Language

Can you imagine how many languages exist in the world? We can't mention it one by one because there so many. I'm always curious about the existence of the language. So, here I'm trying to make a small article about it based on the knowledge that I have ever received during my linguistic class.

What is Language?

What is language?

According to terminology, language is a system of words used to name things in a particular discipline. There are also another definitions about language:

• A systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds of conventional symbol.
• System communication of human living by sounds and meaning.
• A system used to communicate, comprised of a set of symbols and a set of rules (or grammar) by which the manipulation by the symbols productively to convey the new info, distinguish languages from other forms communication.

From the meanings of languages above, I can conclude that the basic or the important components of the language are the sound and the meaning. In saying a word, of course we need a sound that comes from or mouth, and the word that we are saying should have a meaning. That's one of the ways of communication among human being. If a word has meaning, people will understand what message we are going to deliver.

Basic Aspects of Language

After understanding the meaning of language, we'll know some basic aspect of language:

• Sound (the study of sound of language is called phonetics and phonology)
• Meaning (the study of meaning of words is called semantics)
• Form (the study of form of words is called morphology)
• Structure (the study of structure of phrase/sentence is called syntax)

Units of Language

• Phoneme, it is any of the distinct unit of sound that distinguish one word from the another.
• Morpheme, it is a meaningful morphological unit of the language that cannot be further divided.
• Word, it is a single distinct meaningful element of speech of writing, used to to form sentence with another.

Beside what I have mentioned above, there are units of language after the unit word: phrase, clause (sentence), paragraph, and discourse.

Functions of Language

In learning about language, of course we should know the functions of it. There are some functions of language: 

• To communicate the ideas and messages in cooperation with other in order to survive.
• To communicate feelings and emotions.
• To express aesthetic ideas.
• etc.

A Brief History of Language

• Before 19 Century, language was interest of philosophy. Plato and Aristotle (384-322 BC) made contributions to the study of the study of language. They distinguish the noun and verb.
• In 1786, Sir William Jones was introduced historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, and prototypes of language.
• According to Leipzi, language is regular.
• Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), often called as the father of modern linguistics: language is built structure of interwoven elements (the beginning of structural linguistics)
• Leonard Bloomfield (1923): Descriptive linguistics.
• Noam Chomsky (1957): Generative linguistics (grammar which describes a language in terms of a set of logical rules whereby the infinite number of possible sentences of that language can be generated). Chomsky labelled the abstract rules as Universal Grammar (UG).

Languages Facts 

Here some facts about the language:

• Whenever humans exist, language exists.
• Uses sounds and signals.
• Language has discrete sounds.
• Arbitrariness (there is no relationship between sound and meaning in most words).
• Duality (layers of units): Every language has a class of vowels and a class of consonants.
• Displacement: It can present things that happen in the class.
• Creativity (productivity)
• Patterning
• Structure dependence
• There no primitive languages.
• All languages change through time.
• There are similar grammatical categories.
• Every language has semantic universals.

To make it clear, I recommend you to watch this video that explains about the language, I hope you can catch it well.

That’s all the brief information about the language. If you want to learn more about the language especially English, I suggest you to read some books of linguistics. You’ll find more there. Thank you so much to my dearest lecturer for giving me such kind of knowledge. And also thank you for my beloved readers, please give me your comment or correction if you find any mistakes on my post. I’ll be very happy to receive a criticism to make me better in the future :)

Source:

• Linguistics by Jean Aithcison
• Image from Google
• Video from YouTube