PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE LANGUAGE PROBLEM
Claude Piron
cpiron@bluewin.ch

Presence or absence of language handicap

When the organizers of this symposium asked me if I would agree to discuss the subject "Psychological aspects of the language problem", I felt flattered, and said yes. And right away I had to face up to a psychological language problem: what language shall I use? Speakers could choose Esperanto. That was quite tempting for me. But if I spoke Esperanto, there would be no direct communication with most of you.

French, my mother tongue, offered another alternative. But then I would again depend on interpretation, and however talented an interpreter may be, there is a considerable difference between what is said and what gets across the earphones. A spoken language is much more than just words. It is facial expressions, intonation, an individual way of emphasizing, a voice, which is that person's and not another's. It utilizes many subtle means of communicating that do not pass through the interpretation filter. An unexpected metaphor or an original way of putting a thought into words can wake up the drowsy participants in a postprandial meeting, but they raise problems that tax the interpreter's resources, and very often they are poorly rendered. Interpretation makes speech flat. It interposes a screen which precludes direct contact from mind to mind, from heart to heart.

Another alternative was to use English, which, almost certainly, everybody understands in this room. But then I would put myself in an inferior position, because English is not a language that I perfectly master. In English, I often hesitate, I don't find right away the word I need, or I wonder about what syllable to stress. I have to twist my mouth to utter sounds that sound unnatural to me, so that I feel that I am not myself any more. I become a comedian who tries to imitate the Anglo-Saxons, well knowing that this is beyond the range of his capabilities. Instead of thinking of what I want to say, I concentrate on how to put it and pronounce it. And at times my attention is diverted towards strange conversations that happen within myself with one voice saying: "Your pronounciation is too British, try to be a bit more global, i.e. American", and another saying: "You shouldn't try to sound American, you know", while it is pure delusion, since all the time I sound only French. And I'm annoyed by a fact which I noticed time and again in international settings: he who uses a foreign tongue appears less intelligent than he is.

The churning of all those questions in my head led me to an inescapable conclusion. In society as it is now organized at the global level, if you want to avoid all psychological disturbances or handicaps linked to language, there remains only one means: to be a native speaker of English.

But this I am not and can never be. So, I am not in a pleasant psychological condition. Many things hinder me. The indirectness, for instance, as I just said. Or the spoiling of the diversity. I have a special fondness for the Italian language. For me, it is the utmost in phonetic beauty. However, assuming Ms Bonino could come, I would not have the pleasure of hearing her presentation of Il problema delle lingue ed il consumatore , but of The language problem and the consumer. Similarly, I will not hear Dr. Fawzia Alashmawi speaking Arabic, or Dr. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas in Swedish or Finnish. This is a betrayal of the world diversity, and I feel frustrated.

You see, if we could all use our mother tongues, we would be different, but equal. In the way global society is organized, as soon as people from various cultures meet they are divided by language into superiors and inferiors. Deep down in our psyche, this means that a few assume the position of parents and force the others to play children's roles. A kid has a much narrower vocabulary than its father or mother, it knows less well how to express itself, it has quite an inferior mastery of the language weapon, it makes language mistakes. All this enhances the adults' feeling of superiority. However it is felt, whether it be compassion, or embarrassment, or something else, or even if it is not consciously felt, the fact remains that one is higher and the other lower, and this is acknowledged deep down, at the instinctual, animal level which plays such a large part in relationships. It is not a relationship among full-fledged adults.

The majority of people are unaware of the handicaps caused by the global communication system, and especially of their importance for the well-being of individuals and communities. They accept them resignedly and consider them much less hampering and serious than they actually are. Why? Because they lack a reference.

If I feel more acutely than most the disturbances of the usual global communication system, it is because I have a reference. Yesterday and the day before I communicated with people from more parts of the world than are represented in this room. But I did not feel the disadvantages I just mentioned. I enjoyed the cultural diversity. While it was not perfect, as it would be if everybody used their mother tongues, it was perceptible in the way sentences were formed, in the words being used, and especially in the accent, but communication was extremely smooth none the less. It was direct, and we were all adults on an equal footing. I could hear the voices with all their nuances, I heard the tone, and felt the feelings. I related with human beings, who were themselves, full of life, not with people emitting sentences that had to pass through a filter, whether the filter of interpretation or this more subtle filter which is in the speaker's mind and which has been gradually installed through an effort maintained for at least a decade, replacing native concepts by the concepts of another universe with a different atmosphere, different references, different traditions as to how to express oneself.

