In her Ted talk, Christine Sun Kim makes an argument for people to learn ASL. She does this by trying to appeal, in some sense, to the common methods that people use to express themselves – music. As she portrays, music is a language, and so is ASL. Both are beautiful, but one is more universally understood than the other. By understanding sound as a currency of society, and the necessity of a visual component for language, she tries to show ASL as a simple and expressive language that anyone can pick up. But to a similar extent, the same argument can be made for ASL as a medium to expressing oneself, but also the way that humans interact is what is defined as social currency. So, by applying the same argument, people should just learn other languages because it’s natural for people to do so; this is in part due to the nature of music.
But this also doesn’t make sense because although she shows herself as an advocate for learning languages, she asks the audience to learn ASL as an example. So, the question becomes: what language should I learn to create a conducive environment for the rest of the world? Her answer is ASL. But my answer could be English because I’m American. Such is the dilemma that is posted. It is simply not a great answer to say that people should learn languages because it’s easy. It is, in fact, not easy to learn languages because of the way individuals learn languages. For me, Language can only be learned through practice. This is made easy when one is raised with the language or introduced to a competitive environment where they have to use the language. Many people do not have access to these due to a variety of reasons.
In such a case, nice dream, and I’m sure many people are sympathetic, but it can only be a dream. Also, consider the language barrier between different languages. How does one teach a language without knowledge of another’s language? That’s a very difficult communications problem to solve because it requires at least one party to have a complete command of the language. Also, consider, the number of human languages there are. Is it even possible for everyone to be bilingual? Languages die out too, along with native tribes who have knowledge. This is generally because of the nature of wage gaps, as well as the way that expansion works. Competition tends to squash over that which cannot survive, which is how Darwin’s theory of Evolution proclaims life to be. I can’t really say that I like it, but it is how the way is. So, although it is nice to think that many different types of social currency exist, it is not probable to assume that we will be able to give all social currency (language/expression) fair time to express itself. We all have our own preferences.
And so, I have to agree to disagree with her because I’m lazy and I don’t want to learn ASL.