Language Complexity in Historical Perspective: The Enduring Tropes of Natural Growth and Abnormal Contact

Abstract

Focusing on the work of John McWhorter and, to a lesser extent, Peter Trudgill, this paper critically examines some common themes in language complexity research from the perspective of intellectual history. The present-day conception that increase in language complexity is somehow a “natural” process which is disturbed under the “abnormal” circumstances of language contact is shown to be a recapitulation of essentially Romantic ideas that go back to the beginnings of disciplinary linguistics. A similar genealogy is demonstrated for the related notion that grammatical complexity is a kind of “ornament” on language, surplus to the needs of “basic communication.” The paper closes by examining the implications of these ideas for linguistic scholarship.

The origin of semilingualism: Nils‐Erik Hansegård and the cult of the mother tongue

“…Assertions that languages or linguistic competencies may be ‘half’, ‘deficient’ or ‘reduced’ certainly predate both Hansegård and Bloomfield. Examples can be drawn from almost two and a half millennia of Western linguistic thought: from the bastardized Hebrew described in the biblical Book of Nehemiah or Herodotus’ account of the Greek–Scythian mixed language spoken in Gelonus, from the Roman jargon rejected in Dante's De vulgari eloquentia , Bruni's rebuttal of the half‐Greek, half‐Latin of Grosseteste's translation of the Nicomachean Ethics , or Luther's warnings against a double neglect of Latin and the mother tongue in his 1524 treatise on education, and onwards, to modern dialectology, historical linguistics, colonial linguistics, early theories of bilingualism, or even contemporary sociolinguistics (see Heller & McElhinny, 2017; Jaspers, 2016; McElvenny, 2021 for a discussion of modern linguistics). But although contemporary visions of semilingualism clearly have a prehistory, listing historical similarities does not reveal much about the origins of Hansegård's theory, nor about the interests, ideas and aims bound up with it.…”

Creole Prosodic Systems Are Areal, Not Simple

“…Such a role of time depth in the areal diffusion of prosodic features is fundamentally different from the idea that creoles are young and have not yet had time to accumulate (tonal and morphological) complexity in their grammars (e.g., Bickerton, 1988 , 274–278; Lightfoot, 2006 , 7; McWhorter, 2007 , 4–5). The latter view is a trope rooted in 19th century linguistic evolutionism (for an epistemological deconstruction, see Krämer, 2013 ; McElvenny, 2021 ). The results of this study instead suggest that creoles and colonial varieties undergo regular cycles of shift from one part of the typological spectrum (e.g., tone) to another (e.g., stress) and vice versa, without an a priori assumption of simplification or complexification.…”