Easter chocolates in the supermarket (Image credit: Wikimedia)

I’ve been thinking a lot about chocolate lately. Maybe because it is Easter and supermarkets in my part of the world are laden with chocolate products.

Chocolate is good to think with

Chocolate is good to think with – and I don’t mean just because chocolate is known to make our brains release endorphins, chemicals that make us feel good.

Chocolate is good to think with because it provides an easy-to-grasp explanation of the workings of global capitalism and the persistence of a colonial world order.

Global chocolate

The global chocolate industry is worth over 100 billion US$ per year. That wealth accumulation starts with the cultivation of the cacao bean and ends with the Easter egg melting in your mouth.

Cacao grows in tropical climates close to the equator. The world’s largest producer and exporter of cacao beans are two West African countries, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Together with Ecuador, Cameroon, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil, and Papua New Guinea they grow most of the world’s cacao.

Virgin forest cleared to make way for cacao plantation (Image credit: Peru Reports)

Cacao farming is a fast-growing plantation monoculture and a major factor in deforestation. 80% of Côte d’Ivoire’s rain forest, for instance, has in the past few decades been cut down to make way for cacao plantations.

Even though Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana dominate global cacao production, your Easter egg is not going to say “Made in Côte d’Ivoire” or “Made in Ghana.”

The label on your Easter egg is most likely to read “Made in Germany” because Germany is the world’s largest chocolate producer and exporter, followed by Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland.

Cacao – the raw product – is shipped from Africa to Europe to be transformed into the valuable chocolate.

The main consumers of chocolate are in North America and Europe. Over 10% of the world’s chocolate is eaten in USA alone, followed by Germany, France, United Kingdom, and Netherlands.

Per capita chocolate consumption in some of these countries is truly staggering. The average Swiss person, for instance, eats a whooping 8.8 kilos of chocolate per year. The thought alone is enough to give me constipation (although Australians are in no position to point fingers: each of us eats 4.9 kilos of chocolate per year).

The biggest multinational corporations running global chocolate are based in USA (Mars, Mondelēz, Hershey), Italy (Ferrero), Japan (Meiji, Ezaki Glico), Switzerland (Nestlé, Lindt & Sprüngli), UK (Pladis), and South Korea (Orion).

The back-breaking work of cacao production is done in the (supposedly former) colonies (Image credit: Insider)

The global division of labor could not be clearer: those who do the work and suffer the degradation of their environment are completely separated from those who grow rich on their exploitation and those who enjoy the fruits of their labor.

The chocolate profiteers and chocolate victims remain invisible

Despite the ubiquity of chocolate in supermarkets of the global north, few people know how the chocolate got there.

Most of us are ignorant of the money behind chocolate. Italy’s richest man, for instance, is Giovanni Ferrero, of the Nutella chocolate spread. Giovanni’s fortune is estimated to be 32 billion US$. By contrast, the average cacao farmer earns less than one US$ per day.

Now that we have the economics of global chocolate straight, let’s turn to language. The way we think about the word “chocolate” can tell us as much about language and culture contact, as it does about capitalism and colonialism.

“Chocolate” is a universal word

One of the most foundational ways to think about languages is to classify them into many different languages, each separate from the other.

From Afrikaans to Zulu, there are 6,000 languages or so. Each different from the other and each tied to a particular nation, ethnicity, or culture.

The word for “chocolate” and “cacao” in 56 languages (sourced from Google Translate; Latin alphabet used throughout for easy comparability)

Now consider the word for “chocolate” and “cacao” in those languages.

The table shows 56 translation equivalents of “chocolate” and “cacao”, all based on Google Translate, and all written in the Latin alphabet for easy comparability. One glance suffices to see that “chocolate” and “cacao” are essentially the same word in all these languages. There are pronunciation differences, for sure, but it is obvious that that is all there is.

Does it make sense to say that “cokollate” is an Albanian word, that “shukulata” is an Arabic word, that “tsokolate” is a Cebuano word, that “qiǎokèlì” is a Chinese word, that “chocolate” is an English word, that “Schokolade” is a German word, that “chokollis” is a Korean word, that “shoklat” is a Persian word, and that “ushokoledi” is a Zulu word?

