Some myths about language

1. Bengali is a sweet language.

This myth is mostly associated with the phonology of these languages. Some people find
the phonology and the pronunciation of these languages ‘sweet’. However, the notions
such as a language being sweet or harsh are highly subjective and do not stand to any
objective parameter in linguistics. The pleasantness, or otherwise, of a language or a
variety are contingent on the social attributes of the speakers of it.1 For example, in India,
Bengali speakers call themselves as Bhadralok- prosperous, well-educated. Their cultural
traits- enjoying classical music, classical literature of the likes of Ravindranath Tagore and
other authors in Bengali- are perceived as something of excellent aesthetic taste by
themselves or even by other language speakers. As a result of this admiration towards
the cultural taste of Bengali speakers, the Bengali language is then deemed consciously
or unconsciously as a sweet language. However, a person on the other side of the planet
having no prior knowledge of Bengali or Bengal may not find Bengali as ‘sweet’. They
might accord the status of being pleasant or sweet to some other language.
2. Hindi is the national language of India.
This one happens to be the most popular linguistic and political myth in India as well as
abroad. The fact of the matter is that Article 343 of the Indian constitution confers the
status of official languages to Hindi in Devanagari script and English. However, no written
records suggest that Hindi is the national language of India. The myth probably
popularized because around half of the population of India admits Hindi as their first
language making it the most widely spoken Indian language.
3. The languages shape the speakers’ thought process and worldview (Language
determinism).
This stronger form of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis put forth in 1940 believes that the language
we speak determines how we perceive and think about the world. The language
determinism, though popular for some decades, has turned out to be significantly wrong
after many types of research. We would not have been able to translate a concept from
one language to other which does not a word for it if the language shaped our thought
process. But as we can understand any concept from any language with the help of the
lexicon of our language, language as a barrier to understand a certain concept proves to
be a myth.
4. Motherese (baby talk) is syntactically and morphologically simpler.
Adults use motherese (baby talk), characterised by higher pitch, exaggerated intonation
and slower speed while talking to infants and small kids with a belief that such talk is
easier for the infants to understand. But the motherese is not simpler as adults think. We
1
Howard Giles and Nancy Niedzielski, Language Myths (ed. Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill), (Harmondsworth,
Penguin Books, 1998), 92
 use imperatives, verbal questions with question tags, embedded sentences that are
syntactically complex. Moreover, we neither drop inflections from verbs and nouns nor
omit function words such as determiners and auxiliaries.2 Thus it involves syntactically
and morphologically complex parts of the language.
5. Dialect is an inferior variety of a language.
In popular notions, the word dialect connotes many social and political prejudices.
Dialect is considered as an inferior variety of a language, which is spoken in some
countryside by uneducated people. However, in purely linguistic terms, dialect is a
mutually intelligible form of a language that differs in
systematic linguistic features like pronunciation, or vocabulary, or
grammar, or any combination of these depending upon recognizable
region, social or ethnic groups. It is just the non-standard variety of a language whose
speaker do not enjoy high political and/or social status like the speakers of standard
variety do.
6. A code which is not written or does not have a script of its own is not a language.
The language is initially a verbal channel. The child acquires a language through the
verbal medium with a stimulus from their parents and relatives talking to them or with
each other. Writing came up much later(around 3000 BC) in the course of human history.
Humans did have sophisticated languages even before the writing came into practice.
The fact is that writing is not equally popular in all the societies and not all the peoples
have the socio-political privilege to write and read. But that does not make their
language as substandard. Moreover, two separate languages can use the same script eg.
Hindi and Marathi use Devanagari script. Some tribal languages do not have a script but
they still are complete languages.
7. “You speak with an accent.”
An accent is a part of the characteristic way in which a language is pronounced. More
specifically, it is related to the stressed syllabic pattern of the utterance of a language
spoken by an individual or group of individuals. Every person has an accent i.e. a typical
way of intonation, pitch, etc. A language utterance with no or standard accent is a myth.
The accent of the socio-political elites residing in the Sprachraum of the standard variety
is considered as a neutral accent. Normally, an ‘accented speech’ is associated with the
utterance of a speaker of a non-standard variety when they speak in the standard variety.
Additionally, it is normal that there is a strong influence on the speaker of the phonology
of his or her mother tongue while speaking another language. You cannot expect an
Indian learning French in India to sound like a Parisian.
8. Languages such as Bhojpuri are inherently sexist and vulgar languages.

