I’m a linguistics geek. I fully confess that the comparative study of languages, that baseline to which we understand and perceive our worlds fascinates me. It’s led me down a lot of odd paths, one of which has been a rather dilettante-esque study of the Indo-Europeans. Yesterday, after languishing on my bookshelf for ages I finally completed J.P. Mallory’s ”œIn Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth
More after the jump.
I’m not going to review the book, as there are plenty of those out there in the scholarly literature. I’m simply going to comment on one sentence in the book. Mallory writes, ”œAs Ernst Pulgram observed thirty years ago, there are three ways by which we might imagine a language to expand: the migration of complete populations, infiltration of an area by small groups; or diffusion. . . The last hypothesis has never been encountered.”
That got me to thinking about the definition of the word ”˜diffusion: the spread of linguistic or cultural practices or innovations within a community or from one community to another.”
I think we might very well be witnessing the global diffusion of English. Now, I’m not a language supremacist, or an absolutist, by any means. Languages die. Languages change. New languages are thus born out of old ones. It’s a story almost as old as human evolution, and possibly as older. I’m also very ambivalent about preserving languages on the brink of dying. If they die, they die. Certainly, I applaud the work of people who seek to document the literature of said languages, verbal and written, but the life and death of languages is much like the change of the seasons: timeless and irrevocable.
What I find fascinating about the idea of language diffusion is that it wasn’t possible fifty years ago when Pulgram made his comment. The technology wasn’t in place. But now with the internet? After visiting 54 separate nations on this planet and hearing at least that many different languages it always blows me away that so many people in the world speak English. And many people who speak English have little exposure to English speakers. In some places there is infiltration, like Korea or Japan where American soldiers are based. In others there is some small scale immigration, but none of it is wholesale. At least not anymore. Not after Australia and North America were populated by English-speakers, that is.
And so we live in an age where English has diffused across the globe, into the farthest nooks and crannies of China, into the jungles of Sumatra and the wilds of Anatolia. And there English is, breaking into the thought patterns of foreign tongues, sometimes like an unwanted guest, but always there. It’s fascinating to consider what the languages of the world will look like in two or three hundred years. Will they have become homogenized, or will they have broken up into so many news ones?
perhaps, but sad nonetheless. My ancestral language, Tsalagi once had three distinct dialects. These were labeled simply high, mid and low by the euros. Within 50 years of contact, one was gone. There are still two dialects, now distinguished by Eastern band or Western band. Either is hard as hell to learn without assistance from a fluent speaker, and such speakers are terribly difficult to find…going to their graves with frightening rapidity. A pity, I think, as the language is truly beautiful. It reminds me of song, actually.
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Distrust anyone who wants to teach you something.
Sean Paul,
I’m no expert on this, though i’m interested enough to have done a little reading. It seems that the date of publication and who authors use as sources is incredibly important for the Indo-European language story.
Recent archeological evidence suggests that if their was an Indo-European tribe, it was – at most – absorbed into Indian culture. There are finds pushing urban life in India back 9,000 years with artifacts showing yogis in meditation poses. And i know that there are at least a few researches who now think that the Aryans never existed except in the imagination of colonial anthropologists.
As to the diffusion of English, clearly the preeminent position of the US (and Britain before us) helps. But i also think that it’s a matter of ease. IMO, English is by far the easiest language to learn to the point of communicative competency. Without declination and nearly without conjugation, one need not fully understand English grammar to be able to get one’s point across in spoken English. (This all reverses at the higher levels)
Other tongues require a lot of knowledge before even the simplest thoughts can be expressed. And some, like Russian, require all that and the ability to intonate the sentence correctly. I don’t know about you, but i became a master at getting away with shitty grammar in Russian by acting like Russians and swallowing the ends of words so that it didn’t matter if i declinated improperly. (My professor regularly chided me that i was in Russia to learn Russian, not to learn how to talk like a Russian…but i learned the most in kiosk complexes and gypsy cabbing.)
It may also be as a fellow English teacher in Korea (a Brit) surmised. We English speakers are well trained in hearing people murder our language so we’re adept at filling in the blanks and listening over mistakes.
In The Times again…
Schott’s Vocab posted, December 16, an article by French linguist Claude Hagège having Q. & A. on the death of languages. For 2009, Hagège has out the book “On the Death and Life of Languages” [French].
The Times article is a bit abstruse for my level, but what I could slog through, I found interesting.
“All I know is just what I read in the newspapers.” – Will Rogers
“All men’s gains are the fruit of venturing.”
-Herodotus
It’s one thing to say that “the life and death of languages is much like the change of the seasons: timeless and irrevocable.” I don’t think that makes a good case for letting it happen, however. Letting some languages die because they don’t fit our present framework denies that there may be some future framework in which they are more relevant.
At the same time, I can agree that a language never exists in a vacuum; those who speak it, as with the use of any tool of any sort, do so because it serves a need. Even a completely constructed language, as Esperanto, Elvish or Klingon, does things for its speakers that another language does not. Obviate the need and the tool becomes obsolete to all but the antiquarian and the hobbyist.
What’s pivotal to me is the cultural context of the language. Not just how we order a double-shot half-caff skinny dry vente in Urdu, but the shape and depth of the culture from which any language grows. Languages contain and express the subject positions of their speakers. The old saws about the Inuit having 44 words for “snow” and the Hawai’ians having 20 words for “lava” are illustrative. They fill a need to differentiate.
The writer and traveler Richard Burton reportedly spoke and read a great number of languages, including Sanskrit and Babylonian. The historian and Masonic philosopher Albert Pike read and integrated many ancient source documents into his text “Morals and Dogma.” At one time, being at least moderately familiar with ancient languages — at least Latin and Greek — as well as more than one modern language, was the mark of an educated person. Books from the turn of the last century often cite aphorisms and quotations in their original languages, the assumption being that even if the reader does not speak that language, they are at least educated enough to recognize the meaning of a famous phrase. Learn and understand the phrase, down to the subatomic level of understanding the subject position from which it was spoken, and you have the culture in the palm of your hand.
And yet we applaud the “diffusion” of English. It’s a useful tool, but I wonder that maybe we’re reshaping all our problems to fit the tool, instead of honouring the diversity of tools to address unique problems. “When you have a hammer, suddenly everything looks like a nail.” Not so many years ago, the Northern High Plains of the U.S. became a mecca for “call centres.” There’s a mixed cultural metaphor for you!
Credit card companies and travel reservation hotlines went to South Dakota because people would work for lower wages, the location is approximately in the middle of the U.S. time zones, and the region is what is called “dialect neutral.” Which is to say, someone from South Dakota can be easily understood by someone from New York, or California, or Mississippi. Now, of course, cheap labour has trumped location and the dialect of the call centre has taken on a distinctly South Asian flavour that no amount of “Hi, my name is ‘Susie’” can cover up.
I’ve lately been turning this over in idle moments. The ability to travel anywhere at will has diffused English very widely. Cultures in isolation develop their own languages, from New Guinea to the Appalachians. As our globalized oil-and-debt-supported infrastructure contracts, I think we’ll see increasing divergence of local dialects again. Which leads me around full-circle to the realization that the diffusion of English also carries the markers of a culture and a worldview that may need to adapt to changing circumstances.
Though that means ultimately that communication across regions will require learning more languages (or at least allowing for regionalisms), I also think it restores the flexibility of language diversity to reflect and facilitate the development of robust localized cultures.