How many words would you need to know before you could change someone’s mind? This Saturday, the 26th of September, is the European Day of Languages, celebrating the more than 200 languages spoken across our continent. It might sound dry, but it isn’t really about vocabulary tests or radical-changing verbs. It’s about whether we’re willing to understand someone on their own terms, rather than expecting them to come to us on ours.
When travelling, I’ve fallen into the common trap of speaking English and hoping whoever I’m talking to, Italian, French, anyone, will understand. But on the occasions I make the effort, even a badly pronounced “thank you”, the change is instant. People smile, slow down and start to help. Like holding a door open or saying thank you after lunch, a similar concept. A few words of someone’s language cost almost nothing but leave a real impression.
Much conflict, at some level, comes from failing to understand another point of view, and a huge part of that is understanding the language it was formed in. You cannot fully know a culture through translation; something is always lost, and many words simply have no direct English equivalent. Language as a route to peace isn’t just a nice idea, it’s practical: diplomats, negotiators and aid workers will tell you that the first move is almost always linguistic, not political.
Willy Brandt, the former German Chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, put it sharply: “If I’m selling to you, I speak your language. If I’m buying, then you must speak German.” Whoever holds the power gets to choose the language, so learning someone else’s is, quietly, an act of humility: giving up the home advantage and doing the harder work of understanding. And because so much of the world already runs in English, with 1.5 billion speakers, we rarely have to learn another language to get by. So, when we choose to, it says we see the other person as an equal, not someone whose job is to meet us halfway.
Which brings me to Nelson Mandela. He spent twenty-seven years in prison, eighteen of which on Robben Island, off Cape Town, and studied Afrikaans, the language of the government that had locked him up. He did this not to flatter his captors or necessarily forgive them, but to speak in a way they would truly hear: to be fully understood by the people he had every reason to shut out.
Many of you would’ve done this too: when a friend isn’t understanding something, you don’t just repeat yourself louder, you find words that make sense to them. That’s Mandela’s instinct in miniature: adjusting how we speak so someone can genuinely understand us.
So, how many words does it take to change someone’s mind? For Mandela, a whole language. For most of us, it starts with a few: a hello, a thank you, an attempt.
A line often attributed to Mandela sums it up: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
Speaking a language someone understands gets you heard. Speaking their language gets you understood.
Cassius
Senior Prefect