Modern Languages

Why It Matters

Katrin Kohl

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509540556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

It might seem as if globalization is making the whole world speak English. But spend time in any major city and you are likely to encounter a cornucopia of languages.Even monolingual people have different ways of speaking to their bosses or teachers, their intimate friends or their pets. And if you live in India or Nigeria, you might use five different languages during a typical day.

Katrin Kohl makes a passionate case for why we must embrace languages in all their diversity. When you study a language, you open a unique doorway into the world, immerse yourself in a different way of seeing, and discover new ways of communicating with people from different cultures on their terms. Kohl argues that language diversity is of vital importance to human societies, sustaining the complexity of human nature, culture and technology. We should care about preserving it as much as we care about preserving the diversity of our biological world.

1
Understanding Identity

Our language is our most important means of communication. It enables us to express ourselves, sustains our relationships with our family and friends, empowers us to shape our community and organize our society politically, allows us to conduct trade and create verbal art, and provides us with the means to share our interests and concerns with other groups of people across the globe.

Yet already in this general list, there is an issue about which language achieves all these things. ‘My’ language is generally fine for talking to the members of my family – though this may not be true if I have parents from different countries or communities. And it may be sufficient for communicating with other members of my society – that will depend on where I live and whether all those people speak the same language as I do. If I live in India, for example, I might need around five languages in my daily interactions with other people. For trade, my language will not be enough if I want to do business with people whose language is different from my own – they will be happy to sell me their products in my language, but if I want to persuade them to buy my products, I will be well advised to engage with them on their terms, in the language they feel most comfortable with. And I will need more than one language to engage with other people across the globe: it is estimated that there are some 6,500–7,000 languages in the world,¹ and while some are gradually dying out as their speakers diminish, others are emerging – an example is Hinglish (a blend of Hindi and English).

Our language, or languages, are fundamental to our personal identity, an intrinsic part of us, deeply embedded in our psyche, and a key force that connects us with our social group. And languages (in the plural) are fundamental to humankind. Research has shown that babies already develop awareness of language difference before they are born.² Evidently such awareness is one of our most fundamental life skills, and one we are equipped to develop throughout our lives. As we evolve our sense of self in interaction with our environment, we are continually drawing on, and interacting with, the languages we hear around us. They play a crucial part in making us who we are.

Studying modern languages takes us further on that journey, and it provides a sustained opportunity to discover and explore how deeply a language is connected with the cultural contexts in which it has evolved and to which it contributes. This intrinsic connection is at the heart of why studying modern languages matters.

Divergence and Convergence in the World of Languages

In studying modern languages, the language or languages we know play an important part. Language learning is therefore always a process that enables us to gain an insight into how languages relate to each other: in what ways they are similar, and how they diverge. The differences will always be significant, though if the languages are relatively closely related, we may be able to benefit from similarities in the grammar and from ‘cognates’: words that historically derive from the same source and have the same or a similar meaning. Approaching a language from English may also give access to English loan words that have entered its vocabulary, for example in the field of electronic media. In negotiating such differences and similarities, we gain first-hand practical experience of two complementary processes that are continually at work in the world of languages: divergence, or growing apart, and convergence, or growing together. Both tendencies have left their multifarious traces in the history of languages.

Globalization, and the increasing importance of technology in our communication practices, can make it seem as if we are all gradually converging on a small number of ‘world languages’ and indeed that everyone will shortly speak ‘global English’. But this would be to misunderstand the role languages play in communication, and to assume that divergence is a thing of the past, with language development being unidirectional so that we might eventually expect all people to speak the same language. In fact, divergence – which we might also think of as diversification, i.e. creating increasing variety – appears to be as universal in languages as convergence.

