Speech, Community and Power

Checkpoint. It is not the lack of a shared language that creates the barrier, but the barrier that creates the lack of a shared language.

In the early days of this blog I reviewed a book by Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word , in which I quoted its “critical thesis” that a language does not grow through the assertion of power, but through the creation of a larger human community [p. 556]. (See: Words Rubbing Together) The remark seemed important and I’ve cited frequently, but as I have explored its ramifications a variety of mysteries have opened up. For one thing, how does “a larger human community” create something without asserting power?  I finally faced up to that question when a couple of voices came together. One was a recent comment posted on this blog (here):

let's [think] back to a time when human societies had no sophisticated hierarchical structure or when there was no elite or domineering group telling the others how or what 'language' they had to speak …

The other was a study by an Italian team found in the June 10 issue of the Publications of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that shows how individuals without a sophisticated hierarchy can agree on a way to speak about the world. The Italians not only offer a rebuttal to the commenter’s thoughtful remarks, but seem to show how a community can have effects without resorting to power. It would all seem quite mystical if the study had not used those anti-mystical tools, computers.

The PNAS paper is “Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic categories” (abstract here) by a team of physicists, Andrea Puglisi, Andrea Baronchelli, and Vittorio Loreto. The authors did find a hierarchy that coordinates the speaking population, but the top level is not composed of powerful individuals. Instead it is the language itself, called in this study “the linguistic level.”

The linguistic level emerges as totally self-organized and is the product of the (cultural) negotiating process among the individuals. [p 7938]

The tedium of the academic jargon obscures the importance of its point, a direct assault on the commonsense assumption that the regularities of language reside in the heads of the individual speakers. This assumption has unobtrusively framed the debate over whether the rules of syntax are learned, innate, or some combination of the two. But suppose the rules reside on a self-organized “linguistic level” instead. Although the idea might sound absurd, the absurd consequences of the resides-in-the-head viewpoint were noted long ago by Lewis Carroll:

`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.

When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'

             —Alice in Wonderland

We take Humpty Dumpty’s point, but Alice is on target when, at the chapter’s end, she says that conversation with Humpty Dumpty is unsatisfactory. The in-the-head theory of language produces unsatisfactory exchanges because speakers feel no obligation to shape their words and sentences according to a common standard. Few speakers are as liberated about it as Humpty Dumpty, but it is common to read arguments—Pinker’s The Language Instinct contains an example—that people who try to “correct” language are ridiculous, that language evolves, and each person’s language is correct for that person. At best, this attitude leads to mild confusions about what someone means; at worst you get private lexicons that make communication impossible.

Does this tangle have a solution? The PNAS report says yes, create a linguistic level through “the negotiating process among individuals.” They discovered this higher level by running an experiment to test whether memory and feedback was enough to generate a small set of names for the colors of the rainbow. I will spare readers the intricacies of the computer simulation, but it involved “agents” who begin with no color names, but after a series of one-on-one interactions end up with a small set of agreed-upon names useful for identifying the millions of different hues in the spectrum.

When the authors examined the rules each of the agents used for naming colors they found that the agents were not in perfect agreement with one another. They asked, “Given such a strong misalignment among individuals, why is communication so effective?” The answer comes by looking at what happens when two agents are confronted with a color that they name differently. For example, a shade near the blue/green boundary may be called blue by one agent and green by the other. When they interact, both are unable to simply accept the other’s usage but they remember the confusion and are uncertain about the color’s name. Later, one of the uncertain agents may encounter the misalignment color again, in an interaction with a different agent. The second instance will either show that this different agent agrees or disagrees with the uncertain agent’s usage. If the new agent agrees, the uncertainty ends. The agent continues with the old usage. If the new agent disagrees, however, the agent changes its usage to agree with the previous speakers. The PNAS authors call this process “word contagion,” presumably because the word has passed to a new speaker as a result of contact with others.

The critical feature of word contagion is that speakers must be willing to learn from one another. The PNAS team built that bias into their simulation. Humans cannot take that tendency for granted, but, according to this paper, languages only become stable and mutually intelligible when speakers are willing to adjust their speech to one another. Thus, language is like a market or a species; it sounds like an abstraction but it produces real effects because individuals take it seriously when they interact.

Going back to this post’s original question (how does “a larger human community” create something without asserting power?) we find the answer is pretty simple. The members of the community want to create it. So the commenter had it wrong. Language is the result of a community, not an “elite or domineering group telling the others how or what” to say. A great deal of sociology might be deducible from that premise, but with this blog’s focus on speech origins, I will just note one conclusion: membership in a community is older than speech itself. Speech did not produce the community. It was the other way around.

Comments

[JoseAngel]

Elites are important as well, though. If only because elites are also the result of a community's interaction, not something alien to the community. Therefore, the elite's language will be more authoritative not just because of an arfificial imposition, but because such authority makes sense in the dynamics of the community, and therefore of the speech community.

