I’ve made it no secret that I think of languages as living things. They change, they grow, and they thrive on creative use. Without it, they die. One of the reasons this happens is that political forces institutionalize the use of another language, or a specific version of that language, and so all official records maintain this one version and none other. To advance in society, the official version must be adopted, and so the colloquial languages fall out of use and die.
One of things we do in the name of preserving languages is to fastidiously enforce concretized grammatical rules. In France, La Francophonie fights the good fight against encroaching anglicization. But in No Bearla, a native Irish speaker attempts to travel through Ireland using only the official language of the country, and finds himself encountering difficulties getting information outside of token Irish speakers (many who say openly that the language is dead) and some written sources.
One of the theories that arises from the conversations in the show is that Irish is dying because it’s not used a regular language, but instead taught as a subject in schools. Perhaps this over-formalization makes the language inaccessible – instead of communication, the focus is on vocabulary lessons and grammatical rules. In a lot of ways, to concretize a language is to lock it in a time capsule and make it something that eventually dies and becomes the province of scholars alone. The result of this is that the “proper” language stays put while the colloquial language forges on, changing and growing until one day it no longer resembles its origin enough to be identified with it.
Perhaps that’s why the French model works and the Irish model does not – with constant moderation and alteration as society changes, it can stay relevant.
While I don’t have the academic tools as my disposal to explore this idea further, I think a parallel can be drawn to a similar tension in how we treat the English language. I get a little caught between my disdain for people who pride themselves on judging others’ grammar, and my own frustration with ill-crafted sentences that hide the author’s meaning. I’m not fussy, but I can’t deny I prefer to read prose that’s grammatically pleasing. It’s just easier to understand.
In How to Escape the Claws of the Grammar Police, Ben Huberman looks at the “right” ways to break grammatical rules, and I agree with his advice. I think learning the rules gives you a mastery that lets you see it for what it is – a set of arbitrarily rules derived from current patterns. If you break the rules unintentionally, you might be part of a general zeitgeist, but you might not. Master those rules, and you can step outside of them to drive new patterns.
So I’m caught between two desires. I want languages to grow and change match the world in which we live, but I also don’t want to see them die. I think these two goals can be connected, but I’m afraid that they’re both impossible to control. When we police a language too much, we choke it out – but if we let it change too much with the political and social tides, we let slip through our fingers.
5 thoughts on “The Life of a Language”
SelfAwarePatterns
An interesting post. It seems like, historically, it is the fate of all languages to either die out, or evolve into something unrecognizable. I sometimes wonder though what effect mass literacy will have on this. It seems like English changed a great deal between Chaucer and Defoe, but hasn’t change nearly as much since.
Michelle Joelle
I can’t decide whether I think it’s good that our current language has the tools for self-preservation, or if I think it’s a shame that it doesn’t seem likely to change to same degree!
Lee
Languages are a mirror of the cultures to which they’re attached, aren’t they? As goes the culture, so goes the language.
Michelle Joelle
Well put!
knotrune
I became a lot more relaxed about grammar after studying language change, but I do dislike grammatical laziness when it gives rise to ambiguity. As far as the written language goes, I think there is a value to preserving grammar and spelling as it not only allows easier access to texts from the past, but also communication between dialects, some of which are impenetrable to the unfamiliar. It is also faster and less effort to read words presented in a format our brains are practised at deciphering, although as long as the word is the right length, has the right letters and starts and ends with the correct ones we recognise it just as easily if it is jumbled.
Spoken language can be more fluid than formal written language; texting and social media bridge the gap between the two forms. Eventually that may invade written language, causing a change to a new form of English, but I think not in our lifetime, and there may be backlash against it.
The thing with Irish is that people use a second language differently than a first. Unless you have babies growing up with that as their first language, it will become fossilised. This has been observed in reverse with sign language and is the difference between a pidgin and a creole. Where a generation of adults use a new language in a less natural way, not thinking in it, but translating into it, they are not going to coin new usages as readily as people who have grown up using it.
I think the biggest threat to languages is globalisation. Where there are a few dominant languages which it is advantageous to know, there will be a tendency for at least some people within a culture with a less well-known language to abandon their native language in favour of one which they see as more useful. (Quite apart from deliberate suppression of the language by a conqueror or economically dominant neighbour.) Then others in the culture make efforts to protect and preserve that language, which could work, or just might hasten its fossilisation.