LANGUAGE

A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon. Though commonly used as a means of communication among people, human language is only one instance of this phenomenon. This article concerns the properties of language in general. For information specifically on the use of language by humans see the main article on natural language.

Contents [hide]
1 Properties of language
2 Human languages
3 International auxiliary languages
4 Controlled languages
5 Constructed languages
6 The study of language
7 Do animals use language?
8 Formal languages
9 Programming languages
10 See also
10.1 See also (Lists)
11 Notes
12 References
13 Further reading
14 External links



[edit] Properties of language
Languages are not just sets of symbols. They also contain a grammar, or system of rules, used to manipulate the symbols. While a set of symbols may be used for expression or communication, it is primitive and relatively inexpressive, because there are no clear or regular relationships between the symbols. Because a language also has a grammar, it can manipulate its symbols to express clear and regular relationships between them.

Another property of language is the arbitrariness of the symbols. Any symbol can be mapped onto any concept (or even onto one of the rules of the grammar). For instance, there is nothing about the Spanish word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to use it to mean "nothing". That is the meaning all Spanish speakers have memorized for that sound pattern. But for Croatian, Serbian or Bosnian speakers, nada means "hope".

However, it must be understood that just because in principle the symbols are arbitrary does not mean that a language cannot have symbols that are iconic of what they stand for. Words such as "meow" sound similar to what they represent (see Onomatopoeia), but they could be replaced with words such as "jarn", and as long as everyone memorized the new word, the same concepts could be expressed with it.


[edit] Human languages
Main article: Natural language

Some of the areas of the brain involved in language processing: Broca's area, Wernicke's area, Supramarginal gyrus, Angular gyrus, Primary Auditory CortexHuman languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science of studying them is linguistics.

Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible. For instance, there are a few dialects of German similar to some dialects of Dutch. The transition between languages within the same language family is sometimes gradual (see dialect continuum).

Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not always possible to make a well-defined distinction between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the interactions between languages and populations. (See Dialect or August Schleicher for a longer discussion.)

The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.


[edit] International auxiliary languages
Main article: International auxiliary language
Some languages are meant specifically for communication between people of different nationalities or language groups. Several of these languages have been constructed by an individual or group, as noted below. Others are seen as natural, pre-existing languages. Their developers merely catalogued and standardized their vocabulary and identified their grammatical rules. These languages are called naturalistic. One such language, Latino Sine Flexione, is a simplified form of Latin. Another, Occidental, was drawn from several Western languages.

To date, the most successful auxiliary language is Esperanto, invented by the Polish ophthalmologist Zamenhof, which has about 2 million speakers over the world and which has hundreds of songs sung in it, and a vast amount of literature written in it. The Stone City, for example, was originally written in Esperanto. Other auxiliary languages with an important group of speakers are Interlingua and Ido (however, the latter is believed to have only a few hundred speakers).


[edit] Controlled languages
Main article: Controlled natural language
Controlled natural languages are subsets of natural languages whose grammars and dictionaries have been restricted in order to reduce or eliminate both ambiguity and complexity. The purpose behind the development and implementation of a controlled natural language typically is to aid non-native speakers of a natural language in understanding it, or to ease computer processing of a natural language. An example of a widely used controlled natural language is Simplified English, which was originally developed for aerospace industry maintenance manuals.


[edit] Constructed languages
Main article: Constructed language
Some individuals and groups have constructed their own artificial languages, for practical, experimental, personal or ideological reasons. For example, one prominent artificial language, Esperanto, was created by L. L. Zamenhof as a compilation of various elements of different languages, and is supposed to be an easy-to-learn language for people familiar with similar, mostly Indo-European, languages. Other constructed languages strive to be more logical ("loglangs") than natural languages; a prominent example of this is Lojban. Both of these languages are meant as international auxiliary languages.

Some writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, have created fantasy languages, for literary, artistic or personal reasons.

Constructed languages are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by natural human languages.


[edit] The study of language
Main article: Linguistics
The historical record of linguistics begins in Northern India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, known as the Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी). Pāṇini’s grammar is highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root; the phoneme was only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowels, and elements like nouns, verbs, vowels and consonants which he put into classes, were also breakthroughs at the time.

In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 CE in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.

