Modern Myths

concerning Languages
What is language?
• Language is an arbitrary, conventionalized association between a
symbol and a meaning: there’s no necessary connection between the
meaning of a word and how it’s represented in language (spoken,
signed, or written).
• A language like English, French, Japanese, etc. is an accumulation of
all the unconscious rules in the brains of all the speakers who can
understand each other. Mutual intelligibility is generally how linguists
distinguish languages from dialects, although in practice there are also
social factors at play. (Hence the quote: “A language is a dialect with an
army and a navy”). For example, although Swedish and Norwegian are
mutually intelligible, they’re spoken in different countries so people
often call them languages, while Mandarin and Cantonese are not
mutually intelligible at all but are sometimes both referred to as
Chinese.
Myths about Language
Myth #1
Children learn to speak through explicit teaching or memorization

Children learn language long before they enter a classroom, just from exposure to it, and they
produce language that they couldn’t have ever heard before based on figuring out linguistic
patterns. A classic example showing that children figure out patterns in language that they can
generalize to unfamiliar data is the wug test, but another source of evidence comes from
children’s overgeneralizations of irregular forms. For example, children may produce goed,
eated, foots despite the fact that they’ve only ever heard went, ate, feet.

In fact, children may even resist explicit teaching of language, as this example shows:

Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy.

Father: You mean, you want THE OTHER SPOON.
Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please, Daddy.
Father: Can you say “the other spoon”?
Child: Other … one … spoon.
Father: Say … “other."
Child: Other.
Father: "Spoon."
Child: Spoon.
Father: "Other … Spoon."
Child: Other … spoon. Now give me other one spoon?
Myth #2
Animals have language just like humans

Animals can communicate with each other, but human language is unique for
several reasons. Firstly, human language is recursive: sentences can be infinitely
long (or as long as your breath/memory will hold out) by embedding one phrase or
sentence into another. Some examples from children’s songs: “the branch on the
tree and the tree in the hole and the hole in the ground…”, “…she swallowed the
spider to catch the fly, and I don’t know why she swallowed the fly…”, “…who lived in
the house that Jack built”.

Human language is also creative and productive: you can make sentences and even
words that no one has ever heard before (e.g. snowpocalypse, I’m all cookied-out).
Finally, human language is more abstract than animal communication: we can talk
about past and future and even hypothetical events and entities. Although bee
dances can communicate information about food and distances, and dogs can
recognize names of toys and even whether you’re happy or angry, neither of them
can tell you about how their weekend was or what they’d do if they had a million
dollars.
Myth #3
Reading and writing are an essential part of language

Not all languages are written, and language has been around at least a hundred thousand
years before any writing. Spoken and sign languages (at least for young children) are
acquired naturally and without conscious effort, whereas reading and writing can take
years of formal instruction and effort that results in varying levels of proficiency. Writing
is also idiosyncratic and doesn’t reflect everything about spoken language (and is often
even less accurate for sign languages). Spelling doesn’t change as quickly as speech and is
more standardized.

English spelling is also complicated and inconsistent. For example, the sound /i/ can be
spelled at least 8 different ways, as in meet, eat, Pete, funny, key, quay, machine, and
ceiling. And the symbol “e” can represent at least 4 different sounds, as in pen, game,
redo, and the. Even in languages with more logical spelling systems, like Spanish, the
spelling doesn’t reflect the whole language because it misses important aspects like
prosody (the intonational pattern of a sentence or phrase).

Linguistics looks at the sounds of language and analyzes the words based on their
sounds, not their spelling, although “non-standard” spellings can often give clues as to
how words were pronounced when we don’t have recordings of speakers.
Myth #4
Some languages/dialects are more complex or better than others

Children learn whichever language they are exposed to at a similar rate (although
children exposed to multiple languages may learn each language slightly slower,
they will catch up and often exceed their monolingual peers within a few years).
What seems “simple” or “complicated” to you as an adult depends on what you
already know: for example, if you speak a language that already has tone or case
marking or definite/indefinite articles or a tense/lax vowel distinction, these
concepts will seem easy to you, but if you haven’t been exposed to them early, these
concepts will seem hard.

Languages that are straightforward in one area are often complicated in another
area. For example, a language with a rigid system of word order and many
prepositions may lack case marking, while a language with many cases may have
freer word order and/or fewer prepositions. Another example is that a language with
fewer sounds overall is likely to have longer words than a language with many
sounds (the number of possible words of length CV is the number of consonants C
in the language times the number of vowels V in the language), and languages with
less complicated syllable structure tend to be spoken faster.
There’s some evidence that languages that have been learned by a lot of speakers in
adulthood are likely to be more isolating, while languages that have predominantly
been learned by speakers in childhood are more likely to be more
agglutinative/polysynthetic, suggesting that these might be factors in relative ease
or difficulty, but children are still equally capable of learning any language and even
if we end up finding some differences, this is not evidence for one language being
superior. (There are definitely easier and harder writing systems though: English-
speaking children, for example, take longer to learn to read and are diagnosed with
dyslexia at higher rates than Spanish-speaking children, because the English
orthography is far more irregular than the Spanish one.)
Myth #5
Languages deteriorate over time

It’s common to think that “kids these days” aren’t talking as well as
previous generations, but all living languages change over time and it is
not a sign of inferiority: any language at any stage still consists of complex
subconscious patterns. Borrowing words also doesn’t make a language
inferior or corrupt: all languages borrow, and borrowed words get adapted
into the sound system and grammar of the borrowing language.
Myths about linguistics:  
Myth #1: Linguists speak all the languages

Linguists aren’t necessarily polyglots, and a linguistics course will

definitely not teach you how to speak all the languages (if only it were that
easy!), although an awareness of the diverse features of language may
make it somewhat easier to learn languages in the future. Although some
organizations such as the military use “linguist” to refer to people who
speak multiple languages, this is not the same as an academic/theoretical
linguist.
Myths about linguistics:  
Myth #2: Linguists correct/criticize how people talk

Linguists analyze language how it exists, not how some people wish it
exists: for a linguist to tell someone that they’re speaking wrong is like a
biologist telling a bird that it’s singing wrong. You may be thinking of
grammar mavens, editors, and/or lexicographers, although many editors
and pretty much all lexicographers are actually quite tolerant about this
kind of thing and only give feedback when asked.
Myths about linguistics:  
Myth #3: Linguistic/grammar rules include things like don’t split
infinitives, don’t use ain’t

Linguists analyze the part of grammar that is automatic and generally

subconscious. Grammar rules that you have to be taught in English class
or a style guide are:  
a) Often about spelling/punctuation, not the structure of the language,
and we’ve already established that writing doesn’t reflect the full language
anyway
b) Often based on the misapplication of Latin grammar to English by 18th
or 19th century grammarians (for example, the confusion about “you and
me” vs “you and I”)
c) Often modelled on the speech of people who have historically had
power (rich old white men).
None of these are particularly relevant to answering the question of how
language in both its diversity and commonality came to exist in the
human mind: linguists analyze what people actually do when they’re
speaking, not what they or someone else thinks they should do.