The Language That Defines Us: Words, Tone, and Silence

There is a reason we call it the mother tongue. Language is what makes us human, learned from our mothers and primary caregivers, or so we’ve believed for a long time.

But we now know that whales sing in dialects, elephants grieve with specific calls, and prairie dogs can communicate color, shape, and size with startling precision. Other species have language, but ours remains, as far as we know, the most complex.

Linguist Noam Chomsky argued that what separates human language from all others is syntax — the ability to combine words in endless new arrangements, to say something that has never been said before.

Many of us, though, only have one language. Unless you grew up in a household where two languages lived side by side, or in parts of Europe where switching between three is ordinary, the chances are you think, dream, and automatically vocalize words as you learned them in your earliest years.

In the United States, with Spanish as our second language, there are many households that speak languages other than English or Spanish. Still, we claim English as our primary mode of communication in public. Luckily for those born and raised in the United States, over the past few decades, English has become a standard language for global commerce worldwide. Less fortunately, that shared language also means a shared set of limitations. When the world does business in one tongue, it inherits that language’s blind spots, its cultural assumptions, and all the nuances it simply has no words for.

Over time, with multilingual AI translation, interpreting, and instant dubbing, we may soon be losing the joy of learning foreign languages, forgoing the many years it takes to become proficient. More importantly, many languages are becoming extinct, and with their disappearance, we are losing more than words. We are losing unique ways of seeing reality. We become unable to feel our way through the unique worlds that multiple languages create.

The Words We Don’t Have

Some of the most illuminating moments in linguistics are not about grammar or structure but about the words that exist in one language and simply have no equivalent in another.

Saudade — Portuguese. A melancholic longing for something or someone that may never return. Not quite sadness, not quite nostalgia, deeper than both, and warmer. The Portuguese scholar Aubrey Bell described it in 1912 as a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist. You can feel saudade and smile at the same time.

Mono no aware — Japanese. The bittersweet awareness of impermanence. Cherry blossoms falling. A child suddenly taller than you remembered. A perfect evening ending. It holds the sadness and the beauty in the same breath, without resolving either one.

Mamihlapinatapai — Yaghan, Tierra del Fuego. The look exchanged between two people who both want to initiate something but neither will go first. One word, for something most of us have felt many times and never had a name for.

It isn’t a stretch, then, to understand what research clearly shows. Speaking more than one language physically changes the structure of the brain. Studies using MRI scans have found that becoming fluent in a new language, both early and late in life, increases grey matter density in multiple regions of the brain (although more so for early learners), which is the cognitive equivalent of building a stronger muscle. It is literally good for our health to learn more than one language.

Languages are not simply different codes for the same ideas. They create alternate ways of sensing the world. Many of them have words for things English has never found a way to say. This does not disparage English. It is simply to say that just one language cannot possibly include everything.

Considering Tone

In 1967, psychologist Albert Mehrabian conducted research into how people communicate feelings and attitudes, specifically in moments when words and body language are sending different signals. He found that when emotions are present, tone of voice and physical expression carry far more of the message than the words themselves. People read the whole picture, not just the text.

Your tone, in other words, is always speaking. The question is whether it is saying what you intend.

In Mandarin Chinese, this is not a nuance. It is built into the structure of the language itself. The syllable macarries four completely different meanings depending entirely on tone. Mā (flat tone) means mother. Má(rising) means hemp. Mǎ (dipping) means horse. Mà (falling) means to scold. Same sound, four different realities. So, tone is not decorative to language. It is inseparable from core meaning.

Japanese encodes something similar through grammar. Speaking to a superior requires not just more polite word choices but structurally different verb forms and sentence endings. The relationship between two people is written into the language itself.

Most English speakers navigate this intuitively without realizing it. The word “fine” can mean contentment, cold withdrawal, or quiet fury, depending entirely on how it lands. Everyone in the room knows the difference. Nobody needed a grammar lesson.

A glance across a table can carry a whole conversation. The way someone pauses before answering can tell you more than the answer itself. These are not supplements to language. They are language, in the fullest sense of the word.

The Silence Nobody Talks About

Of all the forms of communication we underestimate, silence may be the most misread — at least in the United States.

In Finland, silence between people is deemed natural, and therefore comfortable. It means someone is thinking, not withdrawing. Research on Finnish family conversation found longer and more frequent pauses than in comparable Swedish families, with no social anxiety attached to them. A Vietnamese student studying in Finland described the adjustment this way: in Vietnam, silence can easily mean something is wrong. In Finland, she learned, it simply means someone is present.

The anthropologist Keith Basso documented something similar among the Western Apache in 1970. Silence there is chosen in moments of genuine social weight — meeting a stranger, beginning a courtship, sitting with grief. It is not the absence of communication. It is the appropriate form of it.

