Excerpt:  Strategy & Language / Linguistics, part one

Language, and the ability to communicate, sets humans apart from every other species. It is not surprising, therefore, for humans to be fascinated by the appearance, usage, and disappearance of languages over time.  There is something visceral about learning that so-and-so is the “last surviving speaker of language X.”  It is akin to that poignant feeling you get when you learn about an extremely endangered species of animal.

In this chapter, we delve into the fundamentals of language and the study of languages, that is, linguistics.  How does a language come into being?  Why does language A thrive and language B wither?  What can we learn, in terms of strategy, from those languages that succeed against the odds?

To guide the investigation, we’ll follow a macro- to micro- flow of topics:  the origins of language, the survival of languages over time, the distinguishing features of dominant languages such as Chinese and English, and then a substantive set of characteristics and behaviours associated with language and its use.

Let’s start with the roots of language. In the earlier chapter on Strategy & Biology, we explored at length the development of evolutionary biology and its implications for human behaviour.  Ironically, in the field of linguistics, despite Charles Darwin’s observations about the parallels between linguistic and physical evolution, little progress was made initially in advancing research into the origins of language abilities.  Many attribute this to religious opposition, particularly that of the Catholic Church.

Slowly that opposition eroded, and leading linguists proposed competing theories, starting with Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom, and, inevitably, Noam Chomsky.  Whether one subscribes to Pinker and Bloom’s idea that a series of random mutations led to larger brains and greater intelligence (thus conferring a survival advantage via the ability to communicate) or to Chomsky’s idea that a singular mutation (which he calls “merge”) led to the ability to combine thoughts creatively (in effect the precursor to intelligence) is not as important as the understanding that evolutionary events took place, over time, leading to verbal communication.  The first proto-languages were born.  “Once upon a time,” as E.H. Gombrich memorably put it.

Currently, and probably the case for the past half a century, the topic revolves around the work of Noam Chomsky whose ideas revolutionised linguistics, beginning with his first major publication, Syntactic Structures, in 1957.  The Chomskyan framework contends that human language is a distinct form of communication, that all human languages are variations on a single language, and that the ability of human children to learn language quickly and easily is due to an innate language faculty in the brain.  Although some aspects of human language are shared with other animal species, certain features of language are unique to humans and are directly related to human development and dominance over other species.  In other words, the ability to form and use language is fundamental and intrinsic to human power.

Which may be why we all nod when we hear the aphorism, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”  And why, as a good strategist, you will want to invest, on an ongoing basis, in your language abilities and in those of your team and community of stakeholders.

From this spark, or linguistic equivalent of a big bang theory, emerged the earliest forms of language.  What the first proto-languages sounded like, how many they were, where they occurred, and how they spread over time, all of these questions are part and parcel of the competing theories of paleoanthropology, the study of earliest humans.  Similar to the challenge of understanding early forms of music and other arts, the fossil record supporting proto-language theories is limited.  What is agreed is that language is an (if not the) essential accomplishment of humans.  At the same time, nothing threatens an individual language so much as change, or human progress.

Paleoanthropologists and their linguist counterparts believe that a great wave of language extinctions took place 8000-9000 years ago, following the Neolithic, or Agricultural revolution.  Foraging gave way to farming, and people began to live in larger and less isolated communities.  Increased contact and competition for resources led to some groups prospering at the expense of others, with some early forms of language thriving at the expense of others.  More familiar to today’s reader is the wave of extinctions accompanying the colonisation of much of the planet by geopolitical powers (in turn, Asian, then European).  It is estimated, for example, that before the arrival of the first European settlers in Australia, in 1788, some 260 aboriginal languages were in use.  Traces of only a hundred remain.  According to a 2010 UNESCO report*, by the year 2100, more than half of today’s existing 6000-7000 languages still spoken will no longer be in use.

*Moseley, Christopher (ed.). 2010.  Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd edn. Paris, UNESCO Publishing. Online version:  http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas

Modeling these dynamics to determine the underlying drivers of extinction and survival is a colossal data science effort.  Working from past to present, most geneticists start with the belief that modern humans left Africa approximately 50,000 years ago, perhaps in a single migration with very small numbers.  Working backwards from the present, linguists use glottochronology (statistical data techniques to date the divergence of languages from common sources) to design language trees.  Two examples for the tree of the Indo-European family of languages situate the earliest Indo-European language divergences as commensurate with either (1) the movement of warrior clans from their homeland in the Russian steppes, north of the Black and Caspian Seas, some 6,000 year ago (researchers led by the UCLA anthropologist Marija Gimbutas) or (2) the movement of early farmers who lived in ancient Turkey and the spread of agriculture some 10,000 to 8,000 years ago (researchers led by Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge).  Each hypothesis gives disproportionate weight to the role of either military conquest or technological change.  There is a reasonable basis to be given to each factor.

One recent study*, borrowing methods used by biologists tries to avoid problems with the glottochronology approach.  The researchers drew upon their understanding that genes, like languages, do not mutate at a constant rate, and that organisms (e.g. bacteria) often borrow genes rather than inheriting them from a common ancestor.  The biologists used complex mathematical methods (e.g. generating all possible trees and then deciding statistically which class of trees is more probable than the rest) to reduce the potential subjectivity involved in earlier modelling attempts.  Their calculations suggested that proto-Indo-European existed some 8,700 years ago (+/- 1200 years), closer to Renfrew than to Gimbutas.

* Gray RD, Atkinson QD. Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European Origin. Nature. 2003; 426 (6965): 435-439.  doi:10.1038/nature02029

Modelling the dynamics of languages also requires a robust understanding of what constitutes effective communication.  A great example is the work of Bruno Galantucci, a cognitive scientist at Yale University, whose study in 2005* explored the emergence of human communication systems, using a computer game in which pairs of participants attempt to find each other across a digital blueprint.  They were expected to communicate, but were restricted to inventing their language, not using an existing language.  One surprising finding was how quickly reliable symbolic systems emerged.  Some pairs solved the game in minutes, whereas others struggled for hours.  Some never found each other. In those cases, Dr Galantucci often saw the ideographic equivalent of a person shouting loudly in a foreign country where one does not speak the local language.

Regarding the successful pairs, communication was established as soon as one player decided to copy the symbols proposed by the other player, rather than impose their own. At that point the pair's chances of finding each other increased greatly. Imitation created space for commonality. From that, the players found it straightforward to link useful information to symbols and thus communicate.  The researchers complemented their observations with post-game interviews with the players, learning that a pair could be successful even if a symbol represented something quite different in the digital world to each player—as long as they agreed on what they should do when confronted by it.

In other words, people only need to convey a small amount of information to communicate effectively, and they can do so while holding fundamentally different ideas about how their language describes the world.

Fascinating insight, for a strategist.

* Galantucci B. An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems. Cogn Sci. 2005;29(5):737-767.  doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_34

As we alluded at the beginning of this chapter, humans are indeed fascinated by the appearance, usage, and disappearance of languages over time.  No one more so than Nicholas Ostler, pre-eminent linguist at Oxford University (and, not surprisingly, a former student of Noam Chomsky).  Ostler’s Empire of the Word:  A Language History of the World is as sweeping an account of history as that of Toynbee or Gibbons, and just as illuminating.  Martin Jacques’ review in The Guardian* does it justice:

“There are many ways of recounting the history of the world - via the rise and fall of civilisations, the fortunes of nation states, socio-economic systems and patterns, the development of technology, or the chronology of war and military prowess. This book tells the story through the rise and decline of languages...

“Nicholas Ostler does not adopt a narrowly linguistic approach - based on the structure of languages and their evolution - but instead looks at the history of languages, the reasons for their rise and, as a rule, also their fall. While it is a history of languages, it is at the same time a history of the cultures and civilisations from which they sprang. The book concentrates on those languages that have been - in some form or another - globally influential: they include Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the main European languages, not least English.

“In defence of the centrality of language in human history, Ostler argues that it is language that enables people to form communities and to share a common history: indeed, by the very act of the old teaching the young to speak, language is also central to the establishment and reproduction of tradition. He describes very well how languages reflect and articulate the cultures and histories of different communities: indeed, unless you speak the vernacular, it is impossible properly to understand another people. From his rich picture of why major languages have waxed and waned, it is clear that there is no single model: on the contrary,... there are in fact almost as many models as there are languages. For all the hubris about the rise of English and how it will rule the world's tongues forever, it is sobering to reflect on why languages that in their day seemed utterly irresistible in their dominance and prestige, spoken across large regions of the world for thousands of years, were eventually eclipsed.

“There is Greek, whose fortunes were tied only loosely to Greek civilisation and which somehow managed to hitch a ride on the Roman empire and become, as the prestige language of learning, an integral part of that historical era too. There is Latin itself, which ultimately failed to outlive the imperium and which slowly transmuted into the vernacular Romance languages. There is Sanskrit, which spread from northern India across the sub-continent, largely on the back of Hinduism, and then - though no one quite knows how - to southeast Asia. Codified 2,500 years ago and barely changed since, this was a language that took great pleasure in its own beauty, which was intimately bound up with an Indian worldview, but which was ultimately to ossify to such an extent that today, although still an official language of India, it is spoken by fewer than 200,000 people.

