++EngLiSh DePaRtMeN++

There are so many complexities here that we might argue that it would be better for linguists to give up attempting even to describe particular languages, let alone ‘language’ in the abstract. What are they to describe? Are they to describe the social structure which is complete only in the collectivity,or the mental structure which speakers of that language must be assumed to carry in their heads,or the set of systems which are presumed to allow speakers to create new utterances for themselves,or the actually produced utterances? All of these have been tried. But note that there are logical inconsistencies between these various potential objects of description. If language as a social fact exists only in the collectivity, no individual speaks ‘the language’; any individual must have only a partial knowledge of the language. This isn’t hard to prove: open any large dictionary of English at random, and read the first fifty headwords you come to. You did not know all of these words before you started reading (you probably don’t after you’ve finished), but somebody (or, more likely, a set of individuals) knows them and has used them or they wouldn’t be in the dictionary. So the description of what is in any person’s head can never provide a full description of a language in the sense that English is a language. Many linguists prefer to use the term for the language of an individual. So you don’t speak English, you speak your idiolect. That seems simple enough until we ask what ‘English’ consists of. Presumably it consists of the sum of all the idiolects of people who we agree are speaking English. But some of these people have conflicting ideas about what is part of their language. To take a simple example, there are millions of people speaking what we would call ‘English’, for whom the past tense of the verb dive is dove.For these speakers dived sounds like baby-talk, as writed would instead of wrote. There are also millions of speakers for whom dived is the only possible past tense of dive, and dove sounds like the kind of joke you make when you say that the past tense of think must be thank or thunk. The example is trivial, but it means that we must allow for a lot of different answers to what is English, even mutually incompatible ones. So it must be true that there is no clear-cut line where English stops and something else begins (and it is frequently not clear what that something else is). The language ‘English’ is not well-defined (and the same will be true for any other language which is given a name in this way). Neither is language in the sense ‘language faculty’ well-defined. A lot of work has gone into trying to understand Universal Grammar (or UG as it is usually termed) within Chomskyan approaches to linguistics), and we do not yet understand what it must look like or how it must function. There is even dispute as to whether it is a specifically linguistic set of functions, or whether it is a general set of cognitive abilities which together allow human beings to be language users. If neither a language nor language (the language faculty) is easily definable, we have to ask what it is that linguists deal with. Linguists have to define language for their own purposes. They do not have an external definition of language or of a particular language which is clearly sufficient for their needs. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that care is required.(cited form Bauer,Laurie. 2007.The Linguistics Student's Handbook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

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