What is language?

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There are a lot of words that come to my head when asking myself this question. There aren't any moments in my day that I don't use some form of language expression. I am either thinking, talking, making hand or body gestures, using facial expressions, dreaming, day dreaming, reading or writing. There is no present moment without language. Language is how we can communicate our thoughts, feelings, questions, hopes, dreams, doubts, etc. with ourselves and others.

Communication is the primary way that one living organism passes on its language to another. It is how we understand each other and form bonds. It really is that simple. We can communicate through music, written, verbal, pictures/pictographs, body movements. It is fascinating that somehow overtime as a society agreed upon rules and contexts in which we can have conversation. How did we learn to communicate without language in the first place??

When you communicate with someone, the words you use, the tone you speak in, and your body language with all have an impact in the way that interpret what is being said. Language isn't just the verbal and written language that we think about at first. Words in whatever form they come in are not the only way to communicate our message. Our intonation, animation, expression, or even a simple eye roll can hold so much meaning and significance in the moment. These language features helps to provide the audience with a better understanding. A common situation would be being looking across the room and having a someone shoot you a look. From this situation, you as the reader have no idea what kind of look or the context in which the look is being given, but the phrase you are familiar with. As you are reading you may a mental image of what "giving someone a look" means, let me ask...was that first impression of a positive or negative interaction? In this way, non-verbal language communication is not helpful because we are not currently involved in the situation. If we were physically in this situation, that look could mean the difference between laughing and signaling danger. Giving someone a look could signal any type of negative or positive communication. Are humans the only ones to be able to communicate in this form? How are we able to understand these situations?

The rules for what language consists of have already been put in place. These rules dictate what we understand from what we are seeing, hearing, or observing. We can all agree that a tree is a tree, right? We don't even have to think about what a tree is, there is a collective agreement that what we call this ......

... is a tree. Even now as you just read the word tree several times, some of you may have a mental picture in your head of what a tree looks like. We don't have to speak the same language or live on the same continent to know that a tree is a tree no matter where you are on Earth. How is that possible if we all speak different dialects?

Language is changing faster than we are. The way our world is currently set up, language has become transactional and a global entity. The ways we communicate with ourselves, our friends and family, communities, governments and across long distance has dramatically changed in the last few hundred years. We are more interconnected now than ever and our language has changed significantly because of it. The way we think about communication and language now is way different than it will be in another 300 years. Think about it for a second, 300 years ago or 3,000 the word "airplane" didn't exist but now it does. What do you think that our language will evolve into?

** If you would like more information on the importance of studying thriving and endangered languages, I have linked a video for Endangered Languages: Why Do They Die? and Saving Languages from Extinction. If you don't want to watch a video, or you have already watched the videos and want to keep learning, I have linked a really great short article from The Washington Post, ‘There are no words’: As coronavirus kills Indigenous elders, endangered languages face extinction written by Terrence McCord.