Made in Macao | Celebration of Languages

Jenny Lao-Phillips

A friend reminded me on Tuesday that February 21 was International Mother Language Day, which began in 1999 as a day to celebrate the use of each individual’s mother tongue and promote peace amongst people of different languages. This got me thinking about the origin and the meaning of having different languages. They are, on the one hand, a tool for human beings to communicate, to express thoughts and on the other hand, a source of difference among people.

Remember the story of the Tower of Babel? A united community of human beings, all speaking the same language, decided to build a tower as high as heaven. As punishment for their hubris, God struck the people down by making them unable to understand each other. Here, what stopped our ancestors from continuing with their outrageous ambition was not just the fact they could no longer speak the same language, but the fact that they did not understand each other anymore.

I imagine the shock each of those people at Babel felt when suddenly they did not know what each other were saying. That alone could have stopped the building of the tower for some time. However, if they were so keen on building the tower together, couldn’t they have continued to do so? The plan should have been made known to all before they started building; why couldn’t they continue with their work in silence?

I believe it was not the inability to understand each other that impeded the construction, it was the beginning of the “us and them” duality that destroyed the solidarity needed to move towards a common end. Those that found out they could understand each other would of course stick together, and soon groups were formed.

Perhaps they still did try to continue their work, but the frustration of trying to make a foreign language understood among other groups and the suspicion aroused from wondering what other groups were discussing would surely have created tension that would have further divided people.

It was not the lack of a common language that defeated them, but rather the distrust that slowly built between those who could not understand one another. I often imagine if the people building the Tower of Babel had the patience to try to understand each other, they may have been able to create a lingua franca again, and we would have a Tower of Babel today. Instead, human beings were beaten not with anything as dramatic as flood or fire, but a simple language barrier.

Many will agree that language is a beautiful thing, it turns thoughts and feelings into words, turns what is in our minds into sounds that can be heard by others. But language is also a dangerous thing that often causes division, for only those who can understand the sounds we make can understand us. Even for people who speak the same language, it can be used to express care and share hope that brings people closer, or it can be used as swords or bullets that fire at each other. So, I say, language itself is neither beautiful nor dangerous, it depends what we use it for. And different mother tongues can one day unite everyone.

As people spoke in groups of different languages during the time of Babel, I imagine those groups spread out and developed their own history and culture and after thousands of years we did not know each other anymore. We forgot that once we all spoke the same language and planned to build a tower together that could reach heaven. Still, we hold the hope that one day when all the mother tongues in the world are put together, we can create a new universal mother language, rooted in all, and built upon all languages.