Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

In small societies the situation is radically different. If you are a member of an isolated tribe that numbers a few dozen people, you hardly ever come across any strangers, and if you do you will probably spear them or they will spear you before you get a chance to chat. You know every single person you talk to extremely well, and all the people you speak to know you extremely well. They also know all your friends and relatives, they know all the places you frequent and the things you do.

But why should all that matter? One relevant factor is that communication among intimates more often allows compact ways of expression than communication among strangers. Imagine that you are speaking to a member of the family or to an intimate friend and are reporting a story about people you both know extremely well. There will be an enormous amount of shared information that you will not need to provide explicitly, because it will be understood from the context. When you say “the two of them went back there,” your hearer will know perfectly well who the two of them are, where “there” is, and so on. But now imagine you have to tell the same story to a complete stranger who doesn’t know you from Adam, who knows nothing about where you live, and so on. Instead of merely “the two of them went back there” you’ll now have to say “so my sister Margaret’s fiancé and his ex-girlfriend’s husband went back to the house in the posh neighborhood near the river where they used to meet Margaret’s tennis coach before she…”

More generally, when communicating with intimates about things that are close at hand, you can be more concise. The more common ground you share with your hearer, the more often you will be able merely to “point” with your words at the participants and at the place and time of events. And the more frequently such pointing expressions are used, the more likely they are to fuse and turn to endings and other morphological elements. So in societies of intimates, it is likely that more “pointing” information will end up being marked within the word. On the other hand, in larger societies, where a lot of communication takes place between strangers, more information needs to be elaborated explicitly rather than just pointed at. For instance, a relative clause like “the house [where they used to meet…]” would have to replace a mere “there.” And if compact pointing expressions are used less frequently, they are less likely to fuse and end up as part of the word.

Another factor that may explain the differences in morphological complexity between small and large societies is the degree of exposure to different languages or even to different varieties of the same language. In a small society of intimates everyone speaks the language in a very similar way, but in a large society we are exposed to a plethora of different Englishes. Among the throng of strangers you heard over the last week, many spoke a completely different type of English from yours-a different regional dialect, an English of a different social background, or an English flavored with a foreign accent. Contact with different varieties is known to encourage simplification in word structure, because adult language learners find endings, prefixes, and other alterations within the word particularly difficult to cope with. So situations that involve widespread adult learning usually result in considerable simplification in the structure of words. The English language after the Norman Conquest is a case in point: until the eleventh century, English had an elaborate word structure similar to that of modern-day German, but much of this complexity was wiped out in the period after 1066, no doubt because of the contact between speakers of the different languages.

Pressures for simplification can also arise from contact between different varieties of the same language, since even minor differences in the makeup of words can cause problems for comprehension. In large societies, therefore, where there is frequent communication between people of different dialects and speech varieties, the pressures toward simplification of morphology are likely to be higher, whereas in small and homogeneous societies, where there is little contact with speakers of other varieties, the pressures to simplify are likely to be lower.

Finally, one factor that may slow down the creation of new morphology is that ultimate hallmark of a complex society-literacy. In fluent speech, there are no real spaces between words, so when two words frequently appear together they can easily fuse into one. In the written language, however, the word takes on a visible independent existence, reinforcing speakers’ perception of the border between words. This doesn’t mean that new fusions ain’t never gonna happen in literate societies. But the rate at which new fusions occur may be substantially reduced. In short, writing may be a counterforce that retards the emergence of more complex word structures.

No one knows whether the three factors above are the whole truth about the inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of morphology. But at least there are plausible explanations that make the relation between the structure of words and the structure of a society less than a complete mystery. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of another statistical correlation, which has recently been demonstrated in a different area of language.

Languages vary considerably in the size of their sound inventories. Rotokas from Papua New Guinea has only six distinct consonants ( p, t, k, b, d, g ), Hawaiian has eight, but the!Xóõ language from Botswana has forty-seven non-click consonants and seventy-eight different clicks that appear at the beginning of words. The number of vowels also varies considerably: many Australian languages have just three ( u, a, i ), Rotokas and Hawaiian have five each ( a, e, i, o, u ), whereas English has around twelve or thirteen vowels (depending on variety) and eight diphthongs. The overall number of sounds in Rotokas is thus only eleven (six consonants and five vowels), whereas in!Xóõ it amounts to more than 140.

In 2007, the linguists Jennifer Hay and Laurie Bauer published the results of a statistical analysis of the sound inventories of over two hundred languages. They discovered that there is a significant correlation between the number of speakers and the size of the sound inventory: the smaller the society, the fewer distinct vowels and consonants the language tends to have; the larger the number of speakers, the larger the number of sounds. Of course, this is only a statistical correlation: it does not mean that every single language of small societies must have a small inventory of sounds and vice versa. Malay, spoken by more than seventeen million people, has only six vowels and sixteen consonants, so twenty-two sounds in total. Faroese, on the other hand, has fewer than fifty thousand speakers but sports around fifty sounds (thirty-nine consonants and more than ten vowels), more than twice the number in Malay.

Still, as far as statistical correlations go, this one seems pretty robust, so the only plausible conclusion is that there is something about the modes of communication in small societies that favors smaller sound inventories, whereas something about large societies tends to make new phonemes more likely to emerge. The problem is that no one has yet come up with any compelling explanation for why this should be so. One factor that could be relevant, perhaps, is contact with other languages or dialects. As opposed to word structure, which tends to be simplified as a result of contact, a language’s sound inventory not uncommonly increases due to contact with other languages. For instance, when sufficiently many words with a “foreign” sound are borrowed, the sound can eventually be integrated into the native system. If such contact-induced changes are less likely in smaller and more isolated societies, that fact might go some way toward explaining their smaller sound inventories. But this clearly cannot be the whole story.