Do Languages Increase Love? (Thoughts on Mandela)

This article is mostly my own incoherent reflection on a statement by Nelson Mandela...

He once said: "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart”. (Complete serendipity that it would be his 100th birthday today if he were still alive when I first wrote this article (July 19, 2018) didn’t plan that!) 

This is a commonly quoted statement by Nelson Mandela and by and large, it makes perfect sense to the linguist community. However, on reflection after nearly 3 years of marriage to a woman who doesn’t share my first language, and therefore at any given time, we can never both be speaking and listening to our own native languages at the same time... I’m not sure I agree with Nelson on this one. 

I had this girlfriend when I was about 11. She wasn't interested in me at all. I had to ask her the previous day on MSN messenger if I could see her at break time. She would often say no because she was ‘helping out on the school farm’ (I grew up in Cornwall). Then I’d see her just sitting with her friends near where I would play football… not even hiding it! 

The point is that I often tried to explain to her that I actually felt attached to her emotionally and she would say things back to me which where so insensitive and cruel. I would sit on the bus on the way home thinking: We speak the same language but we clearly have no idea what we are actually saying to each other and it began to dawn on me that emotional clarity and language are not necessarily anything at all to do with one another. 

On the other hand, when I embraced Islam at the age of 17, I found that I had an emotional connection with people who spoke no English at all. I would stand shoulder to shoulder beside men in the mosque who knew no English at all and I’d exchange politenesses with them and get real, genuine warmth from them. So, this begs the question: “What is the real reason why we should learn languages, if it's not to speak to their hearts?”. 

I am married to a woman from Somalia who knows 4 languages and whilst I believe our marriage has been strengthened massively by my attempts to learn her languages, I actually believe that the gesture of making an effort to learn someones language is more powerful than actually conversing in daily details. One of the implications of this is that fact that the first step to learn a language is the most important and often the most rewarding. 

Further, it should be clear that language is not synonymous with communication. It is the medium through which fine detail is conveyed. This fine detail is mostly guided by non-verbal human interaction and emotion which means that in negative emotional settings, language can be a huge strain in a marriage. This ability to convey incredibly complex nuance with sophistical language is both what allows us to reach the extremities of beauty in our poetry on one end of the spectrum, whilst picking up on some of the most intolerable linguistic annoyances on the other, almost 100% dependant on the emotional setting. 

I imagine the only ones of you who noticed that Nelson only mentioned ‘man’ in his statement above are those who are emotionally invested in use of exclusive gender terms. Therein lies my very point... Good night.