The Paradox of Language
Jennifer Montes
We all explore the identity of language in some capacity, whether we are conscious of it or not. There seems to be a human yearning for a universal language, to feel connected, unified, and understood. Yet in the pursuit of universality, we often become more aware of our differences and the plural nature of human experience. This tension appears throughout mythology, theology, philosophy, and history. Many systems claim to bridge the gap between people and meaning, some being more accepted than others. Language exists in a strange paradox. It is seemingly both universal and subjective at once. All humans possess language, and across many philosophical traditions, speech is understood as one of the defining features of human existence: the ability to contemplate, interpret, and share our inner world with others. Yet language is never fixed. It changes across cultures, generations, and histories. Meaning is constantly being revised, adapted, forgotten, and rediscovered. What appears universal may instead reflect social agreements shaped by historical conditions and systems of power. At the same time, subjectivity continuously reshapes how language is understood and lived. Perhaps this is why language feels so contradictory. We seek certainty through it, yet remain limited by interpretation. In this sense, language reflects something fundamental about human nature itself: our desire for connection alongside our inability to escape ambiguity.
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Universality, Subjectivity, or Both
When examining competing theories in linguistics, it can be helpful to consider a fundamental question: What is meaning? The answer is dependent on each person’s interpretation of language and how it functions as a tool for discovering objective truths about the world. These debates about meaning shape our understanding of the relationship between language and truth. Objectivity and subjectivity are the two ends of the spectrum in this conversation about how meaning is socially constructed.
On the one hand, the globalization of media appears to demonstrate that some degree of universal communication exists. Images, emojis, corporate logos, and common phrases can cross linguistic and cultural boundaries. Their success suggests that human beings share certain cognitive capacities and perceptual tendencies that make communication possible across diverse communities. Yet reducing language to a collection of universal signals overlooks much of what makes language meaningful. Language carries identity, memory, and social experience in ways that cannot be fully reduced to universal codes. Another argument for objectivity in language is Logical positivism, which is a movement that asserts that a statement is only meaningful if it can be verified through empirical observation or is logically true by definition. The irony is that, by its own standards, the verification principle itself cannot be empirically verified and is therefore meaningless (Hwang, p.1).
At the opposite extreme are theories of linguistic relativity. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that language influences how individuals perceive and organize reality. In its strongest deterministic form, linguistic relativity suggests that speakers are constrained by the conceptual boundaries of their language, limiting their ability to think beyond the categories provided by their linguistic system (Lee,1997, pp.180–182). Taken to its logical conclusion, however, this position creates its own difficulties. If meaning is entirely relative to particular languages then communication across social worlds becomes difficult to explain. Shared understanding would appear to dissolve into a collection of isolated perspectives.
Constructivist approaches offer a middle ground between these extremes. Rather than viewing meanings as either objectively fixed or wholly subjective, it argues that meaning emerges through social interaction. Categories such as language, identity, culture, and knowledge are continually produced and revised through collective human activity. Meaning is therefore historically situated while remaining socially shared (Bryman, 2021, pp. 28–29). However, explaining how meanings are socially constructed does not fully explain how communication remains possible. If meanings are continually negotiated and revised, then what allows individuals to understand one another across different contexts and communities? One answer is that meaning is fundamentally intersubjective. While meanings may be socially constructed, they become intelligible through shared practices. Individuals learn to participate in common systems of agreement that make words and actions recognizable to others. Language, therefore, derives its stability from the repeated ways communities interpret and respond to one another. Meaning emerges through forms of social participation that create enough continuity for communication while remaining open to reinterpretation and change (Lee, 1997, pp. 226–243).
Viewed in this way, human beings may share broad communicative capacities and recognizable patterns of interaction, yet particular social contexts always shape the meanings that emerge from those capacities. Diversity emerges through the ways individuals and communities work within shared systems of meaning.
Shared Expectations and Linguistic Diversity
The dynamics of universality becoming diverse become clearer when examined through a series of linguistic research. A recent study, “Sit on Someone Else’s Face, I’m Busy!”: How Drag Queens Use Language to Perform Camp on RuPaul’s Drag Race explores how linguistic creativity depends on recognizable social resources. Camp refers to an aesthetic and communicative practice that derives humor and meaning through exaggeration, irony, theatricality, and the playful reinterpretation of familiar cultural symbols. Researchers found that performers relied on shared cultural references, celebrity personas, sexual innuendo, and character subversion to generate humor and affirm queer identity. These performances worked because audiences already recognized the cultural meanings attached to figures such as Shirley Temple, Adele, or Cher. Camp emerged not from inventing entirely new meanings, but from exaggerating, distorting, and recombining familiar ones. The study demonstrates that linguistic innovation depends upon shared systems of recognition. Speakers create novel meanings by creatively reworking symbols that audiences already understand.
A related study, “From Craft to Clarity: Community Politeness and Lexical Shift in Drag Reading,” reached a different conclusion. The researchers examined the practice of drag “reading,” a tradition originating in ballroom culture in which performers deliver witty, crafted insults through layered cultural references rather than direct attacks. Successful reads rely on shared community knowledge and the audience’s ability to recognize implied meanings rather than explicitly stated ones. The study found that earlier reads often depended on this indirectness and insider knowledge, whereas later reads became increasingly direct and broadly accessible. As audiences expanded beyond the communities in which these practices originated, linguistic strategies shifted to accommodate new listeners. The goal was no longer to produce clever wordplay for insiders but to ensure that the intended meaning remained recognizable to wider audiences. Like translation, this process involved adapting recognizable linguistic resources to new social contexts while attempting to preserve their communicative effect. The study suggests that a linguistic practice’s effectiveness depends on shared expectations, yet those expectations must continually be adjusted as language moves between communities.
