Definitions of Language

According to SAPIR: "Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols".
BLOCH & TRAGER wrote: "A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group co-operates."


HALL tells us that language is "the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols."
CHOMSKY: "From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.
GEERAERTS: "Language ...is a repository of world knowledge, a structured collection of meaningful categories that help us deal with new experiences and store information about old ones.
WIERZBICKA: "Language is a tool for expressing meaning. We think, we feel, we perceive -and we want to express our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions. Usually we want to express them because we want to share them with other people, but this is not always the case. We also need language to record our thoughts and to organise them. Vte write diaries, we write notes to ourselves, we make entries in our desk calendars, and so on. We also swear and exclaim-sometimes even when there is no one to hear us. The common denominator of all these different uses of language is not communication but meaning."
Wilhelm von HUMBOLD: "Each language ... contains a characteristics worldview. As individual sound mediates between object and person, so the whole of language mediates between human beings and the internal and external nature that effects them.."
SAPIR: "Language is a guide to social reality. Though language is not ordinarily thought of as of essential interest to the students of social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society."
WHORF: "..language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual's mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade"