It doesn’t matter to ME...
Language is an easy place to find expressions of the common attitude, “It doesn’t matter to me, so it’s not important. And I’m not going to make an effort.”
Communication is a form of social action. When you say something, you’re doing something.
Most of us are raised to think of language primarily as a way to share information. You know something, and you use your words or signs to get that information over to someone else.
But language is a whole lot more. What we say, and how we say it, sends messages to the world. And the message I want to focus on today is how our language can say, “I don’t care” or “I can’t be bothered.”
Because this is an attitude that causes real problems in the world. And if it’s not a message you want to be sending, it’s useful to see the ways it is commonly encoded in language so you can avoid them.
The world is an incredibly complicated place, and one way the human brain copes with this complexity is selective attention. We focus on what we believe to be relevant and tune out what we believe to be irrelevant.
Some of our earliest language learning involves training ourselves to ignore what isn’t important for the language(s) we are acquiring.
For example, at six months old, hearing babies can differentiate all meaningful sounds in the world’s languages. By ten months, they’re down to about 50% accuracy. And by twelve months, they can barely hear distinctions that aren’t relevant to the languages they are learning.
They have learned to filter out “unnecessary” information.
So it makes sense that as adults, we don’t pay attention to language features we have spent our lives filtering out as unimportant.
But! Because we live in a pluralistic and multilingual society, we sometimes have to unlearn some of those filters and pay attention to things we were trained in childhood to think of as irrelevant.
Because the majority of people in the US are monolingual in English, I am constantly finding examples of “it doesn’t matter to me” when other languages are at play. Here are just a few of them.
In February of 2023, the Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny performed live at the Grammys. Here is how his performance was captioned on tv:
Screen capture of Bad Bunny’s performance taken from Dr. Jonathan Rosa’s post on Twitter (now X)
Bad Bunny is one of the world’s most popular musicians and was Spotify’s most streamed artist for three straight years. He sings and raps in Spanish, a language spoken by more than 40 million people in the US.
Bad Bunny’s performance wasn’t a surprise to the producers of the Grammys. And arenas full of people sing along at his performances, knowing every word of his hit songs.
But not only did the Grammys not pre-load his song lyrics, not only did they not hire a Spanish speaker to caption his comments, they didn’t even name the language he was speaking and singing in. All that mattered was that it wasn’t English.
Even language nerds can show a disregard for Spanish. I like crossword puzzles (surprise surprise), but I do not like how often the clue “Spanish year” is answered by the word ANO in the grid. Not año (or AÑO if you’re using an app that fills in with all caps). But ano.
The English alphabet doesn’t use a tilde, the ~ symbol. In Spanish, this tilde creates a meaningful difference in pronunciation. While Spanish n is pronounced the same as in English, Spanish ñ is pronounced like English ny. Spanish cañon = English canyon.
And while Spanish año is English year, Spanish ano is English anus.
So not only does using año in a crossword usually create a mismatch with the word it intersects with (it’s not mañor or raiñy or whatever else), Spanish speakers are stuck looking at the word for anus while the English-speaking puzzle maker pretends it means year.
It’s a meaningful difference.
When Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk was grabbed on the street outside her Boston-area home and abducted by masked and unidentified US federal agents, the news was shared widely on social media. (And, less than it should have been, by corporate news outlets.)
But I have only recently started to her name spelled correctly, using vowels with an umlaut, the two dots up top. (And it’s still pretty rare).
In Turkish, those two dots are meaningful, and change the way the vowel is pronounced (much like in German). Instead of being articulated towards the back of the mouth, that o and u are articulated closer to the front.
Öztürk was certainly singled out not only because she wrote a student newspaper op-ed recommending that her university talk with students about Israeli investments, but also because she is a hijabi and Turkish. Those differences were seen as meaningful. If you want to draw attention to Öztürk’s inappropriate imprisonment, it’s best to pay attention to what is actually meaningful to her, and be respectful of her name as well as her person.
The Hawai‘ian alphabet has a symbol for the glottal stop, the sound made when you slam your vocal cords together. In English, it’s the sound before the oh in “uh-oh” (and if you are able to listen closely, you can hear it before the uh as well). That symbol is similar to an open single quotation mark, ʻ, and is called ʻokina.
While in English, you don’t change the meaning of a word if you insert or remove a glottal stop, in Hawai‘ian you do. For example, pau means ‘completed’ and is a culturally significant word. And paʻu means ‘soot’, a completely different word.
Image of Pe‘epe‘e Falls from Waterfalls.com
But all over Hawai‘i, place names are presented without the ʻokina. The result? Not only are they guaranteed to be pronounced incorrectly by tourists, because they are missing important pronunciation information, but they are also sometimes rendered absurd.
Like Pe‘epe‘e Falls on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, more frequently written as Peepee Falls. I don’t think you need a linguist to explain how disrespectful this can feel.
What messages are being sent when we ignore something that is meaningful to someone else? I’ll unpack a few I’ve found in my data collection.
1
Language Action: There are no closed captions or open captions for a meeting or video.
Message: “We don’t care if Deaf or hearing-impaired people have access to this information.”
2
Language Action: Years are labeled AD (short for Anno Domini, “Year of [Our] Lord”) and BC (short for Before Christ).
Message: “We don’t care if people in our audience aren’t Christian.”
3
Language Action: An audience is addressed as “Ladies and gentlemen…”
Message: “We don’t care that there are people who are nonbinary.”
4
Language Action: A very tall and thin employee is called Beanpole by his teammates.
Message: “We don’t care that you’re sensitive about your height and weight and that you don’t want attention drawn to either.”
5
Language Action: A report of inappropriate and hostile comments by teammates is dismissed with, “They’re just young and curious. You need to cut them some slack.”
Message: “We don’t care about your psychological or physical safety.” And further message, “We don’t care about being a hostile workplace and we’re not worried about being sued.”
These all point to deeper issues of perspective taking and empathy. The idea that, “It doesn’t affect me, so I don’t have to care.”
We see the negative outcomes of this attitude every day.
Language is an easy place to start practicing the contrasting attitude, “It matters to someone, so I’ll pay attention to it.”
Is being careful with your language enough to combat the deeply problematic actions happening all around us? No, of course not. Not even close.
But it is a great place to start. When you pay attention to and honor a meaningful difference for someone else, it shows that you actually care. And it can help build psychological safety and trust. Because your language is telling people, “You matter. And I am keeping you in mind.”
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