LINGUISTICS=DESIGN

An argument for the creation of a new design hybrid field.
Design research and theory.

Oct 2022.

INTRODUCTION

Linguistics, arguably, should be considered a design field. Linguistics as a field of study is mostly concerned with the systems that govern how language works, how it is being used by communities and speakers, and the mutual influence languages have on each other. Owing to this definition, it is assumed that the field consists of the process of documenting languages and establishing correspondences, being dedicated to research entirely. Compared to the work of a linguist, a designer’s thought process can be described as following the “double-diamond” method, where they conduct research to define and understand the problem, then come up with a solution for it that satisfies the needs of the end user.

However, through the observations of documentary linguists, whose work involves a great deal of ethnographic research and communicating directly with communities, it can be noticeable that linguists occasionally have to take on the role of a designer as well, as they have to not only conduct research into the language but also create solutions to problems that the community is facing (from a linguistic point of view). Take the example of people who learned or are learning a second language remember the materials targeted toward children to teach English, Spanish, or any other language; there are exercise books with instructions in the native language, stories written in both languages, and even heavy dictionaries.

Vocal coaches and old playback singers had to use a particular chart called the IPA chart, or the International Phonetic Alphabet, to learn how to pronounce sounds correctly in different languages. The IPA was created in 1888 as an alphabetic system that can be used to transcribe the different sounds of virtually any language, from consonants and vowels to tone markers, stress, and other niches. In the first case, someone had to think of the most influential and user-friendly way to teach a foreign language and make the material understandable and accessible, and the latter had to be made as comprehensive and inclusive as possible, even going as far to codify these sounds and back them with scientific research on phonology to ensure that there is a scientifically-substantiated basis for their alphabet.

Both cases constitute clear examples of how linguists have to provide a solution to an existing problem and ensure that their target group in any case is satisfied with what they offer. Linguists’ overlap with the work of designers extends beyond simply the solution proposal phase, as both have to conduct intensive research in order to understand the different dimensions of a given problem and use methods that have proven their effectiveness, at which point linguists are faced with the reality that their work is more than simply documenting a language or translating ancient texts, but actually needs to promote social change and have a positive impact on the community they are working with.

One specific tool, participant observation, used by linguists and ethnographers, highlights a parallel with not only the research principles used by designers in the ideation phase but also with the approach they use to identify and create solutions for discovered problem.

DEFINITIONS

PASSIVE PARTICIPATION

ACTIVE PARTICIPATION

Before we start explaining how the work of linguists can be considered a form of design or how it is related in principle, we need to understand the concept of participant observation -which will be used to highlight this similarity- and distinguish between the different levels of participation that a linguist or anthropologist would use depending on the context and research goals. Participant observation can be seen in its most basic form as the immersion of the researcher in the daily life of the group being observed, which allows for data collection in the widest possible range of conditions and situations rather than being limited to one-on-one interactions, and allows the researcher a deeper insight into the social context of the group that would not be as easily inferred when the researcher is not as close to the participants. This form of observation usually entails the researcher spending a prolonged period of time living amongst the group in the same social context.

There are two types of participant observation, differing in the level of interaction and integration of the researcher into their research target, with the ability to distinguish sub-categories that are more nuanced in each type:

The researcher goes further than just recording the data that they find at the surface level, engaging in the interactions with the community on their own terms and within their social contexts, such as using their language, participating in their rituals, and attempting to go about daily tasks using the same methods the community has used for ages. This approach helps the researcher gain a deeper insight into how the community operates and might be able to use the data collected along with context cues to analyze and add more depth and dimensions to their findings, which would correspond to the researcher gaining “insider” status among the community rather than just the “outsider” or “bystander”.

The issue with this type of participation is that the researcher might start to get too involved in the community’s social environment and lose the objectivity required to do the research, forgetting that the goal, in the end, is to collect data to help either achieve findings in research or help identify and solve a given problem, depending on the research’s context. In fact, there is another distinguishable type of active participation, in which the researcher already formed part of the community or group they are working with, having full “insider” status already established, which facilitates the ability to record data with a full understanding of the social context and conditions behind it. However, similarly to the aforementioned problem of losing objectivity, complete participant observation runs the risk of being biased due to the pre-existing connection to the culture of the community, losing all semblance of objectivity when approaching the research topic (Schwartz & Schwartz, 1955).

In this context, the researcher has minimal contact with the research group, either by limiting it to collecting data of surface-level interactions happening before them or even detaching themselves further by being geographically isolated and inferring data from a source of data (for example, recorded conversations on video). The level of contact with the research group (limited or non-participatory) determines the amount of data that can be collected by the researcher, who assumes that their presence as anything further than an observer might disrupt the natural flow of interaction between members of the community, and might want to retain a certain role of the bystander that eavesdrops on the daily occurrences. However, this method entails the risk of missing out on crucial context clues that might affect, for example, the understanding of the linguistic context, or the reason behind the problem being studied, and leaves the researcher with no ability to gain further knowledge other than by extrapolating and making hypotheses.

MALI BAINING: LACK OF INTEGRATION

One of the main problems that face linguists and researchers when engaging with their communities is the lack of capacity to communicate effectively, which might be due to a variety of factors, such as the lack of preparation on the researcher’s part, or the negative view of the community of an outsider trying to “infiltrate” them, and the cautiousness and hostility that might arise. Tonya Stebbins’s work for documenting the Mali language, spoken by around 2000 people of the Baining ethnicity in Eastern New Britain, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, exemplifies how the strained interaction capability can affect the way research is conducted.

Stebbins did most of her “fieldwork” in three phases in 2001, 2002, and 2005, and she noted how in the first prolonged stay, she did not speak either the native language or Tok Pisin, which is the lingua franca used by people across Papua New Guinea. She reflected on how she found herself disoriented by the cultural difference and how “in having to relearn even the basics of self-care”, she felt that both her research capabilities and communication skills with the natives were on par with those of a 3-year-old. This unpreparedness was coupled with the fact that the community had viewed her as a “misis”, meaning a white woman in Tok Pisin, which challenged her attempt at integrating with the Mali society by always pointing out her “other” status as someone who clearly doesn’t belong.

From an anthropologic perspective, this can be considered as an example of an attempt to “go native”, which means that the researcher is restricted to the role of a bystander rather than a participant observer, incapable of expanding on the data they record and limiting it to the most basic forms they can infer, essentially restricting their ability to participate actively and resulting in the need to use different methods that might not be as effective in conveying the bigger picture (Stebbins, 2012). From a design perspective, an analogy can be made with a researcher contacting a target group with preconceived notions about the kinds of interactions and information they can gather, which end up being off-target and not matching expectations, leaving the researcher disoriented and confused by the inherent dichotomy between what they were searching for and what they actually find through their fieldwork.

In other words, researchers should be prepared to encounter different results than what their expectation would be, especially in the context of conducting research into groups that feature a different social context than that of the researcher, and be resilient not only in accepting the differing findings but also drawing up conclusions and understanding the reasoning behind the difference, as well as adapting their method to better suit the approach needed to interact with the community or group more effectively. (Dobrin & Schwartz, 2016).

IDIOMA DE SEÑAS DE NICARAGUA: NEW IMPERIALISM

Immersing oneself in fieldwork with no expectation might prove to be useful in not only attempting to understand how the community functions from scratch, following the natural progression of learning like a toddler, but also might help protect communities from being homogenized and potentially losing the uniqueness that characterizes them. The case of the study of Nicaraguan Sign Language (also known in Spanish as Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) by Judy Kegl, an American Sign Language (ASL) expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, demonstrates this desire to protect communities from being stripped of its identity.

