Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Like other uses of lips and hands, such as smiling, stroking, pouting, and punching, vocal noise establishes bonds between people who need or wish to be linked together in some way—for mutual support, to establish rank, or to declare hostility, for example. From that perspective, the babysitter who coos at an infant in a crib is performing a language act of the same general kind as the ambitious student who greets me with a rising tone on the last syllable of “Good morning, sir.” If these acts are communicative, then we must redefine communication not as the transmission of mental states from A to B (and even less as the transmission of “information”) but as the establishment, reinforcement, and modification of immediate interpersonal relations. But it would be better to say: that’s not communication, that’s language. Language is a human way of relating to other humans.

Among the larger primates such functions are carried out through the much studied practice of grooming. Grooming bonds mother and child, it bonds males in hierarchical rank (the “pecking order”), it establishes bonds between males and females prior to copulation, and it generally binds together the entire clan or group of cohabiting animals. But it is a time-consuming business. There is a point of population growth where it can’t easily serve its purpose anymore. Robin Dunbar has suggested that a group of fifty-five animals is just about as large as a grooming-based community can get before it has to split up. When it does, no cross-grooming is possible: you belong to either the old group or the new one. You do not pick fleas off the fur of chimps that are not of “your kind.”[184]

There is a striking fit between this picture of social construction among primates and the way people actually talk. Articulated language allows the group size to increase greatly but not infinitely. The way any individual talks is part of his identity as a member of a specific community, defined by region, area, city, maybe even street, and certainly by clan or family. What’s called dialectal variation, which is just another aspect of linguistic diversity, performs a similar structuring function to the grooming habits of chimpanzees. To put this broad understanding in a nutshell: language is ethnicity.

Ethnicity in this sense has nothing to do with lineage, heredity, race, blood group, or DNA. It means how a social group constitutes and identifies itself.

The bewildering variety of diction that can be heard among the inhabitants of the British Isles gives a spectacular demonstration of the fine-grained group-membership function of the way people speak. Different sounds are used to communicate membership of communities based in Essex, Norfolk, the three Rid-ings of Yorkshire, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Orkney, Shetland, Lewis, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, North Wales, South Wales, Somerset, Scilly, Solent, and Kent, and in addition, the diction of London, now called Estuarine, is audibly divided in two, depending on whether you live on the north or south bank of the Thames’s muddy maw. On top of this, specific phonologies override or else merge with these regional markers to locate the speaker in the pecking order of British society, from the “Mayfairditsch” of wealth and privilege to the related but not identical speech of those educated at private schools (called public schools), public schools (called grammar schools), and the rest. Some, of course, learn to speak not from their classmates but from listening to the BBC (which I think must have been the case for me) and signal thereby their allegiance to an idea of “educated speech” as the dialect of (cultural) authority. In Britain, you just can’t escape the messages about region and class that come from anyone who opens his or her mouth.

In the musical My Fair Lady, based on G. B. Shaw’s stage play Pygmalion, which itself rewrites a far more ancient myth, Professor Higgins asks, “Oh! why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” We must answer, Oh! but they do, Professor Higgins. They teach them to declare themselves to be Geordies and Aberdonians, Etonians and lads on the Clapham omnibus, ladies from Morningside or fishermen from Newquay. If you are British, you just can’t not notice. Alongside its role as a planetary interlanguage in print, English speech—like any other—is a highly pixelated way of telling people who you are.

That is something that all forms of human speech share, and it is perhaps the only thing that is truly universal about language. Every language tells your listener who you are, where you come from, where you belong. Linguistic diversity, including the subtle differentiation in diction within intercomprehensible forms of speech, is the mechanism by which this primordial social function is performed.