Languages In the World (4 page)

Language is the water humans swim in from the age of five months' gestation, when hearing typically develops in the womb, to the day of death. We are surrounded by, and surround ourselves with, language at nearly every waking moment of our lives and even some nonwaking moments, such as when we dream or talk in our sleep. Only those put in solitary confinement, which is considered punishment, or those who take a vow of silence, such as Trappist monks, are cut off from the normal dynamics of language (but even these monks have developed a form of sign language, and they continue to read). There are also cases of severely handicapped infants who are never able to fully enter the human linguistic world. The rest of the 99.99% of us – that makes seven billion worldwide and counting – are in the never-ceasing flow of language and contributing our parts to the currents.

Because language is as natural as breathing in and out, we tend to take it for granted as we go about our daily business. The goal of
Languages in the World
is to bring the usually invisible workings of language to your attention through a global survey of some of the historical, cultural, and sociopolitical factors that shape language and language behavior. Our account is informed by two very basic observations. The first one is: language is always catching up to conditions. In Chapter 1, we outline some of the historical, cultural, and sociopolitical factors that have brought the particular language variety Spanglish into existence, and we discuss the ways that speakers have woven together the structures of their dual linguistic inheritance of Spanish and English to form a now-emergent language. The story of Spanglish illustrates the way that language is always catching up to the conditions of the movements and interactions of people going about their business.

The second basic observation guiding the stories we tell in
Languages in the World
is this: speakers' brains are always embodied, and speakers' bodies are always embedded in contexts. In Chapter 2, we introduce you to what we are calling
the language loop
and show how language loops in several directions at once: language links speakers to their fellows' cognitive domains, to their ambient landscapes, and to their cultures as a whole. Language is perspective taking, and particular languages reliably pull their speakers' attentions toward certain psychological understandings, views of the landscape, and social relations, while other languages make other distinctions in these same categories. Importantly, these perspectives are always bound to behaviors.

Chapters 1 and 2 introduce you to some general linguistic terminology, although terminology as such is not the main focus of either of those chapters. In Chapter 3, by way of contrast, a fuller discussion of linguistic terminology is the main event, and our purpose is to review the four main ways linguists have come to categorize the languages of the world. This comparative/contrastive process has led to a rich understanding of languages and their structures. It is in this context of the study of linguistic structure that we place our wider investigation into the historical, cultural, and sociopolitical conditions that have shaped languages since the beginning of the time we can say that language has existed as such.

In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain and came into control of territory that extended not only over present-day Mexico but also over present-day Central America, as well as large parts of present-day southwest United States. The new
Mexican government continued the Spanish practice of issuing land grants to stimulate settlement and to consolidate and control the native population.
¹
After independence, two rather poor and sparsely populated states, Coahuila and Tejas, were joined together. Since Tejas was the more thinly settled of the two and subject to frequent attacks by Apache and Comanche tribes, the governors of the newly combined state were looking to boost the population there in hopes that incoming settlers could control the Indian raids. The government enacted a system that allowed agents, known as
empresarios
, to promote settlement.

In 1823, the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas granted a contract to Stephen Austin, an Anglo farmer, to become one of the
empresarios
, and he brought 300 families to his settlement a few years later. Increasing numbers of Anglos in search of cheap land in the wake of the first depression in the United States eventually led the Mexican government to limit immigration. However, shifts in political sentiments had already begun. In 1836, after many battles with Mexico, Tejas became the independent Republic of Texas, while Coahuila remained part of Mexico. Nine years later, when Texas joined the United States, it brought into the union an English-speaking majority and a significant number of Spanish-speaking
mestizos
who had lived in that territory for several hundred years. The border between Texas and Coahuila thus marks the place where the two main European populations to colonize North and South America drew their definitive political lines (see
Map 1.1
).
²

The Tex-Mex border is also the place where English and Spanish met head on and started mixing, like the roiling waters of two oceans encountering one another. Now, 200 years later, the desire of English-speaking American farmers for cheaper land and an immigration law enacted by Spanish-speaking Mexican legislators have produced a
linguistic
result. We may call this result Spanglish, and it is a specific and yet inevitable consequence of how the members of a bilingual community have reformed the grammatical pieces of their dual linguistic inheritance. In order to justify the claim that all languages were once Spanglish, we need first to define language and then to provide an account of the conditions through which languages arise.

