In Praise of the Garrulous Read online

  In countries that have more complex linguistic realities (most of the world), this kind of thinking would appear absurd, but in Britain it is depressingly familiar. When Italy was unified in 1861, between 2.5 and 5% of the population spoke Italian (according to the estimate you wish to believe). The “dialects” are still spoken in large parts of Italy, and typically an Italian dialect-speaker will have three basic levels of expression. First there is the dialect, which is generally another Neo-Latin language with or without a literature, and the dialect itself will be divided into different registers. Then there is the intermediate language, which Italians call a “Regional Italian”. This is roughly equivalent to our “accent”, which is phonologically diverse but not grammatically and lexically diverse, but does often involve small changes such as particular idioms and a few words, which may actually be familiar to people from other regions. Occasionally there are more significant changes such as the elision of the final vowel on nouns. Then, of course, there is standard Italian, which will include registers inherent to it, as well as the Regional Italian, effectively an extra register. Italians are much more exacting about the standard language than English-speakers. I can remember an outraged Tuscan shouting at the television when the then prime minister, a Neapolitan, was speaking. “He can’t even speak Italian,” my friend cried, but whatever his other faults, the poor man had only said possibbile instead of possibile. This would be the equivalent of condemning a politician from Yorkshire for pronouncing “but” like “put”, and demonstrates the much higher sensitivity to register in some other cultures (in this case, I think excessive). Paradoxically, linguistic diversity in a country sometimes creates a more rigid concept of the standard language, which in reality is spoken by no one. The Tuscan friend thought nothing of his elided “c”,2 typical of the Tuscan accent, although in a formal situation like a television interview, he would probably have suppressed it.

  Before the invention of writing, register was possibly limited to the distinctions between the formal poetic and the everyday, or to put it another way, between oral literature and oral speech. Writing brings about an enormous change, in part because it creates a new perception of language, but principally because it causes an increasing distinction between the written language and the spoken one. The reason for this is simple: before the invention of printing, literate societies were still predominately oral and the pace of language change was quite dramatic compared with recent centuries; hence every generation brought a greater distance between the spoken language and the founding texts of early literacy. Moreover, the earlier linguistic forms were protected by writing and became increasingly prestigious and were therefore emulated by the elite, creating a new highly artificial, pseudo-archaic language.

  Some elements of the Neo-Latin languages were evident even during late antiquity (for instance, proscriptive grammars of the time would say, “Do not combine two prepositions” as with ab ante, which in Italian becomes avanti or even davanti, a combination of not two, but three prepositions. And the literate continued to read and write in Latin while it died as a widely spoken language and other spoken languages were born. In the fourteenth century, humanism started to resurrect “classical” Latin in place of supposedly “corrupt” medieval Latin, and by the time of the High Renaissance, some humanists were probably more Ciceronian than Cicero. Before printing, the relationship between the spoken language and the written one was complex, in part because of the mystery surrounding the latter. Secular and religious authorities could use that mystery to enhance their power; hence the hostility of the Catholic Church to the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. It was not the case that Latin and the various Neo-Latin vernaculars were totally divided; each affected the other and served to create a series of registers. When the educated spoke a vernacular, they allowed themselves to be influenced by Latin syntax and vocabulary, and this would in turn generate gradations of Latinate influence descending down the social classes, but within each social class, people would have been shifting their language according to social context. Medieval Latin had been “corrupted” by the vernaculars and the erudite set about rescuing the language from the “barbarisms” accumulated over centuries. This created a spectrum in late-medieval Latin between Medieval Latin and Classical Latin. Just when the classicists had achieved their victory, the printing press began to undermine Latin irredeemably. Printing reversed the process started by writing and gradually led the written word back towards the demotic.

  The degree of register must vary from one language to another, and is in any case only one factor when assessing the linguistic complexity of a society. Two other factors that are of great importance are geographical diversity and chronological diversity (still within the same language). To some extent, register is a crystallisation of these two factors within a social context: the most prestigious varieties of language will originate from a certain period and a certain place, but will be transformed by their adoption as the upper registers. Registers serve various purposes, not least that of providing satirists with something to subvert. Excessive degrees of register are probably the sign of a hidebound and hierarchical society.

  However, we should stop seeing language or ideal language as a monolithic block. Languages should have different registers, and by negotiating our way through them, we create our own personalities. I started this chapter with the example of the slenderisation of the feminine dative, and I will not burden the reader with exactly what that is. It is sufficient for our purposes here to know that it is rapidly disappearing from spoken and, very probably, written Gaelic. Some might consider its retention an act of pointless pedantry, and others might consider its disappearance an act of linguistic indolence. Most sensible people would not care too much either way, but if they are speakers, they are still left with the decision as to whether they should slenderise or not. This is a very personal decision, which is affected by aesthetic, social and linguistic considerations. Sophisticated Gaelic-speakers may decide that they will use both forms, and in English and indeed all other languages, we make such decisions all the time, although mainly in an unconscious manner. In some cases, the use of the subjunctive in English sounds stuffy, and in others it can be incisive. Register is ultimately a tool that provides our languages with extra layers of subtlety; we should not let it die.

  Chapter Seven

  The need for a lingua franca and its inherent dangers

  I am a man. I am a man and I must defend my country. My father told me this before we left home. “You can come, but your brother is too small”. My brother cried in anger. But I am a man. The rifle is heavy in my hands, and my father occasionally adjusts its position, while telling me to be a man. He pats me on the back. Be strong! The owner of the flat we are in makes us tea, and the neighbours – a doctor and his nervous wife – beg us to leave. “You’ll get us all killed,” she screams. She weeps. “It’s no good,” she tells her husband. He shakes his head. “It will make no difference,” he says, “they have tanks and planes. You cannot stop them.” “It is our country,” my father cries, exasperated by a people who do not want to be free. They leave. And we wait. Then the noise starts. A mixture of noise. Gunfire, grenades, shouting, screams. A solitary plume of smoke rises behind the houses on the other side of the street. But the noise doesn’t seem to get closer. Will they never come? Finally a tank appears and moves like a giant toy. Its clockwork motion is part of a bigger machine that is going to eat us up. We all fire. I only shoot once, as the rifle leaps in the air and almost breaks my shoulder.

  But now things are moving fast. There are boots on the stairs and automatic fire. Father shifts, and touches me on the shoulder, as if to check that I am still there, even though I am right next to him and breathlessly whimpering with fear. They break into the flat and fire their guns at the same time. Everyone falls to the ground except myself. My father’s cousin moves. He is bleeding badly and a soldier shoots him in the head in the same way that my mother cuts a chicken’s neck.
Perhaps more callously. Another man stands before me, and my stomach and legs turn to water. I can hardly stand. And in as much as I can think, I think that I too am about to die. The man is very big and broad, and has a bloated red face. He smiles. His breath is laboured and smells terribly. These devils are going to kill me and I will never see my mother and my brother again. He shouts at me in a strange language and tears the Lee Enfield from my hand. I forgot that I still had it. He shouts again and slaps me round the face. I do not understand what he is saying, and his language stinks as much as his breath. Now he is even angrier, and he is screaming at me, as though I were a fool. Then I notice that he is occasionally pointing to the door, and I begin to understand. He wants me to go. He is telling me to go somewhere – home probably. My legs that were jelly now find a new strength, and as the idea quickly crystallises in my head, my reflexes return. Suddenly I am at the door and rushing down the stairs. The doctor lies dead on the landing and his wife further down. I leap over them and almost slip on the blood. Another soldier comes out onto the landing to shout some more of that filthy language down the stairwell. I run faster, discovering new sources of energy and without a thought for my dead father. Just life. I want life. I run for several blocks without looking back, and the firing continues all around. In a quiet street, I suddenly find that all my strength goes. I am alone and I start to shake.

  A door opens and a woman appears. “Auntie, let me in. The British are here and want the canal. They are killing everyone. Let me in please.” “Of course, little one. I saw you running and have opened the door for you.” I like being called “little one”. “Little one” fills me with reassurance and at the same time makes me want to cry. “Auntie, what kind of a language is British?” She smiles as she bolts the door. “Where do they speak British, auntie?” She sits me down on a chair and says she will get me something to drink. “Why do they go around the world as though it were theirs, and why do they speak British as though everyone should understand them.”1

  Language divides us. Anyone who has ever travelled in a country whose language they do not know, will have discovered how the most banal activities can suddenly become very complex. This is part of the pleasure of travel, and the traveller experiences the world in a different way. The discovery of someone who has a shared language becomes an event, while at home it would have been an assumption. Language should be one of the identities that most motivates our actions and conflicts, after all it is one of the few identities that is based on a clear analytical distinction, the only other one being sex (language is provided by society and sex by biology). Nationality is an entirely arbitrary category, religions are merely a means for collecting together often entirely contradictory ideas (is a Sufi closer to a Quaker than to a Wahhabi?) and generation is a fascinating distinction, but we have no logical analytical method for assessing when one ends and another starts. Languages, too, were once more difficult to distinguish, and dialect continua meant that the borders of inter-comprehensibility shifted endlessly. But in the age of standardised languages, language is a clearly detectable identity.

