Page 150 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

• Language is an object of study and has value in itself. Linguistics is a field of scientific
study within the humanities. It has a number of sub-fields that investigate a wide
range of language-related issues and questions. This is partly the result of language
being involved in so many areas of human life. Language is indeed involved in such
activities as language learning and teaching which are of use in society. For example,
people may be motivated to learn a language for utilitarian reasons such as applying
for a job or in preparation for overseas study. We also need to know something about
language if we are going to make good dictionaries or language reference books which
are needed in education. And we need people who are good in two or more languages
if we want reliable translating and interpreting. But the scope of linguistics is much
broader than that. There are also studies of other applications of the use of language
in society. These include such things as language and the law, language and the brain,
language and computers and so on where interdisciplinary knowledge is required to
solve various problems or answer questions such as how can linguistics contribute to
the way evidence is given in a trial, or to help provide treatment to someone who
has had a stroke and has lost part of their ability to use language, or how we can
make software that has language abilities. There are, however, some misconceptions
about linguistic studies of minority languages. The first mistaken assumption is that
small, pre-industrial cultures, especially those without writing, are not going to have
anything of value worth studying because they are not ‘civilized’. This idea that small
cultures are in some way ‘primitive’ is a complete fallacy. As one anthropologist
has put it, small cultures are not failed attepts at modernity. They are unique ways
of seeing the world. The first surprising fact to dispel such fallacies is that many of
these indigenous languages have grammatical systems that are more complex than
those in the languages of developed nations. We need data from such languages if
we are to understand human language as a whole. Among the 6,000 or so human
languages, there is a great deal of diversity. The development of any universal theory
of language cannot be created based solely on data from the languages of developed
countries. It must include data from all the langauges in the world. Research into
small, indigenous languages has shown that as yet unstudied languages may reveal
features that are completely new and which no one has yet imagined could exist. Such
discoveries have value when developing formal theories about human syntax as they
throw light on the nature and limits of abstract systems used by all human beings.
Further, comparative studies into lexical systems in different languages can reveal

150 Chapter 3

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