10 Main Characteristics of language

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Hey there, language lover! Have you ever been amazed by the power of words? Language is a wonderful thing that lets us communicate with each other and express our thoughts, feelings, and ideas. In this post, we’re going to read about into 10 main characteristics of language that make it so darn cool. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s take a minute or two to think about what language really is and how it works. By understanding the basics of language, we can better appreciate its intricacies and the role it plays in our lives.

So, let’s get started and explore the amazing world of language together!

Meaning of Language

Language is a medium of communication that enables us to express our thoughts, ideas, information and feelings to others. It is a very complex and dynamic system that has evolved slowly over thousands of years and is unique to humans. Language enables us to express and convey inside-out, thoughts, information, and share creativity, ask questions, give instructions, express emotions, and do a variety of other wonderful things.

Language is an important aspect of human society and culture. Human civilization has only been possible because of language. It is only through language that brought humanity out of the stone age and made big leaps in science, art, and technology.

Language is a human thing, so it is different from how animals talk in many ways. Language has a lot of different qualities, but the most important ones are that it is arbitrary, productive, creative, systematic, vocalic, social, not instinctive, and conventional. These things about language make it different from how animals talk. Some of these things might be part of how animals talk to each other, but they are not all of it.

Language is how people talk and write to each other, but it is much more than just words. Its definition entails five salient features. These five features are: language is a system, it is dynamic, it has dialect, it is sociolect and it is idiolect.

System

There are different levels of language within the system of a language. The most basic level is phonological. It shows that different sounds have different meanings.

Next, the lexical level is made up of morphemes, which are whole words that have definitions attached to them.

On the syntactical level, words are put together in sentences in a certain way to get a message across. At this level, you can’t look at the meanings of individual words without looking at the sentence as a whole, or else you’ll misunderstand.

The sociolinguistic level of the language system is shaped by social factors such as age, gender and social class. It’s easiest to understand when you think about the subtle but clear differences between how men and women say the same thing.

Dynamic

Language is dynamic because it is always changing. The language of the “screen-technology” generation is very different from that of the “baby boomers.” So much so that some words and phrases no longer exist. Shakespeare’s writings are a good example of this.

Dialect

The third feature, “dialect,” describes how language varies from one place to another. The English spoken in places like Australia and London is very different from the English spoken in the North of the United States. These differences can be heard and are also clear.

Sociolect

Sociolect is directly linked to the social class of the person speaking. For example, a king or queen may use different words and tones than a pauper, and the language of the hip-hop generation is very different from that of the “valley.”

Idiolect

Lastly, the most specific thing about language is idiolect. It has to do with the way someone talks. From this point of view, even twins who have lived together their whole lives will speak different languages. It includes the quality of the voice, the pitch, the intonation, the choice of words, and many other things.

Language is all the ways people try to talk to each other. Whether language is spoken, written, or inferred through movement and gesture, the five features of language are still important to how people communicate.

Now, let’s dive into the 10 key characteristics of human language.

10 Key Characteristics of Language

1. Language is verbal, vocal: Language is sound

Language is an organization of sounds, of vocal symbols. It is the sounds produced by the mouth with the help of various organs of speech to convey some meaningful message. It also means that speech is primary to writing. There are several languages because they are spoken. Music and singing also employ vocal sounds, but they are not languages. Language is systematic verbal symbolism; it makes use of verbal elements such as sounds, words. and phrases, which are arranged in certain ways to make sentences. Language is vocal in as much as it is made up of sounds which can be produced by the organs of speech.

2. Language is a means of communication

Language is the most powerful, convenient and permanent means and form of communication. Non-linguistic symbols such as expressive gestures signals of various kinds, traffic lights, road signs, flags, emblems and many more such things as well as shorthand, mores and other codes, the deaf and dumb braille alphabets, the symbols of mathematics and logic, etc. are also means of communication, yet they are not so flexible, comprehensive, perfect and extensive as language is. Language is the best means of self-expression. It is through language that humans express their thoughts, desires, emotions and feelings; it is through it that they store knowledge, and transmit messages, knowledge and experience from one person to another, from one generation to another. Most of the activities in the world are carried on through or by it. It is through it that humans interact. It is language again that yokes the present, the past and the future together.

3. Language is a social phenomenon

Language is a set of conventional communicative signals used by humans for communication in a community. Language in this sense is a possession of a social group, comprising an indispensable set of rules which permits its members to relate to each other; it is a social institution. Language exists in society; it is a means of nourishing and developing culture and establishing human relations. It is a member of society that a human being acquires a language. We learn not born with an instinct to learn a particular language– English, Hindi, Russian, Bengali, Chinese, Tamil, or French. We learn a language as members of society using that language, or because we want to understand that society or, to be understood by that speech community. If a language is not used in any society it dies out.

