The 7,159 Dances – Reflections on how language shapes our world

I have been thinking and talking about languages lately— especially mother tongues. The passing of Irish writer Manchán Magan certainly influenced this. 

Manchán was a passionate pollinator of his mother tongue, An Ghaeilge (Irish). I find his love and devotion to this ancient language exuberant and encouraging. He spread so much pollen made of Irish words — pollen that will keep drifting and sprouting wildly on Irish soil, and perhaps in other parts of the world too.

What Goes Through Everything?

Two years ago, I wrote an article about the taste of the mother tongue. You can read the full piece here:
👉 The Taste of the Mother Tongue

In that article, I mentioned a riddle in Kurdish:

“What goes through everything?”
The answer is language.

This week, as I listened to some of Manchán’s recordings, I was struck by how he described languages as dancing differently — each one moving to its own rhythm and melody.

According to the language index Ethnologue, there are currently 7,159 different mother tongues in the world. Yet more than half of the world’s population speaks only 23 of them.

Think about that: as a species, we have developed 7,159 ways of “going through everything” — or, in Manchán’s words, 7,159 ways of “dancing differently in the world” — and yet we choose to use only 23. Such a waste of richness and diversity.

Throughout his life, Manchán sought to value this richness and the diversity of languages. He also believed that ancient languages could connect us to a wider and wiser reality of life.

At his funeral service last week, a passage from the introduction to his book Thirty-Two Words for Field — which he had updated for international audiences — was read aloud. I believe his words honour not only Irish, but also other ancient languages rooted in land and the cycles of nature:

“The book you hold in your hands is in English, a relatively recent West-Germanic language closely related to Frisian, German and Dutch. It developed when gangs of land-hungry Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians arrived in Britain around the sixth century seeking a new start. Since then it has achieved some success. And as such, it is an ideal medium through which to convey my own native tongue, which ironically was the first to be displaced by English.

By the time English was beginning to shape itself from its mishmash of German dialects, Irish was already a few thousand years old and contained insights and elements that reached further back to the Proto-Indo-European language spoken five thousand years ago by nomadic tribes roaming the south-eastern European plains.

Most European languages have Indo-European origins, but as Irish remained largely untainted by outside influences, the legacy of its tribal roots is more apparent. An Ghaeilge, to give it its proper title — or Gaeilge, as it is called outside of Ireland — is a complex and mysterious system of communication. It has encoded within it the accumulated knowledge of a people who have been living sustainably on the rocky, verdant Atlantic islands for millennia.

As a result, it is profoundly ecological, with an innately indigenous understanding that prioritises nature and the land above all else. Equally important is its ability to convey the magic that our ancestors perceived in the natural world and in the otherworldly realms that surrounded it. Words were believed not only to describe things, but actually to help summon them into being. That may seem like a bewildering concept to us now, but it was relatively common among old languages in which mantras and charms were believed to manifest reality.

Irish is particularly infused with this notion of magical ability, with countless terms and expressions based on a fairy consciousness — a belief in a mystical Otherworld that merges with our own. Since Irish predates our current fixation on reason and rationality, and is more in tune with the mythological world, it offers a wider sense of reality: a different prism through which to view our current existence. If our globalised mindset and stifling orthodoxy feel confining, you may appreciate the sense of freedom and possibility within this ancient language — one rooted in the basic elements of matter and the timeless cycles of the natural world.”

The Case of the Mysterious Sausage

I learned German when I was eleven years old, at a school in Istanbul supported by the Austrian government and a Catholic order called Sankt Georg. The following year, during the summer holidays, my parents sent me to Austria to stay with a family in Neustadl, Amstetten, so I could practise my German.

What I had learned at school was Hochdeutsch — the formal, standard version of German — but the people in Neustadl spoke a completely different dialect. It was quite a shock for my twelve-year-old self to spend three weeks away from home in a place where I couldn’t understand a word. In fact, I recognised only one: Wurst — sausage.

Each day, I heard the word Wurst several times in conversation and wondered why people in Neustadl talked about sausages so much. They spoke to me in Hochdeutsch, but among themselves they switched to their local dialect. I could have asked, “Why do you talk about sausage all the time?” but I was shy, so I kept wondering. One week passed, then another.

At the end of the third week, the father of the family drove me to the airport. In the car, I finally dared to ask about Wurst:

“Why do you talk about sausage so often?”

He burst out laughing. It turned out they weren’t talking about sausage at all — they were saying Mir is’ Wurst, a local variation of Mir ist egal (“I don’t care / It’s all the same to me”). What a relief to my twelve-year-old mind, which had been imagining endless sausages every day!

Not Just Words, But Worlds

Last week on Thursday, I spent a lovely afternoon with Michael, a storyteller colleague who lives in the Netherlands. I told him this anecdote, and he in turn told me about the differences between Afrikaans and Dutch.

Afrikaans is spoken mainly in southern Africa. It is closely related to Dutch because Dutch settlers colonised that region in the seventeenth century. As Michael explained:

“The Dutch language is full of metaphors. For example, if a few friends are arranging a time to meet at a restaurant, you might hear:
— It is sausage to me (meaning, It’s all the same to me).
— Are we doing the captain style or the sailors’ style? (Does everyone pay separately, or will one person cover the bill?)
— It is easier to cut the belt from someone else’s leather (It’s easier to order caviar when someone else is paying).
These metaphors don’t exist in Afrikaans. When Afrikaans speakers hear such phrases, they might understand the words but not the context.”

After that conversation, I realised that language isn’t about words themselves — it’s about the shared agreement on what those words mean. Language reflects our intimate connection to culture and to the people who cultivate it.

For instance, sausage isn’t a common food in Turkish culture, so hearing the word so often felt out of context to me. On the other hand, sausage is a cherished food in Austrian, Dutch and German cultures, so while they say “To me it is sausage,” meaning “To me, it is all the same,” they also imply, “I will eat the sausage any way — I don’t mind.”

A Spectrum of Understandings

Language, then, is not just about words; it is about what those words carry — the soil, the taste, the rhythm, and the worldview they come from. Some languages, like Irish or other indigenous tongues, root us in the land and its living cycles. Others, like the German of my sausage story, tie us to a particular culture and its shared understandings. Each one offers a different lens, a distinct dance of thought and sound through which life is experienced.

There are 7,159 languages spoken on this planet — 7,159 ways of seeing, sensing, and naming the world. This abundance reminds me that there is not one truth, one meaning, or one way of being, but a vast, colourful spectrum of understandings. Life itself is more diverse, generous, and surprising than any single language can ever express.

What does language mean to you?

I would love to hear your reflections. Please share them in the comments.