Introduction
This
Our interest in the history of lingua franca and lingua sacra is a contemporary one, and while examining a range of historic cases we will start from a modern point de vue, using concepts, categories and analyses from contact linguistics. Beyond history and linguistics, we will draw also on disciplines such as anthropology, cultural history
Throughout, our focus will be on questions such as: What are the characteristic properties of lingua sacra, and of lingua franca? What connection, if any, is there between the function or purpose each of them serves and their linguistic form and structure? And what about their history and the difference in longue durée
In section 1.4, we will look into the historic interaction
1.1 Multilingualism in Linguistic and Historical Perspective: Preliminary Considerations
1.1.1 Introduction
Lingua franca and lingua sacra are two very different notions, involving very different disciplines and domains of knowledge. On the one hand, lingua franca—as a vehicle necessary for bridging gaps of communication and comprehension between speakers of different languages—clearly belongs within the domain of linguistics, and today it has a central place in the study of multilingualism and language contact
Meanwhile, from the history of languages we learn that at the end of Classical Antiquity it was St. Jerome’s Vulgate, his translation
So what else do we know of such language constellations, and what insights do we have that can help us to understand them? How, for example, did the particular, historical Lingua Franca that used to be spoken all round the Mediterranean, become a byword for the general category of lingua francas? Which lingua francas and which lingua sacras do we encounter in history; how were they used and by whom; how did they function; and what linguistic properties did they have? And, from a more general perspective: could it be that with lingua franca and lingua sacra we have to do not with two actual languages, but rather with different roles, uses or functions of language—instances, perhaps, of
These and other such questions will be discussed in this contribution, the purpose of which is to try and clarify the notions of lingua franca and lingua sacra, defining their place in history and in linguistics, as well as the conceptual networks around them. But, faced with the very different disciplinary perspectives mentioned above, we will also have to explore how these may be combined into an integrated approach that can do justice to both, and contribute to our understanding of the dynamics and interaction of lingua franca and lingua sacra. As a framework for this investigation we will adopt a systematic
As for the structure of this contribution, in this first section, we will discuss the linguistic and historical preliminaries necessary for our investigation. In the next section, we will take a closer look, first at the historic Lingua Franca as spoken for many centuries around the ports of the Mediterranean until the beginning of the twentieth century; then also at the development of lingua franca as a general category in modern contact linguistics. In section 1.3, we will explore the notion of linga sacra as well as the linguistic features associated with it. In the closing section, our focus will be on the dynamics of lingua franca and lingua sacra in contact in history, as a springboard towards studying the interaction of languages and empires in the Ancient World.
1.1.2 Linguistic Preliminaries
On language(s) and linguistics in general
The following preliminary assumptions and considerations appear to me crucial when studying language(s), multilingualism
(1) Language is always much more than “just” language Every language comes with its own characteristic and richly varied structures, the operation of which involves all kinds of underlying mechanisms of our minds and our brains. But every language also comes with many other equally significant characteristic aspects: with symbolic power and with meaning, content and information; with a context in culture and history plus a range of functions to serve in communication; with implications in the interaction
The discipline of modern linguistics is no less complex and diverse in character. As Ferenc Kiefer and Piet van Sterkenburg have demonstrated with their collection of keynote lectures for the five-yearly international conferences of the Comité International Permanent de Linguistes (CIPL), over the century since the Cours de Linguistique Générale of Ferdinand de Saussure6 the discipline of linguistics has taken an enormous flight.7 With 32 very different major subject areas, the landmark 10-volume Elzevier Encyclopedia of Linguistics8 mirrors the complexity of our object of investigation, language. So does the Blackwell Handbook of Linguistics by Aronoff and Rees-Miller,9 which is just one volume in a series of 35 authoritative handbooks, each containing between thirty and forty expert chapters, which, taken together, cover all the major subdisciplines within linguistics today. The same holds for CIPL’s Linguistic Bibliography Online, published by Brill, and its vast, annual coverage since 1949 of scholarly publications from all subdisciplines of theoretical linguistics, both general and language-specific, from all geographic areas, and with special attention to non-Indo-European,
(2) Language is never just “a” language With an estimated 7,000 languages in the world today,10 broadly divided into 250 very different language families, of which the Indo-European
Now, if we combine this enormous diversity of languages with the complexity of the discipline of linguistics which we noted above, we will quickly run into a myriad multiplicity of questions and problems for investigation—testimony to the ongoing growth, expansion and deepening of the domain of linguistics. Note, for example, that while Aronoff and Rees-Miller’s Handbook of Linguistics contains just one single chapter on the subject of multilingualism,13 the later
Interestingly, in the opening chapter of this Handbook, John Edwards, in an attempt to bring some order to the discussion, presents an ecolinguistic
(3) The perspective of time At this point, we may ask how old multilingualism and linguistic diversity really are. It is not just the world of today which is multilingual; the past has had its fair share too. Many languages have vanished, and from Anglosaxon and Etruscan via Ostrogothic, Punic and
When we travel back in time, what we find is that, at each and every stage of the written record for the past 5,000 years, there have always been many languages in the world. Three millennia BCE,
And before Uruk? Here, as Steven Fischer has observed,32 there is “an absolute boundary of linguistic reconstruction” in “the teeming linguascape of 10,000 years ago.” Beyond that boundary, we move into evolutionary time—when it may well have taken very long indeed, from the earliest beginnings of language (perhaps about 100,000, or possibly 200,000 years ago)33 until the final assemblage of the disparate components—such as vocal imitation and language play, signaling behavior and communicative interaction, speech sound production, the use of structured and meaningful units and verbal
With linguistic diversity of such substantial character as ancient as that, one can understand why Fischer has come to reject the notion that there has ever been one single
(4) Our human language faculty If, now, on the one hand, with Fischer, what we are looking for is no longer that putative, single, universal but nonexistent Ursprache
In my view, in the investigation of linguistic diversity our primary focus should not just be on all those very many languages taken individually, however fascinating that is, but rather go beyond this to the underlying human language faculty, which enables us humans to generate all those very different languages, and also to cope with and overcome—however (im)perfectly, as the case may be—the differences, gaps and barriers between those languages. We humans do not come into the world equipped with a single, particular, fully-fledged language. We are born unfinished, helpless and dependent on others, but fortunately endowed with all kinds of abilities, faculties and senses—one of which is the human language faculty. And as Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836, lxvi—“Die Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedanken”),37 Ferdinand de Saussure (1972, 26—“la faculté de constituer une langue”) and Noam Chomsky (1965, 4—“the Humboldtian conception of underlying competence”) have pointed out over the past two centuries, it is this human language faculty which constitutes the unifying focus that should be at the centre of investigation within the multi-faceted discipline of linguistics, and which should ultimately enable us to make sense of that 7,000-fold complexity of languages that exists in the world in which we live.
The same holds true when we are studying lingua sacra and lingua franca, and so the question that should concern us here is: What can these two tell us about the capabilities, the structure and functioning of our human language faculty?
On lingua franca and lingua sacra in contact linguistics
(5) The centrality of language contact and contact linguistics Given the pervasive presence and extent of linguistic diversity all round the world, everywhere we go we will find languages and their speakers in contact, and people for whom having a multilingual repertoire is an everyday living reality and necessity. That makes language contact a central and crucial phenomenon in everyday life.
