English adapts to the needs of people speaking it more than it shapes those people’s ideas or ideals.Photograph by kimberrywood / Shutterstock
Hideo Kojima is the Japanese creator of the 2015 video game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. He evidently chose “phantom pain” as a subtitle because he thought it captured the experience of being exiled, so to speak, from one’s first language. Kojima hints at its importance from the start of the game, with an epigraph from the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran’s 1986 book Anathemas and Admirations: “It is no nation we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our true fatherland.” At one point, a villain in the game, Skull Face, says of another character, “He doesn’t know the pain of losing his own language-not yet.”
That our native tongue is key to our identity is a plausible claim. Research has revealed the “depth of the relationship all of us have with our native tongues-and how traumatic it can be when that relationship is ruptured,” as psycholinguist Julie Sedivy explained in her Nautilus feature “The Strange Persistence of First Languages.” Her relationship with the Czech language-she was born in Czechoslovakia-ruptured…
l11xuekng22 