What I Believe To Be True About Language
A reflection of my language ideologies: what they were in the past and what they are now.
With language—as with all in life—we need to become aware of the messages we’ve received to distill what it is that we believe to be true. In this process of distillation we unlearn to relearn, and we are left with beliefs that feel aligned with our current knowledge and experience.
This week, I want to explore how my views of language have changed over the past few years, as well as the qualms that I hope to research in the new year. Most of all, I hope to encapsulate what I—in these last few moments of 2022—believe to be true about language. These ideas might very well change. And I hope they do.
Language Is Not Out There, It’s In Here
For most of my linguistics-studying life, I believed that language was something that could be written down—whether on a piece of paper, a syntax tree, or a grammar textbook—and fully examined and explained. Now, I think that approach to language misses the most important things: speakers, feelings, society…to name a few.
But let’s rewind to why I believed what I believed.
Most of my undergraduate classes in linguistics followed Chomsky’s approach to language. Chomsky differentiates between two forms of language: competence and performance. Each individual has both languages inside of them. Competence refers to how competent a speaker theoretically is in the language—considering that Chomsky’s theory posits that we’re all programmed with Universal Grammar which becomes language-specific as we age, every speaker has high competence.
But no one is perfect, nor is anyone’s language perfect. We constantly repeat ourselves, misspeak, make errors. The reason for that, according to Chomsky, is that when we actually speak and use language, it’s an example of our performance. Since performance language is far from perfect, the job of the field of linguistics is to unlock and unravel that which is competence.
In other words, it doesn’t matter how people actually use language out in the real world. No, language is something that is deep inside of people, inside a Language Acquisition Device. And linguists can and should extract language from context to analyze it.
While Chomsky is a key example, he’s hardly the only structural thinker. And thus, most of my formal education followed this idea that language is a structure to be studied.
Cue my change. I started researching sociolinguists and came across a number of quotes like the one below. And I realized context and speakers really matter.
Speakers’ brains are always embodied, and speakers’ bodies are always embedded in contexts.
Tetel-Andresen & Cater, 2016
This quote shows that language is embodied in individuals who are embodied in society. The first part is important because it shows that who the speaker is matters. The listener might use the speakers’ race, accent, dialect to make judgments about the speakers’ language. If you just recorded the language without taking the speaker into account, it’s almost to say that language is neutral, which it is not.
This lack of neutrality is a great segue for the second half: speakers are embodied in a society. The society matters. The society is filled with English textbooks that promote one version of English and memes that demote another version of English. Those ideologies that permeate our everyday lives show that language is not neutral. And that not everyone’s language is viewed the same way.
What’s In Here Is Language & Language is Individual
At this point, my linguistics journey had taken a sociolinguistics turn. And around the same time, I began researching native speakerism—or the belief that “native” speakers make the best English teachers—rather extensively. I researched the language and teaching differences of “native” and “non-native” teachers, and I was left with this idea that both “native” and “non-native” teachers have strengths and weaknesses. “Native” speakers, for example, have a better command of idioms and slang. “Non-native” speakers, on the other hand, have a better command of explaining grammar.
These lists felt shallow and stereotypical. And they felt like they were always low-key giving “native” speakers a boost in terms of English-language skills, stating that they know more vocabulary, etc. At a certain point, I realized that they were judging both groups as if they were monolinguals. In other words, they weren’t taking into account that the “non-native” teachers knew more than one language…just like every student in the classroom.
At that point, my understanding of language took a bilingualism turn.
The world has more bilinguals than monolinguals. And ESL students, by default, are exclusively bilingual. I wanted to learn how to help students learning English feel empowered by their bilingualism. And just as importantly, how to use their other languages in their English-learning journey.
Another Disruption
The thing is, most ESL classrooms treat students like they're on the quest to become monolingual English speakers—or at least as competent as them. And then I learned about translanguaging.
Translanguaging is a post-structuralist approach to language. That means that language is not treated as a structure to be studied. No, the wild thing about translanguaging is that language—as in English, Spanish, German, etc.—doesn’t exist.
The only language that exists is inside the individual—the individual can learn features of named languages, like English, but their true language is ever-evolving with them, as the quote below shows.
The term languaging is needed to refer to the simultaneous process of continuous becoming of ourselves and of our language practices, as we interact and make meaning in the world.
García & Wei, 2015
This view of language felt right with me, as an individual; my language is a reflection of who I am in this particular moment of my life.
Traveling to Switzerland to visit my family this year, I was happy to see that Möneli (my Swiss childhood name) was still in me. Sure, Möneli spoke in words and not sentences, but she was understood…and she understood almost everything. Speaking High German to my family friends, I was happy to see that the German I studied for years in university was still there. I could hear the grammatical mistakes as I said them, but as people understood, and the conversation went on, I cared less and less.
And my Spanish, with the loss of my grandma this year, is still going strong. And she continues to live as her words and her sayings and her accent come out through me.
That’s what translanguaging means to me: the loving acceptance of the co-evolution of myself and my language.
I hope this loving acceptance—of not just our own language, but of others’ language—spreads through Languaging.
Going Forward
I spent this newsletter indulging in a reflection of what my language beliefs were and what they are now. In other words, I exposed my biases as a linguist and writer.
The truth is, I can only view language through my own experiences, both as a languager and a researcher. And I love sharing newsletters about research that feels aligned with my experience.
But I must admit, some of my favorite newsletters to write have been requests from the community. I don’t think I would have delved into Esperanto or language family trees unless they had been requested. It was in learning about these topics—that I knew nothing about before—that my understanding of language broadened and grew.
In the new year, I hope to continue writing about research relating to identity, accent, and the English-teaching world. But I’m also excited to keep broadening my views of language, and seeing how other fields conceptualize language: how do philosophers view language? Anthropologists?
I’m excited to keep learning alongside you.
Wishing you all a happy new year!