ABSTRACT
This chapter argues the concepts of language degeneration were shaped by Victorian linguistics. As philologists traced language change over millennia, such "decay" could be imagined as a natural process, which would take hold when civilization broke down. Postapocalyptic language would not be simply a degradation or impoverishment of language in the old world: it would be an entirely different language encoding different culturally produced "worlds". These ideas acquired potency through the twentieth century as fascism, genocide, anticolonial liberation movements. Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker stands out as one of the first English novels to imagine a postapocalyptic language in its own terms rather than as a degenerate foil to Standard English. Earlier fiction imagined postapocalyptic language through imperialist stereotypes of "primitive" speech. In the twenty-first century, as a few tongues increasingly dominate the global economy and obliterate indigenous speech communities, Hoban's novel suggests new directions for imagining language apocalypse.
