A Typology of The Prestige Language

Linguistic Society of America
A Typology of the Prestige Language

Author(s): Henry Kahane
Source: Language, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 495-508
Published by: Linguistic Society of America
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A TYPOLOGYOF THE PRESTIGELANGUAGE
HENRY KAHANE
University of Illinois, Urbana
The recurrentfeatures of a 'prestigelanguage'are broadlyreviewed. The prevailing
socio-politicalconstellationprovides motivationsfor its rise, the ways of acquiringit,
the domains it transmits,and the causes of its decline. The process of its nativization
can be analysed synchronicallyin terms of creolization,and diachronicallyin terms of
stratigraphy.The linkingof a native languageto the dominantcultureresults in either
substratumor superstratuminfluences.Nativizationmay be overt-as lexemic, morpho-
syntactic or phonologicalborrowing-or it may be covert, expressing itself in style,
calques, and metaphors.The lasting impactof the prestige languageconsists in stand-
ardization,the creationof a sprachbund,and a relativelystablecultureof bilingualism.*
English is the great laboratoryof today's sociolinguist. We are aware of the

role of English in our time, 'the other tongue' on a global scale. A blooming
industry, acronymed TESL and ESL and TESOL, has sprungup on the dry
soil of English grammar.But the event is not new. Like everythingelse in our
times, it is largerin size, but in principlethe situationof Englishis no different
from earlier case histories; and as our experience with English enlivens the
analogous events of the past, so the examples of the past are apt, in their
completed stage, to throw light on our situation, which is still in flux. To add
insight into the happeningsaroundus, I shall thereforeconcentrate,amongthe
multitudeof particularfeatures, on those that appearto be the most typical of
the process.
The great prestige languages of the West which will serve as models reach
from Antiquityinto moderntimes. They are the Greek Koine; Latin at various
stages such as the vernacularof the Empire, medieval Latinity, and the Latin
of Humanism;Old French and Old Proven9alof the castle culture; Italian as
the Mediterraneanlingua franca and as the languageof the Renaissance; and
the 17th-18th century French of the court culture. Even a cursoryobservation
of these case histories reveals a recurrentlinkingof two patterns:that of social
contact and that of linguistic impact. A certain political/social constellation
favors the appealand the spreadof the languagebehindit, andthis constellation
determines the course of events: (a) the social structureof the target culture
which is going to absorb that language;(b) the ways in which that languageis
acquired and integrated;(c) the domains of modernismwhich it represents;
and (d) the causes of its retreat. Let us take a look at these four processes.
(a) In literate societies, one of the primaryMOTIVATIONS for acquiringthe
prestige language is its identificationwith education, which transfersto it the
values of a class symbol. The sector of society in which a familiaritywith the
prestigelanguagetakes root varies with the time and cultures. In ancientRome
the intellectuals knew Greek; in Byzantium the civil servants were expected
to handleLatin; in the CarolingianEmpire(largelypatternedafter Byzantium),
* This paper representsthe PresidentialAddress deliveredto the LSA AnnualMeeting, Balti-
more, December 1984.
495
496 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 3 (1986)
a dying Latin was revived for the administrationof Churchand State; in the
Age of Feudalismthe internationallanguagesof the Castle were Provensaland
French; in the courts of the Renaissance the Humanistsresuscitatedclassical
Latin; and from the 17th century court culture prefiguredin Versailles, down
through the Enlightenmentinto the bourgeoisie of the 19th century, French
was the long-living'must'. Short 1980and Kalinke 1983stress the link between
class and prestige language in the Germaniccountries: in the Anglo-Norman
civilization, bilingualismextended somewhat (but not very far) down from the
aristocracy. In medieval Iceland, the upper classes realized that the mastery
of foreign customs implieda knowledgeof the respective languages;and Latin
and French, being the languagesof the 'rightpeople', had, in this respect, the
greatest currency. The Danish nobility sent their sons to Paristo learn French.
In sharp contrast, the non-aristocraticmajorityof NorthernEurope was mon-
olingual. When French spread a second time, around 1700, as the languageof
the Germancourts, the linguistic situationwas still the same: the Franco-Ger-
man bilingualism of the upper classes was (in the term of Sperber/Polenz
1966:81)'absolute'. We recall the cruel quipof Voltaire,who reported,in 1750,
from the Prussiancourt of FrederickII: 'I find myself here in France. Every-
body speaks our language. Only the horses speak German.'I need hardlyadd
that 'horses' refers to the common people.
(b) The ways of ACQUIRING the prestige language vary, of course, with the
modes of languageteaching. Romanfamiliesemployed Greek slaves; medieval
schools were in the hands of the Church, which selected the pupils for their
Latin-basededucation; in 18thcentury Alamode Germany,Hauslehrertaught
French to the childrenof the well-to-do. The learningof the languagewas just
the first step towardits nativization.The complex process of integrationfollows
traditionalchannels. I will exemplify (followingKahane& Kahane 1980b)with
the classical case of the 'Greek behind Latin'. Four such channels of nativi-
zation can be considered typical:
(i) The literarytext is a weighty tool on all levels of a trainingin letters. It
introducedsyntactic and lexical Grecisms: ancient critics explainedthe use of
Grecisms in terms of the appeal of Greek; Horace welcomed the mixing of
both languagesas a happyblend. Modernphilologistssuch as Kroll 1924,Jans-
sen 1941, and Leumann 1947analyse the role of Latin poetry as a mediumfor
transferringHellenisms, especially syntactic ones.
(ii) Translationkeeps the source languagea realitybehindthe targetlanguage;
thus Dietrich(1973:20,n. 76) believes that the stylistic markof the VulgarLatin
Bible translation,producedduringthe first three post-Christiancenturies, was
a high degree of Hellenization.
(iii) Culturaland bilingualsymbiosis provides the optimalconditionsfor lin-
guistic transmission. The city of Ravenna was, from the middle of the 6th
century to the middle of the 8th, the seat of the Byzantine Exarchatein Italy,
and the VulgarLatin of that areaand that time reflects in its manyByzantinisms
the impact of the symbiosis.
(iv) Special languages, in their transfer, presuppose professional acquaint-
ance with practices and concepts easily varyingfrom the source to the target.
A TYPOLOGYOF THE PRESTIGELANGUAGE 497
Theology, that most technical field of all, exemplifies the process, and (as
Studer 1971 points out) 'the transfer of Greek [theological] concepts always
involved an Umdeutung,a reinterpretation,resultingfrom the fact that Greek
concepts and notions were being transplantedinto a new environment.'
(c) The history of ideas, technology, and manners evolves from the ever-
changing DOMAINS correlated with each of the successive prestige languages.
Toynbee 1973phrasesthe functionof the second languagefor the native speaker
of Latin: the ideal Roman, he notes, had to know Latin to participatein the
world's government, and Greek to participatein the world's cultural life. In
the same vein, one may link the domain of Christianity,in its early stage, to
the Greek Koine; the restructuredadministrationof Churchand State, in the
CarolingianEmpire, to revived Latinity; medieval feudalism and chivalry to
ProvenGaland Old French; and the great wave of Versailles-inspiredcourt
life-followed by Enlightenmentand bourgeoiselegance-to the second phase
of French expansion, lasting from the 17thinto the 19thcentury.
In each case, the prestigelanguagefunctionsas the mediatorof modernism-
or, as has been said, as the 'window on the world'. Kachru 1983pursues the
process of absorptionstill further,from its foreignnessto that degree of nativ-
ization in which the window on the world turns into a window on the target
culture itself. In its new context the prestige languageacquiresa new identity
and serves, at least for a minority, as a creative instrumentfor the integration
of traditionand literature.
The great example of this dynamic function of the prestige languageis our
Western traditionof Humanism.It is best described as a sequence of revivals
of Latin, with Greek always 'behind' the Latin. The way-stations, the high-
points in the evolution of Western Bildung, are labeled Renaissances. These
are relevant as stimulatinginsight through the medium of Latin, and are of
particularinterest here, as markingthe progress of linguistic insight (Kahane
& Kahane 1980a):
(i) The CarolingianRenaissance, forced by the need for a standard,reawak-
ened Latin and widely organized its teaching. Grammaticalcategories and a
grammaticalsystem were established, and the 'sentence' was given its domi-
nant role. Above all, languagetook on its function as the distinctivefeature of
societal structurefor High and Low.
(ii) The Twelfth Century Renaissance, with its scholastic methods, was
strongly attracted to problems of language. Attention was given to rhetoric,
which primarilyinvolved epistolography-the composingof letters for official,
legal, and business purposes. There was interestin lexicology, with the digging
out of Greek roots and with the abstractionof meaningfrom context. Trans-
lation from Greek and Arabic into Latin was a lively business: it rested on the
conviction that only strictest literalness, verbumin verbum, could do justice
to the text. These interests, all promoted throughLatin, represent early ver-
sions of stylistics, semantics, and the theory of translation.
(iii) In the Italian Renaissance, the life style of its glamorousprotagonist-
the Humanist-was tied to language;and his linguisticproblemshave remained
those of Westernsociety. The Humanist'slinguisticexperience, with Latin and
the vernacular,was that of bilingualism.His Latinwas a revived classical Latin,

which conferredhis elite status on him. Immediateknowledgeof the text made
him independent of the interveningactivity of theologians, and the resulting
intellectualfreedom amountedto what we now call a 'liberaleducation'. The
acquisition of classical Latin was not only a vital and complex experience of
the two levels of form and meaning,but also an experience of synchrony(with
the absorptionof rules) and diachrony(with the imitationof the models of ages
past), and of the fusion of languageand culture,rootedin the ubiquityof cultural
features within the prestige language.
(d) The rise of prestige languageshas always, so far at least, been followed
by their DECLINE.The two waves of rise and decline, inherentin second lan-
guages, reflect two fundamentalattitudes of the z6on politikon-the social
being-toward the world, modernism,and nativism. Languageis intertwined
with culture, and the two attitudes represent an age-old cycle. The interna-
tionally dominant position of a culture leads to a powerful expansion of the
language, with its reverse correlate: the very expansion of the languagecon-
tributes to the prestige of the culture behind it. Herder, the linguistic philos-
opher, stressed this latter facet in the Romantic terminologyof his times; he
spoke, in 1787, of the 'latent predominanceof a nation, whose languagehas,
so to speak, succeeded in turninginto a dominantone' (cited in Hofmannsthal
1927:102).Language,in short, is the sheep's clothingwhich hides the wolf, the
dominantculture. Adoptinga dominantcultureis an expensive matter,usually
paid for with loss of real or supposed freedom. Religion is a typical example,
often imported with the language: Olympus comes with Greek to Rome, the
Roman divinities with Latin to Gaul, Christianitywith medieval Latin to the
Germanictribes, Catholicismwith Spanish to the Indians of the New World.
Fashion and life style, education and technology spreadwith their languages.
The decline of a prestige languagemust be viewed, like its rise, in a socio-
linguisticframe. The prestigecomes in with status and elitism;it goes out under
the pressures of popular developments and movements which we may call
nativist rebellions. Each case history is sui generis, yet the causes of decline
fall into patterns:
(i) A new CLASSSTRUCTURE may weakenthe glamourof the prestigelanguage.
The old Romanaristocracy-a bulwarkof Hellenism-lost groundwhen Chris-
tianity, unfavorableto Greek, expanded. In the Anglo-Frenchcivilization, the
events around the Magna Chartaallied feudalism and the bourgeoisie against
the Royal Court, the center of French speech.
(ii) ECCLESIASTIC POLICY is tied to language:the recession of Latin as a re-
ligious languagewas a dynamicfeature of the Reformation,whose appeal and
success were anchored in the vernacular.
(iii) DEMOGRAPHIC
CHANGES
have their impact: numerous intermarriages in
conquered England increased the number of bilinguals, and thereby under-
mined the dominantelitist position of Anglo-Norman.
(iv) EDUCATION, reflectingsocietal currents,is closely tied to linguisticpref-
erences and fashions. In this respect, the relationbetween cause and effect is
particularlytenuous: the prestige languagerequires a formal training,the ac-
A TYPOLOGY OF THE PRESTIGE LANGUAGE 499
quisition of which is demanding, and has always weakened its chances for
survival. In the transitionalphase from the Middle Ages to moderntimes, the
broadened participationof the middle classes in a general, vernacular-based,
education deprived Latin trainingof its elite status and contributedstronglyto
its recession. Duringthe Renaissance, the increasedvolume of necessary doc-
umentation in various professions produced a stampede away from a too-
demandingLatin to the security of the vernacular.
(v) The VERNACULAR tends to become a koine, i.e. the linguisticmedium of
an ever-wideningcommunity;this weakens the prestige language,which up to
then has been functioning, in the absence of a standard,as the one unifying
force in a linguistic culture of regionalvarieties. Thus, in England, the spread
of English in the 14th century contributedto the demise of Anglo-French.
(vi) The SYMBOLIC FUNCTION of languageas a mark of class and status-a
potent factor in the rise of prestige languages-may likewise have its impact
on their decline. Greek, once the prestige languageof intellectualism,receded
in the 4th century because, to Western Christianity,it representedpaganism.
French, in the late 18th century, began to recede and even disappearin Ger-
many because it represented the ANCIEN REGIME, whereas German stood for
the onrushingnew ideas of Enlightenment.
(vii) Among the many symbolic values of language, that of national repre-
sentation, often labeled LANGUAGE LOYALTY, is prevalent(Trescases 1978).The
disintegrationof Medieval Latinityduringthe Renaissancewas tied to the rise
of the Western nationallanguages.The loyalty to the new nations, heightened
by consciousness of and loyalty to the evolving standardlanguage, destroyed
the formerbelief in the supernationalvalues of Latin. Taking'languageloyalty'
as the true identificationof the languagewith its country, Du Bellay, the prom-
inent French sociolinguistof the Renaissance,wrote in 1549:'The same natural
law which requires everyone to defend his birthplacelikewise obliges us to
watch over the dignity of our language.' Du Bellay's call to arms refers to the
impact of the Italian Renaissance, which hurt the Hercule gaulois of French
pride;Italian,the language,was defensively equatedwith the Italians,its speak-
ers. The Italians, mused a contemporaryauthor, Estienne Pasquier(Kahane
1983:234) 'have an effeminate language . . . their language is corrupt because
they have dissolute mores.' The moral evaluation of the dominantlanguage
was certainly not new: in the judgment of the Hispanic theologian and gram-
marian Alderete in 1606 (Schmitt 1982:43),Saint Isidore had felt rightly that
the conqueringGermanictribes broughtinto the Roman Empirethe vices and
faults of both their languageand their mores.
The registers of discourse which transmit prestige languages to the target
languages vary, and the analysis of these variationsfalls into the border area
between stratigraphyand structure. The register acquired by the educated
speakers of the target languageis commonly that of a koine, the spoken stan-
dard. A typical example is the Greek Koine. Based on the Attic dialect, it
evolved roughly from the time of Alexander the Great and the Hellenic uni-
fication. It superseded the regional varieties spoken in the city-states of the
homelandand of Hellenic Asia Minor,first as theircommondenominator;then,
500 LANGUAGE, VOLUME62, NUMBER 3 (1986)
by representingHellenic culture, it became the 'window on the world' for the

