In most of the world, ‘you are what you speak,’ because national identity is often aligned with linguistic identity. Geopolitical regions are partially defined in terms of language, and the subject matter of area and international studies is embedded in local languages. Despite the importance of linguistic expertise for understanding the peoples of a region and accessing primary material, linguistics is typically regarded as a peripheral discipline for area and international studies, relative to ‘core’ disciplines such as political science, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, and geography. This peripheral status results from (largely correct) perceptions that linguistics is highly technical and impenetrable, that linguistics is theoretically fractured, and that most linguists in the US are not interested in topics relevant to area and international studies. However there is evidence of renewed linguistic interest in issues of language in the contexts of geography, politics, history, and culture, as well as a commitment to be accessible to other disciplines and language learners.
1. Linguistics and Area and International Studies
Linguistics is directly relevant and beneficial to area and international studies:(a) when it contributes to understanding the geographical distribution of peoples (by means of typology, dialect geography, historical linguistics, fieldwork, and language planning and intervention); (b) when it contributes to understanding the different world views of peoples (by means of linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, literary analysis, and poetics); and (c) when it contributes to language learning (through the development of pedagogical and reference materials).
Linguistics can also achieve an area or international studies dimension in other endeavors (for example, the development of formal theories) when there is sustained focus on a given language group.
2. A Brief History of Relevant Linguistic Developments
In the early part of the twentieth century (approximately 1900-40), linguistics was dominated by Sapir and Whorf, whose objective was to explore how languages reveal people’s worldviews and explain cultural behaviors. This view of language as a direct artifact of the collective philosophy and psychology of a given society was inherently friendly to the goals of understanding nations and their interactions. The Sapir-Whorf emphasis on the relationship between language and its socio-geographical context (later retooled as ‘functional linguistics’) might have engendered significant cross-disciplinary efforts, but unfortunately, its heyday was largely over before area and international studies became firmly established as academic disciplines.
Area and International Studies: Linguistics By the time the US government made its first Title VI appropriations in the late 1950s, a landmark event in the founding and building of area and international studies as known at the end of the 1990s, linguistics had moved on to a fascination with mathematical models that would predominate (at least in the US) well into the 1980s. The theoretical purpose of an algebraic approach to the explanation of grammatical phenomena is to provide a formal analysis of the universal features of language. This theoretical perspective of’formal linguistics’ marginalizes or excludes issues relevant to area and international studies since language context is not considered a primary factor in language form. The relationship of pure math as opposed to applied mathematical sciences (economics, statistics, etc.) is analogous to the relationship between formal and functional linguistics and their relative sensitivity to contextual factors: the objective of both pure math and formal linguistics is analysis independent of context, whereas functional linguistics and applied math make reference to concrete domains (extra-linguistic or extra-mathematical).
The popularity of mathematical models was widespread in the social sciences in the late twentieth century, creating tension between the so-called ‘number-crunchers’ and area and international studies scholars, and disadvantaging the latter in hiring and promotion. Formal linguistics has played a similar role in the broader discipline of linguistics and yielded a framework that does not focus on language pedagogy or the geographic distribution and differing worldviews of peoples. Formal linguistics has been primarily inspired by the work of Noam Chomsky, whose framework has been successively known as generative grammar, the government binding theory, and the minimalist program. Other important formalist theories include relational grammar and head-driven phrase structure grammar.
Since the 1980s there has been renewed interest in the relationship between language function and language form, known as ‘functional linguistics.’ Though functionalist approaches are not a retreat into the past, they comport well with pre-Chomskyan theories, enabling linguists to build on previous achievements. Functional linguistics is also more compatible with many linguistic traditions outside the US, especially in areas where Chomsky is not well known (for example the former Soviet Bloc countries, where Chomsky’s linguistic work was banned in reaction to his political writings), or in areas where there has been sustained focus on mapping and codifying indigenous languages (such as Australia, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union). The most significant functionalist movement is known as cognitive linguistics, and has George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker as its primary proponents. Cognitive linguistics has rapidly gained popularity in Western and Eastern Europe, in the countries of the former Soviet Union, Japan, and Australia. In addition to cognitive linguistics, many traditional sub-disciplines of linguistics continue their commitment to functionalist principles, among them dialectology, discourse analysis, historical linguistics, and typology. These traditional endeavors and cognitive linguistics bear a mutual affinity since both focus on language-specific data (as opposed to language universals). Because the context of language and its role in meaning are central to the functionalist view of linguistics, the potential contribution of functional linguistics to area and international studies is great. And because functionalist linguistics tends to avoid intricate formal models, it is more accessible to specialists in other disciplines, and its results are transferable to language pedagogy.
At the time of writing, formalist and functionalist linguistics are engaged in an often-antagonistic competition. (For further information on the history and present state of formal vs. functional linguistics, see Generative Grammar, Functional Approaches to Grammar, Cognitive Linguistics; Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; and Newmeyer 1998, Lakoff 1991, Croft 1998).
