Language 1st Definition
 

The system of human communication by means of a structured arrangement of sounds (or their written representation) to form larger units, example: morphemes, words, sentences.
In common usage it can also refer to non-human systems of communication such as the “language” of bees, the “language” of dolphins.

Language 2nd Definition
 

Any particular system of human communication, for example, the French language, the Hindi language. Sometimes a language is spoken by most people in a particular country, for example, Japanese in Japan, but sometimes the language is spoken by only part of the population of a country, for example, Tamil in India, French in Canada.
Languages are usually not spoken in exactly the same way from one part of the country to the other. Differences in the way a language is spoken by different people are described in terms of regional and social variation. In some cases, there is a continuum from one language to another. Dialect A of language X on one side of the border may be very similar to Dialect B of language Y on the other side of the border if language X and language Y are related. This is the case between Sweden and Norway and between Germany and the Netherlands.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
 

The capacity to acquire one’s first language, when this capacity is pictured as a sort of mechanism or apparatus.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Chomsky and others claimed that every normal human being was born with an LAD. The LAD included basic knowledge about the nature and structure of human language.
The LAD was offered as an explanation of why children develop competence in their first language in a relatively short time, merely being exposed to it.

The language attitude
 

The attitudes which speakers of different languages or language varieties have towards each other’s languages or to their own language. Expressions of positive or negative feeling towards a language may reflect impressions of linguistic difficulty or simplicity, ease or difficulty of learning, degree of importance, elegance, social status, etc. Attitudes towards a language may also show what people feel about the speakers of that language .
Language attitudes may have an effect on second-language or foreign language learning. The measurement of language attitudes provides information which is useful in language teaching and language planning.

Language Change :

• Change is a language which takes place over time. All living languages have changed and continue to change.
• For example, in English, changes which have recently been occurring include the following.
A) The distinction in pronunciation between words such as what and watt is disappearing.
B) Hopefully may be used instead of I hope, we hope, it is to be hoped.
C) New words and expressions are constantly entering the language, e.g. drop-out, alternative society, culture shock.

Language Dominance :

l)Greater ability in, or greater importance of one language than another. For an individual, this means that a person who speaks more than one language or dialect considers that he or she knows one of the languages better than the other(s) and/or uses it more frequently and with greater ease. The dominant language may be his or her NATIVE LANGUAGE or may have been acquired later in life at school or a place of employment.

2) For a country or region where more than one language or dialect is used, this means that one of them is more important than the other(s). A language may become the dominant language because it has more prestige (higher STATUS) in the country, is favored by the government, and/or has the largest number of speakers.

Language Planning :

Planning, usually by a government or government agency, concerning choice of national or official language(s), ways of spreading the use of a language, spelling reforms, the addition of spreading the use of a language, the addition of new words to the language, and other language problems. Through language planning, an official language policy is established and/or implemented.

For example, in Indonesia, Malay was chosen as the national language and was given the name Bahassa Indonesia. It became the main language of education. There were several spelling reforms and a national planning agency was established to deal with problems such as the development of scientific terms.

Languages for Special Purposes :

Also languages for specific purposes

Second or foreign languages used for particular and restricted types of communication (e.g. For medical reports, scientific writing, air-traffic control) and which contain lexical, grammatical, and other linguistic features which are different from ordinary language (see REGISTER). In language teaching, decisions must be made as to whether a learner requires a language for general purposes or for special purposes.

The Language Transfer

The effect of one language on the learning of another:

Two types of language transfer may occur. Negative transfer, also known as interference, is the use of a native-language pattern or rule which leads to an ERROR or inappropriate form in the TARGET LANGUAGE. For example, a French learner of English may produce the incorrect sentence I am here since Monday instead of I have been here since Monday, because of the transfer of the French pattern je suis ici depuis lundi ("l am here since Monday"). Positive transfer is transfer which makes learning easier, and may occur when both the native language and the target language have the same form. For example, both French and English have the word table, which can have the same meaning in both languages.

