What is language?

Oh. A spaceship has landed in Maria’s garden. - Blippblopp blipp - An alien. It’s trying to say something, but Maria can’t understand it. It’s speaking a language that Maria doesn’t know. - Vovvovvov - Oh dear, Maria’s dog is frightened. - Blippblopp blippetiblopp - It looks as if the alien is trying to converse with the dog. Imagine if we could understand what they’re saying to each other? - Vovvovvov - Blippblopp - Vovvovvov - Blippblopp blippetiblopp - No, they don’t seem to understand each other.

They speak different languages. Or, actually, dogs don’t really have a language. You don’t agree, Maria? You think your dog does have a language? Yes, true.

You can hear if she’s angry, or happy, or scared when she’s barking or whimpering. But that is not a language - the dog has a limited number of set sounds, and every sound only has one meaning. So what is a language then? Humans also have different sounds that mean things. For something to count as a language, we need something more.

Come along! Just like animals, spoken languages have a small set of sounds - we call them speech sounds. /t/ /k/ /b/ /o/ /a/ /i/ /e/ /s/ /m/ /n/ Different languages have a different number of speech sounds. Some have 10, others have over a 100. The most common number is about 30. These speech sounds in themselves mean nothing.

But if we put them together into words, they have meaning. With only these four speech sounds… you can form lots of different words. cat, attack, stack, cast, scat, task, sack... Can you come up with more? By combining a limited number of sounds, humans can create an unlimited number of words.

But, we don’t. An adult person needs to know about 20,000 words in their daily life. And in most dictionaries, there are typically about 100,000 words. Does that mean that we can only say 100,000 different things, then? No, because we can put together all those words into an infinite number of sentences.

In this way, we can say anything. Even things that no one has ever said, or even thought, before. A green dog wearing a hat flew over the sky yesterday and sat down on the castle’s roof. You can understand what this sentence is talking about, even if you have never heard it before. There is no other animal on earth that can do something similar to what we do.

You can get a dog to understand instructions such as “sit”. But only by training the dog into understanding exactly that message. This way of assembling sounds into words and sentences, seems to be something uniquely human. By combining words, we can say an endless amount of things. But there are limits to how you can combine them.

Look here: The cat is chasing the rat. Is the cat chasing the rat? The rat is chasing the cat. These sentences contain the same words, but changing the word order gives each sentence a different meaning. The second sentence becomes a question, and the third means the opposite of the first.

The order of the words influences the meaning. These rules form a system that tells us how the words combine, and how the meaning is to be interpreted. These rules are the language’s grammar. Speech sounds put together make words. Words put together make sentences.

With grammar, we can create an endless number of meanings. We have endless possibilities of expression. And that seems to be unique to the human race. Well...and maybe this alien. - Blippblipp