many allophonous populationsfrom Asia Minor to Egypt and SouthernItaly.
To quote Meillet's diastraticand diatopic definition(1967:266):'The same civ-
ilization and the same language are carried by the educated, the artists, the
scholars, the craftsmen, and the merchantsgoing from one land to the other.'
A comparablesituation, with the prestige languagefunctioningas the unifying
link in a multi-languageor multi-dialectculture, occurred with Latin in the
Empire, with French in medieval England, with Italian in the late and post-
medieval Eastern Mediterranean,and with Spanish in America.
This basic register of the prestige language, the koine, is flanked by others
serving specific functions. A prestige languagemay be used for formal, essen-
tially written, expression-as was Latin, first in its medieval form and then,
above all, in its rigidrevival practicedby the Humanists.However, the prestige
languagemay spreadin a form representingthe low pole of formality,a pidgin.
Pidgins, according to Schuchardt'sperception of an old dilemma (Kahane &
Kahane 1976:35),were presumablygeneratedby the speakersof the dominant
language: to be understood by 'those colonials', they resorted to the most
radicalreductionpossible of grammaticalrules. Hall 1966tries to circumscribe
the life span of a pidgin: it remains a pidgin so long as no 'social pressures'
towardconformityare exerted. It is temptingto see the spreadof Latin in such
lines. As the languageof the ever-expandingImperiumRomanum,it spreadas
the dominantlanguage,amongnumerouspopulationsof diverse linguisticback-
grounds. But the Romans developed no 'languagepolicy'; and even for cen-
turies after their rule, far into the MiddleAges, 99%of the populationof what
is now France remainedilliterate. In other words, with pidginizationblending
into creolization, a creolized Latin must have been the naturalway of adapting
to the superstratumfor many generationsof the uneducated,as late as the 9th
century.
In the present context of the diverse registers of discourse inherentin the
prestige language, an observation by Munske (1982:237)is worth noting. He
delineates the stages of Latin impact in the history of German:they go from
the period in which the GermaniaRomanawas colonized to the tune of Vulgar
Latin, throughChristianizationvia a resuscitatedLatin in the Carolingianera,
followed by the scholarly Latinity of Humanism,and into the modern world
with its stream of scientific and technological terminology. In each of these
phases, the same-or not quite the same-language represents a different
register.
But not only do various registers of the prestige languageaffect the target
language;the shift of registercan also occur on the other side, withinthe target
language. Here the prestige language tends to filter down from the educated
level, where it entered, to a less educated, where it ends up. Let me exemplify
with the development of Italian, in particularits Venetian variety, in Greece.
After the Crusades, in the Venetianpossessions of the EasternMediterranean,
Italianbecame a usual form of communicationamong the regionalaristocracy
and bourgeoisie. Napoleon dissolved the Venetian Republic and its empire;
and after a short British intermezzo, the Ionian Islands-the most strongly
Italianized area-returned to Greece. Fieldwork on those islands (Kahane

