Speaking in Tongues

I’ve always been jealous of people who are fluent in multiple languages, and this jealously has increased exponentially since coming to American. It seems like everyone here is either bilingual/multilingual, or is taking a foreign language class, or has been all over the world and back again. This might sound strange coming from a person who has been to China ten times, but the most I’ve done there is visit family and attend one three-work summer program. I know a little bit of Mandarin Chinese and I took French for five years but I don’t feel like I have any real worldly knowledge or experience.

Learning languages is absolutely vital to me, for both personal and practical reasons. Right now, I am considering a major in international communication which means I need to know languages other than English in order to be successful at my job, which will provide me with a comfortable lifestyle and the freedom that money provides. Earning big bucks is not my only motivation for learning languages, although overseas is where all the money’s at. I believe studying a language is important in the same way that learning history and philosophy are; they provide a solid framework from which one can form ideas and beliefs. Of course, learning a language does nothing if you don’t use it but I still think the general knowledge of another way of “thinking” is very valuable.

This brings up an issue brought up in the book as well as our class discussion, the question of whether language affects reality. I do not think it does, simply because I do not believe there is one “main” reality that applies to everyone in the universe. Each person has his own reality, which is heavily influenced by his language. Even if there were a “higher reality”, the person describing it would have to use language to do so, resulting in a giant paradox. However, I do believe that the language you speak has an enormous impact on your perception of the world. We talked about languages that have both formal and informal versions of “you”; implying different hierarchical structures in those societies. We also discussed languages that assign a “gender” to words, which definitely say something about that culture’s gender roles. Even slang and informal language can be revealing about a certain group of people. In America for example, many non African-Americans have begun using words and phrases that have roots in African-American culture. Nowadays, it’s “cool to be black”. It’s a complete switch from a mere 150 years ago when slavery was still dominant and a mere 50 when segregation was a societal norm.

I’ll end this blog entry with a quote by Dale Carnegie that sums up my feelings on language: “There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it."