Already in ancient times, the people who created the myth of the Tower of Babel dreamed of the single ‘perfect’ language that would allow all human beings to communicate without language barriers and collaborate effortlessly on the project of building a tower tall enough to reach heaven. They located that language in the past – before God issued the curse of linguistic diversification designed to prevent the people from challenging his power: ‘Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth’ (Genesis 11:7–8). The myth will have emerged from everyday experience of the interplay between very local languages and more widespread ‘lingua francas’ – a Latin term denoting a shared language between groups of people whose local languages are mutually unintelligible. The myth connects linguistic diversification with migration, reflecting an interaction which is a powerful force in globalization today.

In general terms, it would undoubtedly be convenient if everyone spoke the same language. Correspondingly, Polish ophthalmologist Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof invented Esperanto in the late nineteenth century to establish a universal lingua franca that could be learned easily and would promote peace. As ‘conlangs’ (constructed languages) go, the experiment was very successful and, on some estimates, there are now two million Esperanto speakers. However, this is a tiny number by comparison with the well over one billion speakers of English and Mandarin respectively, and the over five hundred million speakers each of Hindi and Spanish. What Esperanto lacks is the connection to a particular group identity and tradition that is typical of ‘natural’ languages, and the political and social power base which is generally associated with languages that become lingua francas, such as Latin in antiquity, French in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and English, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish in their various contexts today.

The rise of artificial intelligence also sheds light on the interplay between convergence and divergence in the world of languages. We can now conceive of a world in which communication would be structured around the use of robots and geared to serving useful purposes with the least possible expenditure of resources. It would then be feasible to have only one language – currently probably English – and everyone would have to learn it in order to be able to access the necessities of daily life. But people are different. We are social beings, and we prize our distinctive identities. We evolve and express these through our cultural practices – and our language. The world of AI has recognized this. Developments in AI are converging neither on Robotspeak nor just on English. There is currently also considerable investment in other languages, with companies like Google or Amazon wanting to diversify their language offering far beyond mainstream languages. In the course of this development, there have in fact been reports of chatbots developing a distinctive language in conversation with each other . . .³

Cultural Identities and Language Diversity

Studying modern languages as an academic subject provides a sustained opportunity to engage with the role languages play in our own interactions with the world. Rather than analysing this scientifically, as an object of study that is systematically distinguished from subjective experience, modern languages involves adopting a multitude of perspectives, including the subjective experience of learning one or more languages, and using them for practical purposes, social interactions and intellectual exploration. A key part of this process is experiencing a language as special, and coherently different from our own. The unique beauty and expressive power of a language can’t be fully appreciated in the abstract, and our unconscious experiences may be as important for perceiving them as what we learn by analysis.

The language or languages we learn at an early age are deeply integrated within our personalities and enable us to ‘express ourselves’ – a metaphor that is embedded in normal English vocabulary and indicates the important role language plays for our psyche. When engaging with the various people who make up our social context, we are in fact inclined to use multiple ‘languages’, and to keep switching how we speak or write depending on who we are communicating with. Talking to a brother or sister will never be the same as talking to a teacher or boss. And talking to a baby or dog will differ to a quite extraordinary degree from talking to an adult acquaintance in a formal situation. Differences encompass the choice of words, the grammatical structures, the intonation, the enunciation. A response to a family member may quite adequately just consist of a grunt.

Moreover, in the social groups we are part of, we can see diversification working at all levels. Families share special words, young people speak differently from old people, mathematicians use jargon that is incomprehensible to historians, twins may create a private language. In some families and communities, it is normal to speak two or more mutually unintelligible languages alongside and in interaction with each other. We all belong to many groups simultaneously – a nation, region, city and local community; an ethnic group, age group, social class and gender; a family, friendship group, group of colleagues and interest group. As we participate in distinct but intersecting conversations, we are continually modifying our language habits in subtle ways and adjusting them to accord with the con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface: Why Languages Matter
• 1 Understanding Identity
• 2 Experimenting with a New Medium
• 3 Exploring Difference
• 4 Training Cultural Intelligence
• 5 Developing the Imagination
• 6 Negotiating Globalization
• Afterword: Sustaining a Multilingual Future
• Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement