Living, Formal, Dead: Why Not All Language Claims Are Based on Linguistic Dispositions
Language is a crucial instrument in creating the social realm – and at the same time, it is an important part of this realm and thus calls out for a social ontological analysis. This article explores the wide and diverse ground such an ontological analysis needs to cover, and argues that language is a transcategorial phenomenon, i.e., that it covers various ontological categories. Among other aspects, I follow Ferdinand de Saussure in distinguishing individual linguistic competences, abstract language systems, and their concretizations in oral or written linguistic performances. While some argue that language is always an aggregate of linguistic competences, I argue that ontological primacy among these aspects varies according to which variety of language is to be analysed: for living languages, individual linguistic competences are the ultimate authority, but for formal languages the abstract systems of rules, and for dead languages the corpus of surviving linguistic performances.