Language as a form of human behavior

So long as the facts of speech are discussed only by students professionally interested in language its peculiar characteristics are very likely to be overlooked. It is not surprising, therefore, that philologists and teachers of particular languages are apt to have vaguer and cruder notions of the fundamental characteristics of human speech than such unspecialized students of human behavior as concern themselves with this most human of all reactive systems. It is clear that if we are ever to relate the fundamental problems of linguistic science to those of human behavior in general— in other words, to psychology—we must learn to see language as possessed of certain essential characteristics apart from those of particular languages that we may happen to be familiar with and as rooted in some general soil of behavior that gives birth to other than strictly linguistic forms of expression. If we take a bird's-eye view of the languages of the world we find that there are certain things that characterize them as a whole and that tend to mark them off somewhat from other forms of cultural behavior. In the first place we are struck by the marvelous completeness of formal development of each and every language that we have knowledge of. Popular opinion to the contrary, there is no known language, whether spoken by a culturally advanced