LANGUAGE

1. (General) So, what is this thing called language? There is no single answer to this question. It is many things. It is:
   1.  A definining characteristic of humanity.
   2.  A tool for communication.
   3.  Commonly seen as a complex system consisting of a number of subsystems.
   4.  Arbitrary, generative, and multifunctional.
   
    | David Nunan, 2012
2. (General) I will consider five answers to the question, "What is a Language?" three or four of which have some currency in contemporary linguistics and philosophy of linguistics. It may be helpful to have the five answers listed in a brief and labelled form:
   1.  A language is a natural kind. (Naturalism.)
   2.  A language is an abstract object. (Platonism.)
   3.  A language is a name given to a set of objects, for example, a set of grammars, lects or idiolects, characteristically taken to be properties of individual speakers. (Nominalism.)
   4.  A language is a social fact, and that social fact is also a (or, in a stronger version, the only) linguistic fact. (Sociologism.)
   5.  A language is a social fact, but that social fact is not a linguistic fact. (Dualism, for want of a better word to indicate a view of reality as stratified and with at least "weak" emergent properties.)
   
    The position I arrive at is that (5) is true; that in addition linguistic facts are not necessarily social facts and, as a matter of fact, frequently aren't; and that the truth of (5) is compatible with the truth of some version of (1). | Trevor Pateman, 1983
3. (Neurocognitive Linguistics) The system used by people for their linguistic activity, i.e., the linguistic information system of the brain.
    The concept language is at best a remotely abstract one. Language is several steps removed from reality. You cannot touch, see, or feel a language. Yes, you can hear speech, but that is something different. Should we assume that because we have the word "language", there must be such things as languages?
    "Language" is just a term of English. It may be interesting to take note of the fact that many of what English calls languages do not have terms equivalent to "language".
    Such a commonly occurring word as "language" naturally encourages people to form a conceptual object within their belief systems to go with it, and to imagine that this concept must have an existence as a definite object of some kind beyond what is tangibly and observably real. What is commonly called a language is not only unobservable, it is not a physical object of any kind. It can be regarded as a very abstract object or as a logical construct, or as an illusion. Furthermore, belief in its existence as a real object tends to deny the fact that every person's linguistic system—a network existing in that person's brain—differs to varying degrees from that of every other person.
    Nevertheless, for the sake of linguistics and in recognition that this field is certainly concerned with languages in some sense of that longtime ill-defined term, neurocognitive linguistics tries to look behind the term and find the tangible and observable reality. | Sydney M. Lamb, 2006
4. (General) 
   1.  (Countable) A body of words, and set of methods of combining them (called a grammar), understood by a community and used as a form of communication.
   2.  (Uncountable) The ability to communicate using words.
   3.  (Uncountable) A sublanguage: the slang of a particular community or jargon of a particular specialist field.
   4.  (Countable; Uncountable; Figurative) The expression of thought (the communication of meaning) in a specified way; that which communicates something, as language does.
   5.  (Countable; Uncountable) A body of sounds, signs and/or signals by which animals communicate, and by which plants are sometimes also thought to communicate.
   6.  (Computing; Countable) A computer language; a machine language.
   7.  (Uncountable) Manner of expression.
   8.  (Uncountable) The particular words used in a speech or a passage of text.
   9.  (Uncountable) Profanity.
    | Wiktionary, 2025

LANGUAGE CONVERGENCE
See CONVERGENCE, LANGUAGE.

LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY

1. (Sociolinguistics) Entrenched beliefs about language (language ideologies). | Philip Seargeant, 2009
2. (Sociolinguistics) The terms ideology and language have appeared together frequently in recent anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies, sometimes joined by and, sometimes by in, sometimes by a comma in a trinity of nouns. We have had analyses, some of them very influential, of cultural and political ideologies as constituted, encoded, or enacted in language (Friedrich 1989, Pecheux 1983, Thompson 1984). This review is differently, and (on the surface) more narrowly, conceived: our topic is ideologies of language, an area of scholarly inquiry just beginning to coalesce (Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity, eds. 1992 [1998]). There is as much cultural variation in ideas about speech as there is in speech forms themselves (Hymes 1974). Notions of how communication works as a social process, and to what purpose, are culturally variable and need to be discovered rather than simply assumed (Bauman 1983). | Kathryn A. Woolard, 1994
3. (Sociolinguistics) Though the relationship of language and thought has received much academic and popular attention, "thoughts about language" by their speakers have, by comparison, been neglected, dismissed, denigrated, or proscribed as objects of study and concern until relatively recently. Language ideology, as succinctly defined by Errington (in Durranti, ed. 2001), "refers to the situated, partial, and interested character of conceptions and uses of language." These conceptions, whether explicitly articulated or embodied in communicative practice, represent incomplete, or "partially successful," attempts to rationalize language usage; such rationalizations are typically multiple, context-bound, and necessarily constructed from the sociocultural experience of the speaker.
    It is important to note that although interdisciplinary scholarship on language ideologies has been extremely productive in recent decades (Woolard 1998), there is no particular unity in this immense body of research, no single core literature, and a range of definitions. One of the most straightforward, though controversial, definitions is that of Alan Rumsey (1990): "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world." | Paul V. Kroskrity, 2004

LANGUAGE PREDICTION
(Psycholinguistics) Language processing is predictive. To some, this is a controversial statement. However, under some interpretations, this is something that the field has known for several decades. To consider a well-known and broadly accepted piece of evidence, consider the phenomenon of garden-pathing during sentence comprehension. In sentences like (1a), the comprehender encounters a temporarily ambiguous sequence of words—a context. Upon encountering new bottom-up input (e.g. conducted in (1b)), this ambiguity is resolved to the a priori less frequent syntactic interpretation (or parse), leading to processing difficulty. This increase in processing difficulty is known as the garden path effect, and it manifests both as relatively slower per-word reading times (Ferreira and Clifton 1986, Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, and Lotocky 1997, MacDonald, Just, and Carpenter 1992, Spivey-Knowlton, Trueswell, and Tanenhaus, 1993) and poorer comprehension accuracy (Ferreira, Christianson, and Hollingworth 2001, Ferreira and Patson 2007). If, however, the comprehender had encountered another context such as (1c), which avoided the temporary ambiguity, she would not have experienced a garden path effect. Importantly, the magnitude of the garden path effect is graded and highly dependent on the predictability of the intended parse given the preceding context.

