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Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

What if, they wondered, you could create a universal written language that could be understood by anyone, a set of “real characters,” just as the creation of Arabic numerals had done for counting? “This writing will be a kind of general algebra and calculus of reason, so that, instead of disputing, we can say that ‘we calculate,’ ” Leibniz wrote, in 1679.

nventing new forms of speech is an almost cosmic urge that stems from what the linguist Marina Yaguello, the author of “Lunatic Lovers of Language,” calls “an ambivalent love-hate relationship.” Language creation is pursued by people who are so in love with what language can do that they hate what it doesn’t. “I don’t believe any other fantasy has ever been pursued with so much ardor by the human spirit, apart perhaps from the philosopher’s stone or the proof of the existence of God; or that any other utopia has caused so much ink to flow, apart perhaps from socialism,”

Quijada began wondering, “What if there were one single language that combined the coolest features from all the world’s languages?”

Solresol, the creation of a French musician named Jean-François Sudre, was among the first of these universal languages to gain popular attention. It had only seven syllables: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, and Si. Words could be sung, or performed on a violin. Or, since the language could also be translated into the seven colors of the rainbow, sentences could be woven into a textile as a stream of colors.

“I had this realization that every individual language does at least one thing better than every other language,” he said. For example, the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t use egocentric coördinates like “left,” “right,” “in front of,” or “behind.” Instead, speakers use only the cardinal directions. They don’t have left and right legs but north and south legs, which become east and west legs upon turning ninety degrees

Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can’t be formed without providing what linguists refer to as “evidentiality,” inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay.

In his “Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language,” from 1668, Wilkins laid out a sprawling taxonomic tree that was intended to represent a rational classification of every concept, thing, and action in the universe. Each branch along the tree corresponded to a letter or a syllable, so that assembling a word was simply a matter of tracing a set of forking limbs

he started scribbling notes on an entirely new grammar that would eventually incorporate not only Wakashan evidentiality and Guugu Yimithirr coördinates but also Niger-Kordofanian aspectual systems, the nominal cases of Basque, the fourth-person referent found in several nearly extinct Native American languages, and a dozen other wild ways of forming sentences.

he discovered “Metaphors We Live By,” a seminal book, published in 1980, by the cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, which argues that the way we think is structured by conceptual systems that are largely metaphorical in nature. Life is a journey. Time is money. Argument is war. For better or worse, these figures of speech are profoundly embedded in how we think.

I asked him if he could come up with an entirely new concept on the spot, one for which there was no word in any existing language. He thought about it for a moment. “Well, no language, as far as I know, has a single word for that chin-stroking moment you get, often accompanied by a frown on your face, when someone expresses an idea that you’ve never thought of and you have a moment of suddenly seeing possibilities you never saw before.” He paused, as if leafing through a mental dictionary. “In Ithkuil, it’s ašţal.”

Neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated a definitive version of the hypothesis that bears their names, but in general the theory argues that the language we speak actually shapes our experience of reality. Speakers of different languages think differently. Stronger versions of the hypothesis go even further than this, to suggest that language constrains the set of possible thoughts that we can have. In 1955, a sociologist and science-fiction writer named James Cooke Brown decided he would test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by creating a “culturally neutral” “model language” that might recondition its speakers’ brains.

most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction. J. R. R. Tolkien, who called conlanging his “secret vice,” maintained that he created the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy for the primary purpose of giving his invented languages, Quenya, Sindarin, and Khuzdul, a universe in which they could be spoken. And arguably the most commercially successful invented language of all time is Klingon, which has its own translation of “Hamlet” and a dictionary that has sold more than three hundred thousand copies.

He imagined that Ithkuil might be able to do what Lakoff and Johnson said natural languages could not: force its speakers to precisely identify what they mean to say. No hemming, no hawing, no hiding true meaning behind jargon and metaphor. By requiring speakers to carefully consider the meaning of their words, he hoped that his analytical language would force many of the subterranean quirks of human cognition to the surface, and free people from the bugs that infect their thinking.

Brown based the grammar for his ten-thousand-word language, called Loglan, on the rules of formal predicate logic used by analytical philosophers. He hoped that, by training research subjects to speak Loglan, he might turn them into more logical thinkers. If we could change how we think by changing how we speak, then the radical possibility existed of creating a new human condition.

today the stronger versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have “sunk into . . . disrepute among respectable linguists,” as Guy Deutscher writes, in “Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.” But, as Deutscher points out, there is evidence to support the less radical assertion that the particular language we speak influences how we perceive the world. For example, speakers of gendered languages, like Spanish, in which all nouns are either masculine or feminine, actually seem to think about objects differently depending on whether the language treats them as masculine or feminine

The final version of Ithkuil, which Quijada published in 2011, has twenty-two grammatical categories for verbs, compared with the six—tense, aspect, person, number, mood, and voice—that exist in English. Eighteen hundred distinct suffixes further refine a speaker’s intent. Through a process of laborious conjugation that would befuddle even the most competent Latin grammarian, Ithkuil requires a speaker to home in on the exact idea he means to express, and attempts to remove any possibility for vagueness.

Every language has its own phonemic inventory, or library of sounds, from which a speaker can string together words. Consonant-poor Hawaiian has just thirteen phonemes. English has around forty-two, depending on dialect. In order to pack as much meaning as possible into each word, Ithkuil has fifty-eight phonemes. The original version of the language included a repertoire of grunts, wheezes, and hacks that are borrowed from some of the world’s most obscure tongues. One particular hard-to-make clicklike sound, a voiceless uvular ejective affricate, has been found in only a few other languages, including the Caucasian language Ubykh, whose last native speaker died in 1992.

Human interactions are governed by a set of implicit codes that can sometimes seem frustratingly opaque, and whose misreading can quickly put you on the outside looking in. Irony, metaphor, ambiguity: these are the ingenious instruments that allow us to mean more than we say. But in Ithkuil ambiguity is quashed in the interest of making all that is implicit explicit. An ironic statement is tagged with the verbal affix ’kçç. Hyperbolic statements are inflected by the letter ’m.

“I wanted to use Ithkuil to show how you would discuss philosophy and emotional states transparently,” Quijada said. To attempt to translate a thought into Ithkuil requires investigating a spectrum of subtle variations in meaning that are not recorded in any natural language. You cannot express a thought without first considering all the neighboring thoughts that it is not. Though words in Ithkuil may sound like a hacking cough, they have an inherent and unavoidable depth. “It’s the ideal language for political and philosophical debate—any forum where people hide their intent or obfuscate behind language,” Quijada co

In Ithkuil, the difference between glimpsing, glancing, and gawking is the mere flick of a vowel. Each of these distinctions is expressed simply as a conjugation of the root word for vision. Hunched over the dining-room table, Quijada showed me how he would translate “gawk” into Ithkuil. First, though, since words in Ithkuil are assembled from individual atoms of meaning, he had to engage in some introspection about what exactly he meant to say.For fifteen minutes, he flipped backward and forward through his thick spiral-bound manuscript, scratching his head, pondering each of the word’s aspects, as he packed the verb with all of gawking’s many connotations. As he assembled the evolving word from its constituent meanings, he scribbled its pieces on a notepad. He added the “second degree of the affix for expectation of outcome” to suggest an element of surprise that is more than mere unpreparedness but less than outright shock, and the “third degree of the affix for contextual appropriateness” to suggest an element of impropriety that is less than scandalous but more than simply eyebrow-raising. As he rapped his pen against the notepad, he paged through his manuscript in search of the third pattern of the first stem of the root for “shock” to suggest a “non-volitional physiological response,” and then, after several moments of contemplation, he decided that gawking required the use of the “resultative format” to suggest “an event which occurs in conjunction with the conflated sense but is also caused by it.” He eventually emerged with a tiny word that hardly rolled off the tongue: apq’uxasiu. He spoke the first clacking syllable aloud a couple of times before deciding that he had the pronunciation right, and then wrote it down in the script he had invented for printed Ithkuil:

“You can make up words by the millions to describe concepts that have never existed in any language before,” he said.

Many conlanging projects begin with a simple premise that violates the inherited conventions of linguistics in some new way. Aeo uses only vowels. Kēlen has no verbs. Toki Pona, a language inspired by Taoist ideals, was designed to test how simple a language could be. It has just a hundred and twenty-three words and fourteen basic sound units. Brithenig is an answer to the question of what English might have sounded like as a Romance language, if vulgar Latin had taken root on the British Isles. Láadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radíidin, defined as a “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.”

“We think that when a person learns Ithkuil his brain works faster,” Vishneva told him, in Russian. She spoke through a translator, as neither she nor Quijada was yet fluent in their shared language. “With Ithkuil, you always have to be reflecting on yourself. Using Ithkuil, we can see things that exist but don’t have names, in the same way that Mendeleyev’s periodic table showed gaps where we knew elements should be that had yet to be discovered.”

Lakoff, who is seventy-one, bearded, and, like Quijada, broadly built, seemed to have read a fair portion of the Ithkuil manuscript and familiarized himself with the language’s nuances.“There are a whole lot of questions I have about this,” he told Quijada, and then explained how he felt Quijada had misread his work on metaphor. “Metaphors don’t just show up in language,” he said. “The metaphor isn’t in the word, it’s in the idea,” and it can’t be wished away with grammar.“For me, as a linguist looking at this, I have to say, ‘O.K., this isn’t going to be used.’ It has an assumption of efficiency that really isn’t efficient, given how the brain works. It misses the metaphor stuff. But the parts that are successful are really nontrivial. This may be an impossible language,” he said. “But if you think of it as a conceptual-art project I think it’s fascinating.”

A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of isolate in such cases is usually clarified. For instance, Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other language despite numerous attempts.

The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method, a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher.

Learning a foreign language helps improve memory

(Working memory deals with the storage and processing of information over a short period of time.)

Speaking a second language helps you focus, and deal with distractions appropriately

A bilingual person is accustomed to switching between different languages, deciding which is the appropriate language to use in a given situation

This gives the brain plenty of practice in focusing and filtering information.

Related to your attention span is your ability to multi-task.

