Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [310]
In fact, academic traditions too have a fairly poor record, even on their own account, for sustaining interest in genuine open-mindedness; there is always the temptation to appeal to authority, and the accepted canon of ‘normal science’: recall how the sképsis and theōría of third- and fourth-century Greece hardened into later linguistic conservatism and scholasticism, how the lively disputations underlying Sanskrit grammar and Buddhist logic congealed and ceased to develop in medieval India, and how the Abbasid golden age of research in Arabic petered out with Averroes in the twelfth century. There is plenty of scope for the worldwide scientific community to go into at least a temporary eclipse; and if global scientific exchange falters, English too will lose out. The second death of Latin shows vividly how such a thing can, and did, happen on an international scale.
There are already new potential centres of world civilisation growing, with different language backgrounds. In East and South-East Asia, Chinese-language communities are increasingly apparent as masters of investment, and look likely at last to work in concert with their fellow Chinese in the rapidly developing People’s Republic. (See Chapter 4, ‘Foreign relations’, p. 161.) In the Middle East, Arabic-speaking peoples are growing in numbers with some sense of solidarity, part of the global ummah bound together by acceptance of Islam. The militant actions of radical Islamists, and the inequities of income and power caused by the dominance of oil revenues in their economies, may slow their real integration. But ultimately it is hard to doubt that this very large and self-conscious group, sharing a faith and a language, and increasingly able to communicate at all levels through modern media, will make common cause, even without political leadership from one of the main states of the region.
Less prominently, too, we can note that two-thirds of the world’s 147 million Turkish-speaking peoples, notably Turks, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, are now organised independently of foreigners for the first time since the Russian advance into central Asia.* As a total community, there are more of them than there are speakers of any of German, French or Japanese. With better communications, they will begin to consider themselves a unit, for most of their languages are mutually intelligible.
Such reorganisations will not immediately threaten, or even at first significantly diminish, the global use of English. But they may offer early signs that the equilibrium of languages used in global communication is beginning to shift in a different direction.
To foresee Chinese or Arabic as major international languages requires no imagination: it follows from extrapolation of current population trends, in combination with well-known economic and political facts. But in reality, the future language history of the world will quite likely involve surprising new developments that alter population balances. Who could have foreseen that discovery of gold in Brazil in the 1790s would suddenly spur that place to fill up with Portuguese speakers, when Portugal had already held the land for three centuries without any great linguistic effect? Sometimes a single event is enough to trigger a potential that has long been possible, but remained unrealised.
And who, even in the eleventh century, could have foreseen that the import into Europe of paper-making (twelfth century), gunpowder (fourteenth century) and printing (fifteenth century) would have first revolutionised its religious life in the Reformation, and then sent its adventurers out to settle, and to dominate others all over the non-Christian world? These three were all