From the viewpoint of communicators, language and other symbolic systems are:

Concept

In semiotics, a symbolic system is a socially shared code. Its signs do not carry fixed meaning by themselves; a community learns and sustains the conventions that connect signs with meanings.

Language is therefore created, transmitted, and changed through collective social use.

Application

The stem asks how communicators should understand language and other symbolic systems. Because their meanings depend on shared conventions among users, they are social products.

Contrast

• Inactive tools describe instruments that are not currently being used; this does not describe the social origin of a symbolic code.

• Economic targets are measurable goals of policy or organizations, not systems of shared meaning.

• Cultural fantasies are imaginative representations shaped by culture; language is a broader socially maintained system through which such representations may be expressed.

Cross-check

If a community stops sharing a symbol’s convention, that symbol loses its common communicative meaning. This dependence on collective convention confirms the classification as social products.

Thus, language and other symbolic systems are social products.