Nicaraguan Sign Language was a rare case of linguistic spontaneous genesis, as it arose naturally among deaf students in two schools for the deaf in Managua, the capital city, in the aftermath of the Sandinista Revolution of 1979. Originally, most of the 200 students had developed no more than rudimentary hand signs that were used by their families in isolated contexts, mostly with no actual influence from other pre-existing sign languages due to a lack of knowledge. When grouped together in the deaf schools, there was a sudden shift towards unifying signs that emerged naturally among students, starting with rudimentary yet spontaneous agreement on the meaning of signs, which then was followed by more complex grammar structures created by the following generations depicting temporal relations and distinguishing narrative mode and grammatical persons (speaker, addressee, others, which corresponds to the three-person system found in English and many other languages).

Kegl, who was in contact with the ISN speakers in 1986, found herself at the center of an extremely rare research discovery, as her colleague Ann Senghas puts it, “It was like being present at the Big Bang”, as the underqualified teachers at the deaf schools were unable to either decipher the language their students were using or teach them Spanish Sign Language, even the simplest of terms and signs. However, at that point, Kegl was faced with the fact that she did not share a common tongue -or hand, a term more fitting in this case- with ISN speakers, which meant she either had to introduce ASL to them or try to understand the context behind ISN, the latter of which carried the risk of perpetuating what is known as “linguistic imperialism” when an introduced language supplants the indigenous one and imposes itself on the native speakers, which would eventually lead to the loss of linguistic diversity. Kegl instead started by building a small dictionary of different signs by observing speakers interact and try to understand the meaning behind it, and very slowly expanding her capability of signing different words and establishing the grammar rules that the children had set out, as well as having the children explain a story that was already known to Kegl and ISN speakers and finding correspondences between actions in sign and writing (Osborne, 1999).

How does this example relate to the work and research of a designer? If Kegl had simply chosen to teach ISN speakers ASL, she would have destroyed the community's uniqueness simply for her convenience as a researcher. Similarly, a designer who values time and resources over the unique needs of the target group or community they are working with might impose a solution that doesn’t resonate or solve the issue at hand that might have detrimental consequences on the community. An example of this would be supplanting architectural styles with no consideration of the local context and conditions or the already existing solutions and techniques used in accordance with said conditions; the sprawling skylines of the Middle Eastern metropolis of Dubai, Doha, and Kuwait all feature skyscrapers that are on par with those in New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, yet the designs used are inefficient when it comes to aspects such as heating, airconditioning, and waste management; most of the aforementioned Middle Eastern cities are located near the Tropic of Cancer in areas classified as arid deserts, which entails a massive system to maintain a 400m-tall building made of steel and glass cold amidst the intense summer, which is very inefficient in terms of energy consumption and carbon footprint.

The region already had some existing solutions for this problem such as windcatchers (known locally as badgirs), which were proven to aid in cooling the building’s interior without the need to introduce expensive and consuming systems, but such a system was not considered in the Western-created design concept of skyscrapers, even when moved to a local context completely different. Overall, designers, anthropologists, and linguists alike must interact with the local population and observe what they already were doing pre-contact, as the key to the solution of the problem or the essence of the culture lies within the natural practices that they partake in.

CHIWERE+ARAPESH: SOCIAL WORK OR ACADEMIC FOCUS?

When doing fieldwork, linguists are faced with the reality that the communities they are working with have problems that the linguists would be more often than not able to help solve, similar to how designers are capable of supporting communities that do not have the means necessary to tackle the issues they have at hand. Researchers are often faced with the dilemma of having to strike a balance between completing their research objectives and offering to help the communities they are collaborating with or observing, which is where the line between the work of designers and linguists starts to blur. The case of the Chiwere and Arapesh languages highlights the aforementioned need for balance; the Chiwere language is spoken by barely 40 semi-fluent speakers across three tribes (Otoe, Missouria, and Iowa) in the Great Plains region of the United States, while the Arapesh language (language family would be a more precise term to describe it) is spoken by around 32 thousand speakers in East Sepik, on the northern shore of Papua New Guinea’s mainland.

