Reflection on topic 1: Language and Communication

After learning the language and communication, I think that language is actually a meaningful code that people use to communicate with each other to express feelings, action, describing things, ideas and etc by means of sounds/letters. There are lots of different languages that can be found around the world. For linguistic, it is actually a study of English.

Different languages have different structure. This is what I have recognized after Madam Ira asked some of my friends to write words in Japanese, Tamil, Arab, and Chinese. For example is in English and Arab. English always come with the structure Subject+ Verb + Object. But for Arab, the verb usually comes last in the sentence. It is just the same with Japanese. For me, this difference makes all of these languages even more interesting. Not only that, linguistic units are constructed according to rules. Some of English words can’t be a sentence if the sentence didn’t have verb and object, for example is “this is the”. This is not a sentence because it didn’t have object. The rules of language allow us to be more creative in many different ways. This is where literature comes into language. Not only has that English also had forms and functions in its sentence. Now I feel that I understand more about the forms and functions after Mdm. Ira asked us to recognize the form and function in the dialogue that we had created.

Our mother tongue can affects in the study of English Language. Some of the factors are multicultural society, urban & rural settings, political/historical influence and educational policies. In Malaysia, we have usually use “bahasa baku” in Bahasa Malaysia. But “bahasa baku” can’t be used in English. This is the major problem for Malaysian as this will affect most of our pronunciation in English. From this, the Manglish problem will occur.

Language is used as means of communication in our daily life for speech or writing. Some of communication is not involving voice or speech like non verbal communication and non-speech communication. Example of non-verbal communication is winking, staring, blinking, body language and etc. For non-speech communication the examples are yawn, cough, sighs, sobs and etc.

So, it is very true that language is very important for us to master our own language and try to understand others language to avoid misunderstanding as language is different for different culture.