The wonders of human language

Your family has its own dialect, but you might not have noticed

If languages and grammar are not your thing, linguistics might seem complex and boring, but nothing could be further from the truth. While some areas of linguistics require prior knowledge, many linguistic concepts and ideas relate to everyday life and can be understood by anyone. Here are some simple linguistic facts that might surprise you!

People like to list languages such as Mandarin, Japanese, or Hungarian as "the most difficult languages in the world", but this is not true. Think about the ease with which babies pick up a language, becoming fluent at a similar rate, no matter the place. The difficulty of a language lies not in its structure, but in its similarities or differences with your own language. Mandarin might be extremely difficult for an English speaker, but quite manageable for someone who speaks Cantonese. So, there isn’t a "most difficult language", but a "most difficult language for you".

This might come as a shock, but you already know everything about your native language. Native speakers learn by imitation, not through methodical study, so they don’t rationalise their language; they simply speak. They might later approach the language from an academic perspective and put a name to different structures and concepts, but they will not learn anything that is actually new.

This might seem obvious, but most people don’t think about it. While differences in grammar and structures are evident, it is common for language learners to approach vocabulary as a set of labels: If I’m learning Spanish, I take an apple and label it "manzana". But languages are not labels, but a way of seeing the world, such as cultures near the North Pole having dozens of words for snow or languages in hierarchical societies changing according to the people speaking. While at a basic level we can often find one-to-one translations, the more we learn about a new language, the more we adopt a new worldview.

Does your family have certain words or phrases that mean something unique to you? It might be a funny mispronunciation that stuck, or a phrase that you use in a specific circumstance, sometimes passed down for a few generations. This is called a "familect", and it happens in most families, but also in tight-knit friend groups. The repetition and preservation of this private code reinforces familial bonds and identity, functions as an emotional anchor, and provides a sense of belonging.

Each language carries a worldview, so it is not surprising that our personality changes slightly when we change languages. We don’t become someone different, but we adapt to the cultural norms and values attached to that language. People who speak more than one language also tend to link specific interests, knowledge, and memories to each language, and specialists have noted that not only do our tone and volume change with each new language, but that we are most likely to swear or discuss sensitive or taboo subjects in a second or third language, as they provide an emotional distance impossible to avoid in our native tongue.

English is a fairly flexible language, meaning that many of its components can be placed in a different order without the sentence becoming unnatural or impossible to understand. But this flexibility does not apply to adjectives, at least when we have to use many of them in a row. English speakers naturally place adjectives in a specific sequence: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose. While this is done subconsciously, changing this order results in unnatural-sounding phrases, such as "a red new nice car".

Have you ever wondered why people refer to sign language as ASL or "American Sign Language"? Not only are there multiple sign languages, classified in families in the same way spoken languages are, but each one is a language of its own, with unique grammar, rules, and vocabulary. This way, American Sign Language (belonging to the French Sign Language family alongside its Russian, Brazilian, or Italian counterparts) is not a signed version of American English, but a distinct, unique language with more than half a million native speakers.

Languages change and shift with use and time, which causes some words to gain positive meanings, but also others to become negative. This downgrading of a word’s meaning is called "pejoration" and is connected to many factors, one of them being whether the term is considered masculine or feminine. English is not a gendered language, but it has gender-specific pairs, such as "master/mistress", "fox/vixen", "bachelor/spinster", or "governor/governess". While initially mistress, vixen, spinster, and governess were merely counterparts to the male-specific term, over time they developed a negative connotation, while the masculine term remained positive or neutral.

Babies typically start using meaningful words around the 12-month mark, so it is natural to think that, before that, babies "don’t speak". While they don’t use meaningful spoken language, they communicate from birth with cries, sounds, and gestures, and these communications have an accent. How is this possible? Third-trimester babies in utero have fully functional hearing and recognize sound patterns, pitch, and intonation. Once they are born, their cries, and later their babbles, mimic the intonation, pitch, and rhythmic patterns of the language of their environment.

