Language and mediality: On the medial status of ‘everyday language’

The medium of (oral) language is mostly disregarded (or overlooked) in contemporary media theories. This ‘ignoring of language’ in media studies is often accompanied by an inadequate transport model of communication, and it converges with an ‘ignoring of mediality’ in mentalistic theories of language. In the present article it will be argued that this misleading opposition of language and media can only be overcome if one already regards oral language, not just written language, as a medium of the human mind. In my argumentation I fall back on Wittgenstein’s conception of language games to try to show how Wittgenstein’s ideas can help us to clear up the problem of the mediality of language and also to show to what extent the mentalistic conception of Chomskyan provenance cannot be adequate to the phenomenon of language.