What is language competence and performance?

Language competence and language performance are concepts introduced by linguist Noam Chomsky in the 1960s to distinguish between two aspects of language knowledge and use.

1. Language Competence:

• Language competence refers to a speaker’s implicit knowledge of their native language, including the rules and structures that govern how sentences are formed and understood. It represents a person’s internalized understanding of their language.
• It is the idealized, theoretical knowledge that enables a speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of sentences, including those they may have never heard before.
• Competence includes knowledge of:
  • Syntax (sentence structure)
  • Semantics (meaning)
  • Phonology (sound patterns)
  • Morphology (word formation)

Example: A speaker of English knows that a grammatically correct sentence should follow a subject-verb-object structure (“She eats an apple”) but may not be consciously aware of all the rules guiding this structure.

2. Language Performance:

• Language performance refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations—how a person speaks, writes, and understands language in real-life contexts.
• It is observable and reflects the speaker’s abilities, but it can be influenced by various factors like memory limitations, distractions, stress, or other external circumstances.
• Performance can sometimes deviate from the idealized rules of competence due to these external influences, but it still provides valuable insight into a person’s ability to communicate.

Example: A person may speak a grammatically correct sentence in their native language but, under stress, might make a mistake or a slip of the tongue (e.g., “She have an apple” instead of “She has an apple”). This would be a performance error.

Key Differences:

• Competence is about knowing the language—the rules and structures stored in the mind.
• Performance is about using the language in practical, real-world situations, which can sometimes be imperfect.

In summary, language competence refers to an idealized, internalized knowledge of language rules, while language performance refers to the actual use of language, which can be influenced by various external factors.