Different ways tospeak
When humans find themselves censored, silenced or plain frustrated by limits of their native tongues, they learn new languages, or sometimes reinvent old ones. African slaves in 18th-century North America and the Caribbean, for instance, barred by white owners from communicating with one another, developed languages of music and dance that formed the basis of their survival, rebellion and eventual freedom.
Such strategies flourish in less dire situations as well: new vocabularies are being created right now to better describe new realities in crisis-ridden streets throughout Europe, and, as always, are pinging on the phones of teenagers everywhere.
In the digital realm, the use of emoticons — creative punctuation to convey expressions, like this smile and wink ;-) — is becoming dated, giving way to emoji, more detailed, colorful and cartoonlike symbols developed in the mobile phone culture of Japanese teenagers. Emoji has caught on, but some of it is being lost in translation.
“There are plenty of emoji for Japanese food like sushi, ramen noodles and mochi balls on a skewer,” The Times’s Nick Bilton wrote, while “emoji for slices of Americana like tacos and hot dogs are hard to find.”
There are more subtle cultural obstacles as well. “The emoji icons can be baffling to the American adults who, whether they realize it or not, are taking their social cues from Japanese teenagers,” Mr. Bilton wrote. For instance, a bright pink heart with a yellow bow might not be everyone’s way of saying “I love you.”
Alternative language might be handy when texting friends, but how about when talking to God?
In her research of “charismatic” Christian churches in the United States and subSaharan Africa, the anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann found a high number of faithful “speaking in tongues” — praying out loud using a spontaneous outpouring of syllables rather than words, considered to be a “language God knows but the speaker does not.”
The people she interviewed said they prayed in tongues “because it was the one language the devil could not understand, but what I found so striking was how happy it seemed to make them,” she wrote in The Times. She found scientific data to show that people praying in tongues enter a unique mental state.
The invention of secret languages has always been so, according to Daniel HellerRoazen, a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey. Roman emperors, medieval troubadours and modern revolutionaries like Lenin spoke and wrote in code to protect their secrets from enemies, he wrote in The Times.
“The truth is that wherever people speak a language, they find ways to modify it according to set rules,” Mr. Heller-Roazen wrote in The Times. “A cryptic idiom may be developed for the purposes of a game, to enable a literary activity, to facilitate a new society or to implement a political project.”
And today, he observes, an age of unprecedented surveillance and intrusions on privacy, the trend is likely to continue. “In a time when speech is subjected to unprecedented scrutiny,” he wrote, “it is worth recalling that the safest way to express a subversive thought is to clothe it in unfamiliar garb. PETER CATAPANO For comments, write to nytweekly@ nytimes.com.