Language games

A language game is a stretch of language seen together with the activity it belongs to. Wittgenstein introduced the term to make one simple point vivid: words do not get their meaning by floating free and attaching to things, but by playing a part in what people do. Giving orders, describing a room, telling a joke, counting apples, saying a prayer: each is its own game, with its own moves.

The idea runs through the Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953, two years after his death. He had been using the term since the early 1930s, and the Blue Book, dictated to students in Cambridge in 1933-1934, already describes language games as the simple forms of language with which a child begins to use words.

The animation above stages Wittgenstein's best-known example, from PI §2. A builder, A, is putting up a wall. His assistant, B, hands him the stones. There are four kinds: blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. A calls "Slab!" and B carries over a slab. That is the whole language. Then watch the same word turn into a different move: "Slab?" becomes a question, and "Five slabs" turns it into counting, as in the extended game of PI §8. The sound barely changes. What it does changes completely, because what it does depends on the activity around it.

Why call it a game?

Think of chess. The king is a small piece of wood, and nothing about the wood tells you how it moves. You understand what a king is when you know its role in the game. Wittgenstein suggests that words are like that. "Slab!" in the builders' game is not a label stuck onto an object; it is a move that gets a certain stone carried to a certain place.

Ich werde auch das Ganze: der Sprache und der Tätigkeiten, mit denen sie verwoben ist, das „Sprachspiel“ nennen.

I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven, the 'language game'.

PI §7

Games also have rules, though not always strict or written ones. You can play football in a park without knowing the official laws of the game. Language is similar: we follow rules all the time without being able to recite them. That thought leads directly to Wittgenstein's long discussion of rule-following.

What counts as a language game?

Wittgenstein uses the term in two ways. Sometimes he means invented, very simple languages like the builders', which work like a model in science: they let you see clearly how language connects to action, without the noise of everyday speech. Sometimes he means the real activities we engage in. In PI §23 he gives a deliberately mixed list:

• giving orders, and obeying them
• describing an object, or giving its measurements
• reporting an event, and speculating about it
• making up a story, and reading it
• play-acting, singing catches, guessing riddles
• making a joke, telling it
• asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying

Das Wort „Sprachspiel“ soll hier hervorheben, daß das Sprechen der Sprache ein Teil ist einer Tätigkeit, oder einer Lebensform.

The word 'language game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.

PI §23

The point of the list is its variety. The Tractatus had treated stating facts as the essence of language. Now Wittgenstein says there are countless kinds of use, and new ones come into existence while others are forgotten.

Same words, different game

This is the core lesson of the builders, and you can test it in a minute. "It's cold in here" can be a weather report, a polite request to close the window, or a complaint about the heating bill. Nothing in the words tells you which. In PI §21 Wittgenstein makes the same point with "Five slabs": said one way it is a report, said another way it is an order, and the difference lies in the part the sentence plays in the game, not in the words or even necessarily in the tone.

The same goes for philosophy. Many puzzles arise, Wittgenstein thought, when a word is lifted out of the game where it works and made to do a job it never had. "Time" works perfectly well in "We're out of time". It starts to seem mysterious only when we ask, in the abstract, what time really is.

Is there one thing all language games share?

No, and that is the next step in the Investigations. When Wittgenstein's imagined critic objects that he has never said what the essence of a language game is, he replies by asking what all games have in common, and finds only a network of overlapping similarities. That is the idea of family resemblance (PI §65-67).

Common misreadings

"Game" does not mean that language is trivial or merely playful. Mourning, promising and testifying in court are language games too. Nor does the idea simply mean that anything goes, or that every group lives in a sealed-off world of words. Language games are woven into shared practices and ultimately into forms of life, which is why we can learn new games and recognise when someone is playing a different one.

Later thinkers took the term in many directions, from ordinary language philosophy in Oxford to Jean-François Lyotard's account of postmodern knowledge. How far they stayed close to Wittgenstein is debated. For a careful overview, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Wittgenstein's manuscripts, where the term first appears, can be explored at Wittgenstein Source, the online Bergen Nachlass Edition.