English as a Universal Language

by Carlos Carrion Torres - Vitoria ES - Brazil

English is without a doubt the actual universal language. It is the world's second largest native language, the official language in 70 countries, and English-speaking countries are responsible for about 40% of world's total GNP.

English can be at least understood almost everywhere among scholars and educated people, as it is the world media language, and the language of cinema, TV, pop music and the computer world. All over the planet people know many English words, their pronunciation and meaning.

The causes for this universality are very well known and understandable. English first began to spread during the 16th century with British Empire and was strongly reinforced in 20th by USA world domination in economic, political and military aspects and by the huge influence of American movies.

The concept of a Universal Language is more significant only now, in the era of world mass communication. Before this era Greek, Latin, French were to some extent universal languages, though mainly in Europe.

By a lucky coincidence due to factors above, English, the Universal language, is one of the simplest and easiest natural languages in the world. The only other simple and easy languages are constructed ones.

Of course the concept of easiness is relative, and it depends on which language you know already. However the concept of simplicity is undeniable: English in an easy language to learn, understand and speak. A complex language such as Hungarian would be a very unlikely candidate for a universal language.

First of all, English Language uses Latin alphabet, the most universal, simple and short one (only the Greek alphabet is shorter and simpler). In addition, in English, the Latin Alphabet presents its most "clean" form as a true alphabet with only 26 basic letters and no diacritics;

Verb conjugation is very simple and easy. Even for irregular verbs, there is almost no variation in person (except 3rd singular in present tense).

Regular verbs have only four forms: Infinitive + Present, Past Tense + Past Participle, 3rd person singular Present Indicative, Present Participle.

There are almost no Inflections. No number or gender inflection for adjectives, articles, adverbs. For adjectives there is only comparative and superlative, almost only number for nouns. In pronouns there are gender and number inflections and only three declension cases (Acc/Dat, Nom, Gen).

English is one of the most analytical languages, with no significant synthetic, fusional or agglutinative characteristics.

Could be there any other alternative for Universal Language, instead of English?

There are other languages that are quite simple and synthetic, with almost no verb conjugation, no declension, such as Asian languages like Thai and Chinese, but they are written with complicated scripts and are tonal languages. However if Chinese were to be written with the Latin alphabet, it could potentially become a univeral language.

There are other strong languages that, due to population and economic power, could be univeral languages, but they have a number of disadvantages when compared with English.

Some examples:

Japanese: has very regular verbs but also a very complicated script.

Chinese: no conjugations or declension, but a very complicated script and tones.

German has many more inflections than English.

The major Romance languages, such as French, Spanish and Portuguese, have fewer inflections than most of languages, but their verb conjugation is very complicated.

Russian has both complex verb conjugations and numerous noun declensions.

In conclusion, it is lucky for us that our universal language is the simplest and easiest, even though that simplicity and easiness weren't the reasons that lead English to that condition.

English language

Last updated 1 day agoEnglish is a West Germanic language spoken originally in England, and is now the most widely used language in the world. It is spoken as a first language by a majority of the inhabitants of several nations, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. It is the third most common native language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. It is widely learned as a second language and is an official language of the European Union, many Commonwealth countries and the United Nations, as well as in many world organisations.

English arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and what is now south-east Scotland, but was then under the control of the kingdom of Northumbria. Following the extensive influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, via the British Empire, and of the United States since the mid-20th century,[6]

HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language" \l "cite_note-6" [7]

HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language" \l "cite_note-7" [8]

HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language" \l "cite_note-8" [9] it has been widely propagated around the world, becoming the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions.

Historically, English originated from the fusion of closely related dialects, now collectively termed Old English, which were brought to the eastern coast of Great Britain by Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) settlers by the 5th century with the word English being derived from the name of the Angles, and ultimately from their ancestral region of Angeln (in what is now Schleswig-Holstein). A significant number of English words are constructed based on roots from Latin, because Latin in some form was the lingua franca of the Christian Church and of European intellectual life. The language was further influenced by the Old Norse language due to Viking invasions in the 8th and 9th centuries.

The Norman conquest of England in the 11th century gave rise to heavy borrowings from Norman-French, and vocabulary and spelling conventions began to give the appearance of a close relationship with Romance languages to what had then become Middle English. The Great Vowel Shift that began in the south of England in the 15th century is one of the historical events that mark the emergence of Modern English from Middle English.

Owing to the assimilation of words from many other languages throughout history, modern English contains a very large vocabulary, with complex and irregular spelling, particularly of vowels. Modern English has not only assimilated words from other European languages but also from all over the world, including words of Hindi and African origin. The Oxford English Dictionary lists over 250,000 distinct words, not including many technical, scientific, and slang terms

Importance of the English Language

Summary: A look at the importance of English in India and the world.

