# data[].attributes.body
Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, art

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Culture means the patterns and characteristics of human behavior, and all that entails in terms of religion, beliefs, social norms, arts, customs, and habits

The word "culture" is used in different ways by different people.

To some, it might mean a string quartet and the use of multiple utensils at dinner. To others, it might be used in a vague way when planning a holiday overseas. If you are a scientist it means a petri dish full of microorganisms.

This is something every human experience and the way you experience it can define your life.

Culture is shared. Culture is learned, and it is not biological.

Rather, it might be said that it is developed as we seek to satisfy our biological needs. It belongs to us, to our families, our peers, our art, and institutions.

What is Culture?

Culture means the patterns and characteristics of human behavior. Culture is one collective term of religion, beliefs, social norms, arts, customs, and habits that we possess

The interesting part is that culture, as a term, almost eludes absolute definition.

Because it is something intrinsic to our humanity, perhaps, and humans, as a rule, also elude definition. That has not stopped some of history's brightest minds from attempting to define it, however.

The first person to use the term "culture" in the way we currently understand it was Edward B. Tylor, an anthropologist,

He explained culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." ( Primitive Culture, 1871).

The Famous Definitions of Culture

Geert Hofstede said

"Culture is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another. Culture in this sense is a system of collectively held values."

Linton said

"A culture is a configuration of learned behaviors and results of behavior whose component elements are shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society"

In L.A. Samovar & R.E. Porter (Eds.), Communication Between Cultures. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. refers

"Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another." - National cultures and corporate cultures.

Edgar Schein quoted

"Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic 'taken for granted' fashion an organization's view of its self and its environment."

What is Culture in Anthropology?

Anthropology is the study of humanity, including prehistoric origins and contemporary human diversity. Often, it is confused with many other disciplines around humanity, history, sociology, etc., anthropology is far broader in scope

The culture of a society pervades it to its very roots.

Biological anthropology - the study of the biological side of human including the evolution

Archaeology - the study of past human cultures through their material remains.

Linguistic anthropology - the study of human communication, including its origins, history, and variation, and change.

Cultural anthropology - the study of living peoples and their cultures, including variation and change.

The fourth discipline - cultural anthropology - defines the culture to a deeper level by analyzing various two key aspects of culture

1. Diversity - Refers to the distinctive behaviors of humans and societies

2. Change - Refers to the evolution of these distinct behaviors and humans adapted to it.

Overall, cultural anthropology refers to how culture affects the way people live, the way they interact, the art they make, the jobs they hold, their beliefs, and relationships.

And yet an archaeologist digging up an ancient site, finding wall stubs and pottery fragments, could never say that they have dug up "culture".

The results of the culture are there for all to see: the patterns on the pottery, the places of worship, the way a family home was set up. But they are remains, nothing more.

Culture belongs to life itself.

The relation between culture and society

It can be a little difficult to draw the lines between culture and society. Both involve the way we live, both involve beliefs and systems, both are formed by groups of people.

A society is a group of organisms that interact with one another. This might mean a school of fish, a flock of birds, a beehive, and so on. Human societies are similar, as they are groups of individuals who interact with one another, though not always directly. In human societies, however, the behavior of the group is not just determined by survival, but by history, tradition, and expectation.

Yet people living in a single society can have different cultures. So society and culture are not the same things - but they are linked.

If culture is a pattern of people's behavior, and if people live in societies, then, of course, they are going to be tied together at multiple points.

And culture cannot exist without society, without people coming together and exchanging ideas and experiences. Without groups of people living together, why would we ever have needed to develop language or politics? You cannot have one without the other.

Culture is all about Learned Behaviors

Culture is not something that we are born knowing. No baby is born being able to understand art, or speaking the language of its parents. Yet what it does possess is a desire to communicate and be understood - a desire it generally seeks to fill by screaming, which works out just fine, to begin with. But then, it learns that different noises mean different things, and so language begins to be learned.

Because of this, culture is also something that accumulates. It is built on overtime.

It's not as though a group of people in 1000BC sat down and discussed whether they were going to use forks or chopsticks, or whether they were going to teach math in school. These things developed slowly - and now, millennia later, schoolchildren are learning mathematical concepts developed by ancient Greeks.

Art and Culture - A soulful connection

Art is yet another concept that is very difficult to define.

Abby Willowroot - "Art speaks the soul of its culture"

But when it comes to a shared understanding of art within a group of people, one could say that art is the physical manifestation of the culture to which it belongs - to the point that sometimes it almost seems impossible to separate the culture from its art.

If you pass a wedding venue and see it crowded with paper swans, it doesn't matter if you are in Texas, Perth or Abu Dhabi, you will immediately recognize the sight as belonging to the culture of Japan.

Geometric patterns with bright colors and striking contrast might bring to mind traditional Kenyan textiles, even if seen in a window in Prague.

"Scandinavian interior design" could be found in a desert.

In addition to this, there is a reason great art movements tend to find their momentum in cities.

That's where you can find the most people, packed in closely together - and, as a result, that's where the cultures to which they belong become the richest, the densest, the most likely to turn into something new.

And sometimes, finding themselves so close to other cultures, they find themselves rubbing together and creating sparks.

An Adaptive Mechanism

When we look at the human experience in all its needs and forms, culture can sometimes seem like something of an extra.

True, humans create art, and language, and politics.

But these things, while adding to the richness, complexity, or possibilities of our lives, do not seem to be necessary for survival.

After all, a person could live in a hut on a hill for their entire lives and never see another human being.

They might never learn a language, create art, or develop an understanding of authority; as long as they can hunt and gather, they will do just fine.

And yet, if you look at cultures across the world, there seem to be very obvious differences between them that have sprung from a need to adapt.

For example, humans are warm-blooded creatures, which was fine when we were all living in subtropical conditions a few million years ago, but when you look further afield and forward in time, you see the mechanisms humans have put in place to survive the environments they moved to.

Thus we have architecture and communal planning.

Unlike other organisms, we did not wait for evolutionary adaptation to allow us to thrive in these new climates. Instead, we invented things to help us - things which became a part of the cultures which developed them.

From the clothes we wear to the food we eat, to the shape of our roofs, we can see how each culture was affected by humanity's need for survival.

And, let's be honest, it worked - we have dominated the planet with our technology and subsequent population growth. (Whether that is a good thing or not is quite another matter.)

Culture's relation to Nature

Depending on the way we have defined culture, it can be argued that humans are not the only species to have developed it.

Not that we're going to find any other animals that create paper cranes for their weddings, but using the broad and relatively simplistic definition of a complex pattern of learned behavior, we can see examples of culture in other species.

Chimpanzees, along with other intelligent primates, seem to be the closest contenders for this.

The young chimpanzees learn from the older ones - whether hunting or gathering skills, communication, or sexual education.

This is a fascinating addition to any discussions one might have regarding culture.

It opens up the possibility that culture is not strictly something that belongs to humans, but perhaps that it is the skill we have developed above all other animals.

We can be outrun, out-swam or out-fought by any number of other species. But our patterns of behavior, in terms of complexity and possibility, leave them all behind.

Culture, from a historical perspective..

The following extract from Kevin Avruch, famous anthropologist and sociologist
A great deal of the problem [of understanding the idea of culture] is caused by the different usages of the word as it was increasingly used in the nineteenth century. Broadly talking, it had been found in three ways (most of that can be found nowadays at the same time). Initial, as stated in Matthew Arnolds' Culture and Anarchy (1867), cultures are known as special intellectual or imaginative endeavors or items, what right now we might get in touch with "high culture" in contrast to "popular culture" (or "folkways"). From this classification, only a portion - typically a small one - associated with a sociable team "has" culture. (The rest are possible resources for anarchy!) This sensation of traditions is a lot more closely linked to beauty rather than to interpersonal science. To some extent in the reaction to this utilization, another, as pioneered by Edward Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870), described a quality possessed by everybody in most social groupings, who nevertheless may be arrayed over an improvement (evolutionary) continuum (in Lewis Henry Morgan's plan) from "savagery" through "barbarism" to "civilization". It is actually really worth quoting Tylor's definition in their entirety initial, mainly because it became the foundational one for anthropology and 2nd because it in part explains why Kroeber and Kluckhohn located definitional fecundity from the early 1950s. Tylor's meaning of traditions is "that intricate whole which includes understanding, notion, artwork, morals, regulation, custom, and any other features and practices obtained by a person as part of society". As opposed to Arnold's perspective, all people "have" customs, they will obtain by virtue of account in some social team - culture. And a total grab case of stuff, from knowledge to behavior to features, tends to make up customs. The extreme inclusivity of Tylor's description stayed with anthropology a very long time it can be one particular reason politics experts who became interested in social queries from the late 1950s experienced it needed to delimit their relevant social domain to "political culture". Although the best legacy of Tylor's definition lay down within his "complex whole" formulation. This was recognized even by those later anthropologists who forcefully denied his evolutionism. They had taken it to mean that cultures were wholes - integrated systems. Even if this assertion has fantastic heuristic importance, in addition, it, since we shall disagree below, simplifies the entire world substantially. The third and last using traditions created in anthropology inside the twentieth-century work of Franz Boas and his awesome college students, although with roots within the eighteenth-century articles of Johann von Herder. As Tylor reacted to Arnold to establish a technological (as opposed to visual) grounds for customs, so Boas reacted against Tylor and other interpersonal evolutionists. Whereas the evolutionists stressed the widespread personality of your single culture, with assorted societies arrayed from savage to civilized, Boas emphasized the individuality of the many and diverse ethnicities of several people or communities. Additionally, he dismissed the worth judgments he found inherent in both the Arnoldian and Tylorean sights of the tradition for Boas, you need to never separate higher from lower traditions, and another ought not differentially valorize civilizations as savage or civilized. Here, then, are three totally different understandings of tradition. A portion of the difficulty within the expression depends on its number of connotations. But to compound concerns, the difficulties usually are not merely conceptual or semantic. Every one of the usages and understandings come linked to, or Primary Principles 2 Precisely what is Customs? | © Spencer-Oatey 2012 might be connected to, distinct politics or ideological agendas that, in a single type or some other, still resonate these days.
Conclusion - What is Culture?

Culture is inherent.

Culture is developed as we seek to fill our basic needs.

It is learned, taught from one generation to the next, picked up when you had no idea that you were paying attention.

Culture is cumulative, ideas, and behaviors collected by each society. Yes, like they were debris being picked up and carried along by a river.

It is not programmed, it is not automatic, but it is not something that we can avoid becoming part of.

The beliefs and social behaviors are ingrained into every human on earth. These social norms are connecting us to each other within our own culture.

And cross-culturally, these norms are allowing us to reach each other across what sometimes seems to be unfathomable distances.

Culture is everywhere - It's is in art, music, dance, the way we decorate our pottery.

It is our governmental systems, it is our leisure time, it is the places of worship we build.

Culture is the way we speak to one another, whether we take our shoes off before we come into the house.

It is shared behavior; the result of humanity trying to negotiate the world it finds itself in and thriving as it does.

About The Artist Editorial

Delivering inspiring and authentic content for the Art, Design and Culture lovers and allowing artists to draw inspiration from no less than the best works of art in the world. View all posts by The Artist Editorial →

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What is Culture? - Definition of Culture, History and Facts | Metacult

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Culture means the patterns and characteristics of human behavior, and all that entails in terms of religion, beliefs, social norms, arts, customs, and habits The word "culture" is used in different ways by different people. To some, it might mean a string quartet and the use of multiple utensils at dinner.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Definitions of language

Many definitions of language have been proposed. Henry Sweet, an English phonetician and language scholar, stated: "Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts." The American linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager formulated the following definition: "A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates." Any succinct definition of language makes a number of presuppositions and begs a number of questions. The first, for example, puts excessive weight on "thought," and the second uses "arbitrary" in a specialized, though legitimate, way.

A number of considerations (marked in italics below) enter into a proper understanding of language as a subject:

Every physiologically and mentally typical person acquires in childhood the ability to make use, as both sender and receiver, of a system of communication that comprises a circumscribed set of symbols (e.g., sounds, gestures, or written or typed characters). In spoken language, this symbol set consists of noises resulting from movements of certain organs within the throat and mouth. In signed languages, these symbols may be hand or body movements, gestures, or facial expressions. By means of these symbols, people are able to impart information, to express feelings and emotions, to influence the activities of others, and to comport themselves with varying degrees of friendliness or hostility toward persons who make use of substantially the same set of symbols.

Different systems of communication constitute different languages; the degree of difference needed to establish a different language cannot be stated exactly. No two people speak exactly alike; hence, one is able to recognize the voices of friends over the telephone and to keep distinct a number of unseen speakers in a radio broadcast. Yet, clearly, no one would say that they speak different languages. Generally, systems of communication are recognized as different languages if they cannot be understood without specific learning by both parties, though the precise limits of mutual intelligibility are hard to draw and belong on a scale rather than on either side of a definite dividing line. Substantially different systems of communication that may impede but do not prevent mutual comprehension are called dialects of a language. In order to describe in detail the actual different language patterns of individuals, the term idiolect, meaning the habits of expression of a single person, has been coined.

Typically, people acquire a single language initially-their first language, or native tongue, the language used by those with whom, or by whom, they are brought up from infancy. Subsequent "second" languages are learned to different degrees of competence under various conditions. Complete mastery of two languages is designated as bilingualism; in many cases-such as upbringing by parents using different languages at home or being raised within a multilingual community-children grow up as bilinguals. In traditionally monolingual cultures, the learning, to any extent, of a second or other language is an activity superimposed on the prior mastery of one's first language and is a different process intellectually.

Language, as described above, is species-specific to human beings. Other members of the animal kingdom have the ability to communicate, through vocal noises or by other means, but the most important single feature characterizing human language (that is, every individual language), against every known mode of animal communication, is its infinite productivity and creativity. Human beings are unrestricted in what they can communicate; no area of experience is accepted as necessarily incommunicable, though it may be necessary to adapt one's language in order to cope with new discoveries or new modes of thought. Animal communication systems are by contrast very tightly circumscribed in what may be communicated. Indeed, displaced reference, the ability to communicate about things outside immediate temporal and spatial contiguity, which is fundamental to speech, is found elsewhere only in the so-called language of bees. Bees are able, by carrying out various conventionalized movements (referred to as bee dances) in or near the hive, to indicate to others the locations and strengths of food sources. But food sources are the only known theme of this communication system. Surprisingly, however, this system, nearest to human language in function, belongs to a species remote from humanity in the animal kingdom. On the other hand, the animal performance superficially most like human speech, the mimicry of parrots and of some other birds that have been kept in the company of humans, is wholly derivative and serves no independent communicative function. Humankind's nearest relatives among the primates, though possessing a vocal physiology similar to that of humans, have not developed anything like a spoken language. Attempts to teach sign language to chimpanzees and other apes through imitation have achieved limited success, though the interpretation of the significance of ape signing ability remains controversial.

In most accounts, the primary purpose of language is to facilitate communication, in the sense of transmission of information from one person to another. However, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies have drawn attention to a range of other functions for language. Among these is the use of language to express a national or local identity (a common source of conflict in situations of multiethnicity around the world, such as in Belgium, India, and Quebec). Also important are the "ludic" (playful) function of language-encountered in such phenomena as puns, riddles, and crossword puzzles-and the range of functions seen in imaginative or symbolic contexts, such as poetry, drama, and religious expression.

Language interacts with every aspect of human life in society, and it can be understood only if it is considered in relation to society. This article attempts to survey language in this light and to consider its various functions and the purposes it can and has been made to serve. Because each language is both a working system of communication in the period and in the community wherein it is used and also the product of its history and the source of its future development, any account of language must consider it from both these points of view.

The science of language is known as linguistics. It includes what are generally distinguished as descriptive linguistics and historical linguistics. Linguistics is now a highly technical subject; it embraces, both descriptively and historically, such major divisions as phonetics, grammar (including syntax and morphology), semantics, and pragmatics, dealing in detail with these various aspects of language.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Language | Definition, Types, Characteristics, Development, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Language, a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.

# data[].attributes.body
Language, a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves.

culture: Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music and is different all over the world.

Linguistic:  is the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language.

# data[].attributes.body
System for the expression of thoughts, feelings, etc., by the use of spoken sounds or convention symbols.

# data[].attributes.body
Language is one of the most important parts of any culture. It is the way by which people communicate with one another, build relationships, and create a sense of community.

Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, art

# data[].attributes.body
Language

Is a term for any complex communication system used by humans that consists of words and phrases that, when combined, can create infinite variable utterances. How humans initially developed language is not wholly clear and is something that linguists are still researching.

Most humans learn at least one language in early childhood. If a person lacks exposure to language as a young child, they will never be able to fluently learn a language as an adult because of how human brain development works.

Culture

Is a broad term that can have different meanings depending on the context. One possible definition is the set of knowledge acquired over time by a group of people. Another possible definition is the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.

Linguistics

Is the scientific study of language. It entails the comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language— cognitive, social, environmental, biological as well as structural.

Linguistics is considered to be an applied science as well as an academic field of general study within the humanities and social sciences. Traditional areas of linguistic analysis correspond to syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics.

# data[].attributes.body
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general.

Linguistics aims to define how languages are developed in the human mind and describes how human languages are formed and how they work. This includes language structure, sociolinguistics, grammar, syntax, semantics and, phonetics.

# data[].attributes.body
Language is a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Definitions of language

Many definitions of language have been proposed. Henry Sweet, an English phonetician and language scholar, stated: "Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts." The American linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager formulated the following definition: "A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates." Any succinct definition of language makes a number of presuppositions and begs a number of questions. The first, for example, puts excessive weight on "thought," and the second uses "arbitrary" in a specialized, though legitimate, way.

A number of considerations (marked in italics below) enter into a proper understanding of language as a subject:

Every physiologically and mentally typical person acquires in childhood the ability to make use, as both sender and receiver, of a system of communication that comprises a circumscribed set of symbols (e.g., sounds, gestures, or written or typed characters). In spoken language, this symbol set consists of noises resulting from movements of certain organs within the throat and mouth. In signed languages, these symbols may be hand or body movements, gestures, or facial expressions. By means of these symbols, people are able to impart information, to express feelings and emotions, to influence the activities of others, and to comport themselves with varying degrees of friendliness or hostility toward persons who make use of substantially the same set of symbols.

Different systems of communication constitute different languages; the degree of difference needed to establish a different language cannot be stated exactly. No two people speak exactly alike; hence, one is able to recognize the voices of friends over the telephone and to keep distinct a number of unseen speakers in a radio broadcast. Yet, clearly, no one would say that they speak different languages. Generally, systems of communication are recognized as different languages if they cannot be understood without specific learning by both parties, though the precise limits of mutual intelligibility are hard to draw and belong on a scale rather than on either side of a definite dividing line. Substantially different systems of communication that may impede but do not prevent mutual comprehension are called dialects of a language. In order to describe in detail the actual different language patterns of individuals, the term idiolect, meaning the habits of expression of a single person, has been coined.

Typically, people acquire a single language initially-their first language, or native tongue, the language used by those with whom, or by whom, they are brought up from infancy. Subsequent "second" languages are learned to different degrees of competence under various conditions. Complete mastery of two languages is designated as bilingualism; in many cases-such as upbringing by parents using different languages at home or being raised within a multilingual community-children grow up as bilinguals. In traditionally monolingual cultures, the learning, to any extent, of a second or other language is an activity superimposed on the prior mastery of one's first language and is a different process intellectually.

Language, as described above, is species-specific to human beings. Other members of the animal kingdom have the ability to communicate, through vocal noises or by other means, but the most important single feature characterizing human language (that is, every individual language), against every known mode of animal communication, is its infinite productivity and creativity. Human beings are unrestricted in what they can communicate; no area of experience is accepted as necessarily incommunicable, though it may be necessary to adapt one's language in order to cope with new discoveries or new modes of thought. Animal communication systems are by contrast very tightly circumscribed in what may be communicated. Indeed, displaced reference, the ability to communicate about things outside immediate temporal and spatial contiguity, which is fundamental to speech, is found elsewhere only in the so-called language of bees. Bees are able, by carrying out various conventionalized movements (referred to as bee dances) in or near the hive, to indicate to others the locations and strengths of food sources. But food sources are the only known theme of this communication system. Surprisingly, however, this system, nearest to human language in function, belongs to a species remote from humanity in the animal kingdom. On the other hand, the animal performance superficially most like human speech, the mimicry of parrots and of some other birds that have been kept in the company of humans, is wholly derivative and serves no independent communicative function. Humankind's nearest relatives among the primates, though possessing a vocal physiology similar to that of humans, have not developed anything like a spoken language. Attempts to teach sign language to chimpanzees and other apes through imitation have achieved limited success, though the interpretation of the significance of ape signing ability remains controversial.

In most accounts, the primary purpose of language is to facilitate communication, in the sense of transmission of information from one person to another. However, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies have drawn attention to a range of other functions for language. Among these is the use of language to express a national or local identity (a common source of conflict in situations of multiethnicity around the world, such as in Belgium, India, and Quebec). Also important are the "ludic" (playful) function of language-encountered in such phenomena as puns, riddles, and crossword puzzles-and the range of functions seen in imaginative or symbolic contexts, such as poetry, drama, and religious expression.

Language interacts with every aspect of human life in society, and it can be understood only if it is considered in relation to society. This article attempts to survey language in this light and to consider its various functions and the purposes it can and has been made to serve. Because each language is both a working system of communication in the period and in the community wherein it is used and also the product of its history and the source of its future development, any account of language must consider it from both these points of view.

The science of language is known as linguistics. It includes what are generally distinguished as descriptive linguistics and historical linguistics. Linguistics is now a highly technical subject; it embraces, both descriptively and historically, such major divisions as phonetics, grammar (including syntax and morphology), semantics, and pragmatics, dealing in detail with these various aspects of language.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Language | Definition, Types, Characteristics, Development, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Language, a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.

# data[].attributes.body
The term 'applied linguistics' refers to a broad range of activities which involve solving some language-related problem or addressing some language-related concern. It appears as though applied linguistics.

# data[].attributes.body
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time.[1] Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.

Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli - for example, writing, whistling, signing, or braille. In other words, human language is modality-independent, but written or signed language is the way to inscribe or encode the natural human speech or gestures.

Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral, manual and tactile languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.

The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Critical examinations of languages, such as philosophy of language, the relationships between language and thought, how words represent experience, etc., have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greek civilization. Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) have argued that language originated from emotions, while others like Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) have argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought. Twentieth century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) argued that philosophy is really the study of language itself. Major figures in contemporary linguistics of these times include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.

Language is thought to have gradually diverged from earlier primate communication systems when early hominins acquired the ability to form a theory of mind and shared intentionality. This development is sometimes thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative and social functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently by approximately three years old. Language and culture are codependent. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language has social uses such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as use for social grooming and entertainment.

Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family; in contrast, a language that has been demonstrated to not have any living or non-living relationship with another language is called a language isolate. There are also many unclassified languages whose relationships have not been established, and spurious languages may have not existed at all. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100.

Definitions

The English word * language derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s "tongue, speech, language" through Latin lingua, "language; tongue", and Old French language. The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers, and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as formally defined computer languages used for computer programming. Unlike conventional human languages, a formal language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. This article specifically concerns the properties of natural human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics.

As an object of linguistic study, "language" has two primary meanings: an abstract concept, and a specific linguistic system, e.g. " French". The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined the modern discipline of linguistics, first explicitly formulated the distinction using the French word language for language as a concept, langue as a specific instance of a language system, and parole for the concrete usage of speech in a particular language.

When speaking of language as a general concept, definitions can be used which stress different aspects of the phenomenon. These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they also inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory. Debates about the nature and origin of language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers such as Gorgias and Plato debated the relation between words, concepts and reality. Gorgias argued that language could represent neither the objective experience nor human experience, and that communication and truth were therefore impossible. Plato maintained that communication is possible because language represents ideas and concepts that exist independently of, and prior to, language.

During the Enlightenment and its debates about human origins, it became fashionable to speculate about the origin of language. Thinkers such as Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder argued that language had originated in the instinctive expression of emotions, and that it was originally closer to music and poetry than to the logical expression of rational thought. Rationalist philosophers such as Kant and René Descartes held the opposite view. Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers began to wonder about the role of language in shaping our experiences of the world - asking whether language simply reflects the objective structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that in turn impose structure on our experience of the objective world. This led to the question of whether philosophical problems are really firstly linguistic problems. The resurgence of the view that language plays a significant role in the creation and circulation of concepts, and that the study of philosophy is essentially the study of language, is associated with what has been called the linguistic turn and philosophers such as Wittgenstein in 20th-century philosophy. These debates about language in relation to meaning and reference, cognition and consciousness remain active today.

Mental faculty, organ or instinct

One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and to produce and understand utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans, and it emphasizes the biological basis for the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain. Proponents of the view that the drive to language acquisition is innate in humans argue that this is supported by the fact that all cognitively normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible will acquire language without formal instruction. Languages may even develop spontaneously in environments where people live or grow up together without a common language; for example, creole languages and spontaneously developed sign languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This view, which can be traced back to the philosophers Kant and Descartes, understands language to be largely innate, for example, in Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, or American philosopher Jerry Fodor's extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied in studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.

Formal symbolic system

Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, and his structuralism remains foundational for many approaches to language.

Some proponents of Saussure's view of language have advocated a formal approach which studies language structure by identifying its basic elements and then by presenting a formal account of the rules according to which the elements combine in order to form words and sentences. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, the originator of the generative theory of grammar, who has defined language as the construction of sentences that can be generated using transformational grammars. Chomsky considers these rules to be an innate feature of the human mind and to constitute the rudiments of what language is. By way of contrast, such transformational grammars are also commonly used in formal logic, in formal linguistics, and in applied computational linguistics. In the philosophy of language, the view of linguistic meaning as residing in the logical relations between propositions and reality was developed by philosophers such as Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, and other formal logicians.

Tool for communication

A conversation in American Sign Language

Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans to exchange verbal or symbolic utterances. This definition stresses the social functions of language and the fact that humans use it to express themselves and to manipulate objects in their environment. Functional theories of grammar explain grammatical structures by their communicative functions, and understand the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which grammar was "tailored" to serve the communicative needs of its users.

This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive, and interactive frameworks, as well as in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as dynamic phenomena, as structures that are always in the process of changing as they are employed by their speakers. This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, or the classification of languages according to structural features, as it can be shown that processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology. In the philosophy of language, the view of pragmatics as being central to language and meaning is often associated with Wittgenstein's later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as J.L. Austin, Paul Grice, John Searle, and W.O. Quine.

Distinctive features of human language

A number of features, many of which were described by Charles Hockett and called design features set human language apart from communication used by non-human animals.

Communication systems used by other animals such as bees or apes are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited, number of possible ideas that can be expressed. In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. This is possible because human language is based on a dual code, in which a finite number of elements which are meaningless in themselves (e.g. sounds, letters or gestures) can be combined to form an infinite number of larger units of meaning (words and sentences). However, one study has demonstrated that an Australian bird, the chestnut-crowned babbler, is capable of using the same acoustic elements in different arrangements to create two functionally distinct vocalizations. Additionally, pied babblers have demonstrated the ability to generate two functionally distinct vocalisations composed of the same sound type, which can only be distinguished by the number of repeated elements.

Several species of animals have proved to be able to acquire forms of communication through social learning: for instance a bonobo named Kanzi learned to express itself using a set of symbolic lexigrams. Similarly, many species of birds and whales learn their songs by imitating other members of their species. However, while some animals may acquire large numbers of words and symbols, none have been able to learn as many different signs as are generally known by an average 4 year old human, nor have any acquired anything resembling the complex grammar of human language.

Human languages differ from animal communication systems in that they employ grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun and verb, present and past, which may be used to express exceedingly complex meanings. It is distinguished by the property of recursivity: for example, a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase (as in "[[the chimpanzee]'s lips]") or a clause can contain another clause (as in "[I see [the dog is running]]"). Human language is the only known natural communication system whose adaptability may be referred to as modality independent. This means that it can be used not only for communication through one channel or medium, but through several. For example, spoken language uses the auditive modality, whereas sign languages and writing use the visual modality, and braille writing uses the tactile modality.

Human language is unusual in being able to refer to abstract concepts and to imagined or hypothetical events as well as events that took place in the past or may happen in the future. This ability to refer to events that are not at the same time or place as the speech event is called displacement, and while some animal communication systems can use displacement (such as the communication of bees that can communicate the location of sources of nectar that are out of sight), the degree to which it is used in human language is also considered unique.

Theories about the origin of language differ in regard to their basic assumptions about what language is. Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These theories can be called continuity-based theories. The opposite viewpoint is that language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. These theories can be defined as discontinuity-based. Similarly, theories based on the generative view of language pioneered by Noam Chomsky see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, whereas functionalist theories see it as a system that is largely cultural, learned through social interaction.

Continuity-based theories are held by a majority of scholars, but they vary in how they envision this development. Those who see language as being mostly innate, such as psychologist Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition, whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as psychologist Michael Tomasello, see it as having developed from animal communication in primates: either gestural or vocal communication to assist in cooperation. Other continuity-based models see language as having developed from music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. A prominent proponent of this view is archaeologist Steven Mithen. Stephen Anderson states that the age of spoken languages is estimated at 60,000 to 100,000 years and that:

Researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it plausible to suggest that language was invented only once, and that all modern spoken languages are thus in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered ... because of limitations on the methods available for reconstruction.

Because language emerged in the early prehistory of man, before the existence of any written records, its early development has left no historical traces, and it is believed that no comparable processes can be observed today. Theories that stress continuity often look at animals to see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be seen as analogous to what pre-human language must have been like. Early human fossils can be inspected for traces of physical adaptation to language use or pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour. Among the signs in human fossils that may suggest linguistic abilities are: the size of the brain relative to body mass, the presence of a larynx capable of advanced sound production and the nature of tools and other manufactured artifacts.

It was mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general. However, a 2017 study on Ardipithecus ramidus challenges this belief. Scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of the genus some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) while others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago), and the development of language proper with anatomically modern Homo sapiens with the Upper Paleolithic revolution less than 100,000 years ago.

Chomsky is one prominent proponent of a discontinuity-based theory of human language origins. He suggests that for scholars interested in the nature of language, "talk about the evolution of the language capacity is beside the point." Chomsky proposes that perhaps "some random mutation took place [...] and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain." Though cautioning against taking this story literally, Chomsky insists that "it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language."

William Jones discovered the family relation between Latin and Sanskrit, laying the ground for the discipline of historical linguistics.

Subdisciplines

The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to linguistics. For example, descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single languages, theoretical linguistics develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of language based on data from the various extant human languages, sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in turn the study of the social functions of language and grammatical description, neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain and allows the experimental testing of theories, computational linguistics builds on theoretical and descriptive linguistics to construct computational models of language often aimed at processing natural language or at testing linguistic hypotheses, and historical linguistics relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the comparative method.

Early history

Ferdinand de Saussure developed the structuralist approach to studying language.

The formal study of language is often considered to have started in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. However, Sumerian scribes already studied the differences between Sumerian and Akkadian grammar around 1900 BC. Subsequent grammatical traditions developed in all of the ancient cultures that adopted writing.

In the 17th century AD, the French Port-Royal Grammarians developed the idea that the grammars of all languages were a reflection of the universal basics of thought, and therefore that grammar was universal. In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by British philologist and expert on ancient India William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics. The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Early in the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them.

By introducing a distinction between diachronic and synchronic analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline of linguistics. Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still fundamental in many contemporary linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm, and the Langue-parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system ( langue), from language as a concrete manifestation of this system ( parole).

Modern linguistics

Noam Chomsky is one of the most important linguistic theorists of the 20th century.

In opposition to the formal theories of the generative school, functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, its structures are best analyzed and understood by reference to their functions. Formal theories of grammar seek to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations, while functional theories seek to define the functions performed by language and then relate them to the linguistic elements that carry them out. The framework of cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms of the concepts (which are sometimes universal, and sometimes specific to a particular language) which underlie its forms. Cognitive linguistics is primarily concerned with how the mind creates meaning through language.

Physiological and neural architecture of language and speech

Speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures. The production of spoken language depends on sophisticated capacities for controlling the lips, tongue and other components of the vocal apparatus, the ability to acoustically decode speech sounds, and the neurological apparatus required for acquiring and producing language. The study of the genetic bases for human language is at an early stage: the only gene that has definitely been implicated in language production is FOXP2, which may cause a kind of congenital language disorder if affected by mutations.

Language Areas of the brain.

The brain is the coordinating center of all linguistic activity; it controls both the production of linguistic cognition and of meaning and the mechanics of speech production. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the neurological bases for language is quite limited, though it has advanced considerably with the use of modern imaging techniques. The discipline of linguistics dedicated to studying the neurological aspects of language is called neurolinguistics.

Early work in neurolinguistics involved the study of language in people with brain lesions, to see how lesions in specific areas affect language and speech. In this way, neuroscientists in the 19th century discovered that two areas in the brain are crucially implicated in language processing. The first area is Wernicke's area, which is in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere. People with a lesion in this area of the brain develop receptive aphasia, a condition in which there is a major impairment of language comprehension, while speech retains a natural-sounding rhythm and a relatively normal sentence structure. The second area is Broca's area, in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. People with a lesion to this area develop expressive aphasia, meaning that they know what they want to say, they just cannot get it out. They are typically able to understand what is being said to them, but unable to speak fluently. Other symptoms that may be present in expressive aphasia include problems with word repetition. The condition affects both spoken and written language. Those with this aphasia also exhibit ungrammatical speech and show inability to use syntactic information to determine the meaning of sentences. Both expressive and receptive aphasia also affect the use of sign language, in analogous ways to how they affect speech, with expressive aphasia causing signers to sign slowly and with incorrect grammar, whereas a signer with receptive aphasia will sign fluently, but make little sense to others and have difficulties comprehending others' signs. This shows that the impairment is specific to the ability to use language, not to the physiology used for speech production.

With technological advances in the late 20th century, neurolinguists have also incorporated non-invasive techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrophysiology to study language processing in individuals without impairments.

Anatomy of speech

The sound of speech can be analyzed into a combination of segmental and suprasegmental elements. The segmental elements are those that follow each other in sequences, which are usually represented by distinct letters in alphabetic scripts, such as the Roman script. In free flowing speech, there are no clear boundaries between one segment and the next, nor usually are there any audible pauses between them. Segments therefore are distinguished by their distinct sounds which are a result of their different articulations, and can be either vowels or consonants. Suprasegmental phenomena encompass such elements as stress, phonation type, voice timbre, and prosody or intonation, all of which may have effects across multiple segments.

Consonants and vowel segments combine to form syllables, which in turn combine to form utterances; these can be distinguished phonetically as the space between two inhalations. Acoustically, these different segments are characterized by different formant structures, that are visible in a spectrogram of the recorded sound wave. Formants are the amplitude peaks in the frequency spectrum of a specific sound.

Vowels are those sounds that have no audible friction caused by the narrowing or obstruction of some part of the upper vocal tract. They vary in quality according to the degree of lip aperture and the placement of the tongue within the oral cavity. Vowels are called when the lips are relatively closed, as in the pronunciation of the vowel [i] (English "ee"), or when the lips are relatively open, as in the vowel [a] (English "ah"). If the tongue is located towards the back of the mouth, the quality changes, creating vowels such as [u] (English "oo"). The quality also changes depending on whether the lips are rounded as opposed to unrounded, creating distinctions such as that between [i] (unrounded front vowel such as English "ee") and [y] ( rounded front vowel such as German "ü").

Consonants are those sounds that have audible friction or closure at some point within the upper vocal tract. Consonant sounds vary by place of articulation, i.e. the place in the vocal tract where the airflow is obstructed, commonly at the lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, palate, velum, uvula, or glottis. Each place of articulation produces a different set of consonant sounds, which are further distinguished by manner of articulation, or the kind of friction, whether full closure, in which case the consonant is called or , or different degrees of aperture creating fricatives and approximants. Consonants can also be either voiced or unvoiced, depending on whether the vocal cords are set in vibration by airflow during the production of the sound. Voicing is what separates English [s] in bus ( unvoiced sibilant) from [z] in buzz ( voiced sibilant).

Some speech sounds, both vowels and consonants, involve release of air flow through the nasal cavity, and these are called or sounds. Other sounds are defined by the way the tongue moves within the mouth such as the l-sounds (called , because the air flows along both sides of the tongue), and the r-sounds (called ).

By using these speech organs, humans can produce hundreds of distinct sounds: some appear very often in the world's languages, whereas others are much more common in certain language families, language areas, or even specific to a single language.

