Stages in Central Asia’s language ecology

Overview of the select historical
stages in Central Asia’s language ecology
Odina Khoshimova,
English teacher of NamETI.
murodkhon Phazliddinov,
Student of NamETI.
Abstract
This chapter reviews literature on languages in Central Asia from several perspectives. The chapter will take a diachronic and a synchronic approach, reviewing select historical stages in Central Asia’s language ecology with a focus on the introduction of new languages into the Central Asian language ecology, followed by a discussion of research relevant to the contemporary language ecology in order to identify studies that can be used to compile a
picture of Central Asia’s language ecology.
Key words: diachronic, synchronic approach, language ecology, deterministic, atomistic.
Researchers have dealt with complexity of language variation in several ways that can fall under the rubric of ecology of language(s), or language ecology. These terms will be used in a broad sense to include any approach that deals with multiple varieties of a language, bi-, multilingualism, and the social conditions in which various language varieties and language practices are found. The term ecology in biology refers to all interrelated plants and animals and their interrelationships. Thus, in some respects, social science accounts of language and society demand an ecological approach simply for the sake of descriptive adequacy.
To the extent that language is an individual, collective, social, even economic and political phenomenon, and societies, and the language(s) found within them, are rarely monolithic, explanatory adequacy would seem to also require an ecological point of view, for these phenomena rarely occur in complete isolation one from another and are subject to mutual influence and interaction. To the extent that society, social relations and language are neither deterministic nor atomistic, but involve human agency as well as structure, then an adequate social science must go beyond idealized linguistic systems to account more fully for how languages are used in actual circumstances in all their complexity.
Works can be distinguished by whether they take an explicit or implicit ecological approach. Those that have a scope broader than a single language, as suggested by Voegelin and Voegelin (1964), and answer some of the questions raised by Haugen (1972), may be considered to have an implicit ecological approach, even if they do not explicitly declare this
as an organizing framework. Many of the works consulted do not themselves take an ecological view and report only on single languages. In addition many of these studies focus on language as an abstract system and say little about language variation, transitional dialects and mixed language, and multilingualism/plurilingualism. Other studies do not take language
as a centre of interest, but focus rather on society, culture or politics, mentioning data about language and language use in passing. Nevertheless, an ecologically-minded researcher can compile findings of multiple single-language/ethnicity studies within the same language ecology, For example, we have several studies of the minority language groups in the region such as the Balochi (Axenov 2006; Jahani and Korn 2003), and Dungan (Allès 2005; Dyer 1980). Synthesizing data from such a wide range of sources reveals a series of suggestive, if incomplete, portrait of language ecology of Central Asia at several periods in time.
Attempts to deal with language policy on a territorial principle rather than the
principle of .personality (Calvet 1996) have proven extremely complex, if not intractable; thus, an ecological approach to linguistic analysis seems particularly suited to Central Asia. Yet awareness of the utility of such an approach still lags. Recent works on language politics in Central Asia largely focus on macro-political aspects of language choice in the region, and do not fully exploit the burgeoning micro-level research on language and use in the region that can be seen as implicitly taking an ecological approach to language in the region (Bahry, Karimova and Shamatov 2013).
For almost five hundred years (est. 300-800 AD), the Eastern Iranian language of Soghdia, centred on today’s Samarqand, was taken far afield by traders and settlers along the Silk Road, who were often proficient in other languages along the route, including Turkic, Uighur, and Indic languages, such as Gandhara Prakrit and Sanskrit, as well as Chinese. The Soghdians functioned as administrators within the Old Uighur Turkic Empire, presumably in part due to their bilingualism and literacy. Their alphabet, derived from the Aramaic script, was used for written Uighur, and ultimately, Mongolian (Harmatta 1996; Yoshida 2009). Indications of bi- and multilingualism among Soghdian speakers include much borrowed
vocabulary from neighbouring languages, as well as numerous borrowings into Old Uighur and New Persian from Soghdian, as well as bilingual texts in Soghdian and other languages (Henning 1939; Yoshida 2009). Archeological evidence from the Turfan oasis in today’s eastern Xinjiang suggests that during China’s Sui (581–618 AD) and Tang (618–907 AD) dynasties the district was multilingual, with all of Chinese, Iranian, and Turkic languages spoken there (Skaff 2012). While Soghdians were known for their bilingualism, and served the Tang Empire as Chinese-Turkic interpreters, whether and how often other peoples learned Soghdian is uncertain (Lung 2011). With the Arabic conquest and the coming of Islam to parts of Central Asia from 670 to 750 AD, written Soghdian disappears from its home district, surviving in a few pockets in Tajikistan as Yaghnobi, replaced in H functions and written language by Arabic (Starr 2013; Yoshida 2009). Soghdian seems to have continued as a spoken language farther north and east for some time: according to Al-Kashgari, there were Soghdian-Turkic bilingual districts in today’s northern Kyrgyzstan/south-eastern Kazakhstan).

Literature:

1. 
   Dzhunusov, Makhsud S. 1980. Vzaimoobogashchenie natsionalnykh kultur i razvitiia
   natsional’no-russkogo dvuiazychiia [Mutual enrichment of national cultures and the
   development of National-Russian bilingualism. In Iunus. D. Desheriev and Eteri G.
   Tumanian (eds.), Vzaimo-otnoshenie razvitiia natsional’nykh iazykov i natsionalnykh
   kultur [Interrelation of development of national languages and national cultures], 42-
   64. Moscow: Nauka.
   
2. 
   Dzyuba, Ivan 1974. Internationalism or russification? A study in the Soviet nationalities
   problem [translation of Internatsionalizm chy rusifikatsiya?]. New York: Monad Press.
   
3. 
   Guboglo, Mikhail N. 1984. Sovremennye etnoiazykovye protsessy v SSSR: Osnovnye faktory I tendentsii razvitiia Natsional’no-Russkogo dvuiazychiia [Contemporary
   ethnolinguistic processes in the USSR: Basic factors and tendencies in the
   development of National-Russian bilingualism]. Moscow: Nauka.
   
4. 
   Guboglo, Mikhail N. 1986. Factors affecting bilingualism in national languages and Russian in a developed socialist society. In Bernard Spolsky (ed.), Language and education in multilingual settings, 23-31. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters
   
5. 
   Hansen, Mette E. 2005. Frontier people: Han settlers in minority areas of China. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press.