All languages have the same purpose—to communicate thoughts—and yet they
achieve this single aim in a multiplicity of ways. It appears there is no feature of
grammar or syntax that is indispensable or universal. The ways of dealing with
matters of number, tense, case, gender, and the like are wondrously various from
one tongue to the next. Many languages manage without quite basic grammatical
or lexical features, while others burden themselves with remarkable
complexities. A Welsh speaker must choose between five ways of saying than:
na, n', nag, mwy, or yn fwy. Finnish has fifteen case forms, so every noun varies
depending on whether it is nominative, accusative, allative, inessive, comitative,
or one of ten other grammatical conditions. Imagine learning fifteen ways of
spelling cat, dog, house, and so on. English, by contrast, has abandoned case
forms, except for possessives, where we generally add 's, and with personal
pronouns which can vary by no more than three ways (e.g., they, their, them), but
often by only two (you, your). Similarly, in English ride has just five forms (ride,
rides, rode, riding, ridden); the same verb in German has sixteen. In Russian,
nouns can have up to twelve inflections and adjectives as many as sixteen. In
English adjectives have just one invariable form with but, I believe, one
exception: blond/blonde.
Not only did various speech communities devise different languages, but also
different cultural predispositions to go with them.
Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very
close, relatively speaking, to those they are addressing. A common scene when
people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a
cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily
retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to
close the gap. Neither speaker may even be aware of it. There are more of these
speech conventions than you might suppose. English speakers dread silence. We
are all familiar with the uncomfortable feeling that overcomes us when a
conversation palls. Studies have shown that when a pause reaches four seconds,
one or more of the conversationalists will invariably blurt something—a fatuous
comment on the weather, a startled cry of "Gosh, is that the time?" rather than let
the silence extend to a fifth second.A vital adjunct to language is the gesture, which in some cultures can almost
constitute a vocabulary all its own. Modern Greek has more than seventy
common gestures, ranging from the chopping off the forearm gesture, which
signifies extreme displeasure, to several highly elaborate ones, such as placing
the left hand on the knee, closing one eye, looking with the other into the middle
distance and wagging the free hand up and down, which means "I don't want
anything to do with it." According to Mario Pei, the human anatomy is capable
of producing some 700,000 "distinct elementary gestures" of this type. We have
nothing remotely like that number in English, but we have many more than you
might at first think—from wagging a finger in warning at a child, to squeezing
the nose and fanning the face to indicate a noisome smell, to putting a hand to
the ear as if to say, "I can't hear you."
Estimates of the number of languages in the world usually fix on a figure of
about 2,700, though almost certainly no one has ever made a truly definitive
count. In many countries, perhaps the majority, there are at least two native
languages, and in some cases—as in Cameroon and Papua New Guinea—there
are hundreds. India probably leads the world, with more than 1,600 languages
and dialects (it isn't always possible to say which is which).
The rarest language as of 1984 was Oubykh, a highly complex Caucasian
language with eighty-two consonants but only three vowels, once spoken by
50,000 people in the Crimea. But as of July 1984 there was just one living
speaker remaining and he was eighty-two years old.
The number of languages naturally changes as tribes die out or linguistic groups
are absorbed. Although new languages, particularly creoles, are born from time
to time, the trend is towards absorption and amalgamation. When Columbus
arrived in the New World, there were an estimated 1,000 languages. Today there
are about boo.
Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has
changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years
ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his
way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like airport and quarter-
pound cheeseburger. In English, by contrast, the change has been much more
dramatic. Almost any untrained person looking at a manuscript from the time of,
say, the Venerable Bede would be hard pressed to identify it as being in English—and in a sense he or she would be right. Today we have not only a completely
different vocabulary and system of spelling, but even a different structure.
Nor are languages any respecters of frontiers. If you drew a map of Europe
based on languages it would bear scant resemblance to a conventional map.
Switzerland would disappear, becoming part of the surrounding dominions of
French, Italian, and German but for a few tiny pockets for Romansh (or
Romantsch or Rhaeto-Romanic as it is variously called), which is spoken as a
native language by about half the people in the Graubunden district (or Grisons
district—almost everything has two names in Switzerland) at the country's
eastern edge. This steep and beautiful area, which takes in the ski resorts of St.
Moritz, Davos, and Klosters, was once effectively isolated from the rest of the
world by its harsh winters and forbidding geography. Indeed, the isolation was
such that even people in neighboring valleys began to speak different versions of
the language, so that Romansh is not so much one language as five fragmented
and not always mutually intelligible dialects. A person from the valley around
Sutselva will say, "Vagned na qua" for "Come here," while in the next valley he
will say, "Vegni neu cheu." [Cited in The Economist, February 27, 1988] In
other places people will speak the language in the same way but spell it
differently depending on whether they are Catholic or Protestant.
German would cover not only its traditional areas of Germany, Austria, and
much of Switzerland, but would spill into Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Romania,
Hungary, the Soviet Union, and Poland, and it could be further divided into high
and low German, which have certain notable differences in terms of vocabulary
and syntax. In Bavaria, for instance, Samstag is the name for Saturday, but in
Berlin it is Sonnabend; a plumber in Bavaria is a spengler, but a klempner in
Berlin.
Italy, too, would appear on the map not as one language entity but as a whole
variety of broadly related but often mutually incomprehensible dialects. Italian,
such as it is, is not a national language, but really only the dialect of Florence
and Tuscany, which has slowly been gaining preeminence over other dialects.
Not until 1979 did a poll show for the first time that Italian was the dialect
spoken at home by more than 50 percent of Italians.
Much the same would be the position in the Soviet Union, which would dissolve
into 1 49 separate languages. Almost half the people in the country speak somelanguage other than Russian as a native tongue, and a full quarter of the people
do not speak Russian at all.
Such pockets would be everywhere. Even Latin would make an appearance: It is
still the official language of Vatican City.
All these languages blend and merge and variously affect each other. French
normally puts the adjective after the noun it is modifying (as in l'auto rouge
rather than le rouge auto), but in Alsace and other Rhineland regions influenced
by Germany, the locals have a tendency to reverse the normal order. In a similar
way, in the Highlands of Scotland, English speakers, whether or not they
understand Gaelic, have developed certain speech patterns clearly influenced by
Gaelic phrasings, saying "take that here" rather than "bring that here" and "I'm
seeing you" in preference to "I see you." In border areas, such as between
Holland and West Germany or between West Germany and Denmark, the locals
on each side often understand each other better than they do their own
compatriots.
Some languages are not so distinct as we are sometimes led to believe. Spanish
and Portuguese are closely enough related that the two peoples can read each
other's newspapers and books, though they have more difficulty understanding
speech.
Finns and Estonians can freely understand each other. Danes, Swedes, and
Norwegians often insist that their languages are quite distinct and yet, as Mario
Pei puts it, there are greater differences between Italian dialects such as Sicilian
and Piedmontese than there are between any of the three main Scandinavian
languages. Romanian and Moldavian, spoken in the Soviet Union, are essentially
the same language with different names. So are Serbian and Croatian, the only
real difference being that Serbian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and Croatian uses
Western characters.
In many countries people use one language for some activities and a second
language for others. In Luxembourg, the inhabitants use French at school,
German for reading newspapers, and' Luxemburgish, a local Germanic dialect,
at home. In Paraguay, people conduct business in Spanish, but tell their jokes in
Guarani, the native Indian tongue. In Greece, for a long time children were
schooled only in Katharevousa, a formal language so archaic that it was (andindeed still is) no longer spoken anywhere in the country.
