English is not the universal language. Machine-readable bar codes is.

Ours is a world of brief encounters in which “How are you?” is not a question reflecting concern or expecting a real answer, but a formula.

A short look at contracts as we experience them today reveals that contracts are based on languages of their own, hard to decipher by even the average literate person.

We know that the system in place in our culture is the result of the logocratic view adopted.

Main tools of communication are languages.

Languages changes like other tools and techniques of communication. Some of these linguistic communication systems even got lost in history, e.g. extinct languages or changed. Through communication per se the main pathways of communication, languages, extended or were geographically reduced in terms of their influence. In every culture more or less the same basic communication means exist: Oral, literal, and medial means.

Today, American writers of lesser stature and talent are translated into the various European languages, for the same reasons that Disneyland was brought to France.

Communication is subject to the languages it is practiced in.

Communication serves in general as a process in order to forward information between entities.

Some languages are extending, while others do not increase neither regarding the number of speakers nor in terms of their vocabulary/thesaurus. Some languages involve a high level of included cultural assets and are productive in terms of their use in media, tools, and other aspects of communication.

As a technological tool of rhetoric languages are not neuter.

Lawyers, journalists, the military, and politicians worry about the role and functions of language in society. Probably most concerned with their own roles in the social structure and with the legitimacy of their institutions, they would preserve those structures of human activity that justify literacy and thus their own positions of power and influence.

One does not have to be literate in any language in order to solder one circuit to another on an assembly line or to snap together modular components fabricated by advanced machines. What is necessary, indeed expected, is an ethic that calls for a sense of duty and pride in a job well done, a sense met by the social promise of permanency. All in all, the Japanese system allows for little variation from the consensus, and even less for the creation of new models.

Rhetoric was one of the first movements interested in the common conditions of spoken language in order to influence other persons.

Languages are necessary for communication, but since the thesaurus and the grammar and linguistic construction of each language are different, also the inherent social concepts may be different.

It is exceedingly difficult to say whether language, as an instrument of continuity and permanence, is failing because the rhythm of existence has accelerated increasingly since the Industrial Revolution, or the rhythm of existence has accelerated because human interaction is no longer at the mercy of language.

Illiteracy symptoms: the decrease in functional literacy; a general degradation of writing skills and reading comprehension; an alarming increase of packaged language (clichés used in speeches, canned messages); and a general tendency to substitute visual media (especially television and video) for written language.

The language is the borderline of the perspective of the individual to the world.

Once within a language, one is bound to look at the world surrounding oneself from the perspective of that language as the medium for partial self-constitution and evaluation.

The more speakers a thesaurus of a language has, the more proficient a language as a communication tool is. The number of speakers -independently from the place the language is spoken- also guarantees the vividness of a language.

In reality, languages are rather loaded systems of conventions in which national biases and other inclinations are extensively embodied and maintained, and even propagated, through speech, writing, and reading.

In language, things are remembered; but also forgotten, or made forgotten, for reasons having to do with new circumstances of work and social life.

Language involves human beings in all their aspects: biology, sense of space and time, cognitive and manual skills, emotional resources, sensitivity, tendency to social interaction and political organization. But what best defines our relation to language is the pragmatics of our existence.

While some fail to notice the decreased role of literacy and the deterioration of language in our life today, others surrender to illiteracy without even being aware of their surrender. We live in a world in which many people—especially those with more than undergraduate college education—complain about the low level of literacy while they simultaneously acquiesce to methods and necessities that make literacy less and less significant.

Language, as a universal means of communication, is consequently the only means that ultimately explains scientific theories. A fatal flaw in language means a fatal flaw in our understanding of scientific theories.

Understanding language is a process that extends far beyond knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Where there is no sharing of experience beyond what a particular language sequence expresses, there is no understanding.

Languages, or any other form of expression and communication, are meaningful only to the extent that they become part of our existence.

When people do not know how to spell words that refer to their existence, we suspect that something related to the learning of spelling (usually the learner) does not function as we assumed it should.

The freeing of language from literacy, and the subsequent loss in quality, is only part of a broader process. The people opposing it should be aware that the civilization of illiteracy is also the expression of practical criticism in respect to a past pragmatic framework far from being as perfect as literacy advocates lead us to believe.

There are two axes for structuring research in the origins and evolution of language like communication systems: the sociocultural/sociobiological axis which concerns the nature of the mechanisms responsible for the origin and propagation of linguistic structure, and the transmission/inferential communication axis which concerns the nature of the communication.

Language and the formation and expression of ideas is unique to humans in that they define a part of the cognitive dimension of our pragmatic. We seem endowed with language, as we are with hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste.

Cowardly conformity stops us short from suspecting that something might be wrong with language or with those literacy expectations deeply anchored in all known political programs thrown into our face when our vote is elicited.

