Introduction: The Myth of Human Language

6.2 “Language” Instruction and Language Departments

[Sir Nigel] was mistakenly proud of his linguistic ability, professing to speak fluent French, Italian and German: in fact it was his personality and confidence rather than his knowledge of languages which enabled him to converse with his many friends abroad.
Obituary for Sir Nigel Strutt, Times of London 10^th February 2004⁶⁵
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
--Mark Twain
A few years ago I attended a faculty meeting at the University of Michigan in which a proposal was being debated about the language requirement for undergraduates. As matters then stood (I have no idea what their policy is now), the language requirement was that students take two years of language instruction, and that they must take two years of the same language. The proposal on the table would have allowed students to take different languages in successive years.
Needless to say, the proposal led to controversy, but one aspect of the debate was particularly interesting to me. One professor claimed that after one year of language instruction a student barely knows enough to order a cup of coffee in a foreign country. Another speaker got up and reported that his students were reading Zola at the end of their first year of language courses. It occurred to me that they were probably both right. Likewise, it wouldn’t surprise me if Mark Twain could read Zola and Sir Nigel couldn’t, while at the same time Sir Nigel could make himself perfectly understood in France, while Twain couldn’t.
What is going on here? The situation seems bizarre, but only if we assume that there is this thing, the French Language, which people in France are supposed to use to communicate. In point of fact, native speakers of “French” are people who share a certain state of their language faculty, and who have entrained with each other enough so that information exchange goes relatively smoothly. Whatever may be said for “rules of grammar”, they are helpful to those learning to read French, but not so helpful in trying to communicate with people living in France. Why? Because prescriptive grammar doesn’t have that much to do with communication. With even some rudimentary knowledge of the linguistic practices of people living in France, Sir Nigel was able to do quite well, even though Twain, with more extensive background, was not.
A lot of this has to do with the costs of staying in a communicative partnership with someone. Talk is not cheap. Sir Nigel’s gift was the ability reduce the cost of communication. A winning personality helps a lot, because communicating with outsiders is costly. Sir Nigel made it worth the effort, or at least made the effort amusing enough to stay in the coordination game.
It is also possible that Sir Nigel was quick on the uptake with respect to communicative strategies. Once I was in Bulgaria with the philosopher Stephen Neale, and we were looking for a local swimming pool that we had heard about. Stephen flagged down a taxi driver and after a fairly brief exchange using fragments of languages that neither of them knew well, the taxi driver had locked onto Stephen’s intention. “He has a good pragmatics module,” was Stephen’s remark, but the same could have been said of Stephen. In fact, looking on as a third party, we might well say that Stephen and the cabby were good at establishing linguistic coordination strategies.
Sometimes the cost of communicating with outsiders can be more than compensated for, even absent a winning personality. Business transactions are cases in point here. Nothing brings out the patient interlocutor like a multi-million dollar business deal, or, for that matter, the desire to buy or sell something on the street corner. Another classic case where the costs of communicating with an outsider are worth it is when that outsider is a lover (or potential lover). Its amazing how patient one can be in such circumstances.
It’s more complicated than this, of course. There are factors like racism, national pride, class issues, and bad days that play a role in keeping these linguistic partnerships intact, just as these factors are involved in any economic transaction. The point, however, is that if the goal of teaching language courses was really to aid communication, shouldn’t students learn how to manage these factors? Salespersons do.
Of course, it’s entirely unclear what the goal of language education is in the United States. It tends to be a split personality of competing goals, ranging from “teaching the students to communicate in country x” to teaching them the proper rules of grammar (which might be deployed in writing or, some day, in speaking in intellectual circles), or it might be to give them information about the underlying psychological state one is in when competent in “French,” or it might be an entre to French culture, etc. The situation is a disaster, and worse, it’s an institutionalized disaster.
The problem with language departments is that they are incoherent academic units. They are constructed around the myth that there are languages like French, German, and English. This isn’t to say that the work done in these departments is flawed or useless, but it is to say that people are being grouped together in ways that make no sense.
Suppose that we decided there should be a Department of Phlogiston Studies, in which we would group together individuals that study the principles that give rise to combustion, other people that study cooking methods and cooking appliances in various cultures, and still other people that train individuals to fight fires and investigate arson. Individually, all of these enterprises are worthy of attention, but putting them altogether simply because they have to do with fire is a joke. The first enterprise has to do with the physical processes underlying an observable natural phenomenon, a second one has to do with some limited uses of aspects of combustion for cultural activities like cooking, and the third has to do with training people with practical abilities for dealing with dangerous and destructive fires.
Language departments in the typical university more or less mimic the imaginary Department of Phlogiston Studies that I described above. Language departments usually have a handful of linguists who are studying the mechanisms by which linguistic competence is acquired, there are usually people interested in cultural products (literature and poetry) that are in some sense linguistic, and there are the people involved in the practical training of individuals to equip them with the ability to communicate in foreign countries. Now to be sure, people in language departments can wear any combination of these hats, but this is not necessarily a good thing. Grouping them all together may well impede progress in each of these areas.
I just painted a pretty grim picture, but I think the actual situation is actually much worse than that. The picture I just painted would be apt if universities had one language department instead of several. So the Phlogiston illustration needs to be extended. Let’s now imagine a situation in which there is not just one Phlogiston Department, but several – perhaps dozens in larger universities. One department is dedicated to the study of how phlogiston acts on wood, how people cook with wood fires and wood ovens, and some of them study how to extinguish wood fires. Another department is dedicated to the study of how phlogiston acts on coal, yet another with how it acts on gas and so on.
Despite all the hype about Universities being full of radical free thinkers, they generally tend to have incredible inertia, and more often than not are dedicated to preserving irrational traditions more than advancing our understanding. One simple piece of evidence for this is the fact that the structure of the university has not changed a whole lot since the days of Aristotle – at least in the sense that the subject matters are divided up in pretty much the same way that they were 2500 years ago. All this is to say that I don’t expect to see any administrators stepping forward and dissolving language departments.
Still, whatever administrative departments are assigned to the study of and reflection on language, we need to be mindful that the usual approaches to investigating and thinking about language are the sediment of centuries of error. So long as those approaches are grounded in the static picture of language we are going to be handicapped with intractable philosophical puzzles, impossible engineering problems, bad social policy, and pedagogical failure. It is my hope that though the static picture is deeply entrenched, it can be identified and isolated where it does occur, and that we can substitute the dynamic picture of language as needed. The result will not be a panacea for solving these puzzles and problems, but perhaps we will have a much clearer sense of the nature of the problems and a better idea of the most promising solution paths.

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