Abstract

We suggest to define “language” within the Saussurean triad of “human speech/language”, “language”, and “speaking/speech/discourse”. Aristotle’s old characterization of human speech as “conventionally significant spoken sound,” which is still valid today, demonstrates awareness of the “essential” language universals, regardless of modern speculations about their biological and cultural properties. From an empirical perspective, though, language is only accessible through discourse data from historically developed individual languages. In the article it is shown that globality does not require further ontological reflections about the very nature of language but instead asks for empirical research of completely new, especially Internet-based, discourse competencies and performances. Finally, it is argued that the crosslinguistic uniformity of recently developed language games and new discourse/text traditions does not necessarily imply a reduction of linguistic diversity in the era of globalization. The more speakers wish to communicate in their traditional languages, the more likely they will be to find proper means and ways to realize this goal in the future.