The problem this poses for linguistics is a major one: How is it possible for us humans to handle this enormous complexity and
Yet, the point is: We can. And we do so through language contact. That is to say, however deeply each one of us may be stamped by the imprint of our
The study of language contact today constitutes a major area of interest in linguistic research, as we can see in Yaron Matras’s Language Contact38 and in Raymond Hickey’s Handbook of Language Contact.39 This field of study was inaugurated early last century by “the omniscient
Today, stimulated certainly also by the seminal Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics
As for the research questions that contact linguists are interested in, Els Oksaar has given an important programmatic statement:
Contact linguistics research today is a broadinterdisciplinary area of research. From a macro-analytic perspective, language contact originates from cultural, economic, political and scientific contact between ethnic and demographic groups. Micro-analytically considered, the starting point and the medium of these contacts are multilingual people who speak, besides their mother tongue, another or several other languages (dialects, sociolects). Language contact arises from the direct or indirect social interaction of speakers, influenced by the units of the communicative act and its sociocultural context. Appropriate topics for language contact are all levels of language system and language use at which changes arise when two or more languages, dialects or sociolects come into contact. Included in investigations today are also psychological, sociological, cultural, political and geographical aspects and conditions of language contact, when it is a question of determining not only what is at issue in a case of contact, but also how and why which contact phenomena arise or have arisen. This complex of questions has only been systematically formulated since the early 1950s.46
(6) The necessity of lingua franca in language contact When we now take a closer look, the question is: How does this contact between languages and their speakers actually work? And what sort of mechanisms and processes does it involve? A good starting point here is offered by Larry Trask, who defines language contact as:
Any change in a language resulting from the influence of aneighboring language of which the speakers of the first have some knowledge; the passage of linguistic objets or features from one language to another. The effects of contact may range from the trivial to the overwhelming, and may involve vocabulary, phonology, morphology, syntax or just about anything else. The simplest contact is borrowing, but far more radical types are possible, including (for example) metatypy, the creation of non-genetic languages and (the ultimate) language shift.47
And indeed, in language contact, it seems that almost anything can happen. Language contact comes in many different shapes, forms and modes, and may have the most diverse effects: not just coexistence of languages,
The central fact here is that, in language contact between people of a completely different mother tongue and culture, we humans are capable of reaching out, adapting our language, constructing comprehension, and producing some sort of agreement—or not, as the case may be. But whatever the outcome of language contact, the need to do something to overcome the barriers hampering it is clear and pressing. Thus, language contact “forces people to develop adaptive strategies such as creating and using a lingua franca.”48 Or, as John Edwards put it: “In such a world [sc. ‘of many languages,’ RS] lingua francas and
Indeed, lingua franca and translation—arising as they both do from need and necessity—provide us with two great methods for overcoming gaps and
About the general notion of lingua franca, and about the historic Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean we will have more to say below, in section 1.2.
(7) Terra incognita: the problem of lingua sacra What we do not find in contact linguistics, however, is lingua sacra. Or at least, all we find in Goebl’s Kontaktlinguistik
The Finnish referred to here is the language of
Beyond this, however, one will find nothing on lingua sacra in Goebl’s Kontaktlinguistik
The problem is: as linguists, we do not have a working view of what lingua sacra really is, or what its specific linguistic features are. Crystal appears to be the only modern linguist to have taken a scholarly interest in sacred and religious languages,60 and we would be really hard put to determine that this or that particular language is indeed a sacred language, or state why this is so, or why not. Also, as things stand, it would appear that lingua sacra is rather more a belief about language, and that this has to do, essentially, with religion and with sacralization—hence, more a category in religious studies than in (contact) linguistics. So, if we are interested in lingua sacra, we shall need to look beyond contact linguistics and draw on studies in other fields—in theology and the history of religion, in cultural anthropology, cultural history, biblical scholarship and philology—in order to come to grips with the notion “sacred” and the factors involved in this.
About these and other questions concerning the notion of lingua sacra, we will have more to say in section 1.3 of this contribution.
1.1.3 Languages(s) in History: Considerations and Approaches
(8) The longue durée of lingua sacra and lingua franca
When we now turn to the historical disciplines and the study of language in history,61 we encounter a variety of perspectives, ranging from historical sociolinguistics and the social history of language through cultural history and the history of civilizations, of religion, of ideas, thought and ideologies, to Global Intellectual History and Wissensgeschichte
Here, to begin with, we note that having the status of lingua sacra may contribute enormously to the
But in the case of lingua franca too, we may well be looking at a very much longer time-span than is often thought. The original Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean may have some connection to the Vulgar Latin
Now it is true that for the historic Lingua Franca spoken in North Africa, Thomason and Elgibali have given the fifteenth century as the date of its earliest record in writing.65 But this leaves wide open the possibility that the spoken use of this language was by then already very much older. Here—unlike in Italy, where Roman Latin developed through spoken Vulgar Latin into early Italian
Put differently: while on the European continent its sacredness as lingua sacra ensured the continuity of Latin
On this reading, lingua franca and lingua sacra can both achieve longue durée and longevity for the particular language concerned—though certainly by very different routes, mechanisms and chains of transmission.
(9) Sociohistorical linguistics and cultural history of language For the further study of languages in history, a relevant field is that of Historical sociolinguistics, which is the “investigation of language in relation to society from times before the human voice is recorded.”67 There is a conundrum here: when we aim to reconstruct the realities of the spoken world of the past, we can only do so on the basis of the surviving written documents.68 But more is possible here than one might think, in particular when we adopt the strategy of
The application of the concepts, techniques and findings of sociolinguistics to the problems of historical linguistics. The idea is that the observed properties of contemporary speech communities, such as variation, the social significance of variants, and social stratification, must also have been typical of earlier speech communities, and hence that what we can learn by studying change in progress today can be usefully applied in elucidating earlier language change.69
In this domain, Richter has demonstrated how, with good use of the available medieval records written in Latin
Comparable findings have been reported from the cultural history of the
Of special interest here is the role, mentioned above by Els Oksaar,74 of intermediaries in language contact
We will come back to these and similar questions in the two main sections of this chapter.
(10) The history of ideas and the sacralization of languages in nineteenth-century Europe As we noted earlier, the issue of lingua sacra does not come up in contact linguistics. Neither does it in historical sociolinguistics. We will therefore have to move beyond those disciplines and look elsewhere.
To begin with we note that, from the Renaissance onwards, and alongside the vernaculars discussed by Burke75 and Frijhoff,76 there has been a long tradition of studying the three sacred languages of Christianity
What we see here is a post-Latin
As analyses of nineteenth-century language ideology the case studies by Anderson and Olender fall well outside, but are a necessary and valuable complement to the domains of both contact linguistics and historical sociolinguistics (this contra James Milroy’s statement that ideology has no place in linguistics;82 it certainly has in the history of languages).
(11) Sanskrit as the language of the gods Yet another perspective, this time focused on a sacred language from outside the European orbit, is presented in the work of
We will come back to Sanskrit as a lingua sacra in section 1.3. What is worth mentioning here is the parallel which Pollock draws between, on the one hand, the spread of Sanskrit culture throughout Asia plus the great time-depth of civilizational processes involved, and, on the other, in pre-modern Europe, the dynamics of vernacularization vis à vis Latin
Latin (like Sanskrit) shaped the revolution [i.e. the rise of the vernacular languages, RS] far more profoundly than it was shaped by it. Vernacular literacy everywhere in Europe for centuries to come not only presupposed and was mediated by Latin literacy (being able to read and write the vernacular without being able to read and write Latin must have been a rarity), but the very sense of what literature meant as a cultural form was taken from Latin.86
The forms and conventions of Latin
The point made by Curtius and Pollock about the hegemonic afterlife of the Roman Empire is clear enough. Taking “hegemonic” in the language-historical and political sense of Antonio Gramsci,92 we see that in almost any sphere of life and culture across Europe, Latin models have continued to dominate for many centuries after the rise of the vernaculars, not just in the field of language and literature, but also in
When it comes to the afterlife of these classical ideals, or models, whether the language concerned is Latin
1.1.4 Language Is the Key
(12) Language history and Wissensgeschichte
Having
On this basis we may draw a comparison between Anglicization as a longterm cultural aftereffect of the British Empire with its Pax Brittannica,98 and Romanization
Seen from this perspective, language history and the contact it involves are central to Wissensgeschichte and its processes of knowledge transmission.101 It goes without saying that decipherment
The same goes for translation, for example, of god names, a well-known channel of transmission and assimilation from one culture into another, witness the equation, at
(13) Language contact and the transmission of Wissen A short excursion into the domain of translation may be useful at this point. In Borges’s tale, Averroes Search,106 the focus is on
Apart from reminding us of the immense contribution of Arabic civilization to modern world culture through many centuries of translation, knowledge transfer
Leaving aside the more general vicissitudes and disruptions to which Wissensgeschichte is exposed, such as the destruction of books,108 this is how the transmission of languages and cultures has worked for millennia: through such slow, long term contacts, chains of local exchanges and continuities of language, of knowledge, of stories, of culture, in a never ending process of Chinese whispers, with all the errors and misunderstandings (creative or otherwise) this may cause—and which can bring about enrichment and the creation of new meanings109 as well as defiguration, destruction even, of the knowledge content so conveyed. A case in point is the migration—from ancient times, over many centuries, through countless markets and other meeting points, relayed by innumerable travelers,
In our globalized world of today—when it seems as if travel, trade and technology
Language is the key here, and in our further pursuits it will have centre stage, as the tracer element on which we will focus our inquiry into the dynamics of contact and the ensuing transfer, transmission and translation
1.2 Lingua Franca: History and Theory
1.2.1 Lingua Franca Today
(1) English as the global lingua franca
To
In almost every domain of life, English is very widely used today: news and infotainment, popular culture, fashion and consumerism; the internet, the digital world, social media, mobile phones and apps; trade, finance, logistics, air travel and tourism; sports, medicine, health care and education; world politics, international organizations, intelligence and communication; science
It is this shared English lingua franca, with the rich, open, diverse and dynamic culture that comes with it, which today is the powerful and lasting legacy of the British Empire—just as, 1500 years ago, the Roman Empire left the world its Latin
(2) Perspective In this second section, in an attempt to move beyond the specific case of English, and in order to further define the notion of lingua franca, we will start from Cremona’s distinction of two different senses of the term, the first historical, the second generic.123 First, we will take a closer look at the original, historical Lingua Franca that used to be spoken around the Mediterranean. Then, secondly, we will undertake a critical exploration of lingua franca as a generic term in contact linguistics, its definition, its characteristic features, structures and processes, as well as the network of notions this concept is part of.
