European languages are exotic
Blame it on the “Dark Ages”
If you ever meet a linguist at a cocktail party and you have nowhere else you need to be, ask them what linguistics is. Go ahead, I dare you. They’ll probably tell you — although it may take a few minutes — that linguistics is the scientific study of human language.
Some linguists might add that they study the aspect of human nature which allows us to produce and comprehend language.
Speaking As A Linguist, I can assure you that they’ll mostly be glad you didn’t ask them how many languages they speak.
Linguistics has a broad mandate, and one that grant committees love: unlocking the secrets of human nature through studying the vagaries of verbs. It’s fantastic stuff, truly.
But this way of thinking about linguistics is relatively modern.
Before the 20th century, linguistics might better have been described as the study of European languages. Scholars were primarily interested in the structure, and especially the history, of the languages of Europe.
This early focus on Europe may seem parochial to us today, but the goal of studying language in those days was not to understand human nature, but to understand how specific languages developed over time.
At first, scholars were most interested in the languages with long and culturally important literary traditions, such as the classical and biblical languages (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew). But they also developed an interest in examining the older, pre-literary forms of the languages they themselves spoke. These languages were largely members of the Romance and Germanic families, such as French, German, and English.
At the time, practitioners would have called what they were doing philology rather than linguistics. The difference in terminology reflects a difference in aims: to define the two simply, a philologist studies languages the better to understand texts, while a linguist studies languages the better to understand human nature.
This philological study grew mostly out of the tradition of classics, which seeded the field with an interest in the old languages of Europe (and, to be fair, some parts of Asia) and a desire to understand how they gave rise to the continent’s modern languages.
This focus on Europe led to a skewed understanding of the nature of human language, one in which the particular features of European languages were mistakenly understood as being typical of all languages, no matter what continent they were spoken on.
But, as it turns out, European languages are peculiar. And when you look at them from a worldwide perspective, European languages even start to appear exotic.
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Just as one doesn’t truly understand one’s own language before studying another, the peculiarities of European languages can only be appreciated in the wider context of what human language is like all over the world.
The horizons of the field would only be broadened in the early 20th century, owing to the influence of the particular flavour of linguistics which developed in North America.
This new American linguistics grew out of departments founded by the students of the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1842). Accordingly, the discipline grew up in the United States1 under the influence of anthropology rather than classics.
American linguists busied themselves more with describing the grammatical systems of indigenous languages than with reconstructing the distant ancestor of Latin and Greek. Their work brought them into contact with languages which functioned very differently from the familiar European languages: when they learned about the structure of Navajo, Mohawk, and Quechua, they realized there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in their philology.
Their acquaintance with the indigenous languages of the Americas gave them the perspective necessary to see European languages for what they are: a cluster of languages which function in ways found only rarely in the wider world. The linguist (and insurance inspector!) Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) came up with a term to describe the characteristic behaviour of European languages: Standard Average European.
Whorf was a student of Edward Sapir (1884–1939), who was himself a student of Boas. For Whorf, the fact that linguists all had such a thorough grounding in Standard Average European languages, but knew comparatively little about the languages of the rest of the world, introduced a bias into the discipline. He worried that linguists were, even unconsciously, seeing European-like patterns in non-European languages.2
In the mind of Whorf and the linguists who have followed in his wake, it was important to avoid unconsciously importing a bias from European languages in order to do justice to the languages of the world which worked so differently.
Ironically, however, this focus on non-European languages led to a renewed interest in European languages. To avoid assuming other languages work like European languages, linguists had to become acutely aware of how European languages work, and how they do things differently from other languages.
In other words, linguists needed to learn to see European languages as exotic.
So what exactly do European languages do that makes them so exotic and unique? And how did they get that way? (Spoiler alert: the answer lies in the period most beloved of every Substack historian, the one that’s always sure to ignite a firestorm in the comments, the so-called Dark Ages.)