Human languages display considerable plasticity in their deployment of two fundamental modes: oral (speech and mouthing) and manual (sign and gesture). For example, it is common for oral language to be accompanied by gesture, and for sign language to be accompanied by mouthing. In addition, some language communities use both modes to convey lexical or grammatical meaning, each mode complementing the other. Such bimodal use of language is especially common in genres such as story-telling (with Plains Indian Sign Language and Australian Aboriginal sign languages used alongside oral language, for example), but also occurs in mundane conversation. For instance, many Australian languages have a rich set of case suffixes that provide details about the instrument used to perform an action. Others lack such grammatical precision in the oral mode, but supplement it with gesture to convey that information in the sign mode. In Iwaidja, for example, 'he went out for fish using a torch' is spoken as simply "he-hunted fish torch", but the word for 'torch' is accompanied by a gesture indicating that it was held. In another example, the ritual language Damin had a heavily reduced oral vocabulary of only a few hundred words, each of which was very general in meaning, but which were supplemented by gesture for greater precision (e.g., the single word for fish, l*i, was accompanied by a gesture to indicate the kind of fish).

Secondary modes of language, by which a fundamental mode is conveyed in a different medium, include writing (including braille), sign (in manually coded language), whistling and drumming. Tertiary modes - such as semaphore, Morse code and spelling alphabets - convey the secondary mode of writing in a different medium. For some extinct languages that are maintained for ritual or liturgical purposes, writing may be the primary mode, with speech secondary.

When described as a system of symbolic communication, language is traditionally seen as consisting of three parts: signs, meanings, and a code connecting signs with their meanings. The study of the process of semiosis, how signs and meanings are combined, used, and interpreted is called semiotics. Signs can be composed of sounds, gestures, letters, or symbols, depending on whether the language is spoken, signed, or written, and they can be combined into complex signs, such as words and phrases. When used in communication, a sign is encoded and transmitted by a sender through a channel to a receiver who decodes it.

Ancient Tamil inscription at Thanjavur

Some of the properties that define human language as opposed to other communication systems are: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, meaning that there is no predictable connection between a linguistic sign and its meaning; the duality of the linguistic system, meaning that linguistic structures are built by combining elements into larger structures that can be seen as layered, e.g. how sounds build words and words build phrases; the discreteness of the elements of language, meaning that the elements out of which linguistic signs are constructed are discrete units, e.g. sounds and words, that can be distinguished from each other and rearranged in different patterns; and the productivity of the linguistic system, meaning that the finite number of linguistic elements can be combined into a theoretically infinite number of combinations.

The rules by which signs can be combined to form words and phrases are called syntax or grammar. The meaning that is connected to individual signs, morphemes, words, phrases, and texts is called semantics. The division of language into separate but connected systems of sign and meaning goes back to the first linguistic studies of de Saussure and is now used in almost all branches of linguistics.

Languages express meaning by relating a sign form to a meaning, or its content. Sign forms must be something that can be perceived, for example, in sounds, images, or gestures, and then related to a specific meaning by social convention. Because the basic relation of meaning for most linguistic signs is based on social convention, linguistic signs can be considered arbitrary, in the sense that the convention is established socially and historically, rather than by means of a natural relation between a specific sign form and its meaning.

Thus, languages must have a vocabulary of signs related to specific meaning. The English sign "dog" denotes, for example, a member of the species Canis familiaris. In a language, the array of arbitrary signs connected to specific meanings is called the lexicon, and a single sign connected to a meaning is called a lexeme. Not all meanings in a language are represented by single words. Often, semantic concepts are embedded in the morphology or syntax of the language in the form of grammatical categories.

Sounds and symbols

Depending on modality, language structure can be based on systems of sounds (speech), gestures (sign languages), or graphic or tactile symbols (writing). The ways in which languages use sounds or signs to construct meaning are studied in phonology.

Sounds as part of a linguistic system are called phonemes. Phonemes are abstract units of sound, defined as the smallest units in a language that can serve to distinguish between the meaning of a pair of minimally different words, a so-called minimal pair. In English, for example, the words bat [bæt] and pat [pʰæt] form a minimal pair, in which the distinction between /b/ and /p/ differentiates the two words, which have different meanings. However, each language contrasts sounds in different ways. For example, in a language that does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants, the sounds [p] and [b] (if they both occur) could be considered a single phoneme, and consequently, the two pronunciations would have the same meaning. Similarly, the English language does not distinguish phonemically between aspirated and non-aspirated pronunciations of consonants, as many other languages like Korean and Hindi do: the unaspirated /p/ in spin [spɪn] and the aspirated /p/ in pin [pʰɪn] are considered to be merely different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme (such variants of a single phoneme are called allophones), whereas in Mandarin Chinese, the same difference in pronunciation distinguishes between the words [pʰá] 'crouch' and [pá] 'eight' (the accent above the á means that the vowel is pronounced with a high tone).

All spoken languages have phonemes of at least two different categories, vowels and consonants, that can be combined to form syllables. As well as segments such as consonants and vowels, some languages also use sound in other ways to convey meaning. Many languages, for example, use stress, pitch, duration, and tone to distinguish meaning. Because these phenomena operate outside of the level of single segments, they are called suprasegmental. Some languages have only a few phonemes, for example, Rotokas and Pirahã language with 11 and 10 phonemes respectively, whereas languages like Taa may have as many as 141 phonemes. In sign languages, the equivalent to phonemes (formerly called cheremes) are defined by the basic elements of gestures, such as hand shape, orientation, location, and motion, which correspond to manners of articulation in spoken language.

Writing systems represent language using visual symbols, which may or may not correspond to the sounds of spoken language. The Latin alphabet (and those on which it is based or that have been derived from it) was originally based on the representation of single sounds, so that words were constructed from letters that generally denote a single consonant or vowel in the structure of the word. In syllabic scripts, such as the Inuktitut syllabary, each sign represents a whole syllable. In logographic scripts, each sign represents an entire word, and will generally bear no relation to the sound of that word in spoken language.

Because all languages have a very large number of words, no purely logographic scripts are known to exist. Written language represents the way spoken sounds and words follow one after another by arranging symbols according to a pattern that follows a certain direction. The direction used in a writing system is entirely arbitrary and established by convention. Some writing systems use the horizontal axis (left to right as the Latin script or right to left as the Arabic script), while others such as traditional Chinese writing use the vertical dimension (from top to bottom). A few writing systems use opposite directions for alternating lines, and others, such as the ancient Maya script, can be written in either direction and rely on graphic cues to show the reader the direction of reading.

In order to represent the sounds of the world's languages in writing, linguists have developed the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to represent all of the discrete sounds that are known to contribute to meaning in human languages.

Grammar is the study of how meaningful elements called within a language can be combined into utterances. Morphemes can either be free or bound. If they are free to be moved around within an utterance, they are usually called , and if they are bound to other words or morphemes, they are called affixes. The way in which meaningful elements can be combined within a language is governed by rules. The study of the rules for the internal structure of words are called morphology. The rules of the internal structure of phrases and sentences are called syntax.

Grammatical categories

Grammar can be described as a system of categories and a set of rules that determine how categories combine to form different aspects of meaning. Languages differ widely in whether they are encoded through the use of categories or lexical units. However, several categories are so common as to be nearly universal. Such universal categories include the encoding of the grammatical relations of participants and predicates by grammatically distinguishing between their relations to a predicate, the encoding of temporal and spatial relations on predicates, and a system of grammatical person governing reference to and distinction between speakers and addressees and those about whom they are speaking.

Word classes

Languages organize their parts of speech into classes according to their functions and positions relative to other parts. All languages, for instance, make a basic distinction between a group of words that prototypically denotes things and concepts and a group of words that prototypically denotes actions and events. The first group, which includes English words such as "dog" and "song", are usually called nouns. The second, which includes "think" and "sing", are called verbs. Another common category is the adjective: words that describe properties or qualities of nouns, such as "red" or "big". Word classes can be "open" if new words can continuously be added to the class, or relatively "closed" if there is a fixed number of words in a class. In English, the class of pronouns is closed, whereas the class of adjectives is open, since an infinite number of adjectives can be constructed from verbs (e.g. "saddened") or nouns (e.g. with the -like suffix, as in "noun-like"). In other languages such as Korean, the situation is the opposite, and new pronouns can be constructed, whereas the number of adjectives is fixed.

Word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically, verbs are used to construct predicates, while nouns are used as arguments of predicates. In a sentence such as "Sally runs", the predicate is "runs", because it is the word that predicates a specific state about its argument "Sally". Some verbs such as "curse" can take two arguments, e.g. "Sally cursed John". A predicate that can only take a single argument is called intransitive, while a predicate that can take two arguments is called transitive.

Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions like "and" that serve to join two sentences, articles that introduce a noun, interjections such as "wow!", or ideophones like "splash" that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have positionals that describe the spatial position of an event or entity. Many languages have classifiers that identify countable nouns as belonging to a particular type or having a particular shape. For instance, in Japanese, the general noun classifier for humans is nin (人), and it is used for counting humans, whatever they are called:

san-nin no gakusei (三人の学生) lit. "3 human-classifier of student" - three students

For trees, it would be:

san-bon no ki (三本の木) lit. "3 classifier-for-long-objects of tree" - three trees

Morphology

In linguistics, the study of the internal structure of complex words and the processes by which words are formed is called morphology. In most languages, it is possible to construct complex words that are built of several morphemes. For instance, the English word "unexpected" can be analyzed as being composed of the three morphemes "un-", "expect" and "-ed".

Morphemes can be classified according to whether they are independent morphemes, so-called roots, or whether they can only co-occur attached to other morphemes. These bound morphemes or affixes can be classified according to their position in relation to the root: precede the root, suffixes follow the root, and infixes are inserted in the middle of a root. Affixes serve to modify or elaborate the meaning of the root. Some languages change the meaning of words by changing the phonological structure of a word, for example, the English word "run", which in the past tense is "ran". This process is called . Furthermore, morphology distinguishes between the process of inflection, which modifies or elaborates on a word, and the process of derivation, which creates a new word from an existing one. In English, the verb "sing" has the inflectional forms "singing" and "sung", which are both verbs, and the derivational form "singer", which is a noun derived from the verb with the agentive suffix "-er".

Languages differ widely in how much they rely on morphological processes of word formation. In some languages, for example, Chinese, there are no morphological processes, and all grammatical information is encoded syntactically by forming strings of single words. This type of morpho-syntax is often called isolating, or analytic, because there is almost a full correspondence between a single word and a single aspect of meaning. Most languages have words consisting of several morphemes, but they vary in the degree to which morphemes are discrete units. In many languages, notably in most Indo-European languages, single morphemes may have several distinct meanings that cannot be analyzed into smaller segments. For example, in Latin, the word bonus, or "good", consists of the root bon-, meaning "good", and the suffix - us, which indicates masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. These languages are called fusional languages, because several meanings may be fused into a single morpheme. The opposite of fusional languages are agglutinative languages which construct words by stringing morphemes together in chains, but with each morpheme as a discrete semantic unit. An example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or "from your houses", consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. The languages that rely on morphology to the greatest extent are traditionally called polysynthetic languages. They may express the equivalent of an entire English sentence in a single word. For example, in Persian the single word nafahmidamesh means I didn't understand it consisting of morphemes na-fahm-id-am-esh with the meanings, "negation.understand.past.I.it". As another example with more complexity, in the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksatengqiggtuq, which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer", the word consists of the morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, "reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative", and except for the morpheme tuntu ("reindeer") none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation.

Many languages use morphology to cross-reference words within a sentence. This is sometimes called . For example, in many Indo-European languages, adjectives must cross-reference the noun they modify in terms of number, case, and gender, so that the Latin adjective bonus, or "good", is inflected to agree with a noun that is masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. In many polysynthetic languages, verbs cross-reference their subjects and objects. In these types of languages, a single verb may include information that would require an entire sentence in English. For example, in the Basque phrase ikusi nauzu, or "you saw me", the past tense auxiliary verb n-au-zu (similar to English "do") agrees with both the subject (you) expressed by the n- prefix, and with the object (me) expressed by the - zu suffix. The sentence could be directly transliterated as "see you-did-me"

In addition to word classes, a sentence can be analyzed in terms of grammatical functions: "The cat" is the subject of the phrase, "on the mat" is a locative phrase, and "sat" is the core of the predicate.

Another way in which languages convey meaning is through the order of words within a sentence. The grammatical rules for how to produce new sentences from words that are already known is called syntax. The syntactical rules of a language determine why a sentence in English such as "I love you" is meaningful, but "*love you I" is not. Syntactical rules determine how word order and sentence structure is constrained, and how those constraints contribute to meaning. For example, in English, the two sentences "the slaves were cursing the master" and "the master was cursing the slaves" mean different things, because the role of the grammatical subject is encoded by the noun being in front of the verb, and the role of object is encoded by the noun appearing after the verb. Conversely, in Latin, both Dominus servos vituperabat and Servos vituperabat dominus mean "the master was reprimanding the slaves", because servos, or "slaves", is in the accusative case, showing that they are the grammatical object of the sentence, and dominus, or "master", is in the nominative case, showing that he is the subject.

Latin uses morphology to express the distinction between subject and object, whereas English uses word order. Another example of how syntactic rules contribute to meaning is the rule of inverse word order in questions, which exists in many languages. This rule explains why when in English, the phrase "John is talking to Lucy" is turned into a question, it becomes "Who is John talking to?", and not "John is talking to who?". The latter example may be used as a way of placing special emphasis on "who", thereby slightly altering the meaning of the question. Syntax also includes the rules for how complex sentences are structured by grouping words together in units, called phrases, that can occupy different places in a larger syntactic structure. Sentences can be described as consisting of phrases connected in a tree structure, connecting the phrases to each other at different levels. To the right is a graphic representation of the syntactic analysis of the English sentence "the cat sat on the mat". The sentence is analyzed as being constituted by a noun phrase, a verb, and a prepositional phrase; the prepositional phrase is further divided into a preposition and a noun phrase, and the noun phrases consist of an article and a noun.

The reason sentences can be seen as being composed of phrases is because each phrase would be moved around as a single element if syntactic operations were carried out. For example, "the cat" is one phrase, and "on the mat" is another, because they would be treated as single units if a decision was made to emphasize the location by moving forward the prepositional phrase: "[And] on the mat, the cat sat". There are many different formalist and functionalist frameworks that propose theories for describing syntactic structures, based on different assumptions about what language is and how it should be described. Each of them would analyze a sentence such as this in a different manner.

Typology and universals

Languages can be classified in relation to their grammatical types. Languages that belong to different families nonetheless often have features in common, and these shared features tend to correlate. For example, languages can be classified on the basis of their basic word order, the relative order of the verb, and its constituents in a normal indicative sentence. In English, the basic order is SVO (subject-verb-object): "The snake(S) bit(V) the man(O)", whereas for example, the corresponding sentence in the Australian language Gamilaraay would be d̪uyugu n̪ama d̪ayn yiːy (snake man bit), SOV. Word order type is relevant as a typological parameter, because basic word order type corresponds with other syntactic parameters, such as the relative order of nouns and adjectives, or of the use of prepositions or postpositions. Such correlations are called implicational universals. For example, most (but not all) languages that are of the SOV type have postpositions rather than prepositions, and have adjectives before nouns.

All languages structure sentences into Subject, Verb, and Object, but languages differ in the way they classify the relations between actors and actions. English uses the nominative-accusative word typology: in English transitive clauses, the subjects of both intransitive sentences ("I run") and transitive sentences ("I love you") are treated in the same way, shown here by the nominative pronoun I. Some languages, called ergative, Gamilaraay among them, distinguish instead between Agents and Patients. In ergative languages, the single participant in an intransitive sentence, such as "I run", is treated the same as the patient in a transitive sentence, giving the equivalent of "me run". Only in transitive sentences would the equivalent of the pronoun "I" be used. In this way the semantic roles can map onto the grammatical relations in different ways, grouping an intransitive subject either with Agents (accusative type) or Patients (ergative type) or even making each of the three roles differently, which is called the tripartite type.

The shared features of languages which belong to the same typological class type may have arisen completely independently. Their co-occurrence might be due to universal laws governing the structure of natural languages, "language universals", or they might be the result of languages evolving convergent solutions to the recurring communicative problems that humans use language to solve.

Social contexts of use and transmission

Wall of Love on Montmartre in Paris: "I love you" in 250 languages, by calligraphist Fédéric Baron and artist Claire Kito (2000)

While humans have the ability to learn any language, they only do so if they grow up in an environment in which language exists and is used by others. Language is therefore dependent on communities of speakers in which children learn language from their elders and peers and themselves transmit language to their own children. Languages are used by those who speak them to communicate and to solve a plethora of social tasks. Many aspects of language use can be seen to be adapted specifically to these purposes. Owing to the way in which language is transmitted between generations and within communities, language perpetually changes, diversifying into new languages or converging due to language contact. The process is similar to the process of evolution, where the process of descent with modification leads to the formation of a phylogenetic tree.

Usage and meaning

When studying the way in which words and signs are used, it is often the case that words have different meanings, depending on the social context of use. An important example of this is the process called deixis, which describes the way in which certain words refer to entities through their relation between a specific point in time and space when the word is uttered. Such words are, for example, the word, "I" (which designates the person speaking), "now" (which designates the moment of speaking), and "here" (which designates the position of speaking). Signs also change their meanings over time, as the conventions governing their usage gradually change. The study of how the meaning of linguistic expressions changes depending on context is called pragmatics. Deixis is an important part of the way that we use language to point out entities in the world. Pragmatics is concerned with the ways in which language use is patterned and how these patterns contribute to meaning. For example, in all languages, linguistic expressions can be used not just to transmit information, but to perform actions. Certain actions are made only through language, but nonetheless have tangible effects, e.g. the act of "naming", which creates a new name for some entity, or the act of "pronouncing someone man and wife", which creates a social contract of marriage. These types of acts are called speech acts, although they can also be carried out through writing or hand signing.

The form of linguistic expression often does not correspond to the meaning that it actually has in a social context. For example, if at a dinner table a person asks, "Can you reach the salt?", that is, in fact, not a question about the length of the arms of the one being addressed, but a request to pass the salt across the table. This meaning is implied by the context in which it is spoken; these kinds of effects of meaning are called conversational implicatures. These social rules for which ways of using language are considered appropriate in certain situations and how utterances are to be understood in relation to their context vary between communities, and learning them is a large part of acquiring communicative competence in a language.

Acquisition

All healthy, normally developing human beings learn to use language. Children acquire the language or languages used around them: whichever languages they receive sufficient exposure to during childhood. The development is essentially the same for children acquiring sign or oral languages. This learning process is referred to as first-language acquisition, since unlike many other kinds of learning, it requires no direct teaching or specialized study. In The Descent of Man, naturalist Charles Darwin called this process "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art".

A lesson at Kituwah Academy, a school where English and the Cherokee language are mediums of instruction

First language acquisition proceeds in a fairly regular sequence, though there is a wide degree of variation in the timing of particular stages among normally developing infants. Studies published in 2013 have indicated that unborn fetuses are capable of language acquisition to some degree. From birth, newborns respond more readily to human speech than to other sounds. Around one month of age, babies appear to be able to distinguish between different speech sounds. Around six months of age, a child will begin babbling, producing the speech sounds or handshapes of the languages used around them. Words appear around the age of 12 to 18 months; the average vocabulary of an eighteen-month-old child is around 50 words. A child's first utterances are holophrases (literally "whole-sentences"), utterances that use just one word to communicate some idea. Several months after a child begins producing words, he or she will produce two-word utterances, and within a few more months will begin to produce telegraphic speech, or short sentences that are less grammatically complex than adult speech, but that do show regular syntactic structure. From roughly the age of three to five years, a child's ability to speak or sign is refined to the point that it resembles adult language.

Acquisition of second and additional languages can come at any age, through exposure in daily life or courses. Children learning a second language are more likely to achieve native-like fluency than adults, but in general, it is very rare for someone speaking a second language to pass completely for a native speaker. An important difference between first language acquisition and additional language acquisition is that the process of additional language acquisition is influenced by languages that the learner already knows.

Arnold Lakhovsky, The Conversation (c. 1935)

Languages, understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speaks them. Languages differ not only in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, but also through having different "cultures of speaking." Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group as well as difference from others. Even among speakers of one language, several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups within a larger culture. Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists, and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities.

Linguists use the term " varieties" to refer to the different ways of speaking a language. This term includes geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood within a particular culture.

Because norms for language use are shared by members of a specific group, communicative style also becomes a way of displaying and constructing group identity. Linguistic differences may become salient markers of divisions between social groups, for example, speaking a language with a particular accent may imply membership of an ethnic minority or social class, one's area of origin, or status as a second language speaker. These kinds of differences are not part of the linguistic system, but are an important part of how people use language as a social tool for constructing groups.

However, many languages also have grammatical conventions that signal the social position of the speaker in relation to others through the use of registers that are related to social hierarchies or divisions. In many languages, there are stylistic or even grammatical differences between the ways men and women speak, between age groups, or between social classes, just as some languages employ different words depending on who is listening. For example, in the Australian language Dyirbal, a married man must use a special set of words to refer to everyday items when speaking in the presence of his mother-in-law. Some cultures, for example, have elaborate systems of "social deixis", or systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means. In English, social deixis is shown mostly through distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, and in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy", "Doctor", or "Your Honor", but in other languages, such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. For instance, in languages of east Asia such as Thai, Burmese, and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest.

Writing, literacy and technology

An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Indigenous Canadian languages

Throughout history a number of different ways of representing language in graphic media have been invented. These are called writing systems.

The use of writing has made language even more useful to humans. It makes it possible to store large amounts of information outside of the human body and retrieve it again, and it allows communication across physical distances and timespans that would otherwise be impossible. Many languages conventionally employ different genres, styles, and registers in written and spoken language, and in some communities, writing traditionally takes place in an entirely different language than the one spoken. There is some evidence that the use of writing also has effects on the cognitive development of humans, perhaps because acquiring literacy generally requires explicit and formal education.

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.

The first page of the poem Beowulf, written in Old English in the early medieval period (800-1100 AD). Although Old English is the direct ancestor of modern English, it is unintelligible to contemporary English speakers.

All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be "decay" or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable.

Changes may affect specific sounds or the entire phonological system. Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound or phonetic feature by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound in a place where there had been none. Sound changes can be conditioned in which case a sound is changed only if it occurs in the vicinity of certain other sounds. Sound change is usually assumed to be regular, which means that it is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of any non-phonological factors. On the other hand, sound changes can sometimes be sporadic, affecting only one particular word or a few words, without any seeming regularity. Sometimes a simple change triggers a chain shift in which the entire phonological system is affected. This happened in the Germanic languages when the sound change known as Grimm's law affected all the stop consonants in the system. The original consonant * became /b/ in the Germanic languages, the previous * in turn became /p/, and the previous * became /f/. The same process applied to all stop consonants and explains why Italic languages such as Latin have p in words like pater and pisces, whereas Germanic languages, like English, have father and fish.

Another example is the Great Vowel Shift in English, which is the reason that the spelling of English vowels do not correspond well to their current pronunciation. This is because the vowel shift brought the already established orthography out of synchronization with pronunciation. Another source of sound change is the erosion of words as pronunciation gradually becomes increasingly indistinct and shortens words, leaving out syllables or sounds. This kind of change caused Latin mea domina to eventually become the French madame and American English ma'am.

Change also happens in the grammar of languages as discourse patterns such as idioms or particular constructions become grammaticalized. This frequently happens when words or morphemes erode and the grammatical system is unconsciously rearranged to compensate for the lost element. For example, in some varieties of Caribbean Spanish the final /s/ has eroded away. Since Standard Spanish uses final /s/ in the morpheme marking the second person subject "you" in verbs, the Caribbean varieties now have to express the second person using the pronoun tú. This means that the sentence "what's your name" is ¿como te llamas? [ˈkomoteˈjamas] in Standard Spanish, but [ˈkomoˈtuteˈjama] in Caribbean Spanish. The simple sound change has affected both morphology and syntax. Another common cause of grammatical change is the gradual petrification of idioms into new grammatical forms, for example, the way the English "going to" construction lost its aspect of movement and in some varieties of English has almost become a full-fledged future tense (e.g. I'm gonna).

Language change may be motivated by "language internal" factors, such as changes in pronunciation motivated by certain sounds being difficult to distinguish aurally or to produce, or through patterns of change that cause some rare types of constructions to drift towards more common types. Other causes of language change are social, such as when certain pronunciations become emblematic of membership in certain groups, such as social classes, or with ideologies, and therefore are adopted by those who wish to identify with those groups or ideas. In this way, issues of identity and politics can have profound effects on language structure.

Multi-lingual sign outside the mayor's office in Novi Sad, written in the four official languages of the city: Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Pannonian Rusyn

One important source of language change is contact and resulting diffusion of linguistic traits between languages. Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact on a regular basis. Multilingualism is likely to have been the norm throughout human history and most people in the modern world are multilingual. Before the rise of the concept of the ethno-national state, monolingualism was characteristic mainly of populations inhabiting small islands. But with the ideology that made one people, one state, and one language the most desirable political arrangement, monolingualism started to spread throughout the world. Nonetheless, there are only 250 countries in the world corresponding to some 6000 languages, which means that most countries are multilingual and most languages therefore exist in close contact with other languages.

When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Through sustained language contact over long periods, linguistic traits diffuse between languages, and languages belonging to different families may converge to become more similar. In areas where many languages are in close contact, this may lead to the formation of language areas in which unrelated languages share a number of linguistic features. A number of such language areas have been documented, among them, the Balkan language area, the Mesoamerican language area, and the Ethiopian language area. Also, larger areas such as South Asia, Europe, and Southeast Asia have sometimes been considered language areas, because of widespread diffusion of specific areal features.

Multilingualism is also common in the Indian Republic. The signboard is displayed in the Imphal International Airport in Meitei, Hindi and English, some of the official languages of the Indian Republic.

Language contact may also lead to a variety of other linguistic phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification (replacement of much of the native vocabulary with that of another language). In situations of extreme and sustained language contact, it may lead to the formation of new mixed languages that cannot be considered to belong to a single language family. One type of mixed language called pidgins occurs when adult speakers of two different languages interact on a regular basis, but in a situation where neither group learns to speak the language of the other group fluently. In such a case, they will often construct a communication form that has traits of both languages, but which has a simplified grammatical and phonological structure. The language comes to contain mostly the grammatical and phonological categories that exist in both languages. Pidgin languages are defined by not having any native speakers, but only being spoken by people who have another language as their first language. But if a Pidgin language becomes the main language of a speech community, then eventually children will grow up learning the pidgin as their first language. As the generation of child learners grow up, the pidgin will often be seen to change its structure and acquire a greater degree of complexity. This type of language is generally called a creole language. An example of such mixed languages is Tok Pisin, the official language of Papua New-Guinea, which originally arose as a Pidgin based on English and Austronesian languages; others are Kreyòl ayisyen, the French-based creole language spoken in Haiti, and Michif, a mixed language of Canada, based on the Native American language Cree and French.

Linguistic diversity

SIL Ethnologue defines a "living language" as "one that has at least one speaker for whom it is their first language". The exact number of known living languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular, on how one defines the distinction between a "language" and a " dialect". As of 2016, Ethnologue cataloged 7,097 living human languages. The Ethnologue establishes linguistic groups based on studies of mutual intelligibility, and therefore often includes more categories than more conservative classifications. For example, the Danish language that most scholars consider a single language with several dialects is classified as two distinct languages (Danish and Jutish) by the Ethnologue.

According to the Ethnologue, 389 languages (nearly 6%) have more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94% of the world's population, whereas 94% of the world's languages account for the remaining 6% of the global population.

Languages and dialects

There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding a famous aphorism attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that " a language is a dialect with an army and navy". For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages or dialects. Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin are, for example, often classified as "dialects" of Chinese, even though they are more different from each other than Swedish is from Norwegian. Before the Yugoslav Wars, Serbo-Croatian was generally considered a single language with two normative variants, but due to sociopolitical reasons, Croatian and Serbian are now often treated as separate languages and employ different writing systems. In other words, the distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or degree of mutual intelligibility.

Language families of the world

Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world.

The world's languages can be grouped into language families consisting of languages that can be shown to have common ancestry. Linguists recognize many hundreds of language families, although some of them can possibly be grouped into larger units as more evidence becomes available and in-depth studies are carried out. At present, there are also dozens of language isolates: languages that cannot be shown to be related to any other languages in the world. Among them are Basque, spoken in Europe, Zuni of New Mexico, Purépecha of Mexico, Ainu of Japan, Burushaski of Pakistan, and many others.

The language family of the world that has the most speakers is the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world's population. This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Hindustani ( Hindi/ Urdu). The Indo-European family spread first through the Indo-European migrations posited to have taken place c. 4000-1000 BCE,[citation needed ] and subsequently through much later European colonial expansion, which brought the Indo-European languages to a politically and often numerically dominant position in the Americas and much of Africa. The Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by 20% of the world's population and include many of the languages of East Asia, including Hakka, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and hundreds of smaller languages.

Africa is home to a large number of language families, the largest of which is the Niger-Congo language family, which includes such languages as Swahili, Shona, and Yoruba. Speakers of the Niger-Congo languages account for 6.9% of the world's population. A similar number of people speak the Afroasiatic languages, which include the populous Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew language, and the languages of the Sahara region, such as the Berber languages and Hausa.

The Austronesian languages are spoken by 5.5% of the world's population and stretch from Madagascar to maritime Southeast Asia all the way to Oceania. It includes such languages as Malagasy, Māori, Samoan, and many of the indigenous languages of Indonesia and Taiwan. The Austronesian languages are considered to have originated in Taiwan around 3000 BC and spread through the Oceanic region through island-hopping, based on an advanced nautical technology. Other populous language families are the Dravidian languages of South Asia (among them Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu), the Turkic languages of Central Asia (such as Turkish), the Austroasiatic (among them Khmer), and Tai-Kadai languages of Southeast Asia (including Thai).

The areas of the world in which there is the greatest linguistic diversity, such as the Americas, Papua New Guinea, West Africa, and South-Asia, contain hundreds of small language families. These areas together account for the majority of the world's languages, though not the majority of speakers. In the Americas, some of the largest language families include the Quechumaran, Arawak, and Tupi-Guarani families of South America, the Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Manguean, and Mayan of Mesoamerica, and the Na-Dene, Iroquoian, and Algonquian language families of North America. In Australia, most indigenous languages belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, whereas New Guinea is home to a large number of small families and isolates, as well as a number of Austronesian languages. Due to its remoteness and geographical fragmentation, Papua New Guinea emerges in fact as the leading location worldwide for both species (8% of world total) and linguistic richness - with 830 living tongues (12% of world total).

Language endangerment

Together, these eight countries contain more than 50% of the world's languages.

These areas are the most linguistically diverse in the world, and the locations of most of the world's endangered languages.

Language endangerment occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an extinct language. While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they have been disappearing at an accelerated rate in the 20th and 21st centuries due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages.

The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. Of the between 6,000 and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, between 50 and 90% of those are expected to have become extinct by the year 2100. The top 20 languages, those spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with less than 10,000 speakers.

UNESCO's five levels of language endangerment

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) operates with five levels of language endangerment: "safe", "vulnerable" (not spoken by children outside the home), "definitely endangered" (not spoken by children), "severely endangered" (only spoken by the oldest generations), and "critically endangered" (spoken by few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers). Notwithstanding claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common lingua franca, such as English or Esperanto, there is a consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world. It is a common belief, going back to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament, that linguistic diversity causes political conflict, but this is contradicted by the fact that many of the world's major episodes of violence have taken place in situations with low linguistic diversity, such as the Yugoslav and American Civil War, or the genocide of Rwanda, whereas many of the most stable political units have been highly multilingual.

The University of Waikato are using the Welsh language as a model for their Māori language revitalisation programme as they deem Welsh to be the world's leading example for the survival of languages. In 2019 a Hawaiian TV company Oiwi visited a Welsh language centre in Nant Gwrtheyrn, North Wales to help find ways of preserving their Ōlelo Hawaiʻi language.

1. The gorilla ^ Koko reportedly used as many as 1000 words in American Sign Language, and understands 2000 words of spoken English. There are some doubts about whether her use of signs is based on complex understanding or simple conditioning.

2. ^ "Functional grammar analyzes grammatical structure, as do formal and structural grammar; but it also analyzes the entire communicative situation: the purpose of the speech event, its participants, its discourse context. Functionalists maintain that the communicative situation motivates, constrains, explains, or otherwise determines grammatical structure, and that a structural or formal approach is not merely limited to an artificially restricted data base, but is inadequate even as a structural account. Functional grammar, then, differs from formal and structural grammar in that it purports not to model but to explain; and the explanation is grounded in the communicative situation".

3. While sign is usually a visual medium, there is also ^ tactile signing; and while oral speech is usually an aural medium, there is also lipreading and tadoma.

4. ^ The prefixed asterisk * conventionally indicates that the sentence is ungrammatical, i.e. syntactically incorrect.

5. ^ Ethnologue's figure is based on numbers from before 1995. A more recent figure is 420 million.

References

1. Nicholas Evans & Stephen Levinson (2009) 'The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science'. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32, 429-492.

2. ^ Kamusella, Tomasz (2016). "The History of the Normative Opposition of 'Language versus Dialect': From Its Graeco-Latin Origin to Central Europe's Ethnolinguistic Nation-States". Colloquia Humanistica. 5 (5): 189-198. doi:10.11649/ch.2016.011. Archived from the original on 26 February 2020.

3. Moseley (2010): "Statistics Archived 12 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine"

4. ^ "language". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1992.

5. ^ Hockett, Charles F. (1966). "The Problem of Universals in Language". Archived from the original on 10 November 2012.

6. ^ Engesser, Sabrina; Crane, Jodie M. S.; Savage, James L.; Russel, Andrew F.; Townsend, Simon W. (29 June 2015). "Experimental Evidence for Phonemic Contrasts in a Nonhuman Vocal System". PLOS Biology. 13 (6): e1002171. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002171. PMC . PMID 26121619.

7. ^ Engesser, Sabrina; Ridley, Amanda R.; Townsend, Simon W. (20 July 2017). "Element repetition rates encode functionally distinct information in pied babbler 'clucks' and 'purrs'" (PDF). Animal Cognition. 20 (5): 953-960. doi:10.1007/s10071-017-1114-6. PMID 28730513. S2CID 21470061. Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 April 2019.

8. ^ Shanahan, D. (2011). Language, feeling, and the brain: The evocative vector. Transaction Publishers.

9. ^ Clark, Gary; Henneberg, Maciej (2017). "Ardipithecus ramidus and the evolution of language and singing: An early origin for hominin vocal capability". HOMO. 68 (2): 101-121. doi:10.1016/j.jchb.2017.03.001. PMID 28363458.

10. ^ Nicholas Evans (2017) Listening Here: Ngûrrahmalkwonawoniyan. Humanities Australia, Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, vol 8, p 39.

11. Stokoe, William C. (1960). ^ Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf, Studies in linguistics: Occasional papers (No. 8). Buffalo: Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Buffalo.

12. ^ Stokoe, William C.; Dorothy C. Casterline; Carl G. Croneberg (1965). A dictionary of American sign languages on linguistic principles. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet College Press

13. ^ Denham, Kristin; Lobeck, Anne (2009). Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction. Cengage Learning. p. 9. ISBN 978-1-4130-1589-8. Archived from the original on 22 May 2020. An ungrammatical sentence is one that is impossible in a given language, one that a native speaker of that variety would never utter naturally. (Remember that ungrammatical sentences are marked with an asterisk, *.

14. ^ Bonvillian, John D.; Michael D. Orlansky; Leslie Lazin Novack (December 1983). "Developmental milestones: Sign language acquisition and motor development". Child Development. 54 (6): 1435-1445. doi:10.2307/1129806. JSTOR 1129806. PMID 6661942.

15. ^ Skwarecki, Beth (26 August 2013). "Babies Learn to Recognize Words in the Womb". Science. Archived from the original on 4 November 2015.

16. ^ O'Grady, William; Cho, Sook Whan (2001). "First language acquisition". Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (4th ed.). Boston: Bedford St. Martin's.

17. ^ "Primer estudio conjunto del Instituto Cervantes y el British Council sobre el peso internacional del español y del inglés". Instituto Cervantes (www.cervantes.es). Archived from the original on 16 September 2017.

18. ^ Lewis (2009), "Summary by language family Archived 1 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine"

19. ^ Briand, Frederic (February 2013). "Silent Plains ... the Fading Sounds of Native Languages". National Geographic.

