3 fun facts about language
All of us speak or read or sign at least one language, but many of us aren’t taught how language really works. Before I went to grad school for linguistics, I was barely taught anything about the rules and patterns of the world’s languages and the ways they are used.
So this month, I’m going to share a few fun facts that I think everyone should know.
1. No one language or dialect is better than another
When we’re growing up, we don’t just learn the grammar of our languages. We also learn to make value judgments about the languages that surround us.
There’s always one language or dialect that is seen as superior.
In experiments, people speaking this prestige version are rated as sounding more intelligent, more powerful, and more scientific.
And there’s always at least one language or dialect that is seen as inferior.
In the US, you might hear it called “broken English.” The minority language I researched in Russia was often dismissed as “a peasant language” or “just a kitchen language.”
In movies and on tv, a low-prestige accent might be used to let the audience know that a character is ignorant or unintelligent or rough.
But linguists know that all languages and dialects are equally complicated, grammatical, and systematic. No one language or dialect is better than another. This includes sign languages, which many people do not realize are real, full, and grammatical languages.
Let’s say aliens arrived and one of the first things they wanted to know was the grammatical rules of all the dialects of English. (It could happen.)
If linguists wrote up descriptions of all the different dialects of English and didn’t say which ones were the prestige versions, the aliens would never be able to guess.
That’s because if you went by grammatical description only, each dialect would be clearly seen as equally complex and equally valid.
It’s only cultural context and misunderstandings that lead people to judge some dialects as inferior. And this is true for every language on the planet.
2. There’s no clear line between language and dialect
Language and dialect sound like technical terms, right?
For most people, language is the top-level category.
A language has a name, it’s associated with a location, and it is distinct and separate from other languages.
If I only speak English and you only speak Mongolian, nobody expects us to communicate easily and understand each other well.
So, a language is something like English or Swedish or Italian or Chinese.
And for most people, a dialect is a subcategory of a language.
Speakers of different dialects may have different ways of pronouncing words (like is there an ‘r’ at the end of car or drawer or draw?). And they may use different words for the same thing (do you say going to or gonna or fixin’ to or finna?).
But even with these differences, most people think of dialects as “belonging” to the same language. People speaking two dialects of the same language can understand each other.
A fancy way to say this is that we think of dialects as “mutually intelligible” and languages as “not mutually intelligible.”
But guess what! There are some things called different languages where people understand each other just fine. And there are some things called dialects where people don’t understand each other at all.
Speakers of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish can read each other’s languages without real difficulty. This is because they are all descended from Old Norse and haven’t diverged too much, especially in the written form. But because Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are three separate countries, we call them three separate languages.
It’s a different story with “Chinese,” where you’ll probably hear about the different “dialects” of Chinese. But bring together a speaker of Mandarin and a speaker of Cantonese and they will mostly not understand each other. Even speakers of Chinese language varieties in neighboring counties might not be able to understand each other.
But China is a single country, with a single shared writing system. So you’ll often hear these language varieties grouped together under the single label Chinese.
There are plenty more examples like these. In the end, it’s not about linguistic rules but about political and cultural history.
3. Everybody has “an accent”
“She’s got a thick accent, so she’s hard to understand.”
“Get a load of your accent! You’re obviously not from here.”
“In drama school, they taught him how to get rid of his accent so he could get more roles.”
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Do you speak with an accent?
A lot of people grow up thinking that accents are for other people.
But everybody speaks with an accent. There is no “unaccented” way of speaking or signing a language.
It’s just that only some ways of speaking are commonly referred to as “an accent” depending on who you are and where you live.
Who is usually labeled as having an accent?
A person who grew up speaking another language and is carrying along some of the rules of that language into yours. Like a Spanish speaker who adds an ‘e’ at the beginning of English words starting with ‘sp’ or a German speaker who pronounces English words ending with ‘d’ like they end with a ‘t’.
A person who comes from a different region or country and speaks a different dialect of your language. For example, a person from Texas visiting New York will probably hear comments on their accent, and vice versa.
A person from the same region who speaks a different dialect because of their race/ethnicity. For example, when I lived in LA, I heard people who grew up there speaking Chicano English, African American English, and a California version of the Western dialect group of US English. In other states, I’ve heard both a Western dialect of US English and what is often called by in-group members a “Reservation Accent” or “Rez Accent” — if you’re not an in-group member you can call it “Native American English.”
Did you ever notice that kids who have parents with a non-local accent still end up speaking the local accent? Many of these kids end up thinking something like, “My parents have an accent, but my friends and I don’t.”
If you think you don’t have an accent, it’s for cultural and political reasons and not linguistic. You probably speak the standard dialect of your region or country. But just like race isn’t only about people who aren’t white, accents aren’t only about people who speak differently from the local standard.
Because your local standard will still be different from someone else’s. Check out these 7 different Portuguese accents or these 65 English accents.
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In the end, a lot of what we think is “language “ is actually politics and culture. There are still rules and patterns to be analyzed. It just gets a lot more complicated (and challenging to analyze) when you realize you can’t separate language from its context.
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