3/4: The wanderlust of language

As a language learner, you've probably more than once stumbled across a hyper-specific word and realized you have no idea how to say it in your second or third language. Badger? Copper? Kohlrabi? Low frequency words that have specific, contextual meanings—like foods or a plants, animals or a materials—are often some of the last vocabulary you pick up in the language learning process. Until you're in some specific context where they are needed, you probably don't have any reason to use them, and your teachers, with so much else to cover, don't have much reason to teach them to you. 

These words, which can become tiny anchors in micro-communities for non-native speakers, but which can also fall by the wayside, can often come from a greater word class: wander-words. Wander-words, or Wanderwort, to use the popularized term, coined in German, are words "word borrowed from one language to another across a broad geographical area." While there is no exact linguistic definition, there are general ideas for principles: a word borrowed from and between numerous different languages, with a broad geographical distribution, often with an unclear origin. That is, given enough time, the origins of wander-words blur, becoming indistinct. So these words that can be so much trouble for language learners are also linguistically slippery, disappearing in a long history of movement and place.

Translating the German literally might give us "migrant words," a more concrete term that begins to capture the process of how words wander and disconnect from their roots. Wander-words usually form as a result from trade, cultural and language contact, colonization, and general trends of globalization. Culturally or regionally-specific items, ideas, and practices move around the world, accompanied by people with, or without, words for those things. As they do, names for these things get borrowed, and changed, and propagated elsewhere—in the spread of empire or the movement of people. The word "chocolate," for example, has wandered into English, but the actual etymological origin is unclear: most likely from Nahuatl or Yucatec Maya, but we may never know for sure without written sources. 

These wandering words, with their constellation of borrowings and their potentially indistinct origins, begin to destabilize our conception of what words are. Words are not stable entities that move to us across time and generations; of course, anyone who has searched a word on Google and seen its etymology understands this. But wander-words also show us the essentiality of place, movement of objects, and movement of people in forming the languages delivered neatly to us in textbooks and conversations. Unlike regular loanwords (like café or kindergarten in English), which are simply borrowed entirely from another language, or words that have similar language heritage, coming from the same or closely linked language families, Wanderwörter come from chains or "starbursts" of borrowing: frequent and sequential borrowing over time, and usually spread between many language families. The word "tea" is another example. Telling the story of the Silk Road trade and other trade routes carrying tea, then, also becomes a story of language migrating with people, creating a constellation of changed words. (While it's generally not great to cite Wikipedia, there is a whole page about the etymology of the word tea!)

On one hand, this type of story concretely shows us the way that we as humans can and do shape language. Maybe there is even a sense of humanity having control over our future, if we can shape powerful forces like language. On the other hand, though, the histories that make up these constellations are necessarily human. And so they are filled with forced displacement and migration, enslavement, exploitative trade, and other destructive and harmful practices, which often cause the wandering of the words we are trying to understand.

While these wandering processes apply to specific words, they also can change and move entire languages. Languages are, at the most basic level, collections of speech communities. We can't define English as "the language spoken in the United States," or even as "the language spoken in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and continue listing every single country with English as its official language". English the language consists of all of the communities who are able to use variations of it among themselves and outside the group with others. And in these starbursts of speech communities, the origins of trends in communication, and the meaningfulness of words and intent, and all of the intricacies that define even a single conversation, are often wanderers, sometimes with unclear origins. So the wandering of a language, across time and space, is exactly what gives us the wealth of individuals, experiences, and expressions to choose from as we communicate, write, form ideas, and live—and as we begin to dive into the worlds of other languages in language courses. 

There is this wanderlust of language, and there is the forced displacement of language across space and time. The wanderlust shouldn't be romanticized; it both depends on and upholds forced displacement and diaspora. And so a seemingly simple thing—how to say peanut, or eggplant, in a language you're learning?—becomes tied up in a history of wandering, migrating words and people. Despite the difficulty of latching onto these words, beginning to understand their history is not a setback in a language learning journey, but a step forward to better understanding your own first language, and all languages, and how they wander. For more, you can read a more extensive article about Wanderwörter, or check out this book about how language migration manifests in writing.