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Language, Communication system and Speech: a deep reflection

9 March, 2026

Language, Communiction system and Speech: a deep reflection

Saturday, September 12, 2020 — 8:00 a.m.

As is usual at that hour, voices are heard on the street through a megaphone, sometimes a woman’s and other times a man’s. I don’t know whether they are from the coast or Venezuelan; what I do know is that I no longer perceive the difference among all the products they promote: “scallions at 2000,” “peas available,” “potato promotion” … “8 pounds of yellow potatoes for 2000”; “Everything you want for 2000”; “Take the sapotes, the papaya” … In short, it is a scene that over the past months has become customary to see and hear.

9:00 a.m.

While I was following what the professor was explaining, through a synchronous class on the Meet platform, I kept connecting the topic being addressed with the scene of the vendors. On some occasions, when we are in a synchronous class and vendors pass by, most people who have the microphone open say, “sorry for the noise, it’s just that a street vendor is passing,” while others apologize when that soundscape is created through the computers’ microphones. It feels as if it were a voluntary interruption. My mind remained on that scene…

11:00 a.m.

While the instructor presented the topic, I could not get out of my head the images woven from street vending which, as I was saying, has already become customary. Yes, when the instructor spoke to us about language, I remembered and recreated in my mind the fruits and vegetables I had heard hours earlier.

I also made the connection between the different names they are known by: I thought about yellow potatoes and red potatoes, I identified the importance of context, which becomes evident in an act that for us is almost invisible.

I remembered the vendors, and the difficulty of knowing whether they were from the coast or Venezuelan, and I linked this with the variables the professor explained to us: geographic, social, individual. I wanted to recreate this example because in everything that surrounds us, we identify ourselves!

12:00 noon

In that small everyday fragment, I found a great example for reflection, a specificity of what is invisible to the eyes. I recalled Ferdinand de Saussure while the professor explained to us that the object of language is langue and speech, and that everything communicates. That speech represents the particular, concrete, and individual realization of a language.

Monday, September 14, 2020

I was reviewing the text I had written on Saturday afternoon, but I felt that something was missing. Once again I thought about the street vendors; in that scene, by not being able to identify whether they were from the coast or Venezuelan, the geographic variant of language comes into play, their accent, their particular way of pronouncing, and I concluded that language is a vital part of a community’s identity, which, as Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy proposes, is also systemic; therefore, it is established as an open system that, through interrelation, generates a change of energy.