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.

Customer success vocabulary

"Are we ready to order?" The true reason servers use the first person

There's a reason why a handful of phrases keep coming at us from public-facing workers across many industries. Decades and decades of trial and error have taught brands which words put customers at ease, which expressions to reach for, and which to avoid at all costs — like "unfortunately" or "I don’t know that." Let's explore 10 of the vocabulary tools used by waiters, hosts, receptionists, and customer service reps, and the real reasoning behind each one.

Have you ever been left wondering why your waitress keeps speaking in the first-person plural? That plural "we" has a name: linguists call it "the royal we", or nosism, meaning the substitution of a group pronoun for a singular one. Monarchs used it for centuries to speak as though they embodied an entire nation; King Edward VII was still doing it in official documents as late as 1902.

It’s unclear when restaurant servers picked up the habit, but it works. By including themselves in the sentence, waiters imply that every step of the dining experience is a team activity that they lead gladly.

When you thank your barista, receptionist, or cashier, you are more likely to hear "no problem" than "you’re welcome". This one stems from naturally friendly and gallant behavior that has set in society in recent decades.

Linguist Aaron Dinkin studied the phenomenon in 2017 and confirmed that younger speakers had opted out of "you’re welcome," since it suggests that effort was spent and is being graciously accepted. "No problem" is a humble assurance that the help cost nothing at all, even if it’s a little white lie at least half of the time.

Here’s something a customer never wants to hear: "Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about that." Experts advise never to use that adverb in the face of a customer’s problem, since it suggests the company is powerless or worse, indifferent.

Instead, the magic words to use are these: "Here's what I'm going to do for you." That will instantly please a customer who is looking for possible solutions. The phrase can be traced back to a 1980 policy at the Ritz-Carlton, where co-founder Horst Schulze gave every employee the authority to spend up to $2,000 per guest fixing a problem on the spot.

In 1936, Dale Carnegie wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People that a person's name is "the sweetest and most important sound in any language," and customer service training is careful to apply that wisdom.

Hearing your own name signals that you're being treated as a person rather than a ticket number. Modern software made the trick easier, since caller ID and account records now hand an agent your name before they've said hello. It can backfire, though; hearing one’s name repeatedly in the middle of a heated conversation can become irritating and sound like mockery.

An alternative to this one is "that would upset me, too." These phrases are a nod to the notion that the client is always right. Companies now admit that the latter is not necessarily true, though, but that often, indulging a customer's complaint, however unreasonable, is cheaper than losing their trust.

"That shouldn't have happened" updates the idea: it validates how a customer feels without declaring them factually correct. Researchers coined the term "service recovery paradox" in 1992 after finding that customers who complain and get an empathetic, competent response often end up more loyal than customers who never had a problem at all.

The two most empathetic words an agent can say are these. The concept behind it is called "active listening." It was so named in a 1957 essay by psychologist Carl Rogers and Richard Farson, and it didn't come from business at all. It came from Rogers's therapy sessions, where he found that people couldn't move toward a solution until they felt genuinely heard first.

Sales trainers later built an entire technique around the same insight, nicknamed "Feel, Felt, Found," which opens with exactly this line before pivoting to a fix. The order matters more than the words, because agents know that offering a solution before acknowledging the feeling can make people argue harder.

This is the go-to sentence to use instead of a dreaded "I can't help you with that." In the industry, this is called a "warm transfer," as opposed to the far more common and far more resented "cold transfer," where you're bounced to a stranger who has no idea why you called and makes you start over. Ideally, a rep will personally explain your problem to another expert and build a bigger team to come up with solutions.

This is the euphemism phrase to use in place of "I don't know." It’s friendly, humble, and a preamble to a brief research that will follow. Technically, saying "That’s a great question" in a conversation is a stalling tactic. It borrows a few seconds through flattery while the brain scrambles for an answer.

In 1963, a Worcester, Massachusetts commercial artist named Harvey Ball was paid $45 to design a simple smiling face for an insurance company, State Mutual Life Assurance, meant only to boost employee morale. Seven years later, two Philadelphia brothers paired the design with the words "Have a Happy Day," soon changed to "Have a Nice Day," trademarked the combination, and sold more than 50 million pins by 1972.

The four words have now become the obligatory send-away greeting that some businesses even write in their windows. It has also become the default sign-off for practically every customer transaction in America; "goodbye" might sound too dramatic.

"Found everything ok?" That question usually greets customers when they reach the cashier in retail stores. It can be traced back to Walmart's national "People Greeter" program in the 1980s, designed to do two things at once: make shoppers feel noticed and discourage theft.

The restaurant version of the same check-in is the "How’s everything?" a few minutes after bringing the food to the table. Waiters are trained to ask this to spot possible complaints early on, and also to remind customers that someone’s paying attention to their experience.