Language, Identity, and the Ethics of Listening
I. Beyond the Words We Understand
In the first part of this reflection, The Unheard Language: When Speaking Is Not Listening, I explored a paradox that continues to trouble me: people may speak the same language, understand every word exchanged, and still fail to understand one another.
We considered the languages that entered Eritrea through history, the curious absence of Italian as a widely inherited national language despite decades of colonial rule, and the multilingual encounters made possible through Ghedli.
But these historical experiences brought us to a question that cannot be settled by counting languages or measuring proficiency. What does it mean to listen? Listening is commonly understood as a capacity to receive and comprehend spoken words. But human communication requires something more demanding. We must also recognize that the person speaking possesses an experience of the world that may not correspond to our own.
This is where language becomes more than a medium of communication. It becomes a condition of belonging. And belonging, unlike vocabulary, cannot be acquired simply by memorizing the correct words.
II. When Language Becomes a Border
A language may connect people across geography, generation, and social background. It can preserve memories, sustain intimate relationships, and provide access to a shared literary and cultural inheritance. But the same language can also become a border. Not necessarily because it excludes those who cannot speak it, although that is one possibility. Sometimes the more consequential exclusion occurs among those who speak it perfectly well.
One person uses a familiar political expression and hears an affirmation of historical sacrifice. Another hears a demand for unquestioning obedience. One invokes unity and imagines solidarity among citizens. Another hears the possibility that differences will once again be suppressed in unity’s name. One speaks of liberation as the achievement of a generation. Another asks what liberation requires of the generations that follow. The words are familiar to everyone. Their meanings are not.
What separates these speakers is not grammar in its conventional linguistic sense. It is the conceptual grammar through which historical experience becomes intelligible. We inherit these grammars from families, political movements, schools, religious communities, social institutions, and the stories societies tell about themselves. Over time, they can become so familiar that we cease to recognize them as interpretations. We begin treating them as reality itself.
The difficulty arises when another person speaks from a different conceptual inheritance. We may hear the words clearly while failing to recognize the world from which they emerge. And when disagreement is interpreted not as a difference of understanding but as evidence of disloyalty, language ceases to be a bridge. It becomes a checkpoint.
III. The Languages of the Nation
This brings us to the question of multilingualism and national unity. Does the existence of several languages enrich a nation, or does it threaten the possibility of a common political identity? The question is often framed as though the nation must choose between cultural diversity and civic cohesion. But this framing may conceal the more important issue.
Languages do not, by themselves, determine whether people can live together politically. A multilingual society may develop strong institutions of mutual recognition. A largely monolingual society may remain profoundly divided. The difference lies less in the number of languages spoken than in the arrangements through which citizens participate in public life.
A society can celebrate its linguistic diversity ceremonially while denying speakers of some languages meaningful access to education, administration, justice, or public discussion. Conversely, a shared language can provide practical advantages without becoming the measure of whose identity is more authentically national.
The challenge is not to eliminate linguistic differences. It is to prevent linguistic differences from becoming a hierarchy of citizenship. For Eritrea, whose communities possess distinct linguistic and cultural inheritances, this distinction is particularly important. National belonging cannot depend upon the assumption that every citizen must enter public life through an identical cultural doorway. Nor can it depend upon treating each linguistic community as a sealed political enclosure.
The first approach risks assimilation. The second risks fragmentation. Between them lies the unfinished work of constructing a civic relationship in which citizens can participate without surrendering the histories that formed them. A common political home need not require a single cultural voice. But it does require institutions capable of hearing more than one.
IV. Translation Is Not Merely Changing Words
Translation offers another way of approaching this problem. We usually imagine translation as the movement of meaning from one language into another. A sentence begins in Tigrinya, Arabic, Tigrayit, or another language and arrives in a different linguistic form. The translator searches for equivalence. But equivalence is rarely complete.
Words carry histories. Expressions acquire emotional associations through particular social experiences. A political term may appear straightforward in one language while carrying several conflicting memories in another. A proverb may survive translation while losing the humor, intimacy, or social circumstances that gave it force.
The translator must therefore do more than replace words. The translator must make judgments about context, intention, emphasis, and the limits of what can be carried across. Something similar occurs whenever people attempt to understand experiences different from their own, even when they share a language.
A person describing exile to someone who has never been displaced is engaged in a form of translation. So is a former fighter attempting to explain the moral world of armed struggle to someone born after independence. So is a young citizen questioning inherited political certainties before an older generation for whom those certainties are inseparable from sacrifice.