This same tension appears in a study of translation: “The Muffin Man Doesn’t Travel Well: How dubbing adapts cultural references across languages”. Researchers examining the dubbing of animated films across Polish, Arabic, and Japanese contexts found that translators frequently altered culture-bound references according to the expectations of local audiences. References such as the “Muffin Man” were often localized, transformed, or omitted altogether. Yet despite these changes, translators sought to preserve the social function of the original joke rather than its exact wording. Suggesting that communication doesn’t solely depend on universals or subjectivity. Meaning remains possible because people share recognizable cultural resources, yet those resources must continually be adapted as they move across communities and contexts.
These contexts are valuable because they make visible processes that are usually taken for granted. While not everyone consciously challenges gender norms, all people navigate social expectations. Individuals continually adapt their speech, appearance, and behavior to different audiences and situations, whether in professional settings, family relationships, friendships, or intimate partnerships. Rather than representing unusual forms of communication, these examples make visible processes that occur throughout everyday language use.
Universality in Mythology
The tension between shared expectations and linguistic diversity is not unique to contemporary linguistic anthropology. Long before modern theories of language emerged, cultures developed myths and philosophical narratives to explain how human beings could simultaneously share a capacity for language while speaking in radically different ways. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel says that humanity once shared a single language and common vocabulary. United by this linguistic cohesion, people sought to build a great city and tower that would secure their collective identity and prevent their dispersion across the earth. In response, God confounded their language, making mutual understanding impossible and scattering them across the globe (New Revised Standard Version, 1989, Genesis 11:1–9).
The story reflects a recurring human desire for a universal language, while also showcasing the multifaceted epistemology of language. Medieval thinkers such as Dante viewed Babel as the moment when an original linguistic unity fractured into a diversity of languages. Yet Dante did not see this diversity as evidence that communication was impossible. Rather, he argued that all languages share a common human capacity for speech, what he called the forma locutionis, while remaining historically and culturally distinct (Nichols, 2012, p.93). This distinction is significant because it suggests that universality and diversity are not opposites. Human beings may share the capacity for language, but meaning is always expressed through particular communities, histories, and forms of life. Traditionally, Babel has been interpreted as divine punishment; it can also be understood as a challenge to centralized authority over meaning. Disrupting linguistic uniformity, the story introduces plurality into human communication and prevents any single community from claiming absolute control over interpretation. As Stephen Nichols argues, debates surrounding Babel raise fundamental questions about the relationship between language and humanity (Nichols, 2012, p.77).
Babel also highlights the relationship between language and power. A universal language promises mutual understanding, but it can also become a mechanism of assimilation when linked to political, religious, or cultural authority. The pursuit of a single linguistic standard often presents itself as neutral or universal while marginalizing alternative ways of speaking and interpreting the world. In this sense, Babel can be read as a cautionary tale about the dangers of conflating linguistic unity with social or moral uniformity. Rather than revealing a flaw in language, Babel illustrates its tension: language must be shared enough to make communication possible, yet diverse enough to accommodate the plurality of human experience. The paradoxical nature of language, therefore, is but a condition of human communication itself.
Perhaps language endures because it never fully belongs to either universality or subjectivity. We inherit words, categories, and expectations from the communities around us, yet each generation reshapes them through lived experience. Meaning is never completely fixed, but neither is it wholly private. It emerges in the fragile space between ourselves and others, where understanding is always partial and always unfinished. The human desire for a universal language may ultimately be a desire for certainty: to be fully understood and to understand in return. Yet the diversity of language reminds us that meaning is never exhausted by a single interpretation. Language persists not because it resolves ambiguity, but because it allows us to navigate it together.
Refrences
Allen, T., Edwards, L., & Phan, G. (2026, June 2). “Sit on someone else’s face, I’m busy!”: How drag queens use language to perform camp on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Languaged Life. https://languagedlife.ucla.edu/sociolinguistics/sit-on-someone-elses-face-im-busy-how-drag-queens-use-language-to-perform-camp-on-rupauls-drag-race/
Bryman, A. (2021). Social research methods (6th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Das, C., Liang, E., Matos, M., Shih, A. (2026, June 22). From Craft to Clarity: Community Politeness and Lexical Shift in Drag Reading. Languaged Life. https://languagedlife.ucla.edu/sociolinguistics/from-craft-to-clarity-community-politeness-and-lexical-shift-in-drag-reading/
Hwang, J. W. (n.d.). Problems with Ayer’s verificationism.
Lee, B. (1997). Talking heads: Language, metalanguage, and the semiotics of subjectivity. Duke University Press.
Nichols, S. G. (2012). Global language or universal language? From Babel to the illustrious vernacular. Digital Philology, 1(1), 73–109.
Rodier, P., Tawadros, P. & Qian, P. (2026, June 2). The Muffin Man doesn’t travel well: How dubbing adapts cultural references across languages. Languaged Life. https://languagedlife.ucla.edu/sociolinguistics/the-muffin-man-dosent-travel-well-how-dubbing-adapts-cultural-references-across-languages/
The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version. (1989). National Council of Churches. (Original work published in Genesis 11:1–9)
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