Descriptive linguistics seeks to describe a language at a given point in its use. The features of the language are described without making subjective judgments about right or wrong. It other words, descriptive linguistics is relativistic rather than prescriptive (i.e. how the language should be spoken). Up until fairly recently, linguists have focused their studies on spoken language and thus the starting point for describing a language has been the sounds and sound patterns which are found in the language.
Spoken language is, of course, only one form of the complex symbol system we call language. In addition to spoken language, there is also written language (which is simply a way of representing speech in another medium) and sign language (which is a language system not based on spoken language.) Regarding sign language, Zdenek Salzmann, in Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, writes:
“…primary sign languages used by the deaf are highly structured, complete, and independent communicative systems, comparable in complexity to spoken and written language.”
Language Sounds
Spoken language is a collection of sounds
which are put together in a culturally appropriate manner to form meaningful communications. The inventory of sounds for any given language is called phonology. The process of producing, transmitting, and receiving these sounds is called phonetics. The number of kinds of sounds in a language will vary greatly from language to language. Anthropologist Dirk Van Der Elst, in his book Culture as Given, Culture as Choice, writes:
“The range of vocalizations human beings use in communications is astonishing. Speakers of every language employ vowels and consonants that speakers of some other language find impossible to imitate without considerable practice—if ever.”
Language is more than just a collection of random sounds: it is about the ability to communicate meaning. A phoneme is a sound that has meaning for the language. In English, for example, b and p are phonemes as they are involved in determining the meaning of words: pit and bit; pitch and bitch. The number of phonemes in languages can vary greatly: English has 40; German has 37; Japanese has 21; the click-using Khoisan languages have 141; Rotokas, a language spoken in East Papua, has 11. In his book Thumbs, Toes, and Tears and Other Traits that Make Us Human, Chip Walter reports:
“No language uses more than 141 phonemes because that represents the outer limit of the sounds we can utter.”
Grammar
Language is far more than just the sounds people make or the words that are made up by these sounds. In his book The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, Thomas Suddendorf writes:
“Languages are based on finite sets of arbitrary units, symbols such as sounds and words. Grammar rules govern how these units are combined and recombined to generate innumerable expressions.”
It is easy for people who are monolingual (those who speak only one language) to assume that languages are different only in the words that they use. The formal structure of language—grammar—can vary greatly from one language to another. While all languages have grammar, there does not appear to be any feature of grammar that is indispensable or universal.
With regard to grammar, in his book The Ape that Spoke: Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind, John McCrone writes:
“Grammar lays down the rules by which we assemble the chains of words that parade through our conscious plane, so that in many ways our grammar and our style of thinking are very much the same. Our higher mental abilities have been likened to towers built out of language and erected on the foundations of the natural animal mind, so if words are imagined as the building blocks for these edifices, grammar is the style of architecture.”
Jared Diamond, in his book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, puts it this way:
“Humans don’t just have vocabularies of thousands of words with different meanings. We also combine those words and vary their forms in ways prescribed by grammatical rules (such as rules of word order) that determine the meaning of the word combinations. Grammar thereby lets us construct a potentially infinite number of sentences from a finite number of words.”
Syntax
One part of grammar is syntax: the way in which words are combined in sentences. As with other parts of language, there is a great deal of variation in syntax. Joan Swann, Ana Deumert, Theresa Lillis, and Rajend Mesthrie, in their book A Dictionary of Sociolinguistics, write:
“Syntactic structures may vary between languages and language varieties, and also socially and stylistically.”
In some languages, such as English, the meaning of a sentence is determined by its word order (isolating languages), while in other languages there may be prefixes, infixes, or suffixes which tell whether a word is the subject of the sentence or an object (fusional languages). People who have studied Latin may recall the agony of declensions. In his book The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention, Guy Deutscher writes:
“In Latin, nouns don’t just have one form, but come in many different shapes and sizes. Whenever a noun is used, it must have an ending attached to it, which determines its precise role in the sentence.”
Word order, and its importance, differs greatly from language to language. Writing about the difficulties facing an Ojibwa-speaker in learning English, historian Donald Smith, in his book Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians, reports:
“In Ojibwa, almost four-fifths of all words are verbs, whereas in English nouns, adjectives, and adverbs predominate. The better Ojibwa orators put the verb first in a sentence, before the noun, so in English the Anishinabeg had, in effect, to talk backward, placing the noun first.”
Number
Another aspect of grammar is number. In its simplest form number refers to singular and plural. In some languages, plural is indicated by adding an infix. In English, for example, “book” is singular while “books” is plural. While the noun, “book” in this case, reflects number, the definite article in English does not: thus we have “the book” and “the books.” In many languages, the definite article must also reflect number. Thus in Spanish we have “el libro” and “los libros.”
