Language is a system of oral or written expression and communication of ideas and emotions or the processes, styles and vocabulary of such systems. Linguistics is the social science covering the study of various languages and the characteristics of those languages. Language and speech are essential to intelligent human communication.

In 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure was the first person to identify language and speech as two different things, and this has become a key idea in linguistics. Noam Chomsky supported this theory with Syntactic Structures, released in 1957. He suggested that the human brain has linguistic 'competence', meaning it has basic knowledge and understanding of language in general. According to his theory, only linguistic 'performance', or specific languages and speech, are taught.