Updated 6 June 2003
Comments Welcome
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii
[Following up on what I said in “Linguistic Quotations” (click here) this is an attempt to group together some quotations that can be seen as having a common theme. They are taken from the collection of quotations that I’ve posted in “Quotations from my office door” (click here).]
My position is that the conventional assumption that language divides neatly into a bunch of individual entities that we call "languages" is an ethnocentric one--that as self-evident as it seems to us today, it's just one of the "truths" belonging to Modern Western culture, and not something that would occur to people in other times and places.As regards the conception of individual languages in earlier times in the Western tradition, I have the following quotation from Illich and Sanders to the effect that in Europe at an earlier time languages were not thought of as distinct, or well-defined, systems. (It also attempts to give an idea of how they were viewed at that time).
"Up until the time of the earliest vernacular grammars--in other words, up until the late fifteenth century--lingua or tongue or habla was less like one drawer in a bureau than one color in a spectrum. The comprehensibility of speech was comparable to the intensity of a color." [Illich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders. 1988. ABC: The alphabetization of the popular mind. San Francisco: North Point Press.(pp. 62-3)
Another quotation that supports this point is the following one, taken from the preface to Samuel Johnson's (18th century) dictionary of the English language. I should point out that this dictionary has been credited--probably more than any other single work--with accomplishing the standardization of the English language. Johnson's point is that, before he designed it, there was no coherent system within what was called "English".
"When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection..." [Samuel Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary.]
Trudgill, in another of the quotations, points out that the modern Western view may also differ from views elsewhere in the contemporary world.
"Le Page's terms focused and diffuse require some discussion. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller have pointed out (1985) that speech communities, and therefore language varieties, vary from the relatively focused to the relatively diffuse. The better-known European languages tend to be of the focused type: the language is felt to be clearly distinct from other languages; its 'boundaries' are clearly delineated; and members of the speech community show a high level of agreement as to what does and does not constitute 'the language'. In other parts of the world, however, this may not be so at all, and we may have instead a relatively diffuse situation: speakers may have no very clear idea about what language they are speaking; and what does and does not constitute the language will be perceived as an issue of no great importance." [Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in contact. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (pp. 85-86)]
Peter Mühlhäusler, in the following quotation, even questions the applicability of the notion of the "language" in most cultures.
"One is led to conclude that the notion of 'a language' is one whose applicability to the Pacific region, and in fact to most situations outside those found within modern European type nation-states, is extremely limited." [Mühlhäusler, Peter. 1996. Linguistic ecology: Language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region. London and New York: Routledge. (p. 7)]
My list also contains the following two quotations from Robert Le Page. His notions of "focus" and diffuseness" (referred to above in the Trudgill quotation) provide the best basis I know of for discussing the reality that lies behind the notion of individual languages.
"Those of us who come from very stable and highly focused societies may find it difficult to distinguish stereotypes about "normal transmission" from the real facts about language use, variation, and change in use, since we are so accustomed to think in terms of idealized, reified, discrete systems; but it is essential to see all language questions in terms of activity between individuals as they form social groups, even in the most static and highly focused societies." [Le Page, Robert B. 1992. "You can never tell where a word comes from": language contact in a diffuse setting. In Ernest Håkon Jahr (ed.) Language contact: Theoretical and empirical studies. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 71-101.(p. 98)].
"Moreover, I have tried, for reasons given in Le Page 1969, 1975b, to avoid the point of view which requires that every speech event must belong to a namable language system. Rather, I regard it as a reflex of the total behavioral system of the person who utters it, interacting with the context in which it is uttered; each speech act is therefore the reflex of an 'instant pidgin', related to the linguistic competence of more than one person (unless one can envisage an utterly solipsist speaker-hearer)." [Le Page, Robert. 1977. Processes of pidginization and creolization. In Albert Valdeman (ed.). Pidgin and creole linguistics. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 222-255. (pp. 222-23)].
The authors of the following two quotations don't take the individual and his/her acts of speaking as the focus of attention as Le Page does, but they agree with him in insisting on the need to acknowledge the lack of uniformity in the languages that we recognize.
In the first, Victor Yngve, who has his own theory to support, argues against a theory of language based on the false assumption of the uniformity of the individual language.
"In science it is necessary to give priority to the evidence over traditional theory or a priori assumptions. If the evidence shows that any two people, or the same person at different times, are partly alike and partly different communicatively, and that any two groups are likewise partly alike and partly different, then we should have a theory that mirrors these observations, rather than one that reflects a uniformity that does not exist." [Yngve, Victor H. 1986. Linguistics as a science. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. (p. 91)].
The same point about the uniformity of the individual language made from the perspective of an outstanding field linguist of the nineteenth century.
"I do not believe that anyone will ever be able to represent a language well if he does not disabuse himself of the striving for a complete system, for every language is more or less a ruin, in which the plan of the architect cannot be discovered, until one has learned to supply from other works by the same hand what is missing in order to grasp the original design. Every attentive student of a language will grant me this, and then he will also have to condemn the way in which in this country people have endeavoured to find a strict system in such language ruins as Javanese and Malay."[Van der Tuuk, H. N. 1971. A grammar of Toba Batak {A translation by Jeune Scott-Kemball of Tabasche Spraakunst (1864/1867)}. Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Translation Series 13. The Hague: Martinuc Nijhoff (xliii)]
Once again a similar point, here from a theoretical point of view invoking Chomsky's concept of the "I- language".
"But if a language is treated, not as the communal property of a group, but as the psychological possession of an individual, then since the linguistic experience of every individual is unique, we may expect the language (the I-language) that he possesses to be at least slightly different from that of every other individual. " [Love, Nigel. 1990. The locus of languages in a redefined linguistics. In Hayley G. Davis and Talbot J. Taylor (eds.) Redefining linguistics. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 53-117. (p.84)
This exhausts (for the moment, at least) the quotations that seem most immediately relevant to the particular assumption. However, it has natural connects to other assumptions that I expect (for the moment) to treat as separate. These include, for example, assumptions about the speaker's knowledge of language, about the "naturalness" of standard languages, and about how language works.
George Grace's home page
Linguistic Quotations
the Ethnolinguistic Notes
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the Ethnolinguistic Notes Series 3
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Ethnolinguistic Notes Series 4 page.
First put on the Web on 17 November 1998
Updated 6 June 2003