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and spread can be global: a language can be spoken in distinct zones on many different continents, with its currency linked only by the sinews of trade and military governance that stretch across the oceans.
    Besides this geographical difference, it is possible to see other gross patterns which distinguish the two epochs.
    Before 1492, the key forces that spread languages are first literacy and civic culture, and later revealed religion. But when a community has these advantages its language is often spread at the point of a sword; without them, military victories or commercial development will achieve little. The general mode of spread is through infiltration: whole peoples do not move, but languages are transmitted by small communities and piecemeal colonies which do. But the foundation of English, which occurs in this period, appears to be an exception to all this.
    After 1492, the forces of spread are at first much more elemental: disease devastates populations in the Americas and elsewhere, and the technological gap between conquerors and victims is everywhere much starker than it had been in the era of regional spread. But once the power balance moves back into equilibrium, with the stabilisation of the Europeans’ global military empires, it becomes hard to distinguish military, commercial and linguistic dominance. At first, travel is difficult, and language spread is slow, still based on infiltration. However, with the spread of literacy and cheaper transport, the mode switches to migration, as large European populations seek to take advantage of the new opportunities. In the twentieth century, this too eases off; but new forms of communication arise, continually becoming faster, cheaper and more comprehensive: the result is that the dominant mode of language spread switches from migration to diffusion. English is once again exceptional, as it has been uniquely poised to take first advantage of the new technologies, but its prospects remain less clear as the other languages, both large and small, settle in behind it. It faces the uncertain future of any instant celebrity, and perhaps too the same inevitable ultimate outcome of such a future. This is not least because, for the world’s leading lingua franca, the whole concept of a language community begins to break down.
    But once informed with the varied stories of the world’s largest languages, our inquiry can move on to ask some pertinent questions.
    How new and unprecedented are modern forces of language diffusion? Do they share significant properties with language spread in the past?
    How will the age-old characteristics of language communities assert themselves? In particular, can all languages still act as outward symbols of communities? And can they effectively weave together the tissues of associations which come from a shared experience? Can each language still create its own world? Will they want to, when science—and some revealed religions—claim universal validity?
    These are the questions we shall want to ask. But first we must examine the vast materials of human language history.
    * As such it is prominent in forming the present-day Top Twenty language communities, to be considered close to the conclusion of this book (see p. 527).
† The widespread use of English in the European Union can be seen as Diffusion reinforced (after the UK’s accession in 1973) by Infiltration.
* It is also an inherently dangerous term, hard to separate from sweeping attempts to evaluate the achievements of whole peoples. (See, e.g., Macaulay’s notorious verdict on Sanskrit- and Arabic-based cultures (see Chapter 12, ‘Changing perspective—English in India’, p. 496).)
* This has led to the total omission of two important known language spreads, and one conjectured one. The Polynesian islands gained their dozens of closely related languages over the four millennia from 3000 BC in perhaps the most intrepid sustained exploration ever. And the Bantu languages