LANGUAGE (OF.. Fr. langage. from Lat. lingua, tongue, language. OLat. din qua, tongue; connected with Goth. tungo. OFIG. zunga. Ger. Zunqe. AS. lunge, Eng. tongue). In its widest use, all means of expressing or of communicating feeling and thought. In this sense there is a `language' of plastic art or of music, consisting of those symbols and conventions used in artistic expression which are intelligible only to persons educated to understand them. In a narrower sense language is restricted to the various forms of bodily expression—gesture, grimace, articula tion; and in a third and commoner usage it designates only such forms of bodily expression as have been universalized through social con vention. Articulate speech is the paramount form : but there are also sign and gesture lan guages of complex development, such as the sign language of deaf-mutes or that in vogue between foreign-speaking tribes of prairie Indians. See GESTURE LANGUAGE.
Language may be studied either as a utility, an art, or a science. The first of these studies gives rise to an extensive methodology of lan guage-teaching, and the second to :esthetic cul tivation of composition and elocution; but neither broaches, strictly speaking. the scientific field. The science of language is threefold. It includes (I) philology, or the study of the structure and history of languages; (2) phonetics, or the physi ological bases of speech ; (3) the psychology of language, dealing with the questions of its origin and natural history and with its relations to mind in general.
All theories as to the origin of language are conjectural; no one of them can plead for its case more than plausibility. Before the nineteenth cen tury. philosophers usually considered language either as a direct revelation to man from divinity. or as the invention of primitive genius; hut these views have now been for the most part discarded. The science of philology endeavors to trace all human speech to certain primitive or root words which form its ultimate data ; but these words already constitute language, even if unorganized. Where the philologist leaves off, the psychologist undertakes the study. His method is perforce comparative; that is, he observes the acquisition of speech in childhood, studies the languages of savages, and the communicative signs of animals.
and thence, taking into consideration the growth of human institutions in general. infers the steps in the evolution of language.
It is now generally' conceived that the origin of language was contemporary with the origin or accentuation of gregarious instinct. There is supposed to have been a stage when the human species, living singly or in isolated families. be gan under the influence of natural exigencies to draw together in tribal companies. Among all gregarious animals we find more or less developed forms of signaling, as among herhivora. Possibly among some there is even' complex communica tion, as the `antennal language' of ants. The hu man species, subjected to the stress of social organization, similarly developed its first. crude community of signs. which, in part because of man's superior powers of articulation. but mainly because of his intellectual supremacy, gave rise to organized speech.
There is little difference of opinion as to the nature of the need which lay at the basis of the creation of language, hut the nature of the im pulse, as primitively felt, is still open to debate. Theories as to this nature are of two general sorts. On the one hand, according to the older schools, it was held that language was brought forth in response to a feeling of need of com munication. that primitive speech was the spon taneous outcome of the desire of primitive man to communicate his thought to his fellows. Un the other hand, it is urged that speech was rather, at first, a natural expressiveness, anal ogous to the cry of joy or pain, uttered without thought of communication. in this view it gained the character of language by reason of community of emotion. Thus, a certain cry became a word, either as instinctively interpreted by like-feeling and like-expressing fellows, or as the characteristic expression of a congregation of savages, brought together under social excite ment, as, for example, a cry of dance or battle. This view is predominant at the present day.