COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY The Mobile Information Society
	NEW PERSPECTIVES ON 21ST-CENTURY COMMUNICATIONS Conference, May 24-25, 2002 Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Introduction

One of the advantages of the world wide web mentioned very often in public discourse is that it makes the acquisition of knowledge more democratic. If the huge stores of knowledge are equally available for people living in small villages and for people who have access to large libraries, and if people who cannot get their education at expensive universities can still afford to use the Internet, then the number of geographic and social factors that work against equal chances will decrease. When the access to the web has become predominantly mobile, the advantages of the Internet will be multiplied; the time we spend with traveling and other now long and boring activities would be utilized much better and we will be able to take with us all the information gathered in this huge external memory, and use it freely any time.

Sad, however, that the world is still far from this informational Paradise. The Internet, in spite of its unbelievable richness of information, cannot compete with the Library of Congress, the British Library, or the Hungarian National Library. The access to the web is not general even in the industrially highly developed countries, not to speak of countries of the third world. The expenses of the use of the mobile common preclude its uninterrupted use today. The new information technologies do nevertheless have the potential of moving the world toward a life of better quality spelled out above, and this not too far in the future.

Apparently, there is another, rarely mentioned effect of the new technologies that will make our life more comforting. In my paper, I argue that the new channels and forms of communication will decrease linguistic discrimination. This would be a rather welcomed consequence since equal chances in modern societies are hindered not only by social and economic factors but also by the linguistic differences which symbolize them.

I think it is reasonable to start with considering how the present situation that can be called "linguistic aristocratism" has emerged. To a better comprehension we should step back in time. Although the topic of this conference is the communications of the 21st century, we will spend some time in the pre-historical ages, as I assume that modern technologies can help us to get back — or forward — to a communicational environment that was — or will be — a more comfortable one. To one that fits better to the biology of human beings and which used to be our natural surrounding for thousands of years. Leaving this nice starting point, we go on a short virtual tour whose stations are the birth, the development and the extension of linguistic aristocratism. Then I consider how in the 21st century new technologies can drive us to a friendly, natural, and human-like communicational environment, similar to the one we left.

The original social functions of language

Most theories about the evolution of language share the idea that language evolved in connection with the increased social needs of early humans. To mention only a few  examples: according to Robin Dunbar’s "gossip as grooming" theory, language played and still plays a similar role in human communities as grooming does for apes, namely the building and maintaining coalitions within the group, strengthening friendship and family ties, and decreasing the ingroup aggression. Drawing his arguments mostly upon anthropological data, Steven Mithen claims that linguistic intelligence became slowly separated from social intelligence that had originally been responsible for handling social situations in the primate brain. Similarly, Robert Worden assumes that the internal representation of linguistic meaning derives from the representations of social situations in apes. Merlin Donald’s theory suggests that both transitions that prepared the evolution of vocal language, ie. the transition from episodic to mimetic, and as well as the transition from mimetic to mythic culture, were driven by the force of the increase of communication needs that are, naturally, inseparable from social needs.

These theories are strongly supported by the investigations about the functions of present languages. Jean Aitchison drew up a list of the functions that human language fulfills only with difficulties and of the ones language is suitable for. According to her categorization, language is moderately good for communicating small pieces of information but it is fairly bad at explaining spatial information, and expressing sensations and emotions. Language is, however, an excellent tool for building and maintaining social relations, and for influencing others. The former function can be recognized very often in talks without any "serious" content, in talks just for talking, and we know the latter function well from conversations in which we tell stories and opinions about others, or about ourselves. Language, deriving from these properties, plays an important role in gaining and maintaining power, especially because its abstract character provides the opportunity for cheating and lying as well.
Aitchison’s suggestions are supported by the data gathered by Dunbar and his students as well as by Emler’s notions. Experiences prove that the topic in two thirds of the conversations is the description of others’ or our own behavior, and that we use language quite a lot to advertise ourselves in several ways.

The strong connection between our special sensitivity to social relations and language is proved by Cosmides’ adapted version of the Wason Selection Test, in that it gives a clear evidence that humans solve the same type of logical problems much more efficiently if the problems are embedded into a social context than in an abstract logical frame, although the problem is in both cases mediated by language.

