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À la mémoire
de Suzanne Aline Marie DeLarichelière
List of figures viii
List of tables ix
Prologue 1
1 Language origins and language diversity 9
2 Interpreting language diversity 31
3 The emergence and measurement of multilingualism 43
4 Dialects and other language varieties 61
5 Multilingual abilities 75
6 The consequences of Babel: Lingua francas and translation 93
7 Keeping languages pure 109
8 Languages and identities 123
9 Language decline and revival: Basic factors 137
10 Language decline and revival: Advocacy and activism 149
11 Language planning and the ecology of language 165
12 Postmodern perspectives 183
Epilogue 197
Notes 200 References 220 Index 248
List of figures
1.1 The Tower of Babel by Anton Joseph von Prenner (1683–1761) 10
1.2 Adam names the animals in the Garden of Eden 15
1.3 Sir William ‘Oriental’ Jones (1746–1794) 25
1.4 The global distribution of the major language families 26
1.5 The central branches of the Indo-European family tree 27
2.1 Dorothy (Dolly) Pentreath of Mousehole (1692–1777) 32
3.1 Taking the census (volkstelling) with the Theunisz family of caravan dwellers, Amsterdam, 1925 51
3.2 Multilingual plaque at the entrance to the European Parliament, Brussels 59
4.1 Cockney rhyming slang on an ATM in Hackney 73
5.1 Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) 87
5.2 The Mortlake mausoleum of Sir Richard and Lady Burton 88
7.1 Dr Samuel Johnson and his Dictionary of the English Language (6th edition, 1785) 116
7.2 Sir James Murray (1837–1915) 118
7.3 Noah Webster (1758–1843) 120
10.1 Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) working on his dictionary of Hebrew (c. 1915) 151
1.1 The ten most widely spoken languages 28
3.1 Pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ in New York and Reading 57 List
Prologue
Introductory note
This is a second edition of a book (in English) that had earlier seen the light of day, in rather different form, in Catalan and Spanish editions. Even though it is now presented in a much revised and enlarged version, it can still only touch upon many important topics that are covered more thoroughly elsewhere. It does, however, provide an overview of multilingualism that is reasonably complete, if abbreviated, and it is meant for all those who find discussions of language and languages both interesting and informative. It may also prove useful for students, either by itself or in conjunction with other linguistic resources.
I present here a picture of global linguistic diversity, with some of its important ramifications and consequences, but I also try to show that many of the most compelling aspects of this diversity are not linguistic in any narrow or self-contained sense; rather, they have to do with the symbolic and identity-marking features of language. If languages were only instruments of communication, there would still be a great deal to say in a world that contains several thousand of them: why there are so many, how different they are from one another, how they present reality in different ways to their speakers, and so on. It would also be useful, particularly for speakers of ‘big’ languages, to discuss in some detail the multilingual capacities that characterize the majority of the world’s population, the normality of multilingualism, and the statistically minor category
of monolingualism. There is a great deal more to say, however, when we realize that languages are totems as well as tools. For then we enter the highly charged psychological and social domains of group attachments, the most powerful and the most historically interesting categories here being ethnic and national affiliations. Even a cursory glance at the table of contents of this book will reveal the attempts to comment upon the intertwining of language and group identity.1
Many languages are mentioned in the book, but many more are not. One cannot deal with all settings and all varieties, of course, and for this reason I have tried wherever possible to make points and to highlight situations that have clearly generalizable features. (I invite readers to pause now and again, to consider how a description or assessment of a particular language setting might or might not find echoes in other circumstances, in other communities.) Since social-scientific work generally reveals a lack of historical and crossdisciplinary awareness, the topics and developments discussed here are given some suitable contextualization, wherever feasible. I have also been attentive to the most significant and coherent treatments in the relevant scholarship. Whether one remains with the Englishlanguage academic literature or ventures further afield, there is much less serious work to be found on non-European contexts, despite the obvious richness of multilingualism in Africa, Asia and South America. Nonetheless, I have been able to make some mention of this richness in the book. Given the current global linguistic picture, a great deal of the discussion has to do with interactions between ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ languages. More specifically – and as most readers will know – these involve contact (and often conflict) between English and other varieties. I should say something here, then, about the unique status of English in the world, and some of its important ramifications.2
English in the world
Since so many modern multilingual scenes take place on a stage for which English provides the general backdrop, I thought it useful to set out a few contextual details in this short section. And, since so much
