Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages 9783110901351, 9783110183375

Table of contents :
An Introduction to linguistic purism
I. Historical Prescriptivism and Purism
Language norm and language reality. Effectiveness and limits of prescriptivism in New High German
Taming thistles and weeds amidst the wheat: language gardening in nineteenth-century Flanders
Bad language in Germany’s past – The birth of linguistic norms in the seventeenth century?
The Revolutionary Argumentative Pattern in Puristic Discourse: The Swabian dialect in the debate about the standardization of German in the eighteenth century
A comparative study of linguistic purism in the history of England and Germany
II. Nationhood and Purism
Linguistic purism in German-speaking Switzerland and the Deutschschweizerischer Sprachverein 1904–1942
Language nationalism in the Schiller commemoration addresses of 1859
Standard Afrikaans and the different faces of ‘Pure’ Afrikaans in the twentieth century
Reimagining the Nation: Discourses of language purism in Luxembourg
III. Modern Society and Purism
On the role of language ideologies in linguistic theory and practice: purism and beyond
Elements of traditional and ‘reverse’ purism in relation to computer-mediated communication
Once an Ossi, always an Ossi: Language ideologies and social division in contemporary Germany
IV. Folk Linguistics and Purism
‘The Grand Daddy of English’: US, UK, New Zealand and Australian students’ attitudes towards varieties of English
Linguistic purism from several perspectives: views from the ‘secure’ and the ‘insecure’
Dialect and written language: Change in dialect norms in the history of the German language
Investigating puristic attitudes in France: Folk perceptions of variation in standard French
V. Linguists and Purism
“Caution is not always the better part of valour” – Purism in the historiography of the German language
Some effects of purist ideologies on historical descriptions of English
Usefulness and uselessness of the term Fremdwort
Index

Citation preview

Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages

W G DE

Studia Linguistica Germanica

Herausgegeben von Stefan Sonderegger und Oskar Reichmann

75

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages

Edited by Nils Langer and Winifred V. Davies

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

©

Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the A N S I to ensure pcrmancnce and durability.

Library of Congress Calaloging-in-Publicaiion Data

Linguistic purism in the Germanic languages / edited by Nils Langer and Winifred V Davies. p. cm. — (Studia linguistica Germanica ; 75) ISBN 3-11-018337-4 (alk. paper) 1. Germanic languages — Standardization — I Iistory. 2. Germanic languages — I Iistory. 3. Germanic languages — Social aspects. 4. Germanic languages — Dialects. I. Langer, Nils, 1969 — II. Davies, W V. (Winifred V.) III. Series. PD74.7.L56 2005 430 — dc22 2004030892

ISBN 3-11-018337-4 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at < h t t p : / / d n b . d d b . d e > .

© Copyright 2005 by Walter de Gruyter G m b H & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. N o part of this b o o k may be reproduced or transmitted in any f o r m or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing f r o m the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schncidcr, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Acknowledgements This book contains the proceedings of a conference held in Clifton Hill House at the University of Bristol in April 2003. As with all such projects, the editors could not have presented you with this book had it not been for the help of a number of colleagues and friends who supported us in the process of organising and running the conference as well as editing this volume. We are especially grateful to Maria Lange (Bristol) and Patrick Honeybone (Edinburgh) as fellow organisers, to our student helpers Louise Hughes, Sarah Spencer Bernard, Emily Vigliar, and Rebecca Wills for looking after the delegates and their many needs, to Bertha Garrett in the Department of German (Bristol) for being there when we needed a clear head, to Anne Simon (Bristol) for some of the translations of medieval German into English, to Jim Milroy (Ann Arbor) for academic help in the editing of this volume, and to Louise Hughes (again) for compiling the index and help with the production of the camera-ready copy. Thanks also to Angelika Hermann, Susanne Rade, and Heiko Hartmann from Walter de Gruyter for their assistance with the publication of this book. Furthermore, our gratitude goes to Professors Sonderegger (Zürich) and Reichmann (Heidelberg) for accepting this volume as a contribution to the Series Studia Linguistica Germanica. Finally, thanks to the Institute for Advanced Studies (Bristol), the Faculty of Arts Research Fund (Bristol), the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB) and the British Academy for their generous financial support. Nils Langer, Bristol Wini Davies, Aberystwyth February 2005

Contents Nils Langer (Bristol) & Winifred V. Davies (Aberystwyth) An Introduction to linguistic purism

1

I. Historical Prescriptivism and Purism Stephan Elspaß (Augsburg) Language norm and language reality. Effectiveness and limits of prescriptivism in New High German

20

Wim Vandenbussche, Roland Willemyns, Jetje De Groof & Eline Vanhecke (VU Brüssel) Taming thistles and weeds amidst the wheat: language gardening in nineteenth-century Flanders

46

Maria Lange (Bristol) Bad language in Germany's past The birth of linguistic norms in the seventeenth century?

62

Joachim Scharloth (Zürich) The Revolutionary Argumentative Pattern in Puristic Discourse: The Swabian dialect in the debate about the standardization of German in the eighteenth century

85

Maria Geers (Tvar State University) A comparative study of linguistic purism in the history of England and Germany

97

II. Nationhood and Purism Felicity Rash (Queen Mary, London) Linguistic purism in German-speaking Switzerland and the Deutschschweizerischer Sprachverein 1904-1942

110

Evelyn Ziegler (Marburg) Language nationalism in the Schiller commemoration addresses of 1859

124

Ria van den Berg (Potchefstroom) Standard Afrikaans and the different faces of 'Pure' Afrikaans in the twentieth century

144

Kristine Horner (Luxembourg) Reimagining the Nation: Discourses of language purism in Luxembourg

166

VIII

Contents

III. Modern Society and Purism Dieter Stein (Düsseldorf) On the role of language ideologies in linguistic theory and practice: purism and beyond

188

Peter Hohenhaus (Nottingham) Elements of traditional and 'reverse' purism in relation to computer-mediated communication

205

Patrick Stevenson (Southampton) Once an Ossi, always an Ossi: Language ideologies and social division in contemporary Germany

221

IV. Folk Linguistics and Purism Betsy Evans (Cardiff) 'The Grand Daddy of English': US, UK, New Zealand and Australian students' attitudes towards varieties of English

240

Nancy Niedzielski (Rice University, Houston) Linguistic purism from several perspectives: views from the 'secure' and the 'insecure'

252

Klaus J. Mattheier (Heidelberg) Dialect and written language: Change in dialect norms in the history of the German language

263

Zoe Bough to η (Exeter) Investigating puristic attitudes in France: Folk perceptions of variation in standard French

282

V. Linguists and Purism Katja Leyhausen (Heidelberg) "Caution is not always the better part of valour" Purism in the historiography of the German language

302

James Milroy (Ann Arbor, Michigan) Some effects of purist ideologies on historical descriptions of English

324

Oskar Reichmann (Heidelberg) Usefulness and uselessness of the term Fremdwort

343

Index

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An Introduction to Linguistic Purism 1. Introduction Purism is an aspect of linguistic study which appeals not only to the scholar but also to the layperson. Somehow, ordinary speakers with many different mother tongues and with no formal training in linguistics (a group referred to as folk by Niedzielski & Preston 2000, a term which we will adopt in this book) share certain beliefs about what language is, how it develops or should develop, whether it has good or bad qualities, etc. But not only that: there is the recurrent phenomenon that speakers of a language agree that the state of their language is in decline, that it contains too many words from informal varieties, that it is threatened by modernising and foreign influences: in short, that it was better in the olden days and that nowadays something needs to be done to restore it to its former glory. It is surely significant that the opening pages of Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language (21997: 2) are devoted a discussion of the interest shown by laypeople in language, a topic which is part of linguistic purism. Language is distinguished from other academic disciplines such as astronomy, Roman mythology, or physics because all speakers consider themselves to be experts in the field of language. In addition, linguistic skills are highly valued in society and linguistic behaviour is a very public affair (ibid.) - hence there are many reasons and opportunities to form, reaffirm and argue about views on language, much more so than for example in the field of Roman mythology cited above. Professional linguists have often ignored the study of folk attitudes to language, dismissing them, perhaps rightly, as ill-conceived and fundamentally flawed due to a lack of understanding of how language works (cf. Milroy & Milroy 1999: 2-9). Whilst the increased general interest in the interaction between language and society since the 1960s has led some scholars to the phenomenon of linguistic purism as a prominent instance of folk linguistics, so far comparatively little work has actually been carried out in this field. Recently, scholars such as Cameron (1995) and Milroy & Milroy (1999) have called for more academic research into attitudes towards language and have

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urged academic linguists to take folk evaluation more seriously rather than to dismiss it as being unworthy of their interest as has tended to be the case. As regards the specific issue of purism, there is as yet only one monograph which aims to provide some theoretical underpinning (Thomas 1991), although there are several collections of articles which either focus on purism or contribute to our understanding of it by presenting important research in related fields, for example the process of standardisation or the historiography of language. Amongst some recent works in the field of Germanic linguistics, we can cite the conference proceedings by Brincat et al. 2003 and Linn & McLelland 2002, the collection of articles on individual languages found in van der Sijs 1999, Deumert & Vandenbussche 2003, and Bex & Watts 1999 and the monographs by Jones 1995 and Niedzielski & Preston 2000. The present volume contains a selection of papers given at a conference at the University of Bristol in April 2003. The conference was entitled Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages and by restricting it to Germanic1 we hoped to retain a certain thematic focus, rather than have a much greater number of languages which would then have made comparisons between findings difficult. However, it became very clear very quickly that despite the fact that the conference was organised around a common theme, the topic of linguistic purism covers a very wide range of issues. Whilst in its very essence purism is about the desire to keep a language pure (cf. Thomas's (1991) definition below), it can also affect folk-linguistic attitudes in general (cf. Niedzielski's and Evans et al.'s contributions), the relationship between standard and non-standard varieties, preserving older varieties and rejecting younger ones, the role of language in nationalist ideology (cf. the papers in the section on Purism and Nation as well as Leyhausen's and Milroy's contributions) and the very concept that a new, borrowed word can be alien to a language (cf. Reichmann's contribution). We felt that this resultant range of topics was a very positive outcome of the conference. Scholars with a similar general interest, namely linguistic purism, had to engage with the complexity of the field, and cross-fertilisation took place both across languages and subject specialisms. In this publication, we hope to achieve the same for our reader: to show, on the one hand, the diversity of the topics covered and, on the other hand, to point out the roten Faden, the continuous thread that gives cohesion to all the contributions.

1

For purism in respect to non-Germanic Languages cf for example van der Sijs 1999 and Brincat et al. 2003. In this volume we have included one article on a non-Germanic language (Boughton, on French) for the sake of comparison.

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In this introduction, we will firstly review some of the most prominent definitions of linguistic purism before discussing the views regarding the benefits and disadvantages of purism for a language. Finally, we will briefly introduce all the contributions.

2. What is purism? General definitions of the concept will always be rather vague but, before discussing our topic in more depth, it seems sensible to see what the agreed common ground is as regards linguistic purism. Larry Trask restricts his definition of purism to foreign influences, highlighting in particular puristic activity towards words, though not excluding other features: purism The belief that words (and other linguistic features) of foreign origin are a kind of contamination sullying the purity of a language. [...] (Trask (1999: 254))

By contrast, George Thomas's definition does not restrict itself to foreign elements but includes varieties such as dialects and particular styles of a language: [purist activity is] "a desire on the part of the speech community [...] to preserve a language form, or rid it of, putative foreign elements or elements held to be undesirable elements (including those originating in dialects, sociolects and styles of the same language). It may be directed at all linguistic levels but primarily the lexicon. Above all, purism is an aspect of the codification, cultivation and planning of standard languages." (Thomas (1991: 12))

Importantly, purism is concerned not only with the removal of (unwanted) linguistic features but also with the preservation of desirable elements. Here we note the importance of the subjective evaluation of elements of a language by (influential) members or groups of the speech community: who is to say what is desirable or unwanted? Purism does not occur automatically at any particular stage in the development of a language, but is rather triggered by folk-linguistic perceptions, for example that the language is going into decline or is being corrupted. How this is caused is still unclear (but cf. the timing of purism below). The second important claim in Thomas's definition is that purism is not solely directed at foreign influences, but also at indigenous forms, for example dialectal features. Presumably this is only possible once a prestige variety has been agreed upon in a given speech community, but even then the actual selection and de-selection of acceptable and unacceptable features is a process which varies from language to language, the mechanisms

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of which are not yet clear. In particular, we need to know more about how stigmatized features are selected - and who has the power to select them. David Crystal's definition (1997: 316) follows similar lines to Thomas's. He defines purism as a "school of thought" which sees a linguistic variety as being in need of protection from external pressures. Such pressures are not just foreign ones but could also be influences from varieties like dialects or colloquial speech. Thus, again, purism refers to keeping a language pure, but, contrary to lay perceptions of purism, impure elements are not simply foreign loan words but also features from non-prestigious varieties, and therefore one would expect the existence of linguistic purism to presuppose the existence of a prestige language variety. Finally, van der Sijs's definition (1999: 11) refers rather generally to the 'language-making' (spraakmakende) section of the speech community which has the power to decide which linguistic features are considered undesirable (ongewenst). Purism, according to her, is deliberate resistance to such elements. Hence, she makes no specific reference to foreign or indigenous words but simply refers to them as undesirable. Overall, we can say that the three definitions above largely agree on what purism is: an (influential) part of the speech community voices objections to the presence of particular linguistic features and aims to remove them from their language. Academic linguists have a problem with this since no language is a precisely defined entity with a unique history and a closed set of linguistic features. Hence any attempt to purify a language must be ill-conceived since no language has ever been pure in the first place. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of linguistic purism does exist and our study of this phenomenon can help us understand the role of language in society - an aim certainly worth pursuing.

3. Purism and standardisation We saw above that purism not only attacks foreign elements but also nonprestigious indigenous ones. By implication, this means that a purist will have an awareness of a prestige variety of his/her language: this brings us to the topic of purism and standardisation. Van der Sijs (1999: 11) argues that purism only affects languages which are standardised or are in the process of standardisation since, before one can remove elements from a linguistic norm, one has to have a linguistic norm. But, as the studies in Brincat et al. (2003) show, purism can occur even where there is no standard and codified norm:

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"[W]e especially disagree with [van der Sijs'] emphasis on the interdependence of the rise of puristic tendencies and the creation of a standardised language norm. Thus purism is depicted as a predominantly conscious process triggered by the agents of official language policy. [.. .however] purism need not be connected with conscious standardisation, and it should not be separated from a broader concept of 'pure language'. [...] purism is an issue that can come up in societies where literacy is heavily restricted and institutions which could organise purist movements are largely missing." (Boeder et al. 2003: viii)

For Boeder et al. (2003: x), purism can take place in languages which are not standardised and where speakers are illiterate: they might still be aware of a prestige or stigmatised form of their language despite the fact that such a form might not be formally codified or agreed. Thus purism is not restricted to standard languages in the "modern, technical sense" (loc. cit.) but rather can be found in all those linguistic varieties where language evaluation occurs. Which variety or feature is favoured or stigmatised is arbitrary in the linguistic sense famously, polynegation2 is a "normal" grammatical feature in medieval German, Dutch and English, as well as in modern languages such as Low German, but also, importantly, in the standard varieties of Italian and French, whereas it is seen as illogical and bad (by folk linguists) in standard English, German and Dutch. Despite the fact that the stigma of polynegation in West Germanic standard languages may seem justified on grounds of propositional logic, the purists involved in its Stigmatisation during the seventeenth and eighteenth century felt there to be no inconsistency with the grammaticality of polynegation in the equally prestigious French or Ancient Greek.3 Hence we must carefully distinguish between a purist's "official" reason for stigmatising a particular word or grammatical construction on the grounds that it is illogical or alien to the indigenous language, and her / his "hidden" motivation, namely a general fear of foreign (cultural) elements or a concern that one's advanced culture might be in danger of decline due to the rise of the lower classes. Whether such a foreign invasion or general cultural decline is actually taking

2

3

The realisation of negation by more than one negatively-marked morpheme, for example Low German: De Hund hett em ni nich höört. (Lindow et al. 1998: 285) the dog has him never not heard "The dog never heard him" Langer 2001 contains an account of the Stigmatisation of polynegation in German in the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that prescriptive grammarians were very well aware of the fact that, whilst their stigma of polynegation followed the pattern of Latin (a prestigious and ancient language), it nonetheless contradicted the grammar of Ancient Greek (also a prestigious and ancient language).

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place is irrelevant - what matters is whether such things are perceived to be happening by influential members of society who will then use emotive factors and symbolic values to represent their concerns. We find these triggers for linguistic purism in Germany both in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in the resistance towards Gallicisms and again, since the 1950s, in the concern that American English will replace German as the main means of communication even in Germany, hence creating insurmountable linguistic barriers between Germans - despite the fact that the grammar of German is not affected 4 by the source languages and the fact that German, like all other languages, is a product of language contact (cf. Reichmann's contribution in this volume on the usefulness of the concept Fremdwort). The purists' fear of foreign influence is thus linked to a more general fear of losing national or regional cultural identities. We can see this in this volume in the contributions by Stevenson, who explores the use of language to create East German identity, and Mattheier, who sketches a history of the changing status of German dialects from being seen as peasants' language to their current perception as symbols of local pride and identity. Van der Sijs (1999: 11) mentions another important socio-political use of language purism: to support the formation of a national or cultural identity. This can be seen in many instances, for example the current debate in Low German circles as to whether the language should be protected from High German influences, or the case of Flemish in the nineteenth century, where one camp of purists preferred a Flemish cleansed from French words to distinguish themselves from the French, whereas another camp felt that French (and regional) features were integral to the Flemish character and could be usefully employed to distinguish the language from that of their northern neighbours in the Netherlands (cf. Vandenbussche et al. in this volume). Importantly, the prestige or stigma of a language is never absolute but is judged in relation to another language, be that a dialect, a foreign language or even the language of a particular individual, famed for his or her rhetorical ability (or lack thereof). "Famous" individuals who are often named by folk

4

All foreign words have grammatical gender, often a German plural, all adjectives have German endings, all verbs are formed according to German patterns of morphology: for example Die coolen Typen haben die flashende Bilddatei downgeloadet. and cf. an authentic example from a German hiphop band Wir sind die Coolsten, nie am losen, weil wir rulen, wenn wir Cruisen. (Massive Töne, MT3, 2002) Foreign influences on German grammar are much more limited and oft-cited examples such as the increasing use of {-s} for plural or in 1992 instead of 1992 or im Jahre 1992 simply exploit patterns which are already present in the grammatical system of German.

