Does Literacy prevent Language Evolution?

Factual Questions
1

When the Roman Empire fell, the literacy rate among the people fell significantly, as far as I know. We know as a historical fact that the fall of the Roman Empire as a political entity was coeval with the disintegration of the Latin language into the multitudinous Romance language in both the spoken and the written word.

Do you think that if the literacy rate decreases below a certain threshold in a population dispersed over some geographical region and initially speaking and writing (by no means universal) a common language, with the added condition that this region as a whole becomes divided into subregions whose inhabitants interact mostly among themselves and rarely with inhabitants of other such regions, that such a disintegration along the lines of what happened to the Latin language is more or less inevitable?

Conversely, do you think that there is any merit to the inverse statement, namely, that if the literacy rate remains high throughout a given period of time in a given geographical space, that the written and spoken language will be preserved, or at least slowed down in its rate of evolution?

Finally, do you think that there is any validity in comparing what supposedly happened to the descendants of the survivors of Noah’s flood and what happened after the collapse of the Roman Empire, at least in their commonality that there was a “confounding of the languages”? Also, if the flood indeed happened as the account thereof in Genesis said it did, would such a confounding of the languages be a reasonable consequence (I am assuming that “literacy rates” fell for the survivors)?

2

Guys, let’s keep the religious jabs out of this thread, kay?

This is quite an interesting idea. Are there any metrics that purport to measure “language change” that we can apply to English language documents written over the past thousand plus years and graph the changes in the rate of change over time and compare them with estimations of historical literacy rates?

E.g. “You can see here on the graph that a few hundred years in the past we see a sharp rise in the rate of change. This correlates to an outbreak of the Black Death in England when most schools were closed and Oxford and Cambridge got hit really badly and 85% of the professors there died. Survival rates among illiterate farmers in rural areas were much better - 90% of them lived. This obviously caused literacy rates to drop. Much later, you can see that the rate slows a bit in 1870. This was when the State of New York passed the Public Schools Act that provided a guaranteed education to all resident children at taxpayer expense. Literacy rates in NY skyrocketed and many graduates moved all over the English speaking world.”

3

Cell phones, texting and the internet are changing language faster than ever.

4

Perhaps, but they all (especially the Internet) make it less likely that English will develop like Latin into a family of different languages. If a word or expression becomes popular in New York or London today, then it will be spoken or written in Delhi or Sydney in a very short time – a few days or even hours. People in Paris and Madrid started speaking different languages because they no longer heard each other or saw each others’ writings. Now we hear and see English from around the world every day.

5

Do kids nowadays have trouble with using chat room lingo in school essays because that’s *all *they know? I consider myself pretty good at 13375p34k and internet jargon but know enough not to use them in professional writing and can write an essay in formal English that could have been understood by someone in 1940. Isn’t this more a case of code switching between a formal language register and a slang register?

6

Specialized subcultures generate new language features. Eventually they would split.

I’m forty and online all the time, but hardly any of my early classmates are. I found 3 people from first to fifth grade on facebook, and even fewer from 6-10th.

The bulk of my friends and acquaintances are family and friends from when I was an adult and worked in a bar. Still, there is a noticeable absence of people older than me.

It is obvious that we live in different worlds, and my feet should be astride that, but I have chosen firmly for the culture of those younger than me.

Likewise professionals have their technical jargon. Or listen to artists talk. These sorts of subcultures push language in new directions, and they are very literate.

7

I once heard an interesting theory that it was a revival in literacy that turned Latin into a dead language. The theory was that throughout the Dark Ages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, most Western Europeans thought they were speaking Latin. Sure the “Latin” they were speaking would have been unrecognizable to Virgil but none of them were reading Virgil so they didn’t know this. And the general collapse of the trade network limited travel so people didn’t realize the “Latin” they were speaking locally was different than the “Latin” people were speaking a couple hundred miles away.

Then the Carolingians re-united a large part of Western Europe and supported the growth of a scholarly class and people were able to sit down and compare notes. And they realized that what they were speaking wasn’t Latin. There was an attempt made at reviving Latin but it had the reverse effect. By trying to save Latin in its classical form, it lost what little connection it still had to the living languages people were speaking.

8

To me it seems almost obvious that written records, or even a memorized oral liturgy, would slow the rate of language change. This might explain, for example, why Atkinson-Gray estimate PIE at ca 7000 BC, while archaeological evidence makes it closer to 3500 BC.

