Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [314]
If this is absent, so that the surrounding people do not share a common language, a language may still be learnt, but it will be a new formation, distinct from all the languages that the adults knew, a mixture of them reconstructed on first principles. When a group of children learn such a language, a creole comes into being. If the learners are older, adults looking for some common means of de facto communication, the result is a pidgin.
The third possibility is that the language is consciously studied and learnt, either through daily exposure to it, or through formal instruction, perhaps at a school. This process does not depend on the native capacity for language-forming that is active in the minds of small children; in fact, it can be put into effect whatever the age of the learner. In this case, the learner must already speak another language, and use it—explicitly and implicitly—in acquiring the new one.
The first two ways are not in any way dependent on the structure of the languages being learnt. It is generally accepted by linguists that any natural language, of whatever structure, can be learnt by any normal child—regardless of the child’s ancestry or its parents’ own linguistic background. Some sounds, and some linguistic structures, may take longer to get implanted than others, but everything will come in time. This fact is almost the definition of what it is to be a natural language. As for the genesis of creoles, the matter is controversial, but it appears that they all tend to have a common structure, which emerges naturally as the language is formed. The structures of the contributing languages, from whose parts the learners are constructing the creole, have no effect on the structure of the new language as it comes together.
The third case, which is common when a language is spreading in a territory new to it, may, however, have some interesting consequences for the possible succession of languages. In this case, learners of a language will retain in their minds some background formed by the language or languages they knew before, what is called the substrate. This substrate may impose a constraint on the kind of language that can then be successfully learnt.
Such a constraint may be of two kinds. It may cause the learners to come up with a new version of the language, influenced by their old speech. English spoken in India has lost its characteristic diphthongs: the words gate and boat, [geyt] and [bewt] in England, are pronounced [gēt] and [bōt] in India. Likewise, the stress-timed tempo of English has been replaced by a more even, syllable-timed, pace. But more radically, the constraint may act as a major block on the learners ever gaining effective command of the new language. An example of this might be seen in the widespread failure of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Japan for several decades after the Second World War, despite Herculean efforts on all sides to give the next generation competence in this new skill.
The idea that there might be this kind of structural constraint on the adoption of a language is highly controversial; it will be difficult to demonstrate in a particular case because there will always be a multitude of non-linguistic reasons which might be inhibiting take-up of the language. But the perspective of this book, where language dynamics have been surveyed over centuries, gives some new arguments to show that it may be a real factor limiting the spread of certain languages into certain territories, or rather among certain populations.
Consider, then, the curious retrenchment in the domain of Arabic, which seemed to roll back from its farthest limits in the east and the west, about three centuries after its first spread following the death of Muhammad. (See Chapter 3, ‘Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission”, p. 93.) It settled permanently only in the territories that had previously spoken an Afro-Asiatic language, i.e. one that was structurally close to Arabic itself. First of all, Arabic took