A language history of the world

Languages

Mind the two P's

Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A
Language History of the World /
HarperCollins; 615 pages; £30.
To be published in America by
HarperCollins in July

A LANGUAGE is far more than the sum of its parts. It is also a
community of shared history, technology and even aspirations, which is
why Nicholas Ostler's new history is as much about societies as it is
about the languages they speak.

Some readers might have preferred the author, when mining his subject,
to have drilled with a diamond-hard bit rather than going for the
open-cast approach. Thankfully, though, he has set himself two limits.
First, he confines himself to languages with a surviving written
record—ruling out at a stroke the tentative histories of the
spread of
Polynesian languages from about 3,000BC and of the Bantu languages
over much of southern Africa from around the same time. Second, he
looks chiefly at languages that were once evidently successful, even
if, eventually, they became extinct.

Very few languages can be said to have been successful. The top
half-dozen languages, defined by the number of speakers who have them
as a first or second tongue, today account for half of the world's
population; Mandarin Chinese (with more than one billion speakers) and
English (with half a billion) alone make up a quarter of the world.
Most of the 6,800-odd language communities are tiny, and one language
dies out every fortnight.

Mr Ostler uses business metaphors to describe the success of
languages. Some spread through organic growth (such as the spread of
Mandarin south from the North China plains) or through mergers and
acquisitions, notably from 1492, when Europeans began their
transoceanic campaigns of conquest and colonisation. Shifting terms of
trade can affect a language's success. Yet one of the lessons that
shines through the book is that neither conquest nor economic might
guarantees a language's survival. Take, for example, the Manchus,
nomads from north-east Asia who conquered China in 1644 and ruled
there until 1911. Within a couple of generations their language had
all but disappeared, surviving today in China's far west among a
handful of descendants of one military garrison. As for trade, neither
the powerful Phoenician merchants who controlled Mediterranean trade
nor the business-driven Sogdians from Samarkand, who spread out along
the Silk Road, ever got their speech accepted as the lingua franca
even of trade.

For languages to thrive, they must also have prestige, through being
the language of a revealed religion (Sanskrit or Arabic) or
international diplomacy and high culture (French). That said,
languages are not always the creatures of world powers.

So what of the future? Mr Ostler warns against thinking that the
global dominance of English is secure. While such technological
innovations as broadcasting and the internet might have boosted the
prestige of English, other forces work against it: faster population
growth in other parts of the world and the possibility that spoken
English could evolve into separate dialect areas, as Latin did into
the Romance languages of western Europe. Chinese, to date
predominantly a national language, could evolve into an international
one as economic ties strengthen between the mainland and the Chinese
diaspora communities of South-East Asia. After all, the prestige that
characterises English today was not always there, and it may not be in
future.

(The Economist, Mar 11, 2005 • Books and arts)