Parrot Time Magazine

The Thinking of Speaking
Issue #7 January / February 2014
Extras
When Languages Meet

When Languages Meet

by Erik Zidowecki
January / February 2014 |  asd

We live in a world of ever changing borders. For thousands of years, the tribes, villages, cities and nations of the world have moved, expanded and contracted to meet the needs of their citizens, and these constant changes have come at a price. When two large factions come together, there are only a few possible results.

The most common resolution, sadly, is conquest. Many times, a community will seek to expand its territory and population, and the quickest way to do that is to conquer others. History has numerous examples of this in the form of empires. As a nation expands, it invades the land of others. Depending on the strength of the defenders, this may result in a large bloody war or a quick slaughter. Whichever size loses (and it isn't always the one being invaded) will usually become merged with the conquering group, who gains all the property of its foe.

Perhaps the greatest example of empire building is that of the Romans. Ancient Rome was once just a small farming community founded around the 8th century BC. It expanded, taking over neighboring villages and cities, always building its military strength and advancing itself in everything from government to engineering to art, and it became an empire which profoundly left its mark on the world. Even today, one can see numerous signs of its might while traveling around Europe.

The second possible result is a merger. If both sides decide that there is more benefit to them working together rather than fighting, they might be able to agree to an arrangement that is peaceful. Sometimes this result can come after a period of conflict has started but in which both sides lose heavily or fight to a stalemate. Such a merger would likely result in an entirely new creation. Many of our existing nations came about after the tribes that had existed separate for centuries decided to form a unified nation, often to avoid being conquered by a worse foe.

It is from these collisions that languages establish a dominance, become extinct, and, in some cases, combine to form entirely new languages.

We can go back to Rome again for an example of this. After the Roman Empire fell, it became again a collection of city-states. A city-state is a self-governing state which consists of a city and the surrounding territory. Larger kingdoms and tribes started invading them, like Rome had done, and for over a thousand years, the regions of modern Italy came under control of Germanic tribes, the Frankish Empire and others. The city-states found themselves having to build up their own defenses as well as establishing trade with others in order to remain undominated. It wasn't until the 1800s that a certain Giuseppe Garibaldi led the drive for unification in Naples and Sicily, and this eventually spread to the rest of the country.

The third result of two bodies of people meeting is a sort of mix of the first two. Each side retains its independence and essentially agree not to fight. They live beside each other, and may have some kind of interaction, but there is always an underlying tension. Pride will always be a component, and neither side will be willing to give up any part of their freedom or identity.

This is the position of most of the existing countries in the modern world. The borders are firmly established and each nation is largely accepted to be independent by the rest of the world. This doesn't mean there is world peace, for some countries are always looking to expand, and precisely because of the thousands of years of conflict, many still have fierce rivalries with other countries. In some cases, this is always boiling under the surface.

An example of this is the standoff between North and South Korea. After World War II, the Korean peninsula was divided into two parts, with the Soviet Union controlling the northern part and the United States controlling the southern. The two countries of North Korea and South Korea were established soon after and left to largely govern themselves. North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, starting the Korean War. It lasted for a few years until an armistice was declared in 1953. An armistice is when the warring sides agree to stop fighting, but it is not really the end of war. Each side constantly watches the other closely for hostility.

Enter The Languages

Up until now, we've looked at what happens when groups of people meet and how they resolve their differences. Languages are an integral part of any community. The first thing we think of when considering traveling to another country is "What language will they speak?". From the largest nation to the smallest tribe, the people and the language are almost synonymous. When using a graphic to represent a language, the most common symbol is the flag of the nation in which the language dominates.

All this means is that when people collide, so do their languages. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the resolutions for these language meetings are very similar to those of the people. It is from these collisions that languages establish a dominance, become extinct, and, in some cases, combine to form entirely new languages.

Conquest


Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. Britain moved in and colonized the region, taking over from the Dutch. Their interference alterred life in Africa drastically.

Like the conquest of a tribe or nation, the consequences of an invasion and domination by another culture can be devastating on a language.

Most of the time, the winner will work hard to crush down the existing culture and replace it with its own. The language becomes banned, and anyone caught speaking it is severely punished, traditionally through beatings. Any existing forms of literature or writing are destroyed and the authors and poets are often killed or exiled. Even in modern times, this is a common practice.

