The Power Of Language Is Bigger Than You Might Think

The Power of Language, by Viorica Marian, is a fascinating exploration of how languages play an enormous role in the life that we each lead. 

Words can limit our understanding and experiencing of the world – or they can expand it. Words matter and the greater word choice a language offers its users, the better we are at communicating and understanding. In fact, the more languages one speaks, the better. 

Even teaching a second language to native English speakers can, according to this book, benefit speakers with cognitive, neurological, economic, and cultural advantages. The author brings into play a field that focuses on the relationship between mind and language – psycholinguistics – and offers some very interesting insights. 

Below are excerpted portions of a transformative book:

 

1. It may be a surprise to learn that the majority of the world's population is bilingual or multilingual. More than seven thousand languages are spoken in the world today. The most common languages spoken are English and Mandarin, with over a billion speakers each, and Hindi and Spanish, with over half a billion each, followed by French, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, and Portuguese. Speaking more than one language is the norm rather than the exception for the human species.

 

2. Though it may seem extreme, a multilingual can quite literally feel differently about people, events, or things when using one language versus another. The likelihood of being rattled by curse words or taboo words changes across native and second languages. Speakers of multiple languages not only report feeling different, but their bodies have different physiological reactions (like galvanic skin responses that measure arousal, or event-related potentials and fMRI that measure brain activity) and their minds make different emotionally driven decisions across languages. The exact relationship between positive and negative emotions and language varies across people.

 

3. Linguistic determinism proposes that language determines thought, and linguistic relativity proposes that thought is relative to language and that speakers of different languages think differently. Hotly debated ever since it was introduced in 1929, at its extreme, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the absence of certain words precludes thinking about the things those words refer to, with much of the debate centering on how one defines and measures thought and language.

 

4. One of the most striking recent discoveries in the neuroscience of multilingualism is that knowing more than one language delays Alzheimer's and other types of dementia by four to six years on average. The benefits of knowing more than one language for brain health as we age are especially astounding when you consider that, other than exercise and diet, we know of nothing else that can provide benefits of this magnitude. A delay of several years in developing dementia means more time enjoying life and living independently, and may mean the difference between playing with your grandchildren and seeing them grow, or never recognizing them.

 

5. Fascinating research has also been done on how babies learn language. When we are born, we're able to hear and learn to produce the sounds of all languages-but as we learn the sounds of the language around us, our brain and articulatory system become tuned to the sounds of our native language and we lose the ability to recognize many of the sounds of other languages, usually by the time we enter our second year of life. In a process known as perceptual narrowing, neural pathways corresponding to native phonemes are strengthened, while those corresponding to foreign sounds are pruned. We go from being "citizens of the world" who can differentiate between the sounds of all languages to being "citizens of one country" who only differentiate between the sounds of our native language. For multilinguals, this window of "universal" sound processing stays open longer.

 

6.  It can be argued that multilinguals, as a result of having a larger repertoire of words for labeling emotions across their languages, are able to experience more emotions. Whether having a word to accurately label and capture a feeling influences how you actually feel remains a contested topic (the Sapir-Whorf conundrum raising its head yet again) in areas as diverse as child development, interpersonal relationships, and psychotherapy. Research on affect labeling finds that labeling your feelings disrupts amygdala activity in response to emotional stimuli. Participants who were asked to verbally describe how they felt before giving a public presentation showed greater reduction in physiological activation than control participants. This suggests that labeling our emotions can indeed influence how we feel. At the same time, emotions can transcend linguistic boundaries. 

 

7. The founding fathers, however, did not favor having one official language for the United States. Thomas Jefferson argued strongly against the idea. Founded as a nation of immigrants, in addition to the languages spoken by the many nations of people native to North Amer-ica, the American colonies spoke not only English but also Dutch, French, and German. Indeed, the majority of U.S. presidents have been bilingual or multilingual. Presidents John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Garfield, and Chester Arthur knew several modern and classical languages. For President Martin Van Buren and for First Lady Melania Trump, English was not even the native language —Martin Van Buren's was Dutch and Melania Trump's Slovenian. First Lady Grace Coolidge knew American Sign Language and had worked as a teacher of deaf students.

 

8. In all, over 350 languages and dialects are spoken in the United States. Other than English and the languages spoken by the Indigenous peoples of North America, the most frequently spoken languages are Spanish and Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien). Other widely spoken languages in the United States include French and French Creole, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, German, Arabic, and Russian. All of them are opportunities to examine how language shapes our identities and modifies our capacities while broadening our social perspectives.

 

9. Approximately 26 percent of school-age children in the United States speak a language other than English at home. In many states — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Florida-the numbers are even higher. Places where immigrants settle, where Indigenous populations reside, or where multiple official languages are supported have higher proportions of speakers of multiple languages. In California, nearly half of school-age children are bilingual.

 

10. What distinguishes the language of poets is not the country they originate from but the way in which they unshackle their writing from the conventions and norms of language, changing it as they write, giving it their own unique voice and way of seeing the world. Because languages have different rules, poets in each language must decide which rules to break, and part of what makes translating poetry difficult is that different sets of rules need to be broken across languages. In a way, poetry is its own language, or rather, it creates a language-and with it, a universe—of its own. Like learning another language, the language of poetry shapes one's mind, brain, senses, emotions, and memories.

 

11. Phonological neighborhood size refers to how many

other words in a language differ by only one sound, and orthographic neighborhood size refers to how many other words in a language differ by only one letter. Phonotactic probability refers to how likely sounds are to occur together based on the patterns of the learner's native language, while orthotactic probability refers to how likely the letters are to occur together in a language. Both across and within languages, some sounds are more prevalent than others. Knowing the likelihood of letters and sounds co-occurring makes a difference when playing Wordle and other word games that rely on letter and sound frequencies, and figuring out those probabilities is part of the fun in those games.

 

12. The exact number of consonants and vowels varies across languages. At one end of the spectrum, Hawaiian has 5 vowels and 8 consonants, and Pirah is believed to have 3 vowels and 7 or 8 consonants. At the other end of the spectrum are languages like Lithuanian with 12 vowels and 47 consonants and Danish with 32 vowels and 20 consonants. The Khmer Cambodian alphabet has 74 characters, whereas the Rotokas language on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea has only 12.

 

13. To make it possible to record and reproduce all sounds of all human languages, an alphabet was created called the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. The IPA is used by linguists, speech-language pathologists, language teachers, and other scientists, clinicians, and educators to transcribe the sounds of all languages.

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About Brian Feinblum

Brian Feinblum should be followed on www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2024. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog. His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully).  This award-winning blog has generated over 3.9 million pageviews. With 5,000+ posts over the past dozen years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” For the past three decades, including 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and director of publicity positions at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler. He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.