Language - Its definition, importance, usage and various aspects

What is Language?

A language may be defined as a broadly accepted systematic means of communicating ideas and feelings using various kinds of sounds, gestures, signs, marks and conventional symbols.

Another widely accepted definition’s of the language:

• A language is a systematic means of communication by the use of sounds or conventional symbols
• It is the code we all use to express ourselves and communicate with others.
• It is communication by word of mouth.
• It is the mental faculty or power of vocal communication.
• It is a system for communicating ideas and feelings using sounds, gestures, signs or marks.
• Any means of communicating ideas, specifically, human speech, the expression of ideas by the voice and sounds articulated by the organs of the throat and mouth is a language.
• This is a system for communication.
• A language is the written and spoken methods of combining words to create meaning used by a particular group of people.
• It is the basic capacity that distinguishes humans from all other living beings.
• Language is potentially a communicative medium capable of expressing ideas and concepts as well as moods, feelings and attitudes.

A set of linguists who based their assumptions of language on psychology made claims that language is nothing but ‘habit formation’. According to them, language is learnt through use, through practice. In their view, ‘the more one is exposed to the use of language, the better one learns’. 

Importance of Languages
It is a way used by the people of common culture to communicate with each other. On the one hand, it is the reflection of the way of thinking of culture, on the other hand, it is affected by the change in the culture of the community.

Origin of the languages
When various speech communities come into contact through trade, conquest and some other ways their languages influence each other thereby originating some another hybrid language. Most existing languages are grouped with other languages descended "genetically" from a common ancestral language. The widest grouping of languages is the language family. Like all the Roman languages are derived from Latin that in turn belongs to the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family descended from the ancient parent language, Proto-Indo-European. Most of the languages begin as speech and many of them go on to develop their writing systems. All can employ different sentence structures to convey feelings. They use their resources differently but seem to be equally flexible structurally. The principal resources are word order, word form, syntactic structure and intonation in speech. Different languages keep indicators of tense, gender, number, person, mood, and other categories separate from the root word. Linguists agree that there are no existing primitive languages and that all modern human populations speak languages of comparable complexity. All existing languages differ in terms of the size of and subjects covered by their vocabulary, all possess the grammar and the syntax necessary for communication and can translate or borrow the vocabulary necessary to express the full range of their speakers' concepts.

History of the evolution of the languages:
From Late Eighteenth to early Nineteenth-century European scholars assumed that the languages of the world reflected various stages in their development from primitive to advanced speech, culminating in the Persian language-one of the most advanced language-. However there is no concrete evidence for the time of origin of the language thus no consensus has yet emerged among the linguists, anatomists, and anthropologists as to its timing of origin and its nature. When over the course of the nineteenth century no clue of any kind of 'primitive' languages was found, discussion of its origins was officially forbidden for quite a long time. One current view that an explosion of cave art and symbolic behaviour some 40?000 years ago coincided with the emergence of language. But this is probably based on an illusion of synchronicity. The adaptation of the vocal track for speech production seems to have been completed at least 200?000 years ago. This would seem to support a much earlier origin for language.

According to Ethnologue, there are currently 6,912 living languages that people speak today. Interestingly, the part of the world with the highest level of linguistic diversity in Papua New Guinea. The region has approximately 830 languages for around 5.4 million people i.e. about one language for every 6,500 residents. Ethnologue also reports a total of 238 languages in the United States. Roughly 120 languages have at least a million speakers, and some 60% of the world's languages have 10,000 or fewer speakers. Out of the 6000 odd languages, some of the widely used languages (native and non-native) have been given below with their native and cross border usage (written and spoken). Six of these highly spoken languages has been accepted as the Official languages of the world's highest governing body The United Nations. The list of few widely spoken languages along with their users, status and some other facts has been provided with:-  

Various Languages of the world with their worldwide use and ranking

Every Homo sapien on this earth belongs to a speech community - a group of people who speak the same languages. Estimates of the number of speech communities range from 3,000 to 7,000 or more, with the number of speakers of a given language ranging from many millions of speakers down to a few dozen or even lesser.

Many persons speak more than one language out of which English is the most common auxiliary language in the world. When people learn a second language very well, they are said to be bilingual. They may abandon their native language entirely because they have moved from the place where it is spoken or because of politico-economic and cultural pressure (as among Native Americans and user of the Celtic languages in Europe). Such factors may lead to the disappearance of languages on the one hand and spreading of a particular language beyond its original territories to an unimaginable extent and make it the universal language. The English language is one such classic example that has spread throughout the world in the last couple of centuries and has virtually attained the status of a universal language.