The Social Interaction of Languages

As was indicated in the Preface, the notion of ‘major language’ is defined in social terms, so it is now time to look somewhat more consistently at some notions relating to the social side of language, in particular the social interaction of languages. Whether a language is a major language or not has nothing to do with its structure or with its genetic affiliation, and the fact that so many of the world’s major languages are Indo-European is a mere accident of history. First, we may look in more detail at the criteria that serve to define a language as being

major. One of the most obvious criteria is the number of speakers, and certainly in making my choice of languages to be given individual chapters in this volume number of speakers was one of my main criteria. However, number of speakers is equally clearly not the sole criterion. An interesting comparison to make here is between Chinese (or even more specifi-

cally, Mandarin) and English. Mandarin has far more native speakers than English, yet still English is generally considered a more useful language in the world at large than is Mandarin, as seen in the much larger number of people studying English as a second language than studying Mandarin as a second language. One of the reasons for this is that English is an international language, understood by a large number of people in many different parts of the world; Mandarin, by contrast, is by and large confined to China, and even taking all Chinese dialects (or languages) together, the extension of Chinese goes little beyond China and overseas Chinese communities. English is not only the native language of sizable populations in different parts of the world (especially the British Isles, North America and Australia and New Zealand) but is also spoken as a second language in even more countries, as is discussed in more detail in the chapter on English. English happens also to be the language of some of the technologically most advanced countries (in particular of the USA), so that English is the basic medium for access to current technological developments. Thus factors other than mere number of speakers are relevant in determining the social importance of a language. Indeed, some of the languages given individual chapters in this volume have relatively

few native speakers. Some of them are important not so much by virtue of the number of native speakers but rather because of the extent to which they are used as a lingua franca, as a second language among people who do not share a common first language. Good examples here are Swahili and Indonesian. Swahili is the native language of a relatively small population, perhaps a couple of million, primarily on the coast of East Africa, but its use as a lingua franca has spread through much of East Africa (especially Kenya and Tanzania) and beyond, so that the language is used by a total of perhaps around 50 million people. The Indonesian variety of Malay-Indonesian is the native language of perhaps 23 million, but is used as a second language by about 140,000,000 in Indonesia. In many instances, in my choice of languages I have been guided by this factor rather than by raw statistics. Among the Philippine languages, for instance, Tagalog does not have the largest number of native speakers, but I selected it because it is both the national language of the Philippines and used as a lingua franca across much of the country. A number of Indo-Aryan languages would surely have qualified for inclusion in terms of number of speakers, but they have not been assigned individual chapters because in social terms the major languages of the northern part of South Asia are clearly Hindi-Urdu and Bengali. Another important criterion is the cultural importance of a language, in terms of the

age and influence of its cultural heritage. An example in point is provided by the Dravidian

is, the oldest Dravidian literary language, and for this reason my choice rested with Tamil. I am aware that many of these decisions are in part subjective, and in part contentious. As I emphasise in the Preface, the thing furthest from my mind is to intend any slight to speakers of languages that are not considered major in the contents of this volume; much of our knowledge of Language as a general characteristic of the human species comes precisely from the study of smaller, often endangered languages. Certain languages are major even despite the absence of native speakers, as with Latin

and Sanskrit. Latin has provided a major contribution to all European languages, as can be seen most superficially in the extent to which words of Latin origin are used in European languages. But even those languages that have tried to avoid the appearance of Latinity by creating their own vocabulary have often fallen back on Latin models: German Gewissen ‘conscience’, for instance, contains the prefix ge-, meaning ‘with’, the stem wiss-, meaning ‘know’, and the suffix -en to form an abstract noun – an exact copy of the Latin con-sci-entia; borrowings that follow the structure rather than the form in this way are known as calques or loan translations. Sanskrit has played a similar role in relation to the languages of India, including Hindi. Hebrew is included not because of the number of its speakers – as noted in the chapter on Hebrew, this has never been large – but because of the contribution of Hebrew and its culture to European and Middle Eastern society. A language can thus have influence beyond the areas where it is the native or second

