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.