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linguists as the creators or protectors of a particular standard language include the translator Martin Luther and the national poets Friedrich Schiller for German (cf. Ziegler's contribution), Pentsjo Slavejkov for Bulgarian (Moskova 1999), William Shakespeare for English, and Klaus Groth for Low German, the linguist and author Ivar Aarsen for Norwegian (Jahr 2003), the lexicographers Azkue for Basque (Jansen 1999) and Samuel Johnson for English, to name but a few. Often, too, particular institutions are, or are seen to be, the preservers of a prestige variety, for example the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft in seventeenth century Germany, the Academie Franqaise in France, the Accademia della Crusca in Italy, but also, the BBC in the United Kingdom. However, for many other languages, it is not individuals or institutions who have symbolic linguistic status but rather particular geographical areas (Tuscany, Hanover, lie de France, Oxford) or cultural artefacts for example the Welsh translation of the Bible (cf. Löffler 2003).

5. Purism and prescriptivism Purism and prescriptivism are closely related concepts since any attempt to purify a language will be a form of prescribing what the correct or better form of a language is. Whilst the term prescriptivism is more general than purism the two are often used interchangeably when applied to the folk-linguistic activity of defining and striving for a better variety of a particular language. There are two strands to the academic's rejection of prescriptivism: on the one hand, it is considered to be ill-conceived in principle to apply such emotive terms as good, bad, rational, elegant etc. to language. Linguists aim to understand, explain and describe language, they do not evaluate it - in the same way that zoologists will not classify and compare different species with regard to their ugliness or friendliness (Milroy & Milroy 1999: 5). This does not mean that linguists do not distinguish between the levels of appropriateness of certain varieties for particular contexts. In particular, academic linguists do accept the usefulness of having a standard language, i.e. a prestige variety for particular domains, for example in national communication (but cf. Trudgill (1975) who argued against the need for an English standard pronunciation in any context). However, and this is the second main objection to prescriptivism, linguists reject the arbitrariness of how prestige and stigmatised forms are selected. This is spelled out in very clear terms in Trask's definition of prescriptivism, aimed at the trainee academic linguist: prescriptivism The imposition of arbitrary norms upon a language, often in defiance of normal usage. [...] Prescriptivism consists of the attempts, by teachers and writers, to settle [...] disagreements [about which forms should be part of a

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standard language] by insisting upon the use of those particular forms and usages which they personally prefer by condemning those others which they personally dislike. [...] [T]he problem is that many prescriptivists go too far, and try to condemn usages which are in fact perfectly normal even for educated speakers [...]. (Trask 2004: 246)

The crucial notions in this definition are clearly the term arbitrary norms and personal like and dislike of a particular form. It is not the "best" forms which are selected but rather those forms which are used by the "best" group of speakers, i.e. the educated upper and middle classes. Here we see how prescriptivism and standardisation are closely intertwined, since the latter crucially involves a stage where features are selected from the whole range of linguistic forms. This selection process is never neutral in that any form could qualify to become a standard feature, but rather, selection will favour only those forms which are considered to be part of "good usage" (cf. Vaugelas's concept of bon usage in seventeenth-century France), i.e. language that is used by educated or prestigious speakers. The selection process is followed by the codification of a prestige language variety5 in normative grammars, dictionaries and style guides and thus grammarians often occupy an important role in the petrification of norms: in German, the editors of the DudenGrammatik have normative power due to the prestige of the Duden as a guardian of good German even though the editors may not wish to be prescriptive.6 When the most recent edition of the orthographical Duden (2000), seen by most German as the dictionary which includes all and only German words, included a substantial increase of Anglicisms - chosen because they occurred with a sufficient frequency in authentic German texts - there was an outcry amongst folk linguists, suggesting that the Duden's editors had somehow corrupted the German language. A similar reaction occurred in 1961, when the editors of the Webster's Third International Dictionary had removed "all traces of value-judgment from their work and refuse[d] to label particular usages (such as ain't) as 'colloquial' and others as 'slang'" (Milroy & Milroy 1999: 4). In both cases we can make the interesting observation that, on the one hand, "linguistic folk" are happy to accept the existence of a particular grammar or dictionary (written by real people and not somehow God-given!) as the sole reference or instantiation of a standard or prestige language, but that on the other hand, the editors are challenged or considered to be unfit for their

5 6

Cf. Haugen 1997/1966 for a comprehensive model of standardisation. Wermke argues that whilst the Duden aims as providing guidance towards the use of norms inherent in language use (sprachimmanente Gebrauchsnormen), it does not strive for a strict and prescriptive setting of norms (Wermke 1998: 16).

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tasks when this grammar or dictionary deviates too much from what linguistic folk expects to be standard. The contradiction is thus: linguistic folk turn to a standard dictionary to find out what standard is, but when they find things that they do not consider to be standard they reject the dictionary - hence the question is, why do they ever turn to the dictionary rather than trust their own judgement in the first place! This contradiction is of course resolved when we realise that linguistic folk consider such items as English or German or Dutch to be things that exist in the real world as singular, clearly defined entities and which existed in a pure and uncorrupted form at some stage in history: despite the fact that those who should know, namely academic linguists whose job it is to know about language, fundamentally disagree with this. Apart from the question of the initiation and instantiation of linguistic prescription, another interesting but as yet rather under-researched topic is the transmission of linguistic norms, i.e. how does a language user acquire knowledge about what forms are standard and hence acceptable in formal discourse and which forms are not. Prescriptive grammarians who set or codify the norms for the standard or prestige language often did not have a lot of contact with "normal" language users and prescriptive grammars and styleguides are usually books that can be found on the shelves of every household but are rarely taken down and read.7 One particular group of speakers are often cited as norm transmitters: school teachers. But as Cameron (1995) pointed out, this is simply assumed in the academic literature - very few studies have actually been conducted to see to what extent the teachers' perception of norms corresponds to what the grammars prescribe. Davies (1999) shows, based on her study of secondary school teachers of German in South-western Germany, that school teachers are often more lenient in their expectations than is currently assumed. More than 50% of her informants reported that they would not insist on the use of Standard German in the classroom, and when they were asked to identify grammatical errors in a set of 20 example sentences, none of the "mistakes" were found by all teachers and hence the teachers would not penalise certain deviations from the language norm as prescribed in normative grammars such as the Duden-Grammatik. In current research-in-progress, Davies & Langer (forth) found that the opposite is also true: the use of wo "where" as a relative pronoun for temporal adverbs8 has been considered to be standard by normative style guides and grammars (for example Duden Richtiges und Gutes Deutsch, 2001) since the

7 8

Cf. Schraeder 1987 and Davies 1999 on the use of normative dictionaries by school teachers in determining (un-)acceptable forms of German. [...] besonders die letzten Stunden, wo es feinen Regen im Winde trieb "especially the last hours, where fine rain was driven in the wind" (J.W. Goethe, as cited in Paul 2002: 1179)

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nineteenth century but school teachers more or less uniformly reject the construction as ungrammatical. Here the teachers are more prescriptive than the prescriptive grammars! Thus it seems important not to simply note that languages are standardised by means of a selection of forms and their codification in grammars but also by the transmission of such norms to language users.

6. The timing of purism In the publisher's announcement for van der Sijs (1999), we read that ledere taal bezit woorden die uit een andere taal zijn geleend. Wanneer hun aantal te groot wordt, treedt een mechanisme in werking om hun invloed te temperen: taalzuivering of purisme. [from publisher's announcement for van der Sijs 1999] [every language contains words which were borrowed from another. Whenever their number becomes too high, a mechanism sets in to reduce their influence to an acceptable degree: language-cleansing or purism]

Thus we hear that the instantiation of purist activities is a mechanism triggered if certain conditions are satisfied: it would be quite remarkable if that were true, but neither van der Sijs (1999) herself nor for example Boeder et al. (2003) agree. Boeder et al. aimed to address this very issue of "whether puristic tendencies were determined by or went along with certain constellations in grammar or lexicon" (2003: ix) in their book; however, despite the findings of their publication "[rjesearch on purism is simply not yet prepared for an evaluation of the subject at hand." (ibid.). What is crucial is not the quantifiably measurable degree of influence but the subjective perception of the speakers (van der Sijs 1999: 23), and which language is considered to have a worrying influence is determined by extra-linguistic factors: when Turkish speakers objected strongly to French and other western influences, they turned towards Arabic/Persian loanwords as being part of their true heritage. On the other hand, when Bulgarians objected to Turkish dominance, they had no problem with and even endorsed western loan words as showing educatedness (van der Sijs 1999: 24). Similarly, the debate in German is aimed at removing the influence of American English, despite the fact that most foreign loanwords come from Latin and Greek: the use of the latter, however, is evaluated particularly highly as demonstrating a classical education. In this book we will not address the question of whether we can abstract a model of triggers for purist activity since we feel that research into the subject has not advanced enough yet. However, we are also rather sceptical to what extent

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11

such a model can ever be developed: the data and scenarios presented in van der Sijs (1999), Brincat et al. (2003) and this volume include so many different factors and rest crucially on the notion of folk-linguistic 'perception' by 'influential' members of a language community with perception and influential both being highly subjective notions. Thus we will have to be satisfied for the moment with presenting case studies covering a range of languages, periods and topics.

7. Purism: good or bad? So far we have shown how linguists view purism as a generally futile endeavour, based on a naive and ultimately ill-conceived notion of what language is, how it develops and, crucially, how it first emerges: whilst purists often see the birth of a language as the emergence of a unique (and therefore pure) form, uncorrupted by outside influence, linguists believe that individual languages9 are the product of language contact and that there is no such thing as a pure language. However, some of the articles in Brincat et al. (2003) as well as in Linn & McLelland (2002) and Deumert & Vandenbussche (2003) which discuss minor(ity)10 languages argue that purism and other standardising activities serve a useful purpose when applied to minor and regional languages. Given that these are rarely codified in the sense of Einar Haugen's four steps of standardisation" and that most speakers are bilingual, often using the dominant language for public purposes (at work, school, etc.), the lack of agreement over one prestige variety may facilitate the decline of minor languages, since for example it makes the use of the language in writing or broadcasting difficult. Löfiler (2003: 63f.)) reports that purist tendencies have been part of the cultivation of a Welsh standard since medieval times for the simple reason that the language used by the bards could be understood at the courts throughout Wales. The case of Low German, a regional language in Northern Germany, is interesting in this context, too. Despite the fact that there is no codified norm of Low German,12 the use of Low German in broadcasting

9 10 11 12

Let's assume for the sake of convenience that individual languages do exist. Both minor and minority languages are used in the secondary literature. For our purposes, the distinction is not important. Selection, Codification, Implementation, and Elaboration. Note that the recent Niederdeutsche Grammatik (1998) does aim to provide guidance in the use of Low German and hence may act as a standardising factor in the use of Low German in public discourse. However, whilst there is a clear "default" use of a particular variety of Low German, namely North Low Saxon (NLS; Nordniedersächsisch), in the choice of example

12

Nils Langer and Winifred Davies

is standardised by the fact that the radio and TV station - situated in Bremen, geographically more or less in the centre of the Low German-speaking area which receives manuscripts for broadcasting, discretely checks the language for particularly salient regional features (D. Stellmacher, p.c.) : this is in no way in order to erase "undesirable" elements along the lines of the types of purism referred to above. But, nonetheless, it is a type of linguistic purism which, given the popularity of the station's programmes, will no doubt cause some levelling of Low German diversity, and it is worth investigating whether Radio Bremen removes not only 'strange' regional words which would not be understood elsewhere, but also High German words in order to preserve the Low-Germanness of the language. 13 Thus purism could serve to counterbalance the current process of the levelling of linguistic diversity (Boeder et al. 2003: vii), and the creation of a prestige variety or Leitvarietät of a minor or regional language might well help it to survive. On the other hand, however, having a prestige variety will often lead to the suppression and eventual Stigmatisation of local features which in itself can accelerate the decline of the language, as shown for example by the elimination of regional features in the attempt to create a standard Welsh (Jones 1998). However, given what we know about language and linguistic development, we feel that the academic linguist might be compromising his or her position as an observer and describer of languages.14 Whilst nobody would wish for a language to die, the only people to stop such a trend are not linguists but parents who decide which language to use with their children and whether to send their children to a monolingual or bilingual school. After these more general remarks on purism we will conclude this introduction by briefly presenting the papers contained in this book. The first group of papers deals with the relationship between Historical Prescriptivism and Purism. The starting point of Elspaß's contribution is the obvious fact that prescriptivism and purism have not always been successful and forms that have been stigmatised by grammarians, in some cases for centuries, seem to be re-appearing, even in writing. By examining letters written by German immigrants to the US in the nineteenth century, Elspaß shows that these forms

13

14

sentences for particular constructions, other regional varieties are also recognised in that they are mentioned without stigma when they deviate from NLS. However, further research is required to find out to what extent standardising tendencies can be witnessed in the use of Low German in public discourse (Haugen's step of implementation). Note, of course, that the notion of academic linguists as 'neutral' observers in the description of language is severely challenged by the contributions of Leyhausen and Milroy in this volume.

Linguistic Purism

13

never died out in informal written German, even if they were almost completely eradicated from the formal written standard. Vandenbussche, Willemyns, De Groof & Vanhecke's paper discusses the debate for and against an integrationist (i.e. with reference to Dutch) and a particularist approach to the standardisation of Flemish in nineteenth century Flanders. The battle was won by the integrationists, which meant that the variety that was codified was the northern one, which was regarded as 'purer' since it was freer of French and dialectal influences. Lange examines a period — the seventeenth century - which has always been considered crucial for the emergence of a standard German variety, but she shows that the grammarians working at this time were not as prescriptive or as influential as has been assumed in histories of German. They may well have subscribed to the notion that a standard variety was desirable but they did not contribute much to the actual codification of specific rules. Scharloth picks up on two types of purism described by Thomas (1991) and, on the basis of an analysis of discourse on language and culture in eighteenth century-Germany he shows how the notion of standardising German by conserving a particular state of the language and defending it from foreign intrusions was contested for a while by those who argued that, rather than tinkering with a corrupt variety, a completely new variety should replace the current one. Geers investigates different types of linguistic purism. In her study of English and German, she sheds light on the similarities and differences of linguistic purism in the two languages, based on evidence from the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth century. In the second section, Nationhood and Purism, the paper focuses on the links between nationhood or nation-building and -maintenance and purism. In the case of Switzerland, Rash describes how important dialects are in the construction of Swiss identity for the German-speaking Swiss (who form the vast majority of the population). They symbolise values like democracy seen as essential to Swissness. This has been a major motivation for purist activities vis ä vis French, also demonstrating that purism is not restricted to standard varieties. Ziegler presents a study of a particular contribution to nation-building in nineteenth century-Germany and demonstrates how civic festivities were used to create a national cultural identity. References to the language of Friedrich Schiller, the German national poet from the eighteenth century, and equating it with standard German were central to these particular festivities, although we find little information about any specific usages. His status was however enhanced by the fact that he seems to have come along at the right moment to save German from overwhelming French influence.

14

Nils Langer and Winifred Davies

In van den Berg's contribution we see how attitudes toward what is 'pure' Afrikaans have (not surprisingly) vacillated as the socio-political situation has changed. A study of dictionaries and wordlists shows how attitudes have shifted from total opposition to English loan-words, to a matter-of-fact acceptance of them as part of Afrikaans. Horner's paper, too, shows how attitudes towards linguistic varieties are influenced by socio-political events, in this case World War 2, but also more recent immigration to Luxembourg. Negative attitudes towards German and the wish to distance Letzebuergesch from it by stressing its status as a language rather than a dialect of German can be instrumentalised in order to withstand French pressure, too. Processes of external (directed at other languages) and internal purism (standardisation) are described. The third section, Modern Society and Purism, is devoted to papers which examine the role of purism in contemporary society. Stein's paper examines how a particular ideology of language - the fixed-code theory - has implications for practice, for example amongst lawyers or language teachers. In the latter case he shows how the ideology of standard and purism (which are linked to the fixed-code notion) means that British English is still privileged in German universities and 'mixed' varieties are discriminated against. Hohenhaus deals with purism in a new domain of linguist usage computer-mediated communication. This is not a domain without norms, but the traditional notion of purism is often turned upside down here and we find a reverse purism with stress on being innovative and creative. Stevenson introduces the notion of sociolinguistic purism. This is linked to the notion that west German speech norms are set up as norms with eastern features being seen as exotic deviations. As Stevenson points out, the linguistic differences (often minimal), are clearly being used to represent social differences, and alleged difficulties of comprehension (usually on the part of westerners) have to be interpreted as, in reality, expressions of a social rather than a linguistic divide. In the fourth section, the authors deal more explicitly with Folk Linguistics and Purism.

Evans et al. describe an investigation into attitudes towards different varieties of English. Despite what Stein says about German university departments of English, it seems that, in general, there is a perception that British English is becoming less popular than US English. However, Evans et al. show that this is not the case, since informants from a range of other English-speaking countries perceived US English quite negatively. Niedzielski's paper discusses certain theoretical and methodological issues which have to be confronted by researchers into language attitudes, for

Linguistic Purism

15

example how do speakers conceptualise the standard form of their language? It seems that there will be differences of perception between secure and insecure speakers, with the latter often being more accurate in their judgements of their own usage. Mattheier's contribution deals with an area which he feels has been marginalised in many histories of the German language, namely the changing place of non-standard regional dialects in the linguistic value system of German-speakers since the Middle Ages. We see that dialects may have been stigmatised as the language of farmers and peasants, but there is also evidence of its positive evaluation in identity formation and as a symbol of the in-group. Boughton's article is the only one focusing on a non-Germanic language, namely French. Her data, collected in the northern French cities of Nancy and Rennes, show that in folk linguistic perceptions, there continues to be deep reverence for the standard language and the preservation of its 'correctness. The final section, Linguists and Purism, demonstrates how even linguists, who like to think of themselves as objective recorders of facts, have not been free of ideological influences, specifically purism. Leyhausen examines a selection of histories of German to show how the presentation of the topic of borrowing or language contact often reveals an underlying (conscious or otherwise) nationalist agenda. The link between nation and national language appears to be still relatively strong. Milroy's contribution shows that a certain bias is not restricted to writers of histories of German, but is also evident in histories of English. He describes two kinds of purism: sanitary purism, which is retrospective and erases alleged impurities from the record, and genetic purism, which is concerned to construct a glorious and ancient heritage for the present-day standard variety. The final paper, by Reichmann, addresses the usefulness of the term Fremdwort in the description of lexical semantics. Instead of classifying instances of lexical borrowing as foreign influence, they should be seen more neutrally a products of mutual language contact. Reichmann argues for a more holistic approach to the languages of Europe, one that will stress what they have in common and the way in which they (i.e. their speakers) have been open to each other for centuries.

8. References Bauer, Laurie & Peter Trudgill (eds.). 1999. Language Myths. London: Penguin. Bex, Tony & Richard Watts (eds.). 1999. Standard English: The Widening Debate. London: Routledge.

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Nils Langer and Winifred Davies

Boeder, Winfried, Brincat, Joseph & Thomas Stolz. 2003. 'Preface.' In: Brincat et al. viii-xiv. Brincat, Joseph, Boeder, Winfried & Thomas Stolz (eds.) 2003. Purism in Minor, Regional and Endangered Languages. Bochum: Brockmeyer. Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge. Crystal, David. 21997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia to Language. Cambridge: CUP. Davies, Winifred. 1999. 'Linguistic norms at school: a survey of secondaryschool teachers in a Central German dialect area.' In: Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 67. 129-147. Davies, Winifred & Nils Langer, forth. Bad German - Past and Present. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang. Deumert, Ana & Wim Vandenbussche. 2003. Germanic Standardisations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Duden 222000. Die deutsche Rechtschreibung, edited by the Dudenredaktion. Mannheim: Dudenverlag. Duden s 2001. Richtiges und gutes Deutsch. Wörterbuch der sprachlichen Zweifels fälle, edited by the Wissenschaftliche Rat der Dudenredaktion. Mannheim: Dudenverlag. Haugen, Einar. 1966 (1997). 'Language Standardization.' In: Coupland, Nicholas & Adam Jaworski (eds.). Sociolinguistics. A reader and coursebook. London: Macmillan. 341-352. Jahr, Ernst Hakon. 2003. 'Norwegian.' In: Deumert & Vandenbussche. 331353. Jansen, Wim. 1999. 'Zuiverheid en zuivering in het Baskisch.' In: Sijs. 287290. Jones, Mari C. 1998. Language Obsolescence and Revitalization. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Langer, Nils. 2001. Linguistic Purism in Action. How Auxiliary tun was stigmatised in Early New High German. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Linn, Andrew & Nicola McLelland (eds.). 2002. Standardization. Studies from the Germanic Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Löffler, Marion. 2003. 'Purism and the Welsh Language: a matter of survival?' In: Brincat et al. 61-90. Milroy, James & Lesley Milroy. 31999. Authority in Language. London: Routledge. Moskova, Anna. 1999. 'Taalzuivering in het Bulgaars.' In: Sijs. 252-257. Lindow, Wolfang et al. 1998. Niederdeutsche Grammatik. Leer: Schuster. Paul, Hermann. 102002. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Bedeutungsgeschichte und Aufbau unseres Wortschatzes, edited by Helmut Henne, Heidrun Kämper & Georg Objartel. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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Niedzielski, Nancy & Dennis Preston. 2000. Folk Linguistics. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Schaeder, Burkhard. 1987. Germanistische Lexikographie. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Sijs, Nicoline van der (ed.). 1999. Taaltrots. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact. Trask, R. Larry. 1999. Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics. London: Routledge. Thomas, George. 1991. Linguistic purism. London: Longman. Trudgill, Peter. 1975. Accent, Dialect and the School. London: Arnold. Wermke, Matthias. 1998. 'Aus der Praxis der Dudenredaktion.' In: Greule, Albrecht & Franz Lebsanft (eds.). Europäische Sprachkultur und Sprachpflege. Tübingen: Narr.

I. Historical Prescript!vism and Purism

Stephan Elspaß

Language norm and language reality. Effectiveness and limits of prescriptivism in New High German 1. Some real written German This paper is concerned with grammatical features in contemporary German that purists would regard as 'bad language'. Consider the following examples from newspapers, magazines, literary works and the internet: (1) Keine Macht fur Niemand ['No power to nobody'] (headline of a book review of Ulrich Beck's book Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter, URL 1 : http://www.changex.de/d_a00817.html, quoting the title of a 1972 album by the German rock group Ton Steine Scherben) (2) Ich wähle Doris' [!] ihren Mann seine Partei [ Ί vote for Doris' husband's party' (literally: Ί vote for Doris her husband his party')] (Slogan from the SPD election campaign 2002) (3) kauft hab ichs wegen Turn The Tide - aber die anderen Tracks sind auch ganz ok Kuhhirt [ Ί bought it because of the track "Turn the Tide" ...' (literally: '0-bought have I-it becausc-of turn the tide...', Standard German ge-prefix on past participle missing)] (Private internet review of the CD Clear Vision, URL: http://www.medienkonverter.de/kritik.php4?KritikNr=l 98

1

All internet sites were accessed in February 2004.

Language norm and language reality

21

(4) tu mich vernicht C - i gessen!

t u mjch

nicht vergessen

['do me A C C not forget' instead of Standard German: 'forget me not!'] (ready-made text message offered by T-Mobile, URL: http://b2b.ucpag.eom/t-mobile-at/pm/l 77/17.html) (5) zurück über das penser joch; tankstellenautomaten getestet (der um 10.000 ITL 5,81 1 diesel hergibt & sonst nur 50.000 ITL-scheine nehmen tat...). [ ' . . . tested a petrol pump ... which would only take 50,000 Italian lira notes' (non-standard nehmenlm

+ rfosuBj-n)]

(Private homepage, URL: http://www.comodo.priv.at/cgibin/journal/journal.cgi?folder=archaeologie&next=8) ( 6 ) Es war Abend, der rote Glanz auf der Mauer war am Verlöschen. ['It was dusk, and the red shine on the wall was fading away.' (non-standard seinTW + am + VERB [ N F for progressive aspect)] (Elias Canetti: Die Stimmen von Marrakesch. München & Wien 2002, p. 7) (7) Zum Kommentar von S. D. „Trittin vor der Tür"... wäre zu ergänzen, daß diese von Trittin in wenigen Jahren herangezogene Lobby ständig am Wachsen ist. [ ' . . . that this lobby ... is constantly growing.' (non-standard ί α π ^ + am + VERB I N F for progressive aspect)] (letter to the editor, Frankfurter

Allgemeine

Zeitung, 27.08.2003, p. 8)

( 8 ) Dasselbe in Grün: Erik Zabel besser wie Lance Armstrong [ ' . . . Erik Zabel better than Lance Armstrong' (comparative + non-standard wie-particle instead of als)] (newspaper headline from Frankfurter

Neue Presse, quoted in Der

Spiegel,

06.08.2001, p. 186) ( 9 ) Teurer wie ein Schulbuch ['More expensive than a textbook' (comparative + non-standard wie-particle instead of als)] (headline from Hessisch-Niedersächsische 17.06.2002, p. 210)

Allgemeine,

quoted in Der

Spiegel,

22

Stephan Elspaß

(10) Ein Quartierplan wirft wegen dem Verkehr hohe Wellen ['District plan creates a stir because of the DAT traffic' (non-standard dative instead of genitive after the preposition wegen)] (headline from Volksstimme Sissach, 21.09.2000, p. 3) (11) Abmahnung wegen dem Begriff „Telekom" [ Ά note of caution because of theDAT term "Telekom"' (non-standard dative instead of genitive after the preposition wegen)] (headline from the Internet Magazine ZDNet, 22.08.2003, URL: http://news.zdnet.de/story/0„tl 10-s2138753,00.html) (12) Sechzig Jahre. „Da kann der Schröder sich eine Scheibe von abschneiden." ['Sixty years. "Schröder can take a leaf from this book." ...' (literally: 'There can the Schröder himself a slice from of-cut')] (Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 28.06.2002, p. 36, on the diamond wedding anniversary of former chancellor Helmut and Loki Schmidt) (13) „Da darf man gar nicht drüber nachdenken" ['You don't want to think about it.' (literally: 'There must one not there-over about-think')] (headline from Osnabrücker Zeitung, 03.06.2003, on the consequences of fowl pest for farmers) (14) „Aber jemandem dann den Lebensstandard weg zu nehmen, aus Geiz oder weil man sagt, das Geld ist nicht vorhanden, da halte ich nichts davon [...]" ['... I don't think very much of this' (literally: 'There think I nothing there-of')] (Dorothee Mantel, MP [CSU], in an interview on Deutschlandfunk, 07.08.2003, http://www.dradio.de/cgi-bin/es/neu-interview/3640.html]

In these examples, the phrases highlighted in bold print have one thing in common: they appear in standard German texts, but according to normative grammar books, they are not standard German. Some grammarians would dismiss examples like these with the comment that people do make mistakes and linguistic errors do happen. However, in the cases presented here (except examples 6 and 7) we are confronted with grammatical features that have been considered 'incorrect' in written High German2 for at least two hundred years.

2

In this paper, I will use "written High German" (hochdeutsche Schriftsprache) to refer to the high variety of German which was established as a written form in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, particularly as a language of literature (Blackall 1959), whereas "standard German" {Standarddeutsch/deutsche Standardsprache) will exclusively refer to the standard

Language norm and language reality

23

When eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians strove to ban them from what they considered 'good' and 'correct' German, these features clearly were in use - otherwise nobody would have bothered to declare them 'incorrect'. The interesting thing, however, is that they are still widely employed in informal spoken German and - as we can see - sometimes also in written German, in spite of the prescriptive work of eminent grammarians like Johann Christoph Gottsched, Johann Christoph Adelung, Karl Ferdinand Becker and their followers. There is, however, one important difference between examples (l)-(5) and examples (6)-(14): The 'deviations' in the first group are used in a humorous way or to mark colloquial language use, whereas the 'mistakes' in the second group were probably not produced intentionally. In this paper, I will be concerned with the question of how and why in some cases language regulation has led to the almost complete disappearance of certain grammatical features from written High German, i. e. why in some cases it has had an effect on language use, whereas in other cases features that have been declared 'incorrect' for two and a half centuries seem to emerge in contemporary standard German, suggesting that prescriptivism in the Germanspeaking communities may have had little or no effect at all on language use. After an outline of some of the main ideas and motivations behind prescriptivism that are relevant in this context, I will briefly address the impact of traditional data selection and data purification on language historiography and then identify the methodology and the text sources of the present study. The main part of the paper will be devoted to a discussion of grammatical features which have disappeared from High German - possibly due to the influence of prescriptivism - and examples of features which are banned from High German but which have resurfaced in it or rather, as I will attempt to prove, never actually disappeared from it.

2. Prescriptivism - ideas and motivations In the history of prescriptivism, at least three different motivational strands can be identified, which will be illustrated with examples from the history of New High German: 1. The most important and certainly most legitimate idea behind language regulation is the standardization3 of a national language. Its motivation may be characterised as rationalist, as it firstly aims at facilitating communication

3

variety (mainly written, but also as a spoken form) which developed not earlier than the twentieth century (cf. section 4 of this paper). For different aspects of standardization processes in the Germanic languages cf. Linn & McLelland (2002).

24

Stephan Elspaß

between the members of a national community which is split up into various dialect groups, and secondly at making this variety fit for use in various domains such as education, administration, jurisdiction, literature and so on. This was certainly one of the main ideas behind the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century grammarians in Germany who tried to establish German in domains which had previously been dominated by Latin and French. 2. A second factor is purism, "the manifestation of a desire on the part of a speech community (or some section of it) to preserve a language from, or to rid it of, putative foreign elements or other elements held to be undesirable (including those originating in dialects, sociolects and styles of the same language)" (Thomas 1991: 12). As has been pointed out frequently, purism often goes hand in hand with nationalist ideologies. "It may be directed at all linguistic levels", as George Thomas wrote (loc. cit.), but primarily affects the lexicon. - A well-known and remarkable example of successful language purism in late nineteenth-century Germany is the introduction of 'Germanised' technical terms in the areas of post and rail, when Convert, Correspondenzkarte, Coupe, Passagierbillet and Perron became Briefumschlag, Postkarte, Abteil, Fahrschein and Bahnsteig ('envelope, postcard, compartment, ticket, platform', cf. von Polenz 1999: 296). This 'change from above' can be directly linked to late nineteenth-century francophobic and nationalist movements in Germany. Nineteenth-century purism with its aim to purify German from 'foreign' elements is markedly different from the movements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which involved weeding out archaisms and provincialisms (von Polenz 1994: 199ff). 3. A third motivation for language regulation might be termed segregational, as it results in the separation of those 'who know' from those who never have the chance to gain full competence in the high variety - and probably never need or desire to master it. Particularly the conservative factions of the educated bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürger), who created and upheld the standard language ideology in Germany (cf. Durrell 2000), were certainly not interested in sharing their newly achieved social power with the masses. In establishing an ideal of correctness and connecting 'correct' speech and writing with cognitive abilities, language regulation has served as a language barrier to put members of the lower and lower middle classes 'in their place'. - In late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany, the enforced codification of grammar and style was aimed at written German and based on 'official' language and the language of 'the best writers' (von Polenz 1994: 199ff.). Nineteenth-century school grammars, textbooks and also guides to letter writing (Briefsteller) can be divided into two groups: those which were directed at students of grammar-school level and educated writers, aimed at guiding those people to master and perfect the written language (e. g. Becker 1831), and those which catered for primary-school children and people with elementary

Language norm and language reality

25

education to give them basic instruction in reading and writing and helping them to formulate simple letters (e. g. Bohm/Steinert 1851). Mass literacy was undoubtedly a major achievement in the nineteenth-century German-speaking states. But the high variety which was a prerequisite to climb the social ladder clearly remained a domain of the upper and upper middle classes - with the exception of the old nobility, who often did not care very much for linguistic norms and correctness (cf. von Polenz 1994: 209ff.). The sociolinguistic situation is described in a nutshell in a scene from Theodor Fontane 's novel Irrungen, Wirrungen, where a young nobleman receives a letter from his mistress, a girl from the lower classes: Dann durchlas er den Brief noch einmal. An zwei, drei Stellen konnte er sich nicht versagen, ein Strichelchen mit dem silbernen Crayon zu machen, aber nicht aus Schulmeisterei, sondern aus eitel Freude. „Wie gut sie schreibt! Kalligraphisch gewiß und orthographisch beinah ... Stiehl statt Stiel ... Ja, warum nicht? Stiehl war eigentlich ein gefurchteter Schulrat, aber, Gott sei Dank, ich bin keiner. Und ,emphehlen'. Soll ich wegen f und h mit ihr zürnen? Großer Gott, wer kann .empfehlen' richtig schreiben? Die ganz jungen Komtessen nicht immer und die ganz alten nie." ['Then he read again through the letter. At two or three points, he could not help underlining with his silver pencil, but not in a schoolmaster's manner but for pure joy. "How good her writing is. Certainly in calligraphic respect, and orthographically it is almost right ... Stiehl instead of Stiel... Well, why not? Stiehl was actually a dreaded Inspector of Education, but I am not, thank God. And emphehlen. Should I be angry with her because she c o n f u s e s / a n d A? Good Lord, who can possibly spell empfehlen correctly? Certainly, the young countesses not always, and the old ones never."] (Theodor Fontane: Irrungen, Wirrungen. Ch. 6)

The "dreaded Inspector of Education", Ferdinand Stiehl, was an influential Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of Education who was responsible for one of the most reactionary decrees in the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolution. The so-called "Stiehlsche Regulative" were a setback in national education as they virtually restricted written language instruction in primary schools to calligraphy, orthography and the drawing up of basic business letters (cf. Fertig 1979: 25). Meanwhile, grammar instruction in higher education contributed to an alienation of written High German, the high variety, from everyday language, as nineteenth-century (high) school grammars in Germany sometimes insisted on rules that no longer applied to everyday language. Examples from German grammar are the strict verbal bracket or elaborated inflectional paradigms, particularly with the genitive and the subjunctive. Otto Behaghel, a leading linguist of that time, noticed, however, that the genitive as well as the

26

Stephan Elspaß

subjunctive as a productive means of inflection had by and large disappeared from everyday spoken German already by the beginning of the New High German period, "während es in der Schriftsprache blüht und gedeiht, gehätschelt von vergangenheitsfreudigen Sprachlehrern" ['while it blossoms and flourishes in written language, pampered by language teachers who indulge in the past'] (Behaghel 1900: 219).4

3. The impact of data selection and data purification on language historiography - the German case Remarks on developments in everyday language like Behaghel's comments on the genitive and the subjunctive are scarce in standard grammars of the time, as grammars as well as traditional studies in historical grammar have focussed on written language. Moreover, their data comes primarily from printed texts, such as fiction (particularly novels), newspapers, scientific and academic texts, encyclopaedias etc. - sometimes also letters and autobiographical texts from artists, politicians, the nobility and other prominent writers. These texts, however, represent the language use of well-educated, experienced writers or even language specialists only. As for the nineteenth century, it has to be remembered that these people accounted for less than 5% of the population. Furthermore, texts written by such authors, particularly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, were usually not edited in their original but in a purified version, so that grammatical and orthographical variants in the works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, the nineteenth-century 'poetic realists', etc. were smoothed out. This editorial practice has not changed very much even today. Texts resulting from such practice seem, of course, to confirm the commonly held view that German grammar has not changed since the second half of the eighteenth century (Admoni 1990: 219f.) - or even worse: they support the view that the German language reached its peak at the time of the classics and has been in constant decline ever since. From this perspective, 'mistakes' such as in examples (1) to (14) are considered as the result of language corruption and decay. Traditional textbooks on the history of German grammar, which mostly follow a teleological approach to language history, have done very little to change this view. In fact, they have rather reinforced it by basing their historical outline on analyses either of printed literary texts or 'pure' dialects,

4

It is largely the excessive use of such forms and constructions in school grammars and literary works which foreign learners of German mocked, such as Mark Twain in his famous essay on "The awful German language".

