Languages In the World (5 page)

The premise of this book is that language is always catching up to conditions. What, then, are these conditions? The example of Spanglish thriving today on the Tex-Mex border opened our discussion to illustrate how normal such mixing is. We can now add the idea that the mixing comes about as a result of decisions taken by people who neither know nor even necessarily care about linguistic causes and effects. The decisions people make are, more often than not, economic.

In the 1940s, the first significant immigration from Puerto Rico to New York City, known as the Great Migration, began as a result of depressed economic conditions in Puerto Rico. Enough Puerto Ricans came that by 1950, East Harlem had become known as Spanish Harlem. Then, in 1952, American Airlines created a nonstop route
from San Juan, Puerto Rico to New York City to bring manual labor to the garment industry. All this is to say that when Puerto Ricans moved, and an airline made a decision about flight routes, no one had any reason to think about the linguistic consequences or to imagine the kind of Spanglish now spoken in Spanish Harlem. Nor did the first wave of Cubans, namely the wealthy ones, who came to Miami just before the end of Castro's Revolution in 1959, foresee the mixed language some of their grandchildren would be speaking. (Some may be thinking of it now and lamenting the fact.) Certainly, there have been times and places when people – heads of state, national assemblies, language academies, concerned citizens – have tried to regulate who speaks and how they speak. Many societies have placed legal restrictions on the types of things that can be said and when. In the United States, for instance, we have laws concerning libel (pertaining to print) and slander (pertaining to speech). By and large, however, people do not think about language on a moment-to-moment basis. They just want to have what they want and to get through their day.

The desire to escape an unwanted political regime, the desire for a desirable mate, the desire for better land, the desire for a better job – these desires cause people to move. These are the initial conditions: the need for one group to find a new watering hole or the good berry bushes or the plentiful game, and these needs inevitably bring encounters with other groups engaged in similar searches. For these encounters to have even minimal linguistic consequences, they need to be between groups from a similar or similar enough lineage, first and foremost the primate lineage. Groups belonging to the primate lineage will have both a particular kind of social organization and a particular kind of cognitive organization, ones that include some social gesturing and the ability to make and interpret some lip smacks and grunts. From there, the kinds of encounters producing significant linguistic consequences will be between and among groups who have elaborated these manual and facial gestures, some of which have become reliable indicators of actions to be done, which is to say that the groups have leveraged gestures and sounds to affect, to influence, and to manipulate the thoughts and actions of their conspecifics, the fellow members of their lineage.

Among the important conditions that language is always catching up to are the conditions that language itself makes possible and continually puts into motion. If I promise you that I will meet you at the coffee shop at four o'clock, I have brought a certain state of affairs into existence that could not occur without language, namely one known as ‘promising,' and this state constrains my future actions, as well as yours. If I do not show up at the coffee shop at the appointed time, it is not the case that nothing has happened. It is rather that I have now brought into existence a different state of affairs, namely one known as ‘breaking a promise,' and this state will also have effects on our future interactions. Our days are filled with such microevents, and the world is filled with similarly structured macroevents, such as December 8, 1941, “The Congress of the United States of America declares war on the Empire of Japan.” Events such as promising and declaring war are called
speech acts
, acts that perform the very act by announcing it.

In this book, we advocate what can be called an ecological account of the origin of language. We believe the instantiation and development of language arose from the perceived benefit of one human orienting a fellow human in his or her cognitive domain, the benefit being that the orienting activity was seen to be effective, that is,
to affect that person. The phrase “Please pass the salt” makes use of someone else's muscle power. A mother speaking in a soothing voice to her infant relaxes the baby's breathing and heart rate. In an ecological account, any cognitive benefits to the species are deemed to have occurred as a result of the development and maintenance of language. No prior cognitive advances are required to instantiate it. In other words, no cognitive advance is posited here to have bootstrapped humans into language. Theorists who do posit such a prior advance – for instance, God (or some evolutionary event) first endowed humans with the faculty of reason – subscribe to what can be called the rationalist account of the origin of language. Among theorists of all stripes, there is general consensus that human language as we know it was up and running at least 60 kya and probably well before that, easily as far back as 150 kya, if not more. For now, it is enough to point out that the other initial condition to which language is always catching up is that these encounters at the water holes, the berry bushes, or the hunting grounds must be between groups who belong to a particular lineage, namely that of
Homo sapiens sapiens
.