“And then there is Chinese. Chinese history is an exemplar of exceptionalism and the Chinese language entirely conforms to this pattern. Its written system dates back around 4,000 years and during that time it has changed remarkably little. Ostler's explanation for its longevity is interesting: Chinese civilisation is highly centred and averse to disunity; like Egyptian civilisation, it owed allegiance to an emperor who enjoyed a "mandate from heaven"; and the sheer density of population in its heartlands during ancient times largely prevented "swamping" by other languages. In a world now dominated by alphabetic languages, Chinese, based on characters, remains a pictographic tongue. This is why the same Chinese written system can serve equally well for the many different Chinese dialects (sometimes described as languages) and thereby provide a powerful source of unity for such a huge and wide-ranging population.

“A major turning point comes around AD1500. Before that, the spread of languages was essentially by means of land routes, which meant that the growth of a language was relatively slow and usually organic. After 1500, the major form of expansion was by sea. The classic mode of language growth in the new European era was by means of military conquest: by contrast, languages such as Sanskrit and Chinese had spread largely by means of the successful natural growth of language communities. Indeed, it is salutary to learn that it has mainly been western cultures - Greek, Roman, French, Dutch, Portuguese, British and American, together with Islam - that have sought to impose themselves, and their languages, on others. Otherwise, the expansion of languages, notably the great Asian languages, has been organic rather than by force. Once language expansion could be achieved by force…, the pace of language growth was enormously accelerated.

“European expansion started with the Portuguese, followed by the Spanish and the Dutch. The spread of language was generally an integral part of the imperial, "civilising" mission. The impact varied enormously from continent to continent, country to country. While many Latin American countries to this day speak Spanish, in another former colony, the Philippines, the linguistic legacy remains marginal. The Dutch, via the Boer settlers, bequeathed Afrikaans to South Africa, but in their largest and most populous colony, the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, the Dutch language was never widely spoken.

“As this example suggests, the most important way in which the invader language usually took root was through the migration of settlers from the imperial centre: where migration did not happen on any great scale, the chances of a language prospering in the long run were much weaker. The reason why the English language became so dominant in its colonies in the United States, Australia and New Zealand was primarily because of large-scale migration from Britain.

“The top 20 global languages - defined in terms of their use as a first or second language - provide an interesting reflection on the fortunes of those languages that have spread by organic growth and those that have expanded by means of (force). At the top of the league table is Mandarin Chinese, which has 1,052 million speakers, more than twice as many as the next highest, English, with 508 million. Third is Hindi with 487 million and fourth Spanish, with 417 million. Of course, English is a far more global language - though primarily as a second language - than Chinese, the vast majority of whose speakers live in China. But with the present rise of China - and indeed India - it would not be difficult to imagine Mandarin and Hindi becoming far more widely spoken by 2100. By way of contrast, French, which until the early 20th century was, with English, the global language of choice, albeit with rather more prestige, now lingers in ninth place in the table, with a mere 128 million speakers - little more than half the number of Bengali speakers, and just above Urdu.

“History teaches us that the future will always be shaped in large part by the unexpected and the unknowable: language is a classic case in point. Even the mightiest languages have fallen, and the future of the mightiest of our time - English - can never be secure or guaranteed, whatever the appearances to the contrary. Languages follow something like Darwin's law of evolution: they come and go, though their life spans vary enormously. Of the approximately 7,000 language communities in the world today, more than half have fewer than 5,000 speakers, and 1,000 fewer than a dozen: many will be extinct within a generation. But which languages, a millennium from now, will still be prospering, which will be the dominant global languages, and which will be the lingua franca? From our vantage point in the early 21st century, this remains entirely unpredictable.”

* Martin Jacques is visiting fellow at the LSE Asian Research Centre;  reviewer in The Guardian, Speaking of Tongues, March 11 2005, of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler, HarperCollins

History is full of past glorious languages (Manchu, used by the Qing Dynasty in China, and Akkadian, used by the Bablylonians, are examples) that fell alongside their associated empires.  Historically, observed the New Zealand-based linguist Steven Roger Fischer, it is languages that are replaced, not people: the human genetic profile in Europe has not altered significantly in over 50,000 years. Another linguist, Michael Krauss (of the University of Alaska), once referred to the “constant struggle for linguistic survival” and marvelled at the tenaciousness of any language still in use today.

