Linguistic Competence

According to Chomsky (1965), the linguistic competence is the set of rules that the speakers will acknowledge (almost automatically) about  what is right and what is wrong when speaking in their language. In simpler words, it is the capacity to distinguish between what would be acceptable to do while speaking and what will not.

This set of rules is consider to be unconscious and learnt almost by default for the speaker depending on the environment. This idea of a linguistic competence involves being able produce an unlimited number of sentences (grammatically correct) even thought he has never heard them before as well as to understand sentences that had never been hear before. The behavior itself will be considered as performance.

This comes as a supplementary part to Chomsky's theories of the Universal Grammar; in this theories, Chomsky states that the language is something that is already on our systems and that just needs outside stimuli to actually start working.

A fascinating fact is that the linguist competence goes beyond its own description: when the speaker has an adequate competence and hence an appropriated performance, the speaker can actually infer meanings and distinguish between ambiguous messages that he may receive and/or produce.

In general terms, and Chomsky's own words, "the linguist competence is what we may call creativity of language", it is capacity to create and understand an unlimited number of messages with a limited number of elements.