According to Chomsky, a Martian sent to Earth would conclude we speak a variety of dialects with mutually unintelligible vocabularies—but dialects, nonetheless, of a single Earthish tongue.

(Kalbfleisch 1994)

Could this be true? Could it be that—in spite of the seeming multitude of differences between English and Kwakiutl, Navajo and Japanese, Albanian and Hawaiian—every human being could accurately say, "I speak a dialect of Earthish"?
Let's assume for a moment, for purposes of discussion, that it's true; let's suppose there is in fact a language that we could (a bit more gracefully) call "Terran." What might that mean for humankind? Does it matter? Would it be important and significant, or would it only qualify as a tidbit of information to include in trivia contests?
If it's true, we clearly need the answers to a number of other questions. For example:

• Does it matter which of these Terran dialects is your own native tongue? Are some of the Terran dialects better than others—more useful, more beautiful, more powerful, or in some other way more desirable?
• If you happen to have native or near-native fluency in more than one "dialect" of Terran, are you blessed, or burdened, or neither? That is, do bilingualism and multilingualism have significant effects on human minds and lives, and if so, what are their consequences?
• Are there good reasons to work toward eliminating many of these language differences? Should we perhaps try to get rid of the hundreds of varieties now spoken only by very small populations—so that we humans could communicate with fewer of the cumbersome systems and devices now required for translating and interpreting all over the world? Or would that be a mistake?

• Jack grinned at the relatives crowding his living room and shook his head at them in mock despair. He'd known they would find his bragging hard to believe; he'd been prepared for resistance. "I'm not kidding you!" he insisted. "I bought that Spanish computer program for Jennifer, and in two months—two months—she was rattling off Spanish like a native! And we're talking about a three-year-old kid here! I'm going to get her the French program next!"
• Thomas was determined not to lose his temper with the kids again, but he couldn't keep the sternness out of his voice as he spoke. They're not stupid! he thought. What do I have to say to get them to pay attention? "Listen to me, you two!" he said urgently. "Haven't I told you, over and over, not to let me hear you talking Tagalog? Haven't I? Hasn't your mother told you the same thing? What's the matter with you, you want to spend your whole life on welfare? You speak English, you hear me? Don't make me have to tell you again!"
• When Barbara got home from work she was in a good mood. It had been such luck that she'd still remembered enough from her years in China to be able to interpret for the patient and Dr. Gales! There could have been serious misunderstandings if she hadn't been there—and she'd saved the hospital the cost of a Chinese interpreter, too. But when she told her husband about it, he frowned at her. "I don't know if that was such a good idea," Jim said slowly. "Don't you think the other nurses may resent the way you were showing off?"
• Philip didn't like having to talk to Anna's mother about this subject; he was very worried about hurting her feelings. But it was his duty to the child, and he was determined to get it done. "Mrs. Kolyoff," he said carefully, "I'm really sorry to have to say this. Russia is a great country; I know that. It has a wonderful history of music and art and literature and scientific discovery. I'm glad that Anna can speak Russian; that's terrific. But you have to realize that it's holding her back. If you want her to go on to fourth grade, ma'am, you're going to have to convince her to speak English!"
• Greg nodded his agreement to what the others were saying about their colleague: Harold Fleming was a top-notch lawyer, no question about it! "But I keep wondering," Greg cut in. "How long are we going to be able to keep Hal in the firm? Did you know that he speaks four languages fluently? Including Japanese? He can write his own ticket, you know? He could get a top position anywhere. I just hope we can hang on to him a while, myself!"
• Janet sighed, looking at the gloomy faces around the table; it wasn't easy being a school principal in times like these. "All right then," she said wearily, "we all hate to do it, but we don't really have any choice. The only way to find the money is to get rid of the frills, and that means dropping French and Spanish. Not that foreign languages aren't a good thing, mind you! If we had unlimited funds I'm sure we'd all be solidly behind having them in our curriculum. But they're not important the way football and math are important, and—that's all there is to it. They've got to go!"

• Set out the questions that must be answered with regard to the power of language in human life, especially in the areas of public policy and in education.
• Establish the importance of multilingualism within the context of the larger topic of the power of language.
• Explain why there is so much confusion and contradiction about multilingualism and about language learning as a whole.
• Provide a fair hearing for both (or all) sides of the major controversies.
• Present the basic facts, when they are available.
• Discuss the possible effects of multilingualism in some major areas of human life.
• Present useful information gathered from speakers of two or more languages about their personal perceptions of, and experiences with, multilingualism.
• Help make possible the building of a consensus for or against multilingualism that is based on scientific information and real-world facts.
• Outline possible directions for further research.

1. What is multilingualism?
2. What is the link between languages and cultures?
3. What effect, if any, do languages have on human perceptions of reality?
4. What are some consequences of multilingualism in a few representative areas of human life (for example, medicine, business, and family life)?
5. Should we have a single language that everybody learns, worldwide, with which to carry on international communication? What effects might that have on our lives?
6. How do people become multilingual, and what happens in their minds and/or brains when they do? Is this good or bad?
7. What does all this information tell us about the power of human language?

Full Disclosure

• I am convinced that Chomsky is correct in his claim that human infants are born with some innate capacity for learning human languages.
• I am convinced that there is a core of elements common to all human languages, usually referred to as universal grammar but more accurately global grammar.
• I am convinced that the link between language and culture is so strong that loss of a language inevitably means loss of the associated culture as well, and I consider such losses tragic.
• I am convinced that human languages (and dialects of human languages) do structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways.
• Finally, I am convinced that multilingualism is desirable for humankind and should be encouraged in every way possible.

Despite bilingual nannies, tapes, picture books, and even sending their kids abroad for the summer, bilingual parents in this country are losing the battle to maintain their children's grasp of a foreign language … The challenge to raise a child bilingually becomes even more difficult for languages of lesser prevalence.

(Mireya Navarro, quoted in Landers 1996, page 5)

The quotation above describes a reality very unlike the one we ordinarily see described and discussed in the mainstream media. How could it be a challenge to raise a child bilingually or multilingually, as Navarro claims? All the news stories and editorials are about the dangers of multilingualism in the United States and the need for defensive strategies against it, as if American English might vanish at any moment! With the single exception of documentaries about Native Americans, we see no news reports in which parents are lamenting the fact that—despite their best efforts—their children speak only English.
We need to know which version of reality is accurate, and we need to find out how and why two such wildly differing portraits of our language environment can exist simultaneously. We can be reasonably sure that a communication breakdown like this one occurs only when two or more groups of people are using the same words and phrases but aren't giving them the same meanings. These situations which I call "reality gaps," can go on for many years without anyone who is involved even being aware that they exist; meanwhile, the problems they create are blamed on all sorts of irrelevant factors.
Our first and most basic question is: What do we mean when we say that someone is multilingual? And our first and most typical reaction to that question is of course that it's absurdly easy to answer. After all, aren't we're just talking about people who know more than one language? Isn't the meaning obvious?
The question isn't easily answered, and the meaning is anything but obvious. This is because we can't define "multilingual" or "multilingualism" until we have agreed on the meaning of that phrase, "know more than one language." No real consensus exists, you see, on what it means to "know" a language, or on precisely what a "language" is. We are well and truly stuck at this point, and the lack of agreement has created a seething broil of controversies. Controversies that can lead to the spending or withholding of many millions of dollars; controversies whose consequences can be as trivial as a bumper sticker—and as grave, even tragic, as civil disorder, terrorism, and civil war.

Defining "Multilingualism"—What It Means to "Know" More than One Language

Defining "Language"—What It Means to Know "a Language"

How Many Different Languages Could One Person "Know?"

Each vocation or avocation has its Babe Ruths and Baryshnikovs, and so it is with the Linguistic Society of America. The champion is Francis E. Sommer, fluent in 94 languages … There were no Olympic medals or Nobel prizes for him, but that is a mistake that should be rectified, said scholars coming to New York City … for the annual convention of the Linguistic Society of America.
But suppose we accept on faith the claim that Francis E. Sommer was fluent in ninety-four languages. We have no way to be certain what that would mean. As Dorian (1982, page 33) says:

At the lower levels of semispeaker proficiency there are some individuals who actually say very little yet continue to interact in a highly successful fashion with fluent speakers. Thanks to their superb passive bilingualism they follow all verbal interactions without any difficulty, and … they can participate for years in a linguistic network without anyone paying much attention to the assymetric nature of their interactions, or even to their flawed productions.
I see nothing unreasonable, based either on the scholarly literature or my own experience, about the idea that people might be comfortable with scores of languages in the fashion that Dorian calls "passive" multilingualism—that is, able to function and carry on their daily lives in an area where any one of those scores of languages is spoken. If you and I are having a conversation and it seems to us that we understand each other, if neither of us is stopping every few minutes to ask what a word means or complain of being unable to keep up, it's very unlikely that either of us will issue some challenge that would require proof of fluency in the language. That happens only in special situations where professional services are being rendered, as when a teacher says to a student, or a lawyer says to a client,"Now, tell me what I just said, please, so that I can be sure you understood." Our foreign language examiners at UCSD all agreed that one of the most important demonstrations of "knowing a language" was that a student laughed in all the right places—a skill that has little to do with accent or verb endings.
In many parts of the United States people tend to look upon multilingualism as something strange and exotic. Unless they work in a field where multiple languages are a standard professional requirement, they may not know personally even one person who speaks more than one language. They are likely to assume that because this is true of their personal language environment it represents what is usual and normal everywhere. Their assumption would be incorrect; in much of the world, it's monolingualism that's unusual, not multilingualism.
James Geary writes that it's common for many Africans "to speak five or six tribal languages in addition to their own mother tongue" (Geary 1997, page 6). One of my husband's relatives was fluent in seven languages, as a result of having spent his childhood in a missionary compound where all seven were spoken. In the foreign language program at UCSD it wasn't unusual for people to be very fluent in four or five languages; one of my associates there was fluent in fourteen.
In my database of multilinguals, people who claim to be able to get by comfortably in four or more languages are common—and many take their expertise with English so much for granted that they didn't even list English as one of their languages when they filled out my questionnaire in English. If I were to create a sort of "Prototype Multilingual" from that database, the linguistic life story would go something like this:

My father spoke Polish and my mother was Italian, and we spoke both of those languages at home because my grandmother lived with us and her only language was Italian. Then when I was three years old we moved to France, and it took me about six months to learn French, which was the language all my friends spoke. I started taking English in school when I was ten, and then we moved again, this time to Turkey, and so I learned Turkish. My first job was with a company that sent me to lapan, and so I learned lapanese when I was in my early twenties. Somewhere along the way I picked up German—I don't really remember when—and although my Russian certainly isn't native I can get by well enough for social and business conversation in that language as well.

How Hard Is It to Become Multilingual?

• The hardest foreign language for an adult to learn will be the first one learned, all else being equal.
• Each tongue learned thereafter from the same language family will be easier to learn than the first foreign language was.
• Even languages from different language families—for example, Spanish and Japanese—will be easier to learn after a few other languages have been mastered.
• So far as we know, and so far as time allows, any number of languages can be learned over a lifetime; no evidence exists to support any upper limit.
• With rare exceptions, none of the languages learned as an adult will be learned with native fluency.

he likens language to an elaborately wired box of switches—root concepts and grammatical principles—set in one position or another by experience. Chinese sets the switches in one pattern, English in another. But the fundamental conceptual framework of how concepts and syntax interlock is the same.
Theoretically, any sound a human being can make could be part of a human language. Why not? In actual practice, however, all languages choose their sounds from the same set of possibilities, a set containing somewhere around seventy to eighty sounds. Nothing logically—or physiologically—prevents a language from having words that begin with a sound made by touching the upper lip to the lower teeth. Many languages have sounds made with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, like English "F" and "V." But no language uses that other option. A language could, logically, include as one of its sounds the sound of the hands clapping, or the nose sniffing; no languages take advantage of those possibilities. Two languages may be separated in time and space by vast distances; nevertheless, they will confine their choices of meaningful sounds to the basic human set.
In the same way, nothing prevents a language theoretically from having any grammar rule the human mind can imagine. However, all human languages use only four kinds of grammar rules:

• Rules that delete something. (We can say either "You eat your peas!" or "Eat your peas!")
• Rules that insert something. (We say, "It's raining," although there is no "it" that rains.)
• Rules that substitute one thing for another. (Instead of "I was looking for the book about Indo-European languages and I found the book about Indo-European languages," we ordinarily say, "I was looking for the book about Indo-European languages and I found it.")
• Rules that move things from one place to another. (We can say either "I hate eggplant" or "Eggplant, I hate")

Language Learning in Young Children Versus Language Learning in Adults

"Ich habe das aufgefmisht." ("I've finished it up.")

"Er supposed das nicht machen." ("He's not supposed to do that.")
The more languages there were involved, the more severe the delays and confusions were expected to be. All this was something "everybody knew." Given the problems most adults in the United States associate with foreign language learning, it all seemed to be self-evident.
Even if the claims had been proved true, I'm not sure they would be anything to worry about. However, dissenting reports have steadily piled up from parents of multilingual children, saying that their kids prove the predictions of language troubles false. It appears that children who have serious or long-lasting problems are the exception rather than the rule. Hakuta tells us: "In most children by the age of three to four, languages are rarely mixed" (Hakuta 1986, page 67). And parents agree: It's unusual for any problems caused by confusion among the languages to last much beyond that age.
One of the most striking things about the information in my database of multilinguals is their relaxed attitude toward their multilingualism. Not a single one complains of having been held back in language development in any way. None report any anxiety about language development in their own children (or look upon mistakes like the ones in the example above as anything serious). And they are unanimous in wanting their own children—existing or potential—to be raised as multilinguals. Typical comments:

"I want them to learn as many languages as they can." (Bertil Eroz, Turkish/English)

"I think children should be exposed to as many languages as possible and given the opportunity to hear them when they are still young enough." (Dominique Estival, French/English)
The closest thing to a negative comment about bringing kids up multilingually comes from Marie Lenstrup (Danish/English/ Swedish/Norwegian, living in Hong Kong), who says, "I'm not sure that it's such a great idea for little children to have too many languages to choose from." But she goes on to demonstrate that what she means by "too many languages" is four or more, saying, "I would of course want any children to speak both my language, the language of their father, and the language of the place we were living in." All my respondents appear to take it for granted that their children should learn at least two or three languages, just as the typical U.S. parent takes it for granted that they should learn to read and write.
Contrast this with the statement from Ruey Brodine (English/Italian): "The process of learning a new language and a new culture are so difficult that I can't imagine anyone undertaking it without having to. But if you stick to it, no other learning experience is more enriching, in my opinion." Brodine (who lives and works in Italy) didn't begin learning the Italian language and culture until the age of twenty-six, by which time it often is a formidable project to learn a first foreign language well. Small children ordinarily react to language learning in this way only when they've been overexposed to older persons' complaints that the process is something to dread.
The idea that learning a language will always be an ordeal is very common among native American English speakers in the United States, even for people who strongly approve of it as a project. Walter Meyer accurately points out in his wonderful book Aliens & Linguists (1980, page 117) that American science fiction writers will cheerfully put their characters through almost any imaginable sort of awful ordeal, and some that almost aren't imaginable, with one exception: Characters are spared the horror of having to learn a foreign language. The Star Trek series reflects this attitude by seeing to it that all potential language problems are settled with a flashlightlike (and extremely improbable) gizmo called a "Universal Translator." If I point my UT at you and you speak Southern Colloquial Venusian Tqiltqish at me, I will hear American English; and when I answer you in American English, you will hear it as Southern Colloquial Venusian Tqiltqish. This would save huge amounts of money at the United Nations and international gatherings of all kinds, and is without question necessary to keep the filmed stories moving along, but it's fantasy rather than science.

Current Attitudes Toward Multilingualism

1. Knowing more than one language is a mark of accomplishment, something to be admired.
2. Knowing more than one language is a transitional condition, a burden that has to be put up with until English is learned and the other language(s) can be abandoned.
3. Knowing more than one language is a mark of some sort of deficiency, whether intellectual, educational, social, or other.

Multilingualism Is an Advantage and Should Be Admired

Multilingualism Is a Burden—Something to Get Rid of as Quickly as Possible

My experience with knowing another language is that the world is much bigger, and more interestingly multifaceted. I know a few multilingual people, and they seem so … large (Elisabeth Vonarburg, English/French—both European French and the French of Quebec).

It's like being able to step outside yourself and take a look, or step outside the world and take a look (Rhonda Eikamp).

The more languages a person knows, the more access one has to alternate realities and the more imagination can rove. Multilingualism is always an intellectual advantage (M. J. Hardman, English/Spanish).
None of my respondents complained about multilingualism having held them back, having interfered with their success, or anything remotely of that kind. Where there were complaints, the typical statement was "I only wish I had learned a few more languages." Rebecca Haden Chomphosy has been talking to Thai and Laotian parents here in Arkansas, and they have without exception expressed the wish that their children should grow up speaking Thai (or Lao) in addition to English. None have said that they hoped their children would learn only English because it would be undesirable for them to know both languages.
In the interests of fairness (and science), I have to point out the possibility that when I sent out my call for volunteers to complete the questionnaire, the only people who responded were people who had never found multilingualism a drawback. Maybe there were five times as many who would have taken the opposite position, but none of them offered to participate. (It's not the case that only people with computer skills filled out questionnaires, by the way. Quite a few were passed along to people who filled them out with pen and pencil.) As is typical with preliminary data-gathering research of this kind, there's no way to know whether my group had succeeded because of their multilingualism or in spite of it, or if the two things are totally unrelated; much more research of this kind needs to be done.
It's also important to mention that after M. J. Hardman wrote that multilingualism is "always an intellectual advantage," she added, "This advantage can be, of course, and frequently is, nullified by negative social circumstances (like putting all Spanish speakers in the speech defect class, like they used to do in New Mexico when I lived there in the 50s)."

Multilingualism Is a Deficiency

Some Necessary Definitions

Dialect and Language
When people perceive themselves not only as speaking the same language but as speaking it "the same way," they are using a dialect. A language is a group of dialects sufficiently alike that all who use them perceive themselves to be speaking the same language, although not necessarily in the same way. The exact line between dialect and language, as we have already seen, is difficult to draw. As an example about which there is a general consensus, we would all agree that English is a language, and we would all agree that the typical English of Brooklyn, New York, and the typical English of Little Rock, Arkansas, are two different dialects of English.

Native Language
Usually, the language that someone learns first, in infancy and early childhood, is called the native language. In Wolof, the metaphor for a native language is mother's milk; when a Wolof native speaker is asked to identify his or her native tongue, the most typical answer means, literally, "I was nursed on Wolof" (Swigart 1992, page 14).
My database for this book includes a few multilinguals who learned some Language X in this way, but who consider Language Y their native tongue because they abandoned Language X in the first few years of their lives—when their family moved to another country, or they lost the caregiver who spoke Language X, or something of that kind. Mikala Joergensen, for example, writes, "For a period between one and six years I was bilingual in Danish and Greenlandic, but I forgot Greenlandic when my family returned to Denmark when I was six. I no longer speak it." But this is unusual. For most of us, the language we learned first will always be the one we identify as our native language.
The terms "first language," for the native tongue, and "second language" (often used to refer to a third, fourth, and so on) are commonly used in this context, but my respondents objected strongly to that practice. Suppose you are born into a household where your father speaks French and your mother speaks Japanese, with people who speak those two languages coming and going all the time. Suppose you have an Italian nanny who looks after you while your parents are at work. Suppose also that the household is located in Hong Kong, so that as soon as you begin making friends outside your home you learn some variety of Chinese. In such situations, my respondents tell me, assigning labels like "first" and "second" to their languages is impossible. They refused to try. In this book; therefore, we'll confine ourselves to "native"—including circumstances in which more than one language is learned as a native tongue in infancy—and "other."

Pidgin and Creole
When two languages come in contact and their speakers must interact with one another, they sometimes develop a mixed language for that purpose that uses some features from each of the two tongues; such languages are called "pidgins." There may be more than two languages involved. Sheng, a language spoken by young people in Kenya, is a mixture of English, Swahili, German, and Latin—and Swahili itself began as a mixed language. Unfortunately, "pidgin," and often "creole" as well, are terms that have negative connotations for many people. It's important to understand that "pidgin" is a neutral term which is used to refer to "any language that is historically a mixture of two or more languages and that serves as a lingua franca for groups of speakers but is not the first language of any people." (O'Grady et al. 1989, page 344). When children learn a pidgin as their native language, it will begin to develop as any other language does. If it survives, it will then be called a "creole."

Variety
All the usual terms that refer to some "manner of speaking a language" have connotations of one kind or another, often unpleasant. My own native dialect is Ozark English. When people hear the phrase "Ozark English dialect" they think of the Beverly Hillbillies television show. They think of those tacky placemats you see in truckstops with the phony "translations" of Ozark speech for tourists. I'm very personally familiar, unpleasantly so, with the negative ideas that are associated with the word "dialect." There are times when we need a term that means, "I am referring to this way of speaking a particular language, and I am making no value judgments of any kind about it when I do so." "Variety" is that term.

Register
Some ways of speaking a language are distinct because they're associated with a particular role of the person who's speaking. The way that doctors typically talk while "doctoring" in the United States is an English register often called MDeitySpeak. The child who says, "Bye, Mom!" to his mother and "Goodbye, Mrs. Mason!" to the school principal and "Later, man!" to his friend on the playground is demonstrating command of three registers. The sequence below is a handsome example of Academic Regalian, a register commonly used by college professors:

Taken literally, the statement "I was wondering if you would be able to drive me to the airport" is a prolix string of incongruities. Why notify me of the contents of your ruminations? (Pinker 1994, page 230)
Sometimes languages themselves become very like registers. In Wales, for example, Welsh is the language of home and church and friendly social situations, while English is the language of government and business. In Maalula, Syria, the language used in schools and public life is Arabic; in the home and on the street, however, people speak Aramaic—the language that Jesus is believed to have spoken. In the United States, the same thing has happened with Mississippi Choctaw and English; Choctaw is the language reserved for private life and Choctaw-community-only events. The technical term for this situation, in which speakers of two languages assign each one to specific roles in life, is "diglossia."

Code Switching
When a multilingual person moves back and forth between two or more languages (or two or more varieties of a language) in a single communication event, that is called "code switching." For example:

With my fellow Hispanics … I can relax into our nuevo creole. (Fernandez 1986)

"Maa ngiy a genoux." ("I'm on my knees.") (Quoted in Swigart 1992, page 19)
Notice that in the first example we don't consider the word "creole" foreign; it has been borrowed into English and has become part of the English vocabulary. Nuevo, on the other hand, is the Spanish word for "new" and is definitely not part of English. In the second example, the speaker starts out in Wolof and ends with the French a genoux.
Both of these examples show code switching happening inside a single sentence. It also happens within longer sequences of language, with a sentence or two of one language, a sentence of another, back to the first language, and so on. In multilingual families a child may speak one language to a parent, another to a grandparent, and still another to a sibling; if all are involved in a single conversation, this code switching will go on the entire time. The languages don't have to be of the same language family, nor do their grammars have to be similar; for example, Japanese/English code switching is a common manner of speech in the Japanese community of Toronto.
Two things about code switching need to be kept in mind. First, it doesn't mean that the speaker is making mistakes or has the two languages or varieties mixed up (like the small child on page 14), and it isn't random. There are rules that govern code switching, just as there are rules for the use of a single language or variety. Spanish/English code switching allows "Es muy friendly," in which the Spanish for "very" is followed by an English adjective, but "Es very amable"—English "very" followed by a Spanish adjective—is forbidden. Second, in any multilingual/multicultural society, code switching is a valuable skill; the more codes someone knows, the more choices that person is likely to have in life.
Code switching isn't usually a term applied to the act of moving among various registers of a single language, but it should be. We've all watched doctors on television droning on in the medical register while an interviewer pleads with them to "speak English"; their inability to switch out of a register in which kidney stones are known as nephroliths is a very real handicap. Highly skilled attorneys switch registers at the drop of a hat, to make themselves seem either more or less threatening to those in the courtroom they're speaking to, depending on their strategic need of the moment. The ability to switch from one register to another at will, according to the language environment around you, is like being able to play any instrument in the symphony orchestra; it removes barriers in all directions.

Language Policy
The term "language policy" refers to the official positions that governments take with regard to language use and maintenance, whether supported by actions—laws passed, programs funded, grants made, and the like—or supported only by rhetoric, in speeches and position papers and public statements. At the moment, unfortunately, neither the U.S. government nor any of the governments of the fifty states (with the possible exception of Hawaii) can be described as having a coherent language policy.

The most basic reason why linguistic diversity should be preserved is that language helps people to retain their culture.

(Kleiner 1995, page 15)

What new immigrant families across the nation are learning, as their predecessors did before them, is that the power of American culture, and particularly the lure of television, is so strong that it is a challenge to raise a child who can speak a foreign language fluently.

(Navarro 1996, page 5)

A culture is the sum of all the things that make up the way a group of people live their lives: how they dress, work, eat, study, raise children, respond to illness, create art, worship, play, argue, make love, function within a family, perceive time and space, and so on. That all peoples have cultures and languages, both of which are of tremendous importance to them, is not a matter of dispute. But there is a debate about whether the language spoken within a culture is just one more element like clothing or housing or music—part of the culture but separable from it—or something quite different and not separable.
A common consequence of the idea that language and culture are inseparable is a conviction that any change in the language threatens the culture. The French have an official language academy to watch over linguistic developments and try to regulate them. They're so alarmed by what they consider to be the "contamination" of French by foreign tongues (especially American English) that they've resorted to drastic measures. French courts recently overthrew a law that would have "forced private-sector TV stations to eschew borrowed English words—le weekend, le leader, and so on—that are sprinkled through every newscast" (Andrews 1995, page 134); the courts ruled the law unconstitutional. That hasn't stopped the language guardians. Their current strategy is to set up for all the mass media obligatory percentages of content created and produced entirely in France—that is, to set up cultural quotas.
There's an Internet site called Maison de la Françité (roughly, "House of Frenchness," with a nice pun included) run by le Cercle de qualité du français dynamique (CQFD). Here you can find proposed "pure French" replacements for foreign words, with detailed explanations and justifications. For example, to avoid the potentially contaminating English "flipchart," CQFD proposes tableau-feuilles. The stated purpose of CQFD is to watch out for "Anglicisms" and similar language hazards "en vue de contribuer à la qualité de notre langue dans un monde en mutation rapide." (That is, to serve as a kind of quality control for French in a rapidly changing world.)
The French are far from being alone in such practices. Lithuania, for example, has "a force of paralinguists who prowl the streets for illicit phrase pushers. Perpetrators face warnings, fines and humiliation-by-radio" (Newman 1993). We are all familiar with the ongoing controversies in Quebec over laws forbidding English signs and the like.
The United States has no such laws—but not because no one has ever tried to establish them. In 1780, John Adams argued passionately (and unsuccessfully) for the creation of an American language academy to keep American English pure, and proposals for similar measures are a constant feature of editorials and letters to the editor to this day.
The Japanese are an interesting contrast. Despite being one of the world's most conservative cultures, they require their children to begin learning English in elementary school as a matter of course, and they borrow English words with great enthusiasm. They appear to have no fear of "contamination." Perhaps this is because their society is so uniform; perhaps it is because of the well-known Japanese conviction that everything Japanese is inherently superior; perhaps there are other reasons.
The truth can be bluntly stated: Every attempt to control spoken languages by laws has failed. If it can be done (and I don't believe that it can), we haven't yet figured out how to go about it. Controlling written language is to some extent possible, but all that happens when the written form isn't allowed to change is that the distance between it and the spoken forms of the language grows ever more vast over time.
The ultimate language change is of course its complete replacement by some other language. Our Founding Fathers considered this move shortly after the Declaration of Independence, "when the aversion to all things English extended to the language." They seriously considered making German, French, Greek, Hebrew, or even an artificial language the "official" language of this country. But a careful look at what would be involved led to a change of heart, summed up by Continental Congressman Roger Sherman with "It would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is and make the English speak Greek" (Time, 9/18/96, page 38).
That's a funny story—but not every American will find it amusing. Many Native Americans in the United States are trying desperately to keep their languages alive, not only because they cherish their native tongues but also because they're convinced that if the languages die the cultures will die with them.
The state of Oklahoma, with thirty-five native languages and more than 76,000 Native American students, leads the country in this effort, especially for Cherokee, Choctaw, Kiowa, Creek, and Comanche. "With twenty-two Head Start centers introducing three-and four-year-olds to their native tongue, the Cherokee program has become a model for the entire nation" (Bilger 1994, page 41).
The Keresan speakers of the Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico are equally concerned about their language, but have taken an unusual path. They are teaching their youngsters Keresan only orally, by the method of total immersion in the language, and will not allow it to be written down for learning. Mary Eunice Romero, who directs their language program, explains that "The language is sacred. One way to protect ourselves is in a sense to be exclusive" (Linthicum 1998). Whether Keresan will survive as an unwritten language in a world where literacy is taken for granted remains to be seen.
On the other hand, there are native peoples who are deeply offended by the suggestion that their cultures depend for their existence on the maintenance of their native languages; there are also peoples who are divided on this issue. Navajo Sylvia Wadsworth says, "Our Navajo language is who we are"; but Navajo Byron Charley says, "I think you would still be Navajo even if you're not a Navajo speaker … Being Navajo depends on how you conduct yourself and go about your life"(Cantoni 1996, page 133 and page 135).
Almost all the Navajo children entering kindergarten in the early 1970s spoke Navajo and few spoke any English. Today—despite the fact that the Navajo have created and maintained some of the most highly acclaimed native-language educational programs, including programs at the college level—things have changed drastically. About half of the kindergarteners speak only English, and the status that goes with speaking Navajo has been declining steadily among the younger generations. Whether there is any link between this change and the new epidemic level of violence among young Navajos is not known; I would be willing to wager a large sum on the existence of that link. (For a fascinating, and in many ways heartbreaking, account of the attempt to incorporate a Navajo teaching philosophy into the college curriculum, see "Diné College Struggles to Synthesize Navajo and Western Knowledge," by Paul Willeto, in the Fall 1997 issue of Tribal College Journal.)
Politicians in the United States point to examples of turmoil caused by multilingualism elsewhere in the world and demand that every immigrant begin learning English and carrying on daily life in English, if not from Day One then certainly from Day Two. An editorial in the October 22, 1977, Oakland Tribune described the situation like this:

To many, American English fluency is the rite of passage into being an American. To others, who generally agree that the ultimate goal is to be American English fluent, rigid time-tables for learning the language create more harm than good. Wrapped around all this, of course, is what some see as the real fight over preserving a single American culture or fracturing into the kind of multiculturalism that leads to ethnic Balkanization.
Some languages have been so loved or hated as vehicles for culture that they have become a justification for subversion and worse; think of Basque, Irish, and Afrikaans. At the same time, placid little multilingual Switzerland serves as our universal symbol of a peaceful and orderly nation; its languages and cultures appear to coexist and thrive without any serious discord. Clearly, there is no more an international consensus on this question than there is on the definition of multilingualism.
When you bring up the hypothesis that losing a language means losing a culture, people typically respond in four very different ways:

1. "Right! And we must not let that happen!"
2. "Right! And the sooner that happens, the better!"
3. "Nonsense. Language is one thing; culture is something entirely different!"
4. "So what?"

"Right! And We Must Not Let That Happen!"

When I speak English, I lose in a way part of my Spanish nature.

(Questionnaire respondent)

I teach language classes, and when I look at the students in there, I have to think about what we're giving them. We're trying to give them a language that will allow them to think in certain values, and certain lifeways that are important to our people.

(Parris Butler, teacher of the Mojave language, in Hinton 1995)

People who respond this way believe that language and culture are interdependent and inseparable. Many in this camp believe that every language and its culture, without exception, are precious and important and should be preserved. Linguist Ken Hale says that languages "embody the intellectual wealth of the people that speak them. Losing any one of them is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre" (in Bilger 1994, page 19). For some this response may well be based only on romanticism; when you get beyond that predictable reflex, the most common justification is based on the comparison of endangered languages with endangered species.
Like most metaphors, this one isn't perfect, but it comes very close. We can look at an endangered plant in a rain forest and insist that it must be protected because, for all we know, it's the cure for Down syndrome or the missing link in a scientific problem that will never be solved without it. In the same way, we can look at a language that has only a handful of living speakers, and insist that it must be protected—because, for all we know, it holds the key to ending domestic violence, or is the missing link in some crucial problem in linguistic science.
A scientific Foundation for Endangered Languages was founded in 1995. Its members named their newsletter latiku, after the mother goddess of the Acoma tribe of New Mexico, who "caused people to speak different languages so that it would not be so easy for them to quarrel" (Gill and Sullivan 1992, page 5). The international organization called Terralingua: Partnerships for Biolinguistic Diversity makes the language/biology metaphor explicit. Its mission statement includes, among other things: "To help preserve and perpetuate the world's linguistic diversity in all its variant forms" and "To illuminate the connections between cultural and biological diversity."
In 1997, the Endangered Language Fund (a nonprofit organization whose goal is to preserve languages threatened with extinction) awarded ten grants to projects that they judged likely to contribute to achieving that goal. Among the awards were:

• Funds to produce original television dramas in Choctaw and Creek, to be shown on cable access channels and made available as videotapes to native speakers of these languages in Oklahoma.
• Funds to help a linguist record the last two living speakers of the Klamath language, so that the recordings will be available to the Klamath tribe.
• Funds to buy equipment needed for language immersion programs in the Micmac, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy languages.
• Funds to help prepare language materials such as textbooks and a dictionary for the Jingulu language of Australia, which now has no more than ten living fluent speakers.

"Right! And the Sooner That Happens, the Better!"

It is absolutely wrong and against American concept to have a bilingual education program that is now openly, admittedly dedicated to preserving the native language and never getting them adequate in English so they can go out into the job market.

(President Ronald Reagan, in Hakuta 1986, page 207)

Winona Simms, a Creek-Yuchi Indian and director of an American Indian program at Stanford, recently told us, "You would think that being bilingual was the equivalent of being learning-disabled." This logic also led an Amarillo judge to tell Martha Loriana two years ago that speaking Spanish to her daughter bordered on child abuse.

(Rodriguez and Gonzales 1997)

Skeptics answer with … the Tower of Babel. Just as conflicting languages kept the tower's builders from reaching heaven, they say, language preservation only keeps us further from peace and mutual understanding. With ethnic wars raging across the planet, shouldn't we seek a common tongue to bind us rather than reviving languages to further divide us?

(Bilger 1994, page 38)

That last quotation is particularly instructive in the context of the ethnic wars that have been ravaging the Balkans. Historian Ivo Banac writes (in Woodward 1996), "The fighting may be over, but the

The Link Between Language and Culture successor states of Yugoslavia are waging new wars over words … The whole point is to create new differences between Croatia and (Serb-dominated rump) Yugoslavia so that communication between the two is more complicated and the idea of separate identities strengthened … Croatian authorities are aggressively 'purifying' their country's language by substituting words deemed to be foreign with Croatian words."
Like those who want to preserve and protect languages, those who respond this way believe that the hypothesis itself is correct, and that cultures are lost when languages are lost. But they don't consider that a tragedy or something to be struggled against. On the contrary! Here's Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham of California arguing during a debate for the English Only legislation (a debate that Rep. Pat Williams said was "the most maddening" he'd sat through in his eighteen years in Congress):

If you want to keep your people in a barrio, if you want to keep them restricted in little tight communities so only you can communicate with them, and we can't in English, then be my guest. But we're going to empower them to get out of that so they can have a piece of the American dream.

Although all observers may be confronted by the same physical evidence in the form of experiential data and although they may he capable of "externally similar acts of observation," a person's "picture of the universe" or "view of the world" differs as a function of the particular language or languages that person knows.

