By Dr Laila Alghalban
How do you feel when you hear or read the term ‘linguistics’, or meet a linguist? Probably, you are not feeling so much excited. You know why? That is because language, the core thing that makes us human, is taken for granted. The common mental image of a linguist is someone who is very fascinated with, or even stuck in, dull, dry academic studies of sacred grammatical rules, speech sounds, word formation, punctuation, etc.
Unfortunately, many people, including academicians, think about language study this way. This masks the mind-blowing nature of human language, the incredible achievements of linguistics in deciphering the puzzles of language faculty and the interdisciplinary work linguists are doing with scientists of almost all fields. It also masks the fact that we have innate, yet unconscious, interest in language.
The ‘mental linguist’ in every one of us
In every one of us, there is a ‘mental linguist’ whose innate, unconscious linguistic knowledge, in grammar only, could run to volumes and volumes! Think about how your brain parses words and gives each one of them a certain grammatical function in a given sentence.
Think about your lexical, semantic and phonological knowledge! Think about your language policing practices. Think about the attitudes you develop towards certain people based on their accents, dialects and languages. Think about why you watch your words when you talk about issues such as diseases, death, sex, gender, race, etc.
Think about how people feel when they are denied the right of speaking the language of their parents. Hasn’t it crossed your
mind how linguistics and artificial intelligence technology work together to develop machine translation, voice recognition and voice-text software? Of course it has. These are just a few things that illuminates our hidden passion for language. Linguistics is not language.
Blah blah blah!
The passion for understanding language has steered me as early as I was a preschool child. I realised that every time I got to nearby shops to buy stuff for mom. On my way, I used to stop to watch how grown-ups talk to one another; that was an amazing hook at the time.
Iwould listen and listen and listen, and all what I could understand were a couple of formulaic structures, usually greetings and goodbyes, no more, or less, just blah blah blah! The rest never made sense to me, a sheer disappointing outcome. Linguistics resolves this puzzle for me, along with many others, about language acquisition and the maturation order in one’s linguistic repertoire. I did not understand their speech because language processing is the result of an incredible mix of two mechanisms.
If a match happens, we understand, if not, we do not. Thus, adult speech was blah blah because I did not have a mental copy
of their speech in my head to match with, as my language development was in progress then. This is similar to listening to a foreign language.
It sounds like mere noise in the absence of background knowledge or previous experience with the language, which could create mental models for its sounds, words, or grammar.
Language variation
Another reason that really attracted me to language at this early age was the language of my uncle; it teemed with
striking vocabulary and structures not found in my parents’.
Later on, I came to understand that this is language variation, and it results from the variation in education background, occupation, gender, age and every individual’s social networks. I also made a connection between people’s dialect and social acceptability.
In search of the right grammatical gender
A third situation was when I tried to find a masculine form of the word qunbila ‘bomb’ to describe one of our male relatives. I did not know at the time that searching for a masculine form to describe a male noun is motivated by our innate and intuitive grammatical knowledge. Unfortunately, I did not find it, and ever since I have been intrigued by the heavily-gendered languages. In the same vine, it has been an exceptionally provocative thing to notice how male singers address women with male forms in Egyptian love songs.
Bass and Falsetto
The fourth situation was really fascinating. My parents used to have a special attachment to the radio; it was their additional
sense to the world. Their favourite Al Qur’an Al Karim (Holy Qur’an) station was on, most of the time. What intrigued me was the incredible voice pitch shifts Qur’an reciters make, especially between bass, the low pitch, and falsetto, the high pitch. At the time, I did not realise that these are possible shifts within the pitch range of every reciter. Interestingly, I thought that there were two reciters: one reading aloud in high pitch and the second in a low, deep pitch. Ever since I have cultivated a special interest in vocal variations, voice types, rhythm, intonation, etc.
The love that runs deep
Finally, language love is inherent in us and every one can recount incidents and situations that give a glimpse into how this love impressively runs deep.
Dr Laila Alghalban
Professor of Linguistics
Faculty of Arts, Kafr el-Sheikh University
Email: [email protected]
