Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa: Plurilinguismo in Europa ... - EURAC

K. Simitopoulou-Kotzamani, N. I. Xirotiris
The Greek language memes have a different evolutionary history. They successfully survived
after the demolition of the ancient Greek civilisation in the intellectual environments of the
Roman Empire, they co-existed for centuries with the Latin language memes in the Byzantine
époque, and they remained alive in Greece and elsewhere during the Ottoman occupation.
Nowadays they are still present in modern Greek, they are hidden in the background of several
European languages and they still feed the pool of the scientifi c terminology.
Language is a strong indicator of memetic preservation. If a language, such as many American
Indian languages, is used mainly by adults without continuity to the young generations, the
memes associated with it are in danger of becoming extinct. This is indeed true of American
Indian languages and cultures; more and more American Indians are deserting their tribal memes
in favour of more successful replicators found in Western society. Indeed, the same is true of
many traditional languages and their memeplexes; adherents are increasingly converting to
more attractive and competitive Western memes.
Accordingly, we are witnessing the dominance of English language favoured by the today’s
globalised economy and science, which infl uences even the few remaining distant cultures.
In a linguistic environment favouring more and more the dominance of powerful languages
(English for commercial and scientifi c reasons, Chinese for population reasons etc.), the
adaptability of the lesser used ones in a high-tech global environment diminishes rapidly,
eventually leading to their death.
The death of languages, a symptom of the death of cultures, although inevitable, actually
decreases dramatically the cultural variability. However, we should be aware that variability,
(either natural or cultural) is the ultimate source of evolution, which, without it, comes to the
dead end of absolute uniformity. Thus, the efforts of the European Union to preserve the less
spoken languages are extremely important for the survival of its cultural heritage.
1.5. Studying linguistics through mathematical models
Mathematical models used in population genetics could be (actually have already been)
transferred, properly modifi ed, to the fi eld of memes, where they offer a more quantitative
approach to issues related to language evolution. Such models are based on several
assumptions:
• a simple language meme, is a piece of information. It could be a symbolic sound, a written
symbol (letter), or a word.
• like genes, memes require a hosting organism, a vector, who carries, amplifi es and
disseminates them. However, genes could be eliminated when their carriers die without
off-springs, whereas memes can be preserved regardless the existence of their vectors,
since they have colonised other individuals’ minds.
• more complex language memes are created as the complexity of the small society proceeds.
Syntaxed sentences, songs, compact expressions are examples of such complex memes.
• like genes, memes are competitive to each other and undergo selection procedures imposed
by their cultural environments.
Selected language memes (e.g. words, themes, phonetics, word “mutations”) could be used
as linguistic markers, (analogous to genetic markers) in order to:
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