Places are Languages
But mostly just a chance for me to geek out over West Germanic languages
I’ve been on a minor linguistics kick lately. I blame the Netherlands, which I just got back from. In the early ‘10s, I had a slight, fleeting interest in the field, more specifically Germanic languages, especially the Western ones.1 I guess the reason was to understand the history of my language (English), the language of my ancestors (Dutch), and the language of perennial cool girl Berlin (German, duh).
Being somewhere with one of these other West Germanic variants, it was interesting seeing the text and hearing the intonations everywhere of a language I was previously fascinated with. Dutch is a bewitching language, at least in the way I find languages interesting. Caught between the two poles of West Germanic languages — English and German, it’s the closest major language to either.2 If you have even a vague familiarity with any of these languages (regardless of whether you can speak them), you can pick out aspects of Dutch that align more with English and others that are more reminiscent of German. There’s also a slight Scandinavian texture to Dutch, even just aesthetically, which I also pick up on in English, but never German. In the case of the latter, it’s due to Britain being colonized by the Vikings from the 9th to 11th centuries, which introduced a lesser-known dose of Old Norse onto our language.
The thing with English is that it’s the Germanic language that acts the least like a Germanic language. So much so that sometimes people have a hard time aligning English more with German than French. This makes sense, because after the Vikings, there was the famous Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, kickstarting the massive French influence that is still felt in English today. It’s estimated that the English vocabulary is about 1/3rd Germanic (whether from the original Anglo-Saxons or the Vikings) and about 1/3rd is French in origin. The remaining third is Latin and Greek, both of which were the largest influences in the development of other Romance languages. No other Germanic language has English’s degree of Romantic vocabulary. It produces an interesting ability in English to say the same thing in two ways, with a Germanic word and a Romantic word. Think ask vs inquire, belief vs faith, or freedom vs liberty. And because Medieval England started the trend of elevating French (and soon after, Latin), the words of French or Latin origin in English today often connote prestige and sophistication compared to the “basic” Germanic words.
I’ve also learnt that if you spoke English the way things were originally pronounced, it would sound quite similar to modern German or Dutch. There are a lot of quirks in Anglo spelling that today we think of as weird and pointless, but they’re holdovers from a point when they were necessary. The k in “kn” words like knight or knife used to be pronounced. It still is in literally every other Germanic language. Similarly, the now-silent “ght” in words like night and sight used to be pronounced and are similar to “cht” words in Dutch and German like nicht (which is night), where the “ch” is still acknowledged when speaking, like in Bach or the Scottish word loch. Licht in German sounds somewhat like licked in English. Which is actually (sort of) how English’s light was originally pronounced.34
All of this got me on the rabbit hole of the Great Vowel Shift, a progressive but major shift in the way words are spoken in English that occurred between 1400 and 1700. The causes for this shift are unknown. Maybe it was French influence yet again or Londoners trying to differentiate their speech from Northern English and Midlands migrants after the Black Death.5 Regardless, when I started listening to clips of how certain words were pronounced in 1400 compared to now (which you can do on Wikipedia here), I noticed something interesting: the words, as they’re spelled today, are pronounced closer to how they would be in Dutch.
One of the clearest things that sticks out to me when looking at Dutch words is they use some of the most English-looking digraphs. The ones I’m thinking of are “oo” and “ee” — something you’d certainly never see in Spanish or Romanian, but you see all the time in Dutch spelling. Except, they don’t correspond to the same sounds in Dutch as in English. The “oo” digraph in Dutch makes a hard “oh” sound, like in toe. This exists in some English words too, like door and floor. To get that “oo” sound as the digraph corresponds to in English, you must look for the “oe” spelling in Dutch. An English example of this is the word shoe, which, if spelled phonetically for Anglophones, ought to be written as “shoo.” For the “ee” digraph, in Dutch, it makes an “ay” or “ey” sound, like in sway or day. So, a Dutch surname like Beekman is not properly pronounced like beak+man, but more like bake+man. The Rotterdam neighbourhood of Coolhaven is pronounced as if it were spelled “Colehaven” in English.
These Dutch digraph pronunciations are nearly identical to the circa 1400 pronunciation of English words with these same digraphs. So meet used to sound more like mate. Boot used to sound like boat. But English is a wildly inconsistent language, partly because it has no overarching governing body to periodically update it, like with French or German. These languages have undergone spelling reform for standardization and simplification as a result in a way that English hasn’t. Accordingly, in English, we still have some words where digraphs are pronounced the old “Dutch style” way as well as ones that were tweaked ad-hoc to a new standard (for as much as there is ever a standard in English).
