Communicative competency and language games

Here is my latest video on some amazing linguistic concepts! Hopefully you enjoy watching it and get excited about the mind-blowing possibilities of language as I continue to reveal them to you!

Unfortunately, parts of the video and audio did not match up during editing and I tried and failed at fixing it. Please forgive me!!

Communicative competence is all about how we participate in activities and how we understand when and how we say certain things during these activities. Like in an Australian Football League (AFL) game, it is normal for the crowd to scream out 'BALL' whenever a player is deemed to have not disposed of the ball properly and is 'holding the ball'. However, it is not normal for someone to start screaming 'BALL' in the middle of a street or in a hospital. It is also not normal for a player in an AFL game to start yelling 'BALL' in regards to their own team mate not disposing the ball properly, but would be completely normal if it was aimed at an opposition player.

Our ability to choose our language while participating in certain activities highlights our individual communicative competence. It is not a conscious act. However, we become blatantly aware how incompetent we are in situations where we don't respond correctly.

This links to the concept of language games. In the video, I refer to Stephen C. Levinson's Activity Types and Language (1979), where he quotes Wittgenstein by defining them as 'to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life'. In summary, we have to know how to speak during an activity to be able to play 'the language game' and if we can't do that competently, we lose the game.

It's all very interesting, so have a watch of the video above for more detailed information!

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