You are What You Speak
Imagine one day we lose all of our languages, how will the life be? The only possible way of communication we left is to use our body language, hand gesture, or eye contact. The efficiency to resolve all kind of affairs will be significantly reduced, even asking for extra sauce on the sushi roll will be challenging. Our life without language will be miserable since we lost our most important tool to communicate with others. We are not even able to say the simplest “I love you” to the ones we loved. In my opinion, the most important use of a language is to communicate in a more specific way. Not only to express oneself more freely, but also to receive information clearer from outside.
“Hi.” “Hola.” “Bonjour.” “你好(ni hao).” Nowadays, in this highly globalized world, we heard different languages every day, such as English, Chinese Mandarin, Spanish, and even other dialects that branched out from one language.Though the basic function of all languages is communication, it is fascinating that different languages grow out from different cultures. They share the similarities to express some basic human emotions, but sometimes also diverge at a certain way of expression. For example, in Chinese culture, people use “吃了吗？(Have you eaten?)” as greetings while in Anglophone culture, people tend to use “How are you?”. As a Chinese myself, I think it is because that our culture is always tightly related to food. Maybe nowadays there might be a stereotype that Chinese eat everything. However, that is because some historical reasons which form this unique culture.
In ancient time, as an agricultural based society with a large population, it is always a big problem for peasants to fill their belly. What can I eat? What is left in the granary? How can I store more food for next year? This kind of questions occupied most of the people’s mind through whole life. There’s even a traditional saying that “民以食为天(People regard food as the heaven.).” With all these unique cultures of value “eat” highly in daily life, there is nothing to be surprised anymore that why we concern have others eaten or not the most. However, in younger generations, people tend not to greet like that anymore. In my opinion, this is due to the development of the agriculture, which filling the belly is not the most crucial problem for most of the Chinese anymore. Thus from this shift of the language habits, we can see the development in a society and the change of focus of people’s life.
I believed that the language and its culture are interrelated to each other. The culture influence how people speak and what words they use, the language also shape the culture. As it influences how people think and some customs will grow out from the language itself. Chinese culture has this tradition of use homophones as taboo or festival ritual. One example is that Chinese eat fish at the new year’s eve dinner, this is because“年年有余(nian nian you yu, means earn more than spending for every year),” which “yu” and fish in mandarin are homophones. So from these two examples, we see how culture and language are intertwined with each other.