Language norm and language reality

27

and they have frequently discarded linguistic mongrels such as colloquial or everyday language. In other words: language historians and grammarians have condoned the suppression of substantial evidence in the history of modern languages.

4. Text sources and method of the present study within the framework of a 'language history from below' It is a much easier task to uncover historical language norms than historical language reality. To assess norms, it suffices to study historical sources of prescriptive work. To learn about the full range of actual language use, however, it is imperative to find 'uncensored' texts from a wide variety of text types from all social classes and all regions. To a certain extent, this methodological path has been taken by Historical Sociolinguistics. Many German studies in the context of Historical Sociolinguistics, however, have more or less adopted the teleological view in which language variation is measured against a supposed standard of the time. In Elspaß (2002), it was denied that such a standard existed for nineteenth-century German, as the variety that in linguistics has traditionally been regarded as the standard was known and accessible only to a small elite. To the vast majority of people, some of the prescriptive norms of the 'standard' variety were most probably not even known. Instead, these people relied very much on regional norms of usage, which they could even have learned in school - from primary-school teachers who did not know better themselves. In Elspaß (2003), I elaborated on this argument and pleaded for a drastic and fundamental change of perspective in historical linguistics, exemplified in the language history of New High German. In a 'language history from below' approach, it is necessary to come down from the bei etage of traditional historical linguistics and view language use and language change from the basement, or - to use a different metaphor - to change from a bird's to a worm's eye view. From the perspective of the majority of people who lived, spoke and also wrote texts without any knowledge of the work of 'classical' authors or, in fact, hardly any other books, the history of language use appears to be much more complex than grammars and textbooks have presented so far. From this point of view, the history of a language has sometimes taken completely different routes from the history of its literary language. How can the language used by the broad mass of the population be unearthed? In historical linguistics, it has appeared to be difficult to exemplify a variationist approach to language change with data other than those from modern dialect studies (cf. Milroy 1992: 45ff.). In recent years, however, written documents, in particular private letters by semi-literate writers

28

Stephan Elspaß

(Schneider 2001: 75ff), have come into focus and have proved to represent the most reliable source of ordinary people's use of written language in modern history. Whenever we get the chance to get hold of such texts, we should seize it and make those texts available for linguistic analysis. In my research on everyday language of 'ordinary people', I have concentrated on the private correspondence of nineteenth-century farmers, artisans, soldiers, housemaids, etc. - people who had received elementary education only and for whom writing was not a daily task. Two of the rare occasions when people from the lower and lower middle classes had reason to write private letters were war and migration. From within the context of mass emigration to the USA in the nineteenth century, when six million people from Germany alone left for the New World, I have assembled 648 letters by writers from all German speaking countries and regions. 60 of these letters were written by people (mostly men) with secondary or higher education, and 588 letters by writers - men and women - with primary education only. Figure 1 is a rather schematic map of the German-speaking areas and the regional distribution of the letter-writers' home areas. It shows the number of writers per traditional dialect area.

West Upper German

50

East Upper German 8

Figure 1: Regional distribution of 19th century letter writers' hometowns (German dialect areas)

In the present analysis, two different groups of text sources will be used: Firstly, text sources of prescriptive work are referred to, such as grammars,

Language norm and language reality

29

particularly school grammars, dictionaries, treatises and similar texts on linguistic matters, but also fictional texts in which linguistic weaknesses and shibboleths of people from certain social classes or different German regions are exposed. Secondly, to measure the effectiveness of this prescriptive work, the actual language use in the letter corpus and in data from present-day colloquial German will be analysed. The results of the comparison between language norms and language reality will be assessed in the following manner: if certain features have fully or virtually disappeared from standard or colloquial German, this may well be attributed to the effectiveness of prescriptivism. On the other hand, if certain grammatical features and patterns which were and still are considered 'incorrect' are still widely used in today's colloquial German (and from there gradually sneak into the written standard), this clearly demonstrates the limited effect of prescriptive grammatical rules on language use in these cases. To put it more positively, this use may be regarded as an indicator of the hidden but far-reaching influence of non-standard norms of usage.

5. Effectiveness of prescriptive work In this section, examples of grammatical features will be presented which have disappeared from the standard variety of German, but which have survived in substandard varieties. 5.1 Double negatives Double negatives are well known in Germanic, but also in Romance languages and in Ancient Greek. It is one of the popular language myths that double negatives are illogical (Cheshire 1998). The belief that a double negative is wrong "is perhaps the most widely accepted of all popular convictions about 'correctness'" (Aitchison 2001: 12). In early German grammars, however, double negation was presented as a "legitimate, sometimes even positive [...] rule of German" (Langer 2001: 167). Influenced by rationalist thinking, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Grammarians considered double negatives as ungrammatical and succeeded in creating the myth that such constructions are illogical (ibid., 171f.). The author Heinrich August Schötensack (1856: 557), for example, claimed that New High German had adopted the "law" in Latin grammar that a double negative makes a positive, i. e. an affirmative statement. It seems ironic then, that West Germanic languages like English, Dutch and German have banned the double negative from their standard varieties, whereas it is fully integrated into Romance languages, which are somewhat closer to Latin.

30

Stephan Elspaß

According to standard textbooks, double negation had virtually vanished from written German by the beginning of the eighteenth century (Admoni 1990: 187). So why did nineteenth-century grammarians like Schötensack bother to pronounce a ban on double negatives when they were supposed to be nonexistent? Most probably because they still existed and were still in frequent use. Wladimir Admoni, one of the leading experts on the historical syntax of German, provides us with a brief but revealing comment on double negatives in nineteenth-century German: "Im modal-affirmativen Bereich des Satzes kommt die doppelte Negation nur bei der Wiedergabe der gröberen Umgangssprache vor." ('In modal-affirmative contexts, double negation only occurs in the representation of crude colloquial language.' ibid., p. 225.) In that the use of double negatives in colloquial language does not seem to matter, we are confronted here with the elitist view that non-standard varieties (other than dialects) do not have a legitimate place in the history of language and language change (cf. Milroy 1999: 3Of.). However, in such colloquial language and in certain substandard varieties of German - as in English (Cheshire 1998) and Dutch (Haegemann 2002) - double negatives never ceased to exist. It is noteworthy that even Schiller, Goethe and some nineteenth-century writers employed double negatives repeatedly in their works, as they seem to have appreciated the stylistic nuances that the use of double negatives can create (Paul 1920: 334). In informal nineteenth-century German letters, they were frequently used - though exclusively by writers with primary education only and, as figure 2 shows, particularly by writers from the south of Germany.

West Upper German 12

(24.0%)

East Upper German 8

(44.4%)

Figure 2: N u m b e r of 19Ul century letter writers using double negatives

Language norm and language reality

31

In present-day German dialects and colloquial language, again chiefly in the south,5 double negatives are still widely used, whereas in standard German they only appear occasionally for specific stylistic effects, as in example (1) (Keine Macht für Niemand). Thus, the prescriptivists' work seems to have been successful in banishing this grammatical construction from the standard variety; it has, however, never caused double negatives to vanish from actual language use altogether.

5.2 Past participle without ge-prefix The ge-prefix became a compulsory word-formation morpheme in written German no earlier than the eighteenth century (von Polenz 1994: 261). The only indigenous stem/root verb without ge-prefix ist werden in verbal complexes like ich bin bestohlen worden ( Ί was robbed'). Other than that, only verbs with inseparable prefixes and verbs ending in ieren in German (unlike Dutch!) are without ge- prefix. 6 Up to the late eighteenth century, participles without the ge-prefix from frequently used verbs like kommen, finden, gehen, essen, bringen, etc. appear even in printed texts. Hoffmann (1988: 179) has shown that until the mid eighteenth century, grammarians merely proposed using the ge-prefix uniformly for indigenous verbs. The most influential grammarian of the late eighteenth century, Johann Christoph Adelung (1781: 274), however, declared forms without ge-prefix "pöbelhaft" and "widerwärtig" ('vulgar' and 'disgusting'). In line with Adelung's view, nineteenth-century grammars treated these forms as incorrect. In nineteenth-century letters, once again an interesting regional distribution of such forms emerges: writers from the North and the South of Germany use forms without ge-prefix more frequently than writers from the Central German dialect areas. Forms without prefix in the North can be directly attributed to interference from West Low German dialects which do not have past participle prefixes at all. An illustrative example of the linguistic straggle for the correct form is the following excerpt from a letter by a writer from Westphalia (15):

5

6

A similar regional pattern appears in the Dutch language area: most of the double negative (or polynegative) dialects can be found in the south, in particular in the dialects of West Flanders (Haegemann 2002). In Early New High German, even verbs in -ieren could have the ge- prefix. Albert Ölinger in his Vnderricht der Hoch Teutschen Spraach from 1574 writes that with these verbs as with verbs beginning with g-/k „augmentum additur vel omittitur [...] Passieren/gepassiert vel passiert, Kommen/gekommen vel kommen" (cited in Hoffmann 1988: 178).

32

(15)

Stephan Elspaß

Euren Brif haben wir erhalten u dar aus gesehen das ihr Krankheiten mit die Kinder g e habt haben was uns alle recht leid ist. Nun Lieben Freunde viel besonders kan ich euch diesmal nicht schreiben Fiederike ist uns hier krank geworden und mit 4 Tagen hat der Tod sie von unser Seite gerissen u ihre Krankheit ist die Kolra wesen gewesen ('that the children were ill ... she had suffered from cholera' - literally: "... that you have had illness with the children ... her disease has the cholera been") [Gerd Hinrich Friemann, West Low German dialect area, Nov. 1866]

Writers from Upper German dialect areas, however, dropped the ge-prefix only in the group of frequently used verbs mentioned above. They still do so in colloquial speech, as Eichhoff in his atlas of urban colloquial speech showed (Eichhoff 2000: 4-74: (ge-)kauft), or in colloquial writing, as can be seen on private homepages and in discussion groups on the internet (example 3). It appears that people in the North have abandoned participles without ge-prefix altogether because the colloquial language in the North has gradually moved closer to the standard and non-prefix forms were increasingly identified as dialect markers. In the South of Germany and in Austria, however, where there is no such clear-cut division between standard varieties, regiolects and dialects, these forms seem to be perfectly acceptable in colloquial language.

5.3 The old ^«-construction - and a note on the new a/w-construction In German, the verb tun 'do' can be employed as a lexical verb as well as an auxiliary. With the exception of verb topicalization {Regnen tut es nie. 'Rain it never does.'), phrases with auxiliary tun are considered as not correct in standard German (Duden 2001: 835). Langer (2001) has conclusively shown how the /^«-construction gradually disappeared from written German in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries due to an almost systematic Stigmatisation by leading grammarians and poetologists of that time. Gottsched declared its use as "altväterlich" and "lächerlich" ('old-fashioned', 'ridiculous') and ascribed it to the lower classes (ibid., p.206). Customary belief has it that constructions with auxiliary tun had disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century except for vernacular texts from the Upper German region (von Polenz 1994: 263). Figure 3, however, shows that in nineteenth-century letters, it was still very much in use all over the German speaking countries: in 70 out of 588 letters from writers with primary education, some form of auxiliary tun was employed.

Language norm and language reality

33

The /^«-construction is still used today, but mostly considered as non-standard (dialect, 'lower class German' or baby talk). In standard German texts it is used only humorously (cf. example 4). In the south, however, particularly in Austria (von Polenz 1994: 263), some forms of auxiliary tun seem to be accepted in colloquial standard German (cf. example 5). With the Stigmatisation of the ^«-construction, a particular grammatical means to express aspect had disappeared from written German, particularly the habitual aspect, as in examples (16) and (17), and the progressive aspect, as in (18) and (19): (16) er hat 40 Dolar das Monat lohn und Kost er thut Schaf hüten für einen Man ('... he tends sheep ...') [Katharina Gamsjäger, East Upper German dialect area, 31.07.1887] (17) sie brauchten den Doctor der that mehrere Tage 2 mal den Tag ihn besuchen ('they needed a doctor; he came to see him twice a day for several days') [Bernd Farwick, West Low German dialect area, 03.1867] (18) jezt tun wir Treschen aber ganz anders wie dort ('now we are (at) threshing the grain ...') [Josef Schabl, East Upper German dialect area, 13.08.1922]

34

Stephan Elspaß

(19) die Aussichten sind das Anmerica sich wieder empor heben thut ('... that America will be recovering again ...') [Heinrich Lohmann, West Low German dialect area, 19.12.1879]

While periphrastic tun was successfully suppressed in written German, another construction has - only recently - made its way up to colloquial standard German, namely the am+iNF+se/n-construction (cf. examples 5 and 6) which practically allows one to express both aspects (Reimann 1999: 97). In nineteenth-century texts, relatively few examples can be found (examples 20 and 21): (20) Donnerstag 9 July ist Gerd Schulte Wieking aus Gildehaus so unvermutet zu Tode gekommen er war im einen neügegrabenen Bierkeller am Arbeiten und einer» alter Steinere Wand fiel um und traf ihm zu Tode ('... he was working in a recently dug-out bierkeller when ...') [Bernd Farwick, West Low German dialect area, 12.07.1868] (21) die Arbeit ist hir rar auf die Zechen kann man jetz noch keine Arbeith krigen wir sint jetz auf der Eisenbahn am Arbeithen ('... we now work on the railway') [Matthias Dorgathen, Low Franconian dialect area, 07.05.1881]

The am-construction is presumably somewhat too 'young' to have attracted the attention of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians.7 In the twentieth century, it was frequently pointed out as 'bad German' by schoolteachers in the west of Germany (including my own), but this may have come too late to prevent it from becoming very popular at the end of the last century (Ebert 1996). In the nineteenth century, the aw-construction was clearly restricted to texts from the West of Germany; nowadays, it is commonly used in most German-speaking regions (Rödel 2003).8 What we have here, then, is an interesting example of a grammatical form which originated in dialect and was

7

In particular, it is missing in an essay by the teacher Joseph Müller (1838), in which frequent mistakes by students in the Rhenish region are exposed. The popular term "Rheinische Verlaufsform" ('Rhenish progressive form') points to the widely held view that the am-construction spread out from this region (cf. aan het doen zijn, which is s t a n d a r d Dutch!).

8

Ebert (1996: 60) illustrated the rapid diffusion of the am-construction with a statement of one of her informants: "A middle-aged man from Swabia [in the Southwest of Germany, S. E.] remembers that am was not known in his village when he was a boy, and that it became a fashion when he was a teenager."

Language norm and language reality

35

diffused in colloquial German to fill a gap which was caused by the elimination of another form from the grammatical system.

6. Limits of prescriptive work I will now turn to a second group of grammatical features in which prescriptive work had little or no effect on everyday language. The first two case studies (particles after the comparative and prepositions with the genitive) have been presented in Elspaß (2002), so that their discussion will be kept relatively short. The third phenomenon (split pronominal adverbs) will be considered in more detail. 6.1 Particles after comparative: als, wie and als wie The use of wie or als wie instead of als after the comparative is a frequently made 'mistake' in colloquial standard German. As can be seen in examples (8) and (9), it not only slips into informal speech and writing, but sometimes even into newspaper headlines. Since Johann Christoph Adelung's "Deutsche Sprachlehre" (1781: 479) the prescriptivists' rule is: to mark difference, an adjective in the comparative form plus the particle als 'than' is to be used (in formal language also denn), to mark agreement, the adjective is in the positive form, followed by the particle wie 'as ... as' (in formal language also als). The grammarians of the nineteenth century strove for a clear iconic distribution, i.e. one conjunction was to stand for one grammatical form, thus als after comparative and wie as the standard unmarked form after positive (although als was permitted in certain stylistic contexts). In the nineteenth-century letters, only educated and experienced writers comply with this rule, whereas in nearly 40% of the instances in which writers with primary education use a particle after comparative, the 'incorrect' forms wie and als wie appear (table 1). writers with ... ... secondary

als

wie

denn

als wie

39

90.7%

4

9.3%

0

0.0%

0

0.0%

347

59.6%

182

31.3%

49

8.4%

4

0.7%

education ... primary education Table 1. Use of comparison particles in 19"' century letters

36

Stephan Elspaß

In a recently conducted internet survey (for details cf. Elspaß 2005), about 1,500 informants from over 300 towns in Germany, Austria and the Germanspeaking areas of Switzerland were asked which particle people in their cities and towns would normally use in a phrase like Mein Bruder ist größer ich. ('My brother is taller than me.') The data clearly show that people are quite aware of a widespread use of wie - or 'worse': als wie. The regional distribution in 2002 (figure 4) suggests that the use of wie is concentrated in the Central and Upper German dialect areas, whereas the data from nineteenthcentury letters (Elspaß 2002, 58) show a preference for wie in the North.

Fig. 4: Use of particle after comparative in colloquial standard German (internet survey 2002) 9

9

Where there are t w o variants reported w h i c h are both used equally frequently, they a p p e a r separated b y a c o m m a (x,y). If two variants are not used equally, they are separated by a dot (x.y), and the variant to the left is m o r e frequent.

Language norm and language reality

37

6.2 Prepositions with the genitive The next feature in this group is the prescribed use of the genitive after 'old' prepositions, like dank, statt/anstatt, trotz, während, wegen, and 'new' prepositions, like hinsichtlich, jenseits, oberhalb, ungeachtet etc. In nineteenthcentury letters, the 230 contexts in which such prepositions were used render only 104 instances where the grammatical case can be clearly identified. Again, educated and experienced writers predominantly comply with the school grammar norms, whereas semi-educated writers use the 'incorrect' dative, sometimes even the accusative, in 83.9% of all documented instances (table 2). writers with ...

genitive

dative or accusative

... secondary education

13

81.3%

3

18.7%

(28)

... primary education

14

16.1%

74

83.9%.

(98)

Table 2. Use of grammatical

case after 'prepositions

(case not clear or preposition followed by von)

with genitive'

in

century

letters.

The most prominent and most frequently used preposition with the genitive is wegen. In the nineteenth-century letters, it accounts for more than two thirds (71 = 68.3%) of all instances. Wegen is a particularly blatant example of the discrepancy between prescriptive language norm and language reality. From Adelung (1781: 349) to the modern Duden (1998: 392), grammars have insisted on the genitive after wegen, although the widespread use of the dative is known (Duden 2001: 928). Again, our recent survey shows that this 'bad' habit is still widespread in colloquial standard German: the vast majority of informants reported that the dative is either the usual preposition after wegen or is used as frequently as the genitive.

6.3 Split pronominal adverbs and similar constructions My last example is the case of split pronominal adverbs and constructions:

related

(12) „Da kann der Schroder sich eine Scheibe von abschneiden." [instead of standard:] Davon kann Schröder sich eine Scheibe abschneiden.

38

Stephan Elspaß

In the construction illustrated in example 12, the pronominal (usually da-, but also wo- and hier-) and the prepositional element of the adverb are separated in such a way that at least one other part of the sentence is moved in between. In most of theses cases, the PRO element is moved to the beginning of the sentence. A similar - and also non-standard - type is a construction in which the pro-element seems to be 'doubled': (13) „Da darf man gar nicht drüber nachdenken" [instead of standard:] Darüber darf man gar nicht nachdenken (14) „da halte ich nichts davon" [instead of standard:] davon halte ich nichts According to grammarians like Eisenberg (1999: 195), the 'double PRO'construction is confined to cases in which the preposition begins with a vowel (example 13) so that the vowel in the second pro element da- is usually dropped (cliticisation). 'Double PRO'-constructions in which the preposition begins with a consonant, however, are also widespread (example 14); sometimes the first pronominal element is immediately followed by a 'full' pronominal adverb {da davon halte ich nichts). In two of the more popular monographs about linguistic tendencies in modern German (Zimmer 1986: 39, and Glück/Sauer 1997: 63), it is claimed that the split pronominal adverb is becoming more widespread in spoken German, sometimes even in written language. What these authors fail to see is that this is not a new phenomenon of sloppy or substandard language use in contemporary German. The fact that we find both constructions in dialects and in other Germanic languages is a good indicator of their antiquity. In Dutch, for example, constructions like (22) and (23) are not only commonplace but standard: (22) Hij had er toch aan gedacht. (Breindl 1989: 142) Er hat da doch (dr)an gedacht. ['He did remember it after all.'] (23) Daarhaddenwe niet meer op gerekend. (Haeseryn 1989: 14) Da hatten wir nicht mehr mit gerechnet. ['We weren't expecting it.'] Split pronominal adverbs are well established in historical German and other Germanic languages. Paul (III 1919: 157ff.), Behaghel (1932: 237, 249) and Dal (1966: 89) give plenty of examples ranging from the Germanic languages up to nineteenth-century literature. It appears that the split pronominal adverb is

Language norm and language reality

39

the older variant and the joint version the younger one. As late as in Early New High German, the split variant is the unmarked form. Goethe, Georg Büchner, Ε. Τ. Α. Hoffmann and other writers from the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century use it occasionally in direct speech in their literary works. The 'poetic realists' and other nineteenth-century novelists, however, clearly prefer the non-split pronominal adverb. And thus, according to the standard textbooks of historical German syntax which are based on the language of literature, the split pronominal adverb disappears from nineteenth-century German altogether - only to magically reappear at the end of the twentieth century? In fact, it had never disappeared. Again, the real problem is not the actual language that people used but the 'descriptive gap' in traditional historical syntax, and this is directly related to the text sources which grammarians have focussed on so far. In spite of the general trend to stigmatize the split adverbs as errors, people continued to use them in informal German. In nineteenthcentury letters, they are very common in letters of semi-educated writers, whereas all but one educated writer use the 'correct' merged pronominal adverbs. Even the specific regional distribution of split pronominal adverbs and similar constructions in the dialects (Fleischer 2002a,b) has survived in modern colloquial German: The 'split' variant is traditionally restricted to the North and Northwest, whereas the 'double PRO'-constructions are used in the East Central German area and the southern German-speaking regions (Upper German; cf. example 14 from an interview with a Bavarian MP). This pattern is apparent in Helmut Protze's (1997: 271f.) survey of urban colloquial speech in the former GDR: here the 'double PRO'-construction was noticeable in the southern regions of Thuringia and Saxony. In another internet survey conducted in 2003, we asked for the distribution of the split pronominal adverb and its variants in all German speaking countries. Our new results confirm the notion of the North -South divide. 10 It may be almost unnecessary to say that the split pronominal adverb and its variants have also been a popular target of prescriptivists. The stigmatization of split pronominal adverbs can be traced back to the farce Der Witzling (1750) by Luise Adelgunde Gottsched, wife and collaborator of Johann Christoph Gottsched, in which she employed such constructions to characterise the linguistic deficiencies of a comic character from the North (cf. von Polenz 1994: 221). Johann Christoph Fröbing (1796: 113f.), a teacher from the North

10

The only difference to the distribution in the traditional dialects and in the nineteenth century letters is that in twentyfirst-century German, the 'double PRO'-construction in cases where the preposition begins with a vowel (da habe ich keine Lust auf), has mostly disappeared from Northern colloquial speech.

40

Stephan Elspaß

(probably Neustadt near Bremen), regarded split pronominal adverbs as one of the most common language errors made by Northerners. Two other Northerners by birth, Johann Christoph Adelung (1782: 189) and Karl Philipp Moritz (1794: 83), declared both the split variant and the 'double PRO' variant as incorrect. According to the Duden, split pronominal adverbs are still non-standard in modern German (Duden 2001: 695).

7. Discussion What makes the difference between the first and the second group of features? Why are wie and als wie after comparative, wegen with dative and the split pronominal adverbs (and their variants) so stubbornly used by people in colloquial German, although they know from school that these grammatical forms are incorrect? Three factors have to be considered: One possible factor for the unremitting use of these grammatical features is the fact that they were never restricted to certain regions, so that they never had the stigma of 'provincialisms'. Whereas the grammatical features of the first group became more and more confined to substandard varieties or colloquial language in the South, the features of the second group have proven to be popular in the colloquial standard of all German-speaking regions. Another explanation may be that the features of the second group are both too convenient and/or too useful to be given up - probably even more so than the features of the first group: •

•

There is no communicative need to distinguish between als and wie (or als wie) as there is no semantic or pragmatic difference between these particles. 11 The positive is sufficiently marked by so and the comparative by the -er-morpheme (so schön als/wie/als wie du\ schöner als/wie/als wie du). Thus, the 'correct' particle is just an additional, not an indispensable marker. The use of wegen and other 'old' prepositions with the dative (or even accusative) is in line with the well-known tendency in German to give up the genitive case as a prepositional case altogether. A formal distinction between the genitive and the dative after these prepositions does not contribute to more semantic or pragmatic clarity. 12

11

"Ein innerlich begründeter Unterschied zwischen als und wie ist nicht v o r h a n d e n . " (Behaghel

12

This does not, of course, apply to so called " W e c h s e l p r ä p o s i t i o n e n " (in, auf, an etc.), w h i c h

1927:205) can take the dative or the accusative. T h e genitive as a prepositional case r e m a i n s relatively

41

L a n g u a g e n o r m and language reality

•

The practicality of split pronominal adverbs can be explained as follows (cf. Behaghel 1932: 249): The PRO element da- is anaphoric and topical, therefore tends to stand at the beginning of a sentence; wo- is a question word which must stand at the beginning. Prepositional adverbs are often compulsory parts of the verb in that they introduce complementary prepositional phrases (abschneiden von, nachdenken über, halten von, denken an, rechnen mit, etc.). In verb second sentences, they tend to appear at the end, following the verb. Thus, to split the pronominal adverb or to use the 'double PRO' construction 13 makes it easier to plan and process the sentence, particularly in spoken language.

A third factor is the intensity of the stigmatization of grammatical features. Whereas the features of the second group have basically and simply been declared 'incorrect', the features of the first group have received more explicit negative characterizations such as 'crude', 'vulgar', 'disgusting', 'oldfashioned', 'ridiculous', etc. Among the features discussed in this paper, the ^ - c o n s t r u c t i o n has probably received most attention by prescriptivists: cohorts of schoolteachers have spent much effort and time in devising petty sanctions aimed at deterring schoolchildren from using it in their language.

8. Conclusion Hundsnurscher (1998: 767) noted in a recent handbook article that the overall influence of prescriptivism on language change, particularly grammatical change, in German is not yet fully clear. In the present study, I have proposed a methodological approach to measure the effectiveness and the limits of prescriptivism and applied this approach to examples from the history of New High German. Data from different features were presented which all have a long tradition in German grammar and which have all been declared 'incorrect' in the course of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prescriptive work. None of these features, however, had ever disappeared altogether from actual language use. The effectiveness of prescriptive norms advocated by grammarians, poetologists and generations of schoolteachers, particularly secondary-school

unaffected only with ' n e w ' prepositions like bezüglich,

hinsichtlich,

betreffs

etc. w h i c h are

mainly used in very formal registers (von Polenz 1999: 346). 13

The ' d o u b l e p r o ' construction, which is the younger of the two variants, can actually be seen not only as a c o m p r o m i s e , b u t also as the optimal f o r m : it leaves anaphoric da- and questionwo- at the beginning, and at the s a m e time leaves the pronominal adverb untouched.

42

Stephan Elspaß

teachers, 14 was then measured against the reality of language use in nineteenthand twentyfirst-century colloquial German. The results may be summarized as follows: - Prescriptivist grammars have been effective, insofar as they managed to eliminate certain grammatical features from the standard variety, such as double negatives, past participles without the ge- prefix or periphrastic tun, which have survived in substandard varieties of German or colloquial language in the South only. - Prescriptivism has had only a limited effect on the use of other features, like the use of particles after comparative, the case after 'prepositions with the genitive' or the use of pronominal adverbs. Here, variants that have been declared 'incorrect' for more than two hundred years, are gradually surfacing in print and electronic media texts. Contrary to the belief of linguistic critics and purists, the emergence of these variants is certainly not due to the influence of bad spoken German, to the decline of the German language or to some obscure new variety which some authors call 'Netspeak'. These variants may not have been visible in the literary language or the language of the print media, but they have never disappeared from informal High German - particularly in spoken language, but also in handwritten texts. - Three possible factors were identified as contributing to the effective-ness or non-effectiveness of prescriptivism: the regional distribution of a certain feature, its functionality and the intensity of its stigmatization. In the light of results from empirical studies of 'real' language employed by the wide majority of its speakers and writers, prescribed linguistic norms sometimes seem to be followed by relatively few users of that language only. It appears "that standard languages are not 'normal' states of affairs, and that variability is normal and primary" (Milroy 1992: 210). Such findings cause a serious problem for the teleological notion in language historiography and for the standard language ideology in particular. The traditional picture of the rise of standard languages and their dominant role in recent centuries, fostered by a static 'view from above' of language history and propagated by generations of teachers and handbook writers, may prove to be incomplete - if not fundamentally flawed.

14

As for the nineteenth century, in particular, it cannot be taken for granted that primary-school teachers had mastered or even k n e w most grammatical norms of written German (cf. Elspaß 2002).

Language norm and language reality

43

9. References Adelung, Johann Christoph. 1781. Deutsche Sprachlehre. Zum Gebrauche der Schulen in den Konigl. Preuß. Landen. Berlin: Voß. Adelung, Johann Christoph. 1782. Umständliches Lehrgebäude der Deutschen Sprache, zur Erläuterung der Deutschen Sprachlehre für Schulen. Vol. II. Berlin: Voß. Admoni, Wladimir. 1990. Historische Syntax des Deutschen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Aitchison, Jean. 3 2001. Language Change. Progress or Decay? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barbiers, Sjef, Leonie Cornips & Susanne van der Kleij (eds.). Syntactic Microvariation. Amsterdam: Meertens Institute. Becker, Karl Ferdinand. 1831. Schulgrammatik der deutschen Sprache. Frankfurt a. Μ.: Kettembeil. Behaghel, Otto. 1900. 'Geschriebenes Deutsch und gesprochenes Deutsch. Festvortrag, gehalten auf der Hauptversammlung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Sprachvereins zu Zittau am 1. April 1899.' In: Wissenschaftliche Beihefte zur Zeitschrift des Allgemeinen Deutschen Sprachvereins 17/18. 213-232. Behaghel, Otto. 1927. Von deutscher Sprache. Aufsätze, Vorträge und Plaudereien. Lahr: Schauenburg. Behaghel, Otto. 1932. Deutsche Syntax. Vol. I (1923): Die Wortklassen und Wortformen. Vol. IV: Wortstellung. Periodenbau. Heidelberg: Winter. Blackall, Eric A. 1959. The Emergence of German as a Literary Language 1700-1775. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Böhm, H[ermann] & W. Steinert. 1851. Kleine deutsche Sprachlehre. Berlin: Krüger. Breindl, Eva. 1989. Präpositionalobjekte und Präpositionalobjektsätze im Deutschen. (= Linguistische Arbeiten, 220.) Tübingen: Niemeyer. Cheshire, Jenny. 1998. 'Double Negatives are Illogical.' In: Bauer, Laurie & Peter Trudgill (eds.). Language Myths. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 113-122. Dal, Ingerid. 3 1966. Kurze deutsche Syntax auf historischer Grundlage. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Duden. 6 1998. Duden. Grammatik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache, ed. by Peter Eisenberg [et al.]. Mannheim: Dudenverlag. Duden. s 2001. Duden. Richtiges und gutes Deutsch. Wörterbuch der sprachlichen Zweifelsfälle. Mannheim: Dudenverlag. Durrell, Martin. 2000. 'Standard Language and the Creation of National Myths in Nineteenth-Century Germany.' In: Barkhoff, Jürgen, Gilbert Carr & Roger Paulin (eds.). Das schwierige neunzehnte Jahrhundert [...]. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 15-26.

44

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Ebert, Karin H. 1996. 'Progressive Aspect in German and Dutch.' In: Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 1. 41-62. Eichhoff, Jürgen. 2000. Wortatlas der deutschen Umgangssprachen. Vol. 4. Bern & München: Saur. Eisenberg. Peter. 1999. Grundriss der deutschen Grammatik. Vol. 2: Der Satz. Stuttgart: Metzler. Elspaß, Stephan. 2002. 'Standard German in the 19th century? (Counter-) Evidence from the private correspondence of "ordinary people".' In: Linn & McLelland. 43-65. Elspaß, Stephan. 2003. Sprachgeschichte von unten. Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltags deutsch im 19. Jahrhundert. Habilitationsschrift Münster [Ms.]. Elspaß, Stephan. 2005. 'Zum Wandel im Gebrauch regionalsprachlicher Lexik. Neue Erforschungswege und Erkenntnisse.' In: Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 72. [in print] Fertig, Ludwig, ed. 1979. Die Volksschule des Obrigkeitsstaates und ihre Kritiker. Texte zur politischen Funktion der Volksbildung im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Fleischer, Jürg (2002a): Die Syntax von Pronominaladverbien in den Dialekten des Deutschen. Eine Untersuchung zu Preposition Stranding und verwandten Phänomenen. Stuttgart: Steiner. Fleischer, Jürg (2002b): 'Preposition Stranding in German Dialects.' In: Barbiers, Cornips & van der Kleij. 116-151. Fröbing, Johann Christoph. 1796. Ueber einige der gewohnlichsten Sprachfehler der Niedersachsen. Ein Büchlein zum Unterricht und zur Unterhaltung. Bremen: Wilmans. Glück, Helmut/Wolfgang Werner Sauer. 2 1997. Gegenwartsdeutsch. Stuttgart: Metzler. Gottsched, Luise Adelgunde Viktorie. 1750/1962. Der Witzling. Ein deutsches Nachspiel in einem Aufzuge. (= Komedia, 1). Berlin: de Gruyter. [After the 2nd edition, 1750; 1st edition „Herr Witzling" 1745], Haegemann, Liliane. 2002. 'Some notes on DP-internal negative doubling.' In: Barbiers, Cornips & van der Kleij. 152-184. Haeseryn, Walter. 1989. 'Gesplitste en ongesplitste voornaamwoordelijke bijwoorden.' In: Neerlandica Extra Muros 52. 12-18. Hoffmann, Walter. 1988. 'Vom variablen Usus zur Kodifizierung der Norm: Die Geschichte der „unorganischen participia mit ge- im Frühneuhochdeutschen.' In: Wiesinger, Peter (ed.). Studien zum Frühneuhochdeutschen. Festschrift für Emil Skala. Göppingen: Kümmerle. 197-184. Hundsnurscher, Franz. 1998. 'Historische Syntax.' In: Besch, Werner, Anne Betten, Oskar Reichmann & Stefan Sonderegger (eds.). Sprachgeschichte.

Language norm and language reality

45

Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung. 2nd rev. ed. Vol. 1. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. 755-775. Langer, Nils. 2001. Linguistic Purism in Action. How auxiliary tun was stigmatized in Early New High German. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. Linn, Andrew R. & Nicola McLelland (eds.). 2002. Standardization. Studies from the Germanic Languages. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford & Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Milroy, James. 1999. 'The consequences of standardisation in descriptive linguistics.' In: Bex, Tony & Richard J. Watts (eds.). Standard English. The widening debate. London & New York: Routledge. 16-39. Moritz, Karl Philipp. 1794. Des Η. Hofr. Moritz grammatisches Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache, fortgesetzt vom Prediger Johann Ernst Stuß. Vol. 2. Berlin: Felisch. Müller, Joseph. 1838. Niederrheinische Provinzialismen. Eine Abhandlung. Aachen, Leipzig: Mayer. Paul, Hermann. 1919. Deutsche Grammatik. Vol. III, part IV: Syntax, Erste Hälfte. Halle: Niemeyer. Paul, Hermann. 1920. Deutsche Grammatik. Vol. IV, part IV: Syntax, Zweite Hälfte (1920). Halle: Niemeyer. Polenz, Peter von. 1994, 1999. Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Vol. II: 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Vol III: 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Protze, Helmut. 1997. Wortatlas der städtischen Umgangssprachen. Zur territorialen Differenzierung der Sprache in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Berlin, Sachsen-Anhalt, Sachsen und Thüringen. Köln, Weimar & Wien: Bühlau. Reimann, Ariane. 1999. Die Verlaufsform im Deutschen. Entwickelt das Deutsche eine Aspektkorrelation? Ph. D. Bamberg. [Mikrofiche]. Rödel, Michael. 2003. 'Die Entwicklung der Verlaufsform im Deutschen.' In: Muttersprache 113. 97-107. Schneider, Edgar W. 2001. 'Investigating Variation and Change in Written Documents.' In: Chambers, J. K., Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.). The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell. 67-96. Schötensack, Heinrich August. 1856. Grammatik der neuhochdeutschen Sprache. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer historischen Entwickelung. Erlangen: Enke. Thomas, George. 1991. Linguistic Purism. London: Longman. Zimmer, Dieter. 1986. Redens Arten. Über Trends und Tollheiten im neudeutschen Sprachgebrauch. Zürich: Haffmanns.

Wim Vandenbussche, Roland Willemyns, Jetje De Groof, Eline Vanhecke

Taming thistles and weeds amidst the wheat: language gardening in nineteenth-century Flanders.

1. Historical background In the history of the standardisation of Dutch in Flanders during the nineteenth century, one can observe a number of attempts to keep the language free of foreign influences on the lexical, morphological and syntactic level, and to promote Dutch alternatives for those foreign forms. As will be demonstrated below, these purist activities - albeit intriguing in their own right - can only be fully appreciated when related to the complex sociolinguistic situation in the southern Low Countries from 1600 onwards. Before zooming in on the actors, the strategies and, most of all, the ideological discussions involved in the nineteenth-century purism debates in Flanders, it will therefore prove useful to clarify a number of extra-linguistic elements which shaped the Flemish linguistic landscape at the time.1 With the fall of Antwerp in 1585 to the Spanish occupying forces, the 17 provinces of the Low Countries were split up: the northern provinces became the independent Republic of the Low Countries (largely identical to the present-day Netherlands), whereas the southern Spanish Low Countries (comprising the greater part of present-day Flanders) remained under foreign rule. In the north, a Standard Dutch gradually began to take shape soon after, but in the south this possibility of standardisation was nipped in the bud by the occupiers' preference for French as the language of prestige and administration. The Austrian (1714-1794) and French (1794-1815) successors of the Spanish rulers also favoured French as their prestige language. When Flanders was eventually reunited with the Netherlands between 1815 and 1830, a sharp linguistic border is said to have separated both territories, to the extent

1

A full account of the standardisation history of Dutch can be found in Willemyns 2003b.

Language gardening in nineteenth-century Flanders

47

that the northern speakers of Dutch did not recognise the southern Dutch dialects as varieties of their own language, and vice versa. The Bruges-born minister of foreign affairs De Coninck-Van Outryve even went so far as to declare that the tongue spoken in Flanders was useless for any official function: [H]et Vlaamsch kan, zooals het door hen gekend wordt, noch den eenen, noch den anderen dienstigh zijn tot het stellen van akten van eenig belang [...] Ik ben van oordeel, dat men in de allereerste plaats in deze provincien de Nederduitsche taal moet doen leeren, omdat men die taal daar niet kent, ten minste zoo niet kent, dat van dezelve door verlichte mannen in eenige belangrijke beraadslagingen gebruik kan worden gemaakt. ['Flemish can, as it is known by them [i.e. the members of various social classes in Flanders], be of use to neither one nor the other, to perform acts of a certain importance [...] I hold the opinion that one should first and foremost teach the Dutch language in these provinces, because one does not know that language there, at least not in such a way, that it could be used by enlightened men in any important discussions'; quoted in Willemyns 2003a: 189; all translations are ours].

Due to the absence of clear language norms for Dutch in Flanders, its speakers were prey to feelings of linguistic insecurity and inferiority. At the time of Belgian independence in 1830, Belgium was dominated by French on all government levels, and the mass of the Dutch dialect-speaking population of Flanders saw itself controlled by a small upper-class layer which deliberately used its knowledge of French to exclude the population from political participation and upward social mobility (Vandenbussche 2004). Although there was official freedom of language choice, an influential segment of government officials considered it evident that French was to be the only language of the Belgians, and the later Prime Minister Charles Rogier even stated in 1832 'on detruira [...] peu ä peu I'element germanique en Belgique' ('one will destroy little by little the Germanic element in Belgium'; quoted in Peeters 1930: xiv). This conflict of a social, political and economic nature between French and Dutch is a first important element for a sound understanding of the purist strategies that would be developed in Flanders during the nineteenth century. A second, equally important and intriguing language conflict, however, manifested itself within the Dutch language and appealed to feelings of an autonomous Flemish national identity. The growing Flemish Movement2 in favour of the revitalisation and rehabilitation of the Flemish population - a

2

The history of the Flemish Movement has been meticulously described in the Nieuwe Encyclopedic van de Vlaamse Beweging (NEVB 1998), which contains an elaborate section on language planning issues (Willemyns and Haeseryn 1998).

48

Wim Vandenbussche, Roland Willemyns, Jetje De Groof, Eline Vanhecke

counter-elite which grew in force despite government policy - realized very soon that a generally accepted Dutch standard language was vital to the successful pursuit of its aims. This Dutch language had to be able to serve as an alternative for all the prestige functions that were consistently attributed to French. Although the various camps in the Flemish Movement shared the conviction that it was necessary to promote a standardised Dutch language, two opposing strategies were proposed to attain this goal. A number of language activists, commonly referred to as 'integrationists', opted for the adoption of the northern standard as it had developed in the Netherlands, hoping that the prestige and the linguistic and functional elaboration of that variety would favour its position and integration in Belgian society. Fiercely opposed to this 'variety import', however, were the so-called 'particularists', defending a newly forged Flemish language that differed mainly from northern Dutch by the presence of lexical and grammatical elements from the great variety of Flemish dialects. As such, the forces of the defenders of Dutch were divided into two camps, which would continue to attack each other in a stream of virulent metalinguistic publications up until the end of the nineteenth century. 3 Both integrationists and particularists have employed purist strategies to obtain their goals, as will be discussed below. It should be stressed, however, that purism - mainly driven by the actions of respected and educated individuals - was a modest part of the much larger array of means used to support their respective causes. The integrationist faction in particular benefited from other actions which eventually were far more powerful and influential than its purist activities: for example, the long-pursued acceptance of a common spelling system for north and south on the governmental level was achieved in 1864 and was a major if not the final blow for the particularists. One must further consider the strengthening effect on the integrationist faction of the collaboration between scholars from the north and south in the context of the bi-annual Dutch Congresses for Language and Literature from 1849 onwards, which led, among other things, to the compilation of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal 'Dictionary of the Dutch Language' (De Groof 2003, Willemyns 1993a). Finally, integrationist and particularist purism are concepts which can be usefully applied when discussing theoretical prescriptivism and views on language policy; it may prove less fruitful, however, to use these labels for the description of actual language use.

3

A comprehensive overview of a selection of these polemic publications can be found in De Groof 2002a.

49

Language gardening in nineteenth-century Flanders

2. Integrationist purism The integrationist goals went beyond merely overcoming the Flemish feelings of insecurity with regard to language use. The strategy of continuously referring to the unity of northern and southern Dutch was aimed at importing the prestige of the northern standard variety as a powerful cultural, economic and political instrument in the battle against French. The fact that the disapproval of French interference in Flemish Dutch was constantly to the fore of the integrationist actions may also (at least partially) be attributed to nationalist and identity issues. 4 A leading figure of the early Flemish Movement, Jan-Baptist David, claimed in this respect (1856): O n z e schryvers d e n k e n niet in h u n n e tael, maar i n ' t Fransch, h e t w e l k e d a e r o m in h u n n e v o o r d r a g t [ . . . ] b a r b a r i s m e n brengt, tot groote s c h a d e der volkstael, j a tot verbastering van het nationael gevoel, van den belgischen geest. [ ' O u r writers do not think in their o w n l a n g u a g e but in French instead, w h i c h leads to the introduction of ' b a r b a r i s m s ' in their diction, to the great d e t r i m e n t of the p e o p l e ' s language, indeed, to the corruption of national feeling and the B e l g i a n Spirit'; quoted in W i l l e m y n s and H a e s e r y n 1998: 2935]

These barbarisms were mostly French loans, commonly labelled Gallicisms (although the less frequent Germanisms were also objected to). The battle against these forms was mainly pursued in a series of articles and books in which the despised French loans were listed, followed by elaborate comments on the proper Dutch alternative forms: Laten. - < < L a a t mij/>>

M O R U A N X , Inl. Nov., 88 ; laissez-moi.

Het w e r k w .

laten

w o r d t z o o niet als overg. w e r k w . met een lijdend voorw., z o n d e r n a d e r e b e p a l i n g hierbij, gebezigd. H e t Nederl. zou zeggen: laat me met rust, laat me met

vrede.

Leenen. - « M e n leent gaarne zijne eigen gevoelens aan a n d e r e n » , M O R U A N X , Inl. Nov.

66; on prete

Frans. Zeg: M e n schrijft

4

volontiers ses propres sentiments ä d ' a u t r e s . Dät w e e r is gaarne zijn eigen gevoelens aan anderen toe.

Cf. Meert (1941 [1899]: 14): "De gallicismen zijn een kenmerk van het Zuidnederlandsch. Als er een afwijking tusschen Zuid- en Noordnederlandsch is, dan is het hoofdzakelijk door de groote hoeveelheid gallicismen die zieh in het Zuidnederlandsch zoodanig hebben vastgezet, dat de Vlaming zonder opzettelijke Studie geen vermoeden krijgt van hun bestaan [...] Het is toch niet onze wensch ze te behouden en dat geestelijk juk van het Fransch te blijven dragen!" ['Gallicisms are a feature of southern Dutch. If there are differences between southern and northern Dutch, then it is mainly because of the large number of Gallicisms which have taken root in southern Dutch in such a way that the Fleming has no suspicion of their existence without deliberate study [...] It cannot be our wish to preserve them and to keep on carrying that moral yoke from French!']

50

Wim Vandenbussche, Roland Willemyns, Jetje De Groof, Eline Vanhecke

[ ' L a t e n [to leave]. - «Laat 88 ; laissez-moi.

mijt»

[lit. « L e a v e m e ! » ] M O R U A N X , Inl.

Nov.,

T h e verb laten is not used in this w a y as a transitive v e r b with a

direct object, w i t h o u t a specific a d j u n c t . In Dutch one w o u l d say: laat me met

rust,

laat me met vrede [lit. leave m e with rest, leave m e with peace]. Leenen [to lend], - « M e n leent g a a r n e zijne eigen g e v o e l e n s aan a n d e r e n » [lit. « O n e eagerly lends o n e ' s f e e l i n g s to o t h e r s » ] , M O R U A N X , Inl. Nov. prete schrijft

66; on

volontiers ses p r o p r e s s e n t i m e n t s ä d ' a u t r e s . This again is F r e n c h . Say: M e n gaarne zijn eigen g e v o e l e n s aan anderen toe. [lit. O n e attributes eagerly

o n e ' s own feeling to o t h e r s ' ; M e e r t 1941 [1899]: 169-170]

It is impossible to quote all the authors and the works in which their prescriptive advice was presented; Peeters's list of Belgicisms contains an extensive compilation of the most frequent 'important deviations from Standard Dutch in the southern Low Countries' (Peeters 1930: xxii) which were considered 'absolutely wrong' (ibid: xxiii), including Gallicisms. The titles of these columns and volumes reveal the moralising attitude of the writers: Uit de pathologie der taal 'from the pathology of language' (Meert 1894a, 1894b), Taalphantasmen 'Language phantasms' (ibid.), Distels 'Thistles' (Meert 1897) and Onkruid onder de tarwe 'Weeds amidst the wheat' (Meert 1941 [1899]). 5 The latter work, together with De Vreese 1899 - both commissioned in a competition by the Royal Flemish Academy of Linguistics and Literature - is considered as the apogee of 'anti-Gallicist' language planning. Its author, Hyppoliet Meert - one of the most prominent integrationist activists - was crystal clear in his evaluation of French interference in southern Dutch: Het v r e e m d e kan o n e i n d i g veel gevaarlijker zijn, daar w a a r het een N e d e r l a n d s c h g e w a a d aantrekt en o n g e m e r k t d a a r d o o r binnensluipt, aan d e taal haar kracht, h a a r eigenaardheid r o o f t en o n s taalgevoel verstompt, vernietigt. D e v r e e m d e invloed kan zieh doen gelden in d e v e r s c h i j n s e l e n van de w o o r d l e e r , in de z i n s v o e g i n g en d e w o o r d s c h i k k i n g ; hij kan h o n d e r d e n uitdrukkingen b i n n e n s m o k k e l e n , die alleen w o o r d e l i j k N e d e r l a n d s , d o c h in den grond v r e e m d zijn. Dat is werkelijk het geval in Zuid-Nederland.

De

taal,

geschreven

door

Vlaamsche

schrijvers, krioelt

van

v r e e m d e inmengsels. V o o r a l staan ze o n d e r F r a n s c h e n invloed. Het gallicisme is v e r r e w e g o n z e ergste vijand. [ ' F o r e i g n i n f l u e n c e can b e endlessly m o r e d a n g e r o u s w h e n it takes on the veil of Dutch and thus intrudes unnoticed,

5

and r o b s the l a n g u a g e of its p o w e r

and

This horticultural imagery would continue to be used for purist Sprachpflege throughout the twentieth century; cf. the title of the daily language advice column in the Flemish newspaper De Standaard from 1957 onwards, Taaltuin 'language garden'.

51

Language gardening in nineteenth-century Flanders peculiarity and blunts, d e s t r o y s our l a n g u a g e feeling. It m a y be felt in

the

vocabulary, in the syntax or w o r d order, it can s m u g g l e in h u n d r e d s of sayings which are o n l y D u t c h in f o r m , but foreign in nature. That truly is the case in the southern L o w Countries. T h e language, written b y the Flemish writers, a b o u n d s with

foreign intermingling. T h e y are especially under French

influence.

The

Gallicism is our biggest e n e m y b y f a r ' ; M e e r t 1897: 76; cf. also M e e r t 1941 [1899]: 122],

This almost evangelical discourse was ultimately aimed at illustrating 'de intieme betrekking [...] tusschen het helder denken van een volk en de vastheid, de duidelijkheid, de volmaaktheid van zijn taal' ['the intimate relationship between a people's clear thoughts and the steadfastness, the clarity and the perfection of its language'; Meert 1894a: 3], It should be noted, moreover, that newspaper journalists were singled out as the major group responsible for the degeneration of Dutch in Flanders: [ 0 ] n z e kranten zijn v o o r o n s taalgevoel het verderfelijkst van al! K a r r e v r a c h t e n ergerlijke fiaters b r e n g e n ze d a g e l i j k s aan den man. O n a f g e b r o k e n g e v e n ze d e koddigste

bewijzen

van

de

onbeholpenste

onwetendheid

op het

gebied

van

taalkennis [ . . . ] Het v e r m a k e l i j k s t e daarbij is, dat deze bladen het d a g e l i j k s met elkaar over taalquaesties aan den stok krijgen. [ ' O u r n e w s p a p e r s are the m o s t r u i n o u s of all for our language feeling. T h e y d a i l y dispose of carriage-loads of a n n o y i n g blunders. T h e y incessantly g i v e t h e m o s t comical p r o o f of the m o s t h e l p l e s s ignorance on the level of l a n g u a g e k n o w l e d g e [ . . . ] T h e m o s t a m u s i n g t h i n g is that these n e w s p a p e r s are involved in daily d i s p u t e s about l a n g u a g e q u e s t i o n s ' ; M e e r t 1941 [1899]: 10]. 6

Excessive purism, Gallicisms, as this integration of north political goal. Meert

however, was not encouraged as a remedy against was counterproductive with respect to the linguistic and south, which always remained the main languageclearly stated:

[1]k ben in 't geheel niet i n g e n o m e n met dat s c h e p p e n van w o o r d e n , w a a r ze volstrekt o v e r b o d i g zijn [ . . . ] die w o o r d s m e d e r i j is een b i j z o n d e r k e n m e r k van het Z u i d n e d e r l a n d s c h ; m e n bezit g e n e uitgebreide, vaste taalkennis; telkens en telkens moet m e n een b e g r i p u i t d r u k k e n , w a a r v o o r m e n het w o o r d niet kent: m e n gaat aan

6

Meert (1894a,b,c), for example, only uses newspaper excerpts to illustrate the ubiquitous 'phantasms from the pathology of language' in Flemish Dutch. Another language gardener, Desire Claes, referred to his enemies as "Gazette, Chronique en andere gallische schotelplaggen" ['newspaper, chronicle and other Gallic dishcloths'; quoted in Willemyns and Haeseryn 1998: 2937],

52

W i m V a n d e n b u s s c h e , Roland Willemyns, Jetje De Groof, Eline V a n h e c k e

't smeden, 'tgeen doorgaans synoniem is met knoeien. Dat smeden vindt zijn oorzaak hierin, dat zoo weinig personen in Zuid-Nederland weten wat taal bepaald, wat de Nederlandsche taal

is;

is; er is iets, waar men zieh niet klaar

rekenschap van geeft: de Nederlandsche taal bestaat:

zij moet niet worden

[...]