Have you ever wondered why English words with “ch” can be pronounced three ways? It can be a “ck” sound as in chaos, a classic “ch” sound as in church, or the regal “sh” sound as in chateau. Most ck-as-ch words originate from Greek, largely entering English through Latin or French influence. It does, ironically, more closely resemble how the ch digraph is usually pronounced in other Germanic languages, though. For “ch” sounds, like church and chariot, two things happened. Church is an Old English word, but it was previously spelled (for as much as standard spelling was a thing in those days) as circe because in Old English the letter c itself made the “ch” sound. It wasn’t just some 2nd k! But Norman scribes rewrote a lot of English words to suit French spelling conventions, which at the time had “ch” pronounced as we see in chestnut today. So church went from circe in Old English to chirche in Middle English. For chariot, which is of French origin, it was due to the influx of French vocab into English thanks again to those pesky Normans. Chariot continues the hard “ch” sound of how it was said in French back then. Later French loanwords words like chateau have sh-as-ch because by the time these words entered the English vernacular, the French pronunciation of that digraph had shifted to the more familiar “sh” sound we see in that language today. This is a great video going over some of this stuff if you’re not completely bored here.
Norman-French had a tremendous impact on English, so much so that their 1066 conquest was the point at which English shifted from Old English to Middle English. These new rulers over England introduced a crazy amount of vocabulary into English, often unedited for the language’s spelling conventions. Instead, Anglophones naturally altered the pronunciation of French vocabulary to fit the tones of English. So figure rhymes with bigger and doesn’t sound like it does in French at all, but the word is spelled like it is in France.6 This is where standardization and spelling reform would probably help a lot. As William Walter Skeat once wrote, “no one can tell how to pronounce an English word unless he has at some time or other heard it.” The language can be extremely confusing for people trying to learn it because it constantly betrays the logic of its own flimsy conventions.
Don’t let this talk of French be confused for interest, though. I’ve never been terribly interested in Romance languages beyond practicality (like, going to French Canada). One of the biggest deterrents to me ever moving to Montreal is that I would need to learn French. I don’t have similar hang-ups about the Netherlands with Dutch, even though both places are fairly Anglo-friendly while you learn the local tongue. The thing is, as cool as Montreal is, I just don’t care about the French language the way I do about Dutch, even if Dutch is, in the grand scheme of things, far less practical to learn. I also think French can feel imposed on people in Anglo-Canada. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great Quebec chose not to be consumed like Louisiana and French communities across the country have space. But French is of little practicality in Alberta outside of some mostly rural Franco-Albertan communities. And yet its requirement makes it feel like a chore rather than something chosen out of interest. Which is sort of why I switched to Spanish in high school (I would’ve preferred German, but my school didn’t offer it). Funnily, I’ve never been to the Hispanosphere, but I’ve interacted with French Canada and now Belgium.
If we want to get more psychoanalytic about why I have more of a penchant for Germanic languages over Romantic ones, it’s probably partially due to how elevated Romance languages are in the Anglosphere. They’re sexy, beautiful, and fancy. This has long been the way in the English-speaking world. It’s why the Normans Frenchified English spellings, why England’s aristocracy spoke in French until the end of the 14th century, why at the time of Shakespeare plays were often in Latin, and it’s why Latin-derived vocabulary is generally more esteemed than our Germanic core. Romance languages are, in a Eurocentric linguistic sense, kind of the popular kids at school. Pretty and talented. Germanic languages sans English are “harsh” and odd but also edgy. So maybe they’re not popular, but they’re cool in a way Latin’s vulgar offspring will never be. They just like me for real though. Never popular, but at one time I thought maybe I could be cool instead. Didn’t work out but you can’t fault a girl for trying!
It’s strange that I was and kind of am interested in language because I don’t think I’m very good at it. I know many people will disagree and I know we’re often our own worst critics, but my modus operandi is to feel quite inarticulate generally. I’m very self-conscious about it too, which no doubt makes me more nervous and prone to stumbling. But I often struggle to say things in a way that does a particular sensation justice. In short, language eludes me. I’ve written a lot about the ways that the Internet is a toxic place for me, but honestly, this essay by Lee Tilghman articulated things I’ve felt in a way I wished I could.
