The geopolitics of language: when is a spoken tongue a dialect and when is it a language?
by Rachel T. Essay CreatorLanguage change—in
particular the inexorable tendency of languages to do so, and why, and how—is
the theme of much of this book. The author is John McWhorter, Associate
Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He uses
examples of change—both recent and historical—to demonstrate how primordial
human languages diversified into the six thousand or so known today. (He seems
to be convinced there was just one original human language, but that seems
extremely unlikely.) He is careful to describe such shifts as language transformation,
rather than evolution, because the latter word so often suggests
progress or advancement—the evidence suggests early languages were at least as
complex as modern ones, though more limited in what it was possible to talk
about.
In the second
chapter he explores the geopolitics of language. Using modern pairs like Urdu and Hindi,
Serbian and Croatian, and the Scandinavian languages, he shows that our
definition of a language has more to do with political history, perceptions and
tensions than with the nature of the languages themselves. Even within a speech
form that is considered to be a single language, wide variations can exist
that, he suggests, means that “in the end, dialect is all there is: the
‘language’ part is just politics”.
Later chapters
discuss the changes to language through the mixing of vocabularies and grammar
following cultural contact (English cheapest essay writing service, the archetypal mongrel language, is a
prime example here) and how this has given rise to pidgins and creoles. The
fifth chapter considers the ways in which languages overshoot minimal
functional needs into what he calls “uselessly baroque elaborations” by adding
markers for gender, tones, and groups of prefixes and suffixes. He argues these
add inessential extra data, and he looks into why they appear. The last chapter
investigates language death and the loss of diversity that results (he quotes
David Crystal’s assessment that, on average, a language dies every two weeks).
John McWhorter’s
approach is largely non-technical (he explains the few formal terms he uses
when they first appear), but his arguments become detailed when necessary,
especially in later chapters, and the going becomes tougher towards the end.
However, the detail is eased by his chatty and informal approach, with personal
asides and pop-cultural references thrown in from time to time. Though it is
grounded in and suffused with US style and culture (to the extent of making a couple
of blunders about British history), the book includes a wealth of examples
chosen from dozens of languages world-wide.
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