Ch. 5: Language and Culture

So I guess this goes way back. This goes way back to Matt Damon on Mars, back to the Silverback gorillas.

Basically culture is communication and language is the primary way we communicate, right? You remember my culture omelette metaphor? My lovely culture omelette metaphor? If rituals and heroes and symbols are the stuff in the omelette, the egg is the culture that holds it together? Right? Well, the language is the yoke.

Anyway, the point is there’s such an intrinsic link between language and culture, I don’t know if you can have culture - in the way we’re talking about culture - without a language. Culture is dependent on the language that enforces it and the reason culture survives generations is because there’s a mechanism - there’s a language - that carries it across. You die, your words don't. And so we can pass down an articulated shared... I don't know. Ethos, I guess. That survives us. Silverback gorillas, as cool as they are, can't do that.

But what’s interesting is that, because different cultures use different languages, those languages shape your experience of the world. Your "French" world isn't quite the same as my "English" one. If we go back to that John Locke thing about conscious experience and sensation, the “is my red your red” thing, the name you give something determines how you perceive the thing you’re perceiving, right? At least to an extent.

So let's start. 

First of all, what do we mean by “language”? OK, a set of symbols - we talked about semiotics before - a set of symbols shared by a community to communicate meaning and experience. Language is an agreement, as much as anything else. Remember how we talked about money and how one of the basis of culture is that I give you money and you recognise it as money and we both recognise it as having the same value so we can take it from there? Well, it’s the same with a word, right? Instead of a dollar, it’s the word “tree”. Right? So if I say the word “tree” you have an idea in your head of what tree “means” and I have the same idea in my head of what tree “means” and that’s the foundation for a culture we call “English” - in this case. 

The contextualisation of experience. You remember phenomenology, the agreement of a created reality? We're all looking at different aspects of the street, we're all experiencing it slightly differently, but collectively we all decide that it's a "street" And that reality - or anyway that whole set of negotiated, contested, and changing realities - is what we call our culture. And as a species we reach that agreement through language. “Tree?” “Tree.”

And language is also used to signal identity with a particular group and to differentiate it from other groups. You know, this brings us right back to tribalism and nationalism. Remember at the beginning of the course, how we talked about how the Irish define themselves - at least in part - as “Not English”. I don’t know if you remember the term “in-group/out-group” which we talked about way back when. But “in-group/out-group” basically means… If you're part of a group, you need another group that can't be part of your group. You need to reject as well as accept, right? The walls of the cell define the cell. It’s High School, basically. In High School, there’s the cool kids and then there’s the other kids, and what makes the cool kids “cool” is that the other kids can’t be with them. So it’s not enough just to have identity with a group, you also have to exclude another group. And language is a really effective way to do that. The whole point of slang is that not everybody understands it. Your mom doesn't understand it, not yet anyway, but once she does - and eventually she will - you've got to go find a new word.

You know, when students come to Dublin, we usually get German students and French students and American students and some Russian students and some Spanish students. And, you know, even though they all have a lot in common with each other, the French kids hang out with the French kids and the Spanish kids hang out with the Spanish kids, at least for the first month or so. At least until they feel safe enough. And some of them never feel safe enough. Because, even though you’re in a new experience (because you’re in a new experience) you still have the security of your group. And you need your group.

The French and the Germans do not work well together, by the way. That’s something I’ve discovered over the years. There’s just this disconnect. The German kids tend to be very headstrong... you know, "this is the right way to do this and this is how we're doing it" and the French kids not so much and then they get kind of resentful and truculent, which drives the German kids crazy, and the poor Spanish kids get stuck in-between trying to make peace, and… I'm not saying the stereotypes are true, you understand, but...

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Irish language as Irish identity. I’m going to talk about this in a little bit, but it’s a big thing in Ireland. It's also a very big issue in Northern Ireland right now, the "Irish Language Act" where a lot of the Nationalist Community - and not just the Nationalist Community, interestingly enough - are trying to get government funding for Irish language education and the Loyalist community are dead-set against it because they see it as undermining... Anyway, it's too complicated to go into here but again, who controls the culture?