1. a. The experienced soldiers warned about the dangers ...
   b. ... conducted the midnight raid.
   c. The experienced soldiers who were warned about the dangers ...

LANGUAGE SHIFT

1. (Diachronic) Or, language transfer, or, language replacement, or, language assimilation. The process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be higher status stabilize or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived by their own speakers to be lower-status. An example is the shift from Gaulish to Latin during the time of the Roman Empire. | Wikipedia, 2022
2. (Diachronic) The study of language maintenance and language shift is concerned with the relationship between change or stability in habitual language use, on the one hand, and ongoing psychological, social or cultural processes,on the other hand, when populations differing in language are in contact with each other. | Joshua A. Fishman, 2009
3. (Examples)
    ○ It is possible, looking at a community as a whole, to speak of language shift even where not a single speaker has changed his linguistic habits. If a high emigration rate, a high in-migration rate, or a differential birth or death rate resulted in a statistically marked change in the ratio of speakers for two languages in a community, a shift would have taken place despite stable patterns of attitude and use (language loyalty). Linguistic groups can be swamped, going from majority to minority position in a short period; this happened in Glamorgan County, Wales, in the process of industrialization, when English immigrants flooded in during the period 1861 to 1911 (Lewis 1978).
    Such sudden swamping is probably less common, however, than a slow attrition in which, during each successive generation, some community members belonging by birthright to one linguistic group change their linguistic affiliation and move wholly or in part into another linguistic group. | Nancy C. Dorian, 2009
    ○ It is well known that Singaporeans have experienced language shift on a large scale. Whether we look at census data, at data collected from schools registrations, or at more impressionistic or ethnographic studies the same trend emerges. This is that as a result of governmental encouragement, there has been a shift towards the domestic use of both English and Mandarin in Singapore (Kuo and Jernudd 1993) | Anthea Fraser Gupta and Siew Pui Yeok, 1995
    ○ When we examine the rates of language shift for specific gropus, the data reveal that more than fifty percent of the persons of Arabic, Filipino, French, German, Scandinavian, and All Other mother tongues had already made English their principal language of use. The rates of English monolingualism already exceed ten percent in all of these groups except the Filipino language group, attaining no less than 31.9 percent in the German group. We must conclude that this degree of language shift is indeed extraordinary. | Calvin Veltman, 1983

LARYNGEAL CONSTRAINT
(Phonology) In this study, the author proposed that neutralization is the result of a well-formedness condition that the author calls the Laryngeal Constraint: In languages that have laryngeal neutralization, a laryngeal node is only licensed in a particular syllabic configuration; elsewhere the node will delink to repair the violation of well-formedness. This approach to neutralization is required to correctly explain the typology of laryngeal neutralization. | Linda Lombardi, 1994

LARYNGEAL FEATURES

1. (Phonetics) One proposal:
   • Sources:
     • gl = glottal.
     • epl = epilaryngeal.
     • nil = no phonation.
   • Larynx height (LH):
     • N = neutral larynx.
     • L = lowered larynx.
     • R = raised larynx.
   • [±cet] = constricted epilaryngeal tube.
   • [±sg] = spread glottis.
   • [±stf] = stiff vocal folds.
   
    | Scott R. Moisik and John H. Esling, 2011
2. (Examples)
    ○ The two phonological features assumed in this paper are [spread glottis] and [voice], commonly referred to and formally treated as laryngeal features (Clements 1985). | Michael Jessen and Catherine Ringen, 2002
    ○ Languages use the larynx in four ways: by varying the tension of the vocal cords so as to produce pitch changes; by adjusting the positions of the arytenoid cartilages so as to produce different glottal strictures; by varying the timing of the onset of voicing relative to articulatory movements; and by raising or lowering the whole larynx to form ejectives or implosives. | Peter Ladefoged, 1973
    ○ In this report we investigate the mechanisms that underlie various phonetic features such as voicing, aspiration, and glottalization, which for want of a better term we may designate by the adjective laryngeal. | Morris Halle and Kenneth N. Stevens, 1971

LARYNGEAL NEUTRALIZATION

1. (Phonology) The most common phonological process involving laryngeal features is laryngeal neutralization, wherein all laryngeal distinctions are lost in syllable-final position. | Linda Lombardi, 1995
2. (Examples)
    ○ In Icelandic, and in most dialects of Faroese, the fundamental laryngeal stop contrast is one of aspiration. This contrast is neutralized in certain positions. | Gunnar Ólafur Hansson, 2003
    ○ In this paper, a detailed investigation of the phonology of laryngeal features and segments in the Klamath language of south central Oregon is presented. Klamath, like many other Penutian languages, shows three-way laryngeal contrasts in both obstruents and sonorants, though in predictable contexts, certain laryngeal constrasts are neutralized. | Juliette Blevins, 1993

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