No human society, however small or isolated, has ever been found without language. This raises an important question: why does every human society need language at all?
No human society, however small or remote, has ever been found without language. That fact raises a bigger question than it first seems: what is language for, and why could we not do without it?
This guide builds on What Is Language? and looks at the deep needs that language meets. It explains six basic needs (sharing thought, cooperating, passing on knowledge, thinking abstractly, belonging and expressing feeling), what makes human language different from other animal communication, the many everyday jobs language does (including small talk), how writing extended it, what language has to do with thinking, and why the loss of a language matters. It includes two worked examples, a checklist, common mistakes and ten practice questions.
When you finish, continue to English as an International Language.
Every known human community uses language, from remote villages to huge cities. Languages differ enormously in sounds, words and grammar, but every one of them is complex enough to express nearly any idea its speakers need. There is no "primitive" language.
A striking case shows how strong the human drive to communicate is. Before the 1970s, deaf people in Nicaragua were mostly isolated from one another, and there was no shared sign language. When special schools opened in the late 1970s and brought many deaf children together for the first time, they began to communicate by gestures. Over the years, and especially as each new group of children joined, those gestures developed into a full sign language with its own grammar, now called Nicaraguan Sign Language. Researchers have been able to watch a new language being born. The lesson is simple: when people live and learn together, language emerges.
Linguists describe the jobs of language in several ways. One helpful way for learners is to think of six basic needs. They are connected, as the diagram shows.
Diagram 1. The needs overlap: a single conversation can serve several at once.
A thought exists in only one mind. Language turns it into sounds, signs or written symbols that another mind can receive and rebuild as a similar thought. Two people who have never met can come to hold much the same idea because of an exchange of words. Without this, every mind would be sealed.
Humans have always depended on coordinated action: hunting, building, defending, farming, trading. With language, a group can plan, assign tasks, warn of danger from a distance and change plans quickly. The same need is met today in hospitals, airports, schools and workplaces.
Each generation does not need to rediscover how to make fire, grow food or treat illness. Knowledge is passed through language, spoken first and then written. This process is called cultural transmission. Some other animals also pass on learned behaviours, such as certain birdsongs or tool use, but human language allows us to explain how and why, to ask questions and to store knowledge in books and, today, in digital form.
Language lets us talk about things that cannot be seen or touched: justice, time, probability, freedom, zero. It also lets us reason about the past and future, imagine "what if" situations and build theories. Law, mathematics and science all depend on a language that can express conditions, comparisons and chains of reasoning.
The languages a person speaks are tied up with family, community, religion, region and history. Sharing a language creates trust and a sense of "us". That is why people often feel strongly about their mother tongue, and why the loss of a language feels like a deep cultural loss.
Humans can do more than cry or laugh. Language lets us say how we feel and why: not just "I am sad" but "I miss my old friends, and I am worried about starting again". That precision helps others understand and support us, and it helps us understand ourselves.
Many animals communicate: bees dance to show where flowers are, birds sing, monkeys give alarm calls. Scientists generally agree that human language has features that no other known animal system has in the same combined form. Linguists such as Charles Hockett suggested lists of these "design features". Four of the most important are:
| Feature | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Displacement | We can talk about things that are not here and now: the past, the future, other places, imaginary things. | "Yesterday my cousin told me about the sea." |
| Productivity | We can make and understand sentences we have never heard before. | "The robot learned to bake a lemon cake on Mars." |
| Arbitrariness | The sound or shape of a word usually has no natural connection to its meaning (apart from words that imitate sounds). | The word "tree" does not look or sound like a tree. |
| Cultural transmission | Each child learns the language of their community, not an inherited one. | A child learns the languages spoken around them. |
It is fair to say that animals have rich communication, and that some can learn certain behaviours from each other. What is unusual about human language is its open-ended power: with a limited set of sounds and words we can express an unlimited number of ideas.
The six needs describe what language is for at a deep level. In daily life, language does many specific jobs, and some of them are not about information at all.
| Job | Example |
|---|---|
| Informing | The bus leaves at nine o'clock. |
| Directing | Please close the door. |
| Expressing feeling | I'm so happy for you! |
| Connecting socially (phatic) | How are you? Lovely weather, isn't it? |
| Creating and playing | Poems, jokes, stories, songs, riddles |
| Thinking and planning | Silently saying to yourself, "First I will finish my homework." |
| Recording | Notes, diaries, laws, books, messages |
The phatic function deserves special mention. When a neighbour says "How are you?", they are rarely asking for a medical report. They are saying, "I see you, and we are on good terms." This kind of small talk is language doing the work of belonging. It is also why learners benefit from mastering short greetings and polite phrases as much as grammar. See Spoken English & Pronunciation and Fluency Building Techniques.
Spoken language lasts only as long as the speaker and the listener. Writing changed this by letting words travel across distance and time. The earliest known writing systems arose around five thousand years ago, in places such as Mesopotamia and Egypt. Later inventions, such as the printing press in Europe in the fifteenth century (printing had earlier traditions in East Asia) and digital communication, made it faster and cheaper to share knowledge.
