Sunday Scribblings

This week's word is Language.

Language, “a body of words and the systems for their use common to a people who are of the same community or nation, the same geographical area, or the same cultural tradition.” www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/language. The full meaning of this word was lost on me until I moved to an island where my words an system, my only form of communication, was not the accepted norm. I have traveled extensively, married a woman born outside of the place we both now call home, and studied (not hard enough) a language not my own. Still, until I thrust myself into a land where my preferred form of communication, and butchered pronunciation of the native tongue, immediately marked me as an outsider, that I fully realized the beauty of commonality associated with language. I could have gotten this from my time in California, where “outside” members of the non-English speaking population were treated as pariahs for their failure to grasp instantly one of the most complicated languages on the face of the earth, but I did not. Thankfully, I understand now why like speaking groups build communities around each other, and sometime shun the world they do not understand and cannot, regardless of how hard "we” try and force them, fully communicate with. For no matter how many words individuals will learn, and whether they can converse with the “natives”, by asking people to scrap their life-long dialect and adopt that of their current land, without regard to what they are giving up, is telling them to not only cast aside an alphabet, but also to leave much of their cultural tradition behind as well. To be clear, this is NOT why I have failed to grasp the tongue of the land in which I now reside, that is based purely upon my own laziness. In fact, people here go out of their way to accommodate my ineptness. I only wish I did not come from a land (and “we” are not the only one) where we demand (or make it incredibly difficult to function otherwise) uniformity of words, pronunciation, and dialect. For language is so much more than words spoken or thrown on a piece of paper, computer screen or street sign, it is a way of life that should be cherished, and understood, by all.