By: Dr. G. Manivannan | Audience: Teachers | Category: Teaching English in Asia

A language is a systematic means of communication by the use of sounds or conventional symbols. It is the code we all use to express ourselves and communicate to others. It is a communication by word of mouth. It is the mental faculty or power of vocal communication. It is a system for communicating ideas and feelings using sounds, gestures, signs or marks. Any means of communicating ideas, specifically, human speech, the expression of ideas by the voice and sounds articulated by the organs of the throat and mouth is a language. This is a system for communication. A language is the written and spoken methods of combining words to create meaning used by a particular group of people.

Language, so far as we know, is something specific to humans, that is to say it is the basic capacity that distinguishes humans from all other living beings. Language therefore remains potentially a communicative medium capable of expressing ideas and concepts as well as moods, feelings and attitudes.

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

Written languages use symbols (characters) to build words. The entire set of words is the languages vocabulary. The ways in which the words can be meaningfully combined is defined by the languages syntax and grammar. The actual meaning of words and combinations of words is defined by the languages semantics.

The latest and the most advanced discoveries and inventions in science and technology are being made in the universities located in the United States of America where English language is the means of scientific discourse.

The historical circumstances of India (having been ruled by the British for over two centuries) have given the Indians an easy access to mastering English language, and innumerable opportunities for advancement in the field of science and technology. Many Indians have become so skilled in English language and have won many international awards for creative and comparative literatures during the last few years. Sometime ago, an Indian author, Arundhati Roy, won the prestigious booker prize for her book The God of Small Things. Her book sold lakhs of copies all over the globe.

Over the years, English language has become one of our principal assets in getting a global leadership for books written by Indian authors and for films made by Indians in English language. A famous Indian movie maker Shekhar Kapoors film Elizabeth has got several nominations for Oscar Awards. It does not require any further argument to establish the advantage English language has brought to us at the international level.

English language comes to our aid in our commercial transactions throughout the globe. English is the language of the latest business management in the world and Indian proficiency in English has brought laurels to many Indian business managers. English is a means not only for international commerce; it has become increasingly essential for inter-state commerce and communication.

In India, people going from North to South for education or business mostly communicate in English, which has become a link language. Keeping this in mind, the Parliament has also recognized English as an official language in addition to Hindi. All the facts of history and developments in present day India underline the continued importance of learning English in addition to vernaculars.

Some of the states of India are witnessing popular increase in public demand for teaching of English language from the primary classes. Realizing the importance, recently, the Minister of Indian Railways, Laloo Prasad Yadav, demands teaching of English language in schools. The great demand for admission in English medium schools throughout the country is a testimony to the attraction of English to the people of India. Many of the leaders, who denounce English, send their own children to English medium schools. Many of the schools in the country have English as the sole or additional medium of instruction.

A language attracts people because of the wealth of literature and knowledge enshrined in it. English poses no danger to Indian languages. The Indian languages are vibrant and are developing by the contributions of great minds using them as their vehicle of expression. English is available to us as a historical heritage in addition to our own language. We must make the best use of English to develop ourselves culturally and materially so that we can compete with the best in the world of mind and matter. English language is our window to the world.

English language is one tool to establish our viewpoint. We can learn from others experience. We can check the theories of foreigners against our experience. We can reject the untenable and accept the tenable. We can also propagate our theories among the international audience and readers.

We can make use of English to promote our worldview and spiritual heritage throughout the globe. Swami Vivekananda established the greatness of Indian view of religion at the world conference of religions in Chicago in 1893. He addressed the gathering in impressive English. Many spiritual gurus have since converted thousands of English people to our spirituality by expressing their thought and ideas in masterful English. English has thus become an effective means of promoting Indian view of life, and strengthening our cultural identity in the world.

When William Caxton set up his printing press in London (1477) the new hybrid language (vernacular English mixed with courtly French and scholarly Latin) became increasingly standardized, and by 1611, when the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible was published, the educated English of London had become the core of what is now called Standard English. By the time of Johnsons dictionary (1755) and the American Declaration of Independence (1776), English was international and recognizable as the language we use today. The Orthography of English was more or less established by 1650 and, in England in particular, a form of standard educated speech, known as Received Pronunciation (RP) spread from the major public schools in the 19th century. This accent was adopted in the early 20th century by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for its announcers and readers, and is variously known as RP, BBC English, Oxford English, and the Kings or Queens English.

Generally, Standard English today does not depend on accent but rather on shared educational experience, mainly of the printed language. Present-day English is an immensely varied language, having absorbed material from many other tongues. It is spoken by more than 300 million native speakers, and between 400 and 800 million foreign users. It is the official language of air transport and shipping; the leading language of science, technology, computers, and commerce; and a major medium of education, publishing, and international negotiation. For this reason, scholars frequently refer to its latest phase as World English.

Last updated 4 hours ago

Second Language Acquisition

What is second language acquisition?

Second language acquisition, or sequential language acquisition, is learning a second language after a first language is already established. Many times this happens when a child who speaks a language other than English goes to school for the first time. Children have an easier time learning a second language, but anyone can do it at any age. It takes a lot of practice!