In summary, historically, languages lived and died based on demographics, empire-building, and technological change.  Given that knowledge, what are the implications for the future?  How would you go about reviving a dead or dying language?  What has worked and what hasn’t worked?

Plenty, it turns out.  The literature of language studies has countless examples - here are some to consider:

1. Language nests:  in which grandparents coach toddlers in the old tongue (Maori, Hawaiian, Wopanaak, Mohawk, Cree, Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Iñupiat)

2. Surviving resources, ceremonies, and texts (Hebrew, Wopanaak, Miami, Mahican)

3. Political action and change in the law:  some maintain that political activism has been a catalyst in nearly every narrative of a language rescued from the brink (Hebrew, Irish, Catalan, Hawaiian, Quebecois / joual, Welsh / Cymraeg, Mohawk (and other indigenous languages), Scots / Gaelic, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Montenegrin) 

4. Sheer numbers and scale (Hebrew, Irish, Scots / Gaelic)

5. Intensity of the sense of identity under threat (Hebrew, Catalan, Basque, Irish, Scots / Gaelic, Rotwelsch, Romani)

6. Champions:  enthusiasts wise enough to care about saving their heritage and young enough to see that this requires embracing modernity, fighting scepticism, and paying attention to transitions such as entering high school (Hawaiian, Miami, Mahican, Selk’nam)

7. Geography:  isolation (vs migration), exclusivity and built-up resistance to pandemics, all contributing to low competitive intensity (Eyak, Icelandic, Hawaiian, Faeroese, Manx)

8. Support from a university / institution (Hawaiian, Wopanaak, Eyak, Matukar Panau, Siletz Dee-ni, Koro-Aka, Tuvan, Yurok, Nishnaabe, Salteaux, Potawatomi, Arikara, Mi’kmaq, Miami, Mahican)

9. Commercial factors:  media and other investments (Irish, Mohawk, Welsh, Scots / Gaelic)

10. Technology:  use of new archival and preservation tools (Eyak, Matukar Panau, Siletz Dee-ni, Koro-Aka, Tuvan, Romani, Wukchumni, Mohawk, Yurok, Nishnaabe, Salteaux, Potawatomi, Arikara, Mi’kmaq, Mahican)

Et cetera.

Of course, just as new technologies can be harnessed for archival and preservation purposes, they are often blamed for weakening the existing use of language.  But early research, as outlined by Gretchen McCulloch in her recent book “Because Internet”, suggests the evidence is ambiguous:

“Why do languages change? A thousand years ago, early versions of English and Icelandic were closely related, possibly even mutually intelligible. English has since evolved hugely, and Icelandic, far less. Linguists have studied the relative effects of strong ties (friends, family) and weaker acquaintanceships in such patterns, hypothesising that small communities would host more stable languages...

“Computer simulations suggest that a mix of strong and weak ties—close-knit groups existing in a larger set—allow language-change “leaders” to disseminate updates to a wider population. For example, Twitter combines strong and weak ties, and drives more language change than Facebook, which is more dominated by strong ties. That, in turn, may explain the conservatism of Icelandic (more like Facebook) over time, versus the mutability of English (more like Twitter).”

In the end, language, as we saw earlier with the topics of history and the arts, is a social construct.  It is inescapably political.  For a language, or even a word or a saying or expression, to live and survive, it must serve a purpose.  Many people must have a reason to use it and understand its meaning.  Otherwise it falls into disuse and dies.  That purpose may be to convey status or information, to exert power and influence, to hide something, to restrict its understanding to a select few, to allow one into a group, to educate, or even to create a new world.  Each, in its own way, lends itself to the study of strategy.

When playwright Michel Tremblay wrote his work, Les Belles Soeurs, which premiered in Montreal in 1968, he, like many playwrights before him, was making a deliberate political gesture, that joual, the dialect of the everyday Quebecois, deserved greater social acceptance.  It deserved power.  That this happened concurrently with the Quiet Revolution and the rise of Quebec nationalism is no coincidence.

We see the same pattern with the use of Catalan in Catalonia, Gaelic and Scots in Scotland, Hebrew in Israel, and Tamil in Sri Lanka.  As is often attributed to Max Weinreich, a Russian linguist expert in Yiddish, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

We’ll continue our exploration of Strategy & Language / Linguistics in next month’s edition.

(To be continued.)

Insights:  The Written World.

