Natural language

The term natural language designates a linguistic variety or form of human language for communicative purposes that is endowed with a syntax and that supposedly obeys the principles of economy and optimality. Natural languages are usually based on a sound sign system although some may be based on gestural signs.

In sociolinguistics, the term natural language is also sometimes used as ethnic language as opposed to planned or constructed languages (such as Esperanto). The ethnic language evolves framed by a culture of native speakers who use said language for communicative purposes. In this way, a distinction is made between languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English, which are ethnic languages; and Esperanto, gone, interlingua, which are called planned languages. However, a planned language can also acquire a native culture and speakers, as is the case with Esperanto. In addition, formally planned languages and ethnic languages can equally meet the requirements of possessing syntax and principles of economy that make them suitable for general human communication.

Characteristics of natural languages

Linguist Charles F. Hockett discusses fifteen defining features of language:

1. Communication mode: it is the vocal-auditive channel, the main one in human language (the message is produced with the mouth and received with the ear). The manual-visual channel can also be given.
2. Broadcasting and targeted reception: in speech a message is issued that expands in all directions and can be heard by anyone; however, the human hearing system allows the identification of where it comes from.
3. Transit: the human message is temporary; the waves fade and the message does not persist in time or in space.
4. Interlocutive development or interchangeability: a speaker, in normal conditions, can both issue and receive messages.
5. Total feedback: the speaker can listen to himself in the precise moment he issues a message. This is important for the correct realization of speech.
6. Specialization: the organs involved in speech, apart from serving for their corresponding physiological functions, are specialized for speech.
7. Semanticity: the signal corresponds to a particular meaning. It is a fundamental element of any communication method.
8. Arbitration: there is no correlation between the sign and the sign. For example, the phonemes that create the word Nothing. in themselves have no relation to that concept; in Croatian, for example, Nothing. means hope. There is no reason why the concept of lack of something should be "nothing" and not any other combination of seals.
9. Discreticity: The basic units are separable, without a gradual transition. A listener can hear or "t" or "d", and regardless of whether he hears it well he will distinguish or one or the other, without listening to a mixture of both.
10. Displacement: reference can be made to situations or objects that are not delusional, in the "here and now", that is, separated by time or distance, or even about things that do not exist or have existed.
11. Double joint or duality: There is a level or second joint in which the elements have no meaning but do distinguish meaning (fonema), and another level or first joint in which these elements are grouped to have meaning (morfema). The elements of the second joint they are finite, but they can be grouped in infinite ways.(Cf. Hjelmslev).
12. Productivity: the rules of grammar allow the creation of new prayers that have never been created, but that can be understood. (Cf. Linguistic competition, generative grammar, Chomsky).
13. Cultural transfer: Human language is a product of historical evolution and is transmitted between generations. (Cf. linguistic change, historical grammar). It may not be given in the rest of non-human forms of communication.
14. Prevarication: the message can be intentionally false.(Conversational maximums, Grice).
15. Metalinguistic functions: Human language allows to refer to itself; it can be said that “altar» is a male word, and no reference is being made to the object, but to the word itself.

Natural languages and language

Natural languages are contrasted with other forms of language, both human and non-human. Thus along with human natural languages we have:

• The animal language that has intentionality, expressivity, representativeness and can even reach the simulation and the pretending; but in which they have not found the presence of something we can call syntactic structures.
• The formal languages used by man, among which are mathematical logic or programming languages. They are structures with something similar to the syntax of human languages, but have a smaller scope than human natural languages.

Differences with formal languages

Unlike in a formal language of a logical-mathematical type, where the meaning of a string or phrase is only influenced by its appearance or «shape», in natural languages the semantics or specific and contextual meaning of its components intervene on the validity or not of the sentence, adding complexity to your study.

Linguistics is the branch of knowledge that deals with the study of language, understood as the set of rules that govern any communication process.

Acknowledging the existence of communication rules, structural linguistics came to extensively define a certain natural language as the set of sentences that can be emitted and used in that language.

At the end of the 1950s, Noam Chomsky proposed incorporating natural languages into the type of languages that can be studied by formal systems by means of generative grammars, which will give rise to valid strings or phrases in a given language.

Differences with animal language

In the XX century, the communication and social interaction systems of numerous animals were studied in detail. That led to the discovery that many of the features present in human natural languages were also present in animal language. However, a small number of features seem exclusive to human languages, among them:

• The syntactic structure, by which the sounds or significant parts of the communication have a hierarchical ordination, in which the change in order of the elements can lead to different messages (e.g. (the) stone wall - (the) stone of the wall).
• The productivity, by which a finite set of elements allow the generation of a potentially infinite number of semantically different messages.
• Existence of metalinguistic function, by which language itself may refer to the form of what has been said, or speak of language itself.

Surprisingly, animal language allows for prevarication or "lying" in the sense that some animals may go so far as to simulate false alarm cries to confuse other individuals.

Origins of languages in humans

Regarding the origin of languages, there are two basic positions:

• The monogenesis or hypothesis that ultimately all the languages of the world derive from a single ancestral language, that is, the hypothesis that the human languages arose by the diversification of a protolengue that arose at a certain evolutionary moment of the species, from which the human languages continued to exist. In ancient times, this theory finds parallelism with the fable of Babel, contained in the Bible.
• Polygenesis maintains that the process that gave rise to human languages could happen in various places and moments.

In both cases, after the appearance of one or more languages, processes of diversification or linguistic change took place that increased the number of languages, until reaching the several thousand languages existing today.

The linguistic theory of creole languages and pidgins suggests that the process of forming a genuine natural language from adequate linguistic input can take as little as a generation. The case of the Nicaraguan sign language created from an inconsistent semiotic system is a paradigmatic example of how a consistent language with a well-fixed grammar can be formed from inconsistent elements.