So let’s talk about business. Working out ways to trade goods and services isn’t without
its perils, but there are a lot of ways it can be beneficial for everyone involved. The
thing is, if you want your business to be everybody else’s business, you’ve got
to find a way to share your ideas. And that means coming up with a language to share around,
too. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
There are a lot of languages in the world. Even some pretty small geographical areas
can play host to a whole bunch of ways of speaking! But just because languages can be
contained within one community, that doesn’t mean people are. Throughout history, people
have traveled around a lot: for trade or business, to study or teach, or even to convert or colonize
other lands. But when you want to have an exchange with somebody from somewhere else,
and you don’t have a language in common, what do you do?
Well sometimes, especially in situations of extensive interaction with no shared language,
it’s possible to develop a pidgin. These are pretty bare-bones linguistic systems,
with simplified grammars and vocabulary which get pieced together from the languages in
contact. The important thing is, though, that they let you get down to business.
But there’s a whole lot of situations where a pidgin isn’t the route people take
to climb over that conversational wall. Often, you can find a common language, even if it’s
no one’s mother tongue. Any language used by a group of people who have diverse linguistic
backgrounds in order to ease trade or cultural exchange is known as a lingua franca.
Now, it’s worth noting that a pidgin can totally become a lingua franca. For example,
in Nigeria, there are over 500 languages used, including English, which is the official
language. But it’s the malleable and culturally significant variety known as Nigerian Pidgin
English that unites people across language groups. That’s more an exception, though:
a lot of the lingua francas throughout history have been full-fledged languages. These can already
exist in the community in some way, and just get grabbed up for convenience. If you
try to think about an example from the present day, the first one that comes to mind might be English.
Over the past century, English has developed into the most spoken non-native language in the
world, with 3 out of 4 people who communicate in it being second language learners. It’s a
lingua franca for much of academia and business, but also for tourism in general.
Like, if you meet a bunch of international travelers at a youth hostel, you’ll probably
try using English to talk with them, if you don’t know anything else about them. And if
you’re preparing something for a global audience, you’ll probably at least consider
making it in English, or having an English version.
So, why English? Or, let’s step back a bit: what do lingua francas have in common?
Well, at their core, lingua francas are languages that are considered economically
favourable to know by the community using it. And which languages are economically dominant
changes over time. During the Roman empire, Latin spread far
and wide, and although a lot of that was based in conquest, armies are also a major economic
force, needing food and supplies and engaging in all kinds of trade with local people. So
knowing Latin became something that was good for business - especially once the Empire
was big, because then someone from Carthage could trade with someone from Massalia without
too much of a language barrier getting in the way. Brilliant!
Latin also came to serve as a lingua franca in particular trades, even after its usage
elsewhere faded. For example, Latin also became the language of the Catholic Church, and in
the Middle Ages, it became the shared language of scholars and academics. This persisted
for centuries, where higher education was offered in Latin throughout much of Europe
and beyond. And it led to any sufficiently learned person being able to read other people's research,
because of their shared Latin knowledge.
To some extent, this is still true of scientific and medical literature: a lot of the names
for things like species or anatomical parts of plants and animals come to us straight
from Latin. And that lets you use the same terms to identify a butterfly in Chile or Iceland.
But sometimes, the path a lingua franca takes to spreading through communities is more complex
than just trade or conquest. Let’s take a look at Nahuatl.
During the Aztec Empire, from the mid-1300s to the early 1500s, Nahuatl was the language of
the dominant social elite, and spread across all of Mesoamerica. It was mostly common among
merchants and the upper class, and then spread to the K'iche' Mayans in the south, as well.
Now, you’d probably figure that with the Spanish invasions of the 16th century, Nahuatl would
fall out of favour. But no - it became even more of a widespread lingua franca than before!
The Spanish introduced the Latin alphabet and started writing grammars and texts in
Nahuatl. In 1570, the king of Spain even decreed that Nahuatl would become the official language
of the colonies of New Spain. Missionaries and priests learned Nahuatl, and then went
around teaching the language to indigenous peoples all the way down in Honduras and El
Salvador, with the idea of making communication in the colonies easier.
And a ton of works of literature were both translated into and originally written in
Nahuatl. Unfortunately, later Spanish monarchs had
other ideas, and a series of royal decrees from the Spanish crown in the late 17th and
18th centuries got rid of Nahuatl’s status as an official language, and eventually banned
it altogether. Even after the ban, though, it persisted, and today, Nahuatl is still
a commonly used language, with about 1.5 million speakers, mostly living in central Mexico.
Language use and language status are pretty tightly interconnected with culture and politics,
and people have used language as a cornerstone of nationhood for probably as long as people
have had nations. So maybe it’s no surprise that lingua francas can get traction through
nation-building endeavours, too. And that was the case with Indonesian.
Interestingly, Indonesian itself is descended from another lingua franca, Malay, which was
the trade language of fishermen and sailors in the southern Malaysian peninsula in the
16th century. There are tens of thousands of islands in the Indonesian archipelago and
the sea around it, with people from widely diverse cultures, and so Malay became
the go-to language for people who did a lot of traveling around them. But the thing is,
being surrounded by all these other languages, Malay absorbed a lot of loan words, and this
became even more notable when the Dutch came along and set up colonies in the area now
called Indonesia in the 17th century.
Add to that the linguistic influence of Islam and Hinduism, and now you’ve got one version
of Malay in Indonesia sponging up Dutch and Arabic and Sanskrit, and a different one
in Malaysia that’s developing along its own path. By the 20th century, the two had
split into mutually understandable but still distinct ways of speaking. And when Indonesia
declared its independence from the Netherlands after three centuries of rule, the Indonesian
version of the language is the one they picked to represent their national unity.
Which might be surprising, when you realize that only a small minority of people in the
new country spoke it as a first language at the time. But if you think about it, the choice
makes a lot of sense: its ancestor was already a lingua franca in the region, and over the decades since
independence, the vast majority of Indonesia’s population of 250 million people have come to speak it -
most of them when they’re young, as a second language.
Of course, as people use a language, they also change it - no language exists in a vacuum.
All of those people speaking it, who come from all of these linguistic communities?
They influence the language, too. So the lingua franca can pick up some features of the other
languages present in the community, and become enriched by this process of language contact.
That can lead to a language that had been a lingua franca splitting into a number of
different languages over time. That’s part of what happened with Latin and its evolution
into the Romance languages, which we’ll talk about in a future episode. But what about
English? Since English is used so pervasively as a lingua franca, is it going to split off
into different languages? There’s a couple of different ways to look at that, and if you
want to know more, take a look back at our website - there’s a link in the description.
The different lingua francas that have been spoken across the world may not have a lot
in common linguistically, but they show a strong drive to communicate that defines us
and enriches us as a species. Through trade, academia, and empire-building,
some of our languages have grown to be spoken across countries, continents, and even oceans.
But wherever you go, there’s always someone trying to expand in the language business.
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week.
If you share the same academic language as me, you learned that lingua francas are used to connect up
people from different linguistic backgrounds for trade or cultural reasons; that lots of languages have served
as lingua francas in different regions of the world; and that lingua francas can get
changed enough by their contact with other languages that they evolve into entirely new languages.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we’ll have some extra material on this topic. And while you’re there,
drop by our store, where we have the prettiest IPA posters ever! Check us out on Tumblr,
Twitter, and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own personal Ling Space,
please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Panamilit!