Language - Nature's Gift to Man

There is a difference between the language of the animal and that of man. Experiments show that dolphins kept in separate tanks communicate with each other when provided with an electro-acoustic link; but they cannot "talk language."

Every human society has a verbal language. This is not true of any animal society in the technical meaning of the term language, which involves powers of discrimination and sufficient memory to transmit and understand a large variety of messages even amid noise and distraction. Young chimpanzees raised by human families like children have still been unable to exhibit the family verbal language. Animals do learn many ways of communicating among themselves and with people without a spoken language, but language in its written and spoken form is a strictly human characteristic.

Development in speech is related closely to learning opportunity. For example, studies show that culturally deprived children lag behind middle-class children in almost all aspects of speech development, even the use of vowels and consonants. Many such children can, however, improve if they are given the opportunity to learn. We can think of writing as a secondary part of a linguistic system founded on speech.

Language is not just words alone. Some parts of sentences are more difficult to comprehend and recall than others. In a study of recall of simple active and passive sentences, it was found that recall is best for the first part of a sentence and poorest for the second part. Not only are written sentences very involved structures, but no two spoken utterances are identical in their acoustical and physiological characteristics. More over, psychological meanings get attached to words.

Language reflects both the personality of and the environment of the person speaking. It is, in effect, the mirror of culture. Both in words and in meaning, the lower and upper classes in most societies speak a different language. Every segment of our culture has its own special language, ranging from the language of the soldier to the technical jargon of the scientist. Language makes possible the growth and continuity of groups and is effective in controlling groups, organizations, and even societies.

All human languages, even those of primitive tribes, are complete, complex and comparable. A normal person can learn to speak any language he is taught. It is true that a second language may come hard for some people, even very intelligent people. We discriminate more easily between things for which we have different names. Social distinctions among dialects are made more on considerations of status than on linguistic grounds.

In short, language is exceedingly complicated. A child learns language by using it. He learns the language because he is shaped by nature to pay attention to it, to notice and remember, and use significant aspects of it.