Language is a badge of tribal membership

I dig linguistics, and I dig HBD, so how do you join them both? I've had this idea for some time now, but I hadn't written about it lest some guy stole it and wrote a book before I did. 

It seems I'll have to give up on that, as science is fast catching up with my awesome blog (see, I just pulled a Half Sigma here). Razib Khan quotes a recent study in Northern Australia that documents how some Abo kids came up with a new language just for the kicks. It fast became cool, and now the young kids of the tribe have a different language from their elders.  As it looks it's a fully new language, with some grammar changes too, not just a bunch of jargon to fool their parents so they can avoid being eaten. A smart guy in Razib's Twitter also linked to an experimental study where they put people to compete in a game, and prompted to develop their own secret speech, which they did.

When you ask a layman they'll tell you that languages are to communicate. But that's patently false, if we wanted to optimize communication we'd all speak the same language. And languages wouldn't change over time. What the common theory is lacking is just a simple modifier. Languages are to communicate within the group. In fact this little modifier explains most of the mysteries of human psychology. Happiness correlates with income within the group. People are naturally cooperative within the group. Take the modifier away and you get the Cathedral.

Many academic theories about language posit that language evolve to aid better coordination, say for hunters. You go left, I go right, I throw the first spear, etc. Chimps seem to be able to coordinate without speaking, but it sounds reasonable that talking does help coordinate better. But if the idea is to be able to coordinate hunters, then why are men worse at language than women? Women do 70% of the talking, and it's mostly inane gossip. It has extremely little information density. Woman conversation is most of the time a status confirmation task, all they do is say get a group, say something and listen carefully to the tone of voice of all the participants, to check what everyone thinks of each other. If the mother hen suddenly is rude to you, well you know you're in trouble. You better find ways to raise your status or undermine hers. I taught a girlfriend that all her speech was an unconscious status confirmation task, and that she should stop caring as she will always be high status in my eyes. She never nagged me again.

For all I know language did start as a way for men to coordinate hunts better, but over time it's obvious that it evolution found other uses for it. Language itself is a big, a huge shibboleth, a simple way of knowing which tribe people belong to. Babies stop telling apart sounds not used in their native language by 10 months, before they even start talking themselves. And the ability to properly learn new phonemes dies permanently after age 10. With years of effort you can learn to communicate in a foreign language, but your accent will always give you away. And that's being lucky, most people just don't have the capability. And of those who do, a big majority are women, whose tribal membership is always tenuous. After all they never knew when they would be exchanged to a different tribe, or kidnapped and taken away.

A big puzzle of linguistics has always been the relationship between languages. Why are some language families so big, and others so small. One big language family extends from Ireland to Bengal. Yet dozens of different languages of 4 unrelated language families linger in close proximity in Southwest China. , with hundreds of languages of a dozen families. And those in the know say that most family groupings are very suspect.

Why don't the Papuans get their shit together and talk the same language? Because they don't want to. For thousands of years they have had no need of talking with the neighboring tribe. The neighbors were there to raid, kill, and occasional cannibalistic feast. Austronesian languages are famously extensive, from Hawaii to Madagascar. Yet the Philippines or Borneo are a patchwork of small tribal languages which are not intelligible by the nearby villages. It surely has something to do with the fact that every year, the able bodied males of a given village would raid the neighboring tribe, cut their heads off and bring them home as a trophy.

Farming changed the normal dynamics of tribal speech, with cooperation forced top down to vast masses of people engaged in farming and trading. First you had tens of thousands of people speaking the same language. Then millions. But massive, empire-wide koinés are tied to their empires, and always die and fragment. Ancient Greek died, Latin fragmented, as did Tang Chinese. The Middle Ages brought regional dialects, mostly sharing local market areas, the Enlightenment chose one dialect and artificially transformed it in the national tongue.

The ideology behind national tongues, nationalism, is dead, but national tongues are still around. Of course they are far too useful, and they are too strongly linked to the nation states who created them. But in the same way that the nation state is slowly losing relevance, so national languages are fading too. 50 years ago you would never have listened a regional accent on national TV, today the BBC makes a point of casting Scottish scientists for their documentaries. Italian dialects are making a comeback.  Even in Japan a big part of movies are voiced in regional dialects, some quite obscure. All while every country on earth is putting ever more resources into English education.

If languages were to communicate, we would have an English speaking world in no time. Instead what we will have is a global English speaking elite, lording over masses speaking bad English to their masters, and revived regional dialects to themselves. Given Google Translate and PRISM, it wouldn't surprise me if vernacular writing dies out, with most speech being done in untranslatable dialect, and writing done in English. A massive Hong Kong style diglossia. It might be the only feasible resistance against what's coming.

Zimmerman went to sleep one day and woke up to find out he's a giant white cockroach.A.S.

Being white is a necessary but not sufficient condition for nationalism.

