This term too… To what degree of “self-awareness”?
A human baby doesn’t distinquish itself from the world outside itself. Soon after, it realizes there is a world and a self, but it still sees its’ mother as part of self. At some point it sees itself as its’ own entity. Is this due to language?..Well,…Like I said,
As we see higher and higher levels of consciousness,
we see higher and higher levels of language.
Did the chicken or egg come first?
IMO the baby (us) keeps asking what the self is.
Self keeps getting smaller and smaller.
It is reduced to nothing.
Finally we realize there is no self, and at the same time, we are one with everything. 
Well, the OP never mentioned self-consciousness, let alone human consciousness.
Good point. But I think self-consciousness can be defined as being aware of ones-self as an entity with a distinct set of historical memories and abstractly understanding that one is not part of the other things in the material universe surrounding ones body.
This may not be a complete or perfect definition, but it is definitely something lower life forms, like single celled organisms, do not possess - hence they also don’t possess the need to communicate in a representative/symbolic mode, like language.
I understand, but I’m making the distinction myself.
Isn’t that called a near-death experience?
No, language doesn’t create consciousness.
Language is not even necessarily co-extensive with consciousness, unless we’re purely talking about information and communication, the lines of transmission of words which encode an ordering, a command, a ‘pure’ desire.
Needless to say, a ‘pure’ desire, unaffected by individual bias or social ‘distortion’, is a myth. And there are certainly no ‘pure’ communicative situations where we could pass on a desire to another without the intervention of a third and non-linguistic element which in fact governs the very geometry of the lines of communication, the transversal pathways which orders and desires can pass through communicative assemblages.
Consciousness as such is light, pure transparency, and is something of an abstraction which allows the experience of existence, that is, the observation of assemblages. Since anything that is said is said by an observer, we have to say that language presupposes observation, that is, that in order to be understood, words must be spoken to someone ready to hear them. Without this expectation or paying attention, there could not be language.
At the same time, language should not be reduced to a tool created by consciousness. Language was never ‘created,’ or rather, it is always being created, not from scratch, but from a shambles: the abyss is not empty but swarming with differences. The linguistic sign has no necessity but yet is not a coincidence. There is a lesson here for every writer, analyst or militant… Even without a ‘pure’ mother tongue, slogans are not necessaily propaganda-- they can electrify the spirit of the times without becoming degenerate. We have to resanctify language, or else completely secularize its transcendence. We cannot play this game of relativism, or else admit that everything is an interface, a machine which is part of a machine and which is made up of machines. Language is never isolated from both nature and culture; moreover, nature and culture are the same, evolving from the same flux of affects and memories of affects.
Language is not a tool, but a rhizome; language was not created or constructed, language evolves; language does not create the subject, rather, expression and content are always found intertwined with one another in a double articulation. In other words, subjects and worlds are always found at once, spiralling an abyss of nonsense. In fact, it is even more complicated than we have let on, because the two are never found separately: language is a series of movements of and mixtures within the body, so we cannot separate language from the affects of language on the body…
DNA is a kind of language that proteins build based upon. Are they conscious?
It is called… being alive! The human condition. “I exist?!”
I am the student in this thread since I just began dwelling into the subject of consciousness not so long ago. I’ll just be the listening ghost in the background.
Some links I did find that might interest people:
marxists.org/reference/archi … 3-s03.html
wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/C … /SPEAK.HTM
I’ll be honest I actually do hope that language is indeed the prime mover of human sapient consciousness as that would help my own form of philosophy in understanding life alot easier. 
I personally think that human languages with syntax first existed with the imitations of other animals which I derive all current languages to be synthetic figures.
Non-syntax languages I believe are the only real forms of expressions in comparison since many forms of understanding life are more understandable without language or with just primitive motion.
Consciousness comes before language. Way before.
This thread reminds me a little of an idea I came across from John Searle. Computers, language, money, don’t exist without people. They aren’t really anything out in the physical world. Money is a piece of paper. There isn’t anything to it that makes it money. It is how people choose to all agree together that it is money. Another example is that calculators don’t exist by themselves out in the real world. A calculator/copmuter can be made out of anything. But it is the USER that UTILIZES something as a calculator/computer. That is key. Language is the same.
Language wouldn’t exist without beings to communicate. We choose to agree on terms of communication and proceed from there.
In Mongolia or China (a long time ago) they conducted an experiment to discover the TRUE human language by raising a group of babies together but never communicating with them. They hoped the children would discover language together themselves and the true human language would be revealed… Needless to say, the children did not develop any language. They ended up severely retarded and I believe a number of them died very young.
My point I’m getting to with this post (rather haphazardly) is that language appears to be a part of ‘consciousness’ or at least functions on some level in ‘conscious’ beings (as you’ve described them), yet it certainly doesn’t CAUSE consciousness. Just the same way that the ability to calculate doesn’t cause consciousness. (computers aren’t conscious)
Nietzsche ties the genesis of consciousness with the need for communication. In this light, we might postulate the following sequence:
Need to communicate - consciousness - language.
So the need for language predates consciousness, but language itself presupposes it. This is why consciousness arises from the need for communication.
There a differing forms of consciousness as animals are conscious.
I am saying that language created sapient consciousness for what it is worth.
Let’s try Spinoza’s approach. All organisms are aware., i.e., they interact with what is other than themselves. This approach allows consideration of scientific findings about evolution as a genetic continuum. Organisms with brains evolve from simple awareness to the complexities of consiousness. Words have nothing to do with it. They are an aquisition appearing in organisms who have prefrontal cortexes. As a child, I was conscious before I knew words. The Greek/Christian concept of logos has nothing to do with consciousness.
How could I know what reality is without having a word or ideal that linguistically expressed it?
How could I be conscious of a god (taking in religion as a example) if I didn’t have a word or ideal to express it linguistically?
Just some curious thoughts of mine.
I agree with this. Were you influenced by Deleuze and Guatarri? I’ve not read their work yet.
I think consciousness occurs long before a need to communicate is felt. In fact, the latter is likely a result of the former.
It depends on what you mean by consciousness. Is an amoeba conscious? In a sense, yes, I think. It has to be conscious of the useful (to it) material around it in order to consume it. On the other hand, it has to assimilate (make similar) it first. So in this case the need for communication derives from the need for nutrition, which is an instinctive - unconscious - need. In order to nourish itself, it has to have the notion of a subject - itself - and an object - its food. From this need there arises a binary language: everything that can be assimilated is a “1” to it, everything that cannot, a “0”. So No, I think I must revise my position:
Consciousness is thinking. Thinking occurs in a language.
So in the amoeba’s case, the need for nutrition creates the need for consciousness, which is internal communication. For this consciousness, however, it is unnecessary to regard the subject as an object (i.e., self-consciousness). This need only arises much later, when the organism has to regard itself as a quantitatively equal organism among others. For most animals, most mammals even, it is not necessary to know themselves, to communicate themselves: the reactions of fear, the marks of sexual activity, express themselves instinctively and are picked up by the other group members anyhow; whereas only when it is important for the individual to have the other group members know exactly what ails it, and this is not obvious (for instance, when they can tell that it is depressed but don’t know what the reason is), it becomes necessary to express an inner state, thoughts, feelings, and for this reason it becomes necessary for it to know its own feelings. Cf. The Gay Science, section 354.