This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison.
Language is a uniquely human gift. We have shaped it to our individual and cultural needs, and it has shaped us in return. Professor Lera Boroditsky reveals how the sounds we make with our mouths influence what’s going on inside our brains. And podcaster Helen Zaltzmann shows us how important language can be to our identities, and what happens when those language identities are challenged.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Cascades by Sound of Picture
Blossoming by Sound of Picture
Many Hands by Sound of Picture
Kitten by Sound of Picture
Call Now by Sound of Picture
Dramamine by Sound of Picture
Buzzy Minuet by Sound of Picture
Saver by Sound of Picture
Light Touch by Sound of Picture
Periwinkle by Sound of Picture
Trickledown by Sound of Picture
Happiness by Sound of Picture
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, and hosted by Dallas Taylor.
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View Transcript ▶︎
[music in]
[SFX: Montage of Hello’s in different languages and voices]
Hello!
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz... I'm Dallas Taylor.
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Of all the sounds that it’s possible for us to make, nothing comes more naturally than what I’m doing right now. Talking to you, in my native language. When you think about it, the noises that come out of our mouths can be strange, but they’re the basis for how we do... pretty much anything. The languages that we’ve developed to communicate with are really central to who we are, but as the world changes, many languages may be under threat.
Lera: I've always been fascinated by language.
That’s Professor Lera Boroditsky. She’s a cognitive scientist based out of UC San Diego. She’s spent her career thinking about language, and how important it is to us humans.
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Lera: Language is a uniquely human gift. There are no other creatures that have the incredible, complex system of communication that we have.
Animals do communicate of course. Birds have beautiful and complex songs that they use to attract mates and stake out territory [Birdsong SFX]. Whale calls can be heard for thousands of miles across the ocean [Whale songs SFX]. And even insects have their own code of clicks, buzzes, and squeaks made by the percussion on their hard outer shells [Insect noises SFX].
Lera: There are lots and lots of smart, clever creatures out there, but there are a couple of really important differences between animal communication and human language.
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Lera: One is the sheer size of it, so for about 15 million years of evolution, the size of the communicative repertoire of most species is about 15 to 30 different communicative signals.
That means that these animals are capable of saying a maximum of 30 different things. They might have specific noises for ‘Hey, I’m over here’ [SFX: Red fox mating call], or ‘Warning, danger approaching!’ [SFX: Sparrow Warning of Hawk].
Lera: Whereas a 20-year-old English speaker knows about 42,000 words.
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And those 42,000 words can be combined in any number of ways to get a much finer point across. For example, we can tell the difference between having cleaned your car, and having your car cleaned. Same noises, different order, totally different meaning. Or different order, same meaning...
Yoda: “When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not, hm?”
So the size of our vocabulary is one thing that sets us apart from animals. The other difference is how we use it.
Lera: Humans are very social creatures [Chatting SFX]. Humans really like to chat. We like to chew the fat, so we like to talk about, "Oh, what do you think will happen tomorrow, and how do you feel about this?
That’s in sharp contrast to how most other animals use their language tools - they have a much more practical purpose in mind.
Lera: [Bee SFX] When bees come back to their hive and do this wonderful three- dimensional dance in the air to show other bees where the nectar is, that's amazing, but really that's all they ever talk about. They never talk about anything else, right? They don't chew the fat.
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That inclination to chat has led to us coming up with all kinds of ways of expressing our feelings, and describing the world around us. We can talk about what has happened, what might happen, what will happen, what would have, could have, should have happened. Millions of years of evolution has led to an incredibly complex communication system.
Lera: In fact, it's so complex we don't even fully understand how complex it is. There are 7,000 or so languages, spoken around the world, and there have been many more in the past.
Seven thousand languages. Considering that each one has grown from a separate community independently figuring out a unique system of communication, it’s even more incredible. Around the world, and across the history of the human species, we’ve found seven thousand ways of chewing the fat.
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Some of them sound familiar, like Shetlandic, from the small Islands north east of Britain...
