Language, Types of

Identifying Types of Language

Although human languages are grouped as spoken or signed, there is a wide range of characteristics in the world's languages that make the task of subclassifying them into types within these categories quite difficult. Given that there are estimates of between 3,000 and 10,000 spoken languages, the development of language varieties and the change that can occur in languages over time add to the dilemma of approximating typologies. The same is true for signed languages in the world. Among the many systems that linguists have used to try to manage complex combinations of linguistic variables, there is a basic focus on how languages differ in their structures and in their formal use.

Crystal provided a detailed explanation regarding spoken language typology and distinguished between two major approaches to the task:differentiation and the search for language universals. The latter construct is especially associated with Noam Chomsky, who has explored language characteristics that could generate a set of rules universal to all languages. Rather than looking at the ways in which languages are different, Chomsky has been more concerned about those things that are in common in a generative grammar that helps to understand the human mind.

The second approach to language typology is differentiation, and it is this approach that is applied not only to characterize language structures but also to [Page 1428]indicate how languages are the expressions of societies and cultures. In other words, by differentiating languages, we can locate patterns of linguistic and societal development and we can formulate theories about societies living in specific geographical areas. Language and culture may be artificially separated for study, but they are actually inseparable for understanding the ways in which people create communities and live in them. Crystal cautioned, however, that there is no evidence that “languages of a particular type are inevitably associated with particular geographic areas or with people of a particular ethnic or cultural group.”

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