Wandering in the Tower of Babel

How many languages are there in the world?

Seems like it should be an easy question, right?  Not so much.  Just like the issue of biological species (that I touched upon in Wednesday's post, about dogs and wolves), figuring out where to draw dividing lines in linguistics isn't simple.  How different do two modes of speech or writing have to be to constitute separate languages?

Here's an admittedly rather facile example from my own experience.  I grew up speaking both French and English; for three of my grandparents, and my mom, French was their first language.  What I heard, though, was Cajun French, a dialect brought into southern Louisiana by people who had been exiled from Acadia (now called Nova Scotia) in the mid-eighteenth century.  (In my mother's family's case, they did a thirty year stint in France first, and left on the 1785 Acadian Expeditions when the king of France decided they weren't fitting in and basically paid them to go away.  Just as well; they missed the French Revolution, which broke out only four years later.  A couple of years after that, the king regretted not going with them.)

What's interesting, though, is that when I go to Québec, I have a really hard time understanding spoken French.  Part of it is that admittedly, I'm a bit rusty; I haven't been around francophones for forty years.  But the accent is so different from what I'm used to that it often befuddles me.  Further still are French-based creoles like Haitian Creole, Antillean Creole, and Seychellois; those have a lot of French vocabulary but a great admixture of words (and grammatical structures) from African languages, particularly from western Volta-Congo languages such as Fongbe and Igbo (for the first two) and the Bantu language (for Seychellois).

And I can verify that Haitian Creole and French aren't mutually intelligible.  A well-meaning principal I worked for was welcoming in a young lady who was a refugee from Haiti, and told her that I was someone she could speak to in her native language -- assuming that Haitian Creole and French were close enough that we could chat.  She and I had a good laugh when we found out that neither of us spoke the other's language, so we had to get by on her broken English supplemented when necessary with my rather ill-remembered French, when the words were at least close enough to help.

Another example is Breton, a Celtic language related to Welsh that's spoken in Brittany.  My band recorded a couple of songs in Breton (here's one example), and a friend noticed how much it sounded like French.  Like Haitian Creole, though, it really is a different language, with its own grammar, syntax, and lexicon -- but enough borrowed words and pronunciation influence from French that it has a superficially French sound.

So even with currently extant languages, it's hard to know where to draw the lines.  Standard French, Cajun French, and Québecois are usually considered close enough to count as the same language (more specifically, as three dialects -- the linguistic analog to a subspecies).  Breton, and the creoles I listed, are universally considered to be separate languages.  The current estimate is that there are now around seven thousand languages spoken in the world, although that number gets revised all the time as we learn more about them.

The situation becomes even more difficult when you start considering languages across time.  Languages evolve, despite the prescriptivists' best efforts, and -- once again, like with biological evolution -- it's an open debate where you draw the line.  English today is pretty similar to English spoken in England and eastern North America in the eighteenth century; a few different words and some odd (to our ears) grammar, is all.  Go back to Shakespeare's day, and it was more different still, although -- with practice -- modern readers can see a performance of Macbeth or As You Like It and understand what's being said.  (And even, in the latter, be able to laugh at most of the bawdy jokes.)  Back in Chaucer's times, today's English speakers would have a difficult time of it.  And actual Old English -- no, Shakespeare isn't "Old English," even if you've heard it called that -- is a completely different, mutually unintelligible language with Modern English.  For example, can you identify this passage?

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum,
si þin nama gehalgod.
To becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa,
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.

If you recognized it as the opening lines of the Lord's Prayer, you're either a language nerd or else really good at picking out patterns.  Old English was a language related to a dialect of West Germanic spoken in Saxony -- on the border of what is now Denmark and Germany -- and so unlike Modern English that if you went back to tenth century England, you'd need a handy phrase book to be understood.

The reason all this comes up is because I stumbled upon a site listing "spurious languages" -- written or spoken systems that we once thought were languages, and now we are kind of saying, "Um, maybe not."  And there are a lot of them.  Some, like Malakhel -- an Eastern Iranian dialect spoken in the Waziristan region of Pakistan -- were, like Cajun French, found to be close enough to an existing language (Ormuri) that the two were combined.  Some, like Dazawa, a Chadic language spoken in northern Nigeria, are so poorly studied we honestly don't know if they're separate languages or not; in the case of Dazawa, there are only a handful of speakers, and most of them have switched to speaking the majority language of Hausa, so it might be too late to find out.  Some, like Palpa, a language supposedly spoken by a small group of people in Nepal, are probably due to inaccuracies in study, and may never have existed in the first place.

