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By Russell Schoch At the age of 4, John McWhorter had a traumatic encounter with a young Jewish girl. She was speaking a language he could not understand. "This was the first time in my life that I had ever known that there were languages other than English," he recalls, "and it remains the profoundest shock I have ever encountered." The young McWhorter felt that he "just had to know" this strange new language--Hebrew--and taught himself to sound it out. "I was driven to do it," he says, "the way most boys are driven to go out and hit a baseball." Thus began a lifelong obsession with foreign languages. McWhorter, now an associate professor of linguistics at Berkeley, speaks French, German, and Spanish, and is able to read eight other languages, including Russian and Japanese. He has just published his seventh book, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (Times Books). McWhorter is known for his conservative views on affirmative action and race, prominently displayed in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000), and on view at two publications where he serves as contributing editor: City Journal and the New Republic. But linguistics is his true passion. In turning aside a question about Black English during the following interview, McWhorter said: "Can we skip that this time? I'm on a mission to show that black people can be deeply interested in something that doesn't have to do with melanin." (In his 1998 book, The Word on the Street, McWhorter argued for the legitimacy of Black English and analyzed the Ebonics controversy.) In his office, he displays a small American flag on his bookshelf. "The flag is there," he explained in December, "because it troubles me that most of the time when professors on this campus speak out about what we're doing in Afghanistan, it's to oppose it. I have the same post-late-'60s skepticism about imperial power that any sensible person has. But the reflexive sense among the most vocal faculty at this school that what we're doing in Afghanistan is wrong because the United States has never been a perfect country strikes me as almost anti-intellectual. I don't agree. So I put up that flag because I think that, while it is not a perfect place, there's no better country than the United States, and I'm in favor of this war." John Hamilton McWhorter V (John Hamilton McWhorter I was a slave) was born in 1965. The child of a professor of social work and a university administrator at Temple University in Philadelphia, he grew up in middle-class black neighborhoods and attended private schools. After a B.A. at Rutgers, he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics at Stanford in 1993, then accepted a postdoctoral minority fellowship at Berkeley before landing his first academic appointment at Cornell. He returned to Berkeley in 1995 with a joint appointment in linguistics and African American Studies. Having found African American Studies not to be the good fit he expected, he now teaches full time in linguistics. McWhorter is engaging, self-confident, and a popular teacher; he was, he says, "born to teach." He peppers his new book, as he does his lectures, with references to popular culture, both because of his genuine affection for it and because he is opposed to writing and teaching in an "academic" style. "It's important to me to show that people can be fun and human while examining important ideas," he says. "The idea that to be smart and to think about things means that you have to become a bland, distant, and uncool person is sad to me, and I think it turns a lot of kids off from learning, especially in this era. I want my teaching and writing to be intelligently entertaining."  You call yourself a "language-head." What do you mean? That's my term for somebody who gets a big kick out of the fact that there are languages other than his own. Many linguists are not language-heads. But I happen to be utterly fascinated whenever I hear anybody saying something I can't understand. And therefore I've always enjoyed teaching myself how to read, and to some extent to speak, foreign languages. And you started this at an early age. Yes. At the age of 4, I cried because a little girl was speaking a language I couldn't understand. At 11, I started teaching myself Spanish, with a record set. When I got to the end of the set, I wanted more Spanish. And I did that with several more languages. It's just always been a sort of benign obsession with me. Is it still? Yes. About a week after September 11, I got that same frustration. All of a sudden our country was under attack from people, many of whom were using Arabic. I don't know Arabic; all these signs and banners in Arabic, I couldn't read them. I thought: It's time to climb another mountain. So I've been teaching myself Arabic the past few months. It's a really difficult language; the writing system is the hardest I've ever had to deal with, besides Japanese. I want to get to the point where I can read the banners and be able to have a conversation in modern standard Arabic. And I will not stop-that's the thing-I will not stop until I can. Because I just can't deal with not knowing a language that's in front of me. Does being so enthralled with language give you a different perspective on the world? Definitely. You see things through a very different lens when you have such a perspective. In particular, the notion of "good speech" and "bad speech" and "primitive language" and "developed language." These things look entirely different through the eyes of most linguists than they do, very understandably, to the rest of the world. Let's talk about "bad speech." You end many sentences in your book with prepositions. And you write: "Was it only me who thought that?" Yes! Instead of [mockingly]: "Was it only I who thought that?" Why? Many of the things that we've been taught are proper English are arbitrary edicts that were laid down by two or three pedants a couple of hundred years ago. These men were under the impression that Latin was somehow the most orderly and noblest language in the world, and that therefore if English were going to become a world language it needed to clean up its act, and we needed to observe these God-given rules that you find exemplified in classical Latin. In Latin, you don't end sentences with a preposition. So these guys decided that in English one should not do that. What's interesting is, if you look at the personal letters of the pedant whose grammar at this time was most influential, he ends his sentences with prepositions. Why? Because it's quite natural in English to do so. We have never met a child, no matter how precocious, who does not naturally end sentences with prepositions. To not do that is something we have to be taught. The