Anyway, down here in Dublin, and in most of Ireland, the Irish language thing. Nobody speaks it. And most people don’t know it. And my kids, for example, when they were going to school they had to study Irish, along with English and Math. And when you're taking your final tests, your leaving cert, you have to do pretty well on the Irish test because if you don’t, it's that much tougher to go to university. And the kids hate it. Worse, they resent it, because they have to work really hard on a difficult language that they’re never going to use so they can go to a university where they will never use Irish so they can immigrate to a country where they will never use Irish. But at the same time, it’s very important to Ireland’s sense of itself that everybody learns it in school.

And they spend a lot of money here so that… you know, there’s a TV station that’s only in Irish and there’s a radio station that’s only in Irish and they play the Irish-speaking news before the main news and there are dedicated pages - more like dedicated half-pages - in the newspaper that are only in Irish and all of the official documents are in English and in Irish and the road signs are in English and in Irish, but nobody reads the Irish. Not really. Which is part of the reason that, as a language, it doesn’t really take hold because too many people… do you remember “top-down” and “bottom-up” with othering? It’s very hard to get a culture to embrace a language if it comes from the top-down. If it comes from the top-down and there's an alternative. I mean, when the English colonised Ireland and forced their language on the Irish, that was top-down as well. But they also took away the alternatives. Irish became illegal, essentially. You want an education? It's in English. You want to go to court for any reason? It's in English. You want to work? It's in English. You want to buy food? It's in English. If you don’t use the language to buy food, if you don’t use the language to buy milk, you’re not really going to use the language, and Irish doesn’t really have that day-to-day connection with people.

I mean, some people, but not many. Not enough to really count.  

     

The other reason that Irish is really important in Ireland is because it’s not English. Right? I mean, it is as important that… I mean, I don’t know how much you guys know about Irish history or anything, but it was a colony. The English came over and installed a government and renamed the places and enforced the laws and all of that, and we talked before about the narcissism of small differences. I mean, in this case the differences between the colonisers and the colonised were relatively minor. But language was one of them. And so, after the revolution, one of the first things the new nation did was embrace the language as both "our" language and "not their" language.  

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Finally, we’re going to look at the direct connection between culture and subculture. We talked about “code switching” last week, I think? Maybe we didn't. Where you speak differently depending on the situation? I have no idea what your background is at all, but in New York if you come from a working-class Dominican neighbourhood in Washington Heights, and you get an office job in Midtown... if you speak the way you do in Washington Heights at your Midtown job, you're going to get some attitude. In fact, you might not get the job at all. And if you speak the way you speak at your Midtown office job back in Washington Heights, you might run into some attitude there as well. And I'm sure the same thing happens in Paris. I'm sure the same thing happens everywhere. It's encoding, really, if you remember our "rhetorical model." You want to establish credibility with whoever it is you're trying to communicate with, and you're trying to make sure your message gets heard. So there’s a lot riding on the ability to switch codes. It’s not just casual. Power has its own accent. And people don’t even know they do it, but they do it all the time. If you remember “high-context” and “low-context” environments, it ties right in.

OK, I'm sure you guys remember this, the rhetorical model of communication. The source? I guess that's me. The encoding? That’s what I’m doing right now. The receiver? That’s you, in this? I know you guys remember. And noise. Syntax, semantics, translation. The things that interfere with the message being understood. I just wanted go back over a couple of these things before we get into language, because it’s all connected. So...  

Perception? You guys remember the three stages from last week? You see the red light, you name the thing, and then you give it meaning? You act? Red light means stop, right? Green light means go. OK, great. And language comes in in the second stage, when you name the thing.

One of you guys said “yellow light means speed up..."

And then semiotics. We talked about this before, too. The concrete form, the thing that it refers to other than itself, and the idea that we all recognise and agree on that thing. "Ah, the shop is closed." You look at the thing and you give a name to that idea and that idea is represented in your head. If that makes sense. You look at it and you say the painting and say “Ah, that's a pipe” because that’s what Magritte’s showing you. But it’s not. It’s a picture, and it's calling attention to itself as a sign instead of the thing that the sign represents, and it makes you call attention to the whole process of giving the sign “meaning”. And it’s that jump. That's the jump your dog can't do, which is why when you point to something it looks at your hand and not thing thing your hand is indicating. The jump from the representation of something to the idea of something.

And that's what language does. It represents something other than itself. It indicates.

And then finally, Berkeley's idea of phenomenology, that it’s the perception of reality that constitutes reality, sort of. That it’s the conscious recognising of the thing and then the naming of the thing that allows the thing to exist. If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s nothing living near enough to hear it, does it make a sound? And Berkeley says no. Because that’s not what constitutes “sound”. What constitutes “sound” is the receiving of it and the naming of it as a “sound”. And, at least for humans, we use language to name things. Right? We’ve gone over this before.

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So, OK. Oh, and by the way, Do you see this tree? That tree - the real tree - that’s Newton’s tree. You know, the whole story of Newton sitting under the tree and the apple fell on him and he was inspired by the idea of “gravity”? Remember that? I think the truth was a little more complicated, but anyway, that's the tree. Apparently. With this little wooden fence around it. It’s in Cambridge, in England. And it’s still there! And I would really like to see it sometime.

It’s not very big, you’d think it would be bigger. Anyway…

So this is the idea. Once upon a time there was a tree before there was anybody around to see it. For millions and millions of years, there was weather. There was water, there was rain. There was lightning. And there was nothing around to see it. And then you started to get trees, and there was still nothing around to see them. So for millions of years, nature existed, but there was nothing around to experience it. Just these unnamed green pointy things sticking out of the ground.

And then one day people came along and saw the tree, and then they named the tree “tree”, and then we all agreed that that’s what a tree was. And so this is Berkeley, in a book that I have, looking at a tree and as soon as you THINK of a tree you don’t even have to SEE the tree anymore because the IDEA of the tree is already there. And now, I can just say the word “tree” and you’ve got a tree in your head, but there’s no tree, there’s the idea of a tree.

And that’s what language does. It replaces the actual physical experience of the world with the idea, the representation, of that experience. Do you understand what I mean by that? I mean, I’m doing it right now, just with all these words. Again, there is no tree. Not really. I give you all these words and you make sense of them and you create a reality.

It’s like that video game my kids used to play where you would build cities and things. I mean, there’s no city, there’s just ideas. Minecraft! Thanks. Yeah, it’s like Minecraft. Except with words instead of pixels, but it’s the same idea. Isn’t there a whole section in the Bible where Adam’s walking around naming things? And by naming them Adam's bringing them into existence? In the beginning there was the word, etc. And so you can think of things that are completely fantastical, but as long as you can name them, they exist. You can put an elephant on the moon. And that's pretty cool. And, of course, a lot less cool... you can look at one person and name them "human" and look at another person and name them "slave". And if that's uncomfortable a hundred years down the line, you can name them "worker" instead.

And this is what we do. This is the whole process of learning the abstractions of language. There’s the tree. And then we have the word “tree”. And we have a picture of a tree next to the word - I mean, that’s the way kids learn language, right? If you’re ever around little kids, that’s all little kids do. They point at things and then they ask and then you give them a word and then the word replaces the thing they’re pointing at. You start with the actual tree, then you have the picture of the tree, then you have the word “tree”, and by the time you have the word “tree” you can get rid of the actual tree. And, when the kids get a little older, you can get rid of the picture of the tree, too. Because the word alone represents the idea.

So you go way back, “In the Beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” and God exists because we have a word for God. We have a lot of words for God.

And not to get all Pagan about it, but we also have a lot of words for "Tree." In Irish the word for “tree” is “crann”. In Basque the word is… I can’t even pronounce it. “Zuhaitz”. In Bosnian it’s “Druo”. In Dutch, “Boom”. In German, “Baum”. In Estonian, “Puu”. In Norwegian, “Medis”. In Catalan, “Arbre”. So we all see the same thing, but we all have different words for it and maybe different associations with it. And sometimes those differences are important.