In each case, the difficulty is not simply linguistic. The listener must make room for a world not already contained within his or her own experience. This is why translation can be understood as an ethical practice. It requires the willingness to approach another person’s meaning without immediately reducing it to our own.
Yet translation also has limits. We cannot fully inhabit another person’s history. We can misunderstand, simplify, or impose familiar categories upon unfamiliar experiences. Acknowledging those limits is not a failure of communication. It may be the beginning of more responsible communication.
V. Who Is Allowed to Speak for Whom?
There is another dimension to the grammar of belonging. Who has the authority to represent a community? A language is never spoken by a single voice, even when political discourse attempts to make it appear so. Within every linguistic community are differences of generation, class, gender, geography, education, political experience, and personal history.
A person may speak the language of a community fluently without sharing the political convictions of those who claim to represent it. Another may speak the language imperfectly while remaining deeply attached to its cultural inheritance. Yet public debate frequently turns language into a shortcut for political identity. We hear claims about what a particular community thinks, wants, fears, or remembers, as though millions of individual experiences could be compressed into a single collective position. The danger is not merely that such claims may be inaccurate. It is that they make disagreement within a community appear illegitimate.
The individual who departs from an expected position may be accused of betraying the very identity that others have assigned to him. This is one of the most consequential ways in which belonging becomes conditional. You may belong, provided you speak as we expect someone like you to speak. But citizenship cannot flourish where identity is treated as a script that individuals are forbidden to revise. A genuinely plural society must recognize that no language, community, or historical experience produces only one political imagination. To listen to a community, therefore, is not simply to identify its loudest representatives. It is to remain attentive to the differences within it.
VI. The Unheard Language
The most difficult language to learn is not another spoken language at all. It is the language of another person’s experience. We may become fluent in several languages and still remain incapable of listening to someone whose interpretation of history unsettles our own. We may pride ourselves on cultural tolerance while responding defensively whenever another person questions the assumptions through which we understand belonging.
We may even invoke dialogue while treating the other person’s participation as an opportunity to demonstrate why we were right all along. In such circumstances, conversation becomes a performance. Each participant waits for the other to finish speaking, not in order to understand, but in order to resume an argument already prepared. The exchange may be grammatically flawless. It may also be intellectually barren.
Listening requires a different disposition. It asks whether we can distinguish disagreement from hostility, criticism from betrayal, and unfamiliarity from threat. It asks whether another person’s experience can complicate our understanding without requiring us to abandon judgment. This does not mean that every claim deserves agreement or that every historical interpretation possesses equal evidentiary weight.
Listening is not the suspension of critical thought. On the contrary, serious listening may demand more rigorous judgment because it requires us to understand a claim before evaluating it. Nor does listening require silence in the face of injustice. There are circumstances in which moral clarity requires firm opposition.
But opposition need not depend upon denying that the person before us possesses a history, an experience, and a capacity for thought. The distinction is fundamental. We can reject an argument without refusing to hear the human being making it.
VII. An Unfinished Conversation
I began these reflections with the languages we inherit and the journeys through which we acquire others. Italian entered Eritrea through colonial rule but did not become a broadly shared national inheritance in the way one might expect from certain other colonial histories.
Ghedli created encounters across linguistic and regional boundaries, bringing together people who might otherwise have remained separated by geography and social experience. And independent Eritrea inherited a multilingual society whose cultural richness remains inseparable from the challenge of constructing an inclusive civic order.
But the deeper question has gradually moved beyond the languages themselves. What do we do with the differences that language reveals? Do we approach them as obstacles to be eliminated, boundaries to be defended, or opportunities to enlarge our understanding? The answer cannot be supplied by linguistic proficiency alone. Nor can it be supplied by appeals to unity that leave the conditions of participation unexamined.
A shared political future requires something more difficult than speaking together. It requires learning how to disagree without converting disagreement into estrangement. It requires recognizing that historical memory may be shared without being experienced identically. And it requires institutions that allow citizens to be heard without first demanding that they conform to an approved account of who they are.
That is where the grammar of belonging begins to change. Not when everyone finally speaks the same language. Not when every disagreement has been resolved. But when the presence of another voice no longer feels like a threat to our own. The purpose of listening is not to make every voice sound alike. It is to make room for the possibility that another voice may have something to teach us. And that is the language we have yet to learn – Work in progress.
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