In both cases, the tribes had asked the researchers working with them to collect data for help identifying a solution to a linguistic problem they are facing; Lise Dobrin, who worked with the Arapesh, was approached by some members of the younger generation to ask for help in creating an interactive chart of kinship, so they can identify the different terms used for their relatives, which implies that their kinship systems functions differently to that of Western society. It is worth mentioning for the sake of comparison, that there are six major kinship systems, which differ in the way different relationships are defined, which are labeled Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, Eskimo, and Sudanese kinships, the second latter of which is the one also used by English speakers. (Dobrin & Schwartz, 2016)

Similarly, Saul Schwartz, who collaborated with Chiwere speakers and tribes on documenting the language as a heritage language, has received numerous requests for translating between English and Chiwere, for example, calquing words and concepts from English, and translating sacred or important texts from Chiwere, even things as simple as slogans for t-shirts. Schwartz indicates that such requests might bring up a sort of conflict between his duty as a recorder and documenter of the heritage language and that of helping the community spread awareness and visibility to a language that constitutes an integral part of the heritage of the tribe, especially when the requested texts for translation clash with the belief system of the tribe itself.

Following the method of participant observation, it would be logical to explain the thought process of how a solution for both scenarios would come to be: Dobrin would communicate with the younger generation and listen to them talk about their relatives and relationships and try to sketch out a diagram of how she envisions the pedigree and terminology of kinship to be, then fix the details by listening to more conversations from different generations to understand the generational differences of referring to one another. Similarly, Schwartz would talk with Chiwere speakers and attempt to understand how they would explain foreign concepts that don’t exist in their language, such as airplanes or first-person shooter video games, without emphasizing the details of each explanation but rather the whole system and how they derive their meaning from pre-existing concepts and how they approach certain concepts such as sexuality or violence that might clash with the belief systems of the tribe, then use that information to create new terms using the same method or approximating it as much as possible. (Schwartz, 2015)

Linguists find themselves in this case put in the role of designers of a solution to a problem, as they have more capacity to identify the best methods of tackling the issue as well as the skills to implement properly, as opposed to the community having to rely on solutions that might not work effectively.

CHATINO: BALANCES, BALANCES

The middle ground provides the right equilibrium. In the case of the Chatino speakers of southern Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico, a researcher coming back to her community to look into the linguistic practices of her people strikes the balance between knowing the context and maintaining professionalism as a linguist.

Emiliana Cruz, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was born in Cieneguilla, a small community near the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, to Chatino activist parents, and studied at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Wanting to rejoin her community and offer help in the field of education, she came to the realization that there is a severe lack of resources for indigenous teachers who want to offer bilingual education to communities in Spanish and their native languages, so she decided to conduct research in her home village and the Chatino-speaking region to establish a linguistic framework for both documentation and teaching purposes. In repeated attempts starting in 2004 all the way to 2013, Cruz was faced with some hardships of being accepted back into the community despite being one of them due to her prolonged stay previously in the United States, but in the end, she was able to create a standardized orthography and material that bilingual teachers could use.

Cruz noted her approach as “combining scholarship with social and cultural engagement. Our scholarship has been documentary-descriptive in the sense that we have sought to record language and language use in its sociocultural setting; and develop analyses of lexico-grammatical systems at least sufficient for adequately transcribing, translating, and annotating what we have recorded”, which implies that the work scope of linguists extends beyond documenting a language, but also extends to building the systems which can be used by the communities to promote their language, essentially solving the issue of linguistic death due to the lack of resources, which has been the case for many indigenous languages that got replaced by a larger more influential language (such as English in Australia replacing Aboriginal languages, Portuguese being the dominant mode of communication in the Amazon rainforest, or Russian as a lingua franca for the Siberian language speakers of the Far East).

