Most Meaningful Takeaway

                “When I think of my tongue being no longer alive in the mouths of men, a chill goes over me that is deeper than my own death, since it is the gathered death of all my kind. It is black night descending once and forever on all that world of forests, lakes, snow peaks, great birds’ wings (…) - my breath catches, my heart jumps.” This is the passage that resonated with me the most from the text ‘The Only Speaker of His Tongue’ by David Malouf. I cannot imagine a world where my mother tongue would no longer exist; a world without the melodious sounds of the language that surrounded the most pleasant chapter of my life, my childhood; a world without the language that taught me how to describe and admire the nature and everything surrounding me. A language is at the end of the day one of a nation’s most powerful tools that unite people with its history and culture, offering them a unique view of the world as well as an identity in the earth’s great ocean of cultures. 

                In the mentioned passage, the author describes the death of his tongue as “deeper than [his] own death” trying to send the message that the death of a language is much more than the death of a single individual. It is the death of a culture, the death of a brave warrior that has fought for centuries, resisting other languages’ attempts of transforming his men into subalterns, passing the values and beliefs throughout countless generations. The words “black night” are used in order to describe the world without language, the element that lights our way in life and never fails us when it comes to express our feelings. “Once and forever”, the culture’s unique way of describing the world, the “forests, lakes, snow peaks, great birds’ wings” is dying once with its language.