Native tongues are just as semiotic. Living words weep and laugh, make double entendre , weave a double helix into gender, status and group. But I can only speak for myself. And I can only speak of the past. I meet all my Natives, I meet all my Strangers, in libraries and archives.
Historians never observe the past.
They only observe the past transcribed, textualised, in some way. The past, for an historian, is always somebody else's history. Recently someone called me excitedly from Cape Town, South Africa. They had seen words of mine in large red letters on a banner over the entrance to the South African National Gallery. There was an exhibition on living histories and memorialised identity at the Gallery at the time.