The words betray us: do you want to be 'normal'?

PalmaSpeakers know that words are rarely innocent. We are fully aware that we use them loaded with social values and connotations that we have learned throughout our experience as members of a linguistic community. For many of us, the word ‘estaca’ no longer solely designates a stake driven into the ground and has become, with Lluís Llach's song, a symbol of the collective will to overcome oppression. The social and emotional meaning of the word ‘estaca’ therefore goes far beyond its strictly literal meaning.

But human communication is even more complex. Presuppositions and implicatures constantly intervene in everyday conversation. The former are those pieces of information that speakers take for granted or shared and that we do not consider it necessary to make explicit. The latter are the deductions that interlocutors draw from the context, the communicative situation, and shared knowledge. When Pere asks Maria: “Do you have a watch?””, she does not interpret that Pere wants to know if she owns a watch. What she understands is that he is asking her what time it is and, consequently, she will answer that it is seven in the afternoon. If Maria were to limit herself to answering that she has one, her answer would be grammatically impeccable, but communicatively a complete disaster. The information ‘what time is it’ does not appear anywhere in the utterance, but Maria infers it because she shares certain conversational conventions with Pere.

Literal meaning

This ability to go beyond the literal meaning of words is one of the most fascinating characteristics of human language, accompanying us everywhere: in pub conversations, in books, and in newspaper headlines. Here we are, when we hear a word as apparently innocent as 'normal', speakers know that we are facing one of the most convoluted terms in the vocabulary. And why? Well, because it is one of those words that tend to be loaded with presuppositions and implicatures.

Let's imagine we read this in a press release: 'Catalan should be a normal language'. The statement seems simple, but it is extraordinarily dense. Firstly, it presupposes that there is a way for a language to be normal. Secondly, it also presupposes that Catalan has not yet fully achieved this normality. And, furthermore, it generates various implicatures: that there are languages that are in this situation, that Catalan suffers some anomaly, and that certain measures would need to be taken to correct this anomalous state.

What is 'normal'? The answer seems easy: what is usual, what is frequent, what the majority does. But this definition hides a trap. No one is normal alone. Normality only exists within a group. And not just any group: the group that, in each context, has the ability to establish what is usual, what is expected, and what falls outside the norm. And here we are, languages, like humans, live within different normalities.

A few days ago I traveled to Lublin, a city in eastern Poland that retains an admirable medieval flavor and, at the same time, conveys an intense feeling of youth and dynamism. During my stay, I experienced something apparently insignificant, but extraordinarily revealing: the practical materialization of the concept of its normality, with a linguistic landscape solely in Polish. The normal language of communication was Polish. The language of the signs was Polish. The language of spontaneous conversations was Polish. And the 'normal' behavior of its speakers consisted of addressing strangers in Polish. I was stopped twice in the street to ask for directions. In both cases they did so in Polish. And I assure you that my physical appearance is considerably far from the stereotype of a Polish woman. I was born in Mallorca and I am from there. Nevertheless, those speakers did not hesitate for a moment to speak to me in their language. Why? Because they assumed something that for them was absolutely natural: that Polish was the normal language of that space.

The same experience was repeated at Warsaw airport. While I was waiting for boarding for the flight to Palma at gate 29, a ground staff member approached the passengers to inform us that there had been a change of gate. I didn't understand a word of what he was saying. In fact, I inferred the content of the message by observing that people were getting up and heading towards another boarding gate.

Natural language

What caught my attention – precisely because my linguistic experience is different – was that no one considered it necessary to repeat the warning in English. The very possibility of translating the message didn't even seem to have crossed the mind of the person transmitting it. They probably assumed that all recipients would understand it in Polish. They acted from a shared evidence: that was the natural language of communication in that space.

For my part, observing that situation, I reached a conclusion that seems inevitable to me: linguistic normality can be understood as a great collective assumption, a reality so deeply shared that it ends up becoming invisible to those who live it every day.