Languages aren’t real. At least, not in the way we’re taught they are. Languages are social tools, not windows onto reality
Languages aren’t real—at least, not in the way we’re taught they are. From Swiss German to Sanskrit, our neat linguistic categories are less about grammar and vocabulary than power, identity and social engineering. Vuk Vukotić, a theorist of ideologies of language, dismantles the myths of both linguistic realism and relativism, revealing how distinct languages are not natural entities but rather artificial tools—often monopolized by elites—for sorting people into tribes, nations and other social groups. Instead of speaking about languages as distinct systems, we should see language as a fluid, amorphous practice in which we all participate.
Languages simply exist, don’t they? There is clearly an English and a German and a Thai language. This might seem an obvious fact in the modern world. Relativists—those who support the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity thesis—believe not only that languages are real and exist, but that they somehow express the worldview of their speakers. On this view, languages construct our realities—so this is a non-realist view of the relationship between language and objective reality. Conversely, generativist linguists would claim that there is only “language” (without the indefinite article)—a universally distributed ability to communicate in verbal symbols—while what we may perceive as distinct individual “languages” are merely expressive variations of those “deep structures” of language. On this view, language is a transparent medium for referring to objective reality—so this is a realist view of the relationship between language and reality.
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An imagined linguistic entity—be it a language, dialect, patois or whatever—is a way of what I call “social doing.”
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Both perspectives have valid points. Relativists have the merit of providing rich descriptions of individual languages and their idiosyncrasies, showing that not everything about language is universal. However, they often stumble in defining languages when working with geographically close and related speech. Are the speech patterns of two neighbouring ethnic groups languages, or mere dialects? For example, are Swiss German, Bavarian and Low German all the same language or different ones? How much difference should there be for something to be considered a different language? There is, to this day, no consensus on these questions.
Moreover—and unfortunately for the relativists—the situation where one has to make such decisions is more of a rule than an exception. In Europe, we have long stretches of dialectal continua, which ignore national borders: the Romance continuum stretches between Portugal, Spain, France and Italy; the North Slavic continuum over Russia, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia; the South Slavic continuum from Slovenia to Bulgaria, etc. This also applies to much of the rest of the world.
Proponents of universal grammar would be quick to point out that politics, rather than nature, makes languages. A handy phrase they’d often use goes, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy” (popularized, although not originated, by the scholar of Yiddish Max Weinreich). This witticism illustrates a key point: the language of the Italian nation is actually a specific type of Florentine, Spanish is Castilian, German is the Saxon-styled language of Luther’s Bible, and so on. In this light, myriad other linguistic entities are relegated to the status of sub-languages (dialects), such as Sicilian, Aragonese or Bavarian. This promotion of an official language was important for nation-building: a single language for a modern nation is a practical—and in some cases a spiritual—necessity.
However, neither of these perspectives can answer the question of why we perceive so much difference, and yet also so much similarity, in different named languages. Relativists end up arbitrarily attributing the labels “language” and “dialect” to various groups of speakers, while structuralists content themselves with not addressing these issues at all. What is more, the “Weinreich witticism,” useful though it is, makes “dialects” the only real linguistic objects. But dialects are themselves notoriously vague. The father of general linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, claimed that “dialects are only arbitrary subdivisions of the total surface of language.” Dialects, too, are human-made taxonomies: they are no more real objects in the world than are “official” national languages like French and Thai.
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When language is utilized solely for the purpose of communication, speakers often do not perceive “languages” or “dialects” as distinct entities at all.
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The way out of this dilemma is not simply to find some compromise between the relativists and universalists. Instead, it requires a wholly new approach, based on a more historical and human-oriented idea of language. Anthropological and post-colonial writing on language highlights something that both the mainstream linguistic perspectives ignore: that an imagined linguistic entity—be it a language, dialect, patois or whatever—is a way of what I call “social doing.” Linguistic entities are always brought to life in our minds to perform a function which is beyond the basic function of communication.
