Post by Dave on Dec 12, 2012 15:26:41 GMT -5
War of words: The language paradox explained
New Scientist, Magazine issue 2894, December 11th 2012, Mark Pagel
www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628941.700-war-of-words-the-language-paradox-explained.html
If language evolved for communication, how come most people can't understand what most other people are saying?
FOR ANYONE interested in languages, the north-eastern coastal region of Papua New Guinea is like a well-stocked sweet shop. Korak speakers live right next to Brem speakers, who are just up the coast from Wanambre speakers, and so on. I once met a man from that area and asked him whether it is true that a different language is spoken every few kilometres. "Oh no," he replied, "they are far closer together than that."
Around the world today, some 7000 distinct languages are spoken. That's 7000 different ways of saying "good morning" or "it looks like rain" - more languages in one species of mammal than there are mammalian species. What's more, these 7000 languages probably make up just a fraction of those ever spoken in our history.
To put human linguistic diversity into perspective, you could take a gorilla or chimpanzee from its troop and plop it down anywhere these species are found, and it would know how to communicate. You could repeat this with donkeys, crickets or goldfish and get the same outcome.
This highlights an intriguing paradox at the heart of human communication. If language evolved to allow us to exchange information, how come most people cannot understand what most other people are saying? This perennial question was famously addressed in the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, which tells of how humans developed the conceit that they could use their shared language to cooperate in the building of a tower that would take them to heaven. God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower and to ensure it would not be rebuilt he scattered the people and confused them by giving them different languages. The myth leads to the amusing irony that our separate languages exist to prevent us from communicating. The surprise is that this might not be far from the truth.
( OMG – is this ever filled with anti-scriptural references – the people of Babel had “conceit,” they were attempting to “usurp “ God’s power – Not Scriptural At All! – it is religious propaganda to discredit scripture – but even this author admits it - might not be far from the truth)
The origins of language are difficult to pin down. Anatomical evidence from fossils suggests that the ability to speak arose in our ancestors some time between 1.6 million and 600,000 years ago (New Scientist, 24 March, p 34). However, indisputable evidence that this speech was conveying complex ideas comes only with the cultural sophistication and symbolism associated with modern humans. They emerged in Africa perhaps 200,000 to 160,000 years ago, and by 60,000 years ago had migrated out of the continent - eventually to occupy nearly every region of the world. We should expect new languages to arise as people spread out and occupy new lands because as soon as groups become isolated from one another their languages begin to drift apart and adapt to local needs (New Scientist, 10 December 2011, p 34). But the real puzzle is that the greatest diversity of human societies and languages arises not where people are most spread out, but where they are most closely packed together.
Papua New Guinea is a classic case. That relatively small land mass - only slightly larger than California - is home to between 800 and 1000 distinct languages, or around 15 per cent of all languages spoken on the planet. This linguistic diversity is not the result of migration and physical isolation of different populations. Instead, people living in close quarters seem to have chosen to separate into many distinct societies, leading lives so separate that they have become incapable of talking to one another. Why?
Thinking about this, I was struck by an uncanny parallel between linguistic and biological diversity. A well-known phenomenon in ecology called Rapoport's rule states that the greatest diversity of biological species is found near to the equator, with numbers tailing off as you approach the poles. Could this be true for languages too? To test the idea, anthropologist Ruth Mace from University College London and I looked at the distribution of around 500 Native American tribes before the arrival of Europeans and used this to plot the number of different language groups per unit area at each degree of latitude (Nature, vol 428, p 275). It turned out that the distribution matched Rapoport's rule remarkably well.
The congruity of biological species and cultures with distinct languages is probably not an accident. To survive the harsh polar landscape, species must range far and wide, leaving little opportunity for new ones to arise. The same is true of human groups in the far northern regions. They too must cover wide geographical areas to find sufficient food, and this tends to blend languages and cultures. At the other end of the spectrum, just as the bountiful, sun-drenched tropics are a cradle of biological speciation, so this rich environment has allowed humans to thrive and splinter into a profusion of societies.
