Language Does Matter

LANGUAGE, WE are taught, is an innate human ability. We have, according to Noam Chomsky, an internal syntax that enables us to acquire language. Therefore, says MIT psychologist Steven Pinker, we should regard all language as equally valid. In other words the vernacular lanugage of the streets is just as human as the language of the academy.

In the current City Journal psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple begs to differ. No doubt there is an inherent ability for language, but just like any other innate human ability, the language ability depends on the way in which it is drawn out and developed.

Dalrymple spent many years working at an inner-city hospital and prison in England. In his experience, the lack of communications ability in the underclass people that he encountered was palpable.

I was struck not by the verbal felicity and invention of my patients and those around them but by their inability to express themselves with anything like facility: and this after 11 years of compulsory education, or (more accurately) attendance at school.

These people just could not articulate abstract thoughts, or even feelings beyond the most basic and crude.

And the reason is not too difficult to find. Underclass people are born to people that lack language skills, and so spend their childhood in an inarticulate environment. Then they go to failed schools where they fail to improve their language skills.

This, Dalrymple points out, adds up to a staqgering disability. Even at the basic level, where underclass people need to communicate with middle-class welfare-state bureaucrats in social services and criminal justice, their lack of language skills means that the bureaucrats do not find out, or do not bother to find out, what their needs are.

Beyond that, of course, they are cut off from the entire world of employment and culture where abstract reasoning and articulate speech is essential to a competently lived life.

And Dalrymple knows whereof he speaks. His father obtained a decent education and was an articulate man. But his uncle, due to lack of funds, did not get an education. This brilliant man was condemned to live his life unable to get the thought in his mind out into the world.

My uncle... remained trapped in the language of the slums. He was a highly intelligent man and what is more a very good one... But he was deeply inarticulate. His thoughts were too complex for the words and the syntax available to him. All through my childhood and beyond, I saw him struggle, like a man wrestling with an invisible boa constrictor, to express his far from foolish thoughts—thoughts of a complexity that my father expressed effortlessly.

It’s cheap for the liberal multicultis to peddle their relativistic notions. They may not value the importance of proficiency in speech and written expression. But their whole livelihood is built upon this proficiency.

And, it might be added, their dominance of the public square depends, to a significant extent, upon keeping a significant minority of the population inarticulate and dependent.

Speech and language may indeed be innate human abilities. But like any innate ability, it is merely latent until you develop it and train it. Ask Tiger Woods.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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