What a Linguist Hears When Biden Speaks

John McWhorter

I don’t think anyone would be shocked to hear that linguists generally study languages, but there is a corner of the discipline that studies something slightly different: pidgins. That’s the word that linguists use to describe the mashup that can result from the collision of two or more languages, emerging amid circumstances such as overseas trade or even enslavement. These are not actual languages; they have small vocabularies and very little of what we could call grammar. They serve largely to allow people to make basic statements, ask simple questions and give commands. One example is Chinese Pidgin English, which was spoken on the coast of China from the 18th century to the mid-20th century. Thought by some to have granted us the expression “long time no see,” it had a vocabulary of a few hundred words and only shards of what we would call grammatical rules.

Some pidgins flower into complex and nuanced languages, as happened with Jamaican patois, Papiamentu, Cape Verdean and the Creole I am most familiar with, Saramaccan of Surinam, each one of which has grammar and vocabulary extensive enough to fill books.

Linguists who study this phenomenon tend to focus on how pidgins evolve into language, but language can go in the other direction, too — unraveling, you might say, into something simpler. I’ve been reminded of that as the nation tries to process President Biden’s jumbled syntax during his debate with Donald Trump and in his subsequent interview with George Stephanopoulos.

Biden has never been the most starchy of orators, but many observers, myself included, were struck by how far his sentences had strayed from the complexities and subtleties he once controlled effortlessly. It is alarming to see someone who is asking to be elected president of the United States — someone who already serves as president of the United States — communicate in such an ineffective manner. But what is actually going on there, linguistically? One way to understand what is happening is to think of it as unraveling.

For all of the attention that the shaggy text flow he slips into at times gets, such as when he seemed to say that he was the first Black vice president, it’s not pidgin-like, and needn’t be alarming. Such a lack of elocution — which Donald Trump is also quite given to — is mainly a symptom of casualness, not pathology. We tend to underestimate the extent to which context, facial expression and intonation clarify the words we speak, including when we are addressing two or three topics at a time within the same stretch of speech.

Other aspects of his speech are more suggestive of unraveling. In his interview last week with George Stephanopoulos, Biden repeatedly used verbless chunks in the place of sentences, with utterances such as “No indication of any serious condition,” “Nobody’s fault, mine” and “Large crowds, overwhelming response, no slipping.” This is hardly unknown in casual speech, but Biden leaned on it a lot given the gravity of the interview. The linguist Ljiljana Progovac has described such inert word sequences as “living fossils” of earlier stages in the development of human language, before people combined those chunks into the flowing, complex sentences we are familiar with.

Biden’s control of suffixes also appears to be slipping. Most discussed has been his “I did the goodest job as I know I can do,” which suggested that he had forgotten that “good” does not take the superlative suffix but rather the modifier “best.” I’m pretty sure I hear him early in the interview saying “preparance” rather than “preparation.” That, too, made me think of pidgins, which have very few or even no suffixes.

Pidgins require the listener to fill in context to a greater extent than full languages do. The Arctic explorer and ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, studying one of the Inuit pidgins that emerged from contact with traders, found that the words “Dog want come” could mean, depending on the situation, “I want the dogs to come,” “Because dogs keep trying to get into the house,” “Because I want him to bring a dog to me,” and more. During the debate, when Biden said “We finally beat Medicare” — by which he meant “We finally beat the problem with Medicare” — he was relying on a similar kind of simplification. But when the statement strays so far from its standard formulation as to suggest its opposite, we are in a bad place.

Added to this is Biden seeming more generally to lose sight of the social levels of the language. Pidgins do not usually have “high” and “low” vocabulary or sentence styles. In the same interview Biden tossed off “Whatever the hell it is,” while in another interview he said “I’ll be damned if I let this S.O. — excuse me, this president ...” Yes, Trump lets off the occasional cuss word, and public language these days is much less buttoned up than it used to be. But imagine Barack Obama using this kind of language in such interviews, or, if we grant Biden his salt-of-the-earth Scranton guy image, Bill Clinton.

A quieter example of how Biden’s command of the language’s colors seems to be fading came when he said to Stephanopoulos, “Today before I come out here” instead of “came out here.” This is not the outright error that some sticklers might suppose — “come” for “came” is a longstanding feature of nonstandard English, and Biden almost certainly grew up hearing and using it. However, one would not expect Biden to use it, Scranton Guy or not, in a formal interview, especially one where his cognitive fitness for office was explicitly on the line.

Any one of these examples would have been unremarkable on its own. The issue is that they piled up to such a degree, in contexts in which a more considered style of expression is the order of the day. In particular, they are occurring at the very moment that the president is trying to reassure the nation that he is in complete control of his verbal faculties. Biden was never exactly Churchillian, but even in interviews as recent as four years ago, the contrast to the present is striking.

Trump’s speaking style is the big elephant in the room here. Yes, his speech is its own kind of ramshackle, well, jazz. It is unprecedentedly informal for a president in public addresses. But though his references grow ever more fantastical, I see no change in his fundamental fluency over the past few years.

In the end, informality and a messy imagination are one thing. The rapid decline of complex sentence structure into something even distantly resembling pidgin is another. Pidgins do a basic job but aren’t designed for detail, grace or suasion. Increasingly, Biden’s speech submits to an alarmingly similar judgment.