Linguistics | What is language?

Linguistics 

What is language?

DEFINITION:

Language is one of the means of communicating our thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, attitudes and ideas make use of voluntarily produced system of arbitrary sounds of vocal or written symbols.

 Language is a means of communication. It is a means of transmitting our ideas, thoughts, feelings, and emotions to the people. Furthermore, language is not the only just means of communication. 

Gestures, signs and facial expression can also communicate our ideas and thoughts. Language is definitely different from gestures signs, because it employs speech sounds. These speech sounds have meaning.

Below are some of the most commonly approved definitions of language given by some linguists:

Edward Sapir says: "Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols” According to Hall, language is “the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols.”

In the words of Noam Chomsky, language is “a set of (finite or infinite) sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.”

Language takes an important place in our lives as human beings. Language is the very medium of expression. Each day activities life is surely to come to an endless language function as a means of communication. Language is inextricably tied up with cultural evolution of mankind and the social. Language is so familiar to us that we are hardly conscious of its significance. 

The term „language‟ can be used to specific to a variety of things or concepts, such as “the particular form of speech or words used between the people of a country, area or social group”, or “the method of human communication using written words or speech”. In other hand, we can talk about a a very specific language.

 

Per examples: 

 English, German, Swahili etc. or about language as such. In linguistics, we are interested in both of these fields, whereby General Linguistics will tend to concentrate on the individual language and the latter topic departments on their specifically language. 

Per examples: 

 English linguistics. A further meaning of Lang is “the style or types of words used by group or a person" that is a topic generally studied within sociolinguistics. 

 Most linguists would probably accept this, although many animals can communicate, they do not actually have "language‟ as humans do. Birds may sing, dogs bark and growl, cat's meow and purr, scream and even chatter, apes grunt, but they are not assumed to be using these sounds in the way we do. Therefore, the language is a major attribute distinguishing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.