(Lee 1996, page 87)

First you have to claw your way through the linguistic thicket created by the academic register in which that quotation is written. Why is it written like that? One of the rules of the Academic Regalian register is that the more you expect other academics to be opposed to what you're saying or writing, the more extreme your use of the register has to be. This is unfortunate, because controversial subjects are also subjects about which it's important to be as clear as possible. But if the academic game is the game you're playing, clarity has to be sacrificed to this linguistic dominance display.
The translation process introduces a delay, certainly; but when you get to the end of it you will realize that you've come upon a concept so interesting that it grips the mind and won't let go. It's called "the linguistic relativity hypothesis" (also "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" and "the Whorf/Whorfian hypothesis"). Lee's quotation says that the way human beings perceive the world around them varies with the languages they know—even though they perceive the same things, in the same manner, using the same physical and mental "equipment." This will strike you either as common sense or nonsense, depending on your own personal convictions about the power of language.
Linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford offers the example of a Cheyenne parent who is sitting with a child on his knee when a ball suddenly bounces across the floor. An English-speaking parent would say to the child, "Look! Ball!" The Cheyenne parent, Alford tells us, would say, "Look! Bouncing!" (in DellaFlora 1998). Both parents are perceiving the same stimulus, with the same sensory equipment. However, the way they express the perception—which tells the child what it's important to pay attention to—is not the same.
In 1958 Ace Books published Jack Vance's science fiction novel The Languages of Pao, in which a government tailored its population for specific roles in adulthood by controlling the language each person learned in infancy. One group of infants learned a native tongue that fitted them for life in the military, another group learned a language designed for business and trade, and so on. This worked very well—until the government was overthrown by a population that had secretly learned more than one of these designer tongues natively and had therefore grown up with more flexible perceptions of reality.
The Languages of Pao is a straightforward presentation of a fictional world having these three characteristics:

1. The linguistic relativity hypothesis is valid and true.
2. The hypothesis can be systematically applied to human life.
3. The government has the power and resources to carry out that systematic application as a national policy, beginning with its population of infants.

The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis in Action

Who's in Charge, the Human or the Horse?

Do these different ways of giving a spoken shape to an experience mean that the human beings involved think about the experience, and about the elements of the experience, in significantly different ways?
A Whorfian would suggest that someone a horse "animals-about" with might, as a result, have an attitude toward horses and horseback riding that would be different from the attitude of a person who uses a horse to go about with, or a person who does something called "riding" to a horse. I'm saying "might" here because you can't come to firm conclusions about this on the basis of just one example. But the single example, to a Whorfian, means that the conclusion is sufficiently likely to be worth further investigation. An anti-Whorfian would say without hesitation that such a conclusion is silly rampant romanticism with no foundation in reality, and that classifying horses as objects or instruments has nothing to do with how horses are perceived. An anti-Whorfian would remind us that speakers of English talk about hearts of celery and hearts of artichokes without the idea of vegetable heart attacks ever crossing their minds.
English speakers tell a restless child, "Be good!" The French, in exactly the same situation, tell the child to "Be wise!" Could that make any difference in the child's perceptions of the world around him or her? Could it make a difference in what the child concludes deserves attention and what can safely be ignored? Could it make a difference in the child's behavior in the real world? The Whorfian would say that it very well might; the anti-Whorfian would say that it couldn't possibly. Let's look at a real-world example.
One of the severe health problems that India struggles with results from the fact that the Ganges River is used not only for bathing and washing and religious rituals of various kinds but also for disposal of waste and disposal of corpses. That seems straightforward enough. But health workers' attempts to explain this to people and help with the problem have run into difficulties, even when (as is often the case in India) fluent English is spoken by everyone involved. Why? Because devout Hindus consider the Ganges holy (a belief which doesn't have its roots in English). How could something holy be polluted? That's an impossible contradiction. Furthermore, it's a dreadful insult. As Fran Peavey writes, "In the context of India, that would be like my saying 'Your mother is a whore' to a Westerner" (Peavey 1995, page 49).
The source of this quandary is in the word "pollution" and its associated meaning and connotations. When Peavey discussed the situation with the people along the river, she found it hard going, but she persevered. After many long conversations and much effort to explain and to understand on both sides, what she would hear from them was this: "The river is holy, but she is not pure. We are not taking care of her the way she needs us to." That is, the river is not "polluted" but "neglected," and it is the people themselves who are neglectful. And then, Peavey tells us:

The funny thing is that, after hearing this reply, I started to think less in terms of "pollution" and more in terms of "people not taking care of the river." This was an important change of perspective. "Pollution" is an abstraction that does not address the responsibility of the people who are making the mess. "Pollution" focuses attention solely on the river. It is almost as if the river is to blame for being polluted!

(Peavey 1995, page 40)
Now health workers have begun saying—in English—"The Ganges is suffering" rather than "The Ganges is polluted" (Ward 1997, page 51). This despite the fact that in English rivers cannot "suffer." With the new way of naming the situation, it has become possible to talk about it, and about potential remedies, without giving or taking offense. The facts have not changed; all the people involved are still perceiving the same event with the same eyes and minds; but the outcome in the real world is very different than it was before. As Howard Rheingold puts it:

Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, or making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn't see anything before … We think and behave the way we do in large part because we have words that make these thoughts and behaviors possible, acceptable, and useful.

(Rheingold 1988, pages 3-4)
Alford puts it even more strongly:

People who are monolinguals and know and think in only one language are handicapped. Because they don't have another worldview to shift to, to look at the same problem and see if they come up with a different answer.

(in DellaFlora 1998)

Who's in Charge, the Human or the Language?

The Lady is my shepherdess; I shall not want.
Do you see her, in your mind's eye? With her blowing skirts and froth of lacy petticoats, and her ruffled pantalettes showing, and her sweet little crook with its pretty bow tied on it? It's Little Bo-Peep. She won't do; this is a very bad "translation" indeed. (We'll return to the inclusive language debate in Chapter 6.)
A similar problem caused our English-speaking news commentators during the Gulf War to start out with "Today our boys and—," come to an abrupt halt, and switch immediately to "Today our men and women in the Gulf [did something or other]." "Our boys and girls in the Gulf" would have sounded as if the military personnel were all sitting in sandpiles playing with little plastic buckets and trowels, not making war; the childish connotations of the word "girl" leak onto "boy" when the two are linked, causing semantic contamination. (It's semantic contamination that makes us accept "He's a dashing bachelor" but balk at "She's a dashing spinster," even though we're taught that "spinster" and "bachelor" differ in meaning only by gender.)
If the LRH isn't valid, effects like these should be extremely rare and always brief; that is, they should be something that is noticed the first time or two that the sequence of language occurs but is forgotten thereafter. That's not what happens.
Martha Heyneman writes, "The mother tongue … orders the savage landscape of our raw sensory impressions, domesticating them, molding them into a world we can step out into with relative confidence, the world of common sense" (Heyneman 1992, page 4). If that is so, and if the LRH is valid, then the decision as to which language(s)—and which varieties of languages—shall be the native tongue(s) of those who will grow up to run a country becomes extremely important. It becomes important to decide which foreign languages, if any—and which additional varieties of native languages, if any—people should be allowed to learn. (We've seen a passionate and confused example of the latter issue in recent years, in the controversy over "Ebonics.") If the LRH is valid, then certain languages, and certain varieties within languages, will tend to mold certain sorts of people. Learning certain languages and varieties may have significant effects on adults, even though they are already molded. It's easy to see why scholars and scientists and policymakers—as well as producers of mass media, such as violent films and computer games—might greatly prefer that this should not be true.
Steven Pinker of MIT is one of the world's most prominent linguists; he is that very rare bird, a linguist celebrity. In 1994, in his best-selling book The Language Instinct, he made it clear that he has no patience with the LRH; he refers to it, as is typical, in its strong form, which he calls "linguistic determinism."
"It is wrong," he says on page 57, "all wrong." He tells us on page 58 that "Once a euphemism is pointed out, people are not so brainwashed that they have trouble understanding the deception."
Let's consider that. There is a form of birth abnormality associated with significant mental retardation and a particular sort of facial appearance which includes slanted eyes. Children born with this abnormality used to be called "Mongolian idiots." Today we have a euphemism that we use instead: We say that these children "have Down's syndrome." The theoretical result of Tinker's position would be a claim that the two dialogues below are synonymous and interchangeable in every way except stylistically:

1. TOM: What's the matter with that kid?
   BILL: She has Down's syndrome.
   TOM: I see. That's a shame.
2. TOM: What's the matter with that kid?
   BILL: She's a Mongolian idiot.
   TOM: I see. That's a shame.

Case Study: The Japanese Water Babies

Thousands of Japanese women visit temples every year to bring baby-clothes, cookies, toys, and other offerings to their mizugo … The mizugo is a fetus, removed from the watery warmth of the womb by nature or abortionist before it sees the world. "To make a water-baby" (mizugo ni suru) means to have an abortion.

(Cherry 1987, page 79)
I was literally thunderstruck—an old-fashioned word, but the exact and perfect one in this case—by Cherry's account. But I was also dubious. I thought that surely this was either folklore or a description of a custom from long ago. I tried to imagine two American women talking to one another about what they planned to buy as a gift for their aborted fetuses this year, and found the image impossible. So I proceeded to check it out.
With the help of respondent Fran Stallings (English/Japanese) and her friend and colleague Hiroko Fujita (Japanese/English), I learned that the water babies not only aren't folklore but are very much a part of contemporary Japanese life. Hiroko Fujita was kind enough to send me a postcard of one of the most famous temples (the Temple of Jizo on the Mountain of the Purple Cloud), showing row after row after endless row of the little statues that Japanese families put there to honor their water babies, both those that result from miscarriage and those that are the result of abortion. Hiroko Fujita sent pages of detailed information; and Dr. Stallings directed me to a book by William R. LaFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan, where I found a thorough account and discussion.
LaFleur explains that it's not just mothers who go to the temples. Children—the water babies' siblings—go along; often whole families join in these visits. The statues memorializing the water babies are images of Jizo (a guardian of children, in the sense that Catholics might speak of a patron saint). They are all almost exactly alike, carved of stone, roughly two feet high, with bald heads and closed eyes. They are stone metaphors: They look like both tiny Buddhist monks and tiny children, at the same time. Over their carved monks' robes they wear the large red bibs that Japanese infants and toddlers wear, tied around their necks by the families who visit them. Often amulets signed by family members are hung in the temples, inscribed with messages to the water baby expressing the family's debt of gratitude. There is no attempt to hide what has happened or to make it disappear from the family memory. Rather:

Loving attention to the dead is shown by washing down the memorial image—an ancient Buddhist practice—providing fresh flowers, and bringing the occasional new toy or garment. These activities and the recitation of simple prayers are expected. But beyond these there is the sense of an active communication, emotional if not verbal, between the living family and the departed child.

(LaFleur 1992, page 11)
Notice, please, that the word LaFleur ends with above is "child." We've come upon another lexical gap, of a somewhat different kind. English has no word or phrase that would mean what we have been translating into English as "water baby." If we were asked what an American English speaker would say in the same situation, silence would be our probable answer, because American English has no vocabulary we can easily or conveniently use. In Womansword (page 80), Kittredge Cherry provides the linguistic spotlight that shows us the gap when (struggling with the clash of languages, as I am also struggling) she writes that the Japanese "do not always draw a clear distinction between a fetus and a baby."
Cherry writes as if American English (AE) does make a clear distinction in this matter, and as if speakers of AE can identify a clear consensus about that distinction—but of course that's not true. For sure, a human being who has gone through the full experience of childbirth is a child. But our entire national debate about abortion, which now is referred to far and wide as our "second Civil War," revolves around the question of when, precisely, the united sperm and egg are a fetus and when they are a baby. If we had "a clear distinction" in that regard, we would perhaps be able to sit down as a nation and make the necessary decisions; we might not still be in turmoil. LaFleur tells us (page 11) that the Japanese "tend to avoid terms like 'unwanted pregnancy' or 'fetal tissue.' That which develops in the uterus is often referred to as a 'child'—even when there are plans to abort it." The power of language is such that it would be an extremely rare mother and native speaker of English who could bring herself to say, "Tuesday afternoon at three-thirty I'm going to abort this child."
The visits to the temple and its cemetery are not the only acknowledgments of the water babies in Japanese society. Many Japanese familes have a household shrine. The aborted child (baby? fetus? fetal tissue? product of conception?), although not an ancestor, is often honored at the shrine and "is treated as an ancestor and will be remembered along with them at the Buddhist altar in those households that have them" (ibid., page 148).
The real-world difference that makes this example so important is (in painful contrast to the the terms we have available in English for discussing it) easily stated:

The water babies are not part of this world, but they remain part of the family; they have a distinct role within the family.
Now you might object that this is not a difference of language but "a cultural difference," or "a religious difference." Many Japanese believe in reincarnation, and believe that the fetus (child? baby? product of conception?) will have another chance, even many more chances, at life on this earth. Certainly, that is a difference of religion and of culture. But language is what we use to express cultural and religious differences, and language is the mechanism we use to transmit information about those differences to others, including our children and our grandchildren. It will be clear to you, just from the problems I've been having writing coherent sentences that explain this Japanese concept in English words, that it makes a real-world difference whether you call this entity a fetus or a baby or something else entirely. As with the linguistic strategies of our own WarSpeak, it makes a difference that the process of government certification for abortionists in Japan makes them members of the Motherhood Protection Association. It's not just a matter of style or manners; it's not, as Pinker has suggested, just a matter of people's susceptibilities to "brainwashing." Women in the United States, not just Japanese women, demonstrate that every day.
Millions of English-speaking women (myself included) have said, "I felt the baby move today"; I have never heard, or heard of, a woman saying, "I felt the fetus move today." No one says to a pregnant woman, "When is your fetus due?" or "What are you going to name your fetus?" No woman says, "I had an ultrasound today, and I'm so pleased—my fetus is a little girl!" I have never heard any woman say "my fetus" (although I have heard doctors say "your fetus" to women); always, for the woman, it is "the" fetus.
The word or phrase we choose when we refer to the "product of conception" commits us, as the linguistic relativity hypothesis would predict, to certain attitudes and certain potential actions—not only with regard to the "product" but with regard to its mother and father (notice how hard that is to process in English!) and other aspects of the situation. Whether we choose a single word or phrase to refer to both abortion and miscarriage, as many languages do, or use two separate words as English does, commits us to certain attitudes and potential actions. Whether the naming we do makes it possible to give the "product" in question a role within the family or not drastically changes our commitments.
The question that immediately comes to mind when we think about this case study in the context of multilingualism is:

What effect does the water baby concept have on attitudes toward and feelings about abortion in someone who has both Japanese and English as native languages?
The anti-Whorfians would say that the question is irrelevant, that such attitudes and feelings are based not on language but on logical consideration by the individual, or on socialization, or on a combination of the two.
I disagree. I don't speak one word of Japanese; nevertheless, just learning about the water babies by reading accounts in English had immediate and significant effects on my own feelings and attitudes. I thought of the huge boost that the United States greeting card and holiday industries would get if we were to add the water baby cultural construct to our American culture; I also thought what a comfort it might be to many women and to their families if that happened. My perception of abortion (and miscarriage) has been permanently changed by my encounter with this phenomenon in language, as has my perception of "a family"; the concept of the water baby presents an entirely new option in the world that had been invisible to me previously. It seems to me impossible that anyone who speaks both languages natively would not suffer to some degree the discomfort of the psyche that Leon Festinger named "cognitive dissonance."
We need to know how Japanese/English speakers resolve conflicts of this kind. Do they choose one of the alternative worldviews over the other? Do they negotiate some sort of compromise worldview that takes features from each, so that they "average out" in some way? Do they reject them both and create a third alternative that is unique to those with their language competencies? Is the conflict impossible to resolve, forcing them to maintain both worldviews and switch back and forth between them, as Carol Cohn had to do in her role as nuclear studies scholar? Can they maintain both world-views without discomfort, in an amazing display of what it means to be broad-minded? Is there yet another alternative that hasn't occurred to me, perhaps because my language makes it difficult to perceive it? How does this all work out? What are its implications in a global society? What happens, to take just one possible example of many, when English-speaking diplomats and officials (who rarely speak Japanese) carry on "family planning" conferences with their Japanese counterparts (who almost without exception speak English)?
This is the paradigmatic problem, the pattern question at the heart of our investigation. Suppose it's true that languages structure and constrain our worldviews. Then how do multilinguals deal with conflict between two (or more) worldviews, especially on issues that are highly charged emotionally? What implications do multilinguals' strategies and solutions in such situations have for the society and culture in which they live—or for the world at large? If it's not true, of course, matters are much simpler, and decisions about language policy are far more easily and conveniently made.
Advocates of measures such as "English Only" (when not basing their support totally on financial or political factors) are making a set of broad assumptions. Using the Japanese water baby concept as our framing example, we can describe what they mean when they say that "English Only" is necessary to "becoming an American." (That expression is used constantly in English, even by those who realize how inaccurate it is given all the peoples of the Americas who aren't Anglos. In the absence of something like "Unitedstatesers" to fill the lexical gap, it's difficult to get by without it.) The "English Only" contingent mean that their policies will bring about a sequence of events like the following :

• A little boy arrives at an American school as an immigrant, speaking only Japanese.
• He learns English and begins relying on English in his daily life.
• As a result, he undergoes a cognitive transformation.
• One effect of that transformation can be summarized roughly as "When I came to the United States I thought there could be an honorable role for an aborted or miscarried fetus in the family that its mother belongs to, but now that I speak English I know better."
• A transformation of this same kind occurs with regard to every cultural concept for which a significant conflict exists between American English and Japanese.

In one of its primary aspects, disease must be construed as a biological event little modified by the particular context in which it occurs. As such it exists in animals, who presumably do not socially construct their ailments and negotiate attitudinal responses to sufferers, but who do experience pain and impairment of function … Nevertheless, it is fair to say that in our culture a disease does not exist as a social phenomenon until we agree that it does—until it is named.

(Rosenberg 1992, pages 179-180)

The initial response by many physicians was that the problems were not real. For a time they were dealing with a cluster of symptoms that had no name—and without a name there was, in essence, no disease.

(Halstead 1998, page 44)

One of the common tactics used for attacking the linguistic relativity hypothesis is to ridicule those who defend it by comparing them to people who believe in magical incantations. Whorfians, it is suggested, should really be called Shazamians, or Abracadabrians.
Let's set aside for the moment the mysterious cast that has been given to our world by the discoveries of quantum physics. We're aware now that the objects which surround us are actually made up of energy fields and busily moving particles, and are mostly empty space. But we don't perceive reality that way, not without the help of powerful electronic microscopes that are impossible to carry with us everywhere we go.
This whole semantic domain is one vast lexical gap in English; we have no vocabulary for talking about quantum reality in an everyday context. Our language reflects our ordinary perceptions; we refer to chairs and books as "concrete objects." As long as we restrict our discussion to such objects, the accusation of Whorfian leanings toward blatant superstition is in some ways accurate. I cannot think up some new concrete object that has never existed in my environment before—let's call it a "crawshbeck"—and cause one to appear by saying, "Shazam! Let there be crawshbecks!" That's very clear, and not a matter of dispute.
However, many things that are abstract have just as much power to create effects in human beings as concrete objects do. When a tree is in my path, I will step aside and go around it; that's one of the effects the tree has on me. I can't see or touch liberty as I can see and touch a tree, but liberty has dramatic effects on my behavior, nevertheless. I wouldn't hesitate to state openly my opinions about the Congress and the President, even if they were totally negative; that's one of the effects that liberty has on me. And creating abstractions out of next to nothing—abstractions whose fantasy status is then extremely difficult to prove—is a snap. English has an array of linguistic devices that can be used that way.
In the field of medicine this particular power of language—the power to use language to create abstractions with substantial effects in the real world—is magnified enormously, so much so that it comes very close to being magical. Consider, for instance the striking example which revolves around the phenomenon of menopause.

Case Study: The Menopause Transformation

1. WOMAN: Is there something wrong with me, Doctor?
   DOCTOR: No. You're going through menopause.
   WOMAN: Well, thank goodness for that! I was afraid I was sick.
2. WOMAN: Is there something wrong with me, Doctor?
   DOCTOR: Yes. You're suffering from hypoestrogenemia.
   WOMAN: I am? What does that mean?
   DOCTOR: It means that you have an estrogen deficiency. But don't worry; we have very effective treatments for it now. I'll write you a prescription, and if you'll stop by the nurse's desk on your way out she'll give you some information that you can read that will answer all your questions. And then I'll need to see you again in a few weeks to check on how you're doing with the medication, whether we need to make any changes in the dosage … that sort of thing.

In what ways does acculturation change the beliefs of patients of various ethnicities, i.e., how are the cultures of immigrants transformed and combined with the culture of their adopted country?

(Blackball et al. 1995, page 823)
The question posed isn't "Does acculturation change the beliefs … " and "Are the cultures of immigrants transformed … "; those results are presupposed. No room is left here for an alternative resolution in which patients simply decide that the American English version of events is nonsense and rely on the perceptions shaped by their native languages instead.
My own experience with native speakers of other languages—not only those who are patients but also those who are working as medical professionals in this country—does not bear out that confident presupposition. The error has serious implications for the health care system in a multicultural nation like the United States
For example, evidence for the placebo effect has made it more than clear that a substantial part of "being well" and "getting well" depends on the patient's faith in the doctor and the medical system. That faith also determines in many ways the degree to which the patient is "compliant" (that is, follows the doctor's orders); this is an equally substantial factor in the ultimate outcome for the patient. How well is medical care going to work for multilinguals when one of their native languages slaps an illness label onto some chunk of their experience that has no such label in another of their languages?
We know that some multilingual populations in this country decide either for their native medicine or for the American version and reject the other alternative. We also know that English/Chinese multilinguals living in the United States, by contrast, typically go to at least two medical professionals—one who is practicing Western medicine and another who is practicing Oriental medicine—as if to cover all their bases. Most native Navajos follow that pattern, going to both a Western doctor and a Navajo medical practitioner. (It does strike the Navajo as bizarre that it is the other system that is referred to as "Western," yes.) Presumably this doubling makes Navajo and Chinese-American patients' health problems even more expensive and time-consuming. What other effects does it have on their behavior, and on their health?
In their book Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson offer an example that is relevant here. They note that various metaphors for numbers exist—NUMBERS ARE POINTS ON A LINE, for example, and NUMBERS ARE SETS. And they say that what people do is choose their metaphor for numbers on the basis of the kind of math they want to do at the time. Perhaps that's what multilinguals do when their native languages offer them conflicting metaphors; perhaps they choose on the basis of the kind of thing they want to do at the time. What would that mean for multilingual doctors and nurses and medical technicians, if that's what they do when they're the ones experiencing the conflict between two or more of their languages? We don't know; no systematic, controlled research on this issue has yet been done.
Christopher Lawrence says, "The focus of inquiry should be on how communities come to frame or see diseases … What is required is an explanation of how and why perceptions are structured as they are and how and why they change"(Lawrence 1992, page 53). I agree with him. How? And why? And how do we find out?
In my experience, conscious awareness of the way a language shapes perceptions usually occurs when its speakers are able to step outside their language in ways that come along rarely in everyday life. Remember the discussion in Chapter 2 of differing perceptions about horseback riding? Each time I taught that material in my classes, the same thing happened. The English-speaking students, after hearing how Navajo gives a surface shape to those perceptions, would say, "I never realized before that riding a horse means doing something to the horse!" The Navajo-speaking students, hearing how English handles the matter, would tell me that they had never before realized that the Navajo equivalent meant doing something together with the horse. It's a cliché to say that you can't see the forest for the trees, but where native languages are concerned it describes the situation with dead-on accuracy.
Native English speakers who are medical professionals are only likely to discover the presuppositions that underlie their own concepts and beliefs about medicine if they are exposed to those that are present in other languages. No mechanism exists in medical training in the United States to make that happen, presumably because it's not considered important. I have been told repeatedly by medical educators that "there's no room for linguistics in the medical curriculum."

Medical Models and Metaphors

Metaphorical thought is commonplace and inescapable; in itself, it is neither good nor bad … The use of a metaphor, however, becomes pernicious when it hides realities in a harmful way.

(George Lakoff, in Lakoff 1991, page 1)

Human languages around the world present very different models of what health and illness/injury/disability and medical care are, depending on the metaphors the language uses for these items and all their related phenomena. The range in medical models encoded in human languages around the world stretches from "All health problems are caused by evil spirits and bad thoughts" through "All health problems are punishments for sin" to "All health problems are caused by germs" and far beyond.
In his book The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, Dr. Ernest Lawrence Rossi insists that all health problems are caused by communication breakdown. Since physiological phenoma happen in the body when the brain sends its neurotransmitters out with instructions, he makes a very strong case. I find it totally convincing, especially since the human brain is unable to distinguish between external and internal stimuli and will dutifully send the body "Prepare to flee or fight!" messages even for imaginary crises. If Rossi's definition were generally accepted in medicine, medical schools would have no choice but to find room for linguistics courses. But his metaphor is not the standard one in Western medicine, and "communications" courses for doctors continue to have little or no input from linguistic science. (I'm happy to say that my own medical seminars are exceptions, but it's a lonely business; the only area of medicine in which I feel that linguistics is beginning to be taken seriously is in emergency medicine, where the necessity to obtain accurate information in a matter of seconds has created in EM professionals a healthy respect for the science of language.)
The African-American culture of the Sea Islands of South Carolina divides nonfitness into two subgroups: "ailments," which are caused by natural forces or punishments from God and can be helped by doctors; and "conditions," which are caused by such things as devils and witchcraft, and can only be helped by spiritual advisers. (Hamadeh 1987). This, needless to say, is not the standard metaphor either. My Laotian son-in-law feels exactly the same way about the idea that "germs" cause illness as the average Western doctor does about "evil spirits" filling that role: He considers a belief in germs to be a foolish and unfortunate superstition. It's not that he doesn't believe germs exist—but he considers them to be the result of illness rather than its cause.
We're going to examine here just two of the most common conceptual systems of medicine around the world: one in which illness is understood as a state of being broken; and one in which illness is understood as a state of being out of balance or unharmonious. An example of the first system is American mainstream medicine; examples of the other would include Chinese and Navajo medicine.
The problems with definitions of terms, and with expressing terms and concepts across the languages, are severe. (This is a situation that you'll be familiar with after our struggles with putting the water babies concept into English.) I'll do my best to straighten things out as we go along, beginning with the choice of a cover term we can use to express the unwieldy set of meanings-and-perceptions covered by such words as "illness," "disease," "disorder," "injury," "disability," "sickness," and more. It's common to see illness defined as "an absence of health" and health defined as "an absence of illness." Going around that circle again won't help us. I'm going to use "non-fitness" as a cover term for all of those deviations from the hypothetical human state of perfect health and perfect well-being. Not because it's an especially elegant choice, but because it seems to me to be the broadest and most neutral one I could choose, much like using the term "variety" to express a neutral attitude toward a way of speaking a language. A sprained ankle is nonfitness; lung cancer is nonfitness; deconditioning is nonfitness; schizophrenia is nonfitness; pregnancy, in the American system, is nonfitness; crise de foie ("liver crisis"), in the French system, is nonfitness; susto ("loss of the soul"), in the Ecuadoran system, is nonfitness; and so on.
In 1991 Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold published Between Heaven and Earth: A Guide to Chinese Medicine. Unlike a number of previous books I've read on the subject, this one does an excellent job of laying out the Chinese medical and health care model in a way that's both understandable and interesting for the Western reader. There's a striking difference, however, between the ease with which the American medical system is explained and Beinfield and Korngold's struggles to express the terms and concepts of the Chinese system in English. Here's a typical example, from page 17:

Western medicine is the study of how the human machine works. When people are like machines, doctors become like mechanics … In this schema, the body is reduced to structural parts, proceeding from organs to tissues, tissues to cells, cells to molecules. The doctor as mechanic separates the whole into parts in order to discern the nature, proportion, and function of each constituent.
Western doctors, the authors go on to explain, identify the broken or malfunctioning part, figure out what's wrong with it, and determine the cause of the problem. Successful treatment then consists of fixing that part, removing it, or replacing it. In the same way that the cause of a punctured tire can be identified as a nail picked up from the road, and the tire is either patched or replaced, the cause of a "broken" tonsil can be identified as a particular bacterium or virus, and the fixing is done by giving the patient a medicine—or, if the damage is too severe, by removing the tonsil surgically. If at some point Western doctors became convinced that the body has to have tonsils to function properly, the next step would be tonsil transplants or artificial tonsils.
This is very straightforward; it gives us a solid foundation for understanding how Western doctors proceed in their efforts to do something about states of nonfitness in their patients. It will annoy doctors who claim to practice holistic medicine, and rightly so; it will offend doctors who consider the comparison with so low-status an occupation as automobile repair demeaning. (Never mind the obvious fact that our lives are in the hands of auto mechanics just as much as they are in the hands of doctors.) Despite the justifiable objections, it accurately and clearly expresses the perceptions most Western patients have of their doctors and medical care.
Now let's compare this clarity with a typical quotation or two—in English—from the corresponding section on Chinese medicine:

In Chinese medicine, health is the ability of an organism to respond appropriately to a wide variety of challenges in a way that insures maintaining equilibrium and integrity. Disease represents a failure to adapt to challenge, a disruption of the overall equilibrium, and a rent in the fabric of the organism.

(Beinfield and Korngold 1991, page 36)

If the cause of disease is understood as imbalance, then the goal of treatment is to recover balance

(ibid., page 44)
These statements may be accurate, but they in no way answer the basic questions readers would have about what a Chinese doctor or health care worker does.
I turned to another excellent book on Chinese medicine, Ted J. Kaptchuk's The Web That Has No Weaver, for help, and found the same sort of thing:

All relevant information, including the symptom as well as the patient's other general characteristics, is gathered and woven together until it forms what Chinese medicine calls "a pattern of disharmony." … The total configurations, the patterns of disharmony, provide the framework for treatment. The therapy then attempts to bring the configuration into balance, to restore harmony to the individual.

(Kaptchuk 1983, page 4)
Although all these authors try hard, over and over again, to sum up this "harmonizing" process for speakers of English, they get nowhere. Until, that is, Beinfield and Korngold change their tactics. After a considerable amount of this floundering about, they give up on constructing careful, rational, "expository" sentences and paragraphs and turn to the much more powerful mechanism of metaphor. They had already established the English metaphor as A DOCTOR IS A MECHANIC. The Chinese metaphor, they tell us, is: A DOCTOR IS A GARDENER. And suddenly the lights go on! Because although we may have no idea what someone we could only refer to as a "harmony-restorer" does, we know what gardeners do, in precisely the same way that we know what mechanics do.
Richard Selzer (writer and surgeon) has provided us with what I consider to be the finest possible description, in English, of Asian medicine in action. In his essay "The Art of Surgery" he describes a grand rounds at his hospital featuring Tibetan healer Yeshi Dhonden, personal physician to the Dalai Lama. The task was to examine a patient chosen for him in advance by Selzer's hospital, a patient whose diagnosis was unknown to anyone except the doctor who chose her, and afterward to discuss the diagnosis with the Western doctors. Selzer describes Dhonden's taking of the patient's pulse, which was a very different process than the one we Westerners are accustomed to. It lasted thirty minutes, and when it was over Selzer writes of his new awareness that "I, who have palpated a hundred thousand pulses, have not felt a single one." Dhonden also examines a urine specimen provided by the patient. And that is all he does. In the discussion with the doctors afterward, he presents his diagnosis (through an interpreter) as follows:

The lifeblood of a Chinese company is guanxi [connections]. Penetrating its layers is like peeling an onion. First come connections between people and ancestors, then those between people from the same village, between members of the family, and finally between the family and close associates who can be trusted … Typically, the Chinese … are less concerned with what is written in the contract than in the actions that people take to meet their obligations as they emphasize guanxi.

(Cannon 1994, pages 332-333)

Suppose that you and I are involved in a business transaction. I want to sell you ten widgets, or ten hours of a service, and you're willing to buy. When the business in question is business as represented by Standard American Mainstream English (SAME), what that means in theory is that the following sequence will take place:

1. I describe the widget or the service to you, accurately and honestly.
2. I agree to a price for the widget or service—a price that covers my cost of business (including fair treatment for any workers and subcontractors and suppliers who may be involved) while at the same time yielding a fair profit.
3. I agree to a delivery time for the widget or service, with fair provisions made for such things as returns and refunds if the widget is damaged or the service is unsatisfactory.
4. I agree to a date by which you must pay my bill for the widget or service.
5. You agree to all of the items above.
6. We both follow through on our agreements, fully and honestly.

Their nonverbal behavior, for example, does not automatically switch to an "Englishized" nonverbal behavior … Thus, when they think the negotiation partner should have understood the (verbal and nonverbal) signs they are using, misunderstandings still occur because some signs may be differently encoded—and decoded—in the other's culture or may not be noticed to be signs at all.

(Niemeier et al. 1998, page 2)
There are now many Englishes, from all over the world, each one strongly influenced by the native language and culture from which it comes. They are not the same language. (For more details, see Chapter 7.) And this isn't just a "vocabulary problem," something that could be fixed if people would only learn more words and phrases.
The number of language-related potential problem areas for international business is so large that no one book (let alone one chapter in one book) could possibly explore them all; we'd need many shelves of books. The potential problem areas include at least these five, which we'll be discussing in this chapter:

• Different understandings of time and of space
• Different positions on what's right and what's wrong
• Different definitions for the key vocabularies of various semantic domains
• Different requirements for making information explicit
• Different dominant cultural metaphors

Why American English Is Such a Good Language for Business

A nominal is a noun (or any item that can do everything a noun can do) plus whatever language chunks go with it.
A typical English sentence will have a verb, plus one or more nominals that fill roles for the verb. For example: "The linguist recited nine boring grammar rules" has "recited" as its verb, plus two nominals, "the linguist" and "nine boring grammar rules."
"The linguist" fills the role of that-which-does-the-reciting; "nine boring grammar rules" fills the role of that-which-is-recited; the verb tells us what action is involved, that it took place in the past, and that it's over with. Every sentence with a verb, in any human language, can be thought of as potentially including a whole set of nominals, along these general lines:

Somebody does something, perhaps to someone or something, perhaps for someone, perhaps along with someone, at or during some time, in some location, in some manner, perhaps along some path in time or space, for some reason or purpose, perhaps using some instrument.
How many of those potential "somes" (and more) are actually spoken or written down, and how many appear not as indefinites but with explicit details, will depend on the rules of the language, the context, and the speaker's needs and intentions.
In scholarly literature on this subject the terms ordinarily used (taken from mathematics and logic) are "predicate" and "argument"; nominals are the arguments of the predicate. It might be possible to make these matters more difficult to talk about, but you'd have to work at it. This traditional terminology is much less efficient for ordinary communication than the Navajo names for car parts are, and I'll have nothing further to say about it.
With that established, we can go on to look at the set of characteristics that make English the businessperson's best current medium for business discourse, both spoken and written and—as in much electronic discourse—in between.

The English Advantage

An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being undertaken to eliminate the consequences of this accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.

(The Soviet press agency Tass, quoted in the New York Times for April 29,1986)
This tactic isn't unique to English; all languages, it seems, allow it. Linguistic universals—that is, items that can reasonably be assumed to be present in every human language, such as vowels or nominals or a way of making things plural—are an important concern in linguistics. (Linguists propose them with great caution, because they are proposals about what qualifies as a human language.) I spent quite a while going to linguists all over the world for help in finding out how universal this phenomenon of "making the responsible nominals disappear" might be. So far as I have been able to determine, there is no human language in which it is literally impossible to do this. No language exists in which speakers would be violating a grammar rule if they didn't openly identify the "spiller of the oil." Some languages do it with passive sequences such as "Oil was spilled"; some do it by constructing sentences that would translate as "Somebody spilled oil" or "One spilled oil" or "They-unidentified spilled oil"; many do it with sequences that translate literally as "Oil spilled itself." However, English is extremely tolerant of this sort of thing, and the "Oil was spilled" tactic is only one of a number of possibilities it offers for hiding or eliminating nominals.
2. English lets you easily and efficiently hide information away in presuppositions and stacks of presuppositions.
Suppose my company has just put a new brand of laundry soap on the market. Chances are, it's much like all the other laundry soaps already available. If I want to say that our new soap is "technology-enhanced" (whatever that might mean), I'm claiming that that's so, and I'm likely to be asked for evidence. However, in English things that are owned are presupposed to exist. A sentence like "My black leather briefcase with the fancy zipper does not exist" would strike a native speaker of English as very strange, and could be used only in special contexts. (We can't say it could never be used, because you can always put together a sentence like "[X] is not a grammatical sequence of English.") This means that I can use a possessive word or phrase to presuppose that the soap is technology-enhanced and then finish my sentence with some claim too trivial to inspire argument. Like this:

My company's new technology-enhanced soap is now available in stores all over the country.
Or

Our new technology-enhanced soap is now on the shelves in stores from coast to coast.
I don't have to stop there. I can stack the presuppositions up as high as I feel a listener or reader will let me. Each presupposed item will turn what would have been an open claim on my part into information that I can reasonably expect you—linguistically speaking—to take for granted. Like this:

Our new and innovative scientifically designed technology-enhanced soap is now available in stores all over the country.
This doesn't guarantee that no listener will challenge me with a demand for an explanation of "technology-enhanced" or "scientifically designed"; it might happen. But it's not nearly as likely as it would be if I just made my claims straight out, especially if my sentence is in the middle of a speech or other presentation. When my listener is someone from a culture that disapproves of such challenges, they're even more unlikely; if the other person is reading my words rather than hearing them, and I'm not present, no convenient opportunity for a challenge exists.
3. English doesn't require you to specify the source of the information you put in your sentences.
There are languages—Aymara is one—in which every sentence has to include a chunk stating what it is that makes you feel justified in saying what you're saying or writing what you're writing. These languages have sets of forms (often called "evidentials") for specify ing the source of information. Evidentials include such things as having perceived something with your own senses, having learned it from a source you consider trustworthy, having made it up yourself from scratch, having seen it in a dream, and so on; which members of the potential complete set occur will vary from language to language. In the same way that English sentences are ungrammatical without some chunk that tells you whether the action or state was or was not in the past, Aymara sentences are ungrammatical without an evidential either explicitly present or made clear by surrounding sentences. Aymara speakers could of course be lying about their sources of evidence, but they have to do so right up front. They can't lie in the far more convenient English fashion.
Imagine what would happen in American business if statements like "This is the best insurance policy on the market" or "We know you're going to be glad that you bought this automobile" were ungrammatical without an evidential. Imagine what it would be like if the absence of an evidential in an English sentence was automatically taken as evidence that you were trying to deceive or mislead. It wouldn't make business discourse impossible, but it would make it vastly more complicated, and would require radical changes in the way we do business in America.
4. English has an enormous vocabulary—hundreds of thousands of words—with an abundance of items that are either opaque or so nearly meaningless that they can be made to mean whatever the user wants them to mean. (Like the word "interesting.")
In some languages you can look at most words and figure out their meanings from the meanings of their morphemes—their meaningful parts. This is much rarer in English, where the jargons and registers of fields and subfields are often meaningless even to other native speakers of English. If you choose a word or phrase of English and then realize that it's uncomfortably narrow and precise, so that it might box you into a business commitment before you're ready, you can almost always find a number of other lexical items to use instead. As Gerald Parshall says, "What makes English mammoth and unique is its great sea of synonyms, words with roughly the same meaning but different connotations, different levels of formality and different effects on the ear." (Parshall 1995, page 48)
It's easy in English to talk at great length, and in a way that sounds serious and significant, while saying almost nothing; this is one of the basic skills learned by everyone who gets a Ph.D. from an American university. Suppose I am presenting a seminar, and the participants are giving me a hard time by refusing to ask questions when I offer them opportunity. They may think that this will make the seminar shorter or force me to stop talking about my topic and start telling jokes to fill the time. They are wrong. I have a Ph.D. from the University of California-San Diego's linguistics department; I am highly trained in the technique of saying things like this:

Today's topic, when subjected to primary effects of interrelated and synergistic demographic parameters, offers us greater scope than would be provided by mere humanistic rubrics in a similar context.
So far as I know, that sentence is for all practical purposes meaningless, but I can use the lexical abundance of English to go on like that for hours. Many of the world's languages offer their speakers no such luxury.
5. English has an extraordinary willingness to add to its vocabulary, not only by coining new lexical items but by borrowing them from any and all other languages. In addition, it expands its vocabulary by using nouns as verbs, and verbs and adjectives as nouns, at the drop of a hat.
We've already seen that a willingness to add words from other languages is by no means a universal characteristic; many nations look upon borrowed words and phrases as a contamination of the native tongue. English has no such barrier, despite the frantic and dogged efforts of purists.
6. English has a writing system that contains almost no information about the tune the words are set to, so that a written agreement can easily be stripped of every last bit of the emotional information that would be present in a verbal agreement.
Most of the emotional information is carried in English not by the words that are said but by the intonation (including tone of voice) that creates the tune the words are set to. As a result, speakers of English can easily say a single utterance with many different emotional meanings, including one that contradicts its "dictionary meaning." A standard exercise in beginning drama courses is to give the students some random word like "goldfish" and instruct them to say that word in such a way that it conveys rage, then lust, then terror, then tenderness, and so on down a long list of emotions. English allows that all to be done by intonation, while many other languages would have to add words or pieces of words—with specific emotional meanings—to accomplish the same thing.
This has the obvious drawback of letting verbally abusive people get away with their unpleasant language behavior by saying, "But all I said was … " and following that up with the words they did in fact say, but set to an entirely different tune. William Labov and David Fanshel are all for this feature of English:

In our view, the lack of clarity or discreteness in the intonational signals is not an unfortunate limitation of this channel, but an essential and important part of it. Speakers need a form of communication that is deniable. It is advantageous for them to express hostility, challenge the competence of others, or express friendliness and affection in a way that can be denied if they are explicitly held to account for it.

(Labov and Fanshel 1977, page 46)
Well, yes, it certainly is advantageous, provided you are "winning" in the business transaction. And that is how the game is played.
It may be that everyone who was present in a meeting to negotiate a contract has understood that members of the negotiation teams were furious or suspicious, or were agreeing only with great reluctance. Nothing in the English writing system requires information of that kind to appear in the contract or other document that comes out of the session. This is a case in which it's true that "you had to be there"; otherwise, you may be entirely in the dark about the participants' feelings.
7. English appears largely free of special discourse restrictions that would make business discourse tricky and difficult.
Japanese has a constraint that goes something like this: "Do everything you possibly can linguistically to make sure that no one ever has to say no to a request." Japanese has built-in mechanisms for indicating the rank and status of everyone present in an interaction, mechanisms that can't be left out of the sentence. Chinese has a constraint which says that you must do everything possible linguistically not to make awkward developments explicit—because once they're explicit, something has to be done about them. English has no such inconvenient features; it no longer has even the distinction between a formal "you" and an intimate one, like the French vous and tu.
Kyoko Mori (quoted in the November 3, 1997, Publishers Weekly) says that she doesn't like to speak Japanese because "you have to agree on … which one of you is superior, how close you expect to be … and who defers." Respondent Atsushi Furuiye (Japanese/English) writes that "English is better than Japanese when negotiating MONEY … Japanese with its complicated ways to speak according to social seniority/inferiority is sometimes a pain." Respondent Fran Stallings (English/Japanese) explains that Japanese has "honorific syllables which can be inserted before and/or after a general word to elevate its status … And there are whole separate sets of vocabulary (nouns and verbs) to be used for different levels of status." Chinese has a number of different words meaning "no," each carrying with it various nuances of meaning about the intensity and finality—the true "no-ness"—of the "no" in question.
Speakers of languages that make heavy use of devices like these can feel linguistically naked when speaking English. They may react to that discomfort by trying to find English substitutes—thus often leading monolingual English speakers to perceive them as either absurdly and excessively polite or as faking politeness. This perception then colors the English monolinguals' judgments negatively and interferes with business.
The seven characteristics of English discussed above (and others not mentioned here) work together synergistically—so that the combined effect is greater than the sum of the parts. Perhaps the most useful aspect of that effect for business is to establish and maintain that quality of deniability we've been discussing. ("Who, ME? Me, carrying the BALL? What makes you think THAT?") English is supremely deniable. This is not the only reason it has become the obligatory language of world business (there is, for example, the extremely important fact that English uses a writing system easily handled by keyboards), but it certainly hasn't held it back.
As long as business transactions are carried on between consenting adults who are all native speakers of Standard American Mainstream English, the results of all this are acceptable. But what happens when other languages (including other Englishes) are involved? When non-native speakers of English are involved? When the communication takes place on the Internet, where English dominance is so extreme that the four other most common languages (German, Japanese, French, and Spanish) combined are only used about 10 percent of the time? Then what?
Some of the things that happen in these situations are amazing; they lend support to the idea that we human beings all speak dialects of Terran. Here is an actual telephone conversation (recorded by Alan Firth and reported in Newman 1995) between an Egyptian cheese importer and a Danish cheese exporter whose only language in common for business is English:

IMPORTER: So I told him not to send the cheese after the blowing in customs.
EXPORTER: I see, yes.
IMPORTER: So I don't know what we can do with the order now.
EXPORTER: I'm not, er, blowing, er, what, er, what is this, er, too big or what?
IMPORTER: No, the cheese is bad. It is, like, fermenting in the customs cool rooms.
EXPORTER: Ah! It's gone off.
IMPORTER: Yes, it's gone off.
What's striking here (and what fascinates linguist Firth) is the way meaning is negotiated on the spot for business purposes, while the two businessmen are talking. "First, the Dane acts as if he understands 'blowing.' Only when his sale seems at risk does he demand a definition. Then he provides a definition of his own, and the Egyptian acts as if he knew what 'gone off' meant all along."
English, the article tells us, "follows markets," resulting in a batch of special-purpose "Englishes" (more accurately, English registers) that we could call Oilglish and Cheeseglish and StockandBondglish and Hackerglish—and so on
This is an extremely complicated issue. Its parts are tangled up together, and they interact in complicated ways. In Chapter 7 we'll return to the topic of English as an international language. For now, in order to arrive at a rough understanding of the situation, let's briefly consider a few of the organizing factors.

The Language of Time

The Language of Information

The Language of Right and Wrong

The Language of the Internet

We are entering a new economic environment—as different as the moon is from the earth—where a new set of physical rules will govern what intellectual property means, how opportunities are created from it, who prospers, and who loses. Chief among the new rules is that "content is free." While not all content will be free, the new economic dynamic will operate as if it were … The provider's vital task is to figure out what to charge for and what to give away.

(Dyson 1995, page 137)
Content is free? What to charge for and what to give away? (The prototype example to clarify this is the standard practice of giving away a computer software program free but charging customers a fee for updates and for each time they need help using the program.) This, together with the idea that score is kept in terms of hits (number of visits to your Internet location, whether any business is transacted during the visit or not), and that your company and its entire plant can be totally "virtual"—existing inside your computer, with no fixed physical location in either time or space—is causing cognitive headaches for businesspeople on a massive scale. The older the businessperson, by and large, the more frequent and severe the cognitive dissonance is. The limits to resources on the Net, Dyson says, are not limits on time and space, but limits on the amount and degree of human attention. "Does a place in cyberspace exist," she asks, "if no one visits it?"
Past attempts to establish an international language, much less an associated international culture, have always failed, but the Internet shows signs of doing what no amount of effort along those lines has ever been able to do before. The language of the Internet is truly an international language, and it looks like written English. But it's not the same English that we're used to, it's Netglish, and its presuppositions are different. Questions such as "Where is your company located?" and "How long will it take everyone to get to the meeting?" and "How much does your widget cost?" and "How large were your profits last year?"—questions that are the heart and soul of off-line business—are often irrelevant for this new variety of English.
There was a brief period when it looked as if Netglish might establish one feature that would put a small dent in the deniability of written English. This feature was the emoticon, a little graphic squiggle that people used in an effort to give a surface shape to meaning that in speech is carried by body language. For example:

When my oldest was first learning how to talk, he came toddling across the room and asked me for a cookie in Spanish. When I did not react, he got mildly upset. Then after a five-minute tantrum, he returned and asked me for a cookie again, but this time he used the English word. After that, he never spoke Spanish to me again.

(Pamela Faber; personal communication)
We know that a number of different positions on the benefits or dangers of multilingualism exist among Americans today, along with many variants of those positions; we know that at least in the United States they are based in large part on folklore and politics and inadequate information. In this chapter we will set aside the ongoing arguments about whether multilingualism should be desired, deplored, or ignored. Temporarily, let's just take multilingualism in the home as a given, the way we take furniture in the home as a given, and turn our attention to the power of language in that context.

Which Language, When, and with Whom?

But Which Language Do They Use at Home?"

• Impoverished immigrant households, where most family members spoke only the language of their homeland, with perhaps one person knowing a little English.
In this situation, unless the family happened to live in an area with a very large immigrant community of its own heritage (usually only in big cities), learning English was a matter of survival. Even in the large cities, public education meant that the kids would have to learn English quickly and well to function in school; no bilingual education program existed. In such households the native language would be used within the immediate family, with English reserved for outside the home.

• Very privileged and wealthy households, where everyone spoke English plus additional languages as a matter of course because this was considered to be an obligatory part of an adequate upper class education.
In this case the family could choose any arrangement for language use that suited its fancy. If that arrangement was to speak Latin at the breakfast table, French at lunch, and English at dinner, with afternoon tea or cocktail conversation in Mandarin Chinese, that was perfectly fine. It was a matter of individual choice. Such households were, and still are, rare.

• Native American households, where older members might speak only their Native American language, where children spoke English, and with wide variation in whether younger members also spoke the Indian language. (The native peoples of the United States are divided on the question of whether they prefer to be called Indians or Native Americans; the decision varies not only from tribe to tribe but within the tribes as well.)
This was of course a special situation, in which—although it might be that speaking the Native American language was the most critical linguistic imperative, because the language itself was in danger of dying—extreme pressure to use English in the home instead came from many sources.

1. What language(s) will the spouses use with one another?
2. And—if there are children—what language(s) will each parent use with each child?

Four Characteristics of Multilingual Homes

My young son and I moved to Indonesia when he was two years old. By the time he was three, he was bilingual in English and Indonesian (spoken to him by the servants). He jumbled the languages for about five minutes. After that, although I could speak to him in Indonesian and he would understand me perfectly, he would reply to me only in English, and to the servants only in Indonesian: he had sorted out who spoke what to his own complete satisfaction. Of course, this meant he thought there were two languages in the world and he spoke both of them. I'll never forget the astonishment on his face when, at the self-assured age of three and a half, he looked at a Korean woman, categorized her, and spoke to her in Indonesian. When she replied in Korean, he was utterly dumbfounded."

(Kathryn Berck, personal communication)
When I discuss arrangements like these with people from traditional monolingual homes, the reaction is always one of astonishment that they don't lead to endless confusion in the home, as well as to friction and frustration. How, they want to know, could such arrangements possibly work? I can tell them only that, however strange it may seem, they do.

"But Doesn't All This Switching Around Confuse the Children in Multilingual Homes?"

When we change words we invite a changed perception of the reality to which the words point. To demand that the words of faith change is to demand that one's faith change. And in changing it can either grow or shrivel, blossom or die.

(Barr 1988, page 366)

Grammar and attitudes have nothing to do with each other. Benjamin Whorf thought they did, but he has been proven wrong.

(Beaver 1988, page 325)

We have considered in some detail the power that language has in medicine, in business, and in the home; we've discussed many aspects of its power in education. Now we're going to turn to the often very different power of religious language. The two quotations above make opposing claims. The first claims that the linguistic relativity hypothesis is true, while the second (from a linguist's letter in response to the first) declares it false. Knowing which of those two claims is valid is arguably more important in the context of religious language than in any other area of life. Religion and spirituality permeate every culture and every worldview, using religious language and talk about religious language as a primary mechanism of transmission. It's difficult to overestimate the power of such language over our lives, even for those who claim to have no religious beliefs and to be part of no religious tradition. In much of the Western world, religion is the area of life in which the most elaborate cognitive gymnastics are required, because of the seemingly unresolvable conflicts and contradictions.

What Is Religious Language?

What if 80 or 90 percent of Americans spoke every day in the brutal and angry cadences of gangsta rap, while the members of a feudal upper class mused over their own demise in Elizabethan English?

(Hedges 1996)
That is, what if written English had been frozen in the forms that were used in the King James Bible, while the spoken language had moved on, and the gulf between the two varieties of English had restricted literacy to an elite upper class?
Suppose politicians in the United States could take something like "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" from the King James Bible and turn it into a rap slogan aimed at illiterate thousands in American inner cities and rural small towns, with complete confidence that its targets wouldn't be able to find that section of the Bible and read the sequence in context, or read commentaries and discussions of the section. Suppose that at the same time the elite classes in the United States would know so little about rap that they'd pay no attention to the slogan and its effects. Suppose politicians could take the loaded word "abomination," which figures so prominently in the Old Testament, reshape it in a dialect unfamiliar to upper-class Americans, and begin using it as a buzzword to whip up hatred against whatever they disapproved of. This is precisely the sort of problem that Arabic-speaking peoples struggle with in the real world today.
Hedges acknowledges that the image is an exaggeration for many privileged speakers of Arabic, but reports that it accurately reflects the linguistic circumstances of the poor throughout the Middle East, whose inability to read written Arabic and interpret it for themselves leaves them dangerously vulnerable. Amy Docker Marcus quotes the Arab poet and songwriter Nabeel el-Khadeer's lament that "Language is the weapon of our times." And Hedges makes it clear that although Arabic may seem far outside American concerns, it in fact affects Americans directly: He explains that the carefully crafted inflammatory slogans and buzzwords aimed at the poor by politicians are "almost incomprehensible to educated Arabs, only widening a dangerous gulf between an elite that looks to the West and an enraged underclass from which suicide bombers and murderers of tourists can be recruited" (Hedges 1996; emphasis added).
The situation in the mainstream cultures of the United States is different, right? There may be a little resistance to new Bible translations, but most Americans are literate, and are broad-minded about religious language. We may feel a sense of stylistic loss when the Christmas angels' "Fear not" is modernized into "Don't be afraid"; we may feel that rendering "Let not your heart be troubled" as "Don't worry" throws away much of the beauty of the earlier version. I certainly feel that way. But nobody is ready to riot against such changes. We may be offended when people pepper their speech with "Jesus Christ" or "God damn" as their preferred casual curses, but we're not likely to attack them physically for that behavior. We may be disgusted when writers and artists take liberties with subjects that we personally consider sacred, but we're not interested in putting such people in prison for their actions. Right? Yes and no. As is true of so many language-related issues, it depends. It's not simple or straightforward.
Some examples of American attitudes toward religious language are as curious as any that an anthropologist might bring back from fieldwork at the outermost fringes. As when the local government of Kleberg County, Texas, voted unanimously in favor of saying "heaven-O" as the official government greeting, never mind the fact that "hello" has nothing whatsoever to do with hell or with the word "hell." (It's instructive, and at the same time bewildering, that this information appeared on page 25 of the December 13,1997, issue of TV Guide, without a byline and with the disrespectful title "Then They All Got Back into Their Heavenicopter and Flew Back to the Mental Hospital.")
Annie Dillard, writing in Holy the Firm, describes the "set pieces of liturgy" as language that people have managed to address to their God "without getting killed."
And Stanley Fish makes a claim that is neither obviously absurd nor obviously poetic—but obviously important, linguistically and spiritually—when he writes that "Religious discourse … cannot be unconcerned with the substantive worth and veracity of its assertions, which are in fact presupposed" (Fish 1996, page 22). That is, we can't just dismiss someone's religious language casually, because unless there is an open statement to the contrary we have to assume that the speaker believes that its various propositions are true.
It's not an accident that Fish makes this claim in an article titled "Why We Can't All Just Get Along." Many Christians who agree with Stanley Fish may find themselves in the awkward position of having to use religious language which presupposes that all the world's billions of non-Christians are doomed to spend eternity in hell. That terrible claim is presupposed by numerous examples of religious language used in Christian sacred texts, sermons, hymns, and the like. It's made explicit in the recent manifesto of the Christian Evangelical denominations in the United States, published in the June 14, 1999, issue of Christianity Today: "We deny that anyone is saved in any other way than by Jesus Christ and his Gospel. The Bible offers no hope that sincere worshipers of other religions will be saved without personal faith in Jesus Christ." That's carefully worded, but its intended meaning is quite clear. (A typical response when I ask believers how they deal with this is "I try not to think about it" plus a swift change of subject.)
In a multilingual and multicultural America this particular presupposition can have complicated consequences. I have a Buddhist friend whose first visit to an American church was his last—because it included a statement from the minister, directly to my friend, that his deceased Buddhist parents were at that moment in hell and would remain there for all eternity. I've seen a number of Southern Baptist ministers, facing a point-blank outraged question like "Are you saying that all Buddhists and Jews will go to hell?" escape by answering with "I wouldn't presume to make a judgment of that kind." The preacher who talked to my friend either wasn't that adroit, or genuinely felt a religious obligation to say what he did; if the latter reason is the explanation, I'm grateful that I carry no such burden.
To understand how religious language in English affects people's lives in the United States today, we need to remember two things as we go along.

First: The effects that religious language has on an English-speaking population are effects of contemporary English, which brings with it all the presuppositions of contemporary English.
This point is far too often overlooked or forgotten. Scholars and theologians of the English-speaking world may be convinced that they know what the words of some religious sequence in English "really" mean, based on their understanding of what the corresponding sequences in ancient Aramaic or Hebrew or Greek "really" meant. I suspect that they're sometimes wrong, and not only because millennia have gone by since the words were first spoken. For all their expertise, they have no way of knowing what English body language—especially what intonation and tone of voice—should be assigned to the translations of religious utterances from their original languages.
Only English spoken by a machine (my answering machine, for example) carries no emotional meaning. Quoted English speech is most often read silently, but we hear it in the mind's ear with some pattern of intonation attached. "If you love me you will keep my commandments" means one thing, while "If you LOVE me, you will KEEP my COMMANDments!" means something else. Not even the most learned scholars—like the members of the famous Jesus Seminar, who presume to rule on which sayings attributed to Jesus he actually did or didn't say—know which of those two English utterances, let alone the multitude of other possibilities, was intended by the original non-English utterance. If the scholars are correct in the judgments they make about such things, that's admirable. But ordinary people, which includes most of us, are even more ignorant of theology and religious theory than of linguistics. We don't experience English religious language as an English way of saying some sequence of Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic that we're able to understand in the original; we understand it as the English of today.
Much time is spent in religious discourse in America, both spoken and written, struggling to explain that when Jesus said "Be ye therefore perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect" he didn't mean perfect. "Perfect" in the original language, we're told, didn't mean "perfect"; it meant something else, something more along the lines of "mature" or "whole" or "complete" but not exactly any of those either. This is little or no help to average devout Christians, who will continue to feel that they've been commanded to be perfect.

Second: The effects of religious language are in no way restricted to effects on believers, and that's not just because believers and nonbelievers share the same world.
I've asked many people who insist that they are totally nonreligious whether they find "The Lady is my shepherdess; I shall not want" offensive. Whether they are shocked by the crucified Santa Clauses that can be found on sale in Japanese gift shops at Christmas. (Bizarre as this seems, the sort of cross-cultural blundering it demonstrates can be seen in almost every gift shop—and truck stop—in America, where the symbols of different Native American religions appear scrambled and distorted in exactly the same fashion on objects of every kind.) If it makes any difference to them whether the gay lifestyle is called "something many people strongly disapprove of" or "an abomination." If they have any opinion about whether their dog has a soul, or about the point at which a fetus has a soul. I've asked them how they'd feel if they heard an emergency room nurse say to a frantic wife in the waiting room, "Mrs. Jones, the doctors have resurrected your husband and you'll be able to see him shortly." They are ordinarily amazed at how strong their reactions to my questions are and at how much these things do in fact matter to them. Finally, I've been intrigued by the number of professedly non-religious young people I know who object to any sort of disrespectful use of the phrase "The Force."
In earlier chapters we've discussed the effects of naming some human state as a disease, as in the case of renaming menopause "hypoestrogenemia." The effects of such naming extend far beyond the individual menopausal woman and into the society around her and the society at large. Similarly, when the state of weighing more than the cultural ideal is called neither a normal variation in human shape nor a disease, but is named as a sin, the consequences permeate the culture. Not to mention the fact that the contemporary understanding of the sin in question—gluttony—is a distortion ot what the term "really" meant. Gluttony is obsession with food. When that obsession takes the form of a constant preoccupation with staying rail thin, it is as much a form of gluttony as is overeating—but contemporary American English has lost track of that meaning; making it possible for one group of gluttons to feel virtuous while considering the sorry state of the other group to be evidence of immorality or moral weakness.
The same thing holds when alcoholism or other addictions, or homosexuality, or attempted suicide, are classified as sins. People behave very differently toward someone whose state is considered proof of moral weakness and wickedness (a sinner) than they do toward someone who is considered to be sick and in need of medical treatment (a patient); the insanity defense for murderers is the prototypical example of that fact. And people who believe their own state and behavior to be sinful behave differently in this world than people who are convinced that they're not personally responsible for their condition because they are its "victims."
Everyone who interacts with a sinner—family, friends, workplace associates, teachers, helping professionals, and on down the list—is affected by the acceptance of that word from the vocabulary of religious language and behaves in ways that are shaped by that word. It makes very little difference whether they are themselves believers; the effects of the words "sin," "sinful," and "sinner" on the person they're applied to bring about changes, including legal changes, and others respond to the circumstances that are created by those changes.
Western elite culture, the culture of the highly educated professional and the academic, is just as subject to the effects we've been discussing as the cultures of our less privileged and less educated citizens; the same thing is true of cultures that are still functioning in ways that Western society set aside centuries ago.
It's not always easy to disentangle religious language effects from the effects of other factors that tend to hide the religious aspect, but the religious ones are always there. We're going to look now at one of the most obvious and easily identified examples, that of the ongoing furor about the overwhelming "maleness," in linguistic terms, of Christianity and Judaism.

Case Study: The Controversy over "Inclusive" Language

What results when the human reality used to point to God is always and everywhere male? The sacred character of maleness is revealed, while femaleness is relegated to the unholy darkness without … This state of affairs has a profound impact on women's religious identity.

(Johnson 1993, page 37)
It's ironic that this quotation, which so perfectly argues the religious language case for women, should bring us right up against another major problem of religious language today. For people of color the constant association of holiness with whiteness, and of wickedness with blackness—as in "the unholy darkness without"—causes great pain. The good and the holy in religious language is always light and white; we never hear that our sins might be washed as black as ebony.
Claudia Camp is even more specific:

Because the Christian traditions have for so long put "God" and "father" in the same category, this conjunction has had a real historical impact. "God is a father" is a literal statement within the discourse.

(Camp 1993, page 33)
We've run up against the linguistic relativity hypothesis controversy again. If linguist Joseph Beaver is right that "grammar and attitudes have nothing to do with each other," then we're talking about nothing more than style and taste. If Benjamin Whorf was right, we're talking about something far more important. If, as Pinker would argue, all that's necessary to clarify matters for a woman who feels excluded from Judeo-Christian religious language is to point out to her that all those male terms are "generic," we have no problem; if Pinker is wrong, the problem is very serious.
Hymn-writer Brian Wren states it very well:

If our language about God is harmless, and has no effect on our thinking and behavior, then the fact that all our names and images of God are male is unimportant … On the other hand, if language powerfully shapes our thinking and behavior, then the maleness of God-language … becomes a crucial issue.

(Wren 1991, page 55)
Over the course of more than a quarter century of investigating religious language in American English, I've asked hundreds of churchgoing Christians—in privacy, and with my promise of complete confidentiality—what they really believe about God's gender. The response, a great deal of the time, has gone like this: "I know I'm supposed to believe that God doesn't have any gender, and that's what I always say—but really, I think God is male." In some cases the answer has ended with the astonishing "I think God is a man. Not a human man, of course—but a man." What does "a man, but not a human man" mean? I have no idea. I haven't had the opportunity to do this informal experiment with the Jewish or Islamic counterparts of these Christians, unfortunately; but if I had to guess, I'd guess that the results would be similar. I have had the opportunity to ask large numbers of people who claim to be nonreligious; when they don't fend me off with "I have no opinions about that, since it's all nonsense anyway," for the most part they agree that God is "really" male.
As this would predict, those who complain about the "generic masculine" in the English Bible, buttressed as it is by an endless proliferation of explicitly male terms like "Father" and "Lord" and "King" and "Son of God," meet with intense criticism from the public as well as from professionals in religion. Zondervan (a major American religious publisher) recently brought out a very mildly inclusive Bible. It used such rephrasings as "Child of God" rather than "Son of God" and "humankind" rather than "mankind"; it changed many singular verbs to plural so that the genderless "they" could be used instead of the gendered "he or "she." The result was such a firestorm of criticism that printing was hastily stopped, despite the financial loss for the publishing house.
It's one thing when such criticism comes from denominations which openly claim that God intends for women to be subordinate to men. That is at least in part a logically consistent position. I say "in part" because so long as Judeo-Christian theology insists that God has no sexual gender, it's illogical to choose any gender at all for language that refers to that God. You don't have to. It's possible to just say "God" everywhere, without any pronouns; the result is not always elegant, but it's entirely comprehensible—and entirely logical when everyone involved is insisting that the entity in question has no sexual gender. Here's an example:

Thus, when God's Spirit "hovers over" the "face" of the earth, we learn that God's relation to creation was an intimate, loving one as a mother hen protecting her chicks, a metaphor God when on earth will repeat.

(Spencer and Spencer 1998, page 23)
Ruether's "God is not male; He is spirit" could simply be "God is not male: God is spirit," and the contradiction would disappear. Even "Godself" for "Himself," if it were routinely used, would soon sound normal and ordinary. But doing that would mean deliberately changing existing religious texts, and the resistance to that—in the United States just as in the Arab nations—is very strong and deeply entrenched.
Ordinarily, individuals who insist that the religious language of Judeo-Christianity must not be changed—either by doing without pronouns for the divine or by making it "inclusive"—also insist that (a) they know very well that God has no sexual gender, and (b) they know very well that men and women are equal in God's sight and should also be equal in the sight of man (by which they of course claim to mean everyone, both male and female, and transgendered).
Suppose we assume that they do in fact believe exactly what they claim to believe. If so, it requires cognitive and linguistic gymnastics of the most intricate kind, and a consistent strategy of reframing, as in the recent very clever editorial by David Neff in Christianity Today which claimed that the argument has nothing to do with sexual gender anyway. Gender, he argues, is a red herring. His title is "The Great Translation Debate," and his claim is that the entire inclusive language argument is not about gender at all, but about how to be "most faithful to the ancient text" (Neff 1997, page 16). Or as stated bluntly by Grant R. Osborne in "Do Inclusive Language Bibles Distort Scripture? No," which opens with this sentence: "Whether or not to use inclusive language in Bible translation is not a gender issue but a matter of translation theory" (Osborne 1997, page 33). That may be true for scholars like Osborne, but for the ordinary person in America it is a gender issue.
We need to be aware that even those who are most severe in their insistence that the Bible's language be translated with utmost fidelity make exceptions in some cases. For example, there is Jeremiah 20:7. In the King James Bible it reads, "O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed; I am in derision daily, everyone mocketh me." The New King James has it as "O Lord, You induced me, and I was persuaded; You are stronger than I, and have prevailed. I am in derision daily; everyone mocks me." Scholar Abraham J. Herschel gives the literal meanings of the two verbs in question as "wrongfully inducing a woman to consent to prenuptial intercourse" and "violent forcing of a woman to submit to extranuptial intercourse." He offers the translation "O Lord, Thou has seduced me, and I am seduced; Thou hast raped me, and I am overcome." This would certainly make the clause about being mocked a good deal easier to understand. But even the liberal Jerusalem Bible, which starts out with "You have seduced me, Yah-weh, and I have let myself be seduced," isn't willing to go that far; it continues with "you have overpowered me; you were the stronger. I am a daily laughingstock." Faithful translation may be the professed goal, but when the result would have Jeremiah accusing the Deity of having raped him, the literalists back down. Clearly, there are limits to this professed goal of "being most faithful to the ancient text."
Here are three more examples of commentary about inclusive language, to show you how varied and ingenious they can be, and how impassioned:

Even if speakers/writers should self-consciously choose not to use the masculine pronouns for God, the fact remains that they are self-consciously choosing not to use them; they are intentionally deciding to go against internalized grammatical convention and the deep, unconscious habits of the society … Thus the practice of avoiding the masculine pronoun when talking about God will never become habitual and routine; such practice must and will remain at the level of self-aware rebellion.

(Hook and Kimel 1993, pp. 16-17)

While women, in their own fashion, may sin as much as men, it is the pride and willfulness and violence of men that most radically disrupts the world's peace and order. Feminist reformers may have no trouble in recognizing this fact, but they seem not to notice that breaking the arrogance and power of men requires a God who is, among other things, the Judge of Nations, the Lord of Hosts, the "King of glory … mighty in battle." … God's lordship is the only plausible check on the predatory tendencies of wicked men and nations, from Pharaoh to Haman to Hider.

(Berke 1996, page 35)

The most simple and compelling reason to reject gender-reimaging is that God, though not a man or a male, has used masculine terms in making His self-disclosure to humanity.

(Berke 1996, page 37)
The second Berke quotation, if taken seriously, would lead us straight to the isolationist position held by Arab speakers toward the Koran, in which the words in the religious texts are perceived as literally the words of God Godself. And how would we then carry on the evangelical practice of translating the Bible into the many human languages in which there are no masculine pronouns?
It might seem that all we'd have to do is make sure that a new pronoun, an exclusively masculine pronoun, is added to those languages that don't already have one. However, we have no reason to believe that that would be any easier to accomplish in other languages than it has been in English. There have been nearly 100 attempts in recent history to give English a gender-neutral third-person pronoun to avoid the constant "he or she" problems, and every single one of those attempts has failed. This is typical linguistic pathology; everybody, in their daily speech, uses "they" as a way out of the quandary; everybody, when talking about what is "correct," says it's wrong to use "they" to refer to just one person.
It's easy to add a new name-for-a-widget to a language; we do that for English almost every time something new is invented or discovered. It's also easy to make changes that do nothing but substitute one widget (as long as it's not a sacred Widget) for another. The English Bible says that marriage means a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. Bible translators Gene and Marie Scott translated that into Sharanhua as "For this reason a man shall have the same mosquito net as his wife"; the Sharanhua of Peru don't leave their parents' homes when they marry. (See Zoba 1997, "Your Sins Shall Be White as Yucca," for details.) This sort of thing has to be done all the time in translating the Bible. But adding a new pronoun to a language is different.
Pronouns carry powerful presuppositions about reality as the speakers of that language perceive it. It matters to English speakers whether something being spoken or written about is animate or inanimate, human or nonhuman, one or more than one, male or female or neither. Sentences that lack such information are totally unacceptable. Speakers of other languages are equally unable to imagine using pronouns that make distinctions differently—that divide up reality differently—than the way they're accustomed to doing it. Pronouns are one of our most powerful tools for specifying what things members of a culture must pay attention to, and there will always be strong resistance to their modification.
We're often told that all of this controversy is a tempest in a teapot because, since not one of us has ever perceived what we are trying to describe and discuss, all talk about the Holy One is by definition metaphorical. That's all very well in theory, but people don't understand beloved religious metaphors as "only figures of speech." Trained religious professionals such as clergy and monks and nuns may be able to ignore the symbol and worship only the Divine Reality behind it; very few ordinary people are able to do that. We may know intellectually that our Heavenly Father is an unimaginable disembodied genderless divine Something-or-other; but when we pray to that Heavenly Father the image in our minds and hearts is probably a very human-looking man, something like Abraham Lincoln or Paul Newman, or their equivalents in other ethnic groups.
We could easily test the hypothesis that speakers of American English really perceive the Christian God as having no sexual gender. We would only have to produce a new biblical movie in which God speaks from the burning bush—and the voice of God is neither Charlton Heston nor James Earl Jones but the voice of a woman. Diane Sawyer, perhaps, or Jessye Norman. We all know what would happen, however much we claim to understand and believe that God is genderless. The people in the audience would react with a shocked silence, perhaps a shocked gasp. And then, depending on how devout they were and what denomination they belonged to, they would either burst out laughing or stand up and march out of the theater in outrage.

Male … Female … and?

Other Metaphors in Religious Language

The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialized in the process of maturation.

(Wink 1998, page 53 )
I agree with Wink's statement; I would add only that the "boys especially" in question are for the most part brought up by women; little girls must therefore be socialized to be willing to participate in this process. By "redemptive" violence, Wink is referring to the concept that violence is acceptable, even admirable, when its goal is to accomplish good, as in just wars.
The strength of the Spiritual Warrior metaphor is growing daily, and it has spread from the domain of actual combat to the more pervasive domain of all competition. It used to specify only that the Warrior must win; now it is understood to demand that everybody else except the Warrior must lose. That is, there can be only one winner, and that winner must leave an empty battlefield behind. We saw this in the recent Olympic Games when the Nike ads at Atlanta said, "You don't win silver. You lose gold." And our young people, who've come into this semantic controversy late in the battle—or in the third quarter—and are not being taught the relevant history, have lost track of the principle of the just war. That principle stipulates that violence must always be the last resort, carried out with heartfelt regret because everything else has been tried and has failed, and no other action appears to be possible. The Warrior metaphor has brutalized our sports and is brutalizing our lives, and it is a religious language phenomenon.
The most extraordinary section in Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) is pages 563-564, where they claim that—having proved to their satisfaction that there cannot be a disembodied mind—they extrapolate from that to the claim that there cannot be a disembodied soul. That is, there cannot be a mind with an existence independent of the body; therefore, there cannot be a soul with an existence independent of the body. They do not even consider the possibility that a divine Creator would be abie to construct something—something which human beings could refer to as "the soul"—and give it characteristics so different from the mind that it would be entirely capable of independence from the body.
The greatest failing of the melting pot metaphor is that it overreaches. It exaggerates the degree to which immigrants' ethnicity is likely to be extinguished by exposure to American society and it exaggerates the need to extinguish ethnicity … Perhaps a new assimilation metaphor should be introduced—one that depends not on a mechanical process like the melting pot but on human dynamics. Assimilation might be viewed as more akin to religious conversion than anything else. In the terms of this metaphor, the immigrant is the convert, American society is the religious order being joined, and assimilation is the process by which the conversion takes place … Conversion is a mutual decision requiring affirmation by both the convert and the religious order he or she wishes to join. Converts are expected in most (but not all) cases to renounce their old religions. But converts do not have to change their behavior in any respects other than those that relate to the new religion. (Salins 1997, page 23; emphasis added)
That is, someone who has openly joined a Christian church in the United States must sit quietly and respectfully, without objecting, while a minister reads and preaches about turning the other cheek and following the Golden Rule, and even reads verses of the Bible commanding us not to charge interest and not to bring lawsuits—but once that person leaves the church, no one expects that the Shepherd will replace the Warrior in his or her life. Perhaps, if we treat assimilation like conversion, as long as those who assimilate observe all the rules of public life and public citizenship there's no reason in theory why they couldn't continue to maintain their ethnic heritage and their native language in the privacy of their homes. The assimilated multilingual individual would end up with a string of beads perhaps even less matched, even less a harmonious whole, than usual—but they would remain just one string of beads.
In theory, this sort of lip service model for assimilation is appealing; in religious life, it might even work. As always, the string of beads would have to be left at home when the multilingual went off to work.

A Final Note—Religion plus Music

So what's the solution? "Thoughtfully planned bilingualism" says Einar Haugen, a linguist … Haugen wants each of us to have a "native, homely, familiar everyday language in which we can live and love" as well as a second "language of wider communication" that will enable us to jet around the world.

(Vines 1996, page 27)

Remember Einar Haugen's proposal, mentioned previously on page 35? ***
Is Haugen right? Maybe. When the communication problems of a multilingual world are discussed, people often express agreement with him (or with some variation on his idea) and suggest that an obvious solution is staring us right in the face: Let's have a single language (traditionally called an "international auxiliary language," or IAL) that everyone would learn in early childhood, so that all human beings on this planet would have at least one shared medium for communication. What could be more logical, or more practical?
Suppose that, for purposes of discussing this idea, we call our hypothetical IAL "WorldSpeak." We'd need to call it something far less English and far more internationally neutral in form, and choosing the final name would have to be done with great care and attention, but WorldSpeak will do for our present purposes. The scenario that carries out this idea and makes WorldSpeak a genuine IAL—in two versions—is easily imagined.
In both versions, all children would acquire their native tongues in the usual way, along with whatever other language or languages were present as input in their language environment; this would involve no change from our present practice.
In both versions, all adults would know WorldSpeak, which would put an end to the need for translators and interpreters, either human or electronic, in every aspect of international interaction. Translation and interpreting would become activities done as art rather than as necessities. Monolingual persons would exist only in the increasingly rare circumstances of peoples truly cut off from modern education and technology. This would save huge amounts of time and money and effort, freeing up resources that could be used for other purposes. Not only because of the logistics-related savings, but also because we would have fewer of the expensive international misunderstandings that result from language differences. Professional translators and interpreters (other than literary translators), along with professionals involved in machine translation, would have to go through the sort of dislocation that occurs when any work role becomes obsolete in a society; they would find other ways to make their livings, in due time.

WorldSpeak Scenario A

WorldSpeak Scenario B

Which language is going to be the one that every human being will be expected to know?
The natural human reaction is an immediate "Well, my language, of course!" but we are well aware that it's not that easy. There are only two possible answers:

• We choose some existing natural language and see that every educated person knows it, in the way that every educated European person was once expected to know Latin.
• We choose a language that's not a natural language but has been constructed (often for the purpose of serving as an IAL, in the way Esperanto was intended by its designer). We could pick one of the hundreds of such languages that have already been proposed, or we could construct a new one (in which case one can only hope that linguists would be consulted).

Choosing an Existing Natural Language as the IAL

A national variety of English is a form or dialect of English which has a national distribution. It is acknowledged to be the form of English identified with the particular nation, having developed features which distinguish it from other varieties of English as a consequence of its separate history, geographical location and cultural context.

Standard English should be defined as that accepted form of English which occurs in prestigious English-language newspapers, publishing and broadcasting in the specified country.
Separate history? Separate cultural context? A standard based on "prestigious" media output in "the specified country," never mind how English might be used in the New York Times? Oops!
It doesn't help matters that we have no accepted definition of Standard English that could be proposed as an international standard. Existing definitions are of two kinds. In one group you'll find a multitude of safely vacuous variations on "Standard English is the language used by educated people." (That is, "We know Standard English when we see it or hear it.") The other group contains dangerously specific definitions that betray the ongoing public ignorance of basic linguistic facts, a situation for which the public can't be blamed but which desperately needs repair. Consider, for example, this definition from the state of Virginia's House Bill No. 2437, passed not in 1900 but in 1997, with emphasis added by me:

Standard English includes the written and spoken language which is accepted by generally recognized authorities as grammatically correct in the United States and shall not include any dialect, jargon, patois or vernacular based on the English language.
Given this state of affairs, it's reasonable to wonder what will become of English as it spreads like some variety of linguistic kudzu into every corner of Earth; but that's something that we know, from experience, cannot be predicted. It's impossible to keep a living language from changing, although that won't keep the governments of Earth from trying.
Something of this kind perhaps happened at that point in the mists of prehistory when everyone in the known world spoke a single language—let's call it Ur. Although there were no media, prestigious or otherwise, there were surely standards. We can imagine one Early Human sneering at another's inferior way of speaking Ur. And then millennia went by, and instead of Ur there were French and Albanian and Chinese and Basque and English and Mohawk. But our world is not the world that Early Humans knew. In a world that has satellite television and the Internet, and telephones that will work in the middle of the most barren desert, human beings who are separated by geography are no longer isolated from one another linguistically. Only a planetwide catastrophe that restored prehistorical conditions could once again make it even remotely possible for words to change gradually over time, in isolation, to such an extent that only highly trained specialists in historical linguistics would be able to tell that they had ever been the same. What happened to Ur (or conceivably to several "Urs") could not happen to International English.
Well, then, can we say that the whole issue of IALs is now moot? Is it settled that WorldSpeak will be some impossible-to-predict form of English? Should those of us lucky enough to already know one or more varieties of English just relax and be grateful that we happened to be born into an English-speaking language environment?
Nobody knows. The Englishing of Earth is something like the global warming of Earth. It may be happening; some experts say so. It may already be an accomplished fact; it may be too late to stop it; some experts say so. In which case, instead of passing laws to protect English we should be doing our utmost to protect our remaining store of other languages! We know from the biological sciences how dangerous it is to reduce any pool of existing varieties to just one. Nothing we know in linguistic science gives us reason to believe that it would be any less dangerous for the world's language "gene pool" to be reduced to only English, even with a multitude of dialects.
Furthermore, before native speakers of English jump to any conclusions, they would be wise to ask native speakers of other languages how they feel about the idea that English should be the lingua franca (which meant "French language") for today's human race. And then they would be wise to back off a good long distance to spare their ears after asking. Many peoples in this world—perhaps almost all—deeply resent the idea that they should sit back and allow all international commerce and science and diplomacy, all international communication, to be conducted in English. A recent attempt by an Internet service to require all communication about soccer to be in English—a very small area of Earthly communication—provoked so passionately negative and furious a response that it was hastily canceled. Even nations whose dominant language is English are fighting to keep their own brand from going under; the Sydney Morning Herald for August 14,1997, reported that a group of Australian researchers have "produced an Australian weapon to fight … American linguistic imperialism," in the form of a dictionary of Australian words and phrases to be substituted for American linguistic imports (Jopson 1997).
Consider the program now being proposed by the foremost linguist of France, Claude Hagege, in his 1996 book L'Enfant aux Deux Langues. H. Stephen Straight (reviewing the book in the March 1998 issue of Language) says on page 140 that Hagege "openly addresses what may well be the most pressing question of educational policy today: how to prepare French schoolchildren—and by extension schoolchildren across Europe and around the world—for the multilingualism that will pervade the 21st century" (Straight 1998, page 140; emphasis added). And then, to the question of which languages should be taught in French elementary schools:

Hagege heart-stoppingly responds—if I may coin an acronym—ABE, Anything But English. The world-wide popularity of English threatens to divert French school-children from the task of developing proficiencies in the many other languages of the European community and of the world.

(Straight 1998, page 140)
Anything but English! It would fit nicely on a bumper sticker or a coffee mug, and it contrasts nicely with English Only. Hagege's proposal is that the French elementary schools offer German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and (for speakers of minority languages in France) French, followed in high school by two additional languages. The goal is that each French youngster would know four languages: the native tongue, two additional European languages learned in early childhood, and one other language learned in adolescence. Only at the high school level would English be one of the possible choices, and even then it would have to compete with Russian, Arabic, Hungarian, Swahili, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and more. Hagege perceives this project as an urgently necessary measure for preventing the global linguistic takeover of English. It's quite clear; speakers of other languages may not be able to prevent it—it may be too late to stop the English juggernaut—but they resent it from the bottom of their hearts.
The fact that English appears to be the easiest solution to the problem of global Babel doesn't mean that it is necessarily the best solution. Perhaps a serious effort ought to be made to call it off. Native speakers of English, because they suffer from the same native-language bias as any other human beings, are the last group who should sit in judgment here. We have to ask ourselves: "What if my native language were Gaelic? Or Arapaho? Or Maori? How pleased would I be with English as an IAL?"
Innocent though we native speakers of English may be personally of any interference in the affairs of other nations and nationals, the political facts are real and have to be faced: For most of the world, English is the Superpower Language. It is the ultimate "colonial" language. It's the language of the Ugly American and the Snobbish Brit. It's the language callously imposed on the downtrodden immigrant or subjugated indigenous population. For the sake of peace in the world, perhaps we should set aside our natural preference and our gut feelings and consider other alternatives.
The first "other alternative" is that we should choose some other existing natural language instead of English. But how do we do that? Many, if not all, nations would insist that their language should be the one chosen, and would offer a strong case. The French would point to their literature, their history, the tradition of French as a lingua franca, and the fact that French uses the Roman alphabet; other European nations would present similar arguments. The Japanese (and other Asian nations) would point to their own proud literary tradition, their history, their position in the world, and the fact that their writing system does not carry the stigma of Western colonialism as the Roman alphabet does. The Hopi (and many other Native American nations and indigenous peoples around the world) would insist that it is precisely the apparent difference between their language and the more commonly used languages, not to mention the absence of a recent history of conquest, that would make Hopi the ideal choice.
And so it would go, with all this passionate wrangling being carried on through translators and interpreters. It's not a prospect that gives one hope, and it's the sort of thing that has led to wars in humanity's history. Perhaps we should abandon the idea of an existing natural language as IAL altogether. Which would bring us to—

Choosing a Constructed Language (Existing or New) as the IAL

There is clearly a very strong species-specific language instinct, or what Chomsky would call a language acquisition device, a LAD. But equally one needs a LASS, as Jerry Brunerputs it, which is a language support system; people who speak language and who encourage the use of language, and so forth.

(Oliver Sacks, quoted in Mcintyre 1995, page 95)
Well, yes—but then, on the other hand, no!
I agree with Dr. Sacks that both a LAD and a LASS are needed for the acquisition of language, but he's much braver than I am. Even for that very limited claim—that language learning requires both nature and nurture—I would hesitate to use the word "clearly," because almost nothing in the current literature on this subject can be considered clear. Even when the statements seem to be uncontroversial, they still cannot accurately be described as "clear."
In fact, any prudent individual writing on "language and the brain" today finds the abundant deniability resources of English extremely seductive. The temptation is to write everything in Hyper-deniability Mode, something like this:

Numerous hypotheses have been put forward, and a variety of proposals have been made. It has been claimed that X, but that has been contradicted forcibly by the claim that Y and the evidence for Z. No final decision among these competing and contradictory theories appears to be possible at this time. [Blah, blah, blah … ] What is said below, therefore, should not be construed as constituting the taking of a position of any kind.
English allows me to do this. You'll notice that it even allows me to avoid admitting that I am the one who insists on remaining free to deny that I've said what I am about to say. I'm tempted, but I'm not going to do it that way. The buck will stop here, but with two preliminary warnings.
First: I have never dissected a single brain, and I could not interpret a brain scan even at gunpoint; I cannot, therefore, speak or write with personal authority about human brains in neurophysiological terms.
Second: When we hear or read anything about the human brain any less concrete than a specification of its physical weight and size—and when we read anything whatsoever about the human mind—that information must be taken with a large grain of salt. When something of that kind strikes you as plausible, the rational course is to assume that it's valid as a metaphor and use the metaphor for whatever it turns out to be worth—but leap to no other conclusions without solid supporting evidence. Lakoff and Johnson tell us in Philosophy in the Flesh that there's no way to even talk about the mind, or the mind as "part of the brain," except in metaphors.

Independent of these metaphors, we have no conception of how the mind works. Even the notion works derives from the Mind As Machine metaphor.

(Lakoff and Johnson 1999, page 248)
With those two warnings in place, I will do my best to sort out the troublesome issues and make clear what the questions are and why there is so much confusion. This badly needs doing. Nonspecialists who are interested in "language and the brain" today can buy and read half a dozen fat books, all current, all by qualified experts, only to find that each one says all the others are wrong and offers interminable arguments to that effect. I had a student in a linguistics course once whose major was engineering; a few weeks into the course, tried past endurance, he shouted, "If engineers did engineering the way you linguists do linguistics, every bridge in America would fall down!" He was probably right.
We try hard, I must point out. The subject of linguists' scientific investigation is nothing like chemicals or rocks or beetles, items that can be measured and weighed and poked at. It's not like planets and stars, items that in spite of being enormously inconvenient for human investigation can nevertheless be examined with sufficiently powerful telescopes and probes and the like. Rather, it is located somewhere—or perhaps somewhen, and more probably both—in the human brain and/or mind. If Karl Pribram's model of the brain as a hologram is correct, it is perhaps located everywhere—and everywhen—in the human brain and/or mind. Our access to the brain is very limited; as for access to the mind, we don't know where the mind is, or even whether it makes any sense to talk about it as having a location. Nevertheless, we linguists press on, determined to do our work as science rather than as speculation, and we should get credit for that.
In the context of this chapter, we're looking for answers to many questions; the six below represent what seems to me to be the barest minimum.

1. How is a single native language learned? What goes on in the brain and mind?
2. How does the learning of an additional native language or languages take place? What goes on in the brain and mind?
3. How does the learning of one or more additional languages—not as native tongues but as foreign ones—take place? What goes on in the brain and mind?

4. What physiological effect(s) and psychological effect(s) do these learning processes have on the brain and mind?
5. Is the answer to #4 different for monolingual versus multilingual persons?
6. Is there some separate language "faculty" or "organ" that is responsible for all this?

Overview

1. Discovered which order is most basic in the language (or languages) they're hearing and observing around them.
2. Strengthened the "on" position for that switch by repeatedly activating the neurons and neuronal connections that are responsible for it.
3. Allowed the other switches to decay (metaphorically speaking, moved them to the "off" position) by failing to activate the neurons and neuronal connections responsible for them.

CHILD: Doggie hungry!
ADULT: Right! The doggie is hungry!
CHILD: Doggie want lunch!
ADULT: Yes, the dog wants its lunch!
CHILD: Mama feed doggie!
ADULT: You think it's time for Mama to feed the dog.
(And so on.)
Much emphasis has been put on the importance of Motherese in the popular press lately. It has even been used—misused—in stories claiming that children in day care facilities will be held back in life because they don't have their mothers doing this sort of thing at them all day long. There are many cultures (and families), however, in which adults rarely speak to infants and small children, and where Motherese would be viewed as an absurd way to deal with kids; nevertheless, children in those environments learn to speak their native languages just like children elsewhere. It's fashionable to insist that learning can't take place without active practice and participation by the learner; it's fashionable, but it's wrong. Much learning can take place passively, with the learner paying very close attention but taking no overt action. In cultures where this is the favored method, people routinely observe a skill in use for long periods of time, and then one day simply begin using it themselves, competently.
In a perfect world, human children from the very first day of their lives would have abundant language input from the adults around them—whether that input came from family members or from other caregivers, either of whom would serve the purpose. Few actions are more likely to help youngsters grow up to be successful and happy adults in our society than providing them with abundant opportunities to practice the skills needed for human language interactions of every kind. This gives kids an extra advantage in today's technological world, where efficient and effective communication of information has become the single most valuable skill. However, we have plenty of evidence that children are perfectly capable of acquiring their native languages without that sort of treatment and attention. They must have exposure to language data; but it doesn't have to be abundant, it doesn't have to include the "Motherese" material, and the data don't even have to be very good.
As stated elsewhere in this book, it was once taken for granted that children who acquired more than one language natively would have somewhat slower language development overall, sometimes coupled with temporary problems related to language in the early school years—but this has been proved to be false. Multilingual children, like any other children, can experience problems at school as a result of all sorts of factors, but there's no cause-and-effect relationship between those problems and multilingualism itself.
We've now come to the end of those things that we can be reasonably certain about, and are moving into areas where we are still only able to speculate. Such as: What happens inside the brain and mind when a native language—or more than one native language—is learned? What happens to the brain and mind? How is that different from what happens when languages are learned later in life, with varying degrees of fluency but not natively? How much do we actually know about such things?
We know very little, and what we know is based on tenuous evidence, often evidence gathered from people whose brains were very different from normal brains due to illness or injury. Reports about brain research appear regularly in the media because brain research is perceived as "sexy." Unfortunately, such reports tend to do little more than increase the general confusion, which is why many scientists behave in a way that gets them accused of being elitists determined to keep their knowledge away from the public.
Well, that's approximately what happened.
Let's look at a recent sequence of research relevant to our discussion in this chapter, and some media reports on that research. Here's a portion of a news release that appeared on the Internet in the summer of 1997 (with emphasis added by me):

In a study that sheds new light on how the brain organizes language, researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center report in the July 10 issue of the British journal Nature that the organization of the brain's language-production region in bilingual individuals is directly related to whether they learned a second language as toddlers (simultaneously with their native language) or as young adults … " A second language acquired during the teenage years, which is late in developmental life, is represented in the brain in a separate location from the native language," explains senior author Joy Hirsch, PhD.
The Wall Street Journal ran a story about this study in its July 10, 1997, issue, written by science reporter Ron Winslow and titled "How Language Is Stored in Brain Depends on Age."
"Toddlers who learn a second language along with their native tongue," Winslow wrote, "store this capability in a single sector in the brain, the researchers discovered. But if the second language is acquired later … the brain designates a separate area for processing it." The New York Times, on July 15, ran a story by Sandra Blakeslee headlined "When an Adult Adds a Language, It's One Brain, Two Systems," reporting that "a new study has found that second languages are stored differently in the human brain depending on when they are learned."
The impression that even careful readers would get from the news release and the two newspaper stories is that in the current stage of knowledge about language and the brain we are able to think of the brain as if it were a cupboard, and that we know where languages are "stored" in that cupboard. We can visualize it: Here's the spot on the shelf where little Mary stashed the English and Turkish she learned before the age of three in her multilingual household; here are the two different spots on the shelves where Johnny stashed first the English he learned as an infant and then the Turkish he learned when his family moved to Turkey after he turned sixteen. Scientists can, figuratively speaking, go to those cupboards, open their doors, and poke at the stored languages. The news reports even identify locations for us, referring to "Broca's area" and "Wernicke's area." It's all very impressive, and confidence-inspiring. We know so much! Surely, if we want to know more, we just have to go check it out.
The problem is that the news stories—from a distinguished medical facility and two distinguished newspapers—are misleading. We can reasonably assume that the researchers involved have been tearing their hair out in frustration over these accounts.
Here's what actually happened.
Sloan-Kettering had twelve bilingual patients—six who had learned both languages as toddlers, and six who had learned a second language as teenagers—scheduled for brain surgery. All had to undergo fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans. The fMRIs, which allow you to see what parts of the brain are active by tracking the flow of blood to various locations, are done to provide the surgeons with individualized brain mapping; this increases the doctors' chances of carrying out surgery without damaging the parts of the brain most responsible for particular functions in that patient. Graduate student Karl Kim, Dr. Hirsch, and their associates asked the twelve patients to talk to themselves silently during the fMRIs about things they had done the day before, first in one of their languages and then in the other. (Talking aloud would have interfered with the fMRI procedure.) The scans were then compared, with particular attention to the two locations in the brain known as Broca's area and Wernicke's area, both of which are known to be involved in language processing.
For all twelve patients, activity in Wernicke's area showed no differences, but there was an interesting difference in the amount of activation in Broca's area. The six patients who learned both languages at the same time in infancy all showed increased activation of just one region in Broca's area. In the six who had learned one language in infancy and the other language in their teens, two separate regions in Broca's area showed activation. In addition, evidence obtained through other Sloan-Kettering patients who weren't involved in this specific study supports the idea that for each additional language learned in the teenage years or adulthood, a separate region in Broca's area would be activated in this same fashion.
That's what happened. Now, what does it tell us? First I need to mention some facts that the news stories didn't bother with or simply trampled into the ground:

1. Twelve research subjects make a very small study. It's typical of brain research that only a handful of subjects are involved, for the obvious reason that getting access to human brains is difficult and expensive. In this study there was the serendipitous fact that the fMRIs had to be done anyway for medical reasons, and the research task was one that could be done at the same time without creating problems. In most areas of human research, studies involving only six to twenty subjects wouldn't be looked at as remotely respectable. An exception is made for brain studies; but brain researchers are well aware, when publishing results based on twenty brains, that if they had been able to get access to twenty-one or twenty-two they might have found something entirely different.
2. Talking to yourself silently, in your mind, is not identical to talking out loud. It's called "covert subvocalization," and we can't be certain that conclusions based on covert subvocalization can be extended to ordinary spoken language.
3. Broca's area is described, in the news stories and elsewhere, as devoted to speech production and grammar. (Wernicke's area is usually described as devoted to interpreting the meaning of language.) But Broca's area—the area where the difference was found—is also deeply involved in controlling motor activities that are part of language. Wendy K.Wilkins and Jennie Wakefield (1995, page 170) write that Broca's area is specialized for "the hierarchical structuring of information in a format consistent with a temporally ordered linear sequence reflective of that structure," which, translated, is the outlining of information. Nothing that we know about Broca's area leads to the conclusion that languages are "stored" there. We don't know with certainty that the idea of language "storage" has any validity. How the media got this "storage" idea I can't say; presumably something one of the researchers said during an interview—in an attempt to explain specialized information to nonspecialists—was misinterpreted, and the misinterpretation was then shared and passed on to the public.

Language and the Brain

The Questionnaire

Instructions

Suzette Haden Elgin

Identifying Information, for My Records and for Analyzing the Data

1. Please give me your name, mailing address, e-mail address, and phone number. (Your addresses and phone numbers will be kept confidential.)
2. How old are you?
3. What is your level of education? (Elementary school, high school, college, graduate school, trade school, etc.
4. Please list any degrees or training certificates that you have received.
5. What kind of work do you do?
6. Do you have any special linguistic qualifications? That is, are you a translator or interpreter, a foreign language teacher, a speech therapist, or anything of that kind? Do you have any language disability? Please explain.

Information About Your Languages

1. What is the language that you learned first?
2. What is your second language? How old were you when you learned it?
3. Please list any other languages you know, with the age that each was learned.
4. Which language do you consider to be your native language? (If more than one, please list all of them.)
5. Which language do you consider to be your second language?
6. Please list all languages that you speak comfortably. If you have studied any of them formally—that is, taken classes in them or studied them on your own—please indicate that for me.
7. What languages do you understand easily? (Please indicate any in which you've taken classes or have studied on your own.)
8. What languages do you read easily? (If you've studied them, please indicate that.)
9. What languages do you write easily? (If you've studied them, please indicate that.)
10. Are there other languages that you can "get by" in or have knowledge of? Please list them and explain.
11. When you use any of the languages, do you feel like you are a DIFFERENT PERSON than when you use your native language? If so, could you tell me a little about that?
12. Are there situations in which—even if everyone present knows both or all of the languages—you prefer to use one language rather than another? If so, please explain.
13. Are there situations in which—even if everyone present knows both or all of the languages—you prefer NOT to use a particular language? If so, please explain.
14. Which language or languages do you use at home?
15. Which language or languages do you use at work?
16. Which language or languages do you use socially?
17. Is there a language you use for other purposes? Please explain.
18. What language or languages would you like for your children to learn? Why? (If you don't have children, please answer as you would if you did.)
19. Is there a language you'd rather your children did NOT learn? Why? (If you don't have children, please answer as you would if you did have them.)
20. Are there any languages that you once knew, but have now forgotten? Can you tell me a little about that?
21. Is there anything else you'd like to add about your languages, your feelings about languages, or any related subject?

23. I am especially interested in metaphorical differences between languages for a number of key areas, both when expressed overtly as metaphor (like English "to pass away" for "to die") and when the metaphor is the literal meaning of the word (as with English "breakfast" for the first meal after the night's fasting). For this purpose, I would be very interested in knowing what words and/or phrases your languages (other than English) use for any or all of the following: to have (or get) an abortion; to die; to be born; to get sick; to be well/healthy; to make a piece of art (or create art); to set up a government; to sin; to get angry; to fall in love; the law of gravity; energy; science.
24. I am also exploring the differences in what are called "unifying metaphors" in bilingual/multilingual speakers and contexts. For example, American English speakers can get almost any project under way by saying, forcefully, "Wagons—HO!" which brings up in consciousness the metaphor of wagon trains setting off across the plains, etc. I would like two pieces of information. First, can you identify a comparable unifying metaphor in your other language or languages? Second, do you feel that any one of the set of such metaphors you use is more powerful and compelling than the other(s)?*

The Respondents

1. Abichaker, Toufic; Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Italian, German
2. Anderson, Myrdene; English, Norwegian, Saami
3. Andruski, Jean; English, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Russian
4. Anonymous; Sesotho, English, Zulu, Afrikaans
5. Anonymous; eight fluent languages—requested that I not list them because the distinctive nature of the set would betray identity
6. Anonymous; English, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese
7. Anonymous; Latvian, English, French
8. Anonymous; English, Spanish
9. Anonymous; Spanish, English
10. Anonymous; German, French, English
11. Anzali, Soheila; Azerbaijani, Farsi, German, English, Turkish
12. Arouca, Karen; Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian
13. Aylward, Renata; English, Spanish
14. Bauer, Laurie; English, French, Danish, German
15. Bemore, Caroline; Navajo, English
16. Blalock, Lucy Parks; Lenape, English
17. Boihang, Lesedi; Setswana, Xhosa, Zulu, English, Afrikaans
18. Boon, Glendia M.; American Sign Language, English
19. Bregman, L. D.; English, Afrikaans
20. Brewer, Keri; English, American Sign Language
21. Brodine, Ruey; English, Italian
22. Brown, Gordon; English, French, Swedish, Spanish, German
23. Browne, E. Wayles; English, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Polish, Slovenian
24. Combon, Marlis; German, Spanish, Italian, English, French
25. Chiarenza, Anna Caterina; Italian, German, English
26. Chomphosy, Bounlieng; Lao, Thai, English
27. Chong, Steve; Cantonese, English, Malay
28. Chung, Karen Steffen; English, German, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese
29. Cook, Diana; English, French, Spanish
30. Cyr, Danielle E.; Quebec French, English, Swedish, Italian, German
31. Mark de Clark; English, Afrikaans, Zulu
32. Derzhanski, Ivan A.; Bulgarian, Russian, English, Hungarian, German, French, Italian, Spanish
33. Dorian, Nancy Currier; English, German, French, Scottish Gaelic (East Sutherland variety)
34. Doty, Margaret Ann; English, Italian, German
35. Eck, Karen; English, French
36. Eikamp, Rhonda; English, German
37. Eldredge, Linda G.; English; Signed English for the Deaf; American Sign Language
38. Eroz, Betil; Turkish, English
39. Estival, Dominique; French, English
40. Faris, Michael A.; English, Polish, Polish Sign Language
41. Fidelholtz, James L; English, Spanish, German, Polish
42. Frishberg, Nancy; English, American Sign Language
43. Furiye, Atsushi; Japanese, English
44. Gladstone, Kate; English, Hebrew, French, German, Russian
45. Gluckman, T. J.; English, German, French
46. Gonzalez, Luis Alberto; Spanish, English
47. Gregory, George Ann; English, Spanish, Choctaw
48. Gu, Peter Yongqi; Mandarin Chinese, English, Hebei Chinese
49. Halford, Richard; English, Afrikaans
50. Haraghey, Marjolijn; Dutch, English, German, Afrikaans, French
51. Hardman, M.J.; English, Spanish, Jaqaru, Aymara
52. Herrarte, Caroline; English, Spanish
53. Herzfeld, Anita; Spanish, English, German
54. Hilgendorf, Suzanne K.; English, German
55. Iturrizaga, Dimas Bautista; Jaqaru, Spanish, English
56. Joergensen, Mikala; Danish, English, German, French
57. Julian, Jane; English, Hebrew
58. Kaspy, Lior; Hebrew, English, Arabic
59. Kernberger, Carolyn; English, Spanish
60. Khoza, Zangie; Tsonga, Swazi, English
61. Kirchner, James; English, Czech, German
62. Kondo, Chikako; Japanese, English
63. Kronenberg, Kenneth; English, German
64. Langent, Moeketsi; Sesotho, English, Afrikaans
65. Lattey, Elsa; German, English, Spanish
66. Lenstrup, Marie; Danish, English, German, Swedish, Norwegian
67. Li, Wen-Chao; Mandarin Chinese, English
68. Llanes, Jose R.; Spanish/English
69. Luk, Ching Man; Cantonese, English
70. Maduell, Mariana; English, Spanish, Italian
71. Maesfranckx, Patricia; Dutch, English, German, Swedish, French
72. Mahdi, Waruno; Indonesian, English, German, Russian, Dutch
73. Mamathuba, Elelwani Charity; Venda, English, Afrikaans'
74. Martinez, Alejandro G.; Spanish, English
75. Mclntire, Marina L.; English, American Sign Language
76. Meynard, Yves; French, English
77. Mohamed, Rahima; English, Afrikaans
78. Morrison, Dave; English, American Sign Language
79. Murphy, Linda; English, French
80. O Se, Gavin; English, German, French, Irish
81. Palmer, Chris; English, French, German ,
82. Parkman, Victoria; Russian, Ukrainian, English
83. Pateris, Lehtla; Latvian, Russian, German, English
84. Pomerantz, Ori; Hebrew, English
85. Rasmussen, Allysse Suzanne; English, Spanish, American Sign Language
86. Rebsch, Debby; German, English
87. Reighard, John; English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish
88. Resende, Rosana; Portuguese, Spanish, English
89. Robertson, Michael; English, Italian
90. Rose, Alex; English, French
91. Schaufele, Steven; English, French, German, Italian
92. Schober, George; English, German
93. Seek, Maguette; Wolof, French, English
94. Siley, Delphine; French, English
95. Sosa, Juan Manuel; Spanish, French, English, Portugeuse
96. Sotello, Susana; Spanish, English
97. Stallings, Fran; English, Japanese
98. Stenson, Nancy; English, Irish, French
99. Swan, Pamela; Japanese, English, Spanish
100. Troen, Carol R.; English, Hebrew, French
101. Trudel, Jean-Louis; French, English
102. True, Sean; English, Spanish
103. Umans, Meg; English, Spanish, German, French
104. van der Goot, Auke; Frisian, Dutch, English, French, German
105. van Wyk, Karin; English, Afrikaans
106. Verspoor, Cornelia M.; English, Dutch, French
107. Vlijm, Chantal; Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish
108. Vonarburg, Elisabeth; French, English
109. Walling, Espy Rodriguez; Spanish, English, French
110. Whiteley, Colin; English, Spanish, French, German, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian
111. Wilson, Mark A.; English, German
112. Yamamoto, Masayo; Japanese, English
113. Yanjin, Yao; Chinese (Mandarin and Shanghai), English
114. Zeviar, Churyl; English, French, American Sign Language
115. Zoeppritz, Magdalena; German, English, French

The Languages of Respondents

Books

Aitchison, J. 1998. The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, 4th ed. New York: Routledge.

Asher, R. E., ed. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Auer, P., ed. 1998. Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity. New York: Routledge.

Bain, B. 1996. Pathways to the Peak of Mount Piaget and Vygotsky: Speaking and Cognizing Monolingually and Bilingually. Rome: Bulzoni Editore.

Beinfield, H., and E. Korngold. 1991. Between Heaven And Earth: A Guide to Chinese Medicine. New York: Ballantine Books.

Berube, M. 1996. Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. New York: Pantheon Books.

Bodmer, F. 1944. The Loom of Language. (Edited by L. Hogben.) New York: W. W. Norton.

Bolinger, D. 1972. Intonation. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Cantoni, G., ed. 1996. Stabilizing Indigenous Languages. Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University. [A Center for Excellence in Education monograph.]

Carson, D. A. 1998. The Inclusive-Language Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

Cherry, K. 1987. Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women. New York: Kodansha America.

Claiborne, R. 1983. Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language. New York: Times Books.

Cook, V., and M. Newson. 1996. Chomsky's Universal Grammar, 2nd ed. London: Blackwell Publishers.

Crawford, J. 1992. Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of English Only. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Crystal, D. 1992. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages. London: Penguin Books.

_____. 1994. Dictionary of Language and Languages. New York: Penguin.

_____. 1998. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

_____. 1998. English as a Global Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Edwards, J. 1995. Multilingualism. London and New York: Routledge.

Ekman, P. 1985. Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. New York: W. W. Norton.

Elgin, S. H. 1984. Native Tongue. New York: DAW Books. (And forthcoming from Feminist Press, New York, in October 2000.)

_____. 1987. Native Tongue II: The Judas Rose. New York: DAW Books.

_____. 1988. A First Grammar and Dictionary of Laadan. Madison, WI: Society for the Furtherance of Fantasy and Science Fiction (SF3).

_____. 1993. Genderspeak: Men, Women, and the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. New York: Wiley.

_____. 1994. Native Tongue III: Earthsong. New York: DAW Books.

_____. 1996. How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable. New York: Wiley.

_____. 1997. How to Turn the Other Cheek and Still Survive in Today's World. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.

Ferre, F. 1961. Language, Logic, and God. New York: Harper and Row.

Festinger, L. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.

Frantzis, B. K. 1993. Opening the Energy Gates of the Body. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Friedrich, P. 1986. The Language Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Gannon, M. J. 1994. Understanding Global Cultures: Metaphorical Journeys Through 17 Countries. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gill, S. and I. Sullivan, 1992. Dictionary of Native American Mythology. New York: Oup.

Grimes, B. F. 1992. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 12th ed. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Grosjean, F. 1982. Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingual-ism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hagege, C. 1996. L'enfant aux deux langues. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob.

Hakuta, K. 1986. Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism. New York: Basic Books.

Hall, E. T. 1959. The Silent Language. New York: Doubleday/Anchor.

_____. 1969. The Hidden Dimension. New York: Doubleday/Anchor.

_____. 1977. Beyond Culture. New York: Doubleday/Anchor.

_____. 1984. The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time. New York: Doubleday/Anchor.

PERSEUS PUBLISHING

According to Chomsky, a Martian sent to Earth would conclude we speak a variety of dialects with mutually unintelligible vocabularies—but dialects, nonetheless, of a single Earthish tongue.

(Kalbfleisch 1994)

Could this be true? Could it be that—in spite of the seeming multitude of differences between English and Kwakiutl, Navajo and Japanese, Albanian and Hawaiian—every human being could accurately say, "I speak a dialect of Earthish"?
Let's assume for a moment, for purposes of discussion, that it's true; let's suppose there is in fact a language that we could (a bit more gracefully) call "Terran." What might that mean for humankind? Does it matter? Would it be important and significant, or would it only qualify as a tidbit of information to include in trivia contests?
If it's true, we clearly need the answers to a number of other questions. For example:

• Does it matter which of these Terran dialects is your own native tongue? Are some of the Terran dialects better than others—more useful, more beautiful, more powerful, or in some other way more desirable?
• If you happen to have native or near-native fluency in more than one "dialect" of Terran, are you blessed, or burdened, or neither? That is, do bilingualism and multilingualism have significant effects on human minds and lives, and if so, what are their consequences?
• Are there good reasons to work toward eliminating many of these language differences? Should we perhaps try to get rid of the hundreds of varieties now spoken only by very small populations—so that we humans could communicate with fewer of the cumbersome systems and devices now required for translating and interpreting all over the world? Or would that be a mistake?

• Jack grinned at the relatives crowding his living room and shook his head at them in mock despair. He'd known they would find his bragging hard to believe; he'd been prepared for resistance. "I'm not kidding you!" he insisted. "I bought that Spanish computer program for Jennifer, and in two months—two months—she was rattling off Spanish like a native! And we're talking about a three-year-old kid here! I'm going to get her the French program next!"
• Thomas was determined not to lose his temper with the kids again, but he couldn't keep the sternness out of his voice as he spoke. They're not stupid! he thought. What do I have to say to get them to pay attention? "Listen to me, you two!" he said urgently. "Haven't I told you, over and over, not to let me hear you talking Tagalog? Haven't I? Hasn't your mother told you the same thing? What's the matter with you, you want to spend your whole life on welfare? You speak English, you hear me? Don't make me have to tell you again!"
• When Barbara got home from work she was in a good mood. It had been such luck that she'd still remembered enough from her years in China to be able to interpret for the patient and Dr. Gales! There could have been serious misunderstandings if she hadn't been there—and she'd saved the hospital the cost of a Chinese interpreter, too. But when she told her husband about it, he frowned at her. "I don't know if that was such a good idea," Jim said slowly. "Don't you think the other nurses may resent the way you were showing off?"
• Philip didn't like having to talk to Anna's mother about this subject; he was very worried about hurting her feelings. But it was his duty to the child, and he was determined to get it done. "Mrs. Kolyoff," he said carefully, "I'm really sorry to have to say this. Russia is a great country; I know that. It has a wonderful history of music and art and literature and scientific discovery. I'm glad that Anna can speak Russian; that's terrific. But you have to realize that it's holding her back. If you want her to go on to fourth grade, ma'am, you're going to have to convince her to speak English!"
• Greg nodded his agreement to what the others were saying about their colleague: Harold Fleming was a top-notch lawyer, no question about it! "But I keep wondering," Greg cut in. "How long are we going to be able to keep Hal in the firm? Did you know that he speaks four languages fluently? Including Japanese? He can write his own ticket, you know? He could get a top position anywhere. I just hope we can hang on to him a while, myself!"
• Janet sighed, looking at the gloomy faces around the table; it wasn't easy being a school principal in times like these. "All right then," she said wearily, "we all hate to do it, but we don't really have any choice. The only way to find the money is to get rid of the frills, and that means dropping French and Spanish. Not that foreign languages aren't a good thing, mind you! If we had unlimited funds I'm sure we'd all be solidly behind having them in our curriculum. But they're not important the way football and math are important, and—that's all there is to it. They've got to go!"

• Set out the questions that must be answered with regard to the power of language in human life, especially in the areas of public policy and in education.
• Establish the importance of multilingualism within the context of the larger topic of the power of language.
• Explain why there is so much confusion and contradiction about multilingualism and about language learning as a whole.
• Provide a fair hearing for both (or all) sides of the major controversies.
• Present the basic facts, when they are available.
• Discuss the possible effects of multilingualism in some major areas of human life.
• Present useful information gathered from speakers of two or more languages about their personal perceptions of, and experiences with, multilingualism.
• Help make possible the building of a consensus for or against multilingualism that is based on scientific information and real-world facts.
• Outline possible directions for further research.

1. What is multilingualism?
2. What is the link between languages and cultures?
3. What effect, if any, do languages have on human perceptions of reality?
4. What are some consequences of multilingualism in a few representative areas of human life (for example, medicine, business, and family life)?
5. Should we have a single language that everybody learns, worldwide, with which to carry on international communication? What effects might that have on our lives?
6. How do people become multilingual, and what happens in their minds and/or brains when they do? Is this good or bad?
7. What does all this information tell us about the power of human language?

Full Disclosure

• I am convinced that Chomsky is correct in his claim that human infants are born with some innate capacity for learning human languages.
• I am convinced that there is a core of elements common to all human languages, usually referred to as universal grammar but more accurately global grammar.
• I am convinced that the link between language and culture is so strong that loss of a language inevitably means loss of the associated culture as well, and I consider such losses tragic.
• I am convinced that human languages (and dialects of human languages) do structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways.
• Finally, I am convinced that multilingualism is desirable for humankind and should be encouraged in every way possible.

Despite bilingual nannies, tapes, picture books, and even sending their kids abroad for the summer, bilingual parents in this country are losing the battle to maintain their children's grasp of a foreign language … The challenge to raise a child bilingually becomes even more difficult for languages of lesser prevalence.

(Mireya Navarro, quoted in Landers 1996, page 5)

The quotation above describes a reality very unlike the one we ordinarily see described and discussed in the mainstream media. How could it be a challenge to raise a child bilingually or multilingually, as Navarro claims? All the news stories and editorials are about the dangers of multilingualism in the United States and the need for defensive strategies against it, as if American English might vanish at any moment! With the single exception of documentaries about Native Americans, we see no news reports in which parents are lamenting the fact that—despite their best efforts—their children speak only English.
We need to know which version of reality is accurate, and we need to find out how and why two such wildly differing portraits of our language environment can exist simultaneously. We can be reasonably sure that a communication breakdown like this one occurs only when two or more groups of people are using the same words and phrases but aren't giving them the same meanings. These situations which I call "reality gaps," can go on for many years without anyone who is involved even being aware that they exist; meanwhile, the problems they create are blamed on all sorts of irrelevant factors.
Our first and most basic question is: What do we mean when we say that someone is multilingual? And our first and most typical reaction to that question is of course that it's absurdly easy to answer. After all, aren't we're just talking about people who know more than one language? Isn't the meaning obvious?
The question isn't easily answered, and the meaning is anything but obvious. This is because we can't define "multilingual" or "multilingualism" until we have agreed on the meaning of that phrase, "know more than one language." No real consensus exists, you see, on what it means to "know" a language, or on precisely what a "language" is. We are well and truly stuck at this point, and the lack of agreement has created a seething broil of controversies. Controversies that can lead to the spending or withholding of many millions of dollars; controversies whose consequences can be as trivial as a bumper sticker—and as grave, even tragic, as civil disorder, terrorism, and civil war.

Defining "Multilingualism"—What It Means to "Know" More than One Language

Defining "Language"—What It Means to Know "a Language"

How Many Different Languages Could One Person "Know?"

Each vocation or avocation has its Babe Ruths and Baryshnikovs, and so it is with the Linguistic Society of America. The champion is Francis E. Sommer, fluent in 94 languages … There were no Olympic medals or Nobel prizes for him, but that is a mistake that should be rectified, said scholars coming to New York City … for the annual convention of the Linguistic Society of America.
But suppose we accept on faith the claim that Francis E. Sommer was fluent in ninety-four languages. We have no way to be certain what that would mean. As Dorian (1982, page 33) says:

At the lower levels of semispeaker proficiency there are some individuals who actually say very little yet continue to interact in a highly successful fashion with fluent speakers. Thanks to their superb passive bilingualism they follow all verbal interactions without any difficulty, and … they can participate for years in a linguistic network without anyone paying much attention to the assymetric nature of their interactions, or even to their flawed productions.
I see nothing unreasonable, based either on the scholarly literature or my own experience, about the idea that people might be comfortable with scores of languages in the fashion that Dorian calls "passive" multilingualism—that is, able to function and carry on their daily lives in an area where any one of those scores of languages is spoken. If you and I are having a conversation and it seems to us that we understand each other, if neither of us is stopping every few minutes to ask what a word means or complain of being unable to keep up, it's very unlikely that either of us will issue some challenge that would require proof of fluency in the language. That happens only in special situations where professional services are being rendered, as when a teacher says to a student, or a lawyer says to a client,"Now, tell me what I just said, please, so that I can be sure you understood." Our foreign language examiners at UCSD all agreed that one of the most important demonstrations of "knowing a language" was that a student laughed in all the right places—a skill that has little to do with accent or verb endings.
In many parts of the United States people tend to look upon multilingualism as something strange and exotic. Unless they work in a field where multiple languages are a standard professional requirement, they may not know personally even one person who speaks more than one language. They are likely to assume that because this is true of their personal language environment it represents what is usual and normal everywhere. Their assumption would be incorrect; in much of the world, it's monolingualism that's unusual, not multilingualism.
James Geary writes that it's common for many Africans "to speak five or six tribal languages in addition to their own mother tongue" (Geary 1997, page 6). One of my husband's relatives was fluent in seven languages, as a result of having spent his childhood in a missionary compound where all seven were spoken. In the foreign language program at UCSD it wasn't unusual for people to be very fluent in four or five languages; one of my associates there was fluent in fourteen.
In my database of multilinguals, people who claim to be able to get by comfortably in four or more languages are common—and many take their expertise with English so much for granted that they didn't even list English as one of their languages when they filled out my questionnaire in English. If I were to create a sort of "Prototype Multilingual" from that database, the linguistic life story would go something like this:

My father spoke Polish and my mother was Italian, and we spoke both of those languages at home because my grandmother lived with us and her only language was Italian. Then when I was three years old we moved to France, and it took me about six months to learn French, which was the language all my friends spoke. I started taking English in school when I was ten, and then we moved again, this time to Turkey, and so I learned Turkish. My first job was with a company that sent me to lapan, and so I learned lapanese when I was in my early twenties. Somewhere along the way I picked up German—I don't really remember when—and although my Russian certainly isn't native I can get by well enough for social and business conversation in that language as well.

How Hard Is It to Become Multilingual?

• The hardest foreign language for an adult to learn will be the first one learned, all else being equal.
• Each tongue learned thereafter from the same language family will be easier to learn than the first foreign language was.
• Even languages from different language families—for example, Spanish and Japanese—will be easier to learn after a few other languages have been mastered.
• So far as we know, and so far as time allows, any number of languages can be learned over a lifetime; no evidence exists to support any upper limit.
• With rare exceptions, none of the languages learned as an adult will be learned with native fluency.

he likens language to an elaborately wired box of switches—root concepts and grammatical principles—set in one position or another by experience. Chinese sets the switches in one pattern, English in another. But the fundamental conceptual framework of how concepts and syntax interlock is the same.
Theoretically, any sound a human being can make could be part of a human language. Why not? In actual practice, however, all languages choose their sounds from the same set of possibilities, a set containing somewhere around seventy to eighty sounds. Nothing logically—or physiologically—prevents a language from having words that begin with a sound made by touching the upper lip to the lower teeth. Many languages have sounds made with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, like English "F" and "V." But no language uses that other option. A language could, logically, include as one of its sounds the sound of the hands clapping, or the nose sniffing; no languages take advantage of those possibilities. Two languages may be separated in time and space by vast distances; nevertheless, they will confine their choices of meaningful sounds to the basic human set.
In the same way, nothing prevents a language theoretically from having any grammar rule the human mind can imagine. However, all human languages use only four kinds of grammar rules:

• Rules that delete something. (We can say either "You eat your peas!" or "Eat your peas!")
• Rules that insert something. (We say, "It's raining," although there is no "it" that rains.)
• Rules that substitute one thing for another. (Instead of "I was looking for the book about Indo-European languages and I found the book about Indo-European languages," we ordinarily say, "I was looking for the book about Indo-European languages and I found it.")
• Rules that move things from one place to another. (We can say either "I hate eggplant" or "Eggplant, I hate")

Language Learning in Young Children Versus Language Learning in Adults

"Ich habe das aufgefmisht." ("I've finished it up.")

"Er supposed das nicht machen." ("He's not supposed to do that.")
The more languages there were involved, the more severe the delays and confusions were expected to be. All this was something "everybody knew." Given the problems most adults in the United States associate with foreign language learning, it all seemed to be self-evident.
Even if the claims had been proved true, I'm not sure they would be anything to worry about. However, dissenting reports have steadily piled up from parents of multilingual children, saying that their kids prove the predictions of language troubles false. It appears that children who have serious or long-lasting problems are the exception rather than the rule. Hakuta tells us: "In most children by the age of three to four, languages are rarely mixed" (Hakuta 1986, page 67). And parents agree: It's unusual for any problems caused by confusion among the languages to last much beyond that age.
One of the most striking things about the information in my database of multilinguals is their relaxed attitude toward their multilingualism. Not a single one complains of having been held back in language development in any way. None report any anxiety about language development in their own children (or look upon mistakes like the ones in the example above as anything serious). And they are unanimous in wanting their own children—existing or potential—to be raised as multilinguals. Typical comments:

"I want them to learn as many languages as they can." (Bertil Eroz, Turkish/English)

"I think children should be exposed to as many languages as possible and given the opportunity to hear them when they are still young enough." (Dominique Estival, French/English)
The closest thing to a negative comment about bringing kids up multilingually comes from Marie Lenstrup (Danish/English/ Swedish/Norwegian, living in Hong Kong), who says, "I'm not sure that it's such a great idea for little children to have too many languages to choose from." But she goes on to demonstrate that what she means by "too many languages" is four or more, saying, "I would of course want any children to speak both my language, the language of their father, and the language of the place we were living in." All my respondents appear to take it for granted that their children should learn at least two or three languages, just as the typical U.S. parent takes it for granted that they should learn to read and write.
Contrast this with the statement from Ruey Brodine (English/Italian): "The process of learning a new language and a new culture are so difficult that I can't imagine anyone undertaking it without having to. But if you stick to it, no other learning experience is more enriching, in my opinion." Brodine (who lives and works in Italy) didn't begin learning the Italian language and culture until the age of twenty-six, by which time it often is a formidable project to learn a first foreign language well. Small children ordinarily react to language learning in this way only when they've been overexposed to older persons' complaints that the process is something to dread.
The idea that learning a language will always be an ordeal is very common among native American English speakers in the United States, even for people who strongly approve of it as a project. Walter Meyer accurately points out in his wonderful book Aliens & Linguists (1980, page 117) that American science fiction writers will cheerfully put their characters through almost any imaginable sort of awful ordeal, and some that almost aren't imaginable, with one exception: Characters are spared the horror of having to learn a foreign language. The Star Trek series reflects this attitude by seeing to it that all potential language problems are settled with a flashlightlike (and extremely improbable) gizmo called a "Universal Translator." If I point my UT at you and you speak Southern Colloquial Venusian Tqiltqish at me, I will hear American English; and when I answer you in American English, you will hear it as Southern Colloquial Venusian Tqiltqish. This would save huge amounts of money at the United Nations and international gatherings of all kinds, and is without question necessary to keep the filmed stories moving along, but it's fantasy rather than science.

Current Attitudes Toward Multilingualism

1. Knowing more than one language is a mark of accomplishment, something to be admired.
2. Knowing more than one language is a transitional condition, a burden that has to be put up with until English is learned and the other language(s) can be abandoned.
3. Knowing more than one language is a mark of some sort of deficiency, whether intellectual, educational, social, or other.

Multilingualism Is an Advantage and Should Be Admired

Multilingualism Is a Burden—Something to Get Rid of as Quickly as Possible

My experience with knowing another language is that the world is much bigger, and more interestingly multifaceted. I know a few multilingual people, and they seem so … large (Elisabeth Vonarburg, English/French—both European French and the French of Quebec).

It's like being able to step outside yourself and take a look, or step outside the world and take a look (Rhonda Eikamp).

The more languages a person knows, the more access one has to alternate realities and the more imagination can rove. Multilingualism is always an intellectual advantage (M. J. Hardman, English/Spanish).
None of my respondents complained about multilingualism having held them back, having interfered with their success, or anything remotely of that kind. Where there were complaints, the typical statement was "I only wish I had learned a few more languages." Rebecca Haden Chomphosy has been talking to Thai and Laotian parents here in Arkansas, and they have without exception expressed the wish that their children should grow up speaking Thai (or Lao) in addition to English. None have said that they hoped their children would learn only English because it would be undesirable for them to know both languages.
In the interests of fairness (and science), I have to point out the possibility that when I sent out my call for volunteers to complete the questionnaire, the only people who responded were people who had never found multilingualism a drawback. Maybe there were five times as many who would have taken the opposite position, but none of them offered to participate. (It's not the case that only people with computer skills filled out questionnaires, by the way. Quite a few were passed along to people who filled them out with pen and pencil.) As is typical with preliminary data-gathering research of this kind, there's no way to know whether my group had succeeded because of their multilingualism or in spite of it, or if the two things are totally unrelated; much more research of this kind needs to be done.
It's also important to mention that after M. J. Hardman wrote that multilingualism is "always an intellectual advantage," she added, "This advantage can be, of course, and frequently is, nullified by negative social circumstances (like putting all Spanish speakers in the speech defect class, like they used to do in New Mexico when I lived there in the 50s)."

Multilingualism Is a Deficiency

Some Necessary Definitions

Dialect and Language
When people perceive themselves not only as speaking the same language but as speaking it "the same way," they are using a dialect. A language is a group of dialects sufficiently alike that all who use them perceive themselves to be speaking the same language, although not necessarily in the same way. The exact line between dialect and language, as we have already seen, is difficult to draw. As an example about which there is a general consensus, we would all agree that English is a language, and we would all agree that the typical English of Brooklyn, New York, and the typical English of Little Rock, Arkansas, are two different dialects of English.

Native Language
Usually, the language that someone learns first, in infancy and early childhood, is called the native language. In Wolof, the metaphor for a native language is mother's milk; when a Wolof native speaker is asked to identify his or her native tongue, the most typical answer means, literally, "I was nursed on Wolof" (Swigart 1992, page 14).
My database for this book includes a few multilinguals who learned some Language X in this way, but who consider Language Y their native tongue because they abandoned Language X in the first few years of their lives—when their family moved to another country, or they lost the caregiver who spoke Language X, or something of that kind. Mikala Joergensen, for example, writes, "For a period between one and six years I was bilingual in Danish and Greenlandic, but I forgot Greenlandic when my family returned to Denmark when I was six. I no longer speak it." But this is unusual. For most of us, the language we learned first will always be the one we identify as our native language.
The terms "first language," for the native tongue, and "second language" (often used to refer to a third, fourth, and so on) are commonly used in this context, but my respondents objected strongly to that practice. Suppose you are born into a household where your father speaks French and your mother speaks Japanese, with people who speak those two languages coming and going all the time. Suppose you have an Italian nanny who looks after you while your parents are at work. Suppose also that the household is located in Hong Kong, so that as soon as you begin making friends outside your home you learn some variety of Chinese. In such situations, my respondents tell me, assigning labels like "first" and "second" to their languages is impossible. They refused to try. In this book; therefore, we'll confine ourselves to "native"—including circumstances in which more than one language is learned as a native tongue in infancy—and "other."

Pidgin and Creole
When two languages come in contact and their speakers must interact with one another, they sometimes develop a mixed language for that purpose that uses some features from each of the two tongues; such languages are called "pidgins." There may be more than two languages involved. Sheng, a language spoken by young people in Kenya, is a mixture of English, Swahili, German, and Latin—and Swahili itself began as a mixed language. Unfortunately, "pidgin," and often "creole" as well, are terms that have negative connotations for many people. It's important to understand that "pidgin" is a neutral term which is used to refer to "any language that is historically a mixture of two or more languages and that serves as a lingua franca for groups of speakers but is not the first language of any people." (O'Grady et al. 1989, page 344). When children learn a pidgin as their native language, it will begin to develop as any other language does. If it survives, it will then be called a "creole."

Variety
All the usual terms that refer to some "manner of speaking a language" have connotations of one kind or another, often unpleasant. My own native dialect is Ozark English. When people hear the phrase "Ozark English dialect" they think of the Beverly Hillbillies television show. They think of those tacky placemats you see in truckstops with the phony "translations" of Ozark speech for tourists. I'm very personally familiar, unpleasantly so, with the negative ideas that are associated with the word "dialect." There are times when we need a term that means, "I am referring to this way of speaking a particular language, and I am making no value judgments of any kind about it when I do so." "Variety" is that term.

Register
Some ways of speaking a language are distinct because they're associated with a particular role of the person who's speaking. The way that doctors typically talk while "doctoring" in the United States is an English register often called MDeitySpeak. The child who says, "Bye, Mom!" to his mother and "Goodbye, Mrs. Mason!" to the school principal and "Later, man!" to his friend on the playground is demonstrating command of three registers. The sequence below is a handsome example of Academic Regalian, a register commonly used by college professors:

Taken literally, the statement "I was wondering if you would be able to drive me to the airport" is a prolix string of incongruities. Why notify me of the contents of your ruminations? (Pinker 1994, page 230)
Sometimes languages themselves become very like registers. In Wales, for example, Welsh is the language of home and church and friendly social situations, while English is the language of government and business. In Maalula, Syria, the language used in schools and public life is Arabic; in the home and on the street, however, people speak Aramaic—the language that Jesus is believed to have spoken. In the United States, the same thing has happened with Mississippi Choctaw and English; Choctaw is the language reserved for private life and Choctaw-community-only events. The technical term for this situation, in which speakers of two languages assign each one to specific roles in life, is "diglossia."

Code Switching
When a multilingual person moves back and forth between two or more languages (or two or more varieties of a language) in a single communication event, that is called "code switching." For example:

With my fellow Hispanics … I can relax into our nuevo creole. (Fernandez 1986)

"Maa ngiy a genoux." ("I'm on my knees.") (Quoted in Swigart 1992, page 19)
Notice that in the first example we don't consider the word "creole" foreign; it has been borrowed into English and has become part of the English vocabulary. Nuevo, on the other hand, is the Spanish word for "new" and is definitely not part of English. In the second example, the speaker starts out in Wolof and ends with the French a genoux.
Both of these examples show code switching happening inside a single sentence. It also happens within longer sequences of language, with a sentence or two of one language, a sentence of another, back to the first language, and so on. In multilingual families a child may speak one language to a parent, another to a grandparent, and still another to a sibling; if all are involved in a single conversation, this code switching will go on the entire time. The languages don't have to be of the same language family, nor do their grammars have to be similar; for example, Japanese/English code switching is a common manner of speech in the Japanese community of Toronto.
Two things about code switching need to be kept in mind. First, it doesn't mean that the speaker is making mistakes or has the two languages or varieties mixed up (like the small child on page 14), and it isn't random. There are rules that govern code switching, just as there are rules for the use of a single language or variety. Spanish/English code switching allows "Es muy friendly," in which the Spanish for "very" is followed by an English adjective, but "Es very amable"—English "very" followed by a Spanish adjective—is forbidden. Second, in any multilingual/multicultural society, code switching is a valuable skill; the more codes someone knows, the more choices that person is likely to have in life.
Code switching isn't usually a term applied to the act of moving among various registers of a single language, but it should be. We've all watched doctors on television droning on in the medical register while an interviewer pleads with them to "speak English"; their inability to switch out of a register in which kidney stones are known as nephroliths is a very real handicap. Highly skilled attorneys switch registers at the drop of a hat, to make themselves seem either more or less threatening to those in the courtroom they're speaking to, depending on their strategic need of the moment. The ability to switch from one register to another at will, according to the language environment around you, is like being able to play any instrument in the symphony orchestra; it removes barriers in all directions.

Language Policy
The term "language policy" refers to the official positions that governments take with regard to language use and maintenance, whether supported by actions—laws passed, programs funded, grants made, and the like—or supported only by rhetoric, in speeches and position papers and public statements. At the moment, unfortunately, neither the U.S. government nor any of the governments of the fifty states (with the possible exception of Hawaii) can be described as having a coherent language policy.

The most basic reason why linguistic diversity should be preserved is that language helps people to retain their culture.

(Kleiner 1995, page 15)

What new immigrant families across the nation are learning, as their predecessors did before them, is that the power of American culture, and particularly the lure of television, is so strong that it is a challenge to raise a child who can speak a foreign language fluently.

(Navarro 1996, page 5)

A culture is the sum of all the things that make up the way a group of people live their lives: how they dress, work, eat, study, raise children, respond to illness, create art, worship, play, argue, make love, function within a family, perceive time and space, and so on. That all peoples have cultures and languages, both of which are of tremendous importance to them, is not a matter of dispute. But there is a debate about whether the language spoken within a culture is just one more element like clothing or housing or music—part of the culture but separable from it—or something quite different and not separable.
A common consequence of the idea that language and culture are inseparable is a conviction that any change in the language threatens the culture. The French have an official language academy to watch over linguistic developments and try to regulate them. They're so alarmed by what they consider to be the "contamination" of French by foreign tongues (especially American English) that they've resorted to drastic measures. French courts recently overthrew a law that would have "forced private-sector TV stations to eschew borrowed English words—le weekend, le leader, and so on—that are sprinkled through every newscast" (Andrews 1995, page 134); the courts ruled the law unconstitutional. That hasn't stopped the language guardians. Their current strategy is to set up for all the mass media obligatory percentages of content created and produced entirely in France—that is, to set up cultural quotas.
There's an Internet site called Maison de la Françité (roughly, "House of Frenchness," with a nice pun included) run by le Cercle de qualité du français dynamique (CQFD). Here you can find proposed "pure French" replacements for foreign words, with detailed explanations and justifications. For example, to avoid the potentially contaminating English "flipchart," CQFD proposes tableau-feuilles. The stated purpose of CQFD is to watch out for "Anglicisms" and similar language hazards "en vue de contribuer à la qualité de notre langue dans un monde en mutation rapide." (That is, to serve as a kind of quality control for French in a rapidly changing world.)
The French are far from being alone in such practices. Lithuania, for example, has "a force of paralinguists who prowl the streets for illicit phrase pushers. Perpetrators face warnings, fines and humiliation-by-radio" (Newman 1993). We are all familiar with the ongoing controversies in Quebec over laws forbidding English signs and the like.
The United States has no such laws—but not because no one has ever tried to establish them. In 1780, John Adams argued passionately (and unsuccessfully) for the creation of an American language academy to keep American English pure, and proposals for similar measures are a constant feature of editorials and letters to the editor to this day.
The Japanese are an interesting contrast. Despite being one of the world's most conservative cultures, they require their children to begin learning English in elementary school as a matter of course, and they borrow English words with great enthusiasm. They appear to have no fear of "contamination." Perhaps this is because their society is so uniform; perhaps it is because of the well-known Japanese conviction that everything Japanese is inherently superior; perhaps there are other reasons.
The truth can be bluntly stated: Every attempt to control spoken languages by laws has failed. If it can be done (and I don't believe that it can), we haven't yet figured out how to go about it. Controlling written language is to some extent possible, but all that happens when the written form isn't allowed to change is that the distance between it and the spoken forms of the language grows ever more vast over time.
The ultimate language change is of course its complete replacement by some other language. Our Founding Fathers considered this move shortly after the Declaration of Independence, "when the aversion to all things English extended to the language." They seriously considered making German, French, Greek, Hebrew, or even an artificial language the "official" language of this country. But a careful look at what would be involved led to a change of heart, summed up by Continental Congressman Roger Sherman with "It would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is and make the English speak Greek" (Time, 9/18/96, page 38).
That's a funny story—but not every American will find it amusing. Many Native Americans in the United States are trying desperately to keep their languages alive, not only because they cherish their native tongues but also because they're convinced that if the languages die the cultures will die with them.
The state of Oklahoma, with thirty-five native languages and more than 76,000 Native American students, leads the country in this effort, especially for Cherokee, Choctaw, Kiowa, Creek, and Comanche. "With twenty-two Head Start centers introducing three-and four-year-olds to their native tongue, the Cherokee program has become a model for the entire nation" (Bilger 1994, page 41).
The Keresan speakers of the Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico are equally concerned about their language, but have taken an unusual path. They are teaching their youngsters Keresan only orally, by the method of total immersion in the language, and will not allow it to be written down for learning. Mary Eunice Romero, who directs their language program, explains that "The language is sacred. One way to protect ourselves is in a sense to be exclusive" (Linthicum 1998). Whether Keresan will survive as an unwritten language in a world where literacy is taken for granted remains to be seen.
On the other hand, there are native peoples who are deeply offended by the suggestion that their cultures depend for their existence on the maintenance of their native languages; there are also peoples who are divided on this issue. Navajo Sylvia Wadsworth says, "Our Navajo language is who we are"; but Navajo Byron Charley says, "I think you would still be Navajo even if you're not a Navajo speaker … Being Navajo depends on how you conduct yourself and go about your life"(Cantoni 1996, page 133 and page 135).
Almost all the Navajo children entering kindergarten in the early 1970s spoke Navajo and few spoke any English. Today—despite the fact that the Navajo have created and maintained some of the most highly acclaimed native-language educational programs, including programs at the college level—things have changed drastically. About half of the kindergarteners speak only English, and the status that goes with speaking Navajo has been declining steadily among the younger generations. Whether there is any link between this change and the new epidemic level of violence among young Navajos is not known; I would be willing to wager a large sum on the existence of that link. (For a fascinating, and in many ways heartbreaking, account of the attempt to incorporate a Navajo teaching philosophy into the college curriculum, see "Diné College Struggles to Synthesize Navajo and Western Knowledge," by Paul Willeto, in the Fall 1997 issue of Tribal College Journal.)
Politicians in the United States point to examples of turmoil caused by multilingualism elsewhere in the world and demand that every immigrant begin learning English and carrying on daily life in English, if not from Day One then certainly from Day Two. An editorial in the October 22, 1977, Oakland Tribune described the situation like this:

To many, American English fluency is the rite of passage into being an American. To others, who generally agree that the ultimate goal is to be American English fluent, rigid time-tables for learning the language create more harm than good. Wrapped around all this, of course, is what some see as the real fight over preserving a single American culture or fracturing into the kind of multiculturalism that leads to ethnic Balkanization.
Some languages have been so loved or hated as vehicles for culture that they have become a justification for subversion and worse; think of Basque, Irish, and Afrikaans. At the same time, placid little multilingual Switzerland serves as our universal symbol of a peaceful and orderly nation; its languages and cultures appear to coexist and thrive without any serious discord. Clearly, there is no more an international consensus on this question than there is on the definition of multilingualism.
When you bring up the hypothesis that losing a language means losing a culture, people typically respond in four very different ways:

1. "Right! And we must not let that happen!"
2. "Right! And the sooner that happens, the better!"
3. "Nonsense. Language is one thing; culture is something entirely different!"
4. "So what?"

"Right! And We Must Not Let That Happen!"

When I speak English, I lose in a way part of my Spanish nature.

(Questionnaire respondent)

I teach language classes, and when I look at the students in there, I have to think about what we're giving them. We're trying to give them a language that will allow them to think in certain values, and certain lifeways that are important to our people.

(Parris Butler, teacher of the Mojave language, in Hinton 1995)

People who respond this way believe that language and culture are interdependent and inseparable. Many in this camp believe that every language and its culture, without exception, are precious and important and should be preserved. Linguist Ken Hale says that languages "embody the intellectual wealth of the people that speak them. Losing any one of them is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre" (in Bilger 1994, page 19). For some this response may well be based only on romanticism; when you get beyond that predictable reflex, the most common justification is based on the comparison of endangered languages with endangered species.
Like most metaphors, this one isn't perfect, but it comes very close. We can look at an endangered plant in a rain forest and insist that it must be protected because, for all we know, it's the cure for Down syndrome or the missing link in a scientific problem that will never be solved without it. In the same way, we can look at a language that has only a handful of living speakers, and insist that it must be protected—because, for all we know, it holds the key to ending domestic violence, or is the missing link in some crucial problem in linguistic science.
A scientific Foundation for Endangered Languages was founded in 1995. Its members named their newsletter latiku, after the mother goddess of the Acoma tribe of New Mexico, who "caused people to speak different languages so that it would not be so easy for them to quarrel" (Gill and Sullivan 1992, page 5). The international organization called Terralingua: Partnerships for Biolinguistic Diversity makes the language/biology metaphor explicit. Its mission statement includes, among other things: "To help preserve and perpetuate the world's linguistic diversity in all its variant forms" and "To illuminate the connections between cultural and biological diversity."
In 1997, the Endangered Language Fund (a nonprofit organization whose goal is to preserve languages threatened with extinction) awarded ten grants to projects that they judged likely to contribute to achieving that goal. Among the awards were:

• Funds to produce original television dramas in Choctaw and Creek, to be shown on cable access channels and made available as videotapes to native speakers of these languages in Oklahoma.
• Funds to help a linguist record the last two living speakers of the Klamath language, so that the recordings will be available to the Klamath tribe.
• Funds to buy equipment needed for language immersion programs in the Micmac, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy languages.
• Funds to help prepare language materials such as textbooks and a dictionary for the Jingulu language of Australia, which now has no more than ten living fluent speakers.

"Right! And the Sooner That Happens, the Better!"

It is absolutely wrong and against American concept to have a bilingual education program that is now openly, admittedly dedicated to preserving the native language and never getting them adequate in English so they can go out into the job market.

(President Ronald Reagan, in Hakuta 1986, page 207)

Winona Simms, a Creek-Yuchi Indian and director of an American Indian program at Stanford, recently told us, "You would think that being bilingual was the equivalent of being learning-disabled." This logic also led an Amarillo judge to tell Martha Loriana two years ago that speaking Spanish to her daughter bordered on child abuse.

(Rodriguez and Gonzales 1997)

Skeptics answer with … the Tower of Babel. Just as conflicting languages kept the tower's builders from reaching heaven, they say, language preservation only keeps us further from peace and mutual understanding. With ethnic wars raging across the planet, shouldn't we seek a common tongue to bind us rather than reviving languages to further divide us?

(Bilger 1994, page 38)

That last quotation is particularly instructive in the context of the ethnic wars that have been ravaging the Balkans. Historian Ivo Banac writes (in Woodward 1996), "The fighting may be over, but the

The Link Between Language and Culture successor states of Yugoslavia are waging new wars over words … The whole point is to create new differences between Croatia and (Serb-dominated rump) Yugoslavia so that communication between the two is more complicated and the idea of separate identities strengthened … Croatian authorities are aggressively 'purifying' their country's language by substituting words deemed to be foreign with Croatian words."
Like those who want to preserve and protect languages, those who respond this way believe that the hypothesis itself is correct, and that cultures are lost when languages are lost. But they don't consider that a tragedy or something to be struggled against. On the contrary! Here's Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham of California arguing during a debate for the English Only legislation (a debate that Rep. Pat Williams said was "the most maddening" he'd sat through in his eighteen years in Congress):

If you want to keep your people in a barrio, if you want to keep them restricted in little tight communities so only you can communicate with them, and we can't in English, then be my guest. But we're going to empower them to get out of that so they can have a piece of the American dream.

Although all observers may be confronted by the same physical evidence in the form of experiential data and although they may he capable of "externally similar acts of observation," a person's "picture of the universe" or "view of the world" differs as a function of the particular language or languages that person knows.

(Lee 1996, page 87)

First you have to claw your way through the linguistic thicket created by the academic register in which that quotation is written. Why is it written like that? One of the rules of the Academic Regalian register is that the more you expect other academics to be opposed to what you're saying or writing, the more extreme your use of the register has to be. This is unfortunate, because controversial subjects are also subjects about which it's important to be as clear as possible. But if the academic game is the game you're playing, clarity has to be sacrificed to this linguistic dominance display.
The translation process introduces a delay, certainly; but when you get to the end of it you will realize that you've come upon a concept so interesting that it grips the mind and won't let go. It's called "the linguistic relativity hypothesis" (also "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" and "the Whorf/Whorfian hypothesis"). Lee's quotation says that the way human beings perceive the world around them varies with the languages they know—even though they perceive the same things, in the same manner, using the same physical and mental "equipment." This will strike you either as common sense or nonsense, depending on your own personal convictions about the power of language.
Linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford offers the example of a Cheyenne parent who is sitting with a child on his knee when a ball suddenly bounces across the floor. An English-speaking parent would say to the child, "Look! Ball!" The Cheyenne parent, Alford tells us, would say, "Look! Bouncing!" (in DellaFlora 1998). Both parents are perceiving the same stimulus, with the same sensory equipment. However, the way they express the perception—which tells the child what it's important to pay attention to—is not the same.
In 1958 Ace Books published Jack Vance's science fiction novel The Languages of Pao, in which a government tailored its population for specific roles in adulthood by controlling the language each person learned in infancy. One group of infants learned a native tongue that fitted them for life in the military, another group learned a language designed for business and trade, and so on. This worked very well—until the government was overthrown by a population that had secretly learned more than one of these designer tongues natively and had therefore grown up with more flexible perceptions of reality.
The Languages of Pao is a straightforward presentation of a fictional world having these three characteristics:

1. The linguistic relativity hypothesis is valid and true.
2. The hypothesis can be systematically applied to human life.
3. The government has the power and resources to carry out that systematic application as a national policy, beginning with its population of infants.

The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis in Action

Who's in Charge, the Human or the Horse?

Do these different ways of giving a spoken shape to an experience mean that the human beings involved think about the experience, and about the elements of the experience, in significantly different ways?
A Whorfian would suggest that someone a horse "animals-about" with might, as a result, have an attitude toward horses and horseback riding that would be different from the attitude of a person who uses a horse to go about with, or a person who does something called "riding" to a horse. I'm saying "might" here because you can't come to firm conclusions about this on the basis of just one example. But the single example, to a Whorfian, means that the conclusion is sufficiently likely to be worth further investigation. An anti-Whorfian would say without hesitation that such a conclusion is silly rampant romanticism with no foundation in reality, and that classifying horses as objects or instruments has nothing to do with how horses are perceived. An anti-Whorfian would remind us that speakers of English talk about hearts of celery and hearts of artichokes without the idea of vegetable heart attacks ever crossing their minds.
English speakers tell a restless child, "Be good!" The French, in exactly the same situation, tell the child to "Be wise!" Could that make any difference in the child's perceptions of the world around him or her? Could it make a difference in what the child concludes deserves attention and what can safely be ignored? Could it make a difference in the child's behavior in the real world? The Whorfian would say that it very well might; the anti-Whorfian would say that it couldn't possibly. Let's look at a real-world example.
One of the severe health problems that India struggles with results from the fact that the Ganges River is used not only for bathing and washing and religious rituals of various kinds but also for disposal of waste and disposal of corpses. That seems straightforward enough. But health workers' attempts to explain this to people and help with the problem have run into difficulties, even when (as is often the case in India) fluent English is spoken by everyone involved. Why? Because devout Hindus consider the Ganges holy (a belief which doesn't have its roots in English). How could something holy be polluted? That's an impossible contradiction. Furthermore, it's a dreadful insult. As Fran Peavey writes, "In the context of India, that would be like my saying 'Your mother is a whore' to a Westerner" (Peavey 1995, page 49).
The source of this quandary is in the word "pollution" and its associated meaning and connotations. When Peavey discussed the situation with the people along the river, she found it hard going, but she persevered. After many long conversations and much effort to explain and to understand on both sides, what she would hear from them was this: "The river is holy, but she is not pure. We are not taking care of her the way she needs us to." That is, the river is not "polluted" but "neglected," and it is the people themselves who are neglectful. And then, Peavey tells us:

The funny thing is that, after hearing this reply, I started to think less in terms of "pollution" and more in terms of "people not taking care of the river." This was an important change of perspective. "Pollution" is an abstraction that does not address the responsibility of the people who are making the mess. "Pollution" focuses attention solely on the river. It is almost as if the river is to blame for being polluted!

(Peavey 1995, page 40)
Now health workers have begun saying—in English—"The Ganges is suffering" rather than "The Ganges is polluted" (Ward 1997, page 51). This despite the fact that in English rivers cannot "suffer." With the new way of naming the situation, it has become possible to talk about it, and about potential remedies, without giving or taking offense. The facts have not changed; all the people involved are still perceiving the same event with the same eyes and minds; but the outcome in the real world is very different than it was before. As Howard Rheingold puts it:

Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, or making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn't see anything before … We think and behave the way we do in large part because we have words that make these thoughts and behaviors possible, acceptable, and useful.

(Rheingold 1988, pages 3-4)
Alford puts it even more strongly:

People who are monolinguals and know and think in only one language are handicapped. Because they don't have another worldview to shift to, to look at the same problem and see if they come up with a different answer.

(in DellaFlora 1998)

Who's in Charge, the Human or the Language?

The Lady is my shepherdess; I shall not want.
Do you see her, in your mind's eye? With her blowing skirts and froth of lacy petticoats, and her ruffled pantalettes showing, and her sweet little crook with its pretty bow tied on it? It's Little Bo-Peep. She won't do; this is a very bad "translation" indeed. (We'll return to the inclusive language debate in Chapter 6.)
A similar problem caused our English-speaking news commentators during the Gulf War to start out with "Today our boys and—," come to an abrupt halt, and switch immediately to "Today our men and women in the Gulf [did something or other]." "Our boys and girls in the Gulf" would have sounded as if the military personnel were all sitting in sandpiles playing with little plastic buckets and trowels, not making war; the childish connotations of the word "girl" leak onto "boy" when the two are linked, causing semantic contamination. (It's semantic contamination that makes us accept "He's a dashing bachelor" but balk at "She's a dashing spinster," even though we're taught that "spinster" and "bachelor" differ in meaning only by gender.)
If the LRH isn't valid, effects like these should be extremely rare and always brief; that is, they should be something that is noticed the first time or two that the sequence of language occurs but is forgotten thereafter. That's not what happens.
Martha Heyneman writes, "The mother tongue … orders the savage landscape of our raw sensory impressions, domesticating them, molding them into a world we can step out into with relative confidence, the world of common sense" (Heyneman 1992, page 4). If that is so, and if the LRH is valid, then the decision as to which language(s)—and which varieties of languages—shall be the native tongue(s) of those who will grow up to run a country becomes extremely important. It becomes important to decide which foreign languages, if any—and which additional varieties of native languages, if any—people should be allowed to learn. (We've seen a passionate and confused example of the latter issue in recent years, in the controversy over "Ebonics.") If the LRH is valid, then certain languages, and certain varieties within languages, will tend to mold certain sorts of people. Learning certain languages and varieties may have significant effects on adults, even though they are already molded. It's easy to see why scholars and scientists and policymakers—as well as producers of mass media, such as violent films and computer games—might greatly prefer that this should not be true.
Steven Pinker of MIT is one of the world's most prominent linguists; he is that very rare bird, a linguist celebrity. In 1994, in his best-selling book The Language Instinct, he made it clear that he has no patience with the LRH; he refers to it, as is typical, in its strong form, which he calls "linguistic determinism."
"It is wrong," he says on page 57, "all wrong." He tells us on page 58 that "Once a euphemism is pointed out, people are not so brainwashed that they have trouble understanding the deception."
Let's consider that. There is a form of birth abnormality associated with significant mental retardation and a particular sort of facial appearance which includes slanted eyes. Children born with this abnormality used to be called "Mongolian idiots." Today we have a euphemism that we use instead: We say that these children "have Down's syndrome." The theoretical result of Tinker's position would be a claim that the two dialogues below are synonymous and interchangeable in every way except stylistically:

1. TOM: What's the matter with that kid?
   BILL: She has Down's syndrome.
   TOM: I see. That's a shame.
2. TOM: What's the matter with that kid?
   BILL: She's a Mongolian idiot.
   TOM: I see. That's a shame.

Case Study: The Japanese Water Babies

Thousands of Japanese women visit temples every year to bring baby-clothes, cookies, toys, and other offerings to their mizugo … The mizugo is a fetus, removed from the watery warmth of the womb by nature or abortionist before it sees the world. "To make a water-baby" (mizugo ni suru) means to have an abortion.

(Cherry 1987, page 79)
I was literally thunderstruck—an old-fashioned word, but the exact and perfect one in this case—by Cherry's account. But I was also dubious. I thought that surely this was either folklore or a description of a custom from long ago. I tried to imagine two American women talking to one another about what they planned to buy as a gift for their aborted fetuses this year, and found the image impossible. So I proceeded to check it out.
With the help of respondent Fran Stallings (English/Japanese) and her friend and colleague Hiroko Fujita (Japanese/English), I learned that the water babies not only aren't folklore but are very much a part of contemporary Japanese life. Hiroko Fujita was kind enough to send me a postcard of one of the most famous temples (the Temple of Jizo on the Mountain of the Purple Cloud), showing row after row after endless row of the little statues that Japanese families put there to honor their water babies, both those that result from miscarriage and those that are the result of abortion. Hiroko Fujita sent pages of detailed information; and Dr. Stallings directed me to a book by William R. LaFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan, where I found a thorough account and discussion.
LaFleur explains that it's not just mothers who go to the temples. Children—the water babies' siblings—go along; often whole families join in these visits. The statues memorializing the water babies are images of Jizo (a guardian of children, in the sense that Catholics might speak of a patron saint). They are all almost exactly alike, carved of stone, roughly two feet high, with bald heads and closed eyes. They are stone metaphors: They look like both tiny Buddhist monks and tiny children, at the same time. Over their carved monks' robes they wear the large red bibs that Japanese infants and toddlers wear, tied around their necks by the families who visit them. Often amulets signed by family members are hung in the temples, inscribed with messages to the water baby expressing the family's debt of gratitude. There is no attempt to hide what has happened or to make it disappear from the family memory. Rather:

Loving attention to the dead is shown by washing down the memorial image—an ancient Buddhist practice—providing fresh flowers, and bringing the occasional new toy or garment. These activities and the recitation of simple prayers are expected. But beyond these there is the sense of an active communication, emotional if not verbal, between the living family and the departed child.

(LaFleur 1992, page 11)
Notice, please, that the word LaFleur ends with above is "child." We've come upon another lexical gap, of a somewhat different kind. English has no word or phrase that would mean what we have been translating into English as "water baby." If we were asked what an American English speaker would say in the same situation, silence would be our probable answer, because American English has no vocabulary we can easily or conveniently use. In Womansword (page 80), Kittredge Cherry provides the linguistic spotlight that shows us the gap when (struggling with the clash of languages, as I am also struggling) she writes that the Japanese "do not always draw a clear distinction between a fetus and a baby."
Cherry writes as if American English (AE) does make a clear distinction in this matter, and as if speakers of AE can identify a clear consensus about that distinction—but of course that's not true. For sure, a human being who has gone through the full experience of childbirth is a child. But our entire national debate about abortion, which now is referred to far and wide as our "second Civil War," revolves around the question of when, precisely, the united sperm and egg are a fetus and when they are a baby. If we had "a clear distinction" in that regard, we would perhaps be able to sit down as a nation and make the necessary decisions; we might not still be in turmoil. LaFleur tells us (page 11) that the Japanese "tend to avoid terms like 'unwanted pregnancy' or 'fetal tissue.' That which develops in the uterus is often referred to as a 'child'—even when there are plans to abort it." The power of language is such that it would be an extremely rare mother and native speaker of English who could bring herself to say, "Tuesday afternoon at three-thirty I'm going to abort this child."
The visits to the temple and its cemetery are not the only acknowledgments of the water babies in Japanese society. Many Japanese familes have a household shrine. The aborted child (baby? fetus? fetal tissue? product of conception?), although not an ancestor, is often honored at the shrine and "is treated as an ancestor and will be remembered along with them at the Buddhist altar in those households that have them" (ibid., page 148).
The real-world difference that makes this example so important is (in painful contrast to the the terms we have available in English for discussing it) easily stated:

The water babies are not part of this world, but they remain part of the family; they have a distinct role within the family.
Now you might object that this is not a difference of language but "a cultural difference," or "a religious difference." Many Japanese believe in reincarnation, and believe that the fetus (child? baby? product of conception?) will have another chance, even many more chances, at life on this earth. Certainly, that is a difference of religion and of culture. But language is what we use to express cultural and religious differences, and language is the mechanism we use to transmit information about those differences to others, including our children and our grandchildren. It will be clear to you, just from the problems I've been having writing coherent sentences that explain this Japanese concept in English words, that it makes a real-world difference whether you call this entity a fetus or a baby or something else entirely. As with the linguistic strategies of our own WarSpeak, it makes a difference that the process of government certification for abortionists in Japan makes them members of the Motherhood Protection Association. It's not just a matter of style or manners; it's not, as Pinker has suggested, just a matter of people's susceptibilities to "brainwashing." Women in the United States, not just Japanese women, demonstrate that every day.
Millions of English-speaking women (myself included) have said, "I felt the baby move today"; I have never heard, or heard of, a woman saying, "I felt the fetus move today." No one says to a pregnant woman, "When is your fetus due?" or "What are you going to name your fetus?" No woman says, "I had an ultrasound today, and I'm so pleased—my fetus is a little girl!" I have never heard any woman say "my fetus" (although I have heard doctors say "your fetus" to women); always, for the woman, it is "the" fetus.
The word or phrase we choose when we refer to the "product of conception" commits us, as the linguistic relativity hypothesis would predict, to certain attitudes and certain potential actions—not only with regard to the "product" but with regard to its mother and father (notice how hard that is to process in English!) and other aspects of the situation. Whether we choose a single word or phrase to refer to both abortion and miscarriage, as many languages do, or use two separate words as English does, commits us to certain attitudes and potential actions. Whether the naming we do makes it possible to give the "product" in question a role within the family or not drastically changes our commitments.
The question that immediately comes to mind when we think about this case study in the context of multilingualism is:

What effect does the water baby concept have on attitudes toward and feelings about abortion in someone who has both Japanese and English as native languages?
The anti-Whorfians would say that the question is irrelevant, that such attitudes and feelings are based not on language but on logical consideration by the individual, or on socialization, or on a combination of the two.
I disagree. I don't speak one word of Japanese; nevertheless, just learning about the water babies by reading accounts in English had immediate and significant effects on my own feelings and attitudes. I thought of the huge boost that the United States greeting card and holiday industries would get if we were to add the water baby cultural construct to our American culture; I also thought what a comfort it might be to many women and to their families if that happened. My perception of abortion (and miscarriage) has been permanently changed by my encounter with this phenomenon in language, as has my perception of "a family"; the concept of the water baby presents an entirely new option in the world that had been invisible to me previously. It seems to me impossible that anyone who speaks both languages natively would not suffer to some degree the discomfort of the psyche that Leon Festinger named "cognitive dissonance."
We need to know how Japanese/English speakers resolve conflicts of this kind. Do they choose one of the alternative worldviews over the other? Do they negotiate some sort of compromise worldview that takes features from each, so that they "average out" in some way? Do they reject them both and create a third alternative that is unique to those with their language competencies? Is the conflict impossible to resolve, forcing them to maintain both worldviews and switch back and forth between them, as Carol Cohn had to do in her role as nuclear studies scholar? Can they maintain both world-views without discomfort, in an amazing display of what it means to be broad-minded? Is there yet another alternative that hasn't occurred to me, perhaps because my language makes it difficult to perceive it? How does this all work out? What are its implications in a global society? What happens, to take just one possible example of many, when English-speaking diplomats and officials (who rarely speak Japanese) carry on "family planning" conferences with their Japanese counterparts (who almost without exception speak English)?
This is the paradigmatic problem, the pattern question at the heart of our investigation. Suppose it's true that languages structure and constrain our worldviews. Then how do multilinguals deal with conflict between two (or more) worldviews, especially on issues that are highly charged emotionally? What implications do multilinguals' strategies and solutions in such situations have for the society and culture in which they live—or for the world at large? If it's not true, of course, matters are much simpler, and decisions about language policy are far more easily and conveniently made.
Advocates of measures such as "English Only" (when not basing their support totally on financial or political factors) are making a set of broad assumptions. Using the Japanese water baby concept as our framing example, we can describe what they mean when they say that "English Only" is necessary to "becoming an American." (That expression is used constantly in English, even by those who realize how inaccurate it is given all the peoples of the Americas who aren't Anglos. In the absence of something like "Unitedstatesers" to fill the lexical gap, it's difficult to get by without it.) The "English Only" contingent mean that their policies will bring about a sequence of events like the following :

• A little boy arrives at an American school as an immigrant, speaking only Japanese.
• He learns English and begins relying on English in his daily life.
• As a result, he undergoes a cognitive transformation.
• One effect of that transformation can be summarized roughly as "When I came to the United States I thought there could be an honorable role for an aborted or miscarried fetus in the family that its mother belongs to, but now that I speak English I know better."
• A transformation of this same kind occurs with regard to every cultural concept for which a significant conflict exists between American English and Japanese.

In one of its primary aspects, disease must be construed as a biological event little modified by the particular context in which it occurs. As such it exists in animals, who presumably do not socially construct their ailments and negotiate attitudinal responses to sufferers, but who do experience pain and impairment of function … Nevertheless, it is fair to say that in our culture a disease does not exist as a social phenomenon until we agree that it does—until it is named.

(Rosenberg 1992, pages 179-180)

The initial response by many physicians was that the problems were not real. For a time they were dealing with a cluster of symptoms that had no name—and without a name there was, in essence, no disease.

(Halstead 1998, page 44)

One of the common tactics used for attacking the linguistic relativity hypothesis is to ridicule those who defend it by comparing them to people who believe in magical incantations. Whorfians, it is suggested, should really be called Shazamians, or Abracadabrians.
Let's set aside for the moment the mysterious cast that has been given to our world by the discoveries of quantum physics. We're aware now that the objects which surround us are actually made up of energy fields and busily moving particles, and are mostly empty space. But we don't perceive reality that way, not without the help of powerful electronic microscopes that are impossible to carry with us everywhere we go.
This whole semantic domain is one vast lexical gap in English; we have no vocabulary for talking about quantum reality in an everyday context. Our language reflects our ordinary perceptions; we refer to chairs and books as "concrete objects." As long as we restrict our discussion to such objects, the accusation of Whorfian leanings toward blatant superstition is in some ways accurate. I cannot think up some new concrete object that has never existed in my environment before—let's call it a "crawshbeck"—and cause one to appear by saying, "Shazam! Let there be crawshbecks!" That's very clear, and not a matter of dispute.
However, many things that are abstract have just as much power to create effects in human beings as concrete objects do. When a tree is in my path, I will step aside and go around it; that's one of the effects the tree has on me. I can't see or touch liberty as I can see and touch a tree, but liberty has dramatic effects on my behavior, nevertheless. I wouldn't hesitate to state openly my opinions about the Congress and the President, even if they were totally negative; that's one of the effects that liberty has on me. And creating abstractions out of next to nothing—abstractions whose fantasy status is then extremely difficult to prove—is a snap. English has an array of linguistic devices that can be used that way.
In the field of medicine this particular power of language—the power to use language to create abstractions with substantial effects in the real world—is magnified enormously, so much so that it comes very close to being magical. Consider, for instance the striking example which revolves around the phenomenon of menopause.

Case Study: The Menopause Transformation

1. WOMAN: Is there something wrong with me, Doctor?
   DOCTOR: No. You're going through menopause.
   WOMAN: Well, thank goodness for that! I was afraid I was sick.
2. WOMAN: Is there something wrong with me, Doctor?
   DOCTOR: Yes. You're suffering from hypoestrogenemia.
   WOMAN: I am? What does that mean?
   DOCTOR: It means that you have an estrogen deficiency. But don't worry; we have very effective treatments for it now. I'll write you a prescription, and if you'll stop by the nurse's desk on your way out she'll give you some information that you can read that will answer all your questions. And then I'll need to see you again in a few weeks to check on how you're doing with the medication, whether we need to make any changes in the dosage … that sort of thing.

In what ways does acculturation change the beliefs of patients of various ethnicities, i.e., how are the cultures of immigrants transformed and combined with the culture of their adopted country?

(Blackball et al. 1995, page 823)
The question posed isn't "Does acculturation change the beliefs … " and "Are the cultures of immigrants transformed … "; those results are presupposed. No room is left here for an alternative resolution in which patients simply decide that the American English version of events is nonsense and rely on the perceptions shaped by their native languages instead.
My own experience with native speakers of other languages—not only those who are patients but also those who are working as medical professionals in this country—does not bear out that confident presupposition. The error has serious implications for the health care system in a multicultural nation like the United States
For example, evidence for the placebo effect has made it more than clear that a substantial part of "being well" and "getting well" depends on the patient's faith in the doctor and the medical system. That faith also determines in many ways the degree to which the patient is "compliant" (that is, follows the doctor's orders); this is an equally substantial factor in the ultimate outcome for the patient. How well is medical care going to work for multilinguals when one of their native languages slaps an illness label onto some chunk of their experience that has no such label in another of their languages?
We know that some multilingual populations in this country decide either for their native medicine or for the American version and reject the other alternative. We also know that English/Chinese multilinguals living in the United States, by contrast, typically go to at least two medical professionals—one who is practicing Western medicine and another who is practicing Oriental medicine—as if to cover all their bases. Most native Navajos follow that pattern, going to both a Western doctor and a Navajo medical practitioner. (It does strike the Navajo as bizarre that it is the other system that is referred to as "Western," yes.) Presumably this doubling makes Navajo and Chinese-American patients' health problems even more expensive and time-consuming. What other effects does it have on their behavior, and on their health?
In their book Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson offer an example that is relevant here. They note that various metaphors for numbers exist—NUMBERS ARE POINTS ON A LINE, for example, and NUMBERS ARE SETS. And they say that what people do is choose their metaphor for numbers on the basis of the kind of math they want to do at the time. Perhaps that's what multilinguals do when their native languages offer them conflicting metaphors; perhaps they choose on the basis of the kind of thing they want to do at the time. What would that mean for multilingual doctors and nurses and medical technicians, if that's what they do when they're the ones experiencing the conflict between two or more of their languages? We don't know; no systematic, controlled research on this issue has yet been done.
Christopher Lawrence says, "The focus of inquiry should be on how communities come to frame or see diseases … What is required is an explanation of how and why perceptions are structured as they are and how and why they change"(Lawrence 1992, page 53). I agree with him. How? And why? And how do we find out?
In my experience, conscious awareness of the way a language shapes perceptions usually occurs when its speakers are able to step outside their language in ways that come along rarely in everyday life. Remember the discussion in Chapter 2 of differing perceptions about horseback riding? Each time I taught that material in my classes, the same thing happened. The English-speaking students, after hearing how Navajo gives a surface shape to those perceptions, would say, "I never realized before that riding a horse means doing something to the horse!" The Navajo-speaking students, hearing how English handles the matter, would tell me that they had never before realized that the Navajo equivalent meant doing something together with the horse. It's a cliché to say that you can't see the forest for the trees, but where native languages are concerned it describes the situation with dead-on accuracy.
Native English speakers who are medical professionals are only likely to discover the presuppositions that underlie their own concepts and beliefs about medicine if they are exposed to those that are present in other languages. No mechanism exists in medical training in the United States to make that happen, presumably because it's not considered important. I have been told repeatedly by medical educators that "there's no room for linguistics in the medical curriculum."

Medical Models and Metaphors

Metaphorical thought is commonplace and inescapable; in itself, it is neither good nor bad … The use of a metaphor, however, becomes pernicious when it hides realities in a harmful way.

(George Lakoff, in Lakoff 1991, page 1)

Human languages around the world present very different models of what health and illness/injury/disability and medical care are, depending on the metaphors the language uses for these items and all their related phenomena. The range in medical models encoded in human languages around the world stretches from "All health problems are caused by evil spirits and bad thoughts" through "All health problems are punishments for sin" to "All health problems are caused by germs" and far beyond.
In his book The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, Dr. Ernest Lawrence Rossi insists that all health problems are caused by communication breakdown. Since physiological phenoma happen in the body when the brain sends its neurotransmitters out with instructions, he makes a very strong case. I find it totally convincing, especially since the human brain is unable to distinguish between external and internal stimuli and will dutifully send the body "Prepare to flee or fight!" messages even for imaginary crises. If Rossi's definition were generally accepted in medicine, medical schools would have no choice but to find room for linguistics courses. But his metaphor is not the standard one in Western medicine, and "communications" courses for doctors continue to have little or no input from linguistic science. (I'm happy to say that my own medical seminars are exceptions, but it's a lonely business; the only area of medicine in which I feel that linguistics is beginning to be taken seriously is in emergency medicine, where the necessity to obtain accurate information in a matter of seconds has created in EM professionals a healthy respect for the science of language.)
The African-American culture of the Sea Islands of South Carolina divides nonfitness into two subgroups: "ailments," which are caused by natural forces or punishments from God and can be helped by doctors; and "conditions," which are caused by such things as devils and witchcraft, and can only be helped by spiritual advisers. (Hamadeh 1987). This, needless to say, is not the standard metaphor either. My Laotian son-in-law feels exactly the same way about the idea that "germs" cause illness as the average Western doctor does about "evil spirits" filling that role: He considers a belief in germs to be a foolish and unfortunate superstition. It's not that he doesn't believe germs exist—but he considers them to be the result of illness rather than its cause.
We're going to examine here just two of the most common conceptual systems of medicine around the world: one in which illness is understood as a state of being broken; and one in which illness is understood as a state of being out of balance or unharmonious. An example of the first system is American mainstream medicine; examples of the other would include Chinese and Navajo medicine.
The problems with definitions of terms, and with expressing terms and concepts across the languages, are severe. (This is a situation that you'll be familiar with after our struggles with putting the water babies concept into English.) I'll do my best to straighten things out as we go along, beginning with the choice of a cover term we can use to express the unwieldy set of meanings-and-perceptions covered by such words as "illness," "disease," "disorder," "injury," "disability," "sickness," and more. It's common to see illness defined as "an absence of health" and health defined as "an absence of illness." Going around that circle again won't help us. I'm going to use "non-fitness" as a cover term for all of those deviations from the hypothetical human state of perfect health and perfect well-being. Not because it's an especially elegant choice, but because it seems to me to be the broadest and most neutral one I could choose, much like using the term "variety" to express a neutral attitude toward a way of speaking a language. A sprained ankle is nonfitness; lung cancer is nonfitness; deconditioning is nonfitness; schizophrenia is nonfitness; pregnancy, in the American system, is nonfitness; crise de foie ("liver crisis"), in the French system, is nonfitness; susto ("loss of the soul"), in the Ecuadoran system, is nonfitness; and so on.
In 1991 Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold published Between Heaven and Earth: A Guide to Chinese Medicine. Unlike a number of previous books I've read on the subject, this one does an excellent job of laying out the Chinese medical and health care model in a way that's both understandable and interesting for the Western reader. There's a striking difference, however, between the ease with which the American medical system is explained and Beinfield and Korngold's struggles to express the terms and concepts of the Chinese system in English. Here's a typical example, from page 17:

Western medicine is the study of how the human machine works. When people are like machines, doctors become like mechanics … In this schema, the body is reduced to structural parts, proceeding from organs to tissues, tissues to cells, cells to molecules. The doctor as mechanic separates the whole into parts in order to discern the nature, proportion, and function of each constituent.
Western doctors, the authors go on to explain, identify the broken or malfunctioning part, figure out what's wrong with it, and determine the cause of the problem. Successful treatment then consists of fixing that part, removing it, or replacing it. In the same way that the cause of a punctured tire can be identified as a nail picked up from the road, and the tire is either patched or replaced, the cause of a "broken" tonsil can be identified as a particular bacterium or virus, and the fixing is done by giving the patient a medicine—or, if the damage is too severe, by removing the tonsil surgically. If at some point Western doctors became convinced that the body has to have tonsils to function properly, the next step would be tonsil transplants or artificial tonsils.
This is very straightforward; it gives us a solid foundation for understanding how Western doctors proceed in their efforts to do something about states of nonfitness in their patients. It will annoy doctors who claim to practice holistic medicine, and rightly so; it will offend doctors who consider the comparison with so low-status an occupation as automobile repair demeaning. (Never mind the obvious fact that our lives are in the hands of auto mechanics just as much as they are in the hands of doctors.) Despite the justifiable objections, it accurately and clearly expresses the perceptions most Western patients have of their doctors and medical care.
Now let's compare this clarity with a typical quotation or two—in English—from the corresponding section on Chinese medicine:

In Chinese medicine, health is the ability of an organism to respond appropriately to a wide variety of challenges in a way that insures maintaining equilibrium and integrity. Disease represents a failure to adapt to challenge, a disruption of the overall equilibrium, and a rent in the fabric of the organism.

(Beinfield and Korngold 1991, page 36)

If the cause of disease is understood as imbalance, then the goal of treatment is to recover balance

(ibid., page 44)
These statements may be accurate, but they in no way answer the basic questions readers would have about what a Chinese doctor or health care worker does.
I turned to another excellent book on Chinese medicine, Ted J. Kaptchuk's The Web That Has No Weaver, for help, and found the same sort of thing:

All relevant information, including the symptom as well as the patient's other general characteristics, is gathered and woven together until it forms what Chinese medicine calls "a pattern of disharmony." … The total configurations, the patterns of disharmony, provide the framework for treatment. The therapy then attempts to bring the configuration into balance, to restore harmony to the individual.

(Kaptchuk 1983, page 4)
Although all these authors try hard, over and over again, to sum up this "harmonizing" process for speakers of English, they get nowhere. Until, that is, Beinfield and Korngold change their tactics. After a considerable amount of this floundering about, they give up on constructing careful, rational, "expository" sentences and paragraphs and turn to the much more powerful mechanism of metaphor. They had already established the English metaphor as A DOCTOR IS A MECHANIC. The Chinese metaphor, they tell us, is: A DOCTOR IS A GARDENER. And suddenly the lights go on! Because although we may have no idea what someone we could only refer to as a "harmony-restorer" does, we know what gardeners do, in precisely the same way that we know what mechanics do.
Richard Selzer (writer and surgeon) has provided us with what I consider to be the finest possible description, in English, of Asian medicine in action. In his essay "The Art of Surgery" he describes a grand rounds at his hospital featuring Tibetan healer Yeshi Dhonden, personal physician to the Dalai Lama. The task was to examine a patient chosen for him in advance by Selzer's hospital, a patient whose diagnosis was unknown to anyone except the doctor who chose her, and afterward to discuss the diagnosis with the Western doctors. Selzer describes Dhonden's taking of the patient's pulse, which was a very different process than the one we Westerners are accustomed to. It lasted thirty minutes, and when it was over Selzer writes of his new awareness that "I, who have palpated a hundred thousand pulses, have not felt a single one." Dhonden also examines a urine specimen provided by the patient. And that is all he does. In the discussion with the doctors afterward, he presents his diagnosis (through an interpreter) as follows:

The lifeblood of a Chinese company is guanxi [connections]. Penetrating its layers is like peeling an onion. First come connections between people and ancestors, then those between people from the same village, between members of the family, and finally between the family and close associates who can be trusted … Typically, the Chinese … are less concerned with what is written in the contract than in the actions that people take to meet their obligations as they emphasize guanxi.

(Cannon 1994, pages 332-333)

Suppose that you and I are involved in a business transaction. I want to sell you ten widgets, or ten hours of a service, and you're willing to buy. When the business in question is business as represented by Standard American Mainstream English (SAME), what that means in theory is that the following sequence will take place:

1. I describe the widget or the service to you, accurately and honestly.
2. I agree to a price for the widget or service—a price that covers my cost of business (including fair treatment for any workers and subcontractors and suppliers who may be involved) while at the same time yielding a fair profit.
3. I agree to a delivery time for the widget or service, with fair provisions made for such things as returns and refunds if the widget is damaged or the service is unsatisfactory.
4. I agree to a date by which you must pay my bill for the widget or service.
5. You agree to all of the items above.
6. We both follow through on our agreements, fully and honestly.

Their nonverbal behavior, for example, does not automatically switch to an "Englishized" nonverbal behavior … Thus, when they think the negotiation partner should have understood the (verbal and nonverbal) signs they are using, misunderstandings still occur because some signs may be differently encoded—and decoded—in the other's culture or may not be noticed to be signs at all.

(Niemeier et al. 1998, page 2)
There are now many Englishes, from all over the world, each one strongly influenced by the native language and culture from which it comes. They are not the same language. (For more details, see Chapter 7.) And this isn't just a "vocabulary problem," something that could be fixed if people would only learn more words and phrases.
The number of language-related potential problem areas for international business is so large that no one book (let alone one chapter in one book) could possibly explore them all; we'd need many shelves of books. The potential problem areas include at least these five, which we'll be discussing in this chapter:

• Different understandings of time and of space
• Different positions on what's right and what's wrong
• Different definitions for the key vocabularies of various semantic domains
• Different requirements for making information explicit
• Different dominant cultural metaphors

Why American English Is Such a Good Language for Business

A nominal is a noun (or any item that can do everything a noun can do) plus whatever language chunks go with it.
A typical English sentence will have a verb, plus one or more nominals that fill roles for the verb. For example: "The linguist recited nine boring grammar rules" has "recited" as its verb, plus two nominals, "the linguist" and "nine boring grammar rules."
"The linguist" fills the role of that-which-does-the-reciting; "nine boring grammar rules" fills the role of that-which-is-recited; the verb tells us what action is involved, that it took place in the past, and that it's over with. Every sentence with a verb, in any human language, can be thought of as potentially including a whole set of nominals, along these general lines:

Somebody does something, perhaps to someone or something, perhaps for someone, perhaps along with someone, at or during some time, in some location, in some manner, perhaps along some path in time or space, for some reason or purpose, perhaps using some instrument.
How many of those potential "somes" (and more) are actually spoken or written down, and how many appear not as indefinites but with explicit details, will depend on the rules of the language, the context, and the speaker's needs and intentions.
In scholarly literature on this subject the terms ordinarily used (taken from mathematics and logic) are "predicate" and "argument"; nominals are the arguments of the predicate. It might be possible to make these matters more difficult to talk about, but you'd have to work at it. This traditional terminology is much less efficient for ordinary communication than the Navajo names for car parts are, and I'll have nothing further to say about it.
With that established, we can go on to look at the set of characteristics that make English the businessperson's best current medium for business discourse, both spoken and written and—as in much electronic discourse—in between.

The English Advantage

An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being undertaken to eliminate the consequences of this accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.

(The Soviet press agency Tass, quoted in the New York Times for April 29,1986)
This tactic isn't unique to English; all languages, it seems, allow it. Linguistic universals—that is, items that can reasonably be assumed to be present in every human language, such as vowels or nominals or a way of making things plural—are an important concern in linguistics. (Linguists propose them with great caution, because they are proposals about what qualifies as a human language.) I spent quite a while going to linguists all over the world for help in finding out how universal this phenomenon of "making the responsible nominals disappear" might be. So far as I have been able to determine, there is no human language in which it is literally impossible to do this. No language exists in which speakers would be violating a grammar rule if they didn't openly identify the "spiller of the oil." Some languages do it with passive sequences such as "Oil was spilled"; some do it by constructing sentences that would translate as "Somebody spilled oil" or "One spilled oil" or "They-unidentified spilled oil"; many do it with sequences that translate literally as "Oil spilled itself." However, English is extremely tolerant of this sort of thing, and the "Oil was spilled" tactic is only one of a number of possibilities it offers for hiding or eliminating nominals.
2. English lets you easily and efficiently hide information away in presuppositions and stacks of presuppositions.
Suppose my company has just put a new brand of laundry soap on the market. Chances are, it's much like all the other laundry soaps already available. If I want to say that our new soap is "technology-enhanced" (whatever that might mean), I'm claiming that that's so, and I'm likely to be asked for evidence. However, in English things that are owned are presupposed to exist. A sentence like "My black leather briefcase with the fancy zipper does not exist" would strike a native speaker of English as very strange, and could be used only in special contexts. (We can't say it could never be used, because you can always put together a sentence like "[X] is not a grammatical sequence of English.") This means that I can use a possessive word or phrase to presuppose that the soap is technology-enhanced and then finish my sentence with some claim too trivial to inspire argument. Like this:

My company's new technology-enhanced soap is now available in stores all over the country.
Or

Our new technology-enhanced soap is now on the shelves in stores from coast to coast.
I don't have to stop there. I can stack the presuppositions up as high as I feel a listener or reader will let me. Each presupposed item will turn what would have been an open claim on my part into information that I can reasonably expect you—linguistically speaking—to take for granted. Like this:

Our new and innovative scientifically designed technology-enhanced soap is now available in stores all over the country.
This doesn't guarantee that no listener will challenge me with a demand for an explanation of "technology-enhanced" or "scientifically designed"; it might happen. But it's not nearly as likely as it would be if I just made my claims straight out, especially if my sentence is in the middle of a speech or other presentation. When my listener is someone from a culture that disapproves of such challenges, they're even more unlikely; if the other person is reading my words rather than hearing them, and I'm not present, no convenient opportunity for a challenge exists.
3. English doesn't require you to specify the source of the information you put in your sentences.
There are languages—Aymara is one—in which every sentence has to include a chunk stating what it is that makes you feel justified in saying what you're saying or writing what you're writing. These languages have sets of forms (often called "evidentials") for specify ing the source of information. Evidentials include such things as having perceived something with your own senses, having learned it from a source you consider trustworthy, having made it up yourself from scratch, having seen it in a dream, and so on; which members of the potential complete set occur will vary from language to language. In the same way that English sentences are ungrammatical without some chunk that tells you whether the action or state was or was not in the past, Aymara sentences are ungrammatical without an evidential either explicitly present or made clear by surrounding sentences. Aymara speakers could of course be lying about their sources of evidence, but they have to do so right up front. They can't lie in the far more convenient English fashion.
Imagine what would happen in American business if statements like "This is the best insurance policy on the market" or "We know you're going to be glad that you bought this automobile" were ungrammatical without an evidential. Imagine what it would be like if the absence of an evidential in an English sentence was automatically taken as evidence that you were trying to deceive or mislead. It wouldn't make business discourse impossible, but it would make it vastly more complicated, and would require radical changes in the way we do business in America.
4. English has an enormous vocabulary—hundreds of thousands of words—with an abundance of items that are either opaque or so nearly meaningless that they can be made to mean whatever the user wants them to mean. (Like the word "interesting.")
In some languages you can look at most words and figure out their meanings from the meanings of their morphemes—their meaningful parts. This is much rarer in English, where the jargons and registers of fields and subfields are often meaningless even to other native speakers of English. If you choose a word or phrase of English and then realize that it's uncomfortably narrow and precise, so that it might box you into a business commitment before you're ready, you can almost always find a number of other lexical items to use instead. As Gerald Parshall says, "What makes English mammoth and unique is its great sea of synonyms, words with roughly the same meaning but different connotations, different levels of formality and different effects on the ear." (Parshall 1995, page 48)
It's easy in English to talk at great length, and in a way that sounds serious and significant, while saying almost nothing; this is one of the basic skills learned by everyone who gets a Ph.D. from an American university. Suppose I am presenting a seminar, and the participants are giving me a hard time by refusing to ask questions when I offer them opportunity. They may think that this will make the seminar shorter or force me to stop talking about my topic and start telling jokes to fill the time. They are wrong. I have a Ph.D. from the University of California-San Diego's linguistics department; I am highly trained in the technique of saying things like this:

Today's topic, when subjected to primary effects of interrelated and synergistic demographic parameters, offers us greater scope than would be provided by mere humanistic rubrics in a similar context.
So far as I know, that sentence is for all practical purposes meaningless, but I can use the lexical abundance of English to go on like that for hours. Many of the world's languages offer their speakers no such luxury.
5. English has an extraordinary willingness to add to its vocabulary, not only by coining new lexical items but by borrowing them from any and all other languages. In addition, it expands its vocabulary by using nouns as verbs, and verbs and adjectives as nouns, at the drop of a hat.
We've already seen that a willingness to add words from other languages is by no means a universal characteristic; many nations look upon borrowed words and phrases as a contamination of the native tongue. English has no such barrier, despite the frantic and dogged efforts of purists.
6. English has a writing system that contains almost no information about the tune the words are set to, so that a written agreement can easily be stripped of every last bit of the emotional information that would be present in a verbal agreement.
Most of the emotional information is carried in English not by the words that are said but by the intonation (including tone of voice) that creates the tune the words are set to. As a result, speakers of English can easily say a single utterance with many different emotional meanings, including one that contradicts its "dictionary meaning." A standard exercise in beginning drama courses is to give the students some random word like "goldfish" and instruct them to say that word in such a way that it conveys rage, then lust, then terror, then tenderness, and so on down a long list of emotions. English allows that all to be done by intonation, while many other languages would have to add words or pieces of words—with specific emotional meanings—to accomplish the same thing.
This has the obvious drawback of letting verbally abusive people get away with their unpleasant language behavior by saying, "But all I said was … " and following that up with the words they did in fact say, but set to an entirely different tune. William Labov and David Fanshel are all for this feature of English:

In our view, the lack of clarity or discreteness in the intonational signals is not an unfortunate limitation of this channel, but an essential and important part of it. Speakers need a form of communication that is deniable. It is advantageous for them to express hostility, challenge the competence of others, or express friendliness and affection in a way that can be denied if they are explicitly held to account for it.

(Labov and Fanshel 1977, page 46)
Well, yes, it certainly is advantageous, provided you are "winning" in the business transaction. And that is how the game is played.
It may be that everyone who was present in a meeting to negotiate a contract has understood that members of the negotiation teams were furious or suspicious, or were agreeing only with great reluctance. Nothing in the English writing system requires information of that kind to appear in the contract or other document that comes out of the session. This is a case in which it's true that "you had to be there"; otherwise, you may be entirely in the dark about the participants' feelings.
7. English appears largely free of special discourse restrictions that would make business discourse tricky and difficult.
Japanese has a constraint that goes something like this: "Do everything you possibly can linguistically to make sure that no one ever has to say no to a request." Japanese has built-in mechanisms for indicating the rank and status of everyone present in an interaction, mechanisms that can't be left out of the sentence. Chinese has a constraint which says that you must do everything possible linguistically not to make awkward developments explicit—because once they're explicit, something has to be done about them. English has no such inconvenient features; it no longer has even the distinction between a formal "you" and an intimate one, like the French vous and tu.
Kyoko Mori (quoted in the November 3, 1997, Publishers Weekly) says that she doesn't like to speak Japanese because "you have to agree on … which one of you is superior, how close you expect to be … and who defers." Respondent Atsushi Furuiye (Japanese/English) writes that "English is better than Japanese when negotiating MONEY … Japanese with its complicated ways to speak according to social seniority/inferiority is sometimes a pain." Respondent Fran Stallings (English/Japanese) explains that Japanese has "honorific syllables which can be inserted before and/or after a general word to elevate its status … And there are whole separate sets of vocabulary (nouns and verbs) to be used for different levels of status." Chinese has a number of different words meaning "no," each carrying with it various nuances of meaning about the intensity and finality—the true "no-ness"—of the "no" in question.
Speakers of languages that make heavy use of devices like these can feel linguistically naked when speaking English. They may react to that discomfort by trying to find English substitutes—thus often leading monolingual English speakers to perceive them as either absurdly and excessively polite or as faking politeness. This perception then colors the English monolinguals' judgments negatively and interferes with business.
The seven characteristics of English discussed above (and others not mentioned here) work together synergistically—so that the combined effect is greater than the sum of the parts. Perhaps the most useful aspect of that effect for business is to establish and maintain that quality of deniability we've been discussing. ("Who, ME? Me, carrying the BALL? What makes you think THAT?") English is supremely deniable. This is not the only reason it has become the obligatory language of world business (there is, for example, the extremely important fact that English uses a writing system easily handled by keyboards), but it certainly hasn't held it back.
As long as business transactions are carried on between consenting adults who are all native speakers of Standard American Mainstream English, the results of all this are acceptable. But what happens when other languages (including other Englishes) are involved? When non-native speakers of English are involved? When the communication takes place on the Internet, where English dominance is so extreme that the four other most common languages (German, Japanese, French, and Spanish) combined are only used about 10 percent of the time? Then what?
Some of the things that happen in these situations are amazing; they lend support to the idea that we human beings all speak dialects of Terran. Here is an actual telephone conversation (recorded by Alan Firth and reported in Newman 1995) between an Egyptian cheese importer and a Danish cheese exporter whose only language in common for business is English:

IMPORTER: So I told him not to send the cheese after the blowing in customs.
EXPORTER: I see, yes.
IMPORTER: So I don't know what we can do with the order now.
EXPORTER: I'm not, er, blowing, er, what, er, what is this, er, too big or what?
IMPORTER: No, the cheese is bad. It is, like, fermenting in the customs cool rooms.
EXPORTER: Ah! It's gone off.
IMPORTER: Yes, it's gone off.
What's striking here (and what fascinates linguist Firth) is the way meaning is negotiated on the spot for business purposes, while the two businessmen are talking. "First, the Dane acts as if he understands 'blowing.' Only when his sale seems at risk does he demand a definition. Then he provides a definition of his own, and the Egyptian acts as if he knew what 'gone off' meant all along."
English, the article tells us, "follows markets," resulting in a batch of special-purpose "Englishes" (more accurately, English registers) that we could call Oilglish and Cheeseglish and StockandBondglish and Hackerglish—and so on
This is an extremely complicated issue. Its parts are tangled up together, and they interact in complicated ways. In Chapter 7 we'll return to the topic of English as an international language. For now, in order to arrive at a rough understanding of the situation, let's briefly consider a few of the organizing factors.

The Language of Time

The Language of Information

The Language of Right and Wrong

The Language of the Internet

We are entering a new economic environment—as different as the moon is from the earth—where a new set of physical rules will govern what intellectual property means, how opportunities are created from it, who prospers, and who loses. Chief among the new rules is that "content is free." While not all content will be free, the new economic dynamic will operate as if it were … The provider's vital task is to figure out what to charge for and what to give away.

(Dyson 1995, page 137)
Content is free? What to charge for and what to give away? (The prototype example to clarify this is the standard practice of giving away a computer software program free but charging customers a fee for updates and for each time they need help using the program.) This, together with the idea that score is kept in terms of hits (number of visits to your Internet location, whether any business is transacted during the visit or not), and that your company and its entire plant can be totally "virtual"—existing inside your computer, with no fixed physical location in either time or space—is causing cognitive headaches for businesspeople on a massive scale. The older the businessperson, by and large, the more frequent and severe the cognitive dissonance is. The limits to resources on the Net, Dyson says, are not limits on time and space, but limits on the amount and degree of human attention. "Does a place in cyberspace exist," she asks, "if no one visits it?"
Past attempts to establish an international language, much less an associated international culture, have always failed, but the Internet shows signs of doing what no amount of effort along those lines has ever been able to do before. The language of the Internet is truly an international language, and it looks like written English. But it's not the same English that we're used to, it's Netglish, and its presuppositions are different. Questions such as "Where is your company located?" and "How long will it take everyone to get to the meeting?" and "How much does your widget cost?" and "How large were your profits last year?"—questions that are the heart and soul of off-line business—are often irrelevant for this new variety of English.
There was a brief period when it looked as if Netglish might establish one feature that would put a small dent in the deniability of written English. This feature was the emoticon, a little graphic squiggle that people used in an effort to give a surface shape to meaning that in speech is carried by body language. For example:

When my oldest was first learning how to talk, he came toddling across the room and asked me for a cookie in Spanish. When I did not react, he got mildly upset. Then after a five-minute tantrum, he returned and asked me for a cookie again, but this time he used the English word. After that, he never spoke Spanish to me again.

(Pamela Faber; personal communication)
We know that a number of different positions on the benefits or dangers of multilingualism exist among Americans today, along with many variants of those positions; we know that at least in the United States they are based in large part on folklore and politics and inadequate information. In this chapter we will set aside the ongoing arguments about whether multilingualism should be desired, deplored, or ignored. Temporarily, let's just take multilingualism in the home as a given, the way we take furniture in the home as a given, and turn our attention to the power of language in that context.

Which Language, When, and with Whom?

But Which Language Do They Use at Home?"

• Impoverished immigrant households, where most family members spoke only the language of their homeland, with perhaps one person knowing a little English.
In this situation, unless the family happened to live in an area with a very large immigrant community of its own heritage (usually only in big cities), learning English was a matter of survival. Even in the large cities, public education meant that the kids would have to learn English quickly and well to function in school; no bilingual education program existed. In such households the native language would be used within the immediate family, with English reserved for outside the home.

• Very privileged and wealthy households, where everyone spoke English plus additional languages as a matter of course because this was considered to be an obligatory part of an adequate upper class education.
In this case the family could choose any arrangement for language use that suited its fancy. If that arrangement was to speak Latin at the breakfast table, French at lunch, and English at dinner, with afternoon tea or cocktail conversation in Mandarin Chinese, that was perfectly fine. It was a matter of individual choice. Such households were, and still are, rare.

• Native American households, where older members might speak only their Native American language, where children spoke English, and with wide variation in whether younger members also spoke the Indian language. (The native peoples of the United States are divided on the question of whether they prefer to be called Indians or Native Americans; the decision varies not only from tribe to tribe but within the tribes as well.)
This was of course a special situation, in which—although it might be that speaking the Native American language was the most critical linguistic imperative, because the language itself was in danger of dying—extreme pressure to use English in the home instead came from many sources.

1. What language(s) will the spouses use with one another?
2. And—if there are children—what language(s) will each parent use with each child?

Four Characteristics of Multilingual Homes

My young son and I moved to Indonesia when he was two years old. By the time he was three, he was bilingual in English and Indonesian (spoken to him by the servants). He jumbled the languages for about five minutes. After that, although I could speak to him in Indonesian and he would understand me perfectly, he would reply to me only in English, and to the servants only in Indonesian: he had sorted out who spoke what to his own complete satisfaction. Of course, this meant he thought there were two languages in the world and he spoke both of them. I'll never forget the astonishment on his face when, at the self-assured age of three and a half, he looked at a Korean woman, categorized her, and spoke to her in Indonesian. When she replied in Korean, he was utterly dumbfounded."

(Kathryn Berck, personal communication)
When I discuss arrangements like these with people from traditional monolingual homes, the reaction is always one of astonishment that they don't lead to endless confusion in the home, as well as to friction and frustration. How, they want to know, could such arrangements possibly work? I can tell them only that, however strange it may seem, they do.

"But Doesn't All This Switching Around Confuse the Children in Multilingual Homes?"

When we change words we invite a changed perception of the reality to which the words point. To demand that the words of faith change is to demand that one's faith change. And in changing it can either grow or shrivel, blossom or die.

(Barr 1988, page 366)

Grammar and attitudes have nothing to do with each other. Benjamin Whorf thought they did, but he has been proven wrong.

(Beaver 1988, page 325)

We have considered in some detail the power that language has in medicine, in business, and in the home; we've discussed many aspects of its power in education. Now we're going to turn to the often very different power of religious language. The two quotations above make opposing claims. The first claims that the linguistic relativity hypothesis is true, while the second (from a linguist's letter in response to the first) declares it false. Knowing which of those two claims is valid is arguably more important in the context of religious language than in any other area of life. Religion and spirituality permeate every culture and every worldview, using religious language and talk about religious language as a primary mechanism of transmission. It's difficult to overestimate the power of such language over our lives, even for those who claim to have no religious beliefs and to be part of no religious tradition. In much of the Western world, religion is the area of life in which the most elaborate cognitive gymnastics are required, because of the seemingly unresolvable conflicts and contradictions.

What Is Religious Language?

What if 80 or 90 percent of Americans spoke every day in the brutal and angry cadences of gangsta rap, while the members of a feudal upper class mused over their own demise in Elizabethan English?

(Hedges 1996)
That is, what if written English had been frozen in the forms that were used in the King James Bible, while the spoken language had moved on, and the gulf between the two varieties of English had restricted literacy to an elite upper class?
Suppose politicians in the United States could take something like "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" from the King James Bible and turn it into a rap slogan aimed at illiterate thousands in American inner cities and rural small towns, with complete confidence that its targets wouldn't be able to find that section of the Bible and read the sequence in context, or read commentaries and discussions of the section. Suppose that at the same time the elite classes in the United States would know so little about rap that they'd pay no attention to the slogan and its effects. Suppose politicians could take the loaded word "abomination," which figures so prominently in the Old Testament, reshape it in a dialect unfamiliar to upper-class Americans, and begin using it as a buzzword to whip up hatred against whatever they disapproved of. This is precisely the sort of problem that Arabic-speaking peoples struggle with in the real world today.
Hedges acknowledges that the image is an exaggeration for many privileged speakers of Arabic, but reports that it accurately reflects the linguistic circumstances of the poor throughout the Middle East, whose inability to read written Arabic and interpret it for themselves leaves them dangerously vulnerable. Amy Docker Marcus quotes the Arab poet and songwriter Nabeel el-Khadeer's lament that "Language is the weapon of our times." And Hedges makes it clear that although Arabic may seem far outside American concerns, it in fact affects Americans directly: He explains that the carefully crafted inflammatory slogans and buzzwords aimed at the poor by politicians are "almost incomprehensible to educated Arabs, only widening a dangerous gulf between an elite that looks to the West and an enraged underclass from which suicide bombers and murderers of tourists can be recruited" (Hedges 1996; emphasis added).
The situation in the mainstream cultures of the United States is different, right? There may be a little resistance to new Bible translations, but most Americans are literate, and are broad-minded about religious language. We may feel a sense of stylistic loss when the Christmas angels' "Fear not" is modernized into "Don't be afraid"; we may feel that rendering "Let not your heart be troubled" as "Don't worry" throws away much of the beauty of the earlier version. I certainly feel that way. But nobody is ready to riot against such changes. We may be offended when people pepper their speech with "Jesus Christ" or "God damn" as their preferred casual curses, but we're not likely to attack them physically for that behavior. We may be disgusted when writers and artists take liberties with subjects that we personally consider sacred, but we're not interested in putting such people in prison for their actions. Right? Yes and no. As is true of so many language-related issues, it depends. It's not simple or straightforward.
Some examples of American attitudes toward religious language are as curious as any that an anthropologist might bring back from fieldwork at the outermost fringes. As when the local government of Kleberg County, Texas, voted unanimously in favor of saying "heaven-O" as the official government greeting, never mind the fact that "hello" has nothing whatsoever to do with hell or with the word "hell." (It's instructive, and at the same time bewildering, that this information appeared on page 25 of the December 13,1997, issue of TV Guide, without a byline and with the disrespectful title "Then They All Got Back into Their Heavenicopter and Flew Back to the Mental Hospital.")
Annie Dillard, writing in Holy the Firm, describes the "set pieces of liturgy" as language that people have managed to address to their God "without getting killed."
And Stanley Fish makes a claim that is neither obviously absurd nor obviously poetic—but obviously important, linguistically and spiritually—when he writes that "Religious discourse … cannot be unconcerned with the substantive worth and veracity of its assertions, which are in fact presupposed" (Fish 1996, page 22). That is, we can't just dismiss someone's religious language casually, because unless there is an open statement to the contrary we have to assume that the speaker believes that its various propositions are true.
It's not an accident that Fish makes this claim in an article titled "Why We Can't All Just Get Along." Many Christians who agree with Stanley Fish may find themselves in the awkward position of having to use religious language which presupposes that all the world's billions of non-Christians are doomed to spend eternity in hell. That terrible claim is presupposed by numerous examples of religious language used in Christian sacred texts, sermons, hymns, and the like. It's made explicit in the recent manifesto of the Christian Evangelical denominations in the United States, published in the June 14, 1999, issue of Christianity Today: "We deny that anyone is saved in any other way than by Jesus Christ and his Gospel. The Bible offers no hope that sincere worshipers of other religions will be saved without personal faith in Jesus Christ." That's carefully worded, but its intended meaning is quite clear. (A typical response when I ask believers how they deal with this is "I try not to think about it" plus a swift change of subject.)
In a multilingual and multicultural America this particular presupposition can have complicated consequences. I have a Buddhist friend whose first visit to an American church was his last—because it included a statement from the minister, directly to my friend, that his deceased Buddhist parents were at that moment in hell and would remain there for all eternity. I've seen a number of Southern Baptist ministers, facing a point-blank outraged question like "Are you saying that all Buddhists and Jews will go to hell?" escape by answering with "I wouldn't presume to make a judgment of that kind." The preacher who talked to my friend either wasn't that adroit, or genuinely felt a religious obligation to say what he did; if the latter reason is the explanation, I'm grateful that I carry no such burden.
To understand how religious language in English affects people's lives in the United States today, we need to remember two things as we go along.

First: The effects that religious language has on an English-speaking population are effects of contemporary English, which brings with it all the presuppositions of contemporary English.
This point is far too often overlooked or forgotten. Scholars and theologians of the English-speaking world may be convinced that they know what the words of some religious sequence in English "really" mean, based on their understanding of what the corresponding sequences in ancient Aramaic or Hebrew or Greek "really" meant. I suspect that they're sometimes wrong, and not only because millennia have gone by since the words were first spoken. For all their expertise, they have no way of knowing what English body language—especially what intonation and tone of voice—should be assigned to the translations of religious utterances from their original languages.
Only English spoken by a machine (my answering machine, for example) carries no emotional meaning. Quoted English speech is most often read silently, but we hear it in the mind's ear with some pattern of intonation attached. "If you love me you will keep my commandments" means one thing, while "If you LOVE me, you will KEEP my COMMANDments!" means something else. Not even the most learned scholars—like the members of the famous Jesus Seminar, who presume to rule on which sayings attributed to Jesus he actually did or didn't say—know which of those two English utterances, let alone the multitude of other possibilities, was intended by the original non-English utterance. If the scholars are correct in the judgments they make about such things, that's admirable. But ordinary people, which includes most of us, are even more ignorant of theology and religious theory than of linguistics. We don't experience English religious language as an English way of saying some sequence of Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic that we're able to understand in the original; we understand it as the English of today.
Much time is spent in religious discourse in America, both spoken and written, struggling to explain that when Jesus said "Be ye therefore perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect" he didn't mean perfect. "Perfect" in the original language, we're told, didn't mean "perfect"; it meant something else, something more along the lines of "mature" or "whole" or "complete" but not exactly any of those either. This is little or no help to average devout Christians, who will continue to feel that they've been commanded to be perfect.

Second: The effects of religious language are in no way restricted to effects on believers, and that's not just because believers and nonbelievers share the same world.
I've asked many people who insist that they are totally nonreligious whether they find "The Lady is my shepherdess; I shall not want" offensive. Whether they are shocked by the crucified Santa Clauses that can be found on sale in Japanese gift shops at Christmas. (Bizarre as this seems, the sort of cross-cultural blundering it demonstrates can be seen in almost every gift shop—and truck stop—in America, where the symbols of different Native American religions appear scrambled and distorted in exactly the same fashion on objects of every kind.) If it makes any difference to them whether the gay lifestyle is called "something many people strongly disapprove of" or "an abomination." If they have any opinion about whether their dog has a soul, or about the point at which a fetus has a soul. I've asked them how they'd feel if they heard an emergency room nurse say to a frantic wife in the waiting room, "Mrs. Jones, the doctors have resurrected your husband and you'll be able to see him shortly." They are ordinarily amazed at how strong their reactions to my questions are and at how much these things do in fact matter to them. Finally, I've been intrigued by the number of professedly non-religious young people I know who object to any sort of disrespectful use of the phrase "The Force."
In earlier chapters we've discussed the effects of naming some human state as a disease, as in the case of renaming menopause "hypoestrogenemia." The effects of such naming extend far beyond the individual menopausal woman and into the society around her and the society at large. Similarly, when the state of weighing more than the cultural ideal is called neither a normal variation in human shape nor a disease, but is named as a sin, the consequences permeate the culture. Not to mention the fact that the contemporary understanding of the sin in question—gluttony—is a distortion ot what the term "really" meant. Gluttony is obsession with food. When that obsession takes the form of a constant preoccupation with staying rail thin, it is as much a form of gluttony as is overeating—but contemporary American English has lost track of that meaning; making it possible for one group of gluttons to feel virtuous while considering the sorry state of the other group to be evidence of immorality or moral weakness.
The same thing holds when alcoholism or other addictions, or homosexuality, or attempted suicide, are classified as sins. People behave very differently toward someone whose state is considered proof of moral weakness and wickedness (a sinner) than they do toward someone who is considered to be sick and in need of medical treatment (a patient); the insanity defense for murderers is the prototypical example of that fact. And people who believe their own state and behavior to be sinful behave differently in this world than people who are convinced that they're not personally responsible for their condition because they are its "victims."
Everyone who interacts with a sinner—family, friends, workplace associates, teachers, helping professionals, and on down the list—is affected by the acceptance of that word from the vocabulary of religious language and behaves in ways that are shaped by that word. It makes very little difference whether they are themselves believers; the effects of the words "sin," "sinful," and "sinner" on the person they're applied to bring about changes, including legal changes, and others respond to the circumstances that are created by those changes.
Western elite culture, the culture of the highly educated professional and the academic, is just as subject to the effects we've been discussing as the cultures of our less privileged and less educated citizens; the same thing is true of cultures that are still functioning in ways that Western society set aside centuries ago.
It's not always easy to disentangle religious language effects from the effects of other factors that tend to hide the religious aspect, but the religious ones are always there. We're going to look now at one of the most obvious and easily identified examples, that of the ongoing furor about the overwhelming "maleness," in linguistic terms, of Christianity and Judaism.

Case Study: The Controversy over "Inclusive" Language

What results when the human reality used to point to God is always and everywhere male? The sacred character of maleness is revealed, while femaleness is relegated to the unholy darkness without … This state of affairs has a profound impact on women's religious identity.

(Johnson 1993, page 37)
It's ironic that this quotation, which so perfectly argues the religious language case for women, should bring us right up against another major problem of religious language today. For people of color the constant association of holiness with whiteness, and of wickedness with blackness—as in "the unholy darkness without"—causes great pain. The good and the holy in religious language is always light and white; we never hear that our sins might be washed as black as ebony.
Claudia Camp is even more specific:

Because the Christian traditions have for so long put "God" and "father" in the same category, this conjunction has had a real historical impact. "God is a father" is a literal statement within the discourse.

(Camp 1993, page 33)
We've run up against the linguistic relativity hypothesis controversy again. If linguist Joseph Beaver is right that "grammar and attitudes have nothing to do with each other," then we're talking about nothing more than style and taste. If Benjamin Whorf was right, we're talking about something far more important. If, as Pinker would argue, all that's necessary to clarify matters for a woman who feels excluded from Judeo-Christian religious language is to point out to her that all those male terms are "generic," we have no problem; if Pinker is wrong, the problem is very serious.
Hymn-writer Brian Wren states it very well:

If our language about God is harmless, and has no effect on our thinking and behavior, then the fact that all our names and images of God are male is unimportant … On the other hand, if language powerfully shapes our thinking and behavior, then the maleness of God-language … becomes a crucial issue.

(Wren 1991, page 55)
Over the course of more than a quarter century of investigating religious language in American English, I've asked hundreds of churchgoing Christians—in privacy, and with my promise of complete confidentiality—what they really believe about God's gender. The response, a great deal of the time, has gone like this: "I know I'm supposed to believe that God doesn't have any gender, and that's what I always say—but really, I think God is male." In some cases the answer has ended with the astonishing "I think God is a man. Not a human man, of course—but a man." What does "a man, but not a human man" mean? I have no idea. I haven't had the opportunity to do this informal experiment with the Jewish or Islamic counterparts of these Christians, unfortunately; but if I had to guess, I'd guess that the results would be similar. I have had the opportunity to ask large numbers of people who claim to be nonreligious; when they don't fend me off with "I have no opinions about that, since it's all nonsense anyway," for the most part they agree that God is "really" male.
As this would predict, those who complain about the "generic masculine" in the English Bible, buttressed as it is by an endless proliferation of explicitly male terms like "Father" and "Lord" and "King" and "Son of God," meet with intense criticism from the public as well as from professionals in religion. Zondervan (a major American religious publisher) recently brought out a very mildly inclusive Bible. It used such rephrasings as "Child of God" rather than "Son of God" and "humankind" rather than "mankind"; it changed many singular verbs to plural so that the genderless "they" could be used instead of the gendered "he or "she." The result was such a firestorm of criticism that printing was hastily stopped, despite the financial loss for the publishing house.
It's one thing when such criticism comes from denominations which openly claim that God intends for women to be subordinate to men. That is at least in part a logically consistent position. I say "in part" because so long as Judeo-Christian theology insists that God has no sexual gender, it's illogical to choose any gender at all for language that refers to that God. You don't have to. It's possible to just say "God" everywhere, without any pronouns; the result is not always elegant, but it's entirely comprehensible—and entirely logical when everyone involved is insisting that the entity in question has no sexual gender. Here's an example:

Thus, when God's Spirit "hovers over" the "face" of the earth, we learn that God's relation to creation was an intimate, loving one as a mother hen protecting her chicks, a metaphor God when on earth will repeat.

(Spencer and Spencer 1998, page 23)
Ruether's "God is not male; He is spirit" could simply be "God is not male: God is spirit," and the contradiction would disappear. Even "Godself" for "Himself," if it were routinely used, would soon sound normal and ordinary. But doing that would mean deliberately changing existing religious texts, and the resistance to that—in the United States just as in the Arab nations—is very strong and deeply entrenched.
Ordinarily, individuals who insist that the religious language of Judeo-Christianity must not be changed—either by doing without pronouns for the divine or by making it "inclusive"—also insist that (a) they know very well that God has no sexual gender, and (b) they know very well that men and women are equal in God's sight and should also be equal in the sight of man (by which they of course claim to mean everyone, both male and female, and transgendered).
Suppose we assume that they do in fact believe exactly what they claim to believe. If so, it requires cognitive and linguistic gymnastics of the most intricate kind, and a consistent strategy of reframing, as in the recent very clever editorial by David Neff in Christianity Today which claimed that the argument has nothing to do with sexual gender anyway. Gender, he argues, is a red herring. His title is "The Great Translation Debate," and his claim is that the entire inclusive language argument is not about gender at all, but about how to be "most faithful to the ancient text" (Neff 1997, page 16). Or as stated bluntly by Grant R. Osborne in "Do Inclusive Language Bibles Distort Scripture? No," which opens with this sentence: "Whether or not to use inclusive language in Bible translation is not a gender issue but a matter of translation theory" (Osborne 1997, page 33). That may be true for scholars like Osborne, but for the ordinary person in America it is a gender issue.
We need to be aware that even those who are most severe in their insistence that the Bible's language be translated with utmost fidelity make exceptions in some cases. For example, there is Jeremiah 20:7. In the King James Bible it reads, "O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed; I am in derision daily, everyone mocketh me." The New King James has it as "O Lord, You induced me, and I was persuaded; You are stronger than I, and have prevailed. I am in derision daily; everyone mocks me." Scholar Abraham J. Herschel gives the literal meanings of the two verbs in question as "wrongfully inducing a woman to consent to prenuptial intercourse" and "violent forcing of a woman to submit to extranuptial intercourse." He offers the translation "O Lord, Thou has seduced me, and I am seduced; Thou hast raped me, and I am overcome." This would certainly make the clause about being mocked a good deal easier to understand. But even the liberal Jerusalem Bible, which starts out with "You have seduced me, Yah-weh, and I have let myself be seduced," isn't willing to go that far; it continues with "you have overpowered me; you were the stronger. I am a daily laughingstock." Faithful translation may be the professed goal, but when the result would have Jeremiah accusing the Deity of having raped him, the literalists back down. Clearly, there are limits to this professed goal of "being most faithful to the ancient text."
Here are three more examples of commentary about inclusive language, to show you how varied and ingenious they can be, and how impassioned:

Even if speakers/writers should self-consciously choose not to use the masculine pronouns for God, the fact remains that they are self-consciously choosing not to use them; they are intentionally deciding to go against internalized grammatical convention and the deep, unconscious habits of the society … Thus the practice of avoiding the masculine pronoun when talking about God will never become habitual and routine; such practice must and will remain at the level of self-aware rebellion.

(Hook and Kimel 1993, pp. 16-17)

While women, in their own fashion, may sin as much as men, it is the pride and willfulness and violence of men that most radically disrupts the world's peace and order. Feminist reformers may have no trouble in recognizing this fact, but they seem not to notice that breaking the arrogance and power of men requires a God who is, among other things, the Judge of Nations, the Lord of Hosts, the "King of glory … mighty in battle." … God's lordship is the only plausible check on the predatory tendencies of wicked men and nations, from Pharaoh to Haman to Hider.

(Berke 1996, page 35)

The most simple and compelling reason to reject gender-reimaging is that God, though not a man or a male, has used masculine terms in making His self-disclosure to humanity.

(Berke 1996, page 37)
The second Berke quotation, if taken seriously, would lead us straight to the isolationist position held by Arab speakers toward the Koran, in which the words in the religious texts are perceived as literally the words of God Godself. And how would we then carry on the evangelical practice of translating the Bible into the many human languages in which there are no masculine pronouns?
It might seem that all we'd have to do is make sure that a new pronoun, an exclusively masculine pronoun, is added to those languages that don't already have one. However, we have no reason to believe that that would be any easier to accomplish in other languages than it has been in English. There have been nearly 100 attempts in recent history to give English a gender-neutral third-person pronoun to avoid the constant "he or she" problems, and every single one of those attempts has failed. This is typical linguistic pathology; everybody, in their daily speech, uses "they" as a way out of the quandary; everybody, when talking about what is "correct," says it's wrong to use "they" to refer to just one person.
It's easy to add a new name-for-a-widget to a language; we do that for English almost every time something new is invented or discovered. It's also easy to make changes that do nothing but substitute one widget (as long as it's not a sacred Widget) for another. The English Bible says that marriage means a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. Bible translators Gene and Marie Scott translated that into Sharanhua as "For this reason a man shall have the same mosquito net as his wife"; the Sharanhua of Peru don't leave their parents' homes when they marry. (See Zoba 1997, "Your Sins Shall Be White as Yucca," for details.) This sort of thing has to be done all the time in translating the Bible. But adding a new pronoun to a language is different.
Pronouns carry powerful presuppositions about reality as the speakers of that language perceive it. It matters to English speakers whether something being spoken or written about is animate or inanimate, human or nonhuman, one or more than one, male or female or neither. Sentences that lack such information are totally unacceptable. Speakers of other languages are equally unable to imagine using pronouns that make distinctions differently—that divide up reality differently—than the way they're accustomed to doing it. Pronouns are one of our most powerful tools for specifying what things members of a culture must pay attention to, and there will always be strong resistance to their modification.
We're often told that all of this controversy is a tempest in a teapot because, since not one of us has ever perceived what we are trying to describe and discuss, all talk about the Holy One is by definition metaphorical. That's all very well in theory, but people don't understand beloved religious metaphors as "only figures of speech." Trained religious professionals such as clergy and monks and nuns may be able to ignore the symbol and worship only the Divine Reality behind it; very few ordinary people are able to do that. We may know intellectually that our Heavenly Father is an unimaginable disembodied genderless divine Something-or-other; but when we pray to that Heavenly Father the image in our minds and hearts is probably a very human-looking man, something like Abraham Lincoln or Paul Newman, or their equivalents in other ethnic groups.
We could easily test the hypothesis that speakers of American English really perceive the Christian God as having no sexual gender. We would only have to produce a new biblical movie in which God speaks from the burning bush—and the voice of God is neither Charlton Heston nor James Earl Jones but the voice of a woman. Diane Sawyer, perhaps, or Jessye Norman. We all know what would happen, however much we claim to understand and believe that God is genderless. The people in the audience would react with a shocked silence, perhaps a shocked gasp. And then, depending on how devout they were and what denomination they belonged to, they would either burst out laughing or stand up and march out of the theater in outrage.

Male … Female … and?

Other Metaphors in Religious Language

The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialized in the process of maturation.

(Wink 1998, page 53 )
I agree with Wink's statement; I would add only that the "boys especially" in question are for the most part brought up by women; little girls must therefore be socialized to be willing to participate in this process. By "redemptive" violence, Wink is referring to the concept that violence is acceptable, even admirable, when its goal is to accomplish good, as in just wars.
The strength of the Spiritual Warrior metaphor is growing daily, and it has spread from the domain of actual combat to the more pervasive domain of all competition. It used to specify only that the Warrior must win; now it is understood to demand that everybody else except the Warrior must lose. That is, there can be only one winner, and that winner must leave an empty battlefield behind. We saw this in the recent Olympic Games when the Nike ads at Atlanta said, "You don't win silver. You lose gold." And our young people, who've come into this semantic controversy late in the battle—or in the third quarter—and are not being taught the relevant history, have lost track of the principle of the just war. That principle stipulates that violence must always be the last resort, carried out with heartfelt regret because everything else has been tried and has failed, and no other action appears to be possible. The Warrior metaphor has brutalized our sports and is brutalizing our lives, and it is a religious language phenomenon.
The most extraordinary section in Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) is pages 563-564, where they claim that—having proved to their satisfaction that there cannot be a disembodied mind—they extrapolate from that to the claim that there cannot be a disembodied soul. That is, there cannot be a mind with an existence independent of the body; therefore, there cannot be a soul with an existence independent of the body. They do not even consider the possibility that a divine Creator would be abie to construct something—something which human beings could refer to as "the soul"—and give it characteristics so different from the mind that it would be entirely capable of independence from the body.
The greatest failing of the melting pot metaphor is that it overreaches. It exaggerates the degree to which immigrants' ethnicity is likely to be extinguished by exposure to American society and it exaggerates the need to extinguish ethnicity … Perhaps a new assimilation metaphor should be introduced—one that depends not on a mechanical process like the melting pot but on human dynamics. Assimilation might be viewed as more akin to religious conversion than anything else. In the terms of this metaphor, the immigrant is the convert, American society is the religious order being joined, and assimilation is the process by which the conversion takes place … Conversion is a mutual decision requiring affirmation by both the convert and the religious order he or she wishes to join. Converts are expected in most (but not all) cases to renounce their old religions. But converts do not have to change their behavior in any respects other than those that relate to the new religion. (Salins 1997, page 23; emphasis added)
That is, someone who has openly joined a Christian church in the United States must sit quietly and respectfully, without objecting, while a minister reads and preaches about turning the other cheek and following the Golden Rule, and even reads verses of the Bible commanding us not to charge interest and not to bring lawsuits—but once that person leaves the church, no one expects that the Shepherd will replace the Warrior in his or her life. Perhaps, if we treat assimilation like conversion, as long as those who assimilate observe all the rules of public life and public citizenship there's no reason in theory why they couldn't continue to maintain their ethnic heritage and their native language in the privacy of their homes. The assimilated multilingual individual would end up with a string of beads perhaps even less matched, even less a harmonious whole, than usual—but they would remain just one string of beads.
In theory, this sort of lip service model for assimilation is appealing; in religious life, it might even work. As always, the string of beads would have to be left at home when the multilingual went off to work.

A Final Note—Religion plus Music

So what's the solution? "Thoughtfully planned bilingualism" says Einar Haugen, a linguist … Haugen wants each of us to have a "native, homely, familiar everyday language in which we can live and love" as well as a second "language of wider communication" that will enable us to jet around the world.

(Vines 1996, page 27)

Remember Einar Haugen's proposal, mentioned previously on page 35? ***
Is Haugen right? Maybe. When the communication problems of a multilingual world are discussed, people often express agreement with him (or with some variation on his idea) and suggest that an obvious solution is staring us right in the face: Let's have a single language (traditionally called an "international auxiliary language," or IAL) that everyone would learn in early childhood, so that all human beings on this planet would have at least one shared medium for communication. What could be more logical, or more practical?
Suppose that, for purposes of discussing this idea, we call our hypothetical IAL "WorldSpeak." We'd need to call it something far less English and far more internationally neutral in form, and choosing the final name would have to be done with great care and attention, but WorldSpeak will do for our present purposes. The scenario that carries out this idea and makes WorldSpeak a genuine IAL—in two versions—is easily imagined.
In both versions, all children would acquire their native tongues in the usual way, along with whatever other language or languages were present as input in their language environment; this would involve no change from our present practice.
In both versions, all adults would know WorldSpeak, which would put an end to the need for translators and interpreters, either human or electronic, in every aspect of international interaction. Translation and interpreting would become activities done as art rather than as necessities. Monolingual persons would exist only in the increasingly rare circumstances of peoples truly cut off from modern education and technology. This would save huge amounts of time and money and effort, freeing up resources that could be used for other purposes. Not only because of the logistics-related savings, but also because we would have fewer of the expensive international misunderstandings that result from language differences. Professional translators and interpreters (other than literary translators), along with professionals involved in machine translation, would have to go through the sort of dislocation that occurs when any work role becomes obsolete in a society; they would find other ways to make their livings, in due time.

WorldSpeak Scenario A

WorldSpeak Scenario B

Which language is going to be the one that every human being will be expected to know?
The natural human reaction is an immediate "Well, my language, of course!" but we are well aware that it's not that easy. There are only two possible answers:

• We choose some existing natural language and see that every educated person knows it, in the way that every educated European person was once expected to know Latin.
• We choose a language that's not a natural language but has been constructed (often for the purpose of serving as an IAL, in the way Esperanto was intended by its designer). We could pick one of the hundreds of such languages that have already been proposed, or we could construct a new one (in which case one can only hope that linguists would be consulted).

Choosing an Existing Natural Language as the IAL

A national variety of English is a form or dialect of English which has a national distribution. It is acknowledged to be the form of English identified with the particular nation, having developed features which distinguish it from other varieties of English as a consequence of its separate history, geographical location and cultural context.

Standard English should be defined as that accepted form of English which occurs in prestigious English-language newspapers, publishing and broadcasting in the specified country.
Separate history? Separate cultural context? A standard based on "prestigious" media output in "the specified country," never mind how English might be used in the New York Times? Oops!
It doesn't help matters that we have no accepted definition of Standard English that could be proposed as an international standard. Existing definitions are of two kinds. In one group you'll find a multitude of safely vacuous variations on "Standard English is the language used by educated people." (That is, "We know Standard English when we see it or hear it.") The other group contains dangerously specific definitions that betray the ongoing public ignorance of basic linguistic facts, a situation for which the public can't be blamed but which desperately needs repair. Consider, for example, this definition from the state of Virginia's House Bill No. 2437, passed not in 1900 but in 1997, with emphasis added by me:

Standard English includes the written and spoken language which is accepted by generally recognized authorities as grammatically correct in the United States and shall not include any dialect, jargon, patois or vernacular based on the English language.
Given this state of affairs, it's reasonable to wonder what will become of English as it spreads like some variety of linguistic kudzu into every corner of Earth; but that's something that we know, from experience, cannot be predicted. It's impossible to keep a living language from changing, although that won't keep the governments of Earth from trying.
Something of this kind perhaps happened at that point in the mists of prehistory when everyone in the known world spoke a single language—let's call it Ur. Although there were no media, prestigious or otherwise, there were surely standards. We can imagine one Early Human sneering at another's inferior way of speaking Ur. And then millennia went by, and instead of Ur there were French and Albanian and Chinese and Basque and English and Mohawk. But our world is not the world that Early Humans knew. In a world that has satellite television and the Internet, and telephones that will work in the middle of the most barren desert, human beings who are separated by geography are no longer isolated from one another linguistically. Only a planetwide catastrophe that restored prehistorical conditions could once again make it even remotely possible for words to change gradually over time, in isolation, to such an extent that only highly trained specialists in historical linguistics would be able to tell that they had ever been the same. What happened to Ur (or conceivably to several "Urs") could not happen to International English.
Well, then, can we say that the whole issue of IALs is now moot? Is it settled that WorldSpeak will be some impossible-to-predict form of English? Should those of us lucky enough to already know one or more varieties of English just relax and be grateful that we happened to be born into an English-speaking language environment?
Nobody knows. The Englishing of Earth is something like the global warming of Earth. It may be happening; some experts say so. It may already be an accomplished fact; it may be too late to stop it; some experts say so. In which case, instead of passing laws to protect English we should be doing our utmost to protect our remaining store of other languages! We know from the biological sciences how dangerous it is to reduce any pool of existing varieties to just one. Nothing we know in linguistic science gives us reason to believe that it would be any less dangerous for the world's language "gene pool" to be reduced to only English, even with a multitude of dialects.
Furthermore, before native speakers of English jump to any conclusions, they would be wise to ask native speakers of other languages how they feel about the idea that English should be the lingua franca (which meant "French language") for today's human race. And then they would be wise to back off a good long distance to spare their ears after asking. Many peoples in this world—perhaps almost all—deeply resent the idea that they should sit back and allow all international commerce and science and diplomacy, all international communication, to be conducted in English. A recent attempt by an Internet service to require all communication about soccer to be in English—a very small area of Earthly communication—provoked so passionately negative and furious a response that it was hastily canceled. Even nations whose dominant language is English are fighting to keep their own brand from going under; the Sydney Morning Herald for August 14,1997, reported that a group of Australian researchers have "produced an Australian weapon to fight … American linguistic imperialism," in the form of a dictionary of Australian words and phrases to be substituted for American linguistic imports (Jopson 1997).
Consider the program now being proposed by the foremost linguist of France, Claude Hagege, in his 1996 book L'Enfant aux Deux Langues. H. Stephen Straight (reviewing the book in the March 1998 issue of Language) says on page 140 that Hagege "openly addresses what may well be the most pressing question of educational policy today: how to prepare French schoolchildren—and by extension schoolchildren across Europe and around the world—for the multilingualism that will pervade the 21st century" (Straight 1998, page 140; emphasis added). And then, to the question of which languages should be taught in French elementary schools:

Hagege heart-stoppingly responds—if I may coin an acronym—ABE, Anything But English. The world-wide popularity of English threatens to divert French school-children from the task of developing proficiencies in the many other languages of the European community and of the world.

(Straight 1998, page 140)
Anything but English! It would fit nicely on a bumper sticker or a coffee mug, and it contrasts nicely with English Only. Hagege's proposal is that the French elementary schools offer German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and (for speakers of minority languages in France) French, followed in high school by two additional languages. The goal is that each French youngster would know four languages: the native tongue, two additional European languages learned in early childhood, and one other language learned in adolescence. Only at the high school level would English be one of the possible choices, and even then it would have to compete with Russian, Arabic, Hungarian, Swahili, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and more. Hagege perceives this project as an urgently necessary measure for preventing the global linguistic takeover of English. It's quite clear; speakers of other languages may not be able to prevent it—it may be too late to stop the English juggernaut—but they resent it from the bottom of their hearts.
The fact that English appears to be the easiest solution to the problem of global Babel doesn't mean that it is necessarily the best solution. Perhaps a serious effort ought to be made to call it off. Native speakers of English, because they suffer from the same native-language bias as any other human beings, are the last group who should sit in judgment here. We have to ask ourselves: "What if my native language were Gaelic? Or Arapaho? Or Maori? How pleased would I be with English as an IAL?"
Innocent though we native speakers of English may be personally of any interference in the affairs of other nations and nationals, the political facts are real and have to be faced: For most of the world, English is the Superpower Language. It is the ultimate "colonial" language. It's the language of the Ugly American and the Snobbish Brit. It's the language callously imposed on the downtrodden immigrant or subjugated indigenous population. For the sake of peace in the world, perhaps we should set aside our natural preference and our gut feelings and consider other alternatives.
The first "other alternative" is that we should choose some other existing natural language instead of English. But how do we do that? Many, if not all, nations would insist that their language should be the one chosen, and would offer a strong case. The French would point to their literature, their history, the tradition of French as a lingua franca, and the fact that French uses the Roman alphabet; other European nations would present similar arguments. The Japanese (and other Asian nations) would point to their own proud literary tradition, their history, their position in the world, and the fact that their writing system does not carry the stigma of Western colonialism as the Roman alphabet does. The Hopi (and many other Native American nations and indigenous peoples around the world) would insist that it is precisely the apparent difference between their language and the more commonly used languages, not to mention the absence of a recent history of conquest, that would make Hopi the ideal choice.
And so it would go, with all this passionate wrangling being carried on through translators and interpreters. It's not a prospect that gives one hope, and it's the sort of thing that has led to wars in humanity's history. Perhaps we should abandon the idea of an existing natural language as IAL altogether. Which would bring us to—

Choosing a Constructed Language (Existing or New) as the IAL

There is clearly a very strong species-specific language instinct, or what Chomsky would call a language acquisition device, a LAD. But equally one needs a LASS, as Jerry Brunerputs it, which is a language support system; people who speak language and who encourage the use of language, and so forth.

(Oliver Sacks, quoted in Mcintyre 1995, page 95)
Well, yes—but then, on the other hand, no!
I agree with Dr. Sacks that both a LAD and a LASS are needed for the acquisition of language, but he's much braver than I am. Even for that very limited claim—that language learning requires both nature and nurture—I would hesitate to use the word "clearly," because almost nothing in the current literature on this subject can be considered clear. Even when the statements seem to be uncontroversial, they still cannot accurately be described as "clear."
In fact, any prudent individual writing on "language and the brain" today finds the abundant deniability resources of English extremely seductive. The temptation is to write everything in Hyper-deniability Mode, something like this:

Numerous hypotheses have been put forward, and a variety of proposals have been made. It has been claimed that X, but that has been contradicted forcibly by the claim that Y and the evidence for Z. No final decision among these competing and contradictory theories appears to be possible at this time. [Blah, blah, blah … ] What is said below, therefore, should not be construed as constituting the taking of a position of any kind.
English allows me to do this. You'll notice that it even allows me to avoid admitting that I am the one who insists on remaining free to deny that I've said what I am about to say. I'm tempted, but I'm not going to do it that way. The buck will stop here, but with two preliminary warnings.
First: I have never dissected a single brain, and I could not interpret a brain scan even at gunpoint; I cannot, therefore, speak or write with personal authority about human brains in neurophysiological terms.
Second: When we hear or read anything about the human brain any less concrete than a specification of its physical weight and size—and when we read anything whatsoever about the human mind—that information must be taken with a large grain of salt. When something of that kind strikes you as plausible, the rational course is to assume that it's valid as a metaphor and use the metaphor for whatever it turns out to be worth—but leap to no other conclusions without solid supporting evidence. Lakoff and Johnson tell us in Philosophy in the Flesh that there's no way to even talk about the mind, or the mind as "part of the brain," except in metaphors.

Independent of these metaphors, we have no conception of how the mind works. Even the notion works derives from the Mind As Machine metaphor.

(Lakoff and Johnson 1999, page 248)
With those two warnings in place, I will do my best to sort out the troublesome issues and make clear what the questions are and why there is so much confusion. This badly needs doing. Nonspecialists who are interested in "language and the brain" today can buy and read half a dozen fat books, all current, all by qualified experts, only to find that each one says all the others are wrong and offers interminable arguments to that effect. I had a student in a linguistics course once whose major was engineering; a few weeks into the course, tried past endurance, he shouted, "If engineers did engineering the way you linguists do linguistics, every bridge in America would fall down!" He was probably right.
We try hard, I must point out. The subject of linguists' scientific investigation is nothing like chemicals or rocks or beetles, items that can be measured and weighed and poked at. It's not like planets and stars, items that in spite of being enormously inconvenient for human investigation can nevertheless be examined with sufficiently powerful telescopes and probes and the like. Rather, it is located somewhere—or perhaps somewhen, and more probably both—in the human brain and/or mind. If Karl Pribram's model of the brain as a hologram is correct, it is perhaps located everywhere—and everywhen—in the human brain and/or mind. Our access to the brain is very limited; as for access to the mind, we don't know where the mind is, or even whether it makes any sense to talk about it as having a location. Nevertheless, we linguists press on, determined to do our work as science rather than as speculation, and we should get credit for that.
In the context of this chapter, we're looking for answers to many questions; the six below represent what seems to me to be the barest minimum.

1. How is a single native language learned? What goes on in the brain and mind?
2. How does the learning of an additional native language or languages take place? What goes on in the brain and mind?
3. How does the learning of one or more additional languages—not as native tongues but as foreign ones—take place? What goes on in the brain and mind?

4. What physiological effect(s) and psychological effect(s) do these learning processes have on the brain and mind?
5. Is the answer to #4 different for monolingual versus multilingual persons?
6. Is there some separate language "faculty" or "organ" that is responsible for all this?

Overview

1. Discovered which order is most basic in the language (or languages) they're hearing and observing around them.
2. Strengthened the "on" position for that switch by repeatedly activating the neurons and neuronal connections that are responsible for it.
3. Allowed the other switches to decay (metaphorically speaking, moved them to the "off" position) by failing to activate the neurons and neuronal connections responsible for them.

CHILD: Doggie hungry!
ADULT: Right! The doggie is hungry!
CHILD: Doggie want lunch!
ADULT: Yes, the dog wants its lunch!
CHILD: Mama feed doggie!
ADULT: You think it's time for Mama to feed the dog.
(And so on.)
Much emphasis has been put on the importance of Motherese in the popular press lately. It has even been used—misused—in stories claiming that children in day care facilities will be held back in life because they don't have their mothers doing this sort of thing at them all day long. There are many cultures (and families), however, in which adults rarely speak to infants and small children, and where Motherese would be viewed as an absurd way to deal with kids; nevertheless, children in those environments learn to speak their native languages just like children elsewhere. It's fashionable to insist that learning can't take place without active practice and participation by the learner; it's fashionable, but it's wrong. Much learning can take place passively, with the learner paying very close attention but taking no overt action. In cultures where this is the favored method, people routinely observe a skill in use for long periods of time, and then one day simply begin using it themselves, competently.
In a perfect world, human children from the very first day of their lives would have abundant language input from the adults around them—whether that input came from family members or from other caregivers, either of whom would serve the purpose. Few actions are more likely to help youngsters grow up to be successful and happy adults in our society than providing them with abundant opportunities to practice the skills needed for human language interactions of every kind. This gives kids an extra advantage in today's technological world, where efficient and effective communication of information has become the single most valuable skill. However, we have plenty of evidence that children are perfectly capable of acquiring their native languages without that sort of treatment and attention. They must have exposure to language data; but it doesn't have to be abundant, it doesn't have to include the "Motherese" material, and the data don't even have to be very good.
As stated elsewhere in this book, it was once taken for granted that children who acquired more than one language natively would have somewhat slower language development overall, sometimes coupled with temporary problems related to language in the early school years—but this has been proved to be false. Multilingual children, like any other children, can experience problems at school as a result of all sorts of factors, but there's no cause-and-effect relationship between those problems and multilingualism itself.
We've now come to the end of those things that we can be reasonably certain about, and are moving into areas where we are still only able to speculate. Such as: What happens inside the brain and mind when a native language—or more than one native language—is learned? What happens to the brain and mind? How is that different from what happens when languages are learned later in life, with varying degrees of fluency but not natively? How much do we actually know about such things?
We know very little, and what we know is based on tenuous evidence, often evidence gathered from people whose brains were very different from normal brains due to illness or injury. Reports about brain research appear regularly in the media because brain research is perceived as "sexy." Unfortunately, such reports tend to do little more than increase the general confusion, which is why many scientists behave in a way that gets them accused of being elitists determined to keep their knowledge away from the public.
Well, that's approximately what happened.
Let's look at a recent sequence of research relevant to our discussion in this chapter, and some media reports on that research. Here's a portion of a news release that appeared on the Internet in the summer of 1997 (with emphasis added by me):

In a study that sheds new light on how the brain organizes language, researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center report in the July 10 issue of the British journal Nature that the organization of the brain's language-production region in bilingual individuals is directly related to whether they learned a second language as toddlers (simultaneously with their native language) or as young adults … " A second language acquired during the teenage years, which is late in developmental life, is represented in the brain in a separate location from the native language," explains senior author Joy Hirsch, PhD.
The Wall Street Journal ran a story about this study in its July 10, 1997, issue, written by science reporter Ron Winslow and titled "How Language Is Stored in Brain Depends on Age."
"Toddlers who learn a second language along with their native tongue," Winslow wrote, "store this capability in a single sector in the brain, the researchers discovered. But if the second language is acquired later … the brain designates a separate area for processing it." The New York Times, on July 15, ran a story by Sandra Blakeslee headlined "When an Adult Adds a Language, It's One Brain, Two Systems," reporting that "a new study has found that second languages are stored differently in the human brain depending on when they are learned."
The impression that even careful readers would get from the news release and the two newspaper stories is that in the current stage of knowledge about language and the brain we are able to think of the brain as if it were a cupboard, and that we know where languages are "stored" in that cupboard. We can visualize it: Here's the spot on the shelf where little Mary stashed the English and Turkish she learned before the age of three in her multilingual household; here are the two different spots on the shelves where Johnny stashed first the English he learned as an infant and then the Turkish he learned when his family moved to Turkey after he turned sixteen. Scientists can, figuratively speaking, go to those cupboards, open their doors, and poke at the stored languages. The news reports even identify locations for us, referring to "Broca's area" and "Wernicke's area." It's all very impressive, and confidence-inspiring. We know so much! Surely, if we want to know more, we just have to go check it out.
The problem is that the news stories—from a distinguished medical facility and two distinguished newspapers—are misleading. We can reasonably assume that the researchers involved have been tearing their hair out in frustration over these accounts.
Here's what actually happened.
Sloan-Kettering had twelve bilingual patients—six who had learned both languages as toddlers, and six who had learned a second language as teenagers—scheduled for brain surgery. All had to undergo fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans. The fMRIs, which allow you to see what parts of the brain are active by tracking the flow of blood to various locations, are done to provide the surgeons with individualized brain mapping; this increases the doctors' chances of carrying out surgery without damaging the parts of the brain most responsible for particular functions in that patient. Graduate student Karl Kim, Dr. Hirsch, and their associates asked the twelve patients to talk to themselves silently during the fMRIs about things they had done the day before, first in one of their languages and then in the other. (Talking aloud would have interfered with the fMRI procedure.) The scans were then compared, with particular attention to the two locations in the brain known as Broca's area and Wernicke's area, both of which are known to be involved in language processing.
For all twelve patients, activity in Wernicke's area showed no differences, but there was an interesting difference in the amount of activation in Broca's area. The six patients who learned both languages at the same time in infancy all showed increased activation of just one region in Broca's area. In the six who had learned one language in infancy and the other language in their teens, two separate regions in Broca's area showed activation. In addition, evidence obtained through other Sloan-Kettering patients who weren't involved in this specific study supports the idea that for each additional language learned in the teenage years or adulthood, a separate region in Broca's area would be activated in this same fashion.
That's what happened. Now, what does it tell us? First I need to mention some facts that the news stories didn't bother with or simply trampled into the ground:

1. Twelve research subjects make a very small study. It's typical of brain research that only a handful of subjects are involved, for the obvious reason that getting access to human brains is difficult and expensive. In this study there was the serendipitous fact that the fMRIs had to be done anyway for medical reasons, and the research task was one that could be done at the same time without creating problems. In most areas of human research, studies involving only six to twenty subjects wouldn't be looked at as remotely respectable. An exception is made for brain studies; but brain researchers are well aware, when publishing results based on twenty brains, that if they had been able to get access to twenty-one or twenty-two they might have found something entirely different.
2. Talking to yourself silently, in your mind, is not identical to talking out loud. It's called "covert subvocalization," and we can't be certain that conclusions based on covert subvocalization can be extended to ordinary spoken language.
3. Broca's area is described, in the news stories and elsewhere, as devoted to speech production and grammar. (Wernicke's area is usually described as devoted to interpreting the meaning of language.) But Broca's area—the area where the difference was found—is also deeply involved in controlling motor activities that are part of language. Wendy K.Wilkins and Jennie Wakefield (1995, page 170) write that Broca's area is specialized for "the hierarchical structuring of information in a format consistent with a temporally ordered linear sequence reflective of that structure," which, translated, is the outlining of information. Nothing that we know about Broca's area leads to the conclusion that languages are "stored" there. We don't know with certainty that the idea of language "storage" has any validity. How the media got this "storage" idea I can't say; presumably something one of the researchers said during an interview—in an attempt to explain specialized information to nonspecialists—was misinterpreted, and the misinterpretation was then shared and passed on to the public.

Language and the Brain

The Questionnaire

Instructions

Suzette Haden Elgin

Identifying Information, for My Records and for Analyzing the Data

1. Please give me your name, mailing address, e-mail address, and phone number. (Your addresses and phone numbers will be kept confidential.)
2. How old are you?
3. What is your level of education? (Elementary school, high school, college, graduate school, trade school, etc.
4. Please list any degrees or training certificates that you have received.
5. What kind of work do you do?
6. Do you have any special linguistic qualifications? That is, are you a translator or interpreter, a foreign language teacher, a speech therapist, or anything of that kind? Do you have any language disability? Please explain.

Information About Your Languages

1. What is the language that you learned first?
2. What is your second language? How old were you when you learned it?
3. Please list any other languages you know, with the age that each was learned.
4. Which language do you consider to be your native language? (If more than one, please list all of them.)
5. Which language do you consider to be your second language?
6. Please list all languages that you speak comfortably. If you have studied any of them formally—that is, taken classes in them or studied them on your own—please indicate that for me.
7. What languages do you understand easily? (Please indicate any in which you've taken classes or have studied on your own.)
8. What languages do you read easily? (If you've studied them, please indicate that.)
9. What languages do you write easily? (If you've studied them, please indicate that.)
10. Are there other languages that you can "get by" in or have knowledge of? Please list them and explain.
11. When you use any of the languages, do you feel like you are a DIFFERENT PERSON than when you use your native language? If so, could you tell me a little about that?
12. Are there situations in which—even if everyone present knows both or all of the languages—you prefer to use one language rather than another? If so, please explain.
13. Are there situations in which—even if everyone present knows both or all of the languages—you prefer NOT to use a particular language? If so, please explain.
14. Which language or languages do you use at home?
15. Which language or languages do you use at work?
16. Which language or languages do you use socially?
17. Is there a language you use for other purposes? Please explain.
18. What language or languages would you like for your children to learn? Why? (If you don't have children, please answer as you would if you did.)
19. Is there a language you'd rather your children did NOT learn? Why? (If you don't have children, please answer as you would if you did have them.)
20. Are there any languages that you once knew, but have now forgotten? Can you tell me a little about that?
21. Is there anything else you'd like to add about your languages, your feelings about languages, or any related subject?

23. I am especially interested in metaphorical differences between languages for a number of key areas, both when expressed overtly as metaphor (like English "to pass away" for "to die") and when the metaphor is the literal meaning of the word (as with English "breakfast" for the first meal after the night's fasting). For this purpose, I would be very interested in knowing what words and/or phrases your languages (other than English) use for any or all of the following: to have (or get) an abortion; to die; to be born; to get sick; to be well/healthy; to make a piece of art (or create art); to set up a government; to sin; to get angry; to fall in love; the law of gravity; energy; science.
24. I am also exploring the differences in what are called "unifying metaphors" in bilingual/multilingual speakers and contexts. For example, American English speakers can get almost any project under way by saying, forcefully, "Wagons—HO!" which brings up in consciousness the metaphor of wagon trains setting off across the plains, etc. I would like two pieces of information. First, can you identify a comparable unifying metaphor in your other language or languages? Second, do you feel that any one of the set of such metaphors you use is more powerful and compelling than the other(s)?*

The Respondents

1. Abichaker, Toufic; Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Italian, German
2. Anderson, Myrdene; English, Norwegian, Saami
3. Andruski, Jean; English, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Russian
4. Anonymous; Sesotho, English, Zulu, Afrikaans
5. Anonymous; eight fluent languages—requested that I not list them because the distinctive nature of the set would betray identity
6. Anonymous; English, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese
7. Anonymous; Latvian, English, French
8. Anonymous; English, Spanish
9. Anonymous; Spanish, English
10. Anonymous; German, French, English
11. Anzali, Soheila; Azerbaijani, Farsi, German, English, Turkish
12. Arouca, Karen; Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian
13. Aylward, Renata; English, Spanish
14. Bauer, Laurie; English, French, Danish, German
15. Bemore, Caroline; Navajo, English
16. Blalock, Lucy Parks; Lenape, English
17. Boihang, Lesedi; Setswana, Xhosa, Zulu, English, Afrikaans
18. Boon, Glendia M.; American Sign Language, English
19. Bregman, L. D.; English, Afrikaans
20. Brewer, Keri; English, American Sign Language
21. Brodine, Ruey; English, Italian
22. Brown, Gordon; English, French, Swedish, Spanish, German
23. Browne, E. Wayles; English, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Polish, Slovenian
24. Combon, Marlis; German, Spanish, Italian, English, French
25. Chiarenza, Anna Caterina; Italian, German, English
26. Chomphosy, Bounlieng; Lao, Thai, English
27. Chong, Steve; Cantonese, English, Malay
28. Chung, Karen Steffen; English, German, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese
29. Cook, Diana; English, French, Spanish
30. Cyr, Danielle E.; Quebec French, English, Swedish, Italian, German
31. Mark de Clark; English, Afrikaans, Zulu
32. Derzhanski, Ivan A.; Bulgarian, Russian, English, Hungarian, German, French, Italian, Spanish
33. Dorian, Nancy Currier; English, German, French, Scottish Gaelic (East Sutherland variety)
34. Doty, Margaret Ann; English, Italian, German
35. Eck, Karen; English, French
36. Eikamp, Rhonda; English, German
37. Eldredge, Linda G.; English; Signed English for the Deaf; American Sign Language
38. Eroz, Betil; Turkish, English
39. Estival, Dominique; French, English
40. Faris, Michael A.; English, Polish, Polish Sign Language
41. Fidelholtz, James L; English, Spanish, German, Polish
42. Frishberg, Nancy; English, American Sign Language
43. Furiye, Atsushi; Japanese, English
44. Gladstone, Kate; English, Hebrew, French, German, Russian
45. Gluckman, T. J.; English, German, French
46. Gonzalez, Luis Alberto; Spanish, English
47. Gregory, George Ann; English, Spanish, Choctaw
48. Gu, Peter Yongqi; Mandarin Chinese, English, Hebei Chinese
49. Halford, Richard; English, Afrikaans
50. Haraghey, Marjolijn; Dutch, English, German, Afrikaans, French
51. Hardman, M.J.; English, Spanish, Jaqaru, Aymara
52. Herrarte, Caroline; English, Spanish
53. Herzfeld, Anita; Spanish, English, German
54. Hilgendorf, Suzanne K.; English, German
55. Iturrizaga, Dimas Bautista; Jaqaru, Spanish, English
56. Joergensen, Mikala; Danish, English, German, French
57. Julian, Jane; English, Hebrew
58. Kaspy, Lior; Hebrew, English, Arabic
59. Kernberger, Carolyn; English, Spanish
60. Khoza, Zangie; Tsonga, Swazi, English
61. Kirchner, James; English, Czech, German
62. Kondo, Chikako; Japanese, English
63. Kronenberg, Kenneth; English, German
64. Langent, Moeketsi; Sesotho, English, Afrikaans
65. Lattey, Elsa; German, English, Spanish
66. Lenstrup, Marie; Danish, English, German, Swedish, Norwegian
67. Li, Wen-Chao; Mandarin Chinese, English
68. Llanes, Jose R.; Spanish/English
69. Luk, Ching Man; Cantonese, English
70. Maduell, Mariana; English, Spanish, Italian
71. Maesfranckx, Patricia; Dutch, English, German, Swedish, French
72. Mahdi, Waruno; Indonesian, English, German, Russian, Dutch
73. Mamathuba, Elelwani Charity; Venda, English, Afrikaans'
74. Martinez, Alejandro G.; Spanish, English
75. Mclntire, Marina L.; English, American Sign Language
76. Meynard, Yves; French, English
77. Mohamed, Rahima; English, Afrikaans
78. Morrison, Dave; English, American Sign Language
79. Murphy, Linda; English, French
80. O Se, Gavin; English, German, French, Irish
81. Palmer, Chris; English, French, German ,
82. Parkman, Victoria; Russian, Ukrainian, English
83. Pateris, Lehtla; Latvian, Russian, German, English
84. Pomerantz, Ori; Hebrew, English
85. Rasmussen, Allysse Suzanne; English, Spanish, American Sign Language
86. Rebsch, Debby; German, English
87. Reighard, John; English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish
88. Resende, Rosana; Portuguese, Spanish, English
89. Robertson, Michael; English, Italian
90. Rose, Alex; English, French
91. Schaufele, Steven; English, French, German, Italian
92. Schober, George; English, German
93. Seek, Maguette; Wolof, French, English
94. Siley, Delphine; French, English
95. Sosa, Juan Manuel; Spanish, French, English, Portugeuse
96. Sotello, Susana; Spanish, English
97. Stallings, Fran; English, Japanese
98. Stenson, Nancy; English, Irish, French
99. Swan, Pamela; Japanese, English, Spanish
100. Troen, Carol R.; English, Hebrew, French
101. Trudel, Jean-Louis; French, English
102. True, Sean; English, Spanish
103. Umans, Meg; English, Spanish, German, French
104. van der Goot, Auke; Frisian, Dutch, English, French, German
105. van Wyk, Karin; English, Afrikaans
106. Verspoor, Cornelia M.; English, Dutch, French
107. Vlijm, Chantal; Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish
108. Vonarburg, Elisabeth; French, English
109. Walling, Espy Rodriguez; Spanish, English, French
110. Whiteley, Colin; English, Spanish, French, German, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian
111. Wilson, Mark A.; English, German
112. Yamamoto, Masayo; Japanese, English
113. Yanjin, Yao; Chinese (Mandarin and Shanghai), English
114. Zeviar, Churyl; English, French, American Sign Language
115. Zoeppritz, Magdalena; German, English, French

The Languages of Respondents

Books

Aitchison, J. 1998. The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, 4th ed. New York: Routledge.

Asher, R. E., ed. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Auer, P., ed. 1998. Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity. New York: Routledge.

Bain, B. 1996. Pathways to the Peak of Mount Piaget and Vygotsky: Speaking and Cognizing Monolingually and Bilingually. Rome: Bulzoni Editore.

Beinfield, H., and E. Korngold. 1991. Between Heaven And Earth: A Guide to Chinese Medicine. New York: Ballantine Books.

Berube, M. 1996. Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. New York: Pantheon Books.

Bodmer, F. 1944. The Loom of Language. (Edited by L. Hogben.) New York: W. W. Norton.

Bolinger, D. 1972. Intonation. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Cantoni, G., ed. 1996. Stabilizing Indigenous Languages. Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University. [A Center for Excellence in Education monograph.]

Carson, D. A. 1998. The Inclusive-Language Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

Cherry, K. 1987. Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women. New York: Kodansha America.

Claiborne, R. 1983. Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language. New York: Times Books.

Cook, V., and M. Newson. 1996. Chomsky's Universal Grammar, 2nd ed. London: Blackwell Publishers.

Crawford, J. 1992. Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of English Only. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Crystal, D. 1992. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages. London: Penguin Books.

_____. 1994. Dictionary of Language and Languages. New York: Penguin.

_____. 1998. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

_____. 1998. English as a Global Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Edwards, J. 1995. Multilingualism. London and New York: Routledge.

Ekman, P. 1985. Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. New York: W. W. Norton.

Elgin, S. H. 1984. Native Tongue. New York: DAW Books. (And forthcoming from Feminist Press, New York, in October 2000.)

_____. 1987. Native Tongue II: The Judas Rose. New York: DAW Books.

_____. 1988. A First Grammar and Dictionary of Laadan. Madison, WI: Society for the Furtherance of Fantasy and Science Fiction (SF3).

_____. 1993. Genderspeak: Men, Women, and the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. New York: Wiley.

_____. 1994. Native Tongue III: Earthsong. New York: DAW Books.

_____. 1996. How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable. New York: Wiley.

_____. 1997. How to Turn the Other Cheek and Still Survive in Today's World. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.

Ferre, F. 1961. Language, Logic, and God. New York: Harper and Row.

Festinger, L. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.

Frantzis, B. K. 1993. Opening the Energy Gates of the Body. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Friedrich, P. 1986. The Language Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Gannon, M. J. 1994. Understanding Global Cultures: Metaphorical Journeys Through 17 Countries. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gill, S. and I. Sullivan, 1992. Dictionary of Native American Mythology. New York: Oup.

Grimes, B. F. 1992. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 12th ed. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Grosjean, F. 1982. Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingual-ism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hagege, C. 1996. L'enfant aux deux langues. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob.

Hakuta, K. 1986. Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism. New York: Basic Books.

Hall, E. T. 1959. The Silent Language. New York: Doubleday/Anchor.

_____. 1969. The Hidden Dimension. New York: Doubleday/Anchor.

_____. 1977. Beyond Culture. New York: Doubleday/Anchor.

_____. 1984. The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time. New York: Doubleday/Anchor.

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