ABSTRACT
From the dawn of history, humans have used a unique faculty-language-to think, to communicate with each other beyond the instinctual use of body signals, to transmit knowledge to subsequent generations, and to do other things that make them unique among species. Human civilization, with its legal systems and written codices of knowledge, is built on language. Altogether, the world’s languages constitute humanity’s collective memory system. Each word is a capsule of time-specic knowledge, an act of human consciousness, and an implicit principle of social structure. The Greek philosophers saw language as a manifestation of lógos, which meant both “word” and “reason or mind,” and thus as the faculty that united thought and speech. The modernday study of this manifestation is the objective of the discipline of linguistics; the study of language as an intrinsic part of social systems is the goal of sociolinguistics, a major branch of linguistics.