1938)showed that the many relics of Italianlexis, word formation,and syntax
were still known to the educated, yet only in the ratherpassive way of 'having
heard them, although no longer using them themselves'; however, many Ital-
ianisms had remained living features in the speech of the 'common people'.
The social forces mobilized against the half-deadformerdominantlanguage-
such as language loyalty and the fear of appearingprovincial-reduced the
vitality of the once prestigiousheritagefor the educated;but no such inhibitions
affected the others.
If we try, then, to analyse the nativizationof a prestige language,two ways
are open, at least in principle,and they correspondto the traditionaldichotomy
of the diachronicand synchronic approaches. In the literatureon contact lin-
guistics (as the field is broadlylabeled) other dichotomiesalso appear, aiming
at about the same model yet emphasizingdifferentaspects. Munske, studying
GermanLatinity, speaks of genesis and result. Ureland 1982contraststhe two
fundamentalthemes of contact linguistics:synchronic'Kreolistik',which deals
with pidginsand creoles, vs. diachronicstratigraphy,which subsumesthe study
of superstratum,substratum,and adstratum.Both scholars object to a one-
sided view: Munske (238) blames the Germanobsession with purism, which
accepts the historicalrecordbut is disinclinedto constructa systemic subcode
'foreignness' or, in the frame of his study, 'Latinity'. Ureland, in contrast,
blames the Neogrammariansas well as the Generativistsfor perceiving the
impactof otherlanguagesonly in termsof proto-systemsandfor thus neglecting
the historical/culturalprocess. Schuchardt,he thinks, was the first to protest
against such narrowness.The 5th Symposiumon LanguageContactin Europe,
held in 1982 at Mannheim,was largely devoted to analogiesbetween past and
present linguistic conditions which contributeto a typology of contacts; spe-
cifically, it dealt with case histories which involve both synchronicKreolistik
as a corrective for diachronicstratigraphy,and stratigraphyas a correctivefor
Kreolistik.
The following observations, supportedby examples from the past, center on
linguistic changes occurringwhen a 'native' languageis becoming linked to a
'dominant' language. Two directions of linguistic change are potentially in-
herent in that link:
(i) The dominantlanguage, throughthe stages of creolizationand standard-
ization, may become a new languagewith its own system, yet may integrate
features of the native languageusually subsumedas substratuminfluence. The
entire early phase of the Romancelanguagesis involvedin this evolution:Proto-
Romance was, dependingon the area, Latino-Italic,Latino-Celtic,or Latino-
Iberian.
(ii) Alternatively, the dominant language functions as a superstratum,and
as such inflicts changes on the native language. Let me illustratethis course
of events with the role of Greekas a superstratumin the developmentof spoken
Latin. Coseriu (1971:141)has formulateda rule of thumb:'If a featureappears
in Greek and Romance but not in classical Latin, there are solid reasons to
interpretthat feature as a Hellenizationof late colloquialLatin.' The following
featureshave been attributedto the impactof Greek(Kahane& Kahane 1980b):

