...για έναν κόσμο που δεν θα χρειάζεται μεταφραστές.
(Αλλά μην μείνετε σε αυτό, υπάρχουν κι άλλα θέματα για σκέψη).
(Αλλά μην μείνετε σε αυτό, υπάρχουν κι άλλα θέματα για σκέψη).
Free Translation
Nicholas Ostler. The Last Lingua Franca: English until the return of Babel
313pp. Allen Lane. £20 (US $28). ISBN 978 1846 14215 4.
Nicholas Ostler. The Last Lingua Franca: English until the return of Babel
313pp. Allen Lane. £20 (US $28). ISBN 978 1846 14215 4.
In the British film Code 46 of 2003, the director Michael Winterbottom creates a visually and verbally hybrid world for a dystopian love story. Cityscapes are an architectural collage of Shanghai, Dubai and London’s Jubilee Line, simultaneously recognizable and alien, and are populated by speakers of a world language that mixes English with Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and Persian, The linguistic hybridization signals that in the world of Code 46 the balance of economic and political power has shifted away from English-speaking nations and hence English is no longer quite the global force to which we have become accustomed.
While tapping current anxieties about the future of the West, the diminished role of English that is anticipated in Winterbottom’s film might seem as far-fetched as the biotechnological inventions that it also features. The dominance of English today as the language of business, science and popular entertainment appears unassailed and perhaps unassailable. For the linguist David Crystal, it is entirely plausible that “English, in some shape or form, will find itself in the service of the world community for ever”. In his new, engaging and learned book, The Last Lingua Franca, Nicholas Ostler challenges this widespread confidence in the continued future of English as the dominant global language, and, more radically, questions whether there will be any need at all for a single language of international communication “in a world where digital technology is cheap and ubiquitous”.
Acknowledging the unparalleled geographical expanse of English, Ostler draws a firm distinction between English as a mother tongue and English as a lingua franca or communicative tool for non-native speakers. This distinction motivates two separate questions concerning the future of English. First, will English, given its spread as a native language, split into a range of separate languages akin to the development of Latin into the Romance languages? Second, will it continue to be a widely used lingua franca, possibly even increase its influence? Ostler’s answer to both of these questions is a resolute no. In a world linked by digital communication networks, native speaker communities of English, no matter their location, are able to remain in constant contact and familiar with each other’s varieties. Regular communicative interaction promotes parallel linguistic development; only when a group of speakers becomes communicatively isolated (or isolates itself) can its dialect diverge from related dialects to the point of becoming a distinct language.
Innovations in translation technology, Ostler argues, will in turn remove the necessity for a global lingua franca. The increasing availability of linguistic corpora in electronic form will generate the language-processing resources needed for machine translation, facilitating interlingual communication, where each party uses its own language. Interlingual communication will reach beyond the languages of the global technological powers: Ostler is confident that “automatic tools are going to become capable of bridging the gap between any languages”, with the ticket for admission into the new information society being “a dictionary, grammar, parser, and a multi-million-word corpus of texts –and they’d better all be computer tractable”.
Such optimism regarding a new age of global communication ought to be tempered. Leaving alone the question of whether the approach of inducing linguistic knowledge automatically from large corpora will in fact result in adequate machine translation systems (which is as yet unknown), the picture that Ostler paints of an egalitarian, multilingual information society does not duly consider, on the one hand, that not all linguistic communities will have the resources to create the requisite electronic corpora and corpus analysis tools, and, on the other hand, that machine-aided interlingual (semi-)communication may not be appropriate for all functions performed by a lingua franca, so that, for example, scientific discourse may continue to employ a single lingua franca for reasons of economy as well as prestige.
