Speaking in Tongues

“Man invented language!” That was the thesis that Johann Gottfried von Herder advanced in a famous 1772 essay that won the prize offered by the Berlin Academy for the most satisfactory answer to the question, “Left to their natural faculties, would men be capable of inventing language?” It was a claim that might have stood in for the whole of the intellectual program of the Enlightenment in its confident certainty that the most pervasive of human institutions could have originated out of the exercise of human reason, rather than from divine imposition. Not surprisingly, other writers of the age expatiated on the topic. The Abbe Condillac saw the origin of language as a paramount step in the transition from nature to culture. For Jean Jacques Rousseau, the earliest language was indistinguishable from the dance and arose out of gestures expressive of human passion, which was why gesture still played such an important role in the languages of “southern peoples” like the Italians, who were still ruled by their emotions.

By the 19th century, though, language was no longer regarded as an institution invented by humans and evolving from a primitive to a developed state. Rather, it was a faculty that was unchanged since “the first dawn of human life and human thought,” as the philologist Max Mueller put it in 1861, and the business of scientific linguistics was to trace its development “in exactly the same spirit in which the geologist treats his stones and his petrifactions.” The unscientific speculations of the 18th century philosophers were set aside; as the British linguist Albert Ellis wrote in 1873: “We shall do more by tracing the historical growth of one single work-a-day tongue, than by filling wastepaper baskets with reams of paper covered with speculations on the origins of all tongues.” And indeed, when the Linguistic Society of Paris was incorporated in 1866, it adopted a charter provision that banned “any paper concerning the origin of language.” That was the time when the concerns of the science of linguistics began to diverge from the concerns of ordinary people, and the field has never looked back. Now, as in the 19th century, historical linguistics focuses on the patterns of change that are always at work on languages, which operate with the relentless obduracy of scientific laws. It’s a discipline with neither patience nor place for the notions that most people have about language change: that language is the direct expression of culture and changes in response to cultural pressures, that languages evolve from primitive to developed stages, and that change can happen for the better or the worse.

John McWhorter’s “The Power of Babel” is an entertaining and informative exposition of the scientific view of language change, which ought to do for historical linguistics what Stephen Pinker did for general linguistics with his 1994 bestseller, “The Language Instinct.” McWhorter has an engaging, personal style and a bottomless trunk of metaphors to draw from--at various points he compares human languages to cloud formations, dinosaur species, bushes, lava lamps and Rodgers and Hart musicals. And he has a wide knowledge of the world’s languages: His examples are drawn not just from familiar Western languages such as English, French and German, but from languages such as Cantonese, Xhosa, Welsh, Maori, Russian and Hindi. (Some readers are apt to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of examples, but McWhorter is clearly a writer in love with his subject matter and readers who aren’t taking the course for credit will find it easy enough to skip around.)

Language changes in multiple ways. Sounds change, as “shut up” morphs into “shaddup.” Grammar changes, so that we no longer use verb forms such as “speaketh” and “speakest.” And meanings change--while Ginger Rogers could use “make love” in the 1935 musical “Top Hat” to mean simply “woo,” the implication today would be a bit more direct. Languages can split into multiple dialects. (However, like most linguists, McWhorter holds that the distinction between “languages” and “dialects” is political--from the linguistic point of view, as he puts it, “dialects are all there is.”) And on occasion, two languages can blend to form a new one, called a creole, through a process that McWhorter describes as linguistic macrame. That process gave rise to the ancestor of the variety that we call Black English, and McWhorter, a specialist in creoles, gives a very lucid explanation of the evolution.

Along with other linguists, McWhorter holds that processes of change are as inevitable as biological evolution or continental drift; those who imagine they can oppose or retard the course of change are merely “shaking their fists at the rain.” Nor does change have much to do with the ebb and flow of the culture that language is swimming around in. It’s a mistake, he says, to suppose that there’s “anything inherently French about ‘taking’ a beverage ... instead of drinking it or inherently English about ‘taking’ a nap, whereas the French ‘make’ one.” And he gives short shrift to the notion that change can be evaluated as progress or decay, or that some language varieties are “better” than others. From the linguistic point of view, he says, it’s “all systems normal”; “standard” languages are simply dialects that happened to be in the right place at the right time. It’s the larger themes such as these that make McWhorter’s book recommended reading even for people with only a limited interest in the technical details of language change. Along the way, he scores some nice points about other cherished beliefs about language change--for example, the idea that English’s triumph as a world language was abetted by its inherent “flexibility” in assimilating loan words from other languages, when the truth is any other language would have looked just as flexible if it had had an equally cosmopolitan history.

Still, it’s unlikely that McWhorter’s book will do much by way of dispelling any of these notions. Over the years, linguists have turned out any number of lively popularizations of their science, including a few bestsellers such as “The Language Instinct.” Yet people have shown no readiness to abandon their traditional notions about language and language change in the way they’ve been willing to shed their prescientific ideas about evolution, say. One reason for this is that for a real understanding of the nature of language, you have to focus on features of language that ordinarily escape notice. It comes as a disappointment to most people to learn that linguists spend most of their time discussing such words as “the” or the intricacies of English helping verbs such as “do” rather than the colorful and exotic words that fill most of the treasure-troves of word-lore that populate the language shelves at the back of the bookstore.

There’s a curious irony here, since the reason we can get away with ignoring the nuts and bolts of language is that it is one human institution that never really fails us. Critics may decry the degeneration of English, but in the end a language can’t fall apart the way an economy or a polity can: We know that we’ll be able to order lunch 50 years from now, even if we’re not able to pay for it. But there’s another reason for the public’s failure to appreciate the linguist’s point of view: The science often takes too broad a perspective to have much relevance to the items that really matter to us. When we consider the structure of English from on high, words such as “incentivize,” “to dialog” and “disinterested” have little importance. And when the last English speaker has ceased to distinguish between “imply” and “infer,” the language as a whole will be scarcely altered. But even if these are small things, people aren’t wrong to take them as the harbingers of broader social changes. And since the 18th century, critics have taken language change as the occasion for a debate--often exasperating, occasionally illuminating--about cultural tendencies that might otherwise be hard to put a finger on.

The 18th century philosophers weren’t entirely wrong about language. From one point of view, McWhorter and other linguists are clearly right to think of language as a deep cognitive faculty that may very well be hard-wired in the human brain. But language is also a social institution, which flutters back and forth in response to the slight atmospheric currents in the room. We may not be able to trace its origins in as direct a way as we can the origins of our political and economic systems (though in recent years, some scientists have begun to revisit the questions of origin that Herder and Rousseau raised). But we can sometimes talk about change in language the way we talk about change in the other institutions we count on. It isn’t easy to keep both points of view simultaneously in mind. Speaking as a linguist, I realize that the tendency to refer to problems as “issues” is a perfectly normal example of semantic change, and that people a generation from now will no doubt wonder why anyone ever bothered to object to it, in the same way I’m at a loss to understand why mid-20th century critics objected to the use of “contact” as a verb. But speaking as a somewhat crotchety inhabitant of the first decade of the 21st century, I find the usage a little smarmy--for the moment, at least, it feels like a way of keeping personal responsibility at arm’s length. So I raise my umbrella, knowing full well it won’t do much to keep the sidewalk dry.

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Geoffrey Nunberg is a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information and consulting professor at Stanford University. His most recent book is “The Way We Talk Now.”