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A language is a system used to facilitate communication among higher animals and/or computers. This article is about the fundamental features typically found in nearly all natural human languages. For information about artificial languages specifically for computers, please see instead machine code. Higher animals believed to employ audible language only, without symbols, include, but are not limited to, dolphins and whales. For information about this subject, please see "Animal communication" instead.
The word language is intimately related to the word "tongue". "Language" (without an article) can also refer to the use of such systems as a phenomenon. "Language" is also used to refer to common properties of languages.
As of early 2007, there are 6,912 known living human languages, according to "Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition" [1]. A "living language" is simply one which is in wide use by a specific group of living people. The exact number of known living languages will vary from 5,000 to 10,000, depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular according to how one treats dialects. There are also many Extinct languages.
The process of converting the writing of one language into another is called translation; the process of converting one language to another orally is called interpreting. With recent advances in technology, machine translation has become more widely available and can be used for understanding the context of a text.
Human languages initially use patterns of sound and gesture (or body language) to convey information. These sounds (along with descriptions of gestures and intonation where crucial to comprehension) can be converted into written (or typeset) form with little loss of information. Gestures and intonation can convey the emotional content of speech and are always a part of delivery, but are not routinely conveyed in written form. Expert readers are often able to induce and restore the original inflection and some of the emotional content from the surrounding context of the written (or typeset) words. (Recent efforts to reduce the emotional content of speech to symbolic form lead to the invention of emoticons, which have become quite popular.)
Not all human languages include a set of visual symbols to complement the spoken words and provide a means to permanently record and widely share ideas. Some human languages, typically those of small populations, exist only in the audible form, implying that the written form develops after the spoken form has matured and the size of the population has increased beyond a certain size.
Languages that exist only in the spoken form, such as those of many of the native American Indian tribes, require the use of audio recording devices such as a digital audio recorder or a tape recorder, augmented by explanatory text written in other languages, for preservation. Recently, efforts have been made to create symbol sets and grammars for such languages to prevent further losses of historically valuable information.
Conversely, there are numerous extinct languages which persist only in their written form. In some cases, experts can only guess at what their spoken form actually sounded like. To prevent further losses of this nature, modern linguists have developed supersets of symbols for the purpose of accurately recording the authentic sounds of known languages.
While the superset symbols, which typically encode phonemes and (more specifically) their allophones, could record continuous conversation with nearly flawless accuracy, it would be tedious and unnecessary to record huge volumes of speech in this manner. That said, there is a practical application for it: fine tuning of the programming for text-to-speech synthesizers to give computers a voice that sounds remarkably human. Where a synthesizer stumbles on a given word, an entry can be added to an exception dictionary, wherein it's definition consists of the word respelled in phonemes and/or allophones.
While there are examples of human languages without the symbolic features, there is no known natural animal communication system that does have them. Humans are the only animals known to instigate the use of symbols. Although some chimpanzees have been taught to use symbols in two-way communication, and some evidence suggests dolphins can be taught to recognize them, it remains controversial, with some experts objecting to even the suggestion that they use language on any level.
A set of rules known as grammar establishes how the recombination of spoken words is governed. This, along with the rules of spelling, indirectly regulates how the symbols from the set are manipulated. In many, but not all, languages the combined basic symbols, called letters, form "words", more formally known as lexemes. Chinese and Egyptian are examples of languages in which individual symbols convey concepts that correlate directly to words or phrases (grouped words) in other languages.
These words and symbols can be recombined productively to convey new information, distinguishing languages from other forms of communication. Complexity of symbol sets combined with flexible grammar confers efficiency and precision advantages in conveying new information.
Some invented human languages have been built entirely on visual cues to enable communication for specialized situations. This includes:
These invented human languages employ flags, flashing lights, or hand gestures for symbols. One particularly successful class of language is American Sign Language. Another is British Sign Language. It is also noteworthy that some persons are able to comprehend spoken words even in the total absence of sound via a process known as "Lip Reading".
The learning of one's own native language, typically that of one's parent(s) or legal guardian(s), normally occurs spontaneously in early human childhood and is biologically driven. A crucial role of this process is performed by the neural activity of a portion of the human brain known as Broca's area.
There are approximately 7,000 current human languages, and many, if not most seem to share certain properties, leading to the belief in the existence of Universal Grammar, as shown by generative grammar studies pioneered by the work of Noam Chomsky. Recently, it has been demonstrated that a dedicated network in the human brain (crucially involving Broca's area, a portion of the left inferior frontal gyrus), is selectively activated by complex verbal structures (but not simple ones) of those languages that meet the Universal Grammar requirements. A detailed explanation of the demonstration, with references, is provided in the subtopic "Broca's area and Universal Grammar" within the main Broca's area article.
There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding linguist Max Weinreich's famous aphorism that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy." In other words, the distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or degree of mutual intelligibility.
Humans, sometimes using computer programs, have developed artificial languages deliberately meant to mimic natural languages, including:
Artificial languages are not restricted to the properties shared by natural human languages. (Languages of other higher animal species likely have unique properties as well.)
Languages are not just sets of symbols. They also often conform to a rough 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 unexpressive, because there are no clear or regular relationships between the symbols. Because a language also often 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 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 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.
Human 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.
There is disagreement among anthropologists on when language was first used by humans (or their ancestors). Estimates range from about two million (2,000,000) years ago, during the time of Homo habilis, to as recently as forty thousand (40,000) years ago, during the time of Cro-Magnon man.
The classification of natural languages can be performed on the basis of different underlying principles (different closeness notions, respecting different properties and relations between languages); important directions of present classifications are:
The different classifications do not match each other and are not expected to, but the correlation between them is an important point for many linguistic research works. (There is a parallel to the classification of species in biological phylogenetics here: consider monophyletic vs. polyphyletic groups of species.)
The task of genetic classification belongs to the field of historical-comparative linguistics, of typological—to linguistic typology.
See also Taxonomy, and Taxonomic classification for the general idea of classification and taxonomies.
The world's languages have been grouped into families of languages that are believed to have common ancestors. Some of the major families are the Indo-European languages, the Afro-Asiatic languages, the Austronesian languages, and the Sino-Tibetan languages.
The shared features of languages from one family can be due to shared ancestry. (Compare with homology in biology.)
An example of a typological classification is the classification of languages on the basis of the basic order of the verb, the subject and the object in a sentence into several types: SVO, SOV, VSO, and so on, languages. (English, for instance, belongs to the SVO language type.)
The shared features of languages of one type (= from one typological class) may have arisen completely independently. (Compare with analogy in biology.) Their cooccurence might be due to the universal laws governing the structure of natural languages—language universals.
The following language groupings can serve as some linguistically significant examples of areal linguistic units, or sprachbunds: Balkan linguistic union, or the bigger group of European languages; Caucasian languages; East Asian languages. Although the members of each group are not closely genetically related, there is a reason for them to share similar features, namely: their speakers have been in contact for a long time within a common community and the languages converged in the course of the history. These are called "areal features".
N.B.: one should be careful about the underlying classification principle for groups of languages which have apparently a geographical name: besides areal linguistic units, the taxa of the genetic classification (language families) are often given names which themselves or parts of which refer to geographical areas.
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 naturalistic language is Interlingua. The vocabulary of Interlingua consists of international words from any language family. Most Interlingua words are of Greco-Latin origin, because Greek and Latin have penetrated very widely into modern-day languages. Interlingua makes use of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, English, German, and Russian as control languages to confirm the internationality of each eligible word. The International Auxiliary Language Association, which standardized Interlingua, found that this selection of controls gave Interlingua the greatest possible internationality.
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.
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.
The historical record of the study of language begins in Northern India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, known as the (अष्टाध्यायी). grammar is highly systematised and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root; the phoneme was only recognised 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 arabic 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 formalisation 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.
The term "animal languages" is often used for non-human languages. Linguists do not consider these to be language; they may better be described as animal communication, because they are fundamentally different in their underlying principles from true language, which has only been found in humans.
In several publicised instances, non-human animals have been taught to understand certain features of human language. For example, chimpanzees and gorillas have been taught hand signs based on American Sign Language; however, they have never been successfully taught its grammar. There was also a case in 2003 of Kanzi, a saved bonobo chimpanzee, allegedly independently creating some words to mean certain concepts. While animal communication has debated levels of semantics, it has not been shown to have syntax in the sense that human languages do.
Some researchers argue that a continuum exists among the communication methods of all social animals, pointing to the fundamental requirements of group behaviour 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 .
Mathematics and computer science use artificial entities called formal languages (including programming languages and markup languages, but also some that are far more theoretical in nature). These often take the form of character strings, produced by some combination of formal grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.
Language is an element of culture that contributes to every aspect of human relationships. Andy Clark’s assertion that language is the ultimate cultural artifact is backed by the countless functions that language serves. The role that language plays in human interaction transcends basic communication (such as commanding somebody to do something, or providing information when asked a question) to facilitate the existence of ethos and mythos. This cultural artifact encodes meanings through its ability to manipulate what others imagine. The existence of denotations, what we mean to point out or say, is often received as connotation, what people have culturally subscribed to understanding when something is pointed out. Because of language’s proficiency to encode an extensive range of meanings, and represent almost all ideas including thoughts, it is the ultimate cultural artifact.
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