5. Retell the text. The language competition

A number of languages appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages. To begin with they were just spoken languages without names and without any reputation. Later on they became written languages and received names of their own, such as English, French, Italian, and Swedish. The most successful languages were associated with a state and gained the position of national languages.

There is nothing in the nature of human languages that makes such a sequence of events necessary or natural. Certainly most languages that have existed have been only spoken languages, used by small groups. Written languages and associations between languages and large states first appeared around 5,000 years ago.

What is special about Europe’s linguistic history is that the written language of antiquity, Latin, remained in use in Western Europe for about a millennium after the fall of the western Roman Empire. The last emperor was deposed in 476, and the new languages ousted Latin as a written language in a process that stretched from around 1300 to around 1700.

Still, the new languages did not become quite what Latin had been. It is true that they were languages of powerful states, that they came to be used for all purposes in speech and writing, and that some of them became vehicles for great literature. But in contrast to Latin, they had competition.

At the earliest stage Latin was just one among several lan­guages of Italy, but after a few centuries it actually was without rivals. Greek was and remained important, to be sure, but the Romans wielded political power also over the speakers of Greek, and in the western part of the empire Latin was totally dominant, in culture and religion as well as in politics. Its position was unthreatened, and remained so for a long time.

The modern European languages have never been in that position. They developed as written languages and languages of political power during the same period in adjacent regions, with much mutual influence. At different periods, areas of Europe ceased to be assemblies of small states with similar spoken languages and were transformed into nations with one leadership and one spoken and written language. But no state was able to rule all the others, and Western Europe became an assembly of nation-states in perpetual competition in the arenas of politics, culture, and language.

In each country there was competition between the national language and Latin. The nation’s language gradually intruded into the various domains of the traditional written language. Parts of the development could be swift, but in general the process was quite slow. More than a millennium elapsed from the first use of English for legal texts around ad 600 to the abolition of Latin as an official language in Hungary in the mid-nineteenth century. Latin was pitted against the national languages in a contest that finally led to the demise of Latin, but also moulded the new written languages into a certain similarity with the old one.

The leaders in the fight for the new languages were almost always people not far from the central power in the state. The new languages are often called popular languages, as opposed to Latin, the language of learning and the learned, but as a matter of fact this designation is hardly appropriate. As written lan­guages and school languages the new languages were the cre­ations of the masters not of the people. To be sure they were more acceptable among ordinary people than Latin was, as they were based on what people in general actually spoke. But the written standard forms of French or English did not reflect how average speakers used the language but rather how it was used in the court and among the noblemen.

The new languages were written languages, and they had to be propagated through systematic education and training. It took a very long time before they had fully penetrated the system of education. Latin remained strong in the schools of most European countries throughout the nineteenth century, while the new languages slowly wormed their way into the curricula. To begin with they were used only for elementary reading and writing later on for arithmetic, and still later literary texts were introduced. For difficult matters such as science, philosophy, and religion, Latin was necessary up to a century and a half ago.

Emulation of the other national languages was even more important than competition with Latin. The standing of the national language had a lot to do with the import of the nation state. For centuries there was rivalry between English and French just as there was between England and France. Portuguese vied with Spanish, and Swedish was the emblem of the state of Sweden in perpetual contest with Danish and Denmark. By and large (though not without exceptions), the European states that maintained their political independence also managed to uphold their national languages and make them prevail within their territories.

1. Study the vocabulary:

adjacent region – соседний регион

antiquity – античность, древность

emulation – соперничество

perpetual competition – вечное, постоянное соревнование

rival – соперник, конкурент

sequence of events – последовательность событий

swift – быстрый

to be unthreatened – быть непоколебимым

to penetrate – проникать

to pit against – противостоять

to propagate – распространять (-ся)

to stretch from ... to – простираться от … до

to vie with somebody – соперничать с кем-либо