Language is a system of communication. It connects signals—such as sounds, hand signs, or letters—to meanings. It allows people to speak to each other and to write their thoughts and ideas. The use of language is one of the most important of human abilities. Other species have ways of communicating with one another, but experts disagree about whether such communication should be considered “language.”
The process people use to connect a language signal to its meaning is extremely complicated. Signals must be learned in specific orders to form words. In addition, languages also feature certain rules of word and sentence structure that must be mastered. Yet, despite the complex skills needed to acquire language, most young children throughout the world gain the ability to speak or sign a language without much conscious effort. Further, children develop their command of language at a time when other complex mental skills are beyond their capabilities. As a result, scientists and linguists (scholars who study language) think people have an innate (inborn) ability to learn and use language.
The sounds of language
The complexity of language is linked to the intricacy of the human vocal tract and the ability people have to hear subtle differences in sounds. What linguists call the vocal tract is a branching tube running up from the larynx (voice box) into the head. One branch of the tract goes through the mouth, the other through the nose. Most speech sounds are made when air is expelled from the lungs and passes the vocal folds (vocal cords) in the larynx. Some sounds require vibrating the vocal folds. Other sounds are made by bringing mouth surfaces close to each other to create audible turbulence, such as by touching the tongue to the roof of mouth behind the teeth (as in s).
Using the vocal tract, people produce distinguishable sounds. The key to speech is, not only can speakers make different sounds, but also listeners can tell them apart.
Linguists call sounds that distinguish one word from another phonemes. In English, for example, the sounds of the letters d and g are phonemes. Most dialects of English have about 40 phonemes, which is about average for a language. Some languages, however, have more than 100 phonemes, and others have only about a dozen.
Because the audible difference in sounds—for example, between d and g—can be subtle, linguists questioned how people came to learn to distinguish these differences. Scientific studies showed that even newborn babies could make such distinctions, indicating that this ability is something with which people are born.
The parts of language
Words and morphemes.
Phonemes are in themselves meaningless, but combining them into larger units can make a word. And unlike its component phonemes, a word has meaning. Some words, such as house, are simple in the sense that none of its parts are meaningful. Other words, such as greenhouse and unthinkable, are complex. Greenhouse is a compound word, made by joining two independent words together to make a new word. In such words as unthinkable, however, the prefix un- is not an independent word. Linguists call such units bound morphemes—that is, sounds that must be bound to a word. House, on the other hand, is called a free morpheme because it can stand alone as a word.
There are many ways to form, combine, and change words, depending on the language. English, for example, uses a productive bound morpheme of -s to mark plurals:
book (singular), books (plural)
cat (singular), cats (plural)
Consequently, when a new noun enters the English language, it will usually take an -s ending to make it a plural. In a study done by linguist Jean Berko Gleason in 1958, children were presented with made-up words they could not have seen before, such as wug. (The children were told that a wug was a small birdlike creature.) In that study, most of the children agreed that the plural of wug must be wugs, even though none of them could have learned this ahead of time. This indicates that children at this stage have learned a rule about how to create the plural form of singular nouns—a rule that applies to many words in the language, even words that children have never before encountered.
Syntax
is the arrangement and ordering of words to convey meaning. It is especially important in English. For example, word order in an English sentence can convey who is acting and who is being acted upon. The sentences below clearly differ in meaning:
A dog bit a man.
A man bit a dog.
Grammar.
Linguists call the collection of mechanisms, rules, and operations that speakers of a language know concerning syntax and word formation and structure the grammar of a language.
People are often unaware of many details of the grammar that they know, much as people are largely unconscious of the mechanical details of walking. For example, few English speakers consciously know the grammatical rule that states that, with few exceptions, productive plurals are not permitted on the first word in a compound word. For example, a piece of furniture that contains many books can be a bookcase, but not a bookscase. Linguists find, however, that though few English speakers can state the rule, even preschool-age children who speak English are usually able to form the correct plural of compounds. Even young language users unconsciously know a great deal about the grammar of their language.
Signed languages
People who cannot hear sometimes have difficulty managing spoken languages. For this reason, some deaf people use signed, or sign, language.
Language scholars began to carefully analyze signed languages in the mid-1900’s. They soon discovered that these languages have a rich and elaborate organization. Signed languages are just as expressive as spoken language, and thoughts can be expressed just as quickly by signing as speaking. There are many distinct signed languages used by deaf people all over the world.
