Rise and fall of lingua franca: how the human search for identity through language can influence which languages become minoritized, and which become hegemonic
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The main aim of the article is to show how the ways that people envision themselves and others as speakers of given languages influence their desire to acquire or refrain from using those languages. The political and social cachet of a given language can entice or dissuade potential speakers to or from its use. We will consider the examples of Latin, Gaelic and Old Church Slavonic, demonstrating that as the economic and political influence of the institutions connected to these languages increased or diminished, so too did the number of people interested in acquiring them. We will also demonstrate that, in more recent times the historical trend has somewhat reversed, with people feeling increasingly inclined to acquire lesser used languages in the pursuit of identity in an increasingly homogenized world. In the case of both phenomena – whether the medieval and early modern drive to self-identity with the influential and wealthy, or the modern drive to self-identity with the minoritized, and thus culturally unique – the search for identity has been a key driver for language acquisition, even to such an extent that it has influenced the rise and decline of languages as hegemons. |
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