Kick that frown away with a hearty thumbs-up

So many languages, so little time, right?

Sure, you have those moments when you get upset with yourself for not following through with your plans to learn at least one other language, or maybe even three or four. By this point in your life, you thought, you would be able to take an around-the-world trip and chat with anybody you met.

But no, here you are, stumbling along the same old monolingual one-way street. Oh, you studied French or Spanish or Italian in high school, but by now all that foreign vocabulary is as alien to you as the mullet and platform shoes you wore way back then.

Depressing, right?

But take heart, because without realizing it, you’re not just bilingual, and you’re not just multilingual.

No, you are panlingual — which means that you and every other human being on the planet all speak the same language.

If you don’t believe me, just turn on the World Cup soccer games for a while and you’ll see what I mean. Don’t worry if you don’t like or understand soccer — that’s not what you’re tuning in for. And don’t worry if the game is only on Telemundo, because you don’t have to know Spanish to see what I’m talking about. In fact, go ahead and turn off the sound if you want, because the volume isn’t necessary to understand the universal language I’m talking about — the one that we all already know by heart, and have known all along, ever since we were babies.

That referee with the stern look on his face, shaking his index finger side to side? “That’s enough!” he is saying. “Do not do that again.”

The player looking at him with shoulders shrugged, his arms out to the side, palms turned upward toward the sky? “What, me? I didn’t do anything.”

The ref, both hands in front with palms turned downward, slowly pushing up and down? “Just calm down. Take it easy.”

The player, his hands before his chest with palms facing the ref, his lips pursed in grudging acceptance? “OK, I hear you.”

Those colorful fans in the stands who all raise their hands in unison to grasp the top of their heads? “Oh-h-h, I was sure that shot was going in, but it just missed!”

Those other fans all wearing a different color with their arms raised straight overhead a few minutes later? “Go-o-o-o-o-o-o-ol!!!”

There is no end to the gestures, but you know in an instant what they all mean, because you’ve been panlingual all your life.

The disapproving eye-roll.

The dismissive wave of the hand.

The disgusted hands on hips.

They all speak volumes, and you hear them loud and clear, don’t you?

Who can say where such gestures originated or how they came to span oceans, continents, and millennia? Somehow we know them all, and we have known them since long before TV could show them to us. Travel to some far-off land deep in the wilderness to meet a tribe who have never seen any human beings outside of their own clan, and they’ll probably speak the same language, or something similar. It’s almost as if we have been hard-wired with this vocabulary of pan-human gestures, no matter where or when we have lived.

The smile and laughter of joy? The frown and wail of grief? The shoulder-slump of disappointment? The leaping toe-dance of elation? Who hasn’t known this language ever since birth, regardless of where we come from? Who can doubt that our great-great-many-times-great grandparents spoke the same language tens of thousands of years ago?

I thought of this as I watched game after game of the World Cup this week, wondering to myself: “How does the referee communicate to the players during the game?” Croatia plays Nigeria, Peru plays Denmark, Costa Rica plays Serbia, and the referees are guaranteed to come from none of those nations to ensure that they don’t have a dog in the fight and won’t be biased. How do they talk to each other when something important needs to be said?

Well, just turn on a World Cup game and you’ll see. Communication isn’t a problem because we’re all human, and we’ve all been panlingual ever since we were babies. Maybe someday, when we play a team from Mars or Jupiter, we may stumble a bit over how to express ourselves clearly. But as long as the World Cup only features human teams from this very human World, we’ll be fine.

Give it a try — watch a World Cup game or two whenever you feel depressingly monolingual, and you’ll stop being so hard on yourself for taking so long to learn a language from some other land.

Because you’re not monolingual at all. You’re panlingual, and you have been all along.

And that’s something to feel pretty good about — so good that you might want to give yourself a pat on the back.

And if somebody sees you do it, they’ll probably give you a thumbs-up.

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