What are the characteristics of language?

Answer 1

Ok, well the characteristics of languages....is that, you know every language has a character to its self and the people that speak that language. When you have your own language it's special to you. Also a language may sound funny although they are saying things that you say too just in a different way

Answer 2

Charles Hockett's proposed design features of a languageinclude the following 6 qualities that have been agreed upon almost universally among linguists:

• Arbitrariness
• Semanticity
• Discreteness
• Displacement
• Productivity
• Duality of Patterning

Nearly every spoken language:

• has a grammar
• has phonemes (the smallest unit of a spoken word)
• has morphemes (smallest language unit that has meaning)
• has syntax (the order and rules of a language)
• has semantics (the meaning of words or phrases in context)
• has a spoken version
• is social in context
• is symbolic and arbitrary
• is systematic and describable (as in descriptive linguistics)
• is unique and diverse
• is learned
• is phonetic (pertaining to acoustic properties or pronunciation of speech sounds)
• has phrases (structures containing more than one word but lacking subject-predicate typical of clauses
• is a network between words and expressions in a sentence
• is dynamic; it changes constantly. Words and meanings may even vary from one generation to the next
• is intellectual in nature
• is conventional and non-instinctive

These are characteristics of MANY languages, but does not relate to some African languages, and non spoken languages such as American Sign Language.