‘Advanced’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘primitive’ languages

Just as some accents are evaluated more highly than others, many people believe that some languages are ‘better’ or ‘more beautiful’ than others. Many a French president has commented on the supposed ‘clarity’ and ‘precision’ of French, as if clear thinking could not be expressed equally well in another language. Others cite, for example, the richness of Shakespeare’s poetry as evidence for the supposed superiority or inherent beauty of English. Matched guise tests again refute claims that any one language is more beautiful than any other: when played to hearers unfamiliar with European languages, no consensus emerges regarding the aesthetic superiority of any one language as opposed to another. More generally, arguments for the superiority of a given language tend to confuse the rhetorical or linguistic dexterity of some individuals with the qualities of the language itself. The obvious problem here is that speakers do not possess these skills in equal measure, as can be seen in the following examples:

A language – any language – is as precise an instrument as its native speakers need it to be for the expression of complex ideas or feelings, and will be used more effectively by some speakers than by others. Don’t blame the language if the thinking it expresses is muddled.

Another common belief is that there are ‘primitive’ languages, just as there are ‘primitive’ societies. Here again, a widely held perception has no basis in linguistic fact. Indeed, if our criterion were grammatical complexity, it might be easier to make the opposite case, namely that languages spoken in isolated, ‘primitive’ societies are often more complex than those used in technologically advanced societies which have been subject to high levels of contact.

This is not, of course, to say that languages will be equally rich in all areas of their lexicon, or vocabulary. We would not expect a language such as Pirahã, spoken by a remote Amazonian tribe of about 250 people, to be as rich in information technology vocabulary as, for example, English: for now at least, Pirahã speakers have little need for such terms and consequently have not developed them to a high degree. But this does not mean that so-called ‘primitive’ languages spoken in less developed societies are unable to acquire new resources when they do need them: in fact they do so with remarkable ease, often by borrowing from other languages. A case in point is English following the Norman Conquest, which borrowed heavily from Norman French: estimates have suggested that around 30–40 per cent of modern English vocabulary is ultimately of French origin. It’s certainly true that English, French, Russian and Spanish are more widely spoken, and more prestigious, than Pirahã, Inuit or Guugu Yimidhirr, but again this reflects socio-political realities rather than any superiority in linguistic terms. To a linguist, all languages (and dialects) are equal.