More than „just language“

The world is a big sparkly and colorful place. But it can feel difficult sometimes to fit it.

Humans have the tendency to constrain the spaces they inhabit in order to make them more sufferable. The communities we’ve build over the centuries run on a very restricted set of rules; most of them arbitrary and entirely made of language. We use words to bring order to the chaos around us. We turn them into laws and regulations. We use them to draw the line between good and evil. We come up with words to praise the things we love.

Words have power. Words can make things better, and they can make things worse. People have been using weapons and building dungeons for millennia—language will not change any of this. But language may well tip the scale the next time we contemplate defending our personal truths with brute force.

I’ve been talking about language and how it affects us and our relationships for quite some time now. Check out my podcast Wissen schafft Sprache to learn more about how we make language work in our lives.

As a sociolinguist and language teacher I work with language every day. But as a human I know that language is always more than what can be studied or taught.

Language is our most powerful means of communication. Through language we express our thoughts and feelings. We say what we want and we ask for what we really need. But language doesn’t come as easy to all of us. Some of us lack the language to talk about who they are, and if they happen to find it they are silenced by those who do not want to listen.

We have built entire societies on language. Thus, using the same language over and over again perpetuates visible and invisible power structures. Language will tell us who is with us, and who is not. Language will tell us the rules, and who is exempt from them. Language will tell us who we need to be in order to be someone. Language creates a very specific idea of how the world is supposed to be.

But language is not about everything there is. Language is about what’s possible.

Language is what is not already there for everyone to see. Yes, language is part of who we are—but it’s also a vision of who we could become.

How can diversity be put into words?

I’m so happy you’ve found your way to this little corner of the Internet. Mind the language is an independent scicomm project which sheds light on how the way we talk about the world may well change the world to make it a more welcoming place. It explores new linguistic possibilities alongside the key terms and principles of diversity. We will zoom in on one core concept at a time, primarily focussing on topics such as body, language, gender, sexuality and (mental) health.

We are going to build our understanding of how diversity can be put into words, and what we need to know about language in general to make our own language more inclusive. We are going to look at different diversity dimensions through different perspectives, integrating linguistic knowledge with my own personal accounts.