1 What is language?

Think about how language fits into your daily life. It’s there first thing in the morning when you listen to the radio, when you read the newspaper, or when you speak to your family over breakfast. It’s there as you check or reply to texts, tweets and emails on your phone (if you have a clever one) or your computer. And it carries on throughout the day, whether at work, while you study, or are at play. Language is such an important part of everyday life that it’s easy to take it for granted.

In this course you will have a chance to stand back from all this and have a think about what language is, what it does and how it works. You’ll start by carrying out a couple of activities to test what you already know.

Activity 2 Beginning to learn about language

Timing: This activity should take around 10 minutes

Now you’ve considered your own ideas about what language is, watch this short video and note down what it includes in its definition of language. Does anything that is included in the video surprise you? Why do you think that is?

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Transcript: Video 1 What is language?

Narrator

What is language? Language is one of the defining features of what it means to be human.

As the philosopher René Descartes once said, ‘There is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately situated, that can put words together in a manner to convey their thoughts.’

All animals communicate, of course, but the way they communicate isn’t anywhere close to being as flexible, wide-ranging or nuanced as us. Language is so fundamental to our nature that it’s used as a test to distinguish humans from robots. It was language above all else which let the human race turn itself from just another inhabitant of planet Earth into one which now dominates the rest of the animal kingdom.

Language first developed about 100,000 years ago, allowing people to work together and shape the society they were living in. Five thousand years ago, writing was invented. This revolutionised the way we record history and pass knowledge on from generation to generation.

But what exactly is language? By the age of three, almost all children have an expert knowledge of how to use it, but a knowledge of precisely what constitutes the phenomenon of language is much more elusive. According to the linguist Edward Sapir, language can be defined as a purely human and non-distinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. These symbols can be made by speech, writing or sign language, and although we might think of language as mostly consisting of words and the way they’re combined, other things like gestures, tone of voice and accent are all part of the way we communicate.

Then there’s the technology we use to communicate. These days this often means computers and smartphones, but writing itself is a technology. So is paper, ink and all sorts of other things. Every new technology that comes along alters the way we communicate. Some people take a very prescriptive view of how language should be used, but in reality it’s changing all the time. It doesn’t degenerate – it just adapts to the different contexts in which it’s used.

Language is also fundamental to our culture. It’s a badge of identity, both for individuals and groups. But this can lead to prejudice. People make assumptions about everything from someone’s education to their moral values based on how they speak.

Language also mediates the way we experience and understand the world. It influences the way we relate to each other, And ultimately, it’s connected to almost everything we do in society.

End transcript: Video 1 What is language?

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Video 1 What is language?

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Discussion

The video emphasises the importance of language in distinguishing human communication from animal communication. Many animals can communicate – dogs bark, cats hiss – but human language allows us to do this in much more complex ways. Language has helped us to cooperate with one another, to develop together in society and, as a species, to dominate the world.

You might also have noted that the video does not equate language with speech or writing – these are alternative channels for language, as are more recent technologies provided by computers and other digital systems, such as Twitter and WhatsApp.

Now ‘language’ in general, as a human capacity (or tool, resource, etc.) is one thing. What people actually do in daily life is use a particular language, such as English, French, Russian, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, and so on. These different languages are originally connected to a people, country or region, and may, for historical reasons, be more or less similar to other languages.