Language Barriers

The language barriers that exist throughout the world and even around our own homes can be frustrating and can throw up huge obstacles toward understanding. There's also no lonelier feeling than being surrounded by people who don't speak your language; you can travel to a new place and easily find yourself without a hope of being understood by anyone you meet. The arrogance of some tourists, who expect others to speak their language, usually doesn't help the isolation and disconnection that can come from different languages.

I think all this is very fertile ground to be explored in fiction, and I've taken a stab at it recently. A story that ended up in my creative senior thesis, whose working title was "Language Barrier", was about a young woman in love with a man whose first language is French. Though his English is excellent, the girl feels isolated by a part of his life that she will always be excluded from -- his French family and childhood, the language he thinks and dreams in first, the language he will most probably teach their children so that she will be an outsider in the family unless she learns it.

Language really can be a significant barrier to understanding among people, but it doesn't have to be an un-crossable one. My main character attempts to find some way to find insight into her lover, and eventually manages to see some deeper sides of him that don't require language. They are isolated from each other at first, but through a few trials, learn to communicate. It may prove inspiring to you to think about language as a potential story catalyst. Who speaks different languages in your story, and who is unable to communicate with whom? What does it mean about the potential for very different characters to connect?

Comments

[Ali]

I do agree your comments regaring Language barriers. you hit it on the head; you know much about the dillema that language problems cast on us.

Al