Language [Fr]

The French word for "language". The term was used by the linguist Saussure to mean the system of a language, that is the arrangement of sounds and words which speakers of a language have a shared knowledge of or, as Saussure said, "agree to use". Language is the "ideal" form of a language. Saussure said called the actual use of language by people in speech or writing "parole”.

Properties of Language : (6 properties)

Displacement :

When your pet cat comes home after spending a night in the back alleys and stands at your feet calling meow, you are likely to understand this message as relating to that immediate time and place. If you ask the cat where it was the night before and what it was up to, you may get the same meow response. It seems that animal communication is almost exclusively designed for this moment, here and now. It cannot effectively be used to relate events which are far removed in time and place.

Human language users refer to past and future time, and to other locations. This property of human language is called displacement. It allows the users of language to talk about things and events not present in the immediate environment. Animal communication is generally considered to lack this property.

It is the property of displacement that allows the human, unlike any other creature, to create fiction and to describe possible future worlds.

Arbitrariness:

It is generally the case that there is no 'natural' connection between a linguistic form and its meaning. You cannot look at the Arabic word كلب , and from its shape, for example, determine that it has a natural meaning, any more than you can with its English translation from dog. The linguistic form has no natural or /iconic/ relationship with that four-legged barking object out in the world. Recognizing this general fact about language leads us to conclude that a property of linguistic signs is their arbitrary relationship with the objects they are used to indicate.

There are, of course, some words in language which have sounds which seems to ‘echo’ the sounds  of objects or activities. English examples might be cuckoo, CRASH, slurp, squelsh or whirr, which are onomatopoeic. In most languages, however, these onomatopoeic words are relatively rare, and the vast majority of linguistic expressions are in fact arbitrary.

Productivity:

It is a feature of all languages that novel utterances are continually being created. A child learning language is especially active in forming and producing utterances which he or she has never heard before. With adults, new situation arise or new objects have be described, so the language-users manipulate their linguistic resources to produce new expressions and new sentences. This property of human language has been termed productivity (or 'creativity’, or 'open- endedness'). It is an aspect of language which is linked to the fact that the potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite.

Cultural transmission:

While you inherit brown eyes and dark hair from your parents, you do not inherit their language. You acquire a language in a culture with other speakers and not from parental genes. An infant born to Korean parents (who have never left Korea and speak only Korean), which is adopted and brought up form birth by English speakers in the United States, may have physical characteristics inherited from its natural parents, but it will inevitably speak English.

• This process whereby language is passed on from one generation to the next is described as cultural transmission. While it has been argued that humans are born with an innate predisposition to acquire language, it is clear that they are not born with the ability to produce utterances in a specific language, such as English.

Discreteness:

• The sounds used In language are meaningfully distinct. For example, the difference between a b sound and a p sound is not actually very great, but when these sounds are part of a language like English, they are used in such a way that the occurrence of one rather than the other is meaningful. The fact that the pronunciation of the forms pack and back leads to a distinction in meaning can only be due to the difference between the p and b sounds in English sounds. This property of language is described as discreteness.

Duality:

Language is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously. This property is called duality. Or 'double articulation". In terms of speech production, we have the physical level at which we can produce individual sounds, like n, b and i. As individual sounds, none of these discrete forms has any intrinsic meaning. When we produce those sounds in a particular combination, as in bin, we have another level producing a meaning which is different from the meaning of the combination in nib. So, at one level, we have distinct sounds and, at another level, we have distinct meanings. This duality of levels is, in fact, one of the most economical features of human language, since with a limited set of distinct sounds we are capable of producing a very large number of sound j combinations (e.g. words) which are distinct in meaning.

PHONOLOGY:

Phonology is essentially the description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds in a language. It is based on a theory of what every speaker of a language unconsciously knows about the sound patterns of that language. When you learn a language you learn which speech sounds occur in your language and how they pattern according to regular rules.

