What does language have to do with national security?

27 October 2005

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You may not have thought about it before, but knowledge of languages is always a part of national security. Think of how many people in America and western Europe learned Russian and other languages during the Cold War. Wherever there's international tension, there are language needs. Because, if you want to know what the other side is up to, you have to know what he's saying, or thinking. And language is the key.

The US intelligence community -- at places like the CIA, FBI, DIA, and NSA -- is no doubt the largest consumer of language skills in the world. It has huge numbers of translators and analysts -- and ideally translators who are themselves analysts -- for whom language skill is indispensable. They spend most of their time pulling threads of information out of haystacks and weaving intelligence out of them. Some of them watch foreign news broadcasts and read newspapers. Others eavesdrop on phone conversations, peek at e-mail, or analyze documents from caves in Afghanistan. Some take part in interrogation of foreign nationals. And they do it all in a language that isn't English.

Obviously, they're listening a lot to Al-Qaeda these days. And it's a challenge. The Arabic of Al Quaida's leadership tends to be saturated with religious references, so it can be hard to distinguish religious dialogue from battle plans. Or they may speak a dialect that's very different from standard Arabic. Al Quaida volunteers include non-native Arabic speakers, who may pronounce things differently or make grammatical errors. A document may be torn or blurry, in bad handwriting, or -- in one case -- reeking of gasoline. The work is often messy. And you have to know the language extremely well.

Language experts don't focus just on what people say, but how they say it. For instance, an analyst might notice that someone's talking in a more formal way because he's dealing with a superior. That might shed light on an organization's command structure. An analyst might notice that a speaker sounds stressed or nervous, which might be a clue to a big event about to happen.

Some analysts are also technical experts who have the task of checking material to see if it's about, say, building bombs. And if it is about making bombs, they want to know how close the enemy is to building them. So the analyst needs expertise in a narrow technical field as well as fluency in a language.

All this is why foreign language analysts are in short supply. It takes years for someone to develop proficiency in a culture as well as a language, and maybe in a technical area as well. In fact, it takes so long that some experts are planning their retirement by the time they become fully useful.

You may be wondering why the government doesn't rely more on computers to do jobs like this that are so hard for humans. Well, it does. Today's machines do triage on texts, sorting the worthless from the promising. Online dictionaries and vocabulary databases -- that work like glorified spell-check programs -- can also help. They take some of the burden of brute language work off the humans' hands, so the humans can do what they really do best: analyze intelligence.

Machines will do more as analytical software gets better, but national security can't wait. For now, the U.S. is keeping humans at the center of its intelligence work, and not trying to replace them with machines. So, to paraphrase the old recruiting slogan: "Uncle Sam is looking for a few good linguists."

National security is one of the most unusual uses of language I know of. It's both fascinating and frustrating. As one linguist put it, "it's like looking at the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without the boxtop that shows what the picture is supposed to look like." It's not easy, but the cost of not doing it -- can be very high.

That's the language thought for today, which comes from Michael Erard, linguist and freelance writer in Austin, Texas. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Ron Wolf at December 7, 2005 05:57 AM