Evolution of a Language

I gave that academic a conceptual diagram. Academics love conceptual diagrams.

  

Clear as mud

  

‘Evolution’ is a tricky metaphor for language development. I’m still trying to work out if it’s suitable or not, though I suspect it’ll be superficially attractive but ultimately not really workable. Comparing methods of evolutionary speciation to language development might be pretty instructive, but one of the main underpinnings of biological taxonomy is that cross-breeding between species is impossible; that’s a pretty good description of what a species is. That obviously doesn’t hold true for languages (and it’s worth noting there are dissenting voices on the biological front as well).

So while most languages can be observed to descend from older proto-languages, you get exceptions in the form of pidgins and creoles (and maybe isolates, but I imagine we’ll come to those later). Above is my attempt to clarify how these relate and progress from one to another. Obviously it’s a much messier process than that.

Pidgins develop as contact languages where at least three different language communities meet, and there’s no obvious single choice as a lingua franca. The pidgin does everything its users need it to, hangs around, and when they have kids it becomes a creole. The second generation flesh it out a bit, give it grammatical bells and whistles and generally pimp it out to their satisfaction. To theirs but, as yet, no-one else’s; this early creole isn’t yet codified, so can’t spread geographically to a sufficient degree to operate as a lingua franca. The only way to really learn it is to live in a community that uses it.

After a while it does get codified. Or at least a variety of it will. Probably the variety used by the most dominant social group. This codification may or may not happen before the creole starts developing its own distinct dialects (though it’s probably all a mess of these things happening at once). However, once it is codified and accepted as an official working language it’ll start spawning variations of its own. All of which will get lumped together as ‘vernacular(s)’.

It’s then perfectly possible to see where this now established language could act as a lingua franca, or indeed to see one of its dialects spinning off on its own to feed into a new pidgin. And so the whole thing starts again. It’s possible, in fact it’s likely, that this new ‘feeder’ dialect will not be the prestige ‘standard’ dialect. Sailors and what have you. Filthy mouths, the lot of them.