What is the best way to teach a second language?

There are many different things that factor into the decision about how to teach a person a second language, including the following:

language spoken in the home

amount of opportunity to practice the second language

internal motivation of the learner

reason that the second language is needed (e.g., to learn at school, to talk to a friend, or for work)

There are different ways that to introduce the second language:

by setting (e.g., English is spoken only in the school, and Urdu is spoken only in the home)

by topic (e.g., French is spoken only during meal time, and Spanish is spoken during school/work activities)

by speaker (e.g., Mom will speak only in German, and Dad speaks Russian only)

The ability of a person to use a second language will depend on his or her family's ability to speak more than one language. It is important for parents/caregivers to provide a strong language model. If you cannot use the language well, you should not be teaching it.

How can a speech-language pathologist help?

A speech-language pathologist (SLP) can provide elective services for individuals who are learning English as a second language. These services are not covered by insurance.

Bottom of Form

715b4a2d-f8fe-4086-beea-257752a3e425

Y2:715b4a2d-f8fe-4086-beea-257752a3e425

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words to communicate. The capacity to successfully use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocalized as with speech or manual as in sign. The human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though the human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called Recursion. Evidence suggests that every individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are: relativization, complementation and coordination. Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language. This is distinguished from second language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.

The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other beings. Although it is difficult to pin down what aspects of language are uniquely human, there are a few design features that can be found in all known forms of human language, but that are missing from forms of animal communication. For example, many animals are able to communicate with each other by signaling to the things around them, but this kind of communication lacks the arbitrariness of human vernaculars (in that there is nothing about the sound of the word "dog" that would hint at its meaning). Other forms of animal communication may utilize arbitrary sounds, but are unable to combine those sounds in different ways to create completely novel messages that can then be automatically understood by another. Hockett called this design feature of human language "productivity". It is crucial to the understanding of human language acquisition that we are not limited to a finite set of words, but, rather, must be able to understand and utilize a complex system that allows for an infinite number of possible messages. So, while many forms of animal communication exist, they differ from human languages, in that they have a limited range of non-syntactically structured vocabulary tokens that lack cross cultural variation between groups.

A major question in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infants from what appears to be very little input. Input in the linguistic context is defined as "All words, contexts, and other forms of language to which a learner is exposed, relative to acquired proficiency in first or second languages" It is difficult to believe, considering the hugely complex nature of human languages, and the relatively limited cognitive abilities of an infant, that infants are able to acquire most aspects of language without being explicitly taught. Children, within a few years of birth, understand the grammatical rules of their native language without being explicitly taught, as one learns grammar in school. A range of theories of language acquisition have been proposed in order to explain this apparent problem. These theories, championed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and others, include innatism and Psychological nativism, in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as opposed to other theories in which language is simply learned as one learns to ride a bike. The conflict between the traits humans are born with and those that are a product of one's environment is often referred to as the "Nature vs. Nurture" debate. As is the case with many other human abilities and characteristics, it appears that there are some qualities of language acquisition that the human brain is automatically wired for (a "nature" component) and some that are shaped by the particular language environment in which a person is raised (a "nurture" component).

Second-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition (often abbreviated to SLA) is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. Second language refers to any language learned in addition to a person's first language; although the concept is named second language acquisition, it can also incorporate the learning of third, fourth or subsequent languages. Second-language acquisition refers to what learners do; it does not refer to practices in language teaching.

The academic discipline of second-language acquisition is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics. It is broad-based and relatively new. As well as the various branches of linguistics, second-language acquisition is also closely related to psychology, cognitive psychology, and education. To separate the academic discipline from the learning process itself, the terms second-language acquisition research, second-language studies, and second-language acquisition studies are also used. SLA research began as an interdisciplinary field, and because of this it is difficult to identify a precise starting date. However, it does appear to have developed a great deal since the mid-1960s. The term acquisition was originally used to emphasize the subconscious nature of the learning process, but in recent years learning and acquisition have become largely synonymous.

Second-language acquisition can incorporate heritage language learning,[4] but it does not usually incorporate bilingualism. Most SLA researchers see bilingualism as being the end result of learning a language, not the process itself, and see the term as referring to native-like fluency. Writers in fields such as education and psychology, however, often use bilingualism loosely to refer to all forms of multilingualism. Second-language acquisition is also not to be contrasted with the acquisition of a foreign language; rather, the learning of second languages and the learning of foreign languages involve the same fundamental processes in different situations.

There has been much debate about exactly how language is learned, and many issues are still unresolved. There have been many theories of second-language acquisition that have been proposed, but none has been accepted as an overarching theory by all SLA researchers. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field of second-language acquisition, this is not expected to happen in the foreseeable future

Second Language is Important

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words to communicate. The capacity to successfully use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocalized as with speech or manual as in sign. The human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though the human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called Recursion. Evidence suggests that every individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are: relativization, complementation and coordination.[1] Language acquisition usually refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language. This is distinguished from second language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.