20. ^ "University of Waikato Launches a Strategic Partnership with Cardiff University in Wales" (Press release). University of Waikato. 10 November 2021. Archived from the original on 24 November 2021 - via Scoop News.

Works cited

Candland, Douglas Keith (1993). Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature. Oxford University Press US. pp. 293-301. ISBN 978-0-19-510284-0. koko gorilla operant conditioning.

Chomsky, Noam (1972). . Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-549257-8.

Deacon, Terrence (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-31754-1.

Dixon, Robert M.W. (1972). The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-08510-6.

Duranti, Alessandro (2003). "Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms". Current Anthropology. 44 (3): 323-348. doi:10.1086/368118. S2CID 148075449.

Evans, Nicholas; Levinson, Stephen C. (2009). "The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 32 (5): 429-492. doi:10.1017/s0140525x0999094x. PMID 19857320.

"First Impressions: We start to pick up words, food preferences and hand-eye coordination long before being born". Scientific American. Vol. 313, no. 1. July 2015. p. 24.

Fisher, Simon E.; Lai, Cecilia S.L.; Monaco, Anthony P. (2003). "Deciphering the Genetic Basis of Speech and Language Disorders". Annual Review of Neuroscience. 26: 57-80. doi:10.1146/annurev.neuro.26.041002.131144. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0012-CB7D-6. PMID 12524432.

Haugen, Einar (1973). "The Curse of Babel". Daedalus. 102 (3, Language as a Human Problem): 47-57.

Hauser, Marc D.; Chomsky, Noam; Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2002). "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?". Science. 298 (5598): 1569-1579. doi:10.1126/science.298.5598.1569. PMID 12446899.

Hauser, Marc D.; Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2003). "What are the uniquely human components of the language faculty?" (PDF). In M.H. Christiansen; S. Kirby (eds.). Language Evolution: The States of the Art. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 August 2014.

International Phonetic Association (1999). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-65236-0.

Labov, William (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change vol.I Internal Factors. Blackwell.

Labov, William (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change vol.II Social Factors. Blackwell.

Ladefoged, Peter (1992). "Another view of endangered languages". Language. 68 (4): 809-811. doi:10.1353/lan.1992.0013. S2CID 144984900.

Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lewis, M. Paul, ed. (2009). "Ethnologue: Languages of the World" (16th ed.). Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Archived from the original on 4 April 2012.

Matras, Yaron; Bakker, Peter, eds. (2003). The Mixed Language Debate: Theoretical and Empirical Advances. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-017776-3.

Moseley, Christopher, ed. (2010). Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (3rd ed.). Paris: UNESCO Publishing. Archived from the original on 20 August 2014.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. (2005). The History of Linguistics. Linguistic Society of America. ISBN 978-0-415-11553-7. Archived from the original on 31 December 2014.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. (1998). Language Form and Language Function (PDF). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 December 2011.

Nichols, Johanna (1992). Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-58057-9.

Nichols, Johanna (1984). "Functional Theories of Grammar". Annual Review of Anthropology. 13: 97-117. doi:10.1146/annurev.an.13.100184.000525.

Olson, David R. (1996). "Language and Literacy: what writing does to Language and Mind". Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 16: 3-13. doi:10.1017/S0267190500001392. S2CID 145677801.

Payne, Thomas Edward (1997). Describing morphosyntax: a guide for field linguists. Cambridge University Press. pp. 238-241. ISBN 978-0-521-58805-8. Archived from the original on 31 March 2021.

Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Perennial.

Sandler, Wendy; Lillo-Martin, Diane (2001). "Natural Sign Languages". In Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller (eds.). The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell. pp. 533-563.

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1983) [1913]. Bally, Charles; Sechehaye, Albert (eds.). Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9023-1.

Zentella, Ana Celia (2002). "Spanish in New York". In García, Ofelia; Fishman, Joshua (eds.). The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City. Walter de Gruyter.

Further reading

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language.

# data[].attributes.body
A language is a system of communication which consists of a set of sounds and written symbols which are used by the people of a particular country or region for talking or writing.

# data[].attributes.body
Language: is a system of symbols that are meaningful and articulate sound (generated by said tool) which are arbitrary and conventional, which is used as a means of communicating by a group of human beings to give birth to feelings and thoughts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
schooalsh.blog - What is mean of language? Did you know? There are some experts who descript definition or understanding language. We consider only the points that exist.

Precisely there are nine experts who express opinions about ten language understanding. But from the other party, Wikipedia, also wrote about the language definition. Well, here is the speech experts on language understanding.

According Keraf in Smarapradhipa (2005:1), providing two language understanding. The first notion of language as stated means of communication between members of the public in the form of a symbol of the sound produced by means of said human. Second, language is a communication system that uses symbols vocal (speech sound) which are arbitrary.

Another case in Stiawan according to Owen (2006:1), describes the language definition language can be defined as a socially shared Those combinations of symbols and rule governed Those combinations of symbols (language can be defined as a socially acceptable code or conventional system for delivering concepts through the use of symbols and combinations of the desired symbols are governed by the provisions).

The opinions above are similar to what was expressed by Tarin (1989:4), he gives two definitions of the language. First, language is a system that systematically, perhaps also for generative systems. Second, language is a set of symbols as you like it or arbitrary symbols.

According to Santoso (1990:1), language is a series of sound produced by said means of a conscious human being.
Another definition, language is a form and not a state (language may be the form and not matter) or something that sounds arbitrary symbol system, or also a system of many systems, a system of an order or an order in the system- the system. The expression proposed by Mackey (1986:12).

According Wibowo (2001:3), language is a system of symbols that are meaningful and articulate sound (generated by said tool) which are arbitrary and conventional, which is used as a means of communicating by a group of human beings to give birth to feelings and thoughts.

Almost similar to the opinion Wibowo, Walija (1996:4), disclose the definition language of communication is the most complete and effective way to convey ideas, messages, intentions, feelings and opinions to others.

Other opinions about the definition of language expressed by Shamsuddin (1986:2), he gave two language understanding. First, language is a tool used to shape the mind and feelings, desires and deeds, a tool used to influence and be influenced. Second, language is a clear sign of a good personality or bad, a clear sign of the family and the nation, a clear sign from the mind of humanity.

While Pengabean (1981:5), argues that language is a system of express and report what happens on the nervous system.

Recent opinion of this short paper about the language expressed by Soejono (1983:01), language is a means of spiritual communication is very important in life together.

As with the Wikipedia, which is almost the same on the definition of language that has been presented to the experts. And the following languages ​​definition according to Wikipedia.
1. a system to represent objects, actions, ideas and circumstances.
2. an apparatus which is used to convey their real concept into the minds of others
3. a unified system of meaning
4. a code that is used by a linguistic expert to distinguish between form and meaning.
5. deliver a speech grammar that have been established (eg, words, sentences, and others.)
6. a speech system that will be understood by the linguistic community....

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Definition Language According to the Experts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
schooalsh.blog - What is mean of language? Did you know? There are some experts who descript definition or understanding language. We consider only the points that exist. Precisely there are nine experts who express opinions about ten language understanding. But from the other party, Wikipedia, also wrote about the language definition.

# data[].attributes.body
Language is a structured system of communication used by humans to express ideas, emotions, and information.

Culture is the beliefs, customs, practices, and social behavior of a particular group or society that are passed down from generation to generation and often reflect the shared history, values, language, and worldview of that group.

Linguistics is defined as the scientific study of language and its structure, including its phonetics, grammar, syntax and meaning.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.[1] Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.

Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Culture ( KUL-chər) is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.

Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.

A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group. Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change. Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be identified in a social group.

Cultural change, or repositioning, is the reconstruction of a cultural concept of a society. Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies.

Organizations like UNESCO attempt to preserve culture and cultural heritage.

Description

Pygmy music has been polyphonic well before their discovery by non-African explorers of the Baka, Aka, Efe, and other foragers of the Central African forests, in the 1200s, which is at least 200 years before polyphony developed in Europe. Note the multiple lines of singers and dancers. The motifs are independent, with theme and variation interweaving.[4] This type of music is thought to be the first expression of polyphony in world music.

Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies. These include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.

In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been used to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the proletariat and create a false consciousness. Such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.

When used as a count noun, a "culture" is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time. In this sense, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes "culture" is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. " bro culture"), or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture.

The modern term "culture" is based on a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi," using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy was man's natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers after him, " refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human."

In 1986, philosopher Edward S. Casey wrote, "The very word culture meant 'place tilled' in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, 'to inhabit, care for, till, worship' and cultus, 'A cult, especially a religious one.' To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it-to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly."

Culture described by Richard Velkley:

... originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meaning in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of " modern liberalism and Enlightenment." Thus a contrast between "culture" and " civilization" is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such.

In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor, it is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, "Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.

The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time." Terror management theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that provide humans with the basis for perceiving themselves as "person[s] of worth within the world of meaning"-raising themselves above the merely physical aspects of existence, in order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain.

The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively. This ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago and is often thought to be unique to humans. However, some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complicated, abilities for social learning. It is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that are transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form.[citation needed ]

Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, indigenization, and transformation. In this context, modernization could be viewed as adoption of Enlightenment era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the notion of progress. Rein Raud, building on the work of Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey C. Alexander, has proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by their cognitive adequacy and endorsed or not endorsed by the symbolic authority of the cultural community in question.

Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period," driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society.

Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change.

Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.

Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce-or inhibit-social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination to the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th-century. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct borrowing," on the other hand, tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.

Acculturation has different meanings. Still, in this context, it refers to the replacement of traits of one culture with another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation. The transnational flow of culture has played a major role in merging different cultures and sharing thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.

Early modern discourses

German Romanticism

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) formulated an individualist definition of "enlightenment" similar to the concept of bildung: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: " Sapere Aude" ("Dare to be wise!"). In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of Bildung: "For Herder, was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people."

In 1795, the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalist movements-such as the nationalist struggle to create a "Germany" out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire-developed a more inclusive notion of culture as " worldview" ( Weltanschauung). According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between "civilized" and "primitive" or "tribal" cultures.

In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) argued for "the psychic unity of mankind." He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas" ( Elementargedanken); different cultures, or different "folk ideas" ( Völkergedanken), are local modifications of the elementary ideas. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858-1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.

English Romanticism

In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." This concept of culture is also comparable to the German concept of bildung: "...culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."

In practice, culture referred to an elite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine. As these forms were associated with urban life, "culture" was identified with "civilization" (from Latin: civitas, 'city'). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in folklore, which led to identifying a "culture" among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between high culture, namely that of the ruling social group, and low culture. In other words, the idea of "culture" that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.

Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with anarchy; other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted "culture" with "the state of nature." According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized" and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, other critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.

Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people's essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by "the folk," i.e., rural, illiterate, peasants) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as " noble savages" living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.

In 1870 the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832-1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms. In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of religion.

Anthropology

Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor's definition of culture, in the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and in the United States and Canada, archaeology. The term Kulturbrille, or "culture glasses," coined by German American anthropologist Franz Boas, refers to the "lenses" through which a person sees their own culture. Martin Lindstrom asserts that Kulturbrille, which allow a person to make sense of the culture they inhabit, "can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately."

The sociology of culture concerns culture as manifested in society. For sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918), culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." As such, culture in the sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people's way of life. Culture can be either of two types, non-material culture or material culture. Non-material culture refers to the non-physical ideas that individuals have about their culture, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions, while material culture is the physical evidence of a culture in the objects and architecture they make or have made. The term tends to be relevant only in archeological and anthropological studies, but it specifically means all material evidence which can be attributed to culture, past or present.

Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918-1933), where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term Kultursoziologie ('cultural sociology'). Cultural sociology was then reinvented in the English-speaking world as a product of the cultural turn of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may be loosely regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory. Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols. Culture has since become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field. Thus, there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead, look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.

Early researchers and development of cultural sociology

The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology (as shaped by early theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) with the growing discipline of anthropology, wherein researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field lingers in the methods (much of cultural, sociological research is qualitative), in the theories (a variety of critical approaches to sociology are central to current research communities), and in the substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.

Cultural studies

In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism such as Stuart Hall (1932-2014) and Raymond Williams (1921-1988) developed cultural studies. Following nineteenth-century Romantics, they identified culture with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). They saw patterns of consumption and leisure as determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production.

In the United Kingdom, cultural studies focuses largely on the study of popular culture; that is, on the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director. Cultural studies in this sense, then, can be viewed as a limited concentration scoped on the intricacies of consumerism, which belongs to a wider culture sometimes referred to as Western civilization or globalism.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Visual art is one expression of culture.

From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed, it began to combine political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies, and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender. Cultural studies is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television or eating out) in a given culture. It also studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Specifically, culture involves those meanings and practices held independently of reason. Watching television to view a public perspective on a historical event should not be thought of as culture unless referring to the medium of television itself, which may have been selected culturally; however, schoolchildren watching television after school with their friends to "fit in" certainly qualifies since there is no grounded reason for one's participation in this practice.

In the context of cultural studies, a text includes not only written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of culture. Culture, for a cultural-studies researcher, not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups) and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the disciplines of comparative literature and cultural studies.

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies had originated in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly under the influence of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later that of Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as "capitalist" mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the " culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.

In the United States, Lindlof and Taylor write, "cultural studies [were] grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition." The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom.[citation needed ] The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.[citation needed ] Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, the mode and relations of production form the economic base of society, which constantly interacts and influences superstructures, such as culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view comes through in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist, and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is among influential voices at the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.

Petrakis and Kostis (2013) divide cultural background variables into two main groups:

1. The first group covers the variables that represent the "efficiency orientation" of the societies: performance orientation, future orientation, assertiveness, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.

2. The second covers the variables that represent the "social orientation" of societies, i.e., the attitudes and lifestyles of their members. These variables include gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, and human orientation.

In 2016, a new approach to culture was suggested by Rein Raud, who defines culture as the sum of resources available to human beings for making sense of their world and proposes a two-tiered approach, combining the study of texts (all reified meanings in circulation) and cultural practices (all repeatable actions that involve the production, dissemination or transmission of purposes), thus making it possible to re-link anthropological and sociological study of culture with the tradition of textual theory.

Psychology

Cognitive tools suggest a way for people from certain culture to deal with real-life problems, like Suanpan for Chinese to perform mathematical calculation.

Starting in the 1990s, psychological research on culture influence began to grow and challenge the universality assumed in general psychology. Culture psychologists began to try to explore the relationship between emotions and culture, and answer whether the human mind is independent from culture. For example, people from collectivistic cultures, such as the Japanese, suppress their positive emotions more than their American counterparts. Culture may affect the way that people experience and express emotions. On the other hand, some researchers try to look for differences between people's personalities across cultures. As different cultures dictate distinctive norms, culture shock is also studied to understand how people react when they are confronted with other cultures. Cognitive tools may not be accessible or they may function differently cross culture. For example, people who are raised in a culture with an abacus are trained with distinctive reasoning style. Cultural lenses may also make people view the same outcome of events differently. Westerners are more motivated by their successes than their failures, while East Asians are better motivated by the avoidance of failure. Culture is important for psychologists to consider when understanding the human mental operation.

Protection of culture

There are a number of international agreements and national laws relating to the protection of cultural heritage and cultural diversity. UNESCO and its partner organizations such as Blue Shield International coordinate international protection and local implementation. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions deal with the protection of culture. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals with cultural heritage in two ways: it gives people the right to participate in cultural life on the one hand and the right to the protection of their contributions to cultural life on the other.

In the 21st century, the protection of culture has been the focus of increasing activity by national and international organizations. The UN and UNESCO promote cultural preservation and cultural diversity through declarations and legally-binding conventions or treaties. The aim is not to protect a person's property, but rather to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity, especially in the event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target of the attack is the identity of the opponent, which is why symbolic cultural assets become a main target. It is also intended to affect the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and the economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, region or municipality.

Tourism is having an increasing impact on the various forms of culture. On the one hand, this can be physical impact on individual objects or the destruction caused by increasing environmental pollution and, on the other hand, socio-cultural effects on society.

References

Further reading

Barker, C. (2004). The Sage dictionary of cultural studies. Sage.

Deacon, Terrence (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York and London: W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-3930-3838-5.

Holloway Jr. Ralph L. (1969). "Culture: A Human domain". Current Anthropology. 10 (4): 395-412. doi:10.1086/201036. S2CID 144502900.

Hymes, Dell (1969). Reinventing Anthropology.

James, Paul; Szeman, Imre (2010). Globalization and Culture, Vol. 3: Global-Local Consumption. London: Sage Publications.

Tomasello, Michael (1999). "The Human Adaptation for Culture". Annual Review of Anthropology. 28: 509-29. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.509.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1941). "The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language". Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Honor of Edward Sapir.

Taylor, Walter (1948). A Study of Archeology. Memoir 69, American Anthropological Association. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Bastian, Adolf (2009), Encyclopædia Britannica Online

Anker, Guy (2000) [2000]. Global communication without universal civilization, vol.1: Coexisting contemporary civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. INU societal research. Geneva: INU Press. ISBN 978-2-88155-004-1.

Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. Archived November 18, 2017, at the Wayback Machine New York: Macmillan. Third edition, 1882, available online. Retrieved: 2006-06-28.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Press. ISBN 978-0-252-06445-6.

Benedict, Ruth (1934). . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Carhart. Michael C. (2007). The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany, Cambridge, Harvard University press.

Dawkins, R. (1999) [1982]. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-19-288051-2

Geertz, Clifford (1957). "Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example". American Anthropologist. 59: 32-54. doi:10.1525/aa.1957.59.1.02a00040.

Kim, Uichol (2001). "Culture, science and indigenous psychologies: An integrated analysis." In D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of culture and psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press

O'Neil, D. (2006). Cultural Anthropology Tutorials Archived December 4, 2004, at the Wayback Machine, Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marco, California. Retrieved: 2006-07-10.

Reagan, Ronald. "Final Radio Address to the Nation" Archived January 30, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, January 14, 1989. Retrieved June 3, 2006.

Tylor, E.B. (1974) [1871]. Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. New York: Gordon Press. ISBN 978-0-87968-091-6.

UNESCO (2002). Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, issued on International Mother Language Day,

Wilson, Edward O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage. ISBN 978-0-679-76867-8.

Wolfram, Stephen (2002). A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Inc. ISBN 978-1-57955-008-0.

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Culture ( KUL-chər ) is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
a. Communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols.b. Such a system including

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Define language. language synonyms, language pronunciation, language translation, English dictionary definition of language. n. 1. a. Communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols. b.

# data[].attributes.body
Language:  is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary.
According to Chomsky, language is a natural object, a component of the human mind, physically represented in the brain and part of the biological endowment of the species (Chomsky, 2002: 1).

# data[].attributes.body
Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society."

# data[].attributes.body
Language heolps us express our feelings and thougths, this is unique to our species because it is a way to express unique ideas and customs within different cultures and societies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.

Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli - for example, writing, whistling, signing, or braille. In other words, human language is modality-independent, but written or signed language is the way to inscribe or encode the natural human speech or gestures.

Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral, manual and tactile languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.

The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Critical examinations of languages, such as philosophy of language, the relationships between language and thought, how words represent experience, etc., have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greek civilization. Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) have argued that language originated from emotions, while others like Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) have argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought. Twentieth century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) argued that philosophy is really the study of language itself. Major figures in contemporary linguistics of these times include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.

Language is thought to have gradually diverged from earlier primate communication systems when early hominins acquired the ability to form a theory of mind and shared intentionality. This development is sometimes thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative and social functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently by approximately three years old. Language and culture are codependent. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language has social uses such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as use for social grooming and entertainment.

Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family; in contrast, a language that has been demonstrated to not have any living or non-living relationship with another language is called a language isolate. There are also many unclassified languages whose relationships have not been established, and spurious languages may have not existed at all. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100.

Definitions

The English word * language derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s "tongue, speech, language" through Latin lingua, "language; tongue", and Old French language. The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers, and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as formally defined computer languages used for computer programming. Unlike conventional human languages, a formal language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. This article specifically concerns the properties of natural human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics.

As an object of linguistic study, "language" has two primary meanings: an abstract concept, and a specific linguistic system, e.g. " French". The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined the modern discipline of linguistics, first explicitly formulated the distinction using the French word language for language as a concept, langue as a specific instance of a language system, and parole for the concrete usage of speech in a particular language.

When speaking of language as a general concept, definitions can be used which stress different aspects of the phenomenon. These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they also inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory. Debates about the nature and origin of language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers such as Gorgias and Plato debated the relation between words, concepts and reality. Gorgias argued that language could represent neither the objective experience nor human experience, and that communication and truth were therefore impossible. Plato maintained that communication is possible because language represents ideas and concepts that exist independently of, and prior to, language.

During the Enlightenment and its debates about human origins, it became fashionable to speculate about the origin of language. Thinkers such as Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder argued that language had originated in the instinctive expression of emotions, and that it was originally closer to music and poetry than to the logical expression of rational thought. Rationalist philosophers such as Kant and René Descartes held the opposite view. Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers began to wonder about the role of language in shaping our experiences of the world - asking whether language simply reflects the objective structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that in turn impose structure on our experience of the objective world. This led to the question of whether philosophical problems are really firstly linguistic problems. The resurgence of the view that language plays a significant role in the creation and circulation of concepts, and that the study of philosophy is essentially the study of language, is associated with what has been called the linguistic turn and philosophers such as Wittgenstein in 20th-century philosophy. These debates about language in relation to meaning and reference, cognition and consciousness remain active today.

Mental faculty, organ or instinct

One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and to produce and understand utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans, and it emphasizes the biological basis for the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain. Proponents of the view that the drive to language acquisition is innate in humans argue that this is supported by the fact that all cognitively normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible will acquire language without formal instruction. Languages may even develop spontaneously in environments where people live or grow up together without a common language; for example, creole languages and spontaneously developed sign languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This view, which can be traced back to the philosophers Kant and Descartes, understands language to be largely innate, for example, in Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, or American philosopher Jerry Fodor's extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied in studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.

Formal symbolic system

Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, and his structuralism remains foundational for many approaches to language.

Some proponents of Saussure's view of language have advocated a formal approach which studies language structure by identifying its basic elements and then by presenting a formal account of the rules according to which the elements combine in order to form words and sentences. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, the originator of the generative theory of grammar, who has defined language as the construction of sentences that can be generated using transformational grammars. Chomsky considers these rules to be an innate feature of the human mind and to constitute the rudiments of what language is. By way of contrast, such transformational grammars are also commonly used in formal logic, in formal linguistics, and in applied computational linguistics. In the philosophy of language, the view of linguistic meaning as residing in the logical relations between propositions and reality was developed by philosophers such as Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, and other formal logicians.

Tool for communication

A conversation in American Sign Language

Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans to exchange verbal or symbolic utterances. This definition stresses the social functions of language and the fact that humans use it to express themselves and to manipulate objects in their environment. Functional theories of grammar explain grammatical structures by their communicative functions, and understand the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which grammar was "tailored" to serve the communicative needs of its users.

This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive, and interactive frameworks, as well as in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as dynamic phenomena, as structures that are always in the process of changing as they are employed by their speakers. This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, or the classification of languages according to structural features, as it can be shown that processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology. In the philosophy of language, the view of pragmatics as being central to language and meaning is often associated with Wittgenstein's later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as J.L. Austin, Paul Grice, John Searle, and W.O. Quine.

Distinctive features of human language

A number of features, many of which were described by Charles Hockett and called design features set human language apart from communication used by non-human animals.

Communication systems used by other animals such as bees or apes are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited, number of possible ideas that can be expressed. In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. This is possible because human language is based on a dual code, in which a finite number of elements which are meaningless in themselves (e.g. sounds, letters or gestures) can be combined to form an infinite number of larger units of meaning (words and sentences). However, one study has demonstrated that an Australian bird, the chestnut-crowned babbler, is capable of using the same acoustic elements in different arrangements to create two functionally distinct vocalizations. Additionally, pied babblers have demonstrated the ability to generate two functionally distinct vocalisations composed of the same sound type, which can only be distinguished by the number of repeated elements.

Several species of animals have proved to be able to acquire forms of communication through social learning: for instance a bonobo named Kanzi learned to express itself using a set of symbolic lexigrams. Similarly, many species of birds and whales learn their songs by imitating other members of their species. However, while some animals may acquire large numbers of words and symbols, none have been able to learn as many different signs as are generally known by an average 4 year old human, nor have any acquired anything resembling the complex grammar of human language.

Human languages differ from animal communication systems in that they employ grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun and verb, present and past, which may be used to express exceedingly complex meanings. It is distinguished by the property of recursivity: for example, a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase (as in "[[the chimpanzee]'s lips]") or a clause can contain another clause (as in "[I see [the dog is running]]"). Human language is the only known natural communication system whose adaptability may be referred to as modality independent. This means that it can be used not only for communication through one channel or medium, but through several. For example, spoken language uses the auditive modality, whereas sign languages and writing use the visual modality, and braille writing uses the tactile modality.

Human language is unusual in being able to refer to abstract concepts and to imagined or hypothetical events as well as events that took place in the past or may happen in the future. This ability to refer to events that are not at the same time or place as the speech event is called displacement, and while some animal communication systems can use displacement (such as the communication of bees that can communicate the location of sources of nectar that are out of sight), the degree to which it is used in human language is also considered unique.

Theories about the origin of language differ in regard to their basic assumptions about what language is. Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These theories can be called continuity-based theories. The opposite viewpoint is that language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. These theories can be defined as discontinuity-based. Similarly, theories based on the generative view of language pioneered by Noam Chomsky see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, whereas functionalist theories see it as a system that is largely cultural, learned through social interaction.

Continuity-based theories are held by a majority of scholars, but they vary in how they envision this development. Those who see language as being mostly innate, such as psychologist Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition, whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as psychologist Michael Tomasello, see it as having developed from animal communication in primates: either gestural or vocal communication to assist in cooperation. Other continuity-based models see language as having developed from music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. A prominent proponent of this view is archaeologist Steven Mithen. Stephen Anderson states that the age of spoken languages is estimated at 60,000 to 100,000 years and that:

Researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it plausible to suggest that language was invented only once, and that all modern spoken languages are thus in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered ... because of limitations on the methods available for reconstruction.

Because language emerged in the early prehistory of man, before the existence of any written records, its early development has left no historical traces, and it is believed that no comparable processes can be observed today. Theories that stress continuity often look at animals to see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be seen as analogous to what pre-human language must have been like. Early human fossils can be inspected for traces of physical adaptation to language use or pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour. Among the signs in human fossils that may suggest linguistic abilities are: the size of the brain relative to body mass, the presence of a larynx capable of advanced sound production and the nature of tools and other manufactured artifacts.

It was mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general. However, a 2017 study on Ardipithecus ramidus challenges this belief. Scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of the genus some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) while others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago), and the development of language proper with anatomically modern Homo sapiens with the Upper Paleolithic revolution less than 100,000 years ago.

Chomsky is one prominent proponent of a discontinuity-based theory of human language origins. He suggests that for scholars interested in the nature of language, "talk about the evolution of the language capacity is beside the point." Chomsky proposes that perhaps "some random mutation took place [...] and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain." Though cautioning against taking this story literally, Chomsky insists that "it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language."

William Jones discovered the family relation between Latin and Sanskrit, laying the ground for the discipline of historical linguistics.

Subdisciplines

The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to linguistics. For example, descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single languages, theoretical linguistics develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of language based on data from the various extant human languages, sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in turn the study of the social functions of language and grammatical description, neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain and allows the experimental testing of theories, computational linguistics builds on theoretical and descriptive linguistics to construct computational models of language often aimed at processing natural language or at testing linguistic hypotheses, and historical linguistics relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the comparative method.

Early history

Ferdinand de Saussure developed the structuralist approach to studying language.

The formal study of language is often considered to have started in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. However, Sumerian scribes already studied the differences between Sumerian and Akkadian grammar around 1900 BC. Subsequent grammatical traditions developed in all of the ancient cultures that adopted writing.

In the 17th century AD, the French Port-Royal Grammarians developed the idea that the grammars of all languages were a reflection of the universal basics of thought, and therefore that grammar was universal. In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by British philologist and expert on ancient India William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics. The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Early in the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them.

By introducing a distinction between diachronic and synchronic analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline of linguistics. Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still fundamental in many contemporary linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm, and the Langue-parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system ( langue), from language as a concrete manifestation of this system ( parole).

Modern linguistics

Noam Chomsky is one of the most important linguistic theorists of the 20th century.

In opposition to the formal theories of the generative school, functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, its structures are best analyzed and understood by reference to their functions. Formal theories of grammar seek to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations, while functional theories seek to define the functions performed by language and then relate them to the linguistic elements that carry them out. The framework of cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms of the concepts (which are sometimes universal, and sometimes specific to a particular language) which underlie its forms. Cognitive linguistics is primarily concerned with how the mind creates meaning through language.

Physiological and neural architecture of language and speech

Speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures. The production of spoken language depends on sophisticated capacities for controlling the lips, tongue and other components of the vocal apparatus, the ability to acoustically decode speech sounds, and the neurological apparatus required for acquiring and producing language. The study of the genetic bases for human language is at an early stage: the only gene that has definitely been implicated in language production is FOXP2, which may cause a kind of congenital language disorder if affected by mutations.

Language Areas of the brain.

The brain is the coordinating center of all linguistic activity; it controls both the production of linguistic cognition and of meaning and the mechanics of speech production. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the neurological bases for language is quite limited, though it has advanced considerably with the use of modern imaging techniques. The discipline of linguistics dedicated to studying the neurological aspects of language is called neurolinguistics.

Early work in neurolinguistics involved the study of language in people with brain lesions, to see how lesions in specific areas affect language and speech. In this way, neuroscientists in the 19th century discovered that two areas in the brain are crucially implicated in language processing. The first area is Wernicke's area, which is in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere. People with a lesion in this area of the brain develop receptive aphasia, a condition in which there is a major impairment of language comprehension, while speech retains a natural-sounding rhythm and a relatively normal sentence structure. The second area is Broca's area, in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. People with a lesion to this area develop expressive aphasia, meaning that they know what they want to say, they just cannot get it out. They are typically able to understand what is being said to them, but unable to speak fluently. Other symptoms that may be present in expressive aphasia include problems with word repetition. The condition affects both spoken and written language. Those with this aphasia also exhibit ungrammatical speech and show inability to use syntactic information to determine the meaning of sentences. Both expressive and receptive aphasia also affect the use of sign language, in analogous ways to how they affect speech, with expressive aphasia causing signers to sign slowly and with incorrect grammar, whereas a signer with receptive aphasia will sign fluently, but make little sense to others and have difficulties comprehending others' signs. This shows that the impairment is specific to the ability to use language, not to the physiology used for speech production.

With technological advances in the late 20th century, neurolinguists have also incorporated non-invasive techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrophysiology to study language processing in individuals without impairments.

Anatomy of speech

The sound of speech can be analyzed into a combination of segmental and suprasegmental elements. The segmental elements are those that follow each other in sequences, which are usually represented by distinct letters in alphabetic scripts, such as the Roman script. In free flowing speech, there are no clear boundaries between one segment and the next, nor usually are there any audible pauses between them. Segments therefore are distinguished by their distinct sounds which are a result of their different articulations, and can be either vowels or consonants. Suprasegmental phenomena encompass such elements as stress, phonation type, voice timbre, and prosody or intonation, all of which may have effects across multiple segments.

Consonants and vowel segments combine to form syllables, which in turn combine to form utterances; these can be distinguished phonetically as the space between two inhalations. Acoustically, these different segments are characterized by different formant structures, that are visible in a spectrogram of the recorded sound wave. Formants are the amplitude peaks in the frequency spectrum of a specific sound.

Vowels are those sounds that have no audible friction caused by the narrowing or obstruction of some part of the upper vocal tract. They vary in quality according to the degree of lip aperture and the placement of the tongue within the oral cavity. Vowels are called when the lips are relatively closed, as in the pronunciation of the vowel [i] (English "ee"), or when the lips are relatively open, as in the vowel [a] (English "ah"). If the tongue is located towards the back of the mouth, the quality changes, creating vowels such as [u] (English "oo"). The quality also changes depending on whether the lips are rounded as opposed to unrounded, creating distinctions such as that between [i] (unrounded front vowel such as English "ee") and [y] ( rounded front vowel such as German "ü").

Consonants are those sounds that have audible friction or closure at some point within the upper vocal tract. Consonant sounds vary by place of articulation, i.e. the place in the vocal tract where the airflow is obstructed, commonly at the lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, palate, velum, uvula, or glottis. Each place of articulation produces a different set of consonant sounds, which are further distinguished by manner of articulation, or the kind of friction, whether full closure, in which case the consonant is called or , or different degrees of aperture creating fricatives and approximants. Consonants can also be either voiced or unvoiced, depending on whether the vocal cords are set in vibration by airflow during the production of the sound. Voicing is what separates English [s] in bus ( unvoiced sibilant) from [z] in buzz ( voiced sibilant).

Some speech sounds, both vowels and consonants, involve release of air flow through the nasal cavity, and these are called or sounds. Other sounds are defined by the way the tongue moves within the mouth such as the l-sounds (called , because the air flows along both sides of the tongue), and the r-sounds (called ).

By using these speech organs, humans can produce hundreds of distinct sounds: some appear very often in the world's languages, whereas others are much more common in certain language families, language areas, or even specific to a single language.

Human languages display considerable plasticity in their deployment of two fundamental modes: oral (speech and mouthing) and manual (sign and gesture). For example, it is common for oral language to be accompanied by gesture, and for sign language to be accompanied by mouthing. In addition, some language communities use both modes to convey lexical or grammatical meaning, each mode complementing the other. Such bimodal use of language is especially common in genres such as story-telling (with Plains Indian Sign Language and Australian Aboriginal sign languages used alongside oral language, for example), but also occurs in mundane conversation. For instance, many Australian languages have a rich set of case suffixes that provide details about the instrument used to perform an action. Others lack such grammatical precision in the oral mode, but supplement it with gesture to convey that information in the sign mode. In Iwaidja, for example, 'he went out for fish using a torch' is spoken as simply "he-hunted fish torch", but the word for 'torch' is accompanied by a gesture indicating that it was held. In another example, the ritual language Damin had a heavily reduced oral vocabulary of only a few hundred words, each of which was very general in meaning, but which were supplemented by gesture for greater precision (e.g., the single word for fish, l*i, was accompanied by a gesture to indicate the kind of fish).

Secondary modes of language, by which a fundamental mode is conveyed in a different medium, include writing (including braille), sign (in manually coded language), whistling and drumming. Tertiary modes - such as semaphore, Morse code and spelling alphabets - convey the secondary mode of writing in a different medium. For some extinct languages that are maintained for ritual or liturgical purposes, writing may be the primary mode, with speech secondary.

When described as a system of symbolic communication, language is traditionally seen as consisting of three parts: signs, meanings, and a code connecting signs with their meanings. The study of the process of semiosis, how signs and meanings are combined, used, and interpreted is called semiotics. Signs can be composed of sounds, gestures, letters, or symbols, depending on whether the language is spoken, signed, or written, and they can be combined into complex signs, such as words and phrases. When used in communication, a sign is encoded and transmitted by a sender through a channel to a receiver who decodes it.

Ancient Tamil inscription at Thanjavur

Some of the properties that define human language as opposed to other communication systems are: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, meaning that there is no predictable connection between a linguistic sign and its meaning; the duality of the linguistic system, meaning that linguistic structures are built by combining elements into larger structures that can be seen as layered, e.g. how sounds build words and words build phrases; the discreteness of the elements of language, meaning that the elements out of which linguistic signs are constructed are discrete units, e.g. sounds and words, that can be distinguished from each other and rearranged in different patterns; and the productivity of the linguistic system, meaning that the finite number of linguistic elements can be combined into a theoretically infinite number of combinations.

The rules by which signs can be combined to form words and phrases are called syntax or grammar. The meaning that is connected to individual signs, morphemes, words, phrases, and texts is called semantics. The division of language into separate but connected systems of sign and meaning goes back to the first linguistic studies of de Saussure and is now used in almost all branches of linguistics.

Languages express meaning by relating a sign form to a meaning, or its content. Sign forms must be something that can be perceived, for example, in sounds, images, or gestures, and then related to a specific meaning by social convention. Because the basic relation of meaning for most linguistic signs is based on social convention, linguistic signs can be considered arbitrary, in the sense that the convention is established socially and historically, rather than by means of a natural relation between a specific sign form and its meaning.

