Welcome to our first issue of the Language Exepress!

The simple answer that many of you may quickly jump to is yes. Clearly languages allow us to share ideas and communicate our feelings easily through words as opposed to body language. They also give people a chance to become accepting of others by understanding other cultures through language learning, thus strengthening identity. However, when we explore the question deeper, the answer becomes less clear and the divisions language can create become more evident.

Of the world’s population 40% are monolingual, 43% are bilingual and only 13% are trilingual which may seem impressive, but then if we take into account that there are actually over 6,500 spoken languages in the world today and 24 official languages in Europe, these figures don’t appear as strong. This means that in reality language creates huge problems for the ability to communicate ideas, even within a singular country where there is never only one spoken language.

Not only does language create communication issues but it also creates many societal divisions within a country leading to isolation in many cases. Languages have the ability to divide society by class, for example in South Asia people can only be considered successful if they are able to speak English. Furthermore, language can cause age gaps. One example is the use of slang, such as verlan in French where words are inverted by the youth. This change in the language results in distance between adults and their children, to the point where in some cases communication is impossible.

Language also evolves to form a cultural divide. An obvious example of this is the issue of accents. Over time, through factors such as migration, accents have developed- variations of the same language due to different pronunciation of certain sounds. This issue can also affect language learning, for example German speakers learning English may have trouble with the beginning sounds of ‘this’ and ‘wish’ as these sounds do not exist in German as they do in English. Thus, languages again appear to divide us as many will struggle to express themselves in a way that can always be understood in other languages.

Finally, it is important to understand that there are many misconceptions about language which result in this division. An example may be that English speakers believe that it is the most spoken language and as such they often don’t attempt to learn other languages. However, in reality, although it is the most spoken language, mandarin is actually spoken by the most native speakers. This demonstrates the importance of language learning to break the cultural divide that has been created by languages.

Although there isn’t one answer to this question, it is clear that languages evolve so quickly in so many different ways that division is ultimately inevitably going to become stronger, unless everyone makes an attempt to embrace other cultures.