It’s so hard to learn another language.
I’ve been living in Iceland for a little over 5 years at this point. It’s home. It’s actually been home for a while. Even if I bitch about the weather sometimes, Iceland is somewhere I’m proud to live. And yet, every time I have to interact with broader Icelandic society (doctors, people in shops, administrators etc.) I’m met with the exact same question: ‘Talar þú íslensku?’. Or, in English: ‘Do you speak Icelandic?’
As someone autistic, I am prone to take the question incredibly literally. I’m very much not alone in that.* I actually think interpreting things literally can actually yield lots of interesting results. I think of it as me fully exploring the depth of meanings available from a certain phrase or question and (hopefully!) picking the relevant one. So, for example, when someone asks me if I speak Icelandic, they could be asking:
- Do you speak any Icelandic at all? Like can you comprehend any Icelandic words at all?
- Do you feel comfortable speaking in Icelandic now?
- Are you understanding me right now?
- What language would you like me to speak now?
- Do you feel fluent in Icelandic?
- Are you making an effort to learn Icelandic? (This is a fun one actually, because while some are definitely asking out of curiosity, there are also definitely those who are asking through a lens of xenohobia. The idea seems to be that if you’re not actively attempting to learn Icelandic then you aren’t interested in integrating with Icelandic society.)
- Are you foreign?
And, to be clear, these aren’t the only interpretations available. This is just a cursory selection. In fact, part of the fun of language is that words have a range of possible meanings. And, to be clear, it can absolutely be (and definitely often is) actually fun to try and navigate these various meanings. I’d actually count that as a hobby of mine. Because you can do it in so many different ways! Speaking of which…
Ooooooooooooooh… Watch out! It’s the classic ‘Matt McKenna explains some fun things about language’ segment! Here we go!
Contrasting the Literal Definition with a More Usual Interpretation
When I was growing up I was often tasked with the dishes. It was my household chore to do. So often, one or other of my parents would ask me to ‘give them a hand’.
If you’re a fan of Dad jokes, you’re probably one step ahead of me. I would occasionally applaud. I would offer my hand for a handshake. I often thought it would be fun to jokingly interpret it as a hand in marriage.
Similarly, if a lover asked me to give them a hand, I could playfully interpret it as flirting. I could offer them a hand. If you know what I mean***
The potential ranges of meaning allow for play. I know what the intended meaning is and therefore I can play with it.
Using the Range of Meanings to Leave A Suggestive Implication
Imagine you’re on a date. It’s early days but it’s going really well. They’re into it. You’re into it. Vibes are good.
As part of the ongoing conversation you’re asked about food. Your date asks you if you like to try new foods. You respond, ‘I like to think I’m generally pretty adventurous’. If you have a cute smirk like me, maybe you drop a smirk.
You see the game here. You’ve answered honestly and directly buuuuuut you’ve used the range of possible meanings to have a little flirty flirt. You’ve used words that could be used in another context deliberately to make an inference. To add a little background flirt to the mix. Delightful.
Flirting is just an example. It works elsewhere. If you’re in a job interview and you’re asked if you’re comfortable with the seating arrangements, you could say ‘I feel really comfortable here. I feel like I could sit here for years’. Cute smirk very optional. You answer literally. You also dangle a wider meaning for the other person to interact with optionally, i.e. that you want the job and would be happy to stay long term.
Being Passive Aggressive
Not all play with a phrase’s range of meaning is used for fun though. A good final example is using a phrase with known subtext for a secondary emotion you don’t want to admit to directly.
So I think everyone who’s seen a sitcom knows that the phrase ‘it’s fine’ is potentially at risk of passive aggressive subtext. It is totally acceptable to say ‘it’s fine’ on a literal level’ so, in my mind, folks use the linguistic cover affording by the literal meaning to impart some passive aggressive stuff. Myself included.
Dogwhistling
And, now we come to an evil use! For those unfamiliar, a dogwhistle is coded language used by a particular political group. The idea is that by using coded language, they can express support for a group or idea without any opposition perceiving it.
I think the most prevalent use of dogwhistles in my discourse are those used by fascists, fascist sympathisers and the alt right. When choosing to be anti-Semitic, the alt right will often talk about ‘globalists’, ‘the cabal’ or ‘global banking’ referring indirectly to Jews.
