Language is such an intuitive part of who we are that we rarely think about the individual elements that make up our language. For those of us in the Western world, our writing system has long been established and most people learn to read and write at a young age. As a result, we typically don’t think of our speech and our spelling system as separate entities. Not all languages have this robust heritage of literacy, however, and this is particularly true for minority languages spoken in smaller, more rural communities.
Most languages that still need God’s Word fit into this category. Some are entirely oral languages, meaning they have never been written down before, and the Bible is the first piece of literature being published in the language. Many others have some semblance of a writing system or a variety of conflicting writing systems, but no standardized form. In these cases, various people began to write in their language, but the spelling or script varied from writer to writer. This creates a challenge for Bible translators to decide which writing system to follow, and they often must wrestle through innumerable questions regarding spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Even though translators are fluent speakers of their language, it is still common to run into uncertainties over how to best write the language.
This is where linguistic studies can help. Linguistics is the attempt to look at spoken language scientifically – analyzing the patterns within a language and exploring how the patterns are similar or different compared to other languages, and even how speech varies within the same language. One of the few things that all linguists agree on is that every language has definite structure and patterns. This is not surprising, considering that language itself is a creation of God, who has structured the world with exceptionally detailed design. Linguists also agree that we can almost always find exceptions to these patterns. We are, after all, creative humans who are constantly finding new ways to use language. While not every element of language fits neatly into a box, we can use the general patterns we find to gain insights into the language. This, in turn, helps guide us in decisions on how to write the language.
Linguistics training directly helps translators improve the quality of their work. When the translators learn basic linguistic principles and better understand the structure of their language, they become more consistent in their writing. Although the translators have typically been educated in a second language, they have probably never studied their own native language in school. They know the language intuitively, but they may not be able to explicitly describe the patterns or explain why one phrase sounds right and another phrase sounds wrong. Providing linguistic training thus helps the translators craft a Bible translation of higher quality.
Linguistic support also helps the translation teams create better unity within their teams and communities. At its core, spelling is rather arbitrary – what symbols get matched to the sounds in a language depends heavily on how the community agrees to do it. As you can imagine, people often have strong opinions and expectations on how to write their language. Linguistics studies can help the group reach a resolution that is based on good reasoning without anyone feeling forced to choose the opinion of one over another.
Another major goal of linguistic analysis is to create a writing system that is usable. A good spelling system (also called orthography) ideally has as little ambiguity as possible while still being easy for a person to learn how to read. If the text is too cluttered with tiny diacritics and markings, it can confuse and discourage a beginner reader. If the text has too few of these symbols, it creates ambiguity that will slow the reader and force them to reread the text several times before understanding what is being said. Using principles associated with these goals, linguists can help translators find a good balance in their writing system and point out potential issues the translators may run into down the road.
This is exactly why linguistic analysis also goes hand-in-hand with literacy development. Once we know the underlying structure of the language, we have enough information to create spelling and grammar rules and thus begin developing primers and other literacy materials that will be used to help people learn how to read their Bibles.
Historically, missionaries and Bible translators have been at the forefront of linguistic development, since they were often the first people to encounter new languages (previously unknown to the western world, at least) and the first to start translating into those languages. In earlier years, they simply did the best they could with the resources they had at the time, but now we can be thankful that linguistics has grown into its own field of study as a result of their hard labor. The work done by those before us helps us better understand how language works and provides us with more extensive tools to better translate the Bible into new languages.