There is evidence to indicate that, when language is utilized solely for the purpose of communication, speakers often do not perceive “languages” or “dialects” as distinct entities at all. Observations of certain non-modern communities, such as Austronesian and other non-European populations, revealed that many speakers did not even operate with the notion of “a language” but tended to see their speech as an ensemble of resources. The same can be seen in the work of a British colonial linguist in India, who complained in 1907 that the Europeans had to invent languages and their names in India (Assamese and Bengali, amongst others), as most of the local population lacked the concept of a “language.” The understanding of language in this situation is thus fluid: there are no linguistic categories that would help the speakers differentiate the world into rigid ethnolinguistic us-es and them-s.
Our minds tend to register linguistic entities—dialects, languages, and so on—when doing so performs functions like identifying elements of selfhood, often via what is termed a “shibboleth.” The notion of a shibboleth comes from the Old Testament, from what may be the earliest documented genocide in history. After Jephthah defeated the tribe of Ephraim, he devised a grim test for identifying remaining Ephraimites: “All right, say ‘Shibboleth’. If he said, ‘Sibboleth’, because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time” (Judges 12:6). A nineteenth-century Serbian philologist described a similar method of identification, noting that peasants in Dalmatia could discern religious affiliations through pronunciation—those who said “I am not” as nisam were recognized as Catholic, while those using nijesam were identified as Orthodox. It seems likely that people have always been able to identify interlocutors through the linguistic shibboleths of their regions or social groups.
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While all humans have language for communicating, they do not have to conceptualise languages as separate entities, at least not until a social need arises to do so.
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And language can perform more complex social functions. Among the Tucano tribes in the North Amazon, for instance, marriage is strictly exogamic: unions are allowed only between individuals from different linguistic groups, i.e. between people who speak very different languages. This cultural norm fosters a remarkable linguistic diversity, resulting in most individuals being tri-, quadri-, or even quinti-lingual. Differentiating between languages is thus a way of doing something socially important: avoiding marriages between what are perceived to be brothers and sisters.
In a nutshell, while all humans have language for communicating, they do not have to conceptualise languages as separate entities, at least not until a social need arises to do so.
Seen in this way, when nineteenth-century elites made languages into grammatical objects of national awe, for them it was also a way of social doing. Linguist-patriots imagined languages as abstract objects belonging to the national groups that spoke them, in order to create nations. The German philosopher Johan Gottfried von Herder saw languages as reflecting each nation’s genius, contained in its songs, folklore and literature. The problem for these patriots was that members of their putative nations appeared to speak in a mess of tongues varying significantly from village to village and town to town. The solution was to abstract the notion of national language away from the speakers’ mouths and brains into a celebrated object that they all had to learn through obligatory schooling. This meant making the language of the Volk Latin-like: providing it with a grammar and dictionary that would prescribe rules of use.
What does all this mean for how we are to understand languages? Giorgio Agamben argued that we “do not have, in fact, the slightest idea of what either a people or a language is,” adding that our whole political ideology defines “something that was already obscure (the concept of people) with the help of something even more obscure (the concept of language).” Although I essentially agree with this, I hope to have shown that it is more productive to think of languages as functions of peoplehood. Compulsory primary education has instilled a relatively new idea in several generations since the nineteenth century: that language is an abstract, rule-governed system, a reflection, particularly in European contexts, of the linguistic essence of a nation. But just as the languages of the Tucano tribes are tools of social reproduction, so are national languages a way of a similar social doing: they are instruments of the cultural elites to control how nations will come to be imagined through their putative languages.
And what about the realist vs. non-realist (or universalist vs. relativist) debate? Do distinct languages determine distinct worldviews, or is all language essentially the same, referring to the same objective world? Should languages be seen as constructing subjective realities, or should we think of language in general as transparently referring to an objective reality?
Based on the above, I would say the realists are essentially right. What we perceive as different languages refer to the same world around us, but these linguistic constructs are created and shaped by what people do with that world. “To language” can thus be a verb: people engage in what sociolinguists call “(poly)languaging,” which might lead to the construction of different languages or dialects (but it also might not). These linguistic entities are constructed not primarily through their linguistic features, but rather through their association with non-linguistic features of the world, such as values, cultures and social organizations.
By Vuk Vukotić
27th August 2025 in IAI TV