The capacity to acquire and use language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other beings. Although it is difficult to pin down what aspects of language are uniquely human, there are a few design features that can be found in all known forms of human language, but that are missing from forms of animal communication. For example, many animals are able to communicate with each other by signaling to the things around them, but this kind of communication lacks the arbitrariness of human vernaculars (in that there is nothing about the sound of the word "dog" that would hint at its meaning). Other forms of animal communication may utilize arbitrary sounds, but are unable to combine those sounds in different ways to create completely novel messages that can then be automatically understood by another. Hockett called this design feature of human language "productivity". It is crucial to the understanding of human language acquisition that we are not limited to a finite set of words, but, rather, must be able to understand and utilize a complex system that allows for an infinite number of possible messages. So, while many forms of animal communication exist, they differ from human languages, in that they have a limited range of non-syntactically structured vocabulary tokens that lack cross cultural variation between groups.

A major question in understanding language acquisition is how these capacities are picked up by infants from what appears to be very little input. Input in the linguistic context is defined as "All words, contexts, and other forms of language to which a learner is exposed, relative to acquired proficiency in first or second languages" It is difficult to believe, considering the hugely complex nature of human languages, and the relatively limited cognitive abilities of an infant, that infants are able to acquire most aspects of language without being explicitly taught. Children, within a few years of birth, understand the grammatical rules of their native language without being explicitly taught, as one learns grammar in school. A range of theories of language acquisition have been proposed in order to explain this apparent problem. These theories, championed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and others, include innatism and Psychological nativism, in which a child is born prepared in some manner with these capacities, as opposed to other theories in which language is simply learned as one learns to ride a bike. The conflict between the traits humans are born with and those that are a product of one's environment is often referred to as the "Nature vs. Nurture" debate. As is the case with many other human abilities and characteristics, it appears that there are some qualities of language acquisition that the human brain is automatically wired for (a "nature" component) and some that are shaped by the particular language environment in which a person is raised (a "nurture" component).

First Language Acquisition How children so quickly and as if by magic acquire language has interested people for thousands of years.

Psammeticus, an Egyptian Pharoah during the 7th century BC, believed language was inborn and that children isolated from birth from any linguistic influence would develop the language they had been born with. He isolated two children, who were reported to have spoken a few words of Phyrgian, an IE language of present day Turkey. Psammeticus believed that this was the first, or original, language.

In the 15th century King James V of Scotland performed a similar experiment; the children were reported to have spoken good Hebrew.

These first studies of human language tended to be concerned with the origin of the oldest, or first, language (They were phylogenetic), and were only secondarily concerned with the precise way in which individual infants acquire speech. True studies of language development in the infant (ontogenetic studies) came later.

Akbar, a 16th cent. Mogul emperor of India, desired to learn whether language was innate or acquired through exposure to the speech of adults. He believed that language was learned by people listening to each other and therefore a child could not develop language alone. So he ordered a house built for two infants and stationed a mute nurse to care for them. The children did not acquire speech, which seemed to prove Akbar's hypothesis that language is acquired and does not simply emerge spontaneously in the absence of exposure to speech.

Only in the last 40 years after the invention of the tape recorder was child language recorded carefully and studied in any systematic fashion. Sophisticated recording machinery of all sorts are now used to monitor language proficiency in infants and small children.

Child language acquisiton studies often attempt to map out the stages of language acquisition. Such studies are of two types:

longitudinal-- development of speech in the same group over time. Most studies of child language acquisition are of this form.

cross sectional-- search for a certain type of data in a broad spectrum of different children, such as a study of the language of two-year olds across the country.

Since this discipline is so new there is little conclusively known about child language acquisition. One fact is definite: Language acquisition depends upon the child being exposed to language. (Akhbar's experiment was correct.) The language a child acquires is that of his/her surroundings. Children who are deprived of language in their environment simply do not begin to speak spontaneously. (Wolf children, Genie, had no language.)

The main question in all modern studies of child language acquisition involves finding out what in human language is inborm, innate, we say hard-wired, into the infant's brain structure, and what is learned through experience. Although this question hasn't been answered to anyone's complete satisfaction, it seems clear that the basic capacity to learn language is innate, while the particular form/meaning connections of individual languages are acquired through prolonged exposure to a specific speech community.

There are three main theoretical approaches to child language acquisition; all of them have merit but none can fully explain the phenomenon of child language acquisition.

1. Cognitive theory-- Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

Views lang. acq. within the context of the child's broader intellectual development. A child first becomes aware of a concept, such as relative size, and only afterward do they acquire the words and patterns to convey that concept. Simple ideas are expressed earlier than more complex ones even if they are grammatically more complicated-- Conditional mood is one of the last. (cf. Spanish vs. Russian.)

