What Is a Technical Language

What is technical language?

Scientists have tried to come up with a definition since the beginning of the 18th century, therefore many interpretations have been made. They started to discuss terms and vocabularies in order to define technical language. A couple of years later they emphasized the importance of text and nowadays they are talking about text from a communication aspect.

The Anglo-Saxon society regarded a language to be a system, therefore they found little interest in technical language. This is one of the reasons why technical language often has remained scattered. However, this was not the case within the School of Prague. They found socio linguistics as well as technical language very interesting. The School of Prague used a horizontal dimension to describe the classification of technical language areas. A vertical dimension was used to describe the different layers of usage. The third dimension was based on expressions and communication, oral as well as written. The dimension dealing with communication is frequently used to find out whether a text should be classified as technical language or not. The result can be seen as a cube. A negative aspect when studying this model is that it can easily be misunderstood.

When a sender and a receiver are experts in the subject discussed, they will probably use technical language. On the other hand, they might have different knowledge and it is possible that they will discuss new information. The main idea is that they have the possibility to use the established technical language. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to separate strict technical language from colloquial language.

A scale has been made to classify the different levels of technical language in the area of geography. We are clearly dealing with technical language when the sender and the receiver have the same knowledge about a specific subject e.g. communication between geographers. The next level is when the sender has to introduce the subject to the receiver e.g. when a geographer communicates with a student. And the final level is when the sender has to explain everything to the receiver e.g. when a geographer communicates with an amateur.

Text type, a sort of style pattern, is a term that can be found in technical language. A textbook is one example. Technolects are found in heavy scientific material for example reports whereas text