Hi.
In the previous video we looked at differences between animal communication
and human language.
In this video we're going to look a little bit deeper into human language, and
more specifically,
into the question, is it true that every human being has a language?
Language arguably is one of the most important
distinguishing characteristics of human beings.
We use language for many different things.
We use it, at least, in order to communicate, to think and
to show who we are, to which group of human beings we belong or want to belong.
It's also very hard to imagine a field in society where no language is used at all.
So it's a characteristic not just of human beings, but also of human society.
Let's first look at certain things which are called languages in English, but
may not really be languages in the sense we want to talk about here.
Programming languages for computers are, I think, clear examples of those, or
the language of flowers, or the language of music.
We call them languages in ordinary life, but not so
in linguistics or in this course.
What is important for human language is first, that there are native speakers,
that there are people that learn those languages as infants.
Secondly, that one can speak about basically everything in it.
That's something we saw in the previous video.
And thirdly, that it is carried and recognized by a more or
less well-defined group of human beings as their language.
There should be some people who say this is our shared language.
So what about sign language?
Is sign language also a language?
You may also wonder whether being spoken is not actually a characteristic of human
language.
So using speech to transfer my information from my head to your head,
isn't that also what human language is about?
Well if that's what you think, you may wonder about deaf people.
Do they have a language as well if they don't hear?
Very often they have sign language.
Is this sign language also a language?
The first thing you have to understand about that is not necessarily every sign,
every gesture I make is a language.
But the systems which are used by deaf people are called sign languages, and
linguists consider them to be real human languages as well.
They're basically the same as spoken language with this one difference,
that they don't use speech.
There are many sign languages in the world.
That's another interesting thing about them.
So there's a lot of variation in sign language,
just as there is in spoken language.
We don't know how many different sign languages there are in the world.
They're more difficult to count.
We know much less about sign languages than about spoken languages, but
there must be hundreds of them.
Furthermore, sign languages have exactly the same kind of functionality as
spoken languages.
They can be used to express any kind of thought.
You can make infinitely many sentences in them.
They have native speakers.
They're groups of people, deaf communities,
who consider them to be their language.
So if deaf people have a language,
does that mean that everybody in the world speaks a language?
Well unfortunately, there are some exceptions.
They're very few, and
they're always people who are suffering from some very physical,
psychological or social impediments, or even some combination thereof.
Examples of people suffering from these very strong, social impediments are so
called wolf children.
They're children who grew up without their parents, or
where their parents didn't want to speak to them for some strange reason.
They may have been deaf children with
hearing parents where the hearing parents were ashamed of having deaf children.
That, unfortunately, sometimes happens.
Or there may be cases of physical and psychological abuse.
One very famous example of this for linguists is the example of Genie.
Genie was an American girl who was locked up in her room from when she was
20 months old until the age of 13.
She didn't have any human interaction in that part of her life.
Her parents were, kind of crazy.
Her father would only bark at her like a dog, and
her mother was not allowed to say anything to her.
So therefore, she didn't learn any human language during her youth.
Also later on, she was not able to figure out
this system of combining all these words into infinitely many sentences.
Fortunately, these are, of course, very exceptional cases.
Something very exceptionally bad must happen to you to end up in such a state.
People might also sometimes lose their language.
They then suffer from a medical condition called aphasia.
This is something which usually hits people after they had a stroke.
They will lose part of their language capacity
because part of their brain no longer functions.
Interestingly, that can be just a very tiny part of using your language.
They may use their ability to pronounce, or
their ability to understand language, or their ability to speak coherently or
their ability to make grammatical sentences.
So they can reveal a message, but their sentences will always be very strange.
In the 19th century, the study of such aphasic patients was one way to find out,
what was the relation between language and the brain?
So you would, if a, after an aphasic patient would die,
you would study the brain of the person to see where the problem of that person was.
So the answer to our original question,
whether all humans have language, seems to be yes.
Something must be really wrong for
a human being not to develop some kind of language.
But this raises an additional question.
What's the evolutionary origin of language, then?
Is it as old as us, as homosapiens?
Is it older?
Or is it younger?
It's very difficult to decide about this, for instance,
because we dont have fossil evidence.
Language is something abstract.
The moment I speak it, it's already gone.
Let alone that we can reconstruct language of 50,000 or 100,000 years ago.
There are theories about it.
The main division is between continuity based theories and
discontinuity based theories.
Continuity based theories say that language is based on animal communication.
It's just a somewhat more complicated form of them.
Discontinuity theories say that human language is really something different.
Something must have happened in our development to make
human language possible.
In the 19th century, there was a learned society in Paris which
disallowed linguists from even talking about these matters, because they were so
difficult to decide.
In the past few decades, we have started to speculate and think about them again.
But still,
it's very difficult to give a definitive answer to that particular question.
So in this video, we have seen there's really a very strong link between
being human and using language.
Almost every human being uses language.
Even deaf people.
If you have enough deaf people, they will create and use a sign language.
And they are definitely languages as well.
We have seen that.
We've also seen that those very few humans who don't have a language
live in very exceptional circumstances.
It might be either some kind of social condition as in the case of Genie,
or some medical condition, as for aphasic patients.
Otherwise, being human means using language.
A very obvious next question is, if language is so
important, how come we have so many different languages?
That's what I will discuss with Marten and Inge in the next video.