ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the aspects of the lay-person's attitude to language, and then contrast them with the linguist's approach, in the hope that the reader will thereafter want to follow us down the linguist's route. The fact that the lay-person takes language for granted means that when they are called upon to talk about a feature of language, they are usually at a loss to say anything sensible: because they have no terminology or 'metalanguage' to talk precisely about language and because they have no solid theoretical framework within which to develop ideas. It explores some of the basic characteristics of human languages, and then examines how linguists organise their study of the phenomenon through the various branches of their discipline. Linguists have identified five basic features: learnability, cultural transmission, displacement, arbitrariness and creativity, productivity. Language can be looked at from two very different perspectives: as system and as behaviour.