This brief origin sketch also serves the purpose of addressing a fundamental question concerning the origin of the languages of the world that is often cast in terms of a dichotomy: Are the living languages today a result of monogenesis, whereby all languages are descended from one source, or are they a result of polygenesis, whereby they are descended from several sources? The question can be improved upon by pointing out that the dichotomy is a false one and then answered by referring to our definition of language. As long as one human was able to orient another in his or her cognitive domain, that action counts as a linguistic action. It does not matter if they are speaking the same language or a different language. It matters only that the action had an effect and, then, was able to be repeated with generally similar effects. We have no difficulty imagining groups of humans spread out in Africa 100,000 years ago, perhaps somewhat localized in East Africa, encountering one another, and producing over time what would qualify as a dialect chain. There would have been haphazard crossings and recrossings of encounters, such that some of the similarities found in the world's languages today (the fact that all human groups have one, to begin with) are strong enough to suggest some kind of common origin. The differences are sometimes equally striking and point toward different origins. Whatever the initial conditions may have been, enough time has elapsed since humans spread out over the globe for certain groups to have taken what might have originally been maybe more, maybe less common linguistic practices and worked them out on unusual trajectories.

When we say that ‘all languages were once Spanglish,' we mean simply to say that all languages – from the first to have arisen in the species some 150,000+ years ago to those taking shape today – arose under a set of conditions. These conditions are necessarily evolutionary (the shape of the vocal tract), cognitive (the ability to parse information and recognize sound sequences), social-psychological (the need to orient conspecifics), and sociohistorical (Spanish and English happen to continually crisscross in parts of North America beginning around 1851). While in the historical world and that of near prehistory the evolutionary, cognitive, and psychological conditions are always given in any instance of language formation, the sociohistorical conditions are not. That is, while the English and Spanish speakers who first encountered one another in Texas were equipped with the evolutionary and cognitive skills to communicate with
each other, as well as the social-psychological need to do so, the historical facts leading to their encounter were in effect accidents of history. It is easy to see that Spanglish was not planned or predetermined in any way, but is rather an emergent phenomenon of the conditions under which it is arising. We can say the same of all other languages to have come on the scene since the very beginning of language in the species.

To support this view, we now adopt the perspective of the uniformitarian hypothesis. Uniformitarianism was first formulated at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the field of geology and as a result of interrelated observations: water moving continuously against solid matter alters and, in fact, erodes that matter's form; effects of erosion take place over large stretches of time; and this activity must have been occurring since the beginning of time. In other words, uniformitarianism assumes that the kinds of geological process happening now must have been at work through all time, and this assumption arose in deliberate contrast to catastrophism, the idea that the earth's landforms had been created by short-lived abrupt events and often one-time events. Catastrophism has Biblical overtones and easily accommodates the idea that God created the world in seven days. Uniformitarianism acknowledges that while circumstances are ever changing, the principles involved in explaining those changes are constant.

Later in the nineteenth century, the American linguist, William Dwight Whitney, was perhaps the first to apply the principle of uniformitarianism in the field of linguistics, and he used it to argue against the plentiful and often fanciful accounts of the origin of language produced in response to Darwin's
The Origin of the Species
(Darwin [1859] 1868). Whitney's great Continental rival, Friedrich Max Müller at Oxford, believed that there was a mysterious relationship between sounds and meaning
⁹
and hypothesized that language began at a time when humans were naturally percussive. That is, upon perceiving an object, a human could feel or ring with the proper word for it. Whitney wondered – rightly, we think – why humans would have had that percussive ability in the deep recesses of time but have lost it now.

In
Languages in the World
, we are following Whitney's suit. We are taking the present as the guide to the past, and we notice that the kinds of encounters humans have today and their linguistic results are likely the kinds of encounters humans have had for all time with similar linguistic results. We humans are a good 100,000 years or more down our linguistic path, and so a lot has happened to make the language dynamics active today somewhat different than those of the remote past. For one, we now have political entities known as nation-states that organize, to some degree, the flow of human movement. For another, we now have ample materials commenting on our languages – dictionaries and grammars, and, in some parts of the world, language academies – that record and sometimes regulate speech. Nevertheless, the complexities of modern life do not alter the fact that we humans have always used the linguistic resources we have at hand, to ignore or to blend as we wish or as the social situation and group practices demand, all the while putting one foot in front of the next.

