If, however, you decide to read on and
find out what this report in fact reports, you may agree with me that
the headline is not about the death of language, but about “language
death”, a concept which became standardised in discussions of the
demise of particular languages. Alternatively, you may agree with the
official who responded to the comment I sent to the BBC about this at
the time, and who dismissed it on account of my unawareness that “the
death of language” and “language death” mean the same thing. As
you can see, the report and its title are still there, both
unchanged.
Whichever the case may be – and
unless, of course, my non-native intuitions
completely fail me –, the mismatch that I’m quite aware of
between the title and the contents of this report illustrates the
ambiguity of the English word language. The word has a
countable meaning, as in ‘one language-many languages’, and a
mass/uncountable meaning, as in ‘language ability’ or
‘acquisition of language’. Which means that there are actually
two English words language, just like there are two English
words thought, as in ‘one thought-many thoughts’, and in
‘human thought’ or ‘thought development’, respectively.
By this quirk of English vocabulary,
the singular form of the count noun language and the mass noun
language are homonyms. This is fine, homonymy and ambiguity
and confusion about what words might mean are probably the rule
rather than the exception, in any language. But the problem is that
ambiguity and confusion percolate through to (assumedly) scientific
accounts of language, by means of the current so-called “language of science”.
Most writing (and probably thinking) about linguistics is available
in English, so it is indeed unfortunate that the language we’ve
come to associate with talk about language lacks the lexical means to
distinguish language from language.
Conflation of both “language”
meanings/words abounds in English-medium academic
publications – which may explain why English-medium popularisation
of research about language doesn’t bother to tell those meanings
apart either. Similar blurring of meanings recurs in languages with
similar homonymy, one example being Swedish and its word(s) språk.
I’ve often wondered whether the confusion stems from deliberate
word play, or from “natural” fogging up of thought paths on
account of formal similarity between words of a particular language,
be it a language that we choose to use (if we have a choice
there) or a language that we have to use (if we don’t). In
Portuguese or in French, for example, things are crystal-clear here:
the linguistic ability shared by all human beings is linguagem
and langage, and specific tongues shared by specific human
beings are língua(s) and langue(s), respectively.
Terminological imprecision of this kind
is what explains that we find English-medium publications where
“language acquisition” means ‘acquisition of one language’;
where “first language” regularly appears in the singular; where
introducing talk about language means introducing talk about a particular language;
and where “language ability” invariably refers to ‘ability in particular languages’.
You can read my most recent review of this resilient English-bound
confusion in a chapter on First language acquisition and teaching,
included in a collection of studies dedicated to folk beliefs about
“language” across the board, Applied Folk Linguistics.
Tolerating vague uses of the core
term(s) of a discipline which prides itself on describing a “unique”
human feature has, predictably, resulted in loose judgements about
those human beings for whom language does not mean a single language.
The next post, by a guest whom I’m proud to welcome to this blog
for the second time, gives a state of the art appreciation of what
clinical assessment of multilinguals has meant.
© MCF 2011
Next post:
=Guest post= Providing clinical services to bilingual children: Stop Doing That!, by Brian A. Goldstein.
Wednesday 7th
December 2011.
Hi Madalena -- the increasing problem of terminological imprecision in news media outlets is a major problem, I agree. A particular bugbear for me is how this (mal)practice has become especially corruptive in political reporting and commentary, as "ideology-creep" insinuates itself into the work and co-opts terminology to serve a prejudice that goes unacknowledged. In the case of the error in the BBC headline, it is careless and clumsy. You were fully justified in bringing it to the editors' attention (your "non-native intuition" is right-on). We can hope that it is the blindness of only one editor in this case. I, for one, really appreciate your attention to this matter.
ReplyDeleteI’m very glad I’m not the only one worrying about these matters, Rebecca! All words are vague, we know that, but it does irk me to see professionals turn to using them in ways that obscure understanding even further. How can we make sense of things, when we need to stop at every word to wonder what so-and-so means by their use??
ReplyDeleteThank you for your support!
Madalena