Of clockworks, goldfish and building bricks: What is language consulting?
What do you think of when someone tells you that they are a linguist? Maybe you think that they must speak many languages. Perhaps accents and dialects come tomind, the way people in your hometown sound differently from where you now live.
Hopefully, you won’t suspect that you have just met an officer of the grammar police. In fact, people who have a background in linguistics are language experts. Some of them do speak several languages and many of them know a lot about language variety and change (those accents!). Chances are that they will be interested in grammar, but they will want to describe and explain it rather than tell anyone how to use it. And all linguists understand the workings of language: how words, grammar and sentences are formed and used to make meaning. As language experts, they can peel back the face of a clock and look at the mechanism that makes it work.
For most people though, a clock is merely for information: it tells the time and as long as it works, it doesn’t matter what the mechanism looks like. But what if it doesn’t work? That is where language experts come in — when negotiations risk breaking down, when a CEO’s attempts to calm a crisis make matters worse, or when you cannot get everyone to contribute to a meeting. But language also matters in less obvious ways. Take an organisation where staff are unhappy, absenteeism is rife, and productivity is low. Clearly, change is needed here, and the first step is to find out why people are unhappy. Looking at what they say, e.g. in employee surveys, is a good start, but what about how they say it? What metaphors do they use to describe their workplace? (The public sector organisation whose employees said working there was “like wading through treacle while stirring a ton of bricks” comes to mind.) Who is shown as active or passive when they talk about relations between staff and management? And who do they refer to in personal (“Sarah from Accounts”) or impersonal ways (“the powers that be”)? Like fish in water, we are surrounded by language, and it often takes a language expert to make us notice it.
In addition to providing linguistic first aid when things go wrong or revealing otherwise hidden thoughts and feelings, language consultants can also help their clients to become confident and even creative language users. When giving advice on how to deliver a business pitch or shine in a job interview, it is not enough to talk about effects (“make sure to sound friendly and competent”) and leave someone with a few stock phrases they can use. That’s like giving someone building bricks and step-by-step instructions to build one thing and one thing only, no matter how impressive it looks. Language consultants can explain all the different ways in which blocks of all colours, sizes and shapes — the words, grammars and sentences of language — can be used to make something that is authentic and original. Let’s start building.
