Learning About Grammatical Animacy
When I was younger, I thought different languages were just different lexicons that you could interchangeably slap concepts into. But of course, different languages of the world have such vastly different grammars and ways of describing the world that I always get my mind blown when I learn about a new grammatical framework in a language unrelated to English (e.g. not German or most Romance languages).
If you’ve read Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer), you may recall the chapter about indigenous language as a different lens for seeing the world. (Obligatory link to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.) I highly recommend the entire book, but here’s a quick independent summary of that chapter if you’re unfamiliar.
Kimmerer’s ancestral language, Potawatomi, has grammatical animacy. In general, this is not a rare linguistic concept; various forms of grammatical animacy may be found in Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, and many others. However, Potawatomi is an exceptionally animacy-rich language that has a lot of wisdom to offer us.
Disclaimer: I am only fluent in English and am largely relying on secondhand resources to understand linguistic concepts. If I have misrepresented any of the languages below, please let me know and I will gladly incorporate corrections.Animate nouns
One common form of grammatical animacy is to have animate vs. inanimate nouns that are treated differently. In English, only humans are consistently considered grammatically animate (…and not all humans, in some cultures with slavery). Pets are sometimes granted animacy, but food animals typically are not.
- Grammatical animacy is illustrated in the difference between saying “Who is that?” instead of “What is it?”.
- Japanese does not mark nouns for animacy, but uses different existential verbs for nouns that are considered alive or not alive. When saying “there are birds here”, you would use the same animate verb いる as to say “my friends are here”, and a different, inanimate verb ある to say “there are tables here” or “there are pencils here”.
- Some languages have hierarchies of animacy, where certain noun classes are considered “more animate” or differently animate than other animate nouns.
For some weird reason, this kind of distinction is called noun gender. It’s probably because Romance languages have “masculine” and “feminine” nouns which may or may not have any actual gendered associations. But in most languages, “noun gender” can simply be thought of as “large categories of nouns with different grammatical markers”.
Animate nouns in Potawatomi
Nearly all nouns in Potawatomi (besides still rocks, actively-dead bodies, and most human-made objects) are grammatically animate. Animate nouns include:
- living animals, plants, insects
- anything currently in use for a spiritual/ceremonial purpose (e.g. ceremonial tobacco during a ceremony, but not recreational tobacco)
- notions of time
- celestial bodies
- things in motion, including cars/rocks that are currently moving
However, animate nouns become grammatically inanimate if you harvest them. A living cedar tree is animate, but if you chop it down, that chopped tree will be inanimate. Simply by speaking in Potawatomi, you must automatically acknowledge the taking of life.
Verb-centric language
An even more unusual paradigm is that 70% of Potawatomi’s lexicon consists of verbs, encompassing many concepts that are usually nouns or adjectives in most languages. Lakes and bays are verbs. Fire is a verb. Being colored red is a verb.
A lake does not exist in isolation as a static thing; it must be conjugated with every reference. Lakes grammatically have time, change, and being baked into them by default.
In Ojibwe, a close linguistic relative of Potawatomi with a similarly verb-rich lexicon, defined times such as seasons and days of the week are also verbs: it can be Saturdaying, or was late-summered, or is-not-afternoon. Sunset is a verb. Being named is a verb.
English: one of the ultimate inanimate languages
By comparison, English is an incredibly inanimate and objectifying language with a huge anthrocentric superiority complex. 70% of its lexicon consists of nouns, and humans get special pronouns while all other entities are “it” by default, even animals. (We tend to make exceptions for specific animals if we like them enough, but this is not the default.)
English has no built-in grammatical way to denote aliveness other than via pronouns; nothing is alive or grouped with humans by default unless we explicitly say so.
“[…] doesn’t this mean that speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature? By denying everyone else the right to be persons? Wouldn’t things be different if nothing was an it?”
— from “The Grammar of Animacy” (Robin Wall Kimmerer)
I’ve spoken English all my life, but now I feel stifled by it. It feels so lonely to walk out into nature and believe yourself the only sentient being there. But when you tap into the complexity and aliveness of all the plants, animals, fungi, and various ever-moving processes around you, it is very hard to feel alone in that sea of aliveness.
