Speaking the Languages of Others

"Now you're speakin' my language!"

If someone says this in a movie, chances are they've just been offered a significant incentive such as cash to cooperate with their interlocutor.

Indeed, in my own experience, the way we acquire and use language is deeply interwoven with our perceived self-interest. And, once we feel we have a pretty firm grip on our language, it is very easy to negatively judge others who don't speak in exactly the same way as we do.

I'm reminded of the time when, while still in high school and working as a waiter, I had a patron from a different linguistic geography of the English-speaking world, who refused to understand me until I pronounced a word the same way he did, rather than the way everyone else I knew said it. And, as far as I could tell, he thought he was doing me a favour by correcting my apparent mispronounciation of this word. (I've long since forgotten the word, and I likely reverted to my previous way of saying it moments after he paid for his meal and left.)

Now, I'm the son of a pair of linguists, which is what my parents needed to be in order to properly carry out their mission of learning another language from scratch well enough to then translate the Bible into it. That means that I grew up surrounded by a language and culture that were not my own, and in the midst of parents who were constantly analyzing language and pronounciation.

As a result, I have a rather heightened sensitivity to the languages of others, and one of the things I've concluded is that no two peope speak exactly the same language. What that means, among other things, is that many conflicts which arise from misunderstanding begin with two (or more) people having different meanings in mind for the same word(s) or idiom(s).

One great example of this is the phrase "full of beans" which, all my growing up years, I understood to mean "full of baloney" or some similar reference to not knowing what you're talking about. So, you can imagine my surprise when the mother of the girl I'd eventually marry told me I was full of beans as if it was a compliment.

It turns out that some people (mostly of Protestant background in my experience) use the term "full of beans" like I understood it, and some people (mostly of Catholic background in my experience) use the term "full of beans" to mean "full of energy!"

Now, at least when speaking to each other, tone of voice and context give us a clue that perhaps there's another meaning intended. But when phrases and words with hidden different meanings get put in writing, for example in emails, one can imagine how it might stir up some hurt feelings.

Here's why these observations belong in this blog/book: many Christian communities unwittingly have their own vocabularies which they use to judge who is "in" and who is not. (See my blog/chapter on sibboleths for some examples.) That's a problem when a Christian of one denomination visits a church of another denomination and opens up their mouth to have a conversation about faith. Suddenly, every turn of phrase they use becomes a potential opportunity to be excluded or judged as "not yet saved" if it is different, or has a different expected meaning, from how their hosts talk.

My advice, based on experience, is twofold for those who would welcome fellow Christians without falling into such shallow judgmentalism:

1) If you are a visitor in someone else's community, understand that it's OK to try to learn and speak their language - you're not sacrificing your integrity or behaving cynically, you're just learning a new dialect.
2) If someone visits your community and seems to be saying all kinds of things that mark them as inferior to established members of your community, ask yourself if you're judging them by their dialect rather than accepting them non-judgmentally.

After all, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:1,2 (ESV), "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you."

(Copyright (c) 2011, Reg Harbeck, all rights reserved)