Diagram 2. Dates are approximate.
An important point: speech is older and more natural than writing. Almost every child learns to speak without formal teaching, while reading and writing must be taught, and some languages have never had a writing system. Writing records language; it is not the same thing as language itself.
Language and thinking are closely linked, but how closely is still debated. Many of us have an "inner voice" that talks to ourselves as we plan, remember or solve problems. Language also lets us hold complicated ideas in mind by giving them names.
A famous idea, often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, suggests that the language you speak shapes the way you think. Most researchers today accept only a weaker version: language may influence what people notice and how they remember or describe things, but it does not lock thought in a box. People can have ideas for which they have no word yet, which is why new words are constantly invented. The question remains open, and good research continues.
One practical conclusion is hard to dispute: having a rich vocabulary and varied sentence structures gives you more tools to express and refine your ideas.
Early access matters. Children need rich exposure to language from the earliest years, in speech or in sign. Sign languages are complete natural languages with their own grammar. Specialists in deaf education stress that deaf children should have early access to a language they can fully perceive, such as a sign language, so that language development is not delayed.
Because language carries identity, its loss matters. Ethnologue lists about 7,160 living languages in its 2024 edition. UNESCO states that at least 40 percent of the world's languages are threatened with extinction in the long term, and the United Nations has estimated that, even on optimistic assumptions, at least half of today's languages could be extinct or seriously endangered by 2100. Most of these are Indigenous languages with small numbers of speakers.
Diagram 3. Each block stands for one tenth of the world's languages.
When a language disappears, a community loses part of its history, songs, stories, names for plants and places, and ways of describing the world. In recognition of this, the United Nations proclaimed 2022 to 2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. Valuing your own mother language, and the languages of others, is part of understanding why language matters. Learning English does not require giving up other languages: many people use several for different needs, and multilingualism is common worldwide.
Imagine waking up tomorrow in a world where nobody can use any language, spoken, signed or written. You cannot read a sign, ask a question, call a friend or follow a recipe. There are no schools, newspapers, contracts, programmes or songs with words. You could still point and gesture, and you could still feel hunger and joy, but nearly all shared planning would fail, and the knowledge of previous generations would be out of reach. This is not simply an inconvenience; it shows that language is basic to the way human societies function.
Event: a school science fair. Match each moment to a need.
| Moment | Need served |
|---|---|
| A student explains her experiment to a judge. | Sharing thought |
| Teams divide up the stalls and set up tables together. | Cooperation |
| A student uses a textbook and a teacher's advice to plan a project. | Passing on knowledge |
| A student explains the idea of "probability" in a chart. | Abstract thought |
| Classmates cheer in their own school language and chant their house name. | Identity and belonging |
| A student says, "I was so nervous, but I feel proud now." | Expressing feeling |
Try it yourself. Choose an event in your own day (a family meal, a bus ride, a cricket match) and match at least four of the needs. Sample answer for a family meal: telling grandmother about school (sharing thought); deciding who will cook (cooperation); learning a recipe from her (passing on knowledge); talking about fairness in a story (abstract thought); speaking the family's home language (belonging); saying "I'm happy you came" (feeling).
Decide the main job of each sentence (inform, direct, express feeling, connect socially, create, record).
Note. One sentence can do two jobs at once. "Could you pass the salt?" looks like a question but is a polite direction, so look at what the speaker wants to achieve, not only at the grammar.
Try it yourself. Say which job each does: (a) "Good morning!" (b) "Lock the gate before you leave." (c) "The train was cancelled."
Sample answer: (a) connecting socially; (b) directing; (c) informing.
Spend one day noticing language. This turns an abstract idea into something you can see.
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| Mistake | Better thinking |
|---|---|
| Thinking language is only words and grammar | Language is also gesture, sign, tone, writing, and social action |
| Saying animals "have no communication" | Animals communicate richly, but human language has features such as displacement and productivity |
| Confusing language with writing | Speech and sign are older; writing records language |
| Saying some languages are "primitive" | All languages are complex and capable of expressing their speakers' needs |
| Treating small talk as meaningless | It builds relationships (the phatic function) |
| Claiming language fully controls thought | Research supports only a weaker influence, and the debate continues |
| Quoting exact numbers of languages without a source | Say "about", and name the source and year |
When you notice what language is for, you also notice why learning to use it well is worth the effort. A richer command of words, grammar and style gives you more ways to share ideas, work with others, learn from the past, think carefully, belong, and express what you feel. It also encourages respect for every language, including your own. Next, read English as an International Language and then The Importance of the English Language.
Activity: ask each student to keep a "language log" for one day, recording five uses of language and the need each serves. In class, compare logs and discuss which needs were most common. Invite students to share a word or phrase from a home language and explain what it means to them.
Please note: figures on languages are estimates that change between editions and sources. Topics such as the origin of language and language and thought are debated by scholars, so present them as open questions. Be sensitive to students' home languages and avoid ranking languages.
10 questions. Select an answer for each, then submit to see your score instantly.