When two or more people communicate with each other in speech, we can call the system of communication that they employ a code. In most cases that code will be something we may also want to call a language. We should also note that two speakers who are bilingual, that is, who have access to two codes and who for one reason or another shift back and forth between the two languages as they converse,either by code-switching or code mixing, are actually using a third code, one which draws on those two languages. The system (or the grammar, to use a well known technical term) is something that each speaker 'knows' but two very important question for linguists are just what that 'knowledge' is knowledge of ad how it may best be characterized.
In practice linguist do not find it all easy to write grammars because the knowledge that people have of the languages that they speak is extremely hard to describe. It is certainly something different from, and is much more considerable than, the kinds of knowledge that we see described in most of the grammars we find on library shelves, no matter how good those grammars may be. Anyone who knows a language knows much more about that language than is contained in any grammar book that attempts to describe the language. What is also interesting is that the knowledge is both something that every individual who speaks the language possesses (since we must assume that each individual knows the grammar of his or her language ) and also some ind of shared knowledge, that is, knowledge possessed by all those who speak the language. It is also possible to talk about 'dead' languages e.g, Latin or Sankrit. However in such cases we should note that it is the speakers who are dead not the languages themselves, for these may still exist, at least in part. We may even be tempted to claim an existence of those who speaks those language.
Today, most linguists agree that the knowledge that the speakers have of the language or languages they speak is knowledge of something quite abstract. It things with sounds, words,and sentences, rather than just knowledge of specific sounds, words, and sentences. It is knowing what is in the language impossible. This knowledge explains how it is we can understand sentence we haven't heard before and reject others as being ungrammatical, in the sense of being possible in the language. Communication among people who speak how it is shared or even how it is acquired is not well understood. Certainly, psychological and social factors are important and possibly genetic ones too. Language is however a communal possession, although admittedly so by using it properly. As we will see, a wide range of skills and activities is subsumed under this concept 'proper'use.
Confronted with the task of trying to describe the grammar of a language like English, many linguist follow the approach which is associated with Noam Chomsky, undoubtedly the most influential figure in late twentieth century linguist theorizing. Chomsky has argued on many occasions that, in order to make meaningful discoveries about language, linguists must try to distinguish between what is important and what is unimportant about language and linguistic behavior. The important matters, sometimes about to as language universal, concern the learn ability of all languages, the characteristics they share and the rules and principles that speakers apparently follow in constructing and interpreting sentences, the less important have to do with how individual speakers use specific utterances in a way as they find themselves in this situation or that.
Chomsky has distinguished between what he has called competence and performance. He claims that it is the linguist's task to characterize what speakers knows about their language,.i.e, their competence, not what they do with their language.
From time to time we will return to this distinction between competence and performance. However, the kind of competence we must explain involves mush more than Chomsky wishes to include, and indeed includes much that Chomsky subsumes under what he calls performance. Knowing a language also means knowing how to use that language.
(Taken From : An Introduction To Sociolinguistics, 1996)
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