Linguistic Hegemony
Obviously, a language's influence widens as its speakers grow in power. Chinese, Greek, Latin, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Russian, German and English have each seen periods of widespread importance, and have had varying degrees of influence on the native languages spoken in the areas over which they have held sway.
Read more about this topic: Language Contact
Famous quotes containing the words linguistic and/or hegemony:
“It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say “that is red” instead of “that reddens,” either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“The author’s hegemony must be broken. It is impossible to go too far in fanatical self-denial or fanatical self-renunciation: I am not I, but rather the street, the streetlights, this or that occurrence, nothing more. That’s what I call the style of stone.”
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)