The term ‘language’ can be used to refer to a variety of concepts / things, such as “the
particular form of words and speech used by the people of a country, area or social group”, or
“the method of human communication using spoken or written words”. In other words, we
can talk about a specific language e.g. English, German, Swahili etc. or about language as
such. In linguistics, we are interested in both of these fields, whereby General Linguistics will
tend to concentrate on the latter topic and the individual language departments on their
specific language e.g. English linguistics. A further meaning of ‘language’ is “the style or
types of words used by a person or group”, which is a topic generally studied within
sociolinguistics.