There is a consistent order of mastery of the most common function morphemes in a language Example from English: first-- -ing, then in and on, then the plural -s, last are the forms of the verb to be. Seems to be conditioned by logical complexity: plural is simple, while forms of the verb to be require sensitivity to both number and tense.

Pros and cons-- clearly there is some link between cognitive development and language acquisiton; Piaget's theory helps explain the order in which certain aspects of language are acquired. But his theory does not explain why language emerges in the first place. Apes also develop cognitively in much the same way as young children in the first few years of life, but language acquisition doesn't follow naturally from their development. Bees develop the cognitive ability to respond to many shades of color, but bees never develop any communication signals based on shades of color.

2. Imitation and positive reinforcementChildren learn by imitating and repeating what they hear. Positive reinforcement and corrections also play a major role in Language acquisition. Children do imitate adults. Repetition of new words and phrases is a basic feature of children's speech. This is the behaviorist view popular in the 40's and 50's, but challenged, since imitation alone cannot possibly account for all language acquisition.

Con: 1) Children often make grammatical mistakes that they couldn't possibly have heard: Cookies are gooder than bread. Bill taked the toy. We goed to the store, Don't giggle me. 2) This hypothesis would not account for the many instances when adults do not coach their children in language skills. Positive reinforcement doesn't seem to speed up the language acquisition process. Children do not respond to or produce metalanguage until 3 or 4, after the main portion of the grammar has been mastered. (Children don't comprehend discussions about language structure.) Story about Tyler, Kornei Chukovsky: yabloka, tibloka)

3. The final theory we will discuss involves the belief in the innateness of certain linguistic features. This theory is connected with the writings of Noam Chomsky, although the theory has been around for hundreds of years. Children are born with an innate capacity for learning human language. Humans are destined to speak. Children discover the grammar of their language based on their own inborn grammar. Certain aspects of language structure seem to be preordained by the cognitive structure of the human mind. This accounts for certain very basic universal features of language structure: every language has nouns/verbs, consonants and vowels. It is assumed that children are pre-programmed, hard-wired, to acquire such things. (The "gavagai" experiment.)

Yet no one has been able to explain how quickly and perfectly all children acquire their native language. Every language is extremely complex, full of subtle distinctions that speakers are not even aware of. Nevertheless, children master their native language in 5 or 6 years regardless of their other talents and general intellectual ability. Acquisition must certainly be more than mere imitation; it also doesn't seem to depend on levels of general intelligence, since even a severely retarded child will acquire a native language without special training. Some innate feature of the mind must be responsible for the universally rapid and natural acquisition of language by any young child exposed to speech.

No one has been able to explain just what this mysterious language acquisition device, or LAD, is. Some language acquisition must certainly be due to simple repetition: greetings, swear words; much of it is not. A three year old child generally can recall and use a new word heard once even months afterward.

Chomsky originally believes that the LAD is a series of syntactic universals, structural properties univerally found in all languages. These syntactic structures are inborn. Only the words are learned. Allows us infinite creativity based on a limited number of patterns. Children thus generate sentences based on learned words and innate syntactic patterns. This is why children make grammatical mistakes that they could not be repeating.

And yet, so far, no properties have been discovered that are truly universal in all languages. It seems that the syntactic structures differ from language to language and couldn't be innate. All attempts to construct a universal grammar that would underlie all structures in all languages have come to failure, Chomsky's theory of transformational grammar being a case in point.

Today Chomsky believes that the universal properties are constraints, rules that dictate what cannot be in any language rather than structures which are universal. Some of these apparently universal constraints include the observation that forms a question by reciting words backwards; the subject of a subordinate clause never governs the verb in the main clause, etc. It is assumed that something about the structure of our brain causes languages to be somewhat limited in how they can differ syntactically. This built in limitation aids the child in acquiring the language by narrowing down the possible patterns to a few.

The problem with the theory of innateness, then, is not in deciding whether the theory is correct, since the ability to learn language is certainly innate, but rather in identifying just what the mysterious language acquisition device actually is, what constraints or structural features are hard-wired in the mind. The LAD must be something more than general intelligence. And yet there doesn't seem to be any structural property or set of properties found in all languages that would allow us to identify any purely linguistic skill that is separate from human intelligence.

Let's take up the subject of just how structured the input is in child learning acquisition. Chomsky maintains that children couldn't simply figure out language structure by repetition and analogy because the language they hear is highly irregular. He claims that language spoken around the child extremenly fragmentary, random simplification of adult speech. Speech between adults is often fragmentary or even ungrammatical. Such run on and incomplete sentences must serve as clues to something already in the mind.

More recent studies show that language spoken around child is not as full of random errors, not as fragmented or randomly pidginized as one might believe. It has been found that mothers use a special register of language, dubbed motherese, to talk to their children. Motherese, just like other social registers, is highly structured; it is not random and irregular as Chomsky would have us all believe. There is a set correlation between motherese and adult language and the featurese characteristic of motherese differ across cultures:

Let's look at a few features of Anglo-American motherese:

Pragmatic features: sentences are shorter (4 or fewer words), speed slower, use of more clarificational features than in speech between adults, more questions, attempts at getting feedback from the child. In Samoan these features are lacking.

