Language vs Communication (defining terms)

Communication is usually understood as a process of sending and/or receiving informative message(s). It is usually provided via a number of channels including written, spoken, drawn, and digital signal. As a result, there are some barriers that may hinder communication such as distance, noise, and volume (Raegan, 2015). This means that we should differentiate communicative signals which might become unintentionally informative signals; imagine that you sneeze, another person receives it as a signal of your potential illness (Yule, 2010). Anyway, a signal can be exchanged intentionally or not with a great range of ways like facial expression, gesturing, writing, speaking, drawing, etc. The examples of communication are honey bee dances, body postures of cats, barks of dogs, street signs, spoken or written words.

Consequently, language never substitutes communication, but it is a uniquely human type of communication (Szathmary & Szamado, 2008; Language, 1998; Bishop & Philips, 2006). The main function of human communication is to express verbal information for personal, interpersonal, and/or societal use. Human language has own attributes: the ability to talk about different time periods, the relationship between audio and visual form of words, the creative nature, the influence of speaking environment. This helps us differentiate human language and animal communication as parts of the notion of ‘communication’.

When taken together, there is an obvious relationship between ‘language’ and ‘communication’: as it was stated above, language is a type of communication. Animals communicate but don’t use human language; there are parrots that “can” be taught to talk but, in fact, they just simulate sounds they hear without complete understanding. Another thing happens when we communicate with our pets: a dog doesn’t speak any language but a human and a dog can send and receive messages like dog’s body posture and human’s intonation. 

In conclusion, it is important to state that it is difficult to compare ‘communication’ and ‘language’ because they have another type of relationship when one is a part of another. This essay demonstrates their main features and the way they relate to each other.

References:

Bishop, R. & Philips, J. (2006). Language. Theory, Culture and Society, 23 (2-3), 51-69.

Language. (1993). In Bloomsbury guide to human thought. London, United Kingdom: Bloomsbury. Retrieved from http://literati.credoreference.com/content/entry/bght/language/0

Raegan, T. (2015). Lecture 1: Introduction to linguistics [Power Point Slides]. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/a/nu.edu.kz/file/d/0B3-4X-GG-TLrN2lPcDJEcWZRSms/edit

Szathmary, E. & Szamado, S. (2008). Being human: Language: A social history of words. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7218/full/456040a.html