Key Features Of Language Essay

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Language is a very important survival tool in our lives, without language we would not be able to navigate the basic necessities to live. Language identifies us as a unique individual; it shows who we are and where we come from. When you think about language you also have to think about cognition, and the reason for that is if we do not analyze and understand the persons language we will never truly understand what they mean. We all come from various backgrounds and many different parts of the world; the way we speak and communicate with one another also varies from culture to culture. From my experience living in America everyone is loud and friendly and always doing things together, however now that I live in Europe things are different. …show more content…

We cannot just memorize words; we have to learn what they mean and why we have to use them in our daily lives. The first feature is communicative, this feature focuses on the interaction that people have on a daily basis to exchange words and sentences, which is called a conversation. The second feature is symbolic, language contains many sounds and symbols that are used to describe and object or even meaning. Words are not signs and they are also not figure, they are symbols of meaning. Language is the meaning of the symbols, which creates the understanding of what is being said or written. The third feature is structure; this mainly means that the symbols in language are not arbitrary. Structure shows exactly how complex and difficult language can be. The fourth feature is generative; this feature explains the possibility to come up with new concepts, and ideas. A good example of generative is the invention of Spanglish, it’s a mixture of Spanish and English. The last feature of language is dynamic, in this concept language is always changing therefore its never just one kind. The reason why it is always changing is because new words and rules are always added to grammar. New words are added to our lexicon, and when new words are added old words start to