Later in the West, the success of science, mathematics, and other formal systems in the 20th century led many to attempt a formalization of the study of language as a "semantic code". This resulted in the academic discipline of linguistics, the founding of which is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure.[citation needed] In the 20th century substantial contribution to the understanding of language came from Ferdinand de Saussure, Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson;[1] they were all characterized as being highly systematic.[1]


[edit] Do animals use language?
Main article: Animal language
The term "animal languages" is often used for nonhuman languages. Linguists do not consider these to be language, but describe them as animal communication, because such communication is fundamentally different in its underlying principles from true language, which has been found in humans only.

In several publicized instances, nonhuman animals have been taught to understand certain features of human language. Chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans have been taught hand signs based on American Sign Language; however, they have never been successfully taught grammar. In 2003, a saved Bonobo chimpanzee named Kanzi allegedly independently created some words to convey certain concepts. The African Grey Parrot, which possesses the ability to mimic human speech with a high degree of accuracy, is suspected of having sufficient intelligence to begin to comprehend some of the speech it mimics. Most species of parrot, despite expert mimicry, are believed to have no linguistic comprehension at all.

While proponents of animal communication systems have debated levels of semantics, these systems have not been found to have anything approaching human language syntax. The situation with dolphins and whales presents a special case in that there is some evidence that spontaneous development of complex vocal language is occurring, but it certainly has not been proven.

Some researchers argue that a continuum exists among the communication methods of all social animals, pointing to the fundamental requirements of group behavior and the existence of "mirror cells" in primates. This, however, is still a scientific question. What exactly is the definition of the word "language"? Most researchers agree that, although human and more primitive languages have analogous features, they are not homologous.


[edit] Formal languages
Main article: Formal language
Mathematics and computer science use artificial entities called formal languages (including programming languages and markup languages, and some that are more theoretical in nature). These often take the form of character strings, produced by some combination of formal grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.


[edit] Programming languages
Main article: Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages, like human languages, are defined through the use of syntactic and semantic rules, to determine structure and meaning respectively.

Programming languages are used to facilitate communication about the task of organizing and manipulating information, and to express algorithms precisely. Some authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms; sometimes the term "computer language" is used for more limited artificial languages.


[edit] See also
Autism
Base language
Broca's area - a speech-related brain region
Cochlear implant
Computer-assisted language learning - a historical perspective
Deception
Dialect
Dictionary - word catalog for a given language
Extinct language
Foreign language
FOXP2 - gene implicated in cases of specific language impairment (SLI)
General-audience description
Great ape language
Historical linguistics
ILR scale - defines 5 levels of language proficiency
Intercultural competence
Interpreting
ISO 639-3 - 3-letter ID codes for all languages
ISO 639 - 2- and 3-letter ID codes for languages
Language education
Language-predicated educational games
Language policy
Language reform
Language school
Linguistic protectionism
Metacommunicative competence
Name
Non-sexist language
Non-verbal communication
Official language
Orthography
Philology
Philosophy of language
Phonetic transcription
Profanity
Psycholinguistics
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Second language
Slang
Speech therapy
Symbolic communication
Symbolic linguistic representation
Terminology
Thesaurus - find the best word for a situation
Tongue-twister
Transition words
Translation
Universal grammar
Verbal abuse
Visual language
Whistled language
Written language



[edit] See also (Lists)
Category:Lists of languages
Ethnologue - list of languages, locations, population and genetic affiliation
List of basic linguistics topics
List of language academies
List of languages
List of official languages

[edit] Notes
^ a b Holquist 1981, xvii-xviii

[edit] References
Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, David (2001). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Gode, Alexander (1951). Interlingua-English Dictionary. New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Company.
Kandel ER, Schwartz JH, Jessell TM. Principles of Neural Science, fourth edition, 1173 pages. McGraw-Hill, New York (2000). ISBN 0-8385-7701-6
Katzner, K. (1999). The Languages of the World. New York, Routledge.
Holquist, Michael. (1981) Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. xv-xxxiv
McArthur, T. (1996). The Concise Companion to the English Language. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

[edit] Further reading
International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Frawley 2003)
The World's Major Languages (Comrie 1987)
The Atlas of Languages (Comrie, Matthews, & Polinsky 1997)

[edit] External links
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