Of course, each of these forms is adapted to the phonology of each language but it is equally clear that the most salient aspect of each of these words is not their difference but their similarity.

The German philological tradition has a term for these types of words that are pretty much identical across languages: wanderwort. Wanderwort literally means “wandering word” or “migrating word.” Such migrating words are “items that are borrowed from language to language, often through a long chain of intermediate languages” (Hock & Joseph, 2009, p. 484).

A textbook example for a wanderwort is “sugar” – another key ingredient in chocolate – which probably started out in Sanskrit as “śarkara” and moved westwards to become Persian “shakar,” Arabic “sukkar,” Greek “sákkharon,” and Spanish “azúcar.” The word did not stop with Spanish but hopped over to French “sucre”, Italian “zucchero”, German “Zucker”, and English “sugar.” The Greek version “sákkharon” took an additional route into Western Europe and also gave us English “saccharin”.

Migrating words – and there are many of them – remind us that the borders between languages are not fixed but highly porous. Language and culture contact is the norm, and has been the norm since time immemorial.

That is the first language lesson of chocolate.

Chocolate is a colonized word that has become universal

The overarching narrative of language contact and language spread in our time is of the triumph of English. Language – like everything else of value – supposedly emanates from the European centre to the rest of the world. Colonial languages are powerless and dying away in the face of the English juggernaut.

There is certainly some truth to this story but it is not the only story. An alternative story is encapsulated in the word for “chocolate”.

Precolonial Mesoamerican depiction of a marriage ceremony involving a drink of chocolate (Image credit: UC Davis Library)

The cacao bean has been cultivated in Mesoamerica and brewed into a chocolate drink for thousands of years. Accordingly, the words for “cacao” and “chocolate” have a long and varied history in the precolonial languages of the region (Dakin & Wichmann, 2000).

The migrating words for “cacao” and “chocolate” that we encounter today in (possibly?) all the world’s language is based on Nahuatl “kakáwa” and “čokola:tl.”

While colonial languages have certainly been spreading, individual words from colonized languages have been on the move, too. Some, like “kakáwa” and “čokola:tl” have made themselves at home universally.

Like “cacao” and “chocolate,” many universal words come from the world’s most threatened and minoritized languages.

Another iconic example is “kangaroo.” This universal word comes from Guugu Yimidhirr, an Australian language from Far North Queensland with less than 1,000 speakers.

The second language lesson of chocolate is that language spread is not a one-way street and colonized languages have also made their tracks around the globe.

Eurocentric etymologies

The Spanish conquest of the Americas brought the cacao bean and its preparation to the attention of Europeans.

The internet is full of claims that “Cortés was believed to have discovered chocolate during an expedition to the Americas” or that “Christopher Columbus discovered cacao beans after intercepting a trade ship on a journey to America and brought the beans back to Spain with him in 1502” (my emphasis).

Europeans have long lied to themselves about chocolate: this 17th century treatise depicts an Indian princess handing over chocolate to the higher-placed Poseidon, the ancient Greek god of the seas (Image credit: Internet Archive)

This is incorrect – like most “discoveries” of the colonial period and the so-called “Age of Discovery,” the existence of the cacao bean and its use in chocolate preparation was well-known to the Aztecs.

In today’s terms, what Cortés, Columbus, and all the other “discoverers” did might be called plagiarism or intellectual property theft.

Words like “cacao” and “chocolate” bear witness to that grand theft in the languages of the world.

Not surprisingly, the colonizers have tried to erase those linguistic tracks.

“Kangaroo” was for a long time thought to be “unknown” in any Australian language, and the idea was that Captain Cook and Joseph Banks somehow made up the word. Another apocryphal story had it that “kangaroo” actually means “I don’t know” in Guugu Yimidhirr. In this anecdote, local knowledge is completely erased while Cook and Banks come out as the heroic discoverers who made sense out of local ignorance.

It was not until 1980, when the publication of R.M.W. Dixon’s The languages of Australia finally settled the debate and confirmed something the Indigenous people of North Queensland had known all along: that the universal word “kangaroo” came from their language.

