Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2006

Visitors

Language death – and the ‘creoloids’ we leave behind

Language death is a major concern for linguists and scholars world-wide. Many, including those at La Trobe University’s Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT) – one of the key centres for international language conservation – are busily documenting these languages before the last speakers die.

Estimates are that some-where between 50 to 90 per cent of the world’s languages will cease to exist by the end of this century. To this bleak prediction Professor Peter Trudgill, a Visiting Fellow at the RCLT, has added an even gloomier one: those that remain may not qualify as ‘real typical languages’.

Professor Trudgill, who holds appointments at the universities of East Anglia in the UK and Fribourg in Switzerland, recently delivered a public lecture, Creoloids and koinés: on the world-wide loss of linguistic complexity.

If modern dominant languages are no longer typical of languages that existed throughout human history, why should that matter? Apart from cultural consequences for those who lose their languages, sociolinguistic patterns – critical links between aspects of a society and its language – help us learn about the world in which we live.

A pioneer of sociolinguistics (his books of the 1970s are still standard texts in the field) Professor Trudgill says that if the distribution of linguistic features over the world’s languages is not totally random, then these features are associated with certain types of societies and structures.

Linguistic change, he explains, is slow when populations are well established and bound by strong ties. It is rapid among fluid populations with weak community ties. Language structures are usually lost during language contact and more readily developed in isolation.

‘Increasing communication and larger populations lead to more language and dialect contact and an increase in new language forms known as creoles, creoloids and koinés. Most languages are in danger, and the ones left behind will be mainly koinés or creoloids.

‘If we are keen to learn more about the inherent nature of linguistic systems, we must urgently focus most our attention on languages spoken in the ever-dwindling numbers of small, isolated, communities with tightly-knit social networks that remain in the modern world.’

Professor Trudgill was awarded an honorary doctorate from La Trobe University during his two months stay at the RCLT for his ground-breaking contributions to the advancement of linguistic knowledge.

An expert on English as an international language as well as other languages and dialects, he has carried out detailed studies of the dialects of the British Isles and of American and New Zealand English. His insights have been featured on radio programs in six countries and on television.

He has also studied the development of Modern Greek and Norwegian, endangered Albanian dialects in Greece, sociolinguistics in several regions of Europe, pidgin and creole languages, linguistic geography, and the diffusion of linguistic features in language contact.

His research has illuminated every-day concerns from the social implications of how countries with large immigrant populations like Australia and Britain teach English to diverse ethnic groups, to the way in which British pop singers were less inclined to use American pronunciation after the rise of the Beatles.

Particularly well-known for his research into standard and non-standard dialects of English and their implications for educational policies, he has published more than 30 books including the seminal work, Sociolinguistics, first released in 1974.

He has also published on ‘Sex, covert prestige, and linguistic change’, work which, among other things, highlights that how people speak reflects how they are treated.

Professor Trudgill says from an educational point of view ‘the position of Standard English as the dialect of English used in writing is unassailable’, stressing, however, that this has ‘nothing whatsoever to do with spelling or punctuation’.

As far as spoken Standard English is concerned, he says teaching it to speakers of other dialects may be commendable – if for no other reason than the discrimination against non-standard dialect speakers in most English-speaking societies. But he doubts such aims are feasible.

As well as having examined linguistic features of pop songs, he shared his problems in visiting his wife’s homeland in a best-selling volume: Coping with America: a beginner’s guide to the USA. Short-listed for the Thomas Cook travel book prize, it has also been translated into French and Portuguese.