Blog Post 2 - Language Barriers

As I am an IB student, you are surround by many people from different countries with different nationalities around the world of which have their own language. You don't really realise how much Language plays an important role in our lives, for me, I definitely believe that it plays an important role in my life specifically because Language itself allows you to express yourself through different ways and most importantly it allows you to communicate with others from different countries with different mother tongues. I never thought about it until I moved from a British curriculum to an IB curriculum, and in fact, I feel that it is a great way to discover different languages through the people you meet around your school campus. You could, in fact, use it to understand how people communicate using their language and you could even pick up the language.

In my opinion, I feel that it is important to study Language because languages can give a different feeling than others. In other words, when you read a book, the book is written in English although in a book the author could have a section where one of the characters brings out his mother tongue language because the specific saying that was stated by that character had a more powerful meaning that it would be in a different language. Even though you may not know what the statement means, you can still be presented with the feeling and emotion that the character is presenting, which is pretty impressive how language can present such feeling.

Doesn't everyone have that one friend that speaks a completely different language ? Well, I certainly have been excluded due to language barriers. As I only speak one language, of which is English, I tend to be stuck behind this language barrier even though I have a mother tongue language. Although I can't speak it due to the fact that I haven't lived in the UK I wasn't able to be brought up in an environment that speaks Welsh. We have people that have been brought up in an environment where they use their mother tongue. Being a young adult, I find it difficult to pick up a new language at the age I am currently than when comparing to younger children. The younger you are, less of a challenge it is to pick up and evolve a language. Another situation would be during school as there are a variety of people with different nationalities where they speak more than one language, this tends to be difficult for me because speaking only one language limits communicating to those who only know how to speak multiple languages. Because we are part of a diverse school, this seems to be the norm. as not everyone speaks the common language (English or Arabic) used in the school. Yes, we're taught the language so we can communicate with others that are fluent in the language but we are still limited when communicating as we only know the bare minimum.