Are Languages Evolving or Devolving?
Our languages don’t satisfy all of today’s needs, so it makes sense to create new ones that do…but what do we lose in the process?
“If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave.”
— Richard Mitchell
Speed is everything today, from the fastest engine to the swiftest thinker. Our lives are a competition not only against each other, but also against ourselves to exceed both physically and mentally. From our school days to our workdays, our report cards, our GPAs and our salaries rate our value as individuals. From an alien perspective, we are no different than our machines: we stop at the red to catch our breath and rush at the green to go, and we run on caffeine in the same way cars run on gasoline. Technology has replaced a majority of our manual functions to speed up our lifestyles and the pace at which we get things done. The more dependent we grow on our technologies, the more we begin to think and act like them, from the artificial 24-hour time limit that we impose on ourselves, to the memorization and reiteration of schedules and notes, to repetitive motor skills that transform into reflexes, like “instinctively” reaching for the light switch in a dark room. Suffice to say, the next step in our evolution as humans is to communicate like machines — oh, wait! We already do.
We want the fast and easy — there’s no shame in that — and society tries pretty damn hard to accommodate those demands with “bigger, better, faster” inventions, which ironically make our lives even more complicated. With each new product we readjust our lifestyles to suit the demands of new mass-produced technologies, but by doing so, we lose more and more of what distinguishes us amongst other species: our language. The very core of what identifies us as the individuals we are, the culture we represent, and the history we carry is gradually reaching a post-modern period that is distinguished by limited characters.
Language started with speech and was followed by writing in the form of pictographs and hieroglyphics; eventually, with a little borrowing here and there and vast migrations across countries and continents, we were ushered into the modern-day tongues we speak today. Our advancements didn’t stop there, however, since we went so far as to invent virtual worlds and digital languages to communicate with each other across the globe. The problem we face today is that with digital communication, it’s difficult to distinguish our human texting from computer coding because of their similarities: both are made up of symbolic characters that provide data and both are a virtual language meant to accommodate a virtual world. Binary code of “010101” is not that different from the “k”, “y”, and “u”. A single number is just a symbol with as much meaning as people imbue it with, much like a single letter is just an emblem with its own fixed meaning. For example, the “6” has more significance than the “1”, just as the “A” represents a better grade than the “F”.
There’s nothing that strips one’s identity bare more than forgetting their culture and the very base of what makes them who they are: their language. Writing in abbreviated formats like those of texts has adapted people’s thinking process to instinctively communicate in a machine-like manner. In this case, too much of a ‘u r’ instead of ‘you are’ can lead to a different type of lingual communication that strays away into something altogether incommunicable for the rest of us. It’s easy to assume that just because it saves time to not write out the whole word, it’s simpler to enter a ‘y’ instead of ‘why’, but in the process of you saving time to do something else, you’re losing the value of the words behind the statement you’re making. Machinery is an artificial invention — each one is designed with a specific purpose in mind without the intellect to comprehend the value and essence of a phrase, but merely to repeat it when its user deems it necessary. Humans, on the other hand, are provided with options and opportunities to evolve in the knowledge they obtain — they are not forced to serve one or two objectives in their entire lifetime in the way machines do, and yet…the very people that created machinery to speed up functions, communications, and labor, they make such great efforts to impress each other on the pace at which they individually get things done, as if they’re competing with their own inventions.
This piece was written by Theodora Karamanlis. Follow Savvy on Twitter, Facebook, subscribe to our newsletter or email us. We love feedback!