The Dynamic Role of Language in Our Everyday Lives

An essential piece of our everyday lives is one that often goes without much forethought of its impact in our lives; language. The prime method of communication between individuals is language. Whether you’re evoking your angriest emotions to express yourself, or channeling your inner happiness to spread to others, you have to use language to express your emotions properly. Using a foreign language or your native tongue, every word that escapes your lips have an impact on yourself and others around you. From building someone’s confidence to damaging your character, your words are impacting somebody. In its simplest form, language is what we use to communicate daily with one another. So in this essay about language, I want to discuss its importance and its role in my life.

Language allows us to correspond in many ways. Our words when blended together are powerful, and many don’t notice exactly how powerful words can be. Many things we say sometimes flow out of our mouths subconsciously, others take immense thought. During casual conversation we often speak from habit, using words that are frequently in our vocabulary. Meaning rather than thinking about our true intent of what we’re saying we are speaking more with social obligation and conscience. Recently I have been focusing on using my language to communicate with intent, rather than letting words spill out of my mouth vacuously, and using phases without the intent of conveying their actual meaning. So far I have noticed positive changes in my life because of it and I have become more content with the way I speak to others as well.

Throughout my life I have been accustomed to speaking English, and it is the only language that I know fluently. I began learning English when I was just a baby. It was the only language spoken in my house of 7, and as an eager baby I wanted to get in on the action of communication rather than whining all the time. After mimicking noises, and observing people’s expressions and emotions, according to my parents I was speaking full sentences by the age 3-4, and I was talking very frequently. This allowed me to advance in my language sooner than others, I learned to write my name and my alphabet when I was only in preschool as well. It seems as though that learning to communicate well early helped me make progress in other aspects of life. When I was a child I was a very quick learner. I caught onto things very easily, and had been understanding more complex things than others. Overall, it seems as though that language was impacting my life more at an earlier stage than the others around me.

Another way that language has impacted my life is one that is rather surprising to me still this day. Surprisingly, after two years of a high school spanish course was enough for me to begin to strengthen my spanish speaking abilities. After some encouragement, I built up the confidence to start trying to speak spanish more frequently. Throughout this past summer, I was able to start ordering from restaurants in spanish, communicate to special adult figures in my life that I wasn't able to communicate well to before, and I was able to also attend a mostly spanish speaking church with a friend of mine. Despite the few moments of error when I was first trying out these few tasks, I was able to be successful. I consider this a very big achievement considering my minimal vocabulary in the beginning, but with the help of my friend that is bilingual, I was able to expand my vocabulary. Expanding my knowledge of the spanish language has been a big impact in my life recently. It has allowed me to begin speaking to an adult figure in my life who I always struggled to talk to because we both barely understood each other’s language. Even though that I’m still not fluent in spanish, I now know enough to be able to hold a decent conversation and properly express myself.

Overall, language is the prime method of communication and it can be very powerful, the decision is yours. As seen from the essay, through our language, we can communicate to others to spread all different kinds of forms of positivity. We can build relationships with others, and speak to others with intent rather than only through habit and social obligation. Speaking from experience, it is a great idea to invest your time to learn to communicate effectively and consciously. With all of the recent changes in my life and the simple ear exposures to language that I received, I can confirm that language truly can have a positive impact on your life.