Then there are languages (probably?) that are known from only an inscription or two, so there's not enough information available even to make a firm determination.  One of many examples is Noric, a presumed Celtic language spoken in the Roman province of Noricum (present-day Austria and Slovenia), known from a grand total of three short inscriptions. 

The Grafenstein fragment, one of three known examples of the Noric language [Image is in the Public Domain]

It's written in Old Italic script, an alphabet also used for the only-distantly-related Etruscan language.  This particular one appears to be a record of a financial transaction.  Another, found near Ptuj, Slovenia, says:

𐌀𐌓𐌕𐌄𐌁𐌖𐌈𐌆𐌁𐌓𐌏𐌙𐌈𐌖𐌉 (ARTEBUDZBROGDUI)

It's thought to be a personal name -- Artebudz, son of Brogduos.  Linguists suspect that the name Artebudz comes from Celtic root words meaning "bear penis," which I think we can all agree is a hell of a name.

The thing is, with only short bits to analyze, any determination of what this language was, who (other than Bear Penis) spoke it, how widespread and long-lived it was, and how it was related to other languages at the time, are all little more than educated speculation.

It's astonishing to think that even as small as the world has gotten, what with near-instantaneous digital communication, international travel, and maps of damn near the entire planet, we still have a hard time pinning down language.  It's fluid, ever-changing, dynamic, with new forms cropping up all the time and old ones dying out or being subsumed.  But that's part of the fascination of linguistics, isn't it?  Something like speech and the written word, that most of us take for granted, is actually phenomenally complex, to the point of being nearly impossible to pigeonhole.  

It's no wonder the ancient Israelites thought of the myth of the Tower of Babel to explain it all.  Even wandering amongst its many rooms is enough to boggle the mind.

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The origin of Antarctican

Here's a bit of writing that should be familiar to most of you.

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.  Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg, and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum; and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice.

Recognize it?

It's the Lord's Prayer in English as it was spoken only a thousand years ago.  My guess is a lot of you had no idea what it was (although I have a number of regular readers who, like me, are aficionados of obscure languages; y'all don't count).  There are a few words that haven't changed in that time -- in this passage, only "us" and "and" -- but most have changed dramatically.  There are even a couple of letters that don't exist in Modern English, strikingly ð (pronounced like the first consonant in there) and þ (the first consonant in thin), both of which are written as "th" in Modern English.

Languages change, and they change at different rates.  Old Norse and Modern Icelandic are really more like different dialects of the same language than they are like different languages, even though just as much time has passed between Old Norse and Modern Icelandic as between Old English and Modern English.  There are sometimes sudden jumps -- the Norman Conquest in the 11th century and the Great Vowel Shift in the 15th are the two best-known examples from English, although the Viking Invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries had a significant effect, too, not only on vocabulary and pronunciation, but on place names.  (The subject of my master's thesis was how the Vikings affected Old English and Old Gaelic, which should win an award for research with no practical applications whatsoever.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

These huge leaps are uncommon, however, and most language change progresses slowly and gradually.  The parallels to biological evolution are obvious, and the argument over whether language change is smooth or goes by fits-and-starts is just as silly as the corresponding argument over evolutionary gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium.  It's not that one is the correct model and the other is not; both are correct, just in different circumstances.

The big jumps, of course, are easier to detect.  The effects of the Norman Invasions of England were profound, as words were adopted from French and then bent to conform to English phonological rules.  It's why we have so many pairs of words for food, one for its living farmyard state and the other for when it's on the table.  Cow/beef; sheep/mutton; pig/pork; chicken/poultry; calf/veal.  In each case, the first is from Old English (because the lower socioeconomic class Anglo-Saxons were the ones on the farm raising the animals) and the other from French (because their Norman overlords only saw the animal after being cooked).

But the similarity between language evolution and biological evolution runs a lot deeper than its pace.  Like evolutionary change in populations, language "speciation" not only needs small changes (corresponding to genetic mutations), selection (some forms succeeding and others disappearing), and some form of isolation.  Isolated populations take off on their own paths, often very different from the parent population, and because of the small number of individuals often do so more quickly than a large group would -- a sort of linguistic genetic drift.  (A good example is the Cornish language, which branched off from Welsh as a dialect in Roman times; by the 13th century, when the earliest extant examples of Cornish were written down, the two had evolved into two no longer mutually intelligible languages.)

This topic comes up because of some recent amazingly cool research by Jonathan Harrington, Michele Gubian, Mary Stevens, and Florian Schiel of the University of Munich, in which linguists have -- perhaps for the first time -- seen the beginnings of a dialect forming as it happens.  In "Phonetic Change in an Antarctic Winter," published last month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, we find out about a study of the people who were isolated at the field station of the British Antarctic Survey during the long, frigid Antarctic winter, and about whom the researchers found something astonishing.

