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

Despite the current vogue for English as the language of the young and free—-as well as the learned and the rich—ultimately the association of a language with profound religious truth gains the most loyal adherents, creating a reputation that may last for thousands of years. This is the only basis for a language to claim a value above simple association with some historic success. Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic all claim a mystic force which goes beyond the mere expression of meaning, or exchange of information among speakers. [228]As such, they may vanish from everyday discourse, but can never be demeaned as old fashioned or irrelevant, as long as there are believers to revere and treasure them.

Languages sometimes spread without any of these forms of prestige, of course. Brute military force can be powerful too, and it is difficult to see any charisma arising from the spread of Turkish to Anatolia, Spanish to Peru, Russian to Siberia, Japanese to Korea, or indeed English to Massachusetts. This is not to say that the conquerors will not have found their own behaviour impressive; especially in pre-literate societies, they may celebrate their conquests in word and song. Such heroic poetry is good for an indigenous literature, but it is unlikely to appeal to outsiders, let alone the conquered.

A prestige language, in general, is any foreign language that is learned for cultural advantage. Sumerian, Akkadian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Italian, French, German and English have all been such languages in their time. But the time will not last for ever. To be a prestige language, its native speakers—or the written records they have left—must somehow impress, and so attract imitators. This impact will depend on the cultural development of the recipients, as well as the merits of the originals. As potential recipients grow in wealth, knowledge and self-confidence, and begin to distinguish themselves, the attraction of a foreign model will shrink. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the charms of what was available in Latin and Greek diminished in the nineteenth century while the speakers of English were taking the world by storm with their own technical innovations and a global empire that left the achievements of the classics in the shade. Likewise, the charms of French and even the recently developing German faded before the self-confident speakers of English.

There are three different ways in which languages are learnt.

Every native language is learnt by small children almost without effort, from their families and older siblings. For this to happen, there has to be a reasonably stable environment, where most of the community around the child speaks the given language.

If this is absent, so that the surrounding people do not share a common language, a language may still be learnt, but it will be a new formation, distinct from all the languages that the adults knew, a mixture of them reconstructed on first principles. When a group of children learn such a language, a creole comes into being. If the learners are older, adults looking for some common means of de facto communication, the result is a pidgin.

The third possibility is that the language is consciously studied and learnt, either through daily exposure to it, or through formal instruction, perhaps at a school. This process does not depend on the native capacity for language-forming that is active in the minds of small children; in fact, it can be put into effect whatever the age of the learner. In this case, the learner must already speak another language, and use it—explicitly and implicitly—in acquiring the new one.

The first two ways are not in any way dependent on the structure of the languages being learnt. It is generally accepted by linguists that any natural language, of whatever structure, can be learnt by any normal child—regardless of the child’s ancestry or its parents’ own linguistic background. Some sounds, and some linguistic structures, may take longer to get implanted than others, but everything will come in time. This fact is almost the definition of what it is to be a natural language. As for the genesis of creoles, the matter is controversial, but it appears that they all tend to have a common structure, which emerges naturally as the language is formed. The structures of the contributing languages, from whose parts the learners are constructing the creole, have no effect on the structure of the new language as it comes together.

The third case, which is common when a language is spreading in a territory new to it, may, however, have some interesting consequences for the possible succession of languages. In this case, learners of a language will retain in their minds some background formed by the language or languages they knew before, what is called the substrate. This substrate may impose a constraint on the kind of language that can then be successfully learnt.

Such a constraint may be of two kinds. It may cause the learners to come up with a new version of the language, influenced by their old speech. English spoken in India has lost its characteristic diphthongs: the words gate and boat , [geyt] and [bewt] in England, are pronounced [gēt] and [bōt] in India. Likewise, the stress-timed tempo of English has been replaced by a more even, syllable-timed, pace. But more radically, the constraint may act as a major block on the learners ever gaining effective command of the new language. An example of this might be seen in the widespread failure of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Japan for several decades after the Second World War, despite Herculean efforts on all sides to give the next generation competence in this new skill.

The idea that there might be this kind of structural constraint on the adoption of a language is highly controversial; it will be difficult to demonstrate in a particular case because there will always be a multitude of non-linguistic reasons which might be inhibiting take-up of the language. But the perspective of this book, where language dynamics have been surveyed over centuries, gives some new arguments to show that it may be a real factor limiting the spread of certain languages into certain territories, or rather among certain populations.

Consider, then, the curious retrenchment in the domain of Arabic, which seemed to roll back from its farthest limits in the east and the west, about three centuries after its first spread following the death of Muhammad. (See Chapter 3, ‘Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission”, p. 93.) It settled permanently only in the territories that had previously spoken an Afro-Asiatic language, i.e. one that was structurally close to Arabic itself. First of all, Arabic took over the whole of the Aramaic-speaking world, modern Syria and Iraq. Here Arabic could have replaced Aramaic almost word for word. It then overran quickly, and subsequently pervaded, the countries in North Africa, whose vernacular was Egyptian (now known as Coptic) and Berber, although in these cases the spread was far slower, and—at least in the case of Berber—is by no means complete. But in al-Fārs (Persia) and in el-Andalūs (southern Spain), despite their early reputation as centres of Arabic scholarship, the language was expelled, except in the liturgy of Islam. These are precisely the countries where the substrate language was Indo-European, respectively Persian and Spanish; perhaps it is not so easy for a population speaking an Indo-European language to pick up an Afro-Asiatic one. [229]Certainly, the next major language spreaders to come through, the Turks, did not pick up Arabic, although they did accept, and even spread into Europe, the religion of Islam. The Turks’ language is even less similar structurally to Arabic than Indo-European is. Islam continued to spread in the second millennium, into the Far East; but never again did it carry Arabic with it outside the mosques.