Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [297]
These figures2 are based on use of the languages as first and second languages, i.e. not just native speakers but also people who have acquired the language for some other purpose and use it actively. Such ‘secondary’ speakers are clearly part of the language’s community. But we must be cautious about the numbers and hence the detailed ranking. The figures here are based ultimately on census returns, which may be subject to distortions with political intent. And English particularly has a large tail of ‘foreign language’ learners who are quite competent in it and use it frequently, even if it plays no official role in their countries, and may be unrecorded in census figures.3 However, the identity of the mega-languages is in practice uncontroversial.
The size distribution of the world’s languages is a lesson in itself. Adding together the native-speaker communities of these top twenty languages, we already have 57 per cent of the world’s population. Indeed, the top twelve alone account for 50 per cent of the world, hinting at how tiny the populations of most of the other six and a half thousand languages still spoken must be.
In the world’s top twenty, all the languages have their origins in the south or east of Asia, or in Europe. There is not one from the Americas, from Oceania or (most surprisingly) from Africa.* But quite naturally, and conversely, these absent areas are precisely where the world’s remaining linguistic diversity is concentrated.
The languages can be divided into two sets: those that have grown ‘organically’ and those that have been put together through processes of ‘merger and acquisition’. Organic growth is principally through population increase in the area of origin, but it can also include encroachment on neighbouring areas. Merger and acquisition spreads a language to discontinuous areas of the world, principally through seaborne invasion and settlement. All the languages that have spread in this latter way, English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, had their origins in western Europe, and indeed are daughter languages of Latin, or profoundly influenced by it. Although the other three European languages in the list, Russian, German and Italian, are not known in recent history for their associated governments’ attachment to peaceful methods of expanding their domains, their linguistic growth has been in practice predominantly organic. It is worth noting, as an early antidote to any militaristic presumptions about the causes of language growth, that outside the activities of the European colonists in the second half of the second millennium AD, very little of the growth of these giant languages in the top twenty can be set down to imperial aggression.*
What does account for their growth, then? It is noticeable that a great many of the languages (nine out of twenty) are spoken in civilisations sustained by rice as a staple crop (Bengali, Japanese, Korean, Wu and Yue Chinese,† Javanese, Tamil, Marathi, Vietnamese). Evidently, rice is capable of supporting dense and extensive populations, and its cultivation, through controlled flooding, requires a high level of organisation. Other languages which are not predominantly in the rice area are spoken in neighbouring areas that have assumed political control of the rice areas (Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi and Urdu, which are linguistically in a dialect continuum if they are distinct at all). It is also inescapable that, outside the European languages, the list is predominantly made up of languages of the two cultural giants of Asia, China and India.
Looking farther down the list (to the top fifty), many of the same patterns obtain: more variants of Chinese (Jinyu, Xiang, Hakka, Min, Gan), more Indian minority languages (Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Panjabi, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Sindhi), more rice economies (Burmese, Sundanese (of western Java), Thai),