About a year ago, I started a thread to pose this same question, but IIRC it got sidetracked with few or no opinions expressed on either side.

9

Am I correct to get out your post that PIE was actually around 3500 BC (the archaeological evidence being the more relevant data), but that Atkinson-Gray estimates it at 7000 BC because they assume that the rate of change in the language was similar to its recent rate of change, which is when writing had more widely used…

But another way of looking at it would be that for much of PIE’s existence, its speakers were illiterate, and hence would have evolved much faster, thus actually requiring less time for the total given evolutionary change in the language to have occurred? (Hence why the longer estimate of 7000 BC is incorrect?)

10

Yes, I believe so:

If education decreases, crime/poverty increases.
If education increases, crime/poverty decreases.

As you look through history, you will find that as education increases a person’s wealth, then also do the upper class tend to suppress it for the sole sake of keeping their status…or, in the case of the US in the 21st century, they (the wealthy) tend to suppress everyone so their children will thrive (e.g. the English only movement.)

11

I was recently reading The Power of Babel which does discuss how having a written language serves as an “anchor” for the spoken language. Five hundred years ago, English was Shakespearean English, which has some weird phrasings but is clearly English enough to be taught to high-schoolers without problems. Five hundred years before that, English was an incomprehensible German-esque language.

The difference between those five hundred years and the next was a substantial body of literature and literacy making a more fixed “Good English” and English becoming a more international language with new learners learning the standard. There was still local slang and idioms but they could never take over as “Good English” like they could before literacy.

Unwritten languages, and languages without political clout, change a lot more rapidly than those that are written down.

12

Languages change in isolation. Anyone who’s seen movies with a fairly faithful(or not?) reproduction of US southern, hillbilly / appalachain, Australian, or other dialogs (Newfie in Canada…) will realize that the language there is close to unintelligible. If the situation were left like Italy, France, Spain etc. after the dark ages, then these would within a few centuries with minimal “cross-contaminaton” become different languages.

However, the regional accents of England were pretty close to different languages. (What was the comment on a different thread, a language is a dialect with an army).

Also, along with literacy eventually comes the Queen’s English, or the Lycee, to set a gold standard for writing. Spelling in the middle ages was atrocious because people spelled as they heard it, and often they heard different than someone else.

Latin was standard because Rome issued somewhat “standard” texts and everyone was reading the same book(s). I read somewhere that even by the time of Julius, common street latin was nothing like the formal, written latin used in literature. Presumably, because only one class saw and heard the classic speech, everyone else worked in a basically non-literate environment.

Latin was domonant because of the catholic church; it fell out of use not just because of development of local literacy and writing, but also because the protestant revolution rejected a lot of Latin as elitist, exclusive, and stilted - only to be used for ceremonial purposes by a hated central church. Much of the protestant revolution centered on the whole issue of local translation of the bible, dropping the veil between the church “insiders” and the lay people… which meant dropping latin.

I think though, while literacy may have some of the slowing characteristic - the interesting trend today is audio(-visual) media. There is a standard American/mid-atlantic accent that is heard all over the world, from popular movies to CNN. This is slowly de-regionalizing the accents around the world, much as BBC and such has done to British accents.

13

I think you are underestimating the effect of what happened in 1066. English changed substantially because of a huge infusion of French. That made it an “incomprehensible German-esque language” to us.

14

Huh? I"ve spoken with Appalachians, Southerners and at least one Newfie and can’t recall ever having serious trouble understanding them.

However, I believe that the reason why Protestants disfavor Latin is because it is nobody’s native tongue and is not the vernacular/street language anywhere. There’s nothing in the grammar or vocabulary itself that makes it especially un-Christian. If a lost village were to be discovered in the mountains of Switzerland that had been isolated for centuries but that has maintained Classical Latin as its language through reading copies of Cicero and Caesar that have been lovingly passed down the generations, most Protestants would have no objection to their missionaries preaching in Latin and holding services there in Latin, because Latin just happens to be the language there, kind of like how they speak Spanish in Buenos Aires and German in Berlin.

Likewise, most Protestants would object to holding services in Sumerian or Classical Persian, not because these languages are non-Christian but because there are no communities that speak these languages.

15

Not me, the thesis of the book I was citing. :slight_smile:

It provides some other examples, like in spoken French, “we are”, instead of “nous sommes”, is usually “on est”, but because of writing “nous sommes” is correct while “on est” is “casual”. If there was no written French, “on est” would just be the first person plural form with some older people remembering that people said it differently in the past.