I was free of all those hindrances because I spoke Esperanto. And Esperanto is the freeest language you can imagine. You're not bound or restricted by usage and tradition. The language follows so closely the universal mechanisms of the brain that, when it has been acquired, everybody feels at home as they will never feel in another foreign tongue, because all other languages are full of traps, one-way streets and off-limit areas that do not exist in Esperanto. In Esperanto, you feel respected by the language itself, and you feel equal, because it is a foreign language for all your partners.

The interference of infantile thinking

At times I wonder if the chief psychological obstacle that prevents intercultural communication from being as smooth, effective and pleasant as it could be is not that the solution to the problem, which is readily available, stems from a miracle. Since a miracle is a very rare occurrence, it is always improbable. If somebody tells you something which is quite unlikely, it is natural not to believe. But another psychological factor intervenes, namely that adult thinking is difficult. We use adult reasoning only in those few fields which are familiar to us or which we studied in detail. In other fields our mind works as in a five year old, following a binary system. It can only deal with two terms at one time: all, nothing; good, bad. All concepts are symmetrical and pushed to the extreme. For such a mind, concepts like probable and improbable, which imply a statistical outlook, thus a proportion, a percentage, are senseless. The result is that improbable or unlikely becomes, in the mind, impossible. If you go through the literature about Esperanto you'll be surprised to see how many intelligent, cultured people with a good mastery of their field, be they linguists, philosophers, literature specialists, politicians or others, assert without regard for the facts, that a language like Esperanto is impossible.

However, it exists, it works, it is used every day, it gave birth to a literature, songs, poetry, even a kind of diaspora community, it is the language of a number of families living in quite different countries. This is a miracle. Was it likely that a project devised by a teen-ager in a provincial town in a provincial country, without the help of a publisher and without the financial possibility to advertise, might become in a few decades a living language widespread all through the world? Definitely not. A language is something so complex, so delicate, so many-sided, that a single man cannot create one. Actually, contrary to what is often told, Esperanto is not the work of just one man. Zamenhof was just the father. He sowed the seed, but a seed is nothing if there is no ground in which it can germinate and grow. Was it likely that a ground would accept the seed, nourish it and ensure its growth? Again, no. It is a miracle that there were people who adopted this project to communicate over cultural barriers, and who, just by using it, without even being aware of what was happening, transformed the project into a language which is more lively, more alive than to-day's French.

It is thus infantile to confuse unlikely or miraculous with impossible. However, it is human.

But another psychological phenomenon appears. I'm referring to the infantile confusion between desired and possible. Wishful thinking, if you want to put it that way. There is a universal denial, in high circles, of the extreme difficulty of national languages, and especially of English. Our world is organized as if its mastery was possible for everybody. But the evidence points to the opposite. Today's society pretends to promote values like justice, objectivity, scientific rigour, efficiency, and competition organized in such a way that the best should prevail. Because of these values, comparison plays an important part in many fields. Scientific research uses it constantly; indeed, the wide development of the statistical science is based on this need for objective comparisons. In quite another field, in the field of public works, comparison has also an important place. When a city decides to build a new stadium, it calls for tenders, it receives projects from various firms and compares them in order to select the one with the maximum advantages. This never happens when a decision has to be taken about language use or teaching. As a result, society spends huge amounts of money for its miserable language communication. All over the world, millions and millions of children and teen-agers learn at least one foreign language (English in 90% of the cases), with deplorable results. In Hong Kong, the level in English is very poor [quote] "though all high school students study English for several hours a day. (...) Just over half the students taking the English exam at the age of 16 or 17 received a passing grade last year." [unquote] [Philip Segal, "Tongue-Tied in Hong Kong, International Herald Tribune, 98.03.18]. An investment of several hours each day for a number of years, with the result that half the persons concerned do not reach the required level, isn't this incredibly far from the standards of cost-efficiency that are the creed of to-day's neoliberalism?

