Language as an Act of Human Connection

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My childhood was spent in three languages: My mother and her family speak French, my father and his family speak Vietnamese, and at home we speak English. I remember listening to conversations as a child, mesmerized by the patterns and picking out the few words I knew. As an adult, I feel at home in the rhythms of these languages; even though my French is passable at best and I know only enough Vietnamese to read a menu, hearing them spoken around me is enough to reassure me that I am home.This is not an experience unique to me or to those of us in multilingual houses. One of the most fascinating things about being human is the shared experience of using language, signed or spoken. From the moment we enter the world, we are surrounded by language, cradled by the rhythms of the signed or spoken languages around us. It's no wonder that a word can feel like childhood or that a language can invoke the warmth of home. Language is tied up in the act of being.Language use is about participation as much as creation. Conversations are joint actions; language is as much about the person being addressed as it is about the speaker (Clark & Brennan, 1991). One of the most interesting and beautiful things about the use of language is that language meaning is created between users of the language and contexts rather than meaning being inherent to words; this means that language is incredibly rich and deep in ways that we sometimes never consider. In conversations, we create a shared context where we develop inside jokes, nicknames for items, and understanding of one another (Clark & Brennan, 1991). As we use language, we signal something to the world about who we are, what we believe in, and where we come from, and we signal this not just with the words we choose but by the way we speak, gesture, and present ourselves.Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love is a well-written introduction to issues in the field of psycholinguistics, language studies, and linguistics, as well as a clear and touching tribute to language itself. Sedivy covers a broad variety of topics, ranging from acquisition to processing, and manages to do so in a way that is clear to those who are outside the field and those inside the field. In a field as dynamic and rapidly changing as linguistics and language studies, it is hard to capture the entire field, yet Sedivy manages to take a view that is easily digestible and comprehensible. This is a book that I would recommend to people interested in language and the study of language, as well as people who know nothing about language.One deft way that she does this is in the chapter about understanding pragmatics. We say (or sign) more than what we mean constantly and, even more remarkably, can communicate this extended meaning to our conversational partners, such as when we use sarcasm or humorous exaggeration (Clark & Brennan, 1991). To understand how we do this, we must start by making several underlying assumptions—namely, that our conversational partners are rational and that they are working together with us in order to reach some shared conversational goal. In turn, this means that we must be following some conversational guidelines, such as the maxims proposed by Grice (1975), and that we must deliberately select the words we intend to say. In other words, we don't produce utterances randomly; our utterances are targeted to our intended meaning and conversational partners. We are always signaling something to our conversational partners. Sedivy starts with the example of “some” and then carries through the metaphor of glacier hiking, a dangerous activity if one makes a misstep. This is an apt comparison: There are many ways to misunderstand one another, and some misunderstandings might be socially costly or embarrassing, such as misspeaking or mishearing important information. Sedivy captures the ways in which conversations, and the ways they are constructed, rely on the speakers in them to work together to construct meaning.Another topic that this book approaches with care is the idea that languages have status and that the perception of speakers can affect how people are treated. It is important to acknowledge that languages can be privileged in some contexts, and this can lead to use or disuse of language. It is also true that speakers are judged based on the ways they speak. For example, at the level of phoneme, producing the word fishin’ instead of fishing is associated with a lower education level (Campbell-Kibler, 2009), and producing /t/ as a stop is associated with being more authoritative (Podesva et al., 2015), although these are stereotypes and not truth. At the word level, producing a hyperstylized form of speech can be a marker of social identity (see Bucholtz, 2001 for a study of “nerd speech” in young women) or youth (as in totally; see Beltrama & Staum Casasanto, 2017). And at the level beyond words, intonational patterns have been associated with various social personae (Beltrama & Schwarz, 2021; Vornik et al., 2003). Although these judgments are based in stereotypes, they have real effects on things such as housing (Du Bois, 2019; Wright, 2023), education (García & Solorza, 2021), and careers (Kang & Yaw, 2024; Spence et al., 2024). Sedivy also discusses how women are often associated with linguistic styles such as uptalk or hedging that can be stereotyped (Holmes, 1990). Sedivy's discussion of this, embedded in a chapter on other ways speakers might be penalized, such as for the use of “um” or “uh,” highlights just how pervasive the problem of linguistic stereotyping is and how fraught success is for women (particularly women in academia). Although this chapter doesn't address the intersectionality of this issue (e.g., women of color are more likely to leave academia because of things like expectations about speech patterns and instruction styles, as shown by Fox Tree & Vaid, 2022), it does address one of the biggest distinctions that those who work on language make: describing language use versus prescribing language use.Psycholinguists are interested in descriptive language use, that is, how language is used every day by people. This is in contrast to prescriptive language use, or saying how language ought to be used. Psycholinguists are not in the business of telling people to “never end a sentence with a preposition” or “never split infinitives”; rather, we catalog, observe, and study the rich and varied ways language can be used. Part of the job of a psycholinguist is to recognize the variation that naturally occurs in speakers of even the same dialect of a language and to unpack the language ideology that prioritizes one form of a language over another form. Sedivy comes back to this idea across chapters, with nuanced discussions intended to lead the reader gently to this point. Framing language use, from comprehension to production, as inherently tied up in assumptions about the world is an important part of understanding how we make meaning together.Sedivy touches on this only briefly, but language change in the form of large language models (LLMs) might be the most topical issue of today. We are beginning to see LLMs reach levels of sophistication that make it hard to distinguish the output from human-generated content. In 2023, The New Yorker published an article calling LLMs blurry snapshots of the web (Chiang, 2023), which uses an analogy of a photocopy to describe how they work. This article raises the question of whether it matters if it uses language the ways humans do; if it looks like it understands, is that all that matters? Although this is a philosophical question, there is real work to be done in understanding LLMs and how they might drive language change going forward. For example, if people start to use LLMs for tasks such as writing emails or replying to comments, how will spontaneous written communication change? And similarly, if essays are run through (or written by) the LLM, how will that change things like author style, let alone frequencies of words used? LLMs are also trained on human data, so they contain all the biases embedded in human language, including biases on gender and race (Kotek et al., 2024). All of these are concerns we must contend with as we move to a future where LLMs are embedded in our use of language.Perhaps the most poignant and moving parts of the book are the last three chapters, where Sedivy discusses language change throughout life, including loss of language and death. These chapters speak to the underlying universal goal of language use: connection. We use language to connect with others in the service of some common goal, and as our bodies change, we change our language use to adapt to our situations. As this book is part memoir, Sedivy deftly ties together her personal stories with scientific facts. Although sometimes aging is seen as a loss in performance, particularly on lab tasks, Sedivy points out that aging gives us experience in conversations, such that we make better predictions about what other speakers might do, and as we age, we might have different conversational needs than in the past. The love Sedivy has for language flows through this book and is evident across the entire text. If a reader would like to learn more about the rich world of language use and the ways in which it is studied through an easily accessible book, then this is the book to reach for.