Every people in the world knows at least one language, their mother tongue. With the help of language we can express ourselves, our thoughts and we can communicate with others. There are different rules on how to use a language or how to produce a sentence, dictionaries contain words from languages but knowing the words does not mean knowing the language. From this some questions arise. What is language? What is linguistics? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay According to myths and religions, language is the source of human power and that language makes us human. This is what distinguishes us from animals. If you know a language, you can talk to others and you can understand them. But language is not just the ability to speak or make speeches. Even deaf people use their own language and understand each other without making sounds. These languages are fully developed languages in which they use hand, body and facial gestures and these languages are same as spoken languages. The fact that deaf people can use languages is evidence of the capacity for language acquisition that every person possesses from birth. This ability is a property of the human being. In most cases people use speech sounds to express meaning but this is not a necessary aspect of a language, for example: sign languages. If we look at animals, they also use sounds to express themselves, the squeaking of dolphins or the chirping of birds are similar to human language but their communication system is not like the human one. We may think that the difference is the lack of speech but it is much more than that. Parrots have the ability to imitate words or phrases what people say, but this does not mean that the parrot knows the meaning of the expressions. It only has the ability to reproduce words and sentences but cannot attribute meanings to them. Language is a system that relates sounds or gestures to meanings. For this reason, this ability is not equivalent to the ability of children to acquire the complex grammar of a human language. However, as we said before, knowing words and their meaning is not enough to know a language. It is not possible to create a sentence, without grammar, that is understandable to a native speaker. And the question arises: what is grammar? Grammar is people's knowledge of the rules of a language. Grammar and a mental dictionary together represent the linguistic competence of a human being. The terms, grammatical or ungrammatical sentence, mean whether or not the sentence fits the rules of mental grammar. There is no language or variety that is superior to others in a linguistic sense, each grammar is equally complex, logical and capable of producing an infinite set of expressions for our thoughts. There are different types of grammar. Descriptive grammars are the subconscious linguistic knowledge of the speaker, these do not teach the rules of the language but describe the rules already known. Prescriptive grammars attempt to legislate what your grammar should be. Didactic or pedagogical grammars were written and foreign languages were taught to people. There was another question above, what is linguistics? Linguistics is the study of language in the sense of the human communication system. We can list three broad categories of linguistics: form of language, meaning of language and language in context. Linguistic form examines the rules of a language (similar to grammar) and includes morphology, syntax, and phonology. Linguistic meaning concerns the logical structures and real-world references used to convey, process, and assign.
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