Language cannot be state property

Alexey Tsvetkov, poet

Nevertheless, I will collect the fragments of my education, which is disappearing into the sand, and I will speak out on the occasion that everyone and everyone is not lazy to speak about today. It is premature to consider yourself a linguist on the basis that you somehow can express your thoughts and know a few letters of this or that alphabet. This is about the same as considering yourself a physicist on the grounds that you more or less observe the laws of physics.

To believe that a language is the property of this or that state and we use it under a license from this or that state is the lot of losers, primarily in history and geography, but also in ethnography and linguistics, even if you have not studied these last two subjects, because that ignorance is not an argument. Today there are 195 states and approximately 7100 languages in the world. To believe that all these languages belong to one state or another is ridiculous. We do not know exactly when we gained the gift of speech, but it is unlikely that it was more than a hundred thousand years ago. The most primitive state formations arose only 6-7 thousand years ago, and almost up to the 19th century. it never occurred to the rulers of these states to declare the language state property. And when it came, in real life, little has changed. And if all these states sink into oblivion, and history suggests that they will sink, people will still speak their languages in the form in which they have come down to them. And if the states declare their property the air, we will still continue to breathe.

And further. Language as a unified standard of phonetics, vocabulary, spelling and grammar, this favorite cudgel of the Grammar Nazis is a social fiction concocted by the ruling elites in the era of nationalism for the convenience of controlling everyone else. In reality, every language is, to one degree or another, a cluster of dialects, and each of us speaks our own dialect. There are rarely clear boundaries between these bushes, usually due to some kind of demographic catastrophe or special terrain. As a rule, where the hands of the linguistic police do not reach, these bushes gradually flow into each other - Russian into Ukrainian, Ukrainian into Polish or Slovak.

The best evidence of the lack of control of the language by the state can be, for example, a large shift in vowels in English or its historically unusually fast transformation from synthetic to analytical - processes in which the English monarchy had and could not have anything to do.

I do not want to drag out and resort to technical arguments that are incomprehensible to the broad masses of folk linguists. The result in a nutshell: the language does not disappear until the population of its speakers disappears. But, of course, it is always evolving and can develop beyond recognition. And if we are still at the very least deciphering the language of Kievan Rus, then, for example, Old English is an absolute filkin's letter for modern speakers.

So, I said about everything I wanted, and now folk linguists are flocking with their theories, but I will not argue with them.