Of course that still leaves the question of why people would want to form into so many distinct groups. For the myriad biological species in the tropics, there are advantages to being different because it allows each to adapt to its own ecological niche. But humans all occupy the same niche, and splitting into distinct cultural and linguistic groups actually brings disadvantages, such as slowing the movement of ideas, technologies and people. It also makes societies more vulnerable to risks and plain bad luck. So why not have one large group with a shared language?
An answer to this question is emerging with the realisation that human history has been characterised by continual battles. Ever since our ancestors walked out of Africa, beginning around 60,000 years ago, people have been in conflict over territory and resources. In my book Wired for Culture (Norton/Penguin, 2012) I describe how, as a consequence, we have acquired a suite of traits that help our own particular group to outcompete the others. Two traits that stand out are "groupishness" - affiliating with people with whom you share a distinct identity - and xenophobia, demonising those outside your group and holding parochial views towards them. In this context, languages act as powerful social anchors of our tribal identity. How we speak is a continual auditory reminder of who we are and, equally as important, who we are not. Anyone who can speak your particular dialect is a walking, talking advertisement for the values and cultural history you share
People everywhere use language to monitor who is a member of their "tribe". We have an acute, and sometimes obsessive, awareness of how those around us speak, and we continually adapt language to mark out our particular group from others. In a striking parallel to the Selepet examples, many of the peculiar spellings that differentiate American English from British - such as the tendency to drop the "u" in words like colour - arose almost overnight when Noah Webster produced the first American Dictionary of the English Language at the start of the 19th century. He insisted that: "As an independent nation, our honor [sic] requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government."
So what of the future?
The world we live in today is very different from the one our ancestors inhabited. For most of our history, people would have encountered only their own cultural group and immediate neighbours. Globalisation and electronic communication mean we have become far more connected and culturally homogenised, making the benefits of being understood more apparent. The result is a mass extinction of languages to rival the great biological extinctions in Earth's past.
Although contemporary languages continue to evolve and diverge from one another, the rate of loss of minority languages now greatly exceeds the emergence of new languages. Between 30 and 50 languages are disappearing every year as the young people of small tribal societies adopt majority languages. As a percentage of the total, this rate of loss equals or exceeds the decline in biological species diversity through loss of habitat and climate change. Already a mere 15 of the Earth's 7000 languages account for about 40 per cent of the world's speakers, and most languages have very few speakers.
Still, this homogenisation of languages and cultures is happening at a far slower pace than it could, and that is because of the powerful psychological role language plays in marking out our cultural territories and identities. One consequence of this is that languages resist "contamination" from other languages, with speakers often treating the arrival of foreign words with a degree of suspicion - witness the British and French grumblings about so-called Americanisms.
This resistance to change leaves plenty of time for linguistic diversity to pop up. Various street and hip-hop dialects, for example, are central to the identity of specific groups, while mass communication allows them easily to reach their natural constituencies. Another interesting example is Globish a pared-down form of English that uses just 1000 or so words and simplified language structures. It has spontaneously evolved among people who travel extensively, such as diplomats and international business people.
In the long run, though, it seems virtually inevitable that a single language will replace all others. In evolutionary terms, when otherwise equally good solutions to a problem compete, one of them tends to win out. We see this in the near worldwide standardisation of ways of telling time, measuring weights and distance, CD and DVD formats, railway gauges, and the voltages and frequencies of electricity supplies. It may take a very long time, but languages seem destined to go the same way - all are equally good vehicles of communication, so one will eventually replace the others. Which one will it be?
Nevertheless, I suspect a monolinguistic future may not be as bad as doomsayers have suggested. There is a widely held belief that the language you speak determines the way you think, so that a loss of linguistic diversity is also a loss of unique styles of thought. I don't believe that. Our languages determine the words we use but they do not limit the concepts we can understand and perceive. Besides, we might draw another, more positive, moral from the story of Babel: with everyone speaking the same language, humanity can more easily cooperate to achieve something monumental. Indeed, in today's world it is the countries with the least linguistic diversity that have achieved the most prosperity.
