Language Policy and Identity in Mauritania. El Hacen Moulaye Ahmed
of language, that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are familiar. The fundamental importance of this creative aspect of normal language use has been recognized since the seventeenth century at least; and it was the core of Humboldtian general linguistics. (Chomsky, 1974, p. 74)
Elsewhere, Chomsky wrote:
The normal use of language is innovative in the sense that much of what we say in the course of normal language use is entirely new, not a repetition of anything that we have heard before, and not even similar in pattern-in any useful sense of the terms “similar” and “pattern”-to sentences or discourse that we have heard in the past. (Chomsky, 2006, p. 10)
The above passages show that the recognition of productivity as characteristic of language, by linguists, was not new, but rather it goes back to the seventeenth century. In the citations, Chomsky also stresses the innovation of language in the sense that it allows its users or speakers to continuously create new utterances, combining the “building bricks” of language in endless ways. Chomsky asserts that the productivity of language is manifested in its grammatical structure through the extreme complexity and heterogeneity of the rules that guarantee and constitute it. In other words, Chomsky unveils the novelty of the rule-changing creativity. However, almost all linguists insisted that the novelty of utterances which language enables its users to produce is rule-governed (Akmajian, Demer, Farmer, & Harnish, 2001, p. 7). Clearly, there are rules which control and guide the structure and function of language. Compactly, a conclusion about the productivity of language can be put as the following: language is an infinite rule-governed creativity.
In addition, displacement is an important characteristic of Language. The characteristic of displacement means that human beings can abstract, lie, and talk about talk itself in imaginary, distant, past, present, future, conjectural, and/or counterfactual statements (Algeo, 2010, p. 16). Language leaves the scope of time open to human beings in expressing their everyday life activities. Animals’ communication systems, however, enable them only to express the messages which are quite connected with their immediate environment. Proper example runs in the following passage:
When your pet cat comes home and stands at your feet calling meow, you are likely to understand this message as relating to that immediate time and place. If you ask your cat where it has been and what it was up to, you’ll probably get the same meow response. Animal communication seems to be designed exclusively for this moment, here and now. It cannot effectively be used to relate events that are far removed in time and place. When your dog says GRRR, it means GRRR, right now, because dogs don’t seem to be capable of communicating GRRR, last night, over in the park. In contrast, human language users are normally capable of producing messages equivalent to GRRR, last night, over in the park, and then going on to say In fact, I’ll be going back tomorrow for some more. (Yule, 2010, p. 12)
It seems that an infinite stock of utterances human beings produce is not limited by time or place unlike the finite stock of communication systems of animals which is time and place bounded.
Furthermore, language is noninstinctive and conventional. Every language is the result of evolution and agreement between its speakers on words and their assigned meanings (Tamasi & Antieau, 2015, p. 3). Every language, then, is a convention in a community. The convention is culturally transmitted from one generation to the next (Saraswati, 2004, p. 25). Yet, it is not genetically transmitted. For instance, Silver and Lwin (2014) asserted that language must be acquired by human beings (p. 7). Indeed, people inherit their physical features such as their eyes and hair colors from their parents, but they do not inherit their language. Noting on this matter, Yule (2010) mentioned the following example: a child born to Korean parents in Korea, “but adopted and brought up from birth by English speakers in the United States, will have physical characteristics inherited from his or her natural parents, but will inevitably speak English. A kitten, given comparable early experiences, will produce meow regardless” (2010, p. 14). Clearly, while animals inherit their system of communication by heredity, humans do not.
The final characteristic of language is its reflexivity. The ability of using language to talk about language is called reflexivity, wrote Dörries (2002, p. 64). All creatures communicate in a way or another with their species, and some communicate across their species divide, yet nonhuman species do not reflect on the way they make their communicative messages or review “how they work (or not). That is, one barking dog is probably not offering advice to another barking dog along the lines of ‘Hey, you should lower your bark to make it sound more menacing.’ They’re not barking about barking.” In contrast, “humans are clearly able to reflect on language and its uses (e.g., ‘I wish he wouldn’t use so many technical terms’)” (Yule, 2010, p. 11). Such quotation gives the premise that human beings can use language to talk about language itself, whereas animals could not as the above example of the barking dog shows. Thus, the property of reflexivity is one of the distinguishing features of language. Indeed, “without this general ability, we wouldn’t be able to reflect on or identify any of the other distinct properties of human language,” added Yule (2010, p. 11).
The eleven characteristics, discussed above, show the novelty of the characteristics of language. Such novelty, as noted earlier, is what made the identification of language a difficult task in the sense that it makes it impossible for anyone to bring out a definition that captures all of them. Moreover, in the course of mapping out these different characteristics, we came up with several remarks. To start with, the eleven characteristics are all interconnected in various ways. In addition, after scrutinizing many linguistic works written by specialized linguists, it was clear that the characteristics are not only present in all languages but also their presence is marked by a very high degree. However, few of them, for example, means of communication, are found in other systems of communication is unquestionable. Nonetheless, what is also unquestionable is that the few characteristics that are present in other systems of communication are not to be found with the same degree of interconnectedness as those of language.
Demolishing Myths about Language
The centrality of language to human beings makes it so universally important that people have contrived with their own notions about how it all works. A lot of what people think about language is true, but sometimes people get it wrong. In the following pages, some common misconceptions about language will be discussed. Only myths that are related to the topic at hand, language policy and identity, will be discussed. However, before so doing, the term “myth” needs explanation. Like any other concept, the concept “myth,” to use Schrempp and Hansen’s words, “continues to resist any definition that is uniform, universally valid” (2002, p. 240). Even though some of the different definitions of the term “myth” are cited, the one that serves the topic at hand is emphasized.
The first definition of the term “myth” was given in Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, as a “traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon” (2006, p. 1320). The definition uses the term “story” to refer to the term “myth.” However, the definition does mention a particular type of story through the use of the modifier “tradition.” The definition also points out the purpose of myth which was described as a solution provider to problematic issues that concern people, their life, or natural phenomenon. Moreover, Watts defined myth as a “tale, a fable, a falsehood, or an idea that is out of date, something untrue.” He further ran an older strict use of the term means “not something untrue, but rather an image in terms of which people make sense of life and the world” (1996, p. 73). In the definitions, Watts points out that the definition of myth has gone through changes overtime. The changes are represented in the modification of the tale from possibly true to definitely untrue.
In lying out the different myths about language and based on the above-discussed definitions, one may fathom that a myth is a story that explains a phenomenon based on guest, observation, or experience rather than scientific experiment. In this sense, it is a theoretically based concept that can be scientifically either proved or unproved. In response to the last question, language myths are misconceived sets of