What even is language?

An exploration of linguistics and world languages, for elementary schoolers

I had big plans for winter break, writing here included, but I actually just slept a lot. But it’s a new year, so here you go:

This year, one of curriculum threads in my class is an inquiry into language itself. How do languages work? How are they different from each other? We’re exploring this in as many ways as I can think of throughout the year. I’ll outline some of them below. I love this thread, because we get to explore big questions as well as learn about grammar and linguistics. I also feel like I’m learning alongside the class, teaching them about things I’m still wrapping my head around myself. My goal is broad strokes and curiosity, so I think that works, but I also feel like we’re just peeking into a huge topic (All of linguistics! All the languages of the world!) and I can only hope our little peek is a respectful, wonder-invoking one.

Body language, nonverbal communication, and gibberish

We started by thinking about body language and nonverbal communication: how else we communicate besides language itself. We told the story “Caps for Sale” using gibberish and then explored what meaning came through and what didn’t. We played around with gibberish conversations as well.

Onomatopoeia

We don’t know where language came from, but sometimes meanings are directly related to the thing they describe. When they make the sound of that thing, of course, that’s onomatopoeia, and it goes a long way beyond bang and boom and moo. Hush, slosh, trot, gallop, swish. Wind has a windy sound. Even pickle, to me, sounds pickly. We wrote noise poems, and poems that used words with similar sounds to the noise we wanted to replicate. For instance, if I wanted a lot of “hush” in my poem, I don’t just have to say “hush, hush, hush.” I could use words like “wish, wash, lush, husk, etc.” and fill my poem up with that sound. (Try it! It’s very fun.)

What do you have to say in English?

Some things, you have to say when you speak English. You have to say if something is in the past or present for instance, unlike Mandarin. On the other hand, you can speak in passing about someone without revealing gender, unlike Spanish, and you don’t have to say how you know a fact, unlike many indigenous languages. It would be harder, I think, to have fake news if you had to say whether you observed something, deduced it, or just heard it from someone else.

Syntax

This led us into syntax, which we mostly explored by breaking it. We picked a sentence from our journals and pretended each word was a block that we could put together in any order. We wrote for a few minutes just building with those words, then put in punctuation at random and read them aloud as if they meant something. We read (and in one class even memorized) ee cummings’ poem “crazy jay blue)” and imitated him.

What can language do besides mean something?

This led us deeper into exploring language abstractly. We thought about all the things language can do besides mean something. How words sound as music, how they feel, the tone they give us. We read some Gertrude Stein, and had a visit from Eric Acosta, a local poet and noise artist (among other art forms he pursues), who had us move from noise and movement into writing. We also imitated one of his poems, a chant-like nonsensical poem that repeats sounds and rhythms. We had a great time!

Language ambassadors

We’re lucky to have fluent speakers of many languages in the families of our class, and some of them are coming to speak to us about how their other language is different than English, teach us a phrase or two, and answer questions. It takes some bravery to answer the questions of children, because you never know what they will be. Some urgent questions that our Spanish speaker was asked include “Do you roll the r’s in burrito because you roll a burrito?” And, “What is the gender of turtle?”

Anumeric languages

There are, it turns out, a few languages in the world that don’t have words for numbers. They have the ideas of “bigger” and “smaller” but not exact amounts. We tried this out for a day, which was a lot of fun. Instead of thinking about it being 10:15, we thought of it as almost snack time. Instead of telling the class they had five more minutes to play, I called “A few more minutes.” They weren’t nine-year-olds, they were medium-sized children. My 14 year old dog was simply ancient. We thought about the things that are hard to do without numbers, and what it would be like to live a life where you needed (and had) different skills and knowledge.

Colors

This week, we’re exploring language for colors, as not all languages have all the same color categories. We will think about all the ways we can differentiate color without having different precise words: the difference between navy blue and sky blue, for instance, even as we see them both as blues.

Some languages only have words for light and dark, and beyond that they describe things as having the color of something else, like being fire colored, or leaf colored. Some languages add in red, some also add in yellow or green or both. Some have blue. Some have similar names to English. Russian divides what we call blue into two colors, a light blue and a dark blue. (Nerdy side note, having that naming distinction makes Russian speakers faster at telling the difference between shades that lie across that divide.)

I have a lot of paint chips, mostly from old projects, so the class will work in small groups to divide up piles of chips according to different ways of talking about color. How would you divide them up if you only had light and dark? What if you had black, white, red, and yellow?

We will also think about how we have the colors of the rainbow drilled into us, rather than them being something we pick up easily. We will look at the green space near class and see how the color scheme isn’t really based on the rainbow, and think about how we might divide up the colors we see there. Then, of course, we’ll write color poems!

Directions

Some languages don’t use right and left, but always express directions based on larger orientation. So something might be next to your north hand, and telling a story about a tree falling when you’re facing west, you might have the tree fall right to left, but if you told the same story while facing east, you’d have the tree fall left to right. We’ll give this a try for a day as well, and explore how well we sense directions as we move through the day, imagining what it would be like to always know which way was which, and honoring that skill in the kids who have it, despite our less directionally oriented culture.

I got nerdy about this when my daughter was little, and rarely used right or left with her, using directions or geographic markers instead. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but that kid has a great sense of direction and can draw very accurate maps of places she’s just been once.

And more

We’re also, looking forward into spring, going to do reports on different languages, touch on different writing systems, play with translation, and more. If you have an idea for us, let me know!