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All these obvious facts give rise to the notion of different `languages’ and ‘language communities’. A language community is, on this account, simply a group of people who communicate by means of a Doctor Adventures language. There is, however, a serious snag to this definition. Unless we can define a language in terms other than of the people who speak it, or a language community in terms which do not include a mention of a common language, we are in a circularity.
Let us attack this problem by considering how we might define a busty language independently of those who speak it. We might start by saying that a language is characterized by having a more or less unitary grammatical, lexical and phonological system. In other words, we would judge whether any particular utterance which was presented to us was or was not an utterance in that language by examining its formal characteristics. To do this we should have to have available, of course, a Carmella grammar and dictionary of that language. But grammars and dictionaries are based upon a body of data drawn from a language.
They presuppose, therefore, that we know what a language is before we start. Again we are in a circularity. The descriptive linguist as linguist is not able within his discipline to define a language. As Haugen (1966) says, ‘There is still no calculus that permits us to describe the difference between languages in a coherent and theoretically valid way.’
Written by admin on December 13th, 2008 with
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