Elon Musk says a technology he is working on could render human language obsolete in as few as five years.
Language is obsolete! We don’t need language to communicate. Language is merely a tool used in the process of communication, we can communicate our thoughts and feelings without using words. A mother and baby communicate without language.
Communicating with another is the most fundamental basic need of all living beings. Trees, plants, animals, humans, all need to communicate with one another. Healthy living involves interacting and engaging with others. Relationships thrive through communication, not language. We don’t need words to talk.
Research estimates that tone of voice accounts for 38 percent of all communications. The way something is said is more important than what is actually said. Empathy, knowledge, body language, facial expressions, intonation, voice quality, pitch, stress, emotion and style of speaking communicate much more than words. Once you start paying attention to all of these you will realise verbal words are less than 10% of communication.
I have communicated with thousands of animals. Sitting in Mumbai I am able to communicate accurately with a cat in Los Angeles and not one word was spoken. Sitting in Santa Barbara I was able to track a dog lost in Boston. I do not have a unique gift and I am not doing something magical. Our ancestors communicated with all sentient beings, even stones, bones, shells and trees. Birds told them when a storm was approaching and animals told them when an earthquake would occur.
Animals have taught me my greatest life lessons, and they don’t have a language. Always listen to your instincts, live in the now and savour the moment. Listen to your body-eat only when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re sleepy, stop and rest when you’re tired. Love unconditionally and fight fiercely. Don’t be attached to anything or anyone, your journey is alone!
I met a couple who had been happily married for over 30 years. Ali is Iranian and Maria is Brazilian. She spoke Portuguese and he spoke English and Persian. Google translate didn’t exist 30 years ago. I was fascinated with their love story. I asked them how they communicated with each other when they didn’t speak the same language, how did they fall in love, marry and raise two kids? Ali said they both had dictionaries and they used it whenever they wanted to fight. They didn’t need words to communicate love.
The language spoken in the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve is still unknown. The origin of languages is a mystery. According to Book of Genesis, humanity was united after the Great Flood and began speaking a single language. The exact number of languages is unknown because there are still many parts of the world that have not yet been fully explored, including the Amazon and highlands of New Guinea, which have the worlds largest number of diverse languages.
There are about 7,111 languages in the world today, 90% are spoken by less than 100,000 people. 46 languages have only one single speaker! UNESCO lists 577 languages as critically endangered. 1 language dies out every 14 days. Linguists estimate that at least 3,000 languages will be lost within the next century-that’s almost half of today’s known languages!
A language holds a world of knowledge-songs, stories, words and expressions developed over many generations. Each language is a unique way of talking to the world, about their world. It is a huge loss every time a language dies, when a language dies, a world dies with it. A community’s past, its traditions, it’s specific knowledge are all lost.
Boa Sr was the last speaker of an ancient tribal language in the Andaman Islands. Her death broke a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures. N|uu language is listed as “critically endangered” by UNESCO. After the death of Ouma Aenki Kassie in South Africa, there are maybe seven people in the world who speak N|uu.
In New Zealand, Maori communities have created ‘language nests’ where elderly teach in Maori. Google launched Endangered Languages Project to preserve languages on the brink of extinction. Utilise your lockdown time to learn an ancient language, you will realise they are about people, special events like birth and death, marriage, the planet, Mother Nature. Words and classical languages were needed when they wanted to write religious texts to divide and rule people, to have power, to spread hate.
In the past few months I have reached out to dozens of friends all over the world, to see how they were doing during these challenging times. All of them, each and every one of them said they had just been thinking of me. Last year I was thinking of my best friends cat Gucci, she emailed me after a few days saying she wanted to do a communication with Gucci. As I was writing this blog about how language is not needed for communication Gayatri who lives 1000 km away messaged me asking if we could do a webisode on how I communicate with animals.
Were these communications in any particular language? We can all communicate without language. Let’s try an experiment with a person you are in lockdown with. With practice you will be able to do this over distance and receive it too. Take a few deep breaths. Sit in front of the person. Close your eyes and think of something they did to irritate you in the past few weeks. Now think of how you will communicate your anger without using words. You will realise it’s not worth producing negative energy in your thoughts and body and then transferring this negativity, it’s simply irrelevant. Love, peace, joy and happiness get transferred very easily. As Ali and Maria said, “You don’t need words to live happily ever after”