It’s tempting to think of language as existing as an entity all its own, a stand-alone thing that doesn’t depend on anything else to tell it how to function or what to look like. We think of “Arabic” or “Welsh” or “English”. We say that each language has a set of rules, and that the rules must be followed in order to use the language correctly. We have dictionaries and grammar references, and even foreign-language materials for non-native speakers.
But the reality is that language does not exist all alone, and it isn’t created by the resources we use to understand it. These things–rules, dictionaries, how-tos–are simply reflections of language. Language has its seat in the mind, and not just one mind, but in many, many minds. We create language, and as a group, native speakers decide what stays and what goes. We decide what’s right and wrong, and we get rid of old forms (radical dude) and institute new ones (‘kay). This is what we find when we look at language linguistically: language is not “top-down,” where some mass of rules exists somewhere and we have to find them and learn them; language is “bottom-up,” where the individual usages of everyday life get mixed together, and a complex structure comes out the other side.
http://thelinguistsnotebook.com/2018/08/16/what-is-a-language/#more-273

How does the way a person speaks impact others' perceptions of them? How a person may be stereotyped or treated differently depending on their accent or dialect alone? Depending on who we're talking to, we may use a different register, or maybe use contractions. We shape our words and language according to how we want the world to see us. https://www.cpr.org/news/story/metropolitan-state-university-oxford-tony-velasquez-linguistics

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Each of the English vowels has multiple pronunciations. What if this were not the case? Here is what English would sound like. See if you can guess what language that pronunciation would be the closest to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day.
"In English," he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."
A voice from the back of the room piped up,
"Yeah, right."

A generation of Chinese is coming of age with an internet that is distinctively different from the rest of the web. China blocks Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and thousands of other foreign websites, including The New York Times and Chinese Wikipedia. A plethora of Chinese websites emerged to serve the same functions — though they came with a heavy dose of censorship. Many young people in China have little idea what Google, Twitter or Facebook are, creating a gulf with the rest of the world. And, accustomed to the homegrown apps and online services, many appear uninterested in knowing what has been censored online, allowing Beijing to build an alternative value system that competes with Western liberal democracy.
Two economists from Peking University and Stanford University concluded this year, after an 18-month survey, that Chinese college students were indifferent about having access to uncensored, politically sensitive information. They had given nearly 1,000 students at two Beijing universities free tools to bypass censorship, but found that nearly half the students did not use them. Among those who did, almost none spent time browsing foreign news websites that were blocked. “Our findings suggest that censorship in China is effective not only because the regime makes it difficult to access sensitive information, but also because it fosters an environment in which citizens do not demand such information in the first place,” the scholars wrote.

In the Chinese culture, cats and butterflies are symbols of longevity. The cat, mao, is a homonym for "seventy," while the butterfly, die, shares the same sound as "eighty." Together, they form a rebus for maodie. This term implies that one would live to be seventy or eighty — considered old age in ancient China. A carving of a cat and butterfly would be a suitable birthday present, to wish the recipient longevity.

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