ENGLISH WON’T DO

1. Why English wouldn’t do in a better world

The Manifesto of the Universal Esperanto Association adopted at the 1996 World Congress in Prague states, among other things, that “[t]he unequal distribution of power among languages is a recipe for permanent language insecurity, or outright language oppression, for a large part of the world’s population” (Phillipson 2003 : 173). While not exactly an Esperanto enthusiast, I whole-heartedly agree with this sentiment. Any inequality in status among languages is directly and immediately translated into inequality of opportunity among their speakers; and crowning the pyramid of linguistic inequality is, of course, English.

Much is being said about International English distancing itself from its traditional native-speaker base and becoming a neutral communication tool that no longer belongs to any particular nation. Efforts are being made to replace the traditional English as a Foreign Language teaching model by a more relevant English as a Lingua Franca approach which does not regard the native speaker as the highest authority and the lofty ideal to aspire to but instead focuses on the features that are really important for successful international communication between speakers with very different first-language backgrounds (Graddol 2006). Simplified or ‘controlled’ versions of English have been proposed; some of them, such as Seaspeak for maritime communication, are used in their specific fields to everyone’s apparent satisfaction (Crystal 2003). In Europe, Diego Marani, a professional EU translator, recently initiated a campaign to legitimise – under the general name of Europanto – English-based language mixtures that many Europeans use to communicate with each other. The “frustrations of the vast majority of people who are forced to use English even though their command of the language is not very good” can, in his opinion, be addressed “by speeding up the process of the internationalization of the English language and by its isolation from the Anglo-American culture”. Here is a delightful, if somewhat over-the-top, example of a possible Romance-Germanic Europanto written by Marani himself:

Cabillot was nicht zo bravo in crossverbas.Seine boss le obliged crossverbas te make ut el cervello in exercizio te keep, aber aquello postmeridio inspector Cabillot was mucho somnolento. Wat esse greco, esse blanco und se mange? tinqued. May esse el glace-cream? No, dat esse italiano aber greco nicht. Cabillot slowemente closed los eyos und sich endormed op seine buro. Der telefono ringante presto lo rewakened. (Marani)

The realist, sober-minded part of me can only wish success to such initiatives; however, the idealist in me is less willing to accept the status quo. A basic assumption in this paper will be that, if we are ever to have a genuine global lingua franca able to facilitate fair, rich and accurate communication, English – either in its ‘full’ form or simplified and peppered with yet more random words from other languages – just won’t do. English may be easier for many people to learn than Hungarian or Mandarin, but it is still “in many ways a treacherous language because of the complexities of structure and usage (reflecting its hybrid origins, and subtle variation in how near synonyms are used) and because there is massive variation in the ways English is spoken by people from different parts of the world” (Phillipson 2003 : 140). More importantly, I find it unlikely that any amount of internationalisation will ever sufficiently distance English from its native-speaker base: “A ‘World Standard Spoken English’ is bound to be based on Anglo-American mother tongue norms” (Phillipson 2003 : 166), giving native speakers, even though they already constitute a minority of English users, “an enormous advantage compared to those people who have to study English to be able to speak the language, because their English is the correct one – not the bastardized versions spoken by other peoples” (Marani). Even if the hegemony of English ends some day and another big natural language takes over, we will still have a situation where a majority of the world’s population is at a disadvantage. The only natural languages fit to serve as lingua francas in terms of fairness are dead ones; and even dead languages are disqualified on the grounds of unnecessary complexity.

So, unfair reality aside, what would happen in a better world? As an Ido website has it, “[t]he answer to this situation is to use a neutral invented language”.

2. The existing constructed languages

There are conflicting estimates as to how many ‘a posteriori’ planned languages have been created so far. “About 1,000” is the figure quoted in several sources; however, a quick look at a website like www.languagemaker.com makes one suspect that there must have been many more – and new ones keep appearing all the time. Regardless of the exact number of invented languages, it is probably safe to assume that a majority of them were not created with the explicit purpose of providing the world with a universal lingua franca: such languages as Klingon from the Star Trek series and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sindarin, as well as numerous lesser-known ‘fictional’ languages, can sometimes boast devoted fan bases, but they were not ‘tailored’ to facilitate international communication in the real world and are normally learned for other reasons. It is also safe to assume that few planned languages have actually been developed in sufficient detail as to be fully functional in the way natural languages are. The multitude of linguistic inventions can thus be narrowed down to just a few contenders, of which the best-known seem to be (in order of appearance) Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, and Interlingua.

Volapük (vola ‘of world’ + pük ‘language’), proposed by Johann Martin Schleyer in 1880, was the first artificial language project to gain significant popularity: during the 1880s, it attracted at least 100,000 enthusiasts (some sources put the number as high as a million) and Volapük clubs sprung up all over Europe. Such was the sweeping popularity of Volapük that an English scholar named Alexander Ellis, in a report to the London Philological Society, was moved to conclude: «all those who desire the insubstantiation of that ‘phantom of a universal language’ which has flitted before so many minds, from the days of the Tower of Babel, should, I think, add their voice to the many thousands who are ready to exclaim lifom-ös Volapük, long live Volapük!» (LaFarge 2000) For the most part, the vocabulary of the original Volapük consisted of unrecognisably modified English roots (vol actually comes from world and pük from speak). The grammar was agglutinative, with a complex system of postfixes and prefixes used to build four German-inspired noun cases and an unrivalled number of verb forms. Both the unnecessary complexity and Schleyer’s stubborn resistance to any reform of the language contributed to a mass desertion of enthusiasts to Esperanto and a quick decline of Volapük; the estimated number of fluent users now stands at 20 people, all of whom learned the language out of linguistic curiosity (LaFarge 2000). However, the initial success of Volapük prepared the ground for later inventions.

Only 7 years younger than Volapük, Esperanto is without a doubt the most successful planned language to date. It was invented by Lejzer (Ludwig) Zamenhof, who grew up in Bialystock, Poland (at the time occupied by the Russian Empire), and later worked as a doctor in Warsaw. Zamenhof, only too familiar with language barriers and aware of the relative success of Volapük, was inspired to press on with his own language project. He published the first outline of his constructed lingua franca in 1887 under the pseudonym ‘Esperanto’ (‘he that hopes’), which eventually caught on as the popular name of his language. The first book contained a basic grammatical sketch accompanied by some 900 roots and a number of text samples. After a somewhat slow start, Esperanto gradually accumulated a dedicated international following and in 1920 was actually considered by the League of Nations for adoption as the working language of the organisation. With France, Britain and the USA pushing for adoption of French and English, one can argue that Esperanto never stood much of a chance; however, 13 countries did vote in its favour, among them Belgium, Brazil, China and Italy. (Phillipson 2003) Despite the vigorous persecution of Esperanto enthusiasts by assorted dictatorial regimes – including Stalin’s Soviet Union, Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany – and the ever-growing role of English as a global lingua franca, the Esperanto movement is still very much alive, and Esperanto remains the only constructed language that most educated people around the world will have heard of. The largest Esperanto organisation, Universala Esperanto-Asocio, has representatives in 62 countries and holds annual conferences around the globe (Yokohama in 2007) (www.uea.org/info/angle/an_ghisdatigo.html), about 250 book titles are published in Esperanto every year, several dozen periodicals appear in the language (Fettes 1990), a simple Google search brings up countless web pages dedicated to it, and the most conservative estimates put the number of fluent speakers at around a million. Much as these statistics pale compared to English and other big languages, “[t]here is no reason to consider these figures insignificant, since speaking Esperanto is an entirely voluntary act almost devoid of material incentives; how many speakers of English as a second language would one expect to find in similar circumstances?” (Fettes 1990) I, for one, tend to think that, along with Modern Hebrew, Esperanto is one of the most impressive exercises in purposeful language construction.

