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George W. Grace
University of Hawaii

The Assumption that Languages like English are "Natural" Languages

[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 objection to all of this is that it's very obvious that individuals in various positions of authority have been intervening in their languages with a very heavy hand for a long time. The very existence of concepts such as "language engineering", "language modernization", and "standard language" is evidence of this fact.

I've found a book by John Earl Joseph about the rise of "standard languages" in Europe very informative. Among other things, he makes it clear that making a "standard language" involves a lot more than regularization. I like the following statement in Suzanne Romaine's review of that book:

"I agree with Joseph that standardization dramatically affects the course of evolution of a variety in an unnatural way by deliberate human intervention, thus rendering standard languages as artificial objects. I use the term 'objects' here deliberately to emphasize even more their special ontological status (see Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; and Popper's 1972 remarks on Third World objects). Because standard languages are taught in schools, their acquisition proceeds in a way which is nothing like that of natural languages."
[Romaine, Suzanne. 1989. Review of John E. Joseph, Eloquence and power: The rise of language standards and standard languages. Linguistics 27: 574-79 (p. 577).]

Likewise this quotation from the book itself about using the evidence of standard languages for linguistic purposes.:

"If a standard language is to be subjected to generative analysis, the conscious human cultural artifacts which it contains must be eliminated from consideration. Otherwise the analysis will be as misleading as a geologist's attempt to deal with Mount Rushmore, Stonehenge, or St. Paul's Cathedral as if they were natural rock formations."
[Joseph, John Earl. 1987. Eloquence and power: The rise of language standards and standard languages. London: Frances Pinter. (p. 19)]

Consider also the following quotation, taken from the preface to Samuel Johnson's (18^th century) dictionary of the English language. He's referring to the state of English before the creation of the English standard language (note that his dictionary has been credited with having played the leading role in the creation of this standard language).

"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.]

It would be rash to suggest that there are any languages anywhere that have remained totally free of deliberate human intervention throughout their history, but "standard languages" in Joseph's sense are a particularly extreme case of deliberate intervention.

Why did this intervention happen at the time and place that it did? Walter Ong has suggested that the peculiar position of Latin that developed in the Middle Ages and continued through the Renaissance was a critical factor. For example, he says,

"Studies of the matter are nonexistent, but one could argue as an initial hypothesis that the modern intellectual world and the modern state of consciousness could never have come into being without Learned Latin or something like it."
[Ong, Walter J. 1977. Interfaces of the word: Studies in the evolution of consciousness and culture. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press (p. 36).]

An important cause of the success of standard languages has been their close association with the rise of modern science. Again Ong,

"Modern science only gradually became viable in the vernacular atmosphere as it transformed this atmosphere by injecting it with Latin terms and forms of thought."
[Ong, Walter J. 1977. Interfaces of the word: Studies in the evolution of consciousness and culture. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press (p. 36).]

Maybe the most significant fact about this "Learned Latin" was that it wasn't the mother tongue of anyone; it was the exclusive property of intellectuals who were free to reshape it as they saw fit.

"This is a strange situation for a language. Latin was distanced--alienated--not from day-to-day life, for it was of the substance of daily life for lawyers, physicians, academic educators, and clergymen, but from the psychological and psycho-somatic roots of consciousness. It no longer in any sense belonged to mother, it did not come from where you came from."
[Ong, Walter J. 1977. Interfaces of the word: Studies in the evolution of consciousness and culture. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press (p. 27-28).]

What standardizers like Samuel Johnson actually produced was a variety of English designed for the precise translation of the current Latin texts and usages. Most of the material for this variety was selected and adapted from previously-existing varieties of English. The newly-designed standard variety was in effect superimposed on the previously-existing ones, and quickly assumed the status of "correct" English.

"[Latin] was in every sense the model that the standardizers of the European vernaculars wanted their languages to approach."
[Joseph, John Earl. 1987. Eloquence and power: The rise of language standards and standard languages. London: Frances Pinter.(p. 50).]

• [The concepts referred to by language names like "English" (or "French", etc.) have typical prototype structures. When we think of the population of western Europe as being divided into speakers of English, French, etc., this "English" (and likewise the "French", etc.) refers to a varietal continuum (or a series of continua). However, descriptive statements about "English" (with no specification of variety), are pretty certain to focus narrowly on the prototype--that is, on the standard or something very close to it.]

English, of course, is just one example of many. The standard language phenomenon has been spreading rapidly through the world since its successes in Western Europe. A major motive for this spread has been its perceived association with technological progress (and the science that underlay it).

"Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, a correlation may be noted between (a) the tendency of a society to accelerate technical progress and to turn toward more modern forms of social organization, and (b) moves to control and order the structures of the language of that society in the direction of rationalization, standardization, simplification, specialization, and greater precision."
[Gallagher, Charles F. 1969. Language rationalization and scientific progress. In The Social reality of Scientific Myth, edited by Kalman H. Silvert. New York: American Universities Field Staff, Inc., pp. 58-87. (p. 60).]

One shouldn't imagine the effects of this "modernization", which is to say the superposition of a standard (in our sense) variety, to have been superficial or trivial. Speakers of languages that have recently undergone "modernization" often comment that this new variety is so different from anything that existed before as to threaten mutual intelligibility. My quotation list contains the following statement from Gallagher:

"The Turkish case is instructive because the Turks were the first non-Western people to become fully aware of protomodern European technical and scientific capacities as early as the first half of the eighteenth century. They were the first Asian society to grasp the idea that internal language backwardness was related to technical lag, and to talk openly of basic structural reform rather than of mere surface refurbishment. The thoroughgoing nature of the Turkish reforms is shown by the fact that, even putting aside the romanization of the script, Ottoman Turkish texts of around 1900 are essentially unrecognizable foreign documents to the modern Turk."
[Gallagher, Charles F. 1969. Language rationalization and scientific progress. In The Social reality of Scientific Myth, edited by Kalman H. Silvert. New York: American Universities Field Staff, Inc., pp. 58-87. (p. 65)]

One last point that I feel shouldn't be omitted is that the original vernaculars were spoken languages which at some point in their history had writing systems designed for them and thus came--secondarily--to be written. On the other hand, the standard variety is designed as a written language, and its oral use is secondary and derivative. In the following quotation, Florian Coulmas comments on the difference:

"That writing does not just duplicate speech is by now a commonplace. It changes the nature of verbal communication as well as the speakers' attitude to, and awareness of, their language. Writing makes a society language-conscious; it is a 'more advanced and specialized form of adaptive behaviour than speech' (Harris 1980: 13)".
[Coulmas, Florian (ed.). 1989. Language adaptation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (p. 14)]

And Roy Harris comments on the failure of contemporary linguistics to recognize that difference:

"How twentieth-century linguists managed to persuade themselves that they were analysing the spoken word by imposing the structure of the written word upon it is an intriguing topic, but one which cannot be pursued here."
[Harris, Roy. Language and speech, in Roy Harris (ed.). Approaches to language. Oxford et al: Pergamon Press. 1983, pp. 1-15. (p. 13)]

First put on the Web on 3 December 1998
Updated 6 June 2003