Aristotle once said that metaphor “…especially has clarity and sweetness and strangeness, and its use cannot be learned from anyone else.”

A good metaphor clarifies the world, envisions things in a new and different way. We may not be able to make the connections ourselves, but a unique thinker or a good writer has the keen eye and cleverness to do so.

As a language lover, I have a few favorite metaphors I’ve jotted down over the years. Here’s one from Vladimir Nabokov: “All silence is the recognition of mystery.” Or from Kurt Vonnegut: “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” As a language lover, however, I’m also aware of the limits of metaphor. I know that there are things in this world too wily and too strange to be confined to the metaphor, too gargantuan to be trapped between a capital letter and a period. I recently realized that one of those things was language itself. 

A teacher of mine in linguistics asked the class, “Do you feel imprisoned in your own language?” When I finally sat down to turn the question over in my head, it struck me how inadequate the implicit metaphor of the question was. Prisons were iron and stone, solitary and still, gray and away from the rest of the civilization. In my experience, the limitations that languages impose are subtle, invisible, mobile, and almost always social.

So I tried coming up with my own metaphors. Language is a passport. Language is a set of contact lenses. Language is a big, flashing sign permanently hovering above everyone’s heads. But try as I might, none of these metaphors had the elegance of explanation as the ones by the writers I was fond of.

Nevertheless, it’s important we talk about these kinds of things, these spots in our lives where language falls short. Language, after all, can be just as powerful a way to stereotype, dismiss, or limit a person as race, gender, or religion. It’s something we need to talk about, even if it means making more than one comparison. So I’ve elected to discuss a few limitations that language imposes with a couple of metaphors, each one tailored for a specific example. 

A language is a set of clothes.

My first and primary language has always been English. It was the one I first cottoned onto, the one I picked up from television and focused on improving as a child, to the detriment of my Filipino and Bicolano. I’ve paid a price for this preference: in my younger years, I was bullied and called homophobic slurs by schoolmates. In adulthood, I’ve been publicly mocked and imitated on a couple of occasions. These incidents don’t really bother me; they happen rarely and aren’t enough to permanently wound me, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about them. I’ve realized that the language a person speaks is like their choice of what clothes to wear: step outside the norm and prepare to be stared at. If Tagalog is a set of slacks and a polo, then English may as well be a rainbow-patterned vest paired with pink beach shorts. It sticks out. 

But the social implications of speaking an outsider language aren’t just aesthetic. In her essay on Rappler, Marguerite de Leon explores the guilt and confusion that accompanies Filipinos who struggle with our native tongue. She comments that Filipinos are so hasty to “categorize each other between rich and poor, and hardly acknowledge the Frankenstein’s monster that is the middle class, the confused fusion of neither/nor and either/or that stumbles through its life not really knowing what it is.”

A person’s chances of speaking English well are improved greatly by being middle class. I know I probably wouldn’t have achieved my level of fluency if it weren’t for the creature comforts of my childhood. Again, then, a person’s language is like a set of clothes: the possession of certain ones indicates a level of class privilege, a level of social status and upbringing. After all, what does it say about a person’s bank account (or his parents’) when his wardrobe contains rainbow-patterned vests and pink beach shorts?

When taken altogether, it is clear that there are social limits imposed by language. The use of a language outside those acceptable to social and class norms bars a person from full acceptance into society at large. This goes for speakers of “high class” languages like English and “low class” indigenous languages and minority dialects. In our odd arrays of linguistic silks and textiles, we become strangers in our homeland. 

A language is a key to a library.

Another limitation of language is one of information. I speak in English and Filipino, and as such, I can comprehend books, recordings, and messages from those languages. This means my access to the world’s information stops there. I can’t read Spanish literature, or carry a conversation in Ilokano, or analyze the news in Chinese.

Imagine if the world was a library, each wing blocked by massive stone doors, unlockable only with the right key – in this case, the right language. I would be limited to the collections of English and Filipino information. This is a limitation that is obvious to anyone who has ever tried speaking to a foreigner or reading a book from a different country – what people call a language barrier. But although this limitation is obvious to most people, I think it carries with it deeper consequences. 

Let’s talk about the arts first. In her book Against World Literature, Emily Apter presents the case for the Untranslatable; the idea that there are words and units of meaning within all languages that can only be uniquely understood by the people speaking those languages. The Untranslatable exists as “intransigent nubs of meaning that trigger endless translating in response to their resistant singularity.”

Apter’s argument is actually common sense when one stops to think about it. We judge literary art based on its language – how writers sequence their words and create intricate patterns, playing with rhythm and euphony, turning phrase and innovating imagery, and layering paragraph after paragraph with potential meaning.

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration,” said Hemingway. Can architecture then be so easily swapped? How much of literature is lost when we translate it? If we take Apter’s cue, much of what is important. In that sense then, have any of us truly read Rizal? Or have we only read his intermediaries? 

Outside the realms of art, the barrier that language poses between us and information in the everyday is frustrating but ultimately unworthy of more than a shrug of the shoulders and a decision to go looking elsewhere. At other times, however, a language barrier can mean life and death.

I recall an article penned by a linguist in Sichuan Province, China talking about the importance of translation in the time of the pandemic. The linguist, Yu Lha, tells one story of how after three weeks into quarantine, it was only then that a translation of pandemic safety measures was produced for Horpa, a minority language of the region. Many of the residents of Sichuan Province are elderly and monolingual; they do not speak the state-sanctioned languages of Mandarin and Amdo Tibetan, but instead speak minority languages such as Horpa, Minyak, and Khrosykabs. If it weren’t for the effort of volunteer translators and non-government entities, perhaps the people most vulnerable to the virus in Sichuan would have also been the least informed about its dangers.

In a country like the Philippines where there are over one hundred languages, you have to wonder who it is we aren’t reaching. A person can only keep themselves safe from threats if they have knowledge of how to avoid them and how to fight against them. But what happens when that knowledge is in a language that you do not know? If information is to be powerful, it has to be understandable. 

I hope by now I’ve been able to persuade you of the unique ways in which language limits and constrains us. While this essay is by no means exhaustive, I do think I’ve managed to shed some light on a few ways language interacts with society and culture that aren’t discussed very often.

Since I started this discussion with a quote from a philosopher, I shall end it with one as well. It was Wittgenstein who once said that, “The limits of language are the limits of my world.” I now know of three limits of language: its limit on who is perceived as a member of the group and who isn’t, its limit on what art I can fully experience, and its limit on what knowledge I can access; camaraderie, beauty, and knowledge. – Rappler.com

Jino Escudero writes. He is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Linguistics at the University of the Philippines Diliman and hails from the province of Sorsogon.