Words of the World

The Global Language System

Abram De Swaan

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745627489, 9780745627472
• eBook ISBN: 9780745663463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This bold and accessible study of human languages and communication explores issues which are at the forefront of today's globalized society.

The human species is divided into more than five thousand language groups that do not understand each other. And yet these groups constitute one coherent world language system, connected by multilingual speakers in a surprisingly powerful way. The chances of a language thriving depend on its position in the system. There are thousands of small, peripheral languages, each connected to one of a hundred central languages. The entire system is held together by one global language: English. A language is a 'hypercollective' good: the more speakers it has, the higher its communication value for each one of them. Thus, when people think that a language is gaining new speakers, that in itself is a reason for them to want to learn it too. That is why, in an age of globalization, only a few languages remain for transnational communication and these often prevail even in national societies.

This important book discusses a number of specific constellations in detail: India, Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa and the European Union. De Swaan concludes by providing a sober but illuminating view of language policy in multilingual societies. This book will be essential reading for those studying sociology, communication studies and linguistics.

1

Introduction: the global language system

The human species is divided into more than five thousand groups each of which speaks a different language and does not understand any of the others. With this multitude of languages, humankind has brought upon itself a great confusion of tongues. But nevertheless, the entire human species remains connected: the division is overcome by people who speak more than one language and thus ensure communication between different groups. It is multilingualism that has kept humanity, separated by so many languages, together. The multilingual connections between language groups do not occur haphazardly, but, on the contrary, they constitute a surprisingly strong and efficient network that ties together – directly or indirectly – the six billion inhabitants of the earth. It is this ingenious pattern of connections between language groups that constitutes the global language system. That is the subject of this book.

This worldwide constellation of languages is an integral part of the ‘world system’. The population of the earth is organized into almost two hundred states and a network of international organizations – the political dimension of the world system; it is coordinated through a concatenation of markets and corporations – the economic dimension; it is linked by electronic media in an encompassing, global culture; and, in its ‘metabolism with nature’, it also constitutes an ecological system. The idea of a global human society which indeed constitutes a system on a world scale has regained much attention in recent years. However, the fact that humanity, divided by a multitude of languages, but connected by a lattice of multilingual speakers, also constitutes a coherent language constellation, as one more dimension of the world system, has so far remained unnoticed. Yet, as soon as it has been pointed out, the observation seems obvious.¹

The global language constellation will be discussed in this book as an integral part of the world system. This implies that language constellations are considered as a – very special – social phenomenon, which can be understood in terms of social science theories. This, too, is new, albeit not entirely without precedent.² Rivalry and accommodation between language groups will be explained with the aid of the political sociology of language and the political economy of language. The former focuses on the structure of the language system and its subsystems, and looks at ‘language jealousies’ between groups, at elite monopolization of the official language, at the exclusion of the unschooled, and at the uses of language to achieve upward mobility; the latter approach analyses how people try to maximize their opportunities for communication, how this confronts them with dilemmas of collective action that may even provoke stampedes towards another language and the abandonment of their native tongue, and what occurs in the unequal relations of exchange between small and large language groups. Many of these notions from sociology and economics have never before been applied to languages or language groups.³ Together they constitute a coherent theoretical framework that can explain events in such disparate language constellations as India and Indonesia, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa, or the European Union.

That language has emerged at all is a cause for marvel; its evolution into innumerable, mutually unintelligible languages is an equally amazing testimony to human ingenuity. As languages grew apart in the course of collective transmission and transformation, new forms of pronunciation must have emerged, thousands of new words appeared and hundreds of grammatical and syntactical rules (and as many exceptions) evolved. All of this was the result of human action and almost none of it was the outcome of human intention.

It seems increasingly likely that all languages that are currently spoken on earth are related and have developed from a common predecessor, roughly following the evolutionary path of present human beings from a common genetic stock in the course of some hundred and twenty thousand years. Evolutionary genetics, comparative linguistics and archaeology are now producing a quickly growing body of evidence for this shared origin.⁴ But even if it turns out to be the case that the human species and its languages come from several, diverse origins, there is no doubt that at present all human groups constitute a single interdependent whole, and that their languages together form a global constellation that represents one dimension of the modern world system.

Five or six thousand languages are spoken on earth. The number cannot be specified more exactly, because languages are not always countable. In this respect they resemble clouds: it is hard to tell where one begins and the other ends, and yet most clouds and languages are obviously distinct, with a clear expanse separating them.

In their inexhaustible variety and almost impenetrable complexity, languages are best compared to that other most complex and variegated phenomenon, life itself. Much as a biological species is defined by the capacity of pairs of male and female members to reproduce, a language may be defined by the capacity of any two speakers to understand one another. Two languages are considered distinct if the speakers of one and the other are mutually unintelligible. Just as species are subdivided into many varieties that can indeed interbreed, within languages various mutually intelligible dialects are discerned. Biological varieties of one species shade into one another as do dialects of the same languages, and that is why, in both fields, classification is so often controversial.⁵ Indeed, cognate languages can be very hard to tell apart. Where in biology the proof is in the mating, in linguistics it is in the understanding. But mutual intelligibility is not simply a characteristic of the two languages involved; not entirely unlike interbreeding, it also depends on the individuals involved. They may have greater or lesser skills in understanding strangers, they may be more or less eager to communicate with one another, and the context of their encounter may be so structured as to facilitate mutual comprehension or hinder it.

