“Language is flimsy, but sometimes it is all you have:” - if language is flimsy, it will by no means be homogenized.
If English expands, will humanity be homogenized? A quandary over a global language
“Language is flimsy, but sometimes it is all you have:”
Open Waters - Caleb Azumah
A very brief contextualization: 2024 meets 2025
To begin with, happy 2025 to everybody - may we have a 2025 filled with powerful and invigorating experiences. Having said that, my 2024 was a rollercoaster of emotions, as I suppose it was for most people I have spoken to. Now that a brand new year has just started, I have realised the clutch of things that happened along the way - the year passed by me as if I were staring at its departure absent-mindedly. Now, I'm seated at my desk, in a quite cosy corner of my office, doggedly recalling and piecing together the broken shards of memory from 2024. In this wave or stream of consciousness, a striking element stands out: 2024 was the year I spent most of my time meditating on language and its arbitrariness.
2024 epitomizes all those self-esteem conflicts bubbling inside of me, and one of the main threads of the year was the willingness and resilience to embrace vulnerabilities and my innermost human fragility. Funnily enough, part of my queries and quandaries over life were inextricably linked to language and communication. As a matter of fact, I was thoroughly committed to making strides in redefining my approach to language and communication, which brought about harsh consequences, and I had to grasp the nettle and face all the hurdles that sprung up along the year. However, both starting a Substack and keeping it consistent did help me to grapple with loads of issues concerning my true self and things I was aligned with: navigating these choppy waters brought clarity and tranquility about what I wanted to do as a professional and a human being.
I had always been in two minds about whether or not I should share my thoughts and writing with people before I started my Substack. Despite the hurdles, this process of taking a plunge into my deeper feelings allowed me to emerge with a clearer sense of my role as a language tutor and researcher, but the challenges I faced definitely offered invaluable insights into biased self-perception, which prompted me to fully dedicate my time to my language research.
In this sense, The Ebb and Flow of Language, as I decided to name this Substack, greatly conveys my personal hurdles as a language enthusiast and, most importantly, the adversities that became the catalyst for growth as a speaker of English. I was able to act on most of the goals I had in mind but, for some reason, I had never felt compelled to put them into practice.
As it follows, the intense and turbulent relationship between language, thinking, and our social reality is at the very core of my writing. Even though I seized every opportunity to defy conventions and create room for experimentation, all essays, interviews, and posts are deeply connected and rounded off by subsidiary topics: language, diversity, and social life. My main focus falls on the connection between identity, the English language, and multicultural environments in contexts where migration and diasporic communities are pervasive. This is how English has evolved over the past years and, to my best knowledge, what should lie at the center of our practice as teachers.
Across contemporary language theory, I aim to align the flow of language in a globalized world with its intricacies and movements in theory, yet without manipulating theory to the extent that it marries practice. To the contrary, the more we dive into theory, the less it will seem in disarray with our material world and reality. Ultimately, the following text is fully aimed at prompting people to examine and dissect texts on language, not with the intention of applying them to their lessons, but to make theory a catalyst for growth and to lay bare the nuanced and hegemonic system of language, thereby promoting more diverse and vivid multicultural language interactions among speakers, teachers, and learners.
If English expands, will humanity be homogenized? A quandary over a global language
This essay is aligned with the system of thought in my previous text: an insatiable curiosity about the ebb and flow of language. As you may have noticed, what has emerged from this perspective is an array of thought-provoking questions about language that I will no sooner be able to respond to than I wish I could. With this in mind, what pulls me back to this question is nothing but my very experience in the classroom and my vulnerabilities toward the ever-evolving aspect of the English language.
The more I dive into its complexities and theoretical tangents, the less certain I become about what I believed I had mastered over the years in the realm of linguistics. I can assure you that there are loads of conflicts bubbling inside me, and it all began through an exercise of reading literature that explores the natural aspect of the English language as a variable, heterogeneous, and flimsy system.
I can recall the times I was beaming with delight while reading a very dear book that was life-changing for me: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson. I am not getting into the nitty-gritty of this lyrical modern story and powerful narrative, but were I to put it in a few words, I would say this is a book about two young Black British people in southeast London. It's worth mentioning that the narrator is a photographer, and we are constantly dealing with the tense yet powerful relationship between images and words. Together, they learn how to grapple with the whirlwind of social disparities and violence in the UK while keeping it a riveting intellectual meditation on language and identity.
Passages like: "You began to write because photos have their own language, and sometimes, the images you make become flimsy in comparison to what you can feel. Sometimes, even this language fails."
"There's so much more you wish to say, but there aren't the words. It's summer now, and language is flimsy, but sometimes it is all you have."
This idea is intentionally repeated throughout the narrative as it seeks to offer a depiction of the fractured and vulnerable state of the English language spoken by two diasporic characters whose heritage is not rooted in London. This scene had a profound impact on me on a scale I had never experienced before in my life. So intense and remarkable was this book that I was compelled to write a few pages about it, connecting its plot to language theory. I became fixated on the idea of writing about this book, but time passed, and I simply fell short of jotting down my thoughts and giving the final touches of sophistication to this piece.
While crafting this text, I came across an essay that blew my mind and reshaped my writing, culminating in subsidiary questions that later metamorphosed into the completely different text I am sharing with you today: How much does our language shape our thinking?
What caught my eye was the essay’s emphasis on the quandary of whether language and thought will long remain homogenized within the realm of English studies. It struck me as an opportune moment to dissect parts of the essay, demonstrating the urgency for a more cultural and social approach to language and the dire need to read such essays through a contemporary lens. On no account do I intend to make any derogatory comment about this essay—on the contrary, my ultimate goal is to shed light on one or two parts of the text, as I neither intend to explore its entirety nor attempt to unearth all its gaps and intricacies.
It would be ludicrous to begin this text without grounding it in textual materiality, as I first want to illustrate part of my line of thinking to outline the trajectory of my ideas.
“An estimated 1.5 billion people—roughly one in every five human beings—speak English, making it the most widely used language in the history of humanity. With an official status in the U.N., nato, the W.T.O., and the E.U., it reigns as the dominant “lingua franca of the world,” Rosemary Salomone writes in “The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language” (Oxford). Like other colonial tongues, it spread first through “conquest, conversion, and commerce,” she notes, but its spread today is powered by a fourth process, what Salomone calls “collusion.”
One cannot overlook the aftereffects of English becoming the cynosure of global communication. Put bluntly, the intricate expansion of English as a global language may, to some degree, serve as a catalyst for professional opportunities, particularly given the high expectations people harbor about pursuing the advantages that speaking a global language promises. So likely are these expectations to be translated into actionable plans that they often become a source of social mobility and a reconfiguration of class stratification.
From a pragmatic standpoint, however, these layers of much-needed social progress may fall short when it comes to fostering cultural formation and literacy. This is partly because, in the extremity of advocating for a language as the backbone of social development, its layered cultural dimensions and the erosion of contradictions embedded in its core risk being woefully out of touch with social reality. Within the realm of language’s layers and intricacies, its constant use and reorientation by speakers across diverse contexts may undermine coherence and disrupt the logic underlying the language itself, reflecting an uneasy apprehension about the erosion of distinct cultural identities.
While I acknowledge the pivotal role that a global language plays in driving social prestige and in relocating the so-called "status quo" within unabashedly elitist discourses at the heart of unequal class stratifications, the interplay between imperialist-hegemonic language and cognitive skills remains an anathema to much of society. Like stepping into quicksand, English precipitates a sense of power because its grammar, syntax, and entrenched meanings are integral to the prospect of cognitive hegemony. Its diffuse circulation becomes subsumed into how deeply we are influenced by its components—from the way we perceive and interpret the world to the biased worldviews we hold as we respond to quandaries and problem-solving tasks.
As accurately stated in the article, the idiosyncrasies of English—its grammar, its concepts, and its connection to Western culture—have muddied the waters by producing arbitrary constructions of reality within an unremitting language system where microviolences have trailed back for centuries. This linguistic circuit for interpretation and decodification shapes the quintessential format of our time and prompted me to reflect on a truly relevant claim made by some experts: in essence, language does affect thought.
This idea is often associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose essay titled “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language” offers an in-depth examination of how time is perceived and discussed by English speakers. While I do not intend to delve deeply into this broad and intricate discussion, I find it worthwhile to highlight that Whorf’s primary goal with this article is to expose the nuanced operations embedded in how various groups conceptualize temporal flow. Moreover, he spares no effort in demonstrating how the linguistic circuit is inextricably linked to the structure of our thoughts and the flow of our cognitive processes.
The ubiquity of these interconnections and circulations is not confined to a deluge of words, sentences, and virtual images shaping the knowability of a world depicted through language. What lies at the heart of this conflicted relationship with the legibility and readability of reality is, however, a pinch of determinism—a mere drop in the ocean when considering the absurdities tied to this line of reasoning. For example, if a language lacks essential verb tenses and lexical chunks, does this render reality inconceivable? Worse still, does it strip speakers of their entitlement to feel emotions? Unsurprisingly, this form of Whorfianism has been discredited and undermined by most theorists, especially given the jarring contrast between not possessing the linguistic tools to construct nuanced and precise descriptions of reality and not being equipped with the bare minimum to navigate social codes and form human connections.
However, it isn’t entirely wrong, and there is a grain of truth in it. Languages are inherently structured around their own patterns of sounds and symbols, and the symbolic evokes distinct social habits in contrast to the imagined presence of norms and traditions to which people are expected to conform. When this symbolic presence of tradition is obstructed or fractured, we encounter a creative and revolutionary rearrangement of social norms and hegemony through language—not merely perceiving norms as flimsy discourse but also carving out space for the significance and meanings that languages can generate in social interactions.
One of the topics addressed in the article is how writers have long assumed that human beings rely on a limited and inflexible capacity to describe certain senses. This is vividly demonstrated when abstract ideas are invoked in texts and more complex discussions. For instance, lengthy arguments and heated debates, where ideas must be conveyed in the heat of the moment, reveal the extent to which language continues to conform to a pervasive style: the instant of language as the full presence of precise and meaningful words used to articulate feelings and emotions. Yet, the architecture and fragile edifice of language are no longer perceived as a solid medium for social relations and the fluid circulation of ideas—if, indeed, they ever were.
Allow me to share a quotation with you:
It makes a difference. In a study that Majid and Burenhult conducted a decade ago, Jahai and English speakers were asked to identify and name twelve smells, including cinnamon, turpentine, gasoline, and onion. English speakers, despite their greater familiarity with the odors, faltered. They mostly gave rambling source-based answers and showed almost no agreement among themselves. One English speaker presented with cinnamon responded, “I don’t know how to say that, sweet, yeah; I have tasted that gum like Big Red or something tastes like, what do I want to say? I can’t get the word. Jesus it’s that gum smell like something like Big Red. Can I say that? Ok. Big Red. Big Red gum.” But Jahai speakers named smells with relative ease. They used abstract terms and were much more likely to converge in their responses. In a follow-up study, wine and coffee experts performed just as badly as novices when given non-wine and non-coffee smells, suggesting the Jahai’s enhanced abilities aren’t simply a result of practice in attending to aromas. Rather, the regular exercise of sorting the olfactory world with abstract labels seems to change how the Jahai understand all smells, familiar and otherwise.
Not only have words failed to produce accurate and coherent lines of thinking, but they have also fallen short of helping speakers to see, hear, and sense a myriad of social hierarchies at the very core of our reality description.
Despite agreeing to a certain extent, I find it hard to envision language as overly determined and tied to such determinism without accounting for contingency and cultural translations. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that our senses are somewhat contingent. Alongside the complexities of sensing and describing things, a startling element pinpointed in the title of my Substack should be deemed pivotal here: language is flimsy.
As I have explored in previous Substacks, language can be interpreted as a non-unified and heterogeneous tangled web of unpredictable variations. At times, this engineered machinery is nothing but a gamble. Constant movement, diversity, and cultural reorientation within a whirlwind of new identities surging across the globe all add up to this coexistence of different voices and language systems. Dwelling upon the definition of language is an unremitting process that can be daunting at times.
Many a time, I have gone on about it: speaking languages is, by far, a war of attrition, yet a much-needed exercise to unpack and examine its foundation. I reckon that it is tempting to reply to language queries in strict disciplinary terms, pointing out its inconsistencies and deviations—but we only gain a comprehensive insight into the topic once we approach it without thinking that universal categories are meaningful without their particular counterparts.
In one of my Substacks, I recall remarking that in literature, beyond isolated islands of knowledge, words used to describe and construct reality are transported into a specific language, where they are endowed with a new architecture, syntax, and a tailored logic intricately tied to each speaker's style. This is what I could unpack while navigating the boundary-pushing, astonishing narrative crafted by Caleb Azumah.
I couldn't help but visualize his words trailing back while I read this essay. Without wishing to examine the book, his narrator has to deal with the hurdles of being in an in-between identity condition: even though he is from South London, both his mother and father are from Ghana. His life is, to an extent, encircled by different places and conflictual heritages. In this line of thinking, the language he speaks is, hands down, contaminated by this stream of geographies, identities, sounds, and memories—something that is on the outer limits of our understanding.
There are a plethora of motives and variants that cause him to reflect on the language he uses to convey his feelings. It's worth reminding the reader that he's a photographer, and images are the other type of language he is familiar with. When he senses that he is unable to set down his thoughts through photographs, as a last resort, writing is how his ideas are expressed. Yet, what draws me to this narrative is that, unlike the other characters, to our narrator, language, specifically English, is portrayed as a flimsy and precarious resource.
Countless times, you get to read intriguing passages where he expresses his disheartenment when language fails and he cannot find any other way to express what he is feeling. It perfectly illustrates the fractured language system we have to wade through while voicing our feelings and airing our concerns. Not only does the narrator struggle to speak his mind, but language is such a minefield that even his sensations are quite scarce. He is constantly struggling with his words to make his sense more evident to people.
Once we come to terms with the idea that our language categories are intrinsically dependent on our organs and organism, it becomes evident that our senses are contingent and reorientable. This serves as a humbling reminder that our senses and memory are deeply rooted in language. I subscribe to the theoretical assumption that language is embedded in a symbiotic evolution between memory and organism. Through language, we can name and sense some of our wildest desires and staggering experiences in life.
Understanding the interplay between language and sense has been instrumental in reorienting my ideas and shaping my outlook, since beyond perceptions and identities, speaking another language gives us new ways of perceiving and building worlds. The demarcations we place on our very way of realizing things, noticing patterns, and the words used to convey these thoughts are not limited to words only. What we perceive as reality is, in essence, a result of social, cultural, and intellectual effort put into the exercise of thinking.
Thinking definitely alters the way we perceive the world. One of the motives that lie behind the fact that we fall short of grasping what people say—and, as a consequence, we are always in the throes of miscommunication—is that words are unceasingly being altered and revamped.
We cannot turn a blind eye to the nodes of immigration, multicultural spaces, and their modes of dissemination within such a nebulous circulatory system. Despite numerous policies aimed at eradicating diversity within local communities in English-speaking countries, language has evolved to such an extent that the coexistence of multiple nationalities within the same regions and communities has reshaped it on a scale that often defies comprehension. Divergent ways of thinking have transformed English into a language that occasionally eludes coherence—these are the shifting sands of a language that serves as a melting pot of cultures.
It's a sentiment that resonated deeply with Viorica Marian in her book The Power of Language: Multilingualism, Self, and Society. In short, she argues that in a study of immigration memories, it stood out that negative words used to describe intense and daunting emotions—emotions stirred up within wrangles and intense conflicts that triggered unwelcome memories—were more frequent than positive ones for immigrants. It's suggested that bilinguals are more likely to use more emotional words in their second language than in their first language. In hindsight, their second language turns out to be slightly more distant from the excruciatingly painful or traumatizing events they had gone through in life.
Multilinguals and immigrants based in spoken English communities are more susceptible to employing specific structures they acquire to express feelings in a more impactful way than it would be for a native speaker. I was staggered to learn that the use of modal verbs, for instance, such as "may" versus "might," has no direct impact on the way decision-making is acted upon in native English speakers.
In contrast, speakers of a second language are prone to succumb to the effects of time, space, and cultural influences when they are presented with more sophisticated and nuanced structures. As an illustration, I found myself grappling with the intricacies of this example provided by Viorica Marian in her book: "The man might have dropped the bag by the bushes," especially because she argues that, dissimilar to native speakers, immigrants and non-native speakers interpret events differently, and they are more inclined to use the word "may" than "might."
Regardless of grammar rules and theoretical affiliations, I am very positive that we are on the same page about the fact that language is primarily associated with different sets of experiences and contrasting cultural backgrounds coexisting within a society. In this sense, sounds, meaning, desires, actions, feelings, and all types of emotion are not only at the heart of a language but are also at the forefront of all perceptions resulting from symbolic and emotional engagement with people, objects, spaces, sensations, and times.
As a result, language opens itself to a relationship with thinking and behavior in a way that wades through the seemingly heterogeneous and unexpected quintessential forms of life. For this reason, the burden of my argument here will fall more heavily on the claim that seeing language attached to thought does not equate to determinism.
The writer holds a kernel of thought: we are fastened to determined circumstances we cannot take distance from, but this crucible of ideas, along with linguistic flourishing, demands the slow and uncertain work of making sense of language, and a flirtation with impracticability, uncertainty, and the unknown. Rather than solely relying on given formats of language theory, it is paramount that we take cultural diversity and global movements into consideration to ensure that language and thought won't be homogenized as a result.
Resources - links
Ideas:
I managed to highlight relevant, meaningful, or advanced language, chunks, and collocations that I employed in this text so that you can pick words that catch your eye.