The Elon Musk chip that will revolutionise language learning! Or will it?

Back in the nineties, I was living in Florence. A friend of a friend came out for a visit and was having a drink with a bunch of us language teachers. To the consternation of all present, he openly admitted he had no interest in learning languages and that he’d be delighted if someone could come up with a device that would do the work for him.

In those days this kind of device was conceptualised as a machine that would translate your speech into the other language via an electronic voice. Lovely! We debated the pros and cons of this but couldn’t really come up with a strong argument against it, at least not strong enough for him, in spite of the fact that it could potentially put us all out of work.

Well, über-magnate Elon Musk announced last year that a chip was in development that could revolutionise the way we communicate. The chip would be implanted into the brain and we would all communicate in a  universal language. It was only 5 years away! Great, right? Maybe it’ll come with a Twitter interface thrown in for free.

We could communicate via the chip with a universal language, and no more feeling ridiculous, and struggling with idioms or weird accents. After all, sometimes I do wonder if I can be bothered learning more languages. I learned Spanish as an adult, some French and am now learning German. It’s so hard. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just implant a chip into our brains that does the work for us?

But then I’m reminded of a Nelson Mandela quote that I think gets to the crux of the matter:

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

We’ve all been in situations when we use a bit of a language we don’t know well and get a better response from our interlocutor just for making that little effort to connect with them. The role of language in facilitating bonding is obvious enough, and can’t really be disentangled from the other, non-verbal, communicative tools humans use to grease the wheels of emotional transfer.

Without this function maybe the universal language chip would go the way of Esperanto. Too much of what is fundamental to communication would be lost. Words and phrases would be stripped of their emotional content, and what about intonation and stress? And creativity? Many years ago I attended a talk by David Crystal in which he demonstrated how rap uses rhythms from syllable-timed languages in a stress-timed language such as English.

Would we lose some of what makes us human? I’d love to know what the guy who was in Florence would make of it. What do you think?