Do you remember when we were talking about food, and dogs and ducks and chickens? All around the world, you look at an egg and you think “Yeah, that’s something you can eat” and you look at an apple and you think “Yeah, that’s something you can eat”. And then you look at a dog and now you start to have issues. Well, everybody sees a tree, right? I mean, one of the reasons we were able to survive as a species is because we were able to climb trees. So we all have a “Matt Damon on Mars” relationship with trees. I guess everybody "interprets" a tree in much the same way.

But then you get to other ideas, like “Freedom”. I mean, in America, “Freedom” has a very specific meaning, and in England “Freedom” has a very specific meaning, too. But it’s not the same specific meaning. And it’s the same language, just to make it even more complicated. I think we've talked about this. So it’s the same word, spoken by people who speak the same language, but even within that the conceptual definition of the word isn’t the same. It’s not like a tree. Or an apple. Abstract ideas like "Freedom" or "Justice" or, if you want to go all the way back to our Belfast baker, "Marriage." "Male" and "Female." If you say somebody's "French" how do you define that? I mean, these are all contested ideas, represented by contested words. Hey, a Coke's only worth a dollar if we both agree on our definition of "dollar."

If culture is constantly negotiated, this battle over the meanings of our shared symbols (and rituals, and heroes, and...) is how it's negotiated. And if I can control the language you conceive the world in, that give me a serious advantage, right?

Anyway, so you have “tree” as an unnamed (unexperienced) object. And then the people show up and now you have “tree” as a named (experienced) object. “Tree?” “Tree.” “Tree!” And then you have - you don’t even need the actual tree anymore, you have the word representing the idea of tree, and then finally you have “tree” as an idea independent of the object entirely. Now you own it. You know, with different cultures and different languages you do different things with that idea. It’s yours now, so play around. You have “tree” as a metaphor, like the “family tree” or the “money tree” or the “language tree”. And then “tree” as an idiom, “barking up the wrong tree” or “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. But all of this starts off with the naming of the thing, of the word.

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I’m almost done talking about trees.

One of the cool things about the whole human migration pattern is how languages develop alongside them. Which makes sense, and which is why the Catalan word for “tree” and the French word for “tree” are similar. But sometimes you get weird relationships. You get Hungarian, which is related to both Turkish and Japanese, I think? I’m not sure anybody really even knows how that happened. But the idea of languages following migratory patterns - remember the “Eve” theory? - there’s a whole school of linguistic anthropology trying to find connections between human evolution and language evolution. But nobody really knows. Some people say it goes back 100,000 or 200,000 years, some say 50,000. Human evolution left fossils and bones. No such luck with language evolution.

And languages change, just like cultures change. Just as cultures change. Because cultures change. Languages and cultures are changing all the time. They only seem permanent because you're in the middle of them.

This is the language tree, by the way. I told you I wasn’t done with trees. And it basically follows those migration patterns we talked about earlier. That’s why… going back, let's follow the European Languages route. And then it splits off into Slavic and Romance and Germanic, and then there’s this split in Romance between what eventually turns into Spanish and Italian and French, which itself splits off into… anyway, you get the idea.

If you remember the causes of human migration, food and politics and weather, this group all headed this way for a while and they all spoke the same basic language. And then inevitably something happened, somebody stole somebody else's cow, whatever, and then they split. Then we all branched out from a common root or set of roots into various families as we kept moving into new territories and developed new cultures and different concepts of the world.

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OK, I want to talk about Edward Sapir for a minute because he’s really very cool. Sapir basically said that you can’t experience the world independent of the language that you experience it in. Right? The differences between languages are the differences between perceptions as well. Syntax, semantics, phonology. Which I suppose is the final logical step in Empiricism to the next step. Because when John Locke was talking about Empiricism, what he was saying was that the world has to be understood to be experienced, you know? It has to be perceived to be understood to be experienced. And what Saphir was saying was “Yeah, that’s true. And not only does it have to be understood, but that understanding depends on what language you’re conceiving the world in.”

