Speak: a short history of languages, was written by Tore Janson, a Swedish linguistics and language professor. The book uncovers the history of how the world’s languages have evolved over the years from prehistory through to modern day touching on the earliest civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe. The book gives a good overview of the world’s large language groupings and explains how languages go from being spoken in small isolated areas, to becoming the majority or ‘big language’ of a large number of speakers.
I especially enjoyed Chapter 2 titled The Large Language Groups, which focuses on the histories of Germanic, Slavic, Romance and Bantu languages. The author describes how Bantu, a grouping of Southern African languages, was comprised of a number of scattered speakers as recently as 3000 years ago but with the development of farming there was a massive expansion in population and an increase in settlement throughout the southern half of the African continent. Currently there are about 180 million speakers of an approximate 300-600 Bantu languages of which only the major ones such as Swahili, Zulu and Xhosa are well known to outsiders.
In Chapter 11, How Languages Disappear, Janson discusses the various reasons why languages die out. The author makes a point of saying that most languages undergo a slow death rather than a rapid decline. Generally this occurs as over a number of generations another language comes to prominence in a given area, as knowledge of a more largely spoken language becomes more economically important. Globalization in general is causing large shifts in the use of language throughout the world with more and more people speaking one of the world’s major languages in addition to their local dialect. In future, these local dialects may be seen as unnecessary and die off as has happened with many indigenous languages around the world.
Currently there are between 6000 and 7000 languages in use globally, but Janson hypothesizes there may be as few as half as many within 100 years. He states, “the 60 largest languages, in terms of numbers of speakers, share more than 4 billion speakers among themselves. That is, about 1% of the [world’s] languages are used by about 75% of the speakers.” The breakdown of the number of languages per continent is roughly: Africa 30% of the world’s total with 2000 languages, the Americas at 15% with 1000 languages, Asia at 32% with 2200 languages, Europe at 3% with 230 languages, the Pacific at 19% with 1300 languages including the island of New Guinea with an estimated 1000 languages alone!
In the final chapters, the author hypothesizes what the language situation on earth may be in 200, 2000 or 2 million years. I have often wondered about the future of languages. No doubt, the English spoken far in the future will be nearly unrecognizable to today’s English as languages are always changing as long as they are in use. It is hard to visualize this as a learner or speaker of a modern language as the changes happen so slowly as to be easily overlooked in one or two generations. Nevertheless, if you pick up a book written a mere 200 years ago there will be a lot of grammatical structures and phrases unfamiliar to the modern speaker.
