Scope in Language
What is language - and where does it end?
What is language - and where does it end?
THE PROVOCATION
What counts as language?
“Each language says the world in its own way.” - George Steiner
What counts as language?
“Each language says the world in its own way.” - George Steiner
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Consider three words - Iktsuarpok is an Inuit word for the feeling of anticipation that makes you keep going to the window to check whether someone you are expecting has arrived. Mamihlapinatapei, from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, describes the wordless glance shared between two people who both want something to happen but neither is willing to initiate it. Hiraeth is a Welsh word for a particular kind of homesickness, grief for a home you can no longer return to, or perhaps one that never quite existed.
None of these words translates into English. You can get near them with phrases, but the concept slips and never quite means the same thing. And this raises an immediate question for TOK: if a language has a word for a feeling and yours does not, does that mean you experience the feeling differently? Or not at all? These words are not just linguistic curiosities. They are evidence that different languages do not simply name the same world in different ways; they carve experience differently. |
Untranslatable words Iktsuarpok - Inuit The anticipation of waiting for someone to arrive, causing you to keep checking. Mamihlapinatapei - Yaghan, Tierra del Fuego A meaningful look shared between two people who both want to initiate something but neither will. Hiraeth - Welsh A longing for home mixed with grief and nostalgia, for something that may never have fully existed. |
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Untranslatable Words
TED Translators The film explores untranslatable words describing subtle human experiences across cultures. These include lingering post-meal conversations, fate bringing people together, nostalgia for what is lost, childlike curiosity, eating without hunger, and private domestic spaces. Other ideas capture fear of offending others, sensitivity to gentle sounds, casual socializing, getting something for little effort, the calming effect of nature, and affectionate gestures like running fingers through someone’s hair. Together, they reveal how language reflects emotional subtleties and shared human connections.
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Big idea 1 - The definition fails - and the failures are instructive.
The Oxford Dictionary defines language as "the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way." Almost every word in that definition is a problem. The word "human" excludes animal communication before the question has been examined. "Spoken or written" excludes signed languages, mathematical notation, and gesture. "Words" excludes music. Each exclusion forces a choice about what we think language fundamentally is.
British Sign Language and American Sign Language are not simplified versions of spoken languages; they are entirely separate linguistic systems with their own grammar and syntax, no more mutually intelligible than English and Japanese. Mathematical notation expresses relationships that resist ordinary prose. Music communicates grief or joy with an immediacy that resists paraphrase. Either music is a language that cannot make statements, or our definition needs to be wider still.
Animal communication produces the same pressure on the definition. Bees communicate the location of food sources through a waggle dance. Vervet monkeys use distinct alarm calls for different predators. Whether any of this constitutes language, or something else entirely, depends on what you think language requires.
British Sign Language and American Sign Language are not simplified versions of spoken languages; they are entirely separate linguistic systems with their own grammar and syntax, no more mutually intelligible than English and Japanese. Mathematical notation expresses relationships that resist ordinary prose. Music communicates grief or joy with an immediacy that resists paraphrase. Either music is a language that cannot make statements, or our definition needs to be wider still.
Animal communication produces the same pressure on the definition. Bees communicate the location of food sources through a waggle dance. Vervet monkeys use distinct alarm calls for different predators. Whether any of this constitutes language, or something else entirely, depends on what you think language requires.
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Do animals have language?
TED-Ed Animals communicate in diverse ways: crabs signal fitness, cuttlefish change color, and bees dance to share food locations. But language has four traits, discreteness, grammar, productivity, and displacement. Most animals lack these fully, though bees and prairie dogs show displacement, and apes and dolphins demonstrate limited elements. Even so, their systems are restricted and often learned from humans. Human language is unique in combining all four traits, allowing infinite, complex expression about real or imagined ideas, though research suggests a possible continuum.
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Big idea 2 - Language is both a way of knowing and an area of knowledge - and the difference matters.
In the old TOK framework, language appeared as a way of knowing: one of the tools through which we access knowledge, alongside reason, emotion, and sense perception. This is how we approached it 11e with Critical Thinking. In the current IB framework, language is an optional theme, which positions it as a subject of knowledge in its own right.
