Ali Bin Abi Talib on language functions

Abstract EN

Functions of language is a relatively old topic that is intensively and extensively studied by linguists and language experts worldwide.

The topic, however, seems to be associated with the work of modern functional scholars like Michael Halliday and Geoffrey Leech, and formalist linguists like Roman Jacobson, to name just a few.

These scholars have a seminal impact on linguistics and their elucidation of language functions is still being applied in different social and technological fields as well as the field of speech pathology and artificial intelligence.

At the same time, scholars of Arabic language and linguistics do not seem to bother to look for any elucidations of language functions within the vast philosophical, religious, and linguistic literature that have been passed on to them from generation to generation.

This literature, and upon a closer inspection, is full of hints, signals, anecdotes, and sometimes astonishing descriptions of linguistic aspects and language functions.

This is not to say that scholars have not worked on the works of Al-Khalil bin Ahmed Al-Faraheedi or Amr ibn Bahr Al-Jahidh, for example.

On the contrary, the works of these and other scholars have been extensively investigated by language scholars across history.

This is mainly because these works are directly dealing with language.

This study purports to investigate Imam Ali bin Abi Talib's references to the functions that language serves on the personal and social level as explained in his important sermon of Wasilah.

It is an invitation to Arab researchers to revisit the vast Arabic heritage in search of old wisdom for modern-day problems.