Younger generations, fearing punishment and becoming outcasts, quickly learn to accept the dominating language and culture, turning their backs on their own culture as a means of pure survival. The elders learn to hide their own traditions and tongue, but with no one to teach them to, they eventually become extinct as the ones holding the knowledge die.

This fate is most common for the indigenous populations of the world, and is usually caused by Europeans expanding their own nations into newly discovered regions. Perhaps the greatest example of this is on the American continents, what was known as "The New World". When Europeans first travelled to that part of the world, they found a land occupied by thousands of tribes, all with their own cultures and languages. In almost all situations, the invaders simply moved in, slaughtering or assimilating the natives, suppressing their traditions and enforcing their own cultures, languages and religions upon them. They also brought with them many diseases that the natives had no immunity to, which devastated the populations of the tribes. Those that survived both disease and conquest were forced into small communities, called reservations.

The various powerful nations colonized the existing populations in all parts of the world. The Spanish took over South America while the French took Canada in North America and the British took over what is now the United States. The French also took over most of Africa while the British took Australia and India. Germany was late in coming to the colonization game, but it did its own part by settling territories, called protectorates in many of the areas already claimed by the others.

Colonization led to the oppression and extinction of hundreds of languages and cultures. Even if those regions gained some freedom from the dominating countries, the languages rarely survived.

This happens even in more recent times. Russia expanded itself, taking over many regions of Europe and forming the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) in the 20th century. During that time, the languages and cultures of the most of its "republics" were suppressed.

Half of the world's languages have become extinct in the just the last 500 years only, with over 80 of those being just in the last decade. The National Geographic Society has estimated that one language dies out every 14 days. At this rate, around 3,500 languages that are spoken around the world now will no longer be in use by 2100. Most of these are linked to conflicts between cultures which have led to the oppression and death of the minor languages.

Merger

Perhaps the most unique result of a clash between languages is the birth of a new one. When two cultures become intertwined, like one group moving into another's region and neither attempts to dominate, the people will mix, as will the languages. Sometimes, one language will become dominant. Other times, the people from both languages will start trying to learn the other one, which results in a linguistic adaptation. This is called a pidgin language.

The most basic definition of a pidgin is "a simplified form of speech formed from one or more existing languages, used by people who have no other language in common". This is mostly a result when both sides need to communicate for something like commercial purposes. A pidgin can come to develop its own basic grammar and vocabulary, but those are very simplified compared to the "parent" languages. Most remain small and specialized and are called "trade languages", since the main reason they were created was to make trading between two groups easier.

An example of this is what is called "West African Pidgin English". It developed during the a time when the British were running a slave trade in the Atlantic during the late 17th and 18th centuries. The sailors and slave traders spoke English and were in constant contact with African villagers. Both sides had a need to communicate, for business purposes, trading in slaves and goods. The further the British traveled inland, the more the pidgin spread and expanded. The majority of the vocabulary was English based, but much of the grammar, syntax and basic sounds of it came from the local languages, the West African Niger-Congo languages.

This pidgin also became specialized, depending on which languages were mixing with the English. Some of the major varieties, with their local names, are Gambian Pidgin English (Aku), Sierra Leone Pidgin English (Krio), Liberian Pidgin English, Ghanaian Pidgin English, Nigerian Pidgin English, and Cameroon Pidgin English (or Kamtok).

When dealing with a pidgin, it is often rather easy to understand what is being said if you know the stronger language in the mix. You just have to blur your hearing, in a way. For example, in Nigerian Pidgin English, you might hear "How you dey?", which can easily be understood to mean "How are you doing today?". The words are the same or truncated, with a few extraneous ones being removed. Spelling can also be simplified, such as with "I no no" for "I don't no". The first "no" is used to imply the negative, while the second one is a phonetic spelling of "know". A few more examples are:

"Gi mi." = "Give it to me."

"I dey fine" = "I’m fine. I’m doing well."

"Wetin dey happen?" = "What’s going on? What’s happening?"

Sometimes, the meaning might be a little more hidden, coming about because of an idea rather than literal meaning. "Comot!" means "Get out of here!", which might be a corruption of "come out" or "go out", depending on the pronunciation. It might also come from "come on". "Abeg" means "please", coming from "I beg you".

