The Last Lingua Franca

The Rise and Fall of World Languages

Nicholas Ostler, 2010

(July 2012)

Language – languages – are messy things. There are no really clear-cut boundaries between the various levels of slang, pidgin, creole, dialect and full blown language. The distinction is often more political than linguistic. The relatively small differences between Scandinavian and Iberian languages are primarily due to specifically identifiable historical decisions; whereas in their ongoing quest to freak out the rest of the world by being as terrifyingly monolithic as possible China insists that there is only one Chinese language, despite spoken Mandarin and Cantonese being mutually unintelligible.

  

The old saw is that the best definition of a language is ‘a dialect with an army and a navy,’ and it’s no coincidence that the most widespread languages at any given time have been those utilized by the preeminent military powers of their day. Nicholas Ostler gives us an absorbing account (if slightly too list based, as is often the way) of the rise and fall of historical lingua francas. This means spending a lot of time in central Asia, and if nothing else it means I finally know what’s up with all the ‘-stans.’ He also posits a couple of other reasons for the spread of a common tongue, namely trade and religion, but basically it comes down to who has the best artillery.

Which brings us back to the dragon in the room that is China. You can see why everyone thinks this will be China’s century (always remembering that people thought the same about Japan 30 years ago), but despite its neocolonial adventures in Africa, it’s hard to see Chinese taking off as a viable common language given that a significant proportion of native speakers can’t make themselves understood in it.

As the title suggests, the theory here is that English will eventually, and perhaps in the not too distant future, decline as the world’s default mode of communication. I’d agree with that assessment to a point, but the second part of the theory is that nothing will replace it. Because magic.

Sorry, because the inevitable advances in machine translation (MT) will make it possible for everyone to communicate in their mother tongues and let the machines do the rest of the work. It’s hard to see how MT couldn’t improve, given how poor it is right now, but I’m always very, very skeptical of predictions based on ‘inevitable’ advances in specific technological fields. A lot of the most paradigm shifting technologies, especially in communications, have kind of emerged by accident, and pinning all your hopes on a very specific – and hard to realize – technological advance seems like just throwing your hands up and saying, “Well, it's got to come good eventually, right? Right?”

Past performance is, famously, no guarantee of future results, and expertise when looking back doesn’t equal the same looking forward. A very absorbing book from the historical perspective, but I wouldn’t place too much faith in the crystal ball just yet.