Language as the leader of civilization’s march

IN “Empires of the Word,” a door-stopping survey of linguistic history that’s as big (and almost as unwieldy) as its subject, Nicholas Ostler puts language front and center as an engine of historical change. If scholars have looked to politics and war or economics and social trends to explain the march of civilizations, Ostler argues for the primacy of language. “Far more than princes, states or economies, it is language-communities who are the real players in world history,” he contends.

Indeed, languages provide the very basis for civilization: They bind societies together and conserve traditions, allowing them to be passed from one generation to the next. Without language, there would be no history to chronicle at all.

From Akkadian to Urdu, Ostler leads us on a rich, if dizzying, tour of “languages that have loomed large in the world.” On every page, “Empires of the Word” bulges with the harvest of Ostler’s prodigious research, but be warned: All this information is sometimes hard to digest. The reader should chew slowly. Still, Ostler, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained linguist and chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, seasons his text with many piercing observations and startling comparisons. Did you know, for example, that English has certain unexpected commonalities with Chinese? Both have subject-verb-object word orders, as well as spoken forms that are “only loosely attached to the written traditions of the language.”

Above all, Ostler is concerned with the growth and spread of language. How does a language develop and thrive, and why does it wither and die? Throughout the book, he argues against a more traditional, triumphalist view of linguistics, which stresses conquest as a key factor in the spread of language. Consider the following from British linguist J.L Firth, who remarked in 1937 that “statesman, soldiers, sailors, and missionaries, men of action, men of strong feelings have made world languages.”

The story Ostler tells is more complicated. In fact, if there is a unifying theme to this sprawling saga, it’s that political domination does not necessarily translate into linguistic supremacy. “Permanent language spread, it turns out, is not to be achieved through planning, or naked force,” he notes. There are any number of historical examples to buttress the claim: The Franks, Vandals and Goths who picked apart the Roman Empire left no linguistic imprint on Western Europe, where the remnants of Latin were transformed into such languages as Italian, Spanish and French. Turkish and Mongol invaders, who ruled China from AD 400 to about 1100, did not dent the authority of Chinese, one of the globe’s most enduring languages. The Dutch ruled Indonesia for nearly two centuries, but you don’t hear their language on the streets of Jakarta. Nor, it turns out, does economic preeminence contribute much to our understanding of language dynamics. Case in point: While the seafaring Phoenicians dominated Mediterranean trade throughout the first millennium BC, Greek thrived as the lingua franca.

As he hopscotches through the centuries, Ostler provides an opinionated tour d’horizon of world history. His account divides roughly into two eras: the epoch before 1492, when the spread of languages took place across land routes and remained largely confined to “coherent, centered regions”; and the three centuries after 1492, when languages expanded across the sea as Europeans pushed into the New World. (There are, of course, exceptions: Sanskrit pushed into Southeast Asia across the Indian Ocean via maritime routes long before the author’s dividing point.) How, then, does a language take hold?

The formula, Ostler suggests, is complex, but in short, a language must have staying power. Technological innovation, cultural authority (Greek and Sanskrit both offered their speakers a body of learned discourse), liturgical necessity (Hebrew and Arabic), migrations and simple pragmatism (Aramaic supplanted Akkadian in ancient Mesopotamia in part because it offered a radically simpler alphabet) all have played major roles in the spread of languages.

Since 1492, the migration of settler groups from Europe has been a key factor in the spread of English, Spanish and Portuguese around the world. Although Ostler does not minimize the drastic effects of disease and military conquest on indigenous peoples, he colors our perception of the ways that Europeans -- especially the Spanish -- settled the New World. To his credit, he is not a believer in historical inevitability. Although it’s now spoken throughout the Americas, Spanish “has had a narrow escape.” As recently as the late 1500s, one could find a lively Babel of languages -- 493, give or take -- spoken in the Spanish empire. Jesuit missionaries slowed the rise of Spanish considerably by preaching the liturgy in the native languages of their subjects. During the first two centuries of Spanish rule, Nahuatl flourished in much of what is now Mexico. But this was not to last: The influence of the Church began to wane in the 18th century, and without the friars and priests, Indian languages had few advocates. The rise of independence movements in the 19th century represented a further blow, as the great liberators of the time shunned local languages, unifying their nationalist movements under the banner of a common Spanish tongue.

“Empires of the Word” is a story of dramatic reversals and puzzling paradoxes. The fate of most languages is impermanence and decay. Ostler reminds us that languages that once seemed dominant -- Greek and Latin, the pioneering Semitic languages of Akkadian and Sumerian -- turned out to be anything but. This brings us to the 800-pound gorilla in the room: English, which is undoubtedly the most influential language in our time. “The past four hundred years have been almost absurdly affirming for the English-speaking peoples,” Ostler writes. Today, English’s reach is vast. It is the universal language of pop culture. (Don’t French pop songs sound ridiculous?) If you throw in the three-quarters of a billion people who study it, one can safely say that at least a quarter of humankind is familiar with the English tongue.

Yet for all that, “Empires of the Word” suggests, its future is murky. As a first language, English has peaked demographically. It may now serve as the vernacular of international commerce, but “businessmen are notoriously unsentimental.” Who knows? Perhaps future chairmen of foundations for endangered languages will be trying to prevent the English language from being cast into the dustbin of history. Either way, Ostler concedes, “English can hardly expect that its linguistic vogue will continue forever.” *