OK, this is the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, and I'm not even sure they worked together directly. But basically what they’re saying is that language structure affects the way its users conceptualise the world. They originally argued that it absolutely determined the way we perceive the world, but I think attitudes have softened a little. Now I think it's more like language influences the way we see the world. But what I think is interesting about whole Saphir-Whorf thing, is that they’re saying that the world exists, right? That there is a universal reality, but that your language determines how much of that pre-existing reality you can experience. So if you don’t have a word for a color, you can’t really see that color. If you don’t have a word for that emotion, it’s hard for you to feel or at least articulate that emotion. If you don’t have a word for “tree” - and fortunately we all do - you can’t really “experience” the tree and so the tree doesn’t “exist” in that sense of existence. And what Sapir-Whorf would say is that it’s not that the tree isn’t there, it’s that it doesn’t “exist” - for you. Because you can’t experience it because you don’t have a language to experience it in.
     
So, yeah. “Linguistic Determinism”. The language structure controls the thought and the cultural norms, and we experience the world only to the extent that our language allows us to. If you can’t name it, you can’t experience it, and so it basically doesn’t exist. In your culture. But if they've got a word for it, it might exist in another culture.

And leads to the idea of "linguistic relativity", which is basically the idea that language and culture influence each other in tandem. Which is what we’ve been saying about culture anyway. Cultures change as the experience changes, right? You’re an individual on a bus, and then the bus gets hit by a taxi, and now you’re part of the community of people that were on that bus when the accident happened. You were part of a group, and then somebody stole somebody else's cow, and now you're part of a different group. Culture changes and as it changes language changes around it, and then our reality changes, because we have new words to experience that new reality. Culture controls and is controlled by language.

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Alright, this next thing. This next thing is kind of the opposite of Sapir-Whorf. What Sapir-Whorf is saying is that “tree” is tree, and if you have a word for it, great, but if you don’t have a word for it, that tree is still there. That there is an objective reality and that the language lets you see as much… to the extent that it lets you see it. 

This is an alternative idea. This is the idea that reality itself is just a product of an agreement within a social group. Language doesn't just contextualise experience, language creates reality, and that reality is subjective and constantly negotiated. I mean, we're in real "Minecraft" territory now. I mean, we'll start with an easy one. A dollar is a dollar because we say it’s a dollar. It’s not exactly “real”. A flag is only a flag because we agree to invest a whole bunch of emotion into it. Otherwise, it’s just a piece of cloth.

And this contradicts Sapir-Whorf in an interesting way, in that one’s cultural reality is predetermined by one’s language. So if Sapir-Whorf were saying “No, reality is here, whether you can see it or not” social constructionism says “no, reality only exists once you create it.” Language allows us to see some pre-existing reality, says Sapir-Whorf. Social Constructivism says language allows us to create (and then negotiate) a mutable reality.

So here’s my question. If you had to pick a team. If it was Batman or Superman, is it Saphir-Whorf or is it Social Constructivism? Saphir-Whorf, just let me remind you. Saphir-Whorf, there is an objective reality and if your language lets you see it, great, and if it doesn’t, fine, but that reality exists either way. It’s there. OR, Social Constructivism, the reality changes as you kind of agree to the changes. Is there a fixed reality, and our language helps us see that reality? Or is reality changeable? I mean, ultimately I guess it’s both, you’re right.

