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.*
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.* And the story continues until we confront the major languages of recent growth, what we have called ‘M&A’ languages.
As it turns out, the story falls into two major epochs, which divide at 1492.
This is the beginning of the worldwide expansion of Europe and some of its languages. Before this point, languages almost always spread along land routes, and the results are regional: large languages are spoken across coherent, centred regions. After this point, the sea becomes the main thoroughfare of language advance, and spread can be global: a language can be spoken in distinct zones on many different continents, with its currency linked only by the sinews of trade and military governance that stretch across the oceans.
Besides this geographical difference, it is possible to see other gross patterns which distinguish the two epochs.
Before 1492, the key forces that spread languages are first literacy and civic culture, and later revealed religion. But when a community has these advantages its language is often spread at the point of a sword; without them, military victories or commercial development will achieve little. The general mode of spread is through infiltration: whole peoples do not move, but languages are transmitted by small communities and piecemeal colonies which do. But the foundation of English, which occurs in this period, appears to be an exception to all this.
After 1492, the forces of spread are at first much more elemental: disease devastates populations in the Americas and elsewhere, and the technological gap between conquerors and victims is everywhere much starker than it had been in the era of regional spread. But once the power balance moves back into equilibrium, with the stabilisation of the Europeans’ global military empires, it becomes hard to distinguish military, commercial and linguistic dominance. At first, travel is difficult, and language spread is slow, still based on infiltration. However, with the spread of literacy and cheaper transport, the mode switches to migration, as large European populations seek to take advantage of the new opportunities. In the twentieth century, this too eases off; but new forms of communication arise, continually becoming faster, cheaper and more comprehensive: the result is that the dominant mode of language spread switches from migration to diffusion. English is once again exceptional, as it has been uniquely poised to take first advantage of the new technologies, but its prospects remain less clear as the other languages, both large and small, settle in behind it. It faces the uncertain future of any instant celebrity, and perhaps too the same inevitable ultimate outcome of such a future. This is not least because, for the world’s leading lingua franca, the whole concept of a language community begins to break down.
But once informed with the varied stories of the world’s largest languages, our inquiry can move on to ask some pertinent questions.
How new and unprecedented are modern forces of language diffusion? Do they share significant properties with language spread in the past?
How will the age-old characteristics of language communities assert themselves? In particular, can all languages still act as outward symbols of communities? And can they effectively weave together the tissues of associations which come from a shared experience? Can each language still create its own world? Will they want to, when science—and some revealed religions—claim universal validity?
These are the questions we shall want to ask. But first we must examine the vast materials of human language history.
Two Italian opinions, separated by fifteen centuries, on the value of an imposed common language:
nec ignoro ingrati et segnis animi existimari posse merito si, obiter atque in transcursu AD hunc modum dicatur terra omnium terrarum alumna eadem et parens, numine