Signed languages use the hands as the signaling device and the eyes as the receiver, as spoken languages use the vocal tract and the ears. Linguists do not know for certain the extent to which these different modes of communicating affect the structure of the languages. But they do know that signed languages share many properties with spoken ones.
For example, signs in American Sign Language (ASL) have predictable properties of form, just as words do in English. It is possible to classify signs in terms of their handshape, movement, and location. If signs share certain features, but differ in another, they can be said to “rhyme.” Signers feel such signs to be related to each other, even though the signs differ dramatically in meaning. ASL has a rich tradition of poetry and story-telling, and sometimes an artist will use the formal relation between signs—that is, their similarity of form, as opposed to meaning—for an effect, just as hearing poets do. For example, as a hearing poet might rhyme slow and glow, a signing poet might “rhyme” the signs for apple and jealous. Just as slow and glow differ only in the initial phoneme, so apple and jealous differ only in handshape, but are the same in movement and location.
Signed languages are ordinary human languages that differ only in the way in which they are transmitted and received. Thus, deaf children learn sign language, with all its complexity, just as easily as hearing children learn their ambient (surrounding) spoken language. Furthermore, native signers appear to use the same brain locations to store particular aspects of their language as speakers do. The vast majority of signers and speakers both store a language they learn as a first language in the left hemisphere (half) of the brain. But, whether it is a sign language or a spoken language, languages learned later in life as a second language are stored in another location.
In addition, signed languages break down under brain damage much the way spoken languages do. For example, a lesion (injury) to the left frontal lobe of the brain in speakers often leads to difficulty in planning the complex movements of the mouth necessary for speech. Such a lesion in a signer can also lead to difficulty in planning the elaborate movements of the hands required for signing. See Brain.
Other species and language
Scientists know that many species have elaborate, shared communication systems. Some fish, for example, have complicated courtship dances that communicate something to other fish of their species. Some scientists consider these systems of animal communication as a kind of language.
Some scientists have wondered if animals could learn human language, and they have performed experiments attempting to teach language to other species with high intelligences. These scientists believed that if language primarily depended on general intelligence, chimpanzees and other relatively smart apes ought to be able to learn much of a human language. But if language is in some way unique to human beings—requiring special brain “circuits”—animals without these special pathways in the brain should have difficulty acquiring language.
Since about the mid-1900’s, chimpanzees have been taught words in a large number of experiments. This research has made clear that the chimpanzee can learn some aspects of human languages. Learning to sign such words as water, for example, is not too difficult for them. Other research focusing on the perception and understanding of language has shown that some chimpanzees can interpret fairly complicated requests. Some researchers claim that certain chimpanzees can perform at the level of a 2- or 3-year-old child.
As a result of these experiments, scientists have learned that features of a language that a human being must learn, such as individual words, can be taught to a chimpanzee. However, the features of a language that people are less consciously aware of when learning or speaking a language, such as syntax, are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to teach to chimpanzees. Human children master language when around other speakers without making any special attempt to do so. But chimpanzees who have been extensively trained in a human language still do not seem to have certain types of facility with language that would be found in a young child.
Language change
Some parts of language seem to be fixed, based on the way the brain works. Other parts of language are fairly changeable. Because of the varied relationships in which children need to communicate, the grammar they acquire is likely to be at least a little different from that of their parents. Such a difference is particularly likely if the children encounter languages or dialects that their parents did not experience. These small changes in grammar, word usage, and other aspects of a language can, over many generations, lead to larger changes. For example, English used in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s by the English playwright William Shakespeare sounds strange to modern-day speakers of English. The earlier English used in the 1300’s by the author Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales—that is, Middle English—is yet more difficult to understand without interpretation. And the Old English used in England from around 500 to 1100, in which the epic poem Beowulf is written, cannot be understood by modern speakers without special training.
Time is not the only factor in language change. When speakers of a language become divided into groups that lose contact with one another, the language of each group continues to change in its own way. After several centuries, the individual groups speak so differently that they may not be able understand one another. Nevertheless, linguists can often determine the original language from which these new languages evolved.
Language families
During the 1800’s, observers of languages began noticing how languages change. These scholars determined a way to reconstruct older, sometimes long-dead languages, on the basis of changes that were known to have occurred to existing languages that could be directly observed. One of the basic principles of such reconstruction is that languages that have come from a common source will look more alike if they have only recently diverged. Through observation and analysis, linguists traced back languages that they believed had descended from a common proto-language. They used that knowledge to construct a system of grouping languages into broad language families. However, not all linguists are in agreement concerning certain language families or the classification of certain languages.
