The Power Of Babel: A Natural History Of Languages, by John McWhorter

The author of this book writes from the point of view of someone who has spent his career largely tracking a specific set of conditions involved in the development of languages, namely the experience and aftermath of large migrations of people and the creation of pidgin and creole languages as a result of this dramatic (and often traumatic) nature, specifically that resulting from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. This particular book contains many traces of that focus as a linguist, including a belief that all dialects are more or less created equal and a high degree of resentment in the prestige that standard dialects and written languages receive. The author, rightly I think, celebrates the diversity of languages that is to be found but also understands why it is that people who care about upward mobility often abandon their traditional and indigenous languages to learn one of the top twenty prestige languages of the world (including English, Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Hindi, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Persian, and a few others) which offer greater opportunities than their own neglected and often stigmatized native languages. As someone who reads a great deal in the area of linguistics, most of what this book had to say was not particularly new, but it was written in a particularly melancholy way, reflecting on the confusing nature in which languages have proliferated and also been lost over the course of history, and how it is that those languages which have been written have tended to become frozen in form because of the fixity that the written word provides.

This book is about 300 pages long and it is divided into 7 pretty long chapters. The book begins with a short introduction that discusses the author’s own background and the source of his interest in language springing from his only-in-America puzzlement that there were people who spoke languages other than his own. After this the author discusses something about what he knows about the way that the first language developed and transformed into the six thousand languages that are spoken in the world today (1). This is followed by a discussion of dialects, and the way that they develop from earlier languages unless they are inhibited by processes which keep people communicating in a standard way (2). This is followed by a discussion of how languages mix with each other and influence the vocabulary and grammar of those languages that are around them in what the Germans call a sprachbund (3). This is followed by a discussion of the painful process by which existing languages are crushed and live again as pidgins and then as creoles in the need to communicate with people of other languages and often in the midst of painful population migration (4). The author then spends a chapter of the book discussing how all languages are more complicated than is strictly necessary, and how those languages that have a small group of in-speakers tend to develop into incredibly complex languages, only simplifying with the need of dealing with adult learners and communicating with outsiders (5). The author then speaks about how some languages are frozen in place, to a great extent, by the advent of writing (6), and then discusses how it is that cultural homogenization and the limiting of opportunities to those who speak prestige language means that most of the world’s languages are doomed to extinction or irrelevance (7). The author then discusses the difficulty of knowing the original language of humanity, before ending wiht notes, acknowledgements, and an index.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing for language to be fixed in writing? Certainly the spoken word is more free and less constrained than writing, but it is also as ephemeral as the wind, often leaving little trace in history unless someone somewhere thought to record it down in some fashion. The author complains about the written word being artificial and leading to unnatural strain on the eyes, leading to people who need to wear glasses (like this reviewer), but at the same time the author himself chose to communicate his thoughts about language in a book written with a high degree of linguistic ability and in language that would be comprehensible to an educated lay reader (while also containing notes and nods to more professionally trained linguists), because that is how one conveys information that one wishes to be remembered. The author gently mocks the way that speaking the way one writes is more than a little stilted and leads to the development of a complex style of subordinate clauses that is not generally mimicked in any kind of natural speech, yet in order to engage in intelligent discussion this sort of ornate written and speech appears to be necessary. The author seeks to define what is the minimum structure that a language needs to work, but comments that this sort of radical simplicity of language is only to be found in languages that are being born through the process of creolization, often in intensely difficult circumstances, or in languages which are dying as a result of having been neglected as living languages, and which are fading into oblivion as so many languages are today.