“Homelang” or how to live in a language

Abstract

The society we are living in is the society of a simple click that opens the world, breaks the barriers and gives access to any type of information no matter time or space. Today, we can live, without any problems, in almost any language. It depends on the person’s interest and willingness to live in a certain language. The study aims at placing the term “home” in a close connection with the term “language” by determining whether the word is the only house that we have and accepting that language is a continuously changing and lifelong battlefield.With the help of metaphors (living metaphor, distance metaphor, mother metaphor, birth and family metaphor, etc.) that are among our principle tools for understanding the construction of linguistic, social and political reality, we have tried to conduct a double levelled research: on one side, the paper aims to identify the identity framework of living in a language (as a mother tongue, as a regional language – dialects, as a national language or official language, as a foreign language learning – which undoubtedly implies foreign culture learning by increasing awareness and developing people’s curiosity towards the target culture and their own, and, of course, helping people to be able to make comparisons among cultures or as a European language according to the Common European Framework for Foreign Languages which provides a common basis for the elaboration of language syllabuses, curriculum guidelines, examinations, textbooks across Europe or as a lingua franca). On the other side, the paper aims to highlight the fact that there are also risks related to the language leaving phenomenon. We live in a language in different ways, but at the same time, for different reasons, people are tempted to leave the language: immigration, high-tech effects, etc. Living in a language vs. leaving a language interfere and the two phenomena still raise questions among researchers and linguists.

Keywords

• language living,language learning,language leaving,identity framework,conceptual metaphor

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