Whites are a minority of the Trayvon Martin protestors and supporters. The majority of the protestors and supporters are black, with some Hispanics and whites. Whites overwhelmingly believe Zimmerman is innocent: http://newsone.com/2001237/trayvon-martin-zimmerman-guilty/

Aside from media elites and brainwashed status whoring urban SWPLs, white people have been much more reasonable than black people with regard to this story. After all, a jury of five white women and one hispanic had the courage to vote not guilty. Would Z be free if there had been five black women on the jury? His chances would be a whole lot worse. I can't find a recent poll, but the Gallup Poll from April 2012 showed that only 10 percent of whites saw Zimmerman as definitely guilty, while 51 percent of blacks saw him as definitely guilty. An additional 20% of both racial groups said that he was "probably guilty". This poll was conducted during the media hype but before the trial where it became apparent that the state had no case and that Z could not reasonably be found guilty. What would those numbers be today? Let's hope they conduct a follow up poll. My impression is that white attitudes would remain vastly, vastly more reasonable than black attitudes on this issue. My impression is that even a significant percentage of white democrats either know what is going on or could be made to understand what is going on, if they were forced to actually watch the trial. If anything this case seems to highlight the need for separation from black people. At this point I don't think that I could get fair justice from a black jury

p.s. Rachel Jeantel exists.

My impression is that white attitudes would remain vastly, vastly more reasonable than black attitudes on this issue.

That's not saying much, is it?

If anything this case seems to highlight the need for separation from black people. At this point I don’t think that I could get fair justice from a black jury

The fact that you just noticed this after living some decades in this earth says a lot.

Nationalism has shown to be unable to survive state disapproval.

Observe that each sign is supposedly of a different organization, but all signs were obviously made by the same equipment and made in the same style, thus in fact made by a single artist. This is characteristic of organized entryism and astroturf - each of those organizations will be found to have the same postal address, probably the Justice Department, and these whites are probably direct full time employees of the organizations located at that address. In short. Totally Fake. The state speaks, and calls itself the people.

No justice, no peace! -USG

I was aware of it before, but I live far away from black people and I try not to think about them. It wasn't a dawning realization that I'd never get a fair trial, but a horrifying reminder that I'd never get a fair trial.

Nothing survives state disapproval that the state disapproves of. I'm working on that.

And that is just about all that she does, exist.

If this is not the foretelling of the West, I don't know what is. Fast forward thirty years, Our laws in practice will follows the balkanization of the country. The major tribes will draw up boundaries that the others may not cross. Just like they did in Prison. The government will be subverted by those who has the most numbers working for it, the same people who survive only due to transfer of payment from the productive to the leech. The media subverts the will of the people to tell the narrative that the ones in charge wanted to tell. The government, using the unlimited tax payer money, subverts the will of the people by infiltrating the people, no doubt using the mechanisms laid out by our esteemed Mr. Snowden. By the time this whole thing runs it course, we are talking about Brazil will nuclear weapons and the biggest military in the world. I am not a religious person at all, but I pray for my kids and the world that they will live in.

Balkanization would be an improvement. The government won't allow it though. They'll force you to mingle and when crime happens they will blame and prosecute the victim. Brazilians are quite segregated regionally. That's why it kinda works.

When I say balkanization, I wasn't just referring to physical boundaries. In the office, in public places, you treat one group of people very different from the other. The physical boundaries also need not be contiguous. e.g., In the prosperous Bay Area, you have East Palo Alto and Oakland, both fairly desirable locations that are currently cesspools. If you live in these two areas, you will follow different rules compared to the rest of the Bay Area. Diddo New Orleans and Detroit. My wife and I went to Watts in L.A. a few years back. After a full ten years of the L.A. riot, the whole neighborhood still has many boarded up store fronts. After the Koreans left, no one wanted to go in there to set up shops anymore.

The problem is demographics. The Serbians in Kosovo surely were annoyed when the first Albanians moved in, but then again they still had their own neighborhoods. Fast forward 2008...

Agreed. Demographics is why I said things will look much worse in thirty years.

Balkanization of the language happened in the old days because travel was limited. Language is dynamic. Given the same starting point, and if the groups are sufficiently isolated, different accents, dialects and eventually different but related languages will evolve. U.S. underwent a consolidation of accents since the advent of TV. Dan Rather did more to standardize accent then just about all the government edicts. While there are backlashes as you pointed out, I am not sure as a whole for China and U.S. they are going the way of further balkanization as you said. Certain groups who wanted to did so. Ebonics is an example, but by large, different groups like the Mexicans coming to the states and adopt the standard language as their own.

Yet most people in Hong Kong still can't speak proper English or Mandarin.

While language evolves over longer periods of time, in the short run it is resistant to change. What is more, the direction and speed of the change is need based. Surely inside China, you see the moderation of the local dialects in favor of the standard mandarin. In Hong Kong, the will of the people do want a separation as they feel that they are not a part of the main land for a long time. I think it could go both ways but the big trend I see is integration.