Language Pride/Language Control

If you're creating a nation - for fantasy or science fiction - I'll begin by encouraging you to give it a language. But even if you have already, don't stop there. One of the things you find all over the world is that people who speak a particular language have strong attitudes about it, both internally or relative to other languages of their world.

Today my husband and I were discussing France and the French reputation for being prickly toward Americans - something which I have never in my life experienced. Interesting, isn't it? Because I speak French well, I always get lots of credit for it. My theory is that Americans and French are very similar. The people of each of these two countries are very proud of their language, and because it is spoken in many countries of the world, they feel that others coming to visit should have the courtesy to learn some of it. This may or may not jive with the experience of some of you, but nevertheless, it's an example of manners which are closely linked to language pride.

In Japan, they have a different kind of language pride. Both my husband and I have encountered situations where we were told we spoke Japanese "too well." There's a strong cultural view of Japanese as a unique language that can't truly be captured by a foreign speaker.

Speakers of different languages can also have varying attitudes toward the use of dialect by people from different regions - some laugh at them, some think they're precious, and others disparage them. Some countries have a national institution whose job it is to maintain the "standard" language against the intrusion of dialectal usages or foreign borrowings (especially foreign borrowings).

I encountered a funny article recently about German train stations replacing signs written in English with ones written in German. The part that was surprising was that the English they were replacing wasn't the kind Americans would necessarily find easy to understand - it was very idiomatically appropriate to a German context. The article is here.

If your world has nations and languages, then considering language attitude on some level will help it feel a lot more real. Even if you've got one language that is the strongest across a whole world, consider that language use diversifies very quickly. English is very strong as an international language, but there are lots of different kinds of English. What is Standard English? How does it compare to the Queen's English? Is one more often learned, or more highly valued in a particular location? If you meet someone from Hong Kong, their English will probably sound British, but someone from the Philippines will probably sound American. If you want to teach English in Japan, it will be easier to get a job if you sound American or British than if you sound Australian.

War is another context in which language control can play a huge role. Take the example of World War II, when Japan occupied Korea and outlawed the use of Korean in public. Korean didn't disappear, but a whole generation of people learned Japanese as a conqueror's language. Imagine how that influenced attitudes about Korean and Japanese!

Think also of the language Hebrew, which was primarily used as a literary language and was then revived for active use starting in the end of the 19th century (source: Wikipedia entry on History of Hebrew). Now it's the native language of millions in Israel.

I hope all of these real world examples can help you extrapolate for situations in your fantasy and science fictional worlds. Language isn't just a tool for conveying messages, but also for conveying information about culture and identity. It can serve conquerors, or rally the oppressed. It can be a measure of refinement or lack thereof. It can be a symbol of national unity, or a symbol of national diversity, or yet again a symbol of deep national history.

It's something to think about.

The Feel of a Language

I've had lots of occasions lately to notice the different way that languages feel. My kids have been learning a bit of French, and there's always some Japanese floating around my house, and often enough I find myself commenting on other linguistic sources, like when I'm reading my son's dinosaur book and come across Tuojiangosaurus. To him it's a dinosaur name that's tricky to say. To me, it screams "Chinese!"

Part of the feel of a language comes from its inventory of sounds. In German, the very existence of sounds like the "ch" in "ich" changes the feel of the language, where in Chinese you get sound combinations, complex syllables, and tones to boot. But if you look at just the sound inventory for a language you can miss things, because some languages have similar inventories - like, for example, Spanish and Japanese. When I was living in a foreigners' dormitory in Tokyo with 360 students from 60 different countries, we all noticed there was a certain advantage for the Spanish speakers in pronunciation. Still, sounds alone aren't enough.

Intonation is a huge part of the feel of language - a part that I don't see described in fiction as often as I'd like.

English has syllable stress, where one syllable of a word tends to be louder and higher in pitch than the others; this influences things like the aspiration of consonants, which is when a sound like "t" is followed by extra exhalation almost like "h." It also makes for all the metrical patterns we see in poetry, and changes the feel of a sentence drastically. I know I'm always looking out for a good metrical feel when I write, even though I don't count out syllables when I do it. It influences what they call "flow."

Neither French nor Japanese has syllable stress. I haven't studied French intonation in as much depth as Japanese, but effectively, in French there isn't any syllable that sticks out in both loudness and pitch, though I do notice a slight rise in pitch at the ends of sentences. Japanese has a pattern of pitch accent which means that there's no difference in loudness, but each syllable (mora, for sticklers) has a pitch value which is relatively higher or lower, so that the speech tends to flow along, alternating between the two.

Here's an interesting trivia tidbit about English speakers learning French and Japanese: even when they're able to produce all of the right sounds, they can have trouble taking the stress out of their speech. This makes for a rather interesting accent, because it's easy to tell that they don't sound native, but hard to pinpoint exactly the source of the issue because technically all the sounds are correct.

I know I've mentioned mouth shape before, but I'll mention it again. French to me is like calisthenics for the lips, because of the variability of the different sounds and mouth positions - and without that, it wouldn't sound as French. Japanese always feels to me like it should be uttered with a faint smile on the lips, because it has much less range in mouth position. Even the Japanese "u" is un-rounded. I literally used to get my Japanese classes to pronounce words better by asking them to "smile when you say that."

Then there are the intangibles. Where do I get the feeling that French and English are playful languages? Maybe from all the puns I've heard in each? I know I get a feeling that Japanese is a graceful language, but I don't ever get the same sense of playfulness. But maybe it's just because I've been in all the wrong language-speaking situations. I could easily imagine a situation where a language-learner thought the language had no humor, just because he'd never been in the right context to hear it.

Languages have such a vast range of use contexts that it's hard to capture them in their entirety. ESL teachers in the US know that it's perfectly possible for someone to be great at playground talk, but to struggle with English for academic purposes. I know from experience that having a good ear for accents and a lot of conversational experience isn't enough to make me feel comfortable when I need to get medical help in either France or Japan. That's a specialized area of vocabulary that I've hardly touched.

In Japanese you also have the issue of formal and casual language, which are used in different contexts. Because of the amount of formal language I've studied, I feel less comfortable using casual forms, and it has the odd effect of making me feel less comfortable speaking Japanese to my kids than French. I don't want to talk to my kids as if they're colleagues or fellow students! It just feels weird.

Those are my thoughts for this evening. I've decided to go ahead with my plan to take a closer look at some characters from books, and how they feel grounded in culture and belief systems. I've been putting together a pile of books, and I hope to get started with that in the next day or two.