What sound does a sheep make? Well, a sheep from where? English-speaking sheep go "baa", but Korean-speaking sheep go "me-e". While sheep don’t care about linguistic differences, humans adapt animal sounds to the available sounds and phonetic rules of their language. This happens not only with animals, but with all kinds of sounds, such as machines, strikes and collisions, physical and natural phenomena, human sounds, and more.

Quirks of English

10 words that sound the same but mean different things

English is beautiful. It has borrowed words, sounds, and grammar from more than 350 other languages, which gives us an amazingly vast vocabulary (hundreds of thousands of words, though we only use 20,000 to 35,000 in everyday life). But this rich history comes with a catch: some words sound exactly like other words even though their spellings and meanings are completely different: think of "flour" and "flower," or "right" and "write." These are called "homophones," and here are 10 of them you may or may not have noticed before.

One is used to cook, and the other to decorate. One grows naturally on a plant and is associated with beauty and gardens, and the other is a powder made by grinding grains and is normally used in the kitchen. In standard American English, both "flower" and "flour" are pronounced /ˈ_flaʊər_/. We have to rely on context to tell them apart: you might plant a flower and bake with flour.

This could be a confusing one for someone just starting to learn English, as "right" can mean "correct," as in "you got the answer right," or refer to the direction opposite of left. But "write" specifically refers to the act of writing: forming words or symbols using a pen, keyboard, etc. But in standard American English, both are pronounced /raɪt/. This means you can "write the right answer."

What does a large body of salt water have in common with the act of perceiving something with your eyes? Well, nothing really, just that both are pronounced /siː/. These two don’t even belong to the same parts of speech; "sea" is a noun whereas "see" is a verb, with "saw" and "seen" as its past-tense forms. And yes, you can "see the sea."

Both pronounced /sʌn/, "sun" and "son" are two nouns that, again, mean two different things. One is a male child in relation to his parents, a person; while the other refers to the star at the center of our solar system, responsible for providing light and heat to the Earth. You could say, metaphorically, that your "son is your sun." Or that the neighbor's "son is playing in the sun."

Again, we have a case of a verb and a noun with no relation to each other, and yet both are pronounced the same, /per/. "Pair" can actually be both a noun and a verb; as a noun, it refers to two things that belong together, such as a pair of shoes, and as a verb, it means to put two things or people together. A "pear" is a bell-shaped fruit that everyone knows. In this case, you could say you have a "pair of pears."

Although these two words can be associated with nighttime/fantasy imagery in old books and stories, the meanings of "knight" and "night" are completely different, even though both are pronounced /naɪt/. One refers to a king’s faithful mounted warriors wearing armour in medieval Europe, and the other simply means the period of darkness between sunset and sunrise: "The knight left the castle at night."

"Peace" is an idea or state. You can use it to mean "world peace," like an ideal state of freedom and happiness, or simply say "I need some peace" to express a need to feel calmer or more relaxed. And a piece is a part or a portion of something, like a piece of cake or a piece of paper. Both are pronounced /piːs/, and you could totally say that you "want to have a piece of cake in peace."

We use "mail" as a noun for items that are delivered through the postal system, but also as a verb that means "to send something through the mail." And even though the noun "male" is also pronounced /meɪl/, it refers to a man or a male animal as opposed to female; it describes sex or gender. It is perfectly valid to say "I sent mail to my male friend."

This is a funny triad. Three words, three different meanings but the same sound: /baɪ/. "To buy" is to purchase something; "bye" is a casual way to say goodbye; and "by" is quite a versatile word English speakers use to indicate everything from location and proximity to method or even the person responsible for an action: "I sat by the window" or "a book by Mark Twain."

And you can combine the three into one brief sentence and say, "Buy a book by an author, then say bye." Confusing? I don’t think so.

"Week" and "weak" both sound /wiːk/. A "week" is what we call a period of seven days, usually counted from Sunday to Saturday, i.e., a period of time. And "weak" can mean a lack of strength or power, both mentally and physically: "I feel weak." Though it can also mean that something is not as effective as it should be: "That’s a weak argument". The two can coexist in the same sentence: "You can feel weak after a long week."