Essay On Bilingual Language

Analyzing the influence of the language that we speak on the ways we express our feelings and discovering the links between different languages appears to be essential, particularly, nowadays, when the vast majority of the people throughout the world tend to change homes each year. In my opinion, it is fairly important to be able to convey emotions as accurately as it is possible. Anna Wierzbicka’s article, which touches the theme of multilingualism and emotions, throws a new light on the vital issues related with the affect that makes a language used for communication on personality and on perception of one’s surrounding. First of all, it is obvious that every language has been formed in different historical background and in various

A child’s first comprehension of the world around him, the learning of concepts and skills, and his perception of existence, starts with the language that is first taught to him, his mother tongue. Concurrently, a child expresses his first feelings, his happiness, fears, and his first words through his mother tongue. As a result, first language has an important role in framing our thinking, emotions and spiritual world. Therefore, a bilingual person often may have a sense of distortion, of falsehood and not being true to oneself during expressing in the second language. However, this does not mean that the emotional expressions of a person’s second language can never be “true”, rather, the reason is that the emotion terms of second language may not have the subjective force that those of the first language have through their autobiographical grounding. Wierzbicka in her paper claims that the point is particularly important to her is that experience of bilingual people should not be construed as merely their experience of speaking two languages but rather as their experience of living with other people through two different languages. To exemplify, one of the most important insights emerging from the recent literature bearing on the issue ‘bilingualism and emotions’ is that a person’s language acquired first is often endowed with a greater emotional force than the second