Language: A close examination (The State of the Language, 1980)

 Leonard Michaels & Christopher Ricks. The State of the Language (1980) In what sense can one talk about a language as an entity that exists? What does “exist” mean? A rock exists. It’s a passive existence. Wind and weather slowly eat at its substance until it ceases to exist. An animal exists, but the processes that keep it alive also wear it out, and these plus the ravages of wind and weather eat at its substance until it too ceases to exist.
     But language? Language is something people do. It’s not passive like a rock. It’s not active like an animal. Language exists while it’s spoken. We observe as well as understand it, and those observations, sorted and classified, compared and contrasted, create a concept. Since concepts must correspond to entities, language must be an entity. That’s the logic of “concept” and “entity.” And so a language exists, and we speak about as if it changes passively like a rock or actively like an animal. A pretty delusion, but it serves to help us discuss how people’s speech habits have changed over time. Thus the “State of the Language”,  a collection of such discussions.
     Most of the essays are by academics, the rest by practitioners. The academics too often write to test or develop some theory. The practitioners enjoy recording their observations. A few indulge in satire, some catalogue and analyse so earnestly that they slip into self-satire. But all take talk about language seriously. Class, trades and professions, psychology and philosophy, the desire for novelty, the literary traditions, these and many other influences on the development and uses of language all get a look-in. All focus on how people speak and write English. All assume, mostly tacitly, that people are what they speak, no matter what they profess to say.
     In the 40-odd years since this book was published, English has become established as the world's lingua franca. Speakers of other languages have adopted and adapted English words. Native English speakers risk misunderstanding when they use their idioms and allusions. Psycholinguistics has come into its own as the study of how language both expresses and shapes experience. The phrase “human language” is now necessary because ethologists have discovered  complexities of animal communication that resemble some features of human language. The link between self-awareness and language is established, but not understood. The creation of large-language-model pattern generators (misdescribed as artificially intelligent) have prompted rethinking of what human language and intelligence are.
     “In the beginning was the word”. So begins the Gospel of John. Whatever else these essays teach us, they show that language not only makes us human, but creates the experience that we call reality.
     A collection worth keeping. ***