What is Language?

• external: social concept

• internal: cognitive concept

Languages in the World

• language is used by communities

• counting languages

  • language or dialect?

  • political factors - government, national borders

  • mutual intelligibility - same language ➝ understanding

  • speaker’s own determination

    • mutually intelligible, but speakers say they are two different languages

  • documentation of languages in the area

  • linguists count languages by their grammar

    • sounds, pronunciation rules, syntax, vocab, etc.

  • counting helps determine ecology / vitality

  • macrolanguage: covers many dialects and languages (ex: chinese)

• endangerment

  • about 2/5 of languages are endangered bc of globalization

  • UNESCO

  • three generation shift

    • oldest generation (monolingual) speakers die

    • middle generation becomes multilingual

    • youngest generation doesn’t learn first language

• summary: linguists study languages for description, documentation, teaching, and preservation efforts

Language in the Mind

• Ferdinand de Saussure

  • Langue: language competence, abstract knowledge. like rules of a game

  • Parole: language performance, use of language. playing the game. creates variation and fluency

• Child Language Acquisition

  • children are biologically and neurologically predisposed to acquire the language they hear

  • 0-5 yrs: figuring out system of grammar

  • Noam Chomsky: LAD

The Communication Chain

• Phonetics: study of speech sounds in articulation, acoustics, and audition

• Phonology: study of speech patterns

• Morphology: study of internal structure of words and word-formation processes

• Syntax: deals with word order

• Semantics: individual word meanings and sentence-level meanings

• Pragmatics: how language is used on a practical level and how semantic meanings change in context

• Sociolinguistics: regional and social dialects