By: josé luis calvo buezas  (Page 4/7)

The truth about how humans enter into a relationship with their world through is not the physical-natural reality, but the cultural. Data is perceived, understood, hierarchized, and expressed by means of language. This process of perception forms, catalogues, and values ideas, feelings, and attitudes. This dimension of language is deeper and more complex than the simple use of language as a didactic instrument. Reality as a social and sociological construction must analyze the processes by which this takes place.

According to a Berkeley philosopher, “esse est percipi,” that is to say, perception places meaning on things. The field of Psychology studies, in part, the mechanisms humans use in order to structure and interiorize such mental construction. These constructions are two-sided, interior and exterior, resulting in communication with others while maintaining an inter-subjective character.

In this complex process, language serves as a scheme of the relation of I with the others, cataloguing, integrating, and conserving experiences. The transference of communication conditions the content of the message and even plays a first order role in the continuity of passed experiences, present ones, and the projection of an integrated future. The immigrants who do not know the language of the society into which they have incorporated will have a harder time participating in the social life of the new society. Ignorance creates an almost insurmountable a barrier to making contact with people and forming part of society. 

For students, learning the language is a way of possessing an adequate instrument to be placed in the scholastic scope. For workers, it is a necessary condition to participate in the productive world. If something is perceived, but cannot be communicated, it is as if it was not known. In the era of globalization, communication, and great migratory movements, knowledge of the language is the first condition for a possible intercultural coexistence. Everybody agrees that we live in the era of communication, but at the same time, many, mainly foreigners, assent to the fact that we suffer from non-communication. Non-communication produces a feeling of pain and solitude in silence, while the tender words of a mother are like vitamins for a child. Non-communication can sometimes occur among people of the same nation; for example, those that come from certain Maghribian zones only know the dialect of their region.

The affective dimension of language can provoke certain emotions in the listener, inducing one to react in a determined way according to the context of its meaning. The initial isolation that schooling brings about on a child or teen who does not know the language not only affects their learning, but also the relations with their companions in the class, during recess, and in complementary activities. The stimulation, relation between schoolmates, and even insults, all have one of the deepest structures of communication and personality within language.