Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

And for France, too, overseas expansion was under government control, ever since King François I had sent Jacques Cartier out to seek a North-West Passage in 1534. In the seventeenth century, Colbert had fretted over the non-expansion of the French language; but a century later, the French colonists on the ground had taken so little interest in de la Salle’s explorations along the Mississippi, let alone effective occupation of them, that Napoleon volunteered to sell them, sight unseen, to the USA. All the colonies that the French acquired in the nineteenth century, from Algeria to Indochina, were taken by French arms for the glory of France: la gloire remained an active motive. At the same time France was clearly still a major force in the scientific civilisation that it promoted, so that use of French could be presented as a channel to modernity. Settlers did move into Algeria, but elsewhere the force that made the French colonies a reality—and so spread the use of French—was the central government. Apart from in Algeria and lndo-China, this centralised approach meant that withdrawal of French control, when it came in the 1960s, was surprisingly speedy and painless. What often remained was an affection for the French language, a symbol of la civilisation française , rational in aspiration, national in sentiment.

Given that Russian was spread over three centuries rather nakedly as a mark of the power of the Tsar’s empire—of limited appeal to those not accepted as Russian—and that the twentieth-century attempt to convert it, after the fact, into a vernacular for ‘Scientific Socialism’ collapsed with the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian language has something of an image problem. The heavy-handedness with which its materialism was asserted contrasted with the lighter touch of French rationalism, and the even-handedness of British pragmatism, and the open-handedness of American consumerism. Russian’s associations with group effort and economic austerity are almost the converse of English’s conjuring up of initiative and ingenuity by individuals, leading to wealth through enterprise.

English, as a quintessentially ‘worldly’ tongue, can also be set against the atmospheres of world languages from a more distant past. Chinese and Egyptian, and indeed Greek and Latin in the ancient world, were all vehicles of civilisations that emphasised the value of the here and now, and at their best were able to provide a high standard of living to their citizens, as well as a degree of peace and security. Arabic and Sanskrit, by contrast, like Latin and Greek in the Christian era, were and are promoted by much more otherworldly cultures, focusing their speakers’ aspirations on spiritual aims, and seeing their degree of visible success or gratification in daily life as only a small part of what is really important. [216]

This difference of language culture is in our age very evident. In the early twenty-first century, the aspiration to learn English or Arabic has become distinctive for many young people all over the world. In the countries of western Asia and North Africa, Arabic Language Teaching has become a service industry seeking foreign customers, just like ELT in so many other parts of the world. English and Arabic are in some ways remarkably similar: both have a written history of about one and a half thousand years, have been spread around the world by speakers who often knew no other language, and have bodies of literature that freight them with associations many centuries old. But rare is the young person who strives to learn Arabic for Avicenna’s philosophy, the stories of the Thousand and One Nights or the novels of Naguib Mahfouz; even rarer is one who struggles with English hoping to read the King James Bible, or the Book of Common Prayer. In our age, Arabic is for foreign learners the language of the Koran, English the language of modern business and global popular culture.

Ohē, iam satis est, ohē, libelle ,

iam peruēnimus usque ad umbilīcos.

Tu procedere adhuc et ire quaeris ,

nec summā potes in schidā tenāri ,

sic tamquam tibi rēs peracta non sit ,

quae prīmā quoque pāginā peracta est.

lam lector queriturque dēficitque ,

iam librārius hoc et ipse dīcit

« Ohē, iam satis est, ohē, libelle.»

Whoa there, that’s enough, whoa there, my book.

Now we’ve the reached the endpapers.

You want to keep going on and on,

And can’t be stopped on the last page,

As if your subject was not exhausted

As it actually was on the first.

The reader is complaining and flagging,

even the publisher is saying:

’Whoa there, that’s enough, whoa there, my book.’

Martial, Epigrams , iv.89 (December AD 88) [721]

The simplest, biological, criterion for success in a language community is the number of users the language has. In setting the boundaries for such a community the linguist’s main guideline is ‘mutual intelligibility’: the community is, after all, the set of people who can understand one another using the language.

There are many difficulties with this definition. There are practical difficulties, having to do with the impossibility of actually testing whether populations can understand one another, one to one. How much understanding counts as knowing the language? And what if people typically know the language of their neighbours, and so can understand them even when they are speaking a different language? This is a common situation in Aboriginal Australia, but also in many other multilingual parts of the world. Then there are political difficulties, having to do with people’s desired or imagined membership of one community rather than another, and the tendency of census data to confuse members of an ethnic group with speakers of its traditional language. And there are, of course, many theoretical difficulties. Importantly, how many languages should be counted when they fade off at the edges into the next language, something they often do. Sometimes speakers of A can talk to B, and B to C, but A can’t talk to C. This is a common situation in the northern plain of Pakistan and India, extending up into Nepal, Panjabi gradually merging into Hindi and then Nepali. Sometimes speakers of A can understand B, but not vice versa, as in the notorious case of Portuguese and Spanish: intelligibility is not always mutual.

A further difficulty comes when the languages are considered historically. Mutual intelligibility has no doubt always been assured in each generation as between parent and child, but this is not enough to guarantee that the language has stayed the same down the centuries. We can’t easily understand what was written in English before the sixteenth century, and if we could hear their speech, we should probably have difficulty with our ancestors in the eighteenth. In fact, languages, even those spoken in the most standardised and widespread communities, almost always change. Should this have an impact on our assessment of language identity, and so of the success of a language over time? [721]

Consider, for example, the case of Latin. Should this language be considered dead, a noble tradition sadly ended, because it has no native speakers whose words are close to what we find in the texts of the Roman empire? Or should it rather be considered to have gone to language heaven? Its texts from every period are still read, and its modern forms, collectively called the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan and many more—are spoken worldwide, with a total speaker population of over 660 million, making it up to the present the second-most successful language in the world (after Mandarin Chinese). O death, where is thy sting?