If you consider the amounts invested by governments and private individuals, the nervous energy that teachers and students spend in their effort to reach the goal, and the miserable proportion of those who can communicate in the relevant language, and if you consider further that after this gigantic investment in money, time and effort, the problem is so far from being solved, that society has to spend more billions of dollars for translation, interpretation and all the related language services, the impression you get is of something psychotic, of lunacy. In an age obsessed by efficiency, by cost-effective analysis, it is hardly believable. But we all know that such is the case.

A social neurosis

What has this to do with psychology? Well, society's behaviour in the field of languages follows so exactly the pattern of neurotic deportment that a psychological glance at the situation may be warranted. People use various means to overcome the language barrier. They try gestures, they stammer in a poorly controlled language, they speak English or some kind of pidgin English, they resort to simultaneous interpretation, they use Esperanto, etc. The method varies according to the individuals concerned and to the circumstances. There is no difficulty in comparing those methods in the field. It is easy to compare the current costs, the previous investment in money and time, the results according to various criteria such as accuracy, fluency, equality among partners, pleasure or annoyance, etc. Such a comparison reveals that, for all criteria, of all systems currently in use, Esperanto affords the most cost effective means, the method with least cultural disadvantages, and that which ensures the maximum equality among participants to the communication. We thus have at our disposal a system which surpasses all the others by a very large margin. However, our society not only rejects it, but it rejects it before checking the facts. This is evidence of its psychopathology.

When a need is being felt, what does a sane person do? He or she acts towards meeting the need by the most effective, pleasant and swift means available. Imagine a man who is hungry and has a wallet full of money and credit cards. He stands in a neighbourhood with various restaurants and markets. If he is normal, he'll go in one of these to order a meal or buy some food. What would you think of a man who, instead of so doing, would go to a railway station, buy a ticket for a place some 200 miles away and there take a long walk in the countryside till he reaches a coffee shop where he gets a mediocre meal? What would you think of such a man, who, because of his strange approach to the problem, felt hungry for hours and ended up eating something unsatisfactory, spending in this odd pursuit a hundred times more than was necessary? Everybody will diagnose this behaviour as neurotic, pathological. There is a similar neurosis, in the field of global communication, at the level of society, even if the individuals concerned are completely sane.

If a Japanese and an Iranian negotiate with an American in English, the first two are usually prevented from saying everything exactly as they'd like to, many shades of meaning are lost, misunderstandings occur, all through the discussion they feel inferior to the American, who can retort in a much more effective way, and at the end of the day they feel a tiredness of which the American has no idea. The inequality is striking. But it is all the more strinking if you look at the amount of previous effort made to achieve this result. All three perfected their knowledge of their mother tongue in school, but for the American, this was enough to be linguistically equipped for the negotiation, whereas the Iranian has had to invest approximately 4000 hours of studying and practicing English, and the Japanese some 6000 hours, although the level so reached is not fully adequate. This is the equivalent of three years of a full time job. If, instead of English as their mutual means of communication, they had chosen Esperanto, the American and the Iranian would have devoted something like 180 hours and the Japanese something like 250 hours in order to attain a level at which they can experience real linguistic comfort.

Our society can choose between, on the one hand, a system that meets its criteria of rationality, fairness, efficiency, minimum costs, elimination of cultural monopolies, comfort, possibility of actually exercising the right to communicate acknowledged in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, on the other hand, an irrational, unfair, inefficient, costly system full of disadvantages and practically depriving many people from their right to communicate freely. Why does it adopt the second one and reject the first one?

Because it doesn't know, you'll tell me. But it is not so. I did some psychological research on this point. I discovered that if you ask intellectuals what they think of the language problem and of Esperanto as a possible solution, you receive in a large proportion of cases a whole argumentation purporting to convince you that Esperanto cannot be a good system. If then you ask precise questions to test their knowledge of facts, you discover that they know nothing of the language, its history, its structure, its geographic extension, its literature, its expressiveness, how it works in international meetings, etc. They have an opinion, but it is not based on any reality. However, they do not know that they don't know. They are sure that they know everything there is to know.

Such is the situation with the large majority of journalists, who create public opinion, but also with the large majority of deciders in high positions. Education ministers, government officials, aides preparing a report on the language situation for an international organization, members of the European Parliament dealing with a petition on language rights all share this same feeling that they know all there is to know to take a proper decision, so that, in their opinion, gathering information would be wasting their time.

The taboo

Where does that illusion come from? Too many factors are involved to be all dealt with here.

