Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

the society, the more information it is likely to mark within the word; the more complex the society, the fewer semantic distinctions it is likely to express word-internally.

Perkins’s study did not really make waves at the time, perhaps because linguists were too busy preaching equality to pay much heed. But more recently, the increased availability of information, especially in electronic databases of grammatical phenomena from hundreds of languages, has made it easier to test a much larger set of languages, so in the last few years a few more surveys of a similar nature have been conducted. Unlike Perkins’s study, however, the recent surveys do not assign societies to a few broad categories of cultural complexity but instead opt to use just one measure, which is both more easily determined and more conducive to statistical analysis: the number of speakers of each language. Of course, the number of speakers is only a crude indication for the complexity of social structures, but the fit is nevertheless fairly tight: at the one extreme the languages of the simplest societies are spoken by fewer than a hundred people, and at the other the languages of complex urban societies are typically spoken by millions. The recent surveys strongly support Perkins’s conclusions and show that languages of large societies are more likely to have simpler word structure, whereas languages of smaller societies are more likely to have many semantic distinctions coded within the word.

How can such correlations be explained? One thing is fairly clear. The degree of morphological complexity in a language is not usually a matter of conscious choice or deliberate planning by the speakers. After all, the question of how many endings there should be on verbs or nouns hardly features in party political debates. So if words tend to be more elaborate in simple societies, the reasons must be sought in the natural and unplanned paths of change that languages tread over time. In The Unfolding of Language, I showed that words are constantly buffeted by opposing forces of destruction and creation. The forces of destruction draw their energy from a rather unenergetic human trait: laziness. The tendency to save effort leads speakers to take shortcuts in pronunciation, and with time the accumulated effects of such shortcuts can weaken and even flatten whole arrays of endings and thus make the structure of words much simpler. Ironically, the very same laziness is also behind the creation of new complex word structures. Through the grind of repetition, two words that often appear together can be worn down and, in the process, fuse into a single word-just think of “I’m,” “he’s,” “o’clock,” “don’t,” “gonna.” In this way, more complex words can arise.

In the long run, the level of morphological complexity will be determined by the balance of power between the forces of destruction and creation. If the forces of creation hold sway, and at least as many endings and prefixes are created as are lost, then the language will maintain or increase the complexity of its word structure. But if more endings are eroded than created, words will become simpler over time.

The history of the Indo-European languages over the last millennia is a striking example of the latter case. The nineteenth-century German linguist August Schleicher memorably compared the sesquipedalian Gothic verb habaidedeima (first-person plural past subjunctive of “have”) with its cousin in modern English, the monosyllabic “had,” and likened the modern form to a statue that has been rolling around on a riverbed and whose limbs have been worn away, so that hardly anything remains but a polished stone cylinder. A similar pattern of simplification is evident also with nouns. Some six thousand years ago, the ancient ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, had a highly complex array of case endings that expressed the precise role of the noun in the sentence. There were eight different cases, and most of them had distinct forms for singular, plural, and dual, creating a mesh of almost twenty endings for each noun. But in the last millennia this elaborate mesh of endings largely eroded in the daughter languages, and the information that had previously been conveyed through endings is now mostly expressed with independent words (such as the prepositions “of,” “to,” “by,” “with”). For some reason, then, the balance tipped toward destruction of complex morphology: old endings eroded, while relatively new fusions materialized.

Can the balance between creation and destruction have anything to do with the structure of a society? Is there something about the way people in small societies communicate that favors new fusions? And when societies become larger and more complex, can there be something in the communication patterns that tilts the balance toward simplification of word structures? All the plausible answers suggested so far go back to one basic factor: the difference between communication among intimates and among strangers.

To appreciate just how often we who live in larger societies communicate with strangers, just try to do a quick count of how many unfamiliar people you talked to over the last week. If you live a normally active life in a big city, there would be far too many to remember: from shop assistants to taxi drivers, from phone salespeople to waiters, from librarians to policemen, from the repairman who came to fix the boiler to the random person who asked you how to get to such-and-such street. Now add up a second circle of people who may not be complete strangers but whom you still hardly know: those you only occasionally meet at work, at school, or at the gym. Finally, if you add to these the number of people you have heard without actively speaking to, on the street or on the train or on television, it will be obvious that you have been exposed to the speech of a vast crowd of strangers-all in just one week.

In small societies the situation is radically different. If you are a member of an isolated tribe that numbers a few dozen people, you hardly ever come across any strangers, and if you do you will probably spear them or they will spear you before you get a chance to chat. You know every single person you talk to extremely well, and all the people you speak to know you extremely well. They also know all your friends and relatives, they know all the places you frequent and the things you do.

But why should all that matter? One relevant factor is that communication among intimates more often allows compact ways of expression than communication among strangers. Imagine that you are speaking to a member of the family or to an intimate friend and are reporting a story about people you both know extremely well. There will be an enormous amount of shared information that you will not need to provide explicitly, because it will be understood from the context. When you say “the two of them went back there,” your hearer will know perfectly well who the two of them are, where “there” is, and so on. But now imagine you have to tell the same story to a complete stranger who doesn’t know you from Adam, who knows nothing about where you live, and so on. Instead of merely “the two of them went back there” you’ll now have to say “so my sister Margaret’s fiance and his ex- girlfriend’s husband went back to the house in the posh neighborhood near the river where they used to meet Margaret’s tennis coach before she…”

More generally, when communicating with intimates about things that are close at hand, you can be more concise. The more common ground you share with your hearer, the more often you will be able merely to “point” with your words at the participants and at the place and time of events. And the more frequently such pointing expressions are used, the more likely they are to fuse and turn to endings and other morphological elements. So in societies of intimates, it is likely that more “pointing” information will end up being marked within the word. On the other hand, in larger societies, where a lot of communication takes place between strangers, more information needs to be elaborated explicitly rather than just pointed at. For instance, a relative clause like “the house [where they used to meet…]” would have to replace a mere “there.” And if compact pointing expressions are used less frequently, they are less likely to fuse and end up as part of the word.

Another factor that may explain the differences in morphological complexity between small and large societies is the degree of exposure to different languages or even to different varieties of the same language. In a small society of intimates everyone speaks the language in a very similar way, but in a large society we are exposed to a plethora of different Englishes. Among the throng of strangers you heard over the last week, many spoke a completely different type of English from yours-a different regional dialect, an English of a different social background, or an English flavored with a foreign accent. Contact with different varieties is known to encourage simplification in word structure, because adult language learners find endings, prefixes, and other alterations within the word particularly difficult to cope with. So situations that involve widespread adult learning usually result in considerable simplification in the structure of words. The English language after the Norman Conquest is a case in point: until the eleventh century, English had an elaborate word structure similar to that of modern-day German, but much of this complexity was wiped out in the period after 1066, no doubt because of the contact between speakers of the different languages.

Pressures for simplification can also arise from contact between different varieties of the same language, since even minor differences in the makeup of words can cause problems for comprehension. In large societies, therefore, where there is frequent communication between people of different dialects and speech varieties, the pressures toward simplification of morphology are likely to be higher, whereas in small and homogeneous societies, where there is little contact with speakers of other varieties, the pressures to simplify are likely to be lower.