Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

is a case of Migration; into India and Scandinavia, of Diffusion; and into South Africa, of Infiltration. † It is only, for example, through Diffusion or Infiltration that a language can become a lingua franca, a language of wider communication: for this, a language must have been taken up by people who did not speak it natively.
    These M&A language communities are the ones whose role develops fast, often through deliberate actions. In practice, these will be the main languages whose careers we trace, because of course they are the most eventful.
    Is there any common feature that makes a language community entice others to use its language, and so join it? A way of viewing this book’s theme is as an inquiry into the roots of Language Prestige, defined as the propensity to attract new users. Under what conditions do languages have the power to grow in this way? And are there any properties of the relation between the new and the old language which make speakers willing and able to make the leap?
    There is a pernicious belief, widespread even among linguists, that there is a straightforward, heartless, answer to this question. J. R. Firth, a leading British linguist of the mid-twentieth century, makes a good simple statement of it:
    World powers make world languages … The Roman Empire made Latin, the British Empire English. Churches too, of course, are great powers … Men who have strong feelings directed towards the world and its affairs have done most. What the humble prophets of linguistic unity would have done without Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit and English, it is difficult to imagine. Statesmen, soldiers, sailors, and missionaries, men of action, men of strong feelings have made world languages. They are built on blood, money, sinews, and suffering in the pursuit of power. 2
     
    This is above all a resonant
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from 1937, the dying days of the British empire, muscular Christianity and male supremacism; and (in his defence) Firth seems mainly to have been concerned to contrast the effectiveness of lusty men of action with enervated scholars in building international languages.
    Nevertheless it really does not stand up to criticism. As soon as the careers of languages are seriously studied—even the ‘Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Sanskrit and English’ that Firth explicitly mentions as examples—it becomes clear that this self-indulgently tough-minded view is no guide at all to what really makes a language capable of spreading. It works neither as an account of where all world languages come from, nor what all world powers achieve.
    The best case for it might be thought to come from the examples Firth cites, multinational military empires that lasted for centuries, such as the Roman and British efforts. But although Romance languages are still with us, their common name showing their common origin, they grew up in countries where Roman rule had been stably replaced by Germanic conquerors. The Franks, Burgundians, Vandals and Goths who set up the kingdoms of western Europe after the fall of the empire at most had an effect on the accent with which Latin was spoken and added a few words to its vocabulary; they nowhere succeeded in imposing their language on their new subjects. Yet at the other end of the Mediterranean, the Romans themselves had had no better success in spreading Latin: in 395, despite over five hundred years of direct Roman rule, Greeks, Syrians and Egyptians were still talking to each other in Greek. (Thereafter the empire was divided east from west, and Latin soon lost even a formal role in the east.)
    Farther afield, in the north of China, repeated conquests by Turkish-, Mongol- and Tungus-speaking invaders, who ruled for some seven hundred years out of a thousand from the fourth century AD, had no effect on the survival of Chinese; finally, the Tungus-speaking Manchu conquered the whole country in 1644, and yet within a century their own language had died out. Back in the Middle East,