WHAT IS LANGUAGE? WHAT ARE CHARACTERISTICS OF LANGUAGE?

Language is a coded system with sounds and symbols and it provides communication among people and animals.

People’s language is not same with animals’ language, it has a more featured system than animals’ language.

For example; people can expresses their feelings and thoughts by their language system, but animals can not do the same with their language.

5 Characteristics of Human Language

Displacement

To be able to refer times, places and living creatures in a language is a potential of it in terms of usability. But these things which are mentioned are not “now and here”. Displacement is about mentioning something which is not occuring now and here, maybe in the past or future.

For example; a student who talks about a class which s/he passed last year or is going to take next year (not now).

In this way, animal communication can be understood more easier. 

For instance; bees are dancing by being an example of displacement. They send messages to each other for a food which does not exist there, maybe 20 km further.

Arbitrariness

Words in languages are made of letters and sounds. No words are selected to be regular and logically related to the other, on the contrary they are all occurred arbitrarily and have no any relationship between their structures and meanings. 

For example; “aşk” word in Turkish means “liebe” in German and “love” in English. As you can see, there is no any similarity among their structural forms but they have the same meaning.

Productivity

Language is a living thing and changes constantly. New words, sounds and sentences can be created at any time.

Cultural Transmission

Some language must be learned and some of them are inherent or instinctive.

People must learn all the language codes which they are exposed to, if exposure does not ocur, language cannot be learnt. This language type is learnable, not instinctive or inherent.

For example; a Chinese baby who was adapted by English parents is supposed to speak which language s/he was exposed, that is English, not Chinese. Because it is not inherent on people.

But if we consider animals, we can see that their language system are inherent and not learnable, because they can not do it. They have to have an innate language system. They try to communicate with their offsprings to teach or show something when there is no threatening factor around.

Duality

There are many languages in the world. In this languages there are limited discrete sounds. For example, we have 44 phonemes in English, but there are unlimited types of meaningful/meaningless syllables.

With these sounds, we can create unlimited syllables as meaningful or meaningless such as "nub" (meaningful in English) and "nbu" (meaningless in English). But these meaningless patterns may have a meaning in other languages.