Speaking two languages, and switching between them, makes you better at multi-tasking in other tasks, too.

Speaking more than one language provides constant exercise for your brain, and keeping your brain active is one way in which to delay the onset of dementia.

What this perceptual sensitivity could mean, is that babies raised with two languages will find it easier to learn other languages later in life, as a result of the ability to easily distinguish between different sounds.

Bilingual people have also been shown to have better cognitive abilities than monolinguals.

Interestingly, this is regardless of what age the person learns the foreign language, so even a person who learns a foreign language as an adult will benefit from these improved skills.

By learning another language, your mother tongue can improve as a result. As you learn a second language, your knowledge of grammar improves.

In fact, as crazy as it may sound, learning a foreign language can actually increase the size of your brain.

In this study, two groups of subjects underwent brain scans. One group did an intensive language course for three months while the other, the control group, did intensive courses in a subject that was not a language. What the scientists found was that specific parts of the language learners’ brains became bigger than those of the non-language learners.

Given all the benefits outlined in this article, it’s hardly surprising that learning a foreign language keeps your brain healthy for longer

The benefits of multiple languages can start as early as before a baby is able to speak

Whatever your age, the health benefits of learning a foreign language make it a surefire way to upgrade your life, and future-proof your brain for old age.

Those who subscribe to the theory of linguistic relativity believe that a person’s way of thinking is influenced by the language he or she speaks

Language is a result of society. Therefore, language does not deserve the credit for shaping the way we process information.

Differences in the thought processes of speakers of different languages should be accredited to the distinct cultures from which these languages emerge.

Nevertheless, language is an important factor in the way a culture evolves. Ultimately, although it is our society rather than our language that shapes the way we think, language helps to enforce the way society is.

Language cannot be said to be responsible for the way a society functions since language itself is a result of that society. A key example of this can be found in the substance of a language, which tends to reflect the values of its speakers and the culture it comes from

A proponent of linguistic relativity might argue that this is an example of language shaping the way people think by defining age as the primary quality to know about a person.

However, this assertion fails to recognize the big picture. A more accurate analysis might indicate that society is responsible for this way of thinking, not language.

However, language still plays an important role in affecting cultures and social norms. Although languages are reflections of cultures, languages do influence how cultures will look in the future.

We can see this phenomenon in the history of the English language, which dates back to sometime between the 5th and 7th century AD, with Modern English gaining prominence in the late 17th century.

As we see with English sentence structure, the influence of cultural institutions on a language is often left intact even after that institution has weakened or disappeared.

Since language is our only proficient method of communication, what we can communicate is limited to the words and phrases available to us. While the society we live in may limit our perspective, the extent and strength of these limitations do not compare to that which language imposes. Cultural change comes more easily to us than linguistic change.

t took centuries for the Great Vowel Shift to occur while the world experienced revolutions, literary movements, great awakenings and deadly plagues at a much faster pace. This pattern is demonstrated in American culture as the language we speak fails to keep up with the progress we make. Patterns in our vocabulary tend to reflect this.

A commonly cited phenomenon is the negative and positive associations that English seems to make with “black” and “white.”

The limits of language may prevent us from progressing as quickly as we may want to, but we do have the ability to overcome some of these linguistic limits.

This is a key point about language use: rarely is natural language ever limited to speech alone. When we are speaking, we constantly use gestures to illustrate what we mean. For this reason, linguists say that language is “multi-modal”. Writing takes away that extra non-verbal information, but emoji may allow us to re-incorporate it into our text.

Emoji are not always used as embellishments, however – sometimes, strings of the characters can themselves convey meaning in a longer sequence on their own. But to constitute their own language, they would need a key component: grammar.

A grammatical system is a set of constraints that governs how the meaning of an utterance is packaged in a coherent way. Natural language grammars have certain traits that distinguish them. For one, they have individual units that play different roles in the sequence – like nouns and verbs in a sentence. Also, grammar is different from meaning

When emoji are isolated, they are primarily governed by simple rules related to meaning alone, without these more complex rules. For instance, according to research by Tyler Schnoebelen, people often create strings of emoji that share a common meaning

This sequence has little internal structure; even when it is rearranged, it still conveys the same message. These images are connected solely by their broader meaning. We might consider them to be a visual list: “here are all things related to celebrations and birthdays.” Lists are certainly a conventionalised way of communicating, but they don’t have grammar the way that sentences do.

What if the order did matter though? What if they conveyed a temporal sequence of events? Consider this example, which means something like “a woman had a party where they drank, and then opened presents and then had cake”:

In all cases, the doer of the action (the agent) precedes the action. In fact, this pattern is commonly found in both full languages and simple communication systems. For example, the majority of the world’s languages place the subject before the verb of a sentence.

These rules may seem like the seeds of grammar, but psycholinguist Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues have found this order appears in many other systems that would not be considered a language. For example, this order appears when people arrange pictures to describe events from an animated cartoon, or when speaking adults communicate using only gestures. It also appears in the gesture systems created by deaf children who cannot hear spoken languages and are not exposed to sign languages.

describes the children as lacking exposure to a language and thus invent their own manual systems to communicate, called “homesigns”. These systems are limited in the size of their vocabularies and the types of sequences they can create. For this reason, the agent-act order seems not to be due to a grammar, but from basic heuristics – practical workarounds – based on meaning alone. Emoji seem to tap into this same system.

