Ecologia da língua: algumas perspectivas evolutivas

Authors

  • Salikoko Mufwene University of Chicago

Keywords:

language ecology; habitat; evolution; social environment.

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to show that some concepts developed originally by biologists and ecologists to study organisms and species in their natural habitats may be extended to explain the fate of languages in their social environments, above all the study of language evolution, which has no teleology. Languages are born, grow and die, as Schleicher used to say towards the end of the 19th century, not as organisms, but as species, in this case, of a parasitic or viral kind, because they only survive on their human hosts. The internal variation of languages is explained in terms of variation in the composition of the population. Communal languages are extrapolation of the totality of idiolects. There is selection and competition, but not among languages proper, but due to the relative socioeconomic prestige of their speakers. We cannot say that one language throws another out. On the contrary, there is a division of labor, as is the case with lingua francas, used mainly where the European colonizers encroached. Individuals and populations are part of the ecological factors that affect languages. The mind of the individuals must be included, because it is precisely what sets humans apart from other animal species. There is the distinction between external and internal ecology, not in the sense of historical linguistics. All changes are motivated externally. What happens internally is processes of grammaticalization that rearrange features already extant.

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Author Biography

Salikoko Mufwene, University of Chicago

ascido na República Democrática do Congo, Mufwene obteve seu doutorado em linguística na Universidade de Chicago (1979), onde é Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor. Já pesquisou termos de parentesco, semântica lexical, classificadores numerais em inglês e tipologia linguística. Ele é mais conhecido na área de crioulística, em que tem investigado as características morfossintáticas e semânticas do gullah, do African-American Vernacular English, do criolo jamaicano e do inglês, em muitos casos comparativamente ao kikongo-kituba e ao lingala. Atualmente, seu principal interesse é evolução linguística, da perspectiva da genética das populações, especiação etc. Serve-se de conceitos como variação, competição de traços, seleção, princípio fundacional e adaptação. Equipara línguas a espécies (não a organismos), idioletos a indivíduos e traços estruturais a genes. As mudanças linguísticas se devem à replicação imperfeita no contato de línguas, de dialetos, de idioletos e na aquisição de língua pela criança. Tem ministrado cursos sobre língua e globalização, ecologia da evolução linguística, desenvolvimento de vernáculos e culturas crioulas, entre outros. É editor da série Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact, da Cambridge University Press. Entre seus vários livros sobressaem-se The ecology of language evolution (2001), Créoles, écologie sociale, évolution linguistique (2005), Language evolution: Contact, competition and change (2008). Recentemente organizou a coletânea Iberian imperialism and language evolution in Latin America (2014).

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Published

2016-02-17

How to Cite

Mufwene, S. (2016). Ecologia da língua: algumas perspectivas evolutivas. Ecolinguística: Revista Brasileira De Ecologia E Linguagem (ECO-REBEL), 2(1), 21–38. Retrieved from https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/erbel/article/view/9896

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2016)

Section

Articles

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