[SFX: Shetlandic speaking clip]
While others are difficult for non-speakers to even get their head around. This language from South Africa called Xhosa.
[SFX: Xhosa speaking clip]
Lera: Each of these languages carries in them an incredible cultural history, all of the ideas and thoughts and adaptations that were made by generations and generations of other humans. It's an incredible human artifact, but also an incredible tool for humans to think and communicate. There's absolutely nothing like it anywhere else in the animal kingdom.
Language has given us these tools for communication, which in turn have allowed us to cooperate in a way that’s unique to the animal kingdom too. Shared language is the foundation for civilization. Without it, it’s hard to see how we could organise ourselves to make towns, cities, schools, shops, or any of the stuff that sets us apart from even the most intelligent animals.
But that’s not to say that everything always runs smoothly...
Lera: George Bernard Shaw had this wonderful quote. He said, "The only problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred." We always think that we have communicated things perfectly, only to find out later, "Wait, you thought I said what? For 20 years you thought that?"
Lera: There's no achieving perfect communication, but of course the more rich the communication channel is, the more ways you can come back and verify and say, "I think you said this. Is this what you meant?"
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Another person who spends a lot of time thinking about language is my friend and fellow podcaster, Helen Zaltzmann. Helen makes a podcast called The Allusionist, which you should totally subscribe to. From her exploration of language, she’s all too aware of the power, and the limitations, of the words we use.
Helen: It's not like there's a treaty saying that, "This word means this, and it only means this, and it specifically means this." There's just this kind of tacit agreement between us that something means a certain thing, and we roughly agree on that, and that is how we communicate.
Helen: It really takes everybody to agree to that bargain, and anyone can break it at any time, and then you get chaos.
Helen: It is extraordinary that it works as well as it does.
Helen: The thing is, language is not a concrete thing. It hasn't been invented. It is something that is shaped by every human that uses the language because everyone will use it slightly differently, even without necessarily realizing it… even because our mouths sound different.
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At the most basic level it all comes down to our mouths. All languages are made up of a variety of speech sounds, called phonemes. These are noises that we make by constricting the different parts of our mouths and throat in one way or another, changing the way air flows. Changing the location of that constriction, and how much it’s closed off, will create different kinds of sounds.
Like plosives. “P” and “B” sounds are made by exploding air from between the lips. The same kinds of explosions further back in the mouth make “D”, “K”, “G”. You can literally feel your tongue touching different parts of your palette.
So, give it a try for yourself, and pay attention to where your tongue is.
Repeat after me: P, B, D, K, G.
And right at the very back of your throat, you have the glottal stop, the sudden swallowed pause you find in phrases like “uh-oh”. Try that… “uh-oh”.
Other sounds come from vibrating different parts, like “V, va” formed by teeth and lips vibrating together. Try it “vu va”. Other sounds include the nasal cavity like “Mmm” and “nnn”. Try that “MMMM” “NNNN”.
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Each of the world’s 7000 languages vary on how they use all of the sounds our mouths can possibly make.
Some use relatively few. Piraha in the Amazon region of Brazil uses just 8 consonants and 3 vowels.
[SFX: Piraha clip]
English uses a large set of 44 phonemes, with an unusually large number of vowels. The following sentence uses all the English phonemes:
[SFX: English phonemes clip]
But English isn’t the most diverse. The Taa language from southern Africa has more than 100 phonemes, including many unique types of click.
[SFX: Taa clip]
Now, if you try to imitate a language like that, you’re likely to struggle. If we’re not used to certain phonemes from experience with our own languages, we may have difficulty in finding the right place to form the sounds in our mouths. This is an issue even between American and British English.
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Helen: I just find my own mouth so incredibly limited phonetically. I can't even say things in American, you know, the rhotic 'R,' which is a great difference between American English and British English. My mouth doesn't have the muscles to do it. It's such a shame. You just take it for granted. You can throw it out whenever you want.
