Arabic’s dominance made Islamic civilization structurally monolingual

Evidence

The situation on the Islamic side was entirely different. The many languages of antiquity either disappeared or dwindled into insignificance, surviving as writ­ ten languages, if at all, in scriptures and rituals. After the spread of Islam, there was only one language that mattered—Arabic. It was the language of scripture, of the classics, of commerce, of government, of science. And although, like Latin in the west, it developed a number of vernaculars, they did not, like French and Spanish and Italian and Portuguese, develop into autonomous languages. Col­ loquially of course they did, but that development was never formally recognised or recorded. Just one language met all needs, and there was therefore no need to learn any other. Why would an Arabic speaker bother to learn the barbarous idioms of infidels and savages beyond the imperial frontier? Arabic provided all his needs, and if anyone wanted to talk to him, they would learn Arabic. One finds a similar attitude in parts of the English-speaking world at the present time. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 152

Categorization

• XREF: The monolingual-empire framing echoes the linguistic asymmetry Lewis is building toward as a cause of dragoman dependence, and mirrors my own notes on colonial bureaucratic language politics.
• DEEPTHINKING: The dialectic between linguistic prestige and practical diplomatic need — a culture too proud to learn others’ tongues becomes structurally dependent on interpreters — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting lens on the whole dragoman institution.