In today’s highly globalized world, languages get mixed and evolve at a much faster pace than ever before. English, for instance, is no longer only divided into British, American, Canadian and Australian English; we could say that there is a variety or dialect of English for any other natural language: Spanglish, Chinglish and so on. When French was the de-facto lingua franca of diplomacy (and, by extension, Western Europe), it was not substantially modified by other local languages; yet when English replaced it, after World War I and especially after World War II, it started changing immediately.

English, in particular its American variety, was not only originally used for international diplomacy; rather, as the United States rose a superpower in many fields (technology, business, etc.), one could argue that its language became widespread from the bottom. The average Joe in most other Western countries was exposed to American words: they wore blue jeans, they put coins into juke-boxes, they went to a bar. English words became commonplace over time, and this ultimately led to the creation of what could be easily considered a series of creoles that are, for the most part, mutually intelligible.

(A simple example: Italian immigrants in the US who returned to Italy brought the word sciuscià back with them. It is now seldom used anymore, but it was a common term in Southern Italy after WW2. As many may have guessed, it was the Italianized version of the English word shoe-shiner, whose direct Italian translation would actually be lustrascarpe.)

This “linguistic pollution,” while being very interesting on its own, makes it extremely difficult to analyze the nature of the relationship between language and thought. Language isolates, however, come to the rescue.

A language isolate is a language which shows no direct “genetic” correlation with any other language. The most widely known isolate is probably Basque (Euskera), spoken in an area between Spain and France. This is what the article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“All human beings are born free…”) looks like in Basque:

Gizon-emakume guztiak aske jaiotzen dira, duintasun eta eskubide berberak dituztela; eta ezaguera eta kontzientzia dutenez gero, elkarren artean senide legez jokatu beharra dute.

While this is unintelligible to most (if not all) non-speakers, we can immediately notice that at least one word is recognizable: kontzientzia. This proves that Basque has been somewhat polluted by surrounding Romance languages, and renders it useless for the research in question.

Thankfully, there are some language isolates that are spoken in areas that are also geographically isolate. The most striking example is the Pirahã language, spoken by less than 400 people along the Maici River, in Brazil. It is among the most amazing languages that we know about.

Widely studied by Professor Daniel Everett, Pirahã shows very peculiar characteristics, the most striking of which are the following:

• A single word meaning both “mother” and “father”
• No numerals, except for words that roughly mean “small quantity” and “large quantity”
• No terms for colors, except for words that roughly mean “dark” and “bright”
• Only three pronouns (I, you, they) that need to be combined to yield the others (I + you = we)
• A very limited clause system that effectively prevents embedding sub-clauses

The lack of specific numerals has been actually tested by Everett in an experiment. The question is: do Pirahã speakers “understand” numbers even without having words for them? They certainly understand the concept of quantities. It has been written — I’m afraid I can’t locate the source right now, so please take this with a grain of salt — that any attempts to teach them actual numeral words failed, because while they understood the underlying concept, they were simply unable to use them, as they were not used to them. In a way, it is not unlike most people’s reaction to Esperanto’s future participle: we sort of get the grammatical idea, but we just don’t know what to do with it.

When I was in Egham, UK, for a summer English course, one of the teachers we had told us one thing that stuck with me: language is a habit. You can say you speak another language, he argued, only when you stop thinking in your native language and translate your thoughts; you can say you have mastered a language only when you think and speak directly in that language. The implications of this simple gem are enormous: in order to be proficient in a language, we have to absorb not just its rules, but its way of thought. If we were to learn Pirahã, then, we would have to rewire our brain in order to get rid of the distinct concepts of numerals, colors and so on that we have been using all our life. If we didn’t, we would just be translating all the time. This is clearly no easy task, but proves that language is indeed a habit.

Another very interesting language, albeit not strictly a language isolate, is the Aymara language, spoken by little more than two million people among Chile, Perú and Bolivia. While most other languages refer to the future as being “in front of us” and the past as being “behind us,” speakers of Aymara refer to the future as being “behind them,” and the past as being “in front of them.” It sounds out of place to us, but only until we put our prejudice aside and stop to think about it.

While we say that “times goes fast,” we still imply that we are the ones moving through time; we simply cannot, quite literally, take a break from it. We are forced to go through time, and we conceive this as physically moving through it. For this reason, we can claim that the future is ahead of us because we are going there, and that the future is behind us because we have already been there; in fact, we are coming from the past and going towards the future. It makes sense.

