"Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary."
A system of communication using sounds, gestures, or written symbols that enables people to express and understand their thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
Linguistics: This includes the study of the structure, rules, and patterns of language, including syntax, phonetics, morphology, and semantics.
Psycholinguistics: The study of the psychological and cognitive processes involved in language acquisition, comprehension, and production.
Anthropological linguistics: Deals with the study of the relationship between language and culture, and how language reflects and shapes cultural practices and values.
Cognitive linguistics: The study of language as a system of thought, and how it is used to express and convey meaning, including metaphor and conceptual metaphors.
Neurolinguistics: Examines how the brain processes and represents language, including the neural basis of language comprehension and production.
Semiotics: The study of signs and symbols and their use in communication, including the relationship between language and other sign systems.
Sociolinguistics: Deals with the social and cultural aspects of language use, including how language is used to express identity, power, and social relationships.
Pragmatics: The study of how context and social factors influence language use and interpretation, including speech acts and implicature.
Language evolution: Study of how languages change over time, and the factors that drive language change.
Language acquisition: Examining how children acquire language, and the different stages of language development.
Language structure: The analysis of language structure, including how words and phrases are put together to create sentences, and how sentence structures vary across languages.
Language typology: The study of language universals and how languages differ from one another in terms of grammar and vocabulary.
Language variation: Analysis of different regional and social dialects, and the factors that contribute to linguistic variation.
Language contact: Studies how languages come into contact with each other, including borrowing, code-switching, and pidgin and creole formation.
Language and gender: Examines the relationship between language and gender, including gender differences in language use and language socialization.
Language and power: Studies the use of language in politics, the media, and other domains of power, and how language shapes and reflects power dynamics.
Language and identity: Examines the relationship between language and personal and group identity, including how language is used to express and construct identity.
Language and culture: Studies how language reflects and shapes cultural practices and values, including the role of language in the transmission of cultural knowledge and heritage.
Language and cognition: Deals with the relationship between language and cognitive processes, including memory, attention, and perception.
Language and emotion: Explores how language is used to express and regulate emotions, including how emotions are conveyed through language.
Semantic language: A language that conveys meaning through words and their associations with other words.
Pragmatic language: A language that focuses on the social aspects of language use, such as politeness or appropriateness in a given situation.
Syntactic language: A language system that uses structural rules to govern how words are combined and arranged to create coherent sentences.
Morphological language: A language that uses morphemic units (such as prefixes or suffixes) to create new words or modify existing ones.
Phonological language: A language that deals with the sounds of language and how they are represented by written symbols.
Prosodic language: A language that focuses on the prosody or intonation patterns of speech, including rhythm, pitch, and stress.
Metalinguistic language: A language that is used to describe or analyze other languages or linguistic phenomena.
Iconic language: A language system that uses symbols or visual representations to convey meaning.
onomatopoeic language: A language that uses words that imitate the sounds they represent.
Non-verbal language: A language system that uses body language, gestures, and facial expressions to communicate.
"It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms."
"The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language."
"Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time."
"Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences."
"The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning."
"Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000."
"In other words, human language is modality-independent, but written or signed language is the way to inscribe or encode the natural human speech or gestures."
"When used as a general concept, 'language' may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication."
"The scientific study of language is called linguistics."
"Critical examinations of languages, such as philosophy of language, the relationships between language and thought, how words represent experience, etc., have been debated..."
"Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) have argued that language originated from emotions."
"Others like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) have argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought."
"Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca's and Wernicke's areas."
"Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently by approximately three years old."
"...language has social uses such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as use for social grooming and entertainment."
"Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages..."
"A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family."
"A language that has been demonstrated to not have any living or non-living relationship with another language is called a language isolate."
"Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100."