Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [318]
From this point of view, our focus on large languages has been above all a convenience. All languages have their own histories, but few are well enough documented to reveal very much about them. It is the large and famous languages that typically have the most adequate documentation. This is where we needed to start, to lay down the outlines of this new field. And this we have done. But ultimately language dynamics must encompass the history of human language in all its diversity.
kva sūryabhavo vaśa kva cālpavi;ayā mati titīrur dustara mohād uupenāsmi sāgaram
here the lineage born of the Sun, and here my weakly endowed mind: would I in folly cross the impassable ocean in my canoe?
Kālidāsa, The Line of Raghu, i.2
* Everywhere the situation was complicated by the simultaneous surge in the use of third parties, mostly black Africans, as slaves; to an extent they, or a mix of them and the indigenous population,
became the representatives of a new minority community, with the immigrants now the majority. But this slave-associated minority was never divided by language from the majority community, since they had become a community themselves only by adopting some version of the slave-owners’ language.
* A little-noted spin-off of this was the first use of printed books as language tutors, initially of Latin. This in turn led to the development of missionary linguistics, originally as an aid to preaching in exotic places (Ostler: 2004).
† This can be expected soon to benefit small language communities, as well as the great languages that have been the subject of this book.
* However, the nature of the home community is changing, partly under the influence of English. Rising levels of female education, more and more including English, and the prevalence of domestic media such as radio and television, mean that the ‘mother-tongue’ situation for learning a first language in the home will increasingly include English.
* Of the forty-eight most heavily used intercontinental flows of telephone calls in 1994, 46.9 per cent (53 billion minutes) were between English speakers. Another 50.4 percent (57 billion) were between English speakers and countries of other languages (figures from TeleGeography Inc., as cited in Graddol 1997: 37).
* See Chapter 13, p. 532.
* Seventeen per cent (mostly Azeris) are in Iran; 7 per cent are in China (mostly Uyghurs); and 7 per cent (made up of Tatars, Chuvash and Bashkirs, and a variety of tiny groups) are in Russia.
* Thai, too, means ‘free’: so the ideal can also be found outside the European tradition.
* There is some irony in that this claim is also made by many small indigenous communities for their own languages, which never spread at all.
* And on the other side of the coin, when such a language is successfully picked up, but then effaced by another Indo-European language, the evidence may still be seen in deeply alien features surviving three millennia later. This is what was suggested to account for quirks of British Celtic ( see Chapter 7, ‘Rún: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts’, p. 292).
* Or, more explicitly and technically, diachronic sociolinguistics. Another recent example, largely focused on Africa, is Mufwene (2001 ).
NOTES
Prologue: A Clash of Languages
1. As such, it was recorded in many near-contemporary chronicles. For Motecuhzoma’s words in Nahuatl, I here quote from the contemporary encyclopedia of Aztec civilisation, General History of the Affairs of New Spain (xii.16), compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún,