Language is a very important part of our lives but very often we tend to forget to what extent language influences us how important it really is for us.
This short report will summarise the main points discussed on the 20/09/2022 in the class 5i regarding the ToK theme; language.

The day began with a short introduction and then two students held a presentation about their ToK books.
Afterwards we reflected on the topic of the day, namely language. We found out that language is a tool for gaining, processing, justifying, and sharing knowledge. We had a look at the scope, the perspectives, the methods and tools and the ethics of language. Our class gained a lot of knowledge about language and realised that language is a lot more complex than we thought is was.
Later that day we had a look at the ToK essay required for ToK. We looked at an example text from an IB student and graded this text. It is important to note that the essay we given an excellent grade of 10/10 points while most of our class appliedd more strict criteria and weren’t as content with the essay. Quite a few of us were surprised at how mild the corrections seemed to be.
After going trhough the essay we returned to the topic of language. We discussed language further and looked at the five main challenges of language: vagueness, ambiguity, secondary meaning, metaphor, and irony.
We then had a look at different accents and took a quiz to figure out which Swiss accent each of us had.
To finish off the ToK day we had a look at two Ted talks concerning the origin of language. Since no one is really certain where language originates from it was interesting to hear about different opinions and follow through the processing of language.

All in all, this day was very exciting and it was truely fascinating to uncover so many truths about an topic from daily life.

Julia Koutintcheva, 5i