Speaking of Tongues

In July 2010, protests broke out in Guangzhou in response to a proposal to replace Cantonese-language television programming with China’s official language Mandarin (or more precisely, Putonghua). ^[1]See, e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/world/asia/27cantonese.html

The protests spilled over into Hong Kong, resulting in a rare example of Hong Kong people making common cause with their Cantonese cousins across the border, a solidarity that governments on both sides had been trying to instill for years without much noticeable success.

The letters column of the South China Morning Post predictably attracted its share of correspondence on the subject. Some huffed that the use of Putonghua was patriotic and Cantonese nothing but a “vulgar relic”, a “dialect” best left to the “wet market”. Others, notable prominent local commentator David Tang, rode to the defense of Cantonese as a full-fledged language, and “a very well-developed and rich language at that”, stressing its links to classical poetry. ^[2]Clarke Li and Sir David Tang, Letters to the South China Morning Post, 5 and 10 August 2010 respectively

It didn’t take the street protests to know that the status of Cantonese, or indeed of any language, is a matter of considerable political significance. Language is an element of culture in use every waking hour, one which ties us intimately to those immediately around us, providing on-going reinforcement for our sense of identity. However, for countries and communities, language is a two-edged sword, both binding and excluding segments of the population.

If Cantonese were just a “dialect”— and a vulgar one at that—then discouraging it might possibly be justifiable. As the author of the “vulgar relic” letter opined in the SCMP: “In the realm of education, Cantonese should be treated as a mispronounced, grammatically incorrect form of Chinese rather than a desirable medium of instruction.”

If, on the other hand, Cantonese is a “language”, discouraging it in favor of Putonghua smacks of politics.

Cantonese, by most linguistic standards, is indeed a clearly separate “language”, at least as different from Mandarin as any two Romance languages are from each other. It is spoken by roughly as many people as, say, Italian. But as the old saw credited to linguist Max Weinreich would have it: “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. In this part of the world, that would have been the dialect around Beijing.

Hong Kong, of course, isn’t faced merely with the question of balancing the teaching and speaking of Cantonese and Putonghua; it also feels it necessary, in its self-appointed role as “Asia’s World City”, to be fluent in English. The supposedly declining standards of English in the city are another perennial subject of letters to the newspapers.

These issues—multilingualism, official languages vs. local and minority languages and dialects, the perceived need for English to be globally competitive—are issues that affect all Asian countries, cutting across everything from the politics of identity to education and globalization. Chinese television broadcasts and films are subtitled—in Chinese—so they can be understood by the population at large, for the truth is that many of China’s nearly 1.4 billion people aren’t fluent in spoken Mandarin. Singapore is officially quadri-lingual, India rather more than that. Arabic is written in a classical form of the language that isn’t actually spoken in the now famous “Arab street”, nor indeed anywhere other than formal settings.

* * *

Language, being as common as breathing, is unsurprisingly a subject often held to be common knowledge. But much of what seems self-evident about language can prove at variance with some tenets of formal linguistics.

Two recent books provide about as painless an introduction as may be possible to the subject, or at least how its application to the everyday: You Are What You Speak by Robert Lane Greene (who writes for The Economist) and Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows.

Greene runs through several of the basic principles of linguistics and a number of current controversies. He takes aim at grammarians and language bores, but also examines the interaction between language and politics. He is refreshingly impolite about things he finds silly: Bill Bryson, Lynne Truss and the French are targets.

Fallows wears her PhD in linguistics lightly and has written a brief and accessible book that manages to be both charming and erudite. Dreaming in Chinese is more about studying Chinese, and studying the Chinese and China through the language, than it is about linguistics itself.

Neither book dwells on, or necessarily even mentions, phonemes, morphology or generative grammars.

Like all living creatures, the languages of the world are strikingly similar yet wildly different: similar, in that they all operate according to a relatively small number of basic principles; different in their sheer diversity. Fallows is particularly struck by how dissimilar Chinese is from English. It is not just the use of tones. She points out how Chinese creates new words and concepts; Chinese, unlike English, has relatively few loan words from other languages. She highlights its lack of gender-specific pronouns. And she shines a light on the way Chinese maps time and space, noting that Chinese uses the same word for “above” and “previous” or “last”, while the word for “below” is used for “future” or “next”: in Chinese the future is “down” and the past is “up”. (This is not so unreasonable, I suppose, given how calendars are laid out). Chinese, she notes, uses east-west, not north-south, as the predominant axis: Northwest Airlines and Southeast Asia become Westnorth Airlines and Eastsouth Asia in Chinese.

Does this mean that Chinese think differently? Speaking English, a Chinese friend told her, requires “an alien mental calculation.”

It is almost a truism that language affects thought in fundamental ways. It is not uncommon to hear English-speakers claim, for example, that the national characters of the French, Italians or Latin Americans are reflected in, and a function of, the languages they speak. These perceptions are not unique to Anglophones: Guy Deutscher leads off Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s commonly-quoted remark that he spoke “Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse”.

Are a person’s thoughts constrained by language? One short answer is: of course not. The fact that Chinese does not distinguish between “he” and “she” does not mean that the Chinese are unaware of the difference between male and female. (Were it the case, such strict population control measures might not have been seen as necessary.)