Around the rough and rugged rocks, the ragged rascal ran… ruh ruh ruh, ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh.
Helen: My husband's name is Martin. When he introduces him in America, they're like a little... it's a little hard for Americans to understand when he introduces himself. I mean, how would you say it? Martin.
I’d say Martin, but I’d feel like that was probably wrong.
Helen: There's no wrong. Don't go around saying your way is wrong.
Aw, thanks.
Helen: It’s just different.
So, Helen has first-hand experience with how we use English on a daily basis. As part of Lera’s research, she studies how speech sounds vary between different languages.
Lera: English distinguishes "R" sounds from "L" sounds, so "R" and "L" sound really different to us English speakers, but this isn't a meaningful distinction in Japanese. Japanese speakers have a really hard time telling the difference between "R" and "L," because that's just not a distinction that exists in the Japanese sound system.
[SFX: Lost In Translation Roger Moore Clip]
Even within a language, the phonemes can get warped and twisted to produce an almost infinite variety of accents. And it’s a topic that many people feel very strongly about.
Lera: The way you pronounce things, the accent that you carry, carries so much information about your identity. I grew up speaking Russian as my native language, English is my second language, and the way that I speak English to most people just sounds like a normal American accent. If people meet me and they don’t know that I grew up in Russia, if they find out say, two weeks later, they feel very suspicious about me because they can’t hear my accent and they feel like there’s something I’m hiding. So we really take accents to be a great indicator of who a person is, where they’re from. We expect to get a lot of information from it.
It’s kinda inevitable that with language so central to our personal and cultural identity, it becomes more than just a tool for communicating. It comes to define us, and we shape it to our needs. But, as Lera has discovered, the language we use also shapes us in return.
Lera: Languages talk very differently, even about very basic things, about space, time, number, colors, causality, basic things that you would need to name the rainbow or count your fingers or do the hokey pokey.
Lera: For example, some languages don't use words like "left" and "right" and instead put everything in cardinal directions like north, south, east and west. Like Guugu Yimithirr.
[SFX: Guugu Yimidhirr sample clips]
Lera: This is a language spoken in Australia ... even talking about body parts would involve words like "north," "south," "east" and "west," so you'd say, "There's an ant on your southwest leg."
It turns out that using language in this way had a surprising effect on the minds of it’s speakers.
Lera: People who speak languages like this actually stay oriented incredibly well, better than we used to think that humans could.
If I asked you to point to North right now, could you do it? It might take you a moment or two to orient yourself, but the Guugu Yimithirr speakers could do it without hesitation, even in an unfamiliar place.
[music in]
In many ways we’re the sum of the languages we use. We use our words to describe our feelings, or medical conditions, our environment. And the words that we choose to use shape our own minds and our identities.
Lera: For example, are you the kind of person that uses words like "simpatico" or "serendipitous," or are you the kind of person that only uses "literally" to mean literally and not as an intensifier?
Lera: We strongly identify with people who speak our languages. We feel a lot more comfortable around people who we can understand. It's a real marker of identity.
So, language shapes us as individuals and can define a culture. But cultures change, and right now we’re changing faster than ever. What will that mean for communities’ characteristic sounds? Can language move with the times, or are we facing a mass linguistic extinction? We’ll find out, after this.
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[MIDROLL]
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The simple sounds that we make with our mouths are one of the major things that set us apart from animals. The words that we use shape our brains, and are the core of our self-identity.
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Lera: Human language is infinite, because you can keep recombining words in new ways and create new sentences that you haven't heard before. It allows you to infinitely recombine and make new things, basically every time you speak.
Like the recombination of genes leads to evolution in nature, recombination of words eventually leads to linguistic evolution.
Lera: Languages are tools that we craft to suit our needs, and so we have the ability to change things that we find distasteful or not useful anymore in our language.
That's how languages always have changed, is people negotiate with each other about how they're going to talk, in a way that best suits the way they want to think and the world that they want to live in, and so, just a reminder that languages are these living things that we craft and have the ability to change if we want.
