Language Replacement (Re: French and US high school language instruction)

[For those of you who haven't read Mark Rosenfelder's article
at the below website, please do so.]

Quoting Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>:

> On 25 May 02, at 18:01, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
> > I think this vastly oversimplifies why people in any
> > given country tend to learn foreign languages in a given
> > way.
> [snip]
> > (We often forget that, as conlangers, we like to learn
> > languages which have more or less by definition no pragmatic
> > value for us in the Real World. Most of mankind is, alas,
> > not like us in this respect.)
>
> Yay! I get to plug Mark Rosenfelder ;)
>
> http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html
A well-written and IMHO generally correct article (although
his documentation could have been better).  However, I have
one quibble:

Rosenfelder claims that a language's "fortunes" have often
improved historically through conquest, and this is undoubtedly
true.  But he wildly exaggerates the ability of sheer, raw
domination to extend a language's influence.  In most cases
in human history, political conquest has only succeeded in
propagating the conquerors' language when the conquerors
began to demographically outnumber speakers of other languages.
The examples he cites of English, Spanish and Portuguese
expansion all took place only *after* the local population
had been decimated by ethnic cleansing, enslavement, and
(primarily) diseases against which their bodies had no
immunity.  This was also followed by, in the case of North
America, by a vast influx of Europeans whose sole interlanguage
was English (when they did not come from the British Isles
already speaking that language). Note too that in Latin
America, where colonization from Europe was more superficial,
indigenous languages, whose speakers were in any event more
numerous than those in North America, are to this day more
far more robust than those in NA.

Rosenfelder minimizes (or is ignorant of) the numerous cases
where such a demographic domination failed to take place --
in Ptolmaic Egypt, for example, where Greek remained (as
the Rosetta stone shows) the language only of the tiny
elite of outside Greeks and Macedonians who kept
themselves mostly to the sea ports of Lower-Egypt. Or of
Manchu China, where the language of the conquerors, far from
spreading as the result of conquest, is actually now almost
extinct.  Or Mughal India.  Or the Eastern half of the
Roman Empire*.  It is clear from all of these cases that
demographics -- or, to put it into his model, economics --
failed to give to people a strong self-interest in learning
the language of the conquerors, and so explains their different
outcome from those where language replacement did occur.

*(The Roman example is an interesting one, since it shows
how the same conquering language is treated differently in
different places.  It is only in those regions of the Roman
Empire where Imperial colonies of Latin speakers had been planted
-- primarily in Southern Gaul, Spain, Italy, -- and not later
overwhelmed by yet another strong demographic force (like the
Germans invading Britain, or the Arabs in North Africa) that
Latin actually came to replace whatever local languages might
have existed before the Conquests.  In the East, which was
richer, and had a much larger population, the indigenous
languages like Greek, Aramaic, Arabic and Coptic all remained
the speech of their respective communities since so few Roman
colonies were ever placed there.

An interesting prediction made from this theory is that the
English language will *not* replace languages on the
European continent since American and British military
contingents are placed only sparsely, and are not intended
to be permanent settlements.)

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier          "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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