[30.12.2015]Languages

Tags: #SocialScience #Education #BBCNews

Original article: Learn a language in 2016--BBC News

According to Oxford Dictionaries, 'language' refers to:

• the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way;
  
• the system of communication used by a particular community or country;
  
• the manner or style of a piece of writing or speech
  

Language is very important to us, because it is a way which we can use to interact with other human beings by expressing our emotions and thoughts through the use of words.

Thus, the aims of this discussion are:

1. How do you define language?
   
2. Do you think language is important, and why?
   
3. Should we learn more than one language? And why?
   

**You can use your own experiences or any relevant case studies to support your argument in your explanation.

As Stavrianos(1971) suggested in Global History, the first step for human to be different with animal were speaking language, using tools and fire.Language is a tool for human to communicate with each others.
"It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology."
----- Niels K. Jerne
'The Generative Grammar of the Immune System', Nobel Lecture, 8 Dec 1984. In Nobel Lectures: Physiology or Medicine 1981-1990 (1993), 223.

There are many people agreed that language is not just a tool for human to communicate, but also a strong bound of a culture, "Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa"(language is soul of a race) is Malay proverb, it bound with a set of technology, culture, tradition, civilization and so on, hence, language is really important.

It is important to learn another language as the first step if you want to know others culture. However, we should not forget that language is a tool for people to communicate, it would be a burden for people to study a new language if he do not necessarily use it.