Language is the most human of all human abilities. It may be the defining characteristic of Homo sapiens. Wherever humans exist, language exists. Although no one knows the precise number of languages in the world, there are at least 3,000 and as many as 8,000 according to different estimates and depending on one’s definition of language and dialect. Considering that the world is populated by billions of people, the number is actually rather small. One-half of the world’s population (approximately 2,100 million) speak only fifteen of these thousands of languages. Of these, more of the world’s population speak Mandarin Chinese than any other language (about 387 million). There are just a few speakers of languages like Apache, an Athabaskan language, or Menomini, an Algonquian language. These languages seem very different from each other and from Zulu, Lapp, Hebrew, Uzbek or English. Yet, despite these surface differences, all human languages are governed by universal properties and constraints, a fact that was understood as early as the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon, who pointed out that ‘He that understands grammar in one language, understands it in another as far as the essential properties of grammar are concerned.’ The similarities of human languages go beyond the spoken languages and include the sign languages used by deaf persons throughout the world. Research on these sign languages show that although gestures instead of sounds are utilized, and the visual perceptual system instead of the auditory system for comprehension, their systems of units, structures and rules are governed by the same underlying principles as are spoken languages.
All human languages are equally complex and equally capable of expression. There are no so-called primitive languages. If one can say something in one language, the same thought can be expressed in another although the form of expression may differ. The vocabulary, that is, the inventory of sound (or gesture)/meaning units of every language, can be expanded to include new words or concepts through borrowing words from another language, through combining words to form compounds such as bittersweet or pickpocket, through blending words together, such as smog from smoke and fog, through neologisms or the coining of new words, a common practice of manufacturers of new products, by the use of acronyms—words derived from the initials of several words such as radar from Radio Detecting And Ranging. Abbreviations of longer words or phrases may also become lexicalized, as exemplified by ad for advertisement, and proper names may be used as common terms, such as sandwich, named from the fourth Earl of Sandwich in England who, it is reported, ate his food between slices of bread so that he need not take time off from gambling to eat in normal fashion. Although these examples are all from English, all languages can expand vocabularies in similar fashion, as is shown by compounds such as cure-dent (toothpick) in French, Panzerkraftwagen (armoured car) in German or četyrexetažnyi (four-storeyed) in Russian. In Akan, a major language spoken in Ghana, the word meaning ‘son’ or ‘child’—oha—is combined with ohene, which means ‘chief’, to form the compound oheneba meaning ‘prince’.
One common or universal characteristic of all languages is that the form of vocabulary items is for the most part arbitrarily related to its referent or meaning. Thus, the word meaning ‘house’ in English is house, in French is maison, in Spanish is casa, in Russian is dom and in Akan is odaη.
All human languages utilize a finite set of discrete sounds (or gestures) like ‘c’, ‘m’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ which can be defined by a finite set of phonetic (or gestural) properties or features. The vowel and consonant sound segments combine to form meaningful units like cat or mat called morphemes. Some words consist of just one morpheme; others are complex morphological units, that is, simple morphemes can be combined to form words like cats or catlike. Each language has specific constraints on word formation. In English one can add un- as a prefix to negate the meaning of a word, as in unlikely or unfortunate, but cannot add it at the end as a suffix; likelyun and fortunateun are not words in English, nor are the units formed by prefixing the suffixes -ly or -ate as in lylike or atefortune.
Just as in word formation, there are constraints or rules which determine how words can be combined to form sentences. The cat is on the mat means something different from The mat is on the cat and cat the on is mat the means nothing because the words are not combined according to the syntactic rules of English.
The syntactic rules in every language are similar kinds of rules although they may differ in specific constraints. Thus, in English, adjectives usually precede the nouns they modify (as in the red house) whereas in French they usually follow (as in la maison rouge). But in all languages these rules of syntax include a principle of recursion which permits the generation of an infinite set of sentences. We know that this is so since any speaker of any language can produce and understand sentences never spoken or heard previously. This recursive aspect is also revealed by the fact that, in principle, there is no longest sentence in any language; one can keep adding additional words or phrases or conjoin sentences with words like and or but or relative clauses, such as The cat is on the mat and the mat is on the floor, or The cat is on the mat that is on the floor, or The cat is on the mat and the mat is on the floor and the floor is made of wood which comes from the forest in the north of the country near the border.
Speakers of a language know these rules; the system of knowledge which underlies the ability to speak and understand the infinite set of sentences constitutes the mental grammar of a language which is acquired by a child and is accessed and used in speaking and understanding. This linguistic knowledge is not identical to the processes used in speaking and understanding. In actual linguistic performance, however, we must access this mental grammar as well as other non-linguistic systems (motor, perceptual, cognitive) in order to speak and understand. This difference between the knowledge of language (the grammar) and linguistic performance accounts for why in principle there is no longest sentence and language is infinite, whereas in performance each sentence is finite and the total number of sentences produced and understood in any one lifetime is finite.
The universality of language and of the grammars which underlie all languages suggests that the human brain is uniquely suited for the acquisition and use of language. This view is receiving increasing support from research on child language acquisition.
Further support for the view that the human brain is a language-learning organ is provided by neurological studies of language disorders such as aphasia. No one now questions the position put forth by Paul Broca in 1861 that language is specifically related to the left hemisphere. Furthermore, there is converging evidence that focal damage to the left cerebral hemisphere does not lead to an across-the-board reduction in language ability, and that lesions in different locations in the left brain are quite selective and remarkably consistent in the manner in which they undermine language. This selectivity reflects the different parts of the grammar discussed above; access to and processing of the phonology (sound system), the lexicon (inventory of morphemes and words), the syntax (rules of sentence formation), and the semantics (rules for the interpretation of meanings) can all be selectively impaired. There is also strong evidence showing that the language faculty is independent of other mental and cognitive faculties. That is, language not only appears to be unique to the human species but also does not appear to be dependent on general intelligence. Severely retarded individuals can learn language; persons with brain lesions may lose language abilities and retain other cognitive abilities.
Victoria A.Fromkin
University of California
Further reading
Akmajian, A., Demers, R., Harnish, M. and Farmer, A. (1990) Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication, 3rd edn, Cambridge, MA.
Chomsky, N. (1986) Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use, New York.
——(1988) Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures, Cambridge, MA.
Fromkin, V. and Rodman, R. (1993) An Introduction to Language, 5th edn, New York.
Jackendoff, R. (1994) Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature, New York.
Klima, E. and Bellugi, U. (1979) The Signs of Language, Cambridge, MA.