She described her status as having had a positive impact on her ability to conduct research, as Cruz puts it, “each person’s sense of belonging can be different. In my own case, sometimes I am a community insider and at other times I am an outsider because I left my village when I was young, but I came back with my parents during holidays. I still speak Chatino and can communicate with everybody there. For the last ten years, during the summers, I have returned home to do research, something that an ordinary citizen does not do.” (Cruz & Woodbury, 2014)

Researchers must maintain the balance of how the community perceives them; in Cruz’s case, she was able to gain both “insider” and “outsider” status, by virtue of her upbringing within the Chatino community, and her living outside of it but maintaining contact with members of the group, which she can use to her advantage when trying to gain insight into the community’s linguistic practices, without having to reconsider her emotional attachment to what she has experienced of the very same aspect she is researching. This emic vs etic approach (which refers to the viewpoints of a researcher, both as an outsider -etic- and placing themselves from the community’s perspective -emic- as an insider) can be reflected in a designer’s “diamonds”; designers must approach a given problem during the research phase as a user would, in order understand the functional and emotional needs of the target group, but also provide for an innovative solution which, as an outsider, the designer is more likely to be able to conjure considering the objectivity of their work. While migration away from native communities is not being encouraged in this paper, people who have a detachment from their native culture have a significant advantage when it comes to working with their native people.

Researchers also must maintain the balance of their work commitments; while documentation is one of the most important linguistic works, linguists must not forget the social implication that their work might have on the communities, which means they have to conduct their research objectively to safeguard the knowledge of the said language and also help tackle the linguistic issues that the community might be facing. Although overused in research and development contexts, oftentimes with negative connotations to support the suspension of aid programs, the proverb “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime” can be somewhat applied to this specific context, but from the perspective of maintaining the power of solving problems within the hands of the community. Linguists, when documenting a language, must recognize that language (unless already extinct) still has a community that uses it regularly, and that language does evolve as communities do, so unless a solution to continue the documentation process from within the community is provided, as a form of self-actualization, their collected data will eventually become outdated and the community will require a new “linguistic intervention” of sorts. In a design context, the one-time process of implementing a solution to a problem will fix it for the time being, but only an iterative solution that allows the target group to continue tackling it as the issue evolves will keep it from becoming outdated.

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

As seen throughout the previous four examples, linguists use participant observation as a research technique in order to collect data as objectively as possible. However, this proximity to the community being studied or “collaborated” with gives the researcher another purpose; to help the community solve its linguistic functional needs. Language does not exist in a vacuum, isolated from the social fabric of its communities, and it must be addressed as such. Through participant observation, linguists usually find the opportunity to not only document endangered languages, but also design the solution to maintain said languages and revive their use, drawing a parallel with the principles of design research, that are understood by designers and used to ensure that all research conducted into a design problem remains as objective as possible. In the end, regardless of differing terminologies, different approaches to research, and misconceptions about the nature of the field, the work of linguists and designers bears a lot of similarities in its inherent nature, and linguistics, arguably and somewhat demonstrably, can be considered as a design field.

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Dobrin, L. M., & Schwartz, S. (2016, June 1). Collaboration or participant observation? rethinking models of 'Linguistic Social Work'. ScholarSpace. Retrieved November 8, 2022, from https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/24694

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Schwartz, M. S., & Schwartz, C. G. (1955). Problems in Participant Observation. American Journal of Sociology, 60(4), 343–353. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2772027

Schwartz, S. (2015, September). DataSpace: The afterlives of language: Chiwere Preservation as a revitalization movement. Princeton University. Retrieved November 20, 2022, from https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp01hm50tv116

Stebbins, T. (2012, December 1). On being a linguist and doing linguistics: Negotiating ideology through performativity. ScholarSpace. Retrieved November 26, 2022, from https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/568184dd-09eb-49ee-8fba-fd0bfd5a044f