“How many languages do you know - how many times are you human” - so Anton Chekhov said. And the essence of this phrase is not completely understood by every modern person. In our world, the walls between countries and cultures gradually began to “fall” - we can freely travel the world, meet new people who speak completely different languages and learn them. When we learn a new type of speech, we discover a new world, become different, and begin to think differently. Why is this so? Our linguistic consciousness is changing. We will talk about what this is and how important this psycholinguistic process plays in a person’s life.
Introduction
Being born in a certain country and from the first months of our lives listening to the speech of parents, we perceive it as a native. We learn to repeat the sounds that are peculiar to her, combinations of letters, her unique words. Every word, even the simplest, is instantly reflected in our consciousness in the form of an object or phenomenon, the symbol of which it is. That is, when we hear the “sofa”, we immediately draw in our head a cozy place near the TV or fireplace, on which you can lie, and the word “tsunami” will cause alarm, make you imagine a huge impending wave.
If a foreigner hears these words in this form, they will not become for him the cause of certain experiences and “drawings” in his imagination. But starting to study the Russian language, he will gradually begin to connect our words, first of all, with his own, which mean the same thing, and only then, having overcome this prism, will understand their true meaning. When a foreigner flies to Russia and is literally imbued with our language and culture, begins to think in Russian, for him these words will become as vivid as for you and me. But there is one “but” - his native names for these objects and phenomena will also remain bright linguistic symbols for him, so a certain duality will form in his head. This will mean that his linguistic consciousness has just been divided in two, thereby becoming richer and more multifaceted.
We dig into the depths of history
And now we are being transported from those times when humanity was at one of the first stages of evolution. Our ancestors have already ceased to be wild animals, have already partially learned to use their minds and make certain discoveries. At this level, they needed to invent a system with which they could communicate and understand each other. People began to invent words, or rather, sets of sounds that would somehow describe everything that surrounded them. It is logical that the first terms were created on the basis of associations with the sounds that objects and phenomena made, later they transformed and became what we now know. So the first dialects appeared, which for each tribe were their own, individual.
A little more time came, and people realized that their verbal terms needed to be written down somehow, for example, to pass on the experience to children, in order to leave a memory in history. The letters and numbers were still very far away, so our ancestors created some signs. Some of them corresponded exactly to visible objects - the sun, a person, a cat, etc. What was difficult to draw in miniature was recorded using a fictitious symbol. Until now, historians cannot unravel all the records created by our predecessors, but at the same time the process of decoding them has acquired the status of an official science - semiotics.
Further turn
Gradually, the signs began to turn into simpler characters, which meant a certain syllable or sound - this is how oral and written speech appeared. Each tribe developed its linguistic branch - this became the basis for the emergence of all the existing languages of the world. This was the reason for the emergence of science dealing with this phenomenon - linguistics. What is studying this area of knowledge? Of course, languages. This science is a part or an offshoot of semiotics, it considers written language as a system of signs, and oral as an accompanying phenomenon. But the most interesting thing is that linguistics studies human language as a single phenomenon. There are no such concepts as English, Russian, Chinese or Spanish linguistics. All languages are simultaneously considered according to a single scheme as a whole organism. With all this, it is worth noting that dead languages - Sanskrit, Latin, runes, etc. are also taken into account. In many ways, they are the basis of linguistic concepts and conclusions.
The main riddle
Such a concept as linguistic consciousness in linguistics is, by and large, absent. This phenomenon is already considered from a psycholinguistic point of view, not without the participation of ethnographic developments. It's simple, because we already realized that linguists are engaged in the human language as a whole, and do not divide it into Romanesque, Germanic, Slavic and other categories, and even more so into their subspecies (that is, our languages). Why is that? Have you ever wondered why to learn a foreign language, moreover, anyone, can every person? It is all about a structure that is the same for all the dialects of our modern world. In every language there are parts of speech, there are their conjugations, various forms that they can take depending on the time and gender, to which they relate, etc.
In one language, the endings of adjectives will be more diverse, while in another, emphasis will be placed on conjugation of verbs. But all grammatical components will be present to one degree or another in any language. Only the letters and words that make up them differ from each other, and the system itself remains unified. Here's the answer - linguistics studies human speech as a single organism, which, depending on its geographical location, sounds differently, but always remains itself. At the same time, a riddle follows from this - why are all our languages that were formed in different parts of the world so similar? No one has figured it out yet.
But what about linguistic diversity?