Nevertheless, some may argue that despite emoji’s current simplicity, this may be the groundwork for emerging complexity – that although emoji do not constitute a language at the present time, they could develop into one over time.

Could an emerging “emoji visual language” be developing in a similar way, with actual grammatical structure? To answer that question, you need to consider the intrinsic constraints on the technology itself.Emoji are created by typing into a computer like text. But, unlike text, most emoji are provided as whole units, except for the limited set of emoticons which convert to emoji, like :) or ;). When writing text, we use the building blocks (letters) to create the units (words), not by searching through a list of every whole word in the language.

emoji force us to convey information in a linear unit-unit string, which limits how complex expressions can be made. These constraints may mean that they will never be able to achieve even the most basic complexity that we can create with normal and natural drawings.

What’s more, these limits also prevent users from creating novel signs – a requisite for all languages, especially emerging ones. Users have no control over the development of the vocabulary. As the “vocab list” for emoji grows, it will become increasingly unwieldy: using them will require a conscious search process through an external list, not an easy generation from our own mental vocabulary, like the way we naturally speak or draw. This is a key point – it means that emoji lack the flexibility needed to create a new language.

we already have very robust visual languages, as can be seen in comics and graphic novels. As I argue in my book, The Visual Language of Comics, the drawings found in comics use a systematic visual vocabulary (such as stink lines to represent smell, or stars to represent dizziness). Importantly, the available vocabulary is not constrained by technology and has developed naturally over time, like spoken and written languages.

grammar of sequential images is more of a narrative structure – not of nouns and verbs. Yet, these sequences use principles of combination like any other grammar, including roles played by images, groupings of images, and hierarchic embedding.

measured participants’ brainwaves while they viewed sequences one image at a time where a disruption appeared either within the groupings of panels or at the natural break between groupings. The particular brainwave responses that we observed were similar to those that experimenters find when violating the syntax of sentences. That is, the brain responds the same way to violations of “grammar”, whether in sentences or sequential narrative images.

I would hypothesise that emoji can use a basic narrative structure to organise short stories (likely made up of agent-action sequences), but I highly doubt that they would be able to create embedded clauses like these. I would also doubt that you would see the same kinds of brain responses that we saw with the comic strip sequences.

I don’t think these tools will ever render learning foreign languages completely obsolete. Real conversation in the flowing nuances of casual speech cannot be rendered by a program, at least not in a way that would convey full humanity.

even if it may fail at genuine, nuanced conversation — for now, at least — technology is eliminating most of the need to learn foreign languages for more utilitarian purposes.

The old-school language textbook scenarios, of people reserving hotel rooms or ordering meals in the language of the country they are visiting — “Greetings. Please bring me a glass of lemonade and a sandwich!” — will now be obsolete

to actively enjoy piecing together how other languages work is an individual quirk, not a human universal

Obsessive language learners have come to call themselves the polyglot community over the past couple of decades, and I am one of them, to an extent. As such, I know well how hard it can be to recognize that most human beings are numb to this peculiar desire.

Most human beings are interested much less in how they are saying things, and which language they are saying them in, than in what they are saying.

Learning to express this what — beyond the very basics — in another language is hard. It can be especially hard for us Anglophones, as speaking English works at least decently in so many places

To polyglots, foreign languages are Mount Everests daring us to climb them — a metaphor used by Hofstadter in his article. But to most people, they are just a barrier to get to the other side of.

After all, despite the sincere and admirable efforts of foreign language teachers nationwide, fewer than one in 100 American students become proficient in a language they learned in school.

Because I love trying to learn languages and am endlessly fascinated by their varieties and complexities, I am working hard to wrap my head around this new reality. With an iPhone handy and an appropriate app downloaded, foreign languages will no longer present most people with the barrier or challenge they once did

Learning to genuinely speak a new language will hardly be unknown. It will continue to beckon, for instance, for those actually relocating to a new country. And it will persist with people who want to engage with literature or media in the original language, as well as those of us who find pleasure in mastering these new codes just because they are “there.”

In other words, it will likely become an artisanal pursuit, of interest to a much smaller but more committed set of enthusiasts. And weird as that is, it is in its way a kind of progress.

In conclusion, there is a nested relationship between language and thought. In the interaction processes mentioned above, the role of language changes. Even though the limits of our language are different from the limits of our thinking, it is inevitable that people prioritize concepts in their languages. This, however, does not mean that they cannot comprehend or think about concepts that do not exist in their language.

There is obviously no point in working so hard to learn a language if you will just forget it as you learn the next one. As much practise as possible is needed!

is Chinese the language of the future?

So which one should you, or your children, learn? If you take a glance at advertisements in New York or A-level options in Britain, an answer seems to leap out: Mandarin.

The practical reasons are just as compelling. In business, if the team on the other side of the table knows your language but you don’t know theirs, they almost certainly know more about you and your company than you do about them and theirs—a bad position to negotiate from.

