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

Overt imperialism is no longer defended. The end is no longer openly willed, though the two surgical wars that led off the twenty-first century, to conquer Afghanistan and Iraq, show that the means are still accepted. Likewise, the flow of large-scale migration is for the time being halted. In the past two centuries, flows from European countries had created much of what are now the English-speaking and the Portuguese-speaking worlds, mostly in the Americas, but also in Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a significant, but much smaller, flow from once colonised countries, which has created new language communities insulated in the heart of European lands.

The trends that will form the future are still obscure. At present, there is still a multitude of migration volunteers, found in a much wider range of countries, not just ex-colonies; the main brake on their movement and resettlement is the unwillingness of their desired host countries to take them in. While some pundits write of an impending ‘clash of civilisations’, pitting most immediately the Arabic- and English-speaking worlds against each other, the political fabric guaranteed by powerful nations seems firm.

But the world’s language future is not a matter of current affairs, or even news analysis. Language spread is a long-term thing, measured at the very least in generations and more often in centuries and millennia. The fundamental question of this book is to ask how—in what circumstances and with what dynamics—language communities have come to flourish in the past, as well as how some of them have declined and even met their ends.

The most straightforward way in which a language can come to flourish could be called the Farmer’s Approach. All the community needs to do is stay united, and grow its population. This is Organic Growth, which is the typical story of large languages in eastern and southern Asia, and not unknown even in Europe, especially towards the east. [4] As such it is prominent in forming the present-day Top Twenty language communities, to be considered close to the conclusion of this book (see p. 527). It is not a strategy of active initiative, but it does raise a consequent question: how have languages that follow such a policy been able to defend themselves from foreign communities, which might be tempted to invade and disrupt their steady growth?

The disruption would come, by its nature, from language communities following a less placid path: they may be called the Merger and Acquisition languages (M&A), by analogy with the offensive players in the modern business world. If Organic Growth is the strategy of farmers, this alternative could rather be called the Hunter’s Way.

Such change, resulting from direct contact between communities, is sometimes characterised as one of three types: Migration, where a language community moves bodily, bringing a new language with it; Diffusion, where speakers do not actually move in large numbers but where speakers of one community come to assimilate their language to that of another with whom they are in contact; and Infiltration, which is a mixture of the former two. [238] e.g. in Lipiński (1997:46). The progress of English into North America and Australia is a case of Migration; into India and Scandinavia, of Diffusion; and into South Africa, of Infiltration. [5] The widespread use of English in the European Union can be seen as Diffusion reinforced (after the UK’s accession in 1973) by Infiltration. It is only, for example, through Diffusion or Infiltration that a language can become a lingua franca, a language of wider communication: for this, a language must have been taken up by people who did not speak it natively.

These M&A language communities are the ones whose role develops fast, often through deliberate actions. In practice, these will be the main languages whose careers we trace, because of course they are the most eventful.

Is there any common feature that makes a language community entice others to use its language, and so join it? A way of viewing this book’s theme is as an inquiry into the roots of Language Prestige, defined as the propensity to attract new users. Under what conditions do languages have the power to grow in this way? And are there any properties of the relation between the new and the old language which make speakers willing and able to make the leap?

There is a pernicious belief, widespread even among linguists, that there is a straightforward, heartless, answer to this question. J. R. Firth, a leading British linguist of the mid-twentieth century, makes a good simple statement of it:

World powers make world languages … The Roman Empire made Latin, the British Empire English. Churches too, of course, are great powers … Men who have strong feelings directed towards the world and its affairs have done most. What the humble prophets of linguistic unity would have done without Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit and English, it is difficult to imagine. Statesmen, soldiers, sailors, and missionaries, men of action, men of strong feelings have made world languages. They are built on blood, money, sinews, and suffering in the pursuit of power. [239] Firth (1964: 70-1). This is a reissue of works originally published in 1937 and 1930.

This is above all a resonant cri de c$oeur from 1937, the dying days of the British empire, muscular Christianity and male supremacism; and (in his defence) Firth seems mainly to have been concerned to contrast the effectiveness of lusty men of action with enervated scholars in building international languages.

Nevertheless it really does not stand up to criticism. As soon as the careers of languages are seriously studied—even the ‘Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit and English’ that Firth explicitly mentions as examples—it becomes clear that this self-indulgently tough-minded view is no guide at all to what really makes a language capable of spreading. It works neither as an account of where all world languages come from, nor what all world powers achieve.

The best case for it might be thought to come from the examples Firth cites, multinational military empires that lasted for centuries, such as the Roman and British efforts. But although Romance languages are still with us, their common name showing their common origin, they grew up in countries where Roman rule had been stably replaced by Germanic conquerors. The Franks, Burgundians, Vandals and Goths who set up the kingdoms of western Europe after the fall of the empire at most had an effect on the accent with which Latin was spoken and added a few words to its vocabulary; they nowhere succeeded in imposing their language on their new subjects. Yet at the other end of the Mediterranean, the Romans themselves had had no better success in spreading Latin: in 395, despite over five hundred years of direct Roman rule, Greeks, Syrians and Egyptians were still talking to each other in Greek. (Thereafter the empire was divided east from west, and Latin soon lost even a formal role in the east.)

Farther afield, in the north of China, repeated conquests by Turkish-, Mongol- and Tungus-speaking invaders, who ruled for some seven hundred years out of a thousand from the fourth century AD, had no effect on the survival of Chinese; finally, the Tungus-speaking Manchu conquered the whole country in 1644, and yet within a century their own language had died out. Back in the Middle East, the triumphs of the Arabic-speaking conquerors were only temporary: from the mid-seventh century, their civilisation monopolised Iran, along with its neighbours to west and east, but when the Seljuk Turks conquered the country from the other side in the eleventh century, it became clear that Arabic had never taken root, and the language of everything but religion reverted to Persian.