Yes, yes, you say, of course, to learn a foreign language, even the most difficult one, of course, is possible, and even interesting. But if we do not know it initially and have not yet begun to learn, then the person who will speak it will look very mysterious to us. We will not understand a word, and the individual sounds uttered by him will be partially compared with our dialect, being in search of at least some similarities. What similarities can be discussed then, and why does linguistics not deal with this issue?
There is a similarity, but it lies in the schematic, or rather, the grammatical level. But when it comes to sounding or writing specific words, of course, unfamiliar dialects scare and repel us. The thing is that our linguistic consciousness is set in a different way, meeting with an unfamiliar “note”, we lose balance. A different science, psycholinguistics, has taken up the study of this phenomenon. She is very young (1953), but her contribution to the development of the science of man and culture is difficult to overestimate. In short, psycholinguistics deals with the study of language, thinking and consciousness. And it is she who can give a clear answer to the question of what the concept of linguistic consciousness is, how it works and what it depends on.
But before we plunge into the study of this truly complex term, consider it as two separate words. The first is language, its varieties and features. The second is consciousness ...
What is a language?
This term is widely used in various scientific disciplines, such as linguistics, philosophy, psychology, etc. It is also interpreted depending on the breadth of the material being studied. But we, as people who just want to understand the meaning of this word, should pay attention to the most so-called “social” decoding of the term, which will cover to a small extent all scientific fields and give a clear answer to the question. So, language is a system of signs in the framework of any physical nature, which performs a communicative and cognitive role in human life. The language can be natural or artificial. The first means the speech that we use daily in communication, read on posters, in advertisements, articles, etc. Artificial language is a specific scientific terminology (mathematics, physics, philosophy, etc.). It is believed that language is nothing but the most important step in the social development of a person. With its help, we communicate, understand each other, interact in society and evolve emotionally and mentally.
From the point of view of psycholinguistics
Psychologists, who based their observations on the dialect of a person who was and remains his family, made several more conclusions based on the generally accepted conclusion. First, language is a limitation. A person experiences feelings, emotions that cause certain external factors in him. These feelings turn into thoughts, and thoughts are thought out by us in a certain language. We are trying to "fit" mental activity under the model of speech, which is native to us, we find the right words to describe this or that feeling, thus, to some extent, we correct it, remove all unnecessary. If there was no need to drive impressions into the framework of certain words, they would be much more vivid and multifaceted. It is in this way that language and linguistic consciousness interact, which is formed by those very “truncated” feelings and thoughts.
On the other hand, if we did not know specific words to describe our feelings, we could not share them with others and could not even remember them exactly - everything would simply mix in the head. It is these processes that occur in the brain of mentally retarded people who do not have speech skills - a fairly common occurrence in psychology. Their ability to do this is simply blocked, so they do not have a clear worldview, therefore, they cannot express it verbally.
Consciousness...
It would not exist as such if there were no language. Consciousness is a very shaky term, which is most often interpreted precisely in psychology. This is the ability to think, reason, observing the world around, to draw conclusions. And to turn all this into their own worldview. The origin of consciousness originates in those days when a person just began to build his first society. Words appeared, the first dialects, which allowed everyone to clothe their previously not subject to thoughts into something integral, to determine what is good and bad, what is pleasant or disgusting. In accordance with the works of ancient philosophers, the origin of consciousness is inextricably linked with the emergence of linguistic culture, moreover, in many respects it is the words and their sound that can affect the perception of a particular phenomenon.
Word trap
So linguistic consciousness ... What is it? What is the interpretation of this term and how can it be understood? First of all, let us again turn to the two words that we have just separately examined in detail separately. Language is a relatively material subject. It is in a concrete form here and now (that is, there is space and time), it can be described, written down, even legalized. Consciousness is an object "not from our world." It is not fixed in any way, is constantly changing, has no form and is not tied to space or time. Scientists decided to combine two opposite concepts in one term, why? Psycholinguistic research has proven that it is language that allows us to form the consciousness that defines us as spiritual personalities. And now we get the answer to the most important question: this is a thought form, which is a collective component consisting of an impression, a feeling and a word that describes all this.
Formation process
The phenomenon described above can be a faithful companion of life only to the person who was born and raised within the framework of society, brought up by people who talked and heard their speech. Exaggeratedly speaking, “Mowgli” has no chance to master the thought form, since the very concept of “speech” is unknown to him. The formation of linguistic consciousness occurs in a person approximately in the first year of his life. At this moment, the child does not yet pronounce specific words - he simply repeats the individual sounds heard from others, and focuses more on the actions and phenomena that surround him. Thus, his first experience is formed, devoid of a thought form, which is built along the chain "action follows action". Simply put, he instinctively fears what scared him before, and is addicted to what once brought pleasure.
