Throughout this course we’ve been debating literacy, or the skill and ability to communicate beyond verbalization. But I think it’s important to briefly consider linguistics and language, as this is what literacy is based within. I took a linguistics course last quarter, and from it I derived two important things that I feel will help further our literacy studies.
One: All languages are the same.
Two: No language is the same.
What we understand as language is actually the technical term for the input and output systems of abstract concepts. All of language is a socially-constructed experience, built on years of association and drive to communicate with each other. In order for something to be a language, it must be computational, mentalistic, nativist, and biolinguistic. Computational refers to the language having a rule governed generative system, aka grammar, which allows us to create coherent structures. Being mentalistic means it must convey the abstract unconscious thoughts, or function within the brain. The nativist aspect is that language is an innate function of the human brain, where it is not learned but rather an already present skill within that must be fine-tuned as a human grows. Finally, language must be biolinguistic as language is constrained by what the brain is capable of handling. So, in this consideration, all languages are the same as they all must meet these requirements in order to be considered the common-sense form of language, a form of communication.
[See part 2 of this installment to see how all languages are different]
