INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS UNIT ONE
Task 1: Language
Language plays a major part in our life. It has a role of expressing the variety of human thought and endeavor. We carry out our every day life by using language. We start hearing our native language in our environment when we are born. When we go to school we are educated in different topics by the means of language. We socialize with others by using language. We are informed about our ancestors and our history through language. We plan our future by using language. We talk about concrete objects and very abstract ideas by language. We can understand science, technology and great masterpieces of literature by means of language. We watch movies, television, and plays where language is an important component. We are so much involved with language in our everyday life. It is so easy and effortless for us to use our native language like walking and drinking water. We produce and comprehend very complex sentences automatically and without effort. Compare you performance to that of computers which scientists have been trying to program to produce and understand human language. Computers cannot come close to the performance of human beings.
Possibly due to this closeness to language and our familiarity with it, speakers do not need to observe language. People take language for granted and everybody has strong opinions, sometimes erroneous views about language as we shall see later.
However, the knowledge of language even for an educated lay person is implicit. Native speakers use their language perfectly well and yet they can not explain language rules with precision and within a system. As we shall see later, language teachers need to have explicit and systematic knowledge about what language is, how it works, what functions it has in society, etc.
Before we go further, we should provide a definition of what we understand when we mean language. In linguistics, language roughly refers to the system of principles that regulates sounds, words, sentences, and texts that people use for expressing their thoughts, ideas, feelings, to keep social contact, etc. Language in linguistics is a term that covers all human languages that actually exist (or existed). We shall see later linguistics investigates facets of all human languages.
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguists are concerned with how language actually works rather than with how some authority says it ought to work.
Linguistics is a science because it shares with other sciences the goals of scientific inquiry, which is objective, unbiased understanding, it is data-oriented. The data to be examined is language. Language is complex and highly regular, namely, rule-governed. Language, due to its rule-governed nature, can be observed and can objectively be defined. These observations on language can be reported and they can be empirically verified or falsified. Like research in other sciences, research in linguistics has a scientific methodology of observing the facts on language and making generalizations. These objective observations and generalizations allow us to develop theories and to form hypotheses that can further be tested by other studies.
As all other sciences, linguistics has its own terminology. In other words, linguists use metalanguage. Metalanguage is the language to describe language itself and it is used to describe linguistic entities and linguistic phenomena in an accurate way and with finer distinctions. In every scientific field, researchers need a terminology to describe the facts accurately. Thus, either a new word is invented or an existing term can be defined with more precision. This is not done in order to confuse the beginners but to be able to explain the facts as clearly as possible. Some of these technical terms, such as phoneme, phone, allophone, morpheme, etc. are all explained for you both in your book and in these online materials. You will not have any problems in understanding the terminology if you study hard enough.
The fact that language is the defining property of humans, that it is shared across all human communities and it does not exist in any other species, means that by learning about language we will inevitably also learn about human nature, about human mind, structures of various societies, etc. Since language has so many aspects, linguistics investigates many diverse topics on language as you will see in the following units and in your textbook. Linguistics studies language in all its facets: its sound patterns, its grammatical structure, meaning, its use, its role in society, its history, etc. That is why we want our students to understand the general perspective about these diverse topics in linguistics and that is why you will have a broad understanding of all these fields of linguistics in this introductory course.
People have certain fallacies (false beliefs) about language. Linguistic research has shown that these deep-rooted beliefs do not have a scientific grounding. In the following, we see these fallacies and how linguistics views them.
Fallacy 1: Written language is better than spoken language.
Truth 1: Language originated as a system of sounds. Even today there are languages that have only an oral tradition and no writing systems. Thus, spoken language is prior to writing in the history of mankind. Remember that there are some people who do not know how to read and write and yet use their language proficiently. Besides, children learn to speak their native language much earlier than they learn how to read and write. As a result, spoken language is prior to writing. Speech and writing are different modalities of language.
Fallacy 2: Some languages are easier than others. Some languages are primitive.
