The Best Language of the World

Lan­guages evolve. They live and die. They bor­row from each other. Each one denotes a cer­tain cul­tural style. Some are writ­ten. Some are only spo­ken. By the end of this cen­tury, it is pre­dicted that the world will be down to fewer than one hun­dred dif­fer­ent lan­guages — mostly due to the Inter­net and the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of life in the “global village” — a life that needs to com­mu­ni­cate faster and with greater uniformity.

I have stud­ied a few liv­ing lan­guages and a cou­ple of dead ones. They have their sim­i­lar­i­ties and their inter­est­ing dif­fer­ences, but it is the emo­tional and spir­i­tual lan­guages of the world that I find most fas­ci­nat­ing. Humans speak a num­ber of uni­ver­sal lan­guages. These are some of the most obvi­ous: love, hate, com­pas­sion, war, dis­dain, laugh­ter, empa­thy, sym­pa­thy, accep­tance, rejec­tion, and praise.

The point of the birth of the church on Pen­te­cost had to do with diverse peo­ple expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing together with­out lan­guage bar­ri­ers. They all “heard in their own lan­guage” the uni­ver­sal mes­sage of the res­ur­rec­tion. Sto­ries and his­tor­i­cal facts can become universal! They can even­tu­ally be said in Navajo or Russ­ian with the essence stay­ing the same.

Emotional/spiritual lan­guages are the most con­ta­gious. Mother Teresa did not have to speak all of the Hindu dialects. She spoke in com­pas­sion. She did not have to say a word. Give a hun­gry per­son some food, and you are speak­ing his or her lan­guage instantly.

Laugh­ter is one of my favorite lan­guages. I like watch­ing for­eign com­mer­cials on You Tube. I do not have a clue what they are say­ing, but I laugh along with them. The com­mer­cial episodes have to do with human sit­u­a­tions — like the joy of find­ing a rare park­ing spot. In any auto­mo­bile cul­ture, this feel­ing of dis­cov­ery is the same. We are humans. We are to laugh together — not at each other — but with each other.

You could watch the movie Titanic for the first time, in a lan­guage you do not under­stand, and still get the gist of the story. In fact, you might even get more of it by not being dis­tracted by the words. What reg­is­ters most in a story is the human heart, not the speech cen­ter of the brain.

At heart, we hope we can all some­day speak love and not war. A world in silence feed­ing each other is bet­ter than one that ver­bally fights over the food. Lis­ten­ing to the laugh­ter of the world’s chil­dren is pre­ferred to any UN speech. Those gig­gling lit­tle ones do not have to talk to play. They are the most appro­pri­ate par­a­digm for the human community.

For­give me for hav­ing had to write this in a sin­gle lan­guage. I would rather have chuck­led it to the entire globe.