Talkin' About Talk Date Archives

Is Sign Language a Universal Language?

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There are two widespread myths about sign languages. One is that they aren't languages at all and the second is that signs are a universal language. That any signer can understand all signers anywhere in the world. Both ideas are false.

It's easy to see why you might ask if sign languages aren't really languages -- they're so different from what we often call "tongues". They have to be seen rather than heard. And some signs look like what they represent, making them easy to dismiss as just gestures. But in 1960, the first scientific description of American Sign Language (commonly called ASL) was done at Gallaudet -- the only liberal arts university for deaf people. And the question was totally resolved. William Stokoe showed that -- except for sound -- sign languages have all the linguistic features that spoken languages have.

A word in spoken language, of course, is made up of sounds, made with your mouth and tongue. In ASL, the components of a word can include how you shape our hand, where you place it, and how you move it. Sign languages have complex grammars, so that words can be strung together into sentences, and sentences into stories. With signs you can discuss any topic, from concrete to abstract, from street slang to physics. And if you have any doubt, think about public events you've seen recently. After watching a signer interpret the State of the Union or a commencement address, could anyone still believe it's not a language?

As for the second myth, it's not as well known that sign languages vary -- just as spoken languages do. Whenever groups of people are separated by time and space, you get separate languages, or at least separate dialects. This is as true for sign as it is for spoken languages. Yes, there are dialects of ASL. It can vary geographically, like American English does, and across social groups. And sign language varies internationally too. The signs used in Italy aren't readily understood by a signer using ASL, and vice versa. In ASL the sign for TREE is made by holding up your hand with your fingers spread. The Danish version is done by tracing the outline of a tree with your palms. Both are based on the same image, a classic leafy tree, but the signs that result are quite different.

Whenever people can't talk to or hear one another, they turn to signing of some kind. Think about hearing adults who need to talk to each other in signs, like monks who have taken vows of silence. Or widows from certain Australian Aboriginal groups expected not to speak during a long period of mourning. In those cases, the sign language invented reflects the grammar of the spoken languages of the adults. But that's an exception. In most cases, sign languages aren't based on the spoken language in the culture around them. If you still think they are, you'll be shocked to learn that signers of ASL don't understand users of British sign language. And British signers don't understand ASL -- even though both swim in a sea of English.

There are at least a half million users of ASL in the U.S., and possibly as many as 2 million. It's routinely taught in schools across the country, and all 50 states recognize it in some way. There are said to be 147 colleges and universities in which the study of ASL can be used for the university's language requirement.

It's really an amazing language system. And according to hearing students who have learned it, communicating in "sign" can give you a totally different perspective on the world -- and an understanding of how non-hearing people perceive it. It opens a window to a different culture. So the next time you think about learning a new language, think about signs.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Leila Monahan in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Are Dialects Dying in the US?

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Here are four people, from four parts of the country, saying the same word:

boht... baht... baot... buaht.

So how do you pronounce the vowel in the word spelled B-O-U-G-H-T? Do you pronounce it in one of these ways -- or in a different way?

Is the carbonated beverage you drink pop, soda, tonic, co-cola -- or maybe even the older Appalachian mountain term -- dope? When you take the highway circling the city, do you drive on a beltline, a beltway, a loop, or a perimeter? And do you get cash at a bank machine, an automated teller, a cash machine, or an ATM?

Everyone notices dialects -- we can't help it. But most of the time, we notice them in other people. We don't speak a DIALECT where we live, we speak normal English. Speakers from Boston, Chicago, Birmingham, Alabama, and San Francisco all echo the same sentiment. Of course, they do this while pronouncing the vowel in words like bought and caught in quite different ways. Or, while eating the same sandwich by a different name -- a sub, a grinder, hoagie, or a hero.

Dialects are everywhere -- it's not just the South, New York, or Boston -- regions that seem to get the most dialect press. The fact of the matter is that it's impossible to speak the English language without using SOME dialect when you speak. In other words, everyone has an accent. When you pronounce the vowel in bought or caught -- or was that baht and caht? -- you've made a dialect commitment -- you can't help it. We are all players in the dialect game, whether we like it or not.

