The Vernacular After Geography — Summary
Dante was banished from Florence in 1302 and never went back. Somewhere in the first years after that he started a treatise about language, finished one book and part of another, and the manuscript stops mid-sentence. It was written in Latin. The case that the language you learn from the woman who nurses you is nobler than the language you learn from a schoolmaster is made, at length and with heat, in the language of the schoolmasters. Dante seems to have found this unremarkable. There was nowhere else to make an argument.
The useful distinction is in book one. There are two channels by which a person comes to have a language. The first every child gets, acquired from the people around you, without instruction, before you know it is happening. The second requires a teacher, a text, and years. Then he goes hunting, counts at least fourteen vernaculars on the peninsula and rejects every one, including his own Tuscan, because what he wants is one that belongs to no single city and is somehow present in all of them. He compares it to the panther of the bestiaries, whose scent hangs in every part of the wood and which is never once seen.
His criterion is acquisition and nothing else. A trained phonetician can produce almost any accent well enough to fool the people who own it, and when the performance stops they revert without deciding to. The trained register is a costume; the acquired one is the body underneath. Instruction always arrives onto a surface already formed, which is why institutions can only overlay a vernacular. So the vernacular was only ever geographic by accident: for the whole of recorded history the people around you were the people near you, and distance did the sorting, and nobody designed that either.
They are not the same thing now. A fifteen-year-old in a mid-sized American city and a fifteen-year-old outside Manila acquire, over the same eighteen months, the same cadences, the same comic timing, the same rising terminal on a declarative sentence. They have never met and neither has been taught any of it. Meanwhile the first cannot fully parse how her sixty-year-old neighbour two doors down builds a sentence, and both were born within nine miles of where they are standing. The feed is the nurse now, it meets Dante’s criterion on every clause, and it has no location.
Every previous machine for making a standard announced itself. The Académie was chartered and staffed and published a dictionary. The King James translators were appointed and their names are known. Whatever else those were, they were legible, and they could be argued with, lobbied, satirized, and in several cases overthrown. The ranking that decides which cadence a hundred million teenagers see this quarter has no charter, no address for correspondence, and no theory of language at all. It has an objective, and the objective is attention. An institution that does not know it is one cannot be reformed, because nobody inside it has the job of receiving the complaint. What arrives announced also gets met with something: a child in a Latin lesson knows a lesson is happening. The feed triggers nothing, because it presents as your friends and your own attention finding its own way, so an unrecognized institution may encode more deeply. Dante’s Latin was resented accordingly. This one arrives as company.
Latin did not come from the villages, and neither did Sanskrit or court French. In every prior arrangement the standard was materially different stuff, with a separate ancestry and separate custodians, and that difference is what gave the vernacular something to be. The current standard is assembled out of the vernacular itself, weighted and smoothed and returned, and the word doing the work is weighted, because what went in was mostly written, mostly English, mostly by people with the leisure to post at length. The pole is gone. Sanskrit could never have become Prakrit. That was the guarantee, and it has stopped being true.
Words are the top layer of a stack. Below them syntax, below that prosody, and below that everything the body does: how close you stand, the pause length that reads as respectful in one place and hostile in another, how you hold a knife against an onion. None of it is written anywhere and none of it travels by feed, because the feed carries only what a camera can resolve and a model can compress. So the stack delaminates. The lexicon goes global, the syntax follows, and the body stays where it was, local for a reason that has nothing to do with anyone protecting it: it cannot be encoded, so there is nothing to harvest. A person can now sound like the whole world and move like a single street.
We wonder whether the body stays local because it truly cannot be encoded, or only because nobody has yet had a sufficient reason to try, and whether we would be able to tell the difference from inside the years before someone did.
For now the older thing holds. Two people can share every word they use and still be unable to sit in a room together comfortably, and the gap will be made of timing, and neither will be able to say what it is.