Language: Words Create Worlds
Language and Languaging
“Words, language, spells, incantations, hymns that sing of awe rather than fear, reflection of soul-searching humility rather than terror-born superstitions” (L.W. King in the letters and inscriptions of Hammurabi- p.4 – The world’s great scriptures -Lewis Browne)
In many self-development communications courses and training programs, spiritual books and other secular readings speak about the power of words. All of them start with the premise that our words create our world. In this writing we will look at the conveying of words and their meaning as information and communications as a form of languaging in a situational context. If our words create our world then why does the world feel so dangerous, scary and without harmony. It may seem obvious that humanity feels these ways because of the language we use to describe our experience of the world. Perhaps we can check where these feelings come from and what words in our language describe our perceptions, shape our beliefs and influence our behavior in the world. We will look at what might be missing from our ability to communicate our feelings as human beings more effectively.
However, before we look at what gives power to our words and their impact on interpersonal interactions and relationships, I want to distinguish between the concept of language and words as the primary source of communications and “languaging” as a form of communication that is beyond our words. We know that words are how we define our reality but what we don’t know is the significant attributes of communication that has very little to do with the words coming out of our mouth. These other ways of communicating I am calling “languaging”. There are studies that support my claim of communication differences that create a gap between varied cultural expressions and communication patterns and styles.
The current social context for addressing the communication and relational gaps is framed inside of a socio-educational experiment with what is labeled as social-emotional learning. I assert that this experiment is a new search for understanding of what has been missing in the Euro epistemological and ontological way of being in the world. Eurocentric language has historically divorced itself from the emotional context of life and living. The dominant euro-language expression is found in words and meanings that belie the unspoken interactional context where languaging occurs.
Words and meanings that have been constructed through western euro languages appropriate power which disregard other forms of communicating by non-euro cultures and renders other forms as invalid. Euro-cultural axiology has defined what constitute communication and its consequence is that this form of language defines for us what things are valuable or fitting to say in public discourse. Take for example the use of cursing or use of vulgar language is not a desired function of communicating in the euro-cultural context. However, the word “lalochezia” a Greek word defined as “emotional relief gained by using indecent or vulgar language”. In certain situations, circumstances, or moments of frustration that cursing feels appropriate, it becomes an emotional relief or euphoric feeling experienced after letting out some curse words, the expression becoming a means for de-stressing. Literally the word “lalochezia” translates to “crapping out of your mouth”. Yes, and sometimes we need to release emotional shit where we don’t have words to speak.
Whoever decides the meaning of words has the power to dictate the experience that those words generate. Whoever defines and propagates which ideas, experiences, theories are valued or fitting controls the narrative of our existence as human beings. The ways in which propaganda through words and the dominant euro-western forms of communication for the most part serve ideological, political, economic, and social pursuits and gains that dismiss the rest of humanity. The euro framing of language in words casts incantations and spells that traps humanity in a fog of fear, war and disharmony, that generate continuous “capricious injustice and casual oppression”.
(W. King in the letters and inscriptions of Hammurabi found in “The World’s Great Scriptures” - p.17, Lewis Browne).
The meaning of words that calls into question our humanity is a result of our being socialized in language that is influenced by Euro social language norms, These norms affirm, criticize, honor, shame, humiliate, revere, blame, or praise the developing human being in the society, The uses of these worlds are propagated under conditions that dictate the socio cultural norm of dominance, with prejudice in narrating reality. The way in which we come to know our humanity is developed through our language acquisition and skills, it is influenced by our experiences, thoughts, feelings, expression and responses to words and phrases that we have been socialized to believe about ourselves and others. If what we say is only 7% of our communications and how we say it is 38% and our body language is 55% of how our communications is given and received, then words as a primary way of communicating creates a gap in communications across different cultural and ontological views related to human interactions.
Ultimately, our expressed body language and how we communicate in the tone quality is an indicator of whether we are attuned to the languaging of self in any particular situation or circumstance. This attuning has significant emotional qualities that are expressed through whole body knowing. Words are the place where our understanding is short circuited in communications. There is a saying in the experience of the African American communication style that asks the question “do you feel me?” or make the statement “I feel you”. It is the social-emotional knowing that is present in these responses. It is in the expression of our feelings where the words we use can generate high or low vibrations that lifts or dismiss human beings, and this is what I am referring to here as situational languaging.