The core vocabulary of Esperanto is Indo-European, with Romance roots constituting a majority of the word stock and the rest coming mostly from German (knabo ‘boy’) or English (birdo ‘bird’); there is also a smattering of Slavic roots (prava ‘right, true’). Like in Volapük, the grammar can be roughly classified as agglutinative: different grammatical markers are stringed onto each other without modifications, e. g. knab root + in feminine marker + o noun marker + j plural marker + n Accusative marker results in knabinojn, as in La knabo approbas knabinojn ‘The boy likes the girls’. There are separate endings for different parts of speech (-o for nouns, -a for adjectives, -e for adverbs, -u for verb infinitives) as well as for different tense forms (-as for present, -is for past, -us for future); all morphology is fully regular. (Sigurd 1993) The standard word order is SVO.

Quite predictably, there have been several attempts to reform and further simplify Esperanto, the most successful of them resulting in Ido, described by an enthusiast as “a language more fit [than Esperanto] for the purpose for which it was intended”. (www.idolinguo.org.uk) In 1907, a special international committee set up by the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language chose Esperanto as the best available candidate for the role; however, the committee also recommended that the language should be modified and thus made more suitable for international use. This caused a split in the Esperanto movement, and Ido was developed by those who chose to comply with the committee’s decision. Ido does away with such features of Esperanto as the obligatory Accusative Case, adjective-noun agreement, accented letters and certain consonant clusters; it also introduces some different endings, a gender-neutral 3d-person pronoun and a number of vocabulary changes, generally bringing words closer back to their natural-language originals. While Ido definitely enjoys much less popularity than Esperanto, it is nevertheless comparatively vibrant: there are regular international Ido conferences and a number of Ido societies, including Svenska Ido-förbundet. (Sigurd 1993)

The last constructed language I will mention in this section is Interlingua, the brainchild of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). IALA was founded in the
USA in 1924 and, presumably after a great deal of preparatory effort, published the first Interlingua dictionary and grammar in 1951. Like Esperanto and Ido, Interlingua is mostly based on ‘international’ vocabulary, the main criterion of internationalism being that a word has to “occur with the same meanings in at least three of the major European languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish/Portuguese treated as a single language, German, and Russian”. (Stanley) The grammar is essentially a simplified and fully regularised version of what is found in Romance languages. One Interlingua website (www.interlingua.org) paints the following, rather gloomy, picture of the current state of the language: “Following a string of initial successes within the scientific community (chiefly publication of Interlingua abstracts in medical journals and summaries by world medical congresses as well as the distribution of plant disease manuals under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Agriculture) during a quarter of a century, interest in the subject waned as English became the undisputed language of globalization and the Interlingua Institute which had been founded to continue IALA’s work was formally dissolved in November, 2000.” It can also been argued that, strictly speaking, Interlingua was never intended to be a genuine living lingua franca; rather, as even its name suggests, it was designed as an auxiliary ‘interlanguage’ for written texts aimed at passive understanding. However, Interlingua does have an impressive presence on the Internet as a functional lingua franca: in addition to Union Mundial pro Interlingua, there are more than a dozen active national societies, including Svenska Sällskapet för Interlingua. While the issue of the actual number of speakers seems to be tactfully avoided on Interlingua websites, there are regularly updated news pages, considerable learning resources and numerous blogs in the language.

3. The problem with the existing constructed languages

Among the more fully-fledged artificial lingua francas one can find on the Internet, there is a language called Slovio, created by Slovak “scientist and linguist” Mark Hucko. Here is a short passage in Slovio:

To es bezsporju historju fakt zxe sovremju Europanis (negda imenitju Indo-Europanis) es potomkis om Dunavju Slavis (negda imenitju Dunavju Lesju Ludis). Odnakuo to es bezsporju fakt zxe vse Europju jazikas originijut iz odnakju jazika, jazika om Dunavju Slavis. (Berger 2004 : 4)

Now, if you speak Slovak, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian or any other of the Slavic languages, my guess is that you understood that the author of the excerpt is propounding the somewhat dubious theory of all modern Europeans being direct descendants of an ancient people he refers to as the “Danube Slavs”. Slovio claims to be what it is: a Pan-Slavic auxiliary language created to facilitate communication between the 300 million speakers of Slavic languages. Apart from a number of international terms of Latin or Greek origin, it has an exclusively Slavic vocabulary, retains a regularised Slavic morphology and is not supposed to be easily learnable by anyone except the target Slav audience. Slovio is not meant to go global. It is very obviously parochial.

The question is: are the languages I looked at in the previous section more ‘global’ than Slovio? Here is the same sentence in Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua (‘Respected Sirs! I read in your city’s newspaper that you are seeking a clerk.’):

Altestimataj sinjoroj! En la ĵurnalo de via urbo mi legis, ke vi serĉas kontoriston. (Esperanto)

Altestimata siori! En la jurnalo di via urbo mi lektis, ke vi serchas kontoristo. (Ido) Estimatissime seniores!

In le jornal de heri de vostre urbe io ha legite, que vos cerca un commisso. (Interlingua) (Sigurd 1993 : 110)

Someone unfamiliar with the languages can be excused for assuming that all three of them are some obscure dialects of Spanish or Portuguese. Looking at the Swedish translation of the sentence given in the source (‘Vördade herrar! I Eder stads tidning läser jag att ni söker en kontorist’), I cannot help but wonder whether Swedish should also be promoted as a potential global lingua franca. Compared to some languages, it is already wonderfully simple; one would only have to do away with the gender system, reduce the number of plural endings and conjugate all verbs as if they belonged to Group 1. There is no doubt that Western European languages such as Spanish, French and, of course, English have more of a global presence than Russian or Polish, the two biggest Slavic languages. However, to people whose first language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family – to cite the most numerous example – any artificial language based on Spanish, English and French is unlikely to appear significantly less alien and intimidating than Slovio; this, in my opinion, is the main problem with the language projects proposed so far. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find reliable studies of the comparative learnability of Esperanto or other constructed languages by people with different language backgrounds. Even so, I am inclined to think that replacing English with Esperanto would make the lives of Chinese speakers a little easier – but it would still leave them at a disadvantage compared to (Indo-)Europeans.

