Definition and Characteristics of Human Language (2.1)

Question posed: Which is more fundamental—speech (เสียง) or writing (ตัวอักษร)?
Key arguments favouring speech
- Every known language can be spoken by its users; many have no native writing system at all.
- Communicative competence develops orally first in children; literacy is learned later and is optional for communication.
- The human vocal tract (lungs, larynx, tongue, lips, nasal cavity) is universally shared across populations, giving all groups identical biological potential for speech.
Writing systems
- Serve as secondary representations of speech (e.g.
- Pictograms: Egyptian hieroglyphs.
- Phonographic symbols: Latin letter “A”, Thai letter “อ”, Japanese “か”).
- Problems & limitations
- Cannot inherently express the speaker’s affect or pragmatics.
- Historically solved by paralinguistic add-ons: emoticons, emojis, stickers.
- Illustrates that writing continuously borrows from other semiotic resources to approximate what speech conveys naturally (intonation, facial cues, gesture).
Languages without indigenous scripts
- Common among oral-tradition communities; sometimes dominated by outside cultures.
- Examples
- Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt)
  - $\approx 85 \text{ million}$ speakers.
  - Modern orthography = modified Roman script.
  - Formerly used a logographic system adapted from Chinese (Chữ Nôm).
- Swahili in Africa historically lacked its own script; now uses Roman.

Are gestures “language”?
- Some gestures appear universal (thumb-up, eyebrow frown).
- Sign languages (Thai Sign, ASL, BSL, etc.) ARE full human languages despite lacking a vocal channel.
- Exhibit phonology (handshape, movement, location), morphology, syntax, pragmatics.
- Must be learned; meanings are conventional.
Sign underscores a critical point: modality (vocal vs visual) does not define language; systematic, arbitrary, conventional symbol systems do.

Lenneberg (1967) outlines two major frameworks
1. Continuity Theory
- Language evolved gradually from simpler communication systems.
- Predicts homologous, incremental stages in other vertebrates.
1. Discontinuity Theory
- Language is a qualitative leap; uniquely human, emerging suddenly.
- Grounds the idea of an inborn “language faculty.”
  - All humans can acquire language despite anatomical variation; suggests species-specific cognitive adaptation.
Comparative primate data
- Species genetically close to us (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, gibbons, bonobos) still cannot produce speech in the way humans do despite similar vocal anatomy scale (illustrated sizes: $30\text{ cm} \approx 12\text{ in}$ images).
Distant animals with complex signalling (birds, insects, marine mammals) share communication complexity but not linguistic structure—showing functional, not evolutionary, similarity.

5 canonical components
1. Sender
2. Message
3. Channel
4. Receiver
5. Effect / outcome
Intra-species communication is expected and vital for survival (mating, alarm, food sharing).
Inter-species communication also occurs (e.g., human–pet interactions) but often asymmetric and limited.

Each species evolves specialised signalling strategies suited to ecological niches.
Exemplars
- Honeybee (Apis mellifera) system
- Channels: olfactory (pheromones), tactile & vibratory cues (through comb), visual dance.
- Queen pheromone
  - Inhibits ovarian development in worker females.
  - Decays upon queen’s death → triggers production of new queens.
- Vibration signal from a ready queen → conditions worker response → queen kills rivals → departs to mate.
- Waggle dance
  - Encodes direction (relative to the sun’s azimuth) and distance (flight duration) to food sources, up to $7\text{ miles}$ from the hive.
  - Considered innate: bees do not need tutoring, though experience fine-tunes accuracy.
  - Ethnographic parallel: “bee dialects”—colonies from different regions dance with subtle variations, analogous to human dialects.

Four primary physical modes highlighted
1. Acoustic (sound)
2. Optical (visual)
3. Tactile (touch/vibration)
4. Olfactory (smell/chemical)
Humans are capable of utilising all four to some extent, but speech (acoustic) dominates linguistic content.

R. L. Trask (1995): What genuinely distinguishes humans is language, not love, war, art, music, or technology.
- Suggests that exponential cultural and technological progress depends on linguistic scaffolding.
Speculative question: “What if sophisticated language ceased to be a uniquely human trait?”
- Would redefine cross-species ethics, social organisation, legal status of nonhuman minds, AI relationships, etc.
- Mirrors current debates in AI language generation and animal cognition research.

Language (narrowly) = arbitrary, vocal, conventional symbol system enabling cooperation.
Speech precedes and underlies writing; writing expands but cannot fully replicate speech’s pragmatic richness.
Gestural and signed systems can satisfy all linguistic criteria; mere iconic gestures usually do not.
Evolutionary perspectives disagree on gradual vs. sudden emergence, but consensus affirms a species-specific capacity.
Animal signalling can be intricate (e.g., bee dances) yet lacks the open-ended generativity, displacement, and syntax of human language.
Communication employs multiple channels; linguistic study focuses on how humans harness these jointly.
Ultimately, “Language is what makes us human” — both a biological endowment and cultural achievement.

Stanlaw, J., Adachi, N., & Salzmann, Z. (2018). Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (7th ed.). Routledge. $doi:10.4324/9780429495076$