{~} language
language is a wide term that encompasses many kinds of communication. typically it refers to speech, the rules of speech, and the means by which people encode and decode information through text.
i speak both english and french natively. in everyday life i use french in meatspace and english in cyberspace; in writing, when i try to link the two, i've had a really difficult time settling on any one language. at first i mostly wrote in french because i felt insecure with english and wasn't convinced of my own fluency after a long time not using it much in quotidian situations.
i quickly realised english is a preferable medium for writing both prose and poetry. i still sometimes use french for prose because i really enjoy its sonorities and the unique character it imbues written text with, but there are many issues that push me away from french as a main language for writing and expression.
as a literature student, i spend a lot of time in contact with language as an object of study. my area of interest within it is not so much the linguistic aspect—which i do find passionating tbh—but the stylistic aspect, ie the various uses one can make of language to colour and characterise a text with different nuances. painting is not just the depiction of the subject but also the curation of a discrete grammar to depict it, using particular styles and use of colour, form, stroke, lighting, perspective, etc. to express ideas. this is why painting has not been deprecated by photography: it's not about representing things photorealistically, rather representing them in a certain light.
just like painting, language is not just a pure mechanism which describes things in one way and one way only, else it would not have evolved as it has throughout time. being the product of the minds of living things, representing their thoughts, it is itself quite living, and thus can adapt to a variety of means of representation which are subjective by nature. stylistics is the study of why a narrator (or speaker) chose to say something in a specific way, why each individual word choice was made: why say you are loved and not someone loves you? why Gaia and not the Earth? stylistics therefore studies all the means which language provides us with, and what the choices we make reveal about what we think and what we meant when we said X.
oulipo
oulipo is a movement which emerged in the french literary scene in the early 20th century. pushing the spirit of modernist pioneering into the realm of grammar and the means of expression at a fundamental level, it came up with a variety of, one of which is the lipogram, the best known of the oulipo's « procédés ». it consists in the proscription of the letter E from a text, E being the most common letter in french (and, i wouldn't be surprised, english).
oulipo provides a fairly arbitrary rule—one can assume no registers of speech nor topics are more affected by lipogrammatic limitations—and leads to the formation of a specific grammar which evolves wildly when one starts writing according to the rule before stabilising when one begins to acquire "tricks", "shortcuts" which approximate natural ways of saying things. oulipo is really interesting to me because it requires careful thought about each word used, and a deliberate choice of how you want to say something: it is intentional writing which disrupts the typically preconscious task of finding words to say something. there is a mastodon instance which is dedicated to lipogrammatic exercise https://oulipo.social.
grammar
every language has a unique grammar, which imparts an approach to semantics and to the world which is different for every speaker. english and french grammar, which split fairly recently in the history of language, share some very cool features which provide fuel both for thought and for concrete expression of complex ideas. i really enjoy studying the fields of interpretation which certain elements of grammar allow: one very cool one is the first person pronoun, we/nous.