As a principle ethical storytelling, I often stress the importance of honoring our contributors’ terminology, and using they words they use to describe themselves and their experiences. Sometimes we use words are not widely used in the English language, and a common thing to do is italicize them so the reader doesn’t confuse them for English words. This article will make the case for reconsidering italicizing words from other languages, and will provide a tip on what to do instead.
Last year when I attended The Educational Travel Consortium, I had the pleasure of hearing Sarah Juckniess of UC Berkeley speak about Decolonizing Language in travel marketing. One of the pieces of advice she gave was to stop italicizing non-English words.
Italics are typically used in the English language in order to distinguish certain works, such as book and movie titles, works of art, and legal cases. But when we italicize words from foreign languages, we are marking them as different or lesser than the language of the text, which can reinforce cultural and linguistic hierarchies.
This is particularly interesting because, as Sarah pointed out, about 80% of all words in the English language actually come from other languages. The word “language” for instances comes from Latin lingua via old French langage. About 60% of all English words have roots in Latin or Greek, but over 350 languages have contributed words to the English language. The word “robot,” for instance, comes from the Czech word robota, meaning “forced labor.”
So if English is borrowing and absorbing foreign words all the time, why are some italicized and others not? For example, most people living in the United States know what sushi is. Sushi is a Japanese word, yet it is so pervasive that I never see it italicized. At what point does a word become so common that it is integrated into the English language and doesn’t need italics?
Sarah’s point was that italicizing the words not only marks foreign language words as different, but it also does not add value to the sentence or increase comprehension.
What I found so refreshing about Sarah’s advice was what to do instead: rather than italicize the word, we should add a phrase or detail that explains it to the reader. See this example below:
Stroll through Tokyo’s Ueno Park in the spring and you are likely to experience the joy of hanami.
In that sentence, it is still totally unclear what hanami even is, except that we have marked it as “other” in the sentence. Here is the rewrite:
Stroll through Tokyo’s Ueno Park in the spring and you are likely to experience the blooming of the cherry blossoms and the joy of hanami, when people gather at public parks to watch the cherry blossoms and celebrate spring.
So next time you are writing a piece of communication and encounter a word from another language, instead of italicizing it, leave it in the sentence as is, and add supporting detail to help clarify the word and add to the reader’s comprehension. That is how we both honor the cultures and languages of our story contributors, while ensuring our audience has an accurate understanding of the term.
