One language vs many in a region

booksense

Hi,

I was pondering about this question, why Europe has many languages, but if you look at China, you only see one language (I am removing dialects from this comparison). These are two huge areas, but they went different ways in terms on language evolution.

Is there any theory/hypothesis/facts around this topic?

Thanks,
B

PS: I was not sure where to place this question, as it is not a real evolution question, but around culture/social-science.

deanhills

booksense

deanhills

booksense

deanhills

ocalhoun

vkykhan33

When I read about history of Chinese language (e.g. http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Culture/language-history-2.html), I realize that this language is quite old and its current form has been created from its older version. I cannot find anything about multiple Chinese language (similar to what Europe has).

vkykhan33

PS: I was not sure where to place this question, as it is not a real evolution question, but around culture/social-science.[/quote]

vkykhan33

Regards,
B[/quote]
Perhaps we can trace the languages to early empires.
Many European languages are based on Latin, the language of the Roman empire, but once the Roman empire died and fragmented, each region started to change its language along different routes, and some of them were mixed with other influences.
Now, supposing the Chinese empire had the same language-unifying effect, the lack of different languages might be explained in that the Chinese empire died only very recently (to be replaced with communism), so the different regions had no time to develop distinctly different languages.[/quote]

zbale

Hi "Booksense",

You are right in a way to say that this question is not easy to place somewhere in science. It has to do with linguistics, but more precisely with external linguistics (as opposed to internal linguistics). The term "external" refers to the fact that it is not qualities within this or that language that determine its future and extent, but reasons outside language, and mainly political.

Let's take a simple example: a few centuries ago, in "France" (of back then, of course), many dialects were spoken, a diversity which indeed, as mentioned earlier in the discussion, resulted from the fact that Latin was imposed (again, a change external to language itself) to regions where diverse things were spoken and where the resulting mixes evolved at different speeds in different directions. Among these dialects, one started becoming prominent because it was used in a region where commerce was doing well, so it seems that people who did not want to be left out learned that dialect, called "Picard" (if my memory is correct), and this dialect started expanding. As it happens, and in a perfectly natural situation in France at the time (and in many places in the world to this day), a different dialect was spoken at the King's court, which was situated somewhere else. Now, the King decided that all texts of law should be written in the dialect used at his court ("Francique", again if my memory does not fail me). And so it was, and legal texts in the whole territory under the political and administrative control of the King started being written in this dialect, which became prominent, leading to the decline of the other dialect that had been more influential until then. It also happens that "intellectuals" in the subsequent centuries started using and defending "common" language instead of Latin (which until then was used for anything of importance, intellectually and religiously) and thus further developed this specific dialect (many dialects where spoken until the beginning of the 20th Century in France, but I should think intellectuals usually tried to stick around the court, which strengthened its particular dialect). Printed books and prescriptive grammarians (i.e. those who tell you how you should speak and write or shouldn't) also encouraged standardization of this dialect, which was officially that of the King, of the administration and of the elite. At the end of the 19th Century, two important institution, school (which became free and compulsory) and the army (also compulsory) meant that many people learned that specific dialect, even though in many cases they still had been raised with a different one at home. During the 20th Century, the mass-media (radio and television especially, with their auditory input) really leveled the language and "French" eventually became the language almost everybody learned, not only at school but even before that at home. At certain periods (though not so recently), the government even tried to eradicate other dialects. In a nutshell, French is just the evolved form of one of the many dialects spoken a long time ago in that part of the world, which rose to prominence not for reasons that were not intrinsic to the language but for reasons external to it (mainly political). From a linguistic point of view, no dialect or language is concerned to have a greater "value" than other, and there is enough evidence to show that the reasons why a certain dialect becomes prominent on a territory are not to be found in a superiority of that dialect (though of course claims to that effect tend to be made by those who speak and impose it).

Now, we can imagine that boundary regions between, say, then France and Italy or France and Spain, had dialects more or less related to one another (and in many cases not more distant or closer than dialects found within the same boundaries), but as one dialect was standardized and imposed on each of those territories (because such was the typical pattern for nation-states), the differences became clearer. Note that Italy was unified only recently (19th Century), and differences between regions are more marked than in France (which has long been known as a "centralized" state, i.e. where decisions are made at the capital and supposed to be followed everywhere). Each country is in fact, different from the others, but the process of standardization of one dialect is common in the Western world and other parts of the world as well.

The consequence is that if you have a bigger state (with a big population) where this process of standardization and imposition of one dialect has taken place, then you will end up having more people speaking it. If you manage to settle in different places (as the English did during their period of colonization), then you might end up with a language spoken in many places by many people (for instance in the US, in Australia, etc.). Note that if you look at the world, the most common situation remains that where you have a standardized language that you learn at school or are exposed to through the media, and another one, spoken in a smaller region, that you've learned at home (to which you sometimes have to add other languages and dialects). Such is usually the case in Africa and in Asia -- including China, where Mandarin Chinese is the official language but where many other languages are spoken, a number of which are represented here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/China_linguistic_map.jpg

Again, I've been simplifying things. I should add that a distinction often given between a language and a dialect, is that speakers of two different language do not understand each other, whereas speakers of two dialects of the same language understand each other, though they are aware of differences. Sometimes you have a chain of areas (for instance imagine three villages on a horizontal line) where the middle area understands what's east and what's west of it but the two areas on the sides do not understand each other.

Note that strictly speaking, it seems that the distinction between dialect and language is also political. A very good book to consult on this and other questions related to language and society would be Peter Trudgill's Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society.

zbale

For those interested, it looks like a recent book tackles the subject:

John Myhill, 2006, Language, religion and national identity in Europe and the Middle East (published in Amsterdam by John Benjamins Publishing Company).

The review of the book in the journal Language (vol. 85, number 1, 2009, p. 228 and following) adds interesting information on the situation in Asia and especially China.

chiragpatnaik

Maybe worth your while to think about the situation in India. A single sub-continent has nearly two dozen languages which are distinct in phonetics, script. Though there is said to be a common root to all these languages, but they are sufficiently different (especially in script) today to qualify as a separate language.

India is relatively strif free (with only the city states warring). With no single true rule with the exception of Ashoka who ruled maybe one-third of modern India, till the advent of British rule, there is simply no reason why language shoul dhave fragmented.

But a closer look will reveal why. The subcontinetn was invaded several times in the past couple of millenia by people who brought languages and customes with them and over time assimilated within. sparking of branches.

My guess would be that several kings (narcissit as they can be) spun of languages to speak amongst heir people as opposed to their neighbours.

The result new languages.

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