Because this goes beyond party tricks with language. The Belfast Baker believes in the idea of a pre-existing and non-negotiable reality. "Marriage" only exists between a "man" and a "woman" as determined by "God". I mean, for that guy, those are unquestionable certainties. JK Rowling, for that matter, believes in pre-existing definitions when it comes to gender and identity as well, although I don't know if there's any God thing in it for her. But what about "race"? We all agreed a couple of weeks ago that "race" doesn't exist - at least not as anything more than as a social construct. I won't get too much into the Rachel Dolezal thing here, but in Washington State there was a woman who identified - who still identifies - as African American, even though her parents are white. And it'd be one thing if she got caught and said "OK, you got me." But that's not what she said. She said "Yeah, it's true that my parents are white, but I identify as black." Now what are you going to do? If I'm going to say that gender is a social construct, and that I support an individual's right to identify in whatever way makes sense to them (and I do), am I not then obliged - if I see race as another social construct - to support Rachel Dolezal's right to identify in whatever way makes sense to her as well? And if you say no, why not? What's the difference?
     
If you talk about the Saphir-Whorf thing, if that’s the opinion you hang on to, then Rachel Dolezal is this white woman from Spokane who got caught pretending to be black. However, if the “social constructivism” thing is the ticket, then Rachel Dolezal might have started off as white, but then her identity shifted as her reality shifted because she decided that her reality was different.

One of the books I have here says that "Language produces meaning through a system of relationships, by producing a network of similarities and differences." So, for example, if you say “black dress” not only does it mean “black dress”, but it also means “not-blue dress”. Or "not-gold dress". or not-green. If we say “girl” we understand it as girl, but we also understand it as “not-boy, not-woman, not-man”. And as the culture changes, our relationship with those ideas change, then our relationship with those words and definitions have to change, too. And if you can change the language, either through use or disuse or consensus or whatever, you can influence that relationship. This is that "Linguistic Relativism" thing Sapir-Whorf were talking about. You change the way you think about things when you change the words you use to think about them in, and vice versa. So, for example, if you want to move away from binary gender - as a concept - you move away from binary gender pronouns. Sometimes the culture takes hold of the changes, sometimes it doesn't, but that't the idea. The guys at the front of the culture train are switching from - some of the guys at the front of the culture train - "he" and "she" to "they" and maybe the guys in the middle of the culture train will take to it, maybe they won't. We do it with racial terminology all the time, from "negro" to "black" to "African-American" to "Black".

And the reason I think that’s interesting is because it goes back to the Rachel Dolezal question right here. How do we understand her? How should we understand her?     

And that’s the thing. I mean, I know we’re going back to an older conversation here, but gender, for example. What does the word “male” mean? What does “female” mean? Is that negotiable or is it non-negotiable? I think it’s a really interesting question. And if we all agreed a couple of weeks ago that race doesn’t exist, or that gender doesn’t exist, or that they’re all social constructs, then why am I all for people deciding which gender they are but not which race?

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And then experiential equivalence. “Schadenfreude”, if you know that word. I like “Schadenfreude”. It’s a German word and it’s a very German concept. Basically it means getting guilty pleasure from somebody else’s misfortune. Which is just such a heavy, heavy … you know, something bad happens to somebody else and you feel good that something bad happened but at the same time you feel shame, you feel bad, for feeling good about something bad happening to them. And for some reason that strikes me as a very German emotion. No, there isn’t an English word for it. That’s the whole point. It doesn’t translate. And so we have to use that word, even though the emotion is familiar enough. 
     
Wabi-Sabi, I don’t know if you know that one? It’s Japanese? Wabi-Sabi means, uh… how to describe it? Essentially taking aesthetic pleasure from imperfection. That because something isn’t perfect, it’s more aesthetically pleasing than if it were.
     
And the next one is French, right? “Depaysement”? Which I guess means… I don’t know. How would you translate it? “Homesick”? I don’t know if that really covers it. “Removed from the place of home” or something? It’s more than just a change of scenery, right? Is there an emotion attached to it?
     
And then in English we have “Jinx”, and I don’t think there’s a translation for that one in other languages. Maybe you use the word, I don’t know. Again, how the hell do you describe “Jinx”? It’s a superstition, or it ties in with superstition. To jinx something is… if there’s a competition between two people, for example, and one person says “I think he’s going to win” before the race is over, that’s bad luck. That person has just jinxed the race. By saying that, you’ve just put bad luck on the person who you think is going to win. So you don’t say anything until the race is over. It’s not necessarily intentional. Also, another thing that happens, when two people say the same thing at the same time, at least in America, if two people say the same thing at the same time just by coincidence, the first person to say “Jinx” has power over the other one. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but… it’s a hard one to describe. All of these are hard to describe, that’s the whole point I guess.

And then finally - and we already kind of talked about this - conceptual equivalence. “Freedom” in the United States and “Freedom” in the U.K. and “Liberte” in France. I think when the French are talking about “Liberte” they’re not talking about the same concept of “Freedom” that they’re talking about in the United States. 

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Pidgins, Creoles and Universal Languages

Do you know “pidgin”? Pidgin isn’t really a sophisticated language in that there’s no literature, it's not really a written language. It’s basically improvised and comes from trade, right? It comes from global trade. So if I’m a Dutch sea captain, for example, and I’m in Singapore and I’m negotiating with somebody who speaks Portuguese and I’m negotiating with somebody who speaks Mandarin and my boss is English, and I'e got to load cargo onto my ship and put together a crew and leave at sunrise, and none of us speak the same language, what we do is kind of mash together a kind of “Frankenstein” kind of thing - we mash together a language that’s taken from all those other languages, Dutch and Portuguese and Mandarin and English and whatever else, just to get a basic communication going. Along with a lot of gestures, pointing for example. A lot of pointing. It’s not really a “taught” language with a set of rules. It has a really limited and temporary vocabulary. It doesn't have any verb tenses. It's like pre-historical intercultural communication, as close to caveman language as we get. But we use it, instinctively, because how else are we going to communicate? We're a language-based species, it's how we makes sense of the world. Our instinct for language is like our instinct for walking, it's an innate human characteristic.

Anyway, pidgin. It’s a compromise language. And nobody speaks it when they go home, they only use it in contact with each other and it only lasts as long as that contact.

As opposed to “creole”, which is a really interesting one. It's more of a hybrid culture. And I should say a creole, because there are a lot of them. This is a picture from Louisiana, this is a creole family. And it's essentially a product of globalisation and colonialism. You know, you've got the Dutch sea captain loading up his ship and he's gone as sunrise. But the guys loading up his ship aren't going anywhere, they'll be loading up another ship tomorrow. They're rooted in the place at least a generation or two and they've developed an actual language with a wider vocabulary than pidgin and its own set of rules.

And so you'll find English creoles in Australia and Barbados and Belize. You'll find French creoles in Haiti and Mauritius and Louisiana. Portuguese creoles in Singapore and Sri Lanka and Macau. "Spanglish”, for example. There was a poetry movement in New York in the 1970s made up of Puerto Rican-born New Yorkers called the “Nuyorican Poetry Movement” and it was made up of a whole generation of kids who weren't seen as Puerto Rican enough by the Puerto Ricans or American enough by the Americans, so they claimed it as their own thing and they wrote poetry and plays - it was an oral tradition but they wrote it in a mix of Puerto Rican Spanish and New York English. I’d call it a creole, I’m not sure they called it a creole.

   

So essentially a language made up of a couple of other languages and different cultures meet and mesh. And then that new language develops over generations. If that's the definition, I can't think of a language that wasn't a creole at some stage, and I guess that's the idea. Languages develop as cultures develop, and as one changes, so does the other. The history of the culture is in the language. "Thursday" is "Thursday" because the Vikings wanted to name a day after Thor. "July" and "August" only exist because the Romans were in charge for a while, and "Parliament" and "Justice" only exist because William the Conquerer beat King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. And that was a thousand years ago. Anyway, you get the idea.

 

And then the idea of a universal language, and I guess the most famous one would be “Esperanto.” The story behind the development of Esperanto is kind of heartbreaking, because it was so well-intentioned and it failed so badly at what it had set out to do. Basically there was this Polish Jewish eye doctor named L. L. Zamenhof, and around the turn of the last century he devoted all of his time when he wasn't being an eye doctor to developing a universal secondary language. He based in in European languages, and tried to make it simple enough that everybody could learn it in a week. He wasn't trying to replace other languages, but he figured that if everybody could communicate with each other through this alternative one... I think after the war between Germany and France in 1870, Zamenhof came up with the idea that if we all spoke… if everybody in Europe at least spoke a universal language, everybody would get along and there would be peace. And as that goes, it was a disaster, it didn’t work at all. Zamenhof's own kids were killed in the Holocaust. But it was a cool idea and it wasn't intended as any kind of novelty, even though it might have become one.

