People in every society use language to convey their feelings, emotions and religious bonds. With the help of language, we learn educational and technical skills.
Language is central to all our lives, and is arguably the cultural tool that sets humans, us, apart from any other species. And on some accounts, language is the symbolic behaviour that allowed human singularities—art, religion and science—to occur. We use it to buy groceries in the supermarket, to get a job, to hire or fire an employee, to buy train tickets, and to compose an email. We use it to make a telephone call, to flirt, to invite someone out on a date, to propose marriage, to get married, to quarrel, and to make up afterwards. Language allows us to make friends, and enemies, to pass the time of day, and so on. In our everyday lives we produce and comprehend language with such apparent ease that we take it for granted.
A sobering fact about language is this: unlike other forms of cultural behaviour, it is blind to demographics, socioeconomics and ethnic difference. I, you and every other cognitively normal human being in the world uses (or comes to use) language with the apparent ease that we do take for granted. Put another way, it doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor, black or white or what the colour of your eyes are. You are destined to acquire at least one language—although the majority of the world’s nearly 7 billion people grow up speaking two or more languages. In this, the pattern of monolingualism amongst English-speaking populations is not the norm. And, by around four years of age each normally developing human child is a linguistic genius. Nevertheless, we carry on ‘learning’ our mother tongue, throughout our lives. This is the case not least because the language we speak changes and evolves, often in quite short periods of time.
In virtually all of the situations in which we find ourselves in our daily lives, language allows quick and effective expression, and provides a well-developed means of encoding and transmitting complex and subtle ideas. Language does this by fulfilling two key functions, functions that underpin linguistic communication.
The first is that language enables us to express our wishes, feelings, likes, dislikes, and ideas—its symbolic function. This language achieves by encoding and externalising our thoughts. To do this, language uses symbols. Symbols are meaningful bits of language. These include sub-parts of words, such as un- and -ed in uninterested, whole words like walk, yesterday and knickers or groups of words which form clauses, such as behind the sofa, and groups of clauses which form sentences, like She left her knickers behind the sofa.