Langauge can include, excluded, represent, and misrepresent.
While watching Fry’s Planet World documentary something that really stuck with me was “our attachment to our language is about emotion and our identity is all about emotion”. I was surprised to realise how true it was that your accent is not just vital to your identity but how others perceive you and your identity. Stereotypically people associate a posh accent with authority. This is how language and represent and misrepresent. Something that got me thinking was: How language we speak affects the way we see and experience the world?
Language can be inclusive and exclusive as seen in the example in the video of France. Occitane is an endangered language from the south of France that had struggled and was not seen as a minority language. The French government wanted to only have one language spoken, people could take the view that France wanting everyone to speak the same language means that they want everyone to be included and be able to communicate. The people that speak Occitane are being excluded and they believe that their language is linked to the identity of their culture.
The Hebrew or Israeli language was revived after world war 2. What was really interesting to me was that they used the language of the Bible, however, some words that weren’t part of the Bible or more modern words are in other languages such as English since there is no Hebrew word for them.
In my opinion, langauge is so important to a person’s identity and how they experience the world. “Identity is about emotion”. I think that our language is a part of who we are and people will never forget this just like the Basque people, people will never forget their cultures and their language.
I agree with your thoughts on how identity can include/exclude and the example with Occitane, another example in the video about how language is exclusive is when they talked about the Irish language and how it was almost lost but is trying to be brought up again for more people to use it. I liked how you talked about “language is about emotion” as it is a bigger idea than just what we use to communicate, it’s an essential part of our identity.