The usual answers to the question go something like this: “Language is a means by which humans communicate their thoughts and feelings through speech, although there are purely gestural languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL) used in the Deaf community.” Or: “Language is used to refer to things in the world. The word
book
refers to a particular kind of object.” The first description highlights one aspect of language, namely that it is primarily a human activity and primarily a spoken one, which seems apt enough to capture the fact that most humans around the world have tended to spend large parts of their day conducting their business, catching up on gossip, discussing politics, telling stories, flirting, fighting, and making up. The emphasis on the spoken mode is traditional but now somewhat misplaced. Most humans in nonrural parts of the world spend large parts of their day on their phones, surfing and texting. The second description is also useful as a first pass because we do often communicate about objects in our world.

In
Languages in the World: How History, Culture, and Politics Shape Language
(hereafter
Languages in the World
), we want to nudge the understanding of language in a direction that will at first feel unfamiliar. Language, as we define it, is an
orienting behavior
that orients the orientee within his or her cognitive-social domain and that arises in
phylogeny
³
(history of the species) and
ontogeny
(individual development) through recurrent interactions with conspecifics. In plainer terms, we can say that when we speak, we are affecting, influencing, even manipulating – not to shy away from a suspicious-sounding word here – the interest and attention of agents who are similar to ourselves, who belong to our phylogenic
lineage
, that is, who are our fellow human beings. These fellow human beings are also likely to be ones who belong to our particular language group. It is also the case that through our recurrent interactions with our fellow human beings in our particular language groups, we also create ourselves, our identities.

Two points are to be highlighted here. First, one person can only influence the cognitive domain – the thoughts and the coordinated actions – of another to the extent that they share a similar enough history. However, the orienting will never be the same for both parties, because one cannot literally transfer one's thoughts and feelings to another's head. However, with similar enough histories of interactions, the parties will be able to coordinate themselves reliably around a set of signals, be they acoustic (as in speech), gestural (as in sign language), or written (as in texting). The ability to reliably coordinate others and, in turn, be reliably coordinated by others is usually what is taken to mean to be able to speak a particular language.

Second, although language is old enough in the species to be woven into the human genome, the particular ways different communities reliably orient their fellow members and thereby coordinate their activities will necessarily vary. This is because individual groups – communities, societies, cultures – are historical products with their own trajectories. Of course, different groups can and do interact with one another, such as English speakers and Spanish speakers over hundreds of years in Texas, and when they do, they create new trajectories for the ways they orient one another and coordinate their actions. One of these trajectories may be a new language.

Another way to approach the question
What is language?
is to ask another: How many languages are there? This question gives us leverage into understanding the way we will be using the term in this book, because it reveals the complexities that the term
language
obscures when used to refer to a seemingly well-known entity such as the English language. Given these complexities, linguists estimate the number of languages in the world today to be somewhere between 4000 and 8000. They often settle on a number between 5000 and 7000. Certainly, there are practical problems in getting an accurate count. The inventory of the languages of the world is necessarily incomplete because linguists are aware of the phenomenon of so-called hidden languages. These are languages spoken, say, in the Amazon or in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, which are obviously known to their speakers but not yet known to linguists, and new languages are somewhat regularly brought to linguists' attention. At the same time, other languages are on the point of extinction. The Celtic language Breton spoken in Brittany, France is only one of many endangered languages in the world today. It is difficult to know whether or not to continue to count it.