The Aymara people, however, use a different paradigm. They stand still, and time travels “through” them. They are facing the past because they know what has already happened, simply because, well, it has already happened. On the other hand, nobody knows what the future yields, therefore it is as if it were behind our back. We can only see in front of us, and we can only fully see the past. It makes sense as well, but if you find yourself having a hard time fully accepting this point of view, worry not: it’s quite common. At least you can understand how the Pirahã feel about dealing with concepts they never felt a need for.

Language indeed defines culture, and this is also why Esperanto can be difficult to handle at times: not having a pool of natural speakers, save for the relatively few “native” children of Esperanto-speaking couples, and therefore not having a unique backing culture, at times it simply feels too arbitrary. Moreover, most Esperantists have a strong aversion to the naturalization of foreign words, preferring etymological translations in order to preserve the language’s origins; failure to do so is referred to as krokodili. As an example, e-mail is called e-mail in most languages (even in French, which is notoriously picky about foreign words: they use logiciels on their ordinateurs rather than software on their computers!) Yet, the correct word for e-mail in Esperanto is not *emajlo or something similar, but rather retpoŝto: ret[a] (network), poŝto (mail.) How this helps new Esperanto speakers, especially in today’s world, is beyond me, but I suppose that this is a topic for another post.

A final note: many of you may have heard that the “Eskimo language” has an incredible number of words for snow. The idea behind this is that, since they are surrounded by snow, they talk about it a lot. While it’s a fascinating claim, it’s also completely false. Moreover, there is no such thing as an “Eskimo language” (just like there is no “Indian language” or “Chinese language”), and the word “Eskimo” is actually considered derogatory. However, this urban legend is yet another proof that language defines culture, or at least feeds prejudices — in this case quite innocent ones, thankfully — about different cultures.

Anybody who studied a foreign language, even without reaching fluency, has most likely had an experience with the linguistic relativity principle. The farther the language in question is different from the native language, the more the phenomenon is obvious.

Since I am currently writing in English, I will refer to English as the native language (L1), and for this to be a real-world example, let’s use Spanish as the target language (L2). They are quite different languages indeed: Modern English belongs to the greater West Germanic group, while Spanish is obviously a Romance language. Even though most Westerners are inevitably familiar with both and may able to understand simple phrases even without formal training (in part because there has been some contamination over the centuries), they are very different.

English nouns have no gender, and even though some of them do carry one (mother, father, brother, sister, etc.), they are still grammatically neuter. In Spanish, and indeed in all languages derived from Latin, all nouns carry a gender: the moon is feminine (la luna), the sun is masculine (el sol); interestingly enough, Spanish has no neuter gender! This is a source of frustration for native speakers of genderless languages: apart from the obvious nouns — la madre, el padre — a foreigner will have to send the gender of common nouns to memory, because there is simply no rule. Why is the hand feminine (la mano), but the foot masculine (el pie)? In many cases Latin can come to the rescue, but it’s probably wiser to just accept it as a challenge, and comply peacefully.

On the other hand, Spanish native speakers can find the lack of gender in English just as confusing. In Spanish you can differentiate between “mi amigo” and “mi amiga,” but in English you have no such luxury. Of course, you can say “my male friend” and “my female friend,” or formulate your sentence in such a way that the gender of the friend becomes obvious, but I can guarantee that a speaker of a Romance language — like me, as a matter of fact — will never get used to being left in the dark upon hearing phrases such as “I met a friend.”

This is a clear effect of linguistic relativity: the peculiarities of our native language are taken for granted, and do shape the way we interact with the world. We expect certain parameters to be taken care of, and when we switch to a language with a different rule set, we end up confused and resigned.

Another practical example is the usage of verbs: Italian has two “main” past tenses, called passato prossimo and passato remoto, ie. near past and far past. They are roughly equivalent in construction to past perfect and simple past. However, the former is used for events in the recent past, and the latter for events in the distant past; nobody would use passato remoto for something that happened just yesterday, while in English it’s perfectly legitimate (and effectively advised) to use simple past in such a case.

