Discussion Details
| Title: | Ask-a-linguist |
| Submitter: | Richard Durkan |
| Description: | The more I study languages the more puzzled I become about their essence and
the nature of their development and I wonder what analytical models there are for studying both of these aspects. Many major languages can be linked to the rise and fall of civilisations and can be treated accordingly. One aspect that strikes me, however, is how so many of them are artificial constructs eg the way the Soviets contrived to emphasise the differences between closely related Turkic languages, creating a language like Kyrgyz which was not clearly distinguished from Kazakh before the Bolshevik revolution; and creating a language like Uzbek on the basis of an atypical, highly Iranicized dialect in the south of Uzbekistan. Lingala was a similarly artificial amalgam of local dialects and languages for trading and missionary purposes. Other languages seem to have been consciously revived by nationalist and independence movements eg Greek and Hungarian in the 19th century and more recently, Hebrew. There is an ongoing tension in the Urdu/Hindi/Sanskrit nexus, particularly with the tendency to Sanskritise the more formal varieties of Hindi to the point where they can be almost incomprehensible even to quite educated Hindi speakers. Some studies seem to see languages in biological/Darwinian terms eg the recent spate of books on language death refer to languages such as English as 'killer languages' in relation to smaller languages. If you adopt a biological model, I wonder how you deal with the concept of 'purity' in languages. Surely for a language to prosper it has to 'interbreed' with other languages to enhance its 'genetic' strength. Otherwise, it would become stagnant and isolated from modern developments unless isolation is imposed on it by geographical location (eg Balti). A language's success seems so bound with military prowess, economic might, political manipulation and the development of nationalist feelings and nation-building. There seems a tension between the desire to preserve rarer languages as part of our human heritage and as another way that humans have mediated reality, on the one hand and, on the other, the danger that they become museum pieces (although I suppose if you take the view that languages are artificial anyway the museum-piece objection is not that strong. If you adopt a Darwinian approach, I suppose you would take a survival of the fittest view - the languages that survive are the ones that deserve to survive). Can you have a model of something as organic as a language, particularly in this global age with constant cross influences (although I cannot think the phenomenon is new - there must have been an enormous amount of cross influences in the past in areas like the Silk Road)? Richard Durkan |
| Date Posted: | 19-Oct-2004 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Anthropological Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 15.2967 |
| Posted: | 19-Oct-2004 |