This is true in Japanese culture as well. To allow for silence after a senior leader speaks is a basic sign of respect. In many a negotiation, the urge to fill that silence prematurely has cost westerners what might otherwise have been a successful outcome.

In coaching, this understanding changes everything. When a coach allows intentional silence after a question, without rushing to fill it, something shifts in the person being asked. Something slower and truer has the space to emerge instead. The silence is doing the work.

In everyday life, silence can also wound. Psychologist Kipling Williams at Purdue University has spent decades studying ostracism, which is the deliberate withholding of acknowledgment. His research found that being ignored activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. The silent treatment leaves no evidence, no words to point to, nothing to confront. The weapon is the absence itself. That is precisely what makes it so disorienting to be on the receiving end of it.

The same silence that heals in one context can be a weapon in another. Context is everything. Learning to read the difference in yourself and in others turns out to be one of the more valuable things a person can develop.

A Communication Style as a Whole Person

Languages are among the most beautiful things human beings have made. Each one is a world of its own. To lose one is to lose that way forever. They deserve our curiosity, our care, and our protection.

What a person learned from their mother tongue is only the beginning. Added to words is the tone they grew up hearing and the emotional vocabulary available to them.

Another layer is the cultural relationship to silence they absorbed without knowing it.

So, language is only the beginning of communication. The tone we choose can soften a hard truth or sharpen a casual remark into a weapon that creates distance. The tone of one’s voice can turn a question into a gentle invitation to reveal what is difficult to say, opening the way to healing. Silence asks to be used with intentionality as a sign of respect and acceptance, never as punishment.

A communication style is not really a style at all. It is a whole person.

To communicate well is to honor all three: words, tone, and silence. For all the time we spend on whatever else fills our days, it has never been more important than it is right now to pay attention to how we communicate with each other, and how we talk to and allow silence for ourselves. Silence is the room we make for one another, not the wall we build between us. It begins with listening to our own tone, minding our silences, and speaking to ourselves with the same care we would offer someone we love.

High quality communication is one of the many ways we can thrive as human beings in the age of AI.

Deborah Grant is an Erickson Coaching International trained coach and Principal of Grant Global Coaching & Consulting LLC. Born in Tokyo, Japan and bilingual in Japanese, she has spent forty years working across cultures as a communications consultant, content strategist, coach, and multimedia producer. Book a session at www.grantglobalcoaching.com.

Sources:

Language, Syntax & Perception

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262530071/aspects-of-the-theory-of-syntax/

Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M.C., Wu, L., Wade, A.R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(19), 7780–7785.

 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0701644104

Sapir, E. (1929). The Status of Linguistics as a Science. Language, 5(4), 207–214.

 https://www.jstor.org/stable/409588

Whorf, B.L. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT Press. https://archive.org/details/languagethoughtr0000whor

Untranslatable Words

Bell, A.F.G. (1912). In Portugal. (First scholarly English definition of saudade.)

Oxford English Dictionary. Saudade. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/saudade_n

Wikipedia. Mono no Aware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_no_aware

Wikipedia. Mamihlapinatapai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamihlapinatapai

Atlas Obscura. How the Internet Changed the Meaning of Mamihlapinatapai. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mamihlapinatapai

Bilingual Brain Plasticity

Mechelli, A., Crinion, J.T., Noppeney, U., et al. (2004). Neurolinguistics: Structural plasticity in the bilingual brain. Nature, 431, 757. https://www.nature.com/articles/431757a

Tone & Nonverbal Communication

Mehrabian, A., & Wiener, M. (1967). Decoding of inconsistent communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6(1), 109–114. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/h0024532

Mehrabian, A., & Ferris, S.R. (1967). Inference of attitudes from nonverbal communication in two channels. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 31(3), 248–252. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/h0024648

Silence Across Cultures

Basso, K. (1970). To Give Up on Words: Silence in Western Apache Culture. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 26(3), 213–230. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3629378

Tannen, D., & Saville-Troike, M. (Eds.). (1985). Perspectives on Silence. Ablex Publishing. https://books.google.com/books/about/Perspectives_on_Silence.html?id=5GJjAAAAMAAJ

Nakane, I. (2007). Silence in Intercultural Communication. John Benjamins Publishing. https://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns.166

Silence in Coaching & Therapy

British Psychological Society. (2019). Silence and its role in coaching practice. The Coaching Psychologist, 15(1), 56. https://explore.bps.org.uk/content/bpstcp/15/1/56

Montgomery, C. (2024). The shifting sound of silence. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/capr.12654

Silence as Aggression

Williams, K.D. (2007). Ostracism: The Kiss of Social Death. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1(1), 236–247. https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00004.x

Williams, K.D., Shore, W.J., & Grahe, J.E. (1998). The Silent Treatment: Perceptions of its Behaviors and Associated Feelings. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 1, 117–141. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1368430298012002