The tyranny of language

One of the things drilled into me as a graduate student (both on the master's and doctoral levels) was the power, the terrible power, of language. Sometimes without even realizing it, we can say things that exclude others or make them feel less valuable or valued--and I'm sure there is a philosophical distinction between those similarly spelled words. In my present context, this shows up rather frequently in the American idioms that pepper my speech. (And even "pepper my speech" is an American idiom!) With many of these, I just take their meaning for granted (what the late Pierre Bourdieu would call doxa). But I have learned, and am indeed still learning, to see the nonverbal clues on my students' faces that indicate bewilderment. When I see The Look, I usually catch myself and go back and define what I just said. ;-)

Another way this came up in the last few days is a discussion with the Master of Science in Theology (MST) student to whom I've been assigned as adviser. By the way, Master of Science in Theology is a very Thomistic-sounding degree, perhaps to be expected in a country whose dominant theological and educational ethos is Roman Catholic. But I digress. In reading over the student's sketch of his first chapter, I said that he needed to italicize something, "because it's a word in a foreign language." I was thinking about that particular phrase this morning, and I realized how another American cultural assumption came into play by how I said that. To wit: saying that a non-English word was "foreign" implies, quite simply, that all non-English words are foreign. Even though they are so to me, as English is my heart-language, nevertheless it highlighted for me a cultural-linguistic bias in my own mind which I had previously taken for granted. But now I am in an Asian context. More properly, I am in a multicultural, English-as-a-second-language (ESL) context, so American assumptions about the priority of English as a language need to be called into question.

Unfortunately, the more precise statement is also the more cumbersome. Rather than saying, "All foreign (i.e., non-English) words written with English characters should be italicized or underlined," it should be "All words from languages other than the primary language of the document, and written with the characters of that primary language, should be italicized, underlined, or similarly identified as different from the remainder of the text." That is an awfully complex statement, but it is accurate. The seminary catalog does say that all non-English words should be italicized or underlined, but this does not betray the same cultural-linguistic bias becuase the rule is built on the assumption of English being the language of all instruction, discussion, and writing at the seminary. Whether that assumption reflects a bias is another matter that I will not explore, except to say that it is a matter of practicality to enforce a common language in multicultural environment. English was chosen as the language of official seminary business because it is one of the official languages of the Philippines and also many Filipinos can speak it, whereas they sometimes have difficulty communicating even amongst themselves in the multivariate languages spoken in the archipelago.

So I will continue to say that non-English words need to be italicized when it comes to written documents at the seminary, but forever after I will remember that even talking about the differences between languages can lead to favoring one language over another. Oh, that the Tower of Babel had never been built and that God had not confused our languages...