What is Language?

[Pheace]

It may be strange but i was one day confronted with this question and i had a hard time answering it. Just saying it is communication just seems too simple to me. I was wondering what your thoughts on the subject might be :)

[atoom]

i would say the language is a thinking mode (maybe thinking method) in essence. english native speaker dont have the same thinking mode as other country people, so do our chinese, ours is different from others' also. so i will master the thinking mode of english speakers when i grasp english pretty well, so do you. the different thinking modes in different countries make the different nations have different culture.

[Tdol]

I'd say that it was a system that allowed users to communicate any information, opinion, emotion, etc, to another person within the community using that system. Also, the predominant feature of language is that it is spoken, as not all languages have a written form.

[ARBITRATOR]

well, the language can be transfered into two types, it couled be spoken or it could be transfered to the meduim of using the gestures of the body (signaling system). And it is fact that the language is a unique of humman biengs and which distinguishs us as humman biengs is (speech) and of course that speech need rapid mental processing.

[Tdol]

Can gestures be considered a whole type of language? I think of them as a subset.

[mesmark]

I'd say language is any medium of conveying information. There are many types other than spoken languages; sign language, eye contact, computer language, gestures, smilies , symbols, pictures, mathematics, and more. They may not all be complete but they all have meaning and are a way of conveying information. So, I would concider them types of language.

Yes, even the middle finger is a form of language.

Pheace? Is that read feace?

[Tdol]

Sign language aside, which is a language, I think that things like gestures and smileys are communication systems, but they aren't full fledged language systems in that they do not allow the full range of human communication. It would be very frustrating to have to communicate only through smileys, and I doubt that I could manage an unreal past armed onlt with ASCII art. I think we're agreed on what they are, just give them slightly different terms.

[manina]

Language is a human speech;
the ability to communicate with others by this means;
a system of vacal sounds and combinations of such sounds to which meaning is attributed, used for the expression or communication of thoughts and feelings.

[JJM Ballantyne]

Manina:

You have it in a nutshell.

For linguistic purposes, language is the use of human speech to communicate ideas.