The digital human. Language 2/6.

Today we communicate in a wide variety of ways including the online world of blogging, messaging on social networking sites and the digital texting where we can instantly communicate to one another. Aleks Krotoski explores the concept that the earliest form of communication and technology is language. Language has been reconstructed and improved throughout history. Professor David Crystal talks about evolution and growth of civilisation and how this is reflected and transmitted in language in response to social change and compares this to the Industrial Revolution and the Renaissance. Biologist, Mark Pagel discusses the uses of language as methods of manipulation or persuasion and the effect of language in our history to the way children use language to get what they want. Aleks Krotoski talks about invented languages or logical languages such as that have been created with grammar and structure found in English. She relates this to the history of the construction of languages and the function of language to control what people say. Arika Okrent talks about an experiment by James Cooke Brown who created the language Loglan to test the hypothesis that language influences the way people think.