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When it comes to the divide between the arts & humanities and the sciences, I confess I've always placed language squarely on the arts & humanities side. I've never thought it could remotely be related to science; and even though I knew that linguistics is defined as "the scientific study of language and its structure" (Oxford Engish Dictionary), I didn't see that as a science, either.

But RH Robins suggests in his book General Linguistics: An Introductory Survey that linguistics could actually be the bridge that connects the two branches.

Because, come to think of it, science can't do without language. It needs to use language in order to talk about its subject, to theorise and experiment and explain. In fact, all branches of knowledge need language in order to explain themselves; therefore, Robins says, "Linguistics may, in some respects, be said to lie at the centre of them all, as being the study of the tool they must use."

Interesting, isn't it? And it gets more interesting yet. Robins points out that since linguistics is the study of language, it both uses language and has language as its subject-matter. Ironic when you think that we're trying to use language to describe language. Then I realised after reading Hunter Diack (Language for Teaching) that teachers face a very similar situation:

The teacher of young children has the problem of using words to communicate facts and ideas to children who are often without previous experience of the things, the facts and ideas the words are connected with, or of the words themselves. Teachers also have to use words when teaching their pupils how to use words.

A friend of mine who's been away for years and is still residing abroad once asked me, "How is it that you sound so Malaysian when you speak, but don't sound Malaysian when you write?"

Tonight my class discussed how children usually grow up learning a dialect or the colloquial form of a language, coz that's what they hear being spoken all around them. But they do pick up the standard language later, and most grown-ups know both versions, switching between either one depending on the occasion.

Apparently my lecturer's children know she's angry when she turns all formal on them -- like how when my parents were angry, they used to call me by my full name. She also pointed out how we always get very formal-sounding when we're making a complaint, because we want to sound "like we mean business". But when we're talking to friends, or people who are close to us, we get very informal, even rude. To the extent of calling good friends strange names. I once knew someone who called her best friend "Bitch", as in, "Hey Bitch! How are you?"

I noticed that it's true, the environment and situation very much influences my use of language. I'm very proper when I answer the phone at work. All, "May I help you, sir?" and not a 'lah' in sight. But once I get off the phone and turn to speak to my colleagues, I sound like a completely different person.

When conversing with non-Malaysians, though, I usually refrain from getting colloquial, because we Malaysians tend to use a lot of words borrowed from the Chinese dialects as well as Malay. Not to mention all the 'short-cuts', like saying, "Off the light afterwords ah," as we step out of the room, when what we really mean is, "Please turn off the lights when you leave." I figure my conversation partner probably wouldn't be able to fathom what I was saying!

But since this friend of mine -- the one I mentioned in the beginning -- is Malaysian (despite having spent years abroad -- I guess I unconsciously discounted that), I just went all Malaysian on him from the get-go.

It's fascinating; I never did think about this before, how I simply switch from colloquial "Manglish" (Malaysian English) to standard English and back again, all the time. I didn't even realise I spoke two different forms of English. They're just both... English... to me.

Language is extremely intuitive. I didn't realise this until I started reading a textbook that pointed out how we constantly put together new sentences all the time and understand all the various sentences we read or hear. We learn words, not phrases or sentences, yet we somehow manage to string all those words together to form sentences with meaning. And when others do the same, we actually understand what they are saying.

Even better, we understand sentences that aren't plausible or don't make sense -- like, "The blind man was dazzled by her blonde hair." We know perfectly well what the sentence means, although it makes us scratch our heads and wonder whether the writer was sober when he wrote it.

The idea is that we manage to communicate in this way because we all have some knowledge of grammar. Arrange words in the 'proper' sequence, and the hearer / reader recognises this sequence and gets what the speaker / writer is trying to say.

But I say language is intuitive, because we don't know that we have this grammatical knowledge or that we're putting it to use every single day of our lives. We see no reason to explain why we place certain words in certain places; all we care about is that those words belong there. We compose and decipher sentences without a second thought, taking it for granted that we should understand each other. We don't realise the depth of knowledge that it takes for us to be able to process all these things in our heads.

Likewise, the way we produce sounds and string the various sounds together to form words -- it's all intuitive. We speak without thinking about the way our lips or tongue are moving.

Scientists can't stand this; they want to figure out how sounds are made and speech is born, how words are formed, how we put sentences together. So they try to break everything down to the very basics, and in doing so, create all sorts of terms, which I now have to learn. For instance, when making the 'b' sound, both lips come together, so it's called a 'bilabial' sound. Thank goodness the label makes sense to me, or I would have the hardest time remembering it!