Language: Instituionalized yet subjective

Language is an institutionalized form. The interpretation(s) is/are subjective in nature (and culture). -J.A.H. Khatri

The above statement captures two complementary ideas from linguistics, sociolinguistics, philosophy of language, and anthropology. It highlights both the socially structured / collective character of language and the individually / culturally variable way meaning is created when people use or understand it.

Let's break it down clearly:

1. "Language is an institutionalized form"

This means language is not a purely individual, spontaneous, or private creation — it is a social institution, much like law, money, marriage, education systems, or religion.

• It is "institutionalized" because:
• It exists as a shared, historically developed system that is maintained and transmitted across generations by communities/societies.
• It comes with norms, rules, conventions, and expectations that speakers mostly follow without thinking (grammar, vocabulary, politeness rules, taboo words, appropriate registers in different situations, etc.).
• These conventions are enforced socially (through correction, mockery, exclusion, education, standardization, dictionaries, school systems, style guides, laws about official languages, etc.).
• Even though individuals speak creatively, they do so within this pre-existing, collectively upheld framework.

In this sense, language resembles other institutions: you cannot just decide alone that "cat" now means "airplane" and expect to be understood — the meaning is socially agreed upon and institutionally stabilized.

Famous related ideas include:

• Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between langue (the abstract, social system / institution) vs. parole (individual speech acts)
• John Searle: institutions as systems of constitutive rules ("X counts as Y in context C")
• Views in sociology of language that treat language as a core social institution transmitting culture, power, and norms

2. "The interpretation(s) is/are subjective in nature (and culture)"

While the system (vocabulary + grammar + conventions) is institutionalized / collective, the act of understanding / making sense of language in real situations is always subjective — i.e., filtered through personal experience, emotions, intentions, knowledge, and cultural background.

Key points here:

• Subjective = dependent on the individual mind (and therefore variable)
• The same sentence can evoke very different mental images, connotations, or evaluations in different listeners/readers.
• Example: The word "freedom" means something noticeably different to a libertarian American, a Soviet-era dissident, a modern Chinese netizen, and a Scandinavian social democrat — even though they all speak "the same" language.
• (and culture) = the subjectivity is not random or purely personal; it is systematically shaped by cultural frameworks
• Cultures provide different prototypes, metaphors, frames, values, taboos, implicatures, and interpretive habits.
• This is why translation is never fully exact, why humor often fails cross-culturally, why politeness strategies differ dramatically, and why the same utterance can be a compliment in one cultural context and an insult in another.

Classic supporting views:

• Linguistic relativity / Sapir-Whorf (weak version): language influences habitual thought & categorization, and cultures emphasize different aspects
• Hermeneutics / Gadamer: all understanding is interpretation, always from within a tradition / horizon
• Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson): interpretation is an active, context-dependent inference process — never just "decoding"
• Anthropological linguistics: meaning emerges in cultural practice, not just in abstract linguistic rules

Putting both halves together — the apparent tension that is actually the point

• Language is institutionalized → provides a relatively stable, shared scaffold / currency that makes communication possible at all
• But interpretation is subjective and cultural → the actual meaning that gets constructed in any real encounter is always personal / situated / culturally inflected

→ Language therefore lives in the tension between collective standardization and individual/cultural variation.

That is exactly why communication works well enough most of the time (shared institutional scaffold) but is also endlessly misunderstood, negotiated, creative, political, poetic, hurtful, beautiful, ambiguous.

In short: Language is a socially constructed and maintained institution (a shared system), but meaning-making inside that system remains deeply personal, interpretive, culturally embedded, and therefore never fully fixed or universal.