Thus, languages must have a vocabulary of signs related to specific meaning. The English sign "dog" denotes, for example, a member of the species Canis familiaris. In a language, the array of arbitrary signs connected to specific meanings is called the lexicon, and a single sign connected to a meaning is called a lexeme. Not all meanings in a language are represented by single words. Often, semantic concepts are embedded in the morphology or syntax of the language in the form of grammatical categories.

Sounds and symbols

Depending on modality, language structure can be based on systems of sounds (speech), gestures (sign languages), or graphic or tactile symbols (writing). The ways in which languages use sounds or signs to construct meaning are studied in phonology.

Sounds as part of a linguistic system are called phonemes. Phonemes are abstract units of sound, defined as the smallest units in a language that can serve to distinguish between the meaning of a pair of minimally different words, a so-called minimal pair. In English, for example, the words bat [bæt] and pat [pʰæt] form a minimal pair, in which the distinction between /b/ and /p/ differentiates the two words, which have different meanings. However, each language contrasts sounds in different ways. For example, in a language that does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants, the sounds [p] and [b] (if they both occur) could be considered a single phoneme, and consequently, the two pronunciations would have the same meaning. Similarly, the English language does not distinguish phonemically between aspirated and non-aspirated pronunciations of consonants, as many other languages like Korean and Hindi do: the unaspirated /p/ in spin [spɪn] and the aspirated /p/ in pin [pʰɪn] are considered to be merely different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme (such variants of a single phoneme are called allophones), whereas in Mandarin Chinese, the same difference in pronunciation distinguishes between the words [pʰá] 'crouch' and [pá] 'eight' (the accent above the á means that the vowel is pronounced with a high tone).

All spoken languages have phonemes of at least two different categories, vowels and consonants, that can be combined to form syllables. As well as segments such as consonants and vowels, some languages also use sound in other ways to convey meaning. Many languages, for example, use stress, pitch, duration, and tone to distinguish meaning. Because these phenomena operate outside of the level of single segments, they are called suprasegmental. Some languages have only a few phonemes, for example, Rotokas and Pirahã language with 11 and 10 phonemes respectively, whereas languages like Taa may have as many as 141 phonemes. In sign languages, the equivalent to phonemes (formerly called cheremes) are defined by the basic elements of gestures, such as hand shape, orientation, location, and motion, which correspond to manners of articulation in spoken language.

Writing systems represent language using visual symbols, which may or may not correspond to the sounds of spoken language. The Latin alphabet (and those on which it is based or that have been derived from it) was originally based on the representation of single sounds, so that words were constructed from letters that generally denote a single consonant or vowel in the structure of the word. In syllabic scripts, such as the Inuktitut syllabary, each sign represents a whole syllable. In logographic scripts, each sign represents an entire word, and will generally bear no relation to the sound of that word in spoken language.

Because all languages have a very large number of words, no purely logographic scripts are known to exist. Written language represents the way spoken sounds and words follow one after another by arranging symbols according to a pattern that follows a certain direction. The direction used in a writing system is entirely arbitrary and established by convention. Some writing systems use the horizontal axis (left to right as the Latin script or right to left as the Arabic script), while others such as traditional Chinese writing use the vertical dimension (from top to bottom). A few writing systems use opposite directions for alternating lines, and others, such as the ancient Maya script, can be written in either direction and rely on graphic cues to show the reader the direction of reading.

In order to represent the sounds of the world's languages in writing, linguists have developed the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to represent all of the discrete sounds that are known to contribute to meaning in human languages.

Grammar is the study of how meaningful elements called within a language can be combined into utterances. Morphemes can either be free or bound. If they are free to be moved around within an utterance, they are usually called , and if they are bound to other words or morphemes, they are called affixes. The way in which meaningful elements can be combined within a language is governed by rules. The study of the rules for the internal structure of words are called morphology. The rules of the internal structure of phrases and sentences are called syntax.

Grammatical categories

Grammar can be described as a system of categories and a set of rules that determine how categories combine to form different aspects of meaning. Languages differ widely in whether they are encoded through the use of categories or lexical units. However, several categories are so common as to be nearly universal. Such universal categories include the encoding of the grammatical relations of participants and predicates by grammatically distinguishing between their relations to a predicate, the encoding of temporal and spatial relations on predicates, and a system of grammatical person governing reference to and distinction between speakers and addressees and those about whom they are speaking.

Word classes

Languages organize their parts of speech into classes according to their functions and positions relative to other parts. All languages, for instance, make a basic distinction between a group of words that prototypically denotes things and concepts and a group of words that prototypically denotes actions and events. The first group, which includes English words such as "dog" and "song", are usually called nouns. The second, which includes "think" and "sing", are called verbs. Another common category is the adjective: words that describe properties or qualities of nouns, such as "red" or "big". Word classes can be "open" if new words can continuously be added to the class, or relatively "closed" if there is a fixed number of words in a class. In English, the class of pronouns is closed, whereas the class of adjectives is open, since an infinite number of adjectives can be constructed from verbs (e.g. "saddened") or nouns (e.g. with the -like suffix, as in "noun-like"). In other languages such as Korean, the situation is the opposite, and new pronouns can be constructed, whereas the number of adjectives is fixed.

Word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically, verbs are used to construct predicates, while nouns are used as arguments of predicates. In a sentence such as "Sally runs", the predicate is "runs", because it is the word that predicates a specific state about its argument "Sally". Some verbs such as "curse" can take two arguments, e.g. "Sally cursed John". A predicate that can only take a single argument is called intransitive, while a predicate that can take two arguments is called transitive.

Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions like "and" that serve to join two sentences, articles that introduce a noun, interjections such as "wow!", or ideophones like "splash" that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have positionals that describe the spatial position of an event or entity. Many languages have classifiers that identify countable nouns as belonging to a particular type or having a particular shape. For instance, in Japanese, the general noun classifier for humans is nin (人), and it is used for counting humans, whatever they are called:

san-nin no gakusei (三人の学生) lit. "3 human-classifier of student" - three students

For trees, it would be:

san-bon no ki (三本の木) lit. "3 classifier-for-long-objects of tree" - three trees

Morphology

In linguistics, the study of the internal structure of complex words and the processes by which words are formed is called morphology. In most languages, it is possible to construct complex words that are built of several morphemes. For instance, the English word "unexpected" can be analyzed as being composed of the three morphemes "un-", "expect" and "-ed".

Morphemes can be classified according to whether they are independent morphemes, so-called roots, or whether they can only co-occur attached to other morphemes. These bound morphemes or affixes can be classified according to their position in relation to the root: precede the root, suffixes follow the root, and infixes are inserted in the middle of a root. Affixes serve to modify or elaborate the meaning of the root. Some languages change the meaning of words by changing the phonological structure of a word, for example, the English word "run", which in the past tense is "ran". This process is called . Furthermore, morphology distinguishes between the process of inflection, which modifies or elaborates on a word, and the process of derivation, which creates a new word from an existing one. In English, the verb "sing" has the inflectional forms "singing" and "sung", which are both verbs, and the derivational form "singer", which is a noun derived from the verb with the agentive suffix "-er".

Languages differ widely in how much they rely on morphological processes of word formation. In some languages, for example, Chinese, there are no morphological processes, and all grammatical information is encoded syntactically by forming strings of single words. This type of morpho-syntax is often called isolating, or analytic, because there is almost a full correspondence between a single word and a single aspect of meaning. Most languages have words consisting of several morphemes, but they vary in the degree to which morphemes are discrete units. In many languages, notably in most Indo-European languages, single morphemes may have several distinct meanings that cannot be analyzed into smaller segments. For example, in Latin, the word bonus, or "good", consists of the root bon-, meaning "good", and the suffix - us, which indicates masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. These languages are called fusional languages, because several meanings may be fused into a single morpheme. The opposite of fusional languages are agglutinative languages which construct words by stringing morphemes together in chains, but with each morpheme as a discrete semantic unit. An example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or "from your houses", consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. The languages that rely on morphology to the greatest extent are traditionally called polysynthetic languages. They may express the equivalent of an entire English sentence in a single word. For example, in Persian the single word nafahmidamesh means I didn't understand it consisting of morphemes na-fahm-id-am-esh with the meanings, "negation.understand.past.I.it". As another example with more complexity, in the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksatengqiggtuq, which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer", the word consists of the morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, "reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative", and except for the morpheme tuntu ("reindeer") none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation.

Many languages use morphology to cross-reference words within a sentence. This is sometimes called . For example, in many Indo-European languages, adjectives must cross-reference the noun they modify in terms of number, case, and gender, so that the Latin adjective bonus, or "good", is inflected to agree with a noun that is masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. In many polysynthetic languages, verbs cross-reference their subjects and objects. In these types of languages, a single verb may include information that would require an entire sentence in English. For example, in the Basque phrase ikusi nauzu, or "you saw me", the past tense auxiliary verb n-au-zu (similar to English "do") agrees with both the subject (you) expressed by the n- prefix, and with the object (me) expressed by the - zu suffix. The sentence could be directly transliterated as "see you-did-me"

In addition to word classes, a sentence can be analyzed in terms of grammatical functions: "The cat" is the subject of the phrase, "on the mat" is a locative phrase, and "sat" is the core of the predicate.

Another way in which languages convey meaning is through the order of words within a sentence. The grammatical rules for how to produce new sentences from words that are already known is called syntax. The syntactical rules of a language determine why a sentence in English such as "I love you" is meaningful, but "*love you I" is not. Syntactical rules determine how word order and sentence structure is constrained, and how those constraints contribute to meaning. For example, in English, the two sentences "the slaves were cursing the master" and "the master was cursing the slaves" mean different things, because the role of the grammatical subject is encoded by the noun being in front of the verb, and the role of object is encoded by the noun appearing after the verb. Conversely, in Latin, both Dominus servos vituperabat and Servos vituperabat dominus mean "the master was reprimanding the slaves", because servos, or "slaves", is in the accusative case, showing that they are the grammatical object of the sentence, and dominus, or "master", is in the nominative case, showing that he is the subject.

Latin uses morphology to express the distinction between subject and object, whereas English uses word order. Another example of how syntactic rules contribute to meaning is the rule of inverse word order in questions, which exists in many languages. This rule explains why when in English, the phrase "John is talking to Lucy" is turned into a question, it becomes "Who is John talking to?", and not "John is talking to who?". The latter example may be used as a way of placing special emphasis on "who", thereby slightly altering the meaning of the question. Syntax also includes the rules for how complex sentences are structured by grouping words together in units, called phrases, that can occupy different places in a larger syntactic structure. Sentences can be described as consisting of phrases connected in a tree structure, connecting the phrases to each other at different levels. To the right is a graphic representation of the syntactic analysis of the English sentence "the cat sat on the mat". The sentence is analyzed as being constituted by a noun phrase, a verb, and a prepositional phrase; the prepositional phrase is further divided into a preposition and a noun phrase, and the noun phrases consist of an article and a noun.

The reason sentences can be seen as being composed of phrases is because each phrase would be moved around as a single element if syntactic operations were carried out. For example, "the cat" is one phrase, and "on the mat" is another, because they would be treated as single units if a decision was made to emphasize the location by moving forward the prepositional phrase: "[And] on the mat, the cat sat". There are many different formalist and functionalist frameworks that propose theories for describing syntactic structures, based on different assumptions about what language is and how it should be described. Each of them would analyze a sentence such as this in a different manner.

Typology and universals

Languages can be classified in relation to their grammatical types. Languages that belong to different families nonetheless often have features in common, and these shared features tend to correlate. For example, languages can be classified on the basis of their basic word order, the relative order of the verb, and its constituents in a normal indicative sentence. In English, the basic order is SVO (subject-verb-object): "The snake(S) bit(V) the man(O)", whereas for example, the corresponding sentence in the Australian language Gamilaraay would be d̪uyugu n̪ama d̪ayn yiːy (snake man bit), SOV. Word order type is relevant as a typological parameter, because basic word order type corresponds with other syntactic parameters, such as the relative order of nouns and adjectives, or of the use of prepositions or postpositions. Such correlations are called implicational universals. For example, most (but not all) languages that are of the SOV type have postpositions rather than prepositions, and have adjectives before nouns.

All languages structure sentences into Subject, Verb, and Object, but languages differ in the way they classify the relations between actors and actions. English uses the nominative-accusative word typology: in English transitive clauses, the subjects of both intransitive sentences ("I run") and transitive sentences ("I love you") are treated in the same way, shown here by the nominative pronoun I. Some languages, called ergative, Gamilaraay among them, distinguish instead between Agents and Patients. In ergative languages, the single participant in an intransitive sentence, such as "I run", is treated the same as the patient in a transitive sentence, giving the equivalent of "me run". Only in transitive sentences would the equivalent of the pronoun "I" be used. In this way the semantic roles can map onto the grammatical relations in different ways, grouping an intransitive subject either with Agents (accusative type) or Patients (ergative type) or even making each of the three roles differently, which is called the tripartite type.

The shared features of languages which belong to the same typological class type may have arisen completely independently. Their co-occurrence might be due to universal laws governing the structure of natural languages, "language universals", or they might be the result of languages evolving convergent solutions to the recurring communicative problems that humans use language to solve.

Social contexts of use and transmission

Wall of Love on Montmartre in Paris: "I love you" in 250 languages, by calligraphist Fédéric Baron and artist Claire Kito (2000)

While humans have the ability to learn any language, they only do so if they grow up in an environment in which language exists and is used by others. Language is therefore dependent on communities of speakers in which children learn language from their elders and peers and themselves transmit language to their own children. Languages are used by those who speak them to communicate and to solve a plethora of social tasks. Many aspects of language use can be seen to be adapted specifically to these purposes. Owing to the way in which language is transmitted between generations and within communities, language perpetually changes, diversifying into new languages or converging due to language contact. The process is similar to the process of evolution, where the process of descent with modification leads to the formation of a phylogenetic tree.

Usage and meaning

When studying the way in which words and signs are used, it is often the case that words have different meanings, depending on the social context of use. An important example of this is the process called deixis, which describes the way in which certain words refer to entities through their relation between a specific point in time and space when the word is uttered. Such words are, for example, the word, "I" (which designates the person speaking), "now" (which designates the moment of speaking), and "here" (which designates the position of speaking). Signs also change their meanings over time, as the conventions governing their usage gradually change. The study of how the meaning of linguistic expressions changes depending on context is called pragmatics. Deixis is an important part of the way that we use language to point out entities in the world. Pragmatics is concerned with the ways in which language use is patterned and how these patterns contribute to meaning. For example, in all languages, linguistic expressions can be used not just to transmit information, but to perform actions. Certain actions are made only through language, but nonetheless have tangible effects, e.g. the act of "naming", which creates a new name for some entity, or the act of "pronouncing someone man and wife", which creates a social contract of marriage. These types of acts are called speech acts, although they can also be carried out through writing or hand signing.

The form of linguistic expression often does not correspond to the meaning that it actually has in a social context. For example, if at a dinner table a person asks, "Can you reach the salt?", that is, in fact, not a question about the length of the arms of the one being addressed, but a request to pass the salt across the table. This meaning is implied by the context in which it is spoken; these kinds of effects of meaning are called conversational implicatures. These social rules for which ways of using language are considered appropriate in certain situations and how utterances are to be understood in relation to their context vary between communities, and learning them is a large part of acquiring communicative competence in a language.

Acquisition

All healthy, normally developing human beings learn to use language. Children acquire the language or languages used around them: whichever languages they receive sufficient exposure to during childhood. The development is essentially the same for children acquiring sign or oral languages. This learning process is referred to as first-language acquisition, since unlike many other kinds of learning, it requires no direct teaching or specialized study. In The Descent of Man, naturalist Charles Darwin called this process "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art".

A lesson at Kituwah Academy, a school where English and the Cherokee language are mediums of instruction

First language acquisition proceeds in a fairly regular sequence, though there is a wide degree of variation in the timing of particular stages among normally developing infants. Studies published in 2013 have indicated that unborn fetuses are capable of language acquisition to some degree. From birth, newborns respond more readily to human speech than to other sounds. Around one month of age, babies appear to be able to distinguish between different speech sounds. Around six months of age, a child will begin babbling, producing the speech sounds or handshapes of the languages used around them. Words appear around the age of 12 to 18 months; the average vocabulary of an eighteen-month-old child is around 50 words. A child's first utterances are holophrases (literally "whole-sentences"), utterances that use just one word to communicate some idea. Several months after a child begins producing words, he or she will produce two-word utterances, and within a few more months will begin to produce telegraphic speech, or short sentences that are less grammatically complex than adult speech, but that do show regular syntactic structure. From roughly the age of three to five years, a child's ability to speak or sign is refined to the point that it resembles adult language.

Acquisition of second and additional languages can come at any age, through exposure in daily life or courses. Children learning a second language are more likely to achieve native-like fluency than adults, but in general, it is very rare for someone speaking a second language to pass completely for a native speaker. An important difference between first language acquisition and additional language acquisition is that the process of additional language acquisition is influenced by languages that the learner already knows.

Arnold Lakhovsky, The Conversation (c. 1935)

Languages, understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speaks them. Languages differ not only in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, but also through having different "cultures of speaking." Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group as well as difference from others. Even among speakers of one language, several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups within a larger culture. Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists, and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities.

Linguists use the term " varieties" to refer to the different ways of speaking a language. This term includes geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood within a particular culture.

Because norms for language use are shared by members of a specific group, communicative style also becomes a way of displaying and constructing group identity. Linguistic differences may become salient markers of divisions between social groups, for example, speaking a language with a particular accent may imply membership of an ethnic minority or social class, one's area of origin, or status as a second language speaker. These kinds of differences are not part of the linguistic system, but are an important part of how people use language as a social tool for constructing groups.

However, many languages also have grammatical conventions that signal the social position of the speaker in relation to others through the use of registers that are related to social hierarchies or divisions. In many languages, there are stylistic or even grammatical differences between the ways men and women speak, between age groups, or between social classes, just as some languages employ different words depending on who is listening. For example, in the Australian language Dyirbal, a married man must use a special set of words to refer to everyday items when speaking in the presence of his mother-in-law. Some cultures, for example, have elaborate systems of "social deixis", or systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means. In English, social deixis is shown mostly through distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, and in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy", "Doctor", or "Your Honor", but in other languages, such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. For instance, in languages of east Asia such as Thai, Burmese, and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest.

Writing, literacy and technology

An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Indigenous Canadian languages

Throughout history a number of different ways of representing language in graphic media have been invented. These are called writing systems.

The use of writing has made language even more useful to humans. It makes it possible to store large amounts of information outside of the human body and retrieve it again, and it allows communication across physical distances and timespans that would otherwise be impossible. Many languages conventionally employ different genres, styles, and registers in written and spoken language, and in some communities, writing traditionally takes place in an entirely different language than the one spoken. There is some evidence that the use of writing also has effects on the cognitive development of humans, perhaps because acquiring literacy generally requires explicit and formal education.

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.

The first page of the poem Beowulf, written in Old English in the early medieval period (800-1100 AD). Although Old English is the direct ancestor of modern English, it is unintelligible to contemporary English speakers.

All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be "decay" or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable.

Changes may affect specific sounds or the entire phonological system. Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound or phonetic feature by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound in a place where there had been none. Sound changes can be conditioned in which case a sound is changed only if it occurs in the vicinity of certain other sounds. Sound change is usually assumed to be regular, which means that it is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of any non-phonological factors. On the other hand, sound changes can sometimes be sporadic, affecting only one particular word or a few words, without any seeming regularity. Sometimes a simple change triggers a chain shift in which the entire phonological system is affected. This happened in the Germanic languages when the sound change known as Grimm's law affected all the stop consonants in the system. The original consonant * became /b/ in the Germanic languages, the previous * in turn became /p/, and the previous * became /f/. The same process applied to all stop consonants and explains why Italic languages such as Latin have p in words like pater and pisces, whereas Germanic languages, like English, have father and fish.

Another example is the Great Vowel Shift in English, which is the reason that the spelling of English vowels do not correspond well to their current pronunciation. This is because the vowel shift brought the already established orthography out of synchronization with pronunciation. Another source of sound change is the erosion of words as pronunciation gradually becomes increasingly indistinct and shortens words, leaving out syllables or sounds. This kind of change caused Latin mea domina to eventually become the French madame and American English ma'am.

Change also happens in the grammar of languages as discourse patterns such as idioms or particular constructions become grammaticalized. This frequently happens when words or morphemes erode and the grammatical system is unconsciously rearranged to compensate for the lost element. For example, in some varieties of Caribbean Spanish the final /s/ has eroded away. Since Standard Spanish uses final /s/ in the morpheme marking the second person subject "you" in verbs, the Caribbean varieties now have to express the second person using the pronoun tú. This means that the sentence "what's your name" is ¿como te llamas? [ˈkomoteˈjamas] in Standard Spanish, but [ˈkomoˈtuteˈjama] in Caribbean Spanish. The simple sound change has affected both morphology and syntax. Another common cause of grammatical change is the gradual petrification of idioms into new grammatical forms, for example, the way the English "going to" construction lost its aspect of movement and in some varieties of English has almost become a full-fledged future tense (e.g. I'm gonna).

Language change may be motivated by "language internal" factors, such as changes in pronunciation motivated by certain sounds being difficult to distinguish aurally or to produce, or through patterns of change that cause some rare types of constructions to drift towards more common types. Other causes of language change are social, such as when certain pronunciations become emblematic of membership in certain groups, such as social classes, or with ideologies, and therefore are adopted by those who wish to identify with those groups or ideas. In this way, issues of identity and politics can have profound effects on language structure.

Multi-lingual sign outside the mayor's office in Novi Sad, written in the four official languages of the city: Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Pannonian Rusyn

One important source of language change is contact and resulting diffusion of linguistic traits between languages. Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact on a regular basis. Multilingualism is likely to have been the norm throughout human history and most people in the modern world are multilingual. Before the rise of the concept of the ethno-national state, monolingualism was characteristic mainly of populations inhabiting small islands. But with the ideology that made one people, one state, and one language the most desirable political arrangement, monolingualism started to spread throughout the world. Nonetheless, there are only 250 countries in the world corresponding to some 6000 languages, which means that most countries are multilingual and most languages therefore exist in close contact with other languages.

When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Through sustained language contact over long periods, linguistic traits diffuse between languages, and languages belonging to different families may converge to become more similar. In areas where many languages are in close contact, this may lead to the formation of language areas in which unrelated languages share a number of linguistic features. A number of such language areas have been documented, among them, the Balkan language area, the Mesoamerican language area, and the Ethiopian language area. Also, larger areas such as South Asia, Europe, and Southeast Asia have sometimes been considered language areas, because of widespread diffusion of specific areal features.

Multilingualism is also common in the Indian Republic. The signboard is displayed in the Imphal International Airport in Meitei, Hindi and English, some of the official languages of the Indian Republic.

Language contact may also lead to a variety of other linguistic phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification (replacement of much of the native vocabulary with that of another language). In situations of extreme and sustained language contact, it may lead to the formation of new mixed languages that cannot be considered to belong to a single language family. One type of mixed language called pidgins occurs when adult speakers of two different languages interact on a regular basis, but in a situation where neither group learns to speak the language of the other group fluently. In such a case, they will often construct a communication form that has traits of both languages, but which has a simplified grammatical and phonological structure. The language comes to contain mostly the grammatical and phonological categories that exist in both languages. Pidgin languages are defined by not having any native speakers, but only being spoken by people who have another language as their first language. But if a Pidgin language becomes the main language of a speech community, then eventually children will grow up learning the pidgin as their first language. As the generation of child learners grow up, the pidgin will often be seen to change its structure and acquire a greater degree of complexity. This type of language is generally called a creole language. An example of such mixed languages is Tok Pisin, the official language of Papua New-Guinea, which originally arose as a Pidgin based on English and Austronesian languages; others are Kreyòl ayisyen, the French-based creole language spoken in Haiti, and Michif, a mixed language of Canada, based on the Native American language Cree and French.

Linguistic diversity

SIL Ethnologue defines a "living language" as "one that has at least one speaker for whom it is their first language". The exact number of known living languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular, on how one defines the distinction between a "language" and a " dialect". As of 2016, Ethnologue cataloged 7,097 living human languages. The Ethnologue establishes linguistic groups based on studies of mutual intelligibility, and therefore often includes more categories than more conservative classifications. For example, the Danish language that most scholars consider a single language with several dialects is classified as two distinct languages (Danish and Jutish) by the Ethnologue.

According to the Ethnologue, 389 languages (nearly 6%) have more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94% of the world's population, whereas 94% of the world's languages account for the remaining 6% of the global population.

Languages and dialects

There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding a famous aphorism attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that " a language is a dialect with an army and navy". For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages or dialects. Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin are, for example, often classified as "dialects" of Chinese, even though they are more different from each other than Swedish is from Norwegian. Before the Yugoslav Wars, Serbo-Croatian was generally considered a single language with two normative variants, but due to sociopolitical reasons, Croatian and Serbian are now often treated as separate languages and employ different writing systems. In other words, the distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or degree of mutual intelligibility.

Language families of the world

Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world.

The world's languages can be grouped into language families consisting of languages that can be shown to have common ancestry. Linguists recognize many hundreds of language families, although some of them can possibly be grouped into larger units as more evidence becomes available and in-depth studies are carried out. At present, there are also dozens of language isolates: languages that cannot be shown to be related to any other languages in the world. Among them are Basque, spoken in Europe, Zuni of New Mexico, Purépecha of Mexico, Ainu of Japan, Burushaski of Pakistan, and many others.

The language family of the world that has the most speakers is the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world's population. This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Hindustani ( Hindi/ Urdu). The Indo-European family spread first through the Indo-European migrations posited to have taken place c. 4000-1000 BCE,[citation needed ] and subsequently through much later European colonial expansion, which brought the Indo-European languages to a politically and often numerically dominant position in the Americas and much of Africa. The Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by 20% of the world's population and include many of the languages of East Asia, including Hakka, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and hundreds of smaller languages.

Africa is home to a large number of language families, the largest of which is the Niger-Congo language family, which includes such languages as Swahili, Shona, and Yoruba. Speakers of the Niger-Congo languages account for 6.9% of the world's population. A similar number of people speak the Afroasiatic languages, which include the populous Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew language, and the languages of the Sahara region, such as the Berber languages and Hausa.

The Austronesian languages are spoken by 5.5% of the world's population and stretch from Madagascar to maritime Southeast Asia all the way to Oceania. It includes such languages as Malagasy, Māori, Samoan, and many of the indigenous languages of Indonesia and Taiwan. The Austronesian languages are considered to have originated in Taiwan around 3000 BC and spread through the Oceanic region through island-hopping, based on an advanced nautical technology. Other populous language families are the Dravidian languages of South Asia (among them Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu), the Turkic languages of Central Asia (such as Turkish), the Austroasiatic (among them Khmer), and Tai-Kadai languages of Southeast Asia (including Thai).

The areas of the world in which there is the greatest linguistic diversity, such as the Americas, Papua New Guinea, West Africa, and South-Asia, contain hundreds of small language families. These areas together account for the majority of the world's languages, though not the majority of speakers. In the Americas, some of the largest language families include the Quechumaran, Arawak, and Tupi-Guarani families of South America, the Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Manguean, and Mayan of Mesoamerica, and the Na-Dene, Iroquoian, and Algonquian language families of North America. In Australia, most indigenous languages belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, whereas New Guinea is home to a large number of small families and isolates, as well as a number of Austronesian languages. Due to its remoteness and geographical fragmentation, Papua New Guinea emerges in fact as the leading location worldwide for both species (8% of world total) and linguistic richness - with 830 living tongues (12% of world total).

Language endangerment

Together, these eight countries contain more than 50% of the world's languages.

These areas are the most linguistically diverse in the world, and the locations of most of the world's endangered languages.

Language endangerment occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an extinct language. While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they have been disappearing at an accelerated rate in the 20th and 21st centuries due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages.

The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. Of the between 6,000 and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, between 50 and 90% of those are expected to have become extinct by the year 2100. The top 20 languages, those spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with less than 10,000 speakers.

UNESCO's five levels of language endangerment

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) operates with five levels of language endangerment: "safe", "vulnerable" (not spoken by children outside the home), "definitely endangered" (not spoken by children), "severely endangered" (only spoken by the oldest generations), and "critically endangered" (spoken by few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers). Notwithstanding claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common lingua franca, such as English or Esperanto, there is a consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world. It is a common belief, going back to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament, that linguistic diversity causes political conflict, but this is contradicted by the fact that many of the world's major episodes of violence have taken place in situations with low linguistic diversity, such as the Yugoslav and American Civil War, or the genocide of Rwanda, whereas many of the most stable political units have been highly multilingual.

The University of Waikato are using the Welsh language as a model for their Māori language revitalisation programme as they deem Welsh to be the world's leading example for the survival of languages. In 2019 a Hawaiian TV company Oiwi visited a Welsh language centre in Nant Gwrtheyrn, North Wales to help find ways of preserving their Ōlelo Hawaiʻi language.

1. The gorilla ^ Koko reportedly used as many as 1000 words in American Sign Language, and understands 2000 words of spoken English. There are some doubts about whether her use of signs is based on complex understanding or simple conditioning.

2. ^ "Functional grammar analyzes grammatical structure, as do formal and structural grammar; but it also analyzes the entire communicative situation: the purpose of the speech event, its participants, its discourse context. Functionalists maintain that the communicative situation motivates, constrains, explains, or otherwise determines grammatical structure, and that a structural or formal approach is not merely limited to an artificially restricted data base, but is inadequate even as a structural account. Functional grammar, then, differs from formal and structural grammar in that it purports not to model but to explain; and the explanation is grounded in the communicative situation".

3. While sign is usually a visual medium, there is also ^ tactile signing; and while oral speech is usually an aural medium, there is also lipreading and tadoma.

4. ^ The prefixed asterisk * conventionally indicates that the sentence is ungrammatical, i.e. syntactically incorrect.

5. ^ Ethnologue's figure is based on numbers from before 1995. A more recent figure is 420 million.

References

1. Nicholas Evans & Stephen Levinson (2009) 'The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science'. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32, 429-492.

2. ^ Kamusella, Tomasz (2016). "The History of the Normative Opposition of 'Language versus Dialect': From Its Graeco-Latin Origin to Central Europe's Ethnolinguistic Nation-States". Colloquia Humanistica. 5 (5): 189-198. doi:10.11649/ch.2016.011. Archived from the original on 26 February 2020.

3. Moseley (2010): "Statistics Archived 12 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine"

4. ^ "language". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1992.

5. ^ Hockett, Charles F. (1966). "The Problem of Universals in Language". Archived from the original on 10 November 2012.

6. ^ Engesser, Sabrina; Crane, Jodie M. S.; Savage, James L.; Russel, Andrew F.; Townsend, Simon W. (29 June 2015). "Experimental Evidence for Phonemic Contrasts in a Nonhuman Vocal System". PLOS Biology. 13 (6): e1002171. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002171. PMC . PMID 26121619.

7. ^ Engesser, Sabrina; Ridley, Amanda R.; Townsend, Simon W. (20 July 2017). "Element repetition rates encode functionally distinct information in pied babbler 'clucks' and 'purrs'" (PDF). Animal Cognition. 20 (5): 953-960. doi:10.1007/s10071-017-1114-6. PMID 28730513. S2CID 21470061. Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 April 2019.

8. ^ Shanahan, D. (2011). Language, feeling, and the brain: The evocative vector. Transaction Publishers.

9. ^ Clark, Gary; Henneberg, Maciej (2017). "Ardipithecus ramidus and the evolution of language and singing: An early origin for hominin vocal capability". HOMO. 68 (2): 101-121. doi:10.1016/j.jchb.2017.03.001. PMID 28363458.

10. ^ Nicholas Evans (2017) Listening Here: Ngûrrahmalkwonawoniyan. Humanities Australia, Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, vol 8, p 39.

11. Stokoe, William C. (1960). ^ Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf, Studies in linguistics: Occasional papers (No. 8). Buffalo: Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Buffalo.

12. ^ Stokoe, William C.; Dorothy C. Casterline; Carl G. Croneberg (1965). A dictionary of American sign languages on linguistic principles. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet College Press

13. ^ Denham, Kristin; Lobeck, Anne (2009). Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction. Cengage Learning. p. 9. ISBN 978-1-4130-1589-8. Archived from the original on 22 May 2020. An ungrammatical sentence is one that is impossible in a given language, one that a native speaker of that variety would never utter naturally. (Remember that ungrammatical sentences are marked with an asterisk, *.

14. ^ Bonvillian, John D.; Michael D. Orlansky; Leslie Lazin Novack (December 1983). "Developmental milestones: Sign language acquisition and motor development". Child Development. 54 (6): 1435-1445. doi:10.2307/1129806. JSTOR 1129806. PMID 6661942.

15. ^ Skwarecki, Beth (26 August 2013). "Babies Learn to Recognize Words in the Womb". Science. Archived from the original on 4 November 2015.

16. ^ O'Grady, William; Cho, Sook Whan (2001). "First language acquisition". Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (4th ed.). Boston: Bedford St. Martin's.

17. ^ "Primer estudio conjunto del Instituto Cervantes y el British Council sobre el peso internacional del español y del inglés". Instituto Cervantes (www.cervantes.es). Archived from the original on 16 September 2017.

18. ^ Lewis (2009), "Summary by language family Archived 1 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine"

19. ^ Briand, Frederic (February 2013). "Silent Plains ... the Fading Sounds of Native Languages". National Geographic.

20. ^ "University of Waikato Launches a Strategic Partnership with Cardiff University in Wales" (Press release). University of Waikato. 10 November 2021. Archived from the original on 24 November 2021 - via Scoop News.

Works cited

Candland, Douglas Keith (1993). Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature. Oxford University Press US. pp. 293-301. ISBN 978-0-19-510284-0. koko gorilla operant conditioning.

Chomsky, Noam (1972). . Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-549257-8.

Deacon, Terrence (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-31754-1.

Dixon, Robert M.W. (1972). The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-08510-6.

Duranti, Alessandro (2003). "Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms". Current Anthropology. 44 (3): 323-348. doi:10.1086/368118. S2CID 148075449.

Evans, Nicholas; Levinson, Stephen C. (2009). "The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 32 (5): 429-492. doi:10.1017/s0140525x0999094x. PMID 19857320.

"First Impressions: We start to pick up words, food preferences and hand-eye coordination long before being born". Scientific American. Vol. 313, no. 1. July 2015. p. 24.

Fisher, Simon E.; Lai, Cecilia S.L.; Monaco, Anthony P. (2003). "Deciphering the Genetic Basis of Speech and Language Disorders". Annual Review of Neuroscience. 26: 57-80. doi:10.1146/annurev.neuro.26.041002.131144. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0012-CB7D-6. PMID 12524432.

Haugen, Einar (1973). "The Curse of Babel". Daedalus. 102 (3, Language as a Human Problem): 47-57.

Hauser, Marc D.; Chomsky, Noam; Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2002). "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?". Science. 298 (5598): 1569-1579. doi:10.1126/science.298.5598.1569. PMID 12446899.

Hauser, Marc D.; Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2003). "What are the uniquely human components of the language faculty?" (PDF). In M.H. Christiansen; S. Kirby (eds.). Language Evolution: The States of the Art. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 August 2014.

International Phonetic Association (1999). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-65236-0.

Labov, William (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change vol.I Internal Factors. Blackwell.

Labov, William (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change vol.II Social Factors. Blackwell.

Ladefoged, Peter (1992). "Another view of endangered languages". Language. 68 (4): 809-811. doi:10.1353/lan.1992.0013. S2CID 144984900.

Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lewis, M. Paul, ed. (2009). "Ethnologue: Languages of the World" (16th ed.). Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Archived from the original on 4 April 2012.

Matras, Yaron; Bakker, Peter, eds. (2003). The Mixed Language Debate: Theoretical and Empirical Advances. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-017776-3.

Moseley, Christopher, ed. (2010). Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (3rd ed.). Paris: UNESCO Publishing. Archived from the original on 20 August 2014.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. (2005). The History of Linguistics. Linguistic Society of America. ISBN 978-0-415-11553-7. Archived from the original on 31 December 2014.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. (1998). Language Form and Language Function (PDF). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 December 2011.

Nichols, Johanna (1992). Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-58057-9.

Nichols, Johanna (1984). "Functional Theories of Grammar". Annual Review of Anthropology. 13: 97-117. doi:10.1146/annurev.an.13.100184.000525.

Olson, David R. (1996). "Language and Literacy: what writing does to Language and Mind". Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 16: 3-13. doi:10.1017/S0267190500001392. S2CID 145677801.