Grammatical elements found in motherese are even more diverse, but each language group has its own structured set: expressive element (intonation), lip rounding (Latvian palatalizes consonants), reduplication: choo-choo, use of special words, especially for toys, bodily functions: bunny, kaka, poo-poo. Use of special morphemes, like English y/ie: doggy, kitty, ducky, (Berber suffix: sh/sht, Russian -ik, ichiko, itsa). Such 'baby' morphemes often are used in speech between adults to make hypochoristics. Some language apparently lack any special grammatical or lexical markers for motherese: Samoan, Maya.

There is also a social register called fatherese: more demanding of information, using more direct questions and a wider vocabulary than motherese. There is also otherese. Older children and neighbors also talk to infants and very small children using special baby talk. The special social registers that developed from the need to speak to small children have developed into forms that are specific to each language. Very little work has been done to study these types of speech.

It seems increasingly apparent that the language a child hears is not fragmented randomly, but is highly structured and this structure plays a role in language acquisition. This proves, once again, that the structures themselves are not innate but acquired through exposure; the capacity to learn is what is innate.

Stages in child language acquistion--Universal1. Pre-speech: Much of importance goes on even before the child utters his first word: infants learn to pay attention to speech, pays attention to intonation and the rhythm of speech long before they begin to speak.

Infants respond to speech more keenly than to other sounds. Speech elicits greater electrical activity in the left side of the 2 month old infant's brain than do other sounds. Experiment with microphone and nipple showed that infants suck more vigorously if the action triggers a human voice as opposed to music or other sounds.

Child learn to recognize the distinctive sounds, the phonemes of the language they hear from birth long before they are able to pronounce them. Infants can distinguish between /p/ and /b/ at three or four months (in an experiment with /ba/ played vs. /pa/, a two month infant showed awareness of the change). But children do not learn how to use these sounds until much later-- around the second year or later--as shown by the experiment with /pok/ and /bok/. The same is true for rising vs. falling intonation, which only becomes systematically funtional much later. Infants know the difference between one language and another by recognition of phonological patterns (Story of the Russian fairy tale book.)

2. Babbling stage. Begins at several months of age. Characterized by indiscriminate utterance of speech sounds-- many of which may not be used in the given language but are found in other languages-- clicks. Many native speech sounds may be absent-- some are naturally harder to pronounce-- /r/ /th/. Very few consonant clusters and repeated syllables are common.

3. One word (holophrastic) stage. Infants may utter their first word as early as nine months: usually mama, dada (these words resemble babbling). Deaf babies whose parents use sign language begin making their first word/gestures around eight months. This stage is characterized by the production of actual speech signs. Often the words are simplified: "du" for duck, "ba" for bottle. When the child has acquired about 50 words he develops regular pronunciation patterns. This may even distort certain words-- turtle becomes "kurka". Incorrect pronunciations are systematic at this time: all words with /r/ are pronounced as /w/. sick--thick, thick--fick. Children tend to perceive more phonemic contrasts than they are able to produce themselves.

The first 50 words tend to be names of important persons, greetings, foods, highlights of the daily routine such as baths, ability to change their environment-give, take, go, up, down, open.

The meaning of words may not correspond to that of adult language:

overextension-- dog may mean any four legged creature. apple may mean any round object. bird may mean any flying object. Child can still distinguish between the differences, simply hasn't learned that they are linguistically meaningful. Dissimilarities linguistically redundant.

two patterns in child word learning--

referential-- names of objects.

expressive-- personal desires and social interactions: bye-bye, hi, good,

This is a continuum. Child's place on this continuum partly due to parent's style: naming vs. pointing.

The extra-linguistic context provides much of the speech info. Rising and falling intonation may or may not be used to distinguish questions from statements at the one-word stage. Words left out if the contexts makes them obvious. At this stage, utterances show no internal grammatical structure (much like the sentence yes in adult speech, which can't be broken down into subject, predicate, etc.)

4. Combining words-- 18 mo--2 years. By two and a half years most children speak in sentences of several words--but their grammar is far from complete. This stage rapidly progresses into what has been termed a fifth and final stage of language acquisition, the All hell breaks loose stage. By six the child's grammar approximates that of adults.

Children learning any language seem to encode the same limited set of meanings in their first sentences:

ownership-- Daddy's shoes; describing events-- Me fall; labeling-- That dog; locational relations-- toy in box.

Sentences usually two words. Children can repeat more complex sentences spoken by adults but cannot create them until later (called prefabricated routines) not indicative of the child's grammar.

Other patterns in early speech

The ends of words learned more quickly: -raff for giraff, -mato for tomato, -narna for banana. This is true even in lang. where the stress in always on the first syllable.

