Understanding Language

Register
Register belongs to the field of sociolinguistics, which aims to describe society's effect on language. Register means simply the way we speak in different situations. Superficially you might think that you speak the same way at all times, however, this is not the case. If you think of how you speak to your friends, and then how you speak to your parents, and then again imagine how you might speak to the Prime Minister or the Queen; your speech will differ in all these situations. This happens unconsciously and is called register.

We all are capable of this. In fact, as native speakers of our respective languages, we are all experts at register! We know exactly how to speak in a given situation, and can subtly adapt the register in use to match the situation as it evolves.

There is also another use for register. England is a country that is extremely rich in local dialects and we can tell where a person comes from by the dialect that they speak. It usually doesn't take more than a few words for any English person to place the other English person with whom they are speaking. Dialect is a separate entity to register, but they function together in certain situations. For example, if you speak to a person with a different dialect, and during the course of the conversation you begin to sense that you don't particularly care for that person, you will unconsciously start to use more and more dialect words and your accent will strengthen. We do this to subconsciously distance ourselves from the other person. On the other hand, if you take to the person with whom you are speaking, and you like them, you will use less and less dialect words, you will start to subtly imitate the way they speak. If the feeling is mutual, they will do the same and you will end up both speaking in a completely different register than would otherwise occur.

We often don't realise it, but we communicate on a subconscious level by way of register!



Word classes
When we talk about language, we have to be able to talk about the stuff that makes up language, that is, words. Words have different roles to play in the sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and stories that we tell as we go about our daily lives. In order to talk about words, we have to give them names so that we can refer to them. In linguistics, words are divided into classes. This is just a way of separating the words into groups so that they are easier to deal with. There are quite a few word classes, but for someone who is interested in language on a general level, the following five classes are sufficient:

Nouns
These are generally the names of things. Babies learn nouns before anything else, so these are the first class of words we humans learn. Your first word, whatever it was, was probably a noun. For example: mum, dad, dog, cat, etc.

Pronouns
These are special nouns that refer only to the people or things that are performing what the verb tells us or are affected by what the verb  tells us. For example: I, you, she, him, them, etc.

Verbs
These generally tell what is happening in any given sentence. For example: run, jump, sit, sleep, etc

Adverbs
These describe time, location, and method. They describe what the person is doing, that is, they tell us how, where, and when. For example: quickly, far, yesterday.

Adjectives
These only affect nouns. They describe the condition of nouns. For example: quiet, red, long, broken, etc.