1.2.2 The Historical Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean
(3) Descriptions and questions The original Lingua Franca “was one of the languages which
In the linguistic literature, different and divergent descriptions have been given of this Lingua Franca. Cremona for example, states:
The name ‘Lingua Franca’ is probably an Italianization of Byzantine Greek and Arabic forms meaning ‘Frankish language,’ that is, ‘language of western Europeans,’ especially French, Occitan, Catalanand Italian (since the Byzantines and the Arabs had applied the term ‘Franks’ to all the Crusaders whatever their ethnic origins), … the ‘Mediterranean Lingua Franca’ was a spoken pidgin language used for communication between Romance-speaking western Europeans on the one hand, and Arabs (and later Turks) around the shores of the Mediterranean from at least the fourteenth c. onwards.126
In contrast, Hancock discusses:
The extinct Sabiror Sabeir, which gained impetus in the Middle East during the time of the Crusades, and which existed in various forms in many Mediterranean ports for several centuries. Known also as the Lingua Franca. Basically a pidginized variety of Provençal, influenced lexically by French, Catalan, Italian, etc., and various languages of the eastern Mediterranean.127
Similarly, in Perego we read:
Les auteurs paraissent s’accorder en général pour appeler ‘sabir’ un mélange de différentes languages romanes, de grec, d’arabe et de turc en usage dans les ports méditerranéens. Le type même du sabir est donc la ‘langue franque.’128
More recently, Trask has taken the view that:
The original Lingua Franca was a variety ofItalian, laced with words from a number of other languages, used as a trade language in the eastern Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages.129
The descriptions above present us with a number of difficulties. While Cremona and Trask speak of Lingua Franca, Hancock and Perego are using a different term, Sabir, though apparently for the same thing. Hancock agrees with Cremona that this was a
Progress in the study of languages in contact has been hindered by terminology often as unfixed as some of the languages it is used to describe.131
This holds in particular for core notions such as creolization, koinè, contact language
That is what the present exploration is about: a clarification of the relevant terms and concepts, in order to get a better grip on the Lingua Franca.
(4) About the Franks and their language Some authors have suggested that the term lingua franca may be linked to porto franco (freeport); Lingua Franca would then be “the language of free trade.” While this may apply to the global English of today, the original sense of the term Lingua Franca is, as Cremona says above, “the language of the Franks.”133
Note here that franqui, faranji or feringi was the Arabic name for people from western Europe—a usage we also encounter in Italian, for example with the Farangi
The Franks were the strongest political power to emerge in medieval times after the demise of the West Roman Empire. In 732, with the battle of Poitiers, it was the Franks under Charles Martel who halted the Islamic
The question here is: What do we know of the language spoken by those Franks? In the Franks’ heartlands in the former Germania they were speaking their own
(5) The Italian connection We must also, however, consider the view of Trask that the Lingua Franca was a variety of Italian.146 After all, it does make a difference whether the basis of the Lingua Franca was supplied by romanized Franks or instead by vulgarized
First of all we must think here of
In view of this expansion, together with the prestige and the impact of the Italian Renaissance
What we must take into account here is a key feature of lingua francas which we noted above in subsection (1) for English in the Hobson-Jobson dictionary of Anglo-Indian usage,151 viz. their easy adoption and incorporation of words from many other languages.
(6) No man’s language
There is considerable indeterminacy here, and we must acknowledge—as Dakhlia has documented152—how little we really know, and how unstable, variable, and undefinable the real Lingua Franca has always been. A relevant circumstance here is the paucity of data we have. In this respect, we note, first of all, that the Lingua Franca was always used in far away places, with strangers across the sea, for barter in the streets, the brothels and the markets—rather than in the metropolis, where Latin
Beyond the paucity of data there is, however, another consideration—as Dakhlia has made clear,155 taking her cue from a Franco-Amerindian contact vernacular, now long extinct, about which the missionary
More specifically, Lejeune’s comment gives rise to the following question: What were those French and
Underneath all this is a basic question: What does it mean to use the name of somebody else’s language to describe one’s own speech? As Dakhlia argues, in the case of Lingua Franca, if this language name was given not by those who spoke it but by others, and if for those naming it, it was not their own language, then the conclusion can only be that what we have before us here is no man’s language.158 With Lingua Franca we have before us a language of which no one will say “this is my language.” At best, it is somebody else’s language, like gibberish, or double dutch, gobbledygook,
With this new notion of no man’s language Dakhlia takes her distance from much modern thinking about language. Established ideas concerning national standard languages are not relevant here, simply because Lingua Franca is not a national language: there is no nation, no cultivation, and no standard here. The same goes for the core notions of modern linguistics—such as de Saussure’s
(7) Basic points: Schuchardt and after We now turn to where any study of lingua francas in modern linguistics has to begin, that is, with the first scholarly examination of the historical Lingua Franca, the pathbreaking article of 1909 in which Hugo Schuchardt established a range of fundamental points.160
To begin with, as he saw clearly, the Lingua Franca was a
Secondly, with respect to the characteristic features of the Lingua Franca, Schuchardt established that it was a reduced form of Romance, with a highly simplified grammatical structure, typical of pidgin languages, with admixtures from different other languages in a lexicon
Thirdly, Schuchardt identified geographic variation and dialects within “the Lingua Franca itself, as it was spoken along the North African coast. In the west, Lt was unquestionably
Contact is the key factor here, and beyond Lanly’s parallel there is a more general suggestion, viz. that, actually, any speaker is capable of producing such variation, and will if necessary always be able to resort to such reduced forms when a language barrier occurs in a contact situation.
(8) Further questions Our findings thus far: The historical Lingua Franca was widely spoken around the Mediterranean, and clearly a matter of the longue durée
Beyond this, however, many questions are still wide open. For example, there is the interesting issue of its geographical dissemination. Matras, referring to the “medieval Romance-based pidgin spoken around the Mediterranean coastal regions, termed Lingua Franca,” has called the idea that all other lingua francas are derived from this basis “the most speculative hypothesis, which is quite impossible to either prove or disprove.”170 This may be so for the idea of monogenesis; but when it comes to the issue of diffusion, we may consider, first, how Arends has convincingly argued for the historical spread of Lingua Franca, together with Spanish, Portuguese and Ladino, by Sephardic Jewish traders from the Italian freeport of Livorno all the way to Brazil and Surinam in the seventeenth century.171 Secondly, to the east as well, from about 800 CE, there were Jewish trading networks running all the way from Charlemagne’s Aachen, Cordoba in Spain and Tangiers in North Africa, through the Arab world, via the Baghdad of Harun al-Raschid down to Calicut in India and over the sea to Kuang-chu in China
Another issue concerns the question: Is the historic Lingua Franca still in use today? There does not appear to be a clear end date for this language, and the question may be hard to answer—but why is that so? Several possibilities come to mind here. Was Lingua Franca, a maritime and coastal lingo mostly used in harbors and at markets, perhaps too marginal and ephemeral even for its demise to be noticed? Has it simply vanished, thrown away as the disposable tool it was, too unstable and too variable to survive, a disparate collection of spoken varieties belonging to the slums and the harbor riffraff, with no support in writing, in education, or from a native speaker community, and was it done down by strong normative pressures against this no man’s language? Or is the explanation a practical one—was it simply because, after the end of the Age of Sail and the ensuing decline of language contact
1.2.3 Lingua Franca as a Conceptual Category in Contact Linguistics
In the second part of this section, we will now consider lingua franca as a category, focusing on the current understanding of this concept within linguistic theory; its definition and place within a network of related concepts within contact linguistics; and relevant distinctions such as langue francque, sabir, langue véhiculaire etcetera.
