What is language and what does it do?

People find the subject of language interesting and worth studying for many different reasons. Language can, for example, be used as a way of finding out more about:

• how our brains work, from investigating how children learn language, or how damage to our brains results in certain kind of language disorders (psycholinguistics);

• how to learn and to teach different languages (applied linguistics); • the relationship between meaning, language and perception (philosophy); • the role of language in different cultures (anthropology); • the styles of language used in literature (stylistics); • the different varieties of language people use, and why there are linguistic differences between different groups (sociolinguistics); • how to make computers more sophisticated (artificial intelligence).