the replacementof Latin case endings by prepositions;the loss of the infinitive
in the Balkan languagesand in SouthernItaly; the shift of the Latin adjectives
to nouns; the frequent irregularityof intertonic vowels in Tuscan; and the
emergingarticle.
The complex process of the integrationof a prestige language can be de-
scribed through a model of overt and covert nativization.The descriptionof
overt patterns of nativizationleads inexorablyback to the early stages of in-
tegration, still on the level of creolization. The substratumbreaks throughin
the surface of the superstratum.What becomes tangible in the act is the sig-
nificant progress from 'mistake' to 'deviation' (stressed by Kachru, 718-19).
In this context, 'mistake' is a symptom of the constant pressure of the sub-
stratumwhich accompanies the learners' unsure steps into the new language;
'deviation' hints at the transformationof the instinctive error into accepted
norm. With the expansion of TESL, 'erroranalysis' has become a customary
approachto such problems;but of course it is an old practice. Let me go back
from the 20th century to the 17th, and from our linguists to Venetian come-
diographers-hardly less professionalobservers. Muchof the VenetianEmpire
was establishedon Byzantine territory,and the inhabitantswho triedtheir best
to communicatein Italianwere native speakersof Greek. Theirway of speaking
Italian,with strongGreekinfluence,was ridiculedwith the same cruelprejudice
which we know fromracismand sexism. Accordingly(Kahane& Kahane1985),
this secondaryuse of linguisticdata can be called 'glossism'. But data are data;
and for the seldom documented pidginizationof Italian by Greeks, labeled
Greghesco, the contemporarycomedies by Molino and Calmoare sterlingma-
terial (cf. Coutelle 1971, Cortelazzo 1972). The old Venetian writers concen-
trated on two processes: interferenceand code-switching.In phonologicalin-
terference, typical Greek features were transferredto Italian, where they do
not occur: n is palatalizedbefore i, changingcani 'dogs' to cagni; the voiced
stops d and b are usually tied to a preceding nasal, changingadesso 'now' to
andesso; voiceless stops are voiced after a nasal, changing tempo 'time' to
tembo. On the morphologicallevel, Greek has three genders, Italian two; so
in Greghesco, masculine and feminine are easily reversed, because of Greek
associations: la casa 'the house' occurs as il casa, imitatingto spiti. Greek
inflectional endings are added to Italian: signore becomes segnuros. Code-
switching occurs when, in the foreigner'suse of a second language,the native
lexicon breaks through. Over 350 Greek lexemes are found in the comedies,
woven into the Greeks' use of Italian. The motivation for this lexicological
conservatism is illuminating.The words which remain Greek emphasize the
native Greek heritage in certain domains-church, family-and in a bent for
terms of evaluation.Native markersof grammaticalstructuresuch as 'because'
and 'unless' are also frequent, as well as modal auxiliariesand exclamations.
I present this sampleof 'mistakes'committedby unpolished(or, if you wish,
'unspoiled') speakers of a second language, as a typical indication of how a
native language tends to interfere with the superimposed.It is interestingto
test this early, creolized stage of interferenceagainsta later one, in which drift
A TYPOLOGY OF THE PRESTIGE LANGUAGE 503
has become rule, and mistakes have become deviations. To do this, it is nec-
essary to go from the 17th century Greeks in Venice, who speak an Italian
distorted by their native Greek, to the 20th century Greeks on the Ionian Is-
lands, whose long-lasting Italo-Venetian superstratumis still marked by the
Greek substratum. The result confirms expectations: on the phonological
level, the still large mass of Italianismsdisplays about the same intrusionof
the regionalGreek dialect which the Venetiancomediographershad witnessed
in their contemporaryinformants. As to the fluctuatingItalianizationof the
lexicon, the resistance of the Greghesco speakers to renderingtheir cherished
native heritagein a foreign tongue has its counterpartin the island dialect. The
uncountableItalianismssurvivingon the Ionian Islands echo the modernism,
the fashions, and the technology of daily life importedfrom Venice; however,
Greek values and the terminology of emotional life remain Greek, unrepre-
sented in the onslaught of foreignism. In this sense, ex silentio, modern stra-
tigraphyconfirms the shrewd mockery of times long past.
The overt nativizationof morphosyntacticclasses is well exemplified, again
in the Greek dialect of the Ionian Islands, by the integrationof the Italian
adverb. The case illustrates the process of nativizationbetween languagesof
similar structure(Kahane & Kahane 1983a).Three main patternsof adverbial
transfer evolve. First, both languages express the category 'adverb' by final
vowels functioning as suffixoids, and Italian adverbs are nativized in Greek
with either the same or a differentvowel: Ven. de logo 'rightaway' yields Gk.
