What Is Language?

Everyone who can speak a language is already an expert on it in one sense: you produce sentences you have never heard, and you know at once when a sentence sounds wrong, without being able to say why. Linguistics is the scientific study of that knowledge. A linguist asks what speakers actually know, how it is organised, how it is learned, how it varies from place to place and how it changes over time. This first chapter draws the boundaries of the subject: what counts as language, how it differs from other kinds of communication, and what kind of study linguistics is.

What Linguists Study (and What They Don't)

A linguist studies language, the human capacity to communicate with words and grammar, and languages, the particular systems such as Hungarian or Esperanto that people speak or sign. Linguistics is not the same as learning many languages (a person who speaks ten languages is a polyglot, not necessarily a linguist), and it is not the same as grammar teaching or style advice. It is also not limited to speech: sign languages such as British Sign Language are full human languages with their own grammar, studied with the same methods.

The field divides into core areas, each of which has a chapter in this course:

Language Versus Communication

Communication is much wider than language. A dog's growl, a human frown, a traffic light and a honeybee's dance all pass information. The question linguists ask is what is special about the human system. The usual answer is a list of properties, first set out in a well-known form by the American linguist Charles Hockett, called design features. Four of them matter most for this course.

1. Arbitrariness

The link between a word's sound and its meaning is, for the most part, a matter of convention. Nothing about a four-legged barking animal makes the sound dog more suitable than the others below. If the link were natural, every language would use more or less the same word.

The first row shows arbitrariness at its plainest. The second row is the exception that proves the rule: onomatopoeia, words that imitate a sound, are similar across languages because they copy the bird's call. Even so, each language shapes the imitation to fit its own sound system, so the words are close but not identical. (Esperanto's hundo is also a reminder that a planned language borrows its vocabulary from existing ones; it is not an exception to arbitrariness, only a shortcut for learners.)

2. Duality of Patterning

Language works on two levels. At the lower level there is a small set of meaningless sounds; at the higher level those sounds combine into meaningful units, the words. English has roughly forty-odd distinct sounds, depending on the accent counted, and from them it builds a vocabulary of hundreds of thousands of words. Some languages use far fewer sounds: Hawaiian is usually described as having about thirteen. The same few sounds in a different order give different words: pat, tap, apt.

3. Displacement

Human speakers can talk about things that are not here and now: yesterday, next year, a country you have never visited, a unicorn. Many animal signals are tied to the situation: an alarm call is made when the danger is present. Honeybees are an interesting borderline case. A returning forager performs a "waggle dance" whose direction and duration give other bees the location of food that is some distance away, so the signal does refer to something that is not present. But the system carries only this one kind of message.

4. Productivity

Speakers can produce and understand sentences they have never heard before. You have almost certainly never read the sentence A retired dentist from Edinburgh painted the castle purple on Tuesday, yet you understood it at once. This is possible because grammar is a set of rules that combine finite words into an unlimited number of sentences. One powerful rule is recursion, in which a phrase can contain another phrase of the same kind:

By contrast, a vervet monkey (an African monkey species studied in the field by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth) gives distinct alarm calls for a leopard, an eagle and a snake, and the other monkeys respond appropriately to each, for example by running up a tree for a leopard and looking up for an eagle. That is a sophisticated system, but it is a closed list of a few calls, not an open-ended set of sentences.

Descriptive Versus Prescriptive

A prescriptive grammar says how people should speak: "do not split an infinitive", "do not end a sentence with a preposition". A descriptive grammar says how people do speak, and records the rules that native speakers actually follow. Modern linguistics is descriptive. That is not because "anything goes", but because the scientific question is what the system is, not what it ought to be.

The third sentence shows the difference. A rule a prescriptive grammarian objects to is usually one that native speakers do follow in speech. A sentence a descriptive grammarian marks as ungrammatical is one that native speakers never produce and instantly reject. Linguists mark such sentences with an asterisk: *Talking you are to who?

Every Language Is Complete for Its Speakers

A second principle follows from describing languages rather than judging them: no language is "primitive". Languages differ widely in vocabulary, because vocabulary tracks what speakers need to talk about, and every language can add words when needed: English added internet, and Esperanto built interreto ("inter-net") from existing roots. What does not vary much is the depth of the grammar: every well-described human language has complex rules of sound, word-building and sentence structure. Another consequence is that people do not "have no grammar" because they speak a non-standard variety. A dialect has a grammar exactly as a standard language does; what differs is its social prestige, which Chapter 9 returns to.

Hands-On Exercises