(Also, sometimes, prized rideable objects such as fancy cars, motorcycles, and boats are called “she”, which is a bizarre phenomenon related to objectification of women that is somehow far more objectifying than if said vehicle had just stayed an “it”.)EDIT: My friend pointed out that English has limited animistic dual vocabulary for animals vs. their meat with pig/pork, cow/beef, bird/poultry, etc. However, the modern English-speaking consumer is usually so far from the meat butchering process that it probably just makes it easier to forget that our meat came from a living animal. This duality is actually an interesting linguistic artifact of the 1066 Norman invasion of England.
Linguistic cross-pollination thoughts
Having learned little bits and pieces of other languages, I’ve noticed more often how I need to reshuffle whole English sentences to semantically express simple concepts that we don’t grammatically have, but which are casually expressible in other languages with a single phoneme change.
Once you have internalized a grammatical concept, you probably don’t think about it every time you use it; by nature, it has to get baked into your thought patterns so that it is as natural as breathing. In Japanese, you don’t stop and think, “…are birds sentient?”; you simply internalize that birds and humans are intrinsically alike in a way that pencils and tables are obviously not.
Thankfully, some fragments of linguistic concepts can still be translated across the language barrier, even if English can’t express them properly.
- I’ve stopped referring to animals (and sometimes plants) as “it”, and instead using they/she/he.
- When objects break and I conceptualize them as entities with complex histories rather than as inanimate things, it no longer makes sense to get mad at them. Instead, I just fix them. Of course they broke as a natural consequence of their history! Super reasonable.
- I went on a guilty late-night conlang bender once where I read the entire Na’vi grammar guide instead of sleeping. Na’vi has mood infixes that you insert into verbs to inflect how you feel about an action, which feels fantastically effortless. English doesn’t have this, so I’ve been trying to inflect more actively with my body language if I’m feeling really happy about a verb.
- Japanese has a versatile sentence-ending particle ね “ne” which can denote that you are not sure about something, asking the listener for confirmation, don’t want to be presumptuous, etc. American English speakers seem to get the point if you end a sentence with “ey?” or “eh?” in the same tone that Japanese speakers use “ne”.
Indigenous revitalization
Languages are an irreplaceable lens through which to better understand different cultural perspectives, and they are dying constantly. The Potawatomi language is still spoken, but it is incredibly endangered, with only nine fluent speakers left alive at the time Braiding Sweetgrass was written.
Like many indigenous American languages, it did not simply evaporate naturally over time. Colonists waged cultural & physical genocide upon indigenous people by forcibly marching them off their homelands, separating indigenous children from their families, forcing them to attend English-only cultural assimilation schools, and abusing and punishing them for speaking their native language. Some of their descendants physically survived, but with many cultural losses.
Indigenous revitalization movements provide resources and networks to help these irreplaceable languages and cultures continue to survive and flourish amongst indigenous people.
- Indigenous Languages Revitalization
- Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS)
- Global Oneness Project has several interviews and articles about indigenous language revitalization.
Also consider finding local indigenous-led community organizations to support, or learning more about the history and current events of the indigenous people local to where you live!
Other resources that have expanded my linguistic worldview
- Dialect is an extremely rules-light (no dice!), oneshot (no commitment!) tabletop RPG about the creation of language through experiences, and how language evolves and dies.
- The Art of Language Invention (David J. Peterson) is a compressed introduction to linguistics in the context of creating naturalistic conlangs that are designed around a specific fictional culture. Even though it’s focused on fictional languages, it’s a really engaging way to think about the breadth of ways in which different languages can be uniquely intertwined with the cultures that originated them.
References I read while writing this post
Potawatomi language
- Language lesson — animate & inanimate nouns | PotawatomiLanguage
- Potawatomi grammar notes | Neaseno
- Potawatomi verbs | Potawatomi.org
- “The Grammar of Animacy” from Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer)
Ojibwe language
- Ojibwe introduction to verbs & pronouns | Ojibwe.net
- Ojibwe verbs: transitivity & animacy
- Ojibwe vii inanimate intransitive verbs | Wiktionary
General linguistics
