Language

My fascination with language was given real-life ramifications through my son, Daniel. He was born in Denmark, and like his older brother, he grew up in a bilingual environment learning Danish at school and speaking English at home. When he experienced developmental delays, we thought his being raised bilingual was the cause. The enormity of learning multiple languages is a major onus on a child, so we hoped that his unusual silence for his age was merely a remnant of that burden.

Eventually, we learned that his delays were abnormal. He was diagnosed with Dyspraxia and childhood apraxia of speech, conditions that left him less able to string together words in proper context due to neurological abnormalities in how his brain’s language-control centers form connections, and physical challenges in moving the muscles to properly pronounce words. The symptoms combined to trap Daniel within himself — he was three years old when he said his first words. He was still expressive in his way, through actions or touch or gestures, but that required shifting the frame of reference to understand the methods of communication he had at his disposal to represent his ideas and needs.

These conditions are common in children and present a wide range of abilities and limitations, both physically and intellectually. Daniel’s case is no different. His particular habit is using only verbs — for instance, instead of saying, “it is raining,” he’ll just say, “raining.” That spartan treatment of language deprives it of some of the meaning, but in reality, it outsources the job of context to others. It’s up to the listener to fill in the blanks where Daniel can’t — who is performing actions, to whom or where actions are directed, etc. Daniel is still learning how to make those connections — from neuron to neuron and from his brain to the spine to the speech muscles — and until he does, we have to make them externally for him.

Daniel’s method of speaking may seem incorrect, but it’s really only wrong through the lens of English. One aspect that Daniel usually omits from conversation is use of syntactic expletives — such as the “it” in “it is raining” — which is a facet of pronoun-dropping languages like English and French. In a way, there’s an elegance to this treatment of the language. In the clause, “it is raining,” the “it” has no meaning. It’s merely a placeholder to allow the sentence to follow the usual subject-verb pattern we view as grammatically correct. It’s meaning and presence is ghostly, so Daniel disregards it. The way he speaks follows an Eastern logic (languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese have varying degrees of null-subjectivity, meaning that verbs can be expressed without an explicitly stated subject).

Instead of using language to make connections, we have to approach it from the opposite angle for Daniel, using what he says as the meaning and tracing backwards to uncover the links between a sentence’s constituent parts. Understanding him requires retraining your ear to his speech patterns and setting aside momentarily the way you’ve been used to hearing English for a long time. But hearing verbs without context doesn’t need to be jarring. Daniel’s speech isn’t dissimilar from how many approach learning new languages, fixating on the context of verbs and nouns before figuring out the syntax surrounding them to correctly orient their meanings toward subjects and objects. In some ways, it makes understanding him easier, stripping away some of the layers that can complicate comprehension and making his statements simpler to digest. That’s the priority at a young age, when Daniel is expressing the simple ideas that comprise his straightforward childhood needs and wants, ideas that he was unable to articulate in any way in the not-too-distant past. It may not be conducive to sharing complicated ideas yet, but it does provide an enlightening window into his thought process as we try to help him understand and mitigate his condition.