Book Review

Nicholas OSTLER, Empires of the Word: a Language History of the World London: Harper Collin Publishers, 2005, pp. 615. $29.95.

Reviewed by TARIQ RAHMAN

Quaid-i-Azam University,

Islamabad, Pakistan

E-mail: drt_rahman@yahoo.com

This is a pioneering work in macrohistory. However, the author seems not to have dwelt on the pioneering nature of his work because he locates it in sociolinguistics rather than the philosophy of history. Indeed, so little is he preoccupied with the theoretical antecedents of his monumental work that it is only towards its end that he points out, and then only in passing, that it does not fall into the categories established by historical linguists. While linguists compare words, structures, sound systems and types of languages, he has ‘considered the evolving status of each language over the centuries of its career (p. 558). He calls it language dynamics or diachronic sociolinguistics of the kind which Mufwene has done for (mostly) African languages (Mufwene 2001). I would venture to suggest that, either out of modesty or for lack of awareness of other disciplines, Ostler has failed to situate his highly erudite study in the field of macrohistory, albeit with language as the focus of inquiry. While the field of macrohistory is well known with great and familiar names, like that of Arnold Toynbee, coming to the mind, that of a macrohistory of language is almost unknown (for macrohistorians of whom none consider language as a focal point see Galtung and Inyatullah 1998). Therefore, this book is a pioneer in that it looks at the great languages of the world—great both in the number of speakers and prestige—in order to investigate the conditions of their rise and fall which is what macrohistorians do about empires or other units of civilization.

The book starts with the theoretical question: ‘What it takes to be a World Language’ (Chapter-2), and gives several hypotheses. First, that ‘world powers make world languages’. However, this does not stand up to all the existing evidence. The Germanic conquerors—Franks, Burgundians, Vandals and Goths—conquered the Roman empire but learned different forms of languages originating from Latin (Romance languages) instead of imposing their own languages on these lands. Similarly, the Turkish, Mongol and Tungus-speaking Manchus who conquered China learned Chinese or, in some cases, Persian.

Another hypothesis is that economic power lies at the root of expansion. While this is true of some languages, such as English, the Phoenicians, who dominated trade in the first millennium BC, never succeeded in planting their language in their colonies. Indeed, it was Greek which remained the lingua franca of the Mediterranean.

The theory of religious significance explains the persistence of Sanskrit, Latin and classical Arabic but there were many languages which were considered sacred yet are now dead. So what makes for world dominance? The author goes through the entire history of languages which did dominate the world, or do so now, to come up with hypotheses which are given in the end.

Next Ostler gives detailed accounts of the major languages of the world. He classifies language empires both according to time and space. The Middle East comes first with Akkadian, Sumerian, Elamite, Armaic, Arabic, Persian and Turkish. The first three languages were spoken in the ancient world of the Tigris-Euphrates civilization beginning from 2300BC. Armaic was disseminated by the Persian empire from 550 BC onwards. The last three languages, spread by Islam, are still in use. Ancient Africa remains largely unexplored but Egyptian is mentioned as being the empire of a powerful civilization in the fourth millennium BC along the Nile. Both Chinese and Sanskrit, located in China and India, have flourished for about 3,500 years, but the domain of the latter language has shrunk now only to certain religious formulaic utterances while Chinese, though changed, is still a major world language. The European languages – excluding Greek and Latin which were languages of empire in the ancient world – have become imperialistic in modern times. The empires of English in Asia, Africa and North America and those of Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America, as also of French, are contemporary facts which will be touched upon later.

Ostler’s method is historical. He studies a vast archive of historical material, mostly in European languages, to trace out the use of languages in times and spaces. The candidates for linguistic imperialism are ‘languages that, for one reason or another, grew out of their homes, and spread across the world’ (p. xx). In some cases, as in the case of Chinese, the movement was across the space now known as China. However, it is not clarified that the apparent unity of Chinese is more because of its logographic script rather than what is defined as language in the other cases. What would have enriched the book further was an investigation of the consequences of linguistic imperialism. Languages carry a world view and establish cultural hegemony when they spread to other users. The languages of empire, used in the domains of power (governance, commerce, knowledge), must have attempted to impose world views, perceptions of reality and values of the dominating civilization over others. This question was worth investigating but has not been addressed even modern linguistic empires based upon Western languages to the spread of which Ostler otherwise gives adequate attention.

The most successful of these Western European languages are French and English. French had tremendous prestige and it is established in Canada, and used by the elite in their former colonies. The organization that promotes it is called la francophonie. The real world language, of course, is English. Its power lies in the fact that it is the language of the United States with its military, economic, scientific and educational dominance of the world. The author discusses the domination of English in chapter 13 (‘The Current Top Twenty’) also. The future of English—and of all languages—is discussed in the last chapter (‘Looking Ahead’, chapter 14). Here the answer to questions posed in the beginning of the book are teased out again. Technological innovation, learnability, culture, political power, economic power, prestige and freedom etc are all examined. Freedom, according to the author, does not matter but if a language is easy to learn (which languages similar to one’s own are) then it has an advantage over a rival which is difficult to learn. Prestige can come from many factors: great literature, religious texts, historical greatness, amount of material available, economic and military domination etc. However, it still remains somewhat difficult to quantify or determine precisely. It seems that English enjoys all these advantages at the moment.

If Ostler had placed his tremendous intellectual achievement in the scholarly tradition of macrohistory, he could have pointed out that he has deviated in a significant way from the practitioners of that discipline. Almost all macrohistorians posit grand patterns of the movement of history through time (linear, cyclical, arc, ascending levels etc). Some link the downward movements (contractions of area of influence) with moral decay while others believe in something which is ultimately taken as a quasi-mystical item of faith ( Hegel’s “Idea”; Marx’s doctrine of the triumph of communism as the last stage of history; Spencer, Compte and Weber’s faith in ‘progress’ which modernity brings in and Fukuyama’s faith in the triumph of the liberal free market in the nineties). But Ostler is at pains to point out that there is no inevitable pattern in the linguistic macrohistory of the world nor any obvious link with morality (unless whatever works is defined as being moral). This thesis is in conformity with the post-modernist distrust of grand narratives and Ostler would have done a great service by pointing this out clearly and with some reference to his predecessors in macrohistory. He is also the first serious historian of language to point out, like Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West 1918-1922) but unlike Toynbee (Study of History in ten volumes,1934-1961), that there is no historical law ensuring the dominance of English for ever. Such insights should have been placed in the debate on historical determinism to be a really significant contribution to historiography.

Notwithstanding this suggestion about locating the book in a different intellectual tradition than the author has placed it in, it remains a tremendous intellectual achievement by any standard. It will remain a landmark in historical linguistics (or diachronic sociolinguistics) where the author locates it but, even more importantly, in the field of macrohistory which needs to be demystified and deconstructed through evidence of the sort provided by Ostler rather than the quasi-mystical fitting in of facts to grand theories as has been the custom in that fascinating field of knowledge.

REFERENCES

John Galtung and Sohail Inyatullah.1998. Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change London: Praeger, 1998.

Mufwene, Salikoko S., The Ecology of Language Evolution Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Toynbee, Arnold.1934-1961. A Study of History 10 volumes. Edition used. Somervell, D.C. .1946. Abridged edition, 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press.