This plays out with my writing here, too. Of all the creative art forms, writing doesn’t require the mastery of a tool, like a guitar, camera, or brush. The mastery is of the craft itself, which is true for any creative medium, but the tools are pretty straightforward when you’re a writer. It means that the technicalities of being able to do the thing can get out of the way and the only stumbling blocks are in how you convey with the medium, provided you have a mastery of a language, which basically any adult does. And yet, writing is so much more daunting than photography. Perhaps that’s not a fair comparison, considering I’ve been a photographer for going on 15 years now. But at any rate, I rarely feel like I’ve properly conveyed something in writing and I hate seeing errors. Plus, it’s kind of scary to write. Words have power and they can be weaponized against you. When you aren’t doing fiction, things get quite literal, and so it’s easier for people to dislike or disdain without any room for variance. Visual art, when left to its own devices, can often just stay open to interpretation and I find comfort in the nebulous nature of that sphere.
I also don’t speak any other languages, not really (I don’t speak German but I can if you like [ow]). I’m a unilingual Anglo. Being a native English speaker carries a lot of weight and privilege, as I’ve mastered the greatest lingua to ever franca, meaning it’s very easy for me to get by without any other language, as compared to speakers of any other tongue. English is the default language of business, aviation, tourism, and the de facto go-between for people who don’t speak each other’s language. In Holland, the default is to speak English if people don’t understand Dutch, and you hear people speak my language with a French, German, or Italian accent more than an American or British one.
But, despite my inability to understand other languages, I’ve been thinking recently about the different kinds of vernaculars that exist. There are love languages, computer languages, and so on. One that I haven’t come across before is the idea of places being a kind of language too, but I’m feeling a bit like a dog with a bone on this one, so let’s go with it.
Places come loaded with meaning, texture, and sensation. Is that not the building blocks of any kind of language? Instead of words, the language of place comes from the people, the built environment, and physical geography, all coalescing into a culture that emanates from a particular area. From this, lore can develop — stories we tell ourselves that hook us into what a place is about, that denizens will identify with, which creates a shared community. We can use standard language to describe the feeling a place creates, but its identity also transcends words. It’s a vibe, it’s how people carry themselves, the socioeconomy, the kind of art that is made, and so on. It’s the institutions, both official and not, too. The Met and Tom’s Restaurant are both New York institutions, for example.
To be able to speak about a place you first need to understand it. And to understand a place, you need to have a degree of fluency in it. You need to know the vibe, the culture, the people, the stories, the phenotypical projections, and so on. You do not have fluency in Toronto if you only spend a few days oscillating between the Harbourfront, Eaton Centre, and Canada’s Wonderland. You’ll see some vignettes, but these are not representative of what Toronto really is. You get Toronto from its vibrant neighbourhoods, diverse culinary offerings, checking out local galleries and shows, consuming its media, and interacting with locals where they’re at. Which is not at the CN Tower.7
I’ve previously thought about having fluency in a particular place within the context of the two cities I’ve lived in: Edmonton and Winnipeg. Only, I didn’t have the words for it until now. There’s long been something off-putting about how people from either city generally talk about the other. And not to sound gatekeep-y, but with lesser-known but highly criticized places like Edmonton and Winnipeg, I don’t think you deserve to critique the place if you haven’t lived in or at least spent significant time in either. Because neither city is New York or London where you can more readily consume its language from afar and it has enough boosters to balance out the haters. Winnipeggers by and large don’t know Edmonton and Edmontonians by and large don’t know Winnipeg. All either party knows is shallow stereotypes.
And yet, people in one city can’t help themselves from having an opinion about the other, despite usually never having set foot in the other city. And it’s usually a negative opinion. It’s so exhausting bringing up Winnipeg to Edmontonians because it’s like the one time they can feel like they’re Calgary (because Winnipeg is obviously a lesser place) and the instinctual response is always to dunk on Winnipeg. I see Edmontonians wait for me to state where I stand viz Winnipeg so they can know if they can tell me what they really think, no matter how baseless it is. And the opinions are so generic, like a constant recycling of trite Globe & Mail comments, revolving around how cold and boring it is. Imagine living in dull, ugly-ass Edmonton and having the audacity to think that without ever setting foot in Manitoba. It’s not like Central Alberta is California, either. At least Winnipeg has a character beyond Boston Pizza and Galaxyland.
