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Language Is The Ability To Acquire and Use Complex Systems of

Language is the human ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication. The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Major debates around the origins and nature of language have occurred since ancient Greece. Estimates of the number of living languages range from 5,000 to 7,000. All languages rely on relating signs to meanings and contain phonological and syntactic systems that govern word and sentence structures. Language is unique to humans and enables a wide range of expressions through its productive and displaced nature. It is acquired socially in early childhood and is deeply entwined in human culture. Languages evolve and diversify over time, with language families like Indo-European descending from common ancestors.

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170 views

Language Is The Ability To Acquire and Use Complex Systems of

Language is the human ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication. The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Major debates around the origins and nature of language have occurred since ancient Greece. Estimates of the number of living languages range from 5,000 to 7,000. All languages rely on relating signs to meanings and contain phonological and syntactic systems that govern word and sentence structures. Language is unique to humans and enables a wide range of expressions through its productive and displaced nature. It is acquired socially in early childhood and is deeply entwined in human culture. Languages evolve and diversify over time, with language families like Indo-European descending from common ancestors.

Uploaded by

Lakshanmaya
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Language is the ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication, particularly

the human ability to do so, and a language is any specific example of such a system. The scientific
study of language is called linguistics. Questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as
whether words can represent experience, have been debated since Gorgiasand Plato in Ancient
Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while
others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought. 20th-century
philosophers such as Wittgensteinargued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major
figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.

Estimates of the number of languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. However, any
precise estimate depends on a partly arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. Natural
languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using
auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli for example, in whistling, signed, or braille. This is because
human language is modality-independent. Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the
definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to
the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of
rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules.
All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to
particular meanings. Oral,manual and tactile languages contain a phonological system that governs
how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system
that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.

Human language has the properties of productivity and displacement, and relies entirely on social
convention and learning. Its complex structure affords a much wider range of expressions than any
known system of animal communication. Language is thought to have originated when
early hominins started gradually changing their primate communication systems, acquiring the ability
to form a theory of other minds and a shared intentionality.[1][2] This development is sometimes
thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of
language as having evolved to serve specific communicative and social functions. Language is
processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca's and Wernicke's
areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally
speak fluently when they are approximately three years old. The use of language is deeply
entrenched in human culture. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language also
has many social and cultural uses, such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well
as social grooming and entertainment.

Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can
be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral
languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages
that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family. The Indo-European family is
the most widely spoken and includes languages such as English, Russian, and Hindi; the Sino-
Tibetan family, which includes Mandarin and the other Chinese languages, and Tibetan; the Afro-
Asiatic family, which includes Arabic, Somali, andHebrew; the Bantu languages, which
include Swahili, and Zulu, and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout Africa; and
the Malayo-Polynesian languages, which include Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, and hundreds of other
languages spoken throughout the Pacific. The languages of the Dravidian family that are spoken
mostly in Southern India include Tamil andTelugu. Academic consensus holds that between 50%
and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become
extinct by the year 2100.

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