A day in the life of... a modern language

Being cultural devices it is only natural that languages are living entities just as the populations that use them. As technologies and customs develop, new terms are forged to be able to describe them, while the ones referring to old uses slowly sediment down into oblivion or get suddenly repurposed for a different use. One paradigmatic example of this case is the word "spam", which used to describe a very filling cheap meat confection often packaged in bulky cans, and has recently been revived to designate the bulk unwanted email that fills our email inboxes every day.

Some terms often grow and contract in meaning according to the advancement of technology. When telephones were invented they were based on landlines, a technology which dominated the system for many decades. As the cellular technology started to become widespread the words cellphone or mobile phone were forged to distinguish "normal" phones (based on landlines) from the new type. Eventually mobile phones became so common that not only the term phone applies to refer to either of them indistinguishably, but in many cases the default has become the cellular one. The line of evolution continued with the blending of phone capabilities into the personal digital assistants to give rise to what we know today as a "smartphone", which has already become the standard meaning for the original "phone" term. Of course, the change of the default meaning has required the invention of terms to refer to the former defaults such as "landline" (for the original technology) and "dumb phone" (for those mobile devices without significant computing capabilities).

Photo: Wally Gobetz

The cultural reaction to this new needs and uses varies from country to country and from language to language. In the case of English there is no central authority that can exert any measure of control, so instead several institutions just compete to try to capture the developments as they gain traction among the general population. The Oxford English Dictionary is the most prominent among them, but certainly not the sole one. At the same time, producers of content such as news outlets and governmental entities usually establish their own style guides to try to provide an understandable and unified language. On the other end of the spectrum France, in its attempt to preserver the identity and the integrity of their language, holds a very strong grip on new uses through the General Delegation for the French language and the languages of France (in French Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France, DGLFLF) decreeing which new developments can be accepted into the French language and even occasionally proposing alternatives to promote "cultural adequacy" (the quotes are mine). The case of Spanish is an intermediate one, being the vehicular language of more than 20 countries. The Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, as its own name describes, is an association of language academies, each one trying to polish the use of Spanish in their own country or region, trying to coordinate it and cooperate in its expansion. And, as we have discussed before, the drive to expand is a key characteristic of living entities.

However, one of the most impressive linguistic phenomena in terms of linguistic evolution is the resignification or reappropriation, where a community takes a term used by the rest of the population as derogatory and exclusionary and starts to use it themselves to establish a stronger sense of identity of the formerly excluded community. As a part of the evolution, the word in question often keeps its negative connotation when used in the mouths of the "out group" while the "in group" is free and even encouraged to use it amongst them. An emblematic case of this situation is, even today, the term nigger to refer to the African American community in the United States.

Our ability to communicate ideas and feelings, to coordinate our efforts and discuss our differences is a wonderful gift. And the fact that it evolves to cover our needs as they rise and fall is truly astonishing. From this small corner of the internet I try to take a moment every day, as I type my words, to make appreciation of this artifact that I regularly enjoy. I hope you have a wonderful week.