You cannot live without language as you are an animal in need of endless social interaction. With language in any forms, you become able to communicate with each other. It needn’t say more about the importance of language further as you can easily observe it by yourself if you give yourself a minute to think about this world without a single language. Although the importance of language is well understood amongst the general public, the very understanding of language itself seems to be lacking. Questions about languages have made bright minds over many centuries question themselves, and the questions are answered now and are to be covered in this academic essay to feast our hunger for knowledge a little. Before you take the journey, I suppose, the definition of language should be served as an hors d’oeuvre. A language is an elaborate assembly of a culture, so understanding a certain culture is needed to know the language of the culture.
Say you now understand what a language is, but what does it mean to know a language, then? When you know a language, you can speak the language and become understood by others in the same language category. That means the sound you make actually holds a certain meaning in a certain language, and so to speak, if you acquire the skill to speak the accepted sounds in a certain order, you will be understood by others who know the language and the process of understanding usually comes naturally as you grow. Then, what do you and me, non-native English speakers apparently, understand now? Can it be told that we know English? Let alone the grammatical understandings, non-native speakers often have so-called ‘their language’ accents, Korean accents or Russian accents. They usually adapt their unique accents to their English vocal system and give native speakers hard time to understand ‘their English.’ Luckily, it happens vice versa.
To addition, the understanding of a language doesn’t exclusively mean that you come to speak similarly to native speakers of a language. The sound system (Phonics), the structure and properties of words (Morphology and Lexicon), how words come into phrases and sentences (Syntax), and the ways in which sounds and meanings are related (Semantics) need to be understood. That a language is a system that relates sounds or gestures with meanings will be more precise definition in this case. Long story short, when you know a language, you know this system.
This Knowledge, linguistic knowledge, mentioned earlier is somewhat different from the actual talk, linguistic performance. Even if you don’t open your mouth and use your vocal cords, you still have knowledge of your language and are able to think in your language. This short instance shows that the ability and behavior may not come out together; it’s your choice whether you want to speak or just think in your language.
Whenever I write or read in English, my second language, I think that every language in the world might not be very different from one another. As an amateur translator, I experience some difficulties during translating an English context to Korean, but those difficulties I encounter is highly bound to the fact that English and Korean share no same cultures. However, some linguists think that some essential grammar is hard-wired into a human being’s brain and Noam Chomsky has provided a blueprint for all human languages, Universal Grammar which is I really don’t want to agree with. A baby, for instance, is not able to speak as their parents. They just make sounds which are not bound to any human grammar (although, the fact that a baby uses certain system to communicate with their parents is true.)
However, Universal Grammar is not a thing that can be neglected, the evidence is found in the way babies acquire language by immersive exposure of a language. Babies in Korea don’t take Korean classes and be taught how to speak, to survive, they acquire those systematic understanding by being exposed to Korean. Babies in any other world learn their parents’ languages the same way. We often praise our offspring’s sponge-like brains. To our surprise, their brains are like sponges. They literally absorb what they experience, and they learn from their experience. However, as sponge becomes hard some time, neurons (information transmitting cell) in their brains cut all those unnecessary routes, which is called the routes to the unlimited imagination, and leave only short-cuts for a better performance, so as they grow older, they have lesser opportunity to become multi-linguals. The bottom line is that the reason why children can learn their parents’ language without education is that there is Universal Grammar, the built-in grammar.
By the way, the less blessed children, hearing impaired ones, doesn’t go through the same process because of their physical difficulties. They learn to use the sign languages which are different from spoken languages, but the grammar system (linguistic knowledge) will be not very different from the one that blessed people use. As there are different languages around the world, there are different sign languages all around the globe. The major sign language used in the United States is American Sign Language (ASL), and the one in South Korea is Korean Sign Language (KSL.) Also, there is International Sign Language (ISL) for those who have impaired hearings in need of international communicating. There is also another type of sign language, Natural Sign Language which uses unique linguistic system which is developed inherently by the hearing impaired people. On the contrary, Grammatical Sign Languages (all other Sign Languages, such as ASL and KSL) are developed by the physically non-impaired people using the linguistic system of their spoken languages.
Languages are used as more than a tool of communication. Thanks to the priceless aspect of humans, creativity, they are used in novels, poems, or lyrics which may never have been heard or seen before.
Humans and their languages are not separate. As they are our hands we use them every single day. The importance is their being is needless to mention. One thing I worry is that the cultures around the world are decaying. As ill-minded consumerism and capitalism can oversimplify the cultures around the world, the languages rooted from the cultures can be contaminated by one culture that all ill-minded consumerism and capitalism are centered in. For example, old Korean words are no longer used by young minds, who frequently chat with their fellows in alien language (a term that Koreans use for teenagers’ slangs originated from their efforts to text faster to their friends and the Internet subculture community sites.) However, one simple truth we all need to accept is that a language evolves as a life form and every former generation thought that our cultures were in decay. I personally wonder and really want to find out what the Korean language Korean Americans use now will become in next ten years.
