The tradition that has excluded contact as an ecological factor from genetic linguistics is at odds with European social history, which has been marked by migrations and conquests, hence by population contact. In the case of the British colonies, extra-European migrations were extensions of what was already taking place in Europe (Bailyn 1986). One would expect that at least some of the same factors which have affected language evolution outside Europe have also affected language change within Europe. Ignoring such similarities, except in the most conspicuous cases such as the Balkans, is subscribing to the principle of “deux poids, deux mesures.” It is tanta- mount to refusing a priorito understand the ecology of change, regardless of whether the innovations originate within or outside a specified commu- nity. It amounts to lack of interest in the causation of change itself, as if this needed no trigger.
At this point, we must ask ourselves whether we can fully blame those who have claimed that English and French developed by “creolization.” I disagree with them because, as noted above, “creolization” is not a structu- ral process – there are no restructuring processes which are specifically creole. Some new vernaculars have been named creoles for sociohistorical reasons which are peculiar to a specific period in our history – especially the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries – and to specific geographical areas, viz., European settlement colonies especially in tropical areas. We really have no reasons for looking for creoles elsewhere.
However, we cannot dismiss offhand the observation that contact of dialects or languages has generally played a catalytic role in favoring spe- cific restructuring paths in the evolution of a language. Thus, we cannot completely fault those who suggest that English and the Romance lan- guages developed in more or less the same ways as creoles did, from the restructuring of a lexifier in a contact setting. That is, they developed in ecologies in which structural features internal and external to the lexifier came to compete with each other through people aiming to speak the same language but modifying it in the process. Those who developed new varie- ties knew what language they wanted to speak, although they probably
were not aware of the deviations they either produced or learned, especially when the target was loosely focused.
Why should creoles not be genetically classifiable at all, if the following ecological conditions show that they cannot be distinguished from other languages? (i) Contact played similar roles in the development of English and Romance languages as of creoles; (ii) there are no restructuring pro- cesses that are particularly creole; (iii) creoles have typically selected more than 90 percent of their vocabularies from their lexifiers; (iv) a large propor- tion of their structural features may be traced to nonstandard varieties of their lexifiers; (v) their native speakers typically think that they speak dialects of their lexifiers; and (vi) the correspondences to which historical linguists subscribe do not hold the same strengths in all families (the case of standard French, according to Posner 1996). Could the problem lie not in how creoles are genetically related to their lexifiers but in how genetic kinship is conceived in genetic linguistics? Is there any particular reason why genetic kinship must be established on the assumption of only one parent per language or language family?
As we focus on language spread and speciation, let us analogize language to a stream flowing down into a delta and splitting into several other streams whose colors and sand contents come to differ from one another.
Could one discuss this speciation without taking into account the surfaces on which the water flows? The obviously negative answer to this question suggests that substratum, hence language contact, should not be over- looked in accounts of language change. Let us also think of a stream whose water merges with that of another to form a shared course. Would we be justified in claiming that either of the streams alone produced the merged portion of their courses by itself ? Here too, the negative answer under- scores the role of contact in language evolution.
Things become of course more complicated with languages conceived as species consisting of individual idiolects, which are produced by speakers whose individual actions affect the species’ fate. The new species that emerges out of competition and selection of features in the contact setting is typically a transformed state of one or more species that came in contact with one another. Part of the transformation lies in the inclusion of fea- tures that a species did not have in its earlier state, part of it lies in the strengthening of features which may have been marginal in the earlier state, and part of it may lie in the elimination of features it had in the earlier state.
So the new species has evidently been affected by its contact with other species, even if the others only helped it enhance features that it had all along or lose features that were not salient in the first place.
The above suggests that we are dealing with a matter of degree of change, subject to specific ecological conditions. Differences among outcomes of
5.7 Some conclusions 143
the restructuring of the same language in different ecological conditions lie more in the outputs of the equation than in the nature of the equation. So far decisions on whether or not to classify languages genetically seem to have relied on that degree of restructuring, based unfortunately on the wrong comparisons in the first place and without an explicit identification of the structural cutoff line. To be sure, such variation in strengths of genetic links – determined by the proportion of features inherited from a parent language – should not be overlooked. It could be captured by mod- ifying the representation of genetic connections, contrary to the nineteenth- century taxonomic tradition to which genetic linguistics still subscribes.
However, things are question-begging when some offspring are simply denied legitimate descendance because they do not look very much like the recognized exclusive parent. In social families, many children would accordingly be disowned because they do not replicate closely enough the phenotypes of their parents!
6 Language contact, evolution, and death: how ecology rolls the dice
In this chapter, I elaborate the population genetics perspective introduced in chapter 1 and adopted in the subsequent chapters. I submit more justifi- cation here for the position that there are indeed heuristic advantages in approaching language evolution on the model of population genetics, assuming that a language is a species but not an organism. However, I also argue that the linguistic species need not be a clone of any biological species, despite the fact that it shares several properties with the parasitic species. In fact, the proposed population genetics of language evolution is more than an analog of population genetics, although its heuristics has been very much inspired by the latter.
A linguistic species must be defined on its own independent terms and its evolutionary properties hypothesized according to its own combination of ontological characteristics. These account for both the similarities and differences which it displays with its closest kin in biological evolution. The basic assumption is that there are general evolutionary principles which apply similarly to the linguistic and biological species. However, there are species-specific principles which distinguish them from each other, based in part on whether a species is of the Darwinian or Lamarckian kind, on whether traits are transmitted sexually or asexually, horizontally and/or vertically, on whether the default quality of copying in trait inheritance is with or without modification, etc. One cluster of factors that plays an important role in any theory of evolution is “ecology.” An important part of this chapter is devoted this notion, articulating how it causes and/or determines language evolution.