If you really think about it, what’s the biggest mistake you can possibly make with a language? Using the wrong word? Making a grammatical error? No. The biggest mistake is not getting your message across. Since the goal of a language is communication, your top priority should not be to sound perfect, but to make yourself understood.
— 📝 Interactional Competence and L2 Pragmatics
Functionalist approaches to language hold that language is primarily used for communication and does not exist without language users.