  The division caused by languages was the inspiration for Ludwik Zamenhof’s attempt to create an artificial lingua franca. He came from the Russo-Polish border, all part of the Tsarist Empire, whose western regions were perhaps its greatest multilingual confusion. Polish, Russian, Byelorussian, Yiddish and Lithuanian were all spoken in the area, and his own family was Russian-speaking. He was also part of that great cosmopolitan and polyglot Jewish world that played a crucial role in European culture for one and half centuries. Indeed it invented Europe before other Europeans were aware of its possibility. His was a difficult and hard-working life, and his creation was nothing short of monumental. Its rational structure was extremely elegant: nouns ended in “o” (plural “oj”), the accusative added an “n”, adjectives ended in “a”, and verbs end in “as” in the present tense, “is” in the past tense and “os” in the future tense. It actually very nearly succeeded, and was ultimately one of the many victims of Nazism, which could not tolerate a language invented by a Jew for the purposes of human understanding. It is interesting that so kindly, modest and selfless a man as Zamenhof could embark on so ambitious and, some might say, megalomaniacal a project as an international language. His motivation was one of human solidarity – one of the finest emotions. Nevertheless he set himself the enormous task of inhabiting the brains of humanity. It also has to be said that it was no more than an elaborate code – too rational to be a real language.

  Curiously, the language barrier is not the primary cause of conflict and misunderstanding, and this tends to undermine Zamenhof’s theory. The conflicts that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia only affected speakers of Serbo-Croat, with the exception of the Kosovo one, which for a long time was put on the back-burner. The “ten-day war” in Slovenia was little more than a skirmish, and Macedonia went its own way without a shot being fired. The battle was between Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims, all of whom spoke Serbo-Croat. This should not surprise us, because language, which is our principal form of communication, also allows us to consolidate our incomprehension. Fanatical Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims may potentially distrust or even hate each other, but they cannot argue until they know the same language. In other words, language is the means by which we understand each other and misunderstand each other, and by which we discover our similarities and our differences.

  Lingua francas can unite us, particularly when the speakers are not native speakers. Lingua francas have the bad habit of obliterating the languages that they were supposed to bridge. The original lingua franca, the Neo-Latin spoken between the crusaders and the peoples they invaded, did not do this, partly because the crusaders were militarily unsuccessful in the long term and partly because it wasn’t strictly speaking a lingua franca, but more probably a pidgin with borrowings from many European and Middle-Eastern languages. Lingua francas are fully developed languages generally imposed by empire, but sometimes just by trade, as in the case of Malay in south-east Asia. It cannot however be denied that they have always fulfilled an essential role, and today that role is even more important.

  It may appear that I have at times been harsh on lingua francas and on English in particular. Perhaps I was being polemical about the language in which I write, and about which it is difficult to form an objective opinion, in the same way that it is difficult to assess one’s own parents. Perhaps I wanted the reader, who necessarily is an English-speaker, to think more carefully about this language, particularly as there is a great deal of smugness amongst English-speakers – the inevitable result of the language’s power. To deprive a Gaelic, Scots or Welsh child of the opportunity to learn Gaelic, Scots or Welsh would amount to an act of cultural vandalism, but equally it would be an act of senseless insularity to deprive that same child of the opportunity to learn one of the world’s great lingua francas, which in these cases is likely to be English (the Welsh of Patagonia providing, I think, the only exception). The greatest problem with English is entirely unconnected to its linguistic structure and its efficacy as a human language; it is simply far too dominant. It is now the dominant or official language of over sixty of the 185 nations recognised by the United Nations. Estimates of the number of speakers of English as a second language vary widely: 350 million, according to Vanishing Voices and between 700 and 1,400 million in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, while The Times estimates the number of competent speakers (including native ones) to be 1,900 million.2 Presumably it is not easy to define a speaker of English as a second language. Of one thing we can be certain: these statistics are out of date as soon as they are collected, such is the unrelenting rise of the English language, which now challenges national languages and even some of the other lingua francas.