Similarly, using “c’est” instead of “est” for emphasis (e.g. “L’etat est moi” means “The state is me”, while “L’etat c’est moi” means “The state, that’s me”) is so common that creoles based on French (invented by people who heard, but did not read French) often have something like “se” as the third person singular, apeing “c’est” instead of the more proper “est”. It is only widespread literacy that forces people to remember that “c’est” is not a verb conjugation in actual French.

Contrast this with similar “for emphasis” changes made before widespread literacy, like the addition of “pas” to negatives, and obligatory articles which just got sucked up into the language and now are the standard.

16

Historical linguist here. The short answer is that no, literacy does not prevent language evolution. Most language evolution occurs when child language learners make mistakes in learning the language. These changes are then passed down to the next generation of speakers. We’re generally talking about children younger than, say, five here, young enough to assume that they would not yet be literate.

You cite the fall of the Roman Empire as an example, but the reality is that spoken Latin was constantly evolving. The changes may sometimes be masked by adherence to a standard literary language, but there are often differences which give away the deeper changes to the untrained eye. We also have documents written by people with various degrees of training, everything from elegant poetry to obscene street graffiti, the latter of which shows pretty clearly which way the language was heading.

The same can be said for many of the other ancient and long-lived literary languages, like Akkadian, Greek, Egyptian, and Hittite, and certainly for many modern languages, like English, French, and Russian.

Also, about the whole Tower of Babel idea. We’re able to reconstruct the ancestor languages which gave rise to the languages of many of today’s major language families. The breakup of Indo-European can be placed at maybe 4,000-6,000 years ago, and Afro-Asiatic at about 10,000 years ago. As far back as we can reconstruct those proto-languages, we can be sure that they were not demonstrably related to each other. So, if there ever was one single human ancestor language, it could only have existed long, long ago in the past, far before the development of any sort of human civilization.

17

Yes, that’s what I meant. (And, IIRC, even Atkinson and/or Gray admit that the later date is likely correct.)

Linguists insist that languages’ rates of change vary unpredictably. Still, I’d like to hear an expert confirm that, other things being equal, literacy (or perhaps memorized oral poetry) would retard many types of language change.

18

Rural east Kentucky is the one area of the rural South where nearly EVERYONE is hard to understand. Plenty of poorer people in rural places in South Carolina, Georgia, etc. can be difficult to understand, but east Kentucky is the worst.

I can’t speak for Newfoundland.

There are some people from the very rural upper Midwest who I’ve found a little difficult to understand, but nowhere near as bad as east Kentucky…and I’m from rural Appalachia.

19

I think it only makes sense that language evolved once and that all languages trace back to that one ancestral event. But that would be, at a minimum, 60k years ago. More likely over 100,000 years ago. I know that some (Greenberg, for one) think they can extrapolate back that far to some extent from modern languages, but I believe the consensus is that 10k is about the limit.

20

See my response above.

Also, for fun, here is a list of the basic vocabulary retention rates of a number of languages over the past 1,000-2,000 years: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000210. If I had to pick any one factor which would most slow linguistic change, it would be geographic isolation.

If you want a good example and counterexample to the notion that literacy prevents linguistic change, I would have to present Vedic Sanskrit. If there was one place that was obsessed with preserving the spoken language as-is from one generation to the next, it was ancient India. They believed that their religious rituals would not be effective if they were not reproduced exactly. So, they went about inventing the science of phonetics and wrote amazing descriptive grammars of Vedic, the most famous of which is certainly Panini’s. To this day, it is still one of the best descriptive grammar of any language.

What happened? In short order, Classical Sanskrit became a fixed literary language, learned and spoken by the elite. There are still people who speak Sanskrit even today, and you can go to spoken Sanskrit seminars. From what I understand, the spoken language doesn’t use the same range of verbal forms you see even in the written language; it’s mostly periphrastic constructions. Vedic continued to develop, continuing a process which we can see even in the Rig Veda, the earliest Vedic text. Vedic developed into Middle Indic, which produced its own fairly standardized literary language, Pali. The various Middle Indic languages eventually became the modern North Indian languages, like Hindi, Marati, Gujarati, and so on.

The moral of the story is that you can manage to preserve a language relatively intact through extensive schooling and sheer force of will, even if it is an abridged version of what was used by the original native speakers. At the same time, this won’t stop the language as spoken by most of the population from changing to the point of unrecognizability.