Avoidance of exceptions-- overextention of a pattern: go--goed; good--gooder.

The rest of the acquisition of grammar is idiosyncratic-- some children repeat more, others create more. Some children produce a great number of words before beginning to combine them into sentences. Others immediately begin to make sentences. There may be several individual routes to mastering one's native language.

Conclusion. All three theories--the imitation theory, the innateness theory, and the cognitive theory--are probably correct to a degree; each describes particular facets of a complex phenomenon.

1) Cognitive development is an essential prerequisite for linguistic development. But language acquisition doesn't occur spontaneously because of cognitive development (as seems to be the case in animal systems of communication.

2) Repetition, imitation, structured input are all a part of language acquisition. Greater exposure to language might speed language acquisition up but is not essential.

3) Innate learning device. All children exposed to language, regardless of environmental factors and differences in intelligence, are able to acquire very complex grammars at a very early age. Something innate to the child--the LAD--allows for such rapid and successful language acquisition by children.

All of the above studies have revealed a few universally accepted facts about child language acquisition.

1) Child Language acquisition is a natural consequence of human society. All children exposed to language acquire it naturally without deliberate efforts of teaching or learning.

2) The outcome of first language acquisition will be the same regardless of individual differences in intelligence. Two children with quite different intellectual abilities will both acquire a highly complex native language by age six.

3) Although the basic ability to acquire language is innate to the child, no specific structural property of language has yet been proven to be innate. Therefore, any infant is equally capable of acquiring any language. Infants born of different racial stocks will acquire the same form of language if raised in the same linguistic environment. There is no such a thing as a Russian language gene or a Swahili language gene. An infant born of Russian parents and adopted into an American family will acquire the same form of English as his stepbrothers and sisters.

Otherwise, the phenomenon of child language acquisition is just as much a mystery to us as it was to Pharoah Psammeticus.

715b4a2d-f8fe-4086-beea-257752a3e425

Y2:715b4a2d-f8fe-4086-beea-257752a3e425

The importance of language is essential to every aspect and interaction in our everyday lives. We use language to inform the people around us of what we feel, what we desire, and question/understand the world around us. We communicate effectively with our words, gestures, and tone of voice in a multitude of situation. Would you talk to a small child with the same words you would in a business meeting. Being able to communicate with each other, form bonds, teamwork, and its what separates humans from other animal species. Communication drives our lives and better ourselves.

Origins of why their are so many different languages as plagued scholars and linguistics for centuries and will continue to puzzle them far beyond our lifetimes to come. In most cultures have myths that there was a common language spoke among the people with a deity getting angry and confusing the people or separating them from each other/segmenting the people to create their own language. Prime examples of stories like this is the Tower of Babel, Hindu with the story of the Knowledge Tree, and even Native Americans believing in a Great Deluge(Flood) separating people and speech.

The importance of communication can be often overlooked. Even with the ability to communicate with each other. Misunderstandings happen. Remember, communication is a two way street that should be embraced and not ignored. Believe it or not, some people can be arrogant to believe they cant go to foreign countries without knowing anything of the language or culture of the people in the places they visit. The importance of language is beneficial regardless if you do it for fun or for your career or even just for personal travel.

They expect the indigenous people to accommodate them and know their language. The importance of language isnt much different no matter what your nationality is. Honestly, if you were to study other languages you will find that most of them are actually pretty similar. Mainly the differences are in alphabet, pronunciation, and grammar with the syntax generally staying the same. We should use it to show our understanding of the cultures and lives of our fellow men in other lands. We should go behind the outer shell and see the speaker beneath.

Part where the importance of languages really shines in business with companies trying to reach global audiences and markets. More and more business leaders are recognize to compete you have to have knowledge in many foreign languages. Knowledge of their language as well as their culture shows that you respect the ideas that they bring to the table and you understand their needs and wants better than somebody who does not have this background.

Additionally, there is the psychological aspect of direct communication during your business transactions. Your clients will be more likely to trust what you are saying and there will be a more intimate relationship than if you were to conduct all communication through a translator. This could be an important step in building strong and lasting business relationships that help ensure the success of your own business.

More and more school are recognizing the importance of language. Some schools begin offering to teach a second language as early as middle school. Many schools and employers are requiring specific language requirements as part of their application process.

Through language we can connect with other people and make sense of our experiences. Imagine what it must be like for your child to develop these skills that we take for granted. As a parent, teacher, or other type of caregiver, you shape a childs language development to reflect the identity, values, and experiences of your family and community.

Therefore, it is up to you to create a warm and comfortable environment in which your child can grow to learn the complexities of language. The communication skills that your child learns early in life will be the foundation for his or her communication abilities for the future. Strong language skills are an asset that will promote a lifetime of effective communication.

I have always been interested in languages. Our language is the most important part of our being. I think it is important to learn other languages besides our own because it helps us to learn about other peoples and cultures but the most important one that we can learn is our own mother tongue as this is one of the most basic parts of our identity. If we lose our own tongue, for example, when we grow up in a country which is not our own, in my opinion, we are losing a part of ourselves.