attention has been given to resisting the global pervasiveness of English, and to improving the fortunes of ‘small’ languages, it is also useful to bear in mind – from the outset – Abram de Swaan’s simple observation: ‘the more languages, the more English’. The implication is that increases in linguistic diversity may actually strengthen the need for a cross-cultural lingua franca. Something to bear in mind for all opponents of linguistic ‘imperialism’.3
In 1578, John Florio published First Fruites, a book that provided ‘familiar speech, merie Prouerbes, wittie Sentences, and golden sayings’ to teach Italian to English gentlemen. In Florio’s time (c.1550–1625), French, Italian and Spanish were the powerful ‘international’ varieties, widely studied in Tudor and Stuart England. Italian challenged the supremacy of French in both the cultural and the commercial worlds, and many prominent Elizabethans learned it. Indeed, the queen herself was a student, along with luminaries like Edmund Spenser and the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesly – a literary patron to Florio and, more famously, to Shakespeare. Few people in the sixteenth century would have predicted global status for English, a language with 4 or 5 million speakers, and well back in the linguistic sweepstakes. One of Florio’s set conversation pieces makes the point that, once across the Channel, English loses most of its usefulness. The first speaker notes that English is a language that ‘wyl do you good in England, but passe Douer, it is woorth nothing’. Then, in reply to a question about the state of the language itself, he adds: ‘Certis if you wyl beleeue me, it doth not like me at al, because it is a language confused, bepeesed with many tongues: it taketh many words of the latine, & mo from the French, & mo from the Italian, and many mo from the Duitch.’ A mixed and bastardized variety, of only insular value.4
I mention Florio’s work here as a salutary general example of the changing fortunes of language and, in the case of what is now the major global lingua franca – often described as an agent of cultural and linguistic imperialism – a reminder that English has not always been a linguistic power-house. The reasons for its growth are familiar enough to require no special attention here; all languages owe their fortunes to the status of their speakers and, even when Florio was writing his manual, the seeds of English global dominance were being planted and nurtured. The language did not follow the usual course, however.
Historical precedent would have suggested that the decline of British power meant the waning of English, but the language received a renewed lease of life as America took centre stage. More unusually still, there may be a third act to the drama, since English has now so thoroughly penetrated the non-anglophone world. Rising economies everywhere are already well used to English, and to its lingua-franca value, both within and between countries. One hesitates to predict that even the dramatic surge in Chinese power and influence will lead to the widespread replacement of English by Mandarin.
While there is now a considerable literature examining the allegedly baleful effects of English linguistic imperialism, there are also voices from beyond the traditional ‘anglosphere’ that not only accept the place of English, but also see it as a medium that has grown far from its original roots and is no longer ‘owned’ by its original speakers. In 1996, Sridath Ramphal, the Guyanese Secretary-General of the British Commonwealth, wrote that English had become a world language, not a language of imperialism. More recent comments along the same lines have come from Farzad Sharifian, an Iranian linguist who claimed English as an international language; from Sung-Yul Park, writing about the ‘local construction of a global language’ in Korea; and from the Japanese sociolinguist Nobuyuki Honna, who sees English as ‘a multicultural language’. Suresh Canagarajah has noted that the use of English as a lingua franca in non-native contexts may facilitate a desirable unity of action in movements for national liberation, for instance. Fuller arguments have been made by Philippe van Parijs, who sees the desirable lingua-franca status of English arising ‘from no hidden conspiracy . . but [as] the spont aneous outcome of a huge set of decentralised decisions, mainly by non-anglophones, about which language to learn and which language to use’.5
Multiculturalism, nationalism and language
Readers may wonder why I merely touch on multiculturalism and nationalism in this very brief section. Large literatures exist for each of them and, within that extensive coverage much mention is
made of their relationships with language. That is one reason why I do not delve more deeply into them here. The more important reason is that the principal ways in which matters of ethnicity, nationalism and culture intertwine with language are made quite clear throughout this book, and this is particularly evident in those many places where I discuss contacts between bigger and smaller languages and communities. Here, then, I wish only to emphasize the point I made at the beginning of the book about the powerful symbolic value that languages possess, which so often comes to the fore when ethnic and national contacts become especially salient or problematic, and whose contribution to the marking of group borders is considerable. I shall return to language-as-symbol in several of the later chapters here.
