What a wonderful word

“Gluggaveður: weather that looks appealing from inside but would be unpleasant to be outside in”.

“Poronkusema: the distance a reindeer could travel without stopping to urinate”.

“Nakama: friends so close that they may be your relatives”.

What do these three words – one Icelandic, one Finnish, one Japanese – have in common? They are untranslatable, cultural symbols that cannot be univocally transferred into another language.

Linguist and professor Federico Faloppa dedicates his “lezione grande” to the wonders of multilingualism. The lesson takes its cue from the picture book What a Wonderful Word: A collection of untranslatable words from around the world by Nicola Edwards, to investigate the profound cultural meaning of languages.

Faloppa guides the audience on a fascinating journey through languages, their history and their classification, from the hierarchical approach of the 19th century to Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar.

His main goal is to highlight how narrow the eurocentric approach to multilingualism can be: why is a person who knows English and German considered a multilingual, while someone who can speak six or seven different African languages is called an “illiterate”?

There are more than 8.000 languages in the world, and more than half of them are only oral. The hierarchical approach that considers written – and western, we may add – languages to be the “best” should be long gone. And yet, it keeps popping back up, both in academia and in the mainstream debate. It may not be defined as “linguistic racism”, but it definitely denotes a narrow-minded prejudice.

Languages are the most powerful device we have to experience multiculturalism. Every language possesses only the words it needs, but there is nothing it cannot express.

The equation “one state = one culture = one language” is a faulty one: dialects, minor local languages are invaluable sources, and are fundamental to keep a language alive. And not only faulty, but scary, if the equation becomes a political weapon used to exclude and segregate.

With glistening eyes, the professor concludes: “each and every language has something to donate, to the world and to other languages”.

So long live the untranslatable, in all of its shades. “Abbiocco” included.