Throughout these four examples we can see that the literal interpretation of language is but one way to understand what someone means.
Thus ends the ‘Matt McKenna explains some fun things about language’ time.
Now, by no means are these three examples meant to be exhaustive. Far fucking from it. Part of the fun of language is that the meanings are deep and broad and evolving. But if you are trying to learn a new language, or, if you are trying to learn a new difficult language (maybe Icelandic for instance?) you might now see the issue.
Learning a language is not just an issue of learning new words and swapping them in. It’s not like you take an English word out of the language template and then just slot an Icelandic one in. There’s so many possible meanings for even the most basic phrases. Don’t believe me? Well…
*Imagine at this point we had a title card that said ‘Matt is about to talk about how much you need to know to learn a language effectively’. It’s a nice smooth transition. Low fi beats. I start talking in a sort of Tom Nicholas/Jonny Harris voice. The beat drops and…*
Let’s go back to Icelandic for a second. In my initial example, ‘talar þú íslensku?’, I deliberately translated that so we could have the initial discussion. I didn’t call attention deliberately to it because I didn’t want to get bogged down. I know most of you don’t tala íslensku, so I wanted it to flow.
But now, dear reader, if you’ll indulge me a quick favour, actually linger over the words. Hold them in your mouth. Try and say them. Can you? Feeling confident on the pronunciation? Reckon you’d know the meaning if I hadn’t told you? Reckon you’d know all the context? Even the widely reported experience of Icelandic xenophobia stuff?
And if you did or do, then awesome! This article isn’t about trying to prove I know anything (my dear sibling in Christ, literally none of my articles are about me knowing anything. I unequivocally know nothing. Not even in a cool Socrates way.). I aim only to show why I believe, which is that learning a language is a hella complicated endeavour.
In this section, I want to tell you about a couple of Icelandic phrases: ‘Hvað segirðu gott?’ and ‘jæja’. By looking at the first we’ll find out the amount of learning you have to do to understand a common phrase. By looking at the second, we’ll talk about about nuance, vibe and cultural understanding.
‘Hvað segirðu gott?’
First off, let’s do our test. No prompts, no guidance. Say it for me (please). Great job. I’m sure you did excellently and I appreciate you going with me on this. Just in case you didn’t, here’s some pointers.
To begin with, if you’re English speaking there may be a letter here we’re not familiar with. The ð (which is not part of your keyboard. Sorry :/) is pronounced as ‘eth’. You can pronounce it a the ‘th’ in ‘bath’. Other pronunciation things to look out for so we can say the thing (even mentally) include ‘hv’ and ‘g’. ‘hv’ shakes out to being something like ‘qv’ though reports vary. I imagine it as The Count from Sesame Street pronouncing ‘q’. ‘Vill you come to my qviz? Ah ah ah.’ and so on. Gs are wild in Iceland. Both in the more general sense and the specific sense of doing whatever you want from poker. We have two gs here. The second is a classic g from English. No danger there. The g from ‘good’. The g in ‘segirðu’ is more like a really subtle y. Like the y in ‘hiya’. It’s unclear to me why. Oh, and the ‘e’ is more an ‘ay’ than an ‘eh’. Got at all? Good.
So we can put this all together and we get:
‘Qvath say-ir-thu gott?’
Try and say it for me now. Compare it to your first go. And feel free to be honest with me dear non-Icelandic speakers. Was that your first guess? Oh, and you remembered that Icelandic words always and only emphasise the first syllable without exception, right? Sorry, forgot to mention that one.
We’re doing great.
We can basically pronounce; now to translate. It would be easy to get tripped up on a literal translation of ‘what do you say good?’. We’re smarter than this. We use a phrasebook. It tells us it means ‘how are you?’.
Some of you linguistics nerds might see the problem ahead of us. Some of you Tom Scott fans know the exact video I’m about to lift liberally from. Lots of you spicy brains know this trick. Let’s talk about phatic expressions.
It’s a recurring bit motherfuckers! It’s once again ‘Matt McKenna explains some fun things about language’ time!
Phatic Expressions
According to potentially the world’s greatest free resource that we all collectively culturally shit on for some reason, Wikipedia, say:
“In linguistics, a phatic expression (English: /ˈfætɪk/, FAT-ik) is a communication which primarily serves to establish or maintain social relationships. In other words, phatic expressions have mostly socio-pragmatic rather than denotational functions”
So, in other words, phatic expressions are phrases we use primarily for social reasons. There is often information being communicated, but generally speaking the social aspect is more important.
A good example in English is ‘you’re welcome’. If someone has thanked you, you say ‘you’re welcome’. You say it not so much to exchange information but for a more general social reason. You might want to be seen as polite or to be known to be acknowledging the thank you. Whilst there absolutely is semantic information, the social information is clearly important.
Other examples of phatic expressions in England include:
- ‘what’s up?’ (nothing is literally up),
- ‘how is it going?’ (nothing is literally going)
- ‘all right?’ (I doubt that the asker wants you to catalogue if everything is or is not right. Otherwise the answer would literally always be ‘No. Very much not all right.’)
Another way you can think of phatic expressions is as questions that don’t need literal answers. They serve a social function. That can be greeting someone, or being polite, or inviting someone to talk. It’s a super interesting part of the way people communicate.
Also interesting for our purposes is that phatic expressions are not universal. Different groups (even within the same language or culture) don’t always share the same phatic expressions. They vary between age groups, cultures, countries, languages and communities. For example, ‘GM’ and ‘GN’ are phatic expressions for gaggles of douchey crypto-bros showing membership of the community and passing regards. ‘No problem’ is a phatic response to ‘thanks’ in England but not so much in all other English speaking countries. ‘Sup?’ is probably not phatic if you’re drawing a pension.
If we look at phatic expressions from an autistic perspective, I currently conceptualise phatic expressions as cheat codes (like in a video game). They let you go on to the next level of conversation.
When talking to someone, what I really want to do is have an actual mutually fulfilling conversation about something interesting.*** But in order to do that you must follow the steps properly. You have to enter the social cheat codes. You have to use phatic expressions.
Because, and this is the important bit, a lot of phatic expressions have set responses or a range of a few acceptable options. For example, if someone asks ‘how are you?’ and you start detailing your multiple mental maladies, you will freak them out. Trust me. There are set responses. The best one here is ‘Not bad. How are you?’. You could try a ‘All good. You?’ or ‘Good, thanks! How are things with you?’. You answer politely and briefly. You ask about them.
They say nothing of importance. No information of any sort has been exchanged, but, you’ve given them the social cheay code. You can now (hopefully!) go to a deeper level of conversation. However, if you’d not asked in return, or given too personal an answer, you might fail this and be stuck in small talk (with an unforgiving or formal audience).
Now! You might be thinking, ‘I see what this very clever and handsome man is doing’. He’s about to draw a link between this language with multiple available meanings from before and show us an opportunity for play. Let me address that real quick. To be clear, my advice on this is:
DO NOT FUCK WITH PHATIC EXPRESSIONS. THEY ARE A SOCIAL TEST. PHATIC EXPRESSIONS ARE NOT AN OPPORTUNITY FOR PLAY.
That might be a skosh dramatic. But it is my advice. Phatic expressions are high risk-low reward situations. Or, in other words: they’re banana skins. Something to trip over. In my experience as an autistic dude, you can absolutely ruin a conversation either deliberately or inadvertently by not following the social dance of phatic expressions. If you follow a literal meaning,it can literally all go to shit. Or, even if you do clever wordplay, it’s not really the time for that. It just doesn’t tend to land. I’m sure exceptions apply, but I’ve not found them.
Basically, phatic expressions are set social phrases. Dance moves that move us into conversation mode or to be polite. Learn them. Use them. Don’t fuck with them.
Back to the essay!
As you may have guessed by that rude and lengthy interruption,**** ‘hvað segirðu gott?’ is a phatic expression in Icelandic. You’re not supposed to answer it honestly. They aren’t asking you how you are yet. They are greeting you.
There are a few good standard responses. One is ‘allt fint, en þú?’, which means ‘all good, and you?’ You might answer ‘bara gott’ (literally ‘just good’, here meaning ‘fine’) or ‘bara fint’ (the same thing). There are variations, but these are the main acceptable answers. My pet theory is that the word ‘gott’, here meaning ‘good’, is literally telling you how to answer the question. You are good. So, it would be offputting for people, for example, if you didn’t understand this as a social exercise and actually told each colleague in your new job exactly how you were in detail. For weeks. You know, in theory.*****
OK, we know the meaning and we can basically pronounce it. We have achieved knowledge. Sure…
Oh, quick thing, I lied about pronunciation. Sure, technically I was correct but in practice, meh, not so much. Just as ‘are you all right?’ in English becomes ‘y’alreet’ in my hometown, ellision occurs naturally in Icelandic too. What you’d actually hear Icelanders say is closer to ‘qva say ray’. Didn’t want to add that in before that might be confusing.
But now we pretty much know what we need to. To use one phrase. It’s a lot, right? And to be clear, there’s more I could have included. We haven’t included tone, or how usage differs by age etc. There’s always more to know. Sure, not all phrases are as loaded with meaning, but hopefully we’ve seen here how much work it is to understand a simple phrase passably.
In the next situation we’ll talk about mastery over a language. Jæja!
Jæja
Because Icelandic isn’t a widely spoken language we need to cover some quick pronounciation basics. Briefly:
- In Icelandic, the ‘j’ is pronounced as a ‘y’ in English. This is the case with both js here.
- The ‘æ’ is a new letter to many. It is pronounced as the ‘i’ in ‘high’ in English.
- The ‘a’ is pronounced here as ‘ah’
- Remember, emphasis is always on the first syllable in Icelandic.
Put that together and you should get something like yi-yah.******
See, you did great! I appeciate your faith. I told you it would get easier. OK, we crushed pronunciation. Now, what does jæja mean?
If you were Icelandic and read this, you might just have done a little involuntary laugh. It’s one of those questions that sounds simple but has unknowable depth. It’s like being asked ‘how do you know her?’ but she’s your ex wife, you have kids, there’s still kinda feelings there and… There’s a lot there and instead of trying to synthesising a comprehensive answer you just sort of laugh and offer a phrase like ‘Now that’s a big question.’ while you reboot. It’s like asking ‘what’s with Ross and Rachel?’ or ‘Do Newcastle and Sunderland just not get on?’. *snorts* How long have you got?
There is actually quite a catalogue of articles about this one particular word. Jæja is a widely discussed word. You can read them here and here and here. It’s a swiss-army-word. Fuck it, let’s just list the ways I’ve seen it used in my brief time in Iceland:
- well (in the same way you might say ‘um’)
- well (in the sense you might say ‘well then’)
- oh
- finally!
- really?
- fine
- Let’s go!
- The same thing that Midwesterners mean when they slap their thighs are go ‘welp’ and you’re expected to leave in a polite way.
- I’m bored of my own story and I’m going to start a different one with no other segue.
- That’s great.
- This situation is awkward but this word will fill the time.
- Anyway (but in the sitcom sense)
I could literally go on forever. But I actually don’t think definitions are always the most helpful thing in cases like this.
Because my pitch here is that actually this isn’t a word with many definitions. It actually functions more like a cultural concept. It, to some extent, can only be probably understood through living in a certain place. Here is where things get a bit ‘thinky’ but bear with me, I think there’s a really cool idea here.
I was raised in Newcastle and we have a few words like jæja. One is ‘canny’. It’s a word we use a lot. It can mean friendly, or trustworthy, or fun. We use it instead of ‘pretty’ in ‘pretty good’. So if something’s ‘canny good’, it’s pretty good. Or with tone, it could mean truly excellent. It’s really hard to pin down what ‘canny’ means.
You can’t really define it. You can list uses and definitions, sure, but reading that doesn’t really give you a sense of how to actually use it. You only know what it means by tapping into the local sense of what it means. And you can only truly understand what it means by spending time in that place or with those people. It’s a word rooted in local culture that can only be understood by rooting yourself in local culture.
It’s not really a word. It’s more of a vibe.
And I think that’s the point. I am 100% sure that someone smarter than me has explored this topic fully but I’ve not seen it so I’m going to call them ‘in-community phrases’. I personally believe that words like this can’t be learned from a dictionary. They have to be soaked in via time with that community. They refer to specific cultural contexts and the resultant feelings within. You gain mastery of them over time.
Having spent formative decades in Newcastle, I can instinctively tell you whether any given thing is ‘canny’. If someone else uses the word incorrectly, I can almost feel it in my guy. I can definitely make corrective uses of the word ‘jæja’ after 5 years in Iceland, but I can’t always tell if someone is using it correctly. And I’m sure there are numerous other examples. The best I can think of is that Gordon Ramsay rescued a particular restaurant on Kitchen Nightmares because they tried to copywrite ‘hon’, a word which holds a similar place in Baltimore, U.S.A.
So some words involve you literally living in a certain place or with certain people. So how do you go about learning about that?
Phew. Dense, huh?
I think that’s my point. When someone says to learn a language, there’s a temptation to forget all the work that entails. It’s tempting to think of it simply thinking of what the new definition is and mapping it over the original. To be clear, I’m not knocking vocabulary lists. One of my educational heroes, Frau Neibig, taught me in German the value of a good vocabulary list. But, as we’ve seen so far, that’s not really the whole story, is it?
I bring Frau Neibig up deliberately. She was the best language teacher I ever had (and I had many excellent ones). She was the best because she aught me that learning a language was about pronunciation and culture and history and common usage and edge cases and… I could go on forever.
Which makes sense, right? You’ve literally just read several thousand words you just read explaining the Icelandic phrases for ‘how are you?’, ‘do you speak Icelandic?’ and ‘*definition not found*’.
I chose the Icelandic language as the entry point to this because of my vague familiarity with it. You could just as easily make the point about any other unfamiliar language. And if you happen to speak Icelandic, I invite you to try the same thought experiment with a language with an unfamiliar script. Maybe Russian or Mandarin? My point isn’t about learning Icelandic being hard (though it is). My point isn’t that these particular phrases are too hard. My point is that learning a language is an incredible big and difficult task.
Learning a language is hours and hours and hours of work. It’s questions. It’s using it wrongly and being corrected and being brave enough to do so. Or even just being in an emotionally strong enough place to be corrected. It’s looking silly. It’s highlighting your foreignness. It’s publicising a lack of skill. It’s risking being made of. It’s being giggled at. It’s resilience in the facce of failure.
It’s definitely not always fun.
I think we can agree on that, no?
Ready for the twist?
You’re actually reading the first of a two part essay. In this essay we’ve discussed the sheer amount of information that you need to learn a language.
In her article, Why We Need to Start Treating “Autistic” As Another Language Instead of a Condition, Jamie A Heidel (or The Articulate Autistic) highlights a lens for conceptualising autism. She persuasively argues that autism is not best thought of as a medical, but a different way of perceiving and talking about the world. It’s a different language.
In Part II, we’re going to discuss the difficulty that ND people in general and autistic folks in specific have learning the language of other folks. Like, emotions and stuff.
It’s going to be ace. I’m sure I’ll see you there.
Hi everyone, thanks for reading this new essay! It means the world!
Remember, if you can subscribe it would mean the world. I’ve hit 33 followers!!!! That’s so many! It’s now reached the number that I’m pretty sure I’m not related to all of them! Exciting timess!
Also, I’d love it if you left a comment (tell me how you’ve found it learning a language) or left a like (I think it’s not called that on here, maybe a clap? — one dopamine unit)
You’re the best. You make me want to be a better man. Yep, all of you.
Talk to someone you love today. Maybe in Icelandic!
** To be clear, Mum, I still mean a handshake but everyone else seems to giggle when I say things like that so I leave them in. Got to build that subscriber base!
*** There is an article in my Drafts folder called ‘I Fucking Hate Small Talk’ which I can not currently write because I can’t do it kindly. I think some of you can relate.
**** If you needed an example of suggestive use of language.
***** You’re damn right that happened. And I would like to personally apologise to every one of my fellow guides at that particular tour company. You know who you are. Sorry!
****** Hi Icelanders. I have no expectations that I’m right. I’m not attempting to show anything other than how poorly I speak your language and how hard it has been for me. I appreciate your patience in this regard.