To these notions we can add the less often mentioned results of sociolinguistic research. Based on the huge amount of sociolinguistic data it may be stated that whenever we speak, our language use inevitably signifies our group identity as well as our relation to the speech partner. In other words, it always shows to which group we belong to, and the position we have in the hierarchy of the group. As highlighted in another lecture, this property of linguistic variability is adaptive, since it ensures the intergroup isolation and the intragroup stabilization at the same time. Both features are necessary to increase the group cohesion, so ordered linguistic variability contributes remarkably to the development of group selection, and, as a consequence, to the proliferation of human cultures.

The use of a common language has been connected to the group identity until our days. Not only in Europe and North America where language use has become a part of ethnic, national and social identity, but in non-industrial societies as well. In Papua New Guinea, for instance, there are neighboring villages whose languages sound almost the same for the outsider, and the inhabitants of these settlements fully understand each other’s dialects. However, since these people identify themselves with different tribes, they keep these idioms different languages. As several old and present examples show, people often see their own language as the only possible product of the human senses while look at the speakers of other languages as "barbarians" or "dumbs". In some cultures children are not held to be entirely human beings until they acquire language.

There is another important property of linguistic variation that is relevant here. Variability is a prerequisite for language change. The permanent change of language is also an adaptive feature, for it makes life more difficult for free-riders who want to gain all the advantages of group life without paying the prize for it. But to acquire and fluently speak a permanently changing language is a hard task without a continuous presence in the group. It also means that the exclusion from the group of those who speak differently, is probably as adaptive for the group as are other types of stigmatization, described by Kurzban and Leary.

The basic properties of human language, variability and change, do not simply offer a possibility to stigmatize people who speak differently from the way we do, but stigmatizing behavior seems to be actually quite useful for the group. Linguistic stigmatization can be supposed to have been born together with human language. As the well-known Shibboleth story proves, people have not only stigmatized each other on the basis of using a different language, but, for a long time, they also have been aware of the fact that language use is an appropriate tool for recognizing, and, if needed, excluding others.

However, there is a very important feature of this period of tens of thousands of years of the history of linguistic stigmatization. In this first period the behavior of the groups was reciprocal. Not only those who pronounced Shibboleth could kill the other group, it could have happened the other way  around, too. Not only did the members of group A hold that people in group B are not entirely humans, ‘cause they do not have "the" language, likewise the members of group B thought the same of group A.

The age of disequilibrium: The development and spread of literacy

The second chapter of the history of linguistic stigmatization, I believe, started with the development of literacy. The appearance of literacy led to the birth of elite culture and this event overwrote the earlier relations of language and culture.

Before the development of phonetic scripts, to learn the art of writing and reading was a rather time consuming activity. It was an exceptional capability, so it ensured high prestige to those who owned it. When writing became used for religious purposes as well, the sacralization of certain texts made highly respected also the written text itself. However, before the development of phonetic scripts, the language literates used to read the texts was probably the same they normally spoke, just as Chinese signs are read in different Chinese dialects. Phonetic scripts determine much more strongly the phonetic interpretation of texts, and this creates the possibility for written and spoken language to divert.

The process resulted in the appearance of a new phenomenon. To the earlier "speech" vs.  "non-speech" or "language" vs. "non-language" opposition a new opposition was added: "correct language use" vs. "corrupted speech". Into this new opposition two components of the European-type cultures are encoded. One divides people who are natives of the same language into two groups, and labels one group as correct users of language, while stigmatizes the other as incorrect language users. The other component opposes written text to speech. Resulting from the well embedded high prestige of writing, written text was interpreted as using good, and speech as damaged language. The impression that language can deteriorate was reinforced by the blooming of philology, and the development of text traditions. The fact that written texts are visible and touchable, as well as their durability suggested that the form of language used in written texts may well be one to be emulated. Also, the written form is the authentic, ideal form of language, while speech is only its paltry shadow.

This thought is still characteristic of cultures based on the Greek tradition. The idea of language correctness is wide spread throughout the world, and the myth that writing is the real and pure form of language is shared by European and North American culture. The Platonic interpretation of language pervades not only the folk linguistic ideas, but two influential linguistic schools of the 20th century, structuralism and generativism, as well. The notion that speech is the main form of language and that speech markers are not unnecessary waste but essential in language has become the topic of linguistic research only recently, in sociolinguistics, and in discourse and conversation analysis.

