Language is alive, beating at the heart of how we share and receive our understanding with the world around us. It is the medium through which we connect, collaborate and build our communities.
Language shapes bring us pleasure and offer space where we can play and be playful. We embrace both the feel and meanings of words, phrases and conversations. Whether in chunks or as individual units, they fill our mouths with delight, tingle like music to our ears and can infuse our souls with joy.
Language is something we feel with our whole body too. We embody and relate to it, we converse and interrogate it, we make it our own, no matter the length, the depth or the breadth. Our relationship with language is personal and unique.
Language can carry every emotion and all those that even we may not yet consciously perceive. Our personal internal and external languages bear witness to all that we experience, holding space until we are ready to receive, milling and encoding energy into something familiar, that we and others may know as relatable.
Language is a medium that sits between our senses and the world around us. Language helps us understand and express connection. It is folded into the touch from someone we love. It is echoed further in moments of wider unison, when, in crowds of support, we may move and communicate as one, in rhythmical, empowered community.
Language offers too the chance to move and to be moved. We can be transported through exploring memories to a favourite place, the sights, the sounds and the smells, or zoom across time zones into the future by messaging across the world. Our lives move, and our language follows suit, we process reparse, remake in endless dynamic eddies of forming and reforming. Language not only ebbs and flows with time but is shaped by time. Finding time to be our authentic selves matters.
Language can be strong, yet also vulnerable; our meanings and relationships, once free and open to the world, may be unheard, unvalidated, and even unloved. There is language too that is subtle and microtonal in nature, nestled in the smallest of spaces, layered within a sigh, carried on a breath and even loud in our still silence, that may yet go unnoticed by those with a lens too narrowly set.
Our language can be many things, the essence of who we are or a cloak to disguise and distract, sometimes a mask, conscious or unconsciously worn. Where it can roam freely, language is an expression of our identity, built on reflections of our spirit and soul. The core of our being is wrapped in the safety we have to bring all of our unique language landscape into the world. And in fields that we may call our own, our language can grow, bloom and flourish without end.
Further reading
Alexander, M. (2019, March 6). Playful Communication Part 3: Wordplay. Play Radical https://playradical.com/2019/03/06/playful-communication-part-3-wordplay/
Bottema-Beutel, K., Zisk, A. H., Zimmerman, J., & Yu, B. (2025). Conceptualizing and describing autistic language: Moving on from ‘verbal’, ‘minimally verbal’ and ‘nonverbal’. Autism, 29(6), 1367-1373. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613251332573
Farah, W., & Nair, V. K. K. (2025). Spaces of reprieve. In: Badwan, K., Dower, R. C., Farah, W.,
Flewitt, R., Hackett, A., Holmes, R., Macrae, C., Nair, V. K. K, and Shannon, D. B. (Eds.), Language, place, and the body in childhood literacies: Theory, practice, and social justice. Routledge.
Hackett, A., Badwan, K., Dower, R.C, Ehiyazaryan-White, E., Farah, W., Flewitt, R., Karen, G., Holmes, R., Macrae, C., Nair, V. K. K., and Shannon, D. B (2025). The Rights of the Talker. In: Badwan, K., Dower, R. C., Farah, W., Flewitt, R., Hackett, A., Holmes, R., Macrae, C., Nair, V. K. K, and Shannon, D. B. (Eds.) Language, Place, and the Body in Childhood Literacies. Routledge. https://shura.shu.ac.uk/36431/
Heath, I. & Montori, V. M. (2023). Responding to the crisis of care. The British Medical Journal; 380.
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