How Do We Know language?

Speakers of languages constantly cross paths, borrowing and switching. Sometimes new types of makeshift mixed languages occur, like pidgins, which when stabilized, become creoles. Through their channels of speech, writing and sign (deaf-sign), languages traverse great distances throughout time and space.

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All these phenomena share in the form of life known as "language". What constitutes our knowledge of language? In order to answer this question, we must take several strides back from what is apparently "present to the mind". 7