My Reflection on Language

To begin my reflection on how language has shaped me, I am going to start telling you that even though I was born in New York my first and strongest language is Spanish. The reason for this, is that I grew up in my parent’s country; Colombia. However, I can perfectly communicate, read and write in English since I left the country when I was around five years old, when I believe my brain had already absorbed essential elements of the language. I can also understand a little of Portuguese due to the similarity that such language has with Spanish, but I cannot speak it at all. English I would say is the language that I usually speak the most with my girlfriend, my friends and people at work; however I also use Spanish a lot, since is the only language in which I communicate in my house. To be honest, I don’t really remember how the exact process of learning the languages I speak happened, but I am pretty sure that it must have been a combination of school and home in the earliest stages of my life. I strongly agree with the theory we mentioned in class, about language being something that us human beings automatically absorb in our earliest years of life, where our brains act like sponges soaking and learning from every piece of available data. Something that I wonder, or that I think would be great, is the idea of every human being speaking the same language. This I think, would be something amazing since we would be able to really share the different perspectives in which we all understand the world.

Finally, I think that Deutscher’s article is very interesting. It kind of made me think a little bit more about language and give it a more significant importance. The facts mentioned in the article about different practices of language giving or causing different perceptions about the world and even developing “super natural” abilities in people are just amazing facts, especially for a person like me who had not give language more credit than the one for simply allowing me to communicate. And even though some of the experiments mentioned in the article caused certain type of skepticism in me, like for example the ones in which Spanish people gave certain characteristics to random objects and that according to Deutscher were result of the influence that language had in their perception, I still strongly respect and find very amazing his theory