Exploring the Universality and Diversity of Human Language Essay

oral communication is an of the essence(predicate) tool of mankind for expression. We think, speak and write in speech communications. Indeed, our use of in advance(p) mode of expression such as oral communication is what distinguishes us from animals. Language is already very much a part of us, but we much take it for granted. We do non give it much thought and probably quite a few attempt to make sense out of its nature and its complexities. Distinguished authorities in psychology, philosophy and linguistics live the concept of nomenclature as a cosmopolitan joint benevolent faculty.If it is not, wherefore is it that despite little recogniseledge of spoken style and its correct usage, children as novel as two years, of any race or ethnicity, quickly conduct to speak and understand any style they argon exposed to? It is amazing how thousands of various languages and dialects fuddle evolved since the cloudiness at Babel in Genesis. The Ethnologue has listed m ore than than sise thousand (6,000) languages from all over the world (Grimes, 2001). Note that we do not merely refer to civilized languages, and there could probably be more that have not been documented yet, or, have not til now been hear of by the civilized population (i. e. tribal languages).Now, with the innumerable modes of pronunciation and styles of language use, we contribute probably come up with a million varieties of languages. If language is a universal gay faculty, why argon human languages so different? Universality of Language Even the scriptures provided some evidence to bear out the concept that language is universal. Before the Tower of Babel incident, as cited in the intensity of Genesis, remember that mankind had one language. Ever since God intervened to cause confusion at Babel and men dispersed to various split of the earth, human language have evolved into various kinds.Still, how ever so, human languages ar astoundingly analogous In what appeara nce are human languages the same, and why? Kumar (1997) cited that children could bunco almost any language with the right timing. Children learn at a remarkable rate if they are immersed in the language during their critical period for language development, which is usually amongst the age of two to five years. Such that at the age of six, they would have learned to use and understand about thirteen thousand (13,000) words (Dunbar, 1996).Further, children of average intellectual capacity learn about ten (10) wise words a day by the time they reach their front birthday. If we have to do our math, this is the equivalent of a parvenu word every 90 minutes of (their) waking life (Dunbar, 1996). It is amazing how children learn a language in such a short time and, only by hearing a few words and short sentences from their parents and former(a)s, they are able to come up with virtually many another(prenominal) others, most of which even follow correct grammatical principles. There are no descend rules or body of ruless of teaching children their first language.Just by the mere impression to the language in their natural environment, they begin to mimic what they hear, experiment on words and phrases, then adults correct them at one point, and quite easily, they learn to speak the language despite its complexities. This is referred to as the environmental input in the article of Nowak and his colleagues (2002), that appeared in the 6 June 2002 of the Nature. Because of this environmental input, children construct an internal design of the implicit in(p) grammar. Children are not told of the grammatical rules.Neither children nor adults are ever aware of the grammatical rules that specify their own language (p. 614). Wilhelm von Humboldt (as cited in Chomsky, 1968) believes that underlying any human language we allow for find a system that is universal, that simply expresses mans unique intellectual attributes. For this reason, it was possible for him to maintain the rationalist view that language is not really learned for certain not taught but rather develops from within, in an essentially predetermined fashion, when the remove environmental conditions exist.One cannot really teach a first language, he argued, but can only provide the thread along which it will develop of its own accord, by processes more like maturation than instruction (Chomsky, 1968). Moreover, it does seem that languages transcend cultural boundaries. A good evidence of this would be how children learn in the same way regardless of cultural background. We can only wonder why when a family moves to another community with a different dialect for instance, children are the quickest to adapt and learn the new language.Do humans have the innate ability and mechanism for getting language within the wag? Lee (1997 ) looked into this innateness of language from a neurobiological standpoint. He asserted that there is certain preexisting universal biological order in the head. If they did not preexist, how would the many brains build synaptic connections that were similar to one another, even the brains of people that speak different languages? Certain parts (such as Brocas and Wernickes areas) of the brain are responsible for vary linguistic functions, which means, there are innate physical structure of the brain which govern our learning of language. Chomsky (1975), a noted linguist, believes that we are specifically knowing to learn language. As Biehler (1976) puts it, there are striking uniformities in languages of other cultures that follow grammatical patterns (universal grammar). Even Farrel (1978) fit ins that there is an underlying design pilot light to all languages. For all of them, language is simply a part of our contractable endowment, or as the evolutionist Haugen (1973) would say it, we have the gift of language, or the universal gift of tongues. Chomsky and other linguists believe that there are system of princip les, conditions, and rules that are elements of all human languages. Human languages contain structure, which means they are self-possessed of several words grouped basically by function (verbs, nouns, and so on ) and this is referred to in linguistic literatures as innate universal grammar.The human brain is equipped with a learning algorithmic rule, which enables us to learn certain languages. This algorithm can learn each of the existing 6,000 human languages and presumably many more, but it is impossible that algorithm could learn every computable language (Nowak, Komarova and Niyogi, p. 615). What are the implications of all these? Regardless of cultural background, whatever language we know or use now, we are all innately predisposed to discover design in languages and we can easily grasp and work some grammatical rules, however complex or elaborate they are.Although of course, young children are at an advantage in using this gift, as timing in acquiring a language is imp ortant as well. Nonetheless, as a general statement, regardless of cultural or ethnic background, mans remarkable ability to communicate through language, in itself, is already a good proof of the universality of language as a human faculty. As mentioned in the Atlas of Languages (1996), there is no known confederacy or community in the world that is language-less.From the evolutionists point of view, language is essentially a human trait and this is a powerful evidence on the universality of language. While animals of the same kind have their own way of communicating, only humans had the power of recursion to create an open-ended and limitless system of communication Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, 2002, p. 1578). Why and how humans acquired the faculty of language and managed to spread from human to human and from culture to culture, (Knezek, 1997) are often the usual subjects of discussion of scholars.Evolutionists would agree that the faculty meditating human communication appears r emarkably different from that of other backup creatures. that the human faculty of language appears to be organized like the transmissible code with respect to its scope of expression. Animals have been designed on the priming of highly conserved developmental systems that read an almost universal language coded in DNA base pairs, however, they lack a common universal code of communication (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, 2002, p. 1569).