When a relationship breaks down, a dialect dies. Falling in love awakens the childlike joy of inventing words, a verbal genesis. We forge sentences that evoke shared memory, understanding, and shared expressions with hidden meaning. We invent nicknames, new inflections – ours -, keys that are impossible to understand outside the magic circle. It appeals to us to only be understood by those who are closest to us. And when we lovingly explore a yet unknown body, by naming its corners, we create a physical cartography whose toponyms no one else will pronounce.
When we speak, we communicate, but we also draw boundaries. Languages construct the concept of the foreign, the other. So the Greeks called a stranger who murmured an incomprehensible language and gurgling voices a “barbarian.” “Barb” was onomatopoeia for confused babble. In turn, our “Gringo” is derived from “Greek,” alluding to a confusing language. The term “algarabía” is nothing more than an adaptation of al-arabiyya, i.e. the Arabic language, because anyone who ignored it only felt chaotic hustle and bustle. The colloquial attribute “guiris” is derived from “guirigay”, i.e. incomprehensible conversation.
The Tower of Babel symbolizes linguistic proliferation as a curse and punishment. It expresses the longing for a legendary past in which humanity spoke the same language and was a single people. In this mythical time, words would be an accurate reflection of reality. Herodotus relates that the Pharaoh Psammetichus conducted an experiment to discover the original language, proudly certain that it would be an Egyptian language. He gave a shepherd two newborns to raise in silence. Without human intervention, in a lonely hut, only in the company of a few dairy goats, their language would be the original one. The first thing these children murmured was “bec,” and immediately the scholars of Egypt racked their brains to identify it. But the truth is that it sounds suspiciously similar to the bleating of goats, their only friends. Of course no language came out of her mouth.
In the collective imagination, we tend to prioritize languages and accents. The empires and wealthiest regions surge with the powerful music of her voice, while a halo of fragility and weather surrounds the most defenseless. However, the value of a language does not depend on the number of speakers: our language is important to us for emotional reasons, regardless of its size. We feel that it houses a view of the world, the melody of our memory, an architecture of thought, a particular way of naming and illuminating reality. This is how others enrich us too. Only those who can love them all truly love a language.
A universe dies out every two weeks. It is predicted that half of the languages that still exist today will have disappeared by the end of the century. A Nahuatl poem translated by Miguel León Portilla describes this shipwreck: “When a language dies, a window, a door, a different perspective on existence and life on earth is closed to all the peoples of the world.” Broken mirrors forever, Shadows of voices forever silenced: Humanity is impoverished.” In an astonishing adventure, the geographer and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt found the last speaker of an extinct people, the Atures, in a village in 1799 while exploring the Orinoco Basin. It was a parrot repeating learned words without understanding them, like the echo of an extinguished dialogue. Intrigued, Von Humboldt wrote down 40 words from this missing dictionary.
Given the age-old curse, recent research confirms that speaking multiple languages exercises the muscles of our minds: it protects us from cognitive decline and broadens the horizons of our thinking. Perhaps the greatest “barbarism” is to marginalize or despise some of them. The longing for the old myth of a uniform language diminishes us. We are creatures of the diaspora, leaving the caves of tiny tribes in the hustle and bustle of Babel to exchange ideas, explore distances and become a mixed species: from troglodytes to polyglots.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits