My Land is My Tongue

“Minha pátria é minha língua” – Fernando Pessoa

What makes us what we are? What is it that makes us feel Portuguese, Brazilian, American, Spanish, German, or Thai? Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese Poet (yes, some poets have to be mentioned with a capital “P”) once wrote: “My land is my tongue”. We all have a gut feeling of belonging that comes attached to our mother language. A certainty of being that is attached to the language we were brought up with.

Cezar Taurion posted a comment on Lera Boroditsky’s TED presentation that brought memories back from the time I worked as an English teacher. If you haven't watched the video, I recommend you do it soon.

If you speak a second language, you know the frustration of not being able to express a thought in it. You will be able to describe it by using additional words that, quite frankly, kill the mood and defeat the purpose of using that original word in the first place. Take the word “saudades” in Portuguese or “ubuntu” in Bantu. One can surely define and describe the concepts behind the words in English. However, there is no way these descriptions can be used in English in the same emotional context they carry in their original languages.

Catherine Caldwell-Harris in “Emotionality differences between a native and foreign language: theoretical implications” identified we are more emotional in our first language than in any other acquired second language. If you speak a second language, you probably know the awkward feeling of finding it easier to talk about certain topics in your second language. There are topics that are just too emotionally charged to be discussed in one’s native tongue.

This may be part of the reason interacting with LLMs, such as ChatGPT, or Bard, bothers non-English speakers so much. These models have been exhaustively trained against samples of the English language, specifically American English, and they excel at that. However, they feel off when interacting in Brazilian Portuguese, for example. The text produced by these models is grammatically correct but lacks the emotional subtext that normally carries through in a conversation.

It might be just a step in the evolution of AI language models, a type of cognitive “uncanny valley”. It might also be a symptom of how we are developing these models and embedding them with our restrictions. This would be a nod to the developers’ capacity in capturing our biases and automating them. This would also present a risk. Restricting our interactions to only one, or two, AI “lingua franca”, our reasoning skills could be lost in the process.

I can’t help but remember Sofia Vergara’s character in “Modern Family”: “Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?”