The mundane instrumental aspects of language provide, in themselves, rich material for study and analysis, and contribute a major pillar to individual and group identity. Most speakers of big languages do not reflect on this contribution very often, simply because it is an unremarkable ‘given’. Indeed, the daily language of many such speakers is also the language of their culture; there is thus a continuity between the past, with its literary and historical associations, and the present. You read poetry in the same language you use to buy apples. What is of immediate instrumental value also carries symbolic freight, and the language-and-identity linkages are clear, if not always uppermost in the mind. They often become very central, however, when linguistic instrumentality is waning or has, indeed, been lost. It is hardly surprising, then, that symbolic aspects of an ancestral language may help to sustain a sense of ‘groupness’ when that language is on an instrumental decline. Not only that: the powerful cultural associations of a language no longer widely spoken may provide a base for vernacular revival – or so linguistic nationalists hope and believe. The upshot here is that much of the subject matter of this book – language and languages in all their forms – deals either explicitly or implicitly with the relationship between language and cultural identity. And this means that, if there were sufficient time and space, it would make a great deal of sense to discuss multiculturalism together with multilingualism. Instead, I can only remind the reader that multiculturalism often implies multilingualism. Indeed, if we accept that languages that have come to possess only
symbolic value for a cultural community might still be discussed under the heading of ‘multilingualism’, then we could replace that ‘often’ with something close to ‘always’.
In most countries – particularly, of course, those immigrantreceiving countries of the new world – multiculturalism has long had de facto status. Canada was the first to give it de jure status, however, to make multiculturalism official. The idea of a ‘mosaic’ of indigenous and immigrant populations was introduced by a journalist in 1922. Four years later, a worker for the YWCA in Canada used the word in the title of her book – she went on to become the secretary of the organization’s ‘Council of Friendship’, set up to assist the integration of newcomers to the country. ‘Mosaic’ then appeared in the title of a 1938 book which compared the Canadian arrangement to that of the American ‘melting pot’, and which can be seen as introducing the concept of multiculturalism – although not the word, which began to emerge during the 1960s. The findings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (established in 1963) led to the Official Languages Act (1969) and the adoption of a federal policy of multiculturalism followed in 1971, later enshrined in an Act of 1988.6
Officially supported multiculturalism is a rare bird. A recent summary of multicultural policy in twenty-one democratic countries shows that only Canada and Australia enshrine such a policy in legislative terms. Since Canada is officially bilingual, and given the sometimes fraught relationship between its francophone and anglophone populations, the multicultural policy exists within a bilingual framework. The French were particularly opposed to endorsing any ‘ethnic’ language, for fear that that would act against the maintenance of French. At the same time, some of those immigrant groups for whom multicultural accommodations were made have regretted (to put it mildly) that their languages were not included under the federal cultural umbrella. A succinct account of the basic objection here – of the difficulty of reconciling official linguistic dualism with ethnocultural pluralism –was provided by a Ukrainian scholar, who described the federal policy as one of ‘political pragmatism’ which:
pleased no one . The failure to provide multiculturalism with a linguistic base especially displeased the Ukrainians; the loosening of the ties between language and culture angered the
francophones who disliked any suggestion that the status of their culture was on a par with that of other ethnic groups.
