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:
“The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the creativity of language, that is, the speakers ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are familiar.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The authors 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. Thats what I call the style of stone.”
—Alfred Döblin (18781957)