My friends Karen and Sam are slowly combining together into one mass of a life force. Not physically, of course: Sam is a tall, lanky freshman who loves Mango Sunrise tea at Peet's Coffee, and Karen is a kettle corn kernel of a human being, a salty, sassy, sweet nugget that will pop once she reaches a certain temperature. I mean that they're starting to sound like each other.
Linguistics is one of those sciences I think is really interesting until I actually look at books that talk about minute differentiations between sounds, and then I'm like, "I'm out." I thought "Arrival" was a beautiful movie with something thought-provoking to say about human communication and interaction but did we have to spend so much time deciphering the little alien goo splots? But if you know me, the way for me to understand and get interested in different areas is to figure out how they compute in a human context. How do our phrasings, our accents, our little nuances and lisps effect how we carry ourselves to other people?
I have always loved accents. As a little kid, I would try and imitate the ones I saw on screen - Steve Martin's Inspector Cousteau's terrible French accent or Pongo and Perdita's British accents, for instance - and I tried out my own Chinese accent. Granted, people tell me my Chinese accent sounds "super white," but hey, I make the effort to make fun of my people. What I've noticed recently, however, is how often I unintentionally take on accents and phrasings, not necessarily of ones from other countries, but from other people.
The most horrific occurrence of this is from about a year ago when my roommate Bobby met a then-new freshman named Daniel Hong. After really hitting it off, they'd come over and cook and makeup words. While I didn't know yet that they planned to completely butcher the English language, I was intrigued by what would become their most extraordinary concoction yet: "luwalz." The word started from "lol," which then turned into "lolz," which then morphed into "lulz," and then became an unholy monster of a word into "LUWALZ." It was so strange and so ethereal that I felt like I actually wanted to be a part of this horrific creation of linguistics and help birth this word and bring it into the wild. It became a catchphrase we all said to get us through finals.
And then, I went home for winter break and was mocked repeatedly for saying this word.
Point is, words bring people together and tear them apart. Let's go back to Karen and Sam. Sam has this strange Southern Gothic drawl where every word is uttered so slowly you'd have to fast-forward his voice. Now, whenever we're in a room, my friend Caitlyn will ask a question and Karen will bring out that same drawl and murmur, "I DON'T KNOW 'BOUT THAT ONE," another trademark Sam quote, and Sam will pull out a classic Karen line, "Shoot, I gotta go," hanging on the t's with a cadence reminiscent of a soundwave, oscillating up and down. The more they hang out, the more they sound alike.
I've noticed this with my own speech. Sometimes, I don't even purposely do it - it just pops out because I've been hearing it so much. It's Joe saying "littttterally" in the whiniest voice, it's Kristen holding out her left hand and muttering, "Ye," Juliane repeatedly saying "fam," and Kevin's low utterance of "LUH-mao." And slowly but surely, they slowly get added into my own personal lexicon. And I try not to be a leech about which words I take. It's a symbiotic relationship of language, and my own vocabulary echoes out into my web of friendships and relationships. I think it's an honor to hear other people say things in my whiny voice, or say "gucc," "not false," and "fam."
I think that's the human element of linguistics. We say things because we hear them, or because the words are just "so us" that we couldn't say anything else. We repeat things because we respond to them in a very visceral, emotional way. In a sense, we're trying to hold on to the people in our lives by taking their language for our own. It's a patchwork job, but maybe, subtly, we're trying to show the people in our lives that they matter to us, and we just don't know how else to say that in words.