4. What does it take to make a true global lingua franca?

To put it in a nutshell, I believe it takes a lot of mutual trust, meticulous research and rational discussion, none of which seem to be too common in global politics. However, as the dream of a fair universal language is utopian in any case, I feel licensed to outline here what is, in my opinion, essential to make the dream come true:

a) The phonemic inventory of a truly universal lingua franca should be very compact and include only those sounds that occur in an absolute majority of language families. The number of such sounds is unlikely to be very high, but if a fully functional natural language such as Hawaiian is able to manage with just 13 distinct phonemes (5 vowels and 8 consonants), there is no real reason why a global lingua franca should have many more. User-friendly phonotactics are also extremely important. Esperanto has been rightly criticised for its consonant clusters (e. g. in funkcio, punkto, ekzemplo), which pose a serious difficulty to speakers of some non-Indo-European languages. There are natural languages that allow very few or no consonant clusters at all and require every syllable to end in a vowel (Crystal 1997); this could be a good strategy for a global lingua franca.

b)Phonetic considerations obviously limit the extent to which already existing words from various languages can be incorporated into a global lingua franca in their original form. Roots will have to be carefully selected from a genuinely representative sample of languages and then modified to fit the phonetic requirements of the new lingua franca: shorter words will be preferred, longer words will be clipped, extra consonants will be discarded, and extra vowels will be inserted. Quite possibly, some words may need to be created from scratch. The core vocabulary should contain concepts found in a majority of language families; the more peripheral vocabulary may need to have an equivalent – not necessarily in a one-word form – for every concept ever expressed in a language. Clear and simple morphological guidelines for borrowing and creating new lexical items will need to be laid down that will fit the phonetic requirements of the language.

c)As for the grammar, it may be a good idea to look to creolised pidgins for inspiration. Most grammatical phenomena that creoles (and especially major world languages) manage to do without can be safely left out – only those that do not cause international learners any significant difficulty may be allowed as a matter of consensus. To cite a few examples from Esperanto, features like the adjective-noun agreement, the definite article, the adjective-adverb distinction and the notorious Accusative marker can hardly qualify for inclusion.

d)A well-funded international body will have to be set up to carry out the necessary research and actual language creation. Any final version of the new language will have to be tried out on a representative learner group. Once the language itself has been created and accepted by the international community, it will take at least several years to prepare the world for a simultaneous launch: promote the project, create learning materials, train a host of teachers, translate a body of information into the language, introduce social and educational incentives to learn it etc etc.

For humanity in its present state, this is a tall order. On the other hand, many things have happened that would have been dismissed as pipe-dreaming only a century ago. One of them has been the creation of a multinational European superstate, uniting countries that, until very recently, used to regularly go to war with each other. Perhaps, the EU could keep up the good work and set another good example for the rest of the world by adopting Esperanto as the pan-European lingua franca. After all, it has been pointed out time and again that at least Europeans are guaranteed to find it easy to learn.

Although the Finns, the Estonians, the Hungarians and the Basques might, of course, have their own view on the matter.

References:

Berger, Tilman. 2004. Vom Erfinden slavischer Sprachen. Slovio.com. Available at http://www.slovio.com/linkis/BergerPlansprachen.pdf Accessed on 1st April, 2007.

Crystal, David. 2003. English as a Global Language. Second Edition. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

Crystal, David. 1997. The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language. Second Edition. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

Fettes, Mark. 1991. Europe’s Babylon: Towards a Single European Language? First published in the series Esperanto Documents. Available at http://esperantic.org/ced/eurlan.htm Accessed on 1st April, 2007.

Graddol, David. 2006 English Next: Why Global English May Mean the End of ‘English as a Foreign Language’. British Council Learning. Available at http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-research-english-next.pdf Accessed on 2d April, 2007.

LaFarge, Paul. Pük, Memory: Why I Learned a Universal Language No One Speaks. The Village Voice, August 2 – 8, 2000. Available at http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0031,lafarge,16942,12.html . Accessed on 2d April, 2007.

Marani, Diego. From productive process to language, or How to cause international English to implode. Newropeans – Arts, Sports, MKP2001, Neurope Tower, Europanto. Available at http://www.neuropeans.com/topic/europanto/what/more.php Accessed on 1st April, 2007.

Mulaik, Stanley. Interlingua for English Speakers. A Quick Survey. Societate American pro Interlingua. Available at http://www.myhomeoffice-online.com/interlinguaus/pakupaku/index.php?page=Interlinguaforanglos Accessed on 1st April, 2007.

Phillipson, Robert. 2003. English-Only Europe? : Challenging Language Policy. Routledge. London.

Sigurd, Bengt. 1993. Esperanto, transpiranto och andra konstgjorda språk. In Jerker Blomqvist and Ulf Teleman, ed. Språk i världen: Broar och barrierer. Lund University Press. Lund. 103 – 114.

NO DOOM OF ENGLISH

The following essay was submitted by Konstantin Andreev as a course paper in Morphology at Dalarna University, Sweden, in 2006.

In A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess’s best-known novel, nadsat is the fictional argot used by the teenage narrator, Alex, his friends and a significant number of other members of their generation, as attested by Alex himself: “Oh, that … is what we call nadsat talk. All the teens use that, sir.’ (Burgess 1985: 126) Apart from the direct speech of the older characters, nadsat talk rather than Standard English is effectively the language of the novel.

The real-world origins of nadsat are fairly straightforward: writing in the early sixties, Burgess set his dystopia in the imaginary Britain of a not-so-distant future and naturally wanted to have the teenage protagonist speak a language that would be original, distinct, unlikely to ever feel dated – and, at the same time, relatively plausible. At the time when Western popular culture was beginning to seep through the Iron Curtain and the first English terms were entering the slang of the urban Soviet youth, Burgess envisaged a complete reversal of the trend for his fictional universe: a world in which Soviet propaganda and its attendant Russian-language culture were miraculously gaining the upper hand. He single-handedly ‘borrowed’ about 200 common Russian words into English, creatively nativised them, threw in a smattering of traditional and invented slang terms, added some archaic verb morphology and German-influenced syntax, peppered the narrative with the prophetically ubiquitous like and thus produced one of the most linguistically striking novels in English-language literature.

By contrast, the emergence of nadsat in the fictional world of the novel is less than clear. The only brief insight into its development is offered by a secondary character halfway through the book: “Odd bits of old rhyming slang… A bit of gypsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal penetration.” (Burgess 1985: 9) After all, Burgess’s primary goals in writing the novel must have been of artistic and philosophical nature; he did not aim to explore an imaginary history of a fictional dialect.

