Linguistics | Function of Applied Linguistics
Linguistics
Function of Applied Linguistics
According to some assessments, people speaking as many as 7,000 different languages on the planet now day and belong to more than a hundred distinct families. One of the central problems that Applied Linguists seek to address is how to meet challenges and consolidate opportunities for this variety through education, policy making, translation, and activism at the local and global levels.
The presence of so many different languages means that most of us cannot communicate in any sustainable and meaningful way with most of our fellow human beings. Up to a third of us are monolingual, and although the majority of the world's population knows and uses more than one language, nobody of course speaks all languages! Perhaps there are few people who are able to speak, read and write in the ten languages that have the largest.
The number of native speakers, but even these polyglots cannot communicate with half of the world's population. Here's a question you may not have thought of before: Why do we speak different languages, instead of having one way of communicating our thoughts to all members of our species? After all, this is more or less how other animals do it: birds and bees mainly inherit their "languages" directly through their parents' genes.
Since modern Homo sapiens is thought to have originated in South Africa about 200,000 years ago, why haven't we all inherited, say, an ancient version of the Zulu, in the same way we inherited the heart, the ability to walk on two legs or the ability to discern a certain range of frequencies the sound? The answer is that language, unlike the heart, is both a biological and a social characteristic. It has evolved not only to serve the individual user, but also group service.
This means that it must have a way to escape from the confines of the human body, allowing us to communicate with others around us. Since telepathy is impossible, language originally found its external medium in sound, and then speech was born. Since language is mediated by speech in society, and not just by genes in the biological system, children do not reproduce an identical copy of their parents' system when they acquire their language. thus, the language inevitably changes. After several generations, the system would switch to a completely different language, as Latin evolved into Spanish, French, and other Romance languages.
No comments