In other situations, instead, the target language may offer more choices than we are used to, and we end up not knowing which one to use: most English speakers have a hard time choosing between ser and estar in Spanish, for instance. In Esperanto, the way participles are formed yields a table of nine combinations for compound verbs: three tenses for the auxiliary verbs (past, present and future), and three tenses for the participles. It is not difficult to grasp the concept when unusual combinations are used, such as a past auxiliary and a future participle, but it’s virtually impossible to translate it to any other language.

This leads us to an interesting question: if our native language shapes the way we deal with the world to the point that we get confused when other languages have no direct equivalent forms for what we want to say (or ours doesn’t match what we’re being told in the foreign language), does it also work backwards? In other words: can forcing the usage of a specifically-tailored language effectively change the way people speak?

Such a theory has been exploited by George Orwell in its famous dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in which the Party has gradually enforced the usage of a new, artificially modified language. The new language — aptly named Newspeak — is simplified: by getting rid synonyms and antonyms, people’s thoughts would also be simplified, and that is the ultimate goal of any totalitarian regime. To do so, prefixes and postfixes are used: bad becomes ungood, great becomes plusgood, excellent becomes doubleplusgood. This is not unlike Esperanto, although the simplification of Zamenhof language was aimed at helping its diffusion rather than limiting the thinking abilities of its speakers. [One might argue whether malsanulejo is really any simpler than *hospitalo: mal- (not), -san- (health), -ul- (person), -ej- (place), -o (noun).]

The Party’s reasoning is indeed very simple: by reducing the ways people can express thoughts, at some point they will be unable to even conceive them. In a world where people’s minds were constantly proved to be fallible, for instance by secretly rewriting newspapers, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that the folk will ultimately comply.

Whether Newspeak would work in the real world, especially in the highly globalized, twenty-first-century world that almost speaks in a single planetary pidgin, is not clear. However, there was at least one attempt, and it was made before Orwell wrote his best-selling novel.

At the end of the 1930s, the fascist regime in Italy promoted the Italic lineage, or “stirpe italica.” Everything Italian, or actually Italic (the distinction being that the latter refers to the ancient great times or Rome, from whose culture Fascism borrowed many symbols), was to be praised and protected. Mussolini was what we would today call a charismatic leader, someone who knew how to handle public relations: he knew how to speak to crowds and make them agree to anything — the declaration of war in 1940 is a testament to this —, also by describing a world that differed from reality. Imported products had to be replaced with locally-made surrogates, and even art was controlled and subjected to heavy censorship: this was the beginning of the infamous tradition of dubbing movies (which was done mostly to replace “inconvenient” parts) that still persists today, but language in general was greatly regulated.

Starting in 1938, the Italianization of foreign words became very aggressive. Not only common foreign nouns were translated (football became giuoco del calcio or calcio; basketball became pallacanestro; sandwich became tramezzino; etc.), but even cities were renamed to hide their foreign origins, with the clear goal of making them “more Italian.” This happened especially in the north-east of the country, an area of strong Slavic presence: Ahrntal became Valle Aurina, Pivka became San Pietro del Carso and so on. Even many last names were replaced with Italian translations or assonances: Vodopivec became Bevilacqua, Krizman became Crismani.

Did this make people more Italian? It’s hard to say, as such an experiment should have to last several decades to yield any measurable effects, yet that would be an unacceptable imposition upon a population. However, some of these words are still in modern use, and movies, as I said, are still dubbed.

What is certain is that the elements we have seem to show that forcing people to speak in a certain way may have censorship as a side effect. Thankfully, in today’s world the Internet tends to restore the languages’ natural evolution path, as it helps bypassing centralized regulation, and also fuels the linguistic melting pot more than centuries of human migrations ever could. But what if a community has no access to modern technology? Can closed groups give a deeper insight about the relationship between language and thought? They may, but that is something I will talk about in a future post.

Latin, for instance, is usually deemed to be a dead language, but this is not the case. To begin with, Latin is still the official language of the Vatican, and while catholic functions have been in local languages since 1964, papal documents continue to be redacted in Latin to this day. Moreover, while there are no native Latin speakers, there are hundreds of millions of people whose native language is directly derived from Latin: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian; these are usually called “romance” or “neo-latin” languages. The word romance has unfortunately nothing to do with feelings, and is rather a reference to roman. Ancient Romans did, in fact, spread the usage of Latin around the world.

