Essay about impact of language on society
Answers
Language and Society
From what has been written so far it is clear that man is possessed of natural sociality. His disposition to band together with his fellows for lower or for higher purposes is one of his fundamental characteristics. To understand his fellows and to be understood by them, men were impelled to the production of language without which they could not communicate with each other.
Language is a product not of one cause but of several factors. It is, in fact a social creation, a human invention an unconscious invention of a whole community. As Professor Whitney has observed, it is as much an institution as a body of unwritten laws, and like these it has been called forth by the needs of developing society.”
Thus language is not the creation of one person or of one period but it is an institution, on which hundreds of generations and countless individual workers have worked.
Three Instrumentalities of Expression:
The traditional instrumentalities of expression are gestures, grimace and tone. Gesture means the changes of the position of the various parts of the body, especially of the most mobile parts, the arms and hands; grimace means the change of expression of features of the countenance, and tone is the utterance of or the production of audible sound.”
These are also termed natural means of expression. In the first stages of communicative expression, all these three were used together, and in fact, there can never have been a period or stage in which all the three instrumentalities were not put to use together. They are used even today. It is very interesting to know what signs or what facial expressions were used for words.”
The Importance of Language:
Language is a constituent element of civilization. It raised man from a savage state to the plane which he was capable of reaching. Man could not become man except by language. An essential point in which man differs from animals is that man alone is the sole possessor of language. No doubt animals also exhibit certain degree of power of communication but that is not only inferior in degree to human language, but also radically diverse in kind from it.
Language is one of the most marked, conspicuous, as well as fundamentally characteristic of the faculties of man. The importance of language for man and society cannot be minimised. As a personal thing, language is not only a mode of communication between individuals but is also a way for the expression of their personality.
Sociologically, language moulds the individual from infancy. The child comes to know most of the things of the world through language.
It is an important attribute of his personality. Its importance to the society lies in the following:
(i)