The fascinating world of languages

The capacity to learn language is deeply ingrained in us as a species We dont nd any serious
dierences in children growing up in congested urban slums, in isolated mountain villages, or in
privileged suburban villas. Dan Slobin, Human Language Series 2, 1994
If theres one thing we take for granted, its our ability to speak our mother-tongue. Whether
it be someone whos never gone to school or a Nobel prize recipient, it seems as if every human
possesses this innate ability to acquire language. How languages function, and how human beings
acquire them, therefore, gives us a lot of understanding about human cognitive processes.
Linguistics is a fascinating eld that studies how languages work and explores the underlying
similarities between languages that look very dierent at the surface. Although languages dier a
lot from each other, you can nd a lot of patterns that suggest that languages rules arent arbitrary.
Linguistics has many branches, each dealing with particular aspects of languages.
Phonetics and phonology, for example, deal with the sounds used by the speakers of a language.
Lets examine a very common rule of Englishthe use of articles a and an. You have been taught
that an appears before vowel sounds like apple while a precedes consonant sounds like banana. Can
you think of any other language that does something similar? Well, lets look at the Hindi prex
~ that is often added to words to negate them. For example, the word |=H| changes to ~|=H|.
Now, what happens when you apply this prex to the word ~? ~~ doesnt quite sound right,
does it? Of course it doesnt, because the correct word is ~+. Before a vowel sound, the ~
changed to ~+

. But wait, thats exactly what English does! Looks like the rule isnt as arbitrary
as we thought it was. It isnt. It turns out that it is dicult to pronounce two vowels when they
come together like this (try it), and many languages dont like this fact. They try to resolve this
problem, called hiatus, by inserting a consonant or removing one of the vowels. If you now look at
all the -1 H|- rules you learnt in Sanskrit/Hindi, all they seek to achieve is remove this hiatus.
The rules themselves are mostly not arbitrary. Recall m

H|-. It asks you to change a sequence

of : and ~ to . Why not to any other consonant? Test it out yourself. Speak a sequence of : and
~ sounds continuously without giving a break (:~:~:~. . . ). You will notice that it will change
to . . . Such rules, therefore, simply seek to document what really happens during speech
production.
The way we are taught languages in school makes us think that the grammar of a language
denes what the language is and what it should do. The truth is actually the opposite. Grammar
textbooks merely attempt to describe what native speakers of a language speak. You may have
noticed that you were uent in your mother-tongue long before you were taught its grammar in
school, and if you lost marks in grammar, it was not because you didnt know your language, but
because you couldnt care less about what nouns, adverbs or clauses were.
Linguistics, therefore, tries to nd out why speakers of a particular language speak the way
they do, and how they acquire rules regarding the same. For example, a three-year old kid whose
mother-tongue is English may not know many English words, but he has already learnt the rule
that plurals of words are generally made by adding -s after them. In a test popularly known as the
Wug test, three year olds are shown a cartoon gure and are told that its name is wug. They then
show the kid a picture with two such cartoons and ask him what he sees, and he replies two wugs.
This might seem trivial to you, but such experiments gives us a lot of insight into how kids learn
rules of their language without being taught explicitly. My 2
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2
year old nephew, for example, says
|| as the past form of |+| instead of the grammatically correct H|. Why? Because, despite
hearing the correct word from his elders, he has acquired the rule that makes regular past forms in
Hindi (eg. |+| ||, |+| ||). H|, being an exception, will be specically learnt later.
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Then we have the eld of Historical Linguistics studies the changes that occur in languages over
a period of timehow word meanings change (sometimes even reverse), or how some words drop
out of usage while new ones are created. The similarities between Indian languages and European
languages, for example, have led linguists to believe that they had a common ancestor that they
have tried to reconstruct. You can see how the word for the number 3 has very similar words in
many languages (three, tres, tre, trois, teen, treeni etc.)
The study of Language and linguistics is therefore a very enriching and fun-lled experience.
It opens our doors to new cultures and gives us more insight into the way our brains work. But
above all, it makes us more broad-minded and helps us appreciate the fascinating diversity of
our languages, thought-processes and cultures, while being aware of the underlying patterns and
similarities. Several studies have shown that bilingualism/multilingualism has several cognitive
benets. I need hardly mention its practical/social benets. Nothing warms people up to you as
easily as speaking their language does and knowing the local language can often be the biggest
asset of a tourist.
If you havent tried to learn any language other than your mother-tongue and English, give it
a shot. You wont regret it!
Antariksh Bothale (IIT Bombay)
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