The world is becoming flatter. So says a paper published in Science by researchers in Barcelona, New Haven and Leipzig―‘The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene’. Using ethnolinguistic data and population estimates in a Bayesian model, they find that languages have dwindled through the Holocene—the planet’s current era, sometimes called the Anthropocene to help the human race feel important―except for a surprising surge about 2,000 years long.
The human race now speaks about 7,500 languages, not many more than the 4,500-6,200 which are presumed to have been in circulation shortly after humans amazed each other by speaking up for the first time. But the study also finds that the period 3,000-1,000 years ago was linguistically splendid, when perhaps tens of thousands of languages flourished.
This linguistic boom, hitherto unsuspected, could be contemporary with the growth of settled living following the development of agriculture and animal husbandry. But the connection between the agricultural revolution and settlements is no longer canonical dogma, and other factors could have fed the growth of languages. The paper also contests the popular idea that the European age of exploration began the destruction of languages through commercial dominance, warfare and by handing out infected blankets to the people they ‘discovered’.
It seems that language loss accelerated much earlier, under the early empires that took their cultures, commercial systems, bacteria, viruses and mother tongues across geographies. Over time, Latin and Greek were in use across Europe. There’s runic graffiti in Istanbul, made by Vikings. Iran influenced a wide swath of cultures, from its Mongolian invaders to modern South Asians. Macedonian influence stretched from Persepolis to present-day Madhya Pradesh. The Cholas’ maritime reach took Indian culture as far as Vietnam. Such expansions typically overshadow local languages. For instance, India, despite its vast array of languages, still has an English hangover because the world’s fastest-growing language offers access to overseas job markets and the upper echelons of society.
Now, in the post-imperial age of globalisation, languages are dying at the rate of about four every year. Often, they literally die with their speakers. India has over 40 critically endangered languages and dialects, like Bangani in Uttarakhand and Na and Mra in Arunachal Pradesh. Many tribal languages are threatened, especially in the Northeast and the Andaman and Nicobar islands. The status of Sentinelese is unknown because the tribe remains in seclusion―the only visitor in years was a peculiar YouTuber who wished to introduce them to Diet Coke but fled the island before making contact.
The Badeshi language of Pakistan’s Swat has gained international fame because it is spoken by only three elderly men. That’s what a critically endangered language looks like―a few elders speak it and young stop learning it. When the number of speakers dwindles to one and conversations give way to internal monologues, students of language scramble to record it for posterity. Because the evolution of language parallels the history of the human race, and every language that’s lost is a missing segment of DNA in the cultural double-helix of the species. And ethnically particular ways of expressing a thought are permanently lost.
Globalisation has flattened the world, its nations and cultures by raising the general above the particular. Everyone wears the same mass-produced clothing. Homes which once used many varieties of rice now eat generic long-staple basmati. Children know of Slenderman but not the local demon.
The language of words has itself been flattened by the visual language of memes, which is universally understood by younger people across the world, and which can express all manner of thoughts and ideas directly and powerfully, like at Jantar Mantar.
For decades, linguistic determinism―loosely known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named for a teacher and his acolyte―held that language determines the scope of thought. If you don’t have the words to speak it, you can’t think it. In reality, languages borrow words from each other, or create alternatives. The Bangla word for ‘fire engine’ actually means ‘steam engine’, because fire engines in Victorian Calcutta were steam-powered and must have arrived as dramatically as locomotives. In Romani, Queen Victoria was ‘Bori Rani’―Big Queen. Whatever works!
And thus, just like in nature, some languages evolve while others fade out. Now, a new form of linguistic evolution is suspected to be in progress―a downshift of the gears. The spoken word and the written word are not the same. They are different registers, demotic and hieratic, with diverging vocabularies.
It’s been this way from the Gutenberg revolution. But now, the internet, which values video and audio over the written word, may be reversing the hierarchy. Children born after broadband internet have less patience for the written word. They say they learn visually. Now that search is also visual and memesis—to coin a word—is cooler than mimesis, there is some anxiety that the hieratic, textual register of language could fade away.
Does the triumph of memes flatten the world? The stricken bull in Picasso’s Guernica, the bull on the wall of the Lascaux cave, which seems to breathe when you look at it long enough, speak in images. Hieroglyphics and pictograms ― the oldest alphabets are so much like modern memes. Picture this: perhaps the history of language is turning a full circle, and returning to the first words ever uttered.
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public
(Views are personal)