Why Can it Be Hard to Perceive Emotions in Unknown Languages Very Different From Our Own?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, so this is Elia calling from northern Arizona.

Hi, Elia. What’s on your mind?

So I’m living on the border with the Navajo Nation, and I’m hearing a lot of Navajos being spoken, whether at work or just in the street. And it’s a wildly different language than I’ve ever heard before anywhere. And I’m also realizing that I’m not understanding whether it’s like a question, just a statement and not getting the tone of the phrase at all. And so I know that like in music, like consonance and dissonance like differs based on the culture. And I was wondering if that was the same with like phrase inflection and stuff like that.

That is a very good question. Let me ask, do you speak any Navajo?

Very little. Every time my coworkers have tried to teach me, I have been pretty miserable at it. It is so hard.

Okay. So you didn’t grow up speaking it. Do you speak any other languages besides English?

Yes. I grew up in France, so I grew up speaking French and learned English kind of as a second language. But, yeah, I’ve been around a lot of languages. At the school, I went to Arabic and Spanish, German, French, English. But this, yeah, this has been just completely new.

It’s really good that you have this other language experience, not only speaking, being fluent in two languages, but having encountered other languages. And especially that you’ve encountered other non-European languages, such as Arabic. Because you already have enough experience understanding that tonality, that is the tones of a language, can be very different. And Navajo, of course, being completely outside of the Indo-European tradition, has a very different tonality. And so that’s why you’re not picking up those tone clues.

Almost all of the European languages have very similar tonality. We’re leaving out things like Basque, for example, that is outside of the isolates like Basque. So a question generally will sound like a question. And anger will generally sound like anger. And the pauses will generally sound like pauses. It generally will sound the same, whereas you shouldn’t expect that in languages outside of the European language tradition. And I think that’s part of what’s happening here.

We bring our own linguistic experience to our understanding of other languages. And for some people, that’s really discomforting and discomfitting. Both of those words are very similar, but they mean different things. Discomforting means we feel uncertain and maybe scared or bothered. And discomfitting means that we feel out of place and disassociated and maybe like we don’t belong. Maybe I’ve made those words sound more like synonyms than ever.

Some people even would call a language like that ugly, just based on a superficial aesthetic judgment, which is obviously unfair, just because it doesn’t sound like things that they’re used to. It is normal to hear a language that has a different kind of tonality and feel like you’re not getting any information at all, especially because you don’t speak it. It’s absolutely normal.

If you’re going to continue in this environment, Ilya, I would encourage you to find a skilled teacher and take formal classes. Even online would do, but face-to-face is better. Because you will find that a skilled teacher will bring gentleness and humor and consistency to the language. And it makes so much more difference than the catch-as-catch-can method that you’re doing now. You’ll move much faster out of the difficult part of learning the language into the part where you’ll have the everyday stuff down like the polite phrases that we need to go about our day. It can make our day so much more effective when we’re going from place to place because you soon realize how much of what we say in any language is repetitive and you’ll youll start to feel like, okay, I get this. They all they said was hello, even though it sounded, even though it took them a while to say all they said was, hello, how are you doing and how’s the family?

Right on, right on. Elia, we look forward to future field reports from you. This is all really, really interesting.

Yeah, thank you for sharing. And thank you for sharing your awkwardness with another language. So often we’re ashamed of our experience and not getting it, but it takes some courage to talk on a national radio show about it.

No, I appreciate it. I don’t mind asking for help, and you guys did really provide that. So thank you so much.

All right. Take care and be well.

Bye-bye.

Thank you. You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, I’m wondering if other listeners have similar experiences, you know, where you don’t know a language but you live side by side with it and you really can’t penetrate it because it’s so different. It comes from an entirely different language family. I’d love to hear about people’s experiences with that. You can call us, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.