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Of course, we already have a universal language, ore or less, and we're using it now… actually, I should ask you guys. You’re all European, I think. You guys are from where? You’re from Europe, you’re from Asia, you’re from Africa. You’re from all over the place, right? Here, let’s make up a flight. You’re flying from Singapore to Dakar with a stopover in Amsterdam. For some reason. You're flying from Sao Paulo to Dublin via Frankfurt. You're flying from Tokyo to Montreal via Los Angeles. What language is everything in? And it doesn't have to be anybody’s first language, but it is the language that everybody understands enough to communicate with each other well enough. Enough to watch CNN in the airport bar.

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And then finally, the whole thing about having a national language, which I think it more complicated than it might first come across.

And again, this goes back to the perception thing and the naming thing and the hegemony thing, right? You see the red light, you name the red light, and then you respond to the red light. And if I can determine how you name it, I can determine how you're going to respond to it. But if I have no control over how you name it, I'm going to get nervous. And we talked about shifting demographics before. I'm already nervous, right?

So there's that argument, and I'm not crazy about that one because that's basically one side claiming the culture and enforcing it to their advantage. You know, the "This-Is-America-Speak- English" argument, and we've talked about this before, like it or not the majority rules, and if the majority wants to speak Spanish for example, which in places like Miami they do ... well, that's just how culture works. But it's an emotional subject, and people get very upset when they feel like they're losing their place, and so every once in a while you'll get a video of some guy losing his shit in a deli in New York or something when the waitress starts speaking Spanish to the fry cook. You know, that thing.

But then there are a couple of arguments I think you could make for a national language which aren't just the usual xenophobic "This-Is-America-Speak-English" argument. The first is social cohesion, which is what French does, or at least tries to do, in France. Or Italian, although maybe not as successfully, in Italy after Garibaldi. But in France, going right back to the First Amendment of the constitution. If you make the case that there is no Black or White or Christian or Muslim or Gay or Straight or - We're all just "French" - well, then you're going to have to come up with a working definition of "French." And language goes a long way towards doing that. We are "French" because, at least when we're together, we speak French and we think in French. You know, a shared language assimilates a collective conscious. Or something.

Another reason is that, in America anyway, money speaks English. I'm not saying it should, I'm just saying it does. If you want a bank loan, if you want an office job in Midtown, if you want a college education, that's just the way it is. And if that's true, you're not doing anybody any favours by not making English mandatory. If anything, you're helping ghettoise already marginal groups of people. Whatever your intentions. 

My mom was a school nurse in California, in the early 1990s, and about half the students in the grade school where she worked were basically middle-class white kids and the other half were basically working-class Mexican kids. And there was a serious debate in a lot of California public schools at the time about teaching subjects like math and, I don't know... probably not history, but at least offering subjects in Spanish for the Mexican kids. And a lot of the teachers - good liberal NPR-listening White teachers, just like me - were all for it. "Spanish is a beautiful language and it will help these kids access subjects and..." And their intentions were good. But of course they were having these debates in English. And they all seemed to feel very proud of themselves. Anyway, my mom was against it, and it wasn't because "This-Is-America-Speak- English." She basically argued that if these Mexican kids didn't learn English, it didn't matter how smart they were at the other subjects. It didn't matter if they were little math geniuses. Their parents were probably pretty smart, too. But if these kids couldn't speak English, in ten years the boys were going to be out picking strawberries with their dads and the girls were going to be changing hotel sheets with their moms. Because money speaks English.

Hell, you guys are all French Business Students, you already know this. You aren't learning English so you can read Chaucer.