Plan: The theory of language

Language is the social phenomena
Plan:
1. The theory of language.
2. Types of language.
3.Language is the social factor.

Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.

Cuneiform is the first known form of written language, but spoken language predates writing by at least many tens of thousands of years.
Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, writing, whistling, signing, or braille. In other words, human language is modality-independent, but written or signed language is the way to inscribe or encode the natural human speech or gestures.
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.
The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Critical examinations of languages, such as philosophy of language, the relationships between language and thought, how words represent experience, etc., have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greek civilization. Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) have argued that language originated from emotions, while others like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) have argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought. Twentieth century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) argued that philosophy is really the study of language itself. Major figures in contemporary linguistics of these times include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.

Language is thought to have gradually diverged from earlier primate communication systems when early hominins acquired the ability to form a theory of mind and shared intentionality. 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 by approximately three years old. Language and culture are codependent. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language has social uses such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as use for 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; in contrast, a language that has been demonstrated to not have any living or non-living relationship with another language is called a language isolate. There are also many unclassified languages whose relationships have not been established, and spurious languages may have not existed at all. 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.
The science of language is known as linguistics. It includes what are generally distinguished as descriptive linguistics and historical linguistics. Linguistics is now a highly technical subject; it embraces, both descriptively and historically, such major divisions as phonetics, grammar, semantics, and pragmatics, dealing in detail with these various aspects of language.
Historical attitudes toward language
As is evident from the discussion above, human life in its present form would be impossible and inconceivable without the use of language. People have long recognized the force and significance of language. Naming—applying a word to pick out and refer to a fellow human being, an animal, an object, or a class of such beings or objects—is only one part of the use of language, but it is an essential and prominent part. In many cultures people have seen in the ability to name a means to control or to possess; this explains the reluctance, in some communities, with which names are revealed to strangers and the taboo restrictions found in several parts of the world on using the names of persons recently dead. Such restrictions echo widespread and perhaps universal taboos on naming directly things considered obscene, blasphemous, or very fearful.
Perhaps not surprisingly, several independent traditions ascribe a divine or at least a supernatural origin to language or to the language of a particular community. The biblical account, representing ancient Jewish beliefs, of Adam’s naming the creatures of the earth under God’s guidance is one such example:
So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
Norse mythology preserves a similar story of divine participation in the creation of language, and in India the god Indra is said to have invented articulate speech. In the debate on the nature and origin of language given in Plato’s Socratic dialogue Cratylus, Socrates is made to speak of the gods as those responsible for first fixing the names of things in the proper way.
A similar divine aura pervades early accounts of the origin of writing. The Norse god Odin was held responsible for the invention of the runic alphabet. The inspired stroke of genius whereby the ancient Greeks adapted a variety of the Phoenician consonantal script so as to represent the distinctive consonant and vowel sounds of Greek, thus producing the first alphabet such as is known today, was linked with the mythological figure Cadmus, who, coming from Phoenicia, was said to have founded Thebes and introduced writing into Greece . By a traditional account, the Arabic alphabet, together with the language itself, was given to Adam by God.
The later biblical tradition of the Tower of Babel exemplifies three aspects of early thought about language: divine interest in and control over its use and development, a recognition of the power it gives to humans in relation to their environment, and an explanation of linguistic diversity, of the fact that people in adjacent communities speak different and mutually unintelligible languages, together with a survey of the various speech communities of the world known at the time to the Hebrew people.
The origin of language has never failed to provide a subject for speculation,
and its inaccessibility adds to its fascination. Informed investigations of the probable conditions under which language might have originated and developed are seen in the late 18th-century essay of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, “Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache” , and in numerous other treatments. But people have tried to go farther, to discover or to reconstruct something like the actual forms and structure of the first language. This lies forever beyond the reach of science, in that spoken language in some form is almost certainly coeval with Homo sapiens. The earliest records of written language, the only linguistic fossils humanity can hope to have, go back no more than 4,000 to 5,000 years. Some people have tried to claim that the cries of animals and birds, or nonlexical expressions of excitement or anger, evolved into human speech, as if onomatopoeia were the essence of language; these claims have been ridiculed for their inadequacy (by, for example, the Oxford philologist Max Müller in the 19th century) and have been given nicknames such as “bowwow” and “pooh-pooh” theories.
On several occasions attempts have been made to identify one particular existing language as representing the original or oldest tongue of humankind, but, in fact, the universal process of linguistic change rules out any such hopes from the start. The Greek historian Herodotus told a (possibly satirical) story in which King Psamtik I of Egypt (reigned 664–610 BCE) caused a child to be brought up without ever hearing a word spoken in his presence. On one occasion it ran up to its guardian as he brought it some bread, calling out “bekos, bekos”; this, being said to be the Phrygian word for bread, proved that Phrygian was the oldest language. The naiveté and absurdity of such an account have not prevented the repetition of this experiment elsewhere at other times.
In Christian Europe the position of Hebrew as the language of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) gave valid grounds through many centuries for regarding Hebrew, the language in which God was assumed to have addressed Adam, as the parent language of all humankind. Such a view continued to be expressed even well into the 19th century. Only since the mid-1800s has linguistic science made sufficient progress finally to clarify the impracticability of speculation along these lines.
When people have begun to reflect on language, its relation to thinking becomes a central concern. Several cultures have independently viewed the main function of language as the expression of thought. Ancient Indian grammarians speak of the soul apprehending things with the intellect and inspiring the mind with a desire to speak, and in the Greek intellectual tradition Aristotle declared, “Speech is the representation of the experiences of the mind” (On Interpretation). Such an attitude passed into Latin theory and thence into medieval doctrine. Medieval grammarians envisaged three stages in the speaking process: things in the world exhibit properties; these properties are understood by the minds of humans; and, in the manner in which they have been understood, so they are communicated to others by the resources of language. Rationalist writers on language in the 17th century gave essentially a similar account: speaking is expressing thoughts by signs invented for the purpose, and words of different classes (the different parts of speech) came into being to correspond to the different aspects of thinking.
Such a view of language continued to be accepted as generally adequate and gave rise to the sort of definition proposed by Henry Sweet and quoted above. The main objection to it is that it either gives so wide an interpretation to thought as virtually to empty the word of any specific content or gives such a narrow interpretation of language as to exclude a great deal of normal usage. A recognition of the part played by speaking and writing in social cooperation in everyday life has highlighted the many and varied functions of language in all cultures, apart from the functions strictly involved in the communication of thought, which had been the main focus of attention for those who approached language from the standpoint of the philosopher. To allow for the full range of language used by speakers, more-comprehensive definitions of language have been proposed on the lines of the second one quoted at the beginning of this article—namely, “A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.” Despite the breadth of this definition, however, its use of the word vocal excludes all languages that are not vocalized, particularly manual (signed) languages.
A rather different criticism of accepted views on language began to be made in the 18th century, most notably by the French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac in “Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines” (1746; “Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge”) and by Johann Gottfried von Herder. These thinkers were concerned with the origin and development of language in relation to thought in a way that earlier students had not been. The medieval and rationalist views implied that humans, as rational, thinking creatures, invented language to express their thoughts, fitting words to an already developed structure of intellectual competence. With the examination of the actual and the probable historical relations between thinking and communicating, it became more plausible to say that language emerged not as the means of expressing already formulated judgments, questions, and the like but as the means of thought itself, and that humans’ rationality developed together with the development of their capacity for communicating.
The relations between thought and communication are certainly not fully explained today, and it is clear that it is a great oversimplification to define thought as subvocal speech, in the manner of some behaviourists. But it is no less clear that propositions and other alleged logical structures cannot be wholly separated from the language structures said to express them. Even the symbolizations of modern formal logic are ultimately derived from statements made in some natural language and are interpreted in that light.
The intimate connection between language and thought, as opposed to the earlier assumed unilateral dependence of language on thought, opened the way to a recognition of the possibility that different language structures might in part favour or even determine different ways of understanding and thinking about the world. All people inhabit a broadly similar world, or they would be unable to translate from one language to another, but they do not all inhabit a world exactly the same in all particulars, and translation is not merely a matter of substituting different but equivalent labels for the contents of the same inventory. From this stem the notorious difficulties in translation, especially when the systematizations of science, law, morals, social structure, and so on are involved. The extent of the interdependence of language and thought—linguistic relativity, as it has been termed—is still a matter of debate, but the fact of such interdependence can hardly fail to be acknowledged.

Language is both a system of communication between individuals and a social phenomenon. The area of language and society – sociolinguistics – is intended to show how our use of language is governed by such factors as class, gender, race, etc. A subsection of this area is anthropological linguistics which is concerned with form and use of language in different cultures and to what extent the development of language has been influenced by cultural environment.

The study of language and society – sociolinguistics – can be dated to about the middle of the twentieth century. Before that there were authors who commented on how language use was influenced or indeed guided by socially relevant factors, such as class, profession, age or gender. Indeed the father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure , saw language as a type of social behaviour and in this he reflected French sociological thinking of his day, above all that of his contemporary Emile Durkheim . But a set of independent, objective principles, in short a methodology for investigating social factors in language use, was not available until some decades after the advent of Saussurean structuralism. In the early 1960s a number of linguists in America began to investigate English usage in the United States from a social point of view. Since then there has been a flood of publications in this vein, primarily in America but soon afterwards in Europe as well .
The extent to which linguistic variables correlate with social features has been investigated in detail by several linguists. One of the investigated items is the variable (ng), alternating between [n] and [n] in many varieties of English. In Norwich, some distance north of London, this variation is found and words like walking can be pronounced either as [/wo:kin] or [/wo:k(] (the stroke under the [n] in the transcription indicates that it is syllable-bearing). This is commonly known as ‘dropping one’s g’s’. An investigation of speech differentiation in Norwich was carried out by the English linguist Peter Trudgill in the late 1960s. The informants of the survey were classified into five social groups from middle middle class (MMC) through lower middle class (LMC), upper working class (UWC), middle working class (MWC) to lower working class (LWC) The parameters used for this classification included income, housing, education and occupation. Trudgill found that the highest incidence of (ng) = [n] occurred in the bottom social group and the lowest incidence, that is the greatest occurrence of (ng) = [n], was typical of the highest social group. He also found that the scores for (ng) = [n] tend to decrease as the formality of the speech situation increased, no matter which particular social group was involved. One explanation for this is that whenever there is class differentiation with a linguistic variable, speakers of all social groups gravitate towards the higher status variants in more formal the situation. However, not all variables which are subject to class differentiation show stylistic variation as well. There are variables which correlate with social class variation but which do not vary when the speech situation changes. Variables which are subject to stylistic variation as well as variation across class, gender or age are referred to as markers. Variables which are not involved in style variation are called indicators, an example would be the fricative t of southern Irish English, in a word like put , which is found in all styles of this variety of English. Indicators do not contribute to the description of class differences as markers do, since speakers appear to be less aware of the social implications of an indicator than of a marker. According to the observer’s paradox, in tape-recorded interviews informants pay more attention to the way they speak and for that reason
produce a formal style (FS) rather than a casual style (CS). In many cases linguists choose to study the increase of stylistic level in formal situations to see what linguistic correlates such a shift has. By asking informants to read a passage of connected prose aloud one can induce a style shift, since reading causes people to be more conscious of their speech and hence to move away from their vernacular mode. The style elicited in this manner can be labelled ‘reading passage style’ (RPS). An even more formal style is the so called ‘word list style’ (WLS) found when informants read one word at a time from of a list. Index scores for (ng) variable across different styles and social groups shift from [n] to [n]
Using the methodology of index scores the quantitative distribution of (ng)-
alternatives can be displayed. It is striking that scores increase regularly across the rows and down the columns. Despite the different values in each row and column, there is a general increase of [n] values when moving both from top to bottom and from left to right. These and similar results reveal clear quantitative correlations between pronunciation and social class. Relationships of this sort were observed, albeitunscientifically, long before urban dialectology arose as a discipline. The advantage of quantitative research of this kind is that it gives more detailed insight into the nature of these relationships. Above all, it shows that the realizations of linguistic variables are a question of more-or-less rather than either-or.