Now, in plain Chomskian terms, every writer possesses full competence of his or her native language, which arguably makes an argot that was consciously designed by one person just as legitimate an object of research as any ‘natural’ product of human linguistic behaviour. One may certainly have reservations about the representative value of such research, but it is still possible to see how a detailed etymological and morphological analysis of nadsat vocabulary can be both scientifically valid and illuminating.

On the other hand, I believe that a purely scholarly approach to analysing nadsat would disregard – or even contradict – its artistic purpose and literary origin. While we must genuinely apply the methods of linguistic analysis to the nadsat data found in the novel, we do not necessarily have to stay within the real-world frame of reference metalinguistically. In order to do justice to the phenomenon of nadsat, we can try to place our analysis in a fictionalised literary context.

Being a somewhat linguistically obsessed reader, I tend to enjoy novels that have language as one of the main characters; and even within such novels, the most fascinating fragments are certainly those dealing with language explicitly. As far as I am concerned, the appendix on the languages of Middle Earth clearly overshadows the rest of The Lord of the Rings; and Anthony Burgess’s failure to go deeper into the phenomenon of nadsat in A Clockwork Orange is the only shortcoming of this otherwise accomplished novel. So, in an attempt to kill too birds with one piece of writing – i.e. both provide the novel with some kind of a linguistic appendix and complete this assignment – I have written the following fictional magazine article:

No Doom of English
A linguist’s look at the popular myths concerning Nadsat Talk

Young people have been inventing and using their own language varieties and older people have been taking them to task for that at least since the generation gap was first bemoaned by classical authors of Ancient Greece and Rome. In this country, the tradition goes all the way back to Swift and Dryden, and the amount of passion and paper spent so far on showing English youngsters the error of their linguistic ways is beyond estimation. However, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that no other argot ever created by English-speaking youth has appalled as many purists and stirred as much controversy as Nadsat Talk. People known to have diametrically opposing views on just about everything else – such as F. Alexander and the current Minister of the Interior – are unanimous in their condemnation of the way our young people speak. The harsh opinions range from “pernicious meaningless gibberish” and “bastardization of our mother tongue” (Priestly in The Citizen, 17 June 1973) to “an act of linguistic high treason, fuelled by enemy propaganda and corroding the very foundation of our society” (Murray in The British Way, 23 December 1975). At best, an informed person’s opinion of Nadsat is similar to that expressed by P. R. Deltoid in The Informer last January: “The jargon … commonly referred to as Nadsat Talk is a perfect example of a modern urban pidgin, an emaciated pseudo-language made up of half-learned Russian and half-forgotten English. Despite its exotic ring, it totally lacks the expressive inventory of either of its sources and, as a communication tool, is only fit to serve the needs of street bullies and inebriated malchicks and devotchkas wasting their lives in milk-plus bars.” (Deltoid in The Informer, 21 January 1975)

Much as descriptions of this kind may appeal to the average reader of The Informer, sociolinguistic research tells us that pidgins do not arise in monolingual communities – not even when some of their members, in accordance with the 1965 National Curriculum, have three lessons of Russian every week. Neither do teenagers anywhere in the world suddenly lose “the expressive inventory” of their first-language when they start using the current youth argot in their everyday speech. In fact, various sub-standard jargons are incredibly inventive. They are constantly enriching the vocabulary of the standard language even as used by Mr Deltoid himself: elsewhere in the same article he talks of the plight of decent young people “left almost entirely on their oddy knocky” by our egalitarian education system, apparently not realising that the wonderful phrase on your oddy knocky entered Standard English directly from Nadsat Talk.

It is not surprising that, in such an atmosphere, it took the huge commercial success of Alex Smith’s autobiography, written entirely in Nadsat, two years ago for the linguistic circles of this country to start taking genuine interest in the phenomenon. We are, however, doing our best to catch up. Our team has been engaged in field research of Nadsat for over a year, and we have already accumulated a corpus of data sufficiently rich to draw at least one important conclusion: the rumours of the linguistic idiocy of our youth have been greatly exaggerated.

To illustrate our point, we offer here a brief overview of just one aspect of Nadsat – the way it incorporates Russian words into the fabric of English speech. We shall see that, in the process, Nadsat masterfully employs the entire range of morphological mechanisms which we find in Standard English. We shall also see further proof that foreign language teaching as it is currently practiced in our secondary schools is just as unlikely to pose a threat to English as it is to result in anybody actually learning a foreign language.

The most striking feature of the Russian loanwords in Nadsat is their un-Russianness, which in this case effectively means “Englishness”. The extent to which our teenagers re-interpret – both phonetically and in spelling – Russian vocabulary to make it fit the conventions of their native language is demonstrated in a study done by Bradly et al. (1975). Eighty-four native Russian speakers, all of whom spoke intermediate-level English, were asked to identify the origin of 50 Nadsat words derived directly from Russian. Half the participants heard the lexical items as a recording while the other half were given a written list, based on the spellings used in Alex Smith’s autobiography; in both cases; the words were presented without any context. While the recognition rate was slightly higher for the written list, both groups failed to identify the Russian originals for at least 40 % of the items. Several Nadsat terms, such as spoogy, gooly, shilarny, razdraz, skvat, chasso, veck, cheena and bratchny (cf. the Russian ispuganniy, gulyat’, zhelanie, razdrazhat’, skhvatit’, chasovoy, chelovek, zhenshchina and vnebrachniy respectively), were not recognised correctly by any of the Russian-speakers.

Let us see what happened to these words to make them so difficult to recognise. The etymological analysis below is based on the findings of Paston and Dahl (1975), who used recorded field data and the Required Russian Vocabulary List, approved by the Ministry of Education and taught in secondary schools since 1965.

1. Spoogy is an adjective meaning “terrified”. To produce this, the Russian word ispuganny (“frightened”) underwent fore- and back-clipping; the resulting noun-like root spoog was then given the English suffix –y, commonly used to derive adjectives from nouns. As the spelling suggests, the neutral-length Russian [u] of ispuganniy was interpreted as the long English [u:].

2. Gooly, despite is adjective-like appearance, is a verb meaning “to walk”, as in “I goolied over to the shelf full of reference veshches” (Smith 1974: 112). The Russian verb gulyat’ (“to have a walk”) lost its verb suffix -yat’; however, the softness of the last root consonant [l’] led to the appearance of [i] at the end. The stress moved to the first syllable, and the Russian [u] was then given the same treatment as in spoogy. In spelling, the final [i] was naturally represented as y. Two-syllable verbs ending in an unstressed –y are not uncommon in English (e. g. study, carry, tally), so there is nothing peculiar about that. What is interesting and telling, however, is the shift in meaning from the original Russian sense of “to have a walk, to be out walking” to the almost full semantic copy of the Standard English verb “to walk”. A number of other Nadsat verbs, e.g. itty, govoreet, viddy and kopat, function in a similar manner – i.e. taking over the entire semantic space of their Standard English equivalents while retaining only a superficial semantic link to the Russian originals. For example, the meaning of kopat (“to dig”) in “I didn’t so much kopat the later part of the book” (Smith 1974: 64) in no way reflects the meaning of the Russian verb kopat’ (literally “to dig”). On the one hand, this feature of Nadsat may be used to demonstrate the superficial nature of the Russian-language tuition in our schools; but more importantly, it shows that Nadsat is English – only with some slightly different labels, or signifiers.

