- system of structured symbols enabling communication, thought, and knowledge transmission
- ~7000 living languages, grouped into families: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Dravidian, Turkic
- components: phonology (sounds), morphology (word structure), syntax (sentence structure), semantics (meaning), pragmatics (context)
- spoken language emerged ~100,000-300,000 years ago with anatomically modern humans
- writing (invention) externalized language into persistent visual form ~3400 BCE
- writing systems encode language: alphabets, syllabaries, logographies
- programming languages extend human language into machine-executable instructions
- cyber treats language as the substrate of search: queries are language, links are semantic relations
- language shapes perception, categorization, and reasoning about the world