If anyone says 'language is words' or anything to that effect, particularly in the field of education, especially Early Years education, then this is not helpful and not true. Language is made up of sequences of words, whether that's within one piece of writing, one piece of spoken language or in a conversation.
Then, going with this false statement about 'words', there is often a statement about language being about 'communication'. This too is false. A lot of the ways in which we use language is not about transferring one slab of meaning to another person and that this meaning can be gleaned from the 'meaning' in the bit of writing or speech. Quite often we interact through suggestion and through implication. We use irony, ellipsis (shortening), incomplete utterances, in order to convey meanings sometimes meaning the opposite of what the language appears to be 'saying'. (one tiny example, 'Yeah right' which can mean, Yes, right. Or the opposite).
But to reduce it to 'communication' is a false representation too. Another way of thinking about language is to think about why we have it. What does the use of language do for us? People have suggested that the answer to this question is largely in thinking of us as 'relational' beings. We use language in order to make, keep, harm, affect or even destroy relations between us. We have 1000s of ways of doing this: commanding, coaxing, pleading, rejecting, persuading, deceiving - and you can think of many more. These may be about 'communicating' but that doesn't tell us much about why we are communicating. In other words, it's a non-human definition: it's a way of thinking about language without thinking of the humans involved. In fact, the communication model came out of people looking at eg morse code and other industrial or military means of passing messages. But this reduces us to a mechanistic model, as if we are machines.
We are not machines, we have the power of affecting each other and also - complicated - being affected by how the other person is affected by what we just said before!
In other words we are 'reflective'. We 'reflect' through language and we 'reflect' through 'reflex', so we can call that 'reflexive'. When we think of language like that, we have to take in who is doing the talking and writing, who is the audience for that piece of talking and writing and what kind of people these parties ('participants') are. This is the necessary social dimension of language that often gets left out when we just talk of 'words' and 'communication'.
