Julie Tetel has made a career out of studying the structures of human connection, whether it be through her many romance novels or her celebrated scholarly works on linguistics. Tetel is a Professor at Duke University and the author of Linguistics in America 1769-1924: A Critical History (Routledge, 1990), Linguistics and Evolution: A Developmental Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Languages in the World: How History, Culture and Politics Shape Language (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), co-authored with Phillip M. Carter.
Caroline Hagood: On March 8, 2019, Duke University held the Language Matters Symposium honoring your scholarly achievements with the book Languages in the World. Did you have any sense as you were writing the book that it would be such a game-changer in the field of linguistics?
Julie Tetel: Honestly, in a word: Yes.
My preceding book Linguistics and Evolution. A Developmental Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2014) was explicitly theoretical. By way of contrast, Languages in the World (LiW) is implicitly theoretical. We wanted to write about the languages of the world in a new way, which required both a new organization and a new way of writing about language itself. However, we didn’t want to point at what we were doing with, “Hey, look at us. We’re doing something new.” We just did it.
In the movie Country Strong, Gwyneth Paltrow plays a country singer who is trying to revive her career. After giving a hit-it-out-of-the-ballpark performance, she walks off-stage and says to her up-and-coming rival, “That’s how it’s done, sweetheart.”
So that’s what we’re saying to our fellow linguists: “This is how you do it, guys.”
Now, after giving that awesome performance Paltrow’s character dies of a drug overdose. So, the parallel between the movie and LiW is confined to one line of dialogue only.
CH: The book is for linguistics students but also for anyone whose work/life would benefit from a multidimensional exploration of what language actually does in the world (so, for everyone). You focus the book around topics of power, movement, and time for many reasons that you carefully lay out in the book, the most provocative of them (to my mind) being, “to put at issue the very subject we are studying, namely language.” What sorts of thought and writing patterns go into achieving such a goal? Put more simply, what was the process of writing this book? If possible, can you describe it step by step for those who are working on books themselves?
JT: Phillip’s suggestion for the macro-sections to be Power and Movement and Time had two effects: it gave the book an organizational nod to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and it meant we would be telling a very complex story in a non-linear fashion. For instance, we start in the present in Chapter 1. The remote past (deep linguistic history) comes up in Chapter 10, the first of three chapters devoted to Time. In between, we’re all over the place, temporally (and geographically) speaking.
Me, I was in micro-weeds obsessing about the Table of Contents, by which I mean I sweated the chapter titles and subheadings. I was determined the Introduction would not be: Introduction. Nope. It’s: All Languages Were Once Spanglish. Then there are subheadings such as: Eiffel Towers in Vietnam and Money Talks: What Language Does It Speak? (Answer: Telangana spoken in the new Indian state of the same name, whose main city, Hyderabad, has tech money.)
We made a further organizational decision: every chapter would open with a story about a language––what we called a hook––related to the subject of the chapter, and every chapter would end with a story about that same language. Same for the language profile for the chapter. For instance, for Chapter 4, Effects of the Nation-State and the Possibility of Kurdistan, our opener is: Lines are Drawn in the Sand, which is the story of how the map of the Middle East got drawn and how Kurdistan got left off it. We close with: The Kurds Today: Different Places, Different Outcomes. The language profile is of Kurdî, which, FYI, happens to be an Indo-European language, making it distantly related to English.
Just as important, as you point out, we are putting at issue language itself. I was responsible for writing Chapter Two, The Language Loop. There I discuss language through various dimensions: the cognitive, the cultural, the structural and the ideological. I define language as “an orienting behavior,” distinguished by “coordinations of coordinations.” After which I write: “This is not the usual way language is talked about, and it is not at first easy to understand and requires more language to work the idea out.”
Later in that paragraph I write: “As a start, you could think of language as elaborated cognitive loops, complex braids of mental-physical routines, beautiful lace tatted throughout our neurons with tendrils extending down through the larynx to the diaphragm, organizing and coordinating not only breathing rates but also muscle patterns as we act and interact with one another throughout our days and lives.”
