How Human Befriends with Language across Cultures and Ages

"If you concern on language, even being a linguist, you have more friends and it's a must". 

This quote was said by my Professor while I was studying Linguistics in Postgraduate Program. His saying was unique and really surprised me. How can it happen? There are approximately 6.912 languages in the world (see Ethnologue). How do we befriend by language?

Let's think about why we acquired language when we were kids. Our parents taught us referential words to call them. This was the first time a kid creating relationship by language. This way didn't stop. Language competence developed until calling brother, sister, other family members,  then friend.

By learning language, what do you hope from it? As people usually say, language is for communication. We acquire and learn language because we believe that we can do many things with it. 

Language makes its users closer. Its performance to apply cooperation starts from a small group and spreads up to inter-group, community, society, and nation. Language contact has being done since civilization formed

From Instinct to Institutionalized Language

Firstly, conversation is the easiest application. Before language science was found, it came from how people do cooperation by uttering sounds. The sounds reflected that they have meanings as well because there was continuation after they were expressed from turn-taking to implemented actions. Why could it be? People in the ancient times produced their languages which hadn't been well as nowadays. Their phones might be uttered based on their cooperative and habitual applications paying attention on the objects they wanted to make sense. Coming from those ancient activities, human thought that it was required to create rule so that a group of people living in a particular place knew each other.

 As long as they made contact interpersonally, the dynamics happened on each individual with their lives. They needed to move, it was possible that the commodities in the place faced decreasing result. Mountains, hills, jungles, shores, and many kinds of surfaces experienced people to adapt. It effected on the way they communicate. Unstable land contour, large range, and natural barrier made people control their sounds, tone, and pitch.  You'll see people living near beach and mountain produce louder voice than those who are living in the city. 

You Pronounced Slightly Different from Its Origin!

Next, the movement of people from particular place to other bring a bag of vocabularies.  Historical and Comparative Linguistic studies the adventure of words passing regions. Many words expressed in similar sounds can be decided that both compared places had relation in the past. They might have contact in the reasonable extent of time so that it could affect distributing vocabularies. The word "book" is pronounced /bu:k/ (English) and /bu:kh/ (German). Or the same word meaning "livre" (French) and "libro" (Spanish). How did they interact in the past?  Easily, you can see where the countries take place on the map. Are they far? What's the land condition there? Are they accessible? Was the one ever conquered by the other?

The implementation of spreading vocabularies also happens on terminology. The word "communication" is pronounced a little bit same by Spanish, but the suffix is pronounced /-cion/. Then, imagine how the word "Ardh" from Arabic is received "Earth" by English.  

Those language cases are also affected by language competence culturally applied by each group of people in each place. German has large number of consonant sounds pronounced by the back position of place articulation like [kh] and [g]. It also happen on the French and Spanish word referring to "book" (livre and libro). They are same on [l], [i], and [r]. In the case of vocal sound, Spanish dominantly has open sound such as amigo, communicacion, nino or nina ;  there are   many words containing [a] and [o]. This happens as well by Arabic and English. The sound [dh] might be received [th] by English like the deictic words that, this, those, them, and so on.

Language Contact

Deeply resulted, those language users contacted. The way they expressed a word is based on their language competences which have been formed from the past they built community. Language contact shows us language connects each other. Although, in several conditions, there might be conflicts, they met taking-giving information and idea. In addition, they shared.

The language phenomena teach us that human use language to communicate and to meet cooperation. Pragmatics has cooperative principles to indicate the success of language performance by quality, quantity, manner, and relevance. Language has been passing years with its journey to connect people and to establish civilization. So, my Professor really said right. To perform language, we need companion. By performing language, we can maximize doing many things with our information up to do action related the content of idea expressed. There may be expansion of the idea of "friend" here. It can be the person personally you talk to and the information arranged by your cognitive competence or internal awareness so that you can express what you want successfully.