Introduction to.

Language
and Linguistics
Dr. M. Enamul Hoque
M.A (English), M. Phil (Applied Linguistics and ELT)
Ph.D (Applied Linguistics and ELT),
Post-doc(Educational Ladership)
Epigraph

By learning, we will teach,

By teaching, we will learn
 Language Overview
 Language is one of the
wonderful gifts given by
God to humanity. It is with
the help of language that
man is able to
communicate and solve a
number of his problems
and has been able to make
a lot of achievements in
life. If there had been no
language, it would have
been difficult for man to
communicate his views to
fellow human beings.
 Language
Language –

•A systematic means of communicating by the use

of sounds or conventional symbols;

• A system of objects or symbols, such as sounds

or character sequences, that can be combined in
various ways following a set of rules, especially to
communicate thoughts, feelings, or instructions.

•The set of patterns or structures produced for

communicating ideas.
 Literature
 Definition: What is literature? Why do we read it?
Why is literature important?

Literature is a term used to describe written or

spoken material. Broadly speaking, "literature" is
used to describe anything from creative writing to
more technical or scientific works, but the term is
most commonly used to refer to works of the creative
imagination, including works of poetry, drama, fiction,
and nonfiction.
 Literature
 Why do we read/ study literature?
Literature represents a language or a people:
culture and tradition. But, literature is more
important than just a historical or cultural
artifact. Literature introduces us to new
worlds of experience. We learn about books
and literature; we enjoy the comedies and the
tragedies of poems, stories, and plays; and
we may even grow and evolve through our
literary journey with books.
 Definition of Language
 According to Sapir (1921:10), "Language is
primarily human and non - human
instinctive method of communicating ideas,
emotion and desires by means of a system
of voluntarily produced symbols.“

 Jesperson (1919:12) says, "Language is a

set of human habits, the purpose of which
is to give expressions to thoughts and
feelings;". Every language has its own
special way of making words.

 The ways in which words behave in a

particular language is called 'grammar.' The
term 'grammar 'in its broadest sense refers
to the statements about the regularities and
the irregularities of language.
 First Language
 First language is the language, which a child
acquires first when the child learns to
communicate with the people around.
 The language that is taught or used for the
communication by ones mother is the first
language to his/her.
 The child first learns the language that is his
native language
 Second Language
 The term 'second language' can refer to any
language that is learnt subsequent to the
mother tongue. Thus, it can even refer to the
learning of third (L3) or fourth Language (L4).
 The main objective of the second language is
to enable the speaker for wider participation
in society and the nation leading to secondary
socialization. Hence, the second language is
usually the official language of a state or
national language.
 Foreign Language
Foreign language is a language which is not a
Native Language in a country. A foreign
language is usually studied either for
communication with foreigners who speak the
language.
 Linguist
 Ferdinand de Saussure
 Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language,
sometimes called the science of language. {1} The
subject has become a very technical, splitting into
separate fields:
sound (phonetics and phonology),
sentence
structure (syntax, structuralism, deep grammar),
meaning (semantics), practical psychology
(psycholinguistics) and contexts of language choice
(pragmatics). {
 Fields of Linguistics
•Linguistics is the study of language, sometimes called
the science of language. The subject has become a very
technical, splitting into separate fields:
•sound (phonetics and phonology), sentence structure
(syntax, structuralism, deep grammar), meaning
(semantics),
•practical psychology (psycholinguistics) and contexts of
language choice (pragmatics).
But originally, as practised in the nineteenth century,
linguistics was philology: the history of words.
Philologists tried to understand how words had changed
and by what principle.