Payne, Thomas Edward (1997). Describing morphosyntax: a guide for field linguists. Cambridge University Press. pp. 238-241. ISBN 978-0-521-58805-8. Archived from the original on 31 March 2021.

Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Perennial.

Sandler, Wendy; Lillo-Martin, Diane (2001). "Natural Sign Languages". In Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller (eds.). The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell. pp. 533-563.

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1983) [1913]. Bally, Charles; Sechehaye, Albert (eds.). Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9023-1.

Zentella, Ana Celia (2002). "Spanish in New York". In García, Ofelia; Fishman, Joshua (eds.). The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City. Walter de Gruyter.

Further reading

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture: can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society."

# data[].attributes.body
Culture is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.[1] Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Culture ( KUL-chər) is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.

Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.

A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group. Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change. Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be identified in a social group.

Cultural change, or repositioning, is the reconstruction of a cultural concept of a society. Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies.

Organizations like UNESCO attempt to preserve culture and cultural heritage.

Description

Pygmy music has been polyphonic well before their discovery by non-African explorers of the Baka, Aka, Efe, and other foragers of the Central African forests, in the 1200s, which is at least 200 years before polyphony developed in Europe. Note the multiple lines of singers and dancers. The motifs are independent, with theme and variation interweaving.[4] This type of music is thought to be the first expression of polyphony in world music.

Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies. These include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.

In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been used to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the proletariat and create a false consciousness. Such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.

When used as a count noun, a "culture" is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time. In this sense, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes "culture" is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. " bro culture"), or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture.

The modern term "culture" is based on a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi," using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy was man's natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers after him, " refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human."

In 1986, philosopher Edward S. Casey wrote, "The very word culture meant 'place tilled' in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, 'to inhabit, care for, till, worship' and cultus, 'A cult, especially a religious one.' To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it-to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly."

Culture described by Richard Velkley:

... originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meaning in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of " modern liberalism and Enlightenment." Thus a contrast between "culture" and " civilization" is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such.

In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor, it is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, "Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.

The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time." Terror management theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that provide humans with the basis for perceiving themselves as "person[s] of worth within the world of meaning"-raising themselves above the merely physical aspects of existence, in order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain.

The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively. This ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago and is often thought to be unique to humans. However, some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complicated, abilities for social learning. It is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that are transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form.[citation needed ]

Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, indigenization, and transformation. In this context, modernization could be viewed as adoption of Enlightenment era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the notion of progress. Rein Raud, building on the work of Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey C. Alexander, has proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by their cognitive adequacy and endorsed or not endorsed by the symbolic authority of the cultural community in question.

Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period," driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society.

Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change.

Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.

Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce-or inhibit-social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination to the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th-century. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct borrowing," on the other hand, tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.

Acculturation has different meanings. Still, in this context, it refers to the replacement of traits of one culture with another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation. The transnational flow of culture has played a major role in merging different cultures and sharing thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.

Early modern discourses

German Romanticism

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) formulated an individualist definition of "enlightenment" similar to the concept of bildung: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: " Sapere Aude" ("Dare to be wise!"). In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of Bildung: "For Herder, was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people."

In 1795, the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalist movements-such as the nationalist struggle to create a "Germany" out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire-developed a more inclusive notion of culture as " worldview" ( Weltanschauung). According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between "civilized" and "primitive" or "tribal" cultures.

In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) argued for "the psychic unity of mankind." He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas" ( Elementargedanken); different cultures, or different "folk ideas" ( Völkergedanken), are local modifications of the elementary ideas. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858-1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.

English Romanticism

In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." This concept of culture is also comparable to the German concept of bildung: "...culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."

In practice, culture referred to an elite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine. As these forms were associated with urban life, "culture" was identified with "civilization" (from Latin: civitas, 'city'). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in folklore, which led to identifying a "culture" among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between high culture, namely that of the ruling social group, and low culture. In other words, the idea of "culture" that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.

Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with anarchy; other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted "culture" with "the state of nature." According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized" and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, other critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.

Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people's essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by "the folk," i.e., rural, illiterate, peasants) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as " noble savages" living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.

In 1870 the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832-1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms. In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of religion.

Anthropology

Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor's definition of culture, in the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and in the United States and Canada, archaeology. The term Kulturbrille, or "culture glasses," coined by German American anthropologist Franz Boas, refers to the "lenses" through which a person sees their own culture. Martin Lindstrom asserts that Kulturbrille, which allow a person to make sense of the culture they inhabit, "can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately."

The sociology of culture concerns culture as manifested in society. For sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918), culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." As such, culture in the sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people's way of life. Culture can be either of two types, non-material culture or material culture. Non-material culture refers to the non-physical ideas that individuals have about their culture, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions, while material culture is the physical evidence of a culture in the objects and architecture they make or have made. The term tends to be relevant only in archeological and anthropological studies, but it specifically means all material evidence which can be attributed to culture, past or present.

Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918-1933), where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term Kultursoziologie ('cultural sociology'). Cultural sociology was then reinvented in the English-speaking world as a product of the cultural turn of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may be loosely regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory. Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols. Culture has since become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field. Thus, there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead, look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.

Early researchers and development of cultural sociology

The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology (as shaped by early theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) with the growing discipline of anthropology, wherein researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field lingers in the methods (much of cultural, sociological research is qualitative), in the theories (a variety of critical approaches to sociology are central to current research communities), and in the substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.

Cultural studies

In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism such as Stuart Hall (1932-2014) and Raymond Williams (1921-1988) developed cultural studies. Following nineteenth-century Romantics, they identified culture with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). They saw patterns of consumption and leisure as determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production.

In the United Kingdom, cultural studies focuses largely on the study of popular culture; that is, on the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director. Cultural studies in this sense, then, can be viewed as a limited concentration scoped on the intricacies of consumerism, which belongs to a wider culture sometimes referred to as Western civilization or globalism.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Visual art is one expression of culture.

From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed, it began to combine political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies, and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender. Cultural studies is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television or eating out) in a given culture. It also studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Specifically, culture involves those meanings and practices held independently of reason. Watching television to view a public perspective on a historical event should not be thought of as culture unless referring to the medium of television itself, which may have been selected culturally; however, schoolchildren watching television after school with their friends to "fit in" certainly qualifies since there is no grounded reason for one's participation in this practice.

In the context of cultural studies, a text includes not only written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of culture. Culture, for a cultural-studies researcher, not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups) and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the disciplines of comparative literature and cultural studies.

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies had originated in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly under the influence of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later that of Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as "capitalist" mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the " culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.

In the United States, Lindlof and Taylor write, "cultural studies [were] grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition." The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom.[citation needed ] The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.[citation needed ] Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, the mode and relations of production form the economic base of society, which constantly interacts and influences superstructures, such as culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view comes through in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist, and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is among influential voices at the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.

Petrakis and Kostis (2013) divide cultural background variables into two main groups:

1. The first group covers the variables that represent the "efficiency orientation" of the societies: performance orientation, future orientation, assertiveness, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.

2. The second covers the variables that represent the "social orientation" of societies, i.e., the attitudes and lifestyles of their members. These variables include gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, and human orientation.

In 2016, a new approach to culture was suggested by Rein Raud, who defines culture as the sum of resources available to human beings for making sense of their world and proposes a two-tiered approach, combining the study of texts (all reified meanings in circulation) and cultural practices (all repeatable actions that involve the production, dissemination or transmission of purposes), thus making it possible to re-link anthropological and sociological study of culture with the tradition of textual theory.

Psychology

Cognitive tools suggest a way for people from certain culture to deal with real-life problems, like Suanpan for Chinese to perform mathematical calculation.

Starting in the 1990s, psychological research on culture influence began to grow and challenge the universality assumed in general psychology. Culture psychologists began to try to explore the relationship between emotions and culture, and answer whether the human mind is independent from culture. For example, people from collectivistic cultures, such as the Japanese, suppress their positive emotions more than their American counterparts. Culture may affect the way that people experience and express emotions. On the other hand, some researchers try to look for differences between people's personalities across cultures. As different cultures dictate distinctive norms, culture shock is also studied to understand how people react when they are confronted with other cultures. Cognitive tools may not be accessible or they may function differently cross culture. For example, people who are raised in a culture with an abacus are trained with distinctive reasoning style. Cultural lenses may also make people view the same outcome of events differently. Westerners are more motivated by their successes than their failures, while East Asians are better motivated by the avoidance of failure. Culture is important for psychologists to consider when understanding the human mental operation.

Protection of culture

There are a number of international agreements and national laws relating to the protection of cultural heritage and cultural diversity. UNESCO and its partner organizations such as Blue Shield International coordinate international protection and local implementation. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions deal with the protection of culture. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals with cultural heritage in two ways: it gives people the right to participate in cultural life on the one hand and the right to the protection of their contributions to cultural life on the other.

In the 21st century, the protection of culture has been the focus of increasing activity by national and international organizations. The UN and UNESCO promote cultural preservation and cultural diversity through declarations and legally-binding conventions or treaties. The aim is not to protect a person's property, but rather to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity, especially in the event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target of the attack is the identity of the opponent, which is why symbolic cultural assets become a main target. It is also intended to affect the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and the economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, region or municipality.

Tourism is having an increasing impact on the various forms of culture. On the one hand, this can be physical impact on individual objects or the destruction caused by increasing environmental pollution and, on the other hand, socio-cultural effects on society.

References

Further reading

Barker, C. (2004). The Sage dictionary of cultural studies. Sage.

Deacon, Terrence (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York and London: W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-3930-3838-5.

Holloway Jr. Ralph L. (1969). "Culture: A Human domain". Current Anthropology. 10 (4): 395-412. doi:10.1086/201036. S2CID 144502900.

Hymes, Dell (1969). Reinventing Anthropology.

James, Paul; Szeman, Imre (2010). Globalization and Culture, Vol. 3: Global-Local Consumption. London: Sage Publications.

Tomasello, Michael (1999). "The Human Adaptation for Culture". Annual Review of Anthropology. 28: 509-29. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.509.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1941). "The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language". Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Honor of Edward Sapir.

Taylor, Walter (1948). A Study of Archeology. Memoir 69, American Anthropological Association. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Bastian, Adolf (2009), Encyclopædia Britannica Online

Anker, Guy (2000) [2000]. Global communication without universal civilization, vol.1: Coexisting contemporary civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. INU societal research. Geneva: INU Press. ISBN 978-2-88155-004-1.

Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. Archived November 18, 2017, at the Wayback Machine New York: Macmillan. Third edition, 1882, available online. Retrieved: 2006-06-28.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Press. ISBN 978-0-252-06445-6.

Benedict, Ruth (1934). . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Carhart. Michael C. (2007). The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany, Cambridge, Harvard University press.

Dawkins, R. (1999) [1982]. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-19-288051-2

Geertz, Clifford (1957). "Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example". American Anthropologist. 59: 32-54. doi:10.1525/aa.1957.59.1.02a00040.

Kim, Uichol (2001). "Culture, science and indigenous psychologies: An integrated analysis." In D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of culture and psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press

O'Neil, D. (2006). Cultural Anthropology Tutorials Archived December 4, 2004, at the Wayback Machine, Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marco, California. Retrieved: 2006-07-10.

Reagan, Ronald. "Final Radio Address to the Nation" Archived January 30, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, January 14, 1989. Retrieved June 3, 2006.

Tylor, E.B. (1974) [1871]. Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. New York: Gordon Press. ISBN 978-0-87968-091-6.

UNESCO (2002). Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, issued on International Mother Language Day,

Wilson, Edward O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage. ISBN 978-0-679-76867-8.

Wolfram, Stephen (2002). A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Inc. ISBN 978-1-57955-008-0.

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Culture ( KUL-chər ) is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.

# data[].attributes.body
What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general. It encompasses not only the study of sound, grammar and meaning, but also the history of language families, how languages are acquired by children and adults, and how language use is processed in the mind and how it is connected to race and gender.

# data[].attributes.headline
Language: language is a system of symbols and rules that constitute the method of human communication , either spoken or written , consisting of the use of words in a structural and conventional way.

# data[].attributes.subject
Language: language is a system of symbols and rules that constitute the method of human communication , either spoken or written , consisting of the use of words in a structural and conventional way.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture refers to the shared beliefs, customs, practices, and values that characterize a particular group or society. It encompasses the ideas, attitudes, behaviors, and artifacts that are passed down from generation to generation within a community.

# data[].attributes.body
Linguistics is the systematic study of the structure and evolution of human language, and it is applicable to every aspect of human endeavor.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The discipline of linguistics focuses on theories of language structure, variation and use, the description and documentation of contemporary languages, and the implications of theories of language for an understanding of the mind and brain, human culture, social behavior, and language learning and teaching.

Phonology and phonetics - the study of the sound systems of languages - deals with the basic utterances in speech. It can be investigated by observing which physical properties of the vocal tract (including the lips and tongue) are used to form distinct linguistic sounds to convey information. Morphology and syntax are concerned with the study of the internal structure of words and sentences. Apart from the study of the sound systems of languages and word and sentence structure, linguists seek to specify the meaning behind words and combinations of words. This investigation is known as semantics. Semanticists also compare the meanings of these combinations when they interact with contextual information, a subfield known as pragmatics.

Linguists investigate how people acquire their knowledge about language, how this knowledge interacts with other cognitive processes, how it varies across speakers and geographic regions, and how to model this knowledge computationally. They study how to represent the structure of the various aspects of language (such as sounds or meaning), how to account for different linguistic patterns theoretically, and how the different components of language interact with each other. Many linguists collect empirical evidence to help them gain insight into a specific language or languages in general. They may conduct research by interacting with children and adults in schools, in the field, and in university labs.

Because of the pervasive influence of language in our everyday lives, work in linguistics interacts in important ways with studies carried out in many other fields, including psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, law, philosophy, computer science, communication, and education. Majors in linguistics find practical outlets for their linguistic training in the computer industry, law and forensics, teaching foreign languages and English as a second language, translation and interpretation, speech pathology, lexicography, and policy-making in government and education. All these fields of employment share an interest in people with highly developed skills in the analysis and use of spoken or written language. The major in linguistics equips students with just such skills.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The discipline of linguistics focuses on theories of language structure, variation and use, the description and documentation of contemporary languages, and the implications of theories of language for an understanding of the mind and brain, human culture, social behavior, and language learning and teaching.

# data[].attributes.body
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general. It encompasses not only the study of sound, grammar and meaning, but also the history of language families, how languages are acquired by children and adults, and how language use is processed in the mind and how it is connected to race and gender.

# data[].attributes.body
Linguistics: the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics.
Linguistic is essentially seen as relating to social and cultural studies because different languages are shaped in social interaction by the speech community.

# data[].attributes.body
Can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, art.

# data[].attributes.body
Is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general. It encompasses not only the study of sound, grammar and meaning, but also the history of language families, how languages are acquired by children and adults, and how language use is processed in the mind and how it is connected to race and gender.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Culture ( KUL-chər) is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.

Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.

A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group. Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change. Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be identified in a social group.

Cultural change, or repositioning, is the reconstruction of a cultural concept of a society. Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies.

Organizations like UNESCO attempt to preserve culture and cultural heritage.

Description

Pygmy music has been polyphonic well before their discovery by non-African explorers of the Baka, Aka, Efe, and other foragers of the Central African forests, in the 1200s, which is at least 200 years before polyphony developed in Europe. Note the multiple lines of singers and dancers. The motifs are independent, with theme and variation interweaving.[4] This type of music is thought to be the first expression of polyphony in world music.

Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies. These include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.

In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been used to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the proletariat and create a false consciousness. Such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.

When used as a count noun, a "culture" is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time. In this sense, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes "culture" is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. " bro culture"), or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture.

The modern term "culture" is based on a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi," using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy was man's natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers after him, " refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human."

In 1986, philosopher Edward S. Casey wrote, "The very word culture meant 'place tilled' in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, 'to inhabit, care for, till, worship' and cultus, 'A cult, especially a religious one.' To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it-to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly."

Culture described by Richard Velkley:

... originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meaning in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of " modern liberalism and Enlightenment." Thus a contrast between "culture" and " civilization" is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such.

In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor, it is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, "Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.

The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time." Terror management theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that provide humans with the basis for perceiving themselves as "person[s] of worth within the world of meaning"-raising themselves above the merely physical aspects of existence, in order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain.

The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively. This ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago and is often thought to be unique to humans. However, some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complicated, abilities for social learning. It is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that are transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form.[citation needed ]

Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, indigenization, and transformation. In this context, modernization could be viewed as adoption of Enlightenment era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the notion of progress. Rein Raud, building on the work of Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey C. Alexander, has proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by their cognitive adequacy and endorsed or not endorsed by the symbolic authority of the cultural community in question.

Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period," driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society.

Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change.

Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.

Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce-or inhibit-social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination to the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th-century. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct borrowing," on the other hand, tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.

Acculturation has different meanings. Still, in this context, it refers to the replacement of traits of one culture with another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation. The transnational flow of culture has played a major role in merging different cultures and sharing thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.

Early modern discourses

German Romanticism

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) formulated an individualist definition of "enlightenment" similar to the concept of bildung: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: " Sapere Aude" ("Dare to be wise!"). In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of Bildung: "For Herder, was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people."

In 1795, the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalist movements-such as the nationalist struggle to create a "Germany" out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire-developed a more inclusive notion of culture as " worldview" ( Weltanschauung). According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between "civilized" and "primitive" or "tribal" cultures.

In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) argued for "the psychic unity of mankind." He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas" ( Elementargedanken); different cultures, or different "folk ideas" ( Völkergedanken), are local modifications of the elementary ideas. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858-1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.

English Romanticism

In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." This concept of culture is also comparable to the German concept of bildung: "...culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."

In practice, culture referred to an elite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine. As these forms were associated with urban life, "culture" was identified with "civilization" (from Latin: civitas, 'city'). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in folklore, which led to identifying a "culture" among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between high culture, namely that of the ruling social group, and low culture. In other words, the idea of "culture" that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.

Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with anarchy; other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted "culture" with "the state of nature." According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized" and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, other critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.

Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people's essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by "the folk," i.e., rural, illiterate, peasants) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as " noble savages" living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.

In 1870 the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832-1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms. In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of religion.

Anthropology

Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor's definition of culture, in the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and in the United States and Canada, archaeology. The term Kulturbrille, or "culture glasses," coined by German American anthropologist Franz Boas, refers to the "lenses" through which a person sees their own culture. Martin Lindstrom asserts that Kulturbrille, which allow a person to make sense of the culture they inhabit, "can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately."

The sociology of culture concerns culture as manifested in society. For sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918), culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." As such, culture in the sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people's way of life. Culture can be either of two types, non-material culture or material culture. Non-material culture refers to the non-physical ideas that individuals have about their culture, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions, while material culture is the physical evidence of a culture in the objects and architecture they make or have made. The term tends to be relevant only in archeological and anthropological studies, but it specifically means all material evidence which can be attributed to culture, past or present.

Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918-1933), where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term Kultursoziologie ('cultural sociology'). Cultural sociology was then reinvented in the English-speaking world as a product of the cultural turn of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may be loosely regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory. Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols. Culture has since become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field. Thus, there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead, look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.

Early researchers and development of cultural sociology

The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology (as shaped by early theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) with the growing discipline of anthropology, wherein researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field lingers in the methods (much of cultural, sociological research is qualitative), in the theories (a variety of critical approaches to sociology are central to current research communities), and in the substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.

Cultural studies

In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism such as Stuart Hall (1932-2014) and Raymond Williams (1921-1988) developed cultural studies. Following nineteenth-century Romantics, they identified culture with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). They saw patterns of consumption and leisure as determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production.

In the United Kingdom, cultural studies focuses largely on the study of popular culture; that is, on the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director. Cultural studies in this sense, then, can be viewed as a limited concentration scoped on the intricacies of consumerism, which belongs to a wider culture sometimes referred to as Western civilization or globalism.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Visual art is one expression of culture.

From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed, it began to combine political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies, and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender. Cultural studies is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television or eating out) in a given culture. It also studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Specifically, culture involves those meanings and practices held independently of reason. Watching television to view a public perspective on a historical event should not be thought of as culture unless referring to the medium of television itself, which may have been selected culturally; however, schoolchildren watching television after school with their friends to "fit in" certainly qualifies since there is no grounded reason for one's participation in this practice.

In the context of cultural studies, a text includes not only written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of culture. Culture, for a cultural-studies researcher, not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups) and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the disciplines of comparative literature and cultural studies.

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies had originated in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly under the influence of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later that of Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as "capitalist" mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the " culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.

In the United States, Lindlof and Taylor write, "cultural studies [were] grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition." The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom.[citation needed ] The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.[citation needed ] Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, the mode and relations of production form the economic base of society, which constantly interacts and influences superstructures, such as culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view comes through in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist, and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is among influential voices at the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.

Petrakis and Kostis (2013) divide cultural background variables into two main groups:

1. The first group covers the variables that represent the "efficiency orientation" of the societies: performance orientation, future orientation, assertiveness, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.

2. The second covers the variables that represent the "social orientation" of societies, i.e., the attitudes and lifestyles of their members. These variables include gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, and human orientation.

In 2016, a new approach to culture was suggested by Rein Raud, who defines culture as the sum of resources available to human beings for making sense of their world and proposes a two-tiered approach, combining the study of texts (all reified meanings in circulation) and cultural practices (all repeatable actions that involve the production, dissemination or transmission of purposes), thus making it possible to re-link anthropological and sociological study of culture with the tradition of textual theory.

Psychology

Cognitive tools suggest a way for people from certain culture to deal with real-life problems, like Suanpan for Chinese to perform mathematical calculation.

Starting in the 1990s, psychological research on culture influence began to grow and challenge the universality assumed in general psychology. Culture psychologists began to try to explore the relationship between emotions and culture, and answer whether the human mind is independent from culture. For example, people from collectivistic cultures, such as the Japanese, suppress their positive emotions more than their American counterparts. Culture may affect the way that people experience and express emotions. On the other hand, some researchers try to look for differences between people's personalities across cultures. As different cultures dictate distinctive norms, culture shock is also studied to understand how people react when they are confronted with other cultures. Cognitive tools may not be accessible or they may function differently cross culture. For example, people who are raised in a culture with an abacus are trained with distinctive reasoning style. Cultural lenses may also make people view the same outcome of events differently. Westerners are more motivated by their successes than their failures, while East Asians are better motivated by the avoidance of failure. Culture is important for psychologists to consider when understanding the human mental operation.

Protection of culture

There are a number of international agreements and national laws relating to the protection of cultural heritage and cultural diversity. UNESCO and its partner organizations such as Blue Shield International coordinate international protection and local implementation. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions deal with the protection of culture. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals with cultural heritage in two ways: it gives people the right to participate in cultural life on the one hand and the right to the protection of their contributions to cultural life on the other.

In the 21st century, the protection of culture has been the focus of increasing activity by national and international organizations. The UN and UNESCO promote cultural preservation and cultural diversity through declarations and legally-binding conventions or treaties. The aim is not to protect a person's property, but rather to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity, especially in the event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target of the attack is the identity of the opponent, which is why symbolic cultural assets become a main target. It is also intended to affect the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and the economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, region or municipality.

Tourism is having an increasing impact on the various forms of culture. On the one hand, this can be physical impact on individual objects or the destruction caused by increasing environmental pollution and, on the other hand, socio-cultural effects on society.

References

Further reading

Barker, C. (2004). The Sage dictionary of cultural studies. Sage.

Deacon, Terrence (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York and London: W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-3930-3838-5.

Holloway Jr. Ralph L. (1969). "Culture: A Human domain". Current Anthropology. 10 (4): 395-412. doi:10.1086/201036. S2CID 144502900.

Hymes, Dell (1969). Reinventing Anthropology.

James, Paul; Szeman, Imre (2010). Globalization and Culture, Vol. 3: Global-Local Consumption. London: Sage Publications.

Tomasello, Michael (1999). "The Human Adaptation for Culture". Annual Review of Anthropology. 28: 509-29. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.509.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1941). "The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language". Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Honor of Edward Sapir.

Taylor, Walter (1948). A Study of Archeology. Memoir 69, American Anthropological Association. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Bastian, Adolf (2009), Encyclopædia Britannica Online

Anker, Guy (2000) [2000]. Global communication without universal civilization, vol.1: Coexisting contemporary civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. INU societal research. Geneva: INU Press. ISBN 978-2-88155-004-1.

Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. Archived November 18, 2017, at the Wayback Machine New York: Macmillan. Third edition, 1882, available online. Retrieved: 2006-06-28.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Press. ISBN 978-0-252-06445-6.

Benedict, Ruth (1934). . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Carhart. Michael C. (2007). The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany, Cambridge, Harvard University press.

Dawkins, R. (1999) [1982]. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-19-288051-2

Geertz, Clifford (1957). "Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example". American Anthropologist. 59: 32-54. doi:10.1525/aa.1957.59.1.02a00040.

Kim, Uichol (2001). "Culture, science and indigenous psychologies: An integrated analysis." In D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of culture and psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press

O'Neil, D. (2006). Cultural Anthropology Tutorials Archived December 4, 2004, at the Wayback Machine, Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marco, California. Retrieved: 2006-07-10.

Reagan, Ronald. "Final Radio Address to the Nation" Archived January 30, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, January 14, 1989. Retrieved June 3, 2006.

Tylor, E.B. (1974) [1871]. Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. New York: Gordon Press. ISBN 978-0-87968-091-6.

UNESCO (2002). Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, issued on International Mother Language Day,

Wilson, Edward O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage. ISBN 978-0-679-76867-8.

Wolfram, Stephen (2002). A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Inc. ISBN 978-1-57955-008-0.

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Culture ( KUL-chər ) is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,morals,law,customs,and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
The mayor elements of culture are symbols, language, norms, values, and artifacts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, , cuisine, social habits, music and arts.

The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition goes a step further, defining culture as shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs and understanding that are learned by socialization. Thus, culture can be seen as the growth of a group identity fostered by social patterns unique to the group.

"Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones and a million other things," Cristina De Rossi, an anthropologist at Barnet and Southgate College in London, told Live Science.

Many countries, such as , , , the , , and are noted for their rich cultures, the customs, traditions, music, art and food being a continual draw for tourists.

The word "culture" derives from a French term, which in turn derives from the "colere," which means to tend to the earth and grow, or cultivation and nurture, according to Arthur Asa Berger. "It shares its etymology with a number of other words related to actively fostering growth," De Rossi said.

Western culture

The term "Western culture" has come to define the culture of European countries as well as those that have been heavily influenced by European immigration, such as the United States, according to Khan University. Western culture has its roots in the Classical Period of the Greco- era (the fourth and fifth centuries B.C.) and the rise of Christianity in the 14th century. Other drivers of Western culture include Latin, Celtic, Germanic and Hellenic ethnic and linguistic groups.

Any number of historical events have helped shape Western culture during the past 2,500 years. The fall of Rome, often pegged to A.D. 476, cleared the way for the establishment of a series of often-warring states in Europe, according to Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, each with their own cultures. The Black Death of the 1300s cut the population of Europe by one-third to one-half, rapidly remaking society. As a result of the , writes Ohio State University historian John L. Brooke, Christianity became stronger in Europe, with more focus on apocalyptic themes. Survivors in the working class gained more power, as elites were forced to pay more for scarce labor. And the disruption of trade routes between East and West set off new exploration, and ultimately, the incursion of Europeans into North and South America.

Today, the influences of Western culture can be seen in almost every country in the world.

Eastern culture

Eastern culture generally refers to the societal norms of countries in Far East Asia (including China, Japan, Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea) and the Indian subcontinent. Like the West, Eastern culture was heavily influenced by religion during its early development, but it was also heavily influenced by the growth and harvesting of rice, according to a research article published in the journal in 2012. In general, in Eastern culture there is less of a distinction between secular society and religious philosophy than there is in the West.

However, this umbrella covers an enormous range of traditions and histories. For example, Buddhism originated in India, but it was largely overtaken by Hinduism after the 12th century, according to Britannica.

As a result, Hinduism became a major driver of culture in India, while Buddhism continued to exert influence in China and Japan. The preexisting cultural ideas in these areas also influenced religion. For example, according to Jiahe Liu and Dongfang Shao, Chinese Buddhism borrowed from the philosophy of Taoism, which emphasizes compassion, frugality and humility.

Centuries of interactions - both peaceful and aggressive - in this region also led to these cultures influencing each other. Japan, for example, controlled or occupied Korea in some form between 1876 and 1945. During this time, many Koreans were pressured or forced into giving up their names for Japanese surnames, according to History.com.

Latin culture

The geographic region encompassing "Latin culture" is widespread. Latin America is typically defined as those parts of Central America, South America and where Spanish or Portuguese are the dominant languages. These are all places that were colonized by or influenced by or Portugal starting in the 1400s. It is thought that French geographers used the term "Latin America" to differentiate between Anglo and Romance (Latin-based) languages, though some historians, such as Michael Gobat, author of "The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy and Race" (American Historical Review, Voll 118, Issue 5, 2013), dispute this.

Latin cultures are thus incredibly diverse, and many blend Indigenous traditions with the Spanish language and Catholicism brought by and Portuguese colonizers. Many of these cultures were also influenced by African cultures due to enslaved Africans being brought to the Americas starting in the 1600s, according to the African American Registery. These influences are particularly strong in Brazil and in Caribbean nations.

Latin culture continues to evolve and spread. A good example is Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, a holiday dedicated to remembering the departed that is celebrated on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2. Day of the Dead dates back to before Christopher Columbus landed in North America, but was moved to its current celebration date by Spanish colonizers, who merged it with the Catholic All Saints Day.

Mexican immigrants to the United States brought the holiday with them, and in the 1970s, artists and activities brought focus to Día de los Muertos as a way of celebrating their Chicano (Mexican-American) heritage, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The holiday is now well-known in the United States.

Middle Eastern culture

Roughly speaking, the Middle East encompasses the Arabian peninsula as well as the eastern Mediterranean. The North African countries of Libya, Egypt and Sudan are also sometimes included, according to Britannica. The term "Middle Eastern culture" is another umbrella that encompasses a huge diversity of cultural practices, religious beliefs and daily habits. The region is the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and is home to dozens of languages, from Arabic to Hebrew to Turkish to Pashto.

While there is significant religious diversity in the Middle East, the predominant religion by numbers is Islam, and Islam has played a large role in the cultural development of the region. Islam originated in what is today Saudi Arabia in the early seventh century. An influential moment for the culture and development of the Middle East came after the death of the religion's founder, Muhammad, in 632, according to the Metropoliton Museum.

Some followers believed the next leader should be one of Muhammad's friends and confidants; others believed leadership must be passed through Muhammad's bloodline. This led to a schism between Shia Muslims, those who believed in the importance of the bloodline, and Sunni Muslims, who believed leadership should not pass through the family. Today, about 85% of Muslims are Sunni, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Their rituals and traditions vary somewhat, and divisions between the two groups often fuel conflict.

Middle Eastern culture has also been shaped by the Ottoman Empire, which ruled a U-shaped ring around the eastern Mediterranean between the 14th and early 20th centuries, according to Britannica. Areas that were part of the Ottoman Empire are known for distinctive architecture drawn from Persian and Islamic influences.

African culture

Africa has the longest history of human habitation of any continent: Humans originated there and began to migrate to other areas of the world around 400,000 years ago, according to the Natural History Museum in London. Tom White, who serves as the museum's senior curator of non-insect invertebrates, and his team were able to discover this by studying Africa's ancient lakes and the animals that lived in them. As of the time of this article, this research provides the oldest evidence for hominin species in the Arabian peninsula.

African culture varies not only between national boundaries, but within them. One of the key features of this culture is the large number of ethnic groups throughout the 54 countries on the continent. For example, Nigeria alone has more than 300 tribes, according to Culture Trip. Africa has imported and exported its culture for centuries; East African trading ports were a crucial link between East and West as early as the seventh century, according to The Field Museum. This led to complex urban centers along the eastern coast, often connected by the movement of raw materials and goods from landlocked parts of the continent.

It would be impossible to characterize all of African culture with one description. Northwest Africa has strong ties to the Middle East, while Sub-Saharan Africa shares historical, physical and social characteristics that are very different from North Africa, according to Britannica .

Some traditional Sub-Saharan African cultures include the Maasai of Tanzania and Kenya, the Zulu of South Africa and the Batwa of Central Africa. The traditions of these cultures evolved in very different environments. The Batwa, for example, are one of a group of ethnicities that traditionally live a forager lifestyle in the rainforest. The Maasai, on the other hand, herd sheep and goats on the open range.

What is cultural appropriation?

Oxford Reference describes cultural appropriation as: "A term used to describe the taking over of creative or artistic forms, themes, or practices by one cultural group from another."

An example might be a person who is not Native American wearing a Native American headdress as a fashion accessory. For example, Victoria's Secret was heavily criticized in 2012 after putting a model in a headdress reminiscent of a Lakota war bonnet, according to . These headdresses are laden with meaningful symbolism, and wearing one was a privilege earned by chieftains or warriors through acts of bravery, according to the Khan Academy. The model also wore turquoise jewelry inspired by designs used by Zuni, Navajo and Hopi tribes in the desert Southwest, illustrating how cultural appropriation can lump together tribes with very different cultures and histories into one stereotyped image.

More recently, in 2019, Gucci faced a similar backlash for selling an item named "the indy full turban" which caused considerable anger from the Sikh community, according to . Harjinder Singh Kukreja, a Sikh restaurateur and influencer, wrote to Gucci on Twitter, stating: "the Sikh Turban is not a hot new accessory for white models but an article of faith for practising Sikhs. Your models have used Turbans as 'hats' whereas practising Sikhs tie them neatly fold-by-fold. Using fake Sikhs/Turbans is worse than selling fake Gucci products."

Constant change

No matter what a culture looks like, one thing is for certain: Cultures change. "Culture appears to have become key in our interconnected world, which is made up of so many ethnically diverse societies, but also riddled by conflicts associated with religion, ethnicity, ethical beliefs, and, essentially, the elements which make up culture," De Rossi said. "But culture is no longer fixed, if it ever was. It is essentially fluid and constantly in motion."

This makes it difficult to define any culture in only one way. While change is inevitable, most people see value in respecting and preserving the past. The United Nations has created a group called The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to identify cultural and natural heritage and to conserve and protect it. Monuments, buildings and sites are covered by the group's protection, according to the international treaty, the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. This treaty was adopted by UNESCO in 1972.
Additional reporting by Live Science Contributors Alina Bradford, Stephanie Pappas and Callum McKelvie.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music and is different all over the world.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture: the collective mental programming of the people in an environment. Culture is not a characteristic of the individuals; it encompasses a number of people who were conditioned by the same education and life experience. When we speak of the culture of a group, a tribe, a geographic region, a national minority, or a nation, culture refers to the collective programming that these people have in common; the programming that is different from the other groups, tribes, regions, minorities or majorities, or nations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Please watch all videos and complete the activities before continuing to Part 1.1

☐ Read the definition of "culture"
☐ Watch YouTube video defining culture
☐ Read & reflect on surface and deep aspects of culture
☐ Read about the cultural iceberg and complete the activity
☐ Reflection Note: Cultural Iceberg explanation
☐ Complete the end of session questions

Identify elements of surface and deep level aspects of culture

List elements of their own cultural identity

Identify at least one inclusive practice that they can use in their work or life on campus

There are many definitions of culture, one of the most simple being: all knowledge and values shared by a group. Geert Hofstede was one of the first scholars to hold a large scale study in order to find out how cultures differ. He defines culture as:

"...the collective mental programming of the people in an environment. Culture is not a characteristic of the individuals; it encompasses a number of people who were conditioned by the same education and life experience. When we speak of the culture of a group, a tribe, a geographic region, a national minority, or a nation, culture refers to the collective programming that these people have in common; the programming that is different from the other groups, tribes, regions, minorities or majorities, or nations" (Geert Hofstede, 1980, p. 43).

Culture rules virtually every aspect of your life and like most people, you are completely unaware of this. If asked, you would likely define culture as music, literature, visual arts, architecture, or language, and you wouldn't be wrong. But you wouldn't be entirely right either. In fact, the things produced by a culture which we perceive with our five senses are simply manifestations of the deeper meaning of culture - what we do, think, and feel. Culture is taught and learned and shared - there is no culture of one. And yet, culture is not monolithic - individuals exist within a culture. Finally, culture is symbolic. For example, a "home", is a physical structure, a familial construct, and a moral reference point - which is distinct from one culture to another. See: Global Affairs Canada.