The most vivid illustration of language as a way of knowing is Helen Keller's account of the moment she understood that the cold water flowing over her hand had a name. She had been blind and deaf since infancy, with sensation but no language. In that moment at the water pump, she suddenly understood that everything has a name, and that names are a way of knowing. In The Story of My Life she describes the world reorganising itself around her. The scene is recreated in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker - one of the few moments in cinema that makes an epistemological argument felt rather than explained.
The most vivid illustration of language as a way of knowing is Helen Keller's account of the moment she understood that the cold water flowing over her hand had a name. She had been blind and deaf since infancy, with sensation but no language. In that moment at the water pump, she suddenly understood that everything has a name, and that names are a way of knowing. In The Story of My Life she describes the world reorganising itself around her. The scene is recreated in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker - one of the few moments in cinema that makes an epistemological argument felt rather than explained.
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Helen Keller - Water Scene
Helen Keller Channel The Miracle Worker (directed by Arthur Penn) is a powerful black-and-white drama about the education of Helen Keller. The iconic water pump scene features Patty Duke as Keller and Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan. As Sullivan repeatedly spells “water” into Keller’s hand, the child suddenly makes the connection between the sign and the sensation. The scene captures a dramatic intellectual awakening, marking Keller’s first step into language, understanding, and human communication.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the philosopher most preoccupied with this problem, argued that language is the medium in which thought takes shape. Language does not merely express thoughts already formed. This is why language is unusual as an area of knowledge: it is simultaneously the object of study and the instrument of study. Every other area - history, mathematics, the natural sciences, ethics - uses language to express its findings. Language is the only area where the subject of inquiry is also the medium through which the inquiry is conducted. We use language to examine language, just as we use reason to examine reason.
3. The plurality of languages is itself a TOK problem.
There are approximately 7,000 living languages in the world. They are not equivalent translations of one another. For example, Russian has two separate words for light blue and dark blue where English has one, and in experiments Russian speakers are measurably faster at distinguishing these colours. Some languages encode spatial direction using absolute compass bearings rather than relative left and right, producing remarkable spatial awareness in their speakers. These differences raise the central question of the Perspectives section: does the language you speak shape what you can know? That debate is explored there in full.
There are approximately 7,000 living languages in the world. They are not equivalent translations of one another. For example, Russian has two separate words for light blue and dark blue where English has one, and in experiments Russian speakers are measurably faster at distinguishing these colours. Some languages encode spatial direction using absolute compass bearings rather than relative left and right, producing remarkable spatial awareness in their speakers. These differences raise the central question of the Perspectives section: does the language you speak shape what you can know? That debate is explored there in full.
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Here, the more immediate point is this. A language is not merely a communication system. It carries millennia of accumulated observation, categories, metaphors, and envronmental knowledge that may not exist anywhere else. When a language disappears, something that cannot be translated disappears with it.
The short film below makes the abstract argument about language death entirely concrete. Marie Wilcox was the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, a Native American language from Central California. For years she worked alone, typing words she remembered into an old computer, trying to save a language that existed only in her memory. What is lost when a language disappears? This film is one answer.
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Language loss A language is estimated to die every two weeks. Of the 7,000 living languages, around half are expected to be extinct by 2100. Many have fewer than a hundred speakers. What knowledge, if any, is irreplaceable when a language disappears? |
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Marie's Dictionary
Global Oneness Project Marie Wilcox (1933–2021) was a Wukchumni elder in California and one of the last fluent speakers of her language. Determined to preserve it, she spent years creating the first Wukchumni dictionary without formal training. Writing thousands of entries from memory, she documented vocabulary, meanings, and usage. With her daughter’s help, the work was digitised. Her project became a vital tool for language revitalisation, helping her community reconnect with its heritage and ensuring the survival of Wukchumni for future generations.
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Bringing it together
Language is the fly-bottle.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, described his philosophical project as showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. The fly is reason, trapped inside a glass bottle it cannot see. It goes round and round, finding no exit. The bottle is language itself; transparent from the outside, invisible from within.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, described his philosophical project as showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. The fly is reason, trapped inside a glass bottle it cannot see. It goes round and round, finding no exit. The bottle is language itself; transparent from the outside, invisible from within.