(9) On lingua francas in general The question before us is: What is a (rather than the) lingua franca? This time there appears to be considerable agreement; the authors whose views on the historic Lingua Franca we discussed above, have all four distilled the same key point, defining the concept of lingua franca as a contact language used by people who do not speak each other’s language, for interaction and communication in all kinds of situations: trade, war, markets, colonization, and so on.
Thus, by way of extension, abstraction and generalization,175 we move from history to concept. As Cremona has it, a lingua franca is “a language widely used for intercommunication among different linguistic groups (e.g. Akkadian
A language which is routinely used in some region for dealings between people who have different mother tongues. In the past this term was often applied to any interlect, even a pidgin, but today is more usually restricted to a mother tongue, though possibly to a version different from that used by native speakers .177
Matras agrees:
The term lingua franca refers to languages that are used for interethnic communication, that is, in interactions in which the participants have diverse background languages.178
English is by no means the only lingua franca. There are, in fact, many other such contact languages, on all the continents of the world.179 In Australasia today, we have Chinese
All these languages, from all phases of history, and in use across wide regions on all the known continents, have been (and often still are) extremely useful for contact and communication between speakers of widely different linguistic background.
(10) Research perspectives There is a variety of reasons why linguists such as Matras, Hicks, Trask, Weinreich and others have taken to the study of lingua franca, pidgins, creoles and language contact. To name a few scholars working in this domain: Mühlhausler182 and Calvet183 have made important contributions to (post-)colonial linguistics, that is, the study of how many of these languages emerged under conditions of colonial power, control and inequality; Thomason and Kaufman have established how, when studying these languages, the conditions of emergence and use of these languages must systematically be taken into account, since the linguistic outcome of language contact always depends on the historical context and circumstances in which they arise;184 Hagège has focused on what he calls the dialogic species and its creole laboratory, which provides insights into basic properties of the human language faculty;185 and Bickerton186 has leapt from creolistics to studying the roots of language under his bioprogram, with its central focus on the universal endowment and language abilities of the human species.
The following three observations may offer some background and perspective here. First, these languages are topical, important for their role both in world history and in the world of today. Apart from the phenomenal rise of English as the first global lingua franca, there are many other such trade languages
Secondly, studying these kinds of languages serves the purpose of critical scrutiny and scholarly hygiene within linguistics: Creoles and lingua francas defy conventional and established ideas and theories about language, providing counter examples that contribute to the testing and falsification of linguistic theories. Thus, for example, Schuchardt disproved the
Thirdly, we are witnessing here the “birth of new languages
Such questions are the subject matter of the new field of contact linguistics which grew quickly at the end of the twentieth century, and is today in full flow. With its new knowledge and insights, its new discoveries and its important theoretical issues and debates, contact linguistics has much to offer if we want to come to grips with lingua franca.
(11) Lingua franca as part of a network of notions: necessary distinctions As a category in modern contact linguistics, the notion of lingua franca is now being applied to the study of other languages with comparable properties, of the present as well as of the past. So our first question must be: What are those properties?
According to Matras a lingua franca can be a pidgin, but it can also be a creole, and could equally be an already existing language.195 The question is, how exactly are these various notions linked? In his dictionary of linguistics, Trask constructs an interesting trail of links and references, running from lingua franca to pidgin, creole, interlect and koinè,
We do so in four steps. Our first step here is to do away with the notion of “
Our next step is to consider the notion of koinè
We come a lot closer, thirdly, when we consider the relationship between lingua franca and pidgin. According to Price a pidgin is
a contact vernacular [...] for purposes of intercommunication, frequently in trading contexts but sometimes for other reasons (e.g. communication between masters and servants or slaves), in situations involving speakers of two or more languages, each of which contributes something of its pronunciation, grammar or lexiconto the pidgin. Pidgins are restricted languages in the sense that their range of functions and their vocabulary are significantly more limited than those of more conventional languages and that they have a simplified grammar lacking many of the features of the languages from which they derive. Nevertheless, a pidgin is not unstructured but obeys widely accepted conventions of pronunciation, grammar and lexical meaning.201
In line with this view, Matras observes that “pidgins might be seen as a kind of make-shift lingua franca.”202 Thus, to some extent, the notions of pidgin and lingua franca overlap.
In this context, fourthly, what about lingua franca and creole? The question matters, because many creoles arose in colonial language contact situations, giving rise to English-based, French-based, Spanish-based, Portuguese-based, Dutch
Creoles derive typically from pidgin languages but, whereas a pidgin is an accessory language and no one’s first language, a creole arises when a pidgin becomes the mother tongue of a speech community. The simple structure that characterized the pidgin is carried over into the creole but since a creole, as a mother tongue, must be capable of expressing the whole range of human experience, the lexicon is expanded and frequently a more elaborate system evolves.206
Here, again, we encounter a degree of overlap, this time between lingua franca and creole.
Given the overlap we encounter here between lingua franca, pidgin and creole, if we are to contribute from linguistics to a better understanding of languages in contact, we do need clear and careful distinctions that can help to disentangle the confusion of distinct but partially overlapping notions.
What is needed here is the distinction between function and structure. As Matras put it, “The principal challenge facing the study of contact languages
This provides us with a useful basic distinction. But things are more complex, and given the overlap that often occurs between lingua franca, pidgin and creole208 we must ask, what exactly is the relation between function and structure here? Is there perhaps a correlation between, on the one hand, a language’s role as lingua franca and, on the other, aspects of its structure, for example, a more analytic syntax
The answer comes in two steps. First of all, pidgins and creoles emerge to serve the same purpose of contact and communication as lingua franca, but a lingua franca does not necessarily have to be a pidgin or creole: it can also be an existing language such as Latin
(12) Core features of lingua franca From the preceding discussion of the historical Lingua Franca and of lingua francas in general, the following core features emerge.
The first, and essential, point was established by Schuchardt: In Lingua Franca
Secondly. The central purpose to be served by a lingua franca is for spoken interaction and oral communication across language barriers in a contact situation. What is needed is interactive behavior that can produce results in the market and on the street. Here, it would seem, anything goes. Do as Gulliver did, trying out his whole linguistic repertoire, in order to overcome the language barrier, choosing the language or communication instrument that offers the best returns. It all depends on the situation.
Thirdly, the key point is: the simpler the better. The key example from the original Lingua Franca is Mi andar. Do not go in for elaborate code, just stick with basic communication—that is the first priority, which overrides all niceties of form, rules and regulation. If necessary, we can reduce the structures of our verbal behavior and our language, using only basic
Fourthly, as for the manner and channel of transmission, note that the broken language variety used as lingua franca is a readymade instrument for practical use; a disposable variety of language, very necessary but handled without care, easily discarded and quickly forgotten afterwards; not
Fifthly, note that in practice a close connection between function and form, purpose and structure, is very common and prevalent. This means that we will always have to inquire into the concrete relationship between on the one hand the social role and purpose of a language variety in contact, and on the other hand the specific structural consequences this may entail.209 It is this very complexity which we also encounter in the case of the mixed language
With these intriguing properties, Lingua Franca is the polar opposite of the solemn Lingua Sacra, which, moreover, usually strongly benefits from being written. More about this in the next section.