For Winnipeggers, Edmonton is stained too. Sometimes the critique is similar to Edmontonians’ of their city, which is kind of funny, but it’s often more just a general Alberta=evil thing due to politics. Which, like, again, imagine sitting in twee Wolseley, Manitoba thinking your jurisdiction’s local politics are vastly better than Edmonton’s. One of the sharpest vibes of Winnipeg is that it’s racist, even in liberal Wolseley, which is constantly reinforced by its citizens regularly killing Indigenous people with little repercussion. On the provincial level, Manitoba’s government spent the last 4 years copying Alberta’s. Municipally, Winnipeg feels like Edmonton 15 years ago. There are so many things Winnipeg is behind on in urban policy that it feels like a time warp at times. Its council is not as progressive as Edmonton’s or even Calgary’s at times.
I feel like I’ve earned the right to these criticisms because I’ve taken the time to develop a fluency and understanding of both Edmonton and Winnipeg. Most people don’t have that because most people don’t speak both of these cities. At most, they speak one of these cities, but not the other. And so having an opinion about the other is misguided.
But, if I’m being honest, most Winnipeggers and Edmontonians don’t have much to say about the other city. Some can’t help themselves from an opinion, but most people are head-empty about the city at the other end of the Prairies from them. Which is definitely a lot better than saying things without any basis. Since my life over the past few years has been split between these two metropoli, I’ve developed a deep understanding of Winnipeg in addition to my pre-existing understanding of Edmonton. But because people in one city rarely have a true understanding of the other, it feels like I can’t properly discuss aspects of my life and where I am without layers of context being explained. Not unlike someone trying to translate the words of someone else speaking in an incomprehensible language. Bringing up BDI, Club 200, honey dill, or Izzy Asper to the average Edmontonian will only elicit blank stares. Bringing up Yelo’d, Janis Irwin, the Aviary, or the Talus Balls to the average Winnipegger will only elicit confusion. Speaking about one city to people in the other as if you’re speaking with locals is basically like speaking an incomprehensible language. So you learn to not say things out because it can be tiresome to explain things. I don’t have the experience of living somewhere with a different language, but I imagine it’s not far off from how certain people end up having to hide or lose their native tongue when it’s deemed incomprehensible by the linguistic majority.
For me, this is lonely. I relate to and think a lot about things in the context of place. What they look like and what they’re about. And it’s also a natural extension of a life lived in a specific place for that place to be referenced. There’s a bilingualism I have as a result of knowing both Edmonton and Winnipeg fluently which means I can naturally converse by easily switching between Edmonton reference points and Winnipeg reference points without skipping a beat. But the people in my life will, with a few exceptions, only really get half of the reference points. Which is fine, objectively. You can’t expect someone from St Vital who’s never set foot in Alberta to understand Edmonton. Just like you can’t expect someone from St Albert who’s never set foot in Manitoba to understand Winnipeg. But as somebody who wants to be understood fundamentally and universally, this is sometimes vexing.
It goes beyond my Edmonton-Winnipeg bilingualism, though. As someone both highly interested in place (and the construction thereof) and decently well-travelled, I can often interact with people beyond where I’ve lived and understand at least some of the local language of those places. This is lonely too because it’s often a one-way street. People in Vancouver or London don’t care about Winnipeg or Edmonton. I wish people gave some interest in less esteemed places. But I kind of get it, both Prairie cities are kind of garbage (but also: I’ve earned the right to say that about them).
Regardless, the languages of places are important, because they’re what define localities and allow community to flourish via shared identities and understanding. Both are things I’m deeply interested in. What constitutes a place and why and what that means is something I often lose myself in. Similarly, having a community is something I truly believe to be important for grounding oneself, even if I often feel lacking in it. I don’t know about you, but I think these place-specific languages can be quite beautiful and invigorating to learn and understand. It’s good for people to learn about the place they inhabit and it can also be refreshing and useful to branch out and learn about other places in the world.
Languages themselves have a geography to them as well. English wouldn’t have the Norse and Norman influence it has without France and Scandinavia being Britain’s neighbours. It means I can look at certain English words and think, aesthetically, they wouldn’t look out of place in an IKEA product naming ceremony. Place also informs the vocabulary of a budding language too, which is why Inuktitut has hundreds of ways to describe snow (though not that many words, despite popular belief).8 Romanian culture is an island in Slavic Europe because it’s a byproduct of the eastern stretches of the Roman Empire, but its development was still influenced heavily by the Slavic cultures it’s in the company of.