New Scientist, Magazine issue 2894, December 11th 2012, Mark Pagel
www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628941.700-war-of-words-the-language-paradox-explained.html
If language evolved for communication, how come most people can't understand what most other people are saying?
FOR ANYONE interested in languages, the north-eastern coastal region of Papua New Guinea is like a well-stocked sweet shop. Korak speakers live right next to Brem speakers, who are just up the coast from Wanambre speakers, and so on. I once met a man from that area and asked him whether it is true that a different language is spoken every few kilometres. "Oh no," he replied, "they are far closer together than that."
Around the world today, some 7000 distinct languages are spoken. That's 7000 different ways of saying "good morning" or "it looks like rain" - more languages in one species of mammal than there are mammalian species. What's more, these 7000 languages probably make up just a fraction of those ever spoken in our history.
To put human linguistic diversity into perspective, you could take a gorilla or chimpanzee from its troop and plop it down anywhere these species are found, and it would know how to communicate. You could repeat this with donkeys, crickets or goldfish and get the same outcome.
This highlights an intriguing paradox at the heart of human communication. If language evolved to allow us to exchange information, how come most people cannot understand what most other people are saying? This perennial question was famously addressed in the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, which tells of how humans developed the conceit that they could use their shared language to cooperate in the building of a tower that would take them to heaven. God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower and to ensure it would not be rebuilt he scattered the people and confused them by giving them different languages. The myth leads to the amusing irony that our separate languages exist to prevent us from communicating. The surprise is that this might not be far from the truth.
( OMG – is this ever filled with anti-scriptural references – the people of Babel had “conceit,” they were attempting to “usurp “ God’s power – Not Scriptural At All! – it is religious propaganda to discredit scripture – but even this author admits it - might not be far from the truth)
The origins of language are difficult to pin down. Anatomical evidence from fossils suggests that the ability to speak arose in our ancestors some time between 1.6 million and 600,000 years ago (New Scientist, 24 March, p 34). However, indisputable evidence that this speech was conveying complex ideas comes only with the cultural sophistication and symbolism associated with modern humans. They emerged in Africa perhaps 200,000 to 160,000 years ago, and by 60,000 years ago had migrated out of the continent - eventually to occupy nearly every region of the world. We should expect new languages to arise as people spread out and occupy new lands because as soon as groups become isolated from one another their languages begin to drift apart and adapt to local needs (New Scientist, 10 December 2011, p 34). But the real puzzle is that the greatest diversity of human societies and languages arises not where people are most spread out, but where they are most closely packed together.
Papua New Guinea is a classic case. That relatively small land mass - only slightly larger than California - is home to between 800 and 1000 distinct languages, or around 15 per cent of all languages spoken on the planet. This linguistic diversity is not the result of migration and physical isolation of different populations. Instead, people living in close quarters seem to have chosen to separate into many distinct societies, leading lives so separate that they have become incapable of talking to one another. Why?
Thinking about this, I was struck by an uncanny parallel between linguistic and biological diversity. A well-known phenomenon in ecology called Rapoport's rule states that the greatest diversity of biological species is found near to the equator, with numbers tailing off as you approach the poles. Could this be true for languages too? To test the idea, anthropologist Ruth Mace from University College London and I looked at the distribution of around 500 Native American tribes before the arrival of Europeans and used this to plot the number of different language groups per unit area at each degree of latitude (Nature, vol 428, p 275). It turned out that the distribution matched Rapoport's rule remarkably well.
The congruity of biological species and cultures with distinct languages is probably not an accident. To survive the harsh polar landscape, species must range far and wide, leaving little opportunity for new ones to arise. The same is true of human groups in the far northern regions. They too must cover wide geographical areas to find sufficient food, and this tends to blend languages and cultures. At the other end of the spectrum, just as the bountiful, sun-drenched tropics are a cradle of biological speciation, so this rich environment has allowed humans to thrive and splinter into a profusion of societies.