But isn't this a different world? -- a global community where people move fluidly, travel frequently, and speak to each other by cell phone? Aren't dialects dying out, thanks to mobility and the media? Think again! Dialectologists counter the popular myth that dialects are dying by showing that major dialect areas like the North, Midland, and South remain very much alive -- as they have for a couple of centuries. But the dialect news is even more startling! Research shows that Northern and Southern speech are actually diverging -- not becoming more similar. Blame those shifty vowels, where the sound of speech in large Northern cities like Buffalo and Chicago is changing in ways that make the vowels different from other regions. So coffee becomes cahffee, lock sounds almost like lack, and bat sounds more like bet. Got it? Don't worry. It's pretty subtle, and a lot of it flies under the impressionistic radar. But it's also very active and real -- and it's making the vowels of Northern Cities quite different from those in the South or West.

How can this be? It seems so illogical for dialects to maintain themselves in today's compressed world. Language is always changing, and sometimes has a mind of its own. Sure, we all watch the same TV programs; but most of us don't model our accent on TV newscasters -- that's way too impersonal. We follow the lead of those we interact with on a daily basis -- they're the ones who judge how well we fit in with the community.

And there remains a strong sense of regional community in the United States that includes dialect. So working class Pittsburghers are proud to speak Pittsburghese -- as they root for the Pittsburgh Stillers -- instead of the Steelers; go dahtahn -- instead of downtown, and put a gumband around their papers -- instead of a rubber band. Part of being a Pittsburgher is speaking Pittsburghese.

But aren't SOME dialects dying? -- like the dialects once spoken in isolated mountain and island communities now flooded by tourists? That's true, though sometimes these communities fight back with their dialect -- just so they won't be confused with "fereigners" -- as they are sometimes referred to in the rural South.

Meanwhile, places gaining momentum -- like Northern California or Seattle -- are starting to portray their new regional identity with dialect traits. So some traditional dialects may be dying out, but they're being replaced by new dialects, like a dialect version of "whack-a-mole." The famous words of Mark Twain apply well to American English dialects: rumors of their death are greatly exaggerated. Dialects remain alive and well -- and an important part of the regional and socio-cultural landscape of the United States.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Walt Wolfram, professor of Linguistics at North Carolina State University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And if we use your question on the air, we'll send you a membership to the Museum of Language. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do.. language makes a difference.

Why Do Languages Change?

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Have you ever left a Shakespeare performance feeling worn out from trying to understand what the characters were saying? It wasn't just because Shakespeare's English is poetic, but because the English that Shakespeare knew was, in many ways, a different language from ours. When Juliet asked "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" she wasn't asking where Romeo was -- after all, he's right there under the balcony! Wherefore meant why. But we no longer have that word because languages shed words all the time. And they also take on new ones, like blog.

Languages are always changing. It's as inevitable for them to change as it is for cloud patterns in the sky to take on new forms. If we see a horsy in the clouds today and walk outside and see the same horsy tomorrow, then something's very wrong. It's the same way with languages -- every language is in the process of changing into a new one.

In English, you can see this easily because our spelling often preserves the way the language was pronounced seven hundred years ago. The word name, for instance, used to be pronounced "NAH-muh." But we stopped saying the final /e/ and the AH sound (NAHme) drifted into an AY sound (NAYm). And then, grammar changes, too. English used to be a language where verbs at the end of the sentence came. That is, that's how you would have said that last sentence, with "came" at the end. We also used to have more pronouns. You was only used when you meant "y'all," while in the singular there was thou. And then for the "generic" you -- as in a sentence like "You only live once" -- the pronoun was man. Now we just use "you" for all of that.

This kind of change is why we face the task of learning foreign languages. If language didn't change, we'd still all speak the first language that popped up in Africa when humans first started to talk. But once the original band of people split off into separate groups, the language took on new forms in each new place -- different sounds, different word order, different endings. The result was that Chinese has tones; some Australian languages have only three verbs; some African languages have click sounds; many Native American languages pack a huge amount of information into single words; and English uses the same word you whether one or two people are involved.

