March Nature of Language

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

What is language? An Introduction.

Language is a system of symbols based on arbitrary conventions that are infinitely

extendable according to the changing needs of the speakers.

Language is composed of both verbal and non-verbal communication.

It is a mixture of both linguistic and non-linguistic signs.

Language is:

1. Systematic
2. Dynamic
3. Fixed structure
4. Based on shared knowledge
5. Culture is embedded in language
6. Arbitrary

English is a West Germanic language belonging to the Indo-European language family. It is

the lingua franca of the world.

It has been divided into

● Old English 450-1100 AD

● Middle English 1100- 1500 AD
● Modern English 1500 AD >

Language is the best means of self-expression. It is through language that humans express
their thoughts, desires, emotions, and feelings. It is through it that they store knowledge,
transmit messages and experience from one person to another and from one generation to
another.

In English the correspondence between the written form and the spoken form is not
consistently maintained as English has a lot of borrowings from other language. In contrast
Indian languages have near perfect sound and spelling correspondence.

NATURE OF LANGAUAGE
March Nature of Language

Hockett, C. (1960). Sixteen "design-features" of human language:

1. Vocal-auditory channel: sounds emitted from the mouth and perceived by the
auditory system.

2. Rapid fading (transitoriness): Signal last a short time. This is true of all systems
involving sound.

3. Interchangeability: All utterances that are understood can be produced.

4. Total feedback: The sender of a message also perceives the message. That is, you
hear what you say.

5. Specialization: The signal produced is specialized for communication and is not the
side effect of some other behavior.

6. Semanticity: There is a fixed relationship between a signal and a meaning.

7. Arbitrariness: There is an arbitrary relationship between a signal and its meaning.

That is, the signal is related to the meaning by convention or by instinct but has
no inherent relationship with the meaning.

8. Discreteness: Language can be said to be built up from discrete units (e.g., phonemes
in human language). Exchanging such discrete units causes a change inthe meaning
of a signal. This is an abrupt change, rather than a continuous changeof meaning.

9. Displacement: Communicating about things or events that are distant in time or

space.

10. Productivity: Language is an open system. We can produce potentially an infinite

number of different messages by combining the elements differently.

11. Cultural transmission: Each generation needs to learn the system of communication
from the preceding generation.

12. Duality of patterning: large numbers of meaningful signals (e.g., morphemes or

words) produced from a small number of meaningless units (e.g., phonemes).

13. Prevarication: Linguistic messages can be false, deceptive, or meaningless.

14. Reflexiveness: In a language, one can communicate about communication.

15. Learnability: A speaker of a language can learn another language.

16. Broadcast Transmission and Directional Reception: When humans speak, sound is
transmitted in all directions; however, listeners perceive the direction from which the
sound is coming.
March Nature of Language

MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE

1) Language is getting worse, language is getting poorer, language is losing its content
because of the influence of dialects, loanwords and the influence of foreign languages.
2) Linguistic change worsens or even kills language.
3) Slang makes people stupid and destroys language.
4) Standard language is the real and best language. People should stop speaking
dialects.
5) Traditional dialects are the best; modern urban dialects are bad language.
6) Mixing languages (code-switching) is bad and represents incapability.
7) Everyone is a specialist of language and can evaluate language matters
linguistically.
8) Words of different languages looking the same must be related.
9) Speakers of tribal languages are simpler in mind because their languages don't have
some concepts that Western languages have (numbers, colours, etc.).
10) I don't have an accent, everyone else does.
11) If I don't recognise a word (of my own language), it is not a word and people using
it are ignorant.
12) If a word can't be found in a dictionary, it does not exist.
13) My language is the most complicated and the most difficult to learn.
14) Language is like mathematics and it should be cleaned of illogical content.

Explanations for some misconceptions about language

Linguistics is not about learning as many languages as humanly possible; it’s the study
of how language works. The language you speak does not determine how you
experience the world. A language can slightly influence thought, but not to a very
strong degree: the most extreme examples are being able to recognize certain colours
milliseconds faster. If a language does not have a word for X, it doesn’t mean they
can’t understand X.
Word means, roughly, an assortment of sounds with a meaning. If a word isn’t in a
dictionary, that doesn’t make it not a word.
Language change will not cause your language to die or fall apart. All languages
change, all the time, and this includes things like slang, grammar changes, accent and
pronunciation changes, etc. No one can stop language change.
In the same way, meaning changes; just because a word used to mean something
doesn’t mean that it does, or should, still mean what it used to mean. In Linguistics,
amelioration is the upgrading or elevation of a word’s meaning, when a word with a
negative sense develops into a positive one. Similarly, pejoration is the depreciation
of a word’s meaning.
If someone speaks in a way different from the standard form, it doesn’t mean that
they’re uneducated, or they are unaware of the language.
Sign language isn’t one language: there are over three hundred different sign
languages, belonging to dozens of different sign language families.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

March Nature of Language

1. English is derived from a Proto-Indo-European language spoken by nomads wandering

Europe about 5,000 years ago. English is conventionally divided into three major
historical periods: Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. Old English was
brought to the British Isles by Germanic peoples: the Jutes, Saxons, and Angles, starting
in 449.
2. The term “English” is derived from Anglisc, the speech of the Angles—one of the three
Germanic tribes that invaded England during the fifth century.
3. The Anglo-Saxon invaders who came to England in the latter part of 5th century A.D.
gave English its name, culture, and language.
4. The language that we know as Old English or Anglo-Saxon is essentially the English
language in the earlier stages of its development. A relatively small vocabulary of such
words remains from which many words have since been lost.
5. During the Anglo-Saxon times, writers did not necessarily always write in English.
6. The language was in a state of flux: attempts were made to assert the French language,
to keep down the local language, English, and to make the language of the church
(Latin) the language of writing.
7. During this period, there was a rapid expansion in the number of words of English.
These words often entered the language from Latin but by far the majority of imports
were French.
8. The words of Latin origin were more formal, learned, and bookish in their use. The
French words were considered to be more literary in function. It was commonly used
in law and administration, arts, fashion, and other areas of cultural and political
dominance. Until the second half of the 14th century, the language of instruction in
English schools was French.
9. The spread of Anglo-Saxon, then English, as a language was one of the most significant
elements, over several centuries, in molding a national identity out of all the cultural
and linguistic influences that the country underwent. Icelandic and Viking, Latin and
French, Germanic and Celtic _ as well as many local linguistic, cultural, and social
forces – were all part of the Anglo-Saxon melting pot which would eventually become
English: the language of England, then of Britain.

10. Structural and grammatical changes happened as well. Charles Barber points out in
“The English Language: A Historical Introduction”:
March Nature of Language

One of the major syntactic changes in the English language since Anglo-Saxon
times has been the disappearance of the S[ubject]-O[bject]-V[erb] and V[erb]-
S[ubject]-O[bject] types of word-order, and the establishment of the S[ubject]-
V[erb]-O[bject] type as normal.

11. Many scholars consider the early Modern English period to have begun about 1500.
During the Renaissance, English incorporated many words from Latin via French, from
classical Latin (not just church Latin), and Greek. The King James Bible (1611) and
works of William Shakespeare are considered in Modern English.

12. The term “Modern” English refers more to the relative stasis of its pronunciation,
grammar, and spelling than it has anything to do with current vocabulary or slang,
which is always changing.

13. According to Christine Kenneally in her book “The First Word,”: “Today there are
about 6,000 languages in the world, and half of the world's population speaks only 10
of them. English is the single most dominant of these 10. British colonialism initiated
the spread of English across the globe; it has been spoken nearly everywhere and has
become even more prevalent since World War II, with the global reach of American
power.”