The language experiment

Please excuse the use of verbal communication throughout this post.

Last night, while training home with some friends after watching an incredible performance of classical guitar at a coffee shop in a suburb, it was somehow decided that it would be interesting to hang out with friends while not using verbal communication. I believe this was inspired by Jordan’s comment, “Man, I wish you guys didn’t speak English.” He seemed to feel that our not speaking the same language would help him achieve insanity, which is definitely one of his most solid goals in life.

We discussed the terms of the experiment while walking to get something to eat. We pledged that once we’d procured 40s and ‘za, the experiment would commence. (While we naturally wanted to start it as early as possible, we thought it’d be inexcusably rude to try to order food without using words.) It was decided that sounds were legal, but referencing any phonemes already existing in any established language (of which any of us had knowledge) was not.

There was much debate surrounding the use of gesticulations. Ultimately it was agreed that while nearly every physical gesture is culturally constructed and therefore constitutive of language, a high degree of abstraction of which would imply associations with verbal communication, certain gesticulates should be made legal, as we did not trust ourselves to avoid them: squinting to convey lack of comprehension; a widening of the eyes to mean surprise; and of course nodding of the head to mean “yes” and shaking to mean “no.”

What surprised me about the experiment is how fluidly we four were able to communicate with each other. I made a your-mom joke, and everyone got it—and we were all stunned at how that was possible. A few hours into the evening, I expressed to one friend that our rapidly codifying system of grunts and gestures was for all intents and purposes identical to our regular spoken language. In other words, it didn’t end up feeling much like an experiment at all, once we got into it. We realized that the next step was to attempt to hang out with no verbal communication, and no nonverbal communication.

Naturally that’s a concept we can approach only asymptotically at best, but I’m intrigued at the chance to try. Somehow I’d expected that the language experiment we ran last night would test my motives to hang out with my friends; for example, if we can’t talk to each other, what else is there? What do we do? But talk we could, because, as it turns out, most of the meaning we have of each other is assumed and might reside within ourselves.

We even renamed each other.

So, I feel I’ve learned a lot about how languages evolve. It was like a crash course in memetics. I highly recommend the experiment to anyone at all curious about communication theory, or merely who’s introspective. Maybe someday I can impose it on a class during a 3-hour session. That would be fun.

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Published:
02.28.09 / 7pm
Category:
musings
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