In yet another way, we are taking a cue from Whitney's lead. He was, among other things, committed to educating the general public about linguistic matters, and this was a commitment that linguists lost, more or less, in the twentieth century. We take up the challenge – alongside many other linguists working today – to use the fruits of the last 150 years of language study to promote greater awareness of language in the
general public. We hope the readers of this book will also respond to this challenge. We take as a pertinent model the efforts of sociolinguist, Walt Wolfram, at North Carolina State University who, for the past several decades, has brought language awareness out of the university classroom and into public spaces, including the North Carolina State Fair and the curriculum of North Carolina public schools. In our own efforts to create language awareness in the general public, we the authors are just getting started.

Words in a language stand out in a way other features often do not. We can look words up in dictionaries, and we can hear borrowed words if they have an unusual sound or sound sequence. For instance, English speakers recognize Spanish words like
mañana
with its palatal nasal [ɲ] and
yo quiero
with the tapped [r]. If we limited our study of language to lexical items, then we might imagine that Spanglish is spoken when any English speaker or Spanish speaker peppers his or her native language with words from the neighboring language. Indeed, most people in the United States are familiar with the terms
lasso
,
rodeo
,
enchilada
,
fajita
, and
cilantro
, which come into American English from Mexican Spanish. At the same time, Spanish speakers talk about
golf
,
email
,
jazz
,
marketing
, and
música pop.
This of course does make these groups Spanglish speakers. Spanglish speakers obviously make use of the lexicon of both languages – and the degree to which they do this varies – but Spanglish is about more than words. In addition to the lexicon, we also mean to emphasize the variable arrays of linguistic elements speakers use to create a new language variety. These elements are what we call linguistic structure, and they may pertain to the following:

(i)
The sounds of a language, or phonetics
. The sound inventories of all languages are limited to the physical and mechanical possibilities of human anatomy: the length of the vocal tract, the size and shape of the oral and nasal cavities, the range of movement of the tongue, and the location of the articulators. Nevertheless, languages differ with respect to the number and types of sounds they produce. The Austroasiatic language Sedang spoken in Vietnam and Laos is said to have as many as 50 unique vowels, while the Caucasian language Abkhaz, spoken in Georgia and Turkey, is said to have just two. Rotokas, a language of Papua New Guinea, is known for having only six consonants, while the language !Xóõ, spoken in southern Africa, has more than 100. And languages that produce the so-called same consonant may do so in subtly different ways. For example, Spanish and English both produce the sound [d], but while the English version is made by placing the tongue tip on the back of the alveolar ridge, the Spanish version is made by placing the tongue on the back of the teeth.

In the case of Spanglish, speakers may demonstrate pronunciations that are distinctive from those found in monolingual varieties of English and Spanish. Part of what may make Spanglish phonetically distinctive are its patterns of rhythm, stress, and intonation. Monolingual varieties of Spanish and English are characterized by different systems of prosodic rhythm, for example. In Spanish, syllables recur at regular temporal intervals and are of roughly the same duration, whereas in English, syllable durations vary. In the case of Spanglish, these systems may meet somewhere in the
middle. Thus, a Spanglish utterance such as “
Llovía bien fuerte,
so
me fui
, I went home” (It was raining really hard, so I left, I went home) may be produced with a Spanish-like rhythm over the differing lexical items, including the words taken from English, with an intermediate pattern, or with two separate systems. This all depends on the speaker and their experiences with both Spanish and English, with some speakers of Spanglish strongly favoring Spanish
prosody
, others favoring English, and others meeting in the middle.

(ii)
The sound system, or phonology
. English does not have the voiced alveolar trill [r] in its sound inventory, and although the tap [ɾ] exists in English, as in the word bu
tt
er, it does not form a minimal pair with another sound and is therefore not used in meaning contrasts. American English speakers may not even be aware they produce the sound, believing instead they are producing [t]. If you produce the word bu
tt
er with [t] or [ɾ], you don't change the standard meaning of the word, only the pronunciation. Similarly, in Spanish, [ð] exists as an allophone of [d] depending on the phonetic environment, or location relative to other sounds. [d] occurs at the beginning of words and after certain consonants, while [ð] occurs after vowels:
diente
with [d], versus
madre
with [ð]. In the case of Spanglish, the phonemic inventory varies from speaker to speaker. While most speakers will use all four
phonemes
 – [r], [ɾ], [ð], and [d] – they may use them in ways that differ subtly from so-called monolingual varieties of Spanish and English. For example, a Spanglish speaker may say
mi diente
using the stop [d] rather than the fricative [ð]. Again, this usage is conditioned by the rate of speech, whether the speaker was speaking primarily in English or in Spanish, as well as factors related to the speech event.

