Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (5 page)

The historic forces of merger and acquisition which, over the last five hundred years, built up many of the European languages in the world’s Top Twenty seemed to have spent themselves—or at least to be dammed up—by the end of the twentieth century.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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:

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.

Evidently, total conquest, military and even spiritual, is not always enough to effect a language change. Yet at times an apparently weaker community can achieve just this. Consider Aramaic, the language of nomads, which swept through an Assyrian empire still at the height of its power in the eighth century BC, replacing the noble Akkadian, which went back to the very beginning of Mesopotamian civilisation. Or consider Sanskrit, taken up all over South-East Asia in the first millennium AD as the language of elite discourse, even though it came across the sea from India backed by not a single soldier. It even appears that Quechua, which became the language of the Inca empire in Peru in the fifteenth century, had actually been adopted as a dynastic compromise: the rulers gave up their own language in order to secure orderly acceptance of a vast extension of their power.

Economic power, often believed to lie at the root of the spread of English, whether under British or American sponsorship, seems even less coercive than the military. Phoenician shipping dominated the trade of the Mediterranean for most of the first millennium BC; for much of that time, it was backed up in the west by the dominance of the Phoenician colony of Carthage, which spoke the same language. But the Phoenician language seems to have remained unknown outside its own settlements: Greek was the lingua franca for international discourse, used even in the Carthaginian army. Farther east and later on, in the sixth to eighth centuries AD, the queen of the Silk Roads to China was the Iranian city of Samarkand: its language was Sogdian, but who has heard of it? Sogdian merchants, rich as they were, found it politic to use the customers’ languages—Arabic, Chinese, Uighur-Turkic and Tibetan.
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In that muscular quote, Firth had emphasised the religious dimension of power, and this is often important: perhaps, indeed, we should be talking not of language prestige but language charisma. Sanskrit, besides being the sacred language of Hinduism, has owed much to disciples of the Buddha; and Hebrew would have been lost thousands of years ago without Judaism. Arabic is more ambiguous: in the long term, Islam has proved the fundamental motive for its spread, but it was Arab-led armies which actually took the language into western Asia and northern Africa, creating new states in which proselytising would follow. Arabs were also famous as traders round the Indian Ocean, but the acceptance of Islam in this area has never given Arabic anything more than a role in liturgy. Curiously, the linguistic effects of spreading conversions turn out to be almost independent of the preachers’ own priorities: Christians have been fairly indifferent to the language in which their faith is expressed, and their classic text, the New Testament, records the sayings of Jesus in translation; and yet Christianity itself has played a crucial role in the preservation of, and indeed the prestige of, many languages, including Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Gothic.

In fact, proselytising religion has been a factor in the careers of only a minority of world languages. It could be claimed that religion is just an example of the cultural dimension of language, which represents the ultimate source of language prestige. Culture, of course, is an extremely vague word, covering everything from the shaping of hand-axes to corporate mission statements, as well as the finer appreciation of the sonnets of Shakespeare and the paintings of Hokusai; so its relevance will need considerably closer attention.
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In the analysis of prehistoric movements of peoples, and the apparent ruthlessness with which one comes to replace another (as in the Bantu-speaking peoples’ spread across the southern third of Africa, with consequent restriction of the domains of the San and Khoi; or the penetration of Austronesian sailors into South-East Asia and into contact with Melanesians), there is little reluctance to discuss the cultural factors presumed to have given the advantage. Finer arts and higher learning are not usually considered serious contenders. Cultural factors that enhance the ability to support larger populations (for example, by new forms of farming or husbandry) are deemed especially important. But simple innovations in military practice may also be effective.

Occasionally, brute biology takes over, and mere cultural differences are left on the sidelines, for a time irrelevant. If a population was vastly more liable to die from disease, as were the invaded inhabitants of the New World facing European interlopers in the sixteenth century, it hardly mattered that their weaponry and military tactics were also vastly inferior—or by contrast that the vegetables they cultivated (including potatoes and maize, tomatoes and chocolate) turned out to be world-beaters.

But the search for the causes of language prevalence is not usually so easily resolved. In the historic record of contacts between peoples, and contests between languages—when we have eyewitness testimony to keep us honest about what really went on—we often cannot point to cultural differences that were clearly crucial. Then we may have to look deeper: not just into the perceived associations of the different communities, how they looked to each other, the language communities’ subjective reputations as well as their objective advantages, but even—and this is deeply unconventional, especially among linguists—to the properties of the languages themselves.

Bizarrely, linguists almost universally assume that the basic properties of languages which they study—the kinds of sounds a language uses, its basic word order, whether it works by stringing together short and independent words or by coordinating systems of prefixes or suffixes—are irrelevant to languages’ prospects of survival. After all, they reckon, every language is by definition learnable by children: that’s what makes it a human language. If a community has problems propagating its language, there must be a social cause, not a linguistic one.

But for us, viewing the language as distinctive of the community that speaks it, we can only wonder what all that linguistic structure is there for. Perhaps a language’s type even has survival value, determining whether a new population that has long spoken another language can readily take it up or not. This is one of the innovations of this book: to suggest ways in which it might actually matter what type of a language a community speaks. (See Chapter 14, ‘What makes a language learnable’, p. 552.)

The plan of campaign for the book as a whole is to review, more or less in temporal order, the histories of languages that have loomed large in the world. It starts from the onset of literacy, because that is when we first have clear evidence of what languages people were speaking. Our policy at every point has been to require explicit evidence, in effect written traces, and so to pass over many events that are believed to have happened in a pre-literate past.
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And the story continues until we confront the major languages of recent growth, what we have called ‘M&A’ languages.