Wittgenstein's central insight was that most of our philosophical confusions come from taking language for granted rather than examining it - from using it as if it were a neutral medium rather than a system with its own structure, limits, and history. The scope questions in this section are designed to make the invisible visible: to ask what language is before asking what it does. The three sections that follow take the inquiry further. Perspectives asks how the language you speak shapes what you can know. Methods asks how language produces knowledge - and how it can distort it. Ethics asks what we owe each other as users of language, and what we lose when a language disappears.
Questions, assessments, films and other stuff.
Questions to think about
These are questions for discussion, reflection, and your TOK journal. They do not have single correct answers, they have better and worse arguments.
These are questions for discussion, reflection, and your TOK journal. They do not have single correct answers, they have better and worse arguments.
- The Oxford Dictionary definition of language requires words, structure, and human use. The waggle dance of bees satisfies some of these criteria but not others. Is the problem with the definition, or with how we have drawn the boundary between language and communication?
- Helen Keller's account suggests that without language, sensation existed but organised knowledge did not. Does this mean language is a precondition for knowledge, or only for the kind of knowledge that can be shared? Is there a difference?
- British Sign Language and American Sign Language are mutually unintelligible, yet both qualify as full languages. If two languages derived from the same spoken language can diverge entirely, what does this suggest about the relationship between language and the communities that use it?
- Music can communicate grief or joy but cannot make a statement that is true or false. Does this mean music is not a language - or that the requirement for truth-aptness is too narrow a criterion?
- Marie Wilcox spent years preserving Wukchumni because she believed something irreplaceable would disappear with it. What kind of argument would be needed to show that a language carries knowledge that cannot be translated into another? Can such an argument succeed?
- Wittgenstein described philosophical confusion as a fly trapped in a fly-bottle - using language to examine language. Is this problem specific to philosophy, or does it affect any attempt to study language from within language?
- A language is estimated to die every two weeks. If linguistic diversity encodes genuinely different ways of knowing, does the global dominance of English represent a net loss of knowledge? Or does a common language enable knowledge to be pooled in ways that outweigh the loss?
- The IB reclassified language from a way of knowing to an optional theme. Does this reclassification change what questions we ask, or just how we organise the asking?
Exhibition connections
See more exhibition ideas and previous student work here
It is never too early to start to think about your TOK Exhibition, the ideas in this lesson connect strongly to three of the 35 prompts. Start noticing objects in the world around you that speak to these questions.
Prompt #6:: How does the way that we organize or classify knowledge affect what we know?
Suggested object: a dictionary entry, a thesaurus, a linguistic taxonomy, or a classification chart. The Oxford Dictionary's definition of language is itself a classification decision. It includes words, structure, and human use - and thereby excludes signed languages, gesture, mathematical notation, and music. An object that performs classification (a dictionary entry, a taxonomic key, a style guide) can open the argument that classifying is never neutral: it determines what counts, and in doing so shapes what we can know. The central TOK move is to show that your object does not just describe a category but creates it.
Prompt #14: Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?
Suggested object: an artefact carrying meaning that does not survive translation - a piece of indigenous art, a text in a minority language, a traditional tool or remedy with no equivalent term in English. Untranslatable words are not simply resistant to translation. They encode observations, relationships, and experiences that may not exist in the same form elsewhere. Mamihlapinatapei names a specific social moment; there is no English equivalent because there is no English word for that configuration of mutual desire and restraint. The TOK argument asks whether this means the knowledge is community-specific - and what that implies for shared knowledge.
Prompt #18: Are some things unknowable?
Suggested object: a musical score, a piece of abstract art, a poem where something essential resists paraphrase - or a photograph of an extinct language's last speaker. Wittgenstein's claim that the limits of language are the limits of the knowable world is one of philosophy's most contested proposals. An object that seems to communicate something beyond what language can state - a symphony, a painting - raises the question: is the failure of language here a failure of the knowable, or only of the sayable? The exhibition argument needs to commit to a position on whether what resists linguistic expression is genuinely unknowable or simply known differently.
Prompt #21: What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?
Suggested object: a proverb, a place name in an indigenous language, a traditional oral text, or any object that carries cultural knowledge inseparable from the language in which it was made. When a language disappears, the cultural knowledge encoded in it - proverbs, kin structures, ecological classifications, oral histories - may not survive translation intact. The exhibition argument asks whether this counts as an epistemic loss or only a cultural one. That distinction turns out to be harder to maintain than it looks.
