SECONDARY RESEARCH - EVALUATION

LANGUAGE - secondary research evaluation

I have been looking at a variety of different angles

-language and culture

-type faces and art

-written and spoken language

-most popular

All this admittedly is secondary research, i wanted to see how broad the subject was across the internet, and journals. There are loads of different stories relating to the subject matter of language and i have literally only scratched the surface.

The most interesting things i found out were looking at language and cultures; "lingustic and cultural diversity is an inescapable fact of the modern world" - The world has an increasingly diverse population with a widening variety of cultures and people. Its important to understand this widening gap because the world's only getting bigger with countries having much larger populations and this creates big divides in background and religions, for example. They need to breach the gap of language in order for people to better understand their neighbors, i am a firm beliver in this. For example, i am fluent in French, my dad brought me up to understand it. And although i don't really like the French i have that opinion from an informed perspective, this is because i have spent a lot of time in france and met a hell of a lot of french. Now instead of me just jumping on some bandwaggen and being like 'i dont like the french' i have my reasons and by speaking the language it breaks that fundamental barrier so i can get to know the people better for who they are and what they represent.

Another angle i looked at was 'written language vs. spoken'. Its interesting to learn while researching language the importance of where it actually comes from. We learn to speak before we write but once we have learnt that it becomes a fundamental part of who we are. We rely on our eyes more than our ears and distinguishing which is more important helps with educational means. We use writing to represent the real world, when we speak the writing, it becomes spoken language. Knowing the relationship between spoken language and written language ie, written language determines spoken language, can help learning knowledge and learning language. One sentence to remember is: language is just a way for representing and exchanging knowledge or meaning.

I have also looked at a variety of text images using different type faces, generally looking at arabic and Chinese. I love looking at Chinese writing because its so complicated and it has so much depth behind each image. Its all down to symbolism and its so complex, i have a great respect to those who can decipher the images to get the write meaning its fascinating. And its interesting because egyptians have been using symbolism like that for years and years and it has been adapted to the Chinese. Images were used long before text and it is something we all connect with because we have been looking at images to tell us a story since we first drew our first cave painting.

So whats next?

Well like i said i have only scratched the surface or areas to research with language. There are a lot of interesting avenues, but my next stage is to start my primary research and this is going to involve asking people about their languages, what they speak what they would like to speak, whether they think its a good idea to learn language thats are in your country to help break those barriers. And other questions like that. I am also going to visit my local language school and speak to the summer students there that have come over to Stamford to learn english and see why they are doing it etc.