Language

Language, like culture, is something that is easier to discuss than to define, and no unitary definition is offered here. Instead, what anthropologists and linguists mean by language is better understood by trying to be clear about what does and does not count as language. In some cases, this involves disentangling folk uses of the term language from scientific uses.

In its folk sense, language is often used to mean any communication system—the “dance” of honeybees, the significance of type and color of flowers given to someone, computer codes, the posture and gestures included in “body language,” and so on. Although these are indeed communication systems, they are not examples of language because they lack specific properties of human language, including especially the following:

Discreteness or discrete infinity. The elements of language (phonemes, words, and phrases) are perceptually discrete and can be combined and recombined without limit.

Dual patterning. A relatively small number of phonemes (as few as 15 for Hawaiian and approximately 35 for English),which are without intrinsic meaning, are combined to form units that bear meaning (e.g., morphemes, words). In other animal systems, each call is a meaningful unit.

Hierarchical structure. Linguistic elements are nested within each other. For example, the noun phrase the gray cat contains the nested constituents the and gray cat, and gray cat in turn contains gray and cat.

Structure dependence. The rules that govern the formation of words, phrases, and sentences operate on structural categories such as nouns and verb phrases, not on individual words such as cat and eat.

Some features of human language that are hinted at in other animal communication systems include the following:

Displacement. Linguistic expressions can have referents that are not present in either space or time such as the moons of Saturn and Attila the Hun.

Prevarication. Linguistic expressions can have referents that exist only in the imagination such as Tolkien's hobbits and Darth Vader.

The displacement feature may be present in the communication of direction and distance to the source made by honeybees. In addition, many animals “lie” by disguising themselves as more dangerous animals. Some monkeys learn to give false warning calls to the troop when they are under threat from other monkeys, and some of the primates that have acquired elements of human sign language seem to be able to use it for both displacement and prevarication, although they appear to be proficient at about the level of a 2-year-old human.

For anthropologists and linguists, then, one sense of language is the species property, the apparently uniquely human and innate capacity to acquire and use the entities that we label with words such as English, Tagalog, and American Sign Language. Darwin called this our “instinctive tendency to acquire an art.” This is not an entirely uncontested view, but most linguists agree that language is innate in humans, although all agree equally that the specific language variety that people acquire as children depends on the social context within which they are enculturated.