What's a language?

DISCLAIMER: The following piece reflects my personal philosophy, and is not to be taken as the only way to think about conlanging. However, I think it remains for anyone a useful thought experiment.

Language construction is the art or science of making a language. Sounds simple. But what, exactly, are we intending to accomplish when we say that we first embark upon the creation of a language? To know how to get there, we must first know where we are getting.

The fact is that language is not a simple thing. Language in the truest sense is a behavior, a phenomenon. It's the name we give the complex array of symbolism that people use to convey information, emotion, and ideas to one another. In modern humanity, language most commonly is an act of oral sound production, and as such this tends to be the focus of linguistic description. However, language can mean the conveyance of meaning through hand signs, writing, or indeed any other mode of semiotic representation. What we mean by a language is something separate entirely.

A language most loosely refers to a single mode or method of conveying information. However, it is in reality never than simple. Describing a language is an attempt to generalize a set of specific behaviors and exchanges. In short, language is defined by its usage. This is something that is so often lost among conlangers, and linguistic hobbyists in general. Language, especially in our culture, may be seen as something pristine, a well-defined, ideal system from which usage deviates, as though everyone in a language community sat down and decided upon every rule in the language. In reality, it's much more messy than that. People speak like their peers, like those with whom they interact, and language is in chief a symbol of communicative identity. To speak someone's language is to indicate in a way that cannot be faked that one subscribes to the same cultural identity, exists within the same community and owns that group's mode of communication through extended exposure. Similarity of language is proportional to how much of one's cultural and linguistic background is shared. As such, a single language is not something to be easily defined when one's community, one's interactions, and even identity itself may be in constant flux.

In general, the standard for defining a language is mutual intelligibility (though national and ethnic identity can also play a major role). However, this leaves a lot more room for error than tends to be described in the modeling of a language. Within a language under such a definition, there is room for regional dialects and cultural registers that may each constitute as rich a background as the "language" itself. In addition, speakers may slide unconsciously between and among these without realizing it, meaning that language can never really be the same twice.

It's said that one may take a succession of taxis between Gibraltar and Rome along the Mediterranean coast without ever realizing that the driver is speaking a new language. This is a fact that often surprises people, used as we are to the neatness of the concept of a language. Officially, one goes through Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Provençal, and Italian along such a journey, but in reality one just gradually slides through a continuum of minor accent changes until the cab lets out at the Trevi Fountain and they realize they've crossed two national borders. 

Simply put, one may never define an entire language, no more than they may define the entirety of all language. To create a perfect system would be to either see it fall apart in the hands and mouths of its users, feeling the pain of a thousand MLA officers, or to hide it away from the world like a precious relic. Either way, one fails to enjoy the communal identity that is, after all, the only lasting or meaningful feature of a language. If one truly endeavors to create language, one must first begin to use it, and embrace its usage. As we move forward into the adventure of language construction, what we must remember is that we are above all creating a code of communication, an identity among users, and that what matters in the end is the exchange. Ennius, the father of Latin poetry, once claimed to have three hearts, one each for his mastery of Latin, Greek, and Oscan. To create a language, then, is to create a heart all one's own.