“Language is the foundation of civilization. It is the glue that holds a people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.” – Arrival

About 3 million years ago, the first hominids descended from the trees and started walking on two feet in order to look over the tall grasslands, watching out for and running from predators. In the African Savannah, Australopithecus Aphaeresis took the first step which enabled us to actively change our environment; with our hands free, we started building tools, wielding weapons, harnessing fire and cooking food. Chewing got easier and faster and we were also able to absorb more nutrients with Cooking which in turn allowed our brains to expand. This new lifestyle freed us from using our mouths for more than just grunting, eating and chewing, now we had plenty of time to talk. 

Despite the common traits between human and animal communication, language is a uniquely human feat. Human language is infinite: Our complex vocal apparatus provides us a long repertoire of sounds which can be combined in countless ways to produce infinite sentences. The dog chased the cat/ the BLACK dog chased the yellow cat/ the black and white dog chased the yellow cat and a car/ the black and white excited dog chased the yellow nervous cat and a green car/ the black and white excited dog chased the yellow nervous cat with patches of white and also a big green car/ the black and white dog excited dog chased down the yellow nervous cat with patches of white and also a big green car with an angry driver…. That sentence could go on infinitely. 

We are able to travel to the past or foresee the future using language. We can talk about things that are, things that never were or things that might have been whilst animals can only live in the concrete present. We can also lie, tell jokes and express ourselves through art, skills that aren’t spontaneous for animals.

Language is inherently cooperative, humans acquire language culturally by observing the behaviors of those around them and interacting in ways deemed appropriate by the group. Language use within the group allows us to share complex thoughts with one another by shaping events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision. 

What is language and what do all languages share in common?

Linguists understand language as a system of arbitrary vocal signs. Language is rulegoverned, creative, universal, innate, and learned, all at the same time. 

Ferdinand de Saussure, the idealizer of linguistics as a science, stated that the relation between the linguistic sign and what it signifies is conventional or arbitrary. That means that for a word to exist, a group must agree that the word refers to something. For instance, speakers of English have entered into a social agreement that the word ‘cat’ stands for a particular animal even if there is no resemblance between the sound of the word “cat” with the animal’s appearance, behavior and the sounds it makes.

Language is universal. Picture a deck of cards. With the same deck, you are able to play different card games, such as poker, canastra, bridge simply by arranging the cards differently. That is how language works, every language in the world has nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, the difference is the way these words are rearranged within different languages, but the cards are always the same. A good example of that is how two different branches from the same indo-european tree, Romance and Germanic languages, organize the word order of nouns & adjectives. Germanic languages always place the adjective before the noun such as White Horse in English or Weisse Pferd in German whereas in Romance languages or vulgar latin, as they were once called, always place the noun phrase before the adjective such as Cavalo Branco in Portuguese or Caballo Blanco in Spanish or even Cheval Blanc in French. That is why we say language is rule-governed. Intuitively understanding these underlying rules of a particular language is what linguistics call Competence Grammar.

Language is innate. 

In 1957, behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proposed that humans acquired language through learning. In his book Verbal Behavior Skinner argued that language, like all animal behavior, was a learned behavior that developed in children as a function of external reinforcement and careful parental shaping. By Skinner’s account infants learn language as a rat learns to press a bar—through monitoring and management of reward contingencies. The nativist Noam Chomsky, writing a review of Verbal Behavior, took a very different position. Chomsky argued that traditional reinforcement learning has little to do with humans’ abilities to acquire language. Instead, every individual has an innate “language faculty” that includes a universal grammar and a universal phonetics; exposure to a speci/c language triggers a “selection” process for one language

Communication-the passing on or exchange of information-distinguishes what is living from what is nonliving in nature. Communication is found even in the apparently passive world of ]plants; trees, for example, have been found to pass on information about advancing predators by means of chemical signals.

Animals communicate among themselves and with humans so effectively that they are frequently held to use ‘language’. But communication and language are not simply words that mean the same thing. Human language is a specific way of representing the world and passing on information. Just as the use of communication sets what is living apart from what is nonliving, the use of language is often said to set humans apart from all other animals. lf animals communicate within a system that is structured like human language, then language as we know it is not the unique property of our species, and we will have to look for other ways of defining humanness.