Here we are at the last post by glottologist Daniele Vitali, author of goWare, on the evolution of language that changes, and also quickly. In the first post we saw how the classic Italian uncertainty about how to pronounce the "s ” intervocalic is resolving in favor of the northern pronunciation. In the second Vitali focused, with many examples, on the use of the subjunctive.
In this third and final post we discuss whether the simplification of the language is really happening, or rather the fact that languages tend to get complicated over time is no longer true. Here is his answer.
The Papuans are multilingual between pidgins and creoles
It is normally believed that in the exotic country of Papua Nuova Guinea, which borders Indonesia and is close to Australia, around 850 languages are spoken.
Currently, however, only three are recognized by the state authorities: English, the language of the British colony to the south and of the Australian administration to the north when it ousted the German colonizers after the First World War, and then two "mixed languages" called tok pisin e hiri motu.
Hiri motu is a simplified variant of the indigenous language motu, and was used as English Language vehicular among the Papuans before English and Tok Pisin reduced him to bad luck.
Tok Pisin is the result of the encounter between English and the languages of the indigenous Papuans, and is today the country's most widespread language: born as a pidgin, it then transformed into a Creole.
La difference between pidgin and creole is that the first is a mixed language used only with a vehicular function, typically between the English colonizers and various peoples of the Far East (the term pidgin in fact reproduces the Chinese pronunciation of the English word business: we are therefore faced with a language used for business ), while the latter is a pidgin that ends up having a community of native speakers (there are also some of Romance origin, such as the French-based Haitian Creole and the Portuguese-based Dutch Caribbean Papiamento).
Creolization has fully invested the tok pisin (from the English talk "to speak" and precisely from pidgin, which the Papuans pronounce pisin), now taught in school, written in the newspapers and spoken by politicians, as the language of a growing part of the population.
Simplification
A feature common to vehicular languages is the simplification. For example, in many pidgins, reduplication is used to make the plural: it would be as if in Italian to say "cats" one would say "gatto-gatto".
In tok pisin reduplication rarely and only indirectly affects the plural (as wil “wheel” that gives wil-wil “bicycle” because this vehicle has two wheels, or kala "color" from which kala-kala “colorful”), and serves more than anything else to change the aspect of the verb (tok “to speak” gives tok-tok “chat” e luk “watch” becomes luk-luk in the sense of "fixing, observing carefully", i.e. examples of duration or intensification) or creating nouns from verbs (from sing “sing” we have sing-sing "traditional festival", that is, in which there is a lot of singing), but as we can see we are still in the field of simplification, morphological e lexical.
An example of phonetic simplification (perhaps connected with the plural) is sip “ship” versus great “sheep”: in English they are said respectively ship /'ʃɪp/ e sheep /'ʃi:p/, but this opposition, which is also difficult for many Italians, is rendered by the Papuans with the reduplication (after all, the sheep live in groups), because the phonetic simplification it does not allow to respect the phonological opposition.
In fact, Tok Pisin has only 5 accented vowel phonemes (plus 3 diphthongs, which however don't seem to be phonological), against 20 in English (this time including diphthongs).
English also pidgins a little bit
An observation must be made immediately, namely that among the vehicular languages there are not only pidgins, more or less creolized, but also national languages such asEnglish. In fact, if compared to the other Germanic languages, which are already simpler than the Romance or Slavic ones, it presents a rather stripped-down grammar (this does not mean that learning English at a high level of competence is very easy, as shown by the poor results obtained so far by the Italians, who are still fighting with ship e sheep: by "simplicity" we mean a relative poverty of verbal forms, a certain regularity in the formation of the plural, the elimination of grammatical categories such as the dual which was found instead in theancient Anglo-Saxon, and so on).
As known, also the Romance languages have introduced various simplifications with respect to the Latin from which they come: at first glance, therefore, modern languages tend to simplify with respect to those ancientwhether they are vehicular or not.
Venetian, the lingua franca
Let's go back to the vehicular languages for a moment to see the situation of Venetian. As known, the dialect of the city of Venice, once a great maritime and commercial power, has strongly influenced the Venetian dialects of the cities of the mainland over the course of history, and has established itself as the basis for know o "lingua franca", i.e. a vehicular language once used for exchanges in the Mediterranean, and gave rise to the so-called “colonial Venetian” with which the Venetian system has replaced dialects of the Friulian and Istriot type (therefore on the coast and in the cities of Friuli, in Trieste and in Istria).
Even if the historical sphere of influence of the Venetian is much more restricted than that of the English, a certain simplification can also be observed in his case with respect to the dialects and surrounding languages.
