The article examines the relation between experience and language. By drawing on the work of Heidegger and others, its objective is to defend the idea that experience is protolinguistic: language begins and works within experience itself. Through a study of different traits in experience – movement, negativity, trying, being marked, changing –, the investigation challenges scientific, metaphysical, and everyday conceptions of experience as well as the idea of language as system and communication, and it suggests a widening of the concept of experience in order to help understanding how experience, thought, language, and use of language are intertwined.