Phonetics provides the means for describing speech sounds. Phonology studies the ways in which speech sounds form systems and patterns in human language.

Phonological knowledge permits a speaker to produce sounds which form meaningful utterances, to recognize a foreign 'accent', to make up new words, to produce 'aspirated' and 'unaspirated' voiceless stops in the appropriate context, to know what is or is not a sound in one's language.

Because of this theoretical status, phonology is concerned with the abstract or mental aspect of the sounds in language rather than with the actual physical articulation of speech sounds.

Thus, when we think of the [t] sound in the words tar, star, and writer as being 'the same', we actually mean that, in the phonology of English, they would be represented in the same way. In actual speech, these [t] sounds are all very different.  

The words tar, car, far and bar are meaningfully distinct, we can see that phonology is concerned with the abstract set of sounds in a language which allows us to distinguish meaning in the actual physical sounds we say and hear.

PHONEMES:

Each one of these meaning distinguishing sounds in a language is described as a phoneme. The phoneme /t/ is described as a sound type, of which all the different spoken version of (t) are tokens. Note that slash marks are conventionally used to indicate a phoneme, /t/, an abstract segment, as opposed to the square brackets, as in [t], used for- each phonetic, or physically produced, segment.

MINIMAL PAIR and SETS

Phonemic distinctions in a language can be tested via pairs and sets of words. When two words such as pat and bat are identical in form except for a contrast in one phoneme, occurring in the same position, the two words are described as a minimal pair.

When a group of words can be differentiated, each one from the others, by changing one phoneme (always in the same position), then we have a minimal set. Thus, a minimal set based on the vowel phonemes of English would include feat, fit, fat, fate, fought, foot, and one based on consonants could have big, pig, rig, fig, dig, wig.

PHONES AND ALLOPOHONES

While the phoneme is the abstract unit or sound-type (‘in the mind’), there are many different versions of that sound type regularly produced in actual speech (‘in the mouth’). We can describe those different versions as phones. Phones are phonetic units and will appear in square brackets. When we have a set of phones, all of which are versions of one phoneme, we refer to them as the allophones of that phoneme.

For example, the [t] sound in the word tar is normally pronounced with a stronger puff of air than is present in the [t] sound of the word star. If you put the back of your hand in front of your mouth as you say tar, the, star you should, have some physical evidence of the aspiration (the puff of the air) accompanying the [t] sound in the initial position of tar (but not in star). This aspirated version is represented more precisely as [t^h].

The crucial distinction between phonemes and allophones is that substituting one phoneme for another will result in a word with a different meaning (as well as a different pronunciation). But substituting allophones only results in a different (and perhaps odd) pronunciation of the same word.

Let's take another brief example. In English, there is a difference in pronunciation of the /i/ sound in words like seed and seen. In the second word, the effect of the nasal consonant [n] makes the [i] sound nasalized. This nasalization can be represented by a diacritic [~], called ‘tilde’, over the symbol [i] in narrow phonetic transcription. So, there are at least two phones, [i] and [i] (nasalized) used in English to realize a single phoneme. They are allophones of /i/ in English.

ALLOPHONES:

1. Free variation

When the substitution of one sound segment for another results in difference in meaning this is a sufficient evidence that the two sounds represent two different phonemes. Note that two different forms may be identical in meaning. Some speakers pronounce the word economics as e. These two forms are not minimal pairs since the substitution of I for e and vice versa does not change the meaning. The different pronunciations of economics are free variations. One meaning is represented by two different phonemic forms.

2. Complementary Distribution

When two or more sounds never occur in the same position or in the same phonemic context they are said to be in complementary distribution. In English, each vowel phoneme has both an oral and a nasalized allophone. The choice of the allophone is not random. It is rule governed. There is a general principle which determines the occurrence of oral and nasalized vowels. No one explicitly teaches the rules. You produce the nasalized allophones of the vowel phonemes automatically whenever they occur before nasal sounds. (bead vs bean).
 

7th and 8th Classes in the following PDF: