“A thing well said will be wit in all languages.”
John Dryden (1631 – 1700)
English poet, playwright, and literary critic.
“Of Dramatick Poesy”
“Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences.”
Anne Sullivan (1866 – 1936)
U.S. teacher.
Speech to the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf
“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”
Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961)
Martiniquan social scientist, physician, and psychiatrist.
Black Skin, White Masks
Look at the definition of “Tongue” at any web site or from any book and such, you’ll see the same definition again and again, recognizing no area or group of people while giving you the definition. Yet, that exact tongue we all have is marvelously interesting by being different from a group of people to another in giving different languages. (Though it’s not only the tongue that’s responsible, but it’s the major doer of the speaking activity, is it not?)
This idea can be the reason behind my passion toward languages. I love listening to different languages even if I understand nothing. I love trying speaking like them. I like knowing their language-families and relating the different languages of each family and how they seem and sound a bit or much alike. In another word: I love everything related to languages; and this made me setting a goal that by reaching age 30 I will have to be a person who speaks at least five languages (I’m learning the forth now).
But having the ability to speak different languages isn’t the real reason behind this addiction, it’s because of what you can discover while learning a new language or enhancing your current ones: cultures, the world and strengthen your relation to people.
When learning a new language, you’ll see yourself learning the history of this language and thus learning the history of its speakers. You’ll learn the way this language’s speakers think, how they tend to make their thoughts and intentions reach, the method of communicating with people, the importance of their own language. You’d understand a lot about a group of people by taking a look of their using of the language, the words and expressions, what they usually repeat and emphasize and what they rarely use and why.
Looking at the history of a language can tell you a lot of its people and how far they could go forward or how back they retreated—or maybe they stood still on their timeline.
Then would come the greatest pleasure of this learning (in my opinion): practicing it with natives and gaining their most amazing reaction seeing you speaking, or trying to speak, their language. That connection the language makes between people is really priceless. It shows us how much we are alike and how much we’re close to each other. And that in spite of the differences we have in “tongue”, we actually are the same from inside (including the tongue…).
There is a phrase in Quran says, “O, people, I made you as males and females, and made you from different nations and clans to become acquainted with each other.” So the main reason of us being different is to learn from each other and living in an integrated world.
There comes the next issue: being indifferent with another language or culture. I have been living in another country since two years and I found out that most of this country’s people do not know any other language other than their own. And they wouldn’t learn another because they are so in love with their own—which is a good love, to be honest, but with bad results. I looked for a speaker of another language for months and when failed to find one I had a belief that those people do not know what is the real reason, purpose or benefit from learning another language; they may be thinking that learning another language and culture means abandoning or giving less care to their own, which is a very wrong thought indeed. And, with learning their language, I found out that having a look at another culture and language can actually make you more attached to your mother tongue and your main culture, and will make you start paying attention to parts of it you didn’t know or realize their existence. Thus learning a new language is actually reconsidering your own in a best way.
Finally I’d like to recommend this bless to everyone; learn a foreign language and live the beauty of being a human begin.
Z. Al-bayyar 