That's not a Language. THIS is a language.

When you learn a foreign language in school, you are usually exposed simply to vocabulary and grammar of the spoken language. However, there are such a lot of other communication means that are linked to different groups of people.

When an Italian shakes another Italian's hand every day in the morning, the message is not different from the Japanese who bows to his compatriote or the American who waves his hand and says "whazzup!" They are all different ways of expressing a greeting.

Far too often one can hear things like that the Italian in the situation above is more formal than the American. He is not. He just manifests his greeting in a different way. He greets in a different language.

But language goes further than that.

The way the Japanese keeps saying "mmm" during a conversation is a way to express a range of feelings - not just an acknowledgement that he is still awake, as when a German does the same thing. It can mean "that surprises me" or "I know, but I appreciate that you know it too" or "I wish I had something sensible to say".

Even facial expressions can be language dependent. All humans smile. That is universal. But some people have a habit of constantly raising their eye brows to stress that something is astonishing. All humans understand it, but some people have made more of a habit of using it than others.

Fashion is an obvious part of our language. Fashion changes from one country to another. If you were in Moscow in the mid 1980s, you could see thousands of people in jackets of a reflecting fabric in pale colours - not entirely different from science fiction films of the epoch. In Shanghai at the same time, everyone wore Mao uniforms. And in Piccadilly Circus people had green hair and safety pin through their cheeks. All of those were simply a way of telling the world "I know what kind of clothes other people wear, and I conform to it." The ways of telling it was different, and the groups of "other people" were very different indeed, but the message was the same. Wearing a Mao uniform in Moscow or green hair in the City of London would have sent a completely different message.

Even the way you walk can be part of your language. Once, late one evening in the suburbs of a Chinese city, I saw the dark silhouette of a woman walking in front of me. It struck me that that way of walking hardly occurs anywhere outside France - and sure enough, she was dijonnaise. Like the mustard.