6eloyu. Second, Italian prepositionalphrases are taken over by Greek either
unchanged(i.e. as lexical items), or with a Hellenizedprefix, or with a deletion
of the prefix; e.g., Ven. a uso 'for use' turns into ya uzo, with the preposition
a replaced by Gk. ya. Third, since Greek unmodifiednouns often function as
adverbs, Italianismscan fill this slot: Ven. sirocal 'southeast wind' appearsin
the phrase o aeras erkhete sirokali 'The wind is blowing from the south.' In
all these examples, foreign structures have been overtly integratedinto the
morphosyntacticframe of the target language.
Borrowedlexemes, borrowedmorphosyntacticfeatures, and borrowedpho-
nemes represent what we may call the OVERT impact of the prestige language
on the native. The COVERT interference,just as powerful, hides behind a de-
ceptively native surface. The linguistic features which we subsume under the
label 'covert' are essentially three: style, calque, and metaphor.
(i) As to STYLE, the Greco-Latinisttraditionturned Western writing, in the
phrasingof Munske, into a 'culturalartifact'.Munskehere senses a promising
field of study: As to morphology, that tradition is behind patterns of word
formation;as to syntax, it is behind word order, the sequence of tenses and
agreement.The lexemes, in short, may be native; the sentence structureoften
is not.
(ii) CALQUES, to which Betz 1949 has drawn attention, are likewise hidden
foreigners, frequently the product of languageloyalty. But such loyalty may
be able to purify only the clothing, not the body. A large part of our Latinist
lexicon of abstraction was translatedfrom Greek with, frequently, a second
translationfrom Latin into German:often quoted examples are Gk. syneidesis
-> La. conscientia - Ger. Gewissen and Gk. patris -> La. patria -> Ger.
Vaterland.
To show how little we are awareof the Greekfoundationof our abstractions,
let me outline the integrationfrom Greek through Latin into Romance of a
widely used morphosyntacticfeature, the adverbialformant -mente. Shorey
1910was the first to be struck by the similaritybetween the adverboid-mente
and a formulaicGreek dative phrase with instrumentalfunction, consisting of
noun + adjective: endoxoi phreni (in Aeschylus) prefigureda Latin-Romance
gloriosa mente. Gk. phreni 'with the mind' was easily replacedin this expres-
sion by quasi-synonyms, all in the dative. Semantically,the nouns shared the
element of human involvement. The noun functionedas the carrierof the ad-
jective, and the latterwas the dominantfeatureof the nexus. The Greekexpres-
sion was paralleledin Latin-with, of course, a shift from dative to ablative,
as in Seneca's honesta mente. Again, the noun functioned throughthe case
ending as the grammaticalmarker,with the adjective as the semantic marker
of the string. The broad spectrumof ablative nouns sharingthe base meaning
'mentaldisposition'was reducedto a singleitem, mente;andby the 6th century,
the Romance use of adverbial-mente was in existence. Malkiel 1978terms the
shift one from composition to derivation;it is most evident in French, where
the morpheme-ment has lost its lexical autonomy.
(iii) The third feature which can be seen as covert interferenceis the MET-
APHOR, that constant stimulus to intellectual creativity. The metaphor shifts
the meaning of a lexeme from its usual linguistic field to another, and thus
metaphorizationrepresents an act of deviation: the rules of contextual collo-
cation have been violated. Weinrich1976supposes that the Westernlanguages
share a good deal of their metaphoricexpression; yet somewhere, sometime
in Western culture, the deviation process, which by now has become com-
monplace, must have had its origin. In view of the paramountrole that Greek
has played in both the intellectual and the linguistic development of our con-
ceptualization, it is tempting to probe in that direction. If we take, e.g., the
field of 'literaryjudgement' as analysed by Van Hook 1905, the traditionof
metaphorizationwent clearly from Greek throughLatin into the modern lan-
guages. A small sample, with English representingthe modernlanguages,will
provide an idea of that tradition. The stimuli for metaphorizationrest in the
everyday experience of man:in nature,the humanbody, social status, and arts
and crafts: Gk. katharos, La. purus, Eng. clear; Gk. antheros, La. floridus,
Eng. flowery; Gk. xeros, La. aridus or siccus, Eng. dry; Gk. demodes, La.
vulgaris, Eng. folksy; Gk. ptochos, La. mops, Eng. poor; Gk. leios, La. levis,
Eng. smooth.
I have attemptedto isolate, in a contrapuntalapproach,some of the typical
features of that almost overwhelminglinguisticphenomenon,the prestige lan-
guage. I will conclude by emphasizingthree of its facets which represent its
most incisive, most lasting impact on our linguisticculture.
(a) First is the function of the various prestige languagesin the standardiza-
tion of our Westernlanguages.The field certainlyinvites furtherstudy. Green-
berg 1978generalizes: 'There is much empiricalevidence supportingthe view

