2/5: Accessibility and language

What makes a language accessible? Accessibility is, with good reason, an increasingly more present piece of social and academic discourse. Legally, it might be defined as "easy to participate in, safely and with dignity, by a person with a disability", or more broadly as "facilitating easy use." It is a term we often apply to physical spaces. But it could, and does, also apply to the experiential, partly intangible space occupied by an entire language. The language space stretches not only across one person's mind, but into the minds of potentially millions of other people, as well as into the physical world. You are probably familiar with some of the manifestations of language accessibility: sign interpreters for speeches and musicals; Braille translations on room signs; or information issued in two languages for areas with a high bilingual population.

But could the accessibility of the language be defined as originating at the level of the language itself, i.e. the unique features that make up its vocabulary, grammar, syntax, structure, and more? The extension of this logic results in an at-best-questionable query about whether any one language demonstrates superior accessibility and therefore is the "best" language for humans to use — this is not the question I'm interested in examining. Rather, I'm curious about how individuals can have different experiences across languages, maybe finding some more accessible or amenable to how their minds work. I'm also curious about how to make all languages more accessible while preserving their unique and meaningful features.

To analyze a person's ease of access to any given language, one natural place to start is with reading. In order to operate in a society that very often conveys essential information visually — think menus, road signs, terms and conditions, newspapers, books, the entire Internet — requires high level reading skills. Conversely, dyslexia, defined as "difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities," skills that can be essential to reading, is one of the more prevalent cognitive disabilities worldwide. However, individuals familiar with the English-speaking landscape in the US, in which dyslexia is fairly common, estimated to affect between 5-20% of the population, may not realize this isn't universal: dyslexia does not occur in every language at this same rate.

The difficulty of reading varies across languages. In fact, children learn to read at markedly different rates depending on their first language. Why? One possible explanation is that different languages have vastly different writing systems. And unlike natural spoken language, which has ostensibly at least partly evolved over time to fit the human brain, written script is a human invention. It's more prone to being arbitrary, and therefore to difficulties. English is a minefield for reading difficulties. It has an irregular orthography, meaning it has inconsistencies in the spelling system and sound-letter correspondence. Even native speakers are aware of this. Who put the letters in that order in "Wednesday"? Why "laughter" but also "slaughter"? Why is there a "b" in "subtle"? Mysteries abound. Letters stubbornly detach themselves from their expected sounds to float around in the pronunciation ether, before settling on some other, seemingly random, sound. Reading in English demands sharp awareness and perception of the spoken language, not just pattern recognition.

On the other hand is Turkish, which has a completely transparent orthography. Each letter corresponds to a single sound, always. Spanish also possesses this quality. Though measuring the actual rate of dyslexia in a population has repeatedly proved elusive, the statistics currently available estimate that these transparent languages may have much lower dyslexia rates. It's worth stating here that influences on dyslexia also may include external factors, and that observed reading difficulty can also result from factors like environment and inequity. Differences in writing system is not the only factor that influences dyslexia prevalence, but evidence suggests it could play a role.

The upshot of this apparent disparity in reading ability across languages, however, is that reading difficulty in one's native language doesn't always imply reading difficulty across all languages. One student who experienced dyslexia-like difficulty in English, his native language, found that he tested for excellent reading and writing in Japanese, a language which requires more spatial-visual awareness to read successfully. For him, a second language was somehow more accessible than his first — an access that he cited as a source of "confidence".

On the other hand, someone who initially learned to read in a language requiring more visual-spatial or even memorization techniques may discover, upon learning a language like English or Danish or Thai with irregular orthography, that they have difficulty in that new language, or have to neurally connect cognitive skills that were previously disparate. Languages and their written scripts require numerous and diverse cognitive skills to decode and use them successfully; all second language learners know this. And this type of linguistic diversity extends beyond reading to listening, writing, speaking, and more. The skills that benefit you in one language don't necessarily do so in another. On the other hand, the skills you do have might be an asset in another language that you haven't learned yet.

Ultimately, it's possible for accessibility to draw learners to a new language — whether that means more ease of comprehension, more ease expressing ideas within that language space, or something else entirely. Your experience learning one language is not necessarily indicative of your experience learning another, even for languages from the same family. While all languages could make their materials and spaces more accessible to all speakers and learners, linguistic diversity means that there are a world of accessible linguistic experiences available to each of us, starting with the very first word.

For more, check out this advice on how to begin reading in a second language even without high levels of fluency, and this study about how dyslexia works in Chinese.