1.3 Lingua Sacra: History and Theory
1.3.1 Religions and their Languages
(1) Introduction: religions and their languages today In
Take
Today, this is as common as it has ever been. In London today, as one of the after-effects of the British Empire, many gods are being worshipped: Allah and God, Dieu, Jahweh, Theos, Bog, the Hindu pantheon, the Buddha, Ganesha, and many more. There are also very large Anglican, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox cathedrals in London, as well as the largest mosque of Europe (in Regent’s Park), the largest Sikh temple (in Southwark), and the largest Hindu temple (in West London). Even Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest religions, established by the Iranian prophet
So many gods, so many languages. In London’s religious domain, multilingualism is a pervasive reality today: more than twenty languages other than English are regularly used for religious services, ranging from Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic and Aramaic, Chinese, Danish and Dutch through Farsi, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese
Of these languages the following eight belong to what are traditionally considered to be lingua sacra: Classical Arabic
The other half are languages which are used for religious services within the relevant linguistic communities. The Dutch language, for example, is used to celebrate the Christian religion within the Dutch speaking community living in London. But note that using Dutch—or Afrikaans, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish and Turkish
With respect to the first of these two categories, the languages of religion, there often seems to exist a one-to-one correlation between language and religion. For Moslems, Classical Arabic is the only true language of Islam, since the
For other languages, however, the correlation may not be as strictly bi-unique. Sanskrit, for example, is the sacred language not only of the Vedas
The Bible comes in a number of sacred languages—of which two are Semitic
At this point we are moving into the second category distinguished above, the languages for religious service. When these are used, for example when the Lord’s Prayer is translated into Dutch, this translation does not in and by itself turn Dutch into a sacred language. Equally, when the German linguist Johann Christoph Adelung, in his Mithridates, presented the Lord’s Prayer in 500 different languages,226 this did not turn each of those 500 into lingua sacra. For religious people and church members, however, this may be different, and the sacredness of the original may carry over onto the translation. An interesting example is the Bible in the Early Modern Dutch Statenvertaling of 1637, today still in use amongst ultra-orthodox Calvinist denominations in the Netherlands, who do not see it as a translation but as God’s Word itself.227 Here, the translation can partake in the sacredness of the original, with Dutch functioning as a lingua sacra in the same way as Latin
1.3.2 So What Makes these Languages Sacred?
(2) Ancient conceptions of sacredness: clearing a space for investigation Having identified a number of existing lingua sacras, from Arabic to Sanskrit, our next question is: What can we say about their sacredness? What is it that makes or made those languages sacred? What concepts, distinctions or factors are involved in saying that a particular language is a lingua sacra?
In section 1.1, we noted how the notion of lingua sacra takes us into new territory: viz. the domain of what is held sacred by people in the domain of religious language—a vast and rather complicated field of deeply-held socio-cultural ideas, beliefs, traditions and values about language and its magic
To begin with the Bible, note that this a vast repository of stories concerning language. There is, to begin with, the notion of the logos spermatikos—that is, the
The Bible is also the source of a number of conceptual traditions concerning language and the plurality of languages. In the
We should not underestimate the continuing influence of these ancient conceptions, or the implications they have for the sacredness of language. But we should also see these conceptions for what they are: myths—that is, religious ways of coming to terms with language and multilingualism. They may be ancient and powerful, but they are and remain myths. In our evolutionary times today, no one can seriously maintain that the universe did indeed emanate from God’s Word; that language really was God’s gift to mankind; that the snake did actually speak to Eve; that Hebrew was the language of Paradise; that the world has ever been “all of one tongue,” and so on. And while the Bible holds a rich collection of such viewpoints, these go off in all directions, and do not constitute a consistent body of testable propositions. Historically, furthermore, it is precisely from these and other such religious preconceptions that the discipline of modern linguistics has had to emancipate itself—in a secularization process beginning in the eighteenth century with the Encyclopédie and its systematic empirical investigations of language and languages, then continuing in the nineteenth century with the breakthrough and formidable successes of historical comparative linguistics. At this point we may ask—from a Wissensgeschichtlich point of view—whether “sacredness” and the practice of calling language (or a language) “sacred” are perhaps tied in with this early modern secularization process. Could it be that “sacredness of language” is a notion belonging to the speculative eighteenth century, just like its ideas on the origin of language, the plurality and the harmony of languages, or the ideal language? And how was this connected to the assertion of Judaism and Jewish orthodoxy in the eighteenth century, which went hand in hand with the promotion of the Hebrew language as its lingua sacra?233 Are we looking here at an early modern sacralization of language, in an attempt perhaps to counter the ongoing disenchantment of the world by the Enlightenment?
However this may be, for us, today, “sacredness,” based as it is on biblical or religious grounds, would appear to be just a belief, at best a speculative and pre-scientific notion, not an object of scholarly investigation. But then, if these biblical notions are no longer valid or relevant, the whole question of lingua sacra may be wrongly conceived and mal posé—and in that case, shouldn’t we reject the whole idea of “sacredness,” and abandon our pursuit?
My answer to this question is no—not until we have first investigated what we can say, from a linguistic point of view, with Crystal234 and Jakobson,235 about the characteristics of lingua sacra.
(3) Varieties of lingua sacra and sources of sacredness A practical starting point for such an investigation is provided by the article on “Sacred Languages” in Wikipedia,236 which invites many questions. Is lingua sacra actually an identifiable kind of language or category of language use? How are sacred languages different from non-sacred languages? If Latin
For an exploration of these questions we will now first take a closer look at the varieties of lingua sacra and the factors involved in their sacredness.
(3.1) Sacred and profane: the mana of language As a first step, we take the distinction between “sacred” and “profane” as developed in the comparative anthropology of religion, in particular in the work of Mircea
Eliade’s work does not contain a separate chapter on “sacred languages,” but it does offer a lot of information on incantations
This mana-aspect of language may have come down to us from magical thinking and ancient times, but it is alive and well today, and can be observed in everyday language behavior; and in the religious domain it exists in more concentrated and intensified form in lingua sacra.
Here, with Crystal,240 we can envisage a linguistics of religious language. Having opened this field of investigation, we shall discuss it further below, in subsection (4). In the meantime, we shall continue to explore here in subsection (3) what other sources, beyond mana and taboo, there may be for the sacredness of lingua sacra.
(3.2) Ancientness of language, and of religions: the time factor in sacredness Amongst the sacred languages mentioned above, we note that Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Avestan, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Latin
The time factor may go far deeper yet. The ancientness of a language may be linked to some beginning, or at least to a very significant moment in time long ago—an initial text or foundational event, perhaps the start of a new era and calendar
An example of the kind of cultic longue durée
(3.3) Rituals, repetition and incomprehensibility The cultic words and symbols, the formulas in ancient sacred languages and the magical practices used in the Frisian
The astounding longevity of these practices testifies to the crucial importance of keeping the formulas concerned always and unchangeably the same. The underlying belief is that “the repetitive statement of certain words can produce the reality stated.”246 All that matters is exact
Note, however, that this unchangeability requirement on lingua sacra sits uneasily alongside the fact that language is a dynamic entity, always in flux and in change. As a consequence, within a few generations, a sacred text, formula or ritual may become dated; its archaisms and ancient character causing obscurity and incomprehension; and triggering a need for exegesis, interpretation
Rituals
(3.4) Lingua sacra, sacred books and the word of God Yet another source of sacredness in lingua sacra is the existence of a Sacred Book or Text.
Here, again, it is not the language itself that is sacred. Rather, its sacredness derives from a text that is holy. The term often used for these languages is “canonical languages.”248 The classical
Religion plays a very powerful role here, as it is ultimately the holiness of the Book which underpins the status of its language as lingua sacra. The Sacred Book, in turn, is often sacred because it is accepted as the actual Word of God—whether this is in Sanskrit as the Language of the Gods,250 or in Classical Arabic
(3.5) Writing and canonization The sacred character of lingua sacra may also be due to the writing and the script in which the texts of a religion are couched.
Writing in itself can bestow prestige, as we can see in the story in Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques of the headman who pretends he can read so as to enhance his status within the tribe by the power, magic and worship attached to writing and reading.252 Nothing new here—since time immemorial, religious and magic powers have been ascribed to the invention of writing. “Many ancient cultures attributed the origin of writing to divine intervention”,253 and Crystal mentions Toth, Nabu, Odin and Brahma as gods of script and writing.254 Writing carries great symbolic power, and for many centuries, the Sybilline books in the Etruscan
So, we must consider the question: Is the sacredness of lingua sacra due to the
Note that Bouquet says that ancient script and writing are not necessarily, and have not always been, ipso facto sacred as such.256 Writing and its invention may well be tied into the organization and continuity of ancient institutions that one could not run very well without it—administration
Even so, even if writing does not have a religious origin, “much ancient writing is connected with sacred affairs, events, and persons”,259 and “
Eventually, this process produced sacred books, validated and canonized by a religious community that sets its seal on the standard compilation of the relevant sacred literature. And this is the core point here: the crucial role of canonization processes. It is not just the symbolic power of writing; behind those sacred books there has always been an authority, a process of selection, and a decision about the canon they are part of.
