The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in an agreed way. Scholars of linguistics conceive of language in various ways. For example, Saussure viewed language as an arbitrary and conventional system of signs used for communication, while for Chomsky it is a set of rules and principles in the mind of a speaker.
Language is central to the transmission of culture.
The use of language also has important political implications. It may be an indicator of identity for ethnic minorities whose identity or existence is threatened, and it expresses group or class membership, as in the use of dialect or jargon. Distinguishing between languages is often more a matter of social, historical, and administrative than of linguistic criteria. If the languages have no standard forms, or if the local dialects are not affected by the standard forms, it may be impossible to find a boundary between them. For example, the dialects of Spain, France, and Italy form a continuum and it used to be hard to say where the linguistic borders were.