Language, knowledge, and intercultural communication

Recently I have been delving a little into the world of international auxiliary languages, also called IALs or “interlangs”. These are constructed languages designed to facilitate intercultural communication – most famously Esperanto – but there are a range of others with small but passionate communities.

For the purposes of this article, I am going to focus on three specific auxiliary languages:

• Esperanto
• Interlingua
• toki ma

The goals of those participating in interlang communities varies from the passionate advocacy of their language as a single worldwide language, to a hobby that is simply undertaken for fun.

As a knowledge manager, I find interlangs fascinating because of what they expose about our assumptions around knowledge and how we share it. While there is no universal agreement on the components of language, the Bloom and Lahey model¹ provides a useful starting point:

Historically, the form barriers in language learning have been the hardest to overcome, with basic differences in phonology (sounds), syntax (grammar) and writing system often making mutual understanding all but impossible.

However as tools such as Google Translate continue to improve in providing rapid translation between languages, these foundational barriers drop away. At this point in time, while the accurate conversion of syntax from one language to another in a naturalistic way remains a significant challenge, it is content and use which have become most important when considering barriers in the use of language for knowledge exchange.

So what can interlangs teach us about knowledge and how it is shared? What becomes clear is that when we seek knowledge exchange through language, three factors are paramount:

• language expression
• language precision
• language knowledge.

Language expression is the ability to physically write or speak a language. Most people of European ancestry are comfortable in speaking languages that use variants of the Latin alphabet, even those which include accents or diacritics with minimal training. However when switching to languages using other writing systems (e.g. the Cyrillic alphabet, Chinese, or Japanese), it is impossible to avoid learning the fundamentals of written communication first.

Similarly, when learning to speak a new language it may be necessary to learn new sounds (or start distinguishing between sounds that are treated the same in your language), or to learn tonal or pitch pronunciation techniques where these impact on semantic content. For example in Japanese, your pitch accent when pronouncing “ippai” determines whether you are asking for “one” or “a lot” of something!

With some exceptions, interlangs tend to be non-tonal and use the Latin alphabet. No doubt this is partly due to the bias of Western audiences to adopt language structures that somewhat mimic their own, but it is also reflective of the typical approach of interlangs to simplify their method of language expression as much as possible.

For example, Esperanto and toki ma both strictly enforce a one letter = one sound rule, while Interlingua and toki ma both use no diacritics or accents in their writing system. Taking this idea further, toki ma deliberately selects a very small set of sounds which are widely used in just about all of the world’s languages, and uses the ordinary IPA (international phonetic alphabet) characters to write them.

Language precision refers to the ability of a language to express knowledge concepts in detail. This is largely but not exclusively tied to the size of a language’s vocabulary. Unlike natural languages which develop and evolve vocabulary as and when needed, interlangs must either invent words from scratch, import them from other languages, or a combination of the two. It is common for them to also have regular rules on how to transform nouns into verbs, verbs into adjectives, adjectives into adverbs, and so on.

In this regard, Esperanto and Interlingua both borrow an extensive vocabulary but in different ways. Esperanto borrows minimal numbers of internationally recognisable word, and uses those to derive others (18 000 words). On the other hand, Interlingua allows the import of any word that can be found in multiple of its so-called “source languages” of English, French, Italian, and Spanish/Portuguese (27 000 words).

In contrast to the other interlangs, toki ma deliberately uses a minimalist language vocabulary (120 words), derived from as wide a range of source languages as possible including Arabic, Finnish, Chinese, and English.

We can see the impacts of the choices of language expression and precision in the communication of complex or abstract relationships. Toki Pona vocabulary is easy to learn, but speaking with precision is difficult and often requires a larger number of carefully selected compound words, for example:

• English: I enjoy sharing knowledge with your group
• Esperanto: Mi ĝuas kunhavigi scion kun via grupo
• Interlingua: Io ata excambiar de cognoscentia a te gruppo
• toki ma: mi li pana e sona en mi li lanpan e sona ki kulupu nan si wa mi li pasan

Of course, similar questions around language accessibility exist in natural languages as well. Public relations campaigns need to consider their audience to ensure they are communicating at a suitable level of language competence, while jargon supports precision in communication at the cost of understandability outside of a small in-group community,

Finally, language knowledge refers to a population’s experience and capability in using the language itself. This is significantly tied to how much of the language’s vocabulary they know, but also to their level of understanding of grammar, ability to rapidly construct and understand sentences, and how to apply social cues and turn-taking in language (sometimes called the “pragmatics” of a language).

Language knowledge is normally taught to a native population over many years through full immersion in the use of that language at school, work, and in a wide range of social situations. So unsurprisingly, it is also the aspect that interlangs struggle with the most.

While most interlangs have strategies to reduce the learning curve of their vocabulary and grammar, either through simplicity or extensive borrowings from other languages, the lack of critical mass in broad adoption hampers acquisition of full fluency and the development of social norms.

An excellent article² by Paul Bartlett discusses the factors that would need to be addressed to achieve broader success of an interlang. Among other things he concludes that informal or formal institutions are essential to provide contact with other users of the language, find publications and articles to learn how to apply the language, and to participate in real-life use of the language in practical context.

(As an aside, I note that analogous benefits from institutions are available to all knowledge communities. Knowledge management continues to suffer in awareness and uptake due to a lack of institutional support.)

A common criticism of interlangs is that they often originate from and focus on language structures of the Global North. While there is no doubt some truth to this, there is an argument that moving to a language which is natively spoken by neither speaker — even if strongly influenced by a source language – can still be beneficial.

Barlett recounts an anecdote of a native French speaker who found he could communicate better in English with Germans than with other native English speakers. Bartlett’s conclusion is that “a language which [is] neither speaker’s native tongue [can be] a better medium of communication than the same tongue used when it [is] native to one.”

This represents a potential enduring advantage of interlangs over de facto languages of intercultural exchange such as English. In this context it is interesting to note that China has a significant history of Esperanto use and still publishes official news in Esperanto today³ In a recent article about the use of Esperanto in China⁴ a practitioner noted that:

“If China continues to grow, there will likely be a clash between the Chinese and English languages,” he says.

“When that happens, a compromise will be necessary; that’s when Esperanto could be useful.”

While it seems likely that interlangs will remain niche for the foreseeable future, at a minimum they will remain an interesting exploration of how language and intercultural knowledge exchange works, and may still have a larger role to play in the international communities of the future.

Header image source: Created by RealKM Magazine from OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay (1, 2), Public Domain.

References: