Abstract
International communication began some 6,000 years ago when Proto-Indo-European speakers left their homeland somewhere in the Pontic-Caspian region or the Caucasus to expand eastward and westward covering a geographical stretch from India to Iceland. This paper examines the historical ups and downs of the Indo-European, family of languages, as well as several other widely used languages, within the framework of the world system theory and the associated Eastern philosophical concepts. It pays particular attention to the evolution of English, today's global language, and it relates the international language order to the core-periphery concept of the world system theory. The world system perspective provides new insights on language phenomena highly conducive to the emerging field of economics of language. Eastern philosophical concepts of codependent arising, part-whole interdetermination, dialectical completion of relative polarities, karma, and impermanence add new dimensions to the hermeneutics of the world system theory itself.
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