Humans are partly animals, as such, we have animalistic desires. Some are obviously animal, from the most primitive parts of our brains, such as hunger, sexual attraction and fear. These emotions are a fundamental part of our makeup, and they need to be honored, as not honoring them can lead to problems with the rest of our psychology (that sentence is just an opinion). To perform these functions, we often need to use language (asking where the toilet is, initiating a grindr conversation etc). Generally, this kind of language is just variations of rote behavior we have learned will help us perform the functions.
The above are internal emotions, triggered mainly by our bodily needs. Another set of animalistic desires responds to what is happening around us. At their most basic level, this is simply fight/flight. Under stress or pressure, our body triggers certain responses, such as running from a man with a gun, or hiding behind the sofa. Interactions at this level may still produce language, such as shouting abuse as a tool of intimidation.
Close to this, we are also a ‘social animal’, and part of being a social animal means trying to assert our position in our group. This means praising or emulating those that we feel are higher than us, and belittling those who we see as lower than us, in an attempt to carve out the social world in a way that sees us placed as highly as we think we could be. It also means forming social groups and creating peers and allies. Personally, I believe that this is what the vast majority of language is used for, both in general life, and on these boards too.
There are lots of things which make us more than just animals. The ability to communicate advanced functions to overcome sophisticated problems and design complex technologies, the ability to self reflect, to analyse problems through collaboration. Only when we are trying to achieve such things are we really elevating ourselves above animals. A defining feature of this type of behavior is that language is required to perform this kind of action, particularly where ‘language’ refers to the language of thought (‘mentalese’), including languages of logic and mathematics. Another defining feature is novelty: the language and its products (physical or otherwise: a bridge, a symphony etc) have some unique features . The final defining feature is collaboration: which means that although the thoughts may be novel or unique, in their entirety they are thoughts of more than one person. In philosophy, for example, thoughts are generally built on the thoughts of predecessors and contemporaries, not just simply products of an internal monologue. In bridge building, no one man could ever have worked out all of the physical concepts and calculations from scratch to build the Humber bridge.
This ‘third type’ of behavior is beyond many people in the first place. All people will exhibit the first two types of behavior. The simplest people in the world operate almost entirely at the first level, whereas someone commonly labelled as a ‘genius’ probably operates at the third for a high proportion of her time. Most people spend most, if not their entire, life operating at the second level, and the first where necessary (by first/second/third level, I mean the first, second and third levels mentioned - I am not proposing a hierarchy).
A final note: I am only classifying. There is nothing normative in my descriptions: I have not said which is ‘better’ or ‘worse’, or proposed some kind of hierachy. ‘simple people’ and ‘genius’ are not meant as value judgements, but descriptions.