Future Words

In Future Words, Dominique Chen invites readers into a life shaped by multiple languages, cultures, and disciplines. Born in Tokyo, Chen grew up moving between Japan, France, and the United States, speaking several languages in overlapping ways. Here his journey—from learning his first French sentences in a Tokyo classroom, to competitive kendo in Paris, to programming early video games, to raising a multilingual daughter—becomes a meditation on how language forms the architecture of our world.

Chen reflects on the “bugs” that appear in both human speech and computer code, on the impossibility and beauty of translation, and on how untranslatable words—like the Japanese hakanai or the French éphémère—carry entire worlds within them. He draws on philosophy from Deleuze to Sapir and Whorf, and on design, anthropology, and cognitive science, to explore the Umwelt: the unique sensory and conceptual world each being inhabits. By moving between memoir and theory, intimate domestic moments and global cultural history, Chen reveals language as a living environment—something we adapt and co-create.

Erudite and witty, this book will make you hear language differently and see life as part of an unfolding conversation with the future.

Translated from Japanese by Shi-Lin Loh