Beyond them lies an abstraction, called 'language', and abstractions called 'languages', that many people believe in. On examination these turn out to be very elusive abstractions, so elusive and abstract that some consider them downright illusory. In any case, belief in the existence of languages as real objects doesn't seem to buy us anything. Both of these are surely real, in the usual sense of real .
Linguists are interested in the patterns and regularity that can be found in the outputs.
And so the word 'language', which has come to us from tradition with its various multiple and ill-defined meanings, encourages people to set up a conceptual object within their belief systems to go with this noun, and to imagine that it must be a system of some kind beyond the two realities mentioned above. People have a natural tendency not only to reify nouns but to suppose that they mean something fairly definite. We tend to overlook their vagueness and ambiguity. Whorfianists might point out that while English has the noun 'language', in many other languages it translates into a nominalization of the verb 'to talk'. Note that in statements like that of the preceding sentence, the term 'language' is used, in its ordinary nontechnical sense.