The colonial Venetian
In the 1977 article «Reconstruction in northern Italy: consonant systems. Sociolinguistic considerations in diachrony", full of important insights on several fronts, John Trumper he also dwells on the question of simplification in the Venetian dialects: the author explains the formation of one Koine which canceled most of the differences between the various urban dialects of the Veneto through "the dominion exercised by Venice over its hinterland", which however also had the effect of pushing the Venetians "to distort their own dialect".
In practice, "To underline [...] its independence", Venice created "new rules [...]. This new courtly language modeled on a Venetian dialect becomes the Koine which, over time, Venice imposed on the urban Veneto and indirectly on the whole of Veneto” (pages 289-290).
It can be added that he imposed it even further, with a further simplification of the structures in the colonial Veneto.
In fact "In the Julian/Friulian situation, Veneto is and was included in a repertoire of multiple varieties with multiple interferences: this fact is at the basis of an inborn tendency to reduce the rules [...] in an inversely proportional way to the complexity of the repertoire, i.e. the simplification […] compensates for the difficulty of having to learn more codes” (p. 285).
Which is to say that in the presence of a particularly stratified bi- or plurilingualism there is a normal tendency to reduce complexity of linguistic norms.
Meanwhile, in Poland…
This tendency was known, if already the Russian-American linguist Roman Jacobson (1896-1982) had observed that dialects used as vehicles of communication in large areas, and moving towards the role of koiné, tend to develop simpler systems than dialects used for eminently local purposes.
In «Center and periphery: adoption, diffusion, and spread», of 1988, the American Slavist Henning Andersen he argued, based on the evolution of the Polish dialects, that the leveling between one dialect and another does not always happen by substitution of the norms but, rather, by re-elaboration of the norms that the more conservative dialect derives from the more innovative dialect.
In practice, it is a matter of a leveling of the differences, without necessarily canceling them, due to the need to communicate, and considerations of prestige do not always intervene (unlike what we have seen for the Venetian).
In the contact between speakers of different dialects, who have some understanding of the linguistic norms of their interlocutors but do not know them in depth, a simplification is easily created, since all the complexities that make communication more difficult disappear, as they are not adopted by who accepts the rule of others.
In turn, the simplification may or may not be adopted by others, leading in the latter case to new divergences, but it is likely that it will tend to spread.
Uncontacted indigenous Amazonians are also innovating
It should be noted that it is not only open communities, those with a large national or vehicular language, that create innovations. Only that while in open communities the language generally evolves in the sense of a simplification, in the gated and peripheral communities it often evolves in the sense of a complexification of the norms.
In his 2009 «Sociolinguistic typology and complexification», the English linguist Peter Trudgill he explored the relationship between the social structure of a community and the degree of greater or lesser complexity of its language.
According to the author, a closed and slow-moving community can more easily preserve life complexity of the language, since everyone knows each other (for example in a tribe in the middle of the Amazon rainforest) and corrects the children when they make grammatical "mistakes" such as eliminating exceptions while learning the language.
In this context of social control, the more difficult rules can easily be perpetuated, and therefore even new more complex rules can arise without communicative or learning damage to the system.
The complexification
The author concludes that “If linguistic contact widespread only among adults is mainly a post-Neolithic and indeed above all modern phenomenon which concerns the last 2000 years, and if the development of large and fluid communities is in turn a phenomenon mainly postneolithic and above all modern, then according to this thesis the dominant standard languages in the world today should be very little representative of what languages have been for almost all of human history.
We have become so accustomed to simplification in the language changes (in Germanic, Romance, Semitic) that it was easy to fall into the temptation to consider it normal, as a diachronic universal.
But maybe there complexification is more normal or, better, it was: some languages, one would say, are certainly more complex than others, but the current diachronic trend is moving towards an ever-increasing number of less and less complex languages, so much so that various characteristics [...], which well illustrate the complexification, have already disappeared, or are about to do so".
. . .
Daniele Vitali, from Bologna, was a translator for the European Commission for years. He has to his credit various glottology works on languages and dialects, including “Linguistic portraits: the Romanian” (Inter @ lia 2002), “Do you speak Italian-Luxembourgish? Notes on the language of the Italians of Luxembourg” (Inter@lia 2009), “Russian pronunciation for Italians” (with Luciano Canepari, Aracne 2013), as well as the great “Dizionario Bolognese-Italiano Italiano-Bolognese” (Pendragon 2007 and 2009, with Luigi Lepri), “Emilian dialects and Tuscan dialects. Linguistic interactions between Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany” (Pendragon 2020) and “Mé a dscårr in bulgnaiṡ. Manual for learning the Bolognese dialect” (Pendragon 2022).