Source: Olds College OER Development Team. (2015). Professional Communications OER. Olds, Alberta: Campus Alberta. Retrieved from http://www.procomoer.org/.

Let us now see how scholars from diverse fields have been trying to define culture.

Learned: Through active and passive teaching and socialization

Shared: By and throughout groups in society.

Dynamic: This means culture is always changing, shifting, and evolving. It is not stagnant.

Systemic: Culture operates on multiple levels and is deeply ingrained in the structure, functioning, and organizing of society.

Symbolic: Culture affects and determines the meaning and interpretation of actions, words, concepts, and things (symbols).

Culture is a very complex topic, but there is at least one model to make this a lot easier to understand. In this section, we'll examine Edward T. Hall's iceberg model of culture and see what it can teach us.

Culture is often compared to an iceberg that has, as Hall states both visible (or external) and invisible (internal) parts. As practitioners of intercultural communication we want to be aware that 'visible' privileges a sensory interpretation of the elements that is inaccurate and can be an example of exclusive language. From this point forward we will use the terms 'surface' and 'deep' in relation to Hall's cultural iceberg. The elements of culture that we can plainly perceive, such as the way we greet each other, the traditions we celebrate, and the food we eat are some of the surface aspects of culture and are represented by the upper portion of the iceberg. Aspects of culture which are less apparent include our beliefs, values and world views, which influence the surface parts of culture, are represented by the much larger portion of the iceberg underwater, deep culture.

Far below the "water line" is a culture's core values. These are primarily learned ideas of what is good, right, desirable, and acceptable, as well as what is bad, wrong, undesirable, and unacceptable. In many cases, different cultural groups share similar core values (such as "honesty", or "respect", or "family"), but these are often interpreted differently in different situations and incorporated in unique ways into specific attitudes we apply in daily situations. Ultimately, these internal forces become tangible to the casual observer in the form of observable behaviours, such as the words we use, the way we act, the laws we enact, and the ways we communicate with each other.

It is also important to note that the core values of a culture do not change quickly or easily. They are passed on from generation to generation by numerous institutions that surround us. These institutions of influence are powerful forces that guide us and teach us. So, like an iceberg, there are things that we can perceive and describe easily... but there are also many deeply rooted ideas that we can only understand by analyzing values, studying institutions, and in many cases, reflecting on our own core values.

Source: www.languageandculture.com
Source: Beyond Culture (1976) by Edward T. Hall

Importance of the Cultural Iceberg

It is important to appreciate and understand the surface and deep elements of culture in order to:

Avoid cultural insensitivity

Improve cultural awareness and respect

Increase the ability to navigate and understand different cultures

Inform good cross-cultural practices and techniques

Avoid "crashing" into the cultural icebergs of others

The Cultural Iceberg Activity

In the activity below, practice identifying the surface and deep elements of culture by sorting the given aspects of culture by dividing them into surface level (tip of the iceberg, easy to notice elements) and deep level (below the water, difficult to notice elements) of culture.

You can complete this activity in any way that you prefer - Word document, PDF, PPT, visual, audio, video, etc. We have also provided you with an online form below so that you can capture your reflections and export a copy of your work.

You've completed: 1.0 What is Culture? Now that we have an understanding of the identifiable aspects of culture, you can move on to 1.1 Exploring Identity and how your identity is informed by those aspects. You can access 1.1 Exploring Identity from the menu at the left or the navigation at the bottom of this page.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Please watch all videos and complete the activities before continuing to Part 1.1 ☐ Read the definition of "culture" ☐ Watch YouTube video defining culture ☐ Read & reflect on surface and deep aspects of culture ☐ Read about the cultural iceberg and complete the activity ☐ Reflection Note: Cultural

# data[].attributes.body
Language is a system of communication consisting of sounds,  words, and grammar.

# data[].attributes.body
Linguistic: is the scientific study of language.  Linguists (experts in linguistics) work on specific languages, but their primary goal is to understand the nature of language in general by asking questions such as:

What distinguishes human language from other animal communication systems?

What features are common to all human languages?

How are the modes of linguistic communication (speech, writing, sign language) related to each other?

How is language related to other types of human behavior?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguists (experts in linguistics) work on specific languages, but their primary goal is to understand the nature of language in general by asking questions such as:

What distinguishes human language from other animal communication systems?

What features are common to all human languages?

How are the modes of linguistic communication (speech, writing, sign language) related to each other?

How is language related to other types of human behavior?

The main goal of linguistics, like all other intellectual disciplines, is to increase our knowledge and understanding of the world. Since language is universal and fundamental to all human interactions, the knowledge attained in linguistics has many practical applications. Linguists, with some training in other appropriate disciplines, are thus prepared to seek answers to questions such as:

How can a previously unstudied language be analyzed and written?

How can foreign languages best be taught and learned?

How can speech be synthesized on a computer or how can a computer be programmed to understand human speech?

How can the language problems of people with speech abnormalities be analyzed and rectified?

How are linguistic issues in legal matters to be handled?

The Sub-Fields of Linguistics

Language is a phenomenon with many layers, from the sounds that speakers produce to the meanings that those sounds express. The field of Linguistics is comprised of several sub-fields. Most professional linguists become specialists in one or more of these sub-fields. The major ones are:

Phonetics

The study of speech sounds. Phoneticians study both the production of speech sounds by the human speech organs ( articulatory phonetics) and the properties of the sounds themselves ( acoustic phonetics). Phoneticians are concerned with such questions as:

What are the sounds, from among all those that humans could make, that actually exist in the world's languages?

What specially defines different "accents"?

Can speakers be identified by "voiceprints"?

What are the properties of sounds that would apply in computerized speech synthesis?

Phonology

The study of language sound systems. Phonologists are concerned with questions such as:

What sounds contrast in one language but not another (answers to such questions explain why Spanish speakers have trouble with the difference between English sh and ch, or why English speakers have trouble with the different "u" sounds in French words like rue 'street' and roue 'wheel'.)?

What sounds of a language can or cannot occur one after the other (for example, why can words begin in st- in English but not in Spanish)?

How do poets or writers or song lyrics intuitively know how to match the rhythm of speech to the abstract rhythmic pattern of a poetic or musical meter?

Morphology

The study of word structure. Morphologists examine such questions as:

To what extent are ways of forming words "productive" or not (e.g. why do English speakers say arrival and amusement but not *arrivement and *amusal)?

What determines when words change form (for example, why does English have to add -er to adjectives when making comparisons, but Hebrew does not add any equivalent)?

How can humans program computers to recognize the "root" of a word separated from its "affixes" (e.g. how could a computer recognize walk, walks, walking, and walked as the "same" word)?

Syntax

The study of how linguistic units larger than the word are constructed. Syntacticians address such questions as:

How can the number of sentences that speakers can create be infinite in number even though the number of words in any language is finite?

What makes a sentence like visiting relatives can be boring ambiguous?

Why would English speakers judge a sentence like colorless green ideas sleep furiously to be "grammatical" even though it is nonsensical?

How can languages express the same thoughts even though they construct their sentences in different ways (e.g. Why does English I saw them there mean the same thing as French je les y ai vus even though the order of elements in French is I them there have seen)?

How can humans program a computer to analyze the structure of sentences?

Semantics

The study of meaning. Semanticists answer such questions as:

How do speakers know what words mean (e.g. How does one know where red stops and orange starts)?

What is the basis of metaphors (e.g. Why is my car is a lemon a "good" metaphor but my car is a cabbage is not)?

What makes sentences like I'm looking for a tall student or the student I am looking for must be tall have more than one meaning?

In a sentence like I regret that he lied, how do we know that, in fact, he did lie?

How many meanings can be found in a sentence like three students read three books and why do just those meanings exist?

In addition to these sub-fields, there are a number of other sub-fields that cross-cut them:
Historical linguistics

The study of how languages change over time, addressing such questions as why modern English is different form Old English and Middle English or what it means to say that English and German are "more closely related" to each other than English and French.

Sociolinguistics

The study of how language is used in society, addressing such questions as what makes some dialects more "prestigious" than others, where slang comes from and why it arises, or what happens when two languages come together in "bilingual" communities.

Psycholinguistics

The study of how language is processed in the mind, addressing such questions as how we can hear a string of language noises and make sense of them, how children can learn to speak and understand the language of their environment as quickly and effortlessly as they do, or how people with pathological language problems differ from people who have "normal" language.

Neurolinguistics

The study of the actual encoding of language in the brain, addressing such questions as what parts of the brain different aspects of language are stored in, how language is actually stored, what goes on physically in the brain when language is processed, or how the brain compensates when certain areas are damaged.

Computational linguistics

Learning and understanding a language involves computing the properties of that language that are described in its phonology, syntax, and semantics. The challenge of describing this process connects linguistics with computational issues at a very fundamental level. How could syntactic structures be computed from spoken language, how are semantic relations recognized, and how could these computational skills be acquired?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What is Linguistics? - Department of Linguistics - UCLA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguists (experts in linguistics) work on specific languages, but their primary goal is to understand the nature of language in general by asking questions such as: What distinguishes human language from other animal communication systems? What features are common to all human languages?

# data[].attributes.headline
Culture: Culture is the values, beliefs, behavior, and material objects that together form people's way of life.

# data[].attributes.subject
Culture: Culture is the values, beliefs, behavior, and material objects that together form people's way of life.

# data[].attributes.body
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture is the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. Also, the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time.

# data[].attributes.body
Century Dictionary (1897) defines this as: "The whole body of uttered signs employed and understood by a given community as expressions of its thoughts; the aggregate of words, and of methods of their combination into sentences, used in a community for communication and record and for carrying on the processes of thought."

https://www.etymonline.com/word/language

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linguistics is the study of language - how it is put together and how it functions. Various building blocks of different types and sizes are combined to make up a language. Sounds are brought together and sometimes when this happens, they change their form and do interesting things.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Definitions of language

Many definitions of language have been proposed. Henry Sweet, an English phonetician and language scholar, stated: "Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts." The American linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager formulated the following definition: "A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates." Any succinct definition of language makes a number of presuppositions and begs a number of questions. The first, for example, puts excessive weight on "thought," and the second uses "arbitrary" in a specialized, though legitimate, way.

A number of considerations (marked in italics below) enter into a proper understanding of language as a subject:

Every physiologically and mentally typical person acquires in childhood the ability to make use, as both sender and receiver, of a system of communication that comprises a circumscribed set of symbols (e.g., sounds, gestures, or written or typed characters). In spoken language, this symbol set consists of noises resulting from movements of certain organs within the throat and mouth. In signed languages, these symbols may be hand or body movements, gestures, or facial expressions. By means of these symbols, people are able to impart information, to express feelings and emotions, to influence the activities of others, and to comport themselves with varying degrees of friendliness or hostility toward persons who make use of substantially the same set of symbols.

Different systems of communication constitute different languages; the degree of difference needed to establish a different language cannot be stated exactly. No two people speak exactly alike; hence, one is able to recognize the voices of friends over the telephone and to keep distinct a number of unseen speakers in a radio broadcast. Yet, clearly, no one would say that they speak different languages. Generally, systems of communication are recognized as different languages if they cannot be understood without specific learning by both parties, though the precise limits of mutual intelligibility are hard to draw and belong on a scale rather than on either side of a definite dividing line. Substantially different systems of communication that may impede but do not prevent mutual comprehension are called dialects of a language. In order to describe in detail the actual different language patterns of individuals, the term idiolect, meaning the habits of expression of a single person, has been coined.

Typically, people acquire a single language initially-their first language, or native tongue, the language used by those with whom, or by whom, they are brought up from infancy. Subsequent "second" languages are learned to different degrees of competence under various conditions. Complete mastery of two languages is designated as bilingualism; in many cases-such as upbringing by parents using different languages at home or being raised within a multilingual community-children grow up as bilinguals. In traditionally monolingual cultures, the learning, to any extent, of a second or other language is an activity superimposed on the prior mastery of one's first language and is a different process intellectually.

Language, as described above, is species-specific to human beings. Other members of the animal kingdom have the ability to communicate, through vocal noises or by other means, but the most important single feature characterizing human language (that is, every individual language), against every known mode of animal communication, is its infinite productivity and creativity. Human beings are unrestricted in what they can communicate; no area of experience is accepted as necessarily incommunicable, though it may be necessary to adapt one's language in order to cope with new discoveries or new modes of thought. Animal communication systems are by contrast very tightly circumscribed in what may be communicated. Indeed, displaced reference, the ability to communicate about things outside immediate temporal and spatial contiguity, which is fundamental to speech, is found elsewhere only in the so-called language of bees. Bees are able, by carrying out various conventionalized movements (referred to as bee dances) in or near the hive, to indicate to others the locations and strengths of food sources. But food sources are the only known theme of this communication system. Surprisingly, however, this system, nearest to human language in function, belongs to a species remote from humanity in the animal kingdom. On the other hand, the animal performance superficially most like human speech, the mimicry of parrots and of some other birds that have been kept in the company of humans, is wholly derivative and serves no independent communicative function. Humankind's nearest relatives among the primates, though possessing a vocal physiology similar to that of humans, have not developed anything like a spoken language. Attempts to teach sign language to chimpanzees and other apes through imitation have achieved limited success, though the interpretation of the significance of ape signing ability remains controversial.

In most accounts, the primary purpose of language is to facilitate communication, in the sense of transmission of information from one person to another. However, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies have drawn attention to a range of other functions for language. Among these is the use of language to express a national or local identity (a common source of conflict in situations of multiethnicity around the world, such as in Belgium, India, and Quebec). Also important are the "ludic" (playful) function of language-encountered in such phenomena as puns, riddles, and crossword puzzles-and the range of functions seen in imaginative or symbolic contexts, such as poetry, drama, and religious expression.

Language interacts with every aspect of human life in society, and it can be understood only if it is considered in relation to society. This article attempts to survey language in this light and to consider its various functions and the purposes it can and has been made to serve. Because each language is both a working system of communication in the period and in the community wherein it is used and also the product of its history and the source of its future development, any account of language must consider it from both these points of view.

The science of language is known as linguistics. It includes what are generally distinguished as descriptive linguistics and historical linguistics. Linguistics is now a highly technical subject; it embraces, both descriptively and historically, such major divisions as phonetics, grammar (including syntax and morphology), semantics, and pragmatics, dealing in detail with these various aspects of language.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Language | Definition, Types, Characteristics, Development, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Language, a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.

# data[].attributes.body
language, a system of conventionalspoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which humanbeings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Defining Culture and Why It Matters to Sociologists

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What would you say if someone asked you, “What is culture?” Sociologists have the answer. Find out more, including why culture matters to sociologists.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Each human language is a complex of knowledge and abilities enabling speakers of the language to communicate with each other, to express ideas, hypotheses, emotions, desires, and all the other things that need expressing. Linguistics is the study of these knowledge systems in all their aspects: how is such a knowledge system structured, how is it acquired, how is it used in the production and comprehension of messages, how does it change over time? Linguists consequently are concerned with a number of particular questions about the nature of language. What properties do all human languages have in common? How do languages differ, and to what extent are the differences systematic, i.e. can we find patterns in the differences? How do children acquire such complete knowledge of a language in such a short time? What are the ways in which languages can change over time, and are there limitations to how languages change? What is the nature of the cognitive processes that come into play when we produce and understand language?

The part of linguistics that is concerned with the structure of language is divided into a number of subfields:

Phonetics - the study of speech sounds in their physical aspects

Phonology - the study of speech sounds in their cognitive aspects

Morphology - the study of the formation of words

Syntax - the study of the formation of sentences

Semantics - the study of meaning

Pragmatics - the study of language use

Aside from language structure, other perspectives on language are represented in specialized or interdisciplinary branches:

Historical Linguistics

Sociolinguistics

Psycholinguistics

Ethnolinguistics (or Anthropological Linguistics)

Dialectology

Computational Linguistics

Neurolinguistics

Because language is such a central feature of being a human, Linguistics has intellectual connections and overlaps with many other disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Some of the closest connections are with Philosophy, Literature, Language Pedagogy, Psychology, Sociology, Physics (acoustics), Biology (anatomy, neuroscience), Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Health Sciences (Aphasia, Speech Therapy).

The main purpose of the study of Linguistics in an academic environment is the advancement of knowledge. However, because of the centrality of language in human interaction and behavior, the knowledge gained through the study of linguistics has many practical consequences and uses. Graduates of undergraduate and graduate programs in Linguistics apply their training in many diverse areas, including language pedagogy, speech pathology, speech synthesis, natural language interfaces, search engines, machine translation, forensics, naming, and of course all forms of writing, editing, and publishing. Perhaps the most widely appreciated application was contributed by UCSC Linguistics alumnus Marc Okrand, who invented the Klingon language for Star Trek.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Each human language is a complex of knowledge and abilities enabling speakers of the language to communicate with each other, to express ideas, hypotheses, emotions, desires, and all the other things that need expressing.

# data[].attributes.body
Is the scientific study of language. It entails the comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language — cognitive, social, environmental, biological as well as structural.

# data[].attributes.body
Generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance. Cultures can be "understood as systems of symbols and meanings that even their creators contest, that lack fixed boundaries, that are constantly in flux, and that interact and compete with one another." Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, art. norms of behavior, such as law and morality, and systems of belief.

# data[].attributes.body
Edward B Tylor: culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

https://patnawomenscollege.in/upload/e-content/culture.pdf

# data[].attributes.body
When you learn a new language, it not only involves learning its alphabet, the word arrangement and the rules of grammar, but also learning about the specific society’s customs and behavior. When learning or teaching a language, it is important that the culture where the language belongs be referenced, because language is very much ingrained in the culture.

# data[].attributes.body
A system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.

# data[].attributes.body
Linguistics is the study of language, how it is put together and how it functions . Various building blocks of different types of sizes are combined to make up a language.

# data[].attributes.body
What is language?
the principal method of human communication, consisting of words used in a structured and conventional way and conveyed by speech, writing, or gesture.

# data[].attributes.body
What is Culture?
all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The discipline of linguistics focuses on theories of language structure, variation and use, the description and documentation of contemporary languages, and the implications of theories of language for an understanding of the mind and brain, human culture, social behavior, and language learning and teaching.

Phonology and phonetics - the study of the sound systems of languages - deals with the basic utterances in speech. It can be investigated by observing which physical properties of the vocal tract (including the lips and tongue) are used to form distinct linguistic sounds to convey information. Morphology and syntax are concerned with the study of the internal structure of words and sentences. Apart from the study of the sound systems of languages and word and sentence structure, linguists seek to specify the meaning behind words and combinations of words. This investigation is known as semantics. Semanticists also compare the meanings of these combinations when they interact with contextual information, a subfield known as pragmatics.

Linguists investigate how people acquire their knowledge about language, how this knowledge interacts with other cognitive processes, how it varies across speakers and geographic regions, and how to model this knowledge computationally. They study how to represent the structure of the various aspects of language (such as sounds or meaning), how to account for different linguistic patterns theoretically, and how the different components of language interact with each other. Many linguists collect empirical evidence to help them gain insight into a specific language or languages in general. They may conduct research by interacting with children and adults in schools, in the field, and in university labs.

Because of the pervasive influence of language in our everyday lives, work in linguistics interacts in important ways with studies carried out in many other fields, including psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, law, philosophy, computer science, communication, and education. Majors in linguistics find practical outlets for their linguistic training in the computer industry, law and forensics, teaching foreign languages and English as a second language, translation and interpretation, speech pathology, lexicography, and policy-making in government and education. All these fields of employment share an interest in people with highly developed skills in the analysis and use of spoken or written language. The major in linguistics equips students with just such skills.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The discipline of linguistics focuses on theories of language structure, variation and use, the description and documentation of contemporary languages, and the implications of theories of language for an understanding of the mind and brain, human culture, social behavior, and language learning and teaching.

# data[].attributes.body
Is a term for any complex communication system used by humans that consists of words and phrases that, when combined, can create infinite variable utterances. How humans initially developed language is not wholly clear and is something that linguists are still researching.

Most humans learn at least one language in early childhood. If a person lacks exposure to language as a young child, they will never be able to fluently learn a language as an adult because of how human brain development works.

# data[].attributes.body
We know now that Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It’s also important to know that linguistics is one member of the broad field that is known as cognitive science.

https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Courses/Canada_College/ENGL_LING_200_Introduction_to_Linguistics/01%3A_Introduction-_What_is_language/1.01%3A_What_is_linguistics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.

Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli - for example, writing, whistling, signing, or braille. In other words, human language is modality-independent, but written or signed language is the way to inscribe or encode the natural human speech or gestures.

Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral, manual and tactile languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.

The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Critical examinations of languages, such as philosophy of language, the relationships between language and thought, how words represent experience, etc., have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greek civilization. Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) have argued that language originated from emotions, while others like Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) have argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought. Twentieth century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) argued that philosophy is really the study of language itself. Major figures in contemporary linguistics of these times include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.

Language is thought to have gradually diverged from earlier primate communication systems when early hominins acquired the ability to form a theory of mind and shared intentionality. This development is sometimes thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative and social functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently by approximately three years old. Language and culture are codependent. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language has social uses such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as use for social grooming and entertainment.

Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family; in contrast, a language that has been demonstrated to not have any living or non-living relationship with another language is called a language isolate. There are also many unclassified languages whose relationships have not been established, and spurious languages may have not existed at all. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100.

Definitions

The English word * language derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s "tongue, speech, language" through Latin lingua, "language; tongue", and Old French language. The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers, and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as formally defined computer languages used for computer programming. Unlike conventional human languages, a formal language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. This article specifically concerns the properties of natural human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics.

As an object of linguistic study, "language" has two primary meanings: an abstract concept, and a specific linguistic system, e.g. " French". The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined the modern discipline of linguistics, first explicitly formulated the distinction using the French word language for language as a concept, langue as a specific instance of a language system, and parole for the concrete usage of speech in a particular language.

When speaking of language as a general concept, definitions can be used which stress different aspects of the phenomenon. These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they also inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory. Debates about the nature and origin of language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers such as Gorgias and Plato debated the relation between words, concepts and reality. Gorgias argued that language could represent neither the objective experience nor human experience, and that communication and truth were therefore impossible. Plato maintained that communication is possible because language represents ideas and concepts that exist independently of, and prior to, language.

During the Enlightenment and its debates about human origins, it became fashionable to speculate about the origin of language. Thinkers such as Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder argued that language had originated in the instinctive expression of emotions, and that it was originally closer to music and poetry than to the logical expression of rational thought. Rationalist philosophers such as Kant and René Descartes held the opposite view. Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers began to wonder about the role of language in shaping our experiences of the world - asking whether language simply reflects the objective structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that in turn impose structure on our experience of the objective world. This led to the question of whether philosophical problems are really firstly linguistic problems. The resurgence of the view that language plays a significant role in the creation and circulation of concepts, and that the study of philosophy is essentially the study of language, is associated with what has been called the linguistic turn and philosophers such as Wittgenstein in 20th-century philosophy. These debates about language in relation to meaning and reference, cognition and consciousness remain active today.

Mental faculty, organ or instinct

One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and to produce and understand utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans, and it emphasizes the biological basis for the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain. Proponents of the view that the drive to language acquisition is innate in humans argue that this is supported by the fact that all cognitively normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible will acquire language without formal instruction. Languages may even develop spontaneously in environments where people live or grow up together without a common language; for example, creole languages and spontaneously developed sign languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This view, which can be traced back to the philosophers Kant and Descartes, understands language to be largely innate, for example, in Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, or American philosopher Jerry Fodor's extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied in studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.

Formal symbolic system

Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, and his structuralism remains foundational for many approaches to language.

Some proponents of Saussure's view of language have advocated a formal approach which studies language structure by identifying its basic elements and then by presenting a formal account of the rules according to which the elements combine in order to form words and sentences. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, the originator of the generative theory of grammar, who has defined language as the construction of sentences that can be generated using transformational grammars. Chomsky considers these rules to be an innate feature of the human mind and to constitute the rudiments of what language is. By way of contrast, such transformational grammars are also commonly used in formal logic, in formal linguistics, and in applied computational linguistics. In the philosophy of language, the view of linguistic meaning as residing in the logical relations between propositions and reality was developed by philosophers such as Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, and other formal logicians.

Tool for communication

A conversation in American Sign Language

Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans to exchange verbal or symbolic utterances. This definition stresses the social functions of language and the fact that humans use it to express themselves and to manipulate objects in their environment. Functional theories of grammar explain grammatical structures by their communicative functions, and understand the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which grammar was "tailored" to serve the communicative needs of its users.

This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive, and interactive frameworks, as well as in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as dynamic phenomena, as structures that are always in the process of changing as they are employed by their speakers. This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, or the classification of languages according to structural features, as it can be shown that processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology. In the philosophy of language, the view of pragmatics as being central to language and meaning is often associated with Wittgenstein's later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as J.L. Austin, Paul Grice, John Searle, and W.O. Quine.

Distinctive features of human language

A number of features, many of which were described by Charles Hockett and called design features set human language apart from communication used by non-human animals.

Communication systems used by other animals such as bees or apes are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited, number of possible ideas that can be expressed. In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. This is possible because human language is based on a dual code, in which a finite number of elements which are meaningless in themselves (e.g. sounds, letters or gestures) can be combined to form an infinite number of larger units of meaning (words and sentences). However, one study has demonstrated that an Australian bird, the chestnut-crowned babbler, is capable of using the same acoustic elements in different arrangements to create two functionally distinct vocalizations. Additionally, pied babblers have demonstrated the ability to generate two functionally distinct vocalisations composed of the same sound type, which can only be distinguished by the number of repeated elements.

Several species of animals have proved to be able to acquire forms of communication through social learning: for instance a bonobo named Kanzi learned to express itself using a set of symbolic lexigrams. Similarly, many species of birds and whales learn their songs by imitating other members of their species. However, while some animals may acquire large numbers of words and symbols, none have been able to learn as many different signs as are generally known by an average 4 year old human, nor have any acquired anything resembling the complex grammar of human language.

Human languages differ from animal communication systems in that they employ grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun and verb, present and past, which may be used to express exceedingly complex meanings. It is distinguished by the property of recursivity: for example, a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase (as in "[[the chimpanzee]'s lips]") or a clause can contain another clause (as in "[I see [the dog is running]]"). Human language is the only known natural communication system whose adaptability may be referred to as modality independent. This means that it can be used not only for communication through one channel or medium, but through several. For example, spoken language uses the auditive modality, whereas sign languages and writing use the visual modality, and braille writing uses the tactile modality.

Human language is unusual in being able to refer to abstract concepts and to imagined or hypothetical events as well as events that took place in the past or may happen in the future. This ability to refer to events that are not at the same time or place as the speech event is called displacement, and while some animal communication systems can use displacement (such as the communication of bees that can communicate the location of sources of nectar that are out of sight), the degree to which it is used in human language is also considered unique.

Theories about the origin of language differ in regard to their basic assumptions about what language is. Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These theories can be called continuity-based theories. The opposite viewpoint is that language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. These theories can be defined as discontinuity-based. Similarly, theories based on the generative view of language pioneered by Noam Chomsky see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, whereas functionalist theories see it as a system that is largely cultural, learned through social interaction.

Continuity-based theories are held by a majority of scholars, but they vary in how they envision this development. Those who see language as being mostly innate, such as psychologist Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition, whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as psychologist Michael Tomasello, see it as having developed from animal communication in primates: either gestural or vocal communication to assist in cooperation. Other continuity-based models see language as having developed from music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. A prominent proponent of this view is archaeologist Steven Mithen. Stephen Anderson states that the age of spoken languages is estimated at 60,000 to 100,000 years and that:

Researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it plausible to suggest that language was invented only once, and that all modern spoken languages are thus in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered ... because of limitations on the methods available for reconstruction.

Because language emerged in the early prehistory of man, before the existence of any written records, its early development has left no historical traces, and it is believed that no comparable processes can be observed today. Theories that stress continuity often look at animals to see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be seen as analogous to what pre-human language must have been like. Early human fossils can be inspected for traces of physical adaptation to language use or pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour. Among the signs in human fossils that may suggest linguistic abilities are: the size of the brain relative to body mass, the presence of a larynx capable of advanced sound production and the nature of tools and other manufactured artifacts.

It was mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general. However, a 2017 study on Ardipithecus ramidus challenges this belief. Scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of the genus some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) while others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago), and the development of language proper with anatomically modern Homo sapiens with the Upper Paleolithic revolution less than 100,000 years ago.

Chomsky is one prominent proponent of a discontinuity-based theory of human language origins. He suggests that for scholars interested in the nature of language, "talk about the evolution of the language capacity is beside the point." Chomsky proposes that perhaps "some random mutation took place [...] and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain." Though cautioning against taking this story literally, Chomsky insists that "it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language."

William Jones discovered the family relation between Latin and Sanskrit, laying the ground for the discipline of historical linguistics.

Subdisciplines

The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to linguistics. For example, descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single languages, theoretical linguistics develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of language based on data from the various extant human languages, sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in turn the study of the social functions of language and grammatical description, neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain and allows the experimental testing of theories, computational linguistics builds on theoretical and descriptive linguistics to construct computational models of language often aimed at processing natural language or at testing linguistic hypotheses, and historical linguistics relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the comparative method.

Early history

Ferdinand de Saussure developed the structuralist approach to studying language.

The formal study of language is often considered to have started in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. However, Sumerian scribes already studied the differences between Sumerian and Akkadian grammar around 1900 BC. Subsequent grammatical traditions developed in all of the ancient cultures that adopted writing.

In the 17th century AD, the French Port-Royal Grammarians developed the idea that the grammars of all languages were a reflection of the universal basics of thought, and therefore that grammar was universal. In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by British philologist and expert on ancient India William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics. The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Early in the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them.

By introducing a distinction between diachronic and synchronic analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline of linguistics. Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still fundamental in many contemporary linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm, and the Langue-parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system ( langue), from language as a concrete manifestation of this system ( parole).

Modern linguistics

Noam Chomsky is one of the most important linguistic theorists of the 20th century.

In opposition to the formal theories of the generative school, functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, its structures are best analyzed and understood by reference to their functions. Formal theories of grammar seek to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations, while functional theories seek to define the functions performed by language and then relate them to the linguistic elements that carry them out. The framework of cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms of the concepts (which are sometimes universal, and sometimes specific to a particular language) which underlie its forms. Cognitive linguistics is primarily concerned with how the mind creates meaning through language.

Physiological and neural architecture of language and speech

Speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures. The production of spoken language depends on sophisticated capacities for controlling the lips, tongue and other components of the vocal apparatus, the ability to acoustically decode speech sounds, and the neurological apparatus required for acquiring and producing language. The study of the genetic bases for human language is at an early stage: the only gene that has definitely been implicated in language production is FOXP2, which may cause a kind of congenital language disorder if affected by mutations.

Language Areas of the brain.

The brain is the coordinating center of all linguistic activity; it controls both the production of linguistic cognition and of meaning and the mechanics of speech production. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the neurological bases for language is quite limited, though it has advanced considerably with the use of modern imaging techniques. The discipline of linguistics dedicated to studying the neurological aspects of language is called neurolinguistics.

Early work in neurolinguistics involved the study of language in people with brain lesions, to see how lesions in specific areas affect language and speech. In this way, neuroscientists in the 19th century discovered that two areas in the brain are crucially implicated in language processing. The first area is Wernicke's area, which is in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere. People with a lesion in this area of the brain develop receptive aphasia, a condition in which there is a major impairment of language comprehension, while speech retains a natural-sounding rhythm and a relatively normal sentence structure. The second area is Broca's area, in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. People with a lesion to this area develop expressive aphasia, meaning that they know what they want to say, they just cannot get it out. They are typically able to understand what is being said to them, but unable to speak fluently. Other symptoms that may be present in expressive aphasia include problems with word repetition. The condition affects both spoken and written language. Those with this aphasia also exhibit ungrammatical speech and show inability to use syntactic information to determine the meaning of sentences. Both expressive and receptive aphasia also affect the use of sign language, in analogous ways to how they affect speech, with expressive aphasia causing signers to sign slowly and with incorrect grammar, whereas a signer with receptive aphasia will sign fluently, but make little sense to others and have difficulties comprehending others' signs. This shows that the impairment is specific to the ability to use language, not to the physiology used for speech production.

With technological advances in the late 20th century, neurolinguists have also incorporated non-invasive techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrophysiology to study language processing in individuals without impairments.

Anatomy of speech

The sound of speech can be analyzed into a combination of segmental and suprasegmental elements. The segmental elements are those that follow each other in sequences, which are usually represented by distinct letters in alphabetic scripts, such as the Roman script. In free flowing speech, there are no clear boundaries between one segment and the next, nor usually are there any audible pauses between them. Segments therefore are distinguished by their distinct sounds which are a result of their different articulations, and can be either vowels or consonants. Suprasegmental phenomena encompass such elements as stress, phonation type, voice timbre, and prosody or intonation, all of which may have effects across multiple segments.

Consonants and vowel segments combine to form syllables, which in turn combine to form utterances; these can be distinguished phonetically as the space between two inhalations. Acoustically, these different segments are characterized by different formant structures, that are visible in a spectrogram of the recorded sound wave. Formants are the amplitude peaks in the frequency spectrum of a specific sound.

Vowels are those sounds that have no audible friction caused by the narrowing or obstruction of some part of the upper vocal tract. They vary in quality according to the degree of lip aperture and the placement of the tongue within the oral cavity. Vowels are called when the lips are relatively closed, as in the pronunciation of the vowel [i] (English "ee"), or when the lips are relatively open, as in the vowel [a] (English "ah"). If the tongue is located towards the back of the mouth, the quality changes, creating vowels such as [u] (English "oo"). The quality also changes depending on whether the lips are rounded as opposed to unrounded, creating distinctions such as that between [i] (unrounded front vowel such as English "ee") and [y] ( rounded front vowel such as German "ü").

Consonants are those sounds that have audible friction or closure at some point within the upper vocal tract. Consonant sounds vary by place of articulation, i.e. the place in the vocal tract where the airflow is obstructed, commonly at the lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, palate, velum, uvula, or glottis. Each place of articulation produces a different set of consonant sounds, which are further distinguished by manner of articulation, or the kind of friction, whether full closure, in which case the consonant is called or , or different degrees of aperture creating fricatives and approximants. Consonants can also be either voiced or unvoiced, depending on whether the vocal cords are set in vibration by airflow during the production of the sound. Voicing is what separates English [s] in bus ( unvoiced sibilant) from [z] in buzz ( voiced sibilant).

Some speech sounds, both vowels and consonants, involve release of air flow through the nasal cavity, and these are called or sounds. Other sounds are defined by the way the tongue moves within the mouth such as the l-sounds (called , because the air flows along both sides of the tongue), and the r-sounds (called ).

By using these speech organs, humans can produce hundreds of distinct sounds: some appear very often in the world's languages, whereas others are much more common in certain language families, language areas, or even specific to a single language.

Human languages display considerable plasticity in their deployment of two fundamental modes: oral (speech and mouthing) and manual (sign and gesture). For example, it is common for oral language to be accompanied by gesture, and for sign language to be accompanied by mouthing. In addition, some language communities use both modes to convey lexical or grammatical meaning, each mode complementing the other. Such bimodal use of language is especially common in genres such as story-telling (with Plains Indian Sign Language and Australian Aboriginal sign languages used alongside oral language, for example), but also occurs in mundane conversation. For instance, many Australian languages have a rich set of case suffixes that provide details about the instrument used to perform an action. Others lack such grammatical precision in the oral mode, but supplement it with gesture to convey that information in the sign mode. In Iwaidja, for example, 'he went out for fish using a torch' is spoken as simply "he-hunted fish torch", but the word for 'torch' is accompanied by a gesture indicating that it was held. In another example, the ritual language Damin had a heavily reduced oral vocabulary of only a few hundred words, each of which was very general in meaning, but which were supplemented by gesture for greater precision (e.g., the single word for fish, l*i, was accompanied by a gesture to indicate the kind of fish).

Secondary modes of language, by which a fundamental mode is conveyed in a different medium, include writing (including braille), sign (in manually coded language), whistling and drumming. Tertiary modes - such as semaphore, Morse code and spelling alphabets - convey the secondary mode of writing in a different medium. For some extinct languages that are maintained for ritual or liturgical purposes, writing may be the primary mode, with speech secondary.

