Sara Bowen

Speaking in Tongues is part of an on-going body of work relating to language, meaning and understanding.  In the 1960’s Noam Chomsky proposed a theory of Universal Grammar.  He suggested that all languages have common ‘building blocks’ grammar and syntax that babies must, in some way, be pre-programmed to recognise as they begin to acquire language skills.  More recently however, linguists have used fMRI scans and deeper explorations of language to suggest that babies are born without a pre-programmed instinctual understanding of language.  Instead, they have an incredibly plastic brain that wants to learn, and from listening in the womb to the tone and cadence of their mother tongue and the frequency of certain sounds, babies acquire basic understandings of their native language. 

I read Professor Nicholas Evan’s book Dying Words, about what is lost when a language disappears and began to think about the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11, 1-9). Many cultures have stories of how through some misdeed, humans who had previously shared a culture and language were dispersed to the four winds. Providentially, fundamentalist Christian websites translate the Christian Bible into many tongues, and I translated and then hand-cut the same nine verses of the Book of Genesis into twenty ‘Towers’. Each tower tells the same story, but unless you can read that language, it is incomprehensible.