Again, then, it is not the language itself that is sacred. Rather, it is the writing and the script, together with the relevant canonization process, which determine the sacredness of the texts and books concerned, from which lingua sacra takes its sacred character.
(3.6) Lingua sacra before the written word As we see, many sacred languages have the weight of a long written tradition behind them. For these languages, the combined power of writing, tradition and longevity ensures a cumulation of sacredness, or as we might say today, an accumulation of symbolic and cultural capital.263
Writing also offers sustainability and endurance. Without it, many sacred texts would not have been preserved. We shall never know the oral traditions of the Druïds, since “the Celtic
So what about religions without writing? How do those religions manage without the accumulated and institutionalized power of writing and tradition? Are there oral lingua sacras? How do these work, and what can this tell us about lingua sacra in general? Are our findings about written lingua sacra applicable here, when there is no sacred book? Or, if not, in what way are oral lingua sacras different?
In this domain of
This takes us well beyond the classical written canonical and liturgical languages, to the category of “secret esoteric languages”
Utterances of such sacred sounds can be a “release from an ‘overwhelming psychic pressure’” and “a spontaneous expression of the inner experience.”267 An example is glossolalia
Mantras too can achieve such a language-transcending effect, since “the very repetition of the
All this is supported by the ancient Sanskrit belief that the spoken word is a thing of great power, that the utterance of the mantra is itself an act, and that by saying the OM mantra we can overcome any difficulty.274 “OM,” or rather “AUM,” one of the oldest and best known Sanskrit mantras, transmitted through a longstanding practice of devotion from ancient times to the present, owes its mantra-qualities—and its sacredness—to spiritual vibration and the mysticism
Thus, ‘A’ represents the waking consciousness, ‘U’ the inner world of dreams, ‘M’ the dreamless state of deep sleep, and beyond these states is the highest consciousness of all, turiya, and this all-encompassing consciousness is represented by a combination of that one syllable AUM and the silence into which the final ‘M’ subsides.276
Invested with this elaborate sound symbolism, the mystery and grandeur of “AUM” is that it is “the Whole,” which is “invisible, ineffable, intangible, indefinable, inconceivable, not designable, whose essence is the experience of its own Self.”277 In this way, the “AUM” mantra is “the one profound and all-embracing vibration of the sacred sound OM,” in fact “the seed-syllable of the universe.”278
The key into all those “sacred sounds” is the mysticism of sound. There is a deep link here—at the level of dream language and the subconscious—between glossolalia (the language of the angels), mantras (demon language) and shamanic (or spirit) language.279 And we may speculate that in these sacred sounds we encounter the full force of the original mana from time immemorial which gives a spoken lingua sacra a sacredness of its own, more ancient and therefore much deeper and stronger than that of a written text.
This type of sacredness is very different from that of the preceding sections. It has to do with orality, with the power of the voice, of ritual repetition and oral tradition, with sound symbolism and mysticism—through all of which vocal energies can be activated and channelled into mantras, or into a liturgy, a Gregorian chant, a religious performance, and so on.
We will come back to this matter below in subsection (4.3) of this section, where these and other questions concerning lingua sacra and orality will be discussed.
(3.7) Sources of sacredness In the preceding subsections we have discussed a network of notions of which lingua sacra is part. In the process, we have distinguished various categories of lingua sacra—sacred languages, canonical languages,
We also identified a range of sources of sacredness, viz. (i) mana or taboo, with language as a hierophany; (ii) ancientness of language, in combination with longevity of the cult associated with it; (iii) ritual, exact repetition, plus a concomitant archaic character of the language used; (iv) incomprehensibility, Delphic character, perhaps deliberate secrecy, hence the need for exegesis; (v) a Holy Book or sacred text; (vi) writing and canonization; (vii) spoken practices such as mantras, glossolalia, chants, spells, prophecies, all to do with orality.
Sacredness thus comes in different shapes and modes, and can be linked to many different things. What we have before us is a broad complex of relevant factors, where sacredness cuts right across the whole spectrum. Again and again, it is the source—mana, ancientness, tradition, ritual, archaisms, incomprehensibility, secrets, writing, book, canonization, religion, orality—which ensures the sacredness of the lingua sacra in question. Thus, sacredness is an attribute: it is not the language itself which is sacred, but something else that makes it so.
1.3.3 A Linguistic Perspective
(4) Introduction The central question of this third section is: What is a sacred language, what is it that makes it a sacred language, and how is it different from language in general? So far, in subsection (1) above we have surveyed which sacred languages there are in the world of today; in (2) we examined ancient biblical preconceptions and myths about sacredness, and in (3) we discussed a variety of sacred languages plus a range of factors that ensure their sacredness.
The question now before us in this subsection (4) is: What can we make of the findings above in today’s modern linguistics? Is lingua sacra a viable category of language? Suppose it is a type of language or language use with specific functions and structures that is in some sense comparable to lingua franca, then what linguistic features and which functions are characteristic of the language forms and behaviors used as lingua franca? Is a general definition of the concept of lingua sacra possible? How can we make this work in linguistic analysis? What distinctions and concepts can help us to get a better grip on sacred languages? And how do we bridge the gap between the disciplines involved in lingua sacra versus lingua franca, such as contact linguistics and the religious-anthropological insights reported above?
What we need, in other words, is a linguistic perspective, that can help us in going beyond all those varieties of lingua sacra. To this end, and following on from the discussion of the linguistics of religious language in Crystal (1956), we adopt the framework of functional-structural linguistics as developed by
(4.1) The sociolinguistics of lingua sacra
It would appear the answer to this question is yes. Let us start, first, from the situation where the religious community and the language community at large share the same vernacular (as is often the case in the Protestant nations). In this case we can define lingua sacra as a matter of in-group communication within that religious community, involving a special religious vocabulary, special practices and rituals, incomprehensibility even. Now, secondly, compare the alternative: a religious community which has a lingua sacra that is different from the everyday vernacular used by both the believers and the world outside—as, for example, the exclusive use of Latin
In the first case, the lingua sacra is a different use of the same vernacular; in the second case it is a different language altogether. But in both these cases, what sets the lingua sacra apart is a matter of using a solemn register, a special vocabulary
At the same time, through such institutionalization and its practices a religion and its language can become a crucial factor in the sociocultural vitality of the language community concerned, as we have seen in the revitalization of Finnish
Spolsky’s comparative sociolinguistic analysis of language in the religious domain can tell us a lot about the social function, role and use of religious language, and offers valuable insights into religious language as an in-group phenomenon, plus the social practices and conventions surrounding this. This is obviously useful and valid. But note that—as we found in the case of London’s 23 “languages for religious purposes”285—while those languages all clearly belong in the domain of the sociolinguistics of language and religion, the fact that they are used for religious purposes does not in itself turn a language into lingua sacra. It is not the domain and social purpose that makes a language sacred, but rather, it would seem, this depends on the intrinsic symbolic power which that language has for its community.
That is to say, there is more to lingua sacra than social setting, usage and conventions. Here, sociolinguistics can only go so far. Or, more precisely, while the sociolinguistics of religion and language is necessary, it is not sufficient. There is a need to make further distinctions here within the domain of religious language, and for this, we will need to look beyond sociolinguistics, into issues involved in symbolic behavior.286
(4.2) Lingua sacra and speech act theory
An important first consideration here is that in lingua sacra it is not the language as such which is sacred; also, it is not the language as a whole, but rather, the particular speech act which is being performed. When the Pope in Rome delivers his urbi et orbi blessing in 70 different languages, it is his act of blessing as God’s representative on earth which guarantees its sacredness. It is the specific religious speech act performed by the Pope that is sacred, rather than the language in which it is delivered. This example triggers the question: How does lingua sacra work? If it is a certain use of language that is sacred here, as in the performative analysis of Austin,287 what is it in the Pope’s blessing that makes it sacred? And what about other speech acts in the domain of religion and language? In short, what contribution can a speech act analysis make to our understanding of lingua sacra?
