Speaker:
Peter Trudgill
Affiliation:
Adger University
University of East Anglia
La Trobe University
Email:
TBC
Date:
Saturday 27 June 2009
Time:
TBC
Venues:
TBC
|
Back to CIPL conference
|
|
|
On the world-wide loss of linguistic complexity:
a sociolinguistic-typological view
Peter Trudgill
One of the fundamental bases of modern historical linguistics is the uniformitarian principle - that 'knowledge of processes that operated in the past can be inferred by observing ongoing processes in the present'. This leads to the methodological principle of using the present to explain the past: we cannot seek to explain past changes in language by resorting to explanations that would not work for modern linguistic systems. However, there is one important respect in which the present is not like the past. Increasing populations and mobility have led to more language contact and larger language communities, so that creoles, creoloids and koinˇs continue to increase. Languages spoken in small, isolated, communities with tightly-knit social networks are becoming less common. Labov warns that we must be "wary of extrapolating backward in time to neolithic preurban societies". If widespread adult-only language contact is a mainly post-neolithic phenomenon, and if the development of large, fluid communities is also a post-neolithic phenomenon, the dominant standard modern languages of today are likely to be seriously atypical of how languages have been for most of human history. If we want to gain an accurate picture of the typology of human languages, we must note that not only are most of the worldÕs languages in danger, but also that those that will be left behind will increasingly tend to be of a single, historically atypical type.
Download abstract
|
