CHAPTER 2

UNDERSTANDING
LANGUAGE
 INTRODUCTION

•The Philippines is a multilingual society with more that 180

distinct native languages. Most Filipinos are bilingual,
trilingual, or quadrilingual and beyond. Filipinos that are
monolingual, i.e. can only use one language, are very rare.
With the passage of the Republic Act 10533, also known as
the “Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013” or the K to 12
Law, these languages are given the opportunity to be utilized
and developed as media of instruction and languages of
literacy by their users and speakers, alongside English and
Filipino.
 Mother Tongue Based Multilingual
Education (MTBMLE)

• MTBMLE is the Utilization of more than two languages

for the purpose of literacy and instruction.

• It starts from “where the learners are and from what

they already know” (Nolasco, 2008)

• It involves learning to read and write and think in one’s

first language or L1 (Cebuano, Tagalog, Ilocano, Waray,
etc.), and also teaching mathematics, Science, Health
and Social Studies in the said L1 (Nicolas, 2008).
 1 NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE

Language is defining feature that distinguishes

human beings among other species.

Language plays a vital role in the human existence as

a primary medium for communication and interaction and
is an integral part in the development of cultures and
societies, language, a distinctly human trait, is embedded
into human being’s physiology, cognition and thought
processes.
 Linguistic – the scientific study of language, deals with
the description of different but interrelated phenomena
involved with language; its structure and use.

Linguist - who mainly study this highly sophisticated

phenomenon in the existence of humanity, differ in their
approaches and understandings of this concept and often
offer different and incompatible definitions.
They view language as: A Social Fact (Saussure 1969), a
mental entity (Pinker, 1995), a set of structures ( Chomsky,
1957), a systems (Meillet, 1903 in Baucer, 2007), or a tool for
communication (Buhler, 1934).
 Chomsky argued for a Universal Grammar, an
innate ability of the human brain to acquire language and
proposed that there exist a “linguistic acquisition device”
which supplies the child with the basic principles of
grammar.

In contrast with the formalist approaches proposed by

Chomsky and his followers, the functional theories of
grammar, views language as “product of more cognitive
abilities that are also used in non-linguistic activities” and
not just as product of a specialized mental device
(Bybee, 1998)
 Table 1: Eight Design Features of Languages ( Brown et al, 2014)

Double Articulation Language uses a small number of sounds(less than 50 in

most languages) that are combined to produce a large,
but infinite number of sentences.
Productivity Language can produce novel sentences that have never
been uttered before.
Arbitrariness There is no necessary connection between sound and
meaning: the meaning dog and the English word dog are
connected arbitrarily as proven by the existence of the
word chien in French, which roughly expresses the same
meaning.
Interchangeability An individual can both be a speaker and a hearer.
Displacement The differences between language units are of an all or
nothing kind; a sound cannot be heard as something in
between a b or p sound.
Specialization Speaking requires only limited part of the speaker’s
behavior/ attention and is independent of its context.
Cultural Not all aspects of language are innate; some are taught
transmission after birth and differ according to the culture the chid is
reared in.
 1.1 Languages of the World and their Classification

Ethnologue, 16th edition listed 7, 102 living

languages spoken by around 7 billion people in the
world( Ethnologue, 2015).
There are 141 different language families and
six of these stand out as the major language
families, comprising the 5% of the world languages
(Ethnologue, 2015).
Table 2: Six Major Language families
of the world (Ethnologue, 2015)
Language Living Number of
Family Language Speakers
Afro-Asiatic 366 380,821,999

Austronesian 1,223 323,456,908

Indo-European 1,524 436,814,956

Sino-Tibetan 453 1,268,181,584

Trans-New Guinea 476 3,540,024

TOTAL 4,479 5,326,390,851

 2 The Study of Human Language

Linguistics deals with the human language,

including deaf sign languages.
It is a “highly diverse and interdisciplinary field”
dealing with the “concrete details of physical
acoustics to abstract logical argument, from
concise grammatical structure to rich observation
on culture and society” (Genetti & Adelman, 2014)
 ELEMENTS OF LANGUAGE

1. Phonetics – the study of how sound are made, how they are classified, how
they are combine and interact with each other, and how they are perceived.

2. Phonology – the study of organization and structure of sounds, their

distribution and conventions

3. Morphology – The study of how words are formed.

4. Syntax – the study of organization or words into sentences and how they
sentences are understood.

5. Semantics – the study or meaning of language

6. Pragmatics – the study of meaning and how it can be interpreted in

context.
 2.2 Defining Grammar

• Grammar – In linguistic, the word grammar

means (i) the mental grammar that a
speakers have in their brains and (ii) the
Model or description of this mental
grammar.
 Two Types of Grammar

• Descriptive Grammar – describe the basic

linguistic knowledge of a speaker/ hearer, how
language is used and not how it should be used.

• Prescriptive Grammar – describes how a

language should or ought to be used. It tells the
speakers how they should speak and what rules
they should follow.
THANK YOU!