The summary study found that, besides the country-wide policies of Canada and Australia, some states do make partial or regionally based multicultural accommodations for immigrant communities. Every reader will be aware, of course, that a heady mixture of concerns about the non-integration of immigrants and refugees, Islamophobia, right-wing activism, racism and political populism has meant that, over the past decade, many European leaders have declared their multicultural efforts to be failures.7
Nationalism is a second important topic in which languages play a central role, but – as with multiculturalism – I have not broken it out for separate examination. Again, however, the matter of language-asnational-marker is implicit throughout the text. In fact, if we realize that the ethnic affiliations that define and fuel multicultural dynamics are nationalisms writ small, if we understand that the demands for cultural recognition and respect are essentially the same at both levels (leaving aside nationalist demands for accreditations as independent states, of course), then the two topics I bring up in this section are reflections of one another.8
Notes and references
I have included a great many references and endnotes, although the flow of the text does not require that they be consulted. I may have rather over-egged the pudding here, but I thought it valuable to provide the fullest documentation for readers who may be concerned to follow up on some parts of the discussion. I apologize for the large number of references to my own work – if nothing else, readers will gather that virtually all of the topics treated in this book have been matters of great interest to me over a long time.
1
Language origins and language diversity
Introductory note
Readers may think it odd that I have devoted the next two sections to biblical and, more generally, ‘spiritual’ aspects of language –especially since I go on to give only cursory attention to modern views of language origins. My reasoning here is twofold. First, the story of the Tower of Babel and its ramifications is intrinsically interesting, particularly as it leads us towards the odd phenomenon of glossolalia. Second, the debates about the language of Eden are also fascinating in themselves (and not without some humorous and/or bizarre asides), besides telling us something of both religious and secular arguments involving language. The specifics of most of these are now mainly of historical interest, but desires to associate one’s group with a particular language are still very much with us. Arguments claiming that one language is above others in terms of ‘purity’, or greater internal logic, or aesthetic superiority, also have modern representations. While various aspects of these matters are taken up in this book, I can anticipate a little by repeating that the central and unifying feature of them all is the relationship between language and group identity.
Spiritual language I: Babel and Babble1
In the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, the divine punishment for human temerity was the confusion of languages. Of course, many scholars have long felt that linguistic diversity does not reflect a punishment at all but, rather, comprises a vital component of a larger and entirely desirable human diversity. Einar Haugen, for example, thought that it was hard to see Babel as a ‘curse’ and later, in a paean to bilingualism and diversity, he wrote about the ‘blessings’ of Babel. A possible interpretation of Babel suggests, in fact, that neither punishment nor blessing is the best characterization; instead, God’s action can be seen as a judgement and a reminder (none too subtle, of course) of the divine injunction to disperse and multiply. Among others, Marianne Moyaert has pointed out that it was not the supposed arrogance of the tower builders – seeking to climb too close to heaven – that disturbed the divine mind, but rather their cultural and linguistic continuity: ‘one people and one language’ intending to
FI g URE 1.1 The Tower of Babel by Anton Joseph von Prenner (1683–1761), after the 1563 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569), Metropolitan Museum of Art (Public Domain).