The evolution of languages is usually caused by their speakers’ movement across the globe: as populations mix, so do their languages. The best example of this is probably Romanian, whose name betrays a Latin origin even though it’s geographically distant from the area where its cousins are spoken. Indeed, the novice might find it surprising that Romanian is indeed a romance language, considering how the Balkan area separates its speakers’ pool from Western Europe, but linguistic evolution, like any other cultural trait, requires taking into account the bigger picture. The area then known as Dacia was inglobated by the Roman empire in 106 CE, but stayed a Roman province until until 271 CE, when the Goths conquered it. During those 165 years, vulgar Latin set its roots in the area, but was then polluted by subsequent linguistic interferences. Modern Romanian shows a striking mix of Latin and Slavic traits, the most immediate of which are postfix articles: EN lake, ES/PT/IT lago, FR lac, RO lac — EN the lake, ES el lago, PT o lago, IT il lago, FR le lac, RO lacul.

The more a geographic area is conquered by different populations, the more intermixed the local language will become, as it draws from all of them. Even more fascinating than Romanian is Maltese, which inherits from Italian, Sicilian, English and Arabic. Written Maltese can look to the untrained eye like a mishmash of random letters. This is how the first article of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights looks like in Maltese:

Il-bnedmin kollha jitwieldu ħielsa u ugwali fid-dinjità u d-drittijiet. Huma mogħnija bir-raġuni u bil-kuxjenza u għandhom igibu ruħhom ma’ xulxin bi spirtu ta’ aħwa.

A recording can be found here (courtesy of Omniglot.) It definitely sounds more Arabic than anything else.

The fact that languages differ over time as the distance increases can be proven by Portuguese, specifically its Brazilian variety. Whereas European Portuguese is very similar to Spanish, to the point that they are almost mutually intelligible in writing, its South American counterpart is so different that some consider it to be an entirely different language, much more so than American English is to British English. The most striking structural distinction is that most Brazilian Portuguese dialects lost the second singular pronoun tu in favor of você (originally vossa mercê, ie. “your grace”, akin to Spanish usted), which is conjugated with third singular person verbs but is used informally. Interestingly, a similar pronoun, vos, is also used in several South American varieties of Spanish, especially those in areas geographically close to Brazil.

Languages generally evolve by simplification, as can easily be seen comparing the complex case system of Latin with modern romance languages, none of which use cases other than for pronouns. Moreover, language evolve under one’s own eyes. When I went to elementary school twenty years ago, the informal yet very common construction a me mi, as in a me mi piace was considered a serious mistake because it implied repeating the same thing twice. While it is not something that one would use in writing, it has become accepted in all but the most formal settings. (Note that the correspondent Spanish construction, a mí me gusta, actually requires the repetition.) A similar thing has happened in English: until a few decades ago, substituting whom (accusative) with who (nominative) in phrases such as I don’t know was considered bad practice; nowadays, it is standard English. Of course, phrases usually used as “whole blocks,” such as for whom the bell tolls or to whom it may concern, are likely to retain the original inflection for much longer. Sometimes the simplification is done by law, usually in the form of spelling reforms. This has recently happened with Greek in 1982 to drop its ancient polytonic orthography, and to German in 1996; the latter wasn’t exactly a smooth transition. Many reforms have been suggested for English, but none has ever been attempted. It is worth to remember this satyrical piece, attributed to Mark Twain, about how such a reform could be carried out over the course of at least two decades:

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or s, and likewise x would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which c would be retained would be the ch formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform w spelling, so that which and one would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish y replasing it with i and Iear 4 might fiks the g/j anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez c, y and x — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais ch, sh, and th rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

In some cases, languages do however indeed die without evolving, but a more correct term in this case is “extinction.” Most scholars consider a language to be extinct when it’s no longer used and there are no direct derivatives. Language extinction is closely linked with the story of populations as a whole, and almost always to catastrophic events such as genocide. For instance, Many Native American languages are now extinct, as the people who spoke them were killed during the colonization. The few survivors eventually stopped using them (or were too young and were never taught to speak them) and began using the language of the colonists. In some cases, if the pool of speakers is already small, there may be no push to teach it to other people and they may eventually die and take the language with them. This is the reason behind the attempt, in the recent years, to revive languages and dialects at a concrete risk of disappearing.

As we have seen, language defines culture and identity. When a language becomes extinct, the loss for humanity as a whole is much bigger than a set of grammar rules.