Throughout our world’s history countries, cultures, and groups of people have influenced each other in different ways. Some of the different ways have been through music, food, art, education, and even government. Sometimes the way that this happens is through the natural movement of people, but sometimes it happens because of the imperialistic goals and wants of countries that results in expansion through colonialism. This can also happen when countries are geographically close together that they fall under their sphere of influence. This can make the exchanging of ideas so much easier and one significant influence has been through language.
Language has heavily influenced different areas of the world. The movement of people can cause two languages to come together to create a new language, an example of this would be Creole. Throughout history the movement of language can be seen through colonialism in the New World. Originally neither English or Spanish was spoken in the New World, but because of colonialism from England and Spain, both languages are still spoken her today. However, it is possible for languages to influence other languages because they are geographically close to each other or one country falls under the other’s sphere of influence. An example of this is how the Chinese language influenced the Japanese language because of China’s past influence over Japan.
The way that the Chinese language impacted the Japanese language can still be seen today through the similar characters in the written language. In fact some of the characters mean the same thing in both languages. It can also be reflected through how certain words are pronounced. In Chinese, there are different ways to pronounce words by putting a specific emphasis on certain parts of the word, and how you put that emphasis is shown by a small marking above what is called 拼音 (Pinyin). These are called tones and are important because using a different tongue can completely change the meaning of a word. Chinese has 4 tones, however Japanese uses something called pitches and there are only two. Like tones, pitch accents tell you how to say a word and if not used correctly, you could be saying something you don’t intend to say.
Although the languages are similar they still have differences, which is why they are different languages. 先生 For example these two characters can be found in both the Japanese and Chinese language, however they don’t have the same meaning. In Chinese, 先生 means Mr. and in Japanese 先生 means teacher. There are many other examples similar to this, showing that there still are several differences between the languages. The languages used to be even more similar back when the national language of China was Traditional Chinese, but it is now Simplified Chinese. Japan also has more language scripts, which is how the language is written, than just Kanji which also adds to the differences in the languages.
This is an example of how languages can double each other or even be influenced by each other. In this example it was mainly focused on two languages spoken near each other and influenced by each other because of geographical location. Languages can still influence each other when they aren’t geographically close to each other. An example of how the English language impacted a country not geographically close is through product. 可口可乐 (ke kou ke le) is Coca-Cola in Chinese and when pronounced sounds incredibly similar. It’s fascinating how different languages have influenced each other throughout time.
