title: Communicative Competence
aliases: [communicative competence]
tags: [term]
category: Linguistics
summary: The full ability to use a language appropriately in real social situations, not just to produce grammatically correct sentences.

Communicative Competence

Communicative competence is what it actually takes to use a language well among people: knowing not only the grammar but when to say what, to whom, and how, and being able to handle real conversation as it unfolds. It is a much larger thing than the clean, paradigmatic sentences that show up in textbooks and computational demos. Everyday language is full of repairs, restarts, false starts, discourse markers, variation, and change over time.