The Purpose and Power of Language

The Purpose and Power of Language

If you are fluent in a language, you probably don't give much thought to your ability to interact with others, to understand and be understood in your world. But what would happen if you lost your voice? Or if suddenly the language skills you have, that is your ability to read, write, and speak, were no longer sufficient to allow you to understand television and newspapers or to tell a waitress what you wanted to eat or a doctor what was wrong with you? What if your language actually caused others to discriminate against you? I suspect your perception of the importance of language would undergo a pronounced change.

Recently, I had an experience with language deprivation when I had laryngitis. The three days I was without my voice were frustrating, interminable, and evidence of the power and purpose of language. Early in her essay, "Mother Tongue," Amy Tan discusses this power of language. She writes, "it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth" (26). Though at times, I could whisper, people had difficulty hearing and understanding me, and I couldn't write my thoughts down quickly enough to meaningfully converse with others. In short, my lack of voice impaired my ability to express myself and to communicate and indeed participate in my world. Moreover, language, the combination of specific words in a particular order, not only empowers individuals to participate as members of a designated community, it is also a fundamental key in enabling individuals to establish and define the dimensions of their identity.

Language is the impetus that empowers individuals to forge ties that bind into a community, thus giving them personal, social, or cultural identificat...

... middle of paper ...

...

Language is many things: the arrangement of words in a particular order, uttered in a certain way, denoting certain meaning, a political instrument which evokes images and emotion. Certainly, all of this is a description of the purpose and function of language. But at its most fundamental, language is quite simply the expression of self and the ability to share that expression with others. Baldwin and Tan both highlight the importance of language: to be without language is to be voiceless, and to be voiceless is to silence the song of the self.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What is?"

Across Cultures. Eds. Sheena Gillespie and Robert Singleton. Boston: Allyn and Bacon,

1999. 128-131.

Tan, Amy. "Mother Tongue." Across Cultures. Eds. Sheena Gillespie and Robert Singleton.

Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999. 26-31.