In the second year of life, a person begins to distinguish words and gradually identifies their sound with objects and phenomena to which they relate. The chain "action-word" is launched, during which the child actively remembers all the ligaments. So he teaches the first words, identifying their sound with the visible world. But the peculiarities of linguistic consciousness are that the words studied are also capable of influencing our perception of specific things in one way or another. For example, in the Russian language a phenomenon can be described by a very complex and long term, therefore it is spoken about less often, it affects the consciousness of people to a small extent. While the same phenomenon in English will be indicated by a short and simple word, it will often be used in everyday speech and it will play an important role in shaping the worldview of people.
As you call a boat, so it will sail
A very ephemeral question for all psycholinguists is one that asks about values in linguistic consciousness. What are they and what are they? This difficult to understand concept most often means those words that have a sacred meaning for us in their sound. It is clear that for each language they will be completely different both in sound and in spelling. Moreover, for every culture that is a native speaker of one language or another, a word may be sacred that in our everyday life has nothing special. The generally accepted values in all dialects of the world are those associated with religion, family, veneration of ancestors. They reflect the values of each individual people in the language in the form of the most lucid words, and they can also describe certain cultural phenomena that are characteristic only of this ethnic group.
It is interesting to know that long wars have led to the emergence in every language of negative expressions and words. Today they perceive us as insults, but if you listen carefully to their sound, you can easily understand that these are simple "everyday" words that are used by speakers of other languages. The most striking example is the word "God" in English - "God". In Russian sounding is an unpleasant word and can only testify to the fact that over the centuries the relations of our ancestors and English-speaking countries have been strained so much that people dared to turn the sacred into an insult.
For a Russian person
It is believed that Russian was the first and only language on the planet long before other dialects appeared. Perhaps this is so, but perhaps not. But we all perfectly see and realize, and also foreigners understand with us that there is no way to find a richer and more saturated language in the world. What is it, Russian linguistic consciousness? Given the above, and also remembering that language can be a limiter for thoughtforms, we come to the conclusion that it was our people who were able to create their worldview according to the most expanded template. That is, the wealth of words, expressions, sayings and conclusions that are compiled and exist in the Russian interpretation allow us to form the most "wide" consciousness.
Basically, the thought form of a Russian person consists of associations and reactions that arise on a particular word. For example, “faith” immediately takes us to church, “duty” makes us strain, we feel obligated, “cleanliness sets us in a positive way, helps to get rid of negative thoughts. Some words may cause laughter or misunderstanding due to their similarities or other context.
Acquaintance with another culture
Learning a foreign language is a lesson that is not just interesting and entertaining. It allows you to expand your verbal and mental boundaries, to understand how people reason and communicate in different cultural contexts, why they laugh, and what are considered the most important. It is one thing when a child from the cradle is brought up in two languages at the same time - a dual language consciousness is initially formed in him. A completely different case is when an adult consciously begins to study foreign speech. In order for it to become the reason for the formation of a new thought form in his head, it is necessary to achieve a certain level of language proficiency. This requires an ideal understanding of the structure, that is, the grammar of a particular dialect, as well as an extensive vocabulary. This includes not only the standard terms taught at school. It is extremely important to know the expressions, statements, sayings. It is from these elements that any speech culture is formed, and getting acquainted with it, you expand your boundaries of perception of the world. Reaching the deepest level of language proficiency, you begin to communicate freely with its native speakers, understand them perfectly, and most importantly, think on this new form of verbal signals for you.
A small bonus at the end
Have you ever wondered why psychologists feel you so subtly, easily recognize lies in the words of others and understand what they really think? Of course, such a technique is not possible for all representatives of this profession, but only for those who have studied psycholinguistics and are familiar with the nature of human speech. So, to understand what is on the mind of a person, allows a psycholinguistic analysis of his speech. What is meant by this term? In every language there are words that serve as certain signals. They can testify to us that a person is worried, talking about a specific thing, or he is in a panic, or is looking for words, since there is simply no truth in his subconscious. Simply put, certain verbal sounds are beacons of lies, insecurity, or, conversely, confirm truthfulness and serve as evidence of feelings and motivations. Having studied the basics of such a simple analysis, you can easily identify the nature of the actions and words of everyone around you.