See more exhibition ideas and previous student work here
It is never too early to start to think about your TOK Exhibition, the ideas in this lesson connect strongly to three of the 35 prompts. Start noticing objects in the world around you that speak to these questions.
Prompt #6:: How does the way that we organize or classify knowledge affect what we know?
Suggested object: a dictionary entry, a thesaurus, a linguistic taxonomy, or a classification chart. The Oxford Dictionary's definition of language is itself a classification decision. It includes words, structure, and human use - and thereby excludes signed languages, gesture, mathematical notation, and music. An object that performs classification (a dictionary entry, a taxonomic key, a style guide) can open the argument that classifying is never neutral: it determines what counts, and in doing so shapes what we can know. The central TOK move is to show that your object does not just describe a category but creates it.
Prompt #14: Does some knowledge belong only to particular communities of knowers?
Suggested object: an artefact carrying meaning that does not survive translation - a piece of indigenous art, a text in a minority language, a traditional tool or remedy with no equivalent term in English. Untranslatable words are not simply resistant to translation. They encode observations, relationships, and experiences that may not exist in the same form elsewhere. Mamihlapinatapei names a specific social moment; there is no English equivalent because there is no English word for that configuration of mutual desire and restraint. The TOK argument asks whether this means the knowledge is community-specific - and what that implies for shared knowledge.
Prompt #18: Are some things unknowable?
Suggested object: a musical score, a piece of abstract art, a poem where something essential resists paraphrase - or a photograph of an extinct language's last speaker. Wittgenstein's claim that the limits of language are the limits of the knowable world is one of philosophy's most contested proposals. An object that seems to communicate something beyond what language can state - a symphony, a painting - raises the question: is the failure of language here a failure of the knowable, or only of the sayable? The exhibition argument needs to commit to a position on whether what resists linguistic expression is genuinely unknowable or simply known differently.
Prompt #21: What is the relationship between knowledge and culture?
Suggested object: a proverb, a place name in an indigenous language, a traditional oral text, or any object that carries cultural knowledge inseparable from the language in which it was made. When a language disappears, the cultural knowledge encoded in it - proverbs, kin structures, ecological classifications, oral histories - may not survive translation intact. The exhibition argument asks whether this counts as an epistemic loss or only a cultural one. That distinction turns out to be harder to maintain than it looks.
Films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.
🎬 WATCH - VSauce: Why do we swear? (Michael Stevens, 2012)
Stevens uses swearing as a test case for what language actually does in the brain versus what the dictionary says it does. Swear words are processed differently from ordinary words, survive some forms of brain damage that destroy ordinary speech, and carry emotional force that cannot be replicated by substituting a synonym. Replacing a swear word with a polite equivalent changes the effect entirely, even though the dictionary meaning is similar. The video implicitly tests the Oxford Dictionary's definition: swearing is structured and uses words, but its force depends on something the dictionary's account of meaning cannot explain. The question it leaves: if the meaning of a word cannot be separated from its emotional force, what does that imply for how we define meaning?
Stevens uses swearing as a test case for what language actually does in the brain versus what the dictionary says it does. Swear words are processed differently from ordinary words, survive some forms of brain damage that destroy ordinary speech, and carry emotional force that cannot be replicated by substituting a synonym. Replacing a swear word with a polite equivalent changes the effect entirely, even though the dictionary meaning is similar. The video implicitly tests the Oxford Dictionary's definition: swearing is structured and uses words, but its force depends on something the dictionary's account of meaning cannot explain. The question it leaves: if the meaning of a word cannot be separated from its emotional force, what does that imply for how we define meaning?
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Further reading
Books
📚 READ - Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (1994) - the case for language as a universal human instinct. Chapters 1 and 3 are the most relevant to scope questions. Pushes back on the idea that language determines thought, but also changes his mind a little in later editions.
📚 READ - Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass (2010) - how languages differ and what this means for knowledge. A bridge between the scope and perspectives sections.
📚 READ - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953) - the most demanding exploration of what language is and how it creates meaning. Section 309 has the fly-bottle.
📚 READ - Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass (2010) - how languages differ and what this means for knowledge. A bridge between the scope and perspectives sections.
📚 READ - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953) - the most demanding exploration of what language is and how it creates meaning. Section 309 has the fly-bottle.