The human faculty of communication; or, a system of spoken communication particular to a community. ‘Man has an instinctive tendency to speak’, wrote Charles Darwin (1809–1882) in The Descent of Man. Human beings acquire language from their environment without explicit instruction being necessary; and although unimpaired individuals will naturally acquire spoken language, SIGN LANGUAGE can also be acquired via environmental exposure. A human being who is exposed to no linguistic input at all in childhood will however fail to acquire normal linguistic competence; in particular, the individual’s command of GRAMMAR will be impaired. Language is species-specific (see ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE BY NON-HUMAN PRIMATES), and is supported by specialized language areas of the brain, especially in the FRONTAL LOBE and TEMPORAL LOBE of the LEFT HEMISPHERE (BROCA’S AREAS, WERNICKE’S AREAS); damage to these areas results in APHASIA.
The particular linguistic system acquired by a developing human will be that of the environment, not of the individual’s progenitors: a child of English-speaking parents adopted as an infant by Eskimos will acquire perfect Inuktitut, not English. In childhood, more than one language can be acquired easily (see BILINGUALISM), but languages acquired after childhood will rarely be acquired to full competence, especially in their phonological system (see DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC PHONOLOGY).
Eastern African hominids dated by archaeologists at about 100000 years ago display the lower larynx and larger pharynx characteristic of modern humans, and may have been the first of our ancestors capable of wide-ranging vocal communication. There are currently around 5000 distinct languages in the world, most of which can be grouped into 30 or so language families. English is a member of the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, which includes most of the languages of Europe, parts of the Near East, and the Indian subcontinent. It is hard to define what counts as a distinct language versus a dialect; such distinctions are more often drawn for political rather than linguistic reasons. Norwegian and Danish are thus termed separate languages although they are largely mutually intelligible, while Alabama English and Newcastle-uponTyne English, or Neapolitan versus Genoan Italian, each pair of which may fail the mutual intelligibility test, are held to be, respectively, dialects of English and Italian. The most important properties of natural language are: (1) the encoding of meaning via sound is arbitrary: with only extremely rare exceptions, the form of language is independent of the meaning it signifies.
(‘Language’ is no more transparent of its meaning than ‘Sprache’ or ‘langue’.) (2) Language is compositional: sentences, words, syllables, phonemes are all composed of elements which can be combined in other ways to make other sentences and so on. (3) Language is systematic and rule-governed. Rules of grammar apply to the order of words within sentences, rules of MORPHOLOGY to the order of morphemes within words, rules of phonology to the order of phonemes within syllables, and so on. In English, man bites dog is a possible sentence, but bites dog man is impossible; un-November-y is a possible word coinage, but y-November-un is not; slomp is a possible syllable but lsopm, oslmp and pmlso are not. (4) Language is creative; most sentences that a language user speaks, hears (and reads or writes) are novel, at least to that person. Further, because the grammars of natural languages allow recursive operation, every language user is in principle capable of producing an infinite number of different sentences.
The language faculty in humans is not simply dependent upon general cognitive abilities; retarded individuals, with for example WILLIAMS SYNDROME, may have unimpaired linguistic competence, while the condition known as SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT is just that—mental impairment which is specific to the use of language, while other cognitive abilities are in principle intact. Language may be encoded in secondary representations such as WRITING. In contrast to the development of spoken language in childhood, the use of such cultural forms of representing language—that is, reading and writing—can only be learned via explicit instruction. Written language, which serves to transmit meaning in the absence of personal contact between the producer and the comprehender, differs from spoken language in many ways: it tends to be more formal, and more elaborate (sentences with several subordinate clauses, and parentheses, such as this one, are more likely to occur in written than in spoken language); it tends to contain fewer contextually bound expressions such as here and this than spoken language; and in many orthographies writing provides a structural system of punctuation with no direct parallel in speech. Disorders of reading and writing due to developmental impairment or brain injury may also exist independently of other areas of linguistic competence (see ALEXIA, DYSLEXIA, AGRAPHIA, DYSGRAPHIA).
References
Crystal D. (1997) The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Pinker S. (1994) The Language Instinct, Penguin: London.
ANNE CUTLER
This is the complete article, containing 791 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
