Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [312]
From our perspective, the avocation of all these ideals, dear as they are to so many, has made little concrete difference to the survival and spread of any language community. Greek-language culture, as ostentatiously propagated round the Levant, Egypt and Persia by Alexander and his successors, and taken up by the Roman elite, involved little or no democracy, and mostly allegiance to absolute rulers—basileĩis—who declared themselves the legitimate successors of the kings of Macedon and Persia and the pharaohs of Egypt. Rome went on purveying Latin round its empire when the free, civic, institutions of the republic had been placed in thrall to a single family with army backing. French had become the preferred international language of European culture under the auspices of the Bourbons’ absolutist monarchy; the French Revolution projected the slogan ’Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité!’ and made France much more aggressive militarily, but it had little or no effect on the attractions of its language; its popularity began to falter only in the early twentieth century, long after the Restoration and the second fall of the French monarchy. The political freedoms so prized by Englishmen and Americans, which had brought the former to behead one monarch and depose his son, and then the latter to declare independence from the British state altogether, turned out to be quite compatible with a ruthless disregard for American First Nations’ rights as specifically granted by treaty, and the use of military force to build a global empire out of other peoples’ territories. Even ‘free trade’ turned out to be no bar to imperial preference within the British empire, or in our day to continuing massive subsidies to domestic producers. None of this in any way diminished the spread of the English language, whether by sweep-aside or re-education, all round the world.
Freedom of speech may now be a reality, not just an unfulfilled ideal, in all these languages’ current territories. But over the centuries and millennia of their development, freedom, under any definition, has never for very long been more than a hollow boast, or at best an aspiration. Our review of their histories has chosen to dwell rather on what life in these languages really meant.
Prestige
Prestige is about positive associations: in the case of languages, the roots of prestige are associations with wealth (in Europe, this above all), but also practical wisdom, enjoyment, and spiritual enlightenment.
The attractions of French in early modern Europe stemmed from the abundance delivered by the French economy, and much the same is true of English today. Somehow, speakers feel that they can share in the wealth by accepting the language. But the prestige of Latin, in the years of the Renaissance and after, and of Greek, in the heyday of the Roman empire, came not so much from abundance of wealth as from wisdom—perhaps itself a result of positive associations, since it is only when wealth is in good supply that that luxury product, education, can also be afforded. This underlay the attraction of Chinese and Akkadian: the sheer inaccessibility of written competence in these languages, paid for through a decade or more of study, added greatly to their prestige, and hence curiously their attractiveness.
And certain sorts of knowledge also offer greater access to wealth: the Greek sophists of the fifth century BC showed this, making the power of persuasive speech available at a fee; modern governments are buying into the same motive when they see competence in English as the road to economic development.