Language

Language is a structured system of conventional signs and rules that a community uses to communicate. It can be spoken, signed, or written.

Phonetics: The study of how speech sounds are produced, transmitted, and perceived. It describes the physical speech sounds that spoken languages use.
Language acquisition: The process through which people develop the ability to understand and use a language. It traces how children come to command a community's linguistic system.
Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change and how they are related over time. It reconstructs the histories behind present-day linguistic diversity.
Writing system: A set of conventions for representing a language through visible or tactile marks. It makes language durable and shareable beyond spoken interaction.
Animal communication: Signals and behaviors through which animals convey information to one another. Comparisons test which features distinguish human language from other signaling systems.
Phonology: The study of how a language organizes speech sounds into meaningful patterns. It explains why sound contrasts differ across languages.
Speech production: The cognitive and physical processes that turn intended messages into spoken utterances. It explains how linguistic plans become audible speech.
Proto-language: A reconstructed ancestral language inferred from similarities among related languages. It offers a method for tracing language families into the past.
Translation: The process of expressing a text or utterance in another language. It carries meaning across communities with different linguistic systems.
Gesture: A bodily movement used to express or convey meaning. Gestures can accompany language or communicate without linguistic structure.

Linked from 31 pages