This factor is the Chinese writing system (which Japan borrowed and adapted centuries ago). The learner needs to know at least 3,000-4,000 characters to make sense of written Chinese, and thousands more to have a real feel for it. Chinese, with all its tones, is hard enough to speak. But  the mammoth feat of memory required to be literate in Mandarin is harder still. It deters most foreigners from ever mastering the system—and increasingly trips up Chinese natives.

If you were to learn ten languages ranked by general usefulness, Japanese would probably not make the list. And the key reason for Japanese’s limited spread will also put the brakes on Chinese.

A recent survey reported in the People’s Daily found 84% of respondents agreeing that skill in Chinese is declining.

Fewer and fewer native speakers learn to produce characters in traditional calligraphy. Instead, they write their language the same way we do—with a computer. And not only that, but they use the Roman alphabet to produce Chinese characters: type in wo and Chinese language-support software will offer a menu of characters pronounced wo; the user selects the one desired. (Or if the user types in wo shi zhongguo ren, “I am Chinese”, the software detects the meaning and picks the right characters.) With less and less need to recall the characters cold, the Chinese are forgetting them

As long as China keeps the character-based system—which will probably be a long time, thanks to cultural attachment and practical concerns alike—Chinese is very unlikely to become a true world language, an auxiliary language like English, the language a Brazilian chemist will publish papers in, hoping that they will be read in Finland and Canada. By all means, if China is your main interest, for business or pleasure, learn Chinese. It is fascinating, and learnable—though Moser’s online essay, “Why Chinese is so damn hard,” might discourage the faint of heart and the short of time.

But if I was asked what foreign language is the most useful, and given no more parameters (where? for what purpose?), my answer would be French. Whatever you think of France, the language is much less limited than many people realise.

French ranks only 16th on the list of languages ranked by native speakers. But ranked above it are languages like Telegu and Javanese that no one would call world languages. Hindi does not even unite India. Also in the top 15 are Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese, major languages to be sure, but regionally concentrated. If your interest is the Middle East or Islam, by all means learn Arabic. If your interest is Latin America, Spanish or Portuguese is the way to go. Or both; learning one makes the second quite easy.

if you want another truly global language, there are surprisingly few candidates, and for me French is unquestionably top of the list. It can enhance your enjoyment of art, history, literature and food, while giving you an important tool in business and a useful one in diplomacy. It has native speakers in every region on earth. And lest we forget its heartland itself, France attracts more tourists than any other country—76.8m in 2010, according to the World Tourism Organisation, leaving America a distant second with 59.7m

The effectiveness of this process is so great that human brain is able to accurately identify words and whole phrases from a noisy background. This power of analysis brings to minds the great similarity between the brain and powerful supercomputers.

Functional imaging of the brain revealed that activated brain parts are different between native and non-native speakers. The superior temporal gyrus is an important brain region involved in language learning. For a native speaker this part is responsible for automated processing of lexical retrieval and the build of phrase structure. In native speakers this zone is much more activated than in non-native ones.

infants begin their lives with a very flexible brain that allows them to acquire virtually any language they are exposed to. Moreover, they can learn a language words almost equally by listening or by visual coding. This brain plasticity is the motor drive of the children capability of “cracking the speech code” of a language. With time, this ability is dramatically decreased and adults find it harder to acquire a new language.

clearly demonstrated that there are anatomical brain differences between fast and slow learners of foreign languages. By analyzing a group of people having a homogenous language background, scientists found that differences in specific brain regions can predict the capacity of a person to learn a second language.

Until the last decade few studies compared the language acquisition in adults and children. Thanks to modern imaging and electroencephalography we are now able to address this question.

Language acquisition is a long-term process by which information are stored in the brain unconsciously making them appropriate to oral and written usage. In contrast, language learning is a conscious process of knowledge acquisition that needs supervision and control by the person.

Second, Time isn’t really linear

time is really just “your assessment of how long something took.”

Time can also feel faster or slower depending on how we experience it.

“Language doesn’t determine how you think, but it can determine how you think about things.”

Defining snow with such specific language grants it multiple meanings, and those multiple meanings increase its significance within the culture of the people using the language.

sees beyond the linear bounds of time

The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.

In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.

As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.

People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions.

And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.

Patterns in language offer a window on a culture's dispositions and priorities.

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs

Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.

Animal communication systems, in contrast, typically have at most a few dozen distinct calls, and they are used only to communicate immediate issues such as food, danger, threat, or reconciliation. Many of the sorts of meanings conveyed by chimpanzee communication have counterparts in human 'body language'.

The basic difficulty with studying the evolution of language is that the evidence is so sparse. Spoken languages don't leave fossils, and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do

All present-day languages, including those of hunter-gatherer cultures, have lots of words, can be used to talk about anything under the sun, and can express negation. As far back as we have written records of human language - 5000 years or so - things look basically the same.

According to current thinking, the changes crucial for language were not just in the size of the brain, but in its character: the kinds of tasks it is suited to do - as it were, the 'software' it comes furnished with.

So the properties of human language are unique in the natural world.

