ABSTRACT
The language myth is the set of ideas and cultural practices that shape our understanding of language. Harris (1980) says of the cultural embeddedness of the concept of a language:
The concept of a language may find expression in various ways and at various levels. It may take the form of myth, legend, or folklore. It may also in certain circumstances become the focal point of an explicit body of knowledge, doctrines, practices and methods of inquiry, tending towards the establishment of what is nowadays usually called a ‘study’, or ‘discipline’, or ‘science’, overtly concerned with linguistic matters.
(Harris 1980: 31). In other words, our understanding of language appears in a range of cultural settings, from myth to doctrine to science. Harris’s point in the first instance is to demonstrate the cultural context in which our ideas about language arise, as well as that in which these ideas are formalized as a science. He later comes to characterize this entire complex of ideas about language as a myth:… it is important for people to understand that a great deal of impressively authoritative modern theorizing about language is founded upon a myth.
… Like other myths, it has ancient origins in the Western tradition. Like all important myths, it flatters and reflects the type of culture which sponsors it. It has many contemporary ramifications.
(Harris 1981: Preface) That is to say, he claims that the elaboration of our concept of language into the science of linguistics is founded on, and itself constitutes part of, a myth. The mythic status of our concept of language does not merely account for the nature of modern linguistics. It connects linguistics to other cultural practices involving our concept or concepts of language.