Authors: Bill Bryson
Not only did various speech communities devise different lan-guages, but also different cultural predispositions to go with them.
Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are ad-dressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to close the gap. Neither speaker may even be aware of it. There are more of these speech conventions than you might suppose. English speakers dread silence. We are all familiar with the uncomfortable feeling that overcomes us when a conversation palls. Studies have shown that when a pause reaches four seconds, one or more of the conversationalists will invariably blurt something—a fatuous com-ment on the weather, a startled cry of "Gosh, is that the time?"—rather than let the silence extend to a
fifth
second.
A
vital adjunct to language is the gesture, which in some cultures can almost constitute a vocabulary all its own. Modern Greek has more than seventy common gestures, ranging from the chopping
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off the forearm gesture, which signifies extreme displeasure, to several highly elaborate ones, such as placing the left hand on the knee, closing one eye, looking with the other into the middle distance and wagging the free hand up and down, which means "I don't want anything to do with it." According to Mario Pei, the human anatomy is capable of producing some 700,000 "distinct elementary gestures" of this type. We have nothing remotely like that number in English, but we have many more than you might at first think—from wagging a finger in warning at a child, to squeez-ing the nose and fanning the face to indicate a noisome smell, to putting a hand to the ear as if to say, "I can't hear you."
Estimates of the number of languages in the world usually fix on a figure of about 2,7oo, though almost certainly no one has ever made a truly definitive count. In many countries, perhaps the majority, there are at least two native languages, and in some cases—as in Cameroon and Papua New Guinea—there are hun-dreds. India probably leads the world, with more than 1,600 lan-guages and dialects (it isn't always possible to say which is which).
The rarest language as of 1984 was Oubykh, a highly complex Caucasian language with eighty-two consonants but only three vowels, once spoken by 50,000 people in the Crimea. But as of July 1984 there was just one living speaker remaining and he was eighty-two years old.
The number of languages naturally changes as tribes die out or linguistic groups are absorbed. Although new languages, particu-larly creoles, are born from time to time, the trend is towards absorption and amalgamation. When Columbus arrived in the New World, there were an estimated 1,000 languages. Today there are about boo.
Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelan-dic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like airport and
quarter-pound
cheeseburger.
In English, by contrast, the change has been much more dramatic. Almost any untrained person looking at a manu-script from the time of, say, the Venerable Bede would be hard
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pressed to identify it as being in English—and in a sense he or she would be right. Today we have not only a completely different vocabulary and system of spelling, but even a different structure.
,Nor are languages any respecters of frontiers. If you drew a map of Europe based on languages it would bear scant resemblance to a conventional map. Switzerland would disappear, becoming part of the surrounding dominions of French, Italian, and German but for a few tiny pockets for Romansh (or Romantsch or Rhaeto- Romanic as it is variously called), which is spoken as a native language by about half the people in the Graubunden district (or Grisons district—almost everything has two names in Switzerland) at the country's eastern edge. This steep and beautiful area, which takes in the ski resorts of St. Moritz, Davos, and Klosters, was once effectively isolated from the rest of the world by its harsh winters and forbidding geography. Indeed, the isolation was such that even people in neighboring valleys began to speak different versions of the language, so that Romansh is not so much one language as five fragmented and not always mutually intelligible dialects. A person from the valley around Sutselva will say, "Vagned na qua" for
"Come here," while in the next valley he will say, "Vegni neu cheu." [Cited in
The Economist,
February 27, 1988] In other places people will speak the language in the same way but spell it differ-ently depending on whether they are Catholic or Protestant.
German would cover not only its traditional areas of Germany, Austria, and much of Switzerland, but would spill into Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and Po-land, and it could be further divided into high and low German, which have certain notable differences in terms of vocabulary and syntax. In Bavaria, for instance,
Samstag
is the name for Saturday, but in Berlin it is
Sonnabend;
a plumber in Bavaria is a
spengler,
but a
klempner
in Berlin.
