Language and speech characteristics

Language characteristics

Language or language is a coding system that allows mutual understanding, as long as it is handled by both the sender and the receiver in a communicative act. Language and speech characteristics

For that to be possible, the language is:

Collective

It cannot be spoken and accepted by a single individual but must be used by a community. Dead languages, for example, are those that no one speaks, even though it is possible to have a record of how they operated. Language and speech characteristics

Ideal

Language has to do with an order of linguistic categories and forms that are mental, not concrete. When they are articulated in real sounds, we are in the presence of speech.

Rigid

Language operates as a linguistic mold, made up of rules, exceptions, prohibitions, and so on. An individual alone cannot change the norm, nor can he impose on others how he would like the tongue to begin to operate.

Flexible

Paradoxically, the language is also flexible, since it allows the creativity of its users, the incorporation of loanwords from other languages ​​or innovations, and it allows itself to change over time, as evidenced by the mode of evolution of languages. different languages. Language and speech characteristics

Speech characteristics

Unlike language, speech is the concrete manifestation of the mental and social code contained in it. It is characterized by being:

Individual

Everyone has their own peculiar way of speaking the same language, depending on their tastes, nationality, physical constitution, etc.

Specify

Speech is the specific way of emitting sounds framed in the language code so that it consists of sound waves perceived by our ears.

Changing 

Speech is pure mutability: it can vary from day to day, from one context to another, from one speaker to another, and from one state of mind to another. However, always within certain basic rules of the language. Language and speech characteristics