One is that the language problem is complex: it has political, economic, social, cultural, psychological, linguistic and educational implications. When something is complex, the natural tendency is to simplify. As a result, society has a tremendously simplified image of the linguistic situation on our globe. For a large part of mankind, there is no language problem. "It's solved by English, or the translators", they think. For another part (or the same people at another time) there is a problem, but it has no solution other than those that have been applied from time immemorial.

Most victims of the situation do not feel as such. Consider for instance a foreign worker who is taken advantage of because of his poor mastery of the local language, or the chief executive officer of a firm who loses a contract because his English is not up to the level required for the negotiations. They do not feel victims of an absurd and unfair system, they feel guilty, they feel they should have mastered the other language, and they are to be blamed. The right to communicate as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not perceived as something society should organize in a spirit of fairness and of realism as to the average learning capabilities of the world population.

Another way of describing the situation would be to say that the chief reason why the existing adequate solution is ignored is inertia. It is easier to do something difficult and painful than to overcome the inertia and ask oneself if another approach would be more appropriate. However, in many fields, inertia is readily overcome when much can be gained. In industry, as soon as a new procedure is discovered which makes production easier and cheaper, all the relevant companies adopt it, even if they have to pay quite a lot for patent rights. Why does nothing similar appear in the field of language communication?

From a psychological point of view, I'd say: because of fear. And indeed fear is the psychological side of inertia. Inertia is rooted in a reluctance towards anything new, in an anxiety about the unknown.

Why should a language elicit fear? Well, for one thing, language is linked to our identity. Some day, as children, we became aware that people around us speak a given language, and that this defines us with respect to the rest of the world. So, deep down, my language is myself. Just look at how the Flemish or Catalan people feel when their languages are criticized, or their use restricted. If you persecute my language, you persecute me.

Many people have a rejecting attitude towards Esperanto because they see in it a language without a people, thus a language with no human identity, and so not a real language, a language which is, with respect to the true languages, what a robot is as compared to real humans. And this is scary. There is a fear that this robot, of which it is said that it has universal ambitions, will crush and flatten out all other languages, all peoples, all cultures. The psychological method called clinical interview, in which the subject is invited to let out freely all associations triggered off by a given word, in this case Esperanto, reveals that such fears do exist in many people. It is an interesting aspect of human psychology that people readily project this crushing of culture onto Esperanto, which in fact offers the best guarantee for their survival, and do not perceive that its rejection leaves the field open to the deleterious impact of other languages, especially English, on most local cultures.

As a matter of fact, the fear elicited by Esperanto is so great that the subject is, for all practical purposes, taboo. If you study the documentation devoted to linguistic organization and language use, you'll see that more than 99% discuss the problem as though Esperanto did not exist, as though mankind had no experience altogether of another way of communicating at the global level than translation, interpretation or the use of a prestigious language such as English. Esperanto is taboo. Here is a case in point. The 17th and the 18th October 1995 were in Brussels days called "The European Parliament listens to the citizens". A Belgian trade union activist, André Martin, who had been accepted as one of the people authorized to address the meeting devoted most of his speech to the language problem and its solution through Esperanto. He suggested that Esperanto be taught so as to reach a general bilinguism among Europeans, a bilinguism mother tongue / Esperanto. Well, the rapporteurs, Members of Parliament Raymonde Dury and Hanja Maij-Weggen, summarized his intervention as follows:

"Discussing the language question in the European Union, the speaker emphasized the need for a drastic choice. It will be needed either to reduce the number of official languages, or to resort to a supranational language. The solution would consist in favouring dialogue among Europeans. To this end, bilinguism, or even trilinguism, should be generalized". [DOC_FR\CR\282\282630.DV PE 214.813]

Here is a man who spends a large part of his speaking time explicitely describing the advantages of Esperanto, and the official record does not even mention the name of the language. Isn't it a beautiful example of taboo?

Where does the taboo stem from? Some causes are of a political or a social nature. Others are psychological. These are linked to the emotional load of the concept "language". We usually think with concepts or words. And these are not merely intellectual items, they have an emotional aura. Not all, but many. If I say war, money, mother, nuclear energy, sex, maybe even year 2000, something vibrates deep in you although you are not aware of this. The emotion can be evidenced with a polygraph. In other words, we are not indifferent towards a large number of our concepts, especially those which are somehow linked to our desires, needs, sufferings, power and so forth.