About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract (the mouth, tongue, and throat): Until anatomically modern humans, about 100,000 years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the modern range of speech sounds. But that doesn't mean that language necessarily began the

Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then (gradually or suddenly) switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue.

. In an early stage, sounds would have been used to name a wide range of objects and actions in the environment, and individuals would be able to invent new vocabulary items to talk about new things

In order to achieve a large vocabulary, an important advance would have been the ability to 'digitize' signals into sequences of discrete speech sounds - consonants and vowels - rather than unstructured calls.

These two changes alone would yield a communication system of single signals - better than the chimpanzee system but far from modern language. A next plausible step would be the ability to string together several such 'words' to create a message built out of the meanings of its parts.

This has led some researchers to propose that the system of 'protolanguage' is still present in modern human brains, hidden under the modern system except when the latter is impaired or not yet developed.

Again, it's very hard to tell. We do know that something important happened in the human line between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago: This is when we start to find cultural artifacts such as art and ritual objects, evidence of what we would call civilization.

One tantalizing source of evidence has emerged recently. A mutation in a gene called FOXP2 has been shown to lead to deficits in language as well as in control of the face and mouth. This gene is a slightly altered version of a gene found in apes, and it seems to have achieved its present form between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Nevertheless, if we are ever going to learn more about how the human language ability evolved, the most promising evidence will probably come from the human genome, which preserves so much of our species' history. The challenge for the future will be to decode it.

But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.

experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on how its speakers think

If a language dies, a fascinating way of thinking dies along with it.

extrapolating cognitive implications from language differences is a delicate business.

One psychologist argued some decades ago that this meant that Chinese makes a person less sensitive to such distinctions, which, let’s face it, is discomfitingly close to saying Chinese people aren’t as quick on the uptake as the rest of us. The truth is more mundane: Hypotheticality and counterfactuality are established more by context in Chinese than in English.

But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?

The answer is still yes, but for other reasons.

First, a central aspect of any culture’s existence as a coherent entity is the fact of its having its own language, regardless of what the language happens to be like

because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community.

Second, languages are scientifically interesting even if they don’t index cultural traits. They offer variety equivalent to the diversity of the world’s fauna and flora.

As with any other feature of the natural world, such variety tests and expands our sense of the possible, of what is “normal.”

Cultures, to be sure, show how we are different. Languages, however, are variations on a worldwide, cross-cultural perception of this thing called life.

different cultures have a predominant fashion in which they use their language and they have differences which cannot be underestimated.

one of the most well known linguists in the world, argues that all languages are dialects of one language, which is the human language. He says that even though they appear very different, they are in fact very similar.

there is no doubt that language and culture are closely connected.

Direct and Indirect Styles

We are encouraged to be direct and to speak our mind.

Asian cultures use an indirect style of communication. Words such as “perhaps" and “maybe" are used much more frequently than “yes", “no" or “for sure".

Personal and Contextual Styles

Two of the most frequently used words in our culture are “I" and “you".

American culture is not very formal, so it is appropriate to say “you" to your boss, to the President, to a stranger, to your spouse or to your child.

In Thai language there are twelve forms of the pronoun “you", which depend of factors such as status or level of intimacy.

The style of language is focused on speaker and depends on someone’s status and identity.

Japanese pay a lot of attention to someone’s status and they use linguistic forms called honorifics, which are used according to the rank of the person who is speaking

Untranslatable Words

Many people don’t realize that there are plenty of words that cannot be translated from one language to another simply because they don’t exist in another language.

The word “shopping", which describes one of the most favorite activities of Americans, doesn’t exist in some other languages (such as for example in Russian) as a noun.

Another interesting example is the word “ilunga".

Republic of Congo and is considered to be the most untranslatable word in the world.

a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first and a second time, but never for a third time.

Language Is Changing Along with the Culture

he and his were used generically in English language.

Since the United States and most of the English-speaking Western Europe are becoming less and less male-dominant cultures, the grammar rules have been changed and new gender agreement rules were created.

Fifty years ago nobody was suspecting that one day in the United States the words “mother" and “father" would become controversial and that some schools would agree to change them both to “parent".

ARABIC IS ONE of the languages the U.S. Department of State dubs “extremely hard.” Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are the others. These languages’ structures are vastly different from that of English, and they are memorization-driven.

To help meet its language-learning goals, in 2003 the Department of Defense established the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language.

MICHAEL GEISLER, a vice president at Middlebury College, which runs the foremost language-immersion school in the country, was blunt: “The drill-and-kill approach we used 20 years ago doesn’t work.” He added, “The typical approach that most programs take these days—Rosetta Stone is one example—is scripted dialogue and picture association. You have a picture of the Eiffel Tower, and you have a sentence to go with it. But that’s not going to teach you the language.”

According to Geisler, you need four things to learn a language. First, you have to use it. Second, you have to use it for a purpose. Research shows that doing something while learning a language—preparing a cooking demonstration, creating an art project, putting on a play—stimulates an exchange of meaning that goes beyond using the language for the sake of learning it.Third, you have to use the language in context. This is where Geisler says all programs have fallen short.