When described as a system of symbolic communication, language is traditionally seen as consisting of three parts: signs, meanings, and a code connecting signs with their meanings. The study of the process of semiosis, how signs and meanings are combined, used, and interpreted is called semiotics. Signs can be composed of sounds, gestures, letters, or symbols, depending on whether the language is spoken, signed, or written, and they can be combined into complex signs, such as words and phrases. When used in communication, a sign is encoded and transmitted by a sender through a channel to a receiver who decodes it.

Ancient Tamil inscription at Thanjavur

Some of the properties that define human language as opposed to other communication systems are: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, meaning that there is no predictable connection between a linguistic sign and its meaning; the duality of the linguistic system, meaning that linguistic structures are built by combining elements into larger structures that can be seen as layered, e.g. how sounds build words and words build phrases; the discreteness of the elements of language, meaning that the elements out of which linguistic signs are constructed are discrete units, e.g. sounds and words, that can be distinguished from each other and rearranged in different patterns; and the productivity of the linguistic system, meaning that the finite number of linguistic elements can be combined into a theoretically infinite number of combinations.

The rules by which signs can be combined to form words and phrases are called syntax or grammar. The meaning that is connected to individual signs, morphemes, words, phrases, and texts is called semantics. The division of language into separate but connected systems of sign and meaning goes back to the first linguistic studies of de Saussure and is now used in almost all branches of linguistics.

Languages express meaning by relating a sign form to a meaning, or its content. Sign forms must be something that can be perceived, for example, in sounds, images, or gestures, and then related to a specific meaning by social convention. Because the basic relation of meaning for most linguistic signs is based on social convention, linguistic signs can be considered arbitrary, in the sense that the convention is established socially and historically, rather than by means of a natural relation between a specific sign form and its meaning.

Thus, languages must have a vocabulary of signs related to specific meaning. The English sign "dog" denotes, for example, a member of the species Canis familiaris. In a language, the array of arbitrary signs connected to specific meanings is called the lexicon, and a single sign connected to a meaning is called a lexeme. Not all meanings in a language are represented by single words. Often, semantic concepts are embedded in the morphology or syntax of the language in the form of grammatical categories.

Sounds and symbols

Depending on modality, language structure can be based on systems of sounds (speech), gestures (sign languages), or graphic or tactile symbols (writing). The ways in which languages use sounds or signs to construct meaning are studied in phonology.

Sounds as part of a linguistic system are called phonemes. Phonemes are abstract units of sound, defined as the smallest units in a language that can serve to distinguish between the meaning of a pair of minimally different words, a so-called minimal pair. In English, for example, the words bat [bæt] and pat [pʰæt] form a minimal pair, in which the distinction between /b/ and /p/ differentiates the two words, which have different meanings. However, each language contrasts sounds in different ways. For example, in a language that does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants, the sounds [p] and [b] (if they both occur) could be considered a single phoneme, and consequently, the two pronunciations would have the same meaning. Similarly, the English language does not distinguish phonemically between aspirated and non-aspirated pronunciations of consonants, as many other languages like Korean and Hindi do: the unaspirated /p/ in spin [spɪn] and the aspirated /p/ in pin [pʰɪn] are considered to be merely different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme (such variants of a single phoneme are called allophones), whereas in Mandarin Chinese, the same difference in pronunciation distinguishes between the words [pʰá] 'crouch' and [pá] 'eight' (the accent above the á means that the vowel is pronounced with a high tone).

All spoken languages have phonemes of at least two different categories, vowels and consonants, that can be combined to form syllables. As well as segments such as consonants and vowels, some languages also use sound in other ways to convey meaning. Many languages, for example, use stress, pitch, duration, and tone to distinguish meaning. Because these phenomena operate outside of the level of single segments, they are called suprasegmental. Some languages have only a few phonemes, for example, Rotokas and Pirahã language with 11 and 10 phonemes respectively, whereas languages like Taa may have as many as 141 phonemes. In sign languages, the equivalent to phonemes (formerly called cheremes) are defined by the basic elements of gestures, such as hand shape, orientation, location, and motion, which correspond to manners of articulation in spoken language.

Writing systems represent language using visual symbols, which may or may not correspond to the sounds of spoken language. The Latin alphabet (and those on which it is based or that have been derived from it) was originally based on the representation of single sounds, so that words were constructed from letters that generally denote a single consonant or vowel in the structure of the word. In syllabic scripts, such as the Inuktitut syllabary, each sign represents a whole syllable. In logographic scripts, each sign represents an entire word, and will generally bear no relation to the sound of that word in spoken language.

Because all languages have a very large number of words, no purely logographic scripts are known to exist. Written language represents the way spoken sounds and words follow one after another by arranging symbols according to a pattern that follows a certain direction. The direction used in a writing system is entirely arbitrary and established by convention. Some writing systems use the horizontal axis (left to right as the Latin script or right to left as the Arabic script), while others such as traditional Chinese writing use the vertical dimension (from top to bottom). A few writing systems use opposite directions for alternating lines, and others, such as the ancient Maya script, can be written in either direction and rely on graphic cues to show the reader the direction of reading.

In order to represent the sounds of the world's languages in writing, linguists have developed the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to represent all of the discrete sounds that are known to contribute to meaning in human languages.

Grammar is the study of how meaningful elements called within a language can be combined into utterances. Morphemes can either be free or bound. If they are free to be moved around within an utterance, they are usually called , and if they are bound to other words or morphemes, they are called affixes. The way in which meaningful elements can be combined within a language is governed by rules. The study of the rules for the internal structure of words are called morphology. The rules of the internal structure of phrases and sentences are called syntax.

Grammatical categories

Grammar can be described as a system of categories and a set of rules that determine how categories combine to form different aspects of meaning. Languages differ widely in whether they are encoded through the use of categories or lexical units. However, several categories are so common as to be nearly universal. Such universal categories include the encoding of the grammatical relations of participants and predicates by grammatically distinguishing between their relations to a predicate, the encoding of temporal and spatial relations on predicates, and a system of grammatical person governing reference to and distinction between speakers and addressees and those about whom they are speaking.

Word classes

Languages organize their parts of speech into classes according to their functions and positions relative to other parts. All languages, for instance, make a basic distinction between a group of words that prototypically denotes things and concepts and a group of words that prototypically denotes actions and events. The first group, which includes English words such as "dog" and "song", are usually called nouns. The second, which includes "think" and "sing", are called verbs. Another common category is the adjective: words that describe properties or qualities of nouns, such as "red" or "big". Word classes can be "open" if new words can continuously be added to the class, or relatively "closed" if there is a fixed number of words in a class. In English, the class of pronouns is closed, whereas the class of adjectives is open, since an infinite number of adjectives can be constructed from verbs (e.g. "saddened") or nouns (e.g. with the -like suffix, as in "noun-like"). In other languages such as Korean, the situation is the opposite, and new pronouns can be constructed, whereas the number of adjectives is fixed.

Word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically, verbs are used to construct predicates, while nouns are used as arguments of predicates. In a sentence such as "Sally runs", the predicate is "runs", because it is the word that predicates a specific state about its argument "Sally". Some verbs such as "curse" can take two arguments, e.g. "Sally cursed John". A predicate that can only take a single argument is called intransitive, while a predicate that can take two arguments is called transitive.

Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions like "and" that serve to join two sentences, articles that introduce a noun, interjections such as "wow!", or ideophones like "splash" that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have positionals that describe the spatial position of an event or entity. Many languages have classifiers that identify countable nouns as belonging to a particular type or having a particular shape. For instance, in Japanese, the general noun classifier for humans is nin (人), and it is used for counting humans, whatever they are called:

san-nin no gakusei (三人の学生) lit. "3 human-classifier of student" - three students

For trees, it would be:

san-bon no ki (三本の木) lit. "3 classifier-for-long-objects of tree" - three trees

Morphology

In linguistics, the study of the internal structure of complex words and the processes by which words are formed is called morphology. In most languages, it is possible to construct complex words that are built of several morphemes. For instance, the English word "unexpected" can be analyzed as being composed of the three morphemes "un-", "expect" and "-ed".

Morphemes can be classified according to whether they are independent morphemes, so-called roots, or whether they can only co-occur attached to other morphemes. These bound morphemes or affixes can be classified according to their position in relation to the root: precede the root, suffixes follow the root, and infixes are inserted in the middle of a root. Affixes serve to modify or elaborate the meaning of the root. Some languages change the meaning of words by changing the phonological structure of a word, for example, the English word "run", which in the past tense is "ran". This process is called . Furthermore, morphology distinguishes between the process of inflection, which modifies or elaborates on a word, and the process of derivation, which creates a new word from an existing one. In English, the verb "sing" has the inflectional forms "singing" and "sung", which are both verbs, and the derivational form "singer", which is a noun derived from the verb with the agentive suffix "-er".

Languages differ widely in how much they rely on morphological processes of word formation. In some languages, for example, Chinese, there are no morphological processes, and all grammatical information is encoded syntactically by forming strings of single words. This type of morpho-syntax is often called isolating, or analytic, because there is almost a full correspondence between a single word and a single aspect of meaning. Most languages have words consisting of several morphemes, but they vary in the degree to which morphemes are discrete units. In many languages, notably in most Indo-European languages, single morphemes may have several distinct meanings that cannot be analyzed into smaller segments. For example, in Latin, the word bonus, or "good", consists of the root bon-, meaning "good", and the suffix - us, which indicates masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. These languages are called fusional languages, because several meanings may be fused into a single morpheme. The opposite of fusional languages are agglutinative languages which construct words by stringing morphemes together in chains, but with each morpheme as a discrete semantic unit. An example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or "from your houses", consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. The languages that rely on morphology to the greatest extent are traditionally called polysynthetic languages. They may express the equivalent of an entire English sentence in a single word. For example, in Persian the single word nafahmidamesh means I didn't understand it consisting of morphemes na-fahm-id-am-esh with the meanings, "negation.understand.past.I.it". As another example with more complexity, in the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksatengqiggtuq, which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer", the word consists of the morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, "reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative", and except for the morpheme tuntu ("reindeer") none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation.

Many languages use morphology to cross-reference words within a sentence. This is sometimes called . For example, in many Indo-European languages, adjectives must cross-reference the noun they modify in terms of number, case, and gender, so that the Latin adjective bonus, or "good", is inflected to agree with a noun that is masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. In many polysynthetic languages, verbs cross-reference their subjects and objects. In these types of languages, a single verb may include information that would require an entire sentence in English. For example, in the Basque phrase ikusi nauzu, or "you saw me", the past tense auxiliary verb n-au-zu (similar to English "do") agrees with both the subject (you) expressed by the n- prefix, and with the object (me) expressed by the - zu suffix. The sentence could be directly transliterated as "see you-did-me"

In addition to word classes, a sentence can be analyzed in terms of grammatical functions: "The cat" is the subject of the phrase, "on the mat" is a locative phrase, and "sat" is the core of the predicate.

Another way in which languages convey meaning is through the order of words within a sentence. The grammatical rules for how to produce new sentences from words that are already known is called syntax. The syntactical rules of a language determine why a sentence in English such as "I love you" is meaningful, but "*love you I" is not. Syntactical rules determine how word order and sentence structure is constrained, and how those constraints contribute to meaning. For example, in English, the two sentences "the slaves were cursing the master" and "the master was cursing the slaves" mean different things, because the role of the grammatical subject is encoded by the noun being in front of the verb, and the role of object is encoded by the noun appearing after the verb. Conversely, in Latin, both Dominus servos vituperabat and Servos vituperabat dominus mean "the master was reprimanding the slaves", because servos, or "slaves", is in the accusative case, showing that they are the grammatical object of the sentence, and dominus, or "master", is in the nominative case, showing that he is the subject.

Latin uses morphology to express the distinction between subject and object, whereas English uses word order. Another example of how syntactic rules contribute to meaning is the rule of inverse word order in questions, which exists in many languages. This rule explains why when in English, the phrase "John is talking to Lucy" is turned into a question, it becomes "Who is John talking to?", and not "John is talking to who?". The latter example may be used as a way of placing special emphasis on "who", thereby slightly altering the meaning of the question. Syntax also includes the rules for how complex sentences are structured by grouping words together in units, called phrases, that can occupy different places in a larger syntactic structure. Sentences can be described as consisting of phrases connected in a tree structure, connecting the phrases to each other at different levels. To the right is a graphic representation of the syntactic analysis of the English sentence "the cat sat on the mat". The sentence is analyzed as being constituted by a noun phrase, a verb, and a prepositional phrase; the prepositional phrase is further divided into a preposition and a noun phrase, and the noun phrases consist of an article and a noun.

The reason sentences can be seen as being composed of phrases is because each phrase would be moved around as a single element if syntactic operations were carried out. For example, "the cat" is one phrase, and "on the mat" is another, because they would be treated as single units if a decision was made to emphasize the location by moving forward the prepositional phrase: "[And] on the mat, the cat sat". There are many different formalist and functionalist frameworks that propose theories for describing syntactic structures, based on different assumptions about what language is and how it should be described. Each of them would analyze a sentence such as this in a different manner.

Typology and universals

Languages can be classified in relation to their grammatical types. Languages that belong to different families nonetheless often have features in common, and these shared features tend to correlate. For example, languages can be classified on the basis of their basic word order, the relative order of the verb, and its constituents in a normal indicative sentence. In English, the basic order is SVO (subject-verb-object): "The snake(S) bit(V) the man(O)", whereas for example, the corresponding sentence in the Australian language Gamilaraay would be d̪uyugu n̪ama d̪ayn yiːy (snake man bit), SOV. Word order type is relevant as a typological parameter, because basic word order type corresponds with other syntactic parameters, such as the relative order of nouns and adjectives, or of the use of prepositions or postpositions. Such correlations are called implicational universals. For example, most (but not all) languages that are of the SOV type have postpositions rather than prepositions, and have adjectives before nouns.

All languages structure sentences into Subject, Verb, and Object, but languages differ in the way they classify the relations between actors and actions. English uses the nominative-accusative word typology: in English transitive clauses, the subjects of both intransitive sentences ("I run") and transitive sentences ("I love you") are treated in the same way, shown here by the nominative pronoun I. Some languages, called ergative, Gamilaraay among them, distinguish instead between Agents and Patients. In ergative languages, the single participant in an intransitive sentence, such as "I run", is treated the same as the patient in a transitive sentence, giving the equivalent of "me run". Only in transitive sentences would the equivalent of the pronoun "I" be used. In this way the semantic roles can map onto the grammatical relations in different ways, grouping an intransitive subject either with Agents (accusative type) or Patients (ergative type) or even making each of the three roles differently, which is called the tripartite type.

The shared features of languages which belong to the same typological class type may have arisen completely independently. Their co-occurrence might be due to universal laws governing the structure of natural languages, "language universals", or they might be the result of languages evolving convergent solutions to the recurring communicative problems that humans use language to solve.

Social contexts of use and transmission

Wall of Love on Montmartre in Paris: "I love you" in 250 languages, by calligraphist Fédéric Baron and artist Claire Kito (2000)

While humans have the ability to learn any language, they only do so if they grow up in an environment in which language exists and is used by others. Language is therefore dependent on communities of speakers in which children learn language from their elders and peers and themselves transmit language to their own children. Languages are used by those who speak them to communicate and to solve a plethora of social tasks. Many aspects of language use can be seen to be adapted specifically to these purposes. Owing to the way in which language is transmitted between generations and within communities, language perpetually changes, diversifying into new languages or converging due to language contact. The process is similar to the process of evolution, where the process of descent with modification leads to the formation of a phylogenetic tree.

Usage and meaning

When studying the way in which words and signs are used, it is often the case that words have different meanings, depending on the social context of use. An important example of this is the process called deixis, which describes the way in which certain words refer to entities through their relation between a specific point in time and space when the word is uttered. Such words are, for example, the word, "I" (which designates the person speaking), "now" (which designates the moment of speaking), and "here" (which designates the position of speaking). Signs also change their meanings over time, as the conventions governing their usage gradually change. The study of how the meaning of linguistic expressions changes depending on context is called pragmatics. Deixis is an important part of the way that we use language to point out entities in the world. Pragmatics is concerned with the ways in which language use is patterned and how these patterns contribute to meaning. For example, in all languages, linguistic expressions can be used not just to transmit information, but to perform actions. Certain actions are made only through language, but nonetheless have tangible effects, e.g. the act of "naming", which creates a new name for some entity, or the act of "pronouncing someone man and wife", which creates a social contract of marriage. These types of acts are called speech acts, although they can also be carried out through writing or hand signing.

The form of linguistic expression often does not correspond to the meaning that it actually has in a social context. For example, if at a dinner table a person asks, "Can you reach the salt?", that is, in fact, not a question about the length of the arms of the one being addressed, but a request to pass the salt across the table. This meaning is implied by the context in which it is spoken; these kinds of effects of meaning are called conversational implicatures. These social rules for which ways of using language are considered appropriate in certain situations and how utterances are to be understood in relation to their context vary between communities, and learning them is a large part of acquiring communicative competence in a language.

Acquisition

All healthy, normally developing human beings learn to use language. Children acquire the language or languages used around them: whichever languages they receive sufficient exposure to during childhood. The development is essentially the same for children acquiring sign or oral languages. This learning process is referred to as first-language acquisition, since unlike many other kinds of learning, it requires no direct teaching or specialized study. In The Descent of Man, naturalist Charles Darwin called this process "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art".

A lesson at Kituwah Academy, a school where English and the Cherokee language are mediums of instruction

First language acquisition proceeds in a fairly regular sequence, though there is a wide degree of variation in the timing of particular stages among normally developing infants. Studies published in 2013 have indicated that unborn fetuses are capable of language acquisition to some degree. From birth, newborns respond more readily to human speech than to other sounds. Around one month of age, babies appear to be able to distinguish between different speech sounds. Around six months of age, a child will begin babbling, producing the speech sounds or handshapes of the languages used around them. Words appear around the age of 12 to 18 months; the average vocabulary of an eighteen-month-old child is around 50 words. A child's first utterances are holophrases (literally "whole-sentences"), utterances that use just one word to communicate some idea. Several months after a child begins producing words, he or she will produce two-word utterances, and within a few more months will begin to produce telegraphic speech, or short sentences that are less grammatically complex than adult speech, but that do show regular syntactic structure. From roughly the age of three to five years, a child's ability to speak or sign is refined to the point that it resembles adult language.

Acquisition of second and additional languages can come at any age, through exposure in daily life or courses. Children learning a second language are more likely to achieve native-like fluency than adults, but in general, it is very rare for someone speaking a second language to pass completely for a native speaker. An important difference between first language acquisition and additional language acquisition is that the process of additional language acquisition is influenced by languages that the learner already knows.

Arnold Lakhovsky, The Conversation (c. 1935)

Languages, understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speaks them. Languages differ not only in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, but also through having different "cultures of speaking." Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group as well as difference from others. Even among speakers of one language, several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups within a larger culture. Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists, and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities.

Linguists use the term " varieties" to refer to the different ways of speaking a language. This term includes geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood within a particular culture.

Because norms for language use are shared by members of a specific group, communicative style also becomes a way of displaying and constructing group identity. Linguistic differences may become salient markers of divisions between social groups, for example, speaking a language with a particular accent may imply membership of an ethnic minority or social class, one's area of origin, or status as a second language speaker. These kinds of differences are not part of the linguistic system, but are an important part of how people use language as a social tool for constructing groups.

However, many languages also have grammatical conventions that signal the social position of the speaker in relation to others through the use of registers that are related to social hierarchies or divisions. In many languages, there are stylistic or even grammatical differences between the ways men and women speak, between age groups, or between social classes, just as some languages employ different words depending on who is listening. For example, in the Australian language Dyirbal, a married man must use a special set of words to refer to everyday items when speaking in the presence of his mother-in-law. Some cultures, for example, have elaborate systems of "social deixis", or systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means. In English, social deixis is shown mostly through distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, and in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy", "Doctor", or "Your Honor", but in other languages, such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. For instance, in languages of east Asia such as Thai, Burmese, and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest.

Writing, literacy and technology

An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Indigenous Canadian languages

Throughout history a number of different ways of representing language in graphic media have been invented. These are called writing systems.

The use of writing has made language even more useful to humans. It makes it possible to store large amounts of information outside of the human body and retrieve it again, and it allows communication across physical distances and timespans that would otherwise be impossible. Many languages conventionally employ different genres, styles, and registers in written and spoken language, and in some communities, writing traditionally takes place in an entirely different language than the one spoken. There is some evidence that the use of writing also has effects on the cognitive development of humans, perhaps because acquiring literacy generally requires explicit and formal education.

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.

The first page of the poem Beowulf, written in Old English in the early medieval period (800-1100 AD). Although Old English is the direct ancestor of modern English, it is unintelligible to contemporary English speakers.

All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be "decay" or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable.

Changes may affect specific sounds or the entire phonological system. Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound or phonetic feature by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound in a place where there had been none. Sound changes can be conditioned in which case a sound is changed only if it occurs in the vicinity of certain other sounds. Sound change is usually assumed to be regular, which means that it is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of any non-phonological factors. On the other hand, sound changes can sometimes be sporadic, affecting only one particular word or a few words, without any seeming regularity. Sometimes a simple change triggers a chain shift in which the entire phonological system is affected. This happened in the Germanic languages when the sound change known as Grimm's law affected all the stop consonants in the system. The original consonant * became /b/ in the Germanic languages, the previous * in turn became /p/, and the previous * became /f/. The same process applied to all stop consonants and explains why Italic languages such as Latin have p in words like pater and pisces, whereas Germanic languages, like English, have father and fish.

Another example is the Great Vowel Shift in English, which is the reason that the spelling of English vowels do not correspond well to their current pronunciation. This is because the vowel shift brought the already established orthography out of synchronization with pronunciation. Another source of sound change is the erosion of words as pronunciation gradually becomes increasingly indistinct and shortens words, leaving out syllables or sounds. This kind of change caused Latin mea domina to eventually become the French madame and American English ma'am.

Change also happens in the grammar of languages as discourse patterns such as idioms or particular constructions become grammaticalized. This frequently happens when words or morphemes erode and the grammatical system is unconsciously rearranged to compensate for the lost element. For example, in some varieties of Caribbean Spanish the final /s/ has eroded away. Since Standard Spanish uses final /s/ in the morpheme marking the second person subject "you" in verbs, the Caribbean varieties now have to express the second person using the pronoun tú. This means that the sentence "what's your name" is ¿como te llamas? [ˈkomoteˈjamas] in Standard Spanish, but [ˈkomoˈtuteˈjama] in Caribbean Spanish. The simple sound change has affected both morphology and syntax. Another common cause of grammatical change is the gradual petrification of idioms into new grammatical forms, for example, the way the English "going to" construction lost its aspect of movement and in some varieties of English has almost become a full-fledged future tense (e.g. I'm gonna).

Language change may be motivated by "language internal" factors, such as changes in pronunciation motivated by certain sounds being difficult to distinguish aurally or to produce, or through patterns of change that cause some rare types of constructions to drift towards more common types. Other causes of language change are social, such as when certain pronunciations become emblematic of membership in certain groups, such as social classes, or with ideologies, and therefore are adopted by those who wish to identify with those groups or ideas. In this way, issues of identity and politics can have profound effects on language structure.

Multi-lingual sign outside the mayor's office in Novi Sad, written in the four official languages of the city: Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Pannonian Rusyn

One important source of language change is contact and resulting diffusion of linguistic traits between languages. Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact on a regular basis. Multilingualism is likely to have been the norm throughout human history and most people in the modern world are multilingual. Before the rise of the concept of the ethno-national state, monolingualism was characteristic mainly of populations inhabiting small islands. But with the ideology that made one people, one state, and one language the most desirable political arrangement, monolingualism started to spread throughout the world. Nonetheless, there are only 250 countries in the world corresponding to some 6000 languages, which means that most countries are multilingual and most languages therefore exist in close contact with other languages.

When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Through sustained language contact over long periods, linguistic traits diffuse between languages, and languages belonging to different families may converge to become more similar. In areas where many languages are in close contact, this may lead to the formation of language areas in which unrelated languages share a number of linguistic features. A number of such language areas have been documented, among them, the Balkan language area, the Mesoamerican language area, and the Ethiopian language area. Also, larger areas such as South Asia, Europe, and Southeast Asia have sometimes been considered language areas, because of widespread diffusion of specific areal features.

Multilingualism is also common in the Indian Republic. The signboard is displayed in the Imphal International Airport in Meitei, Hindi and English, some of the official languages of the Indian Republic.

Language contact may also lead to a variety of other linguistic phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification (replacement of much of the native vocabulary with that of another language). In situations of extreme and sustained language contact, it may lead to the formation of new mixed languages that cannot be considered to belong to a single language family. One type of mixed language called pidgins occurs when adult speakers of two different languages interact on a regular basis, but in a situation where neither group learns to speak the language of the other group fluently. In such a case, they will often construct a communication form that has traits of both languages, but which has a simplified grammatical and phonological structure. The language comes to contain mostly the grammatical and phonological categories that exist in both languages. Pidgin languages are defined by not having any native speakers, but only being spoken by people who have another language as their first language. But if a Pidgin language becomes the main language of a speech community, then eventually children will grow up learning the pidgin as their first language. As the generation of child learners grow up, the pidgin will often be seen to change its structure and acquire a greater degree of complexity. This type of language is generally called a creole language. An example of such mixed languages is Tok Pisin, the official language of Papua New-Guinea, which originally arose as a Pidgin based on English and Austronesian languages; others are Kreyòl ayisyen, the French-based creole language spoken in Haiti, and Michif, a mixed language of Canada, based on the Native American language Cree and French.

Linguistic diversity

SIL Ethnologue defines a "living language" as "one that has at least one speaker for whom it is their first language". The exact number of known living languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular, on how one defines the distinction between a "language" and a " dialect". As of 2016, Ethnologue cataloged 7,097 living human languages. The Ethnologue establishes linguistic groups based on studies of mutual intelligibility, and therefore often includes more categories than more conservative classifications. For example, the Danish language that most scholars consider a single language with several dialects is classified as two distinct languages (Danish and Jutish) by the Ethnologue.

According to the Ethnologue, 389 languages (nearly 6%) have more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94% of the world's population, whereas 94% of the world's languages account for the remaining 6% of the global population.

Languages and dialects

There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding a famous aphorism attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that " a language is a dialect with an army and navy". For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages or dialects. Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin are, for example, often classified as "dialects" of Chinese, even though they are more different from each other than Swedish is from Norwegian. Before the Yugoslav Wars, Serbo-Croatian was generally considered a single language with two normative variants, but due to sociopolitical reasons, Croatian and Serbian are now often treated as separate languages and employ different writing systems. In other words, the distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or degree of mutual intelligibility.

Language families of the world

Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world.

The world's languages can be grouped into language families consisting of languages that can be shown to have common ancestry. Linguists recognize many hundreds of language families, although some of them can possibly be grouped into larger units as more evidence becomes available and in-depth studies are carried out. At present, there are also dozens of language isolates: languages that cannot be shown to be related to any other languages in the world. Among them are Basque, spoken in Europe, Zuni of New Mexico, Purépecha of Mexico, Ainu of Japan, Burushaski of Pakistan, and many others.

The language family of the world that has the most speakers is the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world's population. This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Hindustani ( Hindi/ Urdu). The Indo-European family spread first through the Indo-European migrations posited to have taken place c. 4000-1000 BCE,[citation needed ] and subsequently through much later European colonial expansion, which brought the Indo-European languages to a politically and often numerically dominant position in the Americas and much of Africa. The Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by 20% of the world's population and include many of the languages of East Asia, including Hakka, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and hundreds of smaller languages.

Africa is home to a large number of language families, the largest of which is the Niger-Congo language family, which includes such languages as Swahili, Shona, and Yoruba. Speakers of the Niger-Congo languages account for 6.9% of the world's population. A similar number of people speak the Afroasiatic languages, which include the populous Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew language, and the languages of the Sahara region, such as the Berber languages and Hausa.

The Austronesian languages are spoken by 5.5% of the world's population and stretch from Madagascar to maritime Southeast Asia all the way to Oceania. It includes such languages as Malagasy, Māori, Samoan, and many of the indigenous languages of Indonesia and Taiwan. The Austronesian languages are considered to have originated in Taiwan around 3000 BC and spread through the Oceanic region through island-hopping, based on an advanced nautical technology. Other populous language families are the Dravidian languages of South Asia (among them Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu), the Turkic languages of Central Asia (such as Turkish), the Austroasiatic (among them Khmer), and Tai-Kadai languages of Southeast Asia (including Thai).

The areas of the world in which there is the greatest linguistic diversity, such as the Americas, Papua New Guinea, West Africa, and South-Asia, contain hundreds of small language families. These areas together account for the majority of the world's languages, though not the majority of speakers. In the Americas, some of the largest language families include the Quechumaran, Arawak, and Tupi-Guarani families of South America, the Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Manguean, and Mayan of Mesoamerica, and the Na-Dene, Iroquoian, and Algonquian language families of North America. In Australia, most indigenous languages belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, whereas New Guinea is home to a large number of small families and isolates, as well as a number of Austronesian languages. Due to its remoteness and geographical fragmentation, Papua New Guinea emerges in fact as the leading location worldwide for both species (8% of world total) and linguistic richness - with 830 living tongues (12% of world total).

Language endangerment

Together, these eight countries contain more than 50% of the world's languages.

These areas are the most linguistically diverse in the world, and the locations of most of the world's endangered languages.

Language endangerment occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an extinct language. While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they have been disappearing at an accelerated rate in the 20th and 21st centuries due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages.

The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. Of the between 6,000 and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, between 50 and 90% of those are expected to have become extinct by the year 2100. The top 20 languages, those spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with less than 10,000 speakers.

UNESCO's five levels of language endangerment

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) operates with five levels of language endangerment: "safe", "vulnerable" (not spoken by children outside the home), "definitely endangered" (not spoken by children), "severely endangered" (only spoken by the oldest generations), and "critically endangered" (spoken by few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers). Notwithstanding claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common lingua franca, such as English or Esperanto, there is a consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world. It is a common belief, going back to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament, that linguistic diversity causes political conflict, but this is contradicted by the fact that many of the world's major episodes of violence have taken place in situations with low linguistic diversity, such as the Yugoslav and American Civil War, or the genocide of Rwanda, whereas many of the most stable political units have been highly multilingual.

The University of Waikato are using the Welsh language as a model for their Māori language revitalisation programme as they deem Welsh to be the world's leading example for the survival of languages. In 2019 a Hawaiian TV company Oiwi visited a Welsh language centre in Nant Gwrtheyrn, North Wales to help find ways of preserving their Ōlelo Hawaiʻi language.

1. The gorilla ^ Koko reportedly used as many as 1000 words in American Sign Language, and understands 2000 words of spoken English. There are some doubts about whether her use of signs is based on complex understanding or simple conditioning.

2. ^ "Functional grammar analyzes grammatical structure, as do formal and structural grammar; but it also analyzes the entire communicative situation: the purpose of the speech event, its participants, its discourse context. Functionalists maintain that the communicative situation motivates, constrains, explains, or otherwise determines grammatical structure, and that a structural or formal approach is not merely limited to an artificially restricted data base, but is inadequate even as a structural account. Functional grammar, then, differs from formal and structural grammar in that it purports not to model but to explain; and the explanation is grounded in the communicative situation".

3. While sign is usually a visual medium, there is also ^ tactile signing; and while oral speech is usually an aural medium, there is also lipreading and tadoma.

4. ^ The prefixed asterisk * conventionally indicates that the sentence is ungrammatical, i.e. syntactically incorrect.

5. ^ Ethnologue's figure is based on numbers from before 1995. A more recent figure is 420 million.

References

1. Nicholas Evans & Stephen Levinson (2009) 'The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science'. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32, 429-492.

2. ^ Kamusella, Tomasz (2016). "The History of the Normative Opposition of 'Language versus Dialect': From Its Graeco-Latin Origin to Central Europe's Ethnolinguistic Nation-States". Colloquia Humanistica. 5 (5): 189-198. doi:10.11649/ch.2016.011. Archived from the original on 26 February 2020.

3. Moseley (2010): "Statistics Archived 12 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine"

4. ^ "language". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1992.

5. ^ Hockett, Charles F. (1966). "The Problem of Universals in Language". Archived from the original on 10 November 2012.

6. ^ Engesser, Sabrina; Crane, Jodie M. S.; Savage, James L.; Russel, Andrew F.; Townsend, Simon W. (29 June 2015). "Experimental Evidence for Phonemic Contrasts in a Nonhuman Vocal System". PLOS Biology. 13 (6): e1002171. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002171. PMC . PMID 26121619.

7. ^ Engesser, Sabrina; Ridley, Amanda R.; Townsend, Simon W. (20 July 2017). "Element repetition rates encode functionally distinct information in pied babbler 'clucks' and 'purrs'" (PDF). Animal Cognition. 20 (5): 953-960. doi:10.1007/s10071-017-1114-6. PMID 28730513. S2CID 21470061. Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 April 2019.

8. ^ Shanahan, D. (2011). Language, feeling, and the brain: The evocative vector. Transaction Publishers.

9. ^ Clark, Gary; Henneberg, Maciej (2017). "Ardipithecus ramidus and the evolution of language and singing: An early origin for hominin vocal capability". HOMO. 68 (2): 101-121. doi:10.1016/j.jchb.2017.03.001. PMID 28363458.

10. ^ Nicholas Evans (2017) Listening Here: Ngûrrahmalkwonawoniyan. Humanities Australia, Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, vol 8, p 39.

11. Stokoe, William C. (1960). ^ Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf, Studies in linguistics: Occasional papers (No. 8). Buffalo: Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Buffalo.

12. ^ Stokoe, William C.; Dorothy C. Casterline; Carl G. Croneberg (1965). A dictionary of American sign languages on linguistic principles. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet College Press

13. ^ Denham, Kristin; Lobeck, Anne (2009). Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction. Cengage Learning. p. 9. ISBN 978-1-4130-1589-8. Archived from the original on 22 May 2020. An ungrammatical sentence is one that is impossible in a given language, one that a native speaker of that variety would never utter naturally. (Remember that ungrammatical sentences are marked with an asterisk, *.

14. ^ Bonvillian, John D.; Michael D. Orlansky; Leslie Lazin Novack (December 1983). "Developmental milestones: Sign language acquisition and motor development". Child Development. 54 (6): 1435-1445. doi:10.2307/1129806. JSTOR 1129806. PMID 6661942.

15. ^ Skwarecki, Beth (26 August 2013). "Babies Learn to Recognize Words in the Womb". Science. Archived from the original on 4 November 2015.

16. ^ O'Grady, William; Cho, Sook Whan (2001). "First language acquisition". Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (4th ed.). Boston: Bedford St. Martin's.

17. ^ "Primer estudio conjunto del Instituto Cervantes y el British Council sobre el peso internacional del español y del inglés". Instituto Cervantes (www.cervantes.es). Archived from the original on 16 September 2017.

18. ^ Lewis (2009), "Summary by language family Archived 1 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine"

19. ^ Briand, Frederic (February 2013). "Silent Plains ... the Fading Sounds of Native Languages". National Geographic.

20. ^ "University of Waikato Launches a Strategic Partnership with Cardiff University in Wales" (Press release). University of Waikato. 10 November 2021. Archived from the original on 24 November 2021 - via Scoop News.

Works cited

Candland, Douglas Keith (1993). Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature. Oxford University Press US. pp. 293-301. ISBN 978-0-19-510284-0. koko gorilla operant conditioning.

Chomsky, Noam (1972). . Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-549257-8.

Deacon, Terrence (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-31754-1.

Dixon, Robert M.W. (1972). The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-08510-6.

Duranti, Alessandro (2003). "Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms". Current Anthropology. 44 (3): 323-348. doi:10.1086/368118. S2CID 148075449.

Evans, Nicholas; Levinson, Stephen C. (2009). "The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 32 (5): 429-492. doi:10.1017/s0140525x0999094x. PMID 19857320.

"First Impressions: We start to pick up words, food preferences and hand-eye coordination long before being born". Scientific American. Vol. 313, no. 1. July 2015. p. 24.

Fisher, Simon E.; Lai, Cecilia S.L.; Monaco, Anthony P. (2003). "Deciphering the Genetic Basis of Speech and Language Disorders". Annual Review of Neuroscience. 26: 57-80. doi:10.1146/annurev.neuro.26.041002.131144. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0012-CB7D-6. PMID 12524432.

Haugen, Einar (1973). "The Curse of Babel". Daedalus. 102 (3, Language as a Human Problem): 47-57.

Hauser, Marc D.; Chomsky, Noam; Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2002). "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?". Science. 298 (5598): 1569-1579. doi:10.1126/science.298.5598.1569. PMID 12446899.

