Language and Communication

Language and Communication

Communication is exchange of information about ideas, emotions, thoughts, opinions etc. between one or more persons. Every living animal indulges in communication. But there is a vital difference between the communication systems used by animals and human beings. Animals communicate either through gestures or through sound signals whereas human beings use language for this purpose. It is this difference of the medium used for communication which accounts for the fact that human system of communication is much more efficient than the communication systems used by animals.

Communication through gestures can never be as efficient as communication through language because the number of messages that can be transmitted through gestures is extremely limited. The messages the human beings can exchange through language is infinite. The same is true of the sound signals used by animals for communication. The number of sound signals used by them again is very limited. Moreover, both in the case of gestures and sound signals used by animals, one signal can be used to communicate only one message. These signals can be used to only transmit messages about the basic physical needs like hunger, love and sex, about danger, or for expressing anger and issuing threats.

Another important thing about animal systems is that they are instinctive. Animals do not have to learn them. They are in their genes. Even if an animal child is brought up in an environment where it does not get any chance to learn the communication system of its species, it can still be able to use it. But a human child brought up in an environment where it does not get any chance to acquire language through exposure to the use of language by listening to the communication carried on by others around it will not be able to learn any language.

Another vital difference between the two is that the signals used by all the members of a species are the same everywhere all the children learn the same system. On the other hand, the languages used by human beings differ from area to area. A human child learns only the language which it is exposed to. Even if it learns another language later on, it is through special coaching or, to a limited extent, through exposure to the target language.

The most important property of language, which human beings use for communication, is that it can be used to exchange an infinite number of messages with the help of a small set of sounds or letters and large, almost infinite set of words created by combining those sounds or letters in different ways.

Although language is non-instinctive, the ability to learn it is instinctive. Every human child has it by birth. Very early in life, it is able to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds, begins to pay attention to them and learns how to articulate them just by listening to others using them. Not only this, it infers the meaning of words and the grammatical and syntactic rules of the language used by the people around it and begins to use the language it is exposed to for all necessary purposes.

What makes it possible? The answer is to be found in some properties of language which make it a tool for communication unmatched by any other communication system in the world.

One quality of language that distinguishes it from other communication systems is medium transferability. The sound signals of animal communication systems cannot be converted into graphic signals. Nor can the visual gestural signals be converted into sound signals. But in the case of language, what is spoken can be written and what is written can be read out aloud.

Another extremely important property of language as a tool of communication is its flexibility and versatility. We can use language to express our emotions, to seek cooperation, to make threats, to issue commands, ask questions or to make statements. We can use it to refer to the present, the past and the future, to things present at the scene of communication as well as th things far away from the scene, even to things that do not or cannot exist. No other system has as much flexibility and versatility.

Arbitrariness is an important property of language which makes it a vehicle of an infinite number of messages. It means that it’s the structure of its units is not explicable in terms of some more general principle like logic or reason. There is no logic behind why a word has the meaning attached to it. The only explanation is that somebody at some time associate that meaning with it and thereafter it became a convention. There is no need to match the sounds that form a word with the meaning that the word has. There is no doubt that in every language, there is a small number onomatopoeic words the sound of which conforms to their sense. But the meaning of a huge majority of words has nothing to do with their meaning. That is why we have different words in different languages to refer to the same object or concept. This property of language has some advantages. First, it makes the extension of vocabulary very easy. We can create as many new words as we like without bothering to match the sound with the sense. That is why every language has thousands of words in its lexicon and the possibility of coining new words is almost unlimited. Secondly, it makes confidentiality quite easy. A message, even if interrupted by someone not familiar with the particular language code used cannot be interpreted because the meaning of the words or sentences cannot be predicted from their sounds.

There is a disadvantage as well. Because of arbitrariness, it is very difficult to learn a language.

Duality is another property of language which, along with arbitrariness, bestows upon it the ability to construct an infinite number of messages in the form of words, phrases and sentences. Almost every language has two levels of structure – units of the primary level (words, phrases and sentences) and elements of the secondary level of the secondary level (sounds in speech and letters in writing) which can be combined in multiple ways to yield an infinite number of messages. No other system of communication has this property. Their elements cannot be combined like the elements of language to construct a large variety of messages.

Discreteness is an important property of the elements of the secondary level which, coupled with arbitrariness, makes language more flexible. It means that the value of each element is fixed and does not change with the change in its quality. Two words may differ minimally i.e. with respect to only one sound. It can be possible to articulate a sound having a quality halfway between the two. We cannot have a different word by using that intermediate quality. If we speak a word using that intermediate quality, the listeners will either not recognise it as a word or interpret as the mispronounced version of one of the two words. Two words may differ very little in form but largely in their meaning. This fact increases the discreteness of the formal difference between them. In a large number of contexts, the use of one will be far more probable than that of the other. This reduces the possibility of misunderstanding in poor conditions of transmission.

The most important property of language is its productivity. We do not simply memorise the structures that we hear or read and reproduce them when we need to. What we actually assimilate is the vocabulary and the grammatical and syntactic rules of the language. Using the limited number of words and the grammatical rules in a small number of sentences, we can construct a very large number of sentences different from those. Without this property, we would be able only to reproduce the sentences we hear or read without the ability to construct any new sentences.

In addition to these properties, there are some supra-segmental features which can be superimposed on our utterances to further increase the flexibility and versatility of language. The prosodic features like stress and intonation and the paralinguistic features of tempo and loudness coupled with the body language enhance the effectiveness of language as a tool of communication.