The Body in the Word: An Introduction to Grammatical Somatics

For over a century, the field of linguistics has operated on the principle that the grammar of a language is an arbitrary set of rules, a mental abstraction separate from the physical world. A controversial and largely dismissed Belgian linguist named Dr. Annelise Volkov, however, is the lead proponent of a radical theory that threatens to upend that consensus. Her theory, known as Grammatical Somatics, posits that the structure of a language is not arbitrary at all, but is instead a direct, tangible echo of the physical bodies and environments of the people who first spoke it.

The core idea of Grammatical Somatics is that the dominant physical experiences of a culture—the postures of their labor, the landscape they inhabit, the way they move through the world—are encoded into the very DNA of their language. Volkov argues that grammar evolves to reflect the “somatic reality” of its speakers. While her work is considered fringe, her case studies are as fascinating as they are difficult to prove.

Her most famous example is what she terms “kineto-conjugation” in the language of the (now extinct) Turanic nomads of the central Asian steppe. According to Volkov’s reconstructions of the Turanic language, their verb stems would change not based on tense or mood, but on the direction of the speaker’s travel. The verb “to see,” for example, had a different conjugation if you were seeing something while moving eastward toward the sunrise versus westward. The grammar, she insists, was inseparable from the nomadic experience.

Another of Volkov’s key concepts is the “gravitational case,” which she identified in the grammar of the (fictional) Andean Keshwa, a people who live in high-altitude, mountainous terrain. In this language, nouns have different cases depending on their vertical position. A rock at the base of a mountain is described using the “submontane” case, while the same rock at a summit would require the “apical” case. This system of “altitudinal declension,” Volkov argues, shows a worldview where an object’s identity is fundamentally linked to its position relative to the earth’s gravitational pull.

Where Volkov’s theory moves from the radical to the truly heretical is in her concept of “Somatic Evidentials.” She claims that this “body-grammar” connection is not a one-way street. She posits that, over centuries, the grammar of a language can begin to influence the physical bodies of its speakers, a process she calls “linguistic transference.” Her most explosive and widely rejected paper drew a statistical correlation between the prevalence of the passive voice in the (fictional) “Old Fenric” language and a historically high rate of chronic joint inflammation in the skeletal remains of its speakers. She argued that a grammar that consistently frames its speakers as the recipients of actions, rather than the agents of them, creates a “somatic passivity” that manifests physically over generations.

The academic establishment has almost universally condemned Volkov’s work as pseudoscience, a linguistic version of Lamarckism. Yet, the theory of Grammatical Somatics persists in certain circles, a compelling, if unproven, idea. It forces a profound question: Is language just a tool we use to describe the world, or is it a living record of our physical past, a ghost of our ancestors’ bodies that we unknowingly inhabit every time we speak?