Everything is language

Mathematical notation: language. Stock market and finance jargon: language. Poetry: language.

That last one is obvious, but you may not have thought about math and stocks as being fundamentally linguistic. The language (i.e., words) used can still “correspond” to English¹—or whatever your native language may be—but it isn’t always easily understood, and can feel quite foreign, if we’re not familiar with the subject. This is a perfect example of context-dependent language, where, in North America, for example, the English you speak at home with your family is likely very different from the English you hear on a trading floor (unless you’re from a family of bankers, maybe). Go into a software company’s innovation or R&D department, or an IT branch of a cybersecurity company, or sit in on a symphony orchestra practicing, a gender studies class, or a court hearing or legal briefing. Listen to the language used at a university football practice, on a construction site, in a professional kitchen. What differentiates each of these domains? Of course the things they deal with seem vastly different—sports, music, law, design, economics, philosophy and critical thought, computer programming—but yet, any child who speaks the English language could grow up to participate in any one—or any number—of these fields. The common denominator is English. Yet—what might you notice, in each of these environments? Would you be able to jump into the conversation in each of these places? Perhaps it would be the case that, given a lack of background knowledge or experience, you might find you are actually able to understand very little of what is being said. Is this because you’re not intelligent enough, or don’t have a handle on the English language? Of course not. Too often people—capable, intelligent, valuable people—are driven away from a domain because they feel unequipped to join the conversation. They assume that because they don’t understand what’s being said—often in their own native language, no less—they are either ill-suited to this particular subject matter, or they simply are not capable enough. This is “starting at the end”, as it were. Let’s suppose you heard Zulu being spoken, and thought to yourself, “what a beautiful language”. Interested in learning it, you decided to sit in on an advanced Zulu class, and found that you understood nothing. Would you—a beginner, with no prior knowledge of the language—abandon the idea of pursuing learning Zulu altogether because you didn’t understand what was being discussed at a predictably challenging higher level? Or, perhaps more interestingly, would you have even expected yourself to understand what was happening?

There is a sense that in learning a new language, one must start at the beginning. You need to first build up a vocabulary, an understanding of the structure of the language, knowledge about the culture in which the language is spoken.

The same principle applies to every conceptual domain one can think of.

There should be no shame in the naive quality of being a newcomer to a topic. Additionally, there should be no fear of a subject simply because at first pass, you find you’re not quite able to understand or repeat back the new information. To the former: being a newcomer means you are unfamiliar with the jargon. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t mean you’re unable to grasp the information, the meaning, hidden being the terminology, but rather that you haven’t yet learned what that—often specific, often domain-specific—meaning is. Take the term polysemous. A perfect word for this context. As a linguist, I need to take care not to scare non-linguists away by using *unusual* terms (especially where I could choose more general, or domain-common, words instead). Notice I won’t say “big” or “complex” words—because other (small and simple yet equally confounding) words could fit here too. In any case, it’s about relating to people. So rather than say domain-specific words can be confusing because they’re often polysemous, I might say they can be confusing because they often have more than one meaning. Polysemous = has more than one meaning. Easy, right?

The only reason that domain-specific words (and often, colloquially, “big” words) (yes, I used a five-syllable word in an aside about big words. I can’t help myself. It means “informal”, sort of synonymous with “the vernacular”) seem scary is because they’re new! They look and sound like our language, yet we don’t have any meaning to assign them. It’s like having a label that doesn’t refer to anything. Imagine someone kept talking about “Anna”, but you didn’t know who Anna was, anything about her life, or what she did, or what she looked like. You wouldn’t really have much to contribute to the discussion about Anna per se—but you might ask those things as questions. It’s like when you go to a new restaurant with dishes you’ve never heard of or tried before on the menu. Sometimes all it takes is a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, to get a sense of what kind of food the label refers to. It is fairly intuitive that when you go to, say, a Mexican restaurant, you might learn that “pollo” means chicken. If you only spoke English going into the restaurant, now you have two entries—i.e., labels, i.e., {“chicken”, “pollo”}—in your mind for the food-concept that is chicken. What about the other way around? What does the word chicken mean? That is, what concept does the entry “chicken” correspond to? Does it only have one meaning? Let’s think about this. If you were reading a children’s book about a farm, what does “chicken” evoke? What about at a restaurant? What about with your friends before a swim in the lake on a cold morning? Though we might be unaware of it, we already have many words in our lexicon—our “mental dictionary”—that have multiple different meanings. Same label, different stuff. How and when we use these words, and each of their meanings, depends largely (if not entirely) on the context. Now think back to each of the places and domains I talked about at the beginning—not only do different domains have different new words, they also have words that look and sound familiar, but carry an either somewhat or entirely different meaning.

So to conclude, for now, this yet unfinished thought: one mustn’t fear. Just remember everything is language and you’ll be fine.

¹ the example language for the current purposes, both for simplification (i.e., to avoid having to say “language” or “any language” at every turn) and to make clear that this “language” of which I wish to speak (at least where you now see “English” in the above text) unambiguously points to [a] human natural language, and not language as in phrasing or stylistic considerations or verbiage. All that to say, one could easily insert any other natural language (e.g., Hungarian, Inuktitut, Japanese, Pirahã) and the same principle holds. (The question of why this is is subject matter for another story time…) O blessed footnote, how unironically recursive thou art