language. A good example to illustrate this is Arabic. Arabic loans form a large part of the vocabulary of many languages spoken by Islamic peoples, even of languages that are genetically only distantly related to Arabic (e.g. Hausa) or that are genetically totally unrelated (e.g. Turkish, Persian and Urdu). The influence of Arabic can also be seen in the adoption of the Arabic writing system by many Islamic peoples. Similarly, Chinese loan words form an important part of the vocabulary of some East Asian languages, in particular Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean; the use of written Chinese characters has also spread to Japan and Korea, and in earlier times also to Vietnam. It is important to note also that the status of a language as a major language is far

from immutable. Indeed, as we go back into history we find many significant changes. For instance, the possibility of characterising English as the major language of the world is an innovation of the twentieth century. One of the most important shifts in the distribution of major languages resulted from the expansion of European languages, especially English, Spanish, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent French as a result of the colonisation of the Americas: English, Spanish and Portuguese all now have far more native speakers in the New World than in Britain, Spain or Portugal. Indeed, in the Middle Ages one would hardly have imagined that English, confined to an island off the coast of Europe, would have become a major international language. In medieval Europe, Latin was clearly the major language, since, despite the lack of

native speakers, it was the lingua franca of those who needed to communicate across linguistic boundaries. Yet the rise of Latin to such pre-eminence – which includes the fact that Latin and its descendants have ousted virtually all other languages from southwestern Europe – could hardly have been foreseen from its inauspicious beginnings confined to the area around Rome. Equally spectacular has been the spread of Arabic, in the wake of the spread of Islam, from being confined to the Arabian peninsula to being the dominant language of the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to languages that have become major languages, there are equally languages

that have lost this status. The earliest records from Mesopotamia, often considered the

latter the guage of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires); Akkadian belongs to the Semitic branch of Afroasiatic, while Sumerian is as far as we can tell unrelated to any other known language. Even at the time of attested Sumerian inscriptions, the language was probably already approaching extinction, and continued to be used in deference to tradition (as with Latin in medieval Europe). The dominant language of the area was to become Akkadian, but in the intervening period this too has died out, leaving no direct descendants. Gone too is Ancient Egyptian, the language of the Pharaohs and whose earliest texts are roughly contemporaneous with those of Sumerian. The linguistic picture of the Mediterranean and Near East in the year nought was very different from that which we observe today. Social factors and social attitudes can even bring about apparent reversals in the

family-tree model of language relatedness. At the time of the earliest texts from Germany, two distinct Germanic languages are recognised: Old Saxon and Old High German. Old Saxon is the ancestor of the modern Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialects, while Old High German is the ancestor of the modern High German dialects and of the standard language. Because of social changes – such as the decline of the Hanseatic League, the economic mainstay of northern Germany – High German gained social ascendancy over Low German. Since the standard language, based on High German, is now recognised as the standard in both northern and southern Germany, both Low and High German dialects are now considered dialects of a single German language, and the social relations between a given Low German dialect and standard German are in practice no different from those between a High German dialect and standard German. One of the most interesting developments to have arisen from language contact is the

development of pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language arises from a very practical situation: speakers of different languages need to communicate with one another to carry out some practical task, but do not speak any language in common and moreover do not have the opportunity to learn each other’s language properly. What arises in such a situation is, initially, an unstable pidgin, or jargon, with highly variable structure – considerably simplified relative to the native languages of the people involved in its creation – and just enough vocabulary to permit practical tasks to be carried out reasonably successfully. The clearest examples of the development of such pidgins arose from European colonisation, in particular from the Atlantic slave trade and from indenturing labourers in the South Pacific. These pidgins take most of their vocabulary from the colonising language, although their structure is often very different from those of the colonising language. At a later stage, the jargon may expand, particularly when its usefulness as a lingua

franca is recognised among the speakers of non-European origin, leading to a stabilised pidgin, such as Tok Pisin, the major lingua franca of Papua New Guinea. This expansion is on several planes: the range of functions is expanded, since the pidgin is no longer restricted to uses of language essential to practical tasks; the vocabulary is expanded as a function of this greater range of functions, new words often being created internally to the pidgin rather than borrowed from some other language (as with Tok Pisin maus gras ‘moustache’, literally ‘mouth grass’); the structure becomes stabilised, i.e. the language has a well-defined grammar. Probably at any stage in this development, from inception to post-stabilisation, the

pidgin can ‘acquire native speakers’, i.e. become the native language of part or all of the community. For instance, if native speakers of different languages marry and have