It is sometimes thought because a new language is readily learned, especially in youth, that language is a relatively unstable factor in human history, less permanent than race. It is necessary to guard against two fallacies in this connection. The first is to argue from individuals to societies; the second, that because change is possible, it takes place.
As a matter of fact, languages often preserve their existence, and even their territory, with surprising tenacity in the face of conquest, new religions and culture, and the economic disadvantages of unintelligibility. To-day, Breton, a Keltic dialect, maintains itself in France as the every-day language of the people in the isolated province of Brittany—a sort of philological fossil. It has withstood the influence of two thousand years of contact, first with Latin, then with Frankish German, at last with French. Its Welsh sister-tongue flourishes in spite of the Anglo-Saxon speech of the remainder of Great Britain. The original inhabitants of Spain were mostly of non-Aryan stock. Keltic, Roman, and Gothic invasions have successively swept over them and finally left the language of the country Romance, but the original speech also survives the vicissitudes of thousands of years and is still spoken in the western Pyrenees as Basque. Ancient Egypt was conquered by the Hyksos, the Assyrian, the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman, but whatever the official speech of the ruling class, the people continued to speak Egyptian. Finally, the Arab came and brought with him a new religion, which entailed use of the Arabic language. Egypt has at last become Arabic-speaking, but until a century or two ago the Coptic language, the daughter of the ancient Egyptian tongue of five thousand years ago, was kept alive by the native Christians along the Nile, and even to-day it survives in ritual. The boundary between French on the one side and German, Dutch, and Flemish on the other, has been accurately known for over six hundred years. With all the wars and conquests back and forth across the speech line, endless political changes and cultural influences, this line has scarcely anywhere shifted more than a few dozen miles, and in places has not moved by a comfortable afternoon’s stroll.
While populations can learn and unlearn languages, they tend to do so with reluctance and infinite slowness, especially while they remain in their inherited territories. Speech tends to be one of the most persistent ethnic characters.
In general, where two populations mingle, the speech of the more numerous prevails, even if it be the subject nationality. A wide gap in culture may overcome the influence of the majority, yet the speech of a culturally more active and advanced population ordinarily wrests permanent territory to itself slowly except where there is an actual crowding out or numerical swamping of the natives. This explains the numerous survivals and “islands” of speech: Keltic, Albanian, Basque, Caucasian, in Europe; Dravidian and Kolarian in India; Nahuatl and Maya and many others in modern Mexico; Quechua in Peru; Aymara in Bolivia; Tupi in Brazil. There are cases to the contrary, like the rapid spread of Latin in most of Gaul after Cæsar’s conquest, but they seem exceptional.
As to the relative permanence of race and speech, everything depends on the side from which the question is approached. From the point of view of hereditary strains, race must be the more conservative, because it can change rapidly only through admixture with another race, whereas a language may be completely exchanged in a short time. From the point of view of history, however, which regards human actions within given territories, speech is often more stable. Wars or trade or migration may bring one racial element after another into an area until the type has become altered or diluted, and yet the original language, or one directly descended from it, remains. The introduction of the negro from Africa to America illustrates this distinction. From the point of view of biology, the negro has at least partially preserved his type, although he has taken on a wholly new language. As a matter of history, the reverse is true: English continues to be the speech of the southern United States, whereas the population now consists of two races instead of one, and the negro element has been altered by the infusion of white blood. It is a fallacy to think, because one can learn French or become a Christian and yet is powerless to change his eye color or head shape, that language and culture are altogether less stable than race. Speech and culture have an existence of their own, whose integrity does not depend on hereditary integrity. The two may move together or separately.
53. The Biological and Historical Nature of Language
It is a truism, but one important never to forget in the study of man, that the faculty of speech is innate, but every language wholly acquired. Moreover, the environment of which languages are the product is not a natural one, that is, geographic or climatic, but social. All words and speech forms that are learned—and they constitute almost the complete mass of language—are imitated directly from other human beings. Those new forms that from time to time come into use rest on existing speech material, are shaped according to tendencies already operative although perhaps more or less hidden, cannot generally be attributed, as regards origin, or at least entire origin, to single individuals; in short, present a history similar to that of inventions and new institutions. Language thus is a superorganic product; which of course does not contradict—in fact implies—that it rests on an organic basis.
The “speech” of the animals other than man has something in common with human languages. It consists of sounds produced by the body, accompanied by certain mental activities or conditions, and capable of arousing certain definite responses in other individuals of the species. It differs from human speech in several fundamental particulars. First of all, the cries and calls and murmurs of the brutes appear to be wholly instinctive. A fowl raised alone in an incubator will peep and crow or cluck as it will scratch and peck. A dog reared by a foster cat will bark, or growl, or whine, or yelp, when it has attained the requisite age, and on application of the proper stimulus, as he will wag or crouch or hunt or dig, and no differently from the dog brought up in association with other dogs. By contrast, the Japanese infant turned over to American foster parents never utters or knows a single Japanese word, learns only English, and learns that as well as do his Caucasian step-brothers. Evidently then, animal speech is to all intents wholly organic and not at all “social” in the sense of being superorganic. If this summary is not absolutely exact, it departs from the truth only infinitesimally.
Further, animal speech has no “meaning,” does not serve as a vehicle of “communication.” The opposite is often assumed popularly, because we anthropomorphize. If it is said that a dog’s growl “means” anger, and that his bark “communicates” suspicion or excitement to his fellows, the words are used in a sense different from their significance when we say that the term red “means” the color at one end of the spectrum, or that a message of departure “communicates” information. The animal sounds convey knowledge only of subjective states. They “impart” the fact that the utterer feels anger, excitement, fear, pain, contentment, or some other affect. They are immediate reflex responses to a feeling. They may be “understood” in the sense that a sympathetic feeling is evoked or at any rate mobilized; and thereby they may lead or tend to lead to action by the hearers. In the same way, any man instinctively “understands” the moan of a fellow human being. But the moan does not tell whether the pain is of a second’s or a week’s duration, due to a blow or to gas in the bowel, to an ulcerated tooth or to mental anguish. There is no communication of anything objective, of ideas as distinct from feelings, as when we say red or break or up or water. Not one of these simple concepts can be communicated as such by any brute speech.
One consequence is the “arbitrariness” of human speech. Why should the sound-cluster red denote that particular color rather than green? Why does the same word often designate quite distinct ideas in different languages—the approximate sound group lay meaning “milk” in French; lass “a girl” in English, “tired” in French, “allow” in German? Such facts are physiologically arbitrary; just as it is physiologically arbitrary and organically meaningless that Americans live in a republic and Britons under a monarchy, or that they turn respectively to the right and left on the road. Phenomena like these have other social, cultural, or superorganic phenomena as their immediate causes or antecedents. In the light of such antecedents, viewed on the level of history, these phenomena are intelligible: we know why the United States is a republic, we can trace the development of words like lay and lass. It is only from the biological plane that such facts seem insignificant or arbitrary.