Language, Humility, and Communication

Many of us are familiar with the ‘Brit abroad’ trope of a frustrated tourist speaking ever more loudly in English, seemingly unaware that volume is not the same as communication. This trope plays out as a facet of an arrogance which, while it is not the whole picture, is certainly part of it. In contrast, learning a language can be about many things, chief among them, humility. Going to my Swiss hairdresser for the first time and asking for my fringe to be cut “spicier” rather than “thicker” ranks as one of the more crawl-into-a-hole moments of my life. I’ll never forget the vowel change that renders those two words distinct ever again. Fortunately, my hairdresser was kind to me, through her laughter and my blushes.

Yes, learning a new language is about many things. I am learning to see the world differently, shoring up my intellectual faculties as I age, accessing a different kind of travel, making new friends. I am also painfully aware of the feelings of being an outsider, of not sounding as clever or as funny as I am used to sounding, of everyday embarrassment as I search for ways to articulate myself. I am used to doing the latter rather well, it is good to be reminded that my communication prowess is context specific – when I am writing and talking in English, I can weave my words in ways which connect me to others, imagine new worlds, and make me feel light as a feather. When I am in a second language environment I can crumble and cringe as I laugh in all the wrong places or struggle to make friends with the other parents waiting for the school pick up.

These are tales of the ups and downs, but ultimately of the privilege of learning a new language, an opportunity which came my way thanks to the job of my husband and in a place of security. I can use my language skills as an add on to my life, an extra something to expand my horizons. It is a gift to myself, although probably not a gift to those who must suffer my pronunciation and endless grammatical errors.

Others may experience learning a new language as a matter of survival, of striving to be accepted, of planting new roots in unfamiliar places. People and places go to war over disagreements about the meaning we might give to certain words, like sovereignty, rights, community. I have recently been reading Sumi Madhok’s book Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights, and Gendered Struggles for Justice. In her exploration of the demands for rights by marginalised groups across South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, she poses the question “What different stories of human rights would we tell if we produced human rights scholarship from the standpoint of the stakes and the struggles of these subaltern groups at the frontline of human rights mobilisations?”

What stories would we tell if we experienced the humility of learning another language, of grasping a complex new way of seeing the world, of striving to think like others? In my blog Stories for Progressive Politics I reflected on what is missing from the stories we tell about ourselves, and the stories we tell about others. The telling of the story is not only about content, but it is also about the language we choose to tell it in. I will never forget a fellow academic speaking many years ago at a panel of the International Peace Research Association conference. She gave her talk in English and then gave part of it again in her mother-tongue language of Dutch. She came alive, she spoke with a different tone, at a different speed. I could not understand the Dutch and yet something else was communicated to me about how she felt about her work, the emotional landscape of her intellectual engagement. I realised then and there how much I was losing when listening to my fellow academics only in English, and how much they were losing of themselves and of their stories.

If I were to find a magic lamp one day, one of my wishes would be to speak and understand every language in the world. This is not only to save my embarrassment or to ease my movement through the world. It is to be able to access a diverse and rich array of perspectives and experiences. It is to be able to retreat a little further into the background of a world in which my voice can be louder than others.

June 2025