So, to recap: Germanic languages are a slay, using language can be scary, and places exhibit a language of their own while languages themselves are a reflection of place. That last point is the most important one I have for you, but I hope the rest was fun too. I’d encourage you, if you haven’t done so recently, to spend some time learning something new about wherever you are. Not only can this bring a better understanding, but it can also help you to figure out ways that a place can be improved within the context of its culture and identity.
And maybe consider other places that aren’t so easily digestible and acclaimed without a sense that they aren’t worth knowing. It’s fine to not like a place, but it should come from a place of wisdom, not glibness. Perhaps I selfishly want this more because my place-based multilingualism is a bit lonesome at times. I can imagine, on some level, it’s what non-Anglos speaking English to Anglos feel: that Anglophones will never comprehend the tongues of non-Anglos because it isn’t needed in a world that bends to the will of the Anglosphere. Why does a New Yorker need to comprehend Edmonton when the world comprehends New York? Why does a Winnipegger, when we’re conditioned towards Montreal and Miami instead?
I know I can be kind of snobby about this stuff, too. Last month, I came across North of Bloor, an urbanist-geographer Substack (so basically, my thing) by policy analyst Steve Lafleur. While Toronto-based (hence the name), I appreciate that he very deliberately centres the geographies of places beyond the so-called “Centre of the Universe” (i.e. Toronto, south of Bloor), including places well beyond the GTA. His most recent post was about Oktoberfest in Kitchener, a city I have, strangely enough for an Albertan, visited. I’ve always considered Kitchener-Waterloo as utterly benign in the context of its surroundings. A place that makes Ottawa look interesting and cool. A Western abomination in the East, a la Moncton. But reading Steve’s latest, I got a different portrait of the city, one in which the city’s German heritage (it all goes back to those languages, I tell ya) lives on beyond the spectacle of the largest Oktoberfest outside of Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in everyday spaces inhabited by locals, sharing beer and bratwurst. My point is that even places we sneer at can have value, and I think it’s important to recognize that. That value comes from learning the lingo of a place, not just scratching the surface with the trite and the well-trodden.
I want people’s feelings about a place to come from knowledge rather than ignorance. The best way to do that is to learn the language of a place and feel its textures and intonations spread out in the streets and squares and spots. There are so many beautiful languages that bleed from locales and it can be a lot of fun getting to learn them. So get out there and stay curious!
West Germanic languages are English, Dutch, Frisian, and German. This differs from the North Germanic languages, which are the Scandinavian languages. There used to be East Germanic languages too, like Gothic, but these died out.
But technically, the closest living language to English is the lesser-known Frisian language, also native to the Netherlands.
https://www.ck12.org/tebook/basic-speller-teacher-materials/section/8.6/
https://www.discoveryuk.com/mysteries/what-was-the-great-vowel-shift-and-why-did-it-happen/
No judgment for those who visit places like this. They’re icons for a reason and I’ve been to the CN Tower myself multiple times.
https://readable.com/blog/do-inuits-really-have-50-words-for-snow/
As always, fantastic article. Love the thoughts about particular cities and places being a language. It can be a lonely space to be when you have these very two disparate languages and no one else understands you or at least only half of you. I think that makes chance encounters with folks that do happen to know both of those places, who speak both languages, extra special. In my case, there are very, very, very few people in the world who have spent significant time in both Macau and Winnipeg. Besides my siblings, there is a family friend of ours, who is originally from Syria but fled with her family to Macau, lived there for 4-5 years, until they immigrated to Winnipeg. She is the only other person that I see on a regular basis, besides family. There is always some sort of amazing energy when hanging out with her and talking because of the ability to not have to restrain myself from spouting off all types of examples, comparison, memories when talking about either place.
I think you are right though about their being some uniqueness to speaking both dialects of "prairienese." I would imagine the experience of people moving away, particularly from places like Winnipeg or Edmonton, are generally to much larger cities, where there will be more potential opportunities to encounter folks from those cities and be able to converse in their particular hometown vernacular. Anyways, just a thought perhaps. Once again, always appreciate your thoughts on things like this Tyler.
Did you really call the German language ‚sexy, beautiful, and fancy‘? That is a first for me and I am an almost fifty year old German. 🤣