(iii)
Word formation patterns, how individual words in a language are structured
. The term
word
is not useful in cross-linguistic descriptions, because the way different languages put their words together varies greatly. Instead, linguists speak of word formation patterns in terms of morphology. While English has relatively little inflectional morphology, Spanish has relatively more. For Spanglish, the weight of inflectional morphology is in favor of Spanish, such that any English verb occurring in a Spanish stretch of an utterance will be conjugated according to the Spanish patterns. For example, the English verb ‘to mop' may replace the Spanish verb
trapear
, but will be rendered with Spanish morphology, namely,
mopear
(-
ar
is one of the infinitive marking
morphemes
in Spanish). As often happens when one language starts borrowing a lot of verbs from another language, a default conjugation is chosen. In the case of Spanglish, it tends to be the first conjugation, namely the verbs that end in
-ar
, and the personal pronoun endings from this conjugation are applied. Accordingly, the borrowed verb
janguear
‘to hang out' has the following regular forms:

In addition, when one language starts borrowing a lot of nouns from another language, and if the borrowing language has a gender system, a default gender is often
chosen for the borrowed words. However, in Spanglish, English nouns are assigned gender sometimes by the phonetic form of the word, for instance,
the block
becomes
el bloque
, another word for ‘neighborhood'. Sometimes, the gender transfers from the Spanish equivalent. Because
la nariz
‘the nose' is feminine in Spanish, one can speak of
una runny nose
in Spanglish (
una
is the feminine indefinite article ‘a'), though at this stage no one would bat an eye if a speaker said
un runny nose
instead. English does not mark plurality on definite articles, but Spanglish does. Thus, ‘the munchies' might be rendered
los munchies
in Spanglish. Gender for Spanish nouns is routinely assigned, but the particular assignments are not necessarily stable across Spanglish speakers or speech communities.

High-profile inflectional morphemes from both Spanish and English find their way into Spanglish. The present progressive suffix
-ing
is widespread in English. The Spanish counterparts -
ando
and -
iendo
are also common. However, as flexible as Spanglish grammar is, speakers are unlikely to put a Spanish suffix on an English verb, or vice versa. The English verb
to run
cannot by itself take the Spanish suffix -
ando
just as the Spanish verb
corer
‘to run' cannot take the English suffix
-ing.
However, sometimes Spanglish speakers incorporate English verbs into Spanish phonology, as we saw with
janguear
.

Similarly, reflexive verbs are common in Spanish and nearly absent in English to express activities such as ‘going to bed,' which in Spanish is
acostarse
. The -
se
suffix is the reflexive and refers to the person doing the action, and
acostar
means something like ‘lying down.' Thus, ‘going to bed' in Spanish is the idea of ‘laying oneself down.' This word turned up as a deverbal noun in the phrase
al acostarse
‘at the time of going to bed' in a medicine prescription issued by a Walgreens in Miami, which came with the following instructions:
Aplicar
a thin layer to scalp
y
forehead
cada noche al acostarse por 2
weeks. (Apply a thin layer to scalp and forehead every night upon going to bed for two weeks.) An example of Spanglish earlier in this chapter included two reflexive verbs: “Why make Carol
sentar
se
atrás pa'que
(sit in the back so) everybody has to move
pa'que
se
salga
(for her to get out)?” Here the speaker nicely balances out the grammatical possibilities of the two languages, making the two Spanish utterances parallel through the use of the reflexive in both. Similarly, the speaker of the utterance: “
Apaga la televisión
. (Turn off the television.) Don't make me say it again!
¡Ponla
off!” is able to double the force of the command by marshaling two different verb constructions for the same action.

