3. On Language (1): Definitions

“What is language?” is a question that many linguists and non-linguists alike have sought to address. If anthropologists regard language as a form of cultural behaviour then sociologists consider it as an interaction between members of a social group. Philosophers regard it as a means of interpreting human experience and so on. The fact is that language has so many interfaces with human life that it can be studied from several points of view. No doubt it is a biological behaviour but at the same time it is a social and cognitive bahaviour. Language is truly a very complex phenomenon related to human beings. It is not only a means of communication but also an instrument of thinking, a store house of knowledge. So, the question ‘What is language?’ is in some measure comparable with the question ‘What is life?’ These questions are much too broad to be answered in a direct way since an answer to these needs to subsume many such comprehensive concepts. All attempts to define it at best reflect a certain amount of inadequacy and imperfection in as much as they just hint at only certain characteristics of the vast nature of human language.

Such a large view has been given by dictionaries, encyclopedias, linguists, and philosophers as follows:

i. “Language is a system of communication consisting of sounds, words and grammar, or the system of communication used by the people of a particular country or profession.” -The Cambridge Advance Learner’ s Dictionary (2003) ii. “Speech is the representation of the experience of the mind.” -Aristotle.

iii. “Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.” -E. Sapi: Language.

iv. “Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech sounds combined into words.” -Henry Sweet.

v. “A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group co-operates.” -Bloch and Trager: Outline of Linguistic Analysis.

vi. “The totality of the utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community.” -Bloomfield: Language.

vii. “Language is human … a verbal systematic symbolism …a means of transmitting information... a form of social behaviour … [with a] high degree of convention.” -J. Whatmough: Language.

viii. “A language [is a] symbol system … based on pure or arbitrary convention … infinitely extendable and modifiable according the changing needs and conditions of the speakers.” -R.H. Robins: General Linguistics.

ix. “Human languages are unlimited … an unlimited set of discrete signals … have great structural complexity … structure on at least two levels … are open-ended … allow for the transmission of information.” -R.W. Langacker: Language and its Structure.

x. ‘When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call “human essence,” the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man.” -N. Chomsky: Language and Mind.

xi. “Language in its widest sense means the sum total of such signs of our thoughts and feelings as are capable of external perception and as could be peoduced and repeated at will.” -A.H. Gardiner: Speech and Language, 1935.

xii. “Language may be defined as the expression of thought by means of speech-sound.” -Henry Sweet: The History of Language.

xiii. “A system of communication by sound, i.e., through the organ of speech and hearing, among human beings of a certain group or community, using vocal symbols possessing arbitrary conventional meanings.” -Mario A. Pei & Frank Gaynor: Dictionary of Linguistics, 1954.

xiv. “A language is a device that establishes sound-meaning correlation, paring meanings with signals to enable people to exchange ideas through observable sequences of sound.” -Ronald W. Langacker: Language and its Structure.

xv. “Language is “audible, articulate human speech as produced by the action of the tongue and adjacent vocal organs … The body of words and methods of combining words used and understood by a considerable community, especially when fixed and elaborated by long usage; a tongue.” -Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2^nd ed.

xvi. According to Transformational generative linguists like Noam Chomsky, language is the innate capacity of native speakers to understand and form grammatical sentences.”^[1]

In his Language, Sapir (1921)’s notion (see definition (iii)) seems to have later influenced C. F. Hocket (1958)’s proposal of the design features of language. What is remarkable Sapir’s notion is that human language is a system; that is, an order or a finite set of rule governed behaviour; that it is a potential means of communication among the participating members of a human society; that unlike animal communication, human language is noninstinctive and hence voluntarily produced; that it comprises of arbitrary vocal symbol. Sapir’s view opens an interesting scholarly debate with regards to the nature of language. John Lyons (1981) in a comment on the Sapir’s notion of language presents a critical argument:

This definition suffers from several defects. However broadly we construe the terms ‘idea’, ‘emotion’ and desire’, it seems clear that there is much that is communicated by language which is not covered by any of them; and ‘idea’ in particular is inherently imprecise. On the other hand, there are many systems of voluntarily produced symbols that we only count as languages in what we feel to be an extended or metaphorical sense of the word ‘language’. For example, what is now popularly referred to by means of expression ‘body language’–which makes use of gestures, postures, eye-gaze, etc.–would seem to satisfy this point of Sapir’s definition. Whether it is purely human and noninstinctive is, admittedly, open to doubt. But so too, as we shall see, is the question whether languages properly so called are both purely human and non-instinctive. This is the main point to be noted in Sapir’s definition. (pp. 3-4)

One of the most remarkable statements of language is given by Noam Chomsky (1957: 13) that “a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.” Chomsky’s definition is large and general. It is intended to cover much else besides natural languages. For Chomsky, “all natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense, since each natural language has a finite number of phonemes (or letters in its alphabet) and each sentence is representable as a finite sequence of these phonemes (or letters), though there are infinitely many sentences. Similarly, the set of ‘sentence’ of some formalized system of mathematics can be considered a language.”

In a critical appraisal, John Lyons (1981) observed that:

It [Chomsky’s definition of language] says nothing about the communicative function of either natural or non-natural languages; it says nothing about the symbolic nature of the elements or sequences of them. Its purpose is to focus attention upon the purely structural properties of languages and to suggest that these properties can be investigated from a mathematically precise point of view. It is Chomsky’s major contribution to linguistics to have given particular emphasis to what he calls the Structure-dependence of the processes whereby sentences are constructed in natural languages and to have formulated a general theory of grammar which is based upon a particular definition of this property. (pp. 7-8)

In short, scientists have considered language variously depending on the viewpoint of their own discipline. All such above definitions, however, come to view language as the principal means used in actual social situations by human beings to communicate with each other and to do self expression. They also agree on a number of essential features of language such as arbitrary, non-instinctive, conventional, open-ended, extendable, modifiable and systematic and so on. In general, “most of them have taken the view that languages are systems of symbols designed, as it were, for the purpose of communication” (Lyons 1981: 8).

It is noticeable that although language can be transferred to various media such as writing or sign language (in the case among deaf) and so on, linguistics still considers spoken language as primary and has thus assigned it the priority that speech is an overlaid function. The study of speech sounds is, therefore, of more central importance than the study of writing, or of any other language-medium, whether actual or potential. It is because most immediate and primary manifestation of language is speech. Writing is simply the representation of speech in another physical medium. As such speech has biological, functional, structural and historical primacy over writing. Spoken language encodes thought into a physically transmittable form, while writing, in turn, further encodes the spoken language into a physical form in a visual mode that can transcend time and space. Writing is therefore a two-stage process, a secondary representation of thought. In studying language, the linguist always takes the spoken language as the best source of data and as the object of description. One, of course, need not dismiss written language, but only assign it a secondary position. This is invariably true except in case of languages that are now dead, for example Latin, the language which is no longer used as a natural daily means of spoken communication within a community.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

The definitions from (ii)–(x) are quoted from S.K. Verma & N. Krishnaswamy (1989). Modern Linguistics: An Introduction. India: Oxford University Press, pp. 16-17. And definitions from (xi)–(xvi) are quoted from Rdhey L. Varshney (9^th ed. 2008-09). An Introductory Text Book of Linguistics and Phonetics. Indian, UP: Student Store, pp. 2-3.