the Tomorrow

Dear Pier Paolo,

I will answer the questions asked in your letter according to a couple of principles that are basic in the study of linguistic change.

The first establishes that linguistic systems — the languages spoken by people within determined communities or social ambits — are not an unchanging backdrop to social life. Rather they are the unstable, fragile and always endangered result of social, linguistic and cultural actions. At all times, a stronger cultural, economic, political or linguistic context is lying in wait with the potential to interfere with the reproduction of a certain linguistic arrangement.

In the past two decades, great transformations have come about in the academic sphere of different European nation states and beyond.
In general, the phenomenon of internationalization has become considerably stronger. This has lead to the widespread disregard of national languages (Italian, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, etcetera) in favor of a language able to augment the legibility and hence the diffusion of scientific products. English happened to be in the best position to become the language of choice to communicate one’s thoughts, both in the oral form (for congress-type situations) and in the written form (for articles and academic essays).

This (ideological) transformation is almost complete now, after years of intense global traffic, although we can see recent signals of objection to its outcome. The shift has its roots in the past, in the growing hegemony of the English-speaking world after World War II. Ideological change is linked to marginalization processes whereby verbal and cultural resources with a central position in people’s lives end up being reinterpreted and reformulated by mechanisms of favoritism. Scholars and those who need to evaluate their work increasingly perceive national languages as being marginal, which is why we are witnessing a massive conversion to English. An essay in English carries more weight, as does a scientific communication in English.
This rush toward English has had widely varying and diverging results between oral and written, of which we are reminded in the above-mentioned letter. This type of divergency and inconstancy tends to fade over the years, seeing that for various reasons, the new generations of scholars (including Italians) have more and more familiarity with international settings and master the standard varieties of the English language increasingly well, contrary to past generations. There are great variations in this familiarity from country to country and from language to language, according to the strength of the respective disciplinary and scientific traditions (for example, the French had Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, and this is a factor in terms of their willingness to switch to English), according to the importance of the national language as a cultured literary language (for example, the great literary tradition of the Italian language compared to the almost non-existent one of other languages), and according to the effectiveness of the educational programs for learning English at school. Obviously, all this is given by the hegemonic place that English occupies today in its infinite variations, some of which are barely comprehensible, in the ambits of communications, and academic and scientific research.

The second principle that I am referring to is that of the shifting from the centre to the margins. In many western nations, the spatial metaphor of center and margin is an important key to interpreting linguistic and cultural transformations. Languages and cultures are not independent and autonomous from their speakers. The evaluations (read ideologies) that speakers have of them determine their destiny. Some speakers are convinced that their own language is always appropriate, no matter what. Others think that appropriateness is linked to specific environs (in the family, for example, or on the village square). In all situations of social transformation, these ideas are decisive to the fate of a language and a culture.

In conclusion, languages and cultures (or whatever it is that we call by these terms) do not live or die of their own accord. We are used to speaking of dead languages and living languages, creole languages, and code switching. These expressions evoke images of pureness and contamination, totality and partiality, completeness and fragmentation. But languages live in the use of their speakers, and the use of the speakers depends on their ideologies, on the ways in which they perceive a language in terms of cultural significance. For now, English is dominant, but this could change.

Vincenzo Matera