that external influences play an important role in introducing linguistic
changes.' Similarly, Ureland (1982:3) sees, in the interferenceresultingfrom
linguisticcontact, the Keim 'bud' of new linguisticforms or new varieties. The
specifics of the process change, of course, from case history to case history,
from scholar to scholar. Yet, as I read the literature, a certain consensus
evolves: that the stage of vulgarization,of low prestige,of creolizationinherent
in the vernacularhas been a fertile soil for growth and take-over by the reg-
ulatory forces.
(i) Such an explanationhas been profferedfor the 'Greek behind Latin', to
use the term of Friedlander1944(cf. Kahane& Kahane 1980b).Bonfante 1960
went so far as to describe Italian (a Romance language,to be sure) as 'a syn-
thesis of Latin and Greek'. Dagron (1969:55)saw in the Latin strain of the
Byzantine diglossia the foundation of the developing Greek Demotic, where
lexicological xenophilia weakened the traditionalrigidityof Atticist norms.
(ii) Wolf 1979, invoking the great model of the standardizationof Latin
through Greek, tells the history of French as the standardizationof a Latin
creole, spoken from the 4th to the 9th century, and then re-Latinizedbetween
the Carolingianera and the Renaissance. With the revitalizationof Latinity,
the gap between the two registers began to widen. The spoken languagewas
the foundationof the written;but once the writtenlanguagewas in existence,
it came into the hands of scholars and grammarians.
(iii) The Norman Conquest, with its social implications, produced, in the
analysis of Baugh (1957:205),the conditions favorable to innovations which
yielded Middle English. English became the languageof the uneducated, and
this 'made it easier for grammaticalchanges to go forwardunchecked'.
(iv) In a somewhat narrowerframe, the wave of Alamode French had its
impact on the standardizationof Germanin the 17th century. Sperber/Polenz
(1966:91)find the foundation of modern Germanstyle in French clarte, bon
sens, and precision. These French principlesproducedtheir effect across the
borderinto Germany:the influencewas appealingand sobering,and maderoom
for clarity of writing.
(b) Stressing the role of the prestige language in standardization,I have
consideredit in relationto the correspondingnativelanguage.My second point,
however, takes the prestige language and its impact as a single and unified
event. The shared experience of successive superstratawelded Western civi-
lization-independently of the varying patterns of genetic relationship-into
a community of linguistic culture which shared a style of writing, a body of
new words coming with new things, an abstractlexicon, and a mannerof met-
aphoric expression. This linguistic bond has frequentlybeen emphasized. Let
me mention the S[tandard]A[verage] Eluropean] of Whorf ([1941] 1956:138,
156),centeringon the Latin traditionin our language/culturecomplex;or Wein-
rich's europaische Bildgemeinschaft, the European metaphoric community; or
Ureland's europaisch-atlantischer Sprachbund.
The role of the superstratumin creatinga Sprachbundis well evidenced by
the lexicological model of doublets. Doublets are two different forms of the
same morpheme:one is inheritedand nativized, accordingto the rules of pho-

