Languages are the basis of the way we communicate, how we construct and convey meaning and how we define ourselves culturally and historically. While they follow certain grammatical structures and rules, they are flexible not fixed.

Each of us manipulates or plays with those structures to create or to obscure meanings. Poets, novellists, artists and songwriters, lawyers, advertisers and politicians all use language to help convey explicit and sometimes hidden messages. Areas of specialised language become known as jargon. Chatter between friends often uses slang.

The Bible reads that the whole world once spoke the same language, but when people decided to build a city named Babel with a tower reaching up to Heaven, God punished them by "confounding their language that they may not understand one another's speech", and scattered them across the earth each speaking a different tongue. Why do you think humans speak so many different languages?

Artists Tertia Longmire and Tanya Peixoto worked with a class of Year 8 Modern Language pupils at Acland Burghley School in London, to investigate and explore some of the uses and meanings of language. The works produced were translations of the languages of the classroom.

Language is at the heart of culture. Vocabularies or phrases differ between languages partly because cultural experiences differ. The popular notion that the Inuit (or Eskimo) peoples have 40 different words for snow is disputed but the concept of snow is certainly central to their culture.The sign languages used by deaf people are bound by grammatical rules just like spoken languages, but they represent unique elements of Deaf culture. Arabic is seen as the true language of Islam and the Qu'uran, even though its teachings have
been interpreted into
countless languages.

Identity is partly constructed through language whether that identity is national, regional , social or more likely a shifting mix of all of these. The way we speak very often communicates as much as what we are actually saying. Just as maps visually define regions so languages and accents are used to aurally define origins. Not all languages or ways of speaking are equally valued and sometimes people are discriminated against, because of their speech or their first language.

Words can be toys to play with but language can also be a weapon for liberation. Translations of western news were highly prized in the Soviet Union and other communist states, where information was carefully controlled. Creole languages in the West Indies emerged partly as a way for enslaved people's to communicate with each other without their 'masters' understanding.

Japanese artist, Takahiko Iimura, has made a series of video works in which he plays with the sounds and shapes of different languages, investigating their relationship to each other and to cultural identities. At the same time he interrogates the language of the media itself.