World Language Register
How is speech a sphere?
What is the "linguasphere"?
What can we deduce about the early evolution of the linguasphere?
How have writing and printing changed the linguasphere?
How is the modern telecommunications revolution now changing the linguasphere?
What is the history of the concepts "logosphere" and "linguasphere"?
What is the link between "logosphere" and "noösphere"?
What is the Linguasphere Mapbase of the World's Languages and Speech Communities?
Spoken languages are not discrete and separate systems, but are in continuous interactive contact with one another, through the medium of a "worldwide web" of bilingual and multilingual speakers. From earliest times there has been an expanding network of spoken contacts among human communities across the globe, extending from Africa through Eurasia to Oceania and the Americas, until the crossing of the Atlantic joined the last great physical gap in a planet of living speech. In the 20th century, fragile links established by sequences of spoken and written languages across the continents and oceans of the world have been reinforced by humankind's newly acquired power to record and transmit words in any language instantly around the planet.
This global environment of languages in symbiosis - the linguasphere serves not only to express and share knowledge and information but also to control their flow, and to establish reciprocal identities among individuals and communities in social and economic contact. The social and geographic locations at which infants enter the world, as new participants in the linguasphere, determine which variety of speech they each adopt as their "mother-tongue" and as the medium for formatting their personal thoughts. If they are fortunate, their early experience of the world will enable them to master two or more languages, to think and communicate in alternative ways.
The Linguasphere Observatory, and this website, have been created to serve as a viewing-platform from which the linguasphere may be observed in the round, as a planetary transnational environment, and from which the situation of each speech-community, however small, may be seen in its local and global context. The fundamental approach of the Linguasphere Observatory is based on the conviction that speech - with its written, signed and electronic derivatives - is an organic continuum, a communicational environment linking the minds and voices of individual human beings. A major issue at the turn of the millennium is how the inevitable growth of global communication can be achieved without undermining humankind's multilingual heritage.
As a transnational research network, the fundamental aims of the Linguasphere Observatory are to observe the structure and workings of the linguasphere, to study and promote multilingualism, to consider the role of international languages in the service of a multilingual global society, and to monitor the linguistic rights and needs of the individual and of all speech-communities, however small. The most important of its programmes to date has been the completion of the first comprehensive classification of the languages and speech- communities of the world, the
Linguasphere Register, of which extracts are now being made freely available on this site.
The linguasphere is the web of speech which children, women and men of all communities have created and woven around planet Earth since the beginnings of humankind, involving thousands of spoken languages and dialects, and the many derivatives of speech - including all forms of writing and printing, signing and electronic communication.
The linguasphere has evolved to become a human-made planetary environment, serving not only as a medium of communication and reasoning, but also as a framework for self-identity and mutual identification, from the layer of the individual to the layers of narrower and wider communities. The linguasphere is a worldwide continuum through space and time, comprising every form of spoken and other human communication. Its most fundamental unit is the individual "voice" of each communicating person. All living languages and hence voices are in direct or indirect contact, especially through the medium of bilingual and multilingual speakers, and all are subject to the continuous change and interchange of their component elements. The complex evolution of the linguasphere takes the form of several continuously evolving global systems of semantic, lexical, phonological and grammatical conventions. These systems interlock in various combinations and with varying social, geographical and temporal distributions to form a surface structure of tens of thousands of living languages and dialects, all continuously developing and influencing one another. See the discussion of
What is a language?
It is particularly important to distinguish between the communicational environment which humankind has established around planet Earth (= the linguasphere, from Latin lingua "language"), and the accumulated products of that environment, in the form of a global continuum of differing but interacting views of the world, often in mutual conflict (= the "logosphere", from Greek logos "word, idea").
Whatever may have been the beginning or beginnings of speech, and regardless of whether human communication diverged gradually or suddenly from other forms of communication among primates, it is clear that the exploration and progressive conquest of the world by homo sapiens of the biosphere to which we all belong was greatly facilitated by human powers of speech, and by the intellect of which these powers are both the manifestation and the means of expression.
As human beings first trekked across the continents and explored the islands and coasts of the world, their communities were inevitably small, dependent on food obtained from hunting, gathering and fishing, and suffering relatively low rates of reproduction and survival.
As this gradual exploration of the unknown took place, and notwithstanding distance and terrain, surviving communities inevitably maintained some form of intermittant contact, if only for the exchange of spouses. Differences of language, whether great or small, would have served as a measure of the distance of relationship necessary to avoid in-breeding, as reflected in surviving linguistic taboos affecting daughters-in-law among some exogamous peoples in Africa and South America, for example.
