Thought I’d start out the month strong and long with this post I’ve been sitting on and polishing for a while. Hopefully a good bried break from Labor Day and School Start Stress. Enjoy.
One of my favourite speculative fiction books is Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin. In this work, she details the creation of a women’s language called laadan which is characterized by it’s unique ability to describe complex emotional concepts with ease where nearly all other existing human languages fall short, largely due to systemic misogyny. I agree with her to a point. It is certainly very difficult to express complex emotional topics in this or any existing language. So much so, that people like me have spent entire careers attempting just that. It is, I would argue, the true origin of the literary device itself. However, I don’t think the answer is inventing a whole new language and just expecting everyone to learn it. Most people don’t have the time or access. And what if I wanted to learn Laadan as a blind screenreader user? It’s not like I have access to the native speaker or phoneme coding I would need.
Instead, I would argue that really engaging someone in a story through which you convey the complex ideas you’re struggling to verbalize provides a much more lasting and accessible framework for getting the concepts you want across. IE, I have read the whole Native tongue trilogy 3 times, the first when I really needed it as a teen girl emerging into a misogynistic society, but I have never read the Laadan dictionary she published along with the first book. Partly because the former is available in audio format and the latter is not, but largely because one is objectively more fun than the other. So I write my stories, and in them my characters deliver my points for me. My literary devices convey complex concepts my language has no encodings for. And I do it in English why? I’ll try to explain.
Why is it that so many people worldwide speak English? It’s a non-phonetic language with so many roots that its own rules contradict themselves more often than not. A popular meme describes English as 5 languages in a trenchcoat masquerading as one. Spelling in English is more a matter of memorization than anything else. Any polyglot will gladly wax eloquent about English, or whatever their first language is, presumably. We can even point out other languages that fill in the gaps in our own. So why is this greatly flawed bastard tongue, from some thrice conquered European island one of the most proliferated in the world? Colonialism, you might answer, and that’s definitely a large part of it. There were concerted efforts on the part of some Europeans to force their languages and cultures on the people whose resources they stole. You might attribute it to the US and UK’s large economies and influence in world politics. To which I would answer that businesses have and will always be able to hire interpreters with increasing ease as distance working technology becomes more ubiquitous, and most people’s daily lives aren’t that affected by global politics. Certainly not enough so that they would learn a new language. So why is English such a common second language, despite all its flaws? Media.
If there’s one thing the US has had runaway success with, even internationally, it’s the media industry. Hollywood has produced so much content that the accent it chooses to portray as typical American, my accent, is now considered so; not only internationally but by most of the Americans I know as well. Most of us don’t even know what our middle American accent is called because it’s so over-standardized in our media. When learning a new language, the best way to cement the sounds in your brain is to hear them used in context repeatedly. If you live in a country or region where no one speaks the language you’re trying to learn, 100 years ago, you just would have given up. Now you can just filter your streaming service of choice to show you content in your desired language. And few languages have as large a catalogue as readily accessible as English.
For all its flaws, English is my Mothertongue. It is the language my parents crooned to me when I was a baby, and my grandmother to my mother, her mother to her, and all the way back as far as I can trace. And that’s not something to be dismissed. As much fun as it is to dream of a world where we all gained the ability to perfectly express our emotions, it’s not going to happen. Language always changes. But not overnight. English, like all living languages, is constantly evolving to fit the needs of it’s current users. Whether it’s inventing new terms for things we didn’t have before, or naming things we’ve had all along so we can finally call them our own. We can all choose the words we use and the way we use them. If enough English speakers choose to use our words with empathy and compassion, our language will become more empathetic and compassionate. I’ve seen it already in my lifetime. By the time I’m my grandmother’s age, who knows where we’ll be?
The solution is not, I think, to throw out what we have and start from scratch, rather I want to work with what I have, how I can, so I can try and reach as many people as possible. I can’t say which of us is right, or which path is more difficult; but I know the right one for me. And I think if my namesake, Mary Selina, my mother’s mother’s mother were still here, she’d agree with me.
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