What Language Reveals About Us

I confess that when I first signed the contract to write Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love, I wasn’t entirely sure I could write it.

Linguaphile is a fusion of science writing and memoir, a genre that tries to make sense of life by examining the ingredients of one particular life. For me these ingredients include my years in the lab as a language scientist but also a lifetime of rich linguistic experiences and pleasures. I wanted to write a book that intertwined these threads. Working on Linguaphile illuminated for me the wholeness of language as a human experience.

A theme I kept coming back to was the hunger we humans have to align minds with each other. Anyone who’s locked eyes with a 3-month-old baby on a crowded bus has experienced the innate human urge for connection and communication. A child’s earliest language learning is correlated with her ability to follow another person’s eye gaze and coordinate attention with them.

While working on this book, I couldn’t help but consider what a deeply intimate thing it is for a child to learn a new word from a parent: the way she scans the parent’s face for clues to meaning, the way she shifts her attention to match, the way the parent nimbly uses language to comment on what has caught the child’s notice. These skills of alignment run throughout our linguistic lives; they can be seen in real-time conversation, and they are what allow us to understand meanings that have been left unspoken.

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