Languages were thus continually influencing each other, through contact and the exchange of individual speakers, as well as changing and diverging internally. The natural variability of speech, when unrestrained by writing, makes it reasonable to assume that every distinct community of hunters and gatherers and fisherfolk in that pre-agricultural and pre-pastoral world each numbered in tens or at most hundreds was linguistically distinct (except perhaps for a few years after one community had divided into two or more). There must have been degrees of inter-intelligibility among foraging groups in sporadic contact, or with common origins, but distance and time reckoned in tens of thousands of years will have produced a late paleolithic world of more overall linguistic diversity than the world we inhabit to-day.
By around 20,000 years ago, during the late paleo-linguasphere, the individual societies and cultures of the world were represented by a great arc of perhaps tens of thousands of miscellaneous languages, spoken by tiny populations in more or less tenuous or intermittant spoken contact, often dividing or amalgamating. Although this continuous arc of speech extended from the southern tip of Africa to the southern tip of South America, occupying or traversing much of the habitable space of each continent, the combined speakers of all the languages of the world probably numbered no more than the present population of Bombay or Mexico City.
By around 10,000 years ago, few habitable corners of the earth remained undiscovered, and particular communities were beginning to accommodate themselves to the pleasures of permanent settlement and material acquisition. In widely separated parts of the world, they began to experiment with shifting or settled agriculture and with nomadic or settled pastoralism. This great change in the relationship between humankind and the rest of the biosphere marked also the beginning of what might be termed the meso-linguasphere, during which the modern linguistic map of the world was determined.
The domestication of crops and animals, accompanied by a growing concern with metallurgy, with trade and war, with conquest and slavery, led to steady growths and shifts of population. "Successful" communities began to expand, and with them their languages. Individual languages, or rather groups of closely related languages, began to occupy ever widening areas at the expense of others. By 5,000 years ago, individuals and families in positions of power had begun to address themselves to problems of government and economic control, and to the development of writing, an important tool in the establishment, maintenance and expansion of economic and administrative control. The foundations of the world of empires, revealed religions and nation-states were cemented by this Writing Revolution.
Up to five centuries ago, the meso-linguasphere was still represented by an arc of spoken languages in permanent or intermittant contact, extending from Africa through Eurasia to the Americas and Oceania. Since that time, the development of the linguasphere has been profoundly affected by the joining of its opposite ends across the Atlantic.
In 1492 this closing of the formerly crescent-shaped linguasphere opened the way towards the unprecedented expansion of a handful of European languages - Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, and for a short while Dutch - and signalled the beginning of an era of long-distance communication, in which at least half the inhabitants of the earth now have knowledge of an Indo-European language.
Only a few years earlier, Gutenberg had succeeded in perfecting his design of a letter-press, and the subsequent Printing Revolution helped to impose the domination of the written word over the spoken. The letter-press was a vital instrument in the establishment of the nation-states power over the individual, but also in the undermining of the temporal and intellectual power of the Church in Europe. In the longer term, the same letter-press served to diffuse the principles of personal liberty, which in their turn undermined traditional loyalties to unelected rulers, and encouraged progress towards democracy.
The invention of writing and printing have reinforced the solidification of a minority of languages in the world, introducing an element of conscious standardisation of speech and a slowing down of the fluid process of linguistic change and divergence.
The last hundred years, and especially the last fifty, have seen the creation of what we may call the neo-linguasphere, in a form which would have been unimaginable to earlier generations. In contrast to its previous dependence on momentary speech and fragile documentation, hugging the surface of the earth, our linguasphere is now characterised by the instant transmission of languages through the airwaves around the globe. Human speech, and images and written texts associated with speech, are now omnipresent around the planet.
All forms of speech and writing can be recorded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted at will, and more and more individuals have the power at their fingertips to project their spoken or written words instantly to the other side of the planet, in whatever language they choose. The spoken word is thus recovering much of its importance in relation to the written and printed word, and the two major barriers to spoken communication time and distance have at last been surmounted. At the same time, the written word has acquired the fluidity and immediacy of speech and the printed page has become a by-product of the electronic screen.
Whereas the linguasphere has depended until now on sequences of links among individual spoken languages, papered over by written languages, it now functions as a corporate worldwide environment of instant human expression.
The spread of certain languages, especially major European and Asian languages, is now being reinforced by the expansion of all forms of telecommunications and information technology, including satellite-television. This same Telecommunications Revolution has also provided new means for the diffusion and promotion of more localised languages, meeting needs for regional identification and ethnic awareness, as well as for the maintenance of spoken and economic links among dispersed speech-communities. The relative "confidentiality" always provided by the minority languages of such dispersed communities can now be enjoyed by separated speakers on a regional or world-wide scale.
The word "logosphere" (from Greek logos, meaning "word, thought" and sphera, meaning "globe") has been used in print by the Linguasphere Observatory (Observatoire Linguistique) since 1993, first in French (logosphère), then in Spanish and Italian (logosphera), and in English and Welsh. The first published reference was in David Dalby, Langues de France et des pays et régions limitrophes au 20ème siècle, Observatoire Linguistique, Cressenville, 1993 (ISBN ), in which the concept of the logosphere was introduced at the beginning of the opening paragraph (page 1): "Les langues du monde constituent un système continu de communication globale, la LOGOSPHÈRE" ("The languages of the world constitute a continuous system of global communication, the LOGOSPHERE ")
The title "Logosphere" was used from 1993 as the imprint of the Observatoire Linguistiques publications in France. "Logosphere" was used also to describe the overall "Logosphere Programme" of research and publications initiated by the Observatory, including the "Logosphere Project" of global linguistic mapping undertaken from 1994 to 1997 at the University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies), with generous support from the Leverhulme Trust Fund.
In its global sense of the "continuum of human communication and creativity which surrounds the globe, including every form and derivative of human speech and verbalised thought", the term "logosphere" is gaining currency, on the Internet and elsewhere. In the American Popular Science Magazine of July 1997, Professor Michael Krauss of Alaska was quoted as arguing that "linguistic diversity constitutes an ecosystem of sorts, a "logosphere" within which the human species evolved, and on which it depends".
Meanwhile, it became clear during the preparation of the Linguasphere Register that it would be useful to establish a terminological distinction between the logosphere, in the sense of all that is created or conveyed through or in association with spoken and written languages, and the linguasphere, representing no more and no less than the world's languages viewed as integral parts of a continuous global environment of human communication.
As used to describe the continuum of all human communication and creativity, the term logosphere represents the development of a concept put forward much earlier, and known hitherto in French as the noösphère. In 1947, the French priest, archaeologist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote his treatise Le phénomène humain ("The Human Phenomenon", first published in Paris in 1955), in which he discussed the place of humanity in the evolution of the world. He developed an idea, advanced previously by the Russian biochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, that the human consciousness had created an intellectual envelope or membrane around the globe, supplementing the organic biosphere and the inorganic geosphere a collective memory built up by the peoples of the world since the beginnings of speech.
This specifically human dimension of our planet had already been named noösphère by Vernadsky, from Greek noös "mind", although the awkwardness of this term, in either French or English, has prevented it from gaining very wide currency.
The original concept of the noösphere was partly obscured by the essentially historical approach which Teilhard de Chardin adopted towards the evolution of humanity. He was writing in a different age, at a time when human progress was at a mere gallop, and when scholars in the humanities were as much preoccupied with the remoter past as with the rapidly unfolding present. So it was that speculation on the linguistic prehistory of planet Earth drew attention away from the need to describe the actual linguistic geography of the world in the 20th century, as the framework of the modern logosphere. So it is also that the overall classification of the modern languages of the world has hitherto been expressed in terms of hypotheses of prehistoric relationship as though maps of modern motorways were to be warped to fit in with the reconstruction of prehistoric pathways.
In a strategic speech delivered in Bilbao in March 1996, the Director-General of UNESCO, Sr.Frederico Mayor Zaragoza, called for the preparation of a global linguistic map, un mapa lingüístico mundial. This proposal converged with the Linguasphere Observatory's on-going Mapbase (map + database) of the World's Languages and Speech Communities, of which the first computerised part, covering Africa, was already being developed at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, Departments of Geography and Africa). This GIS-research, involving the Sudanese cartographer Yasir Mohildeen, was accomplished thanks to the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust Fund. The first continental sheet of the Mapbase covering Africa has now been published on this website (see
Mapbase).
The further planning of this global enterprise has beens the subject of recent meetings held by the Linguasphere Observatory in India, with colleagues from the national
Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Centre for Communication Studies in Pune, India.
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