Although we humans are considered different from animals, we are similar to them in terms of instinct. Like animals, we are able to determine our needs with instinct. With it, we humans know that we need food for survival, fire for warmth, and shelter for safety. It is also through instinct that communication was developed, but for communication to happen, a tool has to be used, and this is “language.”
To put it simply, language is the building blocks of communication among individuals, be it humans, animals, and even electronics. (Programming languages are used to communicate with computers and electronics to perform commands and actions.) Language consists of rules, syntax, grammar, and a combination of letters, signs, and numbers that are mixed in a way that provides a clear message by the sender to the receiver.
Being a front-end developer, I know that if the language I am using to input commands into a computer program is wrong, then the computer won’t recognize the commands and either send back an error. Either that or codes won’t work well and fail or do something else entirely that I didn’t intend for it to do. This is essentially the meaning of a language barrier: you don’t know how to communicate with the program properly, resulting in an undesired outcome.
Humans are divided into race that is further divided into countries, religion, factions, line of work, gender, position, age, and the list just goes on. It’s easy to create a language barrier with this many differences in the community. It’s easy for opinions to be misunderstood and facts to be taken as false when it can’t be communicated clearly. And, unfortunately, there is no definite solution. Even if we say that all humans learn the same language (English being one of the languages most recognized worldwide), there are still many factors that induce language barriers. Body language, tone, the loudness of the communicator, and the understanding of the receiver—these are among the many things that accumulate into a massive wall in which humans are divided by their ability to communicate.
