What is language?
The first thing to notice about the question "What is language?" is that it uses the word 'language' in the singular without the indefinite article. Formulated as it is in English, it thus differs Language grammatically, if not in meaning, from the superficially similar question "What is a language?"
Several European languages have two words, not one, to translate the English word 'language': cf. French 'langage': 'langue', Italian 'linguaggio': 'lingua'; Spanish 'lenguaje': 'lengua'. In each case, the difference between the two words correlates, up to a point, with the difference in the two senses of the English word 'language'. For example, in French the word 'langage' is used to refer to language in general and the word 'langue' is applied to particular languages. It so happens that English allows its speakers to say, of some person, not only that he possesses a language (English, Chinese, Malay, Swahili, etc.), but that he possesses language. Philosophers, psychologists and linguists commonly make the point that it is the possession of language which most clearly distinguishes man from other animals. fact that one cannot possess (or use) natural language without possessing (or using) some particular natural language.
I have just used the term 'natural language'; and this brings us to another point. The word 'language' is applied, not only to English, Chinese, Malay, Swahili, etc. - i.e. to what everyone will agree are languages properly so called - but to a variety of other systems of communication, notation or calculation, about which there is room
for dispute. For example, mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists frequently construct, for particular purposes, notational
systems which, whether they are rightly called languages or not, are artificial, rather than natural.
So too, though it is based on pre-existing natural languages and is incontrovertibly a language, is Esperanto, which was invented in the late nineteenth century for the purpose of international communication. There are other systems of communication, both human and non-human, which are quite definitely natural rather than artificial, but which do not seem to be languages in the strict sense of the term, even though the word 'language' is commonly used with reference to them.
Consider such phrases as 'sign language', 'body language' or 'the language of the bees' in this connection. Most people would probably say that the word 'language' is here being used metaphorically or figuratively. Interestingly enough, it is 'langage', rather than 'langue', that Some definitions of 'language' would normally be used in translating such phrases into French. The French word 'langage' (like the Italian 'linguaggio' and the Spanish 'lenguaje') is more general than the other member of the pair, not only in that it is used to refer to language in general, but also in that it is applied to systems of communication, whether they are natural or artificial, human or non-human, for which the English word 'language' is employed in what appears to be an extended sense.
The linguist is concerned primarily with natural languages. The question "What is language?" carries with it the presupposition that each of the several thousand recognizably distinct natural languages spoken throughout the world is a specific instance of something more general. What the linguist wants to know is whether all
natural languages have something in common not shared by other systems of communication, human or non-human, such that it is right to apply to each of them the word 'language' and to deny the application of the term to other systems of communication - except in so far as they are based, like Esperanto, on pre-existing natural
languages.
Some definitions of 'language'
Definitions of language are not difficult to find. Let us look at some. Each of the following statements about language, whether it was intended as a definition or not, makes one or more points that we will take up later. The statements all come from classic works by
well-known linguists. Taken together, they will serve to give some preliminary indication of the properties that linguists at least tend to
think of as being essential to language.
(i) According to Sapir (1921: 8): "Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols." 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 otherhand, there are many systems of voluntarily produced symbols that we only count as languages in what we feel to be an extended
.
