Background
The son of Thomas Language, a medical practitioner, Language was educated at Dennistoun public school in Glasgow before being accepted into the University of Glasgow, where he graduated with a Bsc (Honours) in botany and zoology in 1894.
The son of Thomas Language, a medical practitioner, Language was educated at Dennistoun public school in Glasgow before being accepted into the University of Glasgow, where he graduated with a Bsc (Honours) in botany and zoology in 1894.
He qualified for medicine in 1895 but never became a practicing doctor. Thanks to his own enthusiasm and the encouragement of his teacher Frederick Orpen Bower he instead became a professional botanist.
His first research was on the structure of ferns, something Bower was apparently an authority on, and Language soon followed him in that regard. He moved to study at the Jodrell Laboratory on a Robert Donaldson scholarship in 1895, where he focused on the apomixis of ferns, and discovered a sporangium on the prothallus of a fern at a time when biologists were exploring alternate means of reproduction in plants. In 1899 he travelled to Sri Lanka and Malaya to study tropical cryptogams and collect samples, returning to Britain in 1902, when became a lecturer at the University of Glasgow.
While there he worked closely with Doctorate. T. Gwynne-Vaughan and Bower, with the three of them being known as the "triumvirate".
After Gwynne-Vaughan"s death in 1915 he studied preserved plant remnants in Aberdeen, making great insights into the nature of Psilophyton, which until then had been neglected. In 1900 he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by the University of Glasgow, and when the Barker chair of cryptogamic botany was created at the University of Manchester Language was the first choice.
After his retirement he moved to Westfield due to his wife"s ill health" she died in 1959, and he followed barely a year later on 29 August 1960.
Royal Society]
He was also a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.