3. Linguistic Contributions to Area and International Studies
Many time-honored endeavors of linguists (investigation of unknown languages, research on the relations among languages, preparation of descriptive and pedagogical materials) yield valuable results for area and international studies. Relevant methods and results are discussed under three broad headings below.
3.1 Contributions to Understanding the Geographic Distribution of Peoples
Linguists use the empirical methods of fieldwork to discover the facts of existing languages, recording features of phonology (language sounds), morphology (shapes of words), syntax (grammatical constructions), and lexicon (meanings of words). Investigation of how these features vary through space is known as dialectology, and each line on a map corresponding to one of these features is known as an isogloss. Isoglosses usually correspond to geographic (mountains and rivers), ethnic (often religious), or political (more often historical than current) boundaries. Despite the use of scientific discovery procedures, linguists do not have an operational definition for language as opposed to dialect.
Language is often closely tied to national identity, and the cohesiveness of a given speech community is often more dependent upon the sociopolitical imagination of speakers than on the number of features they share or the number of isoglosses that divide them. Chinese, for example, is a remarkably diverse linguistic entity that elsewhere in the world would probably be considered a family of related languages.
There is only a gradual cline rather than a bundle of isoglosses between Macedonian and Bulgarian, and the speakers do not agree on the status of their distinction: Bulgarians believe Macedonians are speaking a ‘Western Bulgarian dialect,’ whereas Macedonians assert they are speaking a distinct language. Minor dialectal differences are sometimes amplified for political gain. The various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia that speak the language historically known as Serbo-Croatian have used relatively minor distinctions as flags of national identity, claiming distinct languages in order to fracture the country and justify seizure of territory.
The aim of historical linguistics is to discover relationships among languages. Historical linguistics uses two methods to arrive at a description of historical changes and their relative chronology. The first method is internal reconstruction, which compares linguistic forms within a single language in an attempt to reconstruct their historical relationships. The second is the comparative method, which compares cognate forms across related languages in an attempt to arrive at how modern forms developed from a shared proto-language. Any given language change usually spreads gradually across the territory of a language. Over time this yields isoglosses, the primary material of dialect geography, and these isoglosses reflect the relative chronology of historical changes. Thanks to historical linguistics, we know a lot about how languages are related to one another, information valuable for understanding the history, migrations, and ethnic backgrounds of peoples.
Despite considerable removal in both time and space, linguistic relationships continue to inspire political and other behavior. During the Cold War Ceaucescu’s communist regime raised money by selling babies for adoption to infertile French couples; this plan played upon a desire to procure genetically related offspring, since both Romanian and French are Romance languages. The notion of Slavic unity was used to justify much of the Warsaw Pact, and after the break-up of the Soviet Union Solzhenitsyn suggested that the Belarussians and Ukrainians join Russia to form a country based upon the relation of their languages (since Belarussian, Ukrainian, and Russian constitute the East Slavic language subfamily).
Languages in contact can influence one another regardless of any genetic relation. As a result, groups of contiguous languages tend to develop shared features, known as areal phenomena. The languages of the Balkans include a variety of South Slavic and other very distantly related Indo-European languages, among them Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Macedonian, Romani, Greek, and Bulgarian. Together they share certain features, pointing to a greater unity of the Balkans that transcends their diverse heritage. Sustained or intensive language contact can result in the creation of new types of languages.
This takes two forms: one is ‘creolization,’ two or more languages melded into a new language; and the other is ‘pidginization,’ a simplified version of a language (often borrowing words from another language). An example of a Creole is Papiamentu, a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and indigenous languages, spoken in the Dutch Antilles; pidgin English is a language of trade created in Asia and the South Pacific for communication between indigenous peoples and outsiders. A further type of linguistic coexistence is ‘diglossia,’ the use of one language for spontaneous oral communication, but another language for formal and literary expression. For example, after two centuries of German domination removed Czech from the public arena, the Czech National Revival resurrected a literary language from an archaic Bible translation. As a result, there is a significant gap between spoken Czech and the Czech literary language.
Typology compares the structure of both related and unrelated languages. Typology suggests a positive correlation between the severity of geographic terrain and the density of linguistic diversity (Nichols 1990). Perhaps the best example is the Caucasus mountain region, arguably a part of the world with more languages per unit of inhabitable surface area than any other, predictably matched by a high level of ethnic and political tension. Global linguistic diversity is threatened by the phenomenon of language death, and it is predicted that 90 percent of the world’s languages will disappear by the end of the twenty-first century (Krauss 1992, p. 7). Endangered languages are those of minorities who must acquire another language (of a politically dominant group) in order to survive. Protection of minority rights requires protection of minority languages, and can entail fieldwork and the preparation of pedagogical materials. Another significant language-planning issue involves the status of languages in the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. After decades of Russian domination, the majority languages of these new countries are being elevated to the status of official literary languages.