Helen: There are words being invented or added all the time, or the meaning is changed because new things are happening.
Every year, new words are added to the dictionary, that sharply reflect our changing world. Recently, the Oxford English dictionary added the word “exomoon”, a moon orbiting a planet that orbits a different star to our own. Because that’s a thing we know exists now, which is pretty cool.
Helen: People are very often resentful of the new linguistic terms, and yet that is a process that has been happening ever since language was first uttered. None of the terms were born at the dawn of time. All terms have been invented at some point, and, you know, didn't used to need a word for airplane, and came up with one when airplanes were invented.
In this way, slowly, gradually, what we consider to be OUR language transforms beneath our noses.
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If you go back in time, the subtle changes in the way our words sound, and how they’re used really add up. This concept is outlined really well in a youtube video from Simon Roper. The video is called ‘The Evolution of English’.
Here’s Simon reading a passage from Charles Dickens in 1860:
Simon: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”
Pretty recognisable, for about 160 years ago. Now let’s rewind another 250 years to Early Modern English and the time of Shakespeare:
Simon: “To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and, by opposing them, end them.”
We can still understand that, but just 100 years earlier, people were speaking Middle English, which is suddenly very different.
Simon: “My name ys Parott, a byrde of Paradyse, By Nature devysed of a wonderowus kynde....”
And if we keep going back in time, about 1000 years ago, the Lord’s Prayer in Old English sounds completely foreign.
Simon: “Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod, to becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa, on eorðan swa swa, on heofonum.”
We can go even further... you have proto-Germanic, and Proto Indo-European, which was spoken about 4000 years ago. It’s thought to be the ancestor of all European languages.
Simon: “Gheuter tim regm eweukwet “Ihxgeswo deiwom Werunom”.
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Helen: I think English is an extremely interesting language because it combines so many other languages. It's very unusual.
The English language has come to reflect the long and complicated history of Britain itself.
Helen: 2,000 years ago, the Romans invaded, they added Latin to the mix. And then, Germanic forces invaded. They added their own stuff. Vikings, and then 1066, the French invaded, and they not only brought French, they brought a different form of Latin… And then, added to all that, you have got all of the words that came into English because of Britain's… very enthusiastic is the euphemism I might use, colonization of the rest of the world.
Britain is an island nation, so has always had a strong navy and from the 16th Century, ships sailed far and wide, discovering and colonizing as they went. At its height at the beginning of the 20th Century, the British Empire encompassed almost a quarter of the world’s population, and land area.
Helen: They took concepts and items from other countries, and they brought the names back with them. There was a lot of linguistic interchange.
Like “pajamas”, which was originally a word to describe the baggy trousers worn by Indian muslims. Or the word “Jungle”, morphed from the Hindi term “jangal”, meaning a dense growth of trees.
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Now, the British Empire is no more, but the English language is still spoken by two BILLION people, more than a quarter of the world’s population. It’s the most widely spoken language in the world, and has been for some time.
And that’s because while the British were bringing home new words, they were also leaving their own language behind.
Helen: English was firstly taken around the world, and often asserted over whatever local languages there were.
Helen: So it was a language of power, and that also might have incentivized people to use it because it is somewhat asserting power or claiming power, or at least attempting to, or communicating with people of power.
Helen: Then it becomes self sustaining because other countries think, "Okay, well if I want to deal with things internationally, I should get on board with what other people can speak." The more countries that do that, the more English is chosen as the international language of, for instance, science.
So for now at least, English is firmly embedded in the cultures of many countries.
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Helen: I think it's an extremely interesting language, but it's also very problematic because it has linguistically colonized so much of the world, and wiped out a lot of languages whilst doing it. So, I love it, but I also feel a lot of pain about what it has done.
The loss of language is something that we’ve become more aware of in recent years. Linguists claim that we’re losing languages at a rate of one every two weeks. They predicted that half of the world’s 7000 or so languages will be extinct in the next century.
The tragic thing is, we probably won’t even realize they’re gone.