Another common aspect of a pidgin is repeating words to emphasize a meaning. "Listen well well" means "Listen very well" or "Pay attention". Note that this is different than "I no no", which is using a different spelling, not repetition.

Most pidgins are short term languages, existing only for a few years during the time they are needed. If a pidgin does manage to survive for much longer, it may develop into a creole. When the children of the adults speaking the pidgin start learning it as their native and primary language, it has established itself as a stable language. This process is called nativization.

A strange phenomenon which has been noticed among linguistic scholars is that creoles tend to share more grammatical similarities with other creoles than they do with the parent languages. No one has a truly accepted theory on how or why this happens. Perhaps the formation of creoles reflects the most basic grammatical structure the human mind can invent, and that more elaborate grammars develop over a much longer time period, being influenced by the situation of the speakers and the influence of older languages around them.

A great many creoles are based upon the French language, because of the great number of colonies France had. For this reason, many people automatically think the term "creole" is related to French things. However, pidgins and creoles can arise out of any mix of languages. The most common basis for creoles are French, Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Dutch.

One of the most spoken pidgins is Tok Pisin, spoken by over five million people, mainly in Papua New Guinea, where it is actually the official language. Over one million people are taught it as a first language. Most there speak it to a certain degree, but not always fluently. It is particularly popular among the police and urban families. The name comes from the English words "talk" and "pidgin", although they obviously became simplified into Tok Pisin. The vocabulary is mostly Indo-European, coming mainly from English, German, Portuguese, and Latin, while the rest comes from Malayo-Polynesian and Trans-New-Guinea languages. The grammar structure is much more Austronesian based.


People of Papua New Guinea, speakers of Tok Pisin

One interesting aspect of Tok Pisin is its addition of inclusive and exclusive forms of pronouns. While western languages normally just have a singular and plural forms (I, we), Tok Pisin also has a dual and triple form. These are used to define exactly who is involved, and are created by adding the words "tu" and "tri" into the pronoun forms.

Tok Pisin also utilizes reduplication, mainly to distinguish between words. The word for "ship" is "sip", but since that might also sound like a corruption of "sheep", it is doubled, so "sheep" is "sipsip".

In the Caribbean ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao), the creole Papiamento is spoken. This one developed from mixing English, Spanish, Portuguese, some indigenous languages, and some Dutch, which is used mainly for the names of the months. Among the islands, it has two dialects, which is an effect of developing on three separated pieces of land. The dialects also have differences in spelling, so even the name of the language is spelled differently, either as Papiamentu or Papiamento.

Not all creoles develop from pidgins, and they are not always easily recognized. The language of Afrikaans, spoken in parts of Africa, mainly in South Africa, developed when the Dutch settlers arrived there in the 17th century. It is sometimes referred to as a dialect of Dutch, although it adopted words from other languages, like Malay, Portuguese and Bantu. There are still heated arguments that go on as to whether Afrikaans is an independent language, a dialect of Dutch, or a Dutch creole.

There are also a few rare times when a merger, resulting in a creole, may actually become a more dominant form that replaces a parent language, helping to drive it to extinction. On the island of Rama Cay, off the coast of Nicaragua, the indigenous language of the Rama people blended with English to create what is called Rama Cay Creole. As the natives switched to this, the parent language of Rama became abandoned and is now on the verge of extinction. Even stranger, Rama Cay Creole is also struggling to survive, and may also vanish.

Living Together

Just as some people can learn to live together peacefully (mostly), languages can also find a way to coexist. One country in which this can be easily shown is Belgium, which is a convergence point of both Latin and Germanic cultures. Over the centuries, it was dominated by different nations, including the Spanish, Austrians, French and Dutch.

Today, it is mainly divided along its Latin and Germanic heritage. The Latin-evolved language of French has prominence in the region known as "Wallonia", and the dialect of French spoken there is called "Walloon". The Germanic-based language Dutch has its place in the northern areas, and its dialect is called "Flemish".


Meeting for more Walloon language on Walloon public TV at Liège

These "linguistic lines" are very obvious throughout most of the country. In some areas, you can literally cross the street and go from a Flemish to a Walloon neighborhood. Everything changes between those: the spoken language, signs, billboards, etc. Even while driving along the highways, you can see the names of the locations on the signs changing, depending which section you are in.

Each region has its own administration and government. Public libraries, firehouses, unions, even churches are all duplicated between the Flemish and Walloon languages. The countries capital, Brussels, is in the Flemish northern half, and is supposed to remain bi-lingual, but is predominately French. Dual-language signs do exist, but they are often the targets of graffiti, which is used to deface one of the two languages.

The conflict between the two sides has been expanding over recent events, including the introduction of French-speaking cable TV and a festival of French films, the latter of which was cancelled due to a demonstration of a Flemish group in the school where the festival was to be held.

Both sides, Flemish and Walloon, want to become the dominant one in controlling the country. Compromises have continued to keep the balance in check without leading to violence, but how long that remains is unknown.


Map showing the distribution of Bokmål and Nynorsk in Norway.

Neither of these languages, surprisingly, are official languages of Belgium. Those are French, Dutch and English. There are also more languages spoken there. Besides dialects of Flemish, there is Brabantian, Limburgish, Picard, Champenois, Lorrain, Low Dietsch. None of those are involved in such an intense cold war as Walloon and Flemish, though.

In recent years, there has been increased talk of the dissolution of the Belgium, separating the Dutch-speaking people of the Flanders region and Brussels from the French-speaking people of the Walloon region and Brussels. They could become independent or become part of their parent countries of the Netherlands and France.

A stranger case can be experienced in Norway. There, the spoken language is agreed upon, what we call "Norwegian". The conflict here is actually between the two written forms of the language, Bokmål and Nynorsk.

Norway has both Bokmål and Nynorsk as official languages, with both being used by the government, schools, and the media. There isn't just a matter of using different alphabets, as in the Latin Bosnian and the Cyrillic Serbian, or even spelling, as in the different forms of Papiamento. These are two entirely different different written languages. Sometimes, the changes are minimal. "This is a horse" would be written as "Dette er en hest" in Bokmål and "Dette er ein hest" Nynorsk. "I come from Norway" shows a larger difference, with "Jeg kommer fra Norge" (Bokmål) and "Eg kjem frå Noreg" (Nynorsk).

There are also a few rare times when a merger, resulting in a creole, may actually become a more dominant form that replaces a parent language, helping to drive it to extinction.

Although educated in both Bokmål and Nynorsk, most Norwegians use Bokmål as their daily written language, while a much smaller number use Nynorsk as theirs, even though most of the spoken dialects resemble Nynorsk more closely than Bokmål. Neither written language has a true claim to being authentic, and it doesn't appear that Norway will be torn apart over this.

In a few instances, a language exists in its own region within a few different countries. Such is the case of Basque and Catalan.

The Basque people live mainly in what is called Basque Country which can be found at the western end of the Pyrenees, and it is in both north-central Spain and south-western France. In Spain, it is has a co-official language status in the Basque regions there, but in France, it has no official status.

Catalan is a Romance language mainly spoken in what is known as Catalonia, which also straddles Spain in the northeastern part and part of France. It is recognized as the the national and only official language of Andorra, a co-official language of the in the Spanish parts of Catalonia. It, too, has no official recognition in France. Most Catalan speakers in Spain are bilingual in both Catalan and Spanish.

Outcomes

Languages themselves don't actually conflict with each other, of course. It is the people that use them that truly control the situations. Nevertheless, they are bound together, so as long as people fight, their effect on their languages will be part of the outcomes.

As we've noted, there are both good and bad aspects to the conflicts, with some languages becoming extinct while others are born. Languages, like empires, also rise and fall. It's a natural cycle of history, and we will always mourn the deaths of those that fall while celebrating the birth of new tongues. PT

Special Feature - When Languages Meet
Writer: Erik Zidowecki
Images:
Kippelboy: 2012 Catalan independence protest
Samuel Scott: Table Bay and Table Mountain
eGuide Travel: people in highlands of Papua new Guinea.
Paula Rey: Bilbao, Basque Country
cs.belgium: Walloon language on street sign in Liège
Joxemai: Tourist Basque country banner
Lucien Mahin / Lucyin: Meeting for more Walloon language
Zakuragi: map of the official language forms of Norwegian

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except for Petey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

Looking for learning materials?
Scriveremo Publishing, has lots of fun books and resource to help you learn a language. Click the link below to see our selection of books, availlable for over 30 langauges!
Beginner's Romanian Word Searches - Volume 1



Also in this issue




Others like this

Comments

comments powered by Disqus