Imagine this scenario: an English speaker and a Japanese speaker are barely able to say things like “Yo, how’s it hanging?” “Man, I feeling real salty right now” and “How can this be smoky and gamey?” to each other, yet they’ve been life long friends and have been chatting it up for years and years. For many, the immediate thought may be “How the heck does that work?” One idea among those out there is through a common language developed using elements of each one, otherwise known as a lingua franca.
Yes, inventing a whole new way of speaking just to talk with someone may seem quite absurd, but when things need to get done, a common language is essential, just as it was in the Italian-speaking ports of the Mediterranean, where French, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic speakers invented the first lingua franca.
In sharing a language, people can share more of themselves, expressing thoughts and feelings far beyond what their current foreign language skills can facilitate; this becomes especially evident when there isn’t a dictionary, phrasebook, or anything else nearby to help.
If nothing else, lingua franca is among the strongest tools in the verbal arsenal to build an honest rapport, if not the strongest. For proof, just look at how Chris, an English-speaking young Nikkei, and Makoto, his Japanese-speaking cousin, built their own.
When they met as kids, Chris and Makoto both thought the other was speaking gibberish. Yet as they played hide-and-seek around the house, something began to click. Despite Chris being raised in Torrance and Makoto in Chiba City, each saw a spark in the other that they wanted to know more about—for Chris, Makoto’s playfulness, and for Makoto, Chris’ expressive nature. That spark planted the seed from which their lingua franca took root.
As curious kids, general language knowledge—such as what makes nouns, verbs, and so on tick—laid the foundation it needed to grow. The closer they inched to being adults, surfer, cooking, and fighting game-centered jargon let it flourish and blossom with energy. By the time they didn’t need it, their lingua franca became so linked to how they knew each other, it wasn’t just a way to share what was on their minds, it was the way. Chris’ fiancé discovered this when she overheard him say this over the phone:
Yo, Aniki, I’m getting a bit pekopeckish, so I’mma get some of my leftover washoku ready. Take care shite ne? Ja.
To her, this was arbitrary and tough to get, but her chats with Chris revealed that some aspects of language are deep and multi-layered, at times so much so that one or two words aren’t enough to convey them in a foreign language, one ever present example being the word kokoro.
In English, the term is commonly translated as heart, but where heart can mean both the one in someone’s chest and their spiritual center, kokoro refers specifically to the latter. Now, if such subtleties didn’t exist within each language, translators would have a much easier job to do, primarily because the nit-picky folks they translate for would have much less to gripe about. But since they do exist, lingua franca becomes essential to bridging the language gap, even influencing the way it grows.
Nowhere is this clearer than the English language, which has borrowed terms from quite possibly every language on the planet, including Japanese (see karate, typhoon, and rickshaw) to try and capture a concept.
To see the length and depth of concept these words can describe, imagine if someone saw a frat boy catch a football with their face. When they talk about the moment with their friends, they could say it was funny because it was happening to someone else, or they could just say it was “Schadenfreude”—or to use the more modern term, “Lulz.”
All this and more drives the development of lingua franca around the world and across the age spectrum, ensuring it evolves and adapts to each generation.
For many first generation immigrants, part of its appeal is in how it links them back to the place they called home, a connection they want to keep as close to them as humanly possible. As time passes and their families grows, however, their kids start to spend more time in the society around them, seeing it as their home, its language as their language, their identity centered on what that society tells them is “cool.”
Naturally, this embrace of a new way life not only creates conflict within those seeking their roots, but also amongst the group over how connected they still are to them, inspiring terms to illustrate how “out of touch” they are (see “white-washed,” “banana,” and endless others).
In fact, in her book I Know What You’re Thinking, body language and communication expert Lillian Glass, PhD, sees using lingua franca as a way of blocking those unfamiliar with it out. When used among others not familiar with the language, she writes that it is exclusionary, alienating, and rude, going so far as calling it “Ethnic Flavoring Syndrome.”
For those developing a lingua franca, that means, as it is with any casual language, that the best way to use it is among those most familiar with it, as it crafts a more close-knit atmosphere. To see this in action, just look at any place where specialty language is part of the day-to-day life, such as skate parks, army bases, or short-order diners. In allowing communication regardless of background, lingua franca shines like a lighthouse in stormy weather, whether or not the lighthouse, itself, could use some work.
More often than not, people think every thought leaving their lips has to be perfect, stumbling over themselves to find just the right word; bear in mind that even when a language is as natural to them as breathing, this can still happen.
With lingua franca, those awkward first comments using a foreign language shrink like wool in the washer, on top of giving it a feel discrete from that textbook style of speaking. Some may see it as showing incapability, but since when is expressing emotions deep within showing incapability?
To think there is only one way of speaking is to miss what makes speaking enjoyable, engaging and endlessly flexible: the human heart (or to be more precise, the kokoro). Perspective is crucial, and seeing casual chats as a chance to have fun with a language removes a substantial amount of the pressure that comes with learning a new language, like knowing less vocabulary and grammar than a 6-year-old.
Really, when it comes down to it, lingua franca does three things that ensure anybody studying a language sticks to their habits: it makes using the language fun, makes studying it interesting, and makes knowing it something special, which is much sexier than drilling facts into your head from a textbook all day.
© 2011 Roy Fuentes
