Why Study Language ?

Language is a living phenomenon and a distinctive feature of human beings, be it man or animals. It is what shapes thought, and allows transmission of ideas through sounds (see post: a general overview on speech sounds). Man uses it differently from animals, though. Therefore, it became a necessity to study it, and understand the way it operates. Linguists usually prefer to get away from the ‘complex-sounding’ jargon to produce a thumb-nail definition. “This is usually something like Linguistics is the scientific study of language’” (Crystal D.1971). What needs to be mentioned is that scholars have a tendency to describe and investigate language from a specific angle, usually their scientific background. At first, there are several questions to be raised like ‘what is the scientific study of language?’ ‘what is language?’ or rather ‘why bother to study language at all?’ The answer is there is no single, simple answer. However, one can ask ‘why study the brain?’‘why study vision?’ At this stage, people will come up with all the possible rhetorical answers, which leads to the conclusion that whether one is interested in investigating language, or collecting stamps, it is a question of personal taste. According to David Crystal, “there can be –indeed, there has to be, and always has been- a ‘pure’ interest in language study also; and it is this interest in accumulating information about language as an end in itself which is the primary justification for having a separate discipline of study, linguistics.” Another reason is that some individuals consider language as a fascinating and intriguing aspect of human behaviour; something that makes it quite delightful to prod it from different perspectives. One of the strongest arguments to care about language is when a given language suddenly disappears, or even hardly evolves (since language is potentially dynamic). On a different note,the essence of language is represented culturally and ideologically. The way a speech community uses language provides the curious with loads of knowledge on the culture, religion, customs, and ideologies of nations, which might have become extinct. To sum up this discussion, one has to say language is larger than language, and it is enough for it to just be language. All questions about ‘why study language?’ will do no more than satisfy a curiosity, settle an argument, or add to someone’s store of knowledge about the world. In other words, leave the study of language to the people who want to study language.