The spread of printing strengthened the high prestige of written language, and increased the asymmetry of the linguistic situation. The codification of spelling was a practical need of the printing houses, however, because of the Platonic view of language, the rules of spelling became interpreted as the rules of grammar, and the rules of grammar in written styles were thought to be the rules of speech as well.

For instance, in the 17th century it was the general practice of the Hungarian printing houses that the typographers not only unified the spelling of the manuscripts but also rewrote the works they published, certainly in their own dialects, since each of them held his own vernacular the "correct" language. The development of standard dialects in Europe followed the same ancient principle, that is, that "the language is what I speak". Standard varieties evolved out of dialects of the social elite that had political, economic or cultural prestige, so that other groups would happily accommodate to its language use in order to show themselves to be members of this highly respected group. And, in addition, the social elite had the power to make its own dialect to be the dialect of literacy that, again, reinforced its authority.

The extreme prestige of both the written texts and of the standard varieties became widespread and stabilized with the extension of public education. Schooling actually trapped and traps pupils who wanted or want to rise socially: schools demand the use of the standard, and those whose vernacular is not this variety, that is, whose parents do not belong to the social elite, have disadvantages from the very first day they enter school. They need to learn not only what everyone has to learn, but also the language of instruction, and without a proficiency in the use of the standard they cannot be successful, independently of their knowledge of the subject. Experiences show that the gap between the efficiency of standard and non-standard natives is generally increasing during education. It also means that in most European countries and in the United States, education is the most powerful institution to reproduce the linguistic aristocracy. Linguistic stigmatization in our days is so deeply embedded in our culture that — as James Milroy phrases — it is "the last bastion of overt social discrimination". Laymen, including teachers, usually interpret the use of non-standard dialects as an indexic sign of low intelligence instead of looking at it as a symbolic sign of group identity. Painful examples are well known from everyday practice, like for instance the case of African American kids who were labeled mentally deprived for their use of the African American Vernacular English.

However paradoxical it sounds, language in the European-type cultures has got far from its original social functions as a consequence of the development of literacy and of the widespread of public education. Instead of increasing the group cohesion, the linguistic asymmetry we experience day by day disintegrates primary communities since the use of their own dialects is overtly stigmatized and thus it is associated with social shame. Linguistic aristocratism that forces the whole society to use one preferred language variety, goes against our biologically encoded need of belonging to a primary, human sized group. Thus not only does it not reflect the situation which is characteristic for industrial societies, namely that large societies are not the alliances of primary groups of people but a huge complex of alienated individuals, but very effectively contributes to the maintenance of this unhappy state. This way of life is rather uncomfortable for human beings, who, derived from their biology, would prefer living primarily in groups of about 150 people.

The surviving forms of the original social functions of language: The covert prestige

Still, the original social functioning of language has survived. The power of standard varieties could never entirely supersede non-standard varieties. As is well documented in the sociolinguistic literature, people hold to their normal use of language, even if  they judge their own dialectal forms incorrect under the pressure of the overt prestige of the standard. The force that maintain non-standard varieties is called covert prestige, and works most obviously in small villages and in large cities. In a small, isolated community the importance of local values outstrip the external values of society. On the other hand, traditional bonds burst first in huge towns, but with the loss of these ties, the substitutes of the primary communities have emerged as well: teenage gangs, groups of people in slums and in working class districts, real or pseudo-communities of more or less elegant neighborhoods and so on. The language use that is characteristic for a gang, that is their slang is such an important identifier for the group members that it is actually obligatorily used.

In other cases the covert prestige of the vernacular is maintained together with the overt prestige of the standard. As we know from James and Lesley Milroy’s research in Belfast, the stronger the social networks are in a community, the more people in the community use their own non-standard dialect while the socially and geographically mobile members move to the direction of standard when they are outside community. However, as Lesley Milroy highlights, most people living in a modern urban environment do not have the opportunity to live in tight social networks. This leads to a greater variability in their speech, and, very often, increases the feeling of linguistic insecurity. Industrial societies provide uncomfortable environments for human beings not only from a social, biological and psychological aspect but also from a linguistic point of view.

New communication technologies: Forward to the past?

