HISTORY OF THE FUTURE SERIES

LANGUAGE SPREAD AND SURVIVAL: IS THE PAST A GUIDE TO THE FUTURE?
Nicholas Ostler, President, Foundation for Endangered Languages, on 16 March 2000

The lecture began with a snapshot overview of the languages in the world today, focusing on the Top 20 (out of 6,500!), the languages that have over 50 million speakers.
No. of speakers as First Language of
Top Twenty Languages (millions)
Chinese Mandarin 885
Spanish 332
English 322
Bengali 189
Hindi 182
Portugese 170
Russian 170
Japanese 125
German, Standard 98
Chinese, Wu 77
Javanese 76
Korean 75
French 72
Vietnamese 68
Telugu 66
Chinese, Cantonese 66
Marathi 65
Tamil 63
Turkish 59
Urdu 58
(Shocks to our Western view of the world begin even here: for example, fully a quarter of these are not national languages; Vietnamese is on a par with French; and many may not even have heard of Telugu, a language of south India which is as populous as Cantonese.) It considered what these 20 giant languages have in common: what combinations of political and demographic success brought them to this eminence.
The factors which have put today's big languages on top appeared to have been agricultural, cultural and political. Populous languages would be found in large, flat, tropical countries; in societies which were well-integrated and hence encouraged dense populations; and in states which had been successful in imposing themselves on others. This led to the question whether these factors will be important in the future.
The lecture continued with a tour through the pages of language history, reviewing the careers of some of the great languages of the past, and noting some strange parallels: Chinese and Egyptian, vast and culturally dominant in their regions for thousands of years, yet never spreading far; Sanskrit's curious attractiveness to foreigners, and its rigorous language control exercised without the benefit of writing; the alternation of big languages dominating the Near East over three thousand years, and the rivalry of Aramaic and Greek played out everywhere from Spain to Afghanistan for all this time; how Spanish benefited from the spadework of pre-Columbian imperialists in central and south America and so supplanted the various widespread Indian lingua-francas; how advantages in growing food allowed Bantu languages to spread far and wide across Southern Africa, and Australonesian across the Pacific, but over thousands of years; and the much faster spread of cowboy languages from the steppes of central Asia.
These last included not only Hungarian and Turkish, but also our own distant forebears, the Indo-Europeans. Their story is a particularly rich one, drawing on archaeology as well as linguistics, to tell how horse-taming, stock-breeding and chariots enabled an onrush over Eurasia in the name of a new family of languages.
Each of these stories rang its own variations on the subtle theme of how languages preserve and transmit human cultures.
After this linguistic tour of the world's past, the lecture stepped back to offer some deeper analysis, based as much on the diversity still to be found in the world's smaller languages as on the careers of the great. Why are languages thicker on the ground near the Equator, and more diverse in inaccessible regions? What have empires, not least the British Empire, done to diminish diversity, both by accident and design? Why is the present age witnessing an exceptional weakening of the smaller languages of the world? Global comparisons were made, often looking to backgrounds extending for thousands of years.
Before finally taking stock of the future, the lecture treated head-on the vexed question of how far different languages really do give access to different ways of seeing the world. They all convey human thought and emotion conceptually (unlike, for example, graphic art or music), and they are all broadly inter- translatable. But on every level of analysis, from the sounds they use to the categories they treat as basic, from the structures of their sentences to social norms they respect and enforce, they vary. Each language organises our mental world differently, and gives us different expectations of how other people will be. In this way, each language creates its own human world.
Part of the fascination is that these worlds overlap and feed into one another: speakers of other languages can still cross the boundaries between these worlds, and so enrich their own. Languages, then, bring out the full diversity of which we are capable while still remaining human. It cannot be a matter of indifference which language we speak, or which languages our ancestors spoke. Languages frame, analyse and colour our views of the world. A world described in a single language has one perspective, one degree of focus, is monochrome in contrast to the gamut represented by the world's full polyphony.
But this diversity can be fragile. Looking to the future, the lecture noted that we discount this part of our make-up at our peril, since it is the very variability of human beings that has enabled us to thrive in every one of the Earth's environments. In fact, one such new environment is our current globalised view of the world. The technologies which are making this possible, as their prices precipitately fall and their accessibility increases, may ironically yet come to promote rather than to suppress diversity, though perhaps on a networked and virtual, rather than a local basis. And even if one language is to dominate, it is far too early to know whether this will be English, Chinese or some other.
Nicholas Ostler
DISCUSSION
Asked how languages gave birth to others, Dr Ostler thought that they often split like amoebas, but they could also come together, as for example to produce English.
Another questioner suggested that simplification of a language could assist splitting and spreading; that could be a basis for forecasting the future. Are simple languages more likely to survive ? Dr Ostler agreed that using fewer distinct vowels and consonants, and less irregular word inflexion patterns might well make a language easier to learn for adults, but thought that survival depended more upon a language being valued. It was suggested that Danish and Dutch seemed unlikely to survive but Dr Ostler thought they could well be valued by their speakers who were largely bilingual.
What, it was asked, had been the effect of writing on the diversity and survival of languages? Writing, he said, could be an important supplement to language; but only about a third of existing languages are written today. The effects of literacy, though, were deep and not fully fathomed: Leonard Shlain, for example, has argued that when societies become literate, they enter a period of great turmoil; there was also typically a religious effect: their characteristic focus of worship moved from mother goddesses to gods.
Dr Ostler was asked if he was worried about the development of English, but he was happy to leave English to its own devices. He was more concerned about all the other languages which were struggling. The development of English is a cultural matter; it is too widespread for any one society to control its development.
In proposing a vote of thanks to Dr Ostler, Dr Sali Dening said she was most interested in the conditions for survival in the unique position of Chinese. Language determines so much in the way people look at things, and she recalled that French and German authorities were both concerned that only 20% or 25% of children were being taught the other's language. She wished all endangered languages well and thanked Dr Ostler for his enlightening and most interesting talk.
John Coates
Bibliography.
on the languages:
Andrew Dalby: Dictionary of Languages, Bloomsbury, 1998 (gives vignettes of about 150 languages beyond Europe)
Barbara Grimes (ed.): Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, Texas, USA, 2000. (14th edition) ( a catalogue of 6,500 languages)
on language spread:
Jared Diamond: The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, 1992; & Guns, Germs and Steel, 1998, Vintage
Daniel Nettle: Linguistic Diversity, Oxford University Press, 1999
Robin Dunbar: Grooming, Gossip and the Origins of Language, Faber, 1996
on English:
David Crystal: English as a Global Language, Cambridge University Press, 1997
Robert Phillipson: Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford University Press, 1992
David Graddol: The Future of English, British Council, 1997
on language endangerment:
David Crystal: Language Death, Cambridge U.P., 2000
R.M.W.Dixon: The Rise and Fall of Languages, Cambridge U.P., 1997

 

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