3. Shilarny, just as the Russian word zhelanie, means “desire”. Here, we can also see the Russian -ie ending being shortened to -y and the neutral-length Russian [a] being assimilated as the long [a:] of British English, which in this case is represented in spelling as ar. Another telling alteration is the replacement of the initial [ž] with [š]: it is unusual for English words to begin in [ž], so the sound was changed to accommodate the phonotactic rules of English.

4. Razdraz is “upset, angry”. The Russian word is razdrazhonniy (“irritated”), the stress falling on -zho-. Once again, we see back-clipping that cuts off the non-root part of the Russian word (-onniy); skvat (“to grab”) and chasso (“a guard”) were derived from the Russian skhvat-it’ and chaso-voy in the same way. This process, while by no means obligatory (cf. Nadsat adjectives choodessny and dorogoy, in which the Russian suffixes -essny and –oy remain intact) is very common in Nadsat. This is not surprising if we keep in mind that the average morpheme-per-word ratio for English is around 1.68 whereas the figure for Russian is 3.33 (Bauer 1970: 169). There can be little doubt that creators and speakers of Nadsat can “feel” the general tendency of English to have words stripped down to the root, figuratively speaking. Another process evident in razdraz is, again, phonotactic in nature: the [ž] sound, whose possible distribution is constrained in English when compared to Russian, is replaced by the more common [z].

5. Veck (Rus. cheloveck “person, human being”) and cheena (Rus. zhenshchina “woman”, stressed on the first syllable) are used to refer to men and women respectively. In both cases we have rather substantial fore-clipping. It is interesting to note that the clipped form of cheloveck used in Russian youth slang is chel; one can only speculate why English teenagers opted for a different version. Similarly open to speculation is the issue of stress shift in cheena. We have assumed above that the stress shift in gooly was caused by the loss of the originally stressed ending due to back-clipping. However, it may well be that the back-clipping itself was facilitated by the fact that the wrong stress was learned – or, worse still, taught – in the first place. Russian stress is largely unpredictable, and such Nadsat words as devòtchka (Rus. dèvochka) show that a stress shift can occur even if the word has not undergone any clipping. After all, the last thing the average Nadsat speaker probably cares about when speaking an English argot is observing the Russian phonetic conventions. It is therefore fairly likely that whoever first coined cheena already stressed the penultimate syllable of zhenshchina rather than the first one.

6. Bratchny (“bastard”) was created by fore-clipping the Russian word vnebrachniy, which is an adjective literally meaning “done or existing out of wedlock”, as in vnebrachniy rebyonok (“illegitimate child”). Although many Russian adjectives are used on their own as nouns, vnebrachniy is never used in such a way; therefore, in bratchny, we appear to have a clear case of post-loan conversion. Conversion is a derivational process extremely productive in modern English. The heavy use Nadsat makes of conversion can be seen in the following examples (Smith 1974): “Tonight … we pull a mansize crast” (a robbery; from the verb to crast – Russian krast’); “Perhaps you have been having a bit of a quiet govoreet behind my back” (a talk; from the verb to govoreet – Russian govorit’); “With me in this cantora were four millicents, all having a good loud peet of chai” (a drink; from the verb to peet – Russian pit’).

Conversion is by no means the only way of creating new vocabulary and new meanings to be found in Nadsat. Here are a few others:

Affixation
Yarbleless (“testicle-less”, by association with balls also “cowardly”), as in “two horrible yarbleless like eunuchs” (Smith 1974: 38). Derived by means of the suffix -less from yarble (“testicle”, from the Russian yabloko “apple”).
Droogy (“friendly”), as in “a droogy smile”. Formed by means of the suffix -y from droog (“friend”, from the Russian drug “friend”).
Rookerful (“handful”), as in “a horrorshow rookerful of like plum cake” (Smith 1974: 21). Formed by means of the suffix –ful from rooker (“hand”, from Russian ruka “hand, arm”).
Unplatty (“undress”), as in “I got unplattied”. The negative prefix un- here was added to the verb platty, which, in its turn, was formed by conversion from the noun platties (“clothes”, from the Russian platye “a dress”).

Compounding
Bogman (“priest”): bog (“God”, from the Russian bog “god”) + man. The expression itself can be used in further compounds, e.g. bogman platties “a priest’s clothes”.
Glazlid (“eyelid”). The first English component of eyelid has been replaced by its Nadsat equivalent glaz (Rus. glaz “an eye”).
Rozz-shop (“police station”), as in “we were sirening off to the rozz-shop” (Smith 1974: 54). A rozz is a police officer (Rus. rozha “an ugly face”). Another compound based on rozz is rozzvan (“police van”).
Krovvy-covered, krovvy-red and nose-krovvy (“blood-covered”, “blood-red” and “blood coming from the nose”). Krovvy is blood (Rus. krov’ “blood”).

Back-formation
Gloop (“nonsense”), as in “The Manison or the Manse or some such piece of gloop” (Smith 1974: 46). Formed from the adjective gloopy “stupid” (Rus. glupiy “silly”).

Metaphorical usage
There are hundreds of recorded cases of original metaphorical usage in Nadsat. A couple of typical examples would be “real horroshow groodies they were that then exhibited their pink glazzies” (Smith 1974: 22), where pink glazzies (literally “pink eyes”) is used to refer to nipples, and “we had four of these lomticks of like Prison Religion that morning” (Smith 1974: 67), in which lomtick (literally “a slice”) denotes a session.

Unless we choose to remain blind, we can clearly see from these examples that Nadsat is just as expressive and creative as Standard English. In fact, any juxtaposition of Nadsat and English would be misguided as Nadsat is obviously a thriving branch on the big tree of our language. Research into Nadsat will undoubtedly continue, but one thing must be communicated to the public as soon as possible: rather than portending the end of English, Nadsat is a sign of its robustness and linguistic health, and those people who are now so quick to condemn it should instead be looking into the reasons why our youth have chosen to create and speak an English as different from ours as Nadsat is.

References
Bauer, L. 2001. Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Referred to as “(Bauer 1970)” in the article.
Booij, G. 2005. The Grammar of Words. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Burgess, A. 1985. A Clockwork Orange. Penguin Books, London. Also referred to as “(Smith 1974)” in the article.
Katamba, F. 2005. English Words. Routledge, London & New York.

