Month: July 2025

If you’re ever tempted to doubt the power of language to influence behaviour, you need only consider the tragic case of the first known relationship between literature and mass suicide.

In 1774 – at a time when fiction-writing and reading were ever-more popular – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. With its overblown emotions and dramatic plot, it was a runaway bestseller, particularly among young adult readers. 

Young men all over Europe imitated the protagonist by dressing in his trademark yellow trousers and blue jacket, and some of them were even inspired by the fictional character’s sad death (suicide by self-inflicted gunshot after being rejected by the woman he loved) to kill themselves using similar means. Panic-stricken parents rallied, and the book – as well as the outfit – was even banned in some places, while debate raged about whether or not impressionable young people should even be allowed to read fiction at all.

Today, social contagion, particularly when it relates to tragic or unfortunate outcomes, is often attributed to the media. Researchers in the area still refer to the ‘Werther effect’ in discussions of copycat suicide with a connection to language and media.

Photo Source: https://andrewbarger.blogspot.com/2017/04/review-of-sorrows-of-young-werther.html

People caring for infants often instinctively use a specific type of speech, commonly known as ‘baby talk’ or, by researchers, as ‘child-directed speech’.  It is notably higher in pitch, with a slower rate of speech and a more melodic deliverance than that typically used by adults, with an emphasis given to the enunciation of vowels, and longer pauses than is typical in spoken language.

People using baby-talk might sound irritating to the unsentimental bystander, but they haven’t actually gone goo-goo/ga-ga. Research shows that babies are more responsive to child-directed speech,  that they focus more intently on and interact more with adults speaking this way, and even that it enhances their cognitive development, including speech acquisition!

Photo Source: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/03/babies-love-baby-talk-world

Bardic poets occupied a very important role in Irish society from the pre-Christian period until the seventeenth century, with many texts surviving. Bards used highly formalised, complex poetic language to memorise and retell the history and traditions of the tribe or area they worked in, including detailed genealogies and life-stories of the elite.

In order to become a bard, would-be scholars attended special schools that were often restricted to particular families, with students subjected to arduous training, which included having to commit lengthy poems to memory, as well as writing them down. 

Bardic poets were held in such high esteem that when they cursed their employers’ adversaries, it was believed that their words could even have the power to do harm. 

Modern Irish people still admire and respect both poets and members of the general public who are good at using words to praise their allies or declaim their foes. While taken less seriously than before, inventive cursing still plays a role in modern Irish discourse. 

Photo Source: https://meathhistoryhub.ie/o-dalaigh-bardic-poets-their-poetry-and-their-patrons/

In Slavic tradition, the word ‘zagovory’ refers to verbal incantations thought to cast spells. The word itself means roughly ‘that which is performed with speech’. Practitioners used particular words, pronounced in a special way, as they performed their rites.

The tradition of zagovory is based on pre- or non-Christian beliefs, with frequent reference to sacred trees and to celestial bodies such as the sun and moon. It was an integral part of life in Slavic regions until the religious authorities decided to crack down on it from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. In response, the tradition adopted Christian themes and imagery, with the names of figures such as Jesus frequently invoked in more recent iterations of the tradition.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/green-and-brown-mountain-under-white-sky-during-daytime-hOevKaw_hfk?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash

Communication is one of the biggest challenges for people with significant levels of intellectual disability, who often struggle to express their needs and wants in language.

However, researchers and educators have found that using signing to support speech, and sometimes written words, can make a big difference.

Developed in the UK, the Makaton system of signing is taught to people with intellectual challenges, who can use a series of signs to get their message across, in combination with spoken language. Similar signing systems include Lámh (meaning ‘hand’) which was developed in Ireland. The signs are focused primarily on a vocabulary for essential needs, such as ‘eat’ or ‘drink’ or ‘sleep’, but can also help people to communicate their emotions, with signs for ‘sad’, ‘happy’, and so on.  

Makaton, like related signing systems from different countries, is not a fully developed sign language, like sign language for people with deafness, but it does use some of the same signs, so different regions have dialectal differences, and there is no universal vocabulary.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-man-in-a-white-coat-holding-a-piece-of-paper-ysYZzGKlz48

Speech that involves using a mixture of languages is known as ‘macaronic’. There are lots of examples of these from all over the world, including both spoken and written language, generally from cultures in which bilingualism is common. They include: medieval European texts that mixed Latin (then a lingua franca for the educated and for commerce and diplomacy) with a variety of vernacular languages; spoken and written language in Ireland and Scotland until the mid-nineteenth century; and languages spoken in swathes of Latin America until the present

The term ‘macaronic’ comes from a 15th century Paduan word ‘maccarona’, referring to a kind of dumpling eaten by the poorer classes at the time, presumably a verbal sneer at those seen as being less educated. This word can be found in the Italian ‘maccheroni’, a food eaten by the poor, but also in the much more refined French sweets ‘macarons‘‘.

Modern writers and singers still employ macaronic speech in their literature and music, notably Talking Heads with their 1977 hit Psycho Killer. 

You’ve probably engaged in macaronic speech yourself, perhaps referring to ‘having a siesta’ or ‘enjoying some dolce far niente’ or sighing something along the lines of, ‘Well, you know, c’est la vie…’

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-group-of-friends-at-a-coffee-shop–uHVRvDr7pg

You may have come across yodelling in the song ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ from the musical The Sound of Music, but did you know that yodelling originally developed as an important mode of communication in the high and often isolated mountain communities of the European Alps? Or that forms of yodelling are found in many cultures all over the world?

Yodelling is a type of singing that involves rapid and repeated changes of pitch. The form with which most people are familiar was developed in the Alps by herders calling to their flocks, and communicating with one another across considerable distances, not unlike the Turkish ‘bird language’ of which we wrote some time ago. 

Yodelling also features widely in folk music from this region and crossed the Atlantic with European migrants to become an integral part of many different types of folk music in the Americas too. By the 1830s, Alpine yodelling – performed by both white and Black entertainers – was an established form of music-hall entertainment, popularised further after the birth of the film industry in the early twentieth century. 

The world record for yodelling is still held by Canadian Donn Reynolds, who yodelled for seven hours and twenty-nine minutes in 1976 in a feat that would surely have impressed the lonely goatherds of yore. 

Photo Source: https://www.meetsalzburg.com/en/plan-your-event/social-side-programmes/yodeling-lesson/

Many people around the world live with hearing absence or loss, and clearly they have a very different relationship with language than those who can hear. 

A question that hearing people often ask about those who are born without hearing is ‘What language do they think in?’

We all think using a combination of images, words and feelings, but those of us who’ve grown up hearing use language as an integral part of our thought process. People born without hearing, who have never heard spoken speech, generally think in a predominately visual way, with images and, often, word signs or moving lips.

The thought processes of people with acquired deafness are different again. Depending on what age they were when they stopped hearing, they may still think using spoken language, but will tend to use a larger number of visuals the longer they have spent in silence.

Maybe magic isn’t real, but that hasn’t stopped people from cultures all over the world from doing their very best to cast magical spells.

The specialised use of language in the form of incantations is at the heart of most magical practice. An incantation is typically a specific arrangement of words that might be chanted, spoken or sung, often in the context of highly ritualised behaviours.

Specific ‘magical’ words are thought to have special powers; often these are words that would sound nonsensical in another context – think ‘abracadabra’ or ‘shazam’. In cultural contexts in which magic and incantations are taken seriously, these special words may be kept secret from the general population, passed down along formal or family lines to the practitioners of magic.

Photo Source: https://tinyurl.com/3vf4pwf2