Localism and Languages

Q

How many languages did people speak 1000 years ago or more? Who is behind the creation of all these different languages on Earth… and what is the purpose of creating them?*
https://www.quora.com/How-many-languages-did-people-speak-1000-years-ago-or-more-Who-is-behind-the-creation-of-all-these-different-languages-on-Earth-and-what-is-the-purpose-of-creating-them/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-2

Hans-Georg Lundahl

amateur linguist

27.X.2024

1000 years ago, France spoke very many MORE languages than now. I’m not speaking of Basque. I’m also not speaking of German in Alsatia, which back then was Burgundy rather than France.

It had started out with three, Latin, Germanic (Low Franconian), Gaulish-and-Brythonic, then ousted Gaulish (500–600 years earlier) and marginalised its close twin Brythonic to Brittany, marginalised Franconian to the North and for most of the territory kept just some version of Latin. BUT if today you have French, Picard, Arpetan, Occitan, with Nissard in the East and Gascon in the West, however, everyone understanding French, back then you basically were living in the Paris region if you understood French, and even there French was much less standardised, and the other ones weren’t standardised either, except on an élite level, and they were vastly much more important.

2000 years ago, where the Roman Empire spoke Latin, it was still speaking lots of other languages. Gaulish had cousins in Austria and perhaps even North Italy. Rhaetic and Etruscan still existed in North and Central Italy. Ligurian, a language neither Gaulish nor Latin nor Etruscan, was spoken in South France. Lusitanian was spoken in parts of Portugal. Celt-Iberian was spoken in large parts of Spain and Portugal, and obviously an ancestor to Basque in SW France and NE Spain, larger areas than Basque has now. Southern Italy still had a close cousin of Latin that said “pid” instead of “quid” and “pompe” instead of “quinque” …

So, to your initial question, if there are 6000–7000 languages now, and if languages are dying out all the time, some times 1000 to 2000 years ago, there might have been as many as 12000 or 14000.

If you come to parts of France where people in a bar speak some other Latin language than Standard French, enjoy it! There are so many people who came here 60 years ago, who enjoy speaking Arabic and Berber between them, why shouldn’t people who have lived 100’s of years ago in the same area have the right to cherish their native language, just because it isn’t French?

Now, there are natural processes of splitting, and they tend to split more, the more an area is isolated. Which is economically profitable, because it means living on your own resources and sharing the labour effort between nearly all the people, rather than rationalise production for international competivity and get lots of people out of work because they don’t fit that mold.

There is also, as I have mentioned, a certain tendency of administrators and traders to make language more uniform and to doom small languages to death, if people will let them.

But, if the question is, more like “what about Basque, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Latin” … they do not seem to have split off a common root like Picard of Beauvais or Nissard of Nissa or French of Paris split off Latin, what about that?

Atheists and some Christian and Muslim and Jewish Evolution believers will pretend that this diversity happened so long ago, we can know nothing about it. Whether people in China and people in Europe developed to having human language (no such process really) independently or they split off a common root even earlier, the process of splitting languages would already have gone on for 20 times longer than the 2000 years ago when a single Latin was the same in Rome and in Lyons, one would have by 20 times longer languages as different as Basque and Arabic.

Islam doesn’t seem to have a canonic answer. No Quran, no Hadith … I could be wrong.

Christianity answers: God intended language diversity for delaying that unification of mankind against God’s laws and against the remaining believers, that Nimrod had attempted at Babel. A single ruler of all men, a once valiant but more and more corrupt man, enjoyed the advantages for commanding that follow from having a single language spoken by all men. God took it away from him and in the process created such things are “remote villages” (remote from what? back then from everywhere!) where they still speak local languages.

Note

* The question was directed at me by one Bin Hassan. I'm presuming he is Muslim, until further evidence turns up.