Languages and Speech Communities

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LANGUAGES AND SPEECH COMMUNITIES

Languages cannot be counted precisely. Each language forms an integral part of a continuum of human communication. This global continuum, which is as old as speech itself, underlies the often neglected unity of humankind. Communities seemingly separated by language are bound together by bilingual voices on one or both sides of their divide, and words, sounds, and even grammatical rules are exchanged regularly among languages that are in contact with one another.

With the worldwide spread of electronic communication, the interfaces among individual languages will become even more fluid. Multilingualism will increase. The gulf between speech and writing will narrow, as each becomes a potential electronic product of the other. More and more small speech communities will enjoy worldwide mobility through migration and through worldwide usage of telecommunication.

The growth of electronic communication inevitably favors the domination of intercommunal and international relations among a restricted number of languages dominated by English. However, electronic communication also assists in maintaining the use of more localized languages and dialects as markers of communal identity, especially when their speakers are physically separated.

Distribution of Languages by Numbers of Speakers

Populations cannot be enumerated precisely in regard to individual languages except in the case of languages spoken within small circumscribed communities. One cannot define when learners become adequate speakers: Estimates of the global population of speakers of English thus may range from less than 1 billion to almost 2 billion, depending on the definition of proficiency. However, it is possible to make useful estimates of the relative importance of languages worldwide or within specific populations.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century 27 modern "arterial languages" are accessible to 1 percent or more of humankind (i.e., each language to a population of 60 million or more) (See Table 1). Two thirds of those languages fall within a band of between 1.0 and 2.5 percent of the world's total population, ranging from Tagalog, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai with Lao, Tamil, Telugu, Italian, Persian with Tajik, Panjabi, Marathi, Wu, Cantonese, and Swahili (between 60 million and 90 million speakers each) to Javanese, Turkish with Azerbaijani, Japanese, French, and German (between 100 million and 135 million speakers each).

The remaining nine arterial languages are the giants of modern spoken and written communication, with each one being accessible to more than 3 percent of humankind. Seven of these languages are closely related to and draw an important part of their heritage from five major classical written languages (listed with the names of the modern languages in parentheses): Classical Chinese (Mandarin and its close relatives), Sanskrit (Hindi with Urdu and Bengali, along with their close relatives), Classical Arabic (Modern Arabic in its western and eastern forms), Latin (Spanish and Portuguese and their close relatives), and Church Slavonic (Russian and its close relatives).

The phrase "close relatives" conceals the basic problem of what a language is. The name "Chinese" covers a unified writing system but a great variety of spoken forms that are used largely within the same nation-state. Speakers of Spanish and Portuguese have relatively easy access to other Latin-derived arterial

TABLE 1

languages such as French and Italian, and vice versa, although all four of those languages developed as the languages of separate and rival nation-states. The relationship between Russian and the other Slavonic languages is somewhat similar.

Two arterial languages remain: Malay, including its modern derivative Indonesian, and English. Both owe their wide extension to maritime trade and conquest: Malay-Indonesian as a regional language now accessible to over 200 million people and English as a broadly spoken language accessible to a global population of 1 billion or more.

Is English the "most spoken language"? The answer still depends on the time of day. When the sun is over the eastern Pacific, Chinese is the world's most spoken language and Hindi with its close relatives is in the second position. When the sun is over the Atlantic and much of Asia sleeps, English is the most spoken language in the world, with Spanish in a strong second place.

Ebb and Flow of Languages

All spoken and recorded languages form part of a global continuum or "linguasphere," a shared framework for establishing personal and interpersonal thoughts, communications, and identities. The piecemeal approach to the study of individual languages belongs to the twentieth century, together with the spurious comparison of dying languages with dying species of animals and plants. The end of hunting and gathering as a viable lifestyle brought the inevitable end of a large number of minute speech communities. The heritage of those groups should be documented carefully if it is not already too late to do that. However, the natural diversity of humankind will always require and support linguistic diversity. Its extent would be better documented if population census data routinely included information on levels of multilingualism.

Future Trends

Every community that wants to preserve and promote its language should be encouraged to do so. Every child has the right to an education in her or his own language but arguably has also the right to learn a language that provides access to knowledge in all cultural and economic fields. The success or failure of globalization in all its meanings, including globalized respect for diversity and equality of opportunity, will depend on the global development of the world's languages as a shared human resource. This development will clearly benefit from the transnational use of English in the service of a multilingual and multicultural world, rather than as the vector of a dominating monolingual culture.

The most important linguistic development during the twenty-first century will be the increasing electronic empowerment of the spoken word, which is already superseding writing as the principal means of long-distance communication and also may challenge the printed word as the principal vehicle of permanent recording. English is likely to solidify its present position as the dominant vehicle for international communication, but most languages will survive within their own communities, which in several instances will be numerically larger than the population of native English speakers, as languages of cultural and localized identity.

See also: Ethnic and National Groups; Literacy.