Introduction

Any language speaker knows something about

his/her language, but it is difficult for language
speaker to tell us what language is. This is
according to Harris 1980. This make it evidence
that the access to the inner knowledge about the
language is not an easy task despite our
competence in language(s) and its importance for
our mental and social life. Such a task requires
following certain systems in order to discover,
describe and analyze the underlying rules that
controlany language. This led to the emergence of
language theory or model which is sentence to
test like any other theory.

A human system of communication that uses arbitrary signals,

such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols. The study
of language is called linguistics.
There are three different interesting views on what is language
1.
Communicative view of language: The communicative or
functional view of language is the view that language is a
vehicle for the expression of functional meaning.
2. The structural view of language: The structural view of
language is that language is a system of structurally related
elements for the transmission of meaning.
3. The interactional view of language: The interactional view of
language sees language primarily as the means for establishing
and maintaining interpersonal relationships and for
performing social transactions between individuals.

Verbal communication

Non-verbal communication

 This

theory elaborated what language

description can involve as it includes
culturaland social behavior (such as the
choice of the clothes, or the architectural
design)which considered as a signifying
practices and analyzed as same as verbal
language.
Linguistics is usually known as the science of
language. One way to understandthe
difference is to contrasts the scientific study
of language with the humanisticapproach,
since the goals and methods of these two
kinds of study are so different.

 Language is unique

Since languages are arbitrary, systematic networks

of contrasts, each language canbe said to be unique
Languages are similar
All the languages have certain features in
common. This characteristic opens the possibility of
language learning although some languages are very
different from each other the common features help in
language learning process.

Approaches to language
classification

The importance of the classification

methods is vivid because of the fact
that there are so many language
varieties. So there are two approaches
of classification.

1.Typological approach:This approach groups

languages according to their similarities and
differences inlinguistic structure. Here languages
can be classified in term of their
characteristicpatterns of word order. Such as in
English language the normal word order is :

The inadequacies of this approach:Although this

approach has proved very useful it has been
subject to many criticsthrough time. One problem
is that many languages dont feat neatly into
thedivisions listed above. Such as English which
can be regarded as a mix of analytic,synthetic
and agglutinative.

2. Genealogical approach

A genealogical approach of classification

tends to show the historical
relationshipsbetween languages. All
languages which have emerged from a single
parent language are regarded as belonging
to the same language family. Most of
theEuropean and Indian languages are
thought to be derived from a single
prehistoriclanguage, which have been called
Proto-Indo-European languages. Linguists
havetried to represent the relationships
between the Indo-European languages by
meansof family tree. There are about thirty
such language families containing at
least4,000, and perhaps as many as 6,000,
different individual languages (George

Family tree limitations:

The lack of documentary historical

records for the other languages rather
than the Indo-European languages which
where extensively studied during the
nineteenth century make it difficult to
apply such a classification for those
poorly studied languages.
The genealogical approach fails to
account for the contact between
languages after the historical period
when those Indo-European languages

Social and political criteria

As same as the linguistic identity

languages have social and political one,
in Britain, the USA and Australia, most of
English speakers are normally
monolingual in English. On the other
hand, there are four official languages
inSwitzerland (which are German,
French, Italian and Romansch) and
threelanguages in Belgium (which are
Flemish, French and German) such a
phenomenais for some extend unusual
one. Another extreme example is New
Guinea wherethere are about 800
different languages.

Classifying speakers
Classifying

the native speakers of a

language is problematic for two
reasons:
It is difficult to distinguish whether a
language speaker speaks certain
language as first language or second
language.
Monolingual speakers (those who
speak an only one language) may use
different language styles according to

Minority languages

Minority language is a language

spoken by a group of people in a part
of a countrywhere it is not the national
or official language of that country
(R.L. Trask andPeter Stockwell
2007:171).

Language structure language

use
Language structure
Language components:
As long as language is a complex
system of communication linguists role
is to describe this system and analyze
the relationships exist between its
various components: Sound >
Meaning > Grammar

Language Use
The Autonomy of Language :Autonomy
system is a way of describing or
analyzing languages in terms of their
internal relationships and contrasts.
This system is extensively abstract
one which is obviously in contrast with
the concept of language in use (the
actual use of language).

The study of language in

social context
Criticism of Saussurean tradition of
linguistics : First, language in this
tradition is looked at basically as a
vehicle for information
communication and ignored its other
functions such as its use for
negotiation and maintaining social
relationships.
Second, this tradition claimed that
language study is exclusively study of
linguistic form not meaning

Context of situation
According to Malinowski and many
other anthropologists utterances are
only comperhensible in a context of
life of which they form a part. This
result later in what is known as
London School of linguistics. This
concept has been developed later by
Michael Halliday to be extended as a
formal model shows how language
and context are interlinked to produce
meaning.

Conclusion

After looking in details (for some

extend) at these different concepts in
order to come at a percise knowledge
(conclusion) about what is the nature
of language by looking at what is
language. In which we have viewed
language from three different angels
according to the communicative,
structural and interactional point of
view

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