Whenever there is a concept of communication, the first thing which comes to our mind is the language. People think that if we don't know the language we cannot communicate well. I can agree with them because as of today with all the content creation and everything be it in written form or in Video and Audio the communicator will have to communicate via a language. And thus we can understand it better in the language we are comfortable with.
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I know language is a one of the best tool out there for the communication and if the language is our mother tongue then we can communicate better. This is because we have learned the language from the young age, whether speaking, writing or reading. We can convey our thoughts better when we use our own language. For example, English is not my mother tongue, Hindi is. So if I have to communicate in Hindi, I would be in much better position than English or any other language which I know.
The best part of staying in India is that you get to know more than one language. Like in my case I know Hindi, Bengali, English and then now learning Kannada. There are over 500 languages in India and thus each and every corner of India you will find the variation. But the most spoken languages are English and Hindi because of the population. Using English you can actually communicate in any of the big or small city throughout India whereas with Hindi you can communicate in all the places in North India. The problem comes in the villages of southern India where people usually speaks mostly the local language.
Like in my case, we have a hard time communicate with one of the maid who speaks Telugu and doesn't know any other language. So we have to use sign language, google translate , gesture and other things to communicate with her. With this I learned that though language is powerful tool it is not the only way to communicate. If we have to convey our message it can happen with non verbally too in special situations. Non verbal in the sense, through gestures, expressions and other ways.
The easiest way to communicate is using the Smile. It can emit the happiness which is good to the surrounding too. Happiness is infectious and thus if one smiles, it can make the whole surrounding happy. Again there are other ways to communicate without a language using the facial expressions, which we all use at one point of time.
In my early days when I was very fond of going to the Navy, I have learned Morse code and Semaphore which is again a type of communication.
According to WikiPedia,
Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called dots and dashes, or dits and dahs.
Semaphore is the use of an apparatus to create a visual signal transmitted over distance. A semaphore can be performed with devices including: fire, lights, flags, sunlight, and moving arms.
These two are again different kinds of communications which doesn't involve language. Like in a war situation, if two ships are communicating in the day they can use the Semaphore. In this way they can hide the communication with the enemies. Again I have learned both the languages when I was kid.
In simple terms, language is powerful tool to communicate, but it is not the only way to communicate. There are other alternate ways of communication and thus sometimes knowing the alternate ways is quite good and handy.