An Accidental, Anarchist New Year's Resolution

The Emergence of Language Shows How Anarchy Works in the 'Real World'

I’m trying to learn Spanish. This probably doesn’t sound like a big deal in a world in which more people are reasonably fluent in more than one language. But for me, it’s daunting.

I’ve never been able to learn a language. Sure, I know American English quite well, but this is my native language. I didn’t have to learn it. I had it before I was born (babies can hear the outside world, including voices and speech patterns, while still in their mothers’ wombs); hence, the term “native language.”

This weakness of mine has long been an annoyance for me, but not really a huge obstacle. I’ve attended Church liturgies in Spanish and could follow what was happening, because I know the language of liturgy. I worked for a major Spanish-language broadcaster in the U.S., but my roles were in engineering and operations, where knowing English was paramount and Spanish wasn’t required.

Image from seekpng.com — “Transparent PNG Images For Free”

So on New Year’s Day, 2024, I found myself looking at very limited options for streaming the Citrus Bowl football game, and had to settle for the Spanish-language broadcast. It’s not the first time I’ve done such a thing, and I’d either mute the sound or keep it very low in the background.

But this time, I left the sound at full volume and paid attention to the Spanish-speaking commentators.

A new learning method, with anarchist echoes

Around Thanksgiving, I signed up for an online Spanish course that touted the benefits of learning a language through narratives, rather than by reading lists of vocabulary words and starting with rigid grammar.

I read through the course overview that first day … and then spent more than a month shunning the daily emails I received from the course company. Yep, I procrastinated.

And, so, the Citrus Bowl’s Spanish-language broadcast rammed head-on into the nagging feeling that I should try the new language method I’d kept putting off. After the game, I went back to the online course for the first time since late November and recalled what attracted me: It’s less like the top-down school model and more like organic learning.

This means it’s closer to how human language emerged, at what we would call the “grass-roots” level. At its core, the development of language was decentralized and distributed — it’s practically anarchist! — and it worked! I’ve heard several good explanations to this point, most recently by Bob Murphy on a podcast available at the “On the Banks” Substack (transcript at Buzzsprout):

It’s not that English is arbitrary. There’s definitely rules of grammar. …

So who’s in charge of the English language? What group of experts or authority figures dictates to everybody else what the rules of grammar are? And there is no such group of people.

Now there's things like dictionaries and grammar books and style guides, but what those are doing are just codifying what the community’s usage shows.

Anarchy then and now!

There are competing (but not mutually exclusive) theories as to how and why language evolved. But there seems to be no disputing that language did, in fact, begin and develop as a practical matter of ordinary people trying to survive and then thrive, rather than originating as an imposition by a hierarchical elite.

Sure, there are recognized gatekeepers for modern languages, but that’s a much later development. And the bottom-up evolutionary process continues even after formal institutions assume the job of dictating how others are supposed to use language.

Slang is perhaps the best example of ongoing subversive behavior toward the “ruling class” of language. The jargon of cutting-edge technological fields, which eventually makes its way into more common usage, is another good example. Don’t forget texting/social-media shorthand, IYKYK, LMAO!

It’s time for me to give learning a language another chance. And it could help me be a better neighbor to folks whose primary language is Spanish, some of whom used to be co-workers and others of whom are current fellow Church congregants.

What about you?

Do you speak/write with adequate fluency in more than one language? Which ones?

What do you think of the emergence and continued evolution of language as examples of anarchy working in the real world?

What else interests you about the topics explored here?

Tell me in the Comments section …