Language

What is language? We as humans are used to communicate with other people everyday, but do we really know what is exactly the language and what it implies? We are constantly communicating among us as a necessity without knowing what we are exactly doing. This is why language has been the topic of too many investigations by a lot of scientists. Language has different characteristics that differentiate us from the rest of the living beings. Here we will mention the most important facts of it, in order to define it. In the first place, not all the living beings can develop the language per se. The language is an unique and exclusive phenomenon for humans. Animals can communicate among them but they do not have a language. Language is an innate capacity that humans so they can communicate and interact with their surrounding. We as humans are totally rational and we have the capacity of rationalize the language in order to combine the sounds, then words, then sentences and learn the language to be able to communicate. In my opinion, language is also a human necessity in order to live and interact with other people. This human essence is what makes us different. One of the characteristics that language has is that it is creative. We as humans can create new words utterances and as a consequence, dialects and so on and so forth. Animals do not have the capacity of produce different utterances; they repeat the same under the same circumstances, unlike the humans that can create and infinite number of messages under an infinite of different situations. We as humans are rational and we have the capacity of learning and retaining, in order to rationalize new types of words or phrases for a new situation. For this reason the language is infinite and changes constantly.
Being systematic is another characteristic of language. The systematic term implies that the language, in order to being organized, have rules to develop it in a standard way. The language is a system that is very versatile; this is why we have the grammar and the alphabet to have an order. Also, we have the syntax, which is the rules for the word order in order to build a sentence or phrase. This type of direction makes a standard way to communicate and facilitate the language.
In addition, other characteristic of language is its arbitrariness. The arbitrary term implies that there is no relation between the signal and the message in our language, pointing out our creativity with language. In the communication among the animals exists a relation between the signal and the messages, unlike the human that do no t have a relation between the signal and the messages. In our language, images do not goes hand-to-hand with the message. We know the symbols because someone taught it us in out culture. We learn it in a natural way. Also animals cannot communicate something that they are not living in the moment, something abstract. In the other hand humans can communicate about something that is absent in that moment, which is called displacement. Another important fact about language is that is very complex field. The person that studies the language is called linguist. The linguists divided the language in different interdependent subsystems. One of them is the phonology, which studies the sound of the word. Another one is morphology, which studies the composition of the word (inflection and derivation). The semantics is another field that studies the meaning of that word. The syntax are the rules for the word order and phrase sentence construction. Also, the pragmatics is another field that studies how that word is used (sociocultural context).
As a conclusion, language is a phenomenon that only the humans develop. The human being is the only one that has the capacity of learning, retaining and develop language in a natural way because it is a human essence. Finally, some of the important facts that make our language unique is that language is systematic, creative and arbitrary.