Primitive people speak primitive languages. We know, from anthropological research, that there are no primitive people on Earth today; indeed, it may be that the "Neandertals" were the last truly primitive people. And, there are no primitive languages, either. All languages that we know about, including those that are no longer anyone’s native language (Latin, Homeric Greek, etc.) have all the properties of the so-called "modern" languages (French, Spanish, Russian, etc.).
Even languages that have been reconstructed, such as Proto-Indoeuropean (the parent language of most European languages as well as Persian, Hindi, etc.), show no signs of "primitiveness." They have all the characteristics of so-called "modern" languages (see below).
Some languages are "harder" than others. While languages differ from one another in just which parts are simple and which are complex, all languages seem to be about equally complex or difficult to learn in their totality. For example, if we compare English and Russian we find that English nouns are relatively simple, while verbs are rather complex; in Russian, the nouns are hard and verbs are relatively simple.
Language is writing. If we ask a naive English speaker how many vowels English has, the answer is usually "five". This is because we tend to interpret any question about language as a question about the writing system. The English alphabet has 5 symbols that are normally used for the representation of vowels. But the English language has between 10 and 12 basic vowel sounds; this is the answer the linguist is interested in. Language is first and foremost oral; speech as a means of communication has been around for perhaps 200,000 years or more, while writing has existed for only about 6,000 as far as we know. Many languages, including many Native American languages as well as most of the creole languages of the Caribbean, exist without a written tradition. This in no way diminishes their language-ness.
Grammar is a set of prescriptive rules. When we think of grammar, we tend to think of the sorts of rules drilled into us by our language arts and English teachers: "Don’t end sentences with prepositions!" "Don’t use double negatives!"
When linguists work to discover
the
grammar of a language, they are looking for descriptive rules
that
model the linguistic patterns which people carry around inside their
heads.
We follow most of these rules unconsciously. In most cases no-one ever
teaches them to us (see below); and, in most cases, we cannot
articulate
them. We "know how" to use our language, but we don't typically "know
why."
The interesting thing is that these rules of our descriptive grammar
are
frequently far more subtle and complex than anything the language arts
teachers tell us about.
This ain't no joke....The prescriptive rule mentioned above, about not using double negatives, was created by Bishop Robert Lowth in 1762 in England. The idea was to make English more like formal mathematical logic, and thus improve the thinking of English speakers. But this was not a descriptive rule for English; English has always used double negatives, as this sentence from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (written in the time of Alfred the Great) illustrates:Ne
bith thær nænig
ælo gebrowen mid Estum.
Furthermore, in some languages, like Spanish and Russian, so-called "double negatives" are the rule, rather than the exception. Note the Spanish and Russian expressions for I don't see anything. Spanish:
Yo
no veo nada. These are the normal, indeed the only, way of expressing this in Spanish and Russian. If language worked like formal logic, Spanish and Russian speakers would be suffering from a permament case of illogic. Since speakers of Spanish and Russian appear to be normal human beings, we have to conclude that language does not obey the rules of formal logic. Thus, the rule against double negatives formulated by Bishop Lowth is not a grammar rule, but rather a social rule having to do with what he considered to be the acceptable use of English. |
Language is pure and unchanging. As a conservative society heavily focused on written, rather than oral, forms of language, we tend to think that change, in language as in many other things, is bad. A whole industry of language "experts" such as Edwin Newman and William Safire regularly rant and rave against whatever shift in meaning or usage is current. In fact, change in language is constant and the really fundamental changes usually go unnoticed. For example, between Middle and Modern English many English vowels changed their pronunciation, so that words like "house" and "wife", today pronounced [haws] and [wayf], were pronounced as [hu:s] and [wi:f] by Chaucer. These sorts of changes, and others, are still going on in English even as we speak.
Syntax. Speakers have to know how to combine their words into meaningful sentences that call attention to something and then provide information about it. Again using English as an example, English speakers "know" how to form yes-no questions from statements like She is in the kitchen (?> Is she in the kitchen?) by appropriate movement of is.
Semantics. Speakers must know the meaning of the words they use.
Pragmatics. Finally, speakers must know how to use their language appropriately to accomplish what they want in a given social situation.
All normal human children, everywhere, acquire the language of their social setting at about the same pace and in the same way. They do so without formal training, and they do so in social and cultural contexts which differ in terms of what kinds of linguistic interactions are supposed to be appropriate between parents/caregivers and infants. These differences do not seem to affect the rate or quality of children's acquisition of language; in a sense, children acquire language in much the same way as they acquire the skill of walking. However, children who are isolated, for some reason, from all forms of linguistic interaction do not acquire language, and if they reach puberty without exposure to language they may never be able to acquire more than a very rudimentary linguistic ability.
