Introduction

Language is an essential tool that enables us to live the kind of lives we do. Much of contemporary human civilization wouldn’t have been possible without it.

Language is a vital part of our everyday lives. If psychology is a science of behavior, scientific investigation of language use must be one of the most central topics—this is because language use is ubiquitous. Every human group has a language and all “typically” developing human infants learn at least one language (and often multiple languages) without being taught explicitly.

Even when children who don’t have much language to begin with are brought together, they can begin to develop and use their own language spontaneously with minimal input from adults. For example, in Nicaragua in the 1980s, deaf children who were separately raised in various locations were brought together to schools for the first time. Teachers tried to teach spoken Spanish and lipreading with little success. However, they began to notice that the children were using their hands and gestures, apparently to communicate with each other. Linguists were brought in to find out what was happening and it turned out the children had developed their own sign language by themselves. That was the birth of a new language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua, or ISN; Kegl, Senghas & Coppola, 1999). Language appears to be ubiquitous, and humans may be born to acquire and use it.

Although language is often used for the transmission of information (“turn right at the next light and then go straight,” “Place tab A into slot B”), this is only one of its functions. Language also allows us to access existing knowledge, to draw conclusions, to set and accomplish goals, and to understand and communicate complex social relationships. Language plays an important role in our ability to think, and without it we would be nowhere near as intelligent as we are. And while language is a form of communication, not all communication is language. Many species communicate with one another through their postures, movements, odors, or vocalizations. This communication is crucial for species that need to interact and develop social relationships with other members of their species. However, many people have asserted that it is language that makes humans unique among all of the animal species (Corballis & Suddendorf, 2007; Tomasello & Rakoczy, 2003).

Criteria of Human Language

Four major criteria for human language have been proposed by Professor Franz Schmalhofer from the University of Osnabrück as explained below:

• semanticity
• displacement
• creativity
• structure dependency

Semanticity means the usage of symbols. Symbols can either refer to objects or to relations between objects. In the human language words are the basic form of symbols. For example the word “book” refers to an object made of paper on which something might be written. A relation symbol is the verb “to like” which refers to the sympathy of somebody to something or someone.

The criterion of displacement proposes that when humans are communicating about objects, experiences, organisms, and environments, we are not limited only to things in our immediate presence. We also utilize symbols to reference things in other times or places. The word “yesterday” refers to the day before and objects mentioned in a sentence with “yesterday” refer to objects from another time than the present one. Displacement is about the communication of events which had happened or will happen and the objects belonging to those events.

Creativity (sometimes discussed as generativity) is one of the most important features. Our communication is not restricted to a fixed set of topics or predetermined messages. We can combine a finite set of symbols to form an infinite number of sentences and meaning. Such creativity can be illustrated by some simple examples demonstrating the process that creates verbs from nouns. New words can be created and we become able to understand them relatively quickly.

Creative systems are also found in other aspects of language, like the way sounds are combined to form new words. i.e. prab, orgu, zabi could be imagined as names for new products.

To avoid an arbitrary combination of symbols without any regular arrangement, human languages have structure dependency. A change in the symbol order might impact the sentence’s meaning. For example, “The dog bites the cat” has a very different meaning than “The cat bites the dog” based on the different word arrangement of the two sentences.

Components of Language

Language can be conceptualized in terms of sounds, meaning, and the environmental factors that help us understand it. Phonemes are the elementary sounds of our language, morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language, syntax is the set of grammatical rules that control how words are put together, and pragmatics refers to the elements of communication that are not strictly part of the content of language but that help us understand its meaning (e.g., contextual information).

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that makes a meaningful difference in a language. The word bit has three phonemes, /b/, /i/, and /t/ (in transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes), and the word pit also has three: /p/, /i/, and /t/. In spoken languages, phonemes are produced by the positions and movements of the vocal tract, including our lips, teeth, tongue, vocal cords, and throat, whereas in sign languages phonemes are defined by the shapes and movement of the hands.

There are hundreds of unique phonemes that can be made by human speakers, but most languages only use a small subset of the possibilities. English contains about 45 phonemes, whereas other languages have as few as 15 and others more than 60. The Hawaiian language contains only about a dozen phonemes, including 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, and u) and 7 consonants (h, k, l, m, n, p, and w).

Whereas phonemes are the smallest units of sound in language, a morpheme is a string of one or more phonemes that makes up the smallest units of meaning in a language. Some morphemes, such as one-letter words like “I” and “a,” are also phonemes, but most morphemes are made up of combinations of phonemes. Some morphemes are prefixes and suffixes used to modify other words. For example, the syllable “re-” as in “rewrite” or “repay” means “to do again,” and the suffix “-est” as in “happiest” or “coolest” means “to the maximum.”

Syntax refers to the set of rules of a language by which we construct sentences. The syntax of the English language requires that each sentence have a noun and a verb, each of which may be modified by adjectives and adverbs. Some syntaxes make use of the order in which words appear, while others do not. In English, “The man bites the dog” is different from “The dog bites the man”. In German, however, only the article endings before the noun matter. Der Hund beisst den Mann means The dog bites the man, but so does Den Mann beisst der Hund.

Words do not possess fixed meanings but change their interpretation as a function of the context in which they are spoken. We use pragmatics, including the information surrounding language, to help us interpret it. Examples of pragmatically-relevant contextual information include the knowledge that we have and that we know that other people have (common ground), and nonverbal expressions such as facial expressions, postures, gestures, and tone of voice. Misunderstandings can easily arise if people aren’t attentive to such contextual information or if some of it is missing, such as it may be in newspaper headlines or in text messages.

We combine these different components of language in novel and creative ways, which allow us to communicate information about both concrete and abstract concepts. We can talk about our immediate and observable surroundings as well as the surface of unseen planets. We can share our innermost thoughts, our plans for the future, and debate the value of a college education. We can provide detailed instructions for cooking a meal, fixing a car, or building a fire. The flexibility that language provides to relay vastly different types of information is a property that makes language so distinct as a mode of communication among humans.