Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Notion of Language

Language is central to our nature as human beings, yet it seems it is the last thing we can reasonably study objectively—we have to examine everything else (in the physical world) before we can explore how we think and how we communicate.

There is at least one good reason for this. Language is a social artifact—a tool. People who use tools do not generally spend time studying them. We tend to take it for granted. However, our lives depend increasingly on fast and successful communication nowadays. We often blame our poor communication for our personal or global problems. Even machines are“learning” to use language. Linguistics today is at a stage similar to early physics or biology, a time in which a variety of more or less competing hypotheses and systems of description have not yet given way to one agreed view.

Apart from the fact that linguistics is simply too recent to be a unified science, there are five other reasons:

1) Human language has shown itself to be an extremely complex phenomenon, far more so than most educated people appreciate.

2) Unlike other sciences, which use language to handle something else, linguistics has to use language to describe language, which is a demanding exercise.

3) Language is by its very nature beyond the total grasp of any one human or group of humans.

4) Language, like thought, is both a private and a shared phenomenon, and until we understand what is brain or mind, we can only study the product rather than how language is produced, stored, memorized, and used as part of “consciousness.”

5) Sometimes, higher-order groupings can be made, as in such notions “the Romance languages, ” “the Germanic languages, ” “Creole languages”—all this will fall under the heading of “natural languages” which contrasts with artificial languages. At the highest level of abstraction, it refers to the biological faculty which enables all normal human beings to learn and use their language.

Above all, we can conclude the definition of language as “Language is defined as a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.”

“Arbitrary” implies that there is no physical or intrinsic connection between the sounds and the entities in the world to which they refer.

“Vocal” means that the primary medium of language is sound (language is spoken).

“Symbol” stands for another way of looking at arbitrariness.

“Human” means species-specific, unique, and no system of animal communication is like our human language.