nological change, while the other is borrowed,preservingmore or less its orig-
inal shape. Paradoxically,the borrowedform-historically the later-tends to
reflect the earlier stage. Thus La. pensare 'to weigh' yields, with regularloss
of La. n before s, synonymous Fr. peser; but the originalform, with its nasal,
reappears via Church Latin in Fr. penser 'to think', It. pensare, Sp. pensar,
Eng. pensive. Doublets relate indeed to our present context: the borrowed
forms, distinct from the 'folksy' ones, representa good deal of the 'bookish'
lexicon common to the Westernworld. They are particularlynumerousin Ro-
mance and English. French, accordingto the recent monographby Reiner 1980
(cf. Kahane & Kahane 1983b:188-90), displays about six thousandof them.
(c) My third and final observation about the functions of the superstratum
(after tying it to the standardizationof the vernaculars,and to its power of
cultural unification) concerns its most obvious feature: that of implying, by
definition, a state of bilingualism.For about two millennia,bilingualism-i.e.
a second-languagecompetence-has been a distinctiveand most powerfulfea-
ture of Western history: it consolidated a social class system; it has been the
foundationof Western 'paideia'; and for the allophonous,it has been the road
to integration.But not everyone has been bilingual.Those who were stuck with
monolingualismhave been the paupers, who are outside society; the narrow-
minded, who view language as a symbolic organism(condemning,e.g., fran-
glais); and, last but not least, some native speakers of the prestige language.
Plotinus, the Neo-Platonic philosopher, taught in Rome from 245 to 270; he
used his native Greek and apparentlynever bothered, in those 25 years, to
learn Latin. I hope that today's speakers of English, when going abroad, will
not feel stimulatedby the example of Plotinus.
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A Typology of The Prestige Language

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A Typology of the Prestige Language

English is the great laboratoryof today's sociolinguist. We are aware of the

the vernacular,was that of bilingualism.His Latinwas a revived classical Latin,

by representingHellenic culture, it became the 'window on the world' for the

Italianized area-returned to Greece. Fieldwork on those islands (Kahane

featureshave been attributedto the impactof Greek(Kahane& Kahane 1980b):

berg 1978generalizes: 'There is much empiricalevidence supportingthe view

same morpheme:one is inheritedand nativized, accordingto the rules of pho-

Language, culture, and personality:Essays in memory of Edward Sapir, ed. by

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