A language is thus a social event. It can be described only if we know all about the people who are involved in it, their personalities, their beliefs, attitudes, knowledge of the world, relationship to each other, their social status, what activity they are engaged in what they are talking about, what has gone before linguistically and non-linguistically, what happens after, what they are and host of other facts about them and the situation they are placed in.

4. Language is arbitrary

By the arbitrariness of language, we mean that there is no inherent or logical relation or similarity between any given feature of language and its meaning. That is entirely arbitrary, that there is no direct, necessary connection between the nature of things or ideas the language deals with, and the linguistics unites are combinations by which these things or ideas are expressed. There is no reason why four-legged domestic animals should be called Dog in English, Kutta in Hindi, Kukkur in Sanskrit, Kutta in Telugu, Kukur in Bengali, Chien in French, and Kalb in Arabic and so on. That those particular words that imitate the sounds of their referents, for example- buzz, hiss, hum, bang in English and Kal-Kal in Hindi, may seem to invalidate this statement, but such words are comparatively few in different languages, and the accuracy of the limitation depends on the sounds available in the language. Furthermore, these are a variation in different languages of the world and have no uniformity.

5. Language is non-instinctive, Conventional

No language was created in a day out of a mutually agreed-upon formula by a group of humans. Language is the outcome of evolution and convention. Each generation transmits this convention on to the next, Like all human institutions languages also change and die, grow and expand. Every language then is a conventional community, It is non-instinctive because it is acquired by human beings. Nobody gets a language an innate ability to acquire language. Animals inherit their system of communication by heredity, humans do not.

6. Language is symbolic

The symbolism of language is a necessary consequence of the feature of arbitrariness discussed above. A symbol stands for something else; it is something that serves as a substitute. Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols. For concepts, things ideas, objects etc. we have sounds and words as symbols. the language uses words essentially as symbols and not as signs (e.g in Mats.) for the concepts represented by them.

7. Language is systematic

Although the language is symbolic, its symbols are arranged in a particular system. All languages have their system of arrangements. Though symbols in each human language are finite, they can be arranged in infinity; that is to say, we can produce an infinite set of sentences by a finite set of symbols.

Every language is a system of systems. All languages have a phonological and grammatical system we have morphological and syntactic systems, and within these two sub-systems, we have several other systems such as those of plural, of mood, of aspect, of tense, etc.

By “systematic” we also mean the following: the speakers of language use only certain combinations. Thus although the sounds b and z occur in English. There is no word in English which begins with bz. Similarly, we can say that the beautiful girl chased the brown dog is a sentence in English, but the edfulauti girl chased the brown dog is not. Thus we conclude that all languages, though linear in their visual manifestation, have a dual system of sound and meaning. In other words, Language is the systematic composition or arrangement of linguistics which correlates words and meaning. Each language, therefore, can be described as a special system, suitable for conveying the message within its own framework of structure and meaning and having very little direct physical relation to the meanings or acts which it involves. it should also be remembered that language is meaningful.

8. Language is unique, creative, complex and modifiable

Language is a unique phenomenon on earth. Other planets do not seem to have any language, although this fact may be invalidated if we happen to discover a talking generation on any other planet. but so far there is no evidence of the presence of language on the moon. Each language is unique in its own sense. By this, we do not mean that language does not have any similarities or universals. Despite their common features and language universals, each language has its peculiarities and distinct features.

language has creativity and productivity. The structural elements of human language can be combined to produce new utterances, which neither the speaker nor his hearers may ever have made or heard before any listener, yet which both sides understand without difficulty, language changes according to the needs of society. Old English is different from modern English.

9. Language is human and structurally complex

No species other than humans has been endowed with language. Animals cannot acquire human language because of its complex structure and physical inadequacies. Animals do not have the type of brain which human beings possess and their articulatory organs are also very much different from those of human beings. Furthermore, any system of animal communication does not make use of the quality of features, that is, of concurrent systems of sound and meaning. Human language is open-ended, extendable and modifiable whereas animal language is not.

Last but not least, language has several other characteristics like Duality, which refers to the two systems of sound and meaning. Displacement, the capacity to communicate across time and space, Humanness, the inability of animals to learn it, Universality, the linguistic equilibrium among all human beings, Competence and Performance, the notion that language is innate, produced by society, and furthermore, that it is culturally transmitted It is passed down from one generation to the next and is learned by an individual from his elders. As a result, language is a “poly systematic,” to use J. Firth’s term. It can also be researched from a variety of perspectives.

This was all about the characteristics of language.