As we all hope, the new communication technologies of the mobile and networked information societies of the 21st century will be able to improve the unhappy world we lived in the 20th century. Empirical data show that people use the Internet not only for building new relations and maintaining loose friendships with those who live on the other side of the world. Actually, it is more common to maintain regular e-mail connections with people who live closer than with those who live far. Surveys carried out in Toronto, Los Angeles and Michigan prove that the Internet strengthens the traditional community relations, and is not a subtractive but an additive form beside the former channels of information. For people who living in urban societies missed the security of close social networks, the Internet offers a possibility to build up primary communities free from geographical binds.

New technologies can change our linguistic world as well. The established status quo of standard and non-standard varieties will probably be unsettled. The balance between the uses of different varieties can be restored, non-standard varieties may regain much of their rights, and language may fulfil again all of its original social functions. This hypothesis is supported by two main factors.

One is that literacy that generated the asymmetry in the evaluation of linguistic norms seems to be losing much of its power. One reason of it is that the human energy, the time and the financial costs invested into writing, printing, multiplying and spreading texts are much less today than they were even ten years ago. Texts are easily reformatted and corrected by word processors and we do not need to wait months or years for an article to be published. If our partner misunderstands what we write in an e-mail, we can almost immediately explain more clearly what was meant. Another reason is that though many texts which are mediated by the new communication technologies appear in a written form, they belong actually to the kingdom of speech and not to the kingdom of written texts. The texts of many e-mail and forum messages, and the texts of almost all chat and on-line messages contain spoken forms, expressed very often with an orthography that tries to imitate the phonetics of speech, and added also emphatic signs to it, in order to substitute for nonverbal communication. It means first that the number of the domains of language use associated with literacy is decreasing. And it also means that a new practice has developed which does not respect the process and product of writing, instead it handles it as a channel to communicate speech.

The other factor that contribute to the change of the communicational situation is that the reinforcement of old community ties as well as the development of new kinds of primary communities will probably strengthen group identity, and this process will most likely solidify also the language use which is characteristic for the group.

The strengthening of group identity is supported by several factors. One is the internal force that maintained the covert prestige and through it the overtly stigmatized language varieties. From a research conducted in Milton Keynes by Paul Kerswill, Jenny Chesire and Ann Williams, we have clear evidence that people in the 20th and 21st centuries, too, need and develop their own forms of language use that symbolizes their community, even if they live in loose social networks. Milton Keynes is an industrial town in England, near to London, founded quite recently, in 1967. The first inhabitants who settled there were people with varying dialectal backgrounds, and although their kids had the standard as a common dialect, since they used it at school, they have developed a new idiom which is now characteristic of the speech of youngsters in Milton Keynes.

In urban environment, this encoded social need can be fulfilled with the help of modern technics much more efficiently than earlier. The ability to keep up relations free from time and space offers a possibility to speak about the really important things of life instantaneously and as much as we like: I mean we can speak about the little events of everyday life, we can tell stories about others and ourselves that will not be relevant two hours later, we can express moods and we can get comfort. In other words, we can participate in each others daily life, just as if we lived in small, coherent groups where the community members always see and hear each other, and they always know what is going on, who is a friend with whom, who is happy or sad. According to a survey human beings behave quite normally as for the content of their mobile phone talks: just as in face-to-face conversations the two thirds of the topics are "gossip" .

The form of the mobile conversations is supposed to follow the content. It would be extremely difficult to communicate an informal content in a formal style, and when we talk with our group members, it would be strange to use a language variety other than the group’s own dialect, even if we are surrounded by unknown people on a train, for instance. In situations like this, people normally hold it more important to show solidarity with their partners than to prove their proficiency in the overtly respected variety. The more we use our own dialect publicly, even if not to the public, the less social shame will be associated with it. The more we hear different dialects, the less strange they will sound, and, in the end, we may even be able to restrain our propensity for stigmatization.

Another force which strengthens non-standard varieties is a number of well-known phenomena of the 21st century. Globalization, computer networks, permanent availability, and mobile learning fortify the decentralizing tendencies, and support local or other, non-geographically organized communities that are smaller than a nation or a state. The new communicational situation may damage the prestige of the standard varieties that live in a symbiotic relationship with centralization, and will support, again, language varieties that symbolize group identities. Covert prestige may become overt again, and language use that first was attached to group, then to geographical identity, later on, in the industrial societies, signals social class, in the information society may well be associated with primary communities again.
The future that is not blurred anymore, promises that one day language can be used fully, in all of its social functions, just as in the past that is not as obscure anymore. The dawn of the new age, I hope, will bring the fall of linguistic aristocratism.