While the practical problems do complicate matters, the bulk of the indeterminacy stems from the fact that there are two different, equally valid criteria for determining where one language ends and another begins. Unfortunately, their results do not always coincide and are even sometimes contradictory. The two criteria are:

Criterion no. 1: Mutual Intelligibility. If the term
language
is understood from the point of view of individuals interacting with one another, then the ability of speakers to understand one another should serve as a reliable guide for distinguishing a language from a dialect or, as linguists now prefer to say, language
variety
. The preference among linguists for the term
variety
stems from the fact that the term
dialect
sometimes carries the implication among speakers of a language that a nonstandard variety,
that is, a dialect, is inferior. This being said, if speakers of two related speech varieties are able to understand one another, their speech counts as varieties of one language, not as two separate languages. If the two speech varieties are mutually unintelligible, they count as separate languages.

The criterion of mutual intelligibility is notoriously difficult to apply, because it is a scalar notion, a matter of degree. The fuzziness of the criterion is compounded by the fact that it is affected by the amount of contact individuals in the speech varieties have with one another and by the desire of those individuals to understand one another. The phenomenon of
dialect chains
does not make applying the criterion any easier. A dialect chain of A-B-C-D occurs when varieties A and B are mutually intelligible, B and C are mutually intelligible, C and D are mutually intelligible, B and D get along with difficulty, and A and D are incomprehensible. Such a chain extends across hundreds of aboriginal varieties in Australia. Europe alone has several such chains, including the continua of: German, Dutch, and Flemish; the rural varieties of Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, and Italian; as well as Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian.

Criterion no. 2: Group Identity. If the term
language
is understood from the point of view of groups in the context of their social lives, then a language is a language when the group says it is a language. Thus, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are respected as separate languages, although there is a potentially high degree of mutual intelligibility among them, as is the case for Czech and Slovak, Dutch and Flemish, Hindi and Urdu, Laotian and Thai, Serbian and Croatian. In other words, groups recognize political and cultural factors in distinguishing themselves from other groups. Taking the political point of view, a language can be seen as a dialect with an army and a navy.
⁴

Distinguishing cultural factors may include visible differences, such as different writing systems, which help to confer a separate language status for otherwise mutually intelligible varieties: Hindi is written in the Devanāgari script, while Urdu is written in the Perso-Arabic alphabet; Serbian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and Croatian in the Latin alphabet. The use of different scripts often has religious implications and may also line up with geopolitical boundaries. The reverse is also true: mutually unintelligible varieties can be considered as one language. Such is the case for Chinese, which is a cover term for a number of mutually unintelligible speech varieties, where Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese are among the best known. Nevertheless, it makes political and cultural sense to use the term
Chinese
in certain situations, and the logographic writing system is a powerful unifying factor that can be read by all literate Chinese, independent of their speech variety.

There is yet another factor complicating the matter of determining how many languages there are in the world today, and it is the reverse of the problem of how to count languages that are dying off. It is the problem of how to count languages coming into existence. People from different linguistic backgrounds have always been in contact with one another, and the effects of these contact situations can be found in every language of the world, most often in the form of borrowings. The most obvious kinds of borrowings are lexical. Monolingual speakers of English in the United States are likely to know many words borrowed from Spanish such as
amigo
and
sombrero
, familiar phrases such as
hasta la vista
and
yo quiero
,
⁵
and even the date
cinco de mayo
.
⁶
Reciprocally, many varieties of Spanish in the Americas exhibit the influence of English
borrowings. The recent use of
man
as a term of address in Colombian Spanish is but one example among many.