3.2 Contributions to Understanding Behaviors and Worldviews
People use language to describe their experiences of reality and to make hypothetical projections from those experiences. Human experience is mediated by both perceptual mechanisms and conceptual systems. Though much of human perceptual ability is universal, input can be both ambiguous and overly detailed. Perception provides much more opportunity for distinction than any one language can codify in its grammar or any human being can meaningfully attend to. The highly textured world of perception does not suggest any unique strategy for carving nature at its joints. Thus, perception is inseparably joined with conceptual decisions concerning what to ignore and what goes with what (Talmy 1996 has coined the term ‘ception’ to describe the concurrent operation of perception and conception). If, as functional linguists believe, linguistic categories are conceptual categories, and can be specific to a given language, then linguistic categories should reveal important facts about how people understand and interact with their world. Time, for example, is a phenomenon that human beings do not have direct experience of, because humans perceive only time’s effects on objects and events. It is therefore possible to conceive of time in different ways, and a plethora of tense and aspect systems present artifacts of varying conceptions of time. The relationships that exist between beings, objects, and events can likewise be understood in many different ways; a testament to this is the variety of case systems and other means that languages use to express relationships.
Language is the essential vehicle of a number of cultural phenomena, ranging from the daily rituals of oral communication, the subject of discourse analysis, through the artistic use of language that is the subject of literary analysis and poetics. Linguistic analysis of use of metaphor and poetic structure can be valuable in interpreting literary culture.
3.3 Contributions to Language Pedagogy and Reference
Linguistic expertise is essential for the production of effective language textbooks, reference grammars, and dictionaries, tools that enable area and international studies scholars to gain language proficiency. Academic promotion procedures fail to recognize the exacting scholarship and creative thinking that pedagogical authorship and lexicography require. In the US, there is not enough of a market for publications in languages other than French, Spanish, and German to provide financial incentive to take on these tasks. As a result, linguists are reluctant to author textbooks and reference works, and materials for lesser-taught languages are usually inadequate or absent. Faced with financial crises in the 1990s, some colleges and universities acted on the popular myth that native ability is the only qualification needed to teach language, and replaced language professionals with part-time and/or adjunct native speakers. Although it now has competition from functional linguistics, formal linguistics continues to dominate the field, and its findings are not generally relevant or transferable to pedagogy and lexicography (since this is not the aim of formal linguistics). Collectively, academic bias, small market share, de-professionalization of language teaching, and theoretical focus greatly reduce linguists’ impact on language pedagogy and reference materials.
For detailed treatment of the above topics and for further references, see Linguistic Fieldwork; Dialectology; Historical Linguistics; Internal Reconstruction; Comparative Method; Areal Linguistics; Pidgin and Creole Languages; Diglossia; Linguistic Typology; Language Endangerment; Language Policy; Language and Literature; Language and Poetic Structure.
4. Probable Future Directions of Theory and Research
Internet technology provides instantaneous access to vast quantities of language data, an unprecedented resource that linguists are only beginning to use. A large number of national language corpora, even for lesser-taught languages, are now available on the Web. There are also search tools, such as google.com, that are extremely useful to linguists researching the use of forms and constructions (at least in languages with Latin alphabets; despite the advent of Unicode, fonts continue to pose some of the most intractable technological problems linguists face). The sheer quantity and availability of language-specific data seems guaranteed to facilitate research relevant to area and international studies. Perhaps the best example of how corpora and technology can be integrated into linguistic research is Charles Fillmore’s FrameNet, a digital dictionary of the grammatical constructions of a language, based on a language corpus. Originally developed for English, FrameNet is now being expanded to other languages, and promises to be a valuable tool for linguistics and language pedagogy. Perhaps projects like these will raise awareness of the need for lexicographical and other reference materials, and enhance the prestige of such endeavors.
Funding always plays a crucial role in guiding research trends. The US Department of Education and the National Science Foundation are the greatest sources of support for linguistic research, and both agencies fund projects relevant to area and international studies. While linguistics plays merely a supportive role in US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center grants, it is a central player in Title VI Language Resource Center (LRC) grants. There is a new trend for LRC grants to focus on a region of the world. In 1999 three LRC grants were awarded for projects with areal focus: the National East Asian Languages Resource Center at Ohio State University, the National African Languages Resource Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Slavic and East European Language Resource Center at Duke University-University of North Carolina, facilitating the creation of technologically enhanced pedagogical materials and area-specific linguistic research. The launching of LRCs focused on world regions is a major step forward in fostering linguistic projects that are responsive and responsible to area and international studies. Continued attention and funding may enable the relationship between area and international studies and linguistics to realize its potential, much of which today remains untapped.
