THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE

Abstract

Wegener, like Whitney, uses the terms ‘life’ (cf. the title of Part I of his book: ‘On the life of language’; English transl. ‘On the life of speech’) and ‘growth’ (US: 3/121) of language. However, in Wegener’s work these terms have lost their controversial character that so annoyed Whitney, they have also shed all ties with any speculations about the origin of language. After having introduced the term of Sprachleben, Wegener immediately goes on to qualify it and free it from all metaphorical ambiguities. He advises linguists to use this term carefully, and to keep constantly in mind that ‘language’ is only a collective name, an abstraction, standing for certain muscular movements with which a large number of people belonging to a social group associate a certain meaning or representation. In his 1921 article he differentiates more clearly between language and speech: When we talk about the activity of speaking [my emphasis], we mean by it first and foremost the articulated sound production of a single individual and we consider the speaker as opposed to the hearer or as an isolated individual. But if we talk about the language [my emphasis] we mean by it the articulated sound-production which is produced in a similar way, or at least with essentially the same acoustic effect, by all individuals capable of speech and members of a bigger community, and which is understood by all speaking members as the meaningful expression of psychical processes.

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