Another, more elaborated kind of language mixing is found in bilingual situations all over the world, and it is called
code switching
. Code switching can be defined as the use of two or more languages in the same discourse or the alternation of two languages within a single discourse, sentence, or constituent. There does not seem to be any restriction on the languages mixed, be they Moroccan Arabic and French, Tamil and English, Turkish and Dutch, or Quechua and Spanish. The mixing reflects an individual's and a community's experiences with the languages available to them. It is surely the case that two or more languages meet in the interactions of the community in the marketplace, so to speak. However, it is also the case that languages meet in the cognitive domain of the individual. Sometimes, the two languages will mingle and blend, especially when in the presence of another person who also knows those two languages. Sometimes, the two languages will activate a sense of contrast, such that the speaker feels that he or she has slightly or strongly differing personalities, depending on the language being used and the situation it is used in. Note that we are using the term
cognitive domain
to refer to the joining of the mental (thoughts, feelings) and the physical (actions), because the mental and the physical are in continuous feedback. We are using the term
personality
to refer to a characteristic way of behaving in given circumstances.

Code switching occurs in communities of bilingual individuals who move smoothly and often between languages, thereby interweaving two (or more) languages. A couple, one a native French speaker and the other a native English speaker, both fluent in both languages, may develop their own Franglais. If large numbers of English speakers move into a Spanish-speaking territory or vice versa, the interwoven language may become the norm in a certain place. A speech norm qualifies for the status of a language if it meets one of the two criteria described above. In the case of speech norms in, say, certain Puerto Rican communities in New York City, people who are monolingual either in English or in Spanish would have difficulty understanding a sentence such as: “Why make Carol
sentarse atrás pa'que
(sit in the back so) everybody has to move
pa'que se salga
(for her to get out)?”
⁷
This form of speech would qualify as a language in that it satisfies criterion no. 1, since it is not mutually intelligible either to English or to Spanish monolinguals. (Presumably bilingual English/Spanish individuals would have no difficulty picking up the speech norms in whatever English/Spanish community they found themselves in.) At some point, these bilingual individuals might be moved to invoke criterion no. 2 and to recognize their variety as something better than just a hodgepodge that is neither so-called good English nor so-called good Spanish. They might decide to give it a name and call it Spanglish. They might be likely to identify any number of varieties of Spanglish in the Western hemisphere.

However, as always in language matters, the case is not clear cut. Accomplished bilinguals are often not aware that they are speaking a new language. They might even deny that they are mixing languages and may identify either English or Spanish as the language (they think) they are speaking, although a linguist might observe otherwise. We might then say that a language is a language when linguists say it is a language, but even here, there is lack of agreement among linguists on the independent grammatical status of mixed forms such as Spanglish. And, of course, linguists have no greater
authority than speakers who are apt to say things like: “You [the linguist] say that I am speaking Gullah [a creolized
⁸
variety of English]. I say that I am speaking English.” The opposite also holds: many speakers who mix Spanish and English in the United States believe they speak a language called Spanglish, though some linguists believe this variety to be a variety of Spanish in the United States with many English borrowings. While linguists debate whether or not Spanglish is different from Spanish in the United States, speakers debate whether or not they speak it in the first place. The lack of consensus among linguists and speakers strikes us as completely normal, given that Spanglish – whatever it is – is clearly in its early stages of development.

The identification of a language as a language thus depends on many factors: perceptual, political, ideological, social, and even phenomenological, that is, whether interested observers, for instance, speakers of a particular variety and/or linguists, recognize (and agree) that a language has a separate identity. In this book, the term
language
refers to:

1. the means by which one individual more or less reliably orients another's thoughts and actions;
   
2. a culturally determined set of acoustic, gestural, and/or written signals;
   
3. the trans-generational stability of these signals; and
   
4. the functioning of these signals in an environment with artifacts and practices that support the ways the individuals living in that environment are oriented by the language(s) they speak.
   

This description is circular, and deliberately so. It also is meant to suggest a certain looseness or porosity in the linguistic fabric. History provides ample evidence that languages have enough “give” in them for their speakers to unknit and reknit them in response to their always-changing needs and their always-changing environments. As the linguist, Edward Sapir, once aphorized: “All grammars leak.”

Thus, we can say that the number of languages in the world is ultimately indeterminate and that the activity of counting them falls somewhere between an inexact science and a nuanced art.