What Is Language and How Do

We Study It?

Key Concepts
• Human language has numerous features that distinguish it from other communication systems.
• People have unconscious knowledge of language and use this knowledge to speak and
understand language.
• All languages have grammar, a system of phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic
rules.
• A language is really a continuum of language varieties that change over space and time.
• Children are hardwired to acquire a linguistic rule system, and they do so while very young,
without direct teaching.
• All languages have the same basic framework: Universal Grammar.

Language is a means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.
—Mark Amidon

The Scientific Study of Language

So far, much of our discussion has focused on the question, ‘What is language?’ or more
specifically, ‘What is it that we know about language?’ Here are some of the basic facts we’ve
learned about language.
• We all have unconscious knowledge of a linguistic rule system.
• Languages exist independent of writing systems.
• All languages have grammar (morphology, syntax, semantics, phonetics, and phonology).
• All languages have the same expressive power.
• All children acquire language if exposed to it, without instruction.
• All languages change over time, no matter how hard we try to stop that change.
• A language is really a continuum of language varieties.
• All languages have a common set of basic grammatical properties (Universal Grammar), and
some may be parameterized.

The properties of language listed here are relatively recent discoveries and are the result of
subjecting language, like other natural phenomena, to rigorous scientific analysis, or the
scientific method. As in physics or chemistry, language scientists examine data, form hypotheses
about the data, test those hypotheses against additional data, and formulate theories, or
collections of hypotheses, that can be tested against competing theories. (We talk more about
how to study language scientifically throughout the book, and you will have numerous
opportunities to be a language scientist yourself.) Linguistics, the scientific study of language, is
informed by a long history of the study of grammar, and many of the ideas central to current
linguistic theory go back to ancient times. Though many of you have heard the term linguist,
your definition of this term might not be ‘language scientist’. You probably think of a linguist as
someone who speaks many languages or someone who is a professional translator (a linguist in
the U.S. military, for example). Most people are unaware of what linguistics is and of what
linguists do, partly because the field of linguistics is so young and also because the scientific
study of language represents a significant departure from
better-
known ways in which language has been studied in the past.