2. Literary Language and Local Idiom

As a further step, linguistic unity may be destroyed when a natural idiom is influenced by a literary language. This never fails to happen whenever a nation reaches a certain stage of civilization. By literary language I mean not only the language of literature but also, in a more general sense, any kind of cultivated language, official or otherwise, that serves the whole community. Given free reign, a language has only dialects, none of which has the advantage over the others, and for this reason it habitually splinters. But as communications improve with a growing civilization, one of the existing dialects is chosen by a tacit convention of some sort to be the vehicle of everything that affects the nation as a whole. The reasons for the choice differ widely. Sometimes preference goes to the dialect of the region where civilization is most advanced or to the province that has political supremacy and wields the central power. Sometimes the court imposes its dialect on the nation. The privileged dialect, after it has been promoted to the rank of official and standard language, seldom remains the same as it was before. It acquires dialectal elements from other regions and becomes more and more composite, though without losing completely its original character. Thus the dialect of the He de France is clearly recognizable in literary French and the Toscan in Standard Italian. But the literary language is not imposed from one day to the next, and a majority of the population is found to be bilingual, speaking both the standard language and the local patois. This occurs in many parts of France, like Savoy, where French is an imported language that has not yet eliminated the regional patois, and generally in Germany and Italy, where dialects persist alongside the official

languages.

It has been the same with all nations that have reached a certain stage of civilization. The Greeks had their koine, derived from Attic and Ionian, along with coexisting local dialects. Presumably even ancient Babylon had its official language and its regional dialects.

Does a standard language necessarily imply the use of writing? The Homeric poems seem to prove that it does not. Even though they were composed at a time when writing was used little or not at all, their language is conventional and has every characteristic of a literary language.

CAUSES OF GEOGRAPHICAL DIVERSITY

1. Time, the Basic Cause

Whereas absolute diversity poses a purely speculative problem, diversity within related languages can be observed and traced back to unity. That Vulgar Latin took different paths in the northern and southern parts of Gaul explains the common origin of French and Proven gal.

By simplifying the theoretical situation as much as possible, we can get at the basic cause of differentiation in space. What would happen if a language spoken at one clearly delimited point — e.g. a small island — were transported by colonists to another clearly delimited point — e.g. another island? After a certain length of time various differences affecting vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and the like would separate the language of the source (S) from the language of the settlement (S').

It is wrong to imagine that only the transplanted idiom will change while the original idiom remains fixed or vice versa. An innovation may begin on either side or on both sides at the same time. Take a linguistic feature a that can be replaced by h, c, d, etc. Differentiation may occur in three different ways :

a (Source S)

o (Settlement S')

A one-sided approach will not do, for the innovations of either language are of equal importance.

What created the differences? It is illusory to think that space alone was responsible. By itself, space cannot influence language.

On the day following their arrival at S' the colonists from S spoke exactly the same language as on the preceding day. It is easy to forget about the factor of time because it is less concrete than

space, but it is actually the cause of linguistic differentiation. Geographical diversity should be called temporal diversity.

Take two differentiating features h and c. No speakers have passed from the first to the second or from the second to the first. To discover how unity became diversity, we must go back to the original a for which b and c were substituted: a gave way to the later forms b and c. Hence the following diagram of geographical differentiation which will cover all similar cases : S S'

a< — > a

i I

b c

The separation of the two idioms shows the tangible form of the phenomenon but does not explain it. Undoubtedly divergence in space was a necessary condition — no matter how small the amount — but by itself distance does not create differences. Volume is measured, not by one surface, but by adding a third dimension, depth, similarly, geographical differentiation is pictured completely only when projected in time.

One objection might be that differences in environment, climate, topography, and local customs (e.g. customs of mountaineers contrasted with those of a maritime population) influence language, and that our variations are therefore conditioned geographically. Such influences are open to dispute, however. Even if they could be proved, a further distinction would be in order: direction of movement, which is governed in each instance by imponderable forces that can neither be demonstrated nor described, is attributable to environment. At a particular moment and in a particular environment u became it. Why did it change at that moment and in that place, and why did stablished only geographically and

through interdialectal influence.

The phonetician must therefore distinguish carefully between sources and affected zones. At its source a phoneme evolves solely on the axis of time. But mere phonetic facts will not explain affected zones, for they result from the interaction of both time and space.