(iv)
The restructuring of the lexicon
. In the utterance, “Man,
vamos a la marqueta pa' comprar
doughnuts” (Man, let's go the market to buy doughnuts), the speaker has replaced the Spanish word
tienda
and imported the English word ‘market,' which is exactly what one expects when two languages mix. Because English has borrowed so many words from French, it so happens that Spanish and English share many cognates, given the common Latinate origin of French and Spanish. In the title of the Spanglish album
El Talento Del Bloque
by Farruko, a Puerto Rican reggaeton singer, the word
talento
is a cognate and is transparent across the Spanish divide. Sometimes, a cognate in Spanglish will adopt a meaning from English not present in Spanish. Such a cognate is
actualmente
, which in Spanish means ‘right now.' In the Spanglish utterance: “
Fue al súper a las dos. No, actualmente fue a las tres
” (S/he went to the supermarket at two o'clock. No, actually, she went at three o'clock),
actualmente
has the English meaning
of ‘actually, in fact.' Such an utterance makes no sense in varieties of Spanish outside of the United States.

The lexicon can also be restructured by means of
calques
. A calque is a loan translation, where the idea is borrowed but not the words. The Spanglish verb for ‘to call (someone) back' is
llamar pa'tras
, possibly a translation of the English way to express this idea. The Spanish verb is
devolver la llamada
‘return the call.'
Llamar pa'tras
is widespread in the Spanglishes spoken in California, Texas, and Miami, and it is particularly reviled by monolingual speakers of Spanish as an example of the way Spanglish degrades Spanish. From a linguistic point of view, however, these types of lexical phenomena are completely normal.

(v)
Larger phrasal and sentential patterns, also known as syntax
. Because English and Spanish have the same basic word-order pattern: Subject–Verb–Object, there is not much pressure on the word order in Spanglish. However, we find that Spanglish speakers tend not to switch languages at locations where the grammars of the two languages do not line up. An important difference between English and Spanish is that in English, adjectives precede nouns, while the opposite is true in Spanish. Thus, Spanglish speakers are unlikely to make switches between nouns and adjectives. ‘Un coche blue' is as unlikely ‘an azul car.'

(vi)
Other phenomena, generally classed as cultural, such as endearments and terms of address
. Clearly, the ‘man' in an utterance above is borrowed from an English terms of address. In the utterance: “Don't worry
mi'jo, te voy a cuidar
” (Don't worry my son, I'm going to take care of you), the term
mi'jo
is a term of endearment from
mi hijo
‘my son.' The familiar/formal
tú/usted
distinction in the second singular ‘you' forms of address in Spanish may be disappearing in Spanglish, such that speakers primarily only use
tú
. The Spanish plural
vosotros
‘you' is gone completely, just as it has in varieties of Spanish in Latin America. However, respectful terms of address such as
don
,
doña
,
Señor
, and
Señora
may be used by Spanglish speakers to be polite, even while speaking mostly English.

In his book
Pardon My Spanglish
, humorist Bill Santiago quips that Spanglish has “twice the vocabulary and half the grammar” (Santiago 2008). In reality, as the above examples are intended to show, the most competent speakers of Spanglish have the best command of both languages. They make their switches from one language to the other at the point where the words on both sides of the switch are grammatical with respect to both languages. Although we can say that Spanglish is grammatically flexible, the belief that Spanglish is simply a hodgepodge of words with no grammar is a misunderstanding borne out of popular beliefs about what language is or should be.

We have begun our structural review of the languages of the world with examples from Spanish, English, and Spanglish because we imagine that many of our readers are familiar with these languages. Although English and Spanish have their grammatical and vocabulary differences, they also share quite a lot due to the vagaries of history. For instance, it is a coincidence that both languages form the plural of nouns with a final
-s
; the Western Romance languages, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, share this feature, while the Eastern Romance languages, Italian and Romanian, do not. English is a Germanic language, and 1000 years ago only 35% of Old English nouns had the plural ending with a final
-s
, namely the masculine nouns. About 700 years
ago, these
-s
plurals started to spread to all nouns and stabilized about 500 years ago, leaving irregulars such as tooth/teeth, ox/oxen, deer/deer, etc. The fact that Spanish and English could both generalize
-s
plurals in the first place is because they belong to the language stock known as Indo-European. This means both have inherited a cast of structural characters particular to this stock, and the depth of these structural similarities no doubt facilitates the ease of the Spanglish mix.