There is no doubt that Chinese and Dutch are two entirely different languages, but it is a matter of controversy whether German and Dutch are indeed distinct languages,⁶ while almost everybody would agree that Flemish and Dutch are two varieties of the same language (since their respective speakers would have no trouble at all explaining to one another, each in their own idiom, how insuperable the differences between the two are). Granting the cloudy nature of languages, nevertheless most of the time they are discussed here as if they were distinct entities, separated by barriers of incomprehensibility.

1.1 The global language system: a galaxy of languages

Mutually unintelligible languages are connected by multilingual speakers, but not at all in random fashion. In fact, the scheme of all the world’s languages and of the multilinguals that connect them displays a strongly ordered, hierarchical pattern, quite similar to those reversed tree-structures that the French call ‘organigrammes’, charts used to depict the organization of armies or large bureaucracies.

The vast majority of the languages in the world of today, some 98 per cent of them, are situated in the lower part of this chart: these are the ‘peripheral languages’ and although there are thousands of them, all together they are used by less than 10 per cent of humankind. Very little of what has been said in all these languages has ever been recorded, be it on clay, stone, papyrus, paper, tape or disk. They are the languages of memory, and whatever was uttered in these languages could only endure because it was heard and remembered, repeated, understood and memorized again.⁷ Rather than being defined by what they are not, as ‘unwritten’ or ‘scriptless’ languages, these languages deserve to be identified by what constitutes their strength: they are the languages of conversation and narration rather than reading and writing, of memory and remembrance rather than record.

Any two peripheral groups are mutually connected through members that speak the languages of both. But on the whole such ties tend to be scarce. Or rather, they are becoming scarcer since communication between the inhabitants of adjacent villages has become less important, as they increasingly come to deal with traders and administrators in the district capital. As a result, members of the various peripheral groups are more likely to acquire one and the same second language, one that is therefore ‘central’ to these groups. All or most communication between the peripheral groups occurs through this central language. The peripheral languages, grouped around the central language, may be compared to moons circling a planet. There may be about one hundred languages that occupy a central or ‘planetary’ position in the global language system.⁸ Together they are used by some 95 per cent of humankind. The central languages are used in elementary education and usually also at the level of secondary and higher education. They appear in print, in newspapers, in textbooks and in fiction, they are spoken on radio, on cassettes and increasingly on television. Most of them are used in politics, in the bureaucracy and in the courts. They are usually ‘national’ languages, and quite often the official languages of the state that rules the area. These are the languages of record: much of what has been said and written in those languages is saved in newspaper reports, minutes and proceedings, stored in archives, included in history books, collections of the ‘classics’, of folk tales and folkways, increasingly recorded on electronic media, and thus conserved for posterity.

Many of the speakers of a central language are multilingual: first of all, there are those whose native speech is one of the satellite, peripheral languages, and who have later acquired the central language. In fact, everywhere in the world the number of this type of bilinguals is on the increase because of the spread of elementary education and the printed word, and through the impact of radio broadcasting. The second type, on the other hand, that of the native speakers of the central language who have learned one of the peripheral languages, is much less common. Apparently, language learning occurs mostly upward, in a ‘centripetal’ mode: people usually prefer to learn a language that is at a higher level in the hierarchy. This again reinforces the hierarchical nature of the world language system.

If the mother-tongue speakers of a central language acquire another language, it is usually one that is more widely spread and higher up in the hierarchy. At this next level, a number of central languages are connected through their multilingual speakers to one very large language group that occupies a ‘supercentral’ position within the system. It serves purposes of long-distance and international communication. Quite often this is a language that was once imposed by a colonial power and after independence continued to be used in politics, administration, law, big business, technology and higher education. There are about a dozen of these supercentral languages. Their position in the global language system resembles that of so many suns surrounded by their planets, the central languages, which, in turn, are encircled by their respective satellites, the peripheral languages. The supercentral languages are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili. All these languages, except Swahili, have more than one hundred million speakers and each serves to connect the speakers of a series of central languages. In subsequent chapters a number of regional constellations will be discussed, each centring on one or more of these supercentral languages, such as the Indian constellation around Hindi and English; the Indonesian constellation around Malay (bahasa Indonesia); the French-centred constellation of ‘francophone’ West Africa and the East African constellation that hinges upon English; the South African constellation, where English and Afrikaans compete; and, finally, the constellation of the European Union, where a dozen national languages are increasingly linked by English, less and less by French and hardly any more by German.