Gender
Many languages also have grammatical gender. In these languages, all nouns will belong to a category which can be designated as male or female. Keep in mind that these are grammatical categories and may have nothing to do with actual “maleness” or “femaleness” of the object itself. In addition, some languages, such as German, may use a third gender, designated as neuter. In many of these languages the definite and indefinite articles as well as adjectives will also reflect the gender of the noun.
With regard to grammatical gender, Guy Deutscher points out:
“Another area where languages often display erratic behavior is what linguists call ‘gender’, by which they don’t necessarily mean distinctions based on sex, but any classification imposed on nouns according to some of their essential properties. ‘Masculine’ versus ‘feminine’ is indeed one of the most common distinctions, but many languages choose instead (or in addition) to divide nouns into ‘human’ versus ‘non-human’, or ‘animate’ (humans and animals) versus ‘inanimate’, and sometimes even ‘edible’ versus ‘non-edible’. (Which class humans then fall into depends, of course, on local custom.)”
There are also differences in the way men speak and the way women speak in many languages. In Shoshone (an American Indian language), for example, there are some differences between male and female language. Men and women may use different words in referring to the same object. There are also differences when a male is talking to a woman, and vice-versa. Similarly, among the Assiniboine, an Indian nation unrelated to the Shoshone, there was a distinct style of women’s speech which was different from that of men. In his book Land of the Nakoda: The Story of the Assiniboine Indians, James Long reports:
“The pronunciation of many words differed from that of the men. They also used words not used by the men. Therefore, the men avoided that kind of speech, because they did not wish to be accused of ‘talking like a woman.’”
Categories
In Navajo (an American Indian language), an object at rest is placed in one of 15 general categories based on distinctions such as animateness, size, position, cohesiveness, rigidity, shape, and degree of containment. These general categories are signified by the verb stem. Each of the 15 general categories is further subdivided into 15 categories based on variables such as plurality, grouping, and patterning. Thus anthropologist Gary Witherspoon, in his book Language and Art in the Navajo Universe, reports:
“When a speaker of Navajo describes an object at rest, he places the object in one of 225 categories.”
Verbs
Verbs are the action words which describe actions ranging from obvious physical activities such as “play,” “talk,” “sit,” and so on, to mental and emotional concepts such as “love,” “think,” “believe,” and so on. In many languages the verbs are conjugated to indicate when the action takes place. In English, for example, there are only two simple tenses: present and preterite. Further elaboration in time is done with compound tenses: tenses which use helping verbs such as “have.” In English, for example, tense can be indicated as “I see,” “I saw,” “I have seen,” and “I will see.” While tense in English is based largely on the use of compound tenses, this is not true of many other languages.
Time
One of the important characteristics of language is that it enables people to talk about the past and the future as well as the present. Thomas Suddendorf puts it this way:
“The content of many of our conversations involves reflections on past events and potential future events. Human language is exquisitely capable of representing meaning that goes beyond the here and now.”
Language allows us to talk about time. Tense locates actions in time:
- “I drive the car.” (Present)
- “I drove the car.” (Past)
- “I will drive the car.” (Future)
Notice that tense by itself does not tell us when actions started or ended. Some languages, however, use aspect to define temporal relationships according to duration. In his book Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, Seth Lerer writes:
“Aspects can indicate, say, actions that were begun in the past and completed in the past; or begin in the past and completed in the present; or begun in the past and continuing in the future.”
Not all languages view time the same. In some languages, the past tense used will indicate how far in the past the action occurred and whether or not the speaker actually witnessed the action. In Wishram (an American Indian language), for example, there are four preterit tenses which differ in the remoteness of time from the moment of speaking. In looking at differences in tense between English and Shoshone (an American Indian language), Drusilla Gould and Christopher Loether, in their book An Introduction to the Shoshoni Language: Dammen Daigwape, report:
“Shoshoni verbs are very different from English verbs, and there is no one-to-one correspondence between tenses in Shoshoni and English.”
Evidentials
A number of languages use evidentials: features of the word which show how something is known. For example, in Makah (an American Indian language) wikicaxaw would translate into English as “it’s bad weather” or literally “it bad-weathers.” Now look at the meaning of this word with three different evidential endings:
- Wikicaxak-pid: “It’s bad weather—from what it looks like”
- Wikicaxak-qad’i: “It’s bad weather—from what I hear”
- Wikicaxak-wad: “It’s bad weather—from what they tell me”
In Tuyuca, a language spoken in the region between Colombia and Brazil, there are at least five evidentials. In Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction, P.H. Mathews reports:
“The distinctions are obligatory: speakers cannot make an assertion without clarifying whether it refers to something they have seen, or to something they have heard about, and so on.”