What Our Language Reveals About Us

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1 Language Reveals Our Genius For Connecting With Each Other

I confess that when I first signed the contract to write Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love, I wasn’t entirely sure I could write it.

Linguaphile is a fusion of science writing and memoir, a genre that tries to make sense of life by examining the ingredients of one particular life. For me these ingredients include my years in the lab as a language scientist but also a lifetime of rich linguistic experiences and pleasures. I wanted to write a book that intertwined these threads. Working on Linguaphile illuminated for me the wholeness of language as a human experience.

A theme I kept coming back to was the hunger we humans have to align minds with each other. Anyone who’s locked eyes with a 3-month-old baby on a crowded bus has experienced the innate human urge for connection and communication. A child’s earliest language learning is correlated with her ability to follow another person’s eye gaze and coordinate attention with them.

Infants learn new words more quickly from a familiar speaker than from a stranger.

While working on this book, I couldn’t help but consider what a deeply intimate thing it is for a child to learn a new word from a parent: the way she scans the parent’s face for clues to meaning, the way she shifts her attention to match, the way the parent nimbly uses language to comment on what has caught the child’s notice. These skills of alignment run throughout our linguistic lives; they can be seen in real-time conversation, and they are what allow us to understand meanings that have been left unspoken.

I think that human language and human love both come from the same impulse to connect and align with others, so love is a thread that runs throughout the book. One book I read as I researched my own was Helen Keller’s memoir. I was enraptured to come across her notion of love as “invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirits of others.” This is also my definition of language.

2 Language Encompasses More Than Its Information Structure

We’re used to thinking of language as a collection of abstractions (words that map onto concepts along with the grammatical rules for combining them) and in terms of the information it conveys. But while working on this book, I spent more time exploring how language is embedded within our bodily experiences and the context of our relationships.

Infants learn speech sounds better from interacting with another person than by watching a video, even when the information content is exactly the same. They learn new words more quickly from a familiar speaker than from a stranger, suggesting that trust plays an important role. And if a speaker appears not to know what they’re talking about, children resist learning from them. In this regard, we are profoundly different from current artificial systems, which are very good at extracting the informational structure from language but have no sense of such relationships of trust.

Our language is also infused with our sensory memories and experiences, and this allows it to be a source of pleasure and even transcendence, in addition to being a tool for exchanging information. My own relationship to language has been steeped in the pleasure of it. As I worked on this book, it became very important for me to try to distill and convey some of that aesthetic delight for the reader.

3 Language Is at Once Fragile and Resilient

The more I learn about language, the more amazed I am that we manage to understand each other at all. Language is constantly under tremendous pressure due to the limits of our cognitive capacities. One specific source of pressure comes from the fact that our utterances are stretched out over time, as we assemble complex sentences with many linguistic elements that have distinct relationships to one another. This gives language a unique fragility.

Our attention and working memory are shockingly constrained, and, under the pressures of time, language ends up being an imperfect compromise between the capacities of the speaker and those of the hearer. It is riddled with ambiguities, potential misunderstandings, and many disfluencies, backtracking, and seat-of-the-pants repairs. And as we age, our ability to process information slows down, or our hearing falters, adding to these pressures.

And yet, we have many ways of compensating for the potential failures of language. Our ability to align minds through inference and implication helps us fill in the gaps left by our words. And it turns out that the depth of linguistic experience we accumulate over our lifetimes can offset many of our diminishing capacities as we age.

Even deafness, blindness, or aphasia due to a stroke can be overcome as barriers to communication. The human drive to connect is so strong, we manage to find many alternative paths for language to take. In a testament to our communicative hunger and our cognitive flexibility, language finds a way.

Lead image: melitas / Shutterstock

• Julie Sedivy

  Posted on October 15, 2024

  Julie Sedivy is a language scientist who has taught at Brown University and the University of Calgary. She is the author of Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self. Her latest book, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love, will be released in October 2024.

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