Of course that still leaves the question of why people would want to form into so many distinct groups. For the myriad biological species in the tropics, there are advantages to being different because it allows each to adapt to its own ecological niche. But humans all occupy the same niche, and splitting into distinct cultural and linguistic groups actually brings disadvantages, such as slowing the movement of ideas, technologies and people. It also makes societies more vulnerable to risks and plain bad luck. So why not have one large group with a shared language?
An answer to this question is emerging with the realisation that human history has been characterised by continual battles. Ever since our ancestors walked out of Africa, beginning around 60,000 years ago, people have been in conflict over territory and resources. In my book Wired for Culture (Norton/Penguin, 2012) I describe how, as a consequence, we have acquired a suite of traits that help our own particular group to outcompete the others. Two traits that stand out are "groupishness" - affiliating with people with whom you share a distinct identity - and xenophobia, demonising those outside your group and holding parochial views towards them. In this context, languages act as powerful social anchors of our tribal identity. How we speak is a continual auditory reminder of who we are and, equally as important, who we are not. Anyone who can speak your particular dialect is a walking, talking advertisement for the values and cultural history you share
People everywhere use language to monitor who is a member of their "tribe". We have an acute, and sometimes obsessive, awareness of how those around us speak, and we continually adapt language to mark out our particular group from others. In a striking parallel to the Selepet examples, many of the peculiar spellings that differentiate American English from British - such as the tendency to drop the "u" in words like colour - arose almost overnight when Noah Webster produced the first American Dictionary of the English Language at the start of the 19th century. He insisted that: "As an independent nation, our honor [sic] requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government."
So what of the future?
The world we live in today is very different from the one our ancestors inhabited. For most of our history, people would have encountered only their own cultural group and immediate neighbours. Globalisation and electronic communication mean we have become far more connected and culturally homogenised, making the benefits of being understood more apparent. The result is a mass extinction of languages to rival the great biological extinctions in Earth's past.
Although contemporary languages continue to evolve and diverge from one another, the rate of loss of minority languages now greatly exceeds the emergence of new languages. Between 30 and 50 languages are disappearing every year as the young people of small tribal societies adopt majority languages. As a percentage of the total, this rate of loss equals or exceeds the decline in biological species diversity through loss of habitat and climate change. Already a mere 15 of the Earth's 7000 languages account for about 40 per cent of the world's speakers, and most languages have very few speakers.
Still, this homogenisation of languages and cultures is happening at a far slower pace than it could, and that is because of the powerful psychological role language plays in marking out our cultural territories and identities. One consequence of this is that languages resist "contamination" from other languages, with speakers often treating the arrival of foreign words with a degree of suspicion - witness the British and French grumblings about so-called Americanisms.
This resistance to change leaves plenty of time for linguistic diversity to pop up. Various street and hip-hop dialects, for example, are central to the identity of specific groups, while mass communication allows them easily to reach their natural constituencies. Another interesting example is Globish a pared-down form of English that uses just 1000 or so words and simplified language structures. It has spontaneously evolved among people who travel extensively, such as diplomats and international business people.
In the long run, though, it seems virtually inevitable that a single language will replace all others. In evolutionary terms, when otherwise equally good solutions to a problem compete, one of them tends to win out. We see this in the near worldwide standardisation of ways of telling time, measuring weights and distance, CD and DVD formats, railway gauges, and the voltages and frequencies of electricity supplies. It may take a very long time, but languages seem destined to go the same way - all are equally good vehicles of communication, so one will eventually replace the others. Which one will it be?
Nevertheless, I suspect a monolinguistic future may not be as bad as doomsayers have suggested. There is a widely held belief that the language you speak determines the way you think, so that a loss of linguistic diversity is also a loss of unique styles of thought. I don't believe that. Our languages determine the words we use but they do not limit the concepts we can understand and perceive. Besides, we might draw another, more positive, moral from the story of Babel: with everyone speaking the same language, humanity can more easily cooperate to achieve something monumental. Indeed, in today's world it is the countries with the least linguistic diversity that have achieved the most prosperity.
Attachments:
