Language Complexity, Language Contact, and Implications for Linguistic Relativity

Professor John McWhorter | Columbia University

Thursday, March 13 | 5:30pm doors for a 5:45pm start

A central element of human prehistory is language, both as a domain of interest in itself and as a window onto larger questions about humanity through time. A central field for investigation is language complexity, which changes over time, and has been linked to demographic, cultural, cognitive, political, and environmental factors through the history of human groups.

It is often supposed that it is natural for human language to simplify over time. However, under normal conditions, languages maintain considerable complexity, including irregularities. A small subset of the world's 7000 languages are less UNNECESSARILY complex than most, a condition that emerges when a language is learned by a critical mass of adults, whose acquisitional abilities are atrophied compared to children's. One such case is English; the extreme manifestation of this simplification is creole languages. This typological difference between languages means that the idea that what a language chooses to mark overtly and what it chooses to leave to context must be wielded with caution. "Normal" languages tend to mark overtly quite a bit; "streamlined" languages tend to mark less and, under the Whorfian paradigm, are subject to an analysis as indicating cognitive deficits compared to speakers of other languages.

About the speaker:

JOHN MCWHORTER teaches linguistics at Columbia University, as well as music history. He specializes in language change and language contact, and is the author of The Missing Spanish Creoles, Language Simplicity and Complexity, and The Creole Debate. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, The New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and has been a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. For the general public he is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, Words on the Move, Talking Back, Talking Black, and other books, including Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast, has authored six audiovisual sets on language for the Great Courses company, and has written weekly for the New York Times since 2021.

Join us for some refreshments in the Sounds Cafe after the lecture.

This event is proudly supported by Tom Austen Brown Research at the University of Sydney.

Image: Eileen Barroso