The language for common discourse was Dhimotiki, yet perversely this
everyday language was long held in such low esteem that when the Old
Testament was published in Dhimotiki for the first time in 1go3, riots broke out
all over the country. [Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics, page 115 + ]
In countries where two or more languages coexist, confusion often arises. In
Belgium, many towns have two quite separate names, one recognized by French
speakers, one by Dutch speakers, so that the French Tournai is the Dutch
Doornik, while the Dutch Luik is the French Liege. The French Mons is the
Dutch Bergen, the Dutch Kortrijk is the French Courtrai, and the city that to all
French-speaking people (and indeed most English-speaking people) is known as
Bruges (and pronounced "broozsh") is to the locals called Brugge and
pronounced "broo-guh." Although Brussels is officially bilingual, it is in fact a
French-speaking island in a Flemish lake.
Language is often an emotive issue in Belgium and has brought down many
governments. Part of the problem is that there has been a reversal in the relative
fortunes of the two main language groups. Wallonia, the southern, French-
speaking half of Belgium, was long the economic powerhouse of the country, but
with the decline of traditional heavy industries such as steel and coal, the
economic base has moved north to the more populous, but previously backward,
region of Flanders. During the period of the Walloon ascendancy, the Dutch
dialect, Flemish, or Vlaams, was forbidden to be spoken in parliament, courts,
and even in schools.
This naturally caused lingering resentment among the Dutch-speaking majority.
The situation is so hair-triggered that when a French-speaking group of villages
in Flanders known as the Fourons elected a French-speaking mayor who refused
to conduct his duties in Dutch, the national government was brought down twice
and the matter clouded Belgian politics for a decade.
Even more bitter has been the situation in French-speaking Canada. In 1976, the
separatist Parti Quebecois, under the leadership of Rene Levesque, introduced a
law known as Bill 101, which banned languages other than French on
commercial signs, restricted the number of admissions to English schools (andrequired the children of immigrants to be schooled in French even if both parents
spoke English), and made French the language of the workplace for any
company employing more than fifty people. The laws were enforced by a
committee with the ominous name of Commission de Surveillance de la Langue
Francaise. Fines of up to $760 were imposed by 400 "language police." All of
this was a trifle harsh on the 800,000 Quebec citizens who spoke English, and a
source of considerable resentment, as when "Merry Christmas" greetings were
ordered to be taken down and 15,000 Dunkin'
Donuts bags were seized. In December 1988, the supreme court of Canada ruled
that parts of Bill 101 were illegal. According to the court, Quebec could order
that French be the primary language of commerce, but not the only one. As an
immediate response, 15,000 francophones marched in protest through the streets
of Montreal and many stores that had bilingual signs were vandalized, often by
having the letters FLQ (for Front de Liberation de Quebec) spray-painted across
their windows. One was firebombed.
But even a thousand miles from Quebec linguistic ill feeling sometimes surfaces.
Because Canada is officially bilingual, a national law states that all regions of
the country must provide services in both French and English, but this has
caused sometimes bitter resentment in non-French-speaking areas such as
Manitoba, where there are actually more native speakers of German and
Ukrainian than of French. French Canadians are a shrinking proportion of the
country, falling from 29 percent of the total population in 1961 to 24 percent
today and forecast to fall to 20 percent by early in the next century.
People can feel incredibly strongly about these matters. As of February 1989, the
Basque separatist organization ETA (short for Euskadi to Azkatasuna, "Basque
Nation and Liberty") had committed 672 murders in the name of linguistic and
cultural independence. Even if we are repelled by the violence it is easy to
understand the feelings of resentment that arise among linguistic minorities.
Under Franco, you could be arrested and imprisoned just for speaking Basque in
public. Catalan, a language midway between Spanish and French, spoken by
250,000 people principally in Catalonia but also as far afield as Roussillon in
France, was likewise long banned in Spain. In France, for decades letters
addressed in Breton were returned with the message Addresse en Breton
interdite ("Address in Breton forbidden"). Hitler and Mussolini even went so far
as to persecute Esperanto speakers.XSuppression is still going on. In the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Azerbaijanis
and other linguistic minorities rioted, and sometimes lost their lives, for the right
to have newspapers and schoolbooks in their own language. In Romania there
exists a group of people called Szeklers who speak what is said to be the purest
and most beautiful form of Hungarian. But for thirty years, until the fall of
Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian government systematically eradicated its
culture, closing down schools, forcing the renowned Hungarian-language Bolyai
University to merge with a lesser-known Romanian one, even bulldozing whole
villages, all in the name of linguistic conformity.
On the whole, however, governments these days take a more enlightened view to
their minority languages. Nowhere perhaps has this reversal of attitudes been
more pronounced than in Wales.
Once practically banned, the Welsh language is now officially protected by the
government. It is a language of rich but daunting beauty. Try getting your tongue
around this sentence, from a parking lot in Gwynedd, the most determinedly
Welsh-speaking of Wales's eight counties: "A ydycg wedi talu a dodi eich tocyn
yn y golwg?" It translates roughly as "Did you remember to pay?" and, yes, it is
about as unpronounceable as it looks. In fact, more so because Welsh
pronunciations rarely bear much relation to their spellings—at least when
viewed from an English-speaking perspective. The town of Dolgellau, for
instance, is pronounced "doll-geth-lee," while Llandudno is "klan-did-no." And
those are the easy ones. There are also scores of places that bring tears to the
eyes of outsiders: Llwchmynydd, Bwlchtocyn, Dwygyfylch, Cw-mystwyth,
Pontrhydfendigaid, and Cnwch Cock
Given such awesome phonics it is perhaps little wonder that Prince Charles had
endless difficulties mastering the language before his investiture as Prince of
Wales in 1969. In this he is not alone. Almost 80 percent of all Welsh people do
not speak Welsh.
Although the country is officially bilingual and all public signs are in Welsh as
well as English, the Welsh language is spoken hardly at all in the south, around
the main industrial cities of Swansea, Cardiff, and Newport, and elsewhere it
tends to exist only in pockets in the more remote inland areas.That it has survived at all is a tribute to the character of the Welsh people. Until
well into this century Welsh was all but illegal. It was forbidden in schools, in
the courts, and at many places of work. Children who forgot themselves and
shouted it on the playground were often forced to undergo humiliating
punishments.
Now all that has changed. Since the 1960s the British government has allowed
Welsh to become an official language, has permitted its use in schools in
predominantly Welsh-speaking areas, allowed people to give court evidence in
Welsh, and set up a Welsh television station. Welsh, according to The
Economist, is now "the most subsidized minority language in the world."
Discussing the advent of 5 4C, the Welsh-language television station, it
observed:
"Never mind that it costs £ 43 million a year to broadcast to the 20 percent of the
population of Wales who speak Welsh, who in turn make up only 1 percent of
the population of Britain."
All of this was secured for the Welsh people only after a long campaign of
vandalism, in which road signs were painted over, television masts torn down,
and weekend cottages owned by English people set alight. More than a hundred
people were imprisoned during the campaign. Today, although still very much a
minority tongue, Welsh is more robust than many other small European
languages—certainly in much better health than the Breton language of France,
its closest relation. (Breton and Welsh are so close that speakers from the two
regions can converse, though they have lived apart for 1,500 years.) Its numbers
are falling, but it is still spoken by half a million people.
The position is somewhat less buoyant for the Gaelic of Ireland.
There too the government has been a generous defender of the language, but
with less visible success. Ireland is not even officially an English-speaking
country. Yet 94 percent of her citizens speak only English and just i percent use
Gaelic as their preferred language. Ireland is the only member of the Common
Market that does not insist on having its own language used in community
business, largely because it would be pointless. The dearth of Gaelic speakers
does convey certain advantages to those who have mastery of the tongue. The
Spectator magazine noted in 1986 how Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien would respondto an awkward question in the Dail, or lower house of parliament, by emitting a
mellifluous flurry of Gaelic, which most of the members of his audience could
but admire if not even faintly understand.
