Lecture Twenty-Four Language Interrupted

Generally, a language spoken by a small, isolated group will be much more complicated than English. In fact, it is typical for languages to be vastly overgrown in this way. Languages are “streamlined” when history leads them to be learned more as second languages than as first ones, which abbreviates some of the more difficult parts of their grammars. This means that a language such as Tsez of the Caucasus Mountains in Asia is so complex that one wonders how it could be learned, while one variety of Indonesian created by adult speakers of local languages is so streamlined that one wonders how it conveys enough meaning to be useful! Such languages as English and Mandarin Chinese are intermediate cases.