i

Volvemos a recibir manuscritos para la sección general, para los números de diciembre de 2024 en adelante. Recuerden revisar nuestras normas editoriales.

Sobre la (vana) tarea de evaluar lenguas

Autores/as

Resumen

Las lenguas han sido sometidas a evaluaciones de todo tipo, que han resultado en muchos juicios de valor sobre ellas, esto es, sobre el carácter mejor o peor de ciertas lenguas frente a otras. Esta situación persiste actualmente, de modo que la tesis de igualitarismo lingüístico es amenazada por diferentes propuestas. Este artículo analiza críticamente la evaluación de lenguas, sosteniendo que cualquier intento científico de evaluar lenguas desde una óptica lingüística debería satisfacer la condición básica de ofrecer criterios objetivos. Sin embargo, el trabajo muestra que esa condición no se satisface, y formula cuatro diferentes problemas de los que adolece la evaluación de lenguas, lo cual convierte las propuestas de otorgar diferente valor a las lenguas en arbitrarias y/o descontextualizadas. Nuestra conclusión consiste en que construir ránkings de lenguas (según muy diferentes parámetros) basados en su diferente valor no solo no añade nada al conocimiento científico sobre el lenguaje, sino que, en la mayor parte de casos, expresa o fomenta prejuicios lingüísticos.

Palabras clave:

Lengua, Evaluación de las lenguas, Valor de las lenguas, Igualitarismo lingüístico, Prejuicios lingüísticos, Complejidad lingüística

Biografía del autor/a

Víctor M. Longa, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Para correspondencia, dirigirse a: Víctor M. Longa (victormanuel.longa@usc.es), Departamento de Lingua e Literatura Españolas, Teoría da Literatura e Lingüística Xeral, Facultade de Filoloxía, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, avda. Castelao s/n., 15782, Santiago de Compostela (España).

Juan J. López Rivera

Para correspondencia, dirigirse a: Juan J. López Rivera (juanjose.lopez.rivera@usc.es), Departamento de Lingua e Literatura Españolas, Teoría da Literatura e Lingüística Xeral, Facultade de Filoloxía, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, avda. Castelao s/n., 15782, Santiago de Compostela (España).

Referencias

Adami, Christoph. 2002. What is complexity? BioEssays 24/12: 1085-1094. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.10192

Adamson, Peter y Richard C. Taylor. 2005. Introduction. En Peter Adamson y Richard C. Taylor (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, pp. 1-9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521817439.001

Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel. 2006. Handbook to Life in the Aztec World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Al-Jallad, Ahmad. 2017. The earliest stages of Arabic and its linguistic classification. En Elabbas Benmamoun y Reem Bassiouney (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics, pp. 315-331. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315147062-17

Algeo, John. 1998. America is ruining the English language. En L. Bauer y P. Trudgill (eds.), Language Myths, pp. 176-182.

Anderson, Stephen R. 2004. Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion. Animal and the Uniqueness of Human Language. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Andersson, Lars-Gunnar y Peter Trudgill. 1990. Bad Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Balari, Sergio. 2014. Teoría de lenguas formales. Una introducción para lingüistas. Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Balari, Sergio y Guillermo Lorenzo. 2013. Computational Phenotypes. Towards an Evolutionary Developmental Biolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199665464.001.0001

Bauer, Laurie y Peter Trudgill (eds.). 1998. Language Myths. London: Penguin.

Baugh, John. 1988. Language and race: Some implications for linguistic science. En Frederick J. Newmeyer (ed.): Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, vol. IV: Language: The Socio-Cultural Context, pp. 64-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511620577.005

______ 2000. Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

______ 2018. Linguistics in Pursuit of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316597750

Bernárdez, Enrique. 1999. ¿Qué son las lenguas? Madrid: Alianza.

Berwick, Robert C. 2016. Monkey business. Theoretical Linguistics 42/1-2: 91-95. https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2016-0002

Bickerton, Derek. 1995. Language and Human Behavior. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt. Campbell, Lyle y William J. Poser. 2008. Language Classification. History and Method. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486906

Černý, Jiří. 2006. Historia de la lingüística. Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura.

Chomsky, Noam. 1956. Three models for the description of language. IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2: 113-124. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1956.1056813

______ 1959. On certain formal properties of grammars. Information and Control 2: 137-167. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0019-9958(59)90362-6

Cowell, Andrew. 2012. Dictionary of the Arapaho Language, 4th ed. Disponible en: https://homewitharapaho.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/arapaho-dictionary1.pdf

Crystal, David. 1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Deutscher, Guy. 2009. Overall complexity: A wild goose chase? En Geoffrey Sampson et al. (eds.), Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable. Studies in the Evolution of Language 13, pp. 243-251.

Dixon, Robert Malcolm Ward. 2004. The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

______ 2010. Basic Linguistic Theory: Methodology, Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press.

______ 2015. Edible Gender, Mother-in-Law Style, and Other Grammatical Wonders. New York: Oxford University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198702900.001.0001

______ 2016. Are Some Languages Better Than Others? Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198766810.001.0001

Donald, Merlin. 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind. Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Edwards, John. 2006. Language attitudes. En Keith Brown (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, vol. 6, pp. 324-331. Oxford: Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08044854-2/01286-4

Edzard, Dietz Otto. 2003. Sumerian Grammar. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047403401

Emmorey, Karen. 2002. Language, Cognition, and the Brain. Insights from Sign Language Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410603982

Evans, Nicholas y Toshiki Osada. 2005. Mundari: The myth of a language without word classes. Linguistic Typology 9: 351-390. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.2005.9.3.351

Everett, Daniel L. 1986. Pirahã. En Desmond C. Derbyshire y Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.). Handbook of Amazonian Languages, Vol. I., pp. 200-325. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

______ 2005. Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã. Current Anthropology 46/4: 621-633. https://doi.org/10.1086/431525

Fasold, Ralph. 2006. The politics of language. En Ralph Fasold y Jeff Connor-Linton (eds.), An Introduction to Language and Linguistics, pp. 373-400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fenk-Oczlon, Gertraud y August Fenk. 2014. Complexity trade-offs do not prove the equal complexity hypothesis. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 50/2: 145-155. https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2014-0010

Finlay, Bland J. y Genoveva F. Esteban. 2009. Can biological complexity be rationalized? BioScience 59/4: 333-340. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2009.59.4.11

Gil, David. 2008. How complex are isolating languages? En Matti Miestamo et al. (eds.), pp. 109-131. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.94.08gil

______ 2009. How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? En Geoffrey Sampson et al. (eds.), pp. 19-33.

Giroux, Henry. 1987. Introduction. Literacy and the pedagogy of political empowerment. En Paulo Freire y Donaldo Macedo, Literacy. Reading the Word and the World, pp. 1-18. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.

Goldin-Meadow, Susan y Diane Brentari. 2017. Gesture, sign, and language: The coming of age of sign language and gesture studies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40: e46. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X15001247

Gordon, Edmund W., Fayneese Miller y David Rollock. 1990. Coping with communicentric bias in knowledge production in the social sciences. Educational Researcher 19/3: 14-19. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X019003014

Hall, Daniel C. 2020. Review of R.M.W. Dixon, Are Some Languages Better Than Others? Canadian Journal of Linguistics 65/1: 148-152. https://doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2019.12

Harlow, Ray. 1993. Lexical expansion in Maori. The Journal of the Polynesian Society 102/1: 99-107.

______ 1998. Some languages are just not good enough. En Laurie Bauer y Peter Trudgill (eds.), pp. 9-14.

Heine, Bernd y Christa König. 2015. The !Xun Language. A Dialect Grammar of Northern Khoisan. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.

Hirth, Kenneth G. 2016. The Aztec Economic World. Merchants and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316537350

Hockett, Charles F. 1958. A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: MacMillan.

______ 1960. The origin of speech. Scientific American 203: 89-96. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0960-88

Joseph, John E. y Frederick J. Newmeyer. 2012. ‘All languages are equally complex’: The rise and fall of a consensus. Historiographia Linguistica 39/2-3: 341-368. https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.39.2-3.08jos

Joshi, Aravind. 1985. Tree adjoining grammars: How much context-sensitivity is required to provide reasonable structural descriptions? En David R. Dowty, Lauri Karttunen y Arnold M. Zwicky (eds.). Natural Language Parsing. Psychological, Computational, and Theoretical Perspectives, pp. 206-250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511597855.007

Karlsson, Fred. 1999. Finnish: An Essential Grammar. London: Routledge.

Kazeminejad, Ghazaleh, Andrew Cowell y Mans Hulden. 2017. Creating lexical resources for polysynthetic languages—The case of Arapaho. En Antti Arppe, Jeff Good, Mans Hulden, Jordan Lachler, Alexis Palmer y Lane Schwartz (eds.). Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages (Honolulu, March 6-7, 2017), pp. 10-18. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W17-0102

Kilian-Hatz, Christa. 2008. A Grammar of Modern Khwe (Central Khoisan). Koln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.110.10kil

Kortmann, Bernd y Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (eds.). 2012. Linguistic Complexity: Second Language Acquisition, Indigenization, Contact. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110229226

Krausneker, Verena. 2015. Ideologies and attitudes toward Sign Languages: An approximation. Sign Language Studies 15/4: 411-431. https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2015.0014

Labov, William. 1969. The logic of nonstandard English. En James E. Alatis (ed.). 20th Annual Round Table. Linguistics and the Teaching of Standard English to Speakers of Other Languages or Dialects. Georgetown Monographs on Language and Linguistics 22: 1-44.

Lehmann, Christian. 2006a. On the value of a language. European Review 14/2: 151-166. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798706000159

______ 2006b. The value of a language. Folia Linguistica 40/3-4: 207-238. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.40.3-4.207

Levelt, Willem J. M. 2008. An Introduction to the Theory of Formal Languages and Automata. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.143

Linell, Per. 2005. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics. Its Nature, Origins and Transformations. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203342763

______ 2019. The written language bias (WLB) in linguistics 40 years after. Language Sciences 76: 101230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2019.05.003.

Lineweaver, Charles H., Paul C. W. Davies y Michael Ruse. 2013. What is complexity? Is it increasing? En Charles H. Lineweaver, Paul C. W. Davies y Michael Ruse (eds.). Complexity and the Arrow of Time, pp. 3-16. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139225700.002

Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. English with an Accent. Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, 2nd ed. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203348802

Longa, Víctor M. 2020. Reseña de R.M.W. Dixon, Are Some Languages Better Than Others? Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016. Verba 47: 391-404. https://doi.org/10.15304/verba.47.6567

Longa, Víctor M. y Juan J. López-Rivera. 2022. On Dixon’s ‘dangerous idea. Folia Linguistica 56/2: 469-486. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2022-2021

McBurney, Susan. 2012. History of sign languages and sign language linguistics. En Roland Pfau et al. (eds.), pp. 909-948. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110261325.909

Miestamo, Matti. 2008. Grammatical complexity in cross-linguistic perspective. En Matti Miestamo et al. (eds.), pp. 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.94.04mie

Miestamo, Matti, Kaius Sinnemäki y Fred Karlsson (eds.). 2008. Language Complexity. Typology, Contact, Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.94

Miller, Jim y Regina Weinert. 1998. Spontaneous Spoken Language: Syntax and Discourse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Milroy, James y Lesley Milroy. 1985. Authority in Language. Investigating Language Prescription and Standardization. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Moreno, Juan Carlos y José Luis Mendívil-Giró. 2014. On Biology, History and Culture in Human Language: A Critical Overview. Sheffield: Equinox.

Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. 2000. La dignidad e igualdad de las lenguas. Crítica de la discriminación lingüística. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

______ 2003. Síntesis y análisis en las lenguas. Crítica de la tipología morfológica clásica y de algunas de sus aplicaciones sincrónicas y diacrónicas. Estudios de Lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante 17: 465-504. https://doi.org/10.14198/ELUA2003.17.26

______ 2005. Las lenguas y sus escrituras. Tipología, evolución e ideología. Madrid: Síntesis.

______ 2007-2008. Sobre la complejidad y dificultad de las lenguas. El caso del euskera. Revista de Lenguas y Literaturas Catalana, Gallega y Vasca XIII: 199-216.

______ 2013. Cuestiones clave de la lingüística. Madrid: Síntesis.

______ 2014a. Del lenguaje a las lenguas. Tratado didáctico y crítico de lingüística general, Vol. I: El lenguaje. Madrid: Euphonía Ediciones.

______ 2014b. Del lenguaje a las lenguas. Tratado didáctico y crítico de lingüística general, Vol. II: Las lenguas. Madrid: Euphonía Ediciones.

Neidle, Carol, Judy Kegl, Dawn MacLaughlin, Benjamin Bahan y Robert G. Lee. 2000. The Syntax of American Sign Language: Functional Categories and Hierarchical Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Nevins, Andrew, David Pesetsky y Cilene Rodrigues. 2009. Pirahã exceptionality: A reassessment. Language 85/2: 355-404. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0107

Newmeyer, Frederick J. y Laurel B. Preston (eds.). 2014. Measuring Grammatical Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199685301.001.0001

Niklas, Karl J. 1999. Evolutionary walks through a land plant morphospace. Journal of Experimental Botany 50/330: 39-52. https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/50.330.39

Penny, Ralph. 2000. Variation and Change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164566. Citamos por Variación y cambio en español. Madrid: Gredos, 2004.

Pfau, Roland, Markus Steinbach y Bencie Woll (eds.). 2012. Sign Language. An International Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110261325

Piantadosi, Steven T., Laura Stearns, Daniel L. Everett y Edward Gibson. 2012. A corpus analysis of Piraha grammar: An investigation of recursion. Comunicación presentada en el 2012 LSA Annual Meeting, Portland, 5-8 de enero. Disponible en: http://colala.berkeley.edu/papers/piantadosi2012corpus.pdf

Piller, Ingrid. 2016. Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937240.001.0001

Preston, Dennis R. 2006. Folk linguistics. En Keith Brown (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, vol. 4, pp. 521-533. Oxford: Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08044854-2/01501-7

Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1997. Language that dare not speak its name. Nature 386: 321-322. https://doi.org/10.1038/386321a0

Reeves, J. K. 1976. The whole personality approach to oralism in the education of the Deaf. En Peter Henderson (ed.). Methods of Communication Currently Used in the Education of Deaf Children, pp. 9-17. London: Royal National Institute for the Deaf.

Rickford, John R. 1999. Suite for Ebony and Phonics. En John R. Rickford, African American Vernacular English. Features, Evolution, Educational Implications, pp. 320-328. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Riddle, Elizabeth M. 2008. Complexity in isolating languages: Lexical elaboration versus grammatical economy. En Matti Miestamo et al. (eds.), pp. 133-151. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.94.09rid

Rodríguez-Iglesias, Ígor. 2022. La lógica de inferiorización de las variedades lingüísticas no dominantes. Etnografía sociolingüística crítica del andaluz. Berlín: Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/b19416

Rodríguez-Picavea Matilla, Enrique. 1998. La ganadería en la Castilla medieval. Una revisión historiográfica. Medievalismo. Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales 8: 111-152.

Rounds, Carol. 2001. Hungarian: An Essential Grammar. London: Routledge.

Salvador, Gregorio. 1992. Política lingüística y sentido común. Madrid: Istmo.

Sampson, Geoffrey. 2009. A linguistic axiom challenged. En Geoffrey Sampson et al. (eds.), pp. 1-18.

Sampson, Geoffrey, David Gil y Peter Trudgill (eds.). 2009. Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Scheetz, Nanci A. 2012. Deaf Education in the 21st Century. Topics and Trends. Boston: Pearson.

Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2006. Dialect variation. En Ralph Fasold y Jeff Connor-Linton (eds.), pp. 311-341.

Senz, Silvia, Jordi Minguell y Montserrat Alberte. 2011. Las academias de la lengua española, organismos de planificación lingüística. En Silvia Senz y Montserrat Alberte (eds.), El dardo en la academia. Esencia y vigencia de las academias de la lengua española, vol. I, pp. 371-550. Barcelona: Melusina.

Smitherman, Geneva. 2000. Talkin That Talk: Language, Education and Culture in African America. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203254394

Steeman, Sander. 2011. A Grammar of Sandawe: A Khoisan Language of Tanzania. Utrecht: LOT.

Stokoe, William C. 1960. Sign language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American Deaf. Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers 8, University of Buffalo.

Taylor, Talbot J. 1997. Theorizing Language: Analysis, Normativity, Rhetoric, History. Amsterdam: Pergamon.

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples. London & Dunedin, NZ: Zed Books & University of Otago Press.

Tusón, Jesús. 1996. Los prejuicios lingüísticos. Barcelona: Octaedro.

Urquizu Sarasua, Patricio. 2013. Gramática de la lengua vasca. Madrid: UNED.

Van Rooy, Raf. 2020. Language or Dialect? The History of a Conceptual Pair. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198845713.001.0001

Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena y Hirosi Nakagawa. 2019. Linguistic features and typologies in languages commonly referred to as ‘Khoisan’. En H. Ekkehard Wolff (ed.): The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics, pp. 382-416. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108283991.012

Wolfram, Walt. 1998. Myth 13. Black children are mentally deprived. En Laurie Bauer y Peter Trudgill (eds.), pp. 103-112.

Wolfram, Walt, Carolyn Temple Adger y Donna Christian. 1999. Dialects in Schools and Communities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410601148

Yoder, Brendon. 2010. Syntactic underspecification in Riau Indonesian. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. University of North Dakota Session 50: art. 1. https://doi.org/10.31356/silwp.vol50.01

Zuckermann, Ghil’ad. 2003. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403938695

______ 2020. Revivalistics. From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199812776.001.0001