The Critical Period Hypothesis: The Unholy Grail of Psycholinguistics?

The following essay was submitted by Konstantin Andreev as a course paper in Language Acquisition at Dalarna University, Sweden, in 2006.

1. Introduction

If you have ever attempted to learn a foreign language as an adult, chances are you have wondered why something that little children accomplish with apparent ease should require so much rote learning, self-discipline and concentration now that you have grown up – with no guarantee whatsoever of eventual success. It seems sensible – indeed, almost self-evident – to assume that there must be something fundamentally different between how we acquire language in early childhood and how we learn it as adults. But then again, until science proved otherwise, it seemed self-evident that the sun went around the Earth and that a heavy falling object would surely hit the ground sooner than a light one. So what does the science of psycholinguistics have to say on the matter?

That children are naturally superior language learners may sound like a fairly straightforward suggestion, easy to put to a test and eventually prove or reject; however, this is not the case at all. What strikes one about the Critical Period Hypothesis is how many different things it has meant to different people. David Singleton of Trinity College Dublin, at the end of his brief summary of the literature on the subject, likens the idea of a critical period for language acquisition to the “mythical hydra, whose multiplicity of heads and capacity to produce new heads rendered it impossible to deal with” and generally dismisses it as a poorly-defined conjecture that “cannot plausibly be regarded as a scientific hypothesis either in the strict Popperian sense of something which can be falsified or indeed in the rather looser logical positivist sense of something that can be clearly confirmed or supported” (Singleton 2005: 12). The search for a linguistic critical period is thus nothing but a quest for another Holy Grail or, at best, Martian canals – a no doubt fascinating but ultimately unscientific affair. Considering the amount of research that has been invested into the hypothesis, these are strong words, and one would assume that Singleton had good reasons for making such a claim. The question I intend to try and answer for myself in this paper is, therefore, very simple: Does he?

2. How the idea emerged

The concept of “critical periods” in the development of an organism was pioneered in zoology. In the middle of the 20th century, zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who studied greylag geese, found that newly-hatched goslings would develop an attachment to and start following any moving shape that they happened to see during a rigidly limited time period soon after hatching. If that moving shape was Lorenz himself, the goslings would recognise him as their ‘mother’ and ignore the actual mother goose. While the nature of the moving object did not seem to matter much, the time of exposure was crucial: goslings that failed to attach to the mother during the “window of opportunity” seemed unable to do it later. Similar developmental windows of opportunity have since been shown for other animals and traits (Pinker 1994: 293; Bialystok, Hakuta 1994: 56).

Although the Egyptian king Psammettichus is said to have discovered, much to his own chagrin, that children who were not exposed to any language wound up speaking Phrygian, more recent and reliable accounts unequivocally suggest that children who do not hear language will not speak at all. The first person to suggest a critical period for language learning in relatively scientific terms probably was Jean Itard. He was the ambitious French doctor who, in the first half of the 19th century, tried and spectacularly failed to teach language to Victor the Wild Boy of Aveyron, found in a forest at around the age of twelve. In an attempt to explain his failure, Itard speculated that “the apprenticeship of speech”, though very effective in early childhood, must “wane rapidly with age” (Scovel 1988: 131).

In 1959, neurologists Wilder Penfield and Lamar Roberts were prompted by their research into the cortical processes responsible for speech to argue that, after the age of nine, the brain becomes increasingly stiff and rigid, which hinders effective language learning (Singleton 2005: 2). Penfield became convinced that taking up languages in the second decade of life was too late for achieving good results, and he went on to publicly advocate the importance of early foreign language teaching – an idea which has been extremely influential in education and has led, among other things, to the establishment of English-language nursery schools in a number of non-English-speaking countries.

However, the general consensus seems to be that the story of the Critical Period Hypothesis really begins in 1967, when American researcher Eric Lenneberg published his seminal work Biological Foundations of Language. The critical period, as defined by Lenneberg, applies to primary language acquisition as a whole and is limited by “lack of maturation” at the beginning and by “a loss of adaptability and inability for reorganization in the brain” at the end (Lenneberg 1967: 179). The most convincing evidence Lenneberg cited came from young children recovering from acquired aphasia. Unlike adult aphasiacs, whose speech remained severely affected for the rest of their life, child patients were able to fully restore their language if they were less than nine years old before the onset of the disease (Lenneberg 1967: 146).

Arguably, Lenneberg’s definition can be regarded as the classical form of the hypothesis. However, the idea of a critical period for language was bound to fall on fertile ground both in cognitive psychology and in Chomskian linguistics. Conflicting views on the problem began to multiply immediately. Neurological research, case studies of children who had spent the first years of their lives in isolation, late sign-language acquisition in deaf children, studies of the correlation between immigrants’ age of arrival and their phonological and syntactic ability in the language of the host country – these and other sources of evidence, as well as their different interpretations, have led to the emergence of some drastically different ideas about the critical period.

3. What does the critical period affect?

Most fundamentally, it is not clear whether we should look for a critical period only in terms of first language acquisition or if the hypothesis also has to include second language acquisition. Lenneberg assumes that only first language acquisition is crucial since it creates “the matrix for language skills” that can be put to use again later in life (Lenneberg 1967: 176). While it is obvious that adults can and do learn foreign languages, many have argued that native-like competence cannot in principle be achieved by a post-pubescent learner. Thus, whether Lenneberg’s language-learning “matrix” itself is affected by age has been a cause of much disagreement, and Bialystok and Hakuta (1994: 80) sum up the relevant evidence as “at best, confusing”.

That issue aside, Lenneberg originally hypothesised that the critical period imposed a time limit on first-time acquisition of our entire language ability; however, such a broad definition has not been supported by many researchers.

A case has been made for a critical period that applies only to phonology and has no impact on the other linguistic skills. Thomas Scovel (1988: 185) asserts that post-pubescent language learners, while still able to improve their accents, “will never learn to pass themselves off as native speakers phonologically”. He links this to changes in neuroplasticity and suggests a possible evolutionary explanation: for hominids, the ability to tell a member of your own group from a stranger by voice alone might have been a useful asset when visual recognition was limited by darkness, distance or similarities in appearance (Scovel 1988: 80).

Researchers working within a nativist frame of reference have naturally suggested that maturational constraints affect the Language Acquisition Device, or Universal Grammar. According to some nativists, Universal Grammar deteriorates completely after puberty and any post-pubescent language learning has therefore to rely on general problem-solving abilities, which are not as effective in the acquisition of syntax. Others believe that only certain subparts of Universal Grammar, such as the mapping of abstract syntactic features onto their morphological realisations, are subject to age-related degradation. Still others have argued that the innate language device does not shut off at all; rather, it is the non-innate components of our language ability that deteriorate after puberty (Singleton 2005: 6).

Back to non-UG-based explanations, Robert DeKeyser recently suggested that the critical period might end in an irreversible shift from implicit to explicit language learning; the claim is based on evidence that adults beginning to learn a language necessarily use their verbal analytical ability, which child beginners do not employ at all. According to DeKeyser, children are able to acquire a complex abstract system such as language implicitly whereas adults can no longer do that, which results in more effort-consuming and less effective language learning. The interesting aspect of this view is that language is supposed to be just one of the various complex systems whose acquisition is affected by the shift (Singleton 2005: 6, 9).

4. When is the critical period?

Most people would probably venture a guess that a critical period for language – provided there is one after all – must begin at some time soon after birth and end around puberty, but a falsifiable hypothesis is of course expected to contain a more precise schedule than that. An impressive selection of possible onsets and offsets for the critical period has been proposed by different researches. As summarised by Singleton (2005: 5), the earliest suggestion for the onset seems to be the 6th month of foetal life (Ruben 1997; for phonology) while the latest offset proposed so far is 16 years of age (Ruben 1997; for semantic ability). Other suggestions for the offset age include 1 year (Molfese 1977; for phonology), 4 years (Ruben 1997; for syntax), and 15 years (Long 1990; for morphosyntax). Some suggestions (Long 1990; Newport and Johnson 1989) divide the critical period for each aspect of language ability into two distinct phases, each with a separate schedule. On the whole, most researchers have been quite happy to follow Lenneberg’s idea of an offset coinciding with puberty, even though, as Bialystok and Hakuta point out (1994: 79), some of the most convincing data “show a better fit with the notion of a critical period before age five”.

It must be noted that postulating any clearly defined schedule implies a positive answer to a more fundamental question: does the critical period end abruptly at all? If it does, we have to look for a neurological explanation. If, on the other hand, there is a gradual decline in ability stretching over many years, a vast array of other possible explanations can come into play and the very validity of the critical period hypothesis becomes less than obvious.

5. What is the mechanism of the critical period?

Graylag goslings’ window of opportunity for identifying their mother is known to be hardwired into their brains, as is kittens’ critical period for learning to distinguish vertical lines from horizontal ones. It is therefore hardly surprising that neurological explanations for the linguistic critical period in humans have been pursued with more vigour than any alternatives. Moreover, as Bialystok and Hakuta (1994: 53) note, we may be subconsciously “committed to the superiority of organic explanations over psychological and cultural ones, drawing perhaps an analogy from our acceptance of the hypothesis that diseases are caused by organic factors and not by evil spirits”.

As to why any neurological changes affecting language learning should take place at all, the most obvious and compelling explanation is an evolutionary trade-off benefiting a young organism at the expense of an older one. As Steven Pinker (1995: 294) puts it, “learning a language – as opposed to using a language – is perfectly useful as a one-shot skill”. Energy-consuming language-acquisition circuitry is dismantled once it has been used. “The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students,” Pinker concludes on a somewhat sombre note, “might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we display as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigour of youth” (1995: 296).

There seems to be no equally compelling suggestion for what exactly happens to the “greedy” language-acquisition circuitry. In their 1959 publication, Penfield and Roberts (Bialystok, Hakuta 1994: 56) referred to general diminution of cerebral plasticity; this idea was later supported, among others, by Scovel (1988). Lenneberg (1967) blamed the effects of lateralisation with regard to the left-hemisphere dominance in language processing. But these are by no means the only neurological explanations available. After lateralisation was shown to be present in the brain from birth, some researchers argued that more specific localisation of language subfunctions within the dominant hemisphere was the culprit (Singleton 2005: 7). Long hypothesised in 1990 that changes in neurotransmitters might affect second language acquisition (Bialystok, Hakuta 1994: 81). In the early nineties, a maturational process called myelination, in which brain cells become insulated with fatty tissue, was suggested as a possible mechanism; however, as the whole purpose of myelination is to facilitate neural communication, it is hard to see why it should impede language learning (Bialystok, Hakuta 1994: 82). In the mid-nineties, the brain-imaging research carried out by an American team revealed that there were differences in the spatial representation of L1 and L2 in Broca’s area of late bilinguals as opposed to early bilinguals (Singleton 2005: 7). While the late bilinguals showed activation in two separate areas, the early bilinguals appeared to have a single activation area for both languages. Even more recently (2001), a team at the Free University of Bozen found similar differences in brain activation between early bilinguals and late multilinguals (Singleton 2005: 7, 8). Nevertheless, just like every other attempt at a neurological explanation, these findings have been challenged. Friederici, Steinhauer and Pfeifer (2002: 1, 6), for example, claim that their brain-imaging study of adults learning an artificial language showed no significant difference between language processing in native speakers and late learners.

Once we are willing to concede that our language-learning ability is not dismantled overnight but rather suffers a gradual decline, there is no shortage of non-neurological explanations to choose from. In 1975 Krashen, an adherent of Jean Piaget’s cognitive approach to language acquisition, suggested that starting from puberty, language learners can no longer rely on ad hoc solutions – they need a theory; hence the fundamental difference between native speakers and late learners (Singleton 2005: 8). In 1981 Felix executed a marriage of Piaget’s and Chomsky’s ideas claiming that problem-solving cognitive structures emerging at the formal operations stage, which is postulated by Piaget, interfere with Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device (Singleton 2005: 8). On the whole, it is felt that “adopting the cognitive abilities in a language-learning task” results “in less successful learning than found in children” (Gass, Selinker 2001: 342).

Another group of explanations cites social and psychological factors. Different researchers have suggested such constraints on second language acquisition as adults’ reluctance to take on a new language identity, social distance, and attitudes towards the target language (Bialystok, Hakuta 1994). Sagerdahl et al. (2005: 9) closely link first language acquisition to “enculturation”: “Language is so thoroughly intertwined with how we function spontaneously together that it cannot be learned through planned and explicit instruction.” Language as such, they claim, can only be learned in an unplanned manner, “by living together”; this is why adults and children learn languages in fundamentally different ways.

One of the oldest explanations, put forward back in 1939, probably can also be classified as psychological as it takes a Freudian line. Adults’ inherent narcissism, reinforced by their super-ego, it maintains, leads to an acute “sense of shame” when they try to use a new language and thus inhibits learning (Singleton 2005: 9).

6. A methodological nightmare

In critical period research, the number of hypotheses seems to be in inverse proportion to the amount of reliable hard data available. What is more, any hard evidence that is available tends to be interpreted in diametrically opposite ways. To cite just one example, the results of Johnson and Newport’s well-known 1989 study of syntactic judgement in immigrants with different age of arrival were presented by the authors as strong evidence for a critical period for syntax acquisition; Bialystock and Hakuta confidently dismiss this result on methodological grounds (Bialystock, Hakuta 1994). At the same time, their own study of US census data (Hakuta, Bialystok & Wiley 2003), which purports to demonstrate that the data in question contains no indication of a critical period for second-language learning, came under fire from Stevens (2004) for similar reasons.