Italy, too, would appear on the map not as one language entity but as a whole variety of broadly related but often mutually incom-prehensible dialects. Italian, such as it is, is not a national lan-guage, but really only the dialect of Florence and Tuscany, which has slowly been gaining preeminence over other dialects. Not until
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1979 did a poll show for the first time that Italian was the dialect spoken at home by more than 5o percent of Italians.
Much the same would be the position in the Soviet Union, which would dissolve into 1 49 separate languages. Almost half the people in the country speak some language other than Russian as a native tongue, and a full quarter of the people do not speak Russian at all.
Such pockets would be everywhere. Even Latin would make an appearance: It is still the official language of Vatican City.
All these languages blend and merge and variously affect each other. French normally puts the adjective after the noun it is mod-ifying (as in
l'auto rouge
rather than
le rouge auto),
but in Alsace and other Rhineland regions influenced by Germany, the locals have a tendency to reverse the normal order. In a similar way, in the Highlands of Scotland, English speakers, whether or not they understand Gaelic, have developed certain speech patterns clearly influenced by Gaelic phrasings, saying "take that here" rather than
"bring that here" and "I'm seeing you" in preference to "I see you." In border areas, such as between Holland and West Ger-many or between West Germany and Denmark, the locals on each side often understand each other better than they do their own compatriots.
k
Some languages are not so distinct as we are sometimes led to believe. Spanish and Portuguese are closely enough related that the two peoples can read each other's newspapers and books, though they have more difficulty understanding speech.
Finns and Estonians can freely understand each other. Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians often insist that their languages are quite distinct and yet, as Mario Pei puts it, there are greater dif-ferences between Italian dialects such as Sicilian and Piedmontese than there are between any of the three main Scandinavian lan-guages. Romanian and Moldavian, spoken in the Soviet Union, are essentially the same language with different names. So are Serbian and Croatian, the only real difference being that Serbian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and Croatian uses Western characters.
In many countries people use one language for some activities and a second language for others. In Luxembourg, the inhabitants
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use French at school, German for reading newspapers, and' Lux-emburgish, a local Germanic dialect, at home. In Paraguay, people conduct business in Spanish, but tell their jokes in Guarani, the native Indian tongue. In Greece, for a long time children were schooled only in Katharevousa, a formal language so archaic that it was (and indeed still is) no longer spoken anywhere in the country.
The language for common discourse was Dhimotiki, yet perversely this everyday language was long held in such low esteem that when the Old Testament was published in Dhimotiki for the first time in 1go3, riots broke out all over the country. [Peter Trudgill,
Socio-
linguistics,
page 115 + ]
In countries where two or more languages coexist, confusion often arises. In Belgium, many towns have two quite separate names, one recognized by French speakers, one by Dutch speak-ers, so that the French Tournai is the Dutch Doornik, while the Dutch Luik is the French Liege. The French Mons is the Dutch Bergen, the Dutch Kortrijk is the French Courtrai, and the city that to all French-speaking people (and indeed most English-speaking people) is known as Bruges (and pronounced "broozsh") is to the locals called Brugge and pronounced "broo-guh." Although Brus-sels is officially bilingual, it is in fact a French-speaking island in a Flemish lake.
Language is often an emotive issue in Belgium and has brought down many governments. Part of the problem is that there has been a reversal in the relative fortunes of the two main language groups. Wallonia, the southern, French-speaking half of Belgium, was long the economic powerhouse of the country, but with the decline of traditional heavy industries such as steel and coal, the economic base has moved north to the more populous, but previ-ously backward, region of Flanders. During the period of the Wal-loon ascendancy, the Dutch dialect, Flemish, or Vlaams, was forbidden to be spoken in parliament, courts, and even in schools.
This naturally caused lingering resentment among the Dutch-speaking majority.
The situation is so hair-triggered that when a French-speaking group of villages in Flanders known as the Fourons elected a French-speaking mayor who refused to conduct his duties in
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Dutch, the national government was brought down twice and the matter clouded Belgian politics for a decade.
Even more bitter has been the situation in French-speaking Canada. In 1976, the separatist Parti Quebecois, under the lead-ership of Rene Levesque, introduced a law known as Bill 101, which banned languages other than French on commercial signs, restricted the number of admissions to English schools (and re-quired the children of immigrants to be schooled in French even if both parents spoke English), and made French the language of the workplace for any company employing more than fifty people. The laws were enforced by a committee with the ominous name of Commission de Surveillance de la Langue Francaise. Fines of up to $76o were imposed by 400 "language police." All of this was a trifle harsh on the 800,000 Quebec citizens who spoke English, and a source of considerable resentment, as when "Merry Christmas"
greetings were ordered to be taken down and 15,000 Dunkin'
Donuts bags were seized. In December 1988, the supreme court of Canada ruled that parts of Bill 101 were illegal. According to the court, Quebec could order that French be the primary language of commerce, but not the only one. As an immediate response, 15,000
francophones marched in protest through the streets of Montreal and many stores that had bilingual signs were vandalized, often by having the letters FLQ (for Front de Liberation de Quebec) spray-painted across their windows. One was firebombed.
But even a thousand miles from Quebec linguistic ill feeling sometimes surfaces. Because Canada is officially bilingual, a na-tional law states that all regions of the country must provide ser-vices in both French and English, but this has caused sometimes bitter resentment in non-French-speaking areas such as Manitoba, where there are actually more native speakers of German and Ukrainian than of French. French Canadians are a shrinking pro-portion of the country, falling from 29 percent of the total popula-tion in 1961 to 24 percent today and forecast to fall to 2o percent by early in the next century.
People can feel incredibly strongly about these matters. As of February 1989, the Basque separatist organization ETA (short for Euskadi to Azkatasuna, "Basque Nation and Liberty") had com-
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mitted 672 murders in the name of linguistic and cultural inde-pendence. Even if we are repelled by the violence it is easy to understand the feelings of resentment that arise among linguistic minorities. Under Franco, you could be arrested and imprisoned just for speaking Basque in public. Catalan, a language midway between Spanish and French, spoken by 25o,000 people princi-pally in Catalonia but also
as far
afield as Roussillon in France, was likewise long banned in Spain. In France, for decades letters ad-dressed in Breton were returned with the message
Addresse en
Breton interdite
("Address in Breton forbidden"). Hitler and Mus-solini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers.
XSuppression is still going on. In the Soviet Union in the 198os, Azerbaijanis and other linguistic minorities rioted, and sometimes lost their lives, for the right to have newspapers and schoolbooks in their own language. In Romania there exists a group of people called Szeklers who speak what is said to be the purest and most beautiful form of Hungarian. But for thirty years, until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian government systematically erad-icated its culture, closing down schools, forcing the renowned Hungarian-language Bolyai University to merge with a lesser-known Romanian one, even bulldozing whole villages, all in the name of linguistic conformity.
On the whole, however, governments these days take a more enlightened view to their minority languages. Nowhere perhaps has this reversal of attitudes been more pronounced than in Wales.
Once practically banned, the Welsh language is now officially pro-tected by the government. It is a language of rich but daunting beauty. Try getting your tongue around this sentence, from a park-ing lot in Gwynedd, the most determinedly Welsh-speaking of Wales's eight counties: "A ydycg wedi talu a dodi eich tocyn yn y golwg?" It translates roughly
as
"Did you remember to pay?" and, yes, it is about as unpronounceable
as
it looks. In fact, more so because Welsh pronunciations rarely bear much relation to their spellings—at least when viewed from an English-speaking per-spective. The town of Dolgellau, for instance, is pronounced "doll-geth-lee," while Llandudno is "klan-did-no." And those are the easy ones. There are also scores of places that bring tears to the
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