I am reading Robert Tombs’ very exciting book “The English and Their History”, and came across some passages that set off a chain of related thoughts in my mind on the growth and death of languages. I am neither a linguist nor a historian, so these facts might be “obvious” within those fields. I just hope to learn more by loudly pontificating on this blog.
English, perhaps due to the colonial success of Great Britain, and subsequently due to the soft-power of the US entertainment industry and the explosion of the internet, has become the de facto “lingua franca” (an ironic phrase!).
And yet, it was not always the case even within England.
Tombs writes about English in the 11th century (pg. 54):
The Normans eradicated written English as the language of government and undermined it as the language of literature, and spoken English ceased to be the language of the elite society. […] It was long believed that English largely disappeared except as a peasant dialect. Walter Scott in Ivanhoe (1819) made the famous point that English became the language of the farmyard (swine, ox, calf) and French that of the table (pork, beef, veal).
Tombs argues how pervasive this view was, even though Old English (along with Irish) already had a standard written form, and French then had no written literature at all. He writes,
Replacing English required two languages: Latin, for legal, administrative, ecclesiastical, commercial and intellectual contexts; French for verbal communications among the elites. […] “Unless a man knows French he is a little thought of,” wrote the chronicler Robert of Gloucester in about 1290; “but low-born men keep to English and to their own speech still.”
It is fascinating how languages can thrive and survive even after years of oppressive elitism only with provincial support.
Japanese is a case in point, I think. The earliest known novel in Japanese was written by a woman. (This is in distinct contrast to often observed patriarchal nature of literature in societies). The Tale of Genji written by Murasaki Shikibu, a relatively low-ranked noble and lady-in-waiting in the Heian Imperial court. During her life, Chinese was the language of governance and for formal learning (and, hence spoken mainly by men). Japanese (which was just developing kana script) was the language of intimacy. Over time, due to historical divergence and nationalistic vigor, the Japanese language itself developed its own literature, and the Japanese people came to be almost monolingual.
Living in the United States and plying my trade in English, as a parent, I often worry about my kids becoming monolingual in English. I often search for refined sources of learning for the children — books and threads that bind them to some shared history of the family. Instead, I should let them watch some entertaining and non-redeeming television.
I grew up in Madras speaking and learning Tamil in school. It was an accepted notion in the 1980s that despite its ancient literature and the linguistic pride among those who spoke it, Tamil was under constant assault and needed regulatory protection. Sanskrit, like the ecumenical Latin — a more nuanced comparative analysis at a later point –, was the language of religious scriptures and classical music — a natural language of the cultural elite. English was the commercial lingua franca and a ladder for upward mobility — the language of economic elites. Hindi, despite Tamil Nadu’s protests insisting autonomy, was the dictated mode of recent national identity, backed by a centralized bureaucracy.
Somewhat diminished by cultural, economic, and national status, Tamil (like Telugu) thrives in the substrata — in weeklies, magazines, popular movies that are never mistaken for arthouse films and tv soaps that keep middle-class housewives hooked. I suppose that all of such channels only intensify (incorrectly or not) the notion of low-brow positioning on the social scale.
I used to believe (and many still do) that a language can thrive only by making it more acceptable to the elite, through regulatory intervention: literary awards for erudite writing, memorization of the classics in schools, and as a medium of learning science, economics and arts. But, I am not so sure now.
Perhaps, it is the “low-brow” art and entertainment that nourishes a language and makes it thrive. Perhaps, Languages, like Cuisines, emerge from the primordial and diurnal trappings of the people. It is born of dust and sweat on the people. Were Shakespeare and Dickens considered pulp, before the birth of literary veneration and analysis at the universities?