They started with a variety of accents, coming as they did from different English-speaking regions, but over the six months they were isolated, their accents began to converge into a distinct way of speaking unlike any of the "parent" accents.  Vowel sounds, especially, merged.  As an example, some of the speakers started out pronouncing the vowel sound in the word food as a front vowel (this is more common in British English), whereas others used a back vowel (more common in American English).  After only six months, the two sounds had converged, and everyone pronounced the sound as a middle vowel about halfway between the two extremes.

The authors write:

An acoustic analysis was made of the speech characteristics of individuals recorded before and during a prolonged stay in Antarctica.  A computational model was used to predict the expected changes due to close contact and isolation, which were then compared with the actual recorded productions.  The individuals were found to develop the first stages of a common accent in Antarctica whose phonetic characteristics were in some respects predicted by the computational model.  These findings suggest that the phonetic attributes of a spoken accent in its initial stages emerge through interactions between individuals causing speech production to be incrementally updated.

Of course, since the field station isn't permanently occupied by the same people, it's pretty likely that when the eleven test subjects went back to their homes (eight from various regions of England, one from the United States, and the other two -- who were not native speakers -- to Iceland and Germany) their accent reverted to the pronunciations typical for their milieu.

But it does give us a lens into how dialects form in other less contrived situations, and you can easily see how -- given enough time -- you might end up with modes of speaking so different that they would no longer be mutually intelligible.

Even, perhaps, to the point that "Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum" becomes "Our Father, who art in heaven."

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Accentuating the positive

Having grown up in the Deep South (as my dad used to say, any Deeper South and your hat would be floating), I'm frequently asked why I don't have more of an accent.  I think there are several answers.  First, my dad was a career Marine, and retired when I was seven, so I spent the first few years of my life moving from military base to military base, amongst people who came from all parts of the United States.  Second, although my mom was what they call "full-bleed Cajun," my dad was a complete mutt -- his father was born in Louisiana and was of French, German, Scottish, and Dutch descent, and his mother was a Scotch-Irish Yankee from southwestern Pennsylvania.  The third reason, though, I think is the most interesting; when I moved north (to Seattle) when I was 21, I got teased out of my accent.  To this day my voice can assume the south Louisiana Cajun swing in no time at all -- all I have to do is talk to one of my cousins on the phone, or better yet, go back down to visit.  It's like I never left.

To this day I still find it rather appalling that I was teased for having a southern accent, but I've found (having lived in YankeeLand USA for almost thirty years) that the perception of southern accents as being comical, or worse yet, a sign of ignorance, is common across the north.  Of course, the media is partially to blame; witness television shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction, and the comic strip and Broadway show Li'l Abner -- all four of which, I must point out, were produced and written by Northerners, and all of which portray Southerners as ignorant, backwards bumpkins.  However, if that stereotype had not already existed, no one would have found them funny.  The South was already considered an uneducated backwater beforehand.

The fact that the Southern accent is considered a sign of ignorance was highlighted a few years ago with an experiment in which groups of college students were shown different video clips of a pre-recorded speech.  It turned out that the content of the speech in each clip was identical; the only thing that differed was the accent.  The students were then asked to rate the speaker on articulateness, presentation, and content, and to guess the speaker's educational level.  Across the board, the clip that featured someone speaking with a Southern accent was rated lower -- even when the experiment was performed in Georgia, and the students themselves were from the South!

I recall some years ago hearing students in the high school where I teach talking about watching some clips from Ken Burns' The Civil War, and they referred to one of the historians interviewed as "that hillbilly dude."  "That hillbilly dude" turned out to be the late Shelby Foote, a highly educated man whose expertise on the Civil War allowed him to author a number of outstanding books, both fiction and non-fiction, on the subject.  To my ears, his graceful Mississippi accent sounds cultured; to my students', it apparently sounded foolish enough that they hardly listened to what he said.

All of this is just a preface to my telling you about a study recently released by Portfolio magazine, identifying the ten brainiest cities, and the ten least brainy cities, in the United States.  (The determination was done using the average number of years of education for adults in the city.)  While the brainiest cities were scattered about fairly randomly -- the five highest were Boulder, Colorado; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Washington DC; Durham, North Carolina; and Bridgeport, Connecticut -- the ten least brainy showed a distinct grouping.  Anyone care to guess what state hosts four of Portfolio's least-brainy cities in the United States?

California.

Interesting, no?  Furthermore, while a couple of the least-brainy cities were in Texas, none of them were in the states of the "Old South" -- Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

It's nice to know that I have a little more hard data to use when I lambaste my students for laughing when I say "y'all."

I guess it's time to revise some stereotypes, eh, Yanks?