‘stay together at one place’. In this view, God intervenes to restore the diversity previously ordained. Incidentally, as with stories of great floods, dramatic language dispersals are described in the mythologies of many cultures. George Steiner thus writes that ‘no civilization but has its version of Babel, its mythology of the primal scattering of languages’ or, as he put it elsewhere, a ‘remembrance of a primal severance, of a brutal weaning’. One of the most comprehensive treatments is Arno Borst’s Der Turmbau von Babel, a work in six volumes.2
In biblical terms, the linguistic confusion at Babel was remedied, albeit only in a spiritual context, by the miracle that occurred at the first Pentecost – a word meaning ‘fiftieth’, thus marking a holiday celebrated seven weeks, or fifty days, after the Jewish Passover. We read in Acts that, at this first celebration after Christ’s martyrdom, the apostles were suffused with the holy spirit and ‘began to speak with other tongues’. Those who listened were amazed, ‘because that every man heard them speak in his own language . . . how hear we every man in our own tongue?’ But Peter and the apostles said that this new mutual intelligibility was partial fulfilment of a prophecy, one that foresaw the ‘pouring out’ of God’s holy spirit. The result is a double miracle, inasmuch as the speakers were in receipt of divine inspiration, and the listeners required some heavenly interpretation service to make sense of what would otherwise be gibberish.
In some interpretations, the passage in Acts suggests xenoglossia, the ability to speak in a language one does not know, but which is nevertheless an existing variety. Those listening to the apostles were members of more than a dozen groups – from Parthians and Medes to Cretans and Arabians – and they were astonished to find that they understood the speakers (all of them ‘Galilæans’). Were the apostles actually speaking in the many languages of their listeners, then? Or were the latter able to understand what was said – however it was said – in their own tongue? Is the miracle in the speaking or in the hearing? A third possibility is that the ‘other tongues’ produced by the holy spirit were indeed a type of glossolalic speech – no real language at all – in which case the miracle was indeed a double one.
The word glossolalia derives from a Greek compound uniting ‘language’ with ‘speech’ and was coined by Frederic Farrar in his life of St Paul. He referred to ‘soliloquies of ecstatic spiritual emotion’,
but also suggested caution in both practice and interpretation. Here he drew inferences from the apostle’s own admonitions, as found in I Corinthians, where Paul says that prophecy is preferable to speaking in tongues – indeed, if such speech is not based in revelation or divine prediction, if it does not flow from the holy spirit, then it is a false quantity. There is, Farrar wrote, a possible ‘rivalry of unmeaning sounds among the glossolalists’, and of a ‘manifestation at first both sacred and impressive, but liable to easy simulation and grave abuse’. This ‘gift of tongues’ appears throughout Christian history, but Farrar and others – both within and without the church – have described its hysterical symptoms, which often lead to ‘disorderly and deplorable’ consequences.3
In the contemporary western world, glossolalia is found most often in some of the smaller branches of modern Pentecostalism, but it also occurs in larger charismatic and evangelistic settings. The redoubtable Billy Graham gave it his imprimatur in the 1970s, as did the Southern Baptist Convention in 2015. Glossolalia has also been important in the Mormon tradition. While Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, cautioned that there is nothing ‘more easily imitated by the devil than the gift of tongues’, he nevertheless acknowledged its usefulness in missionary work.4
Glossolalia is perceived as one of the revelations of the holy spirit. In fact, five such manifestations are mentioned in Mark, the other four being the ability to heal the sick, to cast out devils, to handle venomous snakes and to drink deadly poison. Some or all of these divine gifts can be found in current Christian sects. The Appalachian ‘Signs Followers’ exhibit all five, with a notice in its West Virginian church pointing out (in uncorrected copy here) that:
The Paster and Congregation are not Responsible for anyone that handles the Serpent’s and get’s bit. If you get bit the Church will stand by you and pray with you. And the same goes with drinking the poision.5
Glossolalists themselves obviously believe that speaking in tongues is a sign of divine and desirable possession, but more disinterested assessments reveal psychological and neurological underpinnings. From a linguistic point of view, it is clear that, while glossolalic ‘words’
are ‘semantically empty and lacking in grammatical patterning . they do have phonological patterns, and these are derived from the speaker’s native language and from any other language(s) s/he has heard.’ With affective or emotional force, but without rational meaning, historical and contemporary manifestations of speaking in tongues clearly do not have the semantic characteristics that appeared at Pentecost. Modern glossolalists may assume that the infusion of the holy spirit produces ‘real’ language, but they do not expect either transmission or reception of logically or grammatically understandable information.6
Spiritual language II: From the garden of Eden
If linguistic diversity first occurred because of some celestial intervention, some deliberate confusion, what came before? What was the original language? There are one or two quite well-known experimental investigations – perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not – based on the assumption that, if left uninfluenced, children would somehow come out with that first variety. Herodotus reports that the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik arranged for two babies to be nurtured without hearing any language: at the age of two, the infants apparently said becos, a Phrygian word meaning bread. Early in the thirteenth century, the Holy Roman Emperor attempted a similar experiment, but without success, for it was found that ‘the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments’. Later on, James IV of Scotland put two infants with a dumb woman, and ‘some say they spoke good Hebrew’. The assumptions underpinning these regal enquiries went unsupported, of course, not least by the naturally occurring ‘experiments’ provided throughout history by ‘wolf-children’ and ‘bear-children’. None of these feral youngsters have been able to speak, and most efforts to teach them language have been failures. Victor, the ‘wild boy of Aveyron’, discovered in 1799 aged about eleven, is the best known case here.7 Dubious empiricism aside, the question of the primal human language has always been important, in both religious and secular
settings. In terms of the great monotheisms of the classic world, it has generally taken the form of enquiry into the language of Eden. This was once important (although hardly evidentiary, of course) and the early speculations, while quite without linguistic or historical merit, remain of some psychological and social interest. This is simply because they are a manifestation of the place that language has always had in our sense of who we are. And what, after all, could be more important than being able to show that your language was, in fact, the very first one (or, at least, a lineal descendant of that ‘Adamic’ variety)? The implications for group and individual identity, for relations with other people, and for communication, are considerable. Any ‘winner’ here could claim both linguistic and cultural superiority. The search for the divine language, then, is the earliest example of something that has a continuing resonance in discussions of multilingual contact and conflict. These commonly involve languages of greater or lesser social force, languages with which speakers have very close affiliations, languages about which strong opinions are held.
Genesis tells us that after God had made all the birds and beasts, he ‘brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.’ Or, as John Milton has the first man say, in Paradise Lost:
I nam’d them, as they pass’d, and understood Thir Nature, with such knowledge God endu’d My sudden apprehension . . .
Once, then, there was an original and ideal language and, unlike all languages since, there was a mystical but perfect correspondence between words and the things that they named. Many believed that that blissful language of Eden, the divinely inspired lingua humana, was necessarily a perfect medium – but to identify it and to make a case for some relationship with an existing human language proved rather more difficult. In fact, more than three centuries before Milton, in the Divine Comedy, Dante’s Adam says that his language was long extinct before the time of Babel, which rather complicates the matter. Earlier, however, Dante had held (in De vulgari eloquentia) that the language of Eden was Hebrew, and that this remained the common language until the great confusion of tongues.8
From about the second century BCE, Jewish literature gave pride of place to Hebrew: this was the medium of revelation, the language in which God spoke to Adam, the language used by all creatures until the fall, and all people until Babel. Hebrew had the support of most of the Christian community, too. Virtually all of the Greek, Latin and (later) Byzantine patriarchs supported its primary status, as did most of the Arabic-speaking Christian theologians. Among other things, this support was itself a buttress of the Christian claim to be the ‘new Israel’. Simply put, ‘until the sixteenth century, most Western thinkers assumed that [the] first language was Hebrew.’9
Still, Hebrew did not have it all its own way. Theodoret of Antioch and Gregory of Nyssa, for example, both prominent religious figures of the fourth century, were dubious. Theodoret plumped for Syriac, and argued that since God gave Hebrew to Moses – that Hebrew had only come into being at the time of the exodus from Egypt – it could hardly be the language of creation. Aramaic, a variety widely spoken throughout the middle east generally, and within the Jewish community specifically, was also a continuing rival for top honours. Its