“Everything must change, for everything to remain the same...”

• Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

What should a good strategist make out of the TikTok and Huawei debacles?  What do these arbitrary decisions mean for the rule of law in business?

No one comes out of this looking good, other than Zhang Yiming and Ren Zhengfei, the talented entrepreneurs behind these successful firms.

We’ve been lulled by the one-sided nature of tech innovation - all US all the time.  The occasional success story that originates outside the US (RIM / Blackberry, ARM, Waze, DeepMind) always ends up acquired or diminished by the American incumbents.  This narrative is being upended, along with so much else we’ve taken for granted.

For along come the innovators of PR China:  Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance, Huawei, etc.  There’s never been anything like this, and, as Lampedusa observed, there will be change.  Change on a massive scale.

Just like, as our book excerpt notes, when a language is adopted by multitudes, there is change.  Change on a massive scale.

We are now more than six months into this pandemic.  Six months of experimentation, real-time tests carried out across every nation, every stratum of society, every mental and moral model of behaviour.  This experience is different from a classical random controlled trial.  This is natural selection as Darwin first envisioned it.  An intense competition for survival.  Some are benefiting greatly, others have been devastated.  The majority appear to be muddling through, waiting for it all to be over.

Where else do we see such intense experimentation?  Well, in biology, of course, specifically virology (ironic, given the pandemic).  There is an endless dance of death between viruses and microbes, one that, over time, shapes the direction of natural selection.  Researchers, led by Eugene Koonin* of the NIH, are beginning to explore the idea that virus-fighting bacteria will self-sacrifice as a way to limit virulence, and that this self-sacrifice is related to complexity-guiding competitive pressure in communities of bacteria.

Analogously, in this month’s excerpt on Strategy & Language / Linguistics, we noted how, as more and more human communication is made accessible through more and more virulent technology (printing, telegraph, telephone, email, social media, next?), we are exposed to greater and greater noise, a no-holds-barred transparent revelation of human nature, warts and all.  The pressure to act (to amplify, to filter, to censor) in defence is real.

In the backdrop is an odd signal, a growing sense that society’s love affair with social media is on the wane.  Just as in virology, when a threshold of harm is crossed, self-preservation kicks in.

* Koonin EV, Wolf YI, Katsnelson MI. Inevitability of the emergence and persistence of genetic parasites caused by evolutionary instability of parasite-free states. Biol Direct. 2017;12(1):31. Published 2017 Dec 4. doi:10.1186/s13062-017-0202-5

Learnings:  Building a Regional Geographic Strategy

What was the challenge?

• Revise the 3-5 year corporate strategy for the EMEA region of a major conglomerate in financial services

• Opportunities for growth were to include ones both organic and via acquisition (“everything on the table”), making the case for investment to the global leadership team

• A high priority initiative to overcome recent slowing of growth, relative to the competition

• Ongoing challenge to align the executive team, some of whom joined the firm from a series of acquisitions over the previous few years

• Within a region of very diverse macroeconomics and degree of industry development

The regional CEO led the effort, with senior executive involvement across all major countries, business units, and functions (i.e. fully matrixed).  A small set of contrarian executives from outside the region were involved on a selective basis, to offset any group-think effects.

What did it take to complete the work successfully?

Over five months, across multiple countries, we worked closely with the executive team to identify and stress-test the most compelling strategic options for the company.  Our approach was based on the shared understanding that most of the knowledge needed to complete the analysis was already resident with the firm, in a fragmented, siloed condition.  Much of the time was therefore committed to unearthing and synthesising the information in a disciplined manner.  The main resource implication was the a priori agreement to dedicate a highly experienced team over a substantive period of time.

The strategic choice framework that we used led with an assessment of corporate capabilities attainable over the timeperiod, concurrent with an initial overview of the executive team’s preferred growth opportunities.  We then mapped the capabilities against internal and external constraints and trends to discover additional credible opportunities.

The follow-on workflow revolved around monthly multi-day sessions at their regional offices, with the full senior team as participants.  Inter-session work (primary and secondary research, analysis) allowed us to create interim briefing materials for discussion at each session.  There was a methodical, gradual progression from many options to a handful, with the level of detail increasing commensurately.  The final report, submitted to the global leadership, recommended the most attractive (risk-adjusted) path forward and associated implementation plan.

The consulting team comprised three full-time partners.

Tip

If you remember just one thing from this edition…

“People only need to convey a small amount of information to communicate effectively, and they can do so while holding fundamentally different ideas about how their language describes the world.”

Until next month.