Boonville, California, a few hours north of San Francisco, is a small town known for its craft beer and its unique contribution to communication – not the high tech communication that is the stuff of Silicon Valley, but rather a more basic sort of innovation. With a population of just over 1,000, Boonville is the home of Boontling, which, if you didn’t know, is the town’s own language, developed over the past century-and-a-half, mostly so that the denizens of Boonville could communicate with one another without being understood by outsiders.
To be accurate, Boontling isn’t really a ‘language’ properly speaking, not the way linguists define it at least. One could more accurately call it a regional vernacular, a jargon perhaps. It’s a variety of spoken English that has never been spoken by more than 1,000 people at a time and today its population of speakers is dwindling as their offspring adopt the ways, customs, and speech of the very outsiders that Boontling was intended to keep outside. No interpreter service can keep Boontling alive. The sheer force of standardization is pushing it into the past.
Boontling grew up in the late 19th century as a unique vocabulary of novel words relating to people and events specific to Boonville. To work hard, for example, is to be “ottin,” so-dubbed in remembrance of a Boonville original named Otto who was the hardest working man in town. A large share of the Boontling lexicon consists of substitute words for terms not quite fit for print, but it’s not all novel profanity. Some terms are innocuous enough – “zeese” for coffee, “blue-tail” for rattlesnake, and so on. It’s enough to fill a dictionary published by Charles Adams,Boontling: An American Lingo. Boonville residents refer to Adams’ publication as “The Big Book.” Adams and The Big Book are Boontling’s interpreter service to the English-speaking world.
The uniqueness of Boontling is uncommon in the US, but it hasn’t always been so. Prior to the beginning of the last Century, when wire and cable began connecting all corners of the country, some regional dialects of our common language were so isolated they were most uncommon indeed. Those are bygone days. Today, accents notwithstanding, all variants of English spoken in this country are completely inter-intelligible, with the exception of Boontling, of course.
You will not need interpreter services to get by in Boonville. All the town’s residents speak “downstream” English as well as Boontling. But what’s interesting about the case of Boontling is not how unique it is, but rather how typical it is of human language across nearly all times, all places and all cultures. Without the communication technology, broadcast media, and other features of modernity that serve to standardize language, the development of isolated dialects — pockets of small language groups and clusters of thousands of speakers, not millions — was the norm for language from as far back as history can trace. Even today, the overwhelming majority of the world’s estimated 6,000 distinct languages are spoken by no more than a few thousand people. Localization is normal.
To speak effectively with most of the world still means speaking a regionally specific variety of one language or another. The role of interpreters in most cases is to render the generic in specific terms, terms familiar to and comfortable for the target audience. Any interpreter service can generate your standard English message in standard French, German, Spanish, and so on, but that alone won’t get your point across to all people everywhere, not even in France, Germany, or Spain. Qualified local interpreter services are required to reach the more remote and variable pockets of language speakers where the homogenization of language hasn’t yet encroached.
The case of Boontling is more than an interesting side-note to the story of home-grown American English. It’s also an illustrative case of why interpreter services matter perhaps more now than ever before. Local interpreter services can help to connect disparate communities divided by linguistic uniqueness, preserving what is special about small language groups while facilitating truly global communication of any message.