Indo-European
is the most prominent language family. It includes many of the languages of Europe, as well as languages of India, such as Hindi. Speakers of Indo-European languages now live in other parts of the world as well. Languages from this family have become the most important tongues in Australia and New Zealand, and in the countries of North, Central, and South America.
The Indo-European family has several living branches. They are (1) Albanian, (2) Armenian, (3) Balto-Slavic, (4) Celtic, (5) Germanic, (6) Greek, (7) Indo-Iranian, and (8) Romance. Not all Indo-European scholars group the branches in this way. For a breakdown of these branches, see the Indo-European language table in this article.
Many simple, basic words are similar in Indo-European languages. For example, the English word mother is mata in Sanskrit, a language used in ancient India; meter in Greek; mater in Latin; madre in Spanish; and Mutter in German.
Speakers of the parent Indo-European language probably lived in the area north of the Black Sea. From there, they likely migrated in several directions, changing the language along the way. The earliest Indo-European language of which we have a record is Hittite, which was used by an ancient people who lived in what is now Turkey. Greek and Sanskrit were other early Indo-European languages.
Other language families.
Scholars have constructed numerous other language families in addition to Indo-European.
The Sino-Tibetan family
includes Chinese, with its many dialects, Thai, Burmese, and Tibetan. These languages are the leading languages of East Asia.
The Afro-Asian family
includes Arabic and Hebrew, the Berber tongues of North Africa, and the Amharic of Ethiopia. Most of the people who speak these languages live in North Africa, the Near East, and northeast Africa.
The Uralic family
includes Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian (or Magyar). Languages in this family can be found in northern Europe and northwestern Asia.
The Altaic family
includes Turkish and Mongolian, which are largely limited to Turkey and Mongolia. Some linguists also include Japanese and Korean in the Altaic family, but their inclusion is controversial.
The Dravidian family
is made up of Tamil, Telugu, and other languages. Most speakers of these languages are in southern India and parts of Sri Lanka.
The Austronesian family
includes the languages of Indonesia, the Philippines, Hawaii, New Zealand, Madagascar, and most other islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans.
The Mon-Khmer family
has most of its speakers in Southeast Asia and parts of India. This family is sometimes called Austro-Asiatic.
The Nilo-Saharan family
is made up of languages spoken in countries around the upper branches of the Nile River in Africa. This family includes Luo, which is spoken in Kenya.
The Niger-Congo family
includes the Bantu languages, such as Swahili, as an important subgroup.
The Khoisan family
features languages famous for the “clicking sounds” they have. These languages are spoken around the Kalahari Desert.
Language loss.
There are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world. Of those languages, however, linguists believe that as many as half will die out within the next 100 years. Consequently, large numbers of entire language families would be lost. The areas that seem to be most threatened with the possible extinction of languages include Australia, central South America, eastern Russia, the Pacific Coast, eastern Siberia, and the southwestern United States. These areas all have indigenous (native) people who are losing their language and moving to a more dominant language, such as English or Portuguese. Linguists try to record languages and describe the grammars of them before the last speaker dies.
The science of language
At some time between 400 and 200 B.C., the Indian grammarian Panini produced the first language study to meet strict linguistic criteria. He compiled a written grammar of Sanskrit that linguists still admire as a model of precise and sophisticated description. Then little was done in the study of languages for centuries. During the Middle Ages, from about the A.D. 400’s through the 1400’s, many people mistakenly believed all languages came from Biblical Hebrew.
In the late 1700’s, such scholars as Friedrich Schlegel, Jakob Grimm, and Franz Bopp, all of Germany, studied languages by the comparative method. They compared the world’s languages and noted relationships among them. This work eventually led to a classification of languages into families.
During the early 1900’s, Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss scholar, introduced several important concepts to linguistics, such as the distinction between what people know about their language and how people use that knowledge when speaking. Saussure also focused on the systematic nature of languages. He is widely considered to be the father of modern linguistics. Linguists still follow Saussure’s example in seeking to develop careful descriptions of existing languages. In the United States, one special focus of this work is in American Indian languages, many of which have become or may soon become extinct.
The last half of the 1900’s saw the emergence of the American linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar, a way of studying people’s knowledge (sometimes their unconscious knowledge) of their language. Chomsky emphasized precise mathematical characterizations of languages and their grammars. Chomsky’s work has drawn attention to those aspects of language that appear to be innate in human beings. As a result, many experts today consider linguistics to be a means of studying some of the fundamental aspects of human nature.