Hauser, Marc D.; Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2003). "What are the uniquely human components of the language faculty?" (PDF). In M.H. Christiansen; S. Kirby (eds.). Language Evolution: The States of the Art. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 August 2014.

International Phonetic Association (1999). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-65236-0.

Labov, William (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change vol.I Internal Factors. Blackwell.

Labov, William (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change vol.II Social Factors. Blackwell.

Ladefoged, Peter (1992). "Another view of endangered languages". Language. 68 (4): 809-811. doi:10.1353/lan.1992.0013. S2CID 144984900.

Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lewis, M. Paul, ed. (2009). "Ethnologue: Languages of the World" (16th ed.). Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Archived from the original on 4 April 2012.

Matras, Yaron; Bakker, Peter, eds. (2003). The Mixed Language Debate: Theoretical and Empirical Advances. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-017776-3.

Moseley, Christopher, ed. (2010). Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (3rd ed.). Paris: UNESCO Publishing. Archived from the original on 20 August 2014.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. (2005). The History of Linguistics. Linguistic Society of America. ISBN 978-0-415-11553-7. Archived from the original on 31 December 2014.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. (1998). Language Form and Language Function (PDF). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 December 2011.

Nichols, Johanna (1992). Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-58057-9.

Nichols, Johanna (1984). "Functional Theories of Grammar". Annual Review of Anthropology. 13: 97-117. doi:10.1146/annurev.an.13.100184.000525.

Olson, David R. (1996). "Language and Literacy: what writing does to Language and Mind". Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 16: 3-13. doi:10.1017/S0267190500001392. S2CID 145677801.

Payne, Thomas Edward (1997). Describing morphosyntax: a guide for field linguists. Cambridge University Press. pp. 238-241. ISBN 978-0-521-58805-8. Archived from the original on 31 March 2021.

Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Perennial.

Sandler, Wendy; Lillo-Martin, Diane (2001). "Natural Sign Languages". In Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller (eds.). The Handbook of Linguistics. Blackwell. pp. 533-563.

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1983) [1913]. Bally, Charles; Sechehaye, Albert (eds.). Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9023-1.

Zentella, Ana Celia (2002). "Spanish in New York". In García, Ofelia; Fishman, Joshua (eds.). The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City. Walter de Gruyter.

Further reading

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Addition of minocycline to cultures reduced but did not completely inhibit activation of this pathway.

Oocytes surviving the injection were either cultured without further treatment or exposed to ethanol solution to induce parthenogenetic activation.

These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

culture

These are words often used in combination with culture.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

alien culture

A mere hint of an accent can seem to the hearer to represent an alien culture.

ancient culture

Ventura survival of old beliefs and customs that may help us in understanding the ancient culture.

aspect of culture

He sought neither to reduce the cultural sciences to the natural sciences nor to show that science was just another aspect of culture.

These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
culture definition: 1. the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at.... Learn more.

# data[].attributes.body
the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics. Specific branches of linguistics include sociolinguistics, dialectology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, historical-comparative linguistics, and applied linguistics.

# data[].attributes.body
Is a broad term that can have different meanings depending on the context. One possible definition is the set of knowledge acquired over time by a group of people. Another possible definition is the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.

# data[].attributes.body
Is the scientific study of language. It entails the comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language— cognitive, social, environmental, biological as well as structural.

Linguistics is considered to be an applied science as well as an academic field of general study within the humanities and social sciences. Traditional areas of linguistic analysis correspond to syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics.

# data[].attributes.body
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages.

Language is intrinsic to the expression of culture. As a means of communicating values, beliefs and customs, it has an important social function and fosters feelings of group identity and solidarity. It is the means by which culture and its traditions and shared values may be conveyed and preserved.

# data[].attributes.body
Lenguistics helps us understand our world. The most important part of lingustics is mastering pronunciation and sounds.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.[1][2] It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language,[3] particularly its nature and structure.[4] Linguistics is concerned with both the cognitive and s…

# data[].attributes.body
Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society."

# data[].attributes.body
The study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language.

Apart from simply understanding the intricacies of world languages, this knowledge can be applied to improving communication between people, contributing to translation activities, assisting in literacy efforts, and treating speech disorders.

# data[].attributes.headline
"The limits of my language are the limits of my world." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

# data[].attributes.subject
"The limits of my language are the limits of my world." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

# data[].attributes.body
Language: Language refers to a system of communication that uses words, sounds, and gestures to convey meaning. It is a tool that allows individuals to express their thoughts, ideas, and emotions and to interact with others. Language can be spoken, written, or signed, and it encompasses grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics.

Culture: Culture refers to the shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that characterize a group or society. It encompasses the knowledge, traditions, social norms, language, arts, and other aspects of human behavior that are learned and transmitted from generation to generation. Culture influences how individuals perceive the world, interact with others, and shape their identity.

Linguistics: Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It examines the structure, sounds, meaning, and evolution of languages, as well as the social, cultural, and cognitive aspects of language use. Linguists analyze the phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of languages, seeking to understand the principles and patterns underlying human language and communication. Linguistics encompasses various subfields, including sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and computational linguistics.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts.
Thus, culture can be seen as the growth of a group identity fostered by social patterns unique to the group.

# data[].attributes.body
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general. It encompasses not only the study of sound, grammar and meaning, but also the history of language families, how languages are acquired by children and adults, and how language use is processed in the mind and how it is connected to race and gender. With close connections to the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences, linguistics complements a diverse range of other disciplines such as anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology, computer science, health sciences, education and literature.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Language-more specifically human language-refers to the grammar and other rules and norms that allow humans to make utterances and sounds in a way that others can understand, notes linguist John McWhorter, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Table of Contents

culture, behaviour peculiar to Homo sapiens, together with material objects used as an integral part of this behaviour. Thus, culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements.

The existence and use of culture depends upon an ability possessed by humans alone. This ability has been called variously the capacity for rational or abstract thought, but a good case has been made for rational behaviour among subhuman animals, and the meaning of abstract is not sufficiently explicit or precise. The term symboling has been proposed as a more suitable name for the unique mental ability of humans, consisting of assigning to things and events certain meanings that cannot be grasped with the senses alone. Articulate speech-language-is a good example. The meaning of the word dog is not inherent in the sounds themselves; it is assigned, freely and arbitrarily, to the sounds by human beings. Holy water, "biting one's thumb" at someone ( Romeo and Juliet, Act I, scene 1), or fetishes are other examples. Symboling is a kind of behaviour objectively definable and should not be confused with symbolizing, which has an entirely different meaning.

The concept of culture

Various definitions of culture

What has been termed the classic definition of culture was provided by the 19th-century English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in the first paragraph of his Primitive Culture (1871):

Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

In Anthropology (1881) Tylor made it clear that culture, so defined, is possessed by man alone. This conception of culture served anthropologists well for some 50 years. With the increasing maturity of anthropological science, further reflections upon the nature of their subject matter and concepts led to a multiplication and diversification of definitions of culture. In Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952), U.S. anthropologists A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn cited 164 definitions of culture, ranging from "learned behaviour" to "ideas in the mind," "a logical construct," "a statistical fiction," "a psychic defense mechanism," and so on. The definition-or the conception-of culture that is preferred by Kroeber and Kluckhohn and also by a great many other anthropologists is that culture is an abstraction or, more specifically, "an abstraction from behaviour."

These conceptions have defects or shortcomings. The existence of behavioral traditions-that is, patterns of behaviour transmitted by social rather than by biologic hereditary means-has definitely been established for nonhuman animals. "Ideas in the mind" become significant in society only as expressed in language, acts, and objects. "A logical construct" or "a statistical fiction" is not specific enough to be useful. The conception of culture as an abstraction led, first, to a questioning of the reality of culture (inasmuch as abstractions were regarded as imperceptible) and, second, to a denial of its existence; thus, the subject matter of nonbiological anthropology, "culture," was defined out of existence, and without real, objective things and events in the external world there can be no science.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now

Kroeber and Kluckhohn were led to their conclusion that culture is an abstraction by reasoning that if culture is behaviour it, ipso facto, becomes the subject matter of psychology; therefore, they concluded that culture "is an abstraction from concrete behavior but is not itself behavior." But what, one might ask, is an abstraction of a marriage ceremony or a pottery bowl, to use Kroeber and Kluckhohn's examples? This question poses difficulties that were not adequately met by these authors. A solution was perhaps provided by Leslie A. White in the essay "The Concept of Culture" (1959). The issue is not really whether culture is real or an abstraction, he reasoned; the issue is the context of the scientific interpretation.

When things and events are considered in the context of their relation to the human organism, they constitute behaviour; when they are considered not in terms of their relation to the human organism but in their relationship to one another, they become culture by definition. The mother-in-law taboo is a complex of concepts, attitudes, and acts. When one considers them in their relationship to the human organism-that is, as things that the organism does-they become behaviour by definition. When, however, one considers the mother-in-law taboo in its relationship to the place of residence of a newly married couple, to the customary division of labour between the sexes, to their respective roles in the society's mode of subsistence and offense and defense, and these in turn to the technology of the society, the mother-in-law taboo becomes, again by definition, culture. This distinction is precisely the one that students of words have made for many years. When words are considered in their relationship to the human organism-that is, as acts-they become behaviour. But when they are considered in terms of their relationship to one another-producing lexicon, grammar, syntax, and so forth-they become language, the subject matter not of psychology but of the science of linguistics. Culture, therefore, is the name given to a class of things and events dependent upon symboling ( i.e., articulate speech) that are considered in a kind of extra-human context.

Universalist approaches to culture and the human mind

Culture, as noted above, is due to an ability possessed by man alone. The question of whether the difference between the mind of man and that of the lower animals is one of kind or of degree has been debated for many years, and even today reputable scientists can be found on both sides of this issue. But no one who holds the view that the difference is one of degree has adduced any evidence to show that nonhuman animals are capable, to any degree whatever, of a kind of behaviour that all human beings exhibit. This kind of behaviour may be illustrated by the following examples: remembering the sabbath to keep it holy, classifying one's relatives and distinguishing one class from another (such as uncles from cousins), defining and prohibiting incest, and so on. There is no reason or evidence that leads one to believe that any animal other than man can have or be brought to any appreciation or comprehension whatever of such meanings and acts. There is, as Tylor argued long ago, a "mental gulf that divides the lowest savage from the highest ape" ( Anthropology).

In line with the foregoing distinction, human behaviour is to be defined as behaviour consisting of, or dependent upon, symboling rather than upon anything else that Homo sapiens does; coughing, yawning, stretching, and the like are not human.

Next to nothing is yet known about the neuroanatomy of symboling. Man is characterized by a very large brain, considered both absolutely and relatively, and it is reasonable-and even obligatory-to believe that the central nervous system, especially the forebrain, is the locus of the ability to symbol. But how it does this and with what specific mechanisms remain to be discovered. One is thus led to the conclusion that at some point in the evolution of primates a threshold was reached in some line, or lines, when the ability to symbol was realized and made explicit in overt behaviour. There is no intermediate stage, logical or neurological, between symboling and nonsymboling; an individual or a species is capable of symboling, or he or it is not. The life of Helen Keller makes this clear: when, through the aid of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, Keller was enabled to escape from the isolation to which her blindness and deafness had consigned her and to effect contact with the world of human meanings and values, the transformation was instantaneous.

Evolution of "minding"

But even if almost nothing is known about the neuroanatomy of symboling, a great deal is known about the evolution of mind (or " minding," if mind is considered as a process rather than a thing), in which one finds symboling as the characteristic of a particular stage of development. The evolution of minding can be traced in the following sequence of stages. First is the simple reflexive stage, in which behaviour is determined by the intrinsic properties of both the organism and the thing reacted to-for example, the contraction of the pupil of the eye under increased stimulation by light. Second is the conditioned reflex stage, in which the response is elicited not by properties intrinsic in the stimulus but by meanings that the stimulus has acquired for the responding organism through experience-for example, Pavlov's dog's salivary glands responding to the sound of a bell. Third is the instrumental stage, as exemplified by a chimpanzee knocking down a banana with a stick. Here the response is determined by the intrinsic properties of the things involved (banana, stick, chimpanzee's neurosensory-muscular system); but a new element has been introduced into behaviour, namely, the exercise of control by the reacting organism over things in the external world. And, finally, there is the symbol stage, in which the configuration of behaviour involves nonintrinsic meanings, as has already been suggested.

These four stages exhibit a characteristic of the evolution of all living things: a movement in the direction of making life more secure and enduring. In the first stage the organism distinguishes between the beneficial, the injurious, and the neutral, but it must come into direct contact with the object or event in question to do so. In the second stage the organism may react at a distance, as it were-that is, through an intermediate stimulus. The conditioned reflex brings signs into the life process; one thing or event may serve as an indication of something else-food, danger, and so forth. And, since anything can serve as a sign of anything else (a green triangle can mean food, sex, or an electric shock to the laboratory rat), the reactions of the organism are emancipated from the limitations that stage one imposes upon living things, namely, the intrinsic properties of things. The possibility of obtaining life-sustaining things and of avoiding life-destroying things is thus much enhanced, and the security and continuity of life are correspondingly increased. But in stage two the organism still plays a subordinate role to the external world; it does not and cannot determine the significance of the intermediary stimulus: the bark of a distant dog to the rabbit or the sound of the bell to Pavlov's dog. This meaning is determined by things and events in the external world (or in the laboratory by the experimenter). In stages one and two, therefore, the organism is at the mercy of the external world in this respect.

In the third stage the element of control over environment is introduced. The ape who obtains food by means of a stick (tool) is not subordinate to his situation. He does not merely undergo a situation; he dominates it. His behaviour is not determined by the juxtaposition of things and events; on the contrary, the juxtaposition is determined by the ape. He is confronted with alternatives, and he makes choices. The configuration of behaviour in stage three is constructed within the dynamic organism of the ape and then imposed upon the external world.

The evolution of minding is a cumulative process; the achievements of each stage are carried on into the succeeding one or ones. The fourth stage reintroduces the factor of nonintrinsic meanings to the advances made in stages two and three. Stage four is the stage of symboling, of articulate speech. Thus, one observes two aspects of the evolution of minding, both of which contribute to the security and survivability of life: the emancipation of behaviour from limitations imposed upon it by the external world and increased control over the environment. To be sure, neither emancipation nor control becomes complete, but quantitative increase is significant.

Evolution of culture

The direction of biologic evolution toward greater expansion and security of life can be seen from another point of view: the advance from instinctive behaviour ( i.e., responses determined by intrinsic properties of the organism) to learned and freely variable behaviour, patterns of which may be acquired and transmitted from one individual and generation to another, and finally to a system of things and events, the essence of which is meanings that cannot be comprehended by the senses alone. This system is, of course, culture, and the species is the human species. Culture is a man-made environment, brought into existence by the ability to symbol.

Once established, culture has a life of its own, so to speak; that is, it is a continuum of things and events in a cause and effect relationship; it flows down through time from one generation to another. Since its inception 1,000,000 or more years ago, this culture-with its language, beliefs, tools, codes, and so on-has had an existence external to each individual born into it. The function of this external, man-made environment is to make life secure and enduring for the society of human beings living within the cultural system. Thus, culture may be seen as the most recent, the most highly developed means of promoting the security and continuity of life, in a series that began with the simple reflex.

Society preceded culture; society, conceived as the interaction of living beings, is coextensive with life itself. Man's immediate prehuman ancestors had societies, but they did not have culture. Studies of monkeys and apes have greatly enlarged scientific knowledge of their social life-and, by inference, the scientific conception of the earliest human societies. Data derived from paleontological sources and from accumulating studies of living, nonhuman primates are now fairly abundant, and hypotheses derived from these are numerous and varied in detail. A fair summary of them may be made as follows: The growth of the primate brain was stimulated by life in the trees, specifically, by eye-hand coordinations involved in swinging from limb to limb and by manipulating food with the hands (as among the insectivorous lemurs). Descent to the ground, as a consequence of deforestation or increase in body size (which would tend to restrict arboreal locomotion and increase the difficulty of obtaining enough food to supply increased need), and the assumption of erect posture were other significant steps in biologic evolution and the eventual emergence of culture. Some theories reject the arboreal stage in man's evolutionary past, but this does not seriously affect the overall conception of his development.

The Australopithecines of Africa, extinct manlike higher primates about which reliable knowledge is very considerable today, exemplify the stage of erect posture in primate evolution. Erect posture freed the arms and hands from their earlier function of locomotion and made possible an extensive and versatile use of tools. Again, the eye-hand-object coordinations involved in tool using stimulated the growth of the brain, especially the forebrain. It is not possible to determine on the basis of paleontological evidence the precise point at which the ability to symbol (specifically, articulate speech) was realized, as expressed in overt behaviour. It is believed by some that man's prehuman ancestors used tools habitually and that habit became custom through the transmission of tool using from one generation to another long before articulate speech came into being. In fact, some theorists hold, the customary use of tools became a powerful stimulus in the development of a brain that was capable of symboling or articulate speech.

The introjection of symboling into primate social life was revolutionary. Everything was transformed, everything acquired new meaning; the symbol added a new dimension to primate-now human-existence. An ax was no longer merely a tool with which to chop; it could become a symbol of authority. Mating became marriage, and all social relationships between parents and children and brothers and sisters became moral obligations, duties, rights, and privileges. The world of nature, from the stones beside the path to the stars in their courses, became alive and conscious spirits. "And all that I beheld respired with inward meaning" (Wordsworth). The anthropoid had at last become a man.

Relativist approaches to sociocultural systems

Thus far in this article, culture has been considered in general, as the possession of all mankind. Now it is appropriate to turn to particular cultures, or sociocultural systems. Human beings, like other animal species, live in societies, and each society possesses culture. It has long been customary for ethnologists to speak of Seneca culture, Eskimo culture, North American Plains culture, and so on-that is, the culture of a particular society (Seneca) or an indefinite number of societies (Eskimo) or the cultures found in or characteristic of a topographic area (the North American Plains). There is no objection to this usage as a convenient means of reference: "Seneca culture" is the culture that the Seneca tribe possesses at a particular time. Similarly, Eskimo culture refers to a class of cultures, and Plains culture refers to a type of culture. What is needed is a term that defines culture precisely in its particular manifestations for the purpose of scientific study, and for this the term sociocultural system has been proposed. It is defined as the culture possessed by a distinguishable and autonomous group (society) of human beings, such as a tribe or a modern nation. Cultural elements may pass freely from one system to another (cultural diffusion), but the boundary provided by the distinction between one system and another (Seneca, Cayuga; United States, Japan) makes it possible to study the system at any given time or over a period of time.

Every human society, therefore, has its own sociocultural system: a particular and unique expression of human culture as a whole. Every sociocultural system possesses the components of human culture as a whole-namely, technological, sociological, and ideological elements. But sociocultural systems vary widely in their structure and organization. These variations are attributable to differences among physical habitats and the resources that they offer or withhold for human use; to the range of possibilities inherent in various areas of activity, such as language or the manufacture and use of tools; and to the degree of development. The biologic factor of man may, for purposes of analysis and comparison of sociocultural systems, be considered as a constant. Although the equality or inequality of races, or physical types, of mankind has not been established by science, all evidence and reason lead to the conclusion that, whatever differences of native endowment may exist, they are insignificant as compared with the overriding influence of the external tradition that is culture.

Since the infant of the human species enters the world cultureless, his behaviour-his attitudes, values, ideals, and beliefs, as well as his overt motor activity-is powerfully influenced by the culture that surrounds him on all sides. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the power and influence of culture upon the human animal. It is powerful enough to hold the sex urge in check and achieve premarital chastity and even voluntary vows of celibacy for life. It can cause a person to die of hunger, though nourishment is available, because some foods are branded unclean by the culture. And it can cause a person to disembowel or shoot himself to wipe out a stain of dishonour. Culture is stronger than life and stronger than death. Among subhuman animals, death is merely the cessation of the vital processes of metabolism, respiration, and so on. In the human species, however, death is also a concept; only man knows death. But culture triumphs over death and offers man eternal life. Thus, culture may deny satisfactions on the one hand while it fulfills desires on the other.

The predominant emphasis, perhaps, in studies of culture and personality has been the inquiry into the process by which the individual personality is formed as it develops under the influence of its cultural milieu. But the individual biologic organism is itself a significant determinant in the development of personality. The mature personality is, therefore, a function of both biologic and cultural factors, and it is virtually impossible to distinguish these factors from each other and to evaluate the magnitude of each in particular cases. If the cultural factor were a constant, personality would vary with the variations of the neurosensory-glandular-muscular structure of the individual. But there are no tests that can indicate, for example, precisely how much of the taxicab driver's ability to make change is due to innate endowment and how much to cultural experience. Therefore, the student of culture and personality is driven to work with "modal personalities," that is, the personality of the typical Crow Indian or the typical Frenchman insofar as this can be determined. But it is of interest, theoretically at least, to note that even if both factors, the biologic and the cultural, were constant-which they never are in actuality-variations of personality would still be possible. Within the confines of these two constants, individuals might undergo a number of profound experiences in different chronological permutations. For example, two young women might have the same experiences of (1) having a baby, (2) graduating from college, and (3) getting married. But the effect of sequence (1), (2), (3) upon personality development would be quite different than that of sequence (2), (3), (1).

Cultural comparisons

Ethnocentrism is the name given to a tendency to interpret or evaluate other cultures in terms of one's own. This tendency has been, perhaps, more prevalent in modern nations than among preliterate tribes. The citizens of a large nation, especially in the past, have been less likely to observe people in another nation or culture than have been members of small tribes who are well acquainted with the ways of their culturally diverse neighbours. Thus, the American tourist could report that Londoners drive "on the wrong side of the street" or an Englishman might find some customs on the Continent "queer" or "boorish," merely because they are different. Members of a Pueblo tribe in the American Southwest, on the other hand, might be well acquainted with cultural differences not only among other Pueblos but also in non-Pueblo tribes such as the Navajo and Apache.

Ethnocentrism became prominent among many Europeans after the discovery of the Americas, the islands of the Pacific, and the Far East. Even anthropologists might characterize all preliterate peoples as being without religion (as did Sir John Lubbock) or as having a "prelogical mentality" (as did Lucien Lévy-Bruhl) merely because their ways of thinking did not correspond with those of the culture of western Europe. Thus, inhabitants of non-Western cultures, particularly those lacking the art of writing, were widely described as being immoral, illogical, queer, or just perverse ("Ye Beastly Devices of ye Heathen").

Increased knowledge led to or facilitated a deeper understanding and, with it, a finer appreciation of cultures quite different from one's own. When it was understood that universal needs could be served with culturally diverse means, that worship might assume a variety of forms, that morality consists in conforming to ethical rules of conduct but does not inhere in the rules themselves, a new view emerged that each culture should be understood and appreciated in terms of itself. What is moral in one culture might be immoral or ethically neutral in another. For example, it was not immoral to kill a baby girl at birth or an aged grandparent who was nonproductive when it was impossible to obtain enough food for all; or wife lending among the Eskimo might be practiced as a gesture of hospitality, a way of cementing a friendship and promoting mutual aid in a harsh and dangerous environment, and thus may acquire the status of a high moral value.

The view that elements of a culture are to be understood and judged in terms of their relationship to the culture as a whole-a doctrine known as cultural relativism-led to the conclusion that the cultures themselves could not be evaluated or graded as higher and lower, superior or inferior. If it was unwarranted to say that patriliny (descent through the male line) was superior or inferior to matriliny (descent through the female line), if it was unjustified or meaningless to say that monogamy was better or worse than polygamy, then it was equally unsound or meaningless to say that one culture was higher or superior to another. A large number of anthropologists subscribed to this view; they argued that such judgments were subjective and therefore unscientific.

It is, of course, true that some values are imponderable and some criteria are subjective. Are people in modern Western culture happier than the Aborigines of Australia? Is it better to be a child than an adult, alive than dead? These certainly are not questions for science. But to say that the culture of the ancient Mayas was not superior to or more highly developed than the crude and simple culture of the Tasmanians or to say that the culture of England in 1966 was not higher than England's culture in 1066 is to fly in the face of science as well as of common sense.

Evaluative grading

Cultures have ponderable values as well as imponderable, and the imponderable ones can be measured with objective, meaningful yardsticks. A culture is a means to an end: the security and continuity of life. Some kinds of culture are better means of making life secure than others. Agriculture is a better means of providing food than hunting and gathering. The productivity of human labour has been increased by machinery and by the utilization of the energy of nonhuman animals, water and wind power, and fossil fuels. Some cultures have more effective means of coping with disease than others, and this superiority is expressed mathematically in death rates. And there are many other ways in which meaningful differences can be measured and evaluations made. Thus, the proposition that cultures have ponderable values that can be measured meaningfully by objective yardsticks and arranged in a series of stages, higher and lower, is substantiated. But, it should be noted, this is not equivalent to saying that man is happier or that the dignity of the individual (an imponderable) is greater in an industrialized or agricultural sociocultural system than in one supported by human labour alone and sustained wholly by wild foods.

Actually, however, there is no necessary conflict between the doctrine of cultural relativism and the thesis that cultures can be objectively graded in a scientific manner. It is one thing to reject the statement that monogamy is better than polygamy and quite another to deny that one kind of sociocultural system contains a better means of providing food or combating disease than another.

Cultural adaptation and change

Every sociocultural system exists in a natural habitat, and, of course, this environment exerts an influence upon the cultural system. The cultures of some Eskimo groups present remarkable instances of adaptation to environmental conditions: tailored fur clothing, snow goggles, boats and harpoons for hunting sea mammals, and, in some instances, hemispherical snow houses, or igloos. Some sedentary, horticultural tribes of the upper Missouri River went out into the Great Plains and became nomadic hunters after the introduction of the horse. The culture of the Navajos underwent profound change after they acquired herds of sheep and a market for their rugs was developed. The older theories of simple environmentalism, some of which maintained that even styles of myths and tales were determined by topography, climate, flora, and other factors, are no longer in vogue. The present view is that the environment permits, at times encourages, and also prohibits the acquisition or use of certain cultural traits but otherwise does not determine culture change. The Fuegians living at the southern tip of South America, as viewed by Charles Darwin on his voyage on the Beagle, lived in a very cold, harsh environment but were virtually without both clothing and dwellings.

"Culture is contagious," as a prominent anthropologist once remarked, meaning that customs, beliefs, tools, techniques, folktales, ornaments, and so on may diffuse from one people or region to another. To be sure, a culture trait must offer some advantage, some utility or pleasure, to be sought and accepted by a people. (Some anthropologists have assumed that basic features of social structure, such as clan organization, may diffuse, but a sounder view holds that these features involving the organic structure of the society must be developed within societies themselves.) The degree of isolation of a sociocultural system-brought about by physical barriers such as deserts, mountain ranges, and bodies of water-has, of course, an important bearing upon the ease or difficulty of diffusion. Within the limits of desirability on the one hand and the possibility of communication on the other, diffusion of culture has taken place everywhere and in all times. Archaeological evidence shows that amber from the Baltic region diffused to the Mediterranean coast; and, conversely, early coins from the Middle East found their way to northern Europe. In aboriginal North America, copper objects from northern Michigan have been found in mounds in Georgia; macaw feathers from Central America turn up in archaeological sites in northern Arizona. Some Indian tribes in northwestern regions of the United States had possessed horses, originally brought into the Southwest by Spanish explorers, years before they had ever even seen white men. The wide dispersion of tobacco, corn (maize), coffee, the sweet potato, and many other traits are conspicuous examples of cultural diffusion.

Diffusion may take place between tribes or nations that are approximately equal in political and military power and of equivalent stages of cultural development, such as the spread of the sun dance among the Plains tribes of North America. But in other instances, it takes place between sociocultural systems differing widely in this respect. Conspicuous examples of this have been instances of conquest and colonization of various regions by the nations of modern Europe. In these cases it is often said that the culture of the more highly developed nation is "imposed" upon the less developed peoples and cultures, and there is, of course, much truth in this; the acquisition of foreign culture by the subject people is called acculturation and is manifested by the indigenous populations of Latin America as well as of other regions. But even in cases of conquest, traits from the conquered peoples may diffuse to those of the more advanced cultures; examples might include, in addition to the cultivated plants cited above, individual words ( coyote), musical themes, games, and art motifs.

One of the major problems of ethnology during the latter half of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th centuries was the question "How are cultural similarities in noncontiguous regions to be explained?" Did the concepts of pyramid building, mummification, and sun worship originate independently in ancient Egypt and in the Andean highlands and in Yucatán or did these traits originate in Egypt and diffuse from there to the Americas, as some anthropologists have believed? Some schools of ethnological theory have held to one view, some, to another. The 19th-century classical evolutionists (which included Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis H. Morgan, among others) held that the mind of man is so constituted or endowed that he will develop cultures everywhere along the same lines. "Diffusionists"-those, such as Fritz Graebner and Elliot Smith, who offered grand theories about the diffusion of traits all over the world-maintained that man was inherently uninventive and that culture, once created, tended to spread everywhere. Each school tended to insist that its view was the correct one, and it would continue to hold that view unless definite proof of the contrary could be adduced.

The tendency nowadays is not to side categorically with one school as against another but to decide each case on its own merits. The consensus with regard to pyramids is that they were developed independently in Egypt and the Americas because they differ markedly in structure and function: the Egyptian pyramids were built of stone blocks and contained tombs within their interiors. The American pyramids were constructed of earth, then faced with stone, and they served as the bases of temples. The verdict with regard to the bow and arrow is that it was invented only once and subsequently diffused to all regions where it has been found. The probable antiquity of the origin of fire making, however, and the various ways of generating it-by percussion, friction, compression (fire pistons)-indicate multiple origins.

Evolution

Evolution of culture-that is, the development of forms through time-has taken place. No amount of diffusion of picture writing could of itself, for instance, produce the alphabetic system of writing; as Tylor demonstrated so well, the art of writing has developed through a series of stages, which began with picture writing, progressed to hieroglyphic writing, and culminated in alphabetic writing. In the realm of social organization there was a development from territorial groups composed of families to segmented societies (clans and larger groupings). Sociocultural evolution, like biologic evolution, exhibits a progressive differentiation of structure and specialization of function.

A misunderstanding has arisen with regard to the relationship between evolution and diffusion. It has been argued, for example, that the theory of cultural evolution was unsound because some peoples skipped a stage in a supposedly determined sequence; for example, some African tribes, as a consequence of diffusion, went from the Stone Age to the Iron Age without an intermediate age of copper and bronze. But the classical evolutionists did not maintain that peoples, or societies, had to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development, but that tools, techniques, institutions-in short, culture-had to pass through the stages. The sequence of stages of writing did not mean that a society could not acquire the alphabet without working its way through hieroglyphic writing; it was obvious that many peoples did skip directly to the alphabet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Culture | Definition, Characteristics, Examples, Types, Tradition, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
culture, behaviour peculiar to Homo sapiens, together with material objects used as an integral part of this behaviour. Thus, culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements. The existence and use of culture depends upon an ability possessed by humans alone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Language-more specifically human language-refers to the grammar and other rules and norms that allow humans to make utterances and sounds in a way that others can understand, notes linguist John McWhorter, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general. It encompasses not only the study of sound, grammar and meaning, but also the history of language families, how languages are acquired by children and adults, and how language use is processed in the mind and how it is connected to race and gender. With close connections to the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences, linguistics complements a diverse range of other disciplines such as anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology, computer science, health sciences, education and literature. The subfield of Applied Linguistics emphasizes the use of linguistic concepts in the classroom to help students improve their ability to communicate in their native language or a second language.
Important subfields of linguistics include:

Phonetics - the study of how speech sounds are produced and perceived

Phonology - the study of sound patterns and changes

Morphology - the study of word structure

Syntax - the study of sentence structure

Semantics - the study of linguistic meaning

Pragmatics - the study of how language is used in context

Historical Linguistics - the study of language change

Sociolinguistics - the study of the relation between language and society

Computational Linguistics - the study of how computers can process human language

Psycholinguistics - the study of how humans acquire and use language

Learn More About Linguistics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general.

# data[].attributes.body
Language
Culture
Linguistics

# data[].attributes.body
Language is what makes us human. The importance of developing this skill is what will allow us to effectively communicate our opinions or needs. Language interacts with every aspect of human life in society, and it can be understood only if it is considered in relation to society.

# data[].attributes.body
A word is a unit of language that people who speak the language can refer to as a separate and specific unit of meaning. Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general.

# data[].attributes.body
Since childhood, culture has been described to us as how people live, the food, clothing, language, and celebrations are all a part of their culture. That's all the ways of life including arts, beliefs, and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation.

# data[].attributes.body
language, a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings express themselves as members of a social group and participants in its culture.

Culture:
Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, art.
Linguistics:
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general.

# data[].attributes.body
What is Language?
Language is the most important aspect in the life of all beings.

We use language to express inner thoughts and emotions, make sense of complex and abstract thought, to learn to communicate with others, to fulfill our wants and needs, as well as to establish rules and maintain our culture.

Language can be defined as verbal, physical, biologically innate, and a basic form of communication.

https://www.academia.edu/7330892/What_is_language

# data[].attributes.body
Language is the most important aspect in the life of all beings. We use language to express inner thoughts and emotions, make sense of complex and abstract thought, to learn to communicate with others, to fulfill our wants and needs, as well as to establish rules and maintain our culture.

Language can be defined as verbal, physical, biologically innate, and a basic form of communication.

https://www.academia.edu/7330892/What_is_language

# data[].attributes.body
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguists (experts in linguistics) work on specific languages, but their primary goal is to understand.

# data[].attributes.body
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages.

Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, art. norms of behavior, such as law and morality, and systems of belief.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and its focus is the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general. It encompasses not only the study of sound, grammar and meaning, but also the history of language families, how languages are acquired by children and adults, and how language use is processed in the mind and how it is connected to race and gender.

# data[].attributes.body
A system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves.

# data[].attributes.body
culture consists of the values, beliefs, systems of language, communication, and practices that people share in common and that can be used to define them as a collective

# data[].attributes.body
It entails the comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language , cognitive, social, environmental, biological as well as structural.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
UNESCO defines culture as " the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, that encompasses, not only art and literature but lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs" (UNESCO, 2001).

Culture is often defined by the objective aspects, those we can see, feel, touch and taste. This includes art, food, festivals, and political and educational structures. When we talk about intercultural awareness we look at the subjective aspects of culture. "Subjective culture refers to the experience of the social reality formed by a society's institutions - in other words, the worldview of a society's people." (Kleinman & Benson) Intercultural understanding involves the ability to recognize different worldviews and how they influence everyday communication, behavior, and interactions.

As we further our intercultural skills we need to continually remember not only how multifaceted and complex culture is, but also how much it is ingrained in our identity and sense of self.

Talking about Culture:
Cultural Generalizations vs. Stereotypes: Good Cultural Generalizations are based on systematic cross-cultural research. They refer to predominant tendencies among groups of people, so they are not labels for individuals. A given individual may exhibit the predominant group tendency a lot, a little, or not at all.

Stereotypes are not descriptive, but judgemental. Rather than being a broad generalization that is flexible, stereotypes are narrow and limiting, unable and not intended to invite an additional perspective or growth in knowledge.
Additional Resources:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UNESCO defines culture as " the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, that encompasses, not only art and literature but lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs" (UNESCO, 2001). Culture is often defined by the objective aspects, those we can see, feel, touch and taste.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linguistics is the study of language - how it is put together and how it functions. Various building blocks of different types and sizes are combined to make up a language. Sounds are brought together and sometimes when this happens, they change their form and do interesting things.

# data[].attributes.body
Mireya Broce

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linguistics is the study of language - how it is put together and how it functions. Various building blocks of different types and sizes are combined to make up a language. Sounds are brought together and sometimes when this happens, they change their form and do interesting things.

# data[].attributes.body
A language is a system of communication which consists of a set of sounds and written symbols which are used by the people of a particular country or region for talking or writing.
“Language”: a system of symbols, words, and/or gestures used to communicate meaning. Does everyone on earth speak the same language? Obviously, no. People are raised in different cultures, with different values, beliefs, customs, and different languages to express those cultural attributes.

# data[].attributes.body
Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts.
The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition goes a step further, defining culture as shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs and understanding that are learned by socialization.

# data[].attributes.body
Linguistics is the scientific study of language.  Linguists (experts in linguistics) work on specific languages, but their primary goal is to understand the nature of language in general by asking questions such as:

What distinguishes human language from other animal communication systems?

What features are common to all human languages?

How are the modes of linguistic communication (speech, writing, sign language) related to each other?

How is language related to other types of human behavior?

# data[].attributes.body
A system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.

# data[].attributes.body
Language, a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves.