When a Language Became an Ecology: V. When an Instance Changed the System

A language makes particular meanings possible.

And then someone says something.

The words, the grammar, the choices of meaning are an instance of what the language makes possible.

It would be easy to stop there.

The system makes the instance possible. The instance is simply what happens when someone uses the system.

But language does not quite work that way.

Sometimes what someone says changes what can be said afterwards.

A new expression is used. Someone else picks it up. Its meaning shifts slightly. The new use becomes familiar. Eventually it no longer feels new at all.

Something that began as an instance has become part of the potential.

The system has changed.

This can happen so gradually that we barely notice it.

A particular way of using a word becomes common. A construction acquires a new function. A distinction that was once unusual becomes available to more people. Something that was once impossible to imagine saying becomes an ordinary thing to say.

No single instance caused the language to change by itself.

The change emerges across the population.

But it begins with instances.

This gives the relation between potential and instance a curious directionality.

The potential makes instances possible.

Instances, accumulated and taken up across the population, can reorganise the potential.

The system is therefore not simply prior to its instances.

It is continually becoming what its instances make of it.

That does not mean that every utterance changes the language.

Most instances disappear into the flow of ordinary meaning-making. They do what the system already makes possible and leave no lasting trace.

But some are taken up.

They are repeated, adapted, remembered, conventionalised.

And when that happens, the boundary between system and instance becomes less secure.

What was once an instance can become a resource for future instances.

A possibility that once belonged to one person's repertoire can become available to many.

The population has changed, and with it the potential that the population sustains.

So the movement is not simply:

system → instance.

It is:

potential → instance → uptake → changed potential.

The system makes the instance possible.

The instance can become part of what makes future instances possible.

This is why a language can have a history without there being anyone standing outside it directing its development.

Its history is made from within.

Each generation inherits a potential that has already been shaped by innumerable previous instances. It then develops its own variations, produces its own instances, and contributes those instances to the population from which subsequent possibilities emerge.

The language is never simply handed down unchanged.

What is handed down is a potential that has already been changed by the people who inherited it before.

And this brings us back to the population.

The collective potential exists through individual repertoires.

Individual repertoires are formed within the population.

Instances produced from those repertoires can alter what becomes available across the population.

The population therefore does not merely contain variation.

It carries variation forward.

And once variation can be carried forward, something rather important has happened.

The ecology has acquired a history.

The next question is no longer simply how individuals develop within it.

It is how the ecology itself becomes part of the conditions under which the next individuals can develop.

When a Language Became an Ecology: IV. When Languages Began to Meet

If a language exists as a population of individual variations, then those variations are constantly meeting.

Every conversation is a meeting of repertoires.

So is every classroom, workplace, family gathering, friendship and chance encounter. Wherever people make meaning together, one person's way of using the resources of language encounters another's.

And something happens.

A word one person uses may become part of another person's repertoire.

A pronunciation may be adopted.

An expression may be modified.

A distinction that was unfamiliar may become familiar.

Sometimes the change is barely noticeable. Sometimes it spreads through a whole population.

The important point is that the meeting does not leave the individual repertoires exactly as they were.

One variation can become a resource for another.

This means that the population is continually changing through the interactions of its members.

There is no need for anyone to decide that the language should change.

No committee has to introduce a new expression.

No individual has to invent a new language.

The changes can begin with something much smaller: someone using an available resource in a slightly different way, someone else noticing it, and someone else using it again.

What was once one person's variation can become part of the variation available to others.

And the process can run in the other direction.

A form that was once widespread may become less useful, less familiar or less frequently encountered. It may gradually disappear from some repertoires while remaining alive in others.

The population does not change all at once.

It changes unevenly.

Some variations spread. Some remain local. Some coexist for generations. Some encounter one another and combine. Others mark differences between groups.

The language is continually being redistributed across the population.

This is why the ecology is not simply a collection of individual repertoires.

The individuals are resources for one another.

Each person develops within a field of possibilities partly created by the people around them. And when they use those possibilities, they may alter that field for someone else.

The collective potential therefore has no need to sit above the population as a fixed model.

It can be sustained through the population itself.

What is collectively available is continually being renewed through what individuals make available to one another.

And this gives variation a rather unexpected consequence.

Variation does not merely produce differences between individuals.

It provides the material through which the collective system can change.

A language can therefore change without anyone changing the language.

It changes because its speakers are continually meeting one another's versions of it.

The ecology is doing the work.

And now we can see something else beginning to happen.

The individual does not merely inherit a language and then use it.

The individual encounters a population of possibilities, develops a particular repertoire within it, and then returns that repertoire to the population through everything they say.

The circle is beginning to close.

What comes next is the really interesting part.

For what happens when an instance of language does more than express a variation that already exists?

What happens when what someone says becomes something that changes what the language can be?

That is where an instance can begin to change the system.

When a Language Became an Ecology: III. When Variation Became a Population

If no two people speak quite the same language, then there is no single individual version of the language that could stand for all the others.

There is only the population.

That changes the picture.

We might imagine individual repertoires as separate things, each belonging to a particular person. But people do not develop their repertoires in isolation. They encounter other people's ways of making meaning from the beginning.

A word heard from someone else becomes available for use.

A new expression catches on.

