Language as Part of Intercultural Competence. Modern Languages and their Importance

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2016 in the subject Communications - Intercultural Communication, grade: 2,3, University of applied Sciences Regensburg, course: Language and Intercultural Competence, language: English, abstract: Language, or communication, in a broader sense, is just a part of culture but a very important one because a shared language allows members of different cultures to express themselves and communicate with each other. Just as norms, expectations and behaviour, language vary across cultures, and it can change and evolve in the course of time for several reasons, e.g. new needs of the speakers of a language, technological progress, new products, just to mention a few.

The origins of human language have been discussed as a topic for centuries and there is no consensus as to when it really began. Noam Chomsky, an American linguist and often referred to as the "father of modern linguistics", states that it has been an evolutionary process that still goes on today because he speaks of a so-called Language Faculty as a special component of the human brain which is specifically dedicated to language and required for language acquisition.

Michael Corballis, emeritus professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland, is challenging Chomsky's theory as he argues in his book "The Truth about Language" that gesture was crucial to the development of speech instead of a single mutation in a single human. He states that we share that ability with other animals and his idea is supported by investigations of sign languages developed by deaf children who start to babble with their hands just as hearing children do with their mouths.

Languages are constantly changing and this makes it difficult to count the exact number of living languages existing in the world today. Another problem could be the definition of a language because there is a difference between a language and a dialect, or between a language and a macrolanguage. For that reason, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has set international standards toward comprehensive coverage of languages and language groups in the ISO 639 series. The language codes are used in the Ethnologue, a catalog of living languages published by SIL International, which is the registration authority for ISO 639-3. According to Ethnologue (19th edition), there are 7,097 living languages in the world.