Language, tongue and speech: key differences explained from psychology and anthropology

The confusion between language, tongue (or language system) and speech is still common among teachers, students, and even grammar books. They are often used as synonyms, but in reality they are three distinct concepts which, from modern linguistics and evolutionary psychology, have very clear functions and origins.

In this article, we will explore the differences between language, tongue, and speech from an anthropological and psychological perspective, supported by recent scientific studies and explained in simple terms so you can apply it in your academic or professional life.

Why is it important to differentiate language, tongue and speech?

Distinguishing these three terms is not just an academic whim. Understanding them allows us to:

• Comprehend how humans developed the universal capacity to communicate.

• Identify which part of that capacity materializes in social systems like English, Spanish, or Quechua.

• Recognize how each person concretizes those systems in their individual expression.

Moreover, this distinction clarifies debates in education, translation, cognitive psychology, and human evolution, where it is crucial to know what is innate, what is socially learned, and what depends on individual variation.

Language: the universal human faculty

Language is the psychological and biological faculty unique to humans that allows us to learn and produce tongues (languages). It is not a specific idiom, but rather the capacity we all share.

Recent studies demonstrate that this faculty has an evolutionary and neurological basis:

• Fitch (2017) points out that language combines genetic and cognitive components shared with other primates, but also uniquely human elements such as recursion (Fitch, 2017).

• Markov and colleagues (2023) highlight that the language faculty continues to evolve, relying on general cognitive skills such as sequence memory (Markov et al., 2023).

In Chomskyan terms, we speak of the Faculty of Language in the Broad Sense (FLB), which shares abilities with other species, and the Faculty of Language in the Narrow Sense (FLN), considered uniquely human (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch, 2002).

Tongue: social and cultural system

The tongue (what we usually call a language, like Spanish or English) is the system of signs and rules shared by members of a linguistic community. It is abstract, conventional, and social.

Key characteristics of the tongue:

1. It is social: it only exists because the community accepts and maintains its norms.

2. It is conventional: signs are arbitrary; for example, the word table has no natural connection to the object it names.

3. It is structured: it contains grammatical, phonological, and semantic rules that all speakers internalize.

Moreover, studies on semantic change show that tongues evolve in predictable ways: more frequent words change more slowly than less common ones (Hamilton et al., 2016). This reflects the collective and changing nature of the tongue.

Speech: the individual realization

Speech is the concrete and individual expression of the tongue in a given context. Every time we talk, write, or express an idea, we are executing the tongue in a unique way.

Its main characteristics are:It is individual: it depends on each speaker’s style, accent, emotional state, and physical conditions.

• It is concrete: it occurs in specific times and places, with constant variation.

From the perspective of psychology of language, speech is crucial because it reveals how individuals apply their linguistic knowledge. Even mistakes or innovations in individual speech can, over time, influence and transform the shared tongue.

Comparative table: language, tongue and speech

Competence, performance and the brain

Modern linguistics also distinguishes between competence (the internal knowledge of the tongue) and performance (the actual use of speech). This distinction, proposed by Chomsky, coincides with Saussure’s distinction between tongue and speech.

A study by Caucheteux et al. (2021) shows that the brain processes language in different hierarchical levels (syntactic, semantic, narrative), which aligns with the difference between knowing the tongue and putting it into practice.

Conclusion

Differentiating between language, tongue, and speech is not just a theoretical detail:

• Language is the universal faculty that allows us to acquire and use complex symbols.

• The tongue is the shared system of a community, with rules and conventions.

• Speech is the individual manifestation of that tongue in concrete situations.

Being able to distinguish them is essential in education, translation, anthropology, and cognitive psychology. It also helps us understand how human language evolved and how it continues to transform within societies.

References

• Caucheteux, C., Gramfort, A., & King, J.-R. (2021). Model-based analysis of brain activity reveals the hierarchy of language in 305 subjects. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.06078. https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06078

• Christiansen, M. H., & Chater, N. (2015). The language faculty that wasn’t: A usage-based account. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1182. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01182

• Fitch, W. T. (2017). Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(1), 3–33. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1236-5

• Hamilton, W. L., Leskovec, J., & Jurafsky, D. (2016). Diachronic word embeddings reveal statistical laws of semantic change. Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.09096

• Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298(5598), 1569–1579. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.298.5598.1569

• Markov, I., Kruglova, N., & Gusev, A. (2023). Language: Its origin and ongoing evolution. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1173983. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1173983