The now well-established method of studying critical periods in animals is through deprivation. Animal rights issues aside, a scientist is free to take several goslings, make sure they are not exposed to any moving shapes for the entire duration of the suggested critical period, and see how they fare afterwards. For the obvious ethical reasons, this approach is not possible in studies of human linguistic behaviour, but this is only part of the reason why the critical period research has been anything but straightforward.

There is a feeling that even if such language deprivation experiments were possible, they might at best help clarify the issue of the critical period for first language acquisition. When it comes to second language acquisition, the sheer number of variables one has to keep track of and control for is staggering, and for some variables any application of the experimental method is downright impractical. Supposing we wanted to test whether a language could really only be acquired to a native-like level hand in hand with enculturation: how would we go about “ex-culturating” adults? Or how are we to measure the robustness of someone’s language identity and its correlation with the thickness of their foreign accent? As for the interference of cognitive problem-solving abilities with the LAD, it is hard even to conceive of what could be used as an independent variable should it come to testing this proposition.

“Language is far too complex a system to reveal itself through a single skill, a single experience, or a single test. People, too, are complex…” (Bialystok, Hakuta 1994: 80) Age-related factors can impact on language learning in a myriad of ways; and in some cases we cannot even be sure that these factors are age-related in the first place. Neither is it quite clear what it means to be a better language learner (Gass, Selinker 2001: 335): should we take into account initial and medium-term progress, or is it only ultimate attainment that matters? In the former case, adult beginners have been shown time and again to outperform child beginners (Bialystok, Hakuta 1994; Aitchison 1993; Gass, Selinker 2001); in the latter, how exactly do we decide at which point attainment becomes ultimate?

7. Critical period hypotheses

Do this methodological nightmare and the resulting multitude of opinions mean that the Critical Period Hypothesis is indeed a vague unfalsifiable conjecture, a misapplied zoological metaphor? Does the complexity of human behaviour, to which the concept is extended, make it “difficult, if not impossible, to identify the parameters of sensitive periods with appropriate specificity”? (Thompson 2001, quoted in Singleton 2005: 12)

Singleton is certainly right in saying that if we were to reduce the different versions of the CPH to a single summary (“For some reason, the language acquiring capacity, or some aspect or aspects thereof, is operative only for a maturational period which ends some time between perinatality and birth.” – Singleton 2005: 12), the result would be patently imprecise and unsatisfactory. However, I do not see why the whole issue should be reduced to a single hypothesis at all. The impression I have gathered from the literature is that there are at least several largely independent hypotheses which can be formulated with enough precision for their predictions to be unambiguous and falsifiable. Here is a list of the more obvious hypotheses I have been able to identify:

1. There is a neurologically pre-programmed age limit beyond which a human being, previously unexposed to any language cannot fully acquire one. Obviously, one has to specify the age limit and make clear what one means by “full language acquisition” for genuine scientific scrutiny of this hypothesis to be possible. However, once these values have been filled in, looking for relevant evidence is fairly straightforward, if not necessarily easy.

2. There is a fundamental neurological difference between second-language learning that takes place before or after this hypothetical age limit. Brain-imaging studies and studies of possible differences in syntactic intuitions between native speakers and late learners seem to be two promising ways of tackling this problem.

3. There are near-absolute biological constraints on the ultimate acquisition of morphology and syntax to a native-like level which become operative after a certain age. Again, the age value and the definition of native-like morphosyntactic skills have to be specified.

4. There are near-absolute biological constraints on the ultimate acquisition of phonology to a native-like level which become operative after a certain age. See 3 above.

5. There is a gradual age-related decline in a learner’s ability to fully acquire the morphology and syntax of a foreign language. Once this much has been established, the different social and psychological factors which can potentially affect language learning can be considered. As is almost invariably the case, a complex combination of such factors would be most likely to emerge as the cause of the decline.

6. There is a gradual age-related decline in a learner’s ability to fully acquire the phonological system of a foreign language. See 5 above.

On balance, I believe that there is no reason to dismiss the entire field of critical period research and put the problem on the backburner until some more advanced technology allows us to read the workings of the brain as if it were a television set. A number of scientifically valid critical period-related hypotheses can be formulated; in fact, they have largely been formulated by researchers studying particular aspects of the issue. It is obvious that the notion of critical periods as it is understood in zoology cannot be applied to human language without some serious modifications; perhaps, the term itself should be replaced by something less loaded and potentially misleading. It is also obvious that particularly high standards of methodological precision are needed to study any interaction between language and its neurological and social environment. If these requirements are met, however, critical period-related research can help us make important progress towards the ultimate goal of linguistics – complete understanding of how language works.

REFERENCES

Aitchison, J. 1993. The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. Routledge. London.
Bialystock, E. Hakuta, K. 1994. In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second-Language Acquisition. BasicBooks (A Division of HarperCollins Publishers). New York.
Cattell, R. 2000. Children’s Language: Consensus and Controversy. Cassell. London.
Friederici, A. D. Steinhauer, K. Pfeifer, E. 2002. Brain signatures of artificial language processing: Evidence challenging the critical period hypothesis. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 8 January 2002, vol. 99, 529-534). The Max Plank Society eDoc Server. http://edoc.mpg.de/18836 (17 October 2006)
Gass, S. M. Selinker, L. 2001. Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Mahwah, N.J.
Hakuta, K., Bialystok, E., Wiley, E. 2003. Critical evidence: A test of the critical-period hypothesis for second-language acquisition. (Psychological Science, 14, 31–38.) ). Blackwell Synergy. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1467-9280.01415 (17 October 2006)
Lenneberg, E. H. 1967. Biological Foundations of Language. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York.
Obler, L. K. Gjerlow, K. 1999. Language and the Brain. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
Pinker, St. 1995. The Language Instinct. Penguin Books. London.
Scovel, Th. 1988. A Time to Speak: A Psycholinguistic Inquiry into the Critical Period for Human Speech. Newbury House Publishers. Cambridge, Mass.
Segerdahl, P. Fields, W. Savage-Rumbaugh, S. 2005. Kanzi’s Primal Language: The Cultural Initiation of Primates into Language. Palgrave Macmillan. Basinstoke.
Singleton, D. 2005. A Coat of Many Colours (International Review of Applied Linguistics 43 (4), 269-285). The directory of personal home pages for people using the Research Computing Facility at the University of Southern California. http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~ionin/SLAgroup/Ling527papers/Singleton%20Critical%20Periods%20iral.2005.43.4.269.pdf (17 October 2006)
Stevens, G. 2004. Using census data to test the critical-period hypothesis for second-language acquisition. (Psychological Science, 15, 215–216). Blackwell Synergy. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.01503012.x (17 October 2006)