What seems a more likely scenario is that interlingual communication will be confined to what Ostler calls the “big beasts”, the world’s major languages as characterized by the number and economic power of their speakers. As Ostler rightly notes, the prospects of a lingua franca depend on its competition, and it may not be as much the decline of English that is inevitable as the rise of other languages as alternatives to English in the global arena. Ostler convincingly demonstrates how the study of linguistic and cultural history can illuminate our understanding of present-day and future developments; and if history has taught us anything, it is that linguistic hegemonies –from Persian to Portuguese– are readily usurped and that the rise and fall of a lingua franca cannot be divorced from the fall and rise of its surrounding languages. The Last Lingua Franca beautifully ties together a diverse and ambitious range of themes, which will offer something new to all readers. Its strength lies in the wealth and mixture of historical fact and linguistic insight, allowing an informed glimpse into the “potentially incalculable future” of the global linguistic landscape.
While tapping current anxieties about the future of the West, the diminished role of English that is anticipated in Winterbottom’s film might seem as far-fetched as the biotechnological inventions that it also features. The dominance of English today as the language of business, science and popular entertainment appears unassailed and perhaps unassailable. For the linguist David Crystal, it is entirely plausible that “English, in some shape or form, will find itself in the service of the world community for ever”. In his new, engaging and learned book, The Last Lingua Franca, Nicholas Ostler challenges this widespread confidence in the continued future of English as the dominant global language, and, more radically, questions whether there will be any need at all for a single language of international communication “in a world where digital technology is cheap and ubiquitous”.
Acknowledging the unparalleled geographical expanse of English, Ostler draws a firm distinction between English as a mother tongue and English as a lingua franca or communicative tool for non-native speakers. This distinction motivates two separate questions concerning the future of English. First, will English, given its spread as a native language, split into a range of separate languages akin to the development of Latin into the Romance languages? Second, will it continue to be a widely used lingua franca, possibly even increase its influence? Ostler’s answer to both of these questions is a resolute no. In a world linked by digital communication networks, native speaker communities of English, no matter their location, are able to remain in constant contact and familiar with each other’s varieties. Regular communicative interaction promotes parallel linguistic development; only when a group of speakers becomes communicatively isolated (or isolates itself) can its dialect diverge from related dialects to the point of becoming a distinct language.
Innovations in translation technology, Ostler argues, will in turn remove the necessity for a global lingua franca. The increasing availability of linguistic corpora in electronic form will generate the language-processing resources needed for machine translation, facilitating interlingual communication, where each party uses its own language. Interlingual communication will reach beyond the languages of the global technological powers: Ostler is confident that “automatic tools are going to become capable of bridging the gap between any languages”, with the ticket for admission into the new information society being “a dictionary, grammar, parser, and a multi-million-word corpus of texts –and they’d better all be computer tractable”.
Such optimism regarding a new age of global communication ought to be tempered. Leaving alone the question of whether the approach of inducing linguistic knowledge automatically from large corpora will in fact result in adequate machine translation systems (which is as yet unknown), the picture that Ostler paints of an egalitarian, multilingual information society does not duly consider, on the one hand, that not all linguistic communities will have the resources to create the requisite electronic corpora and corpus analysis tools, and, on the other hand, that machine-aided interlingual (semi-)communication may not be appropriate for all functions performed by a lingua franca, so that, for example, scientific discourse may continue to employ a single lingua franca for reasons of economy as well as prestige.
What seems a more likely scenario is that interlingual communication will be confined to what Ostler calls the “big beasts”, the world’s major languages as characterized by the number and economic power of their speakers. As Ostler rightly notes, the prospects of a lingua franca depend on its competition, and it may not be as much the decline of English that is inevitable as the rise of other languages as alternatives to English in the global arena. Ostler convincingly demonstrates how the study of linguistic and cultural history can illuminate our understanding of present-day and future developments; and if history has taught us anything, it is that linguistic hegemonies –from Persian to Portuguese– are readily usurped and that the rise and fall of a lingua franca cannot be divorced from the fall and rise of its surrounding languages. The Last Lingua Franca beautifully ties together a diverse and ambitious range of themes, which will offer something new to all readers. Its strength lies in the wealth and mixture of historical fact and linguistic insight, allowing an informed glimpse into the “potentially incalculable future” of the global linguistic landscape.
της KERSTIN HOGE από το TLS 11.3.2011