reason it's so hard to learn is because it's not the way our system works. "Billy and me went to the store" or "Was it only me who thought that?" is something we're taught is wrong because we're taught that if the pronoun is used as a subject, then we have to use the subject form of the pronoun. Now, as it happens, many languages work that way. Latin, for example. Just as many languages divide the labor between subject form and object form differently. French people consider themselves to speak the clearest, most wonderful language in the world, and yet you would say, in French: "Who did it? Me." It would have to be "moi." If you said, in French, "Who did it? Je," you'd sound like an alien. English is that way as well. "Who did it?" Well, technically, yes, it is "I" that did it. But if you said, "Who did it? I," then, frankly, you will never date-it's as simple as that! And so, in the same way, "Was it only me who thought that?" comes very naturally in our language, because that happens to be the way we use pronouns. That kind of usage of "me" goes back into the earliest English documents. Only in the late 1600s, and especially the 1700s, do we have people who come along and say that these things aren't right. Their books were the models for the books that began to be used throughout England and America in the 1800s, and now you and I labor under those myths. Now, in public speaking, I would avoid saying things like "Billy and me went to the store." I've learned that you have to put on that stiff, itchy suit when you're in public. But, really, it's a conditioned response, and it has nothing to do with the inner genius of the way English works. Yet some people-including readers of this magazine-get very upset when they perceive "incorrect" usage. Smart people, too. They get very upset and sometimes see linguists as a force for evil, as relativists. But if you have reason to examine your own language in detail, and then you examine the world's languages, there are two things you notice. One is that what you consider to be good usage in your own language is often quite illogical. For example, we say "I am not," but then if we make it into a question, we don't say "amn't I"-we say "aren't I," even though we would never say "I are not"! And there are all sorts of wrinkles like that in English that you would never think about. Naturally, our gaze is pulled toward the things that we have been taught to think about. And then you also realize that a lot of the things we consider bad usage in our language are considered quite ordinary in other languages, even closely related ones. For example, we're not supposed to say "There's books in the cabinet"; we're supposed to say "There are books." But in German to say "There's books in the cabinet" is the only way to say it; you can't say "There are books in the cabinet." The Germans are certainly known for their passion for order. So what exactly are we doing wrong in English? It's purely arbitrary. But most people have no reason to page through the grammars of dozens or hundreds of other languages, so it's a natural illusion that the things they've been told are correct have to be that way. What you're saying feels liberating. Well, there is a sense of liberation. When I say "Billy and me went to the store," I feel good. I feel like I'm using the grammar of my language; it sounds pleasant to me. But a lot of people feel that they're making little slips when they're saying things like that. A lot of people feel they don't speak well, even when they're perfectly articulate. They mean that they're inclined to say things like "There's books" or "What are you putting it in?" instead of "Into what are you putting it?" which no human being could possibly say comfortably. So there is a sense of liberation. And a sense of beauty. I like the way my language sounds when it's being used in the normal way. It's chummy, it's homey, it's apple pie. I think it's a shame that many people feel that "Billy and me went to the store" is wrong. Or that people have to say "To whom were you speaking?" "Whom" is not a part of our current language, and that's why most people don't use it "right" when they try, and why no child grows up using "whom," and why it's so hard to get a handle on it. It's a shame that we feel that way. Prescriptivism runs particularly thick in English-speaking cultures, and I've been trying to do my part to work against it. More so than in France or Germany, where they have societies for the "preservation" of their languages? In those cultures there is much less sentiment on the ground that things ordinary people, especially educated people, say in casual conversations are wrong. There's a sense that there are certain forms that you only use in speaking, but not that people are making grammatical mistakes when they talk that way. There's more relativism in those countries, and I think we would benefit from having more of that here. What impresses you most about language? What I call its "riotous diversity." The diversity of the world's languages fascinates me on a gut level because it's beautiful. In the same
When you step away from Europe, you see that what you think of as language is a much wider palette than one would think. "Language" is so different from what we're speaking right now. And that includes all of the Native American languages. How you would put even the most basic thoughts in those languages differs in ways you would never consider. So there's the beauty. What is language for? Well, among other things, it communicates the nuances and contours of the soul with a precision that is available to no other creature. I can tell you, "Russ, did you know that giant squids have been found washed up on beaches? They've never been seen actually alive, but the largest one caught to date was 55 feet long." There is no way that any other animal could communicate that. We love our dogs and our cats, and we like to pretend they can understand what we're saying. But dogs or cats cannot communicate those kinds of concepts to each other. We're unique in what we can get across. And that's very special. It's a great deal of what makes us human. How many languages are there in the world? One would think, reasonably, that there probably are about three hundred to four hundred languages in the world, since there are about two hundred countries. But, no, there are actually six thousand! How many of those languages are written? The number of languages that are written in any widespread, serious way is only a little bit over 200. Which means that 5,800 of the world's languages are primarily spoken. You maintain in your book that there was a single, original human language. Yes. My feeling is that simple deductive logic requires that there must have been one original language. Especially given the fact that we seem to be either genetically specified or genetically highly compatible with speech. And there's no other creature that does it but us. It seems that we're dealing with something that's partly mutational, in which case it's much more economical to assume that that mutation happened once, rather than independently in separate populations. Two points you emphasize are that languages change and that they mix. It's very easy to miss, as we go though our short lives, that it's natural for a language to change. Not only in terms of slang words-"groovy" becomes "neat" becomes "cool"-but in terms of grammar. The language I'm speaking right now would have been quite unintelligible to either you or me as it was spoken a thousand years ago. This is true of our language as well as other people's, and there's nothing one can do to stop that kind of change. I also wanted to get across the fact that it's natural for languages to mix. They always mix. For example, we often think that when Mexicans start speaking Spanish with a lot of English in it, that something has gone wrong, that the purity of Spanish is being muddied. But, in fact, what is going on in "Spanglish" is the sort of thing that's been going on all over the world. In Germany, there's now a scrappy little crusade against English flowing into German-they're calling this Anglicized German "Denglish." All it is is fluent German spoken with a lot of American English vocabulary. But One analogy I use is that language is a lava lamp. That is, you have the clump which is moving all around in the lamp, but at no point do you think that the clump is somehow "better" or "worse" than it was five minutes ago. It's just doing what it does in there; it's in a constant state of change. Could you give a specific example of language change? Every word in every language is always in the process of turning upside down into a new one. I'll give you an example from the Algonquians, a group of Native Americans in the United States and Canada. Their original word for winter was peponwi. This word really went through its paces on its way to the Cheyenne language, all the result of ordinary sound changes piling on top of one another. First it changed to pepon, then to eon, then to ain, then ai, then ai'i, then aa'i-and today's word is aa', pronounced roughly "ah-AH." All that took place in about 1,500 years. How about language change in English? Okay. Often we're told that language change has to do with the fact that there was, say, a medieval instrument called a shawm; and now there isn't such an instrument, so we don't use the word any more. But people tend not to realize that other parts of language change just as much. Take the word "silly." It started out meaning "blessed." The original meaning that you find for "silly" in Old English is: something that is ordained by the gods above. If you know German, the word selig is the same root; and selig means blessed. Gradually, in English, there was a series of inferences about "silly." If you're blessed it means you're probably innocent. So, in Middle English, people start saying "Well, I'm just a silly person," where clearly they mean "I'm a blameless person." Then, if you're innocent, chances are you need some kind of help; chances are that you're kind of a lowly person. If you're lowly, you're not very intelligent; if you're not very intelligent, then you're a fool-and therefore you're silly. Such a process happens century by century. And it's really quite ordinary. This sounds like culture has a lot to do with language change. It does. But it's important to understand that language change and language contact-mixing-are not tied as closely to cultural issues as we're often told. We're told that the culture changes and the language changes with it. And that's true. But one thing I try to make clear in my book is that most of what's in a language is not tied in any serious way to culture. There's no cultural reason why the French have masculine and feminine gender and why they say "I'm going to 'take' lunch," whereas in English we don't have gender and we "eat" lunch. That has nothing to do with culture. It's just arbitrary. The story of language is only partly a cultural one. Language presents something that we can be interested in quite apart from culture. You say there are 6,000 languages. Do they, like living creatures, face extinction? A great many of the world's creatures are on the way to extinction because of historical contingencies of our own creation; and most of the world's languages seem to be on the way to extinction for the same reason. Estimates are that in 100 years we are going to lose 5,550 of the world's 6,000 languages. We have a project here at Berkeley, supervised by Professor Leanne Hinton, dedicated to preserving as many of the Native American languages of California as possible. I feel a responsibility to try to help to write a grammar of a language of this kind, so that when the last speakers die, there will be some comprehensive record of that language. I am going to work on a language called Tubatulabal, spoken by a small community in California. A final question, about American accents. Could you talk about the change from a Northeastern to a Midwestern accent? If you listen to radio shows from the 1930s, one of the most striking things is that announcers, to our ears, sound almost British. "Right heah, on ah station," etc. The reason for that is, back then, there was still a sense in America that British English was the best English, and therefore cultivated speech, particularly in the Northeast, sounded a lot like Great Britain's. Think of FDR: "We have nothing to feah but feah itself." There are many people in old movies-think of Bette Davis-who you might think were born in Britain. "Petah! The lettah!" But Bette Davis was born right here, in the U.S. What happened? During the Second World War, various developments led to Midwestern English being chosen as the standard. "Cultivated" people began sounding like Midwesterners-the Walter Cronkite sound. What you read in secondary sources is that, around 1943, America was pulsing with a new sense of power, a new sense of world accomplishment, and this created a predilection for a way of speaking that sounded more "manly," rather than the "effete" pseudo-British that old announcers used. This is one example of the constant change natural to language. We are often taught the history of living creatures, of music, dance, and even private life. But too seldom have linguists shared with the public the story of how that first language became six thousand. That's what The Power of Babel is about, and it's what keeps me fascinated with human language. |
 John McWhorter Photo by Robert Holmgren
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