Language Is an Honor
What a beautiful thing words are. Language is magic, connecting us at once to our ancestral and to our present humanity. There is something intimate and deep in speaking or hearing the sounds our ancestors made. Languages themselves are interconnected, words and roots shared like bread and oil between strangers at a table.
(20 Homophones Examples for Writers.)
What is powerful about language is the way it shapes your mind and the way you perceive the world. In a cognitive study1, researchers had speakers of German and Levantine Arabic (which happens to be my dialect) undergo an MRI scan (Wei, et al., 2023). What the researchers found were physical differences between the brains of German and Arabic speakers. Those who speak Arabic had stronger connections between their left and right hemispheres, and those who speak German had more connections within the left hemisphere. This is a direct result of the complexity differences of the two languages.
Another study, the Russian Blues study2, involved Russian and English speakers. The findings showed a difference in how quickly Russian speakers can discriminate between lighter and darker shades of the color blue (Winawer, et al., 2007). This may not seem like a huge deal, distinguishing between colors, but it is. The Russian speakers outperformed English speakers in being able to identify which colored squares matched another, meaning they were better able to perceive similarities between objects. Because of their spoken language, Russian speakers perceive colors more.
In writing The Jinn Daughter, it came naturally that Arabic would be woven into the story. As I wrote in English, the Arabic flowed onto the page as naturally as blood flows in my veins. Certain words, like hayati, and binti, are emotional for me. Those are words my family says to me, words my father uses when he tells me he loves me. Arabic for me is not just a string of sounds that make up a word, it is the language of love, of my ancestors, of my heritage.
As beautiful and intimate as language is, it can be weaponized. Arabic is an ancient and powerful language, used by intellectuals and artists alike throughout the generations. It is also a language that in modern-day society is sometimes viewed as being a “dangerous” language.
Just look to the movies and shows we watch, that throw Arabic into a character’s lines to tell us, ‘beware, this character may be a villain.’ Any person who speaks a “dangerous” language in a country that is not the origin of that language knows the feeling of being looked at in suspicion, or being told directly to “speak [insert some other language here, usually English].”
It was important for me in The Jinn Daughter to create positive associations between Arabic and (hopefully) a beautiful story. I want to create a frame where Arabic is seen as a conduit of creativity, of literature, of culture. Syria, my family’s origin country, is known for its rich tradition of literature and poetry.
Check out Rania Hanna’s The Jinn Daughter here:
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Oral storytelling has always been a powerful tradition for us, and the oral storytellers, the hakawati, of the Levant are as precious as gold—more so because they hold our history and our people’s stories on their tongues. There’s still the oldest coffeehouse in Damascus, Syria, called the Al-Nawfara Cafe that keeps this tradition of oral folktales and folklore alive. A tradition unshaken by time, by war, or by man.
Many have forgotten this deep tradition in the midst of Syria’s current turbulent years. But we are a people of literature, language, love, and humanity. We love the arts, culture, poetry, and music. We delight in it all. The world has seemed to push that aside, in favor of news articles of war and damage. I want to change that with my storytelling.
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References:
Wei, X., Adamson, H., Schwendemann, M., Goucha, T., Friederici, A. D., & Anwander, A. (2023). Native language differences in the structural connectome of the human brain. Neuroimage, 270, 119955. Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 104(19), 7780-7785.