What Is a Dominant Language?: Giacomo Leopardi: Theoretician of Linguistic Inequality

In my The World Republic of Letters, I feel I neglected one topic, or at least did not explore it thoroughly enough, despite its importance in a world republic: the question of translation. I revisited an article I had written around a decade ago, whose original findings remain valid, but I made some new discoveries which, by the same token, made the topic more intelligible and interesting.¹ I therefore intend to continue my inquiry into world literature and consider translation through historical bilingualism.

Amongst the millions of living and extinct languages in history, it seems there has always been one that was more "prestigious" than the other contemporary language or languages. In other words, it appears that the notion of "equality" among languages, even if it is true in an absolute sense, is completely false in practice, even though it has always been presented as a compulsory belief, necessary for the normal function of the linguistic grouping in question: it is highly unpopular to say or believe the contrary. This view is, to use Bourdieu's term, "a professional ideology," the profession in this case being that of linguists. This type of ideology is difficult to interrogate and, as Jacques Bouveresse writes, it "always presents a noble, idealized and sublimated image of what the profession in question really is."²

"Prestige" comes from the Latin praestigium, meaning, according to Larousse, "imposture, illusion," or "illusion produced by magic or a spell," thus "ascendancy, enticement, attraction, charm. It is a sort of power based on illusion."

It becomes clear that all world languages have always been affected by this difference. The "prestigious" language will (in a completely arbitrary way, through the simple fact of its "prestige") exert its power and domination over other languages. The asymmetrical relationship between Latin and Greek, as we shall see, provides an excellent example from antiquity. In this way, languages do not exist in and for themselves, but in their mutual relationships; one cannot claim to know or analyze them without considering these relationships that bind them to others.

One of the major literary axioms revealed by The World Republic of Letters is that a collective bilingualism or plurilingualism (what American sociolinguist Charles Ferguson calls "forced") is an unmistakable sign of domination;³ in symmetrical fashion, monolingualism belongs to speakers using a dominant language (or dominated languages that are particularly closed off, as with Greek, some years ago, and Portuguese).⁴ These are the signs by which we can distinguish, immediately, a dominant language from a dominated one. There is a dominant language if (and only if) speakers believe in the difference; there is, furthermore, only one way to effectively resist a dominant language, which is to adopt an "atheist" stance, and not to believe in the dominant language's prestige, but to be convinced of the totally arbitrary nature of its domination.

Abram De Swaan, who has studied these global-level phenomena extensively, maintains that what he calls "the global language system" derives its coherence from multilingualism.⁵ In de Swaan's view, we can measure the centrality (which I would call domination) of a language by the number of plurilingual speakers who speak it in a system he describes as a "floral figuration," meaning a system in which all peripheral languages are linked to the center by plurilinguals.⁶

A language is dominant if (and only if) it is a second language used by bilinguals or polyglots around the world. It is not the number of speakers that determines whether it is dominant or not (otherwise, Mandarin would be the dominant language). The criterion is, rather, the number of plurilingual speakers who "choose" it.

This is why the dominant language is also the one favored in all translations, both in projects translating into the language in question as well as those translating from it into another one. In the first case, it is understood by plurilingual speakers from every language background, and, in this sense, from a broader spectrum than others (allowing plurilingual speakers of other languages to read it). In the second...