Who counts as a speaker of a language? | Anna Babel
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2020
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Backed by research and personal anecdotes, Spanish professor Anna Babel reveals the intricate relationship between language and culture, showing how social categories and underlying biases influence the way we hear, regard and, ultimately, judge each other. A talk that will leave you questioning your assumptions about what it really means to speak a language.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. This show comes at you in English, but I also speak and understand Mandarin Chinese and a little Spanish. But I don't feel comfortable claiming I'm a speaker of those non-English languages. Why is that? How do we decide whether we consider ourselves a speaker of a |
| 0:21.6 | language? And what judgments do we bring to who we expect to speak languages that are foreign to us? |
| 0:27.5 | The answers are part of today's fascinating talk from linguistic anthropologist Anna Babel. She gave it at |
| 0:33.6 | TEDx Ohio State University in 2020. People say that a long, long time ago, everybody on |
| 0:42.3 | earth spoke the same language and belonged to the same tribe. And I guess people had a little too |
| 0:47.9 | much time on their hands because they decided they were going to work together to become as |
| 0:52.0 | great as God. So they started to build a tower |
| 0:55.3 | up into the heavens. God saw this and was angry. And to punish the people for their arrogance, |
| 1:01.7 | God destroyed the tower and scattered the people to the ends of the earth and made them all |
| 1:06.8 | speak different languages. This is the story of the Tower of Babel. And it's probably not a |
| 1:13.5 | literal historical truth, but it does tell us something about the way that we understand languages |
| 1:19.5 | and speakers. So for one thing, we often think about speaking different languages as meaning |
| 1:25.3 | that we don't get along, or maybe we're in conflict, and speaking the same language as meaning that we don't get along or maybe we're in conflict, |
| 1:28.9 | and speaking the same language as meaning that we belong to the same group and that we can work |
| 1:33.2 | together. Modern linguists know that the relationship between language and social categories |
| 1:39.7 | is intricate and complex, and we bring a lot of baggage to the way that we understand language, |
| 1:46.0 | to the point that even a seemingly simple question, |
| 1:49.0 | like, what makes a person a speaker of a language, |
| 1:52.0 | can turn out to be really, really complicated. |
| 1:55.0 | I'm a Spanish professor at Ohio State. |
| 1:58.0 | I teach mostly upper-level courses |
| 2:00.0 | where the students have taken four to five years of university-level Spanish courses. |
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