The distinction of language in man is very
great from all animals”, he wrote, “but do not overrate—animals communicate to each other”
(Barrett ed. 1987, p. 542-3). Darwin observed the similarities between animal sounds and
various natural cries and gestures that humans make when expressing strong emotions such as
fear, surprise, or joy. He noted the physical connections between words and sounds, exhibited
in words like “roar”, “crack”, and “scrape” that seemed imitative of the things signified. He drew
parallels between language and music, and asked: “did our language commence with singing—
is this the origin of our pleasure in music—do monkeys howl in harmony”? (Barrett ed. 1987, p.
568).

The origin of language was widely studied and controversially debated in the Victorian
period in a variety of fields, including comparative philology and linguistics, philosophy,
anthropology, and psychology. Some argued that human speech derived from natural,
instinctive utterances that were shared with some animals, and that languages developed and
spread gradually according to various natural laws and processes. Proponents of the natural
language theory included Darwin’s cousin, Hensleigh Wedgwood, the liberal Anglican
scholar Frederic Farrar, the German philologist August Schleicher, and the American
philologist William Dwight Whitney. Others argued that language was uniquely human, a
manifestation of man’s higher nature and an instrument of his reason. Its origin was divine, and
its development more akin to an art, than to any purely natural process. The leading advocate of
this natural theological view of language was Friedrich Max Müller, a German linguist and
oriental scholar who had emigrated to Britain and who eventually obtained a professorship at
Oxford. In a series of influential lectures delivered several years after Darwin’s Origin of
Species, Max Müller asserted that language was the “one great barrier between the brute and
man”; “no process of natural selection will ever distil significant words out of the notes of birds
and the cries of beasts” (Müller 1861, 1: 22-3, 354).

Darwin eventually published his views on language in Descent of Man (1871), as part of

a chapter on the comparative mental powers of humans and the lower animals. He
acknowledged that language had “justly been considered as one of the chief distinctions
between man and the lower animals”; but he went on to emphasize the similarities between
animal and human communication. Darwin’s arguments were based on his broad knowledge of
anthropology, language use and acquisition in children, linguistic pathologies, and the behaviour
of a wide range of animals, wild and domestic. Much of this information had been gathered
through correspondence, as well as observations of his own children and pets. Darwin
described how language might have evolved through natural and sexual selection. He
compared birds learning to sing to infants babbling. An early progenitor of man, he wrote,
probably used his voice as did the male gibbon, to produce musical cadences for courtship, and
to compete with other males. The origins of language as a system of signifiers, he added, might
have evolved from the imitation of the sounds of various predators (growls and snarls, for
example), which functioned as warning signs. Darwin addressed the natural theology of Max
Müller and others by arguing that language use, while requiring a certain mental capacity, would
also stimulate brain development, enabling long trains of thought and strengthening reasoning
power. Vocalization in humans would be greatly enhanced by the development of other
functions, especially the use of the hands. Finally, Darwin drew an extended analogy between
the evolution of languages and species, noting in each domain the presence of rudiments, of
crossing and blending, and of variation, and remarking on how each developed gradually
through a process of struggle: “the survival of certain favoured words in the struggle for
existence is natural selection” (Descent 1: 61).

Debates about the origin of language are still ongoing. Are there specific language
centres in the human brain? Do comparable structures exist in the brains of primates? Are
animals capable of using language in a structured way, and do they possess powers of reason?
Did linguistic ability, such as the use of syntax, evolve gradually, or did it emerge rapidly or even
all at once in some now extinct progenitor of the human race?  Such questions, addressed in a
variety of scientific disciplines, such as neurology, paleoanthropology, and animal psychology,
build upon the work of Darwin and his contemporaries, while taking that work in new directions.