Truth 2: Languages are both diverse and equally complex. The idea that one language is simpler than the other does not have any scientific grounds. All languages are equal in fulfilling the needs of their speakers. All languages are worth investigation and they can shed light on our understanding of human nature and societies. There are of course some languages that are more prestigious than others at certain times due to socio-economic and political reasons. For example, French used to be a very important language back in the 19th Century while English is very popular today because of the influence and super-power status of the USA. Nevertheless, this does not mean that a language spoken in an underdeveloped country is less important or simpler than a language spoken in a more "civilized" country. All languages are equal in their ability to express thoughts, feelings, etc and they are equally sophisticated.
Fallacy 3: Borrowing foreign words and language change cause corruption of the language.
Truth 3: Although many people dislike change, all languages change. Language change is observed at every level of language and it is inevitable and unpredictable. The main reason of language change is the change of the society.
New words are either invented or borrowed because of technological developments, new inventions, changing needs of speakers, etc. All languages have borrowed words from other societies throughout history because of language contact situations during invasions, wars, conquests, colonialism, migrations, urbanization, cultural and educational relationships, or trade. For example, during the Norman Conquest between the years of 1066-1200 English borrowed many words from the French language. These words still exist in Modern English.
Language purists desire to keep the language unaffected from foreign influences and language change. You must have heard arguments on dil kirlenmesi, which has become a major topic for those who believe that the Turkish language is flooded by many foreign words and that it should be kept as "pure" as possible. However, linguists believe that languages change and there are no languages without any foreign words.
Fallacy 4: The standard language is better than other dialects.
Truth 4: Linguists believe that all languages have variation. That means that language has dialects based on region, ethnic background, socio-economic status of the speaker, etc. The job of linguists is to describe what native speakers actually do rather than what a so-called expert tells speakers how they should use the language. According to linguists, all varieties of a language are absolutely equal. We can never say that the Karadeniz accent is better than the Denizli accent, or vice versa. The goal of linguistics is NOT to rank these variations according to their superiority but rather to understand the nature of grammatical systems of these variations and to describe them.
Fact 1: Language is a creative system
Human thought and experience are diverse and complex. This necessitates a complex language structure. Communication is not fixed to a limited number of topics. Language thus does not provide a predetermined set of ready-made messages. We use language to express some brand new ideas and very complex thoughts, feelings, events. We use language to express all these and this requires us to be able to use language creatively. This means that we can produce and understand sentences that we have never heard before. We can invent new words as our needs change and when we want to name new objects, innovations and new activities. Under this creative aspect of language we have an intricate mental system.
Fact 2: Language is a rule-governed system
One of the fundamental claims of linguistics is that all languages have rules at the level of sounds, sentences, texts. Thus, languages as diverse as Swahili, Japanese, English, Chinese, French, and Turkish all have rules. These rules cannot be seen without investigation because they are abstract and complex. Linguists try to describe these rules.
Fact 3: Universality: Languages are alike
There are many differences in human languages. For example, English does not have the initial sound in the word üzüm, and Turkish does not have the final sound in the word truth. But this does not mean that they do not have limits on types of rules on sound systems and grammars. Quite the contrary, the research has shown that languages are very similar rather than different in many ways. There are principles shared by all languages. One such principle is that all languages have categories such as subject, verb, object, etc. Besides, all languages are governed by rules.
As future language teachers you will need the knowledge of linguistics when you plan language lessons, assessing the progress made by your students, selecting and evaluating language teaching materials, making decisions on how to present language and in which order, the content of your presentation (which language items to include at a certain level and which to exclude), when you organize the syllabus, how to practice language material, when you prepare language tests, and exercises for practice. In addition to this, you may encounter a range of problems in your classrooms that can be solved by linguistic knowledge. These problems may be related to particular sound structures of English or Turkish, related to grammar, or textual organization. If you want to find the right solutions to these problems, you must apply the appropriate knowledge that has been accumulated for a century or so thanks to the work carried out in the scientific study of language. Language teachers must have an informed awareness of the complexity and rule-governed nature of human language. This knowledge will lead you in your way to make crucial decisions in your profession. Such knowledge is of crucial importance because only a professional equipped with this knowledge can rely on the accumulated common wisdom and findings of long scientific research that have been refined throughout many years. A systematic and explicit knowledge of human language based on solid scientific background is always much more effective, efficient, illuminating, sensible, time and energy saving than trying to find your way in your career through trial and error. Thus, an informed awareness of language is an important factor that will distinguish you from an educated lay person who will be lost without this systematic knowledge in a language teaching job.