The Thing About Language

DID YOU KNOW…

A biblical story recounts a time when the world had one language and one common way of speaking. The people settled on a plot of land and decided to build a tower so high that it reached the heavens to prepare for the possibility of another flood. According to the story, God saw this as blasphemy, where people would forgo faith for a human-made structure. And He said, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Language enables cooperation among individuals. So God confused their language, giving them different tongues so that they could not understand each other and, therefore, could not finish the tower. The Bible refers to this place as Babel, which today means confused noise, like a baby’s speech. The story of the Tower of Babel, as it is commonly known, illustrates the role that the lexicon of a community plays in how it enables cooperation among its members.

Language is the front door to culture. Culture writer and linguist Amanda Montell speaks about language as the way we get people on the same ideological page and make them feel that they belong to the group. Knowing the hidden meanings within a coded language is to evidence a level of intimacy within a community, a way of proving you’re one of us. The use and understanding of the lexicon not only signal membership and intimacy but also provide a currency that community members can exchange as an act of social cohesion.

Much as apes physically groom the hairs of other apes to foster community, we use the exchange of language to promote social bonding through the act of mimicry. When conversing with others, we coordinate breaking patterns and use the exact words and similar grammatical structures. These are all means of community building, and the lexicon plays a significant role in this performative act throughout society.

WORDS.

Considering the nature of language as a cultural practice, I partnered with the consumer insights company Suzy to get a sense of the kind of language that Democrats and Republicans use about hotbed topics like guns and the border. So, using a natural language database to score sentiment on a scale of -1 to 1, we conducted a sentiment survey among Americans across age and gender. Of course, the sample was split across self-identified Democrats and Republicans to compare and contrast how these different groups use language to construct meaning. And the goal of all of this endeavor is to help “us” better understand “us.”

When probed on guns in America, the Republican respondents provided strong positive statements about the Second Amendment. Language like “right to bear arms” was a reoccurring phrase that gives us some ideological understanding of how they frame the world so that we might better understand their policy preferences. The Republican verbatims also demonstrated negative sentiment on the topic of mental health and neutrality when it comes to background checks and gun violence.

When it comes to the topic of abortion, sentiment also runs strong, with Democrats demonstrating positive sentiment toward personal choices and the right to choose.  However, Republicans tend to demonstrate less positive sentiment, evoking more neutrality around the topics of birth control, rape, and incest.

The border topic demonstrates the broadest range of sentiment for both Democrats and Republicans, with shared negative sentiment around the topic of illegal immigrants and polarizing sentiment around the way the border is covered in the news.

The topic of parenting demonstrated positive sentiment for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats tended to have the most positive sentiment around the regulation of social media and the most negative sentiment around the impact on mental health, a point of view they share with Republicans.