One of the concepts with a strong emotional aura is language. Why? Because it evokes the possibility of making oneself understood, which is one of the most basic wishes of any human. Language is the vehicle of human relationships, so it symbolizes them. Furthermore, our mother tongue was acquired at a very early age, and we have no memory of the learning process, so it became something mythical. Deep down in our psyche, language is a gift of the Gods.

A hidden message

The emotions linked to language include also the relationship with authority. When language is being transmitted to a kid, there is a hidden message, which is never explicitly discussed. It defines the respective positions of child and adult in society.

When a kid begins to speak, it uses forms that come spontaneously to its mind, but which are not supposed to exist. In most cases, these forms are more logical than those of the standard language. But the kid soon realizes that he should get rid of them. A young speaker of English discovers that it is not in his interest to say more good or gooder, he has to say better. What does this mean for the deepest layers of the psyche? The implied message is: "Don't trust your spontaneous, natural tendency, which makes you generalize any linguistic trait that you have noticed. Don't rely on your innate logic. Don't trust your reflexes, your instinct. Don't trust yourself. Do as we do, even if there is no reason for it". Gradually the idea that language is made for people to understand one another is replaced by the idea that it is a means of putting people into categories.

Language is one of the fields in which we function with a primitive mind: a number of things are to be excluded, without anybody knowing why. In a particular tribe nobody dares pass through a given area, although it would shorten the walking time considerably, and nobody knows why: the area is taboo. In English, I will not be taken seriously, in a formal setting, if I say the womans or I knowed, I have to say the women and I knew, although everybody understands me if I say womans or knowed. The most direct path in the brain is often taboo. Ninety percent of the time needed to acquire a foreign language is taken up by the setting up of the reflexes necessary to respect these taboos.

Now, don't misunderstand me. I do not say that we should change English, or French or any language. All those irregularities are part of their beauty, they sum up centuries of development, they deserve to be observed and respected. But it is a fact that the way they are transmitted from generation to generation entails a hidden message which prevents people from approaching questions of languages with a free mind.

Unwittingly Esperanto aggresses this primitive conception of relationships and mutual understanding. It proves that most obligations and prohibitions embodied in languages are unnecessary if the goal is simply to communicate. Such a realization can be devastating. I once witnessed a dramatic emotional reaction to this realization. I was teaching Esperanto in Geneva. One of the students was a policeman. He relished making up words, often funny words, and he was delighted to discover that they were usually correct. That day, he had an outburst of anger which was most impressive: "This is incredible," he said, "I've had bad marks all through my teens in German and English because I could not keep in my head all the details to be taken into account to form the simplest sentence. I've been forced to learn those languages, but I've never succeeded and I've never been able to use them. Why did I have to wait till I was thirty three to discover that there was a language in which I could progress at a normal pace. without overloading my brain with all those petty details that hamper communication instead of helping it? How come nobody told me about it before? I'VE BEEN CHEATED!". Is it unreasonable to assume that a similar reaction is latent in many people? And that one of the functions of the taboo is to prevent its occurrence?

Whatever its cause, it is deplorable that this taboo exists. The global system of language communication, as currently applied, entails a lot of suffering for which there is surprisingly little compassion. Nobody seems to take seriously the plight of the millions of teen-agers who sweat over the inconsistencies of English and its huge vocabulary, all through the world, who devote hours and hours of straining their minds for a result which will have no relation with what they imagined at first. Nobody seems to take seriously the plight of many refugees and displaced persons who are constantly put in situations where their lack of a practical means of communication is a source of complications, sufferings, and, very often, injustice. Nobody seems to take seriously the fact that many unemployed could find a suitable job if they were not handicapped by the fact that they never succeeded in learning English, through no fault of their own, since not everybody is gifted for languages. And so on and so forth. It would be indecent to compare my present situation to the plights I just mentioned, but it is a fact that my quality of life would be much better if, instead of having to use English in so many situations, I could use a language like Esperanto, in which you avoid most of the doubts and hesitations that hamper free speech in a national language. Isn't linguistic comfort something worth striving at? But if we want to organize society so that a majority of human beings can enjoy it, much of what seems obvious has to be questioned. This is what I've attempted to do: to sow in your minds a few of the pertinent questions. Answers are much less important than the questions themselves.