Cuneiform is the first known form of written language, but spoken language predates writing by at least tens of thousands of years.

Language diversity. Red: the eight countries that together hold more than 50% of the world's languages. Blue: areas of great diversity.[1]Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication. The scientific study of language in any of its senses is called linguistics.

The approximately 3,0006,000 languages that are spoken by humans today are the most salient examples, but natural languages can also be based on visual rather than auditory stimuli, for example in sign languages and written language. Codes and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as those used for computer programming can also be called languages. A language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. The English word derives ultimately from Latin lingua, "language, tongue", via Old French.[2] When used as a general concept, "language" refers to the cognitive faculty that enables humans to learn and use systems of complex communication.

Language as a communication system is thought to be fundamentally different from and of much higher complexity than those of other species as it is based on a complex system of rules relating symbols to their meanings, resulting in an indefinite number of possible innovative utterances from a finite number of elements. Language is thought to have originated when early hominids first started cooperating, adapting earlier systems of communication based on expressive signs to include a theory of other minds and shared intentionality. This development is 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 functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Brocas and Wernickes areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently when they are around three years old. The use of language has become deeply entrenched in human culture and, apart from being used to communicate and share information, it also has social and cultural uses, such as signifying group identity, social stratification and for social grooming and entertainment. The word "language" can also be used to describe the set of rules that makes this possible, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules.

All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate a sign with a particular meaning. Spoken and signed languages contain a phonological system that governs how sounds or visual symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are used to form phrases and utterances. Written languages use visual symbols to represent the sounds of the spoken languages, but they still require syntactic rules that govern the production of meaning from sequences of words. 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 for the later stages to have occurred. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family. The languages that are most spoken in the world today belong to the Indo-European family, which includes languages such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Hindi; the Sino-Tibetan languages, which include Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and many others; Semitic languages, which include Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew; and the Bantu languages, which include Swahili, Zulu, Shona and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout Africa. Forty per cent of the world's languages are endangered and likely to become extinct.[3he word "language" has at least two basic meanings: language as a general concept, and "a language" (a specific linguistic system, e.g. "French"). Ferdinand de Saussure first explicitly formulated the distinction, using the French word langage for language as a concept, and langue as the specific instance of language.

When speaking of language as a general concept, several different definitions can be used that stress different aspects of the phenomenon. These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory.

DefinitionsThe word "language" has at least two basic meanings: language as a general concept, and "a language" (a specific linguistic system, e.g. "French"). Ferdinand de Saussure first explicitly formulated the distinction, using the French word langage for language as a concept, and langue as the specific instance of language.

When speaking of language as a general concept, several different definitions can be used that stress different aspects of the phenomenon. These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory.

[edit] Mental faculty, organ or instinctOne definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and produce and understand utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans and the biological basis of the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain.[6]

HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" \l "cite_note-Language_Instinct-6" [7] This view often understands language to be largely innate, for example as in Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, Jerry Fodors extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied by studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.

Formal symbolic systemAnother definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses the fact 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 most approaches to language today. Some proponents of this view of language have advocated a formal approach to studying the structures of language, privileging the formulation of underlying abstract rules that can be understood to generate observable linguistic structures. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, who defines language as a particular set of sentences that can be generated from a particular set of rules.[8] The structuralist viewpoint is commonly used in formal logic, semiotics, and in formal and structural theories of grammar, the most commonly used theoretical frameworks in linguistic description. In the philosophy of language these views are associated with philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, early Wittgenstein, Alfred Tarski and Gottlob Frege.

Tool for communicationYet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans to cooperate. 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 understands the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which grammar was "tailored" to serve communicative needs of its users. This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive and interactional frameworks, as well as in socio-linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as a dynamic phenomenon, as structures that are always in the process of changing as they are employed by their speakers. This view leads to the study of linguistic typology being of importance, as it can be shown that processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology. In the philosophy of language these views are often associated with Wittgensteins later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as G. E. Moore, Paul Grice, John Searle and J. L. Austin.

What makes human language uniqueHuman language is unique in comparison to other forms of communication, such as those used by animals, because it allows humans to produce an infinite set of utterances from a finite set of elements,[10] HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" \l "cite_note-8"

and because the symbols and grammatical rules of any particular language are largely arbitrary, so that the system can only be acquired through social interaction. The known systems of communication used by animals, on the other hand, can only express a finite number of utterances that are mostly genetically transmitted.Human languages also differ from animal communication systems in that they employ grammatical and semantic categories such as noun and verb, or present and past, to express exceedingly complex meanings.[11] Human language is also unique in that its complex structure serves a much wider range of functions than any other known communication system.

Language is also unique in that it has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in "the chimpanzee's

_1402178442.bin

_1402178443.unknown

_1402178441.bin