The Evolving European Language System: A Theory of Communication Potential and Language Competition

Abstract

Modern Western languages were shaped in the course of European state formation. A number of languages each came to be closely associated with a national state and as a result became particularly "robust." This prior development, the theme of the first section of this paper, very much shapes the dynamics of the ongoing rivalry between national languages in the contemporary European context. Moreover, the process of language unification at the national level contributes to an understanding of the process of language rivalry and accommodation now proceeding at the subcontinental level, which forms the subject of the second section. There, a measure is presented of the communication potential of a language or repertory of languages for a speaker in the system: its Q -value. People will add to their repertoire the language that most increases this Q -value. The historical and analytic strands are combined in a third section, which uses data from censuses and questionnaire research to assess the competitive relations between the larger European languages and to adumbrate which language will come to predominate. Language Unification at the National Level'Since antiquity, Latin has served as the connecting language in Europe; in all the language groups of Christendom there were some, usually clergyman, who could speak it and thus maintain connections with other language groups. The connecting web was tenuous, the Latin speakers few in number, but the web held together until the nineteenth century in the domain of religion and learning. Before that, by the eighteenth century, however, French had emerged as an alternative connecting language, more geared towards worldly ends, spoken at the European courts, by diplomats, and by men of taste and learning all over the continent.

From Englishization to Imposed Multilingualism: Globalization, the Internet, and the Political Economy of the Linguistic Code

“…The spread of English is sometimes compared to the spread of communication technologies, such as the telephone or the Internet (de Swaan 1993(de Swaan , 1998a(de Swaan , 1998b, but learning to use the telephone or the Internet is not difficult, whereas gaining proficiency in a language is a highly demanding task. A very rudimentary grasp of English-a closed set of key words and phrases-is fairly easy to obtain, especially in the global flooding of American TV broadcasts and movies.…”

“…First of all, it spells a conceptual change with respect to the question of the future of the world's languages. Current theoretical models (most notably de Swaan 1993de Swaan , 1998ade Swaan , 1998b conceptualize the spread of English in terms of the practical need to form networks of global communication. In Abram de Swaan's model, languages differ with respect to their prevalence and centrality.…”

Transnationales linguistisches Kapital der Bürger und der Prozess der Europäischen Integration

“…Jeder, der in einem Land war, dessen Sprache er nicht spricht und versucht hat, den Weg zum Bahnhof oder zum Flughafen herauszufinden, weiß dies. 2 Die Menge der Einzelsprachen, die auf der Erde gesprochen werden, die Dominanz mancher Sprachen und die Bedeutungslosigkeit anderer Sprachen wird entscheidend durch die Machtstrukturen der gesellschaftlichen Institutionenordnung geprägt (de Swaan 1993(de Swaan , 2001b. So ist zum Beispiel die Dominanz des Englischen in der Welt u.a.…”

Los mercados lingüísticos

“…En cuanto a los estudios procedentes de la sociología y la ciencia política 3 , que parten de la perspectiva teórica de la elección racional, se trata de un núme-ro limitado de autores que han depositado su interés en la potencialidad del «método económico» para abordar la problemática concerniente a los idiomas, bajo la denominación de «economía política del lenguaje» o «sociología política del lenguaje», centrándose en asuntos que se refieren a la distribución de recursos entre grupos lingüísticos bajo una determinada estructura de intereses, observables particularmente en los procesos de planificación lingüística en diferentes contextos, ya sea en la construcción del estado moderno (Laitin, 1988(Laitin, , 1993, como ante los retos de la globalización (De Swaan, 1993). Colomer (1996, p. 10-11), en una propuesta integradora de las distintas disciplinas, sitúa el centro de atención en el objeto particular en el que se centra el investigador para clasificar el trabajo científico.…”