‘Don’t Believe a Word,’ a Look at Language and Power (and Why Dolphins Have Accents)

“Don’t Believe a Word,” a new book by the Guardian writer and editor David Shariatmadari, delves into the riddles of language: the opacities, ambushes, dead ends, sudden ecstasies. It’s a brisk and friendly introduction to linguistics, and a synthesis of the field’s recent discoveries. So much more is now known about how language evolves, how animals communicate and how children learn to speak. Such findings remain mostly immured in the academy, however. Our “insatiable appetite for linguistic debate,” Shariatmadari writes, is born out of confusion. “Why do millennials speak their own language? Do the words they choose reflect the fact that they are superficial, lazy, addicted to technology? How can you protect a language against outside influence? Does the language we use to talk about climate change, or Brexit, change the way we think about them?”

Shariatmadari organizes his book around a few core misapprehensions, taking decisive aim at some well-chosen foes. Enemy Number One: The pedant or self-styled grammar snob, who has been with us for at least 400 years judging by the examples presented here, wringing his hands and lamenting the decline in linguistic standards. “Even though the idea that language is going to the dogs is widespread, nothing much has been done to mitigate it,” Shariatmadari writes. “It’s a powerful intuition, but the evidence of its effects has simply never materialized. That is because it is unscientific nonsense.”

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The expressive power of language is undiminished, but human communication is in constant flux and ought to be understood, this book argues, as “a snapshot” of a time, place and particular community of speakers. Even the simplest words alter with time. “Adder,” “apron” and “umpire,” for example, were originally “nadder,” “napron” and “numpire.” Bird used to be “brid,” and “horse,” “hros,” transpositions of letters that later became the norm. “Empty” used to be “emty” — a transformation that reveals physics at work, according to Shariatmadari. “The simple mechanics of moving from a nasal sound (‘m’ or ‘n’) to a non-nasal one can make a consonant pop up in between” — in this case, the “p” sound we hear.

Our bodies drive these changes, as do our yearnings for status and belonging. Members of a community in Papua New Guinea were found to have flipped the masculine and feminine gender agreements to distinguish themselves from the neighboring tribes, with which they shared a language. A study of Martha’s Vineyard in the 1960s found that longtime residents were unconsciously adopting an accent to separate themselves from summer visitors.