Helen: Because there are also a lot of languages that have no written record, because they would have been oral languages. If there's no physical record of the language, then once it's lost and everyone's dead, and it was pre-recordings… you don't even know what is gone.
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In many cases, the loss of language is an unintentional consequence of globalisation. But sometimes it can be a little more sinister.
Helen: What happens when you have a language that is quite specific to your geographical region, or to your race, or to your culture, and then you're not allowed to use it. You can lose a huge amount without language. Not only this collective memory and certain things which would be specific to you and the other people who use the language, and there may not be words for it in other languages, because they wouldn't necessarily need them.
Since the language we speak defines our self identity, and our cultural identity, suppression of that language can mean a direct suppression of a cultural group.
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Helen: For example, the Scots language…
This is a clip from a Ted Talk from Michael Dempster:
[SFX: Scots language clip]
Helen: Which people in Scotland, a lot of them will speak at home, and then they would get to school, and they would be physically punished if they used it. There's a huge amount of shame attached to it. Then, a lot of them would never use it again, or they wouldn't realize that it was actually a language that was very widespread amongst people in Scotland. They might think, "Oh, this is just slang we use in our house, and I mustn't use it anywhere else."
But it’s not all bad news, with a strengthening of the Scottish identity, there’s more widespread support for the language.
Helen: There's been a lot of campaigning to try and revive Scots, and make it more visible. It is an official language now in Scotland, but there are people who are my age or younger who were beaten at school for using it and it's very hard to remove that wiring in your brain. It's such a big thing representing your culture, and your feelings about that culture, and your ways to express it.
The global world of international language is not always easy to navigate, and people haven’t always got it right in the past. But finally we’re waking up to the value of our languages, and what they can tell us about ourselves.
Helen: I think at the root of my interest in language is empathy, because language is so individual to the person who's using it.
Helen: They might not be using it in ways that I think they are, because I only have my subjective experience, and then some academic knowledge of other people, and anecdotal knowledge. I can't truly know what someone else is thinking about, but being aware of the different possibilities of language is one of the few ways available to me to understand someone else's thoughts.
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If we can understand the power of language, then we can be more conscious about the way we use it.
Helen: It's a very, very complex instrument. To use it thoughtlessly can be very hurtful. It can be dangerous, or misleading. Also, you can use it in a very positive way, if you know how to. You can use it to be very kind, or to really expand your horizons, or other people's horizons.
Not only is it helping us connect with other people around us, it’s the key to making us who we are, as individuals, as cultures, and as a species.
Lera: Language is really part of the human essence. The more we understand about human language, the closer we get to what is really unique about the human species, and how we come to be so incredibly smart and sophisticated as we are. The fact that we have so many languages is a real testament to the incredible ingenuity and flexibility of the human mind, that human minds are able to invent not just one way of looking at the world but 7,000 ways…
Lera: That tells you just how much capacity and creativity human minds have, beyond what we're used to in our own languages and cultures, just how much more we're capable of.
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Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team creating the sonic palette of the world’s most thoughtful brands. Find out more at Defacto Sound dot com.
This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound edited and sound designed by Soren Begin, it was mixed by Jai Berger.
Thanks to our guests, Professor Lera Boroditsky and Helen Zaltzmann. Lera continues to research, write, and present on how language helps to make humans so smart. You can follow her work on twitter: @leraboroditsky.
The Allusionist is Helen’s podcast about language, and it’s absolutely fantastic. Be sure to subscribe by searching for The Allusionist. That’s Allusion with an A.
Thanks also to Simon Roper, for the samples of English through the ages, you can find more fascinating stuff on his YouTube channel - just search for Simon Roper.
Gregory Corlett named this episode. If you’d like to help name future episodes, follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Finally, if you haven’t checked out our website, you’re really missing out! You can find all sorts of things, full transcripts of the show, Youtube videos, and links. You can check that out at twenty kay dot org. That’s two-zero and the letter k dot org.
Thanks for listening.
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