My Love Language Is Language Itself

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Queen's U chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

The 19th century, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said: “When different languages are set alongside one another it becomes clear that, where words are concerned, what matters is never truth, never the full adequate expression, otherwise there would not be so many languages.” One of my favourite novelists, R.F. Kuang wrote that “an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal.” 

Before you get bored, I promise I have a point with these two quotes. I’ve always wanted to think and understand as much as I can. If I could snap my fingers and learn every language by heart, there’s no doubt in my mind that I would. But knowing various languages isn’t just a flex and a cool party trick, but it’s a way of understanding and seeing the world through multiple different lenses. I never realized, from a practical angle, how much language shapes your world view and how important language truly is until I felt that I’d lost my own. 

At the end of January, my plane landed in Istanbul on a brisk day and I stepped off the tarmac with my carry-on strapped to my back, without knowing a single word of Turkish— the language I would spend months surrounded by. I slowly began to learn different words and worked hard to practice my conversation and pronunciation with my Turkish roommates. However, it wasn’t easy as Turkish is a language that’s completely different from what I’m used to. Turkish shares a language family with Mongolian, Korean, and Japanese. As well, Turkish is an agglutinative language, meaning words and sentences are formed by stringing together prefixes and suffixes, creating long words composed of various morphemes unlike English where sentences and words are split up. For example, to say “I am going” in Turkish is only one word— “gidiyorum.” The [gidi] of the word is derived from the verb [gitmek] which means ‘to go’ or ‘to leave’. However, once the verb is attached to the morpheme [iyor] that symbolizes the present tense, the ‘t’ from gitmek must be switched into a ‘d’. Finally, the [um] morpheme means ‘I.’ Therefore, once you put all the chunks together, you have ‘I am going’. 

That was a long-winded rant, basically intended to tell you: Turkish is complicated. 

I began to understand how expensive and valuable a word can be when I had to explain something to someone in Turkish using my limited vocabulary. I’d desperately scour my brain for the words that would’ve come so easy if I was speaking another tongue. I discovered a newfound respect for everyone I knew from home who spent their lives, continuously shifting back and forth between languages. Speaking with all my friends from exchange, I got comfortable with the lilts, the stalls, the forehead slaps, as everyone searched for the right words. I realized then that language is a dance, an exchange. 

In my Turkish lectures, my language professor would in turn ask us questions about words in English. He’d show us a picture of a fruit and ask us what it was called in English while pointing and teaching us the word in Turkish. We’d sit there for an hour and a half in the tiny lecture room, swapping words like a form of currency. 

Turkish language has a richness that isn’t necessarily inherently present within the English language. The everyday common sayings in Turkey carry a depth and poeticism that I don’t know how to translate over back into life in Canada. For example, when someone sneezes, instead of saying bless you, you say “çok yaşa!” The literal meaning in English is “Live long”, to which the person who sneezed is supposed to reply “Sen de gör”, meaning “Live to see it.” 

When I learned the meanings of these common sayings, I wanted to cry at how kind people can be. My Turkish friends would poke fun at me for how emotional I got over basic sayings, but it demonstrated to me how once we get used to our own languages, we likely accidentally overlook the beauty within the words we use. 

But language isn’t stagnant, it’s constantly flowing. While travelling in Bucharest and Budapest, I kept noticing words here and there that I knew from Turkiye which served as a literal reminder of the Ottoman’s history occupying the Balkans. As a history major, I appreciated the fact that I could follow historical moments, just by learning different words for foods and common phrases. 

Because of the language barrier throughout my exchange, I was plunged into a new understanding of silence. When I was riding through the city on public transport or sipping tea in a local cafe, I was surrounded by Turkish which blurred together into a rhythmic hum. Since I could hardly understand anything going on in the world around me, I felt a profound isolation that wasn’t confining, but beautiful. It felt like my thoughts and I against the world as the scenes around me blended into a hum of confusion. 

I would listen to speech patterns and pick out words to try and understand, but mostly I’d just listen to the vibration of human conversation as an outsider. Here’s the thing though; regardless of my terrible Turkish, I never felt like an outsider. One of my favourite moments was when I went to stay at my Turkish roommate’s house for the holiday weekend. Nobody in her family knew a word of English and I hardly knew any Turkish. But, we found ways to connect through squeezed hand touches, smiles, shared food, laughter, and helping one another. My exchange taught me about language in many different ways, but it also reminded me that while sometimes language can fail, the universality of humanity and connection will always prevail.