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

Whatever happens, any changes that do occur may have a surprisingly disturbing effect on the English speakers who remain. For three centuries now, the bounds of the language have continually expanded. Typical speakers may pride themselves on their pragmatism, and welcome the breaking down of language barriers, in the interests of wider understanding and easy communication. But when the language whose use is to be reduced is their own, expect discomfort to be registered. In 1984, some 8 per cent of the US population professed a first language other than English. This was enough for a programme of legislation to get under way in the early 1990s, to ‘recognize English in law as the language of the official business of the Government’. [742]There is now a continuing hubbub of proposal and appeal on the topic in many states’ assemblies, which remains inconclusive. We have yet to see how other English-speaking countries will react when they too can no longer easily assume that the option of communication in English is always open.

But no law and no decree anywhere has ever yet stemmed the ebbing of a language tide.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

What one cannot speak of, one must pass over in silence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus

At various points in this narrative, there has been a temptation, almost a duty, to speak of freedom. Many language traditions make a particular claim to speak with it, or for it. Freedom of speech is one of the cardinal ideals, upheld in the great modern statements of human rights, and endlessly controversial in practice. For many civilisations, freedom is the virtue that gives speaking its main purpose. Yet in the end, we have said next to nothing about it. Why?

Freedom is a particular concern of some kinds of states, particularly republics. Some peoples that have particularly exhibited freedom as an ideal are the Greeks, the Romans, the Venetians, the French after their Revolution in 1789, the British (though discreetly) after their ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688 which asserted the supremacy of Parliament over monarch, and the United States of America. But although it is generally agreed that eleuthería, libertās, libertá, liberté and freedom are translation equivalents, there has never been widespread agreement on what makes a person, a people or a state free—even in these polities, which are in a continuous, and very self-conscious, tradition of European political philosophy. [227]Is it independence from foreign overlordship, civic self-governance, non-recognition of hereditary rights, or the right of personal choice over religion, location and means of support? All these ideals suggest different ways in which the right of choosing what to say should be exempt from restriction.

From our perspective, the avocation of all these ideals, dear as they are to so many, has made little concrete difference to the survival and spread of any language community. Greek-language culture, as ostentatiously propagated round the Levant, Egypt and Persia by Alexander and his successors, and taken up by the Roman elite, involved little or no democracy, and mostly allegiance to absolute rulers— basileĩis —who declared themselves the legitimate successors of the kings of Macedon and Persia and the pharaohs of Egypt. Rome went on purveying Latin round its empire when the free, civic, institutions of the republic had been placed in thrall to a single family with army backing. French had become the preferred international language of European culture under the auspices of the Bourbons’ absolutist monarchy; the French Revolution projected the slogan ’Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité!’ and made France much more aggressive militarily, but it had little or no effect on the attractions of its language; its popularity began to falter only in the early twentieth century, long after the Restoration and the second fall of the French monarchy. The political freedoms so prized by Englishmen and Americans, which had brought the former to behead one monarch and depose his son, and then the latter to declare independence from the British state altogether, turned out to be quite compatible with a ruthless disregard for American First Nations’ rights as specifically granted by treaty, and the use of military force to build a global empire out of other peoples’ territories. Even ‘free trade’ turned out to be no bar to imperial preference within the British empire, or in our day to continuing massive subsidies to domestic producers. None of this in any way diminished the spread of the English language, whether by sweep-aside or re-education, all round the world.

Freedom of speech may now be a reality, not just an unfulfilled ideal, in all these languages’ current territories. But over the centuries and millennia of their development, freedom, under any definition, has never for very long been more than a hollow boast, or at best an aspiration. Our review of their histories has chosen to dwell rather on what life in these languages really meant.

Prestige is about positive associations: in the case of languages, the roots of prestige are associations with wealth (in Europe, this above all), but also practical wisdom, enjoyment, and spiritual enlightenment.

The attractions of French in early modern Europe stemmed from the abundance delivered by the French economy, and much the same is true of English today. Somehow, speakers feel that they can share in the wealth by accepting the language. But the prestige of Latin, in the years of the Renaissance and after, and of Greek, in the heyday of the Roman empire, came not so much from abundance of wealth as from wisdom—perhaps itself a result of positive associations, since it is only when wealth is in good supply that that luxury product, education, can also be afforded. This underlay the attraction of Chinese and Akkadian: the sheer inaccessibility of written competence in these languages, paid for through a decade or more of study, added greatly to their prestige, and hence curiously their attractiveness.

And certain sorts of knowledge also offer greater access to wealth: the Greek sophists of the fifth century BC showed this, making the power of persuasive speech available at a fee; modern governments are buying into the same motive when they see competence in English as the road to economic development.

kaì toũto pleĩn ē muríōn est’ áxion statērōn

hairoúmenon toùs hēttonas lógous épeita nikān

And this is worth more than 10,000 staters to take the weaker argument and then win

Aristophanes, Clouds , 11. 1041-2 (Athens, 423 BC)

All prestige languages give access to a special enjoyment, because they all have extensive literatures, and the first purpose of literature is to give enjoyment to the people who can appreciate it. Usually, knowing that not many others can share the appreciation has been part of the pleasure. This has been a charm of classical languages down the ages, from the Akkadian epics recited in the Hittite tablet-house of the thirteenth century BC to the Persian poetry quoted in seventeenth-century India and the French novels read in nineteenth-century Russia. But in the present age the charm of the prestige language, English, is somewhat reversed—perhaps as a side effect of the first globalised market in culture. English, especially as the American entertainment industry promotes it, is meant to convey that its culture is universally accessible, that it gives a release from other languages’ traditions and restraints. The purported special link with freedom is part of this, but as we have just argued, this is hard to sustain as serious politics. All the same, if you are rich, it’s much easier to be free and irresponsible.