If an Arab and a Chinese, a Russian and a Spaniard, or a Japanese and a German meet, they will almost certainly make themselves understood in one and the same language, one that connects the supercentral languages with one another and that therefore constitutes the pivot of the world language system. This ‘hypercentral’ language that holds the entire constellation together is, of course, English.

In the present world, English is the language of global communication. It is so to speak at the centre of the twelve solar language systems, at the hub of the linguistic galaxy.⁹ English has not always held that position. On the contrary, it has now done so for only half a century or so and one day it may lose its hypercentral functions again, but in the next decades it is only likely to reinforce its position even further.

If the origins of language correspond closely to the origins of the human species, the spread of languages across the globe is intimately connected with the history of humanity. For scores of millennia, languages spread with demographic expansion and migration. In historical times, they followed in the wake of conquest, commerce and conversion. It is only since a century ago at most that languages spread more frequently through formal schooling than in any other way. But the educational system certainly does not operate independently of the political, economic and cultural context, which continues to shape the patterns of language acquisition.

1.2 A historical atlas of the world as a language system

The best way to visualize the evolving global language constellation is through a series of maps of the world.¹⁰ Quite probably, in prehistoric times, as the human species scattered across the continents, small bands must time and again have left their main group, crossed mountains and seas, to settle in areas that were quite distant from the next human population. There, in isolation, and in the absence of any written texts, their languages may have changed rather quickly, reaching unintelligibility with respect to the original language in the span of a few dozen generations.¹¹ Encounters with other human groups and the ensuing language contacts produced new amalgamations. Thus an imaginary map of the prehistoric distribution of languages would render language areas as fairly small circles, extending and elongating as language groups spread and trekked across new territory, stretching to the breaking point, when a separate circle would indicate the emergence of a ‘new’ language in that location.

Thus, the hypothesis of ‘monogenesis’, the evolution of all languages from a single predecessor, does not at all contradict the existence of a great many, mutually unintelligible, languages, once the human species had scattered across the continents. The early distribution of human languages was much more fragmented than the present world language system. Yet it is quite likely that bands in adjacent territories traded and intermarried and some people learned the language of the next group. The circles, no matter how small, may have shown some overlap in the more densely populated areas. As people settled and began to work the land, they must have developed a language for communication between adjoining villages: an early lingua franca, which appears on the map as a dotted line, enclosing the entire area where the linking language is used. That is where the pattern of language distribution is regaining some coherence.

The early ‘military-agrarian’ regimes, based on military conquest of agrarian communities, demanded the payment of tribute for protection (against other warriors and themselves).¹² With their dominion, they also usually imposed their religion, and their language. Thus the first ‘central’ languages emerged, linking the peripheral languages of the conquered communities through bilingual speakers to the language of the victors: the language of conquest, conversion and commerce. On the language map, the territory of such regimes would be rendered in a solid but rather pale colour, indicating its wide extension and relatively low density. The circles of the peripheral languages would still clearly show through in their respective areas.

The next stage of integration of the language system occurred with the formation of empires. Marching armies laid one people after another under tribute, maintained roads and harbours, and protected trading routes across the territory. The map of the language constellation in the year 1 shows several such ‘world empires’. Not much is known about the western hemisphere or Africa, in that period, but on the Eurasian continent plenty of written records have survived. At least three languages had already spread along very long, but very thin lines. First of all, Latin, emanating from Rome all along the Mediterranean coast, stretched across the southern half of Europe and, more sparsely, further to the north, into the Germanic and Celtic lands. Latin was a spoken and a written language; it served to administer the conquered areas, to carry out diplomatic missions and trading ventures, and to spread new knowledge and technology. Soon, moreover, it was to be the vehicle of Christian expansion. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin served for another fifteen hundred years as a major European linking language. But in all the many language groups of Christendom there were only a few individuals, clergy usually, who had learned the language of the church and hence could communicate with their peers all over the continent. They served as translators and mediators to connect their communities with the continental network. Until the Renaissance, Latin hardly had competitors as the language of learning and long-distance communication. The connecting web may have been extremely tenuous, the Latin speakers very few in number, but in the domains of scholarship, law and religion it held together until the nineteenth century. Thus, Europe, with Latin as its supercentral language, already constituted a coherent, if precarious, language system more than two thousand years ago. The language map of the era would have displayed the supercentral presence of Latin by a pattern of rays in a single colour, extending from Rome in ever thinner lines across the continent and overlaying the solid patches of central languages with the circles of the peripheral languages still visible underneath.

The second imperial language of that era was of course Chinese. In the core area of contemporary China, a ‘pre-classical’ version of Han C...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the global language system
• 2 The political economy of language constellations
• 3 Language, culture and the unequal exchange of texts
• 4 India: the rivalry between Hindi and English
• 5 The triumph of bahasa Indonesia
• 6 Africa: the persistence of the colonial languages
• 7 South Africa: the survival of the old language regime
• 8 The European Union: the more languages, the more English
• 9 Conclusions and considerations
• Notes
• References
• Index