A similar obfuscation takes place when you look up the etymology for “chocolate” in English. English “chocolate” is said to derive from Spanish “chocolate” or French “chocolat.” The latter in turn derives from Spanish “chocolate,” and only in another step does it go back to Nahuatl “chocolatl.”

The etymology of the German “Schokolade” similarly highlights inner-European transmission by deriving German “Schokolade” from Dutch “chocolate,” which derives from Spanish “chocolate.” Nahuatl is only mentioned at the end of that list.

In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt writes that “an imperial tendency to see European culture emanating out to the colonial periphery from a self-generating center has obscured the constant movement of people and ideas in the other direction” (p. 88).

Amongst other things, colonialism has been a huge project of knowledge transfer from the colonized to the colonizers. The third language lesson of “chocolate” is to lay bare the big con that has made it look as if knowledge only travels in the other direction.

References

Dakin, K., & Wichmann, S. (2000). Cacao and chocolate: a Uto-Aztecan perspective. Ancient Mesoamerica, 11(1), 55-75.
Dixon, R. M. W. (1980). The Languages of Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hock, H. H., & Joseph, B. D. (2009). Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics (2nd rev ed.). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

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San Miguel Tenango

There can be no question about the crucial role that good quality communication plays in health care. Clearly, the aim of any responsible health care provider is to offer services of a high standard even when multilingual and multicultural settings may present challenges to mutual understanding between doctors and patients. Hence, for years, research in social medicine has been addressing linguistic diversity mostly from the perspective of obstacles that it created for effective health care. Practical, day-to-day considerations still make health professionals focus on ‘overcoming’ or ‘removing’ language barriers rather than view language as a value in itself.

Indigenous minoritized groups worldwide are known to have a worse health profile than majority populations, and they also tend to lose their languages in favor of the languages of majority. The main source of both problems is centuries-long, institutionalized marginalization of Indigenous peoples in the countries where they dwell. Such is the case of Mexico, a country that still counts 67 living Indigenous languages although all of them are in decline.

In Mexico, as elsewhere, Indigenous languages are heavily underrepresented in health care. There are no government-sponsored medical interpreting services in Indigenous languages despite the fact that there are still many citizens that need them – especially elderly persons who have little or no command of Spanish. Medical workers, doctors and nurses alike, are not trained in cultural competence before going to work in predominantly Indigenous communities, nor are they required or even encouraged to learn the languages spoken there.

Location of Puebla state in Mexico (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In San Miguel Tenango, a Nahuatl-speaking community in the northern part of Puebla state, a clinic, or Centro de Salud (‘Health Center’), was established 35 years ago. Although it provides services that are in great demand there, contact with clinic employees has remained very complicated and, on many occasions, painful. Until recently, discrimination against patients and obvious disdain for their culture and traditions on the part of medical personnel has unfortunately been commonplace. And barely any medical worker assigned to the Tenango clinic by the state department of health could speak any Nahuatl.

The older generation of Tenango residents, who have little proficiency in Spanish, have to rely solely on the assistance of their younger, bilingual relatives and friends when they need to go to the clinic. But the presence of such ad hoc interpreters, however helpful, conceals the fact that elderly patients will almost always omit important details that they are embarrassed to share. This risk increases even more when a medical worker, seeing that such a patient comes unaccompanied, picks any random person in sight and asks them to interpret. To prevent such cases, old people who live on their own try to organize chains of assistance between themselves, so that one who speaks better Spanish can help a number of her neighbors in case of necessity.

At the terminology workshop

Another problem is that even fairly bilingual residents come into difficulties when they have to translate biomedical discourse, full of specialized terminology and unfamiliar concepts, from Spanish to Nahuatl. Not every medic has been sensitive enough to assess the gap – social, cultural, and educational – between them and the population they serve. Thus, rarely enough effort has been made to ensure that the patients understand the doctor’s words correctly.

At some point health authorities established a position of ‘health educator’ in rural communities, whose duty was to organize informational meetings with the residents. More than that, the attendance of these meetings was made obligatory for persons who receive government assistance for the poor. But in Tenango all such meetings have been conducted in Spanish by a person from outside the community, and old Nahuatl speakers, who were required to show up and sit there until the end, could hardly understand a word.

