Reconciling the language and empathy gap

Early in my life I learned what it was like to live in linguistic limbo—where I could understand a language that I couldn’t speak. Growing up in an immigrant household meant that my conversations with family members were generally reciprocated in two tongues—my mom and grandparents would speak to me in Korean, while I would respond in English. At the time, the interchange seemed so natural that I hardly noticed how my voice couldn’t articulate the very sentences my ears so easily comprehended. Still, I felt something special taking form whenever we spoke. We were creating a discourse that was ours alone, a makeshift system of syntax and semantics that bridged the gap that language left behind. Boundaries were broken and chasms were crossed, for language was to us the sharing of souls, not words.

But as the years passed, I began to see that not all languages in this world are treated as equal. For all the flavorful diversity enjoyed by our nation, the dialogue of our collective experience remains insipidly monolingual. As native speakers of the world’s de facto lingua franca, people from Anglophone countries are blessed with the agency to understand and partake in an international discourse spoken in our own mother tongue. This hegemony has sometimes facilitated and sometimes stagnated the overall flow of narratives in our global network, but as Immanuel Kant would be quick to point out, net results don’t always reveal the injustices that occur betwixt and between.

As a native English speaker in the United States, I’ve rarely been put in a situation where I couldn’t express myself in my own words. But every day I meet people who struggle to communicate their thoughts in the language beyond a few basic phrases. And every day I realize, to my horror, how much the presence or absence of linguistic common ground influences how I can see a person as a person. When I listen to an immigrant speaking in broken, tentative English, I assume on instinct that the extent of his or her intellect corresponds to what I hear. At once, fellow human beings in my mind are reduced to simple-minded creatures with limited capacity for creativity, simply for struggling to speak my language.

The tendency is natural, which makes it even worse. Oftentimes we gauge the level of a person’s intelligence by the eloquence of her speech or the insight of his argument. Those who harbor a mastery and artistry of our language are regarded as complex, multifaceted and impressive individuals. At the opposite end of the dichotomy are those who appear inarticulate, and thereby unsophisticated, because the language we speak feels foreign on their tongues. To us, they are not people but caricatures, stock personas with nothing unique to contribute to our conversation.

So as much as language may serve to bring certain people together, it also inevitably excludes others. Even among native speakers of English, there exist harmful assumptions that estrange us from one another—in the United States, the Southern dialect is unsophisticated, the voice of the West Coast is laid-back, and the Midwest accent is our “standard” American English. We gain nothing from such narratives except misunderstanding and resentment. On the other hand, what we lose is something infinitely valuable—the ability to establish solidarity with the feelings of others.

I’ve given a lot of thought to how we can learn to foster empathy towards people who seem, at first, much different from how we see ourselves. It’s not too difficult to imagine yourself in the situation of a person you can relate to, but can we do the same with someone who doesn’t even speak our language? What can we possibly share if not our words?

The masters of the English script have long been frustrated and fascinated by the inadequacy of language to fully represent the sentiments of the heart and mind. In a way, language is built inherently upon its own lack—we speak knowing that our words will chase the lost object of their reference, only to fall short. Shakespeare knew this better than anyone—his actors are constantly breaking language with lies, puns or misunderstandings, dancing with words until slippery new meanings are created. But if words can so easily deceive us, how can we resolve this semiotic crisis of ours? How can we trust language to convey exactly what we mean to say?

The truth is, our human capacities for language and empathy are both flawed. It’s impossible for us to fully understand the words of others, much less the feelings that they are trying to express. So I believe the only way we can reconcile the shortcomings of our language and empathy is to find other ways to speak and listen.