- What is a language?
- Languages and dialects
- Differences between language and language
- Language examples
We explain what a language is, why it is a social fact and various examples. Also, differences with dialects and with the language.
What is a language?
A language or language is the linguistic code used by a people or a nation to communicate, and that somehow reflects their history culture and its conception of the world. In other words, language is a specific way of associating certain real referents (concrete like a stone, and abstract like ideas) to a Linguistic sign (to a fixed and established series of sounds) that is shared by a group or a community human.
As far as we know, the ability to build languages is unique to the human being. The animals they are capable of communicating, of course, but not of constructing linguistic signs with which to represent the reality.
For example, one dog may growl at another to warn it that it is ready to defend itself, but it cannot associate a different growl for each specific reason it wants the other to walk away, nor can it teach such. code to other dogs and establish a common behavior.
Seen this way, every language is a social fact: it is necessarily shared by a group of speakers, who learn this code at an early age and materialize it in a speaks specific, that is, in a specific way of speaking it. Thus, the different ways of speaking the same language are known as dialects. Languages without speakers are called "dead languages."
In the world there are around 7,000 different languages, although many have been lost throughout the history. According to what was established by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), father of the linguistics structural, since every language is a social and mental code established by convention and by tradition, is always in a constant process of change and modification.
Thus, as time goes by, new words are created, old ones are discarded, new twists and ways of use are incorporated, dialects arise and disappear, and even, in the long run, entire languages are born and die.
That is why specialists classify existing and past languages according to their origin and their formal or structural tendencies, in a set of families over time. For example, Romance languages are descendants of Latin, and have certain similarities in form and substance.
Languages and dialects
Since language is a code, a mental pattern of pronunciation and association of referents, it exists only in our heads, that is, language is an abstract, mental model, inseparable from thought same. On the other hand, their forms of materialization, that is, their forms of enunciation and pronunciation, can be very different, without thereby breaking the system of rules typical of the language.
Each of the concrete forms of materialization of a language is a dialect, especially when the variation occurs in geographically remote communities. For example, the Spanish language has different realizations: peninsular Spanish spoken only in Spain, River Plate Spanish spoken in Argentina and Uruguay, Caribbean Spanish with its Canarian and African influences, and so on.
On the other hand, when the variation occurs within the same society, but in different social strata, it is called sociolect. That is, speakers from the lower strata of society tend to use the language in a different way from that of the middle and upper classes.
We must note, however, that to be able to speak of dialect or sociolect we must be in the presence of different manifestations of the same language, and not of two different languages, although one presents dominance (for political or historical reasons) over the other. Basque, Galician and Catalan, for example, are not dialects of Spanish, but languages with a totally independent history.
Sometimes the dialects can differ so much from each other that they become mutually incomprehensible, as in Italy with regional dialects. If the dialects of a language continue in a historical trajectory that differentiates them more and more, with the passage of time they can become different languages, as happened with the Latin of antiquity, whose dialects became independent languages.
Differences between language and language
In principle, the terms language and language are synonyms, that is, they mean exactly the same thing. However, they can present a certain margin of distance in terms of their use: the first of both is usually preferred in academic discourses, especially in the area of linguistics, and was the one chosen by Saussure to establish his classic dichotomy (that is, a pair of complementary opposites) of language / speech.
On the other hand, the term language has greater political connotations, and that is why it is usually preferred in speeches nationalists or in political debates, and is often used when referring to values traditional homelands.
Language examples
It is not difficult to think of language examples, such as:
- English (British and American).
- Spanish (peninsular and Latin American).
- Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese and their other varieties).
- Russian.
- French.
- German.
- Italian.
- Greek.
- Arab.
- Swedish.
- Armenian.
- Polish.
- Nahuatl.
- Quechua.
- Basque.
- Hausa.
- Catalan.
- Hungarian.
- Serbian.
- Czech.
- Xhosa.
- Swahili.
- Maya.
- Scottish Gaelic.
- Hindi.
- Japanese.
- Norwegian.
- Romanian.
- Bulgarian.
Follow with: Language