Economical conditions play an increasingly dominant role in syntactic theorizing.

Our lives take place increasingly in the impersonal world of stereotype discourse of forms, applications, passwords, and word processed letters. The Internet, as World Wide Web, e-mail medium, data exchange, or chat forum effectively overrides constraints and limitations resulting from the participation of language in human pragmatics. Our world is becoming more and more a world of efficiency and interconnected activities that take place at a speed and at a variety of levels for which literacy is not appropriate.

Sharing is the ultimate qualifier for a sign, especially for a language.

Contents of languages primarily transmitted thought interpersonal communication and oral tradition are less stable than contents of languages using literacy or both modes of communication.

Language is also something other than the act of using it. We make our language the way we continuously make ourselves. This making does not come about in a vacuum, but in the pragmatic framework of our interdependencies.

Different mind concepts stand behind communication terminology in several languages leading to different communicative styles.

We can use a hammer or a computer, but we are our language.

A word on paper, one like the many on this page, is quite different from a word in the hypertext of a multimedia application or that of the Web.

The written language itself has different forms in various cultures. A character in an alphabet is an abstract sign of a language, which is not related any longer to any meaning of the form itself.

Since these languages and oral societies reflect the social structure of their communities of speakers, there is a lack of a 'direct' language of intervention and critique for alternative forms of discourse.

The main factor for the use of communication is the language itself. Since there are several groups of languages existing, communication depends on the local language and its transformation into other languages.

The contemporary number of living languages is approximately 6916, while the number of those languages that are nearly extinct is 523. Over 96% of the earth's inhabitants speak a language in the top 10 language families. The languages in the remaining groups are spoken by only 4% of the world population.

Language is sequential, centralized, linear, and corresponds to the stage of linear growth of humankind.

The sequential nature of language, in particular its embodiment in literacy, no longer suits human praxis as its universal measure.

The top four languages on the internet in 2008 were English (29.7%), Chinese (13.3%), Spanish (7.7%), and Japanese (7.5%).

Languages are also means of storage of the knowledge of their cultures.

Languages that contain high values and adjust their terminology according to the needs of modern technologies etc. are as cultural languages stable and enlarger the number of speakers compared to other languages. The integration of terms from other languages in these languages is used for the increase of their own value. Languages as a part of this information economy are elements in a global exchange of information.

Such a ‘linguistic economy’ is based upon communications, technology, war, terrorism and information.

Language development follows economical principles. Languages with a low economical impact seem to be reduced in terms of their valence and number of speakers.

What takes precedence today is interconnectivity at many levels, a function for which literacy is ill prepared. Citizens become Netizens, an identity that relates them to the entire world, not only to where they happen to live and work.

Languages with a high economical impact are in general more successful in terms of their continuity and influence on other languages.

Languages serve both as a tool of transmission of cultural values and illiteracy.

Digital networks, connecting production lines, distribution channels, and points of sale spectacularly augment the volume and variety of such transactions. Practical experiences of shopping, transportation, banking, and stock market transactions require literacy less and less.

The language of physics, id est, mathematics, can hardly be used in the internet: you can write Chinese, Korean, and even Manchu, but you cannot efficiently write Maxwell's equations. This is called "digital illiteracy".

Humans acquire languages.

All languages change with time.

Native speakers of any given language are dependable.

A language can be "exported" from one country to another region.

A language can be banned.

Stereotyped, highly repetitive or well defined unique tasks, and the literate language associated with them, have been transferred to machines. Unique tasks require strategies of specialization.

European culture has a close connection between communication as an applied field and the theory of communication.

In languages the grammatical rules are different, but structural features can be compared in all languages: All words in every language are organized within a grammatical system and possess an etymological history.

Meanings can change historically.

A specific human interaction can be provided, when all meanings are known.

Not only in non-verbal communication, but also in verbal communication in a native language the cultural sources and influences are preserved in the individual speakers’ language.

What remains after a certain language disappears (and we know of some that have disappeared) are elements as important as the language itself for our better understanding of what makes language necessary.

Drawing attention to oneself or to others does not require language.

The space and time of virtual experiences are an example of effective freedom from language, but not from the experiences through which we acquired our understanding of time and space. Computers able to perform in the space of human assumptions are not yet on the horizon of current technological possibilities.

Granted that a common language is a necessary condition for communication, such a common language is not simultaneously a sufficient condition, or at least not one of most efficient, for communication.

The most favorable case for the functioning of language—direct verbal communication—becomes a test case for what it really means to speak the same language, and not what we assume a common language accomplishes when written or read by everyone.

The assumption that a common language automatically means a common experience is falsified by the mere existence of civil wars.