What is Language? To be honest, I had never thought of it as a whole. Language envelops us, its all around. Prior to my recent encounters with language, I had thought to myself, theres no possible way language is the most important Way of

Language can be interpreted in so many ways that I had never even thought of. Throughout the lesson, my perspective on it has changed. We’ve all looked at language, as in English or Japanese, books or novels and various things are written on them but then comes the question. What is Language? To be honest, I had never thought of it as a whole. Language envelops us, it’s all around. Prior to my recent encounters with language, I had thought to myself, there’s no possible way language is the most important Way of Knowing. Oh, how very wrong I was. How would we be able to think if there was no language to think in? Body language is a language too, isn’t it? Language is a great part of life, and as a person, everybody will be using language in multiple ways throughout the duration of even a single day. The odd thing is, you would believe it to be easy to explain as it is such a great part of us, but as it is difficult to describe any colour to a blind person, it is difficult to fully define ‘language’. In class, we talked about how language can completely alter the meaning of something. Language and messages may differentiate from one another ie, a translation of an English joke might be lost in translation (such as Spongebob, the humorous bits are often lost), or how people of whom speak different languages interpret sayings in different manners ie break a leg cannot be translated into French for ‘good luck’ or ‘four’ does not necessarily bring about bad luck in Western cultures but it resembles death for the Chinese. Language can be come across as quite a mind boggler if thought about in more depth.