Why is Man a Linguistic Animal?

Communication is a rather natural skill that is essential to one’s survival . Any animal needs to find methods of communication to survive, because with communication comes order. Animals mostly live to survive and as a result their communication skills need not be advanced and their methods of communication are rather basic. The Human Being is a different story. Can we even imagine a life without communication? How organized and evolved would be without language ?

Man is the evolved species which uses a higher method of communication we now know as language. This means of communication makes us more efficient and extraverted. We can easily understand each other thanks to these sounds we can physically produce and understand unlike other animals. As human beings we have vocal chords which enable us to create tons of sounds unlike other animals who can only produce a few. Sounds alone are meaningless , we had to define each sound in order to produce what we nowadays recognize as words.

Language is a huge part of evolution. It’s a proven fact, we as human beings are constantly evolving while animals seem to have reached to pinnacle of evolution. Thanks to language we are able to understand and study what’s happening around us. This is the very reason why we are constantly evolving and adapting, if not physically mentally. As a result of communication, by means of language, man now has the ability to exchange knowledge, a simpler word to refer to this is teaching. Education would be much more difficult without language, it would be already difficult to understand what someone is trying to tell you , let alone teach you.

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The transfer of information can only be done thanks to language, or by means of the language’s syntax.  We also see a resemblance in biological code to human language.  Various letters we know which have a certain meaning, have another meaning in biological terms. Roman Jakobson says that as no phrase on its own makes any literal sense no isolated gene makes a nucleic fibre. He believes that both biological and human codes have a perfect parallelism. Other philosophers such as the French biologist Jacob, think that we don’t have to give the similarities between biological codes and linguistic codes much importance, because heredity just happens and linguistic codes are created freely. He says we don’t choose who we are but we choose what language to speak in. This means we can freely choose to speak other languages if we feel like, but we cannot change who we are. In other words, biological codes can’t be changed but linguistic codes can.

“Man is a rational animal”       

This is how Aristotle’s definition of man. We are animals but we differ because we are animals with reason, intelligent animals if you like.  Animals use communication to survive, by using sense , movement and likeness. They also have some strange and well-structured techniques on how to communicate. For example, the bees perform a certain dance known as the “Waggle Dance” , this dance is when they move in a wiggly manner in the form of an eight, from this dance they indicate to other bees where food may be found. Obviously they do this because they don’t have the ability to speak. As human beings we are the only known species who have the ability to produce and understand language, as we physically have vocal chords who permit this. We understand syntax and semantics, while for example monkeys would not understand syntax. They might learn what a word means individually but they don’t have the ability to form a sentence , because they don’t have syntax.

Therefore man is a linguistic animal because he is an intelligent species compared to animals and has the physical ability to speak. Language is one of the basic keys to evolution and man is constantly evolving, therefore Language is of vital importance. It is also what makes us different than other species, it is a unique characteristic of the human being.