[Gavin]

The Norman Conquest complicates things for that argument because the elite were completely alien and although they considered their language to be authoritative it never spread lower down the social hierarchy. In fact the opposite happened: the elite eventually ended up speaking English.

Elites do try to influence language for reasons of power, but how (and whether) that works is not very well understood. My work on the social and political history of early-modern England suggests that reality often failed to live up to how the elite said things ought to be.
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BLOGGER: The Normans are a particularly interesting case because they took over part of France and learned French, took over England and learned English, took over part of southern Italy and learned Italian. The western Roman empire does seem to have picked up Latin, as shown by the existence of French, Spanish, and the other Romance languages. In Tibet the elites and the commoners ended up speaking different languages.

[Jesús Sanchis]

Dear Blogger,

I am the commenter whose sentences you quoted in your post. I am afraid you quite misunderstood what I meant by those words. It is obvious that the language spoken in a society is the result of the interaction between the speakers, among other factors, and not something just imposed from above. But the ruling elites do have a role in this, through education, mass media, and all possible expressions of power. This becomes clear in highly-stratified societies, like the ones we live in. In these societies, people usually look down on things like pidgins, because they look "impure", but this purity exists because some people have decided what is pure and what is not. The experiment that you mention, carried out by that group of Italian researchers, sounds interesting, and it shows interaction mechanisms that may be similar to those taking place in human societies. But as I said, the complexity of our modern societies makes a difference if we compare them, for example, to pre-Neolithic societies. It is absurd to ignore this fact.

You say in your post:

"the commenter had it wrong. Language is the result of a community, not an “elite or domineering group telling the others how or what” to say".

I agree with what you say about language, but I still don't understand what is wrong about what I said. And what I said was, sorry to repeat it, that the role of the ruling elites is relevant, and must be taken into account, especially when we consider complex, highly-stratified societies. What's wrong with that, Mr Bolles?
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BLOGGER: First, let me say that the commenter has been a regular contributor to comments on this blog and I much appreciate it. He runs a rival blog on the origns of language (http://languagecontinuity.blogspot.com/) which visitors to Babel's Dawn should check out.

As to this post, I was disagreeing with what I took to be the proposition that today's speech results from an "elite or domineering group from the telling the others how or what 'language' they had to speak ... [while in prehistoric times] the mixture of language was definitely a common phenomenon and the most important factor in language evolution." If that proposition is compatible with saying that languages are the result of "negotiations" between members of the community, good and I'm sorry I misunderstood you.

Speaking of misunderstanding, I can't help feeling that some of this confusion comes from the cross-national aspect of this blog. "Elite" is such a loaded word in American politics and strongly resisted here. Meanwhile, Spain has had a recent history under Franco of trying to outlaw languages. I was quite struck by the language situation in Barcelona when I visited there. The Catalan language has made a strong comeback.

[Jesús Sanchis]

I think you're right. When I talked about the role of elites in modern societies I had in mind situations in which there's more than one language, like in Spain or many other European countries. But not only that. Even in monolingual communities, the influence of the elite tends to determine what version of the language is more acceptable in certain situations.

On the other hand, the term 'language' is quite confusing. It is used with a variety of meanings. For example, as a label to refer to a standardized form of language, like "English" or "Spanish", and also to refer to what people actually speak. In a more scientific context, it is clear that it would be avisable to use specific words to refer to these varying concepts. However, in everyday speech and in a multidisciplinary framework, which seeks to ease the path for dialogue among the sciences, one tends to think that the ambiguity of words like "language" is not an insourmountable problem. Anyway, no matter what terminology we use (dialect, speech, language, sociolect) we usually find social or ideological elements associated to it, which makes the use of these words even more complicated. It is clear that talking about language from a social perspective is not an easy task

[watercat]

This computer simulation appears to replicate Susan Goldin-Meadow's work in the field. Home signers invent gestures to represent their ideas, but without any language model their creations are not uniform, as clearly exemplified by word order. Some children consistently produce their signs in the order verb-object, others will use the OV order. This forms a barrier to communication that, when several children interact, resolves itself in exactly the manner described. Presumably they converge on color terms by the same process, and any other parameter-setting their growing language requires.
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BLOGGER: I am a big fan of Goldin-Meadow and a skeptic about the utility of most of the computer simulations I read; however, in this case the simulation illustrates the point I wished to make: words can spread through a community without there being any possibility of a role for "elites."

[watercat]

This brings to mind a controversy re 'asymmetrical' pidgins, that form between the superstrate, spoken by those in power, and the other less prestigious languages. Most models of creole genesis assume asymmetry, with some even insisting that a symmetrical pidgin is impossible. In Mulhausler's model of Abrupt Creolization however, a symmetrical pidgin evolves amongst the substrates. The Nicaraguan case proves him right since it is clear that the adstrate homesigns created the early pidgin LSN, before it evolved into a full language.