Basic Characteristics

SIMPLICITY OF FORM. Old English, like modern German, French, Russian and Greek, had many inflections to show singular and plural, tense, person, etc., but over the centuries words have been simplified. Verbs now have very few inflections, and adjectives do not change according to the noun.

FLEXIBILITY. As a result of the loss of inflections, English has become, over the past five centuries, a very flexible language. Without inflections, the same word can operate as many different parts of speech. Many nouns and verbs have the same form, for example swim, drink, walk, kiss, look, and smile. We can talk about water to drink and to water the flowers; time to go and to time a race; a paper to read and to paper a bedroom. Adjectives can be used as verbs. We warm our hands in front of a fire; if clothes are dirtied, they need to be cleaned and dried. Prep­ositions too are flexible. A sixty-year old man is nearing retirement; we can talk about a round of golf, cards, or drinks.

OPENNESS OF VOCABULARY. This involves the free admissions of words from other languages and the easy creation of compounds and derivatives. Most world languages have contributed some words to English at some time, and the process is now being reversed. Purists of the French, Russian, and Japanese languages are resisting the arrival of English in their vocabulary.

THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH. Geographically, English is the most widespread language on Earth, second only to Mandarin Chinese in the number of people who speak it. It is the language of business, technology, sport, and aviation. This will no doubt continue, although the proposition that all other languages will die out is absurd.

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Human language is, perhaps, the most astonishing creation of man. It helps us understand each other. We make use of it in practically everything we do.

Language is a means of communication in human society. People can use other means of communication, such as red lights and flags, but these signs are interpreted into human language. So language is the normal form and the main means of communication in human society.

We cannot say anything definite about the origin of language. But we realize now that language is a product of human society and it can exist only in human society.

Man (“homo sapiens”) is the only living being with the power of speech. The appearance of language on our planet is as recent as the appearance of man himself. Labour and language are distinctive and exclusive marks of human being. Without them the growth and progress of human society is unthinkable.

Primitive people had a few hundred words at the most. Today highly cultured nations have more that seven hundred thousand words in their dictionaries. This means that now people can communicate by words much better than they did it in the remote past. The rapid growth of the vocabulary of modern languages is due to the development of science and technology.

But spoken languages were easy to forget; so people invented writing to record them. Writing is a way of recording language by means of visible marks. The first form of writing was picture writing. Symbols representing the sound of a language appeared much later. The art of writing made it possible to fix thoughts and to store knowledge, and to pass them on from one generation to another.

There are people who know three, five or six languages. They are polyglots. They study languages because knowledge of languages is their specialty or hobby.

For a modern engineer and research worker it is absolutely necessary to have practical command of foreign languages. A scientist who can read the literature of his field in several languages has a much better grasp of the subject. Learning foreign languages enriches the native language, makes it clearer, more flexible and expressive.

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What is Language?

Many animals and even plant species communicate with each other. However, human language is unique in being a symbolic communication system that is learned instead of biologically inherited. Symbols are sounds or things which have meaning given to them by the users.

A word is one or more sounds that in combination have a specific meaning assigned by a language. The symbolic meaning of words can be so powerful that people are willing to risk their lives for them or take the lives of others. For instance, words such as “queer” and “nigger” have symbolic meaning that is highly charged emotionally in America today. They are much more than just a sequence of sounds to us.

Language and speech are not the same thing. Speech is a broad term simply referring to patterned verbal behavior. In contrast, a language is a set of rules for generating speech. A dialect is a variant of a language. If it is associated with a geographically isolated speech community, it is referred to as a regional dialect. However, if it is spoken by a speech community that is merely socially isolated, it is called a social dialect. These latter dialects are mostly based on class, ethnicity, gender, age, and particular social situations. Black English (or Ebonics) in the United States is an example of a social dialect. Dialects may be both regional and social. Not all societies have distinct dialects. They are far more common in large-scale diverse societies than in small-scale homogenous ones.

A pidgin is a simplified, makeshift language that develops to fulfill the communication needs of people who have no language in common but who need to occasionally interact for commercial and other reasons. Pidgins combine a limited amount of the vocabulary and grammar of the different languages. People who use pidgin languages also speak their own native language. Over the last several centuries, dozens of pidgin languages developed. The most well known one is Pidgin English in New Guinea and pidgin developed by American Indians is Chinook used on the Northwest Coast of North America.

At times, a pidgin language becomes the mother tongue of a population. When that happens, it is called a creole language. As pidgins change into creoles over several generations, their vocabularies enlarge. In Haiti, a French-African pidgin became the creole language spoken in that nation today by the majority of the population as their principle or only language. The same thing happened among some of the peoples of Papua New Guinea, the Pacific Islands of Vanuatu, and Sierra Leone in West Africa, where different versions of Pidgin English became creoles.

It is common for creole speakers to also speak another "standard" language as well. People may quickly switch back and forth between dialects, depending on the person they are talking to at the time. This pattern is referred to as diglossia. The African American situational use of standard and Black English is a prime example. Black English is usually reserved for talking with other African Americans.

Typically, the dialects of a society are ranked relative to each other in terms of social status. In the London area of England, the upper class speak "public school" English, while the lower class often use a Cockney dialect. Because of the stigma against the latter, upwardly mobile Cockneys in the business world may take language lessons to acquire the “public school” speech patterns.