Professor Rudi Keller from Germany’s University of Dusseldorf gave two talks at CFLC on October 21, 2019. He elaborated on the changes of language and the possibility of the decline of the German language.

In his talks, the eminent German linguist elaborated on how signs emerge, function, and develop in the permanent process of language change. He recombined thoughts and ideas from Plato to the present day to create a new theory of the meaning and evolution of icons and symbols. By assuming no prior knowledge and by developing his argument from first principles, Rudi Keller has written a basic text which includes all the necessary features: easy style, good organization, original scholarship, and historical depth. This is a non-technical book which will interest linguists, philosophers, students of communications and cultural studies, semioticians/semanticists, sociologists, and anthropologists.

In the twentieth century, linguistics was dominated by two paradigms - those of Saussure and Chomsky. In both these philosophies of linguistics, language change was left aside as an unsolvable mystery which challenged theoretical entirety. Professor Rudi Keller reassessed language change and placed it firmly back on the linguistics agenda. Based on the ideas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers such as Mandeville, Smith and Menger, he demonstrated that language change could indeed be explained through the workings of an “invisible hand”.

On the fear for the future of the German language, Professor Keller said: “For more than 2,000 years, complaints about the decay of respective languages have been documented in literature, but no one has yet been able to name an example of a ‘decayed language’.” The hard truth is that German, like all other languages, is constantly evolving. It is the speed of the change, within our own short lives, that creates the illusion of decline. Because change is often generational, older speakers recognize that the norms they grew up with are falling away, replaced with new ones they are not as comfortable using. This cognitive difficulty doesn’t feel good, and the bad feelings are translated into criticism and complaint. We tend to find intellectual justifications for our personal preferences, whatever their motivation. If we lived for hundreds of years, we would be able to see the bigger picture. Because when you zoom out, you can appreciate that language change is not just a question of slovenliness: it happens at every level, from the superficial to the structural.

Any given language is significantly reconfigured over the centuries, to the extent that it becomes totally unrecognizable. But, as with complex systems in the natural world, there is often a kind of homeostasis: simplification in one area can lead to greater complexity in another. What stays the same is the expressive capacity of the language.