Why Study Linguistics?

Over the past two weeks, Amy and I have met with dozens of people in a double handful of meetings – challenging them to participate in fulfilling the Great Commission. We cannot overlook the 2.1 billion people today who don’t have access to God’s Word, simply because there are no believers in their 2,000 languages who can tell them! While sharing the staggering scope of this need to expand the reach of the Gospel, we have been asked some really great questions about how and why we work as missionaries. Perhaps one of the best is one of the simplest: “Why did you study linguistics?”

When I entered New Tribes’ linguistics program, I had several misconceptions regarding the material I was to study. I thought that linguistics would make me a better translator, better equipped to bring the Bible into a naturally readable form for one of the ‘least-reached’ people groups Amy and I wanted to serve. Instead, I found that linguistics and translation were very distinct fields – certainly complimentary, but not at all the overlapping disciplines I’d imagined.

So, what are some of the reasons why studying linguistics will be valuable on the mission field?

• Linguistic analysis allows us to identify which sounds in a language ‘belong’ together – which sounds are thought of as the same ‘letter’, even though they are not the same. (An example in English: the two ‘T’s in ‘turtle’). Without this process, any alphabet we create for a previously unwritten language will be very frustrating to that language’s speakers!
• Learning a language is very difficult, but analyzing phrases and conversations with linguistic techniques can provide some shortcuts! This is the best way to identify hidden ‘patterns’ in word order, or the way in which parts of words are constructed.
• While linguistics is not the same as translation, a skilled linguist can be one of a translator’s best assets in preparing passages for review. The best translator tends to be the person who can best speak a language naturally… but oftentimes, those people don’t fully understand the details behind what they choose to say, or why! Adding the layer of analysis to their work helps remove error earlier in the translation process, and allows translation to progress more quickly.

Hopefully this gives you some idea of the value of linguistics to a cross-cultural church planting team. But no matter how detailed the reasons I share with you, nothing will make the value of good linguistic analysis clearer than seeing it in action! So in closing, please read this letter from a Wycliffe missionary – and see how God is using the work of linguists on the mission field today!

Missionaries discovered that the verbs for a particular African language consistently end in one of three vowels: i, a, or u. But the word for ‘love’ was only found with i and a. “Why no u?” they wondered.

In an effort to truly understand the concept of ‘love’ in this African language, one of the missionaries began to question the translation team which included influential leaders in the community.

“Could you dvi your wife?”

“Yes,” they answered, “that would mean that the wife had been loved, but the love was gone.”

“Could you dva your wife?”

“Yes,” they responded, “that kind of love depends on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.”

“Could you dvu your wife?”

Everyone in the room laughed.

“Of course not!” they replied. “If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water and never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would have to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say dvu. It just doesn’t exist.”

The missionary sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, “Could God dvu people?” There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started trickling down the weathered faces of the elderly men of the tribe.

Finally they responded, “Do you know what this would mean? This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, while all that time we rejected His great love. He would be compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.”

The missionary noted that changing one simple vowel changed the meaning from “I love you based on what you do and who you are,” to “I love you, based on who I am. I love you because of me and not because of you.”

God encoded the story of His unconditional love right into this African language. For centuries, the little word was there—unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable.

Adapted from a letter titled One Little Vowel, published to staff of Wycliffe USA on 30 July 2012.