From the point of view of speech act theory, lingua sacra constitutes a wide-ranging domain of language acts and practices, such as prayer, worship, glorification, baptism, naming, consecration and blessing, confessing and forgiving, the sacraments, oaths, bans, cursing, purification and exorcism, etcetera—all of which are used in religious rituals.288 Together, they constitute a collection of exclusive, usually prescribed formulaic speech acts, in a specific language or register, to be uttered according to precise instructions, within a community of fellow initiates, in particular settings (e.g. a consecrated location), and by a serving priest, who has the competence and authority to enact the particular speech act in conformity with the canonical liturgy of the church as institution.
This approach provides us with interesting insights into the characteristics of religious speech acts, which by analogy can be applied to the sacred languages of other religions. A mantra, for example, can be described as a performative utterance which relates to the ritual action which it accompanies, conferring divine status on its practitioner and divine significance to the action, while situating the participants in key events of their religion.289
Here, speech act/performative analysis of lingua franca makes a necessary contribution, which usefully complements the sociolinguistic analysis above. It makes clear that what is sacred here is not the language as such, but rather a range of religious speech acts, specific acts of meaning, symbolization and communication performed in and with language. Note, however, that as its focus is primarily on liturgic rituals and the rules governing it, speech act analysis does not have much to say on sacred performances as in prophecy, glossolalia, chants, hymns
(4.3) Lingua sacra and orality: on the power of mantras In our third sounding, we will be following on from our discussion of non-written religions and their languages in subsection (3.6) above, and look into the domain of orality for religious purposes—as, for example, in confession, chants, prayers, blessings, sermons
An interesting testimony to the special status of ancient and sacred sounds is the story of
There is a deep symbolic value to this story, for here this oldest hymn of the world, after millennia of oral transmission and ritual repetition by Hindus in India, was now being reproduced and disseminated in late nineteenth-century England, with the use of modern technologies, in printed book form and on the phonograph, with the same aim as in the tradition of devotion, viz. to ensure its longevity by capturing as exactly as possible the most ephemeral of events, the speaking voice and the momentary sound it produces—but with pride of place clearly going to the oldest and most sacred of them all.291 Mantras such as “OM” enjoy a similar special status, as we saw in subsection (3.6) above. In the tradition various reasons have been adduced for their sacredness: not just their ancientness, but also the use of sacred sounds, of sound symbolism, the mysticism
Here, we will restrict discussion to mantras. Going beyond the views from tradition, the question here is: Are mantras sacred? If so, what is it that makes them so? What can we say about mantras from a linguistic point of view? What is so special about the use of such sacred sounds? What can we say about the power of orality—the use of the voice, sound, speech and other oral means and modes, plus the impact they can have—that we encounter in the varieties of lingua sacra?
Of great interest here is the tradition of the Sanskrit grammarians in India who, understanding the importance of the Vedic mantras
Oral ritual, and its precise description, in the service of correct pronunciation and the exact and unchanged repetition of a mantra, necessary to ensure its efficacy, would seem to be of basic importance here, and a good key into the study of oral lingua franca. The study of the sound structure of ritual utterances may reveal complex phonological patterns which we find more widely in oral traditions—as Williams295 and Thompson296 have demonstrated—such as we find in glossolalia
Thus, along this dimension of orality, we can study the specific properties of sound and
As we see, all three soundings above produce useful insights into important dimensions of sacred language, which demonstrate the value of sociolinguistics
We need all three approaches; each on its own is necessary, but not sufficient; only the combination will do; that is why we have argued that they need to be brought together into an integrated Jakobsonian functional-structural analysis.
(5) On the linguistic properties of lingua sacra In conclusion, we now come to the same questions we faced earlier with respect to lingua franca. What can we say about the characteristic properties of lingua sacra? In what way is lingua sacra different from language in general? What features of language behavior, usage, form and structure are distinctively associated with lingua sacra? What linguistic consequences follow from this lingua sacra-function for the forms of language?
A crucial opening point: just like lingua franca, lingua sacra is not a particular language in history, but a generic concept defining a role or function of a language. Thus, lingua sacra is a vehicle serving a religious purpose, while lingua franca serves the purpose of bridging a gap or barrier in a contact situation in which speakers of different languages need to communicate with each other. In addition, lingua sacra and lingua franca each have a range of characteristic properties associated with them, so it seems useful to proceed here by way of comparative and contrastive clarification. This way, we can establish the following significant differences:
First, whereas lingua franca is born of necessity and is needed as a bridge in language contact
Secondly, lingua franca is above all an instrument of occasional spoken communication where, as Schuchardt noted, all is fluid and in flux. The first priority here is practical and effective communication, overriding all niceties of form, rules and regulation. What matters here is what Gulliver did: try out anything and use whatever works to overcome the language barrier. In contrast, lingua sacra is firmly set apart by its solemn register and delivery. Here, what matters is perfect realization: everything has to be correct or else it would be invalid, ineffective, or worse, counterproductive. The emphasis therefore is on keeping the language unchangingly the same, and to this end a wide range of prescriptive practices is used, of power, discipline and control, of canonization, symbolism and sanctions on incorrectness, of rituals and rules governing their enactment, the roles and behavior of participants at the appropriate time and place, in the right context, and so on.
Thirdly, as we noted earlier for lingua franca: the simpler the better. As we can see in the example of Mi andar—what works here is a pidgin
Fourthly, each of the two is linked to a very different channel of transmission
Finally, in lingua franca, as we saw earlier, there is often a close connection between its communicative function and its free, uncanonical
All in all, the contrast with the properties we noted at the end of section 1.2 for lingua franca could not be greater: the two are almost polar opposites.
1.4 The Dynamics of Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra in History: Analyses and Perspective
This final section comes in four parts. First, we will be taking a look at what can happen in the contact between lingua franca and lingua sacra. Secondly, to get a grip on the dynamics of their interaction, I will outline two distinct historic scenarios, one concerning lingua sacra, the other for lingua franca. Thirdly, in this context, as a special case that merits attention, we will consider the Dutch colonial empire in South East Asia
(1) Lingua franca and lingua sacra in contact The first thing to note here is that our explorations confirm that the social history of languages is rather more complex than De Saussure
As a result, today we know much more about multilingualism
A second point, no less crucial, is that lingua franca and lingua sacra are two different roles or functions of language, tendencies which, if taken to their extreme, can become polar opposites. Quite often though, a particular language functions simultaneously as lingua franca and as lingua sacra, in which case the two roles will complement each other. An interesting example is
The same confluence of the roles of lingua franca and lingua sacra can be seen in the adoption, by St. Jerome
In contrast, when the roles of lingua sacra and lingua franca are fulfilled by different languages, this may lead to tensions, perhaps even mutual exclusion. Here we may think of Koranic Arabic
Such was the case for the
As we can see, lingua franca and lingua sacra as roles or functions of language and as forces in history are by no means always mutually exclusive: they may be the same language, or they may be two different languages; the two roles may co-occur and co-exist in diglossia; they may overlap to varying degrees, or they may be in competition and conflict.
But in all these various cases—and this is our third point here—, what we have before us is a situation where lingua franca and lingua sacra are in contact with each other, along a scale of language contact which runs from total exclusion, through various degrees of co-existence and overlap to the complete confluence of the two roles.
(2) Two scenarios When we now proceed to look at the role of lingua sacra and lingua franca in the historical dynamics of languages, we note, to begin with, that empires do not have to be linguistically homogeneous. Indeed, they usually are quite diverse in their linguistic make-up. The more diverse they are linguistically, the greater the need for and pressure towards lingua franca, as a common vehicle for communication between the various linguistic and cultural communities within that empire. That is to say,
The same asymmetry appears to hold for religion, which always needs a lingua sacra, and always comes with one. But here too, the reverse is not the case—a lingua sacra may well survive long after the corresponding religion has vanished.
The point is that when lingua franca and lingua sacra interact, they do so not only with each other, but also with power and religion. So, when we explore the dynamics of lingua franca and lingua sacra, we will need to factor in the role of those other two major forces in history, as well as the asymmetries just noted. This is not a matter of either-or, as is clear from the scale of language contact we envisaged above. If we now add to this the factors of power and religion, this will necessitate a multi-factor analysis, plus, of course, further careful historical case studies, since in actual history, many other motives than sacredness and necessity, power and religion (such as convenience, practicality, politics, the missionary impulse, or simply the power of numbers) may play a role as well in language contact.