Such disregard on the part of health authorities and employees could not but lead to a lack of trust towards public health services in Tenango. Even in cases when a member of the clinic’s personnel managed to build a bond with the community, they could be reassigned to another clinic at any moment, without consulting the residents in any form. For the public health system, the people of Tenango have been no more than numb recipients of services and their language has been treated as if it was non-existent.

Bilingual poster about dehydration

Talking with the residents, we realized how little it would actually take in terms of language in order to make people feel welcome on their visit to the clinic. And yet, even basic accommodations were rarely done, even in case that did not even involve any knowledge of Nahuatl. For example, doctors who worked in Tenango used to address any patient, irrespective of their age, with tú and not with usted, which is a more polite form of address in Spanish. In Tenango, however, politeness traditionally plays a crucial role in communication. In Nahuatl, the honorific prefix -on- in a verb is almost obligatory when you are talking to an adult, and this manner of speech has also influenced the way of how the local population speaks Spanish. Even using more formal language in Spanish could go some way to make patients feel respected.

The people of Tenango do not really expect that the employees of the health center would start to learn and speak Nahuatl with them, oh no. “But”, they were telling us, “even a greeting in the language would suffice”: that simple tzinōn that you can hear anywhere you go through the green hills of this sprawling community.

This situation inspired us to launch a participatory action research project, focused on the introduction of the Nahuatl language into the work of local health services. Our main aims were, on the one hand, to enhance the prestige and functional utility of Nahuatl, and, on the other hand, to improve health communication and health literacy in Tenango and neighboring villages. We have managed to involve in this project both locals who were eager to contribute to the well-being of their community and the personnel of the health center. As an active group, we hold regular meetings where we discuss vital health issues, trying to solve misunderstandings that have long festered between medical personnel and villagers.

Our first practical step was the development and production of bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish educational posters that tackled the most acute health issues in the community: diabetes type 2, dehydration, healthy nutrition, and high blood pressure. After discussing the content of the posters with the doctors, we then worked on the Nahuatl text and carefully tested it with as many speakers as possible before preparing the final version and the design.

We were well aware that the majority of elderly patients in Tenango could not read or write, but it was important to make Nahuatl visible in the clinic for the first time. Then we could proceed to the creation of audio materials.

Bilingual poster about diabetes

That symbolic appearance of Nahuatl in the local health center provoked a lot of interest among the residents, including young people, who started to take photos of the posters and disseminate them on social networks. Some older visitors noted that it would also be good to make signs in the clinic bilingual, and we happily included this task into our project. Medical personnel, in their turn, started asking us to translate other informational materials into Nahuatl, such as questionnaires distributed by the regional department of health.

The outbreak of Covid-19 seemed to bring our project to a halt but, in fact, also provided us with new opportunities. Although we both happened to be far from Mexico when the pandemic was declared, we decided to produce an informational video about the coronavirus and precautions against it in the variety of Nahuatl spoken in Tenango. At that moment, the virus had only recently emerged in Mexico and hardly any measures had been taken to curb its spread. But the inhabitants of Tenango were excited about the video, and it got shared by tens of people and seen hundreds of times just in a few days. Two weeks later, when certain anti-coronavirus measures had come into force, the village council asked us to produce another video in Nahuatl, with updated information, which we gladly did.

In addition, Herlinda recorded an informational audio message, which was then played in communal gatherings and from a loudspeaker attached to a truck belonging to the council, making the warnings heard across the whole village.

Nothing of this sort had ever been done in this region by health authorities. For the first time, health information in Tenango was given a Nahuatl voice, but even more importantly, it was a voice that many villagers easily recognized – it was one of their own voices. The impact of these innovations is yet to be assessed, but the demand for them and the impression they have had on the community already tell a great deal.

We can only hope that the current pandemic will make health authorities in Mexico – and in linguistically diverse societies around the globe – rethink their attitudes and policies towards Indigenous people, giving Indigenous languages and their speakers an adequate role in the services provided for the communities where these languages are spoken. There is a growing awareness of the importance of language-centered approach to health. As for now, we represent only a small community project, but we also want to set an example of how things can be changed and how a healthier language can also improve societal health.

Reference

A longer account of the study of communication in health services in Sierra Norte de Puebla will be published in Multilingua shortly.

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