I can guarantee you, linguists generally do not talk about language as an orienting behavior or as beautiful lace or as having anything to do with tendrils. As a point of information, language as an orienting behavior is the idea of the Chilean neuroepistemobiologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. (Did I just write “neuroepistemobiologists”? Seems so.) And linguists never talk about Language Loops.
Unfortunately, I can’t give you the step-by-step process for writing this book. I can only give you the feeling of it coming together. We didn’t think we could pull something like this off, so the feeling was of constant amazement to see the chapter sections being created and turn into whole chapters and then whole sections.
CH: As a teacher, I appreciated the exercises and discussion questions at the end of each chapter. One such exercise asks the reader to imagine she has been appointed special commissioner to the United Nations and tasked with finding a solution to the tension between the Chinese government’s push for Putonghua and Tibet’s desire to preserve its traditional language. I know you based this book on your experience teaching a very successful linguistics course, Languages of the World. In writing this book, you were responding to the lack of teaching and reading materials that brought together “linguistic structural information with historical, sociocultural, and political contexts.” Above all, what were you hoping to give students with this book? What message do you have for student readers?
JT: We very much wanted our students to see their linguistic lives reflected in much of what we write about. At the Duke Language Matters Symposium, Adam Schwartz, who teaches at Oregon State University, uses LiW in a course called Introduction to Language and Culture Studies. I can’t resist sharing with you this 2017 quote from a student named Gabriela that Adam used in his PowerPoint presentation:
While we were writing the book, Phillip had in mind the kind of student who attends Florida International University where he teaches in Miami. It has a majority Latinx student body. Me, I had in mind some mythical undergraduate in Hong Kong, for some reason.
But I gotta say: I love the real Gabriela!
CH: In Languages in the World, you integrate a consideration of the lives and stories of the actual people who do the speaking with the more theoretical aspects of language in a way that’s innovative and, frankly, wholly refreshing. You are donating your royalties to the Endangered Language Fund, and the book pays careful attention to everything that is lost when a language dies. Hint: it’s not merely words. What are some things that can be done to help revive dying languages?
JT: Technology will not cure all, but it is proving remarkably helpful in reviving dying languages.
At the Duke symposium, K. David Harrison of Swarthmore College and an expert on Endangered Languages, gave the example of Matukar Panau, spoken by less than 1000 people in Papua New Guinea. It is being revived with the help of an online talking dictionary funded through The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.
One speaker, Ngau Rudolf, has written the first book in Panau, his autobiography.
An online presence for many endangered languages brings awareness to them, fosters community among existing speakers, and inspires others to learn them.
CH: Clearly, your book is deeply dedicated to the interdisciplinary approach. You also write romance novels. What relationships and bridges exist between your scholarship and your fiction?
JT: The answer is simple:
Q: What is language?
A: Connection.
Q: What is love?
A: Connection.
I love to talk. I love to listen to people talk. I love to notice how they say things and try to understand why they say things. I love to learn new languages and improve the ones I know.
The writer Anita Loos, most famous for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, once said, “I love to get up in the morning and write dialogue.”
Works for me! The center of a good romance is the dialogue between the hero and heroine. Their verbal sculpture creates the relationship. So, writing a romance novel gives me what I want in spades: two people creating a love connection by talking.
I don’t think I could have written such a sprawling book as LiW, with all its characters, plots and subplots, if I hadn’t written so many novels. Early on in the writing of LiW, I kept noticing the topic of religion butting its head into various topics and I kept elbowing it away. Then at one point, I thought, “Oh, heck, I’ll just make religion another subplot. I can handle it.” So, I started weaving it into the book. It figures in the hook for Chapter Two, The Language Loop, and it runs in and out of Chapter Five, The Development of Writing in the Litmus of Religion and Politics, among other places.
A linguistics textbook, a romance novel, they’re both devoted to people making connection through language, and me telling stories about them.
CH: Finally, I read that as a child you loved to make up new words to share with your sister. Can you remember any of them? Can you leave us with one?
JT: The only one I can think of at the moment is: minkie. I think I was about five years old when I decided it should be a word to mean something like ‘hip’ or ‘butt.’ Looking back as an adult, I wonder if I was using the model of pinkie to give a nickname name to another body part.