“Not Your Typical Linguist”
A review of
?What Language Is:
And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be
by John McWhorter
Review by Brittany Buczynski.
What Language Is:
And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be
John McWhorter
Hardback: Gotham, 2011.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
If all books on language were this entertaining, there would be more college linguistics majors than undecideds. John McWhorter’s What Language Is: And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be is easily the smartest, clearest (and funniest) meta-literary book I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.
Linguistics is an incredibly complex field of study, including not only the practical elements like language families and the International Phonetic Alphabet, but the intangible theoretical aspects. Does an unwritten oral tongue count as a full-fledged “language”? How did Old English morph into Middle English and then Modern English? And why did it move in the direction it did? Are there any overriding patterns behind language evolution? Questions like these are just the tip of the iceberg for the linguistics student. The other frustrating thing is that languages are constantly changing, so unless you’re studying a dead language (e.g., Latin) you’re given the added challenge of trying to hit a moving target, almost as if a scientist were attempting to examine a squirming, live ant under a microscope.
Suffice it to say that linguistics is not for the faint of heart or mind. Consequently, there are many (myself included) who find their brains are not equipped for this exhausting work and who instead opt for the more practical language-related fields, like literature or journalism. For the many armchair linguists like us, John McWhorter offers the perfect solution: a linguistics book that is somehow less complicated than most textbooks and more fun than some comic books.
It would have been easy to write a fully serious study of language evolution using this book’s title. It could have been chock full of scholastic vocabulary, endless conjugation charts, and pretentious commentary, without a hint of humility or humor. In fact, that would accurately describe most of the linguistics books I’ve read up to this point. The subject matter itself is fascinating, but the writing is as dull and uninspired as a car manual. I’ve often wondered, How can someone who loves language so much be such a terrible writer? But with McWhorter, the question quickly inverted itself: How can someone this scientifically intelligent be such a good storyteller?
And make no mistake, McWhorter can write like the Dickens. (After a few more nonfiction hits, I could see him vying for a spot on the fiction bestseller lists too.) This user-friendly approach begins with the table of contents. By laying out the book in five simple chapters, McWhorter organizes his study under the acronym, IDIOM. “Namely, in honor of the word idiom and its muttly history, with individual sounds tracing to different sources, I’d like to split the word up in a similar way so that it can show us the nature of human language most directly” (12). According to McWhorter, language is defined by these five traits: Ingrown, Dissheveled, Intricate, Oral, and Mixed. Each chapter then explains in detail why and how language is the way it is. And while the material and examples themselves can get weighty, there’s always a welcome spritz of comic relief thrown in at regular intervals to refresh the reader’s mind. The best of these are tucked away in the hilarious footnotes, which mention everything from historical tidbits and the author’s personal anecdotes to Looney Tunes and The Lucy Show.
What Language Is might work so well precisely because of McWhorter’s ability to humanize (and frequently “humorize”) a subject that, ironically, can easily become dry and abstract. He succeeds by leaving the reader with memorable, almost pneumonic, linguistic catchphrases and proverbs: “Mistakes today are grammar tomorrow” (91); there is a characteristic “blaccent” of Ebonics (108); English vocabulary “is like a plant with dead leaves scattered throughout” (83).
But perhaps my favorite is the repeated linchpin concept of the “Persian Conversion,” which explains how language will simplify when a large adult population suddenly has to learn it. Being unable to master all the linguistic intricacies that have built up over time, the adults distill the language to an easier, uncluttered form, which is then passed on to their children. This frequently involves the deletion of complex case endings, irregular verb conjugations, super-specific vocabulary, and other superfluous linguistic “extras,” all of which denote fine shades of meaning among native speakers but which necessarily become the first details to go when the language is being picked up by a bunch of adults. As McWhorter says, “user-friendliness is an accident” (73). These adults didn’t set out to streamline a language; that was just a byproduct of them scrambling to catch up with their victors. The result: a vernacular version of the language spoken in the new political climate. But this process of simplification is opposed to the naturally messy state of language, exemplified by the IDIOM acronym. “If a language is strangely easy,” concludes McWhorter, “then it’s a sign something irregular happened to it” (156).
Besides delving into these historical aspects of language, the book also forges ahead and speculates on the future. What about a supposedly ideal “universal language” such as Esperanto? What about the impact of the Internet, e-mailing, texting, and the “new sphere of talk-writing”? In the face of ever-increasing technology, is traditional, formal English doomed to be corrupted into a horrible rule-eschewing mess? McWhorter argues that 1) all language is inherently messy anyway, and 2) technology only gives us a new dialect, not a new language. In fact, this judgmental “discomfort with comfortable writing” probably says more about those in the ivory tower than about the masses who converse easily in multiple dialects, depending on context of work e-mails, face-to-face chats, texting, etc. (164). In short, the Internet will not kill formal writing skills any more than the typewriter killed novels.
What more can I say to recommend What Language Is? If you’re a language lover, a word nerd, or a history buff, you’ll find more than enough to keep you engaged. And even if you’re not, you might be surprised at how accessible and enjoyable this book is. I’ll admit that linguistics isn’t normally a topic people enjoy reading for fun. But then again, John McWhorter isn’t your typical linguist.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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