History is Encoded in the Words of a Language
Each one of us carries the ability to communicate and understand the world around us through language. The languages that we use are not inanimate objects or meaningless tools that we use as a means to an end. They are an extension of culture, containing all the different ways to describe, categorise, and interpret the world.
Over thousands of years, the world’s languages (there are over 7,000 languages spoken around the world by the way) have been handed down through generations and across different cultural groups, with each making changes to the language to better meet the demands of the time.
All the changes each generation makes, be it new words, new grammatical patterns, even new pronunciation, are like bookmarks in the story of a language. When you look closer at those little bookmarks, some of them reveal stories of largescale wars, migrations, colonisation, exploration, societal schisms, even the rise and fall of empires. An example? Well, we can start with the name of the language this article is written in.
The origin of the word “English” comes from when Germanic tribes called the Angles and Saxons began invading and populating Britain 1,600 years ago. Anglo-Saxon was shortened to Anglos, over time turning to Anglish, and finally becoming what we refer to now as Old English, the ancestor of modern English. This is why English is called a Germanic language instead of a Celtic language like the other tongues of Great Brittain. The name “England” used to be something akin to “Angla-land”. If you say it fast, it’s easy to see how we got to the modern name.
English’s sister languages are German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and a few others forming what we call the Germanic language family. Our words for numbers, days of the week, everyday words for family and common animals, are all Germanic with parallels in those other Germanic languages. But then we notice there’s all this Old French stuff in the English language as well, another historical bookmark. In 1066, the French absolutely smashed their way into England through war and conquest.
By holding power in England, the Norman French occupied the upper levels of society while the English-speaking population was pushed into lower status positions, such as labourers and farmers. So, the English words for farm animals like cow, sheep, chicken, pig/swine, and others are all Germanic because the farmers were speaking a Germanic language.
But the French were often the ones in the restaurants eating the food, and so the names for the foods are all essentially French in the English language; poultry, beef, pork. This class divide can also be seen today in many of our legal and academic words. If someone is speaking using very formal, technical language today, chances are they are using way more French words than normal.
But bringing this home, you can also see shared cultures, shared histories, mind-boggling voyages, and connections over vast expanses when we consider te reo Maori and its language family. The Polynesian language family is a sub-group of a much larger family, with the closest sister languages to te reo being te re Moriori, Hawaiian, Tahitian, Rarotongan, and the language of Easter Island (Rapanui). Other languages in this group include Samoan and Tongan but these are not as closely related to te reo Maori.
Now take out your phone and look at a map. Look at the distances between Hawaii, Tahiti, Rarotonga, Easter Island, and Aotearoa. How closely related the languages are and how far apart they are from one another geographically hints that there was a technological boom that revolutionised sailing, sending many more waka out into the waves and further than before. This kickstart in exploring the entire Pacific Ocean is hinted at in the languages, because those languages also journeyed with their speakers over those distant horizons, and they have many more stories to tell us.
The words that come out of our mouths when we speak are not just random sounds slapped together into sentences. They are encoded with thousands of years of history. They form the way we see and describe the world and people around us. As a linguist, every word is precious, and I think many people would benefit from seeing it this way too.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Words by Matt Bowden
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