Woordsmederij voor begrippen, die in de taal een vasten, algemeen gebruikelijken naam hebben, is niet alleen nutteloos, maar is zelfs zeer gevaarlijk, wanneer ze op zoo groote schaal gedreven wordt zooals dit in Zuid-Nederland het geval is. [ Ί am not pleased with the creation of words where they are entirely superfluous... This coining of words is a particular characteristic of southern Dutch; one does not have a broad, fixed knowledge of the language; over and again one has to express a meaning for which one does not k n o w the word; one starts coining, which is usually synonymous with bungling. This coining is caused by the fact that very few people in the southern Low Countries are aware what language is; more specifically, what the Dutch language is; there is something which is not clearly understood: the Dutch language exists, it does not have to come into being... Creating words for concepts that have a fixed and commonly used name in a language is not only useless, but even very dangerous when it is practised on a large scale as is the case in the southern Low Countries'; Meert 1894c: 3]. 7

3. Particularist purism The particularists, inspired to a certain extent by feelings of Flemish-centred national pride, were opposed to what they called the consistent attempts to purify standard Dutch from Flemish interference. Muyldermans, a late nineteenth-century particularist, summed up their views as follows: Wij veroorloven ons ook de rechten van het spraakmakende deel der Zuidelijke Nederlanden voor te staan [...] Moet er de gouwtaal van het Zuiden uitgesloten, dan dient onze taal geen Nederlandsch maar enkel Noordnederlandsch te worden geheeten [...] want nu ook meer dan ooit trekt men in naam der beschaving tegen ons Zuidnederlandsch taaleigen te velde, alsof de Nederlandsche taal niet meer literarisch, niet meer beschaafd zoude weezen, wanneer de gekuischte goudsteenen van onze gewestspraak er in versmolten waren. [ ' W e grant ourselves permission to defend the rights of the language making part of the southern Low Countries. If the specific regional southern language is to be excluded, the language should not be called Dutch but northern Dutch... because now more than ever is our own southern Dutch language fought against in the name

7

This point of view w a s c o n f i r m e d in M e e r t (1941 [1899]: 120), where puristerij was called ridiculous.

'puristery'

Language gardening in nineteenth-century Flanders

53

of civilisation, as if the D u t c h l a n g u a g e w o u l d n o longer be literary or civilised if the polished l u m p s of gold of our r e g i o n ' s language w e r e to b e i n c l u d e d ' ; q u o t e d in W i l l e m y n s and H a e s e r y n 1998: 2 9 3 5 ]

Despite the publication of particularist language guides (Muyldermans 1893, for example) and inflammatory polemics between particularist and integrationist language advisors (cf. Willemyns and Haeseryn 1998: 2937-8), the real opposition between the actual written language of both factions appears, in retrospect, to have been less significant than their language-political feud. In addition to the fact that they shared the negative attitude towards French loans, certain integrationists actually did accept certain aspects of southern language use, whereas the texts of many particularists were less 'specifically southern' than their more radical theoretical claims suggested. One reason for the early failure of the particularists may have been the fact that the first generation (active around 1840) concentrated all their efforts on a topic which had little to do with real linguistic evolution, namely orthography. In many of the treatises which were written at the time, spelling was not seen as a mere convention but as the very heart and soul of the language. As such, for long [a:] was considered to be more Flemish that . 8 Despite the particularist attempts during the so-called spelling war (Couvreur & Willemyns 1998), to fight against the adoption of the northern Dutch spelling system (which they found both Protestant, heretic and reminiscent of the political union between Flanders and the Netherlands), a near-identical spelling convention was introduced by law in 1844.9 This first symbolic step towards linguistic integration foreshadowed the defeat of the first generation of particularists (which would, as mentioned above, be consolidated with the acceptance of the De Vries - te Winkel system in 1864). Their successors at the end of the century were similarly engaged in virulent discussions on the use of certain words and expressions, without ever relating their views to the larger context of the social situation in Flanders. This detachment from social reality, in which the majority of the population was illiterate (Ruwet & Wellemans 1978), may have been a second lethal characteristic of the particularist discourse. The dire need for a good school curriculum in Dutch and the idea of

8

9

An overview of the variation across the spelling systems at play in nineteenth-century Flanders is given in Vandenbussche (2002: 31). The sociohistorical context of the successive spelling reforms is discussed in Couvreur and Willemyns (1998). The ideological overtones of this orthography issue may be gleaned from the long poem Spellingoorlog 'Spelling war' by the Flemish author Prudens Van Duysse: "Wat gaat men doen met wijsberaden zin/ Om 't waer geloof en de echte Spelling voor te planten?/ -Den catechismus drukken in/ De Spelling van de Protestanten." ['What will one do with wise sense/ To spread the true faith and the true Spelling?/ Print the catechism in/ the Protestants' spelling'; quoted in Coopman and Schärpe 1899: 92],

54

Wim Vandenbussche, Roland Willemyns, Jetje De Groof, Eline Vanhecke

the standard language as a crucial means of emancipation, for example, were constantly recurring themes in the integrationist treatises: in their conception, the language struggle was first and foremost a social struggle (Boeva 1994).

4. Abused purism The term particularists has been used not only for those language planners advocating an internal standardisation based on local, southern language usage or for those advocating a more extensive proportion of southern vocabulary in a standard language with a northernly flavour. It is also commonly applied to the so-called 'second generation' of particularists, who were mainly active in the coastal province of West Flanders during the 1870s.10 This group is to be distinguished from the first generation for its overt and very specific ideological motivations. As a matter of fact, it appears to have been a movement that had little interest in linguistic emancipation altogether. Its leaders clearly identified themselves as members of the fanatic ultramontane wing of Catholicism, and their involvement in the language issue was nothing but a function of a larger religious goal, a motivation which is rarely observed in the context of purism and language care. The dismissal of northern language elements and the integration of 'purist' dialectal West Flemish forms in a Flemish language-of-its-own were necessary weapons in their religious battle. A close reading of the minutes of meetings of the foremost association of second-generation particularists, the 'Sint-Luitgaarde Gilde' (SLG 1875, 1876, 1877, 1879), reveals a discourse which may amuse the reader today, but equally illustrates the overt abuse of language planning and purism for ideological purposes. The need to promote West Flemish linguistic elements was explained as follows by one of the chairmen of the movement: [...] dragen w i j o n s oud Dietsch eene z o o vuerige liefde toe, 't is o m d a t het o n z e d i e p i n g e w o r t e l d e o v e r t u i g i n g is dat het o u d e v l a a m s c h e kleed het b e k w a a m s t e is o m de zuivere v l a a m s c h e M a a g d

te b e v r i j d e n tegen de v e r p e s t e n d e

invloed

van

g o d d e l o o s h e i d en z e d e b e d e r f . [ ' i f w e so d e a r l y love our W e s t F l e m i s h language of old, it is b e c a u s e w e are d e e p l y convinced that the old F l e m i s h r o b e is best able to liberate the p u r e F l e m i s h M a i d f r o m the p o i s o n i n g i n f l u e n c e of g o d l e s s n e s s and moral c o r r u p t i o n ' ; S L G 1875: 57].

10

A detailed discussion of the motivations, the discourse and language planning strategies of the second particularist generation is given in Willemyns 1997, which served as the basis for this paragraph.

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55

Any attempt to create a standard language which would enable the West Flemish population to take note of the heathen northern ideas had, therefore, to be rejected by all possible means. Despite the presence of a number of wellinformed linguists in this movement, the influence and spread of the 'half Jewish, half heathen High Dutch' (as the famous poet Gezelle labelled it) was scapegoated in the most obsessive and hilarious ways, even if this meant taking the argument well beyond the border of reason and scientific facts. One representative example m a y illustrate the appalling and nonsensical abuse of pro-West Flemish purist strategies by the second generation particularists. At the 1877 meeting of the Sint-Luitgaarde Gilde, a lecture on the influence of German on Dutch was held, to support the view that Flemish monophthongs had to be promoted in the pronunciation of Dutch, because these were intrinsically better than northern Dutch diphthongs (SLG 1877: 7786). The motivation for this preference was not linguistic, but purely religious. The diphthongisation of the long vowels in German was claimed to be heathen and devilish because this sound change had been instigated by Luther, the 'German antichrist', whose Bible translation had changed the German pronunciation [vi:n] to Saxon [vain]: En inderdaad, van Luthers tijd voort, ziet men overal de oude, zuivere, voile Swaabsche klanken der Minnesänger en Heldendichter plaatse maken voor de nieuwopkomende saksersche sonanten. De alemannische lange ?, gelijk wij ze, West-Vlamingen nog op onze lippen hebben, ging over in ei, die eene soort van tweeklank is [...]: Min lib, din wib, thie wile, sin rich, dat wierd nu mein leib, dein weib, die weile, sein reich, enz. De lange ύ (de weersplete van onze uu) kreeg van 's gelijke eene a of ä (e in 't vi.) voor klankgenoot, en wierd alzoo in au of äu (de hollandse ui) herschapen: Zoo stond rümen in räumen, läten in lauten, [...] hüs in haus [...] verkleed. De middelhoogduitsche tweeklank iu wierd vervangen door het nieuwe eu: fiur wierdfeuer, [...] niuwe, neue; [...] enz. ['In effect, from Luther's times onwards one sees everywhere how the old, pure, full Swabian sounds of the Minnesänger and Heldendichter are replaced by the new Saxon sounds. The Alemannic long i, as we West Flemings still have it on our lips, changed into ei, which is some kind of diphthong [...]: Min lib, din wib, thie wile, sin rich, now became mein leib, dein weib, die weile, sein reich, etc. The long ü (cognate of our uu) similarly got an a or ä (e in Flemish) as a soundcompanion and thus became au or äu (the Hollandic ui): Thus rümen was dressed up as räumen, lüten as lauten, [...] hüs as haus. The Middle High German diphthong iu was replaced by the new eu: fiur became feuer; [...] niuwe, neue; [...] etc.'; SLG 1877: 79]

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Similarly, the heathen character of a diphthong and the Catholic character of a monophthong could also be observed in the Low Countries, where diphthongisation was introduced by the Protestant Hollanders, more specifically by Marnix van Ste Aldegonde, William of Orange's secretary and the author of a virulent satire on the Roman Catholic Church: De Hollanders nu hebben stap voor stap hunne overrhijnsche gebeurs gevolgd, en onze oude nederduitsche klanken hebben gevaren juist gelijk de oude hoogduitsche: zij wierden verdreven door het zegevierende Saksersch [...] Marnix van Ste Aldegonde schreef uy en ij. Van toen voort, gaat de lange u en de lange zuivere i, in de geleerde taal, verloren: de saksersche äu en ei aleen worden fatsoenlijk geheeten. ['Step by step, the Hollanders, now, have followed their neighbours on the other Rhine bank, and our old Dutch sounds have undergone the same fate as the Old High German ones: they were swept away by triumphant Saxon [...] Marnix van Ste Aldegonde wrote uy and ij. From then onwards, the long u and the long pure i have been lost in the learned language: only Saxon äu and ei are named decent'; SLG 1877: 80-81],

The nonsensical identification of language structures (and even spelling norms) as carriers of ideologies and beliefs, and the subsequent attempts to replace these 'contaminated' structures with innocent alternatives were confirmed and elaborately explained by the guild's most famous member, the acclaimed dialectologist Leonardus de Bo,11 in a lecture on 'Why there can be no eloquence in literary Dutch': [D]e Waarheid en de Valschheid hebben noodwendiglijk elk hunne taal... Omdat het Protestantisme eene dwaalleer is en geene waarheid daarom kon de predikatie van het Protestantisme... niet eenvoudig, niet natuurlijk, niet rechtzinnig zijn. Daaruit moest dan volgen - z o o ' t met der daad gevolgd is - dat de taal van die predikatie belemmerd en stram wierd, verwrongen, gezocht, gekunsteld, hoogdravend, vol wind en declamatie. [...] E n ' t is bemerkensweerdig dat zij, die hier in Belgie die taal willen in-brengen, ook al lieden zijn die van de waarheid niet veel maken, zij gevoelen instinctieflijk dat deze taal hunne taal is, de taal van de kwade trouw en van de verwaande en hooveerdige miswetendheid. ['Truth and Falseness inevitably have their own language. Because Protestantism is a false doctrine and not the Truth, that is why the preaching of Protestantism could not... be simple, natural and open-hearted. The consequence had to be - as indeed it has been - that the language of this preaching became stiff and twisted, far-fetched, artificial, bombastic, full of wind and rhetoric [...] And it is to be noted that those

11

Cf. Willemyns 1993b for a detailed description of this man's activities as a linguist.

Language gardening in nineteenth-century Flanders

57

who would like to introduce this language to Belgium, are indeed all people who do not think much of the truth themselves; instinctively they sense that this language is theirs, the language of falseness and arrogant ignorance'; SLG 1876: 20-21]

5. The effect of purism? The real impact of the aforementioned purist publications on everyday language use in nineteenth-century Flanders is hard to assess, for various reasons: • the influence of purism cannot be isolated from the overall results of the bundle of language planning measures taken at the time; • most of the purist actions described above were driven by individuals and did not have any official status; • explicit metalinguistic comments in everyday written language referring to purist influence are rare; • there are very few corpus-based analyses of the presence and evolution of Gallicisms and Belgicisms in nineteenth-century Flanders (see below). In her overview of 200 years of language planning in Belgium, De Groof (2002b) defends the commonly accepted view that the purist discourse never got beyond purely theoretical discussions, and, as such, was not translated into the actual adoption and spread of a codified norm. Its importance should mainly be evaluated on an attitudinal level: 'Although they [i.e. teachers, linguists and other 'language lovers' who were involved in the practice of purification] did not have the means to implement their norm for the masses, their discussion probably increased the awareness of the existence of a norm for certain layers of society' (De Groof 2002b: 128-129). Vanhecke's (1998, 2002) study of the language use in town council reports in the Flemish town of Willebroek between 1818 and 1900 supports this view. Her data show a dramatic rise in the number of Gallicisms and Belgicisms in the chancery records after 1830 but the frequency of these constructions remains the same throughout the rest of the century, a fact which may be related to the lack of official Dutch translations for French administrative terminology up until 1900.12 One may, however, want to question the validity of the language gardeners' claims for all domains of the written language in nineteenth-century Flanders.

12

Ongoing research at the Vrije Universiteit Brüssel is focussing on the influence and use of Gallicisms in the Antwerp and Bruges town council records.

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Wim Vandenbussche, Roland Willemyns, Jetje De Groof, Eline Vanhecke

A sharp contrast with the findings regarding the heavily Frenchified official discourse is provided by Haest (1982), who conducted an analysis of a number of 'Gallicist' structures in newspapers from the town of Antwerp between 1700 and 1900. She found 1191 Gallicisms on a total of (approximately) 1700 pages (i.e. no more than 0.7 per page), which puts into perspective the language gardeners' obsessive preoccupation with the alleged ubiquitous presence of Gallicisms in journalists' language. As far as the distribution of these structures in the corpus is concerned, however, the major increase also occurred after Belgian independence: 2% of all 'Gallicisms' found appeared in the newspapers from 1700, 6,8% in 1750, 12,2% in 1800, versus 44,6% in 1850 and 34,1% in 1900. Contrary to other language purifiers, the second-generation particularists did not succeed in influencing the general attitudinal climate towards Standard Dutch. Their principles were hardly ever put into practice, not even in their own texts, which - apart from a few archaic forms - display a language use that is remarkably close to that of the integrationists. One member of the particularist group, however, did consistently try to introduce Flemish purisms into official decrees of the Bruges town council; one of his rare victories had the amusing consequence that, for many years, bicycles were referred to as 'wheel horses' in all official town documents.13

6. Concluding remarks This necessarily brief portrayal of the complex linguistic discussions which dominated nineteenth-century Flanders has illustrated the presence of purism in the first two stages of the standardisation process (the selection and the codification phases; cf. Einar Haugen's model) in both main currents with regard to the shaping of a Dutch standard language for Flanders. Integrationists believed that the Dutch used in Belgium was an impotent regional variety, full of local idioms and interference from French. The only means of obtaining a worthy standard language that would be able to replace French was the adoption of the northern standard, with the consequent battle against Gallicisms and the promotion of Hollandic forms. Particularists believed that the Flemish Dutch dialects contained many elements that were worth preserving, and favoured the acceptance of these regionalisms as an integral part of the Dutch language. It is clear, in retrospect, that the integrationist

13

An overview of this m a n ' s language-political activities - his name was Eugeen van Steenkiste - is given in Vandenbussche 1995; a case study of his attempts at a particularist written language is presented in Willemyns 1996.

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movement won the battle at an early stage and that the particularist movement hardly stood a chance from the very onset. The debate on purism and language cultivation was driven by underlying motivations of identity, social promotion, political aspirations and - as a footnote - even religious fundamentalism. The first three motivations continued to determine the debate about the form of Standard Dutch in Flanders during the twentieth century up until the 1980s, a debate which was continuously fed by a stream of purist publications, by language advice on radio and on television, and by newspaper columns of the 'don't say... but say....' type (Willemyns 2003b). As the centre of gravity of the Belgian economy shifted to Flanders and the reform of the Belgian state led to the establishment of a largely autonomous Flemish region and community, Flanders (and the Dutch language in Flanders) came of age on the cultural, social and political level, compared to both the Netherlands and the Frenchspeaking part of Belgium (Witte, Craeybeckx and Meynen 2000). In this new social context, the purism described above has gradually become a footnote in the recent history of Dutch.

7. References Boeva, Luc. 1994. Pour les Flamands la meme chose. Hoe de taalgrens ook een sociale grens was. Gent: AMSAB. Coopman, Theophiel & Lodewijk Schärpe. 1899. Geschiedenis der Vlaamsche letterkunde van het jaar 1830 tot heden. Antwerpen: De Nederlandsche boekhandel. Couvreur, Walter & Roland Willemyns. 1998. 'Spellingoorlog.' In: Nieuwe Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging. Tielt: Lannoo. 2802-2805. Groof, Jetje de. 2002a. 'Langue Flamande. De vroege Vlaamse beweging in 23 volumes.' In: Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 112, 1. 127-175. Groof, Jetje de. 2002b. '200 years of language planning in Belgium.' In: Linn, Andrew & Nicola McLelland (eds.). Standardization. Studies from the Germanic languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 117-134. Groof, Jetje de. 2003. 'De Nederlandsche Congressen: aardig allegaartje of prestigieus taalplanningsorgaan?' In: Koole, Tom, Jacomine Nortier & Bert Tahitu (eds.). Artikelen van de Vierde Sociolingui'stische Conferentie. Delft: Eburon. 121-131. Haest, Reinhilde. 1982. Gallicismen in het Zuidnederlands. Een onderzoek naar interferentieverschijnselen in Antwerpse krantentaal van 1700 tot 1900. PhD Dissertation. Rijksuniversiteit Gent. Meert, Hippoliet. 1894a. Uit de pathologie der taal. Taalphantasmen 1-7. Gent: Siffer.

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Meert, Hippoliet. 1894b. Uit de pathologie der taal. Taalphantasmen 8-16. Gent: Siffer. Meert, Hippoliet. 1894c. Taalpolitie. Gent: Siffer. Meert, Hippoliet. 1897. Distels. Proeve van taalzuivering. Brüssel: J. Lebegue en C°. Meert, Hippoliet. 1941 [1899], Onkruid onder de tarwe. Proeve van taalzuivering. Turnhout: N.V. Brepols. Muyldermans, Jacob. 1893. Verzameling der meest voorkomende Moeilijkheden, Gallicismen en Germanismen in onze taal. Bijdragen tot Taal- en Stijlzuivering. Mechelen: Van Velsen. NEVB. 1998. Nieuwe Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging. Tielt: Lannoo. Peeters, Constant 1930. Nederlandsche taalgids. Woordenboek van Belgicismen. Antwerpen: De Sikkel. Ruwet, Joseph & Yves Wellemans. 1978. L'analphabetisme en Belgique XVIIIeme - XlXeme siecles. Louvain: Bibliotheque de l'universtite - Leiden: E.J. Brill. SLG. 1875. Gilde van Sinte Luitgaarde. Handelingen van de eerste vergadering der werkende leden. Brugge: Beyaert-Defoort. SLG. 1876. Gilde van Sinte Luitgaarde. Handelingen van de tweede vergadering der werkende leden. Brugge: Beyaert-Storie. SLG. 1877. Gilde van Sinte Luitgaarde. Handelingen van de derde vergadering der werkende leden. Brugge: Amaat De Zuttere. SLG. 1879. Gilde van Sinte Luitgaarde. Handelingen van de Vierde vergadering der werkende leden. Brugge: Amaat De Zuttere. Vandenbussche, Wim. 1995. 'Eeuwig zagen voor de vlaamsche taal. De invloed van Eugeen Van Steenkiste op de vernederlandsing van de Brugse stadsadministratie.' In: Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 105, 2-3. 264-284. Vandenbussche, Wim. 2002. 'Dutch orthography in lower, middle and upper class texts in 19th century Flanders.' In: Linn, Andrew & Nicola McLelland (eds.). Standardization. Studies from the Germanic languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 29-42. Vandenbussche, Wim. 2004. 'Triglossia and pragmatic variety choice in 19th century Bruges: a case study in historical sociolinguistics.' In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5.1. 27-47. Vanhecke, Eline. 1998. Enkele aspecten van het ambtelijk taalgebruik in de negentiende eeuw: taal, spelling en woordenschat in de verslagen van het Willebroekse Schepencollege (1818-1900). M.A. thesis. Vrije Universiteit Brüssel. Vanhecke, Eline. 2002. 'Een eeuw ambtelijk taalgebruik: taal, spelling en woordenschat in de verslagen van het Willebroekse Schepencollege (1818-

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1900).' In: Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 112, 3. 471-488. Vreese, Willem De. 1899. Gallicismen in het Zuidnederlandsch. Gent: Siffer. Willemyns, Roland. 1993a. 'Integrationism vs. particularism. The undeclared issue at the first "Dutch congress" in 1849.' In: Fishman, Joshua (ed.). The earliest stage of language planning: the "First Congress" phenomenon. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. 69-83. Willemyns, Roland. 1993b. 'Leonardus Lodewijk De Bo. Dialectoloog en particularist.' Kortrijk: Cahier Westvlaamse schrijvers. Willemyns, Roland. 1996. 'Proeve van particularistisch taalgebruik.' In: Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 106, 2-3. 177-191. Willemyns, Roland. 1997. 'Religious Fundamentalism and Language Planning in 19th Century Flanders.' In: Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics andSemiotic Analysis 2.2. 281-302. Willemyns, Roland. 2003a. Het verhaal van het Vlaams. De geschiedenis van het Nederlands in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden. Antwerpen: Standaard Uitgeverij. Willemyns, Roland. 2003b. 'Dutch.' In: Deumert, Ana & Wim Vandenbussche (eds.). Germanic standardizations. Past to present. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 93-125. Willemyns, Roland & Rene Haeseryn. 1998. 'Taal.' In: Nieuwe Encyclopedic van de Vlaamse Beweging. Tielt: Lannoo. 2931-2946. Witte Els, Jan Craeybeckx, & Alain Meynen. 2000. Political history of Belgium from 1830. Brüssel: VUB Press.

Maria Barbara Lange

Bad language in Germany's past the birth of linguistic norms in the seventeenth century?1 0. Introduction This article concerns the origin of negative value judgements on language that exist in German (as in many other languages). Negative value judgements exclude functional constructions from the linguistic standard of a language, as can be demonstrated by the use of the German double perfect. A construction like 'Die Kleine hat den Nerz in einer Pelzhandlung gestohlen gehabt' although found in a newspaper, is considered undesirable in written language by the Duden, a best-selling German reference work.2 Instead of using the double perfect, the reader is advised to say 'Die Kleine hatte den Nerz in einer Pelzhandlung gestohlen,'3 The difference between the two constructions does not appear to be motivated by any other desire than to avoid the repetition of syllables (ge-) - at least the Duden does not provide a satisfactory explanation for its value judgement on the first sentence, apart from labelling it as 'stilistisch unschön' {stylistically ugly). Similarly, in German the use of the tan-periphrasis is not considered fully acceptable, so that the sentence 'Das Mädchen tut die Suppe essen' is considered inferior to 'Das Mädchen isst die Suppe.'4 If we can establish the origin of such stigmatizations, we can come closer to explaining their nature and their purpose. This article explores the possibility that negative value judgements are the artificial product of intensive grammatographical activities that eventually led to the standardization of German. In other words, it seeks to establish whether or not proscriptive rules of German were invented by the authors of grammar books in the seventeenth century.

1

2 3 4

This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board as well as the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. I wish to express my gratitude to Sheila Watts (Cambridge) and Martin Durrell (Manchester) for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. All remaining errors and shortcomings are, of course, my own. Cf. Duden Bd. 4. Grammatik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (1998: 122). Translation: The little girl had stolen the mink from a fur store. Translation: The girl eats the soup.

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The central question therefore concerns the extent to which the authors of seventeenth-century poetologies and grammars are responsible for the rules that were eventually codified in the German language. The standardization processes led to the formation of a written standard variety out of many different forms - the question is, whether grammarians actively contributed rules to the standard set of norms by adding their own suggestions, and whether they installed these norms prescriptively, i.e. against everyday use. In recent research literature we find descriptions of these grammarians which suggest that their work had a direct influence on the standardization process of German (Konopka (1996: 230) simply declares such influence to be quite likely, while we find actual examples in Takada (1998: 296)). It is also suggested that at least some of the negative value judgements that exist today have their origins in the works of such grammarians (Langer 2001 demonstrated this in tracing the stigma of auxiliary tun through the sixteenth to the eighteenth century). Part one of this article will look at modern histories of German, in order to establish in more detail their general assessment of seventeenth-century grammarians and the possibility of a prescriptive influence on the standardization process (with particular focus on possible proscriptive influence). Part two will look at some samples of texts concerned with the use of language dating from around 1650, a time of high productivity in this field and considered by some to be the time of transition to High German. This section will identify what grammar writing looked like, what the main concerns of the grammarians were, and how the question of prescriptive grammar writing was dealt with. In accordance with the initial question about the origin of negative value judgements, particular interest will be given to negative formulations in the treatment of individual linguistic features.

1. The influence of seventeenth-century grammarians on the standardization of written German in recent textbook accounts The seventeenth century saw the shift from Early New High German (ENHG) to New High German (NHG). It is widely agreed that linguistic standardization in this period was linked to the activities of a group of erudite literary men, generally referred to as grammarians. These grammarians formed linguistic societies to promote humanist values, and above all the elaboration of a vernacular literary language. The first and most important society was the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (founded by Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen in 1617 in Weimar) which for more than half a century was very prominent in the literary scene of the Early German Baroque, and at times numbered more than five hundred members.

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Although mainly concerned with poetic language, the literary societies also stimulated the production of books about language and grammar, and orthography became a topic of primary interest for many grammarians. In striving for a standardised literary language, they had to deal with the fact that there was no political centre in Germany to promote an accepted linguistic norm, as was the case in other countries such as France or Spain. Apart from controversial discussions about which dialect the norm should be based on 5 (most followed the famous Silesian poet Martin Opitz in declaring the variety used in Meissen in Saxony to be the most valuable), there were also disagreements over how to standardise the language. These disagreements culminated in a debate between two prominent members of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, Johann Christian Gueintz (protege of Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen) and Justus Georg Schottelius (protege of Duke August of Wolfenbüttel, Ludwig's adversary), 6 in which varying conceptions of the role of the grammarian were debated. While Gueintz adopted a more descriptive view, seeing grammar writing mainly as the stocktaking of existing linguistic anomalies, Schottelius propagated a more aggressive approach, believing the work of the grammarian to be the search for and description of analogies - and the elimination of anomalies. His idea was to extract an underlying perfect language. 7 This so-called anomalia-analogia debate between the two opponents escalated during the publication of Gueintz's grammatical treatise Deutscher Sprachlehre Entwurf in March 1641 (which was quickly countered by the publication of Schottelius's draft on the same topic, see also 2.1 and cf. Jellinek 1913, §64-82 for discussion). A view that Schottelius shared with many of his contemporaries was that existing languages were corrupt forms of originally perfect languages. Damage done to these languages through everyday use (especially by the uneducated masses, Pöbef) was thus to be repaired through grammar writing.

5 6 7

8

The norm that eventually emerged for written German was indeed an artefact. For Wells (1990: 308) the conflict between the grammarians reflected the conflict between their rulers. Grundrichtigkeit. This concept is based on the assumption that existent languages were corrupted forms of a perfect language given to man by God. Hence it must be possible to reverse the corruptions and to reconstruct the latter on the basis of the former. In Middle High German times the word Pöbel originally simply referred to the people (Lat. populus). Sometime after the Middle Ages, however, it began to acquire a negative connotation. It seems to be clear that in Schottelius's time the term was already predominantly negative (cf. Kluge 1999: 638 and Paul 2002: 755). According to the account of the DWB, the negative connotations came up gradually after the Middle Ages and seem to have caught on from the sixteenth century onwards (cf. Grimm, vol. 13, columns 1951-1952). What becomes especially clear in the following entry concerning Pöbelmund (language of the people, loc. cit.), is that in Schottelius's perception the people's language is characterised by a lack of sophistication. We can see in this entry that for Schottelius the language of the people was the opposite to perfect: 'was kan der pöbelmund, ist das nicht, was man nennt Vollkommenheit und grund' (Schottelius in DWB,

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As we shall see, research into the history of German grammar writing is compelled to label the character of grammars as either descriptive or prescriptive - I would like to suggest that this may be a consequence of the anomalia-analogia debate. Unfortunately, however, it is often unclear to what these labels apply in accounts of grammar writing, for they could refer to the intention of a grammarian, the style or tone of a grammar, or (in the case of prescriptive works) the influence a grammarian's work has on actual language use. In the following section I will present some views on the grammarians of the seventeenth century, and focus on the assessment of the prescriptive influence of these grammarians. I will thus look at accounts of Jellinek, von Polenz, Wolff, Moser, Schildt, Wells, and Schmidt as representatives of twentieth-century textbook knowledge. M A X H E R M A N N JELLINEK'S history o f N H G grammar writing ( 1 9 1 3 / 1 9 1 4 ) is the first substantial account of seventeenth-century grammarians, and despite its age it is still a standard work. Jellinek ( 1 9 1 3 : 1 9 ) claims that '[o]lder grammar is serving practical purposes and it is normative' and that 'German grammar has always wanted to be normative, [...]' (loc. cit. p. 113). These statements on the normative character of early grammar are not elaborated on. They are ambivalent in that they only declare the aims of the grammar to be normative - it is debatable if Jellinek thinks they actually were (it should be noted that Jellinek's approach focuses on the grammarians and their intellectual history, rather than on the reception of their work). The fundamental debate about the authority of the grammarian which escalated in the mid-seventeenth century over the question of anomaly or analogy (Jellinek 1913: 12Iff.) adds another perspective to this discussion. Jellinek gives a detailed description of the conflict that polarised the language societies after 1638 (1913, pp. 113; see above). According to him (1913: 115ff.), the group gathered around Gueintz consisted mainly of speakers of East Central German (ECG). This accounts for their lack of interest in grammar, for they never questioned the status of ECG and concentrated on the perfection of language use, above all in poetry. In contrast, Schottelius's sympathisers originated mainly from northern Germany. Being speakers of Low German (LG) their approach to language was more critical and they strove to find generally valid definitions of good German (loc. cit.). As a result, this group was more prolific in the field of grammar writing and linguistic theory, and some of its members were more ready to challenge traditional usage. As Georg Philipp Harsdörffer wrote, for example, in a letter to Prince Ludwig in 1646:

vol. 13, column 1953; cf. 2.). This perception of the people's language lacking sophistication, however, is not quite the same yet as its Stigmatisation (i.e. attributing negative characteristics to it). Note in this context that Schottelius saw the distinction between the quotidian language of the people and the cultivated language of an elite as a characteristic of highly developed cultures (cf. footnote 18).

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Maria Barbara Lange Gueintz (der Ordnende)

wishes usage to be the measure of all things, be it good or

bad, correct or not: should it become the rule, all quarrels must end and one will have to follow the same old rut. 9 (cited in Jellinek 1913: 183) 10

It was ultimately Schottelius's side which stamped its mark on German grammar writing.11 However the debate about anomalia/analogia seems to have had an influence on how the work of Schottelius was perceived and Gueintz's judgement of his adversary's work appears to have stuck with it until today. The following quotation demonstrates the polemic nature of the discussion as well as the importance that Jellinek attributes to the dispute: Gueintz had misunderstood some arguments of his opponent, but this he had recognized very well: that the critique had put himself into fundamental opposition to all previous German grammar-writing. Gueintz expressed this glaringly by exaggerating the opposition: "Doing everything according to one rule is to make everything equal, which is not even in the human soul; wanting everything just as one imagines is imagination; we cannot make languages, they are already; but to teach others who do not know them, this is what rules are made for. And if it is just like one imagines, or like new judges think, there has never been any German in the past or at present; not even himself: there has never been any correct letter, little has been printed correctly and no real speech or sermon has been done and presented." (Jellinek 1913: 160)

In a much later language history by HUGO MOSER (1957),12 we find that Schottelius is given a similarly dominant position (loc. cit. p. 23); he is referred to as the most important Baroque grammarian (loc. cit. p. 150). While Jellinek's description of the grammarians as normative leaves room for interpretation (see above), Moser leaves no doubt as to his view that the grammarians actively shaped the German standard variety. Their influence, however, is not explained, and Moser gives no details about the long period between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, which he covers in one sentence (loc. cit. p. 158):

9

10 11

12

Despite the differences, however, it is impossible to describe one group as conservative and the other as progressive, due to the complexity of the linguistic questions and the changing individual opinions. Cf. Jellinek (1913: 214ff.) on the preference for older (i.e. according to the grammarians more original and hence more correct) language and his statement on Schottelius's role as a compiler rather than a creator (loc. cit. p. 141). All translations from German are my own. We note that in Gero von Wilpert's respected Deutsches Dichterlexikon, Gueintz is not even listed while Schottelius features as a grammarian and language expert (although his own poetry is said to be 'of no importance': pp. 723). Regarding its depiction of the grammarians, Moser's Sprachgeschichte did not change between the third and the fifth editions (published 1957 and 1965: the quotations can be found on the same pages).

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German grammar books were written as early as the sixteenth century. But it was above all in the seventeenth century that the formal consolidation of the written language took place, not so much through natural growth from below, but from above: not only through the influence of poetry, but also through conscious regulation - through the work of language researchers [...]. [my emphasis; MBL]

Interestingly, Moser is not willing to engage in any discussion of the fundamental debate between the two opponents Gueintz and Schottelius on this question. For him it is important that both of them (though admittedly Schottelius more than Gueintz) held the view that ' [...] the literary language had to follow grammar [...]' (loc. cit. p. 159). JOACHIM SCHILDT (1976) presents a similar view of the grammarians' work, and describes the demand of linguistic societies for a nationally accepted language - again with Schottelius as the key figure (loc. cit. pp. 124 and 136) and their efforts to codify the language in grammars, dictionaries, and poetologies. While the debate between Gueintz and Schottelius is mentioned, it is not elaborated on (loc. cit. p. 124). Apart from these descriptions, Schildt speaks of normative efforts in the seventeenth century (loc. cit. p. 135), but consistently makes it clear that he is talking about the intentions of the grammarians, not the degree of their actual influence on linguistic standardization (loc. cit. pp. 130 and 135). PETER VON POLENZ (1978) sees the activities of the grammarians as having exerted a certain degree of direct influence on the linguistic standardization process (p. 99): Without doubt the German grammarians and the style teