Identity. Part 2

This is the second part of the article. To read Part 1, go here.

Language

Maalouf speaks of how important language is to the individual, that everybody needs a language, how vitally important it is for people to have their own language — and the damage done to a person when their language is taken away, so to speak. When they are in a setting where they are not allowed to use their own language and are forced to adopt another language without being able to continue using their own.

He equates language with identity. But language, like identity, is very close to survival. If you take away someone’s language, you take away their means of communication with other people. If they don’t understand the language they hear around them, they are deprived of knowledge about what’s going on around them. It’s like being blind. You are deprived of a very important means of communication.

You may be trying to express yourself in a language you don’t speak easily, and you have difficulty trying to express what you think, what you feel, what you need. If you need something that’s very important to you and you can’t explain this to somebody else, it gives you a feeling of helplessness and defenselessness.

It’s much more than just being deprived of freedom in the usual sense of the word; it’s being deprived of one means of survival. It’s much closer to the core of the human being than the usual conception of freedom — which is a rather abstract notion in many ways, much less concrete than the idea of survival.

Monolingualism or multilingualism

What about people in places where most of the population speaks only one language? In a country like the United States, for example, where little importance is attached to learning other languages, the result is that people are enclosed within themselves. There’s a feeling that language is not important because they don’t need any more than the one they’ve got.

The U.S. is a particular case because, besides being a powerful, geographically large country, its language is rapidly becoming universal. Many people there think it’s not important for them to learn other languages because they don’t need to, There’s no “practical” reason to learn another one. (Speaking other languages gives you an appreciation of other cultures as well, which might be a good idea for people in a place like the U.S., but that’s another issue.)

On the one hand it puts people who think that way more on the defensive. There’s an underlying feeling that they’re missing something vital, that they can’t communicate with others because of their limited language skills. So they stay enclosed within themselves, and they’re on the defensive when they meet people who speak other languages. Even if those people are not doing anything to them but simply speaking in another language close by and the locals can’t understand, they feel threatened. I’ve heard people say it makes them fearful because they think the other person may be expressing negative attitudes about them, ridiculing them. It’s a rather common assumption, and it makes people fearful.

Language and identity

Maalouf talks about language as being a part of identity, and he describes the case of Icelandic, a language spoken by very few people. Nevertheless, he says, on the Internet the number of websites in Icelandic is in a higher proportion to the population than in other countries where other, more widely known, languages are spoken.

He says that nearly all of them are in Icelandic, and most of them offer an option to go to an English version and some even offer another language, often Danish or German. This, he says, is the way this country has approached maintaining its own language, but without resisting or fighting against the importance of English and other languages. There is an effort to preserve the local language by using it in public formats, and the Internet is one of the best ways of doing it because it’s so cheap. Anybody can put up a website in Icelandic and it’s not a costly affair for individuals or the government. In countries where minority languages are spoken by a limited number of people, it’s a medium they can use to express their thoughts to the rest of the world and among themselves. It’s a way to keep the language alive.

Then he goes on to say that good knowledge of English is important if one wants to communicate with the rest of the planet. But it would be wrong to say that English is enough. English has its place in the world and it satisfies some of our needs, but it doesn’t satisfy others, especially the need for identity, he ends by saying. And I would add, the need for survival.

Language, identity and survival

Identity is closely linked to the notion of survival. Having a language in which one can express one’s thoughts, one’s feelings and needs, is more than just an abstract identity thing. It’s survival.

Maalouf says that, for Americans, the English and some others, English is also the language of identity, so these people have no problem. But for nine-tenths of humanity it is not. It can’t play that role, and it would be dangerous to try to make it play that role because it would risk creating legions of what he calls beings who are “remote, with a distorted personality”.

According to Maalouf, for a person to feel at ease in today’s world, it is essential that they not be forced to abandon their identity language. So what about people who are born and raised in a bilingual or multilingual situation? What happens to their identity? They now have a split personality, which, if I may interject a personal note, is how I feel. I wasn’t raised in a bilingual situation, but I now speak Spanish as easily as I speak English and I often feel this split in myself.

But what about people who grow up speaking two or more languages? There are more and more in the world today. I was told of a man who was raised in Spain with an English mother and a French father, and he now uses any of his three languages in certain situations depending on how he had used them during his childhood. He uses English to communicate the type of things he communicated with his mother, and in French for the kinds of things when he used his father’s language as a child. And the same goes for Spanish.

I learned about sailing in Spain, and I don’t have the equivalent terminology in English. It’s not a part of my English-language identity. It exists in the Spanish part of me.

It keeps you jumping between worlds. You can have more than one identity, and you can switch from one identity to another according to the circumstances of the moment.

Truly multilingual people (who are fluent in more than one language, not just babblers) don’t tend to identify exclusively with one culture. They can identify with more than one. Linguists say that a person’s ability to learn a language depends on their ability to identify with the culture that speaks it. I wholeheartedly agree.

When a bilingual or multilingual person speaks one language, they identify with the culture that speaks that language. The only way you can acquire a language at such an instinctive level is to live for a number of years in a place where that language is spoken and immerse yourself in the life of the place. It’s not something you can acquire through books. You can express yourself well in a language, but in order to express yourself deeply and truly communicate in that language in more or less the same way as you communicate in your birth language(s), you need to live in that culture. You need to absorb not only the language but the cultural situations in which that language is used so you know when to use a certain vocabulary, certain expressions in a given situation within that culture. And then that language becomes a true identity language for you and you have acquired another identity.

Many cultures, a common language

What about situations in which a group of people come together, all speaking many different languages, and they need to have a common language in which to express themselves? For some it may be their identity language; for others it won’t be.

Maalouf talks about the distance between the identity language and what he calls the global language. Your identity language is your own; the global language, which today is English and in the past was French, is that language which people use to express themselves in international situations, in global situations.

He says there is a vast space between these two. So how to fill this space? The global language is useful for many superficial purposes, but it’s not enough. When you speak a language that is not an identity language for you, there is always translation going on at some level. You think in your identity language and then search for the words in the other one because you can’t “feel” them in the same way. You are distanced from that other language, which makes it difficult to express anything other than superficial ideas.

So then, how to reconcile the individual need for identity, which is closely linked to survival — of which an important part is the need to communicate your feelings and needs to people around you — with the need to communicate with other people in a language that is not an identity language?

Perhaps in the future we will be able to communicate in other ways, so that language will no longer be the only way we can communicate our deepest feelings. It isn’t now; the importance of body language is known and recognized today, and people can learn, little by little, to understand others and communicate with them in ways that do not depend solely on language, on words, and also to look beyond the other person’s words and learn to understand what somebody else is trying to express, what the other person’s needs are. All this can take place in a non-identity language because people will learn to read the other signs that people are constantly giving off outside the language, other than just the words.

Filling the gap

Maalouf’s view of the way to fill this gap between the identity language and the global language is by learning a third language that falls somewhere in between the identity language, which is the native language, the one closest to one’s survival, and the global language, which is more a language of international communication. He says there will be specialists who, in addition to this, will learn a third language, which they choose freely according to their own “affinities” and “through which they can expand personally and professionally”. In other words, it’s a personal choice, and probably an instinctive kind of choice. It will come from within the person, that they feel they want to learn that language simply because they feel it. It may be of practical utility for them, or they feel attracted to the language for no specific reason, but they learn it because they want to. That’s the way one learns a language truly well, because you feel you want to learn it.

I’m not quite sure I understand Maalouf’s reasoning with this and his explanations of it, but I think he’s got an interesting point, because it eliminates a dichotomy. Often people feel they are forced to learn English if they want to travel, or if they want to expand professionally. Most people approach learning English in this way. And they feel forced to learn English in much the same way as people are forced to learn the language of another culture that has conquered theirs and forces them to take on the language. Maalouf gives the example of Algeria.

It is important for people to understand the value of language and look beyond the mere practical utility of a language. This is already happening today; more people are interested in learning other languages and often do it simply because they want to.