What Is a Language?

What is a language? You may well be wondering why I ask this question when everyone knows what a language is—it’s what you’re expressing and I’m comprehending, you say. Let’s change the question’s form a bit: How would one identify something as a language if he encountered what might be one in an obviously nonhuman species—for example, flowing kaleidoscopic color patterns on the bulbous bodies of octopus-like creatures who land in a spaceship right in one’s own backyard? And, for that matter, is the natural signing of deaf-mutes a language? The game of chess? And what about the “language” of music or art? Or suppose that pale, eyeless midgets were discovered in extended caverns far below the present floors of the Mammoth Cave—emitting very high-frequency pipings from their rounded mouths and apparently listening with their enormous, rotatable ears. How might one decide whether or not these cave midgets have an identifiably humanoid language] Only if one can say what defines a language in general and defines a human language in particular can he go on to offer possible answers to some other very important, questions: Do certain nonhuman animals “have” a language? What is common to prelinguistic cognizing and linguistic sentencing? When does a developing child “have” a language? How may languages have developed in the human species? Answers to all these questions, of course, would have relevance to the basic issue of universals and uniquenesses in human communication.