By the time they are around 3-4 years of age, children have mastered some of the most complex and subtle rules of their language, rules which no teacher of language could ever teach them. Of course, they still have lots of vocabulary to learn, as well as some of the pragmatic rules of language use in different social situations, and they have to learn to read and write.
While the underlying shape of language is biological, any given language itself is a cultural artifact. The best way to illustrate this is to take the words for the domesticated animal which English speakers refer to as a dog. All languages have a word for this animal; no language has a word for "half-a-dog." This seems to result from a property of the human brain that guides our perception and representation of natural objects in the world, like dogs, which come to us in whole "packages" (other candidates might be rocks, trees, birds, and so on). At the same time, though, the words we find in different languages
are as different as dog
(English);
perro
(Spanish); anu (Aymara); kelb (Arabic); sobaka
(Russian).
None of these words has a privileged connection to the animal itself.
Each
is an arbitrary but conventional answer to the problem of
naming
these familiar domesticated animals.
Infinite use of finite media. Although languages are complex, they are not infinitely complex. The number of rules that anyone needs to "know" to create sentences in their language is relatively small, and the number of different kinds of sentences is quite small. Still, the number of sentences that can be produced by any speaker of a language is potentially infinite.
Multiple patterning. Language is patterned at a number of levels of organization: sounds are patterned into phonemes, phonemes into words, words into phrases, phrases into sentences, sentences into larger units of discourse. This is what makes the infinite use mentioned above possible.
Predication. All languages make it possible for their speakers to name something and then make some kind of assertion about whatever was named. In other words, all languages allow for sentences that contain a subject and a predicate. We’ll explore this further in the unit on syntax.
Learnability. A central fact about all known languages is that they are all learnable by human beings. All normal human children acquire the language of their social group, and many (perhaps most!) go on to acquire more than one.
Traditional transmission. While all humans appear to have a built-in, genetically provided capacity for language acquisition, the actual acquisition of language must take place in a social context. The social context determines whether the language acquired is English, Russian, or Inuit, etc.
Displacement. Unlike most animal vocalization systems, which require that a stimulus be physically present for the vocalization to take place, human language allows us to talk about things that are absent in either space or time, or both. Without this feature, humans would not be able to talk about dinosaurs, or Cleopatra. We can add that this feature also allows us to talk about things that never existed, such as Klingons. Without it, we could have neither history or fiction.
Openness. Also unlike
other
animals, which typically have a fixed set of vocalizations, humans can
increase
the number of expressions at their disposal by inventing words. This
feature
allows us to add new words to our vocabulary such as
hard drive,
internet,
and gigabyte.
The analytic model of language
includes
the notion of linguistic relativism, which suggests that there
is
no point in trying to rank languages on any kind of scale. All human
languages
that we have any direct information about appear to contain all the
characteristics
necessary for language. In this view, there is no qualitative
difference
between a language and a dialect; the reasons why a particular variety
of speech gets labeled as a dialect instead of as a language must be
sought
elsewhere. In particular, the reasons are to be found in the political,
social, and economic value placed on the speakers of the
language
variety in question. The people who wield political, economic, and
social
control speak the "language"; those who do not speak the "dialect."
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The realization that languages and dialects are not qualitatively different, and that attitudes toward them really reflect social prejudices, has led some linguists to say that a language is "a dialect with an army and a navy." For linguists, then, what counts as a "language," as opposed to a "dialect," is socially and culturally negotiated; not determined by some objective linguistic truth. Sometimes the negotiation is spectacularly unsuccessful, as when the Oakland (California) school board attempted to declare African American Vernacular English (Ebonics) a "language." There was a great public outcry against this, but almost nobody understood the real reason: African Americans in the US do not have "an army and a navy"; therefore, they are not entitled to have a "language."
I tend to avoid the difficulty of the word dialect by using variety instead. It seems easier and less judgmental to speak of varieties of English such as British, Australian, North American, or West Indian. We can even talk about varieties of creole English, such as Jamaican, Trinadadian, Barbadian, Belizean, and so on. Or, we can go in the other direction, and discuss varieties of Romance such as Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian; varieties of Indo-European such as Germanic and Balto-Slavic; or even varieties of human language such as Indo-European, Austronesian, and so on. It all depends on what level of abstraction we are interested in.
Although from an analytic
viewpoint
they "know" a language as well as anyone, speakers of non-standard
varieties
of language are often assumed by the folk model to be
language-deficient.
In the Caribbean, this manifests itself especially when creole-speaking
children get to school and come up against the standard language in an
intense way for the first time. Teachers, who through no fault of their
own very often have only minimal training, are aware only of the folk
model
for language. They assume that deviation from standard language forms
is
evidence for a lack of language, and that children "have no
grammar."
The analytic model of language tells us that all normal human children
"have grammar" but that grammar is their own knowledge of their native
language, not the rules written down in school books.
Last update: May 15, 2005
Copyright © Ronald Kephart, 2005