The only thing that makes it look as if a language stays the same forever is print, because print does stay the same way forever. We think of Latin as a dead language, because it was written and we can see it on the page. And we know that no one speaks that particular Latin anymore. But technically, the Latin we struggle with in classrooms was just one stage in a language that never died. It just drifted into several new versions of itself like French, Spanish, and Italian. We don't think of the language of the opera Don Giovanni as "street Latin" -- it's a new language altogether. There was never a day when people in Italy woke up and proclaimed "We were speaking Latin last night but today we're speaking Italian!" Latin just morphed along like cloud formations, and after a while what was once a horsy was a wabbit.

But within our lifespans, it's hard not to think of changes in our language as mistakes. There was a time when people in France thought of early French as just grade-F Latin instead of as a new language in its own right. Gray zones are always tricky. So, when young people say things like "She's all 'don't talk to me like that' and I was like 'you shoulda known anyway'", they're pushing the language on its way to new frontiers. It was through the exact same kinds of changes that English got from Beowulf to Tom Wolfe.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. John McWhorter, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at . In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: maria otero-davis at June 6, 2005 11:59 AM

Is Pidgin English just Bad English?

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How una dé? Uskain nius? These two greetings, the first from Nigeria and the second from Cameroon, both mean roughly "Hi, what's happening?" Both use words from English, but combine them in new ways. It's like when we greet someone by saying "long time no see," or when we invite a friend to come have a "look-see" or use "no can do" when something's not possible. When we do that, we're no longer speaking English. It's a new language -- based on English words but with simpler grammar and vocabulary. "Look-see" and "no can do" come from a language once called China Coast Pidgin English, and was used by sailors and merchants throughout the Pacific. But what kind of bird is this "pidgin?"

Imagine for a moment that everyone listening to this program spoke a different native language, not English, but that each of us had studied a year or two of English somewhere along the way. If we all get stranded on the proverbial desert island, we'd have to use our bits of English with one another, with no grammar books, and no native speakers to correct us or teach us new words. As the years went by, we'd all become fluent in this way of talking, and we'd invent combinations that a true native speaker of English would barely recognize.

A language formed this way -- among people sharing no native language and forced to communicate in one that no one speaks well -- is known by linguists as a Pidgin (spelled P-I-D-G-I-N). The word probably comes from South Sea traders' mispronunciation of the word business.

Pidgins start out as simplified languages, but something happens when children are born into pidgin-speaking families. It's the only language the children know, and they expand it. These new languages, spoken natively by the next generation in the family, are called creole languages. There are dozens of creole languages scattered around the world, derived from European languages such as English, French, and Portuguese, but also from Arabic, Swahili, and other non-European tongues. English-based creoles are used in the South Pacific from Papua New Guinea to the Solomon Islands and northern Australia. Gullah in South Carolina and Georgia and Hawaiian Pidgin are creole languages native to the U.S.

Creole languages have millions of speakers. And they aren't "broken" versions of what you might think of as "real" languages. They have established grammars, they're taught in schools, and used in radio, television, and the press. The Pidgin used to open this broadcast is spoken in much of West Africa. While many people mistakenly refer to it as "broken English," it's the language of African popular music and literature, and of novels that won a Nobel Prize.

Creoles often include words and expressions that speakers of languages like English or French would recognize, but with very different meanings. For example, beef in West African Pidgin English refers to any animal whose meat can be eaten. So a pig could be a "beef." In Papua New Guinea the word Meri (from the English name "Mary") is a word for woman, any woman.

Speakers of languages with long literary traditions sometimes laugh at creole languages, thinking of them -- and their speakers -- as inferior. But that kind of viewpoint has no basis in fact. Creoles are new languages, at most a few hundred years old, and deserve the same respect as the world's new nations, many of which also emerged through struggle.

Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human rights, translated into Nigerian Pidgin English, begins: Everi human being, naim dem born free and dem de equal for dignity and di rights wey we get, as human being. Speaking a creole language with pride and dignity is one of those basic human rights.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Dr. John Lipsky from Penn State University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.