Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
"The Persistence of English:" taken from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition. Copyright 1962, printed by WW Norton Company, Inc. in the United States.
The Persistence of English
If you measure the success of a language in purely quantitative terms, English is entering the twenty-frist century at the moment of its greatest triumph. It as between 400 and 450 million native speakers, perhaps 300 million morewho speak it as a second language- well enough, that is, to use it in their daily lives- and somewhere between 500 and 750 million who speak it as a foreign language with various degrees of fluency. The resulting total of 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion speakers, or roughly a quarter of the world's population, gives English more speakers than any other language and is the predominant lingua franca of most fields of interanational activity, such as diplomacy, buisness, science, and technology.
But figures like these can obscure a basic question: what exactly do we mean when we talk about the " English Language" in the first place? There is, after all, an enormous range of variation in the forms of speech that go by the name of English in the various parts of the work- or oftern, even within te speech of a single nation- and it is not obvious why we whould think about all of these as belonging to a single language. Indeed, there are some linguists who prefer to talk about "world Englishes," in the plural, with the implication that these varieties may not have much more to unite them than a single name and a common historical origin.
To the general public, the reservations may be hard to understand; people usually assume that languages are natural kinds like botanical species, whose boundaries are matters of scientific fact. But as linguists observe, there is nothing in the forms of English themselves that tells us that it is a single language. it may be that the varieties called "English" have a great deal of vocabulary and structure in common and that English-speakers can usually manage to make themselves understood to one another, more or less ( though films produced in one part f the English-speaking world often have to be dubbed or subtitled to make them more intelligible to audiences in another). But there are many cases in which we find linguistic varieties that are mutually intelligible and gramatically similar, but where speakers nonetheless identify seperate languages-for example, Danish and Norweigan, Czech and Slovak, or Dutch and Afrikaans. And on the other hand, there are cases in which speakers indentify varieties as belonging to a single language, even though they are linguistically quite distant from one another: the various "dialects" of Chinese are more diffrent from one another than the Latin ofshoots that we identify as French, Italian, Spanish, and so forth.
Philosophers sometimes compare languages to games, and the analogy is apt here as well. Trying to determine whether American Englsih and British English or Dutch and Afrikaans are the "same language" is like trying to determine whether baseball and softball are "the same game" - it is not something you can find out just by looking at the rules. It is not surprising, then, that linguists should throw upt their hands when someone else asks then to determine on linguistic grounds alone whether two varieties belong to a single language. That, they answer, is a political or social determination, not a linguistic one, and they usually go on to cite a well-known quip: " a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy."
There is something to this remark. Since the eighteenth century, it had been widely believed that every nation deserved their own language, and declarations of political independence have often been followed by declarations of linguistic independence. Until recently, for example, the collection fo similar language varieties that were spoken in most of central Yugoslavia was regarded as a single language, Serbo-Croatian, but once the various regions became independent, their inhabitants began to speak of Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian as separate languages, even though they are mutually comprehensible and gramatically almost identical.
The English language has avoided this fate ( though on occasion it has come closer to breaking up than most people realize).But the unity of a language is never a foregone conclusion. In any speech-community, there are forces always at work to create new differences and varietiesL the geographic and social separation of speech-communities, their distinct cultural and practical interests, their contact with other cultures and other languages, and, no less important, a universla fondess for novelty for it's own sake, and a desire to speak differently from one's parents or the people in the next town. Left to function on their own,these centrifugal pressures can rapidly lead to linguistic fragmentation of the speech-community. That is what happened, for example, to the vulgar ( that is, popular) Latin of the late Roman Empire, which devolved into hundreds or thousands of separate dialects ( the emergence of the eight or ten standard varieties that we now think of as the "Romance languages" was a much later deveolpment).
Maintaining the unity of a language over and extended time and space, then, requires a more or less concious determination by its speakers that they have certain communicative interests in common that make it worth-while to try to curb or modulate the natural tendency to fragentation and isolation. This determination can be realized ina number of ways. The speakers of a language may decide to use common a common spelling system even when dilaects become phonetically disinct, to refer to the same set of literary models, to adopt a common format for their dictionaries and grammars, or to make instruction in the standard language a part of the general school curriculum, all of which the English-speaking world has done to some degree. Or in some other places, the nations of the linguistic community may establish academies or other state institutions charges with regulating the use of te language, and even go so far as to publish lists of words that are unacceptable for use in the press or in official publications, as the French government has done in recent years. Most important, the continuity of the language rests on speakers' willingness to absorb the linguistic and cultural influences of other parts of the linguistic community.
More to come, folks, but I'm tired and have to work tomorrow morning. Maybe I'll write some more tomorrow night. Spring semester is over, so I have more free time to waste here on CFC! The next installment is called 'The Emergence of the Enlgish Language:" this is where I make my point Plotinus, so be patient.
The Persistence of English
If you measure the success of a language in purely quantitative terms, English is entering the twenty-frist century at the moment of its greatest triumph. It as between 400 and 450 million native speakers, perhaps 300 million morewho speak it as a second language- well enough, that is, to use it in their daily lives- and somewhere between 500 and 750 million who speak it as a foreign language with various degrees of fluency. The resulting total of 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion speakers, or roughly a quarter of the world's population, gives English more speakers than any other language and is the predominant lingua franca of most fields of interanational activity, such as diplomacy, buisness, science, and technology.
But figures like these can obscure a basic question: what exactly do we mean when we talk about the " English Language" in the first place? There is, after all, an enormous range of variation in the forms of speech that go by the name of English in the various parts of the work- or oftern, even within te speech of a single nation- and it is not obvious why we whould think about all of these as belonging to a single language. Indeed, there are some linguists who prefer to talk about "world Englishes," in the plural, with the implication that these varieties may not have much more to unite them than a single name and a common historical origin.
To the general public, the reservations may be hard to understand; people usually assume that languages are natural kinds like botanical species, whose boundaries are matters of scientific fact. But as linguists observe, there is nothing in the forms of English themselves that tells us that it is a single language. it may be that the varieties called "English" have a great deal of vocabulary and structure in common and that English-speakers can usually manage to make themselves understood to one another, more or less ( though films produced in one part f the English-speaking world often have to be dubbed or subtitled to make them more intelligible to audiences in another). But there are many cases in which we find linguistic varieties that are mutually intelligible and gramatically similar, but where speakers nonetheless identify seperate languages-for example, Danish and Norweigan, Czech and Slovak, or Dutch and Afrikaans. And on the other hand, there are cases in which speakers indentify varieties as belonging to a single language, even though they are linguistically quite distant from one another: the various "dialects" of Chinese are more diffrent from one another than the Latin ofshoots that we identify as French, Italian, Spanish, and so forth.
Philosophers sometimes compare languages to games, and the analogy is apt here as well. Trying to determine whether American Englsih and British English or Dutch and Afrikaans are the "same language" is like trying to determine whether baseball and softball are "the same game" - it is not something you can find out just by looking at the rules. It is not surprising, then, that linguists should throw upt their hands when someone else asks then to determine on linguistic grounds alone whether two varieties belong to a single language. That, they answer, is a political or social determination, not a linguistic one, and they usually go on to cite a well-known quip: " a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy."
There is something to this remark. Since the eighteenth century, it had been widely believed that every nation deserved their own language, and declarations of political independence have often been followed by declarations of linguistic independence. Until recently, for example, the collection fo similar language varieties that were spoken in most of central Yugoslavia was regarded as a single language, Serbo-Croatian, but once the various regions became independent, their inhabitants began to speak of Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian as separate languages, even though they are mutually comprehensible and gramatically almost identical.
The English language has avoided this fate ( though on occasion it has come closer to breaking up than most people realize).But the unity of a language is never a foregone conclusion. In any speech-community, there are forces always at work to create new differences and varietiesL the geographic and social separation of speech-communities, their distinct cultural and practical interests, their contact with other cultures and other languages, and, no less important, a universla fondess for novelty for it's own sake, and a desire to speak differently from one's parents or the people in the next town. Left to function on their own,these centrifugal pressures can rapidly lead to linguistic fragmentation of the speech-community. That is what happened, for example, to the vulgar ( that is, popular) Latin of the late Roman Empire, which devolved into hundreds or thousands of separate dialects ( the emergence of the eight or ten standard varieties that we now think of as the "Romance languages" was a much later deveolpment).
Maintaining the unity of a language over and extended time and space, then, requires a more or less concious determination by its speakers that they have certain communicative interests in common that make it worth-while to try to curb or modulate the natural tendency to fragentation and isolation. This determination can be realized ina number of ways. The speakers of a language may decide to use common a common spelling system even when dilaects become phonetically disinct, to refer to the same set of literary models, to adopt a common format for their dictionaries and grammars, or to make instruction in the standard language a part of the general school curriculum, all of which the English-speaking world has done to some degree. Or in some other places, the nations of the linguistic community may establish academies or other state institutions charges with regulating the use of te language, and even go so far as to publish lists of words that are unacceptable for use in the press or in official publications, as the French government has done in recent years. Most important, the continuity of the language rests on speakers' willingness to absorb the linguistic and cultural influences of other parts of the linguistic community.
More to come, folks, but I'm tired and have to work tomorrow morning. Maybe I'll write some more tomorrow night. Spring semester is over, so I have more free time to waste here on CFC! The next installment is called 'The Emergence of the Enlgish Language:" this is where I make my point Plotinus, so be patient.
