Issue 22: Language

NOVEMBER 12, 2024

In many ways, language has been an obsession of The Dial’s since its launch. It is, most obviously, our medium for telling stories. As editors, we regularly wrestle with the nuances of language — phrasing, punctuation, pauses — as we think about the most powerful way to tell a story and capture our readers’ imaginations. We have published reporting, fiction and poetry translated from more than 15 languages into English, as part of our effort to champion new writing from around the world. In this issue, we make language our subject and interrogate its possibilities and its limits.

What does it mean to be fluent in a language? In her piece on Duolingo, the world’s most popular language-learning app, Imogen West-Knights reflects on the realities of learning a language on your phone. “I think there’s something hopeful, maybe even touching, about all of us thinking that five minutes of language learning a day is going to have us chatting away to natives,” she writes.

What happens when a community can no longer tell its stories or when words are suddenly out of reach? In the Kurdistan region of Iraq, a new project led by local poets is trying to record and preserve the oral tradition of the Yazidis. Winthrop Rodgers reports on how persecution, displacement and new technologies have disrupted the community’s ability to hand down myth and history. The short story “Earshot,” by the South Korean author Guka Han and translated from French into English by Katie Assef, explores a young girl’s descent into deafness after she tries to drown out the sound of her mother’s neglect with music: “I was absorbed by the purity of the notes that flowed into my ears, by this gentleness I’d never experienced before.”

Can a new language change our perception of death? As a student, the Norwegian author Teresa Grøtan fell in love with Latin American literature — an obsession that led to her discovery of the Spanish subjunctive, a grammatical mood that better expresses uncertainty than anything in her native tongue. In “Death in Grammar,” originally published in Vinduet and translated into English by Caroline Waight, Grøtan writes movingly about how the discovery helped her express, and ultimately move beyond, her uncertainty about whether or not to live.

In this issue, we also examine the role of new technologies, and how language is wielded in other realms, like the judiciary system and the political sphere.

Julia Webster Ayuso delves into the world of forensic linguistics, in which patterns in language are used to help solve cold cases. In an essay, linguist Ross Perlin argues against the idea that artificial intelligence will save endangered languages. In fact, Perlin writes, these new tools “are finders, not creators; they are mimics, not conversation partners; they are machines, not people.”

In “To Read,” Mixe author Yásnaya Elena A. Gil recounts how she was first taught to read in Spanish, a language she didn’t understand, as part of a larger political effort in Mexico to stamp out Indigenous languages like her own. In a dispatch from Taipei, Will Buckingham charts the rise of Tâi-gí, a local Taiwanese language, in tandem with the country’s growing sense of political independence from China.

We also, of course, consider translation. A new work of fiction by Filipino writer Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, translated by Kristine Ong Muslim, is narrated by a self-effacing translator working with an author whose beliefs he’s unable to fully grasp. In a review of three novels featuring translators as central characters, Irina Dumitrescu examines the age-old trope of translation as an act of fraud.

You can receive all of these stories in your inbox via our free weekly newsletter. In our emails this month, translators will share the words and expressions that haunt them — precisely because of their untranslatability. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so here.

— The Editors