The Irish-speaking area of Ireland, called the Gaeltacht, has been inexorably
shrinking for a long time. Even before the potato famine of 1845 drove hundreds
of thousands of people from the land, only about a quarter of the population
spoke Gaelic. Today Gaelic clings to a few scattered outposts, mostly along the
rocky and underpopulated west coast. This has long been one of the most
depressed, if fabulously scenic, areas of Europe. The government has tried to
shore up the perennially faltering economy by bringing in tourists and industry,
but this has put an inevitable strain on the local culture. In the 1970s the
population of Donegal, the main Irish-speaking area, increased by a fifth, but the
incomers were almost entirely English speakers who not only cannot speak
Gaelic but have little desire to learn a language that is both difficult and so
clearly doomed.
All the evidence suggests that minority languages shrink or thrive at their own
ineluctable rate. It seems not to matter greatly whether governments suppress
them brutally or support them lavishly. Despite all the encouragement and
subsidization given to Gaelic in Ireland, it is spoken by twice as many people in
Scotland, where there has been negligible government assistance. Indeed,
Scottish Gaelic is one of the few minority languages in the world to be growing.
Gaelic was introduced to Scotland by invaders from Ireland thirteen centuries
ago and long held sway in the more remote islands and glens along the western
side of the country.
From 80,000 speakers in 1960 the number has now crept up to a little over
90,000 today. Even so, Gaelic speakers account for just 2.5 percent of the
Scottish population.
But almost everywhere else the process is one of slow, steady, and all too often
terminal decline. The last speaker of Cornish as a mother tongue died 200 years
ago, and though constant efforts are made to revive the language, no more than
fifty or sixty people can speak it fluently enough to hold a conversation. It
survives only in two or three dialect words, most notably emmets ("ants"), the
word locals use to describe the tourists who come crawling over their gorgeous
landscape each summer. A similar fate befell Manx, a Celtic language spoken onthe Isle of Man, whose last native speakers died in the 1960s.
The Gaelic of Ireland may well be the next to go. In 1983, Bord na Gaelige, the
government body charged with preserving the language, wrote: "There is very
little hope indeed that Irish will survive as a community language in the
Gaeltacht beyond the end of the century"—an uncharacteristically downbeat, if
sadly realistic, assessment.
We naturally lament the decline of these languages, but it is not an altogether
undiluted tragedy. Consider the loss to English literature if Joyce, Shaw, Swift,
Yeats, Wilde, Synge, Behan, and Ireland's other literary masters had written in
what is inescapably a fringe language. Their works would be as little known to
us as those of the poets of Iceland or Norway, and that would be a tragedy
indeed. No country has given the world more incomparable literature per head of
population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small,
selfish celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.
Sometimes languages fail to acquire what may seem to us quite basic terms. The
Romans had no word for gray. To them it was another shade of dark blue or dark
green. Irish Gaelic possesses no equivalent of yes or no. They must resort to
roundabout expressions such as "I think not" and "This is so." Italians cannot
distinguish between a niece and a granddaughter or between a nephew and a
grandson. The Japanese have no definite or indefinite articles corresponding to
the English a, an, or the, and they do not distinguish between singular and plural
as we do with, say, ball/balls and child/children or as the French do with
chateau/chateaux. This may seem strange until you reflect that we don't make a
distinction with a lot of words—sheep, deer, trout, Swiss, scissors—and it
scarcely ever causes us trouble. We could probably well get by without it for all
words. But it is harder to make a case for the absence in Japanese of a future
tense. To them Tokyo e yukimasu means both ["I go to Tokyo" and "I will go to
Tokyo." To understand which sense is intended, you need to know the context.
This lack of explicitness is a feature of Japanese—even to the point that they
seldom use personal pronouns like me, my, and yours. Such words exist, but the
Japanese employ them so sparingly that they might as well not have them. Over
half of all Japanese sentences have no subject. They dislike giving a
straightforward yes or no. It is no wonder that they are so often called
inscrutable.