A familiar expression acquires a different shade of meaning.

A way of saying something spreads through a group, while another disappears.

One person's variation becomes another person's resource.

The population is therefore not simply a collection of individuals who happen to speak the same language. The variants are continually entering into relations with one another.

They overlap.

They influence one another.

They compete, combine and diverge.

And through all of this, something recognisable as the language persists.

This gives the word population a significance that community does not quite capture.

A community tells us who is involved.

A population draws our attention to variation within what is collectively sustained.

The individual repertoires are not identical members of a uniform set. They are variants of one another, with different histories and different possibilities. Some may be very close; others may be surprisingly distant. There need be no sharp boundary between them.

Yet they remain part of the same larger potential.

The language, viewed from the collective pole, is therefore not simply one system.

It is a system whose individual existence is distributed across a population of variations.

And now the population begins to look rather like an ecology.

Not because language users live in an environment called language.

The population itself is the environment in which individual repertoires develop.

What one person says can become part of what another person encounters. What another person encounters can become part of what they can say. And what many people do with the resources available to them can gradually alter what becomes available to others.

The direction runs both ways.

The individual repertoire depends upon the population.

The population depends upon the individual repertoires.

This means that variation is not merely tolerated by the language.

Variation is one of the conditions through which the language continues to exist.

The language does not survive by keeping its variants identical.

It survives by remaining recognisably itself while its variants continue to differ.

And that gives us a rather different image of a language system.

Not a single structure reproduced in many heads.

Not a community gathered around a fixed code.

But a population of related variations, continually making one another's possibilities available.

A language may be one thing at the collective pole.

But at the individual pole, it is many.

And perhaps that is what it means for a language to have an ecology.

When a Language Became an Ecology: II. When No Two Languages Were Quite the Same

No two people speak quite the same language.

That sounds more radical than it is.

One person says supper, another says dinner. One has a dozen ways of talking about something another rarely talks about at all. One person's speech carries traces of a particular family, region or profession; another's carries traces of a different history.

Even people who have lived together for years do not develop identical repertoires.

And yet they can understand one another.

More than that: they can recognise what they are doing as speaking the same language.

So perhaps the interesting question is not why people differ.

The interesting question is how so much variation can remain recognisably the same system.

We might be tempted to think that there must be some core of the language that everyone possesses unchanged. But that would make the variations look like deviations from the real language.

The alternative is more interesting.

Perhaps the language remains a language precisely because its individual versions are not identical.

A language has enough shared potential for different repertoires to remain mutually relevant, but enough openness for each repertoire to develop its own particular organisation of that potential.

The individual repertoire is therefore neither a copy of the collective system nor an independent invention.

It is a variation within it.

And variation is not something that happens after the system has been established. It is one of the ways the system exists.

Every individual brings a slightly different history to the possibilities of meaning. Every individual therefore organises those possibilities somewhat differently. The differences accumulate across the population.

Some remain local. Some spread. Some disappear. Some become conventional. Some acquire new meanings. Some never get beyond the person who first used them.

The language does not stand outside this process, regulating it from above.

It persists through it.

This gives the collective language a rather different character.

It is not a single uniform object reproduced in many places. It is a potential sustained across a population of variations.

The question is no longer:

How does one language become many versions?

It becomes:

How can many versions constitute one language?

And perhaps the answer begins with a simple fact.

They do not have to be the same.

They only have to remain sufficiently related for what one person does with the possibilities of meaning to matter to another.

Once we see that, individual variation stops looking like noise around the language.

It begins to look like the population through which the language lives.

When a Language Became an Ecology: I. When a Language Became Someone’s

 A language seems to belong to a community.

We speak of English, French, Japanese, Arabic. We talk about a language as though it were a single thing shared by everyone who speaks it.

But listen to two people speaking the same language.

Their accents may differ. So may their vocabulary, their preferred expressions, the distinctions they habitually make, the ways they organise experience, even the ways they use the resources of the language in interaction. Give them different histories, different families, different occupations and different lives, and their ways of meaning will not be quite the same.

Yet both can speak the same language.

This is not simply because they know different amounts of it. The difference goes deeper than competence. Each has a particular repertoire: a particular organisation of the possibilities made available by the language.

The language, in other words, has become someone’s.

That sounds straightforward. But it raises a peculiar question.

If a language is a collective meaning potential, what happens when that potential is organised in an individual?

It does not simply become a smaller copy of the collective system. The individual does not carry around English in miniature. What exists is a particular configuration of the possibilities of English, shaped by everything that has entered into that person's experience of meaning.

And another person's configuration will be different.

So the relation between the collective and the individual is not quite the relation between an original and a copy. The individual pole of language is already a point of variation.

This matters because it changes how we might think about what a language is.

We can look at the collective potential and see a system of possibilities shared across a population. Or we can look at that same potential from the other direction and see a population of individually organised variants.

Neither view is more real than the other.

The collective exists through the individuals who instantiate it. The individuals, in turn, become possible because there is a collective potential from which their repertoires can develop.

And so a language does something rather strange.

It becomes many without ceasing to be one.

Perhaps that is where the story of a language's ecology has to begin.

Not with a community surrounding a language.

But with a population of different ways in which a language has become someone's.