Language: Three ways I'm obsessed
For as long as I can remember, my Twitter (aghhh, “X”) handle has been “human rights, cities, language”. Today I’m going to dig in to the language part. Here are three ways I’ve recently been thinking about the importance of language.
First, there is language for language’ sake, in all its spontaneity and specificity, and what might seem the simple act of naming things, but is of course so much more than that, it’s an act of power, and sometimes resistance. The more diverse, and different, languages across a place are, the more ways there are of understanding and communicating the World: from “official” languages, to slang, to sign.
The photo below is of a board in Abisko National Park in Northern Sweden. It provides the words for certain landscape features in Jukkasjärvi Sami, in Swedish, and in English. The meaning contained in each is not exactly the same: translation is always the best possible bridging between meanings.
And this is a map of languages spoken in Queens, NYC, created by the Endangered Language Alliance. I encountered it around the time that I was gathering the words for “I live here” in as many of the languages spoken in Queens as possible, in written and video form. I keep the map above my desk.
It includes Chinese dialects in Flushing’s Chinatown, like those of Fujian, Shanghai, Hunan, and Guangzhou, which are fading in favor of Mandarin; the jail on Rikers Island where gangs have created new languages to evade authorities; and churches where Coptic – descending from the language of the pharaohs – is still used as a liturgical language.
The second angle that has been on my mind a lot is the terminology that solidifies in professional spheres. It is sometimes necessary, to specify a group or a course of action. Yet so often it puts up barriers to bringing more people in, and therefore to advancing what those professional spheres are working towards in the first place. Like climate target vocabularies which mean little to most people, while a flooded street, or a failed crop, or a soaring electricity bill are all very real. Or like the acronym-filled world of responsible business – MHRDD / ESG / CRSD / DNSH etc, which risks:
a) converting deeply material business impacts on society and the planet to something that can be dealt with through checklist compliance, rather than as a core part of strategy and business-model design, and;
b) being fuel for political push-back, presenting these efforts as elite and disconnected, as is happening in the bizarre way in which ESG has become a punching bag in US politics, the context in which many people are encountering the acronym for the first time.
The third is the fact that some of the fastest developments in Artificial Intelligence have been in the area of large language models and voice recognition. This has the potential to be used in all kinds of creative and effective ways. Yet it puts language – the essence of what it is to be human – into the domain of a money-making race between large tech firms, and brings risks of homogenization, discrimination, and consolidation as they don’t begin to get to the depth and nuance of expression I touched on at the start of this newsletter.
Which brings me back to the idea of language as resistance: language that opens up spaces that expand our possibilities of building connections and moving forwards. This can involve intentionality in listening; inquiry and reporting that’s then communicated in ways that reach the people it needs to reach, to transform mindsets and action; language in all its verbal, visual meaningfulness.
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Two more things…
Because this has been on my mind, I was drawn to (or an algorithm fed me) an article by author Adam Thirlwell: “We’re gripped by graphomania”. It’s an appeal for language outside of the mainstream – and the mix of channels and formats that enable it to flow – drawing on a story from pre-revolutionary France.
And at the endlessly awesome intersection of language and the built environment, check out “Towards a Universal Language of the Built Environment”, a thesis by Qi Wang. It has a wonderful prologue about male cichlid fish on the bed of Lake Tanganyika, who build intricate sand-dune patterns to attract their wives, grain by grain. (Definitely echoes there of grandiose vanity building projects that continue to rise across the globe: though in the case of those, it’s not the owners doing the physical work).
“Each one has its own construction site, very tiny but elaborately tended,” Qi Wang says, adding: “It is the power of crystallizing the information in constructions, the power of communication in architecture, and the power of built language.”