Here, as a first step, we will restrict ourselves to what happens when the two different roles of lingua franca and lingua sacra are distributed differently in history. Our findings on the dynamics of their interaction in history can be grouped under two distinct scenarios, one for lingua sacra, the other for lingua franca.
(2.1) Scenario 1: the hegemonic expansion of one’s lingua sacra This first scenario occurs when the lingua sacra of a particular religion is imposed and disseminated in the belief of its sacredness or its divine origin. The same goes for empires when they, as part of their mission civilisatrice
The paradigm
The same hegemonic scenario holds for Latin
Sooner or later, though, once that lingua sacra has become established as the lingua franca, it will (like any other vernacular) go into a further process of change, in the case of Koranic
Even then, however, this is not an either-or situation, since very often the varieties of language involved—the unchanging lingua sacra and the ever changing lingua franca—may well continue to be used alongside each other.
(2.2) Scenario 2: adopting an existing lingua franca The second scenario concerns the adoption of a pre-existing and widespread lingua franca, either as the lingua sacra of a religion, or as the official language of an empire—even if the ruling elite or priesthood is itself of a different linguistic background. As a consequence, the language in question will undergo a process of status upgrade, regulation and standardization
The paradigm case here is the adoption, for missionary purposes, of the Vulgar Latin
In the Ancient world, similarly, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Jews before it became the lingua sacra of the
In the western Christian tradition, St. Augustine’s missionary adoption of the vulgar tongue has had a long-lasting influence. In essence, his point was taken up in Dante’s vernacular revolution, and the Bible translations this stimulated in German
(3) An exceptional case? The Dutch colonial empire and its languages
The Dutch clearly—and intriguingly—handled this matter very differently from the other European empires, and did not follow scenario 1. So, what did they do instead—and why?
When they arrived in the Malay archipelago, they found both
The other lingua franca was indigenous Malay. In use all around the archipelago, without an empire of its own, but widespread and extremely useful as a language of contact everywhere, it was adopted by the Europeans who came to Indonesia
Alongside Portuguese and Maly, as a third language, there was Dutch, which—as the language of the VOC, the first multinational company in the world—gave access to a vast trading network spanning the oceans from New York and Dutch Brazil to Amsterdam, and from the Baltic and the Mediterranean all the way along the coasts of Africa, Arabia, Persia
In this language constellation, the general lingua franca was and remained Malay, for which, given the multiplicity of multilingual contact situations, there always was a strong demand. Here lies the difference with
For Malay, in contrast, it was scenario 2 that kicked in, when this lingua franca was chosen in the 1860s by the Dutch to serve their endeavor to unify and modernize the vast Indonesian archipelago as part of the Dutch colonial empire. In the process, Malay was standardized by the Dutch, with a standard grammar
(4) Venturing into the Ancient World Looking back, what we have done in this contribution is to bring together, from contact linguistics and the history of language and religion, contemporary knowledge and information on lingua franca, lingua sacra and their characteristic properties. In the process, on the basis of a variety of historic cases, we have scrutinized and refined the conceptual and methodic toolkit which we use to study lingua sacra and lingua franca. We have also identified two distinct historic scenarios for lingua franca and lingua sacra and their interaction
Now, looking forward, this contemporary basis provides us with a springboard into the past, whether it is as a heuristic or to test these findings against situations of multilingualism in other times and places than we have discussed so far.
In this respect, my contribution has proceeded in the same spirit and with the same strategy as envisaged by Gwendolyn Leick in her groundbreaking volume on The Babylonian World
We can only experience the remote past in a tentative and fragmentary way and through the lens of our contemporary patterns of thought. How we think about history always reflects our contemporary preoccupations. The Babylonian world seen through the eyes of the leading specialists in the field at the beginning of the third millennium AD brings into focus areas of concern typical for our time: ecology, productivity, power relations, economics, epistemology, scientific paradigms, complexity.317
Notwithstanding Piggott’s caveat that “the Mediterranean
But, remarkably, in her book we do not find a discussion of that most Babylonian of them all: language. Whereas precisely language is, and has always been, the key to any knowledge and understanding we may have of the lives, culture, ideas, beliefs and practices of those ancient Babylonians.319 And also, they themselves have produced interesting linguistic analyses of their language.320
But when—à la Leick—we pursue our own very contemporary interest in multilingualism and language contact in the Babylonian world
What we really need here are modern insights, from contemporary contact linguistics and the history of language contact
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Footnotes
Jakobson (1987). Cf. Salverda (1999, 51–53).
See http://www.ethnologue.com, accessed April 3, 2017. Cf. Calvet (2011).
Crüsemann (2013, 32, 190, 260, 311). Cf. Bienkowski and Millard (2000, 84, 174–175).
Cf. Weinreich (2013 [1957]; 1968).
Trask (2000, 183). Cf. Weinreich (2013 [1957]).
Goebl (1996–1997, 972).
Richter (1995a, 132).
Certeau (2002 [1975]).
Anderson (1991 [1983]).
Cf. also Ostler (2007, ch. 11).
Kraus and Ottomeyer (2007, 289–290, 461).
Gramsci (1971, 333, 416; 1985, 164–165). Cf. Pollock (2006, 520–521).
Pagden (2002, 158–159).
Chaudhuri (1991 [1951], 2).
Cooper (2013, 286–287).
Rankin (1987, 114–129); Cunliffe (1988, 123–124).
Chaudhuri (1991 [1951]).
Drijvers (1976, 26–27).
Smith (2013, 86, 98).
In the sense of Raymond Williams (1979, 176–177).
Cf. Salverda (1996, 51–52).
Cf. Yule and Burnell (1996 [1886]).
White (1986 [1950], 29). Cf. Whiteley (1938, 246–248, 267).
Siegel (2013, 518–519).
Cremona (1998, 302–303).
Smith (2005, 27, 209).
Hutterer (1999, 304–316).
Thorpe (1974, 38–41).
Lanly (1970, 330–331). Cf. Richter (1995a, 105, 118); Smith (2005, 24–27, 37).
Cf. Richter (1995a, 108).
Yule and Burnell (1996 [1886]).
Lanly (1970, 328–332).
Gilbert (1969, 21–22). Cf. Chambers (2008, 35–36). See Halbertsma (2002) for the early arrival of Christians and Muslims in Tang China.
Which, incidentally, also gave us the term linguist. Cf. Yule and Burnell (1996 [1886], 517–518).
Calvet (2002 [1974]; 1981; 2011).
Cf. the pejorative use of “Fatma’s” as a disdainful term for Islamic women (Lanly 1970, 42).
Weinreich (2013 [1957]).
Trask (2000, 214–215).
Matras (2009, 278–280).
Todd (1990, 2–3), cited in Price (1998, 105–106).
Cf. Thomason and Kaufman (1988, 212–213).
Johnston (2007, 101–102).
Scheid (2007, 112, 116).
Cf. Wikipedia s.v. “Sacred Language”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_language, accessed July 7, 2017.
Baumann (1996, 123–126).
Cf. http://www.ethnologue.com, accessed April 3, 2017.
Cf. Willemyns (2012, 88, 93).
Wikipedia s.v. “Sacred Language”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_language, accessed July 7, 2017.
Cf. Eliade (1957, 9). But note Piggott’s caveat: in ancient times “they did not see things divided into sacred and profane” (Piggott 1968, 15).
Eliade (1997 [1958], 8).
Trask (2000, 200). Cf. Trask (2000, 25, 80, 148).
Mencken (1958, 143–147).
Cf. Wikipedia s.v. “Sacred Language”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_language, accessed July 7, 2017.
Bouquet (1954, 20–26).
Piggott (1968, 12–13).
Williams (1981, 225–226).
Williams (1981, 169, eqs.).
Williams (1981, 206, 209).
Cf. Eliade (1997 [1958], 123–124).
Chaudhuri (1974, 145, 262–263).
Chaudhuri (1974, 146–147).
Malmberg (1991, 38–39).
Bouquet (1954, 40–41).
Beverley (1947 [1705]).
Anderson (1991 [1983]); Olender (1992).
Cf. Kraus and Ottomeyer (2007, 289–290, 461).
Swellengrebel (1974–1978, 10–11).
Swellengrebel (1974–1978, 8).
Swellengrebel (1974–1978, 11).
Bienkowski and Millard (2000, 89). Cf. Pope (1975, 85–122).