Language functions have received special attention from semioticists since Roman Jakobson expanded them from three to six in 1960, starting from the model previously proposed by Karl Bühler. At that time, Jakobson stated that language should be investigated in all the variety of its functions based on the constitutive factors of any speech event, in any act of verbal communication. These six functions were outlined by Jakobson in accordance to those six fundamental constituents defined by him, which are: the addresser of a message, the message in itself, the addressee, the context referred to, the code used to convey the message, and the contact, understood as the physical channel and the psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee. The resultant functions were, respectively: a) emotive or expressive; b) poetic; c) conative; d) referential or cognitive; e) metalingual; and f) phatic. In every message, more than one of these functions is present, but there is always one that predominates over the others, allowing to classify any message according to Jakobson’s scheme. However, as Jakobson was interested mostly in verbal language, especially in the poetic function, he was led to base his analysis mostly on verbal criteria and, although he stated that poetic features belong, not only to the science of language, but to the whole theory of signs, and, although he was a keen reader of Peirce, his analysis did not take advantage of specific semiotic concepts. In this way, the aim of the present paper is to discuss the six functions of language proposed by Jakobson in the light of the Peircean definitions of sign, object and interpretant, the fundamental distinction among icons, indexes and symbols, and the different interpretants they can generate. As Peircean concepts are more general than linguistic ones, this analysis is expected to shed light on the potentials of verbal and nonverbal messages understood according this theoretical framework.