The second short answer: of course it does. Higher mathematics and most other specialized subjects, for example, require being able to put words to concepts.

Deutscher’s book is an attempt at a non-trivial answer to this question. Some of it is common sense. Languages may not constrain what one can say, but they do determine—in certain cases—what one must say. A simple example: in English-speaking households, one may spend the night “at a friend’s house” and remain studiously vague about the friend’s gender, an option not available to speakers of French and Spanish. Speakers of languages with formal and informal pronouns must continually express (and hence determine) their views about their relative place in immediate social hierarchy.

More intriguingly, certain languages—notably some aboriginal languages in Australia and Latin America—do not use “left” and “right”, so-called “egocentric” directions. Instead, everything must be positioned according to the cardinal points (“north”, “south”) or relative to a geographical landmark (“upriver” or “downhill”). Speakers of these languages, as Deutscher illustrates with examples of experiments, must always cite absolute, rather than merely relative, directions. They must therefore picture the world, and remember it, differently.

That is, however, about as far as it goes. Deutscher spends much of the book on a fascinating discussion about color terms. The number of different colors a language has words for is correlated with the culture’s level of material development. William Gladstone (yes, that William Gladstone) noted in a monumental mid-nineteenth century work about Homer that the poet had a distinctly narrow, almost monochromatic palate. This, as it turns out, was neither poetic brilliance nor an aberration: other languages display similar patterns. Distinctions between red and yellow, or green and blue, or even blue and black, seem to start arising once a society’s culture is complex enough—when they start to use dyes and artificial pigments, for example—to actually need them as terms. It doesn’t mean that people in simple societies cannot distinguish blue and green; they just don’t have the terms to distinguish them because it is not a distinction that matters greatly in everyday life.

This is fascinating but perhaps, upon reflection, not all that surprising. Ancient peoples (to use an example from Deutscher) didn’t need words to distinguish blue from other colors in order to appreciate lapis lazuli; nor do we need to master the distinctions between “fuchsia” and “mauve” to choose a favorite shade of violet.

Deutscher’s main claims are that language is not independent from culture, and that thought is affected by language to at least some degree. But these are rather mild claims at most, prompting the uninitiated to wonder whether an entire book on the subject was actually necessary. He is not arguing, for example, that Chinese, Arabic and English speakers have fundamentally different mental processes.

In defense of his efforts, however, the notion that thought and character are formed by language is enduring and strong. For example, Greene notes that in 2007 France pushed for French to be the sole legal language of the EU. Why French? Greene quotes Maurice Druon, the “perpetual secretary” of the Académie Française:

The Italian language is the language of song, German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is the best at precision, it has a rigor to it. It is the safest language for legal purposes.

The academic discipline of linguistics hasn’t always helped. In the earlier part of the last century, the conjecture that mental processes are constrained and determined by language began to masquerade as scientific theory. Linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf claimed, in Greene’s words, that “a person’s access to reality is determined by the language he speaks.”

Perhaps because it continues to resurface in new forms, both Greene and Deutscher feel the need to drive a stake anew through the heart of the now-infamous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which held, for example, that the Amerindian Hopi language had no concept of time and so neither did the Hopi themselves. Both hypothesis and conclusion turned out not just wrong, but absurd.

This has made anything smacking of “Whorfianism” toxic. Deutscher draws a parallel with Lamarckian evolution and the idea that giraffes have long necks because they reach high into the trees. As a result, he observes, linguistics dismissed the possibility that any aspect of language might be the result of nurture (culture) rather than nature (genetics). Deutscher argues, in effect, that the cultural baby has been thrown out with the Whorfian bathwater.

* * *

In earlier times, says Greene, there were no real boundaries between dialects and languages, which instead just shaded into one another. “At that time in history,” he writes, “it was almost never obvious what was a local pronunciation, what was a dialect, and what was a language.” How did it happen that speech, this benign vehicle of communication, became the stuff of policy, patriotism and protest?

“In short,” says Greene, “the nation-state happened... The varying attitudes we see today toward language can, to a surprising extent, be traced to how and when a nation-state was built.” One doesn’t have to look farther than the letters column of the South China Morning Post for evidence of this ongoing process.

All Chinese speak Chinese, except of course they don’t: they speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka, Fukkien or something else. Each is, as Fallows notes, as different from the other as German is from English. “But,” writes Greene, “the Chinese nonetheless insist on speaking of one Chinese language with different dialects.” And it’s not just the government: “Mostly [Chinese] really do believe they speak the same language.”

Chinese are able to maintain the fiction (or perhaps more accurately, the fantasy) that they are all speaking one language because of the unified written language.

“Western linguists....” Greene continues, “tend to see writing systems as artificial structures built on top of the real language, which is the organic product of people’s brains and mouths.” That was certainly what I remember from my linguistics courses of more than thirty years ago. Any effect of the written form on speech was seen as something of an embarrassment, to be disregarded if at all possible.

The interaction between spoken and written forms of language is perhaps harder to ignore in Chinese. Chinese words are mostly monosyllabic. Other languages have more phonemes (or sounds) per word and so have more combinations to make use of. Tones in Chinese compensate to some extent by providing a different set of combinations, but Chinese nevertheless has ended up with more than its share of homonyms. It is not uncommon, notes Fallows, for “Chinese to write tiny characters for each other on scraps of paper, if they are trying to identify a homonym. Or they draw characters with a finger in the air.”

Arabic is like Chinese in that its various modern spoken versions can be mutually unintelligible. In spite of changes in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, everyone nevertheless reads and mostly writes a frozen-in-time form of classical Arabic. This is perhaps analogous to the situation in medieval Europe, when people spoke early forms of French, Spanish and Italian, but read and wrote Latin. Greene writes:

Though most Arabs don’t like to admit it, today, spoken Arabic is not a “dialect” of classical Arabic. It has become a different language in widely varying forms... Talking about this is awkward, and Arabs are often at pains to stress that they really do speak the same language and it’s a shame more people don’t speak “better Arabic.” They are in denial that classical Arabic has no native speakers... This denial has political roots and heavy implications. Many Arabs recognize that they speak differently from one another, but they still strongly identify with an “Arab nation.”

These unified writing systems may be under some pressure. Since the advent of simplified characters in the People’s Republic of China, Chinese no longer has a single set of always mutually intelligible characters. There is pressure in both Arabic and Chinese to write in the vernacular which, by definition, doesn’t always fit in the traditional forms. Innovative here as it has been elsewhere, Hong Kong has even created new characters which are used nowhere else. Latin letters and English words have crept into written texts. Improving living standards and increasing demand for popular culture are likely to feed the process.

In spite of, or perhaps due to, the politics of language, English remains Asia’s most important means of mutual communication—native to none but common to almost all. English is Asia’s, and the world’s, lingua franca. According to the title of Nicholas Ostler’s recent book, it is in fact The Last Lingua Franca. English, he writes, is “possessed of a truly global status that is unprecedented in human history,” but he counsels that this status will prove transient. His argument, expounded in considerable detail by a writer who collects language facts as others might collect stamps, is that every other lingua franca from Greek and Latin to Persian and Malay has largely ceased to be a means of communication for non-native speakers (or just ceased to be, at all). “International English is a lingua franca, and by its nature, a lingua franca is a language of convenience. When it ceases to be convenient—however widespread it has been—it will be dropped, without ceremony and with little emotion.”

So, are Chinese linguistic patriots and upwardly-mobile parents of Mandarin-tutored toddlers right? Is there a look-in for Chinese (and the alternative is always Chinese, never Hindi) as the world’s next global language?

All the Confucius Institutes around the world notwithstanding, the answer, says Greene, is no. “The really relevant question is how many non-Chinese communicate in Chinese... the number is doubtless tiny.” And it will remain that way, due among other reasons to “Chinese’s dreadfully difficult orthographic system.” Fallows concludes at the end of her book that Chinese is just very difficult indeed.

It may be that Chinese will become less complex as it spreads. Something similar seems to have happened to English, argue both Deutscher and Greene. English lost its Germanic case endings after the Norman Conquest when it bumped into French and thus had a more diverse constituency. If Chinese were to ditch its characters and opt for a romanized writing system, it would certainly become more accessible. And Chinese already has a romanized system: pinyin.

There is a problem, as Greene points out. It is not just the cultural value placed by Chinese on the characters, but that romanization, i.e. writing words as they sound, would break the unity of the writing system. Pinyin doesn’t work in Cantonese: it would be like English speakers having to write only in German.

It is inevitable that at some point the balance of the global economic system will shift and the current predominance of English will wane. However, the timing—several generations or less than one—matters, especially

for those planning educational strategies, either at national level or simply for their own families.

Latin managed a millennium of international dominance after the fall of Rome, so economic and political dominance isn’t the only factor. Oster suggests that it won’t be another language that ousts English, but rather technology. He argues that machine translation will soon remove the need for any lingua franca, including English.

* * *

Which brings us full circle. As anyone who has ever operated in a bilingual or multilingual environment knows, translation is not just about the words. Words, especially those of importance in an international, multi-cultural context, carry with them generations of cultural and philosophical baggage. The English words for “agreement”, “equity” and “rights” are rooted in at least two centuries of philosophical, legal and intellectual history. The Chinese or Arabic words that nominally have similar enough meanings to be considered translations are not rooted in the same traditions. People can use exactly the same words, but mean rather different things.

Even the words for “language” and “dialect”, which should be scientifically objective, have in practice considerable political content and may obscure rather than illuminate the Chinese situation. Greene, blogging as “Johnson” in The Economist, notes that Chinese use the term fangyan which, while usually translated into English as “dialect”, actually means something more like “place-speech”. ^[3]The Economist, “Johnson” blog posting of 4 August 2010

Whether Cantonese is a language or dialect is, at least for the Cantonese themselves, more a question of identity than linguistics. The answer may depend not just on what Cantonese-speakers believe but also on the language in which they phrase the distinction.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books. A Hong Kong-based entrepreneur, publisher and sometime columnist, he has been a long-serving contributor to the Asian literary scene.