System complexity is useful in linguistics when discussing language systems as a whole.

For example, when comparing the French language system with the English Language system, in terms of the use of articles, French is more complex.

In English, the article ‘an’ is placed before nouns beginning with a vowel and ‘a’ is used anywhere else. In French, ‘les’ is used before plural nouns, ‘la’ before feminine nouns, ‘l’’ before vowels and ‘le’ everywhere else.

In linguistics, system complexity would then help us in estimating how much, content wise, a person is required to learn to achieve proficiency in that language. But even here then, we can see a need to pick out specific aspects to judge complexity and that the system approach might not be as wholesome as it seems.