what is the significance of language?

Question

i have to write an essay in it.

Answer 1

See some definitions, hopefully they'll inspire you for the essay. You can just take the definitions one by one and provide your own comment to them. You can quote these source, even if you can't access them, as I have an online subscription to these dictionaries.
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Oxford English Dictionary Online

1. a. The whole body of words and of methods of combination of words used by a nation, people, or race; a ‘tongue’. dead language: a language no longer in vernacular use. first language: one's native language. second language: a language spoken in addition to one's native language; the first foreign language one learns.

b. Applied to methods of expressing the thoughts, feelings, wants, etc., otherwise than by words. finger language = DACTYLOLOGY. language of flowers: a method of expressing sentiments by means of flowers.

c. Applied to the inarticulate sounds used by the lower animals, birds, etc.

d. Computers. Any of numerous systems of precisely defined symbols and rules for using them that have been devised for writing programs or representing instructions and data.

2. a. In generalized sense: Words and the methods of combining them for the expression of thought.

b. Power or faculty of speech; ability to speak a foreign tongue. Now rare.

3. a. The form of words in which a person expresses himself; manner or style of expression. bad language: coarse or vulgar expressions. strong language: expressions indicative of violent or excited feeling.

b. The phraseology or terms of a science, art, profession, etc., or of a class of persons.

c. The style (of a literary composition); also, the wording (of a document, statute, etc.).

f. Phr. to speak (talk) someone's language, to speak (talk) the same language: to have an understanding with someone through similarity of outlook and expression, to get on well with someone; to speak a different language (from someone): to have little in common (with someone).
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The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English


1. the method of human communication, gestured, spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in an agreed way.
2. the language of a particular community or country, etc.
3. (a) the faculty of speech. (b) a style of expression; the use of words, etc. (his language was poetic). (c) (also bad language) coarse, crude, or abusive speech.
4. a system of symbols and rules for writing computer programs or algorithms.
5. any method of expression (the language of flowers; sign language).
6. a professional or specialized vocabulary.
7. literary style.
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Dictionary of the Social Sciences


language The study of language is pursued in a wide array of contexts that furnish it with very different meanings. This breadth is an indicator of how fundamental language is to both the study of culture and the larger question of what it means to be human.

One of the most persistent classical theories of language holds that the vocabularies of different languages reflect greater or lesser divergence from an original, natural language. This view has been largely rejected by modern linguistics, although the study of change and differentiation among languages remains important. Since Ferdinand de Saussure's pioneering work in the early twentieth century, linguistics has been based on the principle that the relationship of words to their referents is purely conventional—that signifiers (or “sound patterns,” as Saussure defined them) have no intrinsic relationship to signifieds (the mental concepts of things). The pairing of the two constitutes a sign, and signs are only fixed by their relationship to one another. Saussure is generally credited with formalizing this set of insights, and thereby with furnishing not only the basis of modern linguistics but also of subsequent structuralist approaches to culture that exploit the concept of differential systems of meaning (see structuralism).

The world's languages also vary enormously in their grammar, although this dimension of language may be less arbitrary. The now widely accepted theories of transformational–generative grammar, associated with Noam Chomsky, suggest that certain capacities or dispositions to the formation of grammar are biological in nature, “hard-wired” into the human brain—although to what degree remains an object of considerable debate. Studies by Phillip Lieberman, John Hawkins, Murray Gell-Mann, and others place emphasis on the development of the human capacity to vocalize a wide and highly differentiated range of sounds, although the gestural languages of the deaf have been shown to replicate nearly all the features and complexity of spoken languages and, in certain respects, can be acquired even earlier than spoken language. All such theories, in the end, need to accommodate the fact that children show a broadly uniform pattern of language acquisition, regardless of the language.

There has been a persistent tension in the study of language between those who treat it as a cognitive science and those who insist on its social, contextual dimension. Modern linguistics in the Chomskyan tradition and the larger issue of language acquisition have emphasized the former, whereas studies of specific languages, their cultural contexts, and linguistic situations more generally (including semantics, pragmatics, phonemics, ethnographies of language, and structuralism, especially in the anthropological tradition) have emphasized the latter.

Of these areas, pragmatics has produced one of the richest traditions of inquiry, focused on the diverse referential and performative functions of language. C. S. Peirce's work on signs and indexicality—the dependence of signs on proximity to the thing referred to—is the origin of this subfield. Pragmatics recognizes that the word “I” changes its referent depending on who is speaking; similarly, the word “here” depends on how the conversation (or text) points to a specific context. Bronislaw Malinowski was one of the first to integrate the study of the contextual effects of language into the study of culture, arguing that in addition to communicating information, language possesses a conative function of addressing a listener, an emotive function that conveys emotional states, and a phatic function that serves to establish and maintain social relations (“hello” and “how are you” generally represent phatic uses of language; see phatic communion). Malinowski's work was elaborated by early linguistic structuralists such as Roman Jakobson and Emile Benveniste. In turn, their work had a major impact on the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and, in Anglo-American linguistics, the theory of speech-acts proposed by J. L. Austin in the early 1960s. Austin emphasized the ways in which people “do things with words,” many of which carry a performative effect distinct from their simple meaning. Naming is an example—the bestowal of a name is different than the use of the same word to describe or invoke an already existing relationship of signifier and signified. Austin's work has influenced both Pierre Bourdieu's studies of practical action (including speech) and Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis share this interest in how speech patterns and habits of language structure activities as fundamental as conversation. Sociolinguistics is another area of contextual study that examines (among other things) how linguistic variation correlates with divisions of class, race, gender, or other significant divisions within a community. Many of these studies have emphasized the ways that social inequality produces or authorizes different kinds of speech in specific situations. The term discourse analysis is sometimes used to describe this broad turn toward the linguistic analysis of power relations.
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don't forget: read carefully, quote properly (you can use the links bellow in your "bibliography") and provide your own comments and interpretations. The above definitions and articles are centered on the meaning of "language", just copying them in your essay won't be enough.

Answer 2

You would not be able to pose the question without it. Write your essay in a language that your teacher does not understand.

Answer 3

Language is a necessity in our life.We can't imagine our lives without it. If it weren't have been for language then we wouldn't be able to communicate with each other and couldn't get the knowledge and progress in life.

Answer 4

You can take what he said, or just take it as being alive, I would say just being human, but it is so very apparent that animals communicate in their own language, so it is not just a human thing.