Fourth, you have to use language in interaction with others. In a 2009 study led by Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington, researchers found that young children easily learned a second language from live human interaction while playing and reading books. But audio and DVD approaches with the same material, without the live interaction, fostered no learning progress at all. Two people in conversation constantly give each other feedback that can be used to make changes in how they respond.

our research shows that the ideal model is a blended one,” one that blends technology and a teacher. “Our latest research shows that with the proper use of technology and cognitive neuroscience, we can make language learning more efficient.” 

The school released its first two online programs, for French and Spanish, last year. The new courses use computer avatars for virtual collaboration; rich video of authentic, unscripted conversations with native speakers; and 3-D role-playing games in which students explore life in a city square, acting as servers and taking orders from customers in a café setting. The goal at the end of the day, as Geisler put it, is for you to “actually be able to interact with a native speaker in his own language and have him understand you, understand him, and, critically, negotiate when you don’t understand what he is saying.” 

The program includes the usual vocabulary lists and lessons in how to conjugate verbs, but students are also consistently immersed in images, audio, and video of people from different countries speaking with different accents. Access to actual teachers is another critical component.

“Slang may not represent us at our best, or our most admirable, but it represents us as human beings with anger, fear, self-aggrandisement, and our obsession with sex and bodily parts.”

This clever, playful use of metaphor would come to define anti-languages for Halliday. As you could see from the dialogue between the two Elizabethan ruffians, the strange, nonsensical words render a sentence almost impossible to comprehend for outsiders, and the more terms you have, the harder it is for an outsider to learn the code. It is the reason that selling words to the police can be heavily punished among underworld gangs.

All borrow the grammar of the mother language but replace words (“London”, “purse”, “money”, “alehouse”) with another, elliptical term (“Rome”, “bounge”, “lower”, “bowsing ken”). Often, the anti-language may employ dozens of terms that have blossomed from a single concept – a feature known as “over-lexicalisation”. Halliday points to at least 20 terms that Elizabethan criminals used to describe fellow thieves, for instance

Similarly, the Kolkata underworld had 41 words for police and more than 20 for bomb. Each anti-society may have its own way of generating new terms; often the terms are playful metaphors (such as “bawdy basket”), but they can also be formed from existing words by swapping around or inserting syllables – “face” might become “ecaf”, for instance.

striking similarities in the patois spoken by all three underground groups and the ways it shaped their interactions.

“The better you are, the higher the status between those users,” explains Martin Montgomery, author of An Introduction to Language and Society.

Halliday doubted that secrecy was the only motive for building an anti-language, though; he found that it also helps define a hierarchy within the “anti-society”. Among the Polish prisoners, refusing to speak the lingo could denigrate you to the lowest possible rung of the social ladder, the so-called “suckers”.

The concept of an anti-language throws light on many of the vibrant slangs at the edges of society, from Cockney rhyming slang and Victorian “Gobbledygook” to the “Mobspeak” of the Mafia and “Boobslang” found uniquely in New Zealand prisons. The breadth and range of the terms can be astonishing; a lexicography of Boobslang reaches more than 200 pages, with 3,000 entries covering many areas of life.

Consider Polari. Incorporating elements of criminal cants, the gypsy Romani language, and Italian words, it was eventually adopted by the gay community of early 20th Century Britain, when homosexuality was still illegal. (Taking a “vada” at a “bona omi” for instance, means take a look at the good-looking man). Dropping an innocent term into a conversation would have been a way of identifying another gay man, without the risk of incriminating yourself among people who were not in the know.

His success is a startling illustration of the power of an anti-language to subvert – using the establishment's prudish "Auntie"  to broadcast shocking scenes of gay culture, two years before the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality. The show may have only got the green light thanks to the fact that the radio commissioners either didn’t understand the connotations

the song Girl Loves Me on David Bowie’s latest album was written as a combination of Polari and Nadsat, the fictional anti-language in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

Montgomery thinks we can see a similar process in the lyrics of hip-hop music. As with the other anti-languages, you can witness the blossoming of words for the illegal activities that might accompany gang culture. “There are so many words for firearm, for different kinds of drug, for money,”

Again, the imaginitive terms lend themselve to artistic use. “There’s quite often a playful element you elaborate new terms for old,” Montgomery says. “To use broccoli as a word for a drug – you take a word from the mainstream and convert it to new use and it has semi-humorous twist to it.”

He thinks that the web will only encourage the creation of slang that share some of the qualities of anti-languages; you just need to look at the rich online vocabulary that has emerged to describe prostitution;

new, metaphorical forms of speech will also proliferate in areas threatened by state censorship; already, you can see a dozen euphemisms flourishing in place of every term that is blocked from a search engine or social network.  If we can learn anything from this rich history of criminal cants, it is the enormous resilience of human expression in the face of oppression.

Although it is at pains to point out that it does not believe language can be preserved unchanged, it worries that communication is at risk of becoming far less effective. “Some changes would be wholly unacceptable, as they would cause confusion and the language would lose shades of meaning

“Without grammar, we lose the agreed-upon standards about what means what. We lose the ability to communicate when respondents are not actually in the same room speaking to one another. Without grammar, we lose the precision required to be effective and purposeful in writing.”

At the same time, our laziness and imprecision are leading to unnecessary bloating of the language – “language obesity,”

That’s five writers, across a span of 400 years, all moaning about the same erosion of standards. And yet the period also encompasses some of the greatest works of English literature.

Since then, the English-speaking world has grown more prosperous, better educated and more efficiently governed, despite an increase in population. Most democratic freedoms have been preserved and intellectual achievement intensified.

Linguistic decline is the cultural equivalent of the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf never turns up

Our language will always be as flexible and sophisticated as it has been up to now. Those who warn about the deterioration of English haven’t learned about the history of the language, and don’t understand the nature of their own complaints – which are simply statements of preference for the way of doing things they have become used to.

But the problem is that writers at that time also felt they were speaking a degraded, faltering tongue

Seventy-odd years ago, people knew their grammar and knew how to talk clearly. And, if we follow the logic, they must also have been better at organising, finding things out and making things work.

Hand-wringing about standards is not restricted to English. The fate of every language in the world has been lamented by its speakers at some point or another.

“For more than 2,000 years, complaints about the decay of respective languages have been documented in literature, but no one has yet been able to name an example of a ‘decayed language’.” He has a point.

One common driver of linguistic change is a process called reanalysis.

Another form that linguistic change often takes is grammaticalisation: a process in which a common phrase is bleached of its independent meaning and made into a word with a solely grammatical function

One instance of this is the verb “to go”, when used for an action in the near future or an intention.

Human anatomy makes some changes to language more likely than others. The simple mechanics of moving from a nasal sound (m or n) to a non-nasal one can make a consonant pop up in between

The way our brain divides up words also drives change. We split them into phonemes (building blocks of sound that have special perceptual significance) and syllables (groups of phonemes).

ound changes can come about as a result of social pressures: certain ways of saying things are seen as having prestige, while others are stigmatised. We gravitate towards the prestigious, and make efforts to avoid saying things in a way that is associated with undesirable qualities – often just below the level of consciousnes

The problem arises when deciding what might be good or bad. There are, despite what many people feel, no objective criteria by which to judge what is better or worse in communication

Though we are all capable of adaptation, many aspects of the way we use language, including stylistic preferences, have solidified by our 20s. If you are in your 50s, you may identify with many aspects of the way people spoke 30-45 years ago.

The irony is, of course, that the pedants are the ones making the mistakes. To people who know how language works, pundits such as Douglas Rushkoff only end up sounding ignorant, having failed to really interrogate their views

Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as “dialects” of one language, are actually treated as separate languages

It turns out that it’s also impossible to determine precisely where one “language” leaves off and another begins

As such, English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on “intelligibility”: If you can understand it without training, it’s a dialect of your own language; if you can’t, it’s a different language

The only thing that can save an attempt to impose a formal definition on the terms “language” and “dialect” now is perhaps to be found in popular usage, which suggests that languages are written and standardized and have a literature, while dialects are oral, without codified rules, and have no literature.

Namely, it’s the implication that there is something lesser about a “dialect.

As often as not, obscure, unwritten “dialects” are much more grammatically complicated than familiar “languages.”

A language, then, is indeed a dialect with an army and a navy; or, more to the point, a language is a dialect that got put up in the shop window.

In popular usage, a language is written in addition to being spoken, while a dialect is just spoken. But in the scientific sense, the world is buzzing with a cacophony of qualitatively equal “dialects,” often shading into one another like colors (and often mixing, too), all demonstrating how magnificently complicated human speech can be.

a key study in the 1960s by Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, found that the ability to speak two languages does not stunt overall development. On the contrary, when controlling for other factors which might also affect performance, such as socioeconomic status and education, they found that bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in 15 verbal and non-verbal tests

Besides giving us bilinguals a brain boost, speaking a second language may have a profound effect on behaviour. Neuroscientists and psychologists are coming to accept that language is deeply entwined with thought and reasoning, leading some to wonder whether bilingual people act differently depending on which language they are speaking. That would certainly tally with my experience. People often tell me that I seem different when I speak English compared with when I speak French.

One explanation is that each language brings to mind the values of the culture we experienced while learning it, says Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, a psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. She recently asked bilingual Mexicans to rate their personality in English and Spanish questionnaires. Modesty is valued more highly in Mexico than it is in the US, where assertiveness gains respect, and the language of the questions seemed to trigger these differences. When questioned in Spanish, each volunteer was more humble than when the survey was presented in English

Much has been made of the difficulties of learning a new language later in life, but the evidence so far suggests the effort should pay off. “You can learn another language at any age, you can learn it fluently, and you can see benefits to your cognitive system,” says Marian. Bialystok agrees that late language-learners gain an advantage, even if the performance boost is usually less pronounced than in bilingual speakers. “Learn a language at any age, not to become bilingual, but just to remain mentally stimulated,” she says. “That’s the source of cognitive reserve.”

As it is, I’m grateful that particular challenge is behind me. My mother could never have guessed the extent to which her words would change my brain and the way I see my world, but I’m certain it was worth the effort. And for all that I just have to say: Merci!