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I once read a Star Wars book that featured a group of humans who were enslaved for hundreds of years. During this time, they were not allowed to speak. Eventually, they developed an entire language based on non-verbal communication.

I guess the point of this is that "language" is really just a more highly specific and, most importantly, less ambiguous form of communication. I would agree with Natsu that music is a language, however I would be more wary to include dance as a language, and I would be very opposed to calling art in general a language.

I think what separates music from those other art forms is that it appeals directly to our sense of sound in a way that not much else does. What kinds of things do we hear? I'd say we hear only three different kinds of things: oral language, ambient noise, and music. That makes music a pretty important form of communication. Dance and art appeal to the eyes, which have a lot more on their hands, so to speak, since they are our primary guide for moving around and stuff, as well being responsible for reading written language.

Bringing this back to emergence, or at least attempting to do so, I would say that all languages "emerge." Visual art and dance are both certainly forms of communication, but they lack a universally accepted code that maps meaning to various commonly accepted symbols. (When you say something to someone, that person usually can figure out what you mean pretty easily, much more so than if you had painted that person a picture or performed a dance.) Perhaps if, for example, we lost our sense of hearing, something like dance could evolve into a fully formed language. In this way, the evolution of various languages is definitely an emergent system—a point that I think has already been made in this forum, but one certainly worth repeating.

In response to the original question, I would hesitate to say that there is any kind of universal meaning behind the words that we use to convey meaning. Even beyond written or spoken language, every piece of information that we try to convey to someone else, or even simply to think about, is transmitted via language. The closest thing I can think of to pure meaning, unhindered by language, would be a baby crying. Only that baby knows what the cry means, if he or she even does. On the other hand, good luck trying to understand if you're not the baby. So sure, maybe language is inaccurate, but it's better than nothing.