2
Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, An Introduction to Language, (Wadsworth, Cenage Learning,
2011), 329
The Bhojpuri language has been popularized by artists making songs, which use sexual
innuendos, or words denoting the objectification of the female body to appeal a large
number of audience in the region. While many of the Bhojpuri songs indulge in the
objectification of the female body, it will be inappropriate to conclude that Bhojpuri is a
sexist and vulgar language, lest we concede to the view of language determinism, the
validity of which has been refuted in several linguistic types of research.
9. Sanskrit is the mother of all Indian languages.
Sanskrit is not the mother of all Indian languages. Sanskrit is a part of Indo-Aryan sub-
branch of the Indo-European language family. Though it is lexically and
morphosyntactically related to other members of the sub-branch such as Hindi, Marathi,
Bengali etc., it differs significantly with members of other language families in India such
as Tamil, Kannada, Santhali, Khasi, Javanese etc. The fact that we see many words of
Sanskrit origin in other Indian languages has occurred due to the contact phenomenon.

10. Sign Language is not a complete language.

Sign language has been misperceived as a system of gestural and iconic representations
that is simply a translation of spoken language into signs or hand movements. But in
reality, it is linguistically as complex as any other language expressed through a verbal
channel. Sign languages are fully developed languages with their own set of lexicons as
well as complex morphosyntactical, and semantical rules.
11. Some languages are difficult to learn.
The difficulty in learning a language as a foreign language refers to relative difficulty. One
finds linguistically related languages to the language known by him as easier to learn and
vice versa. For a Marathi speaker, Bengali will be easier to learn than to learn French. The
difference in orthography may pose a difficulty but the writing part comes much later to
the language. The difficulty in learning the grammar and vocabulary of a language is
relative.
12. Some languages do not have grammar.
For a linguist, grammar refers to the set of phonological and morphosyntactical rules
which are realized in the actual utterance of the language. But for some non-linguists,
grammar refers to only the prescriptive grammar part. For example double negatives
make the positive or past tense of to catch is caught. They think languages that do not
have a recorded prescriptive grammar lacks the grammar and therefore are substandard
or easy to learn. Nevertheless, technically all the languages in the world have grammar
i.e. set of rules which the speaker unconsciously apply in the speech. If a language had no
grammar, it would be impossible to make mistakes in the language. But since we know
which part of the speech is grammatical or ungrammatical, it is very much evident that
the languages are functions of a set of rules i.e. grammar.
13. Millennial using short forms in messages are ruining the language.
 Millennials using acronyms such as LOL, ROFL and shorter version of words such as dey
shudnt go instead of They should not go in SMSs and Whatsapp messages, other is often
criticized by the language purists that usage of such acronyms and short forms corrupt
the language. But it is often forgotten that such words are used in a specific setup, the
usage is limited to converse with specific people in our lives and they serve a specific
purpose. Shorter words saved money in the era of telegram. In today’s date, they save
time! Language changes according to the situation and the purpose of the
communication. No language in the world has at any point of time remained unchanged.
Change in a language is a constant process. We do not talk the same way as our
ancestors spoke before 500 years.
14. Pune’s Marathi is the purest form of Marathi.
In Maharashtra, the variety of Marathi spoken by the dwellers of the city of Pune is often
regarded as the purest form of Marathi. More specifically, it is the variety and accent of
the Brahmins of Pune which is considered as the purest Marathi. The reason for the
popularity of this myth is the cultural hegemony enjoyed by the Brahmins of Pune, which
was once ruled by the powerful Brahmin Peshwas- the de facto rulers of Maharashtra. As
they were the social and political elites who had the means to influence the masses
through their variety of Marathi, the variety became a by default standard variety.
However, for a linguist, no variety or a language is purer than other variety or a language.
15. Children acquire language through imitation as a response to stimuli.
The behaviourists prescribed that the children acquire the language as a response to
stimuli. i.e when they hear their parents talking to them and correcting their mistakes.
However, the universal grammar theory of Noam Chomsky was more or less able to
convince that the acquisition of a language in children is not merely a response to stimuli.
The child has an innate language faculty (in words of Chomsky: Language Acquisition
Device) hard-wired in the brain which facilitates the acquisition of a language in the
critical period of language acquisition.

References:
1. Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2011). An introduction to language (9th ed.,
International Student Edition). Wadsworth: Cengage Learning.
2. Bauer, L., & Trudgill, P. (Eds.). (1998). Language myths. Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin Books.
3. Hindi, not a national language: Court. (2010, January 25). Retrieved August 1, 2019, from
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/Hindi-not-a-national-language-
Court/article16839525.ece