The power to create our world through our words arises from our emotional responses, when we choose to read, speak, or hear words that lift or dismiss our spirit of knowing. So, when we feel that the world is dangerous, scary, without harmony and we have not been able to articulate that danger, that fear, that disharmony within ourselves, then the words that we use to try and convey a message to others have us in a communication gap that cannot distinguish the difference between communicating with our heads or our hearts. There are associations called triggers that we attribute to words, phrases, statements etc. When your words from our heads don’t match the feeling in our heart, we are encouraged not to really express the yearning in our hearts, instead we say the social-political “right” thing to say out of our fears. Both the fears within ourselves and the fear of others.
Let’s unpack the European and African way of being in the experience of language and languaging in the United States. When black people say I don't feel you, know it's because they don't, they don't feel what is happening, nor the truth of the words you might be saying. They just hear words. If there is no expression that indicates those words are generated from the heart it leaves a wanting about honesty, truth and trust. There is a read that Black folk have on your body language, an attunement to your tone, your energy, your rhythm. When you enter the realm of the black experience with white America is that your word is a yes and your heart is a no, it rings true in your communications. It comes across in what is read in the languaging of black folk interactions with white America.
The suppression of the truth is present in the lack of white America’s bodily performance of emotional expressions, which denies them an expressed connection to the communication styles of Black Folk. Black folk have had to use the language of the white tongue without white Americans having to enter into the languaging style of black folk. We all have had to succumb to the imposition of the euro language structure which denies the full embodied self-expression of the black voice. The inauthenticity of White America’s word creates the distrust that has not allowed for a bridge to be built across the communication gap, which they may say has no validity, epistemologically (meaning how we come to know what we know), that is.
There is a natural social emotional knowing of black folk that white folk don’t want to acknowledge. This is when they suggest object related facts to prove something that is clearly present but not desirable. But in fact, you can read when a person is not there emotionally, really connecting, if you are paying attention to the languaging of their body, their tone, their capacity to express, the quality of their posture. All of these non-objective ways of knowing in the form of languaging is the language that black folk read really well. Therefore, when we say that we feel dismissed or we don't feel heard, it is because we are reading a particular sometimes subtle and intuitive languaging of a white person when they are responding to us. Black children do this very well. They are dismissed in the school settings by white and black teachers who are unaware of the type of language that is occurring in their interactions with students, when either the student or the teacher is conveying information through words.
It's not just the inequality of our experience of language and languaging but it's also the environment. There is a direct correlation in the relationship between the environment and what we are feeling inside. What I am bringing to our attention is the form of languaging that we use in our community. When we speak words that do not convey our heart or the conception of our reality because of the environmental context, there is a loss in translation of what we mean and how it lands, perhaps because the language prevents us from expressing through our own languaging forms. This concern is part of an oppressive environmental context and a repressive emotional context where our most natural ways of communicating have been removed from the heart and planted in the head. Languaging is a function of the quality of our emotions and has been separated from language as a spoken phenomenon.
For Black people in the United States this separation is a product of enslavement and subsequent oppressions that denied the language of origin for many and forced us to become mute in our expression. Our voices were muted. Our gaze upon the situation and circumstance enhanced our ability to read the context and respond with a knowing that could not be spoken but felt. There was a forced demand that we learn English, then we cease thinking in our own language in a way that denied our full self-expression as a human being. Because of the forced loss of language, we had become framed and trapped inside the English language box or the French language box or whatever Eurocentric language box. As I begin to think about this white box thinking through language, I came across academic research around a term called translanguaging.
Translanguaging is when you are able to think in your own language. If you can think in your own language, you can create and own your experience as your own. I didn’t know there was such a concept. When I began to read more about this concept, it was clear that it was focused on ESL (English as a second language) for immigrants. I also knew that when Dr. Adelaide Sanford was championing “Ebonics” as a legitimate language of communication in Black America, there was clear disdain for the idea that a linguistic form had developed from the Black American experience. This disdain points to the power dynamics of who controls the words, also controls the narrative.
The system that holds the most power for controlling the narrative of the Black experience is the education system. First of all, why have education institutions continued to perpetuate the inequitable relationship that denies the true voice of the African descendants of slavery in America? What might be questions that go beyond the power of arbitrators of words and their understanding of the language and languaging expressions of African descendants here in the United States? Why can't the teachers learn the language and languaging expression of the children they teach? Why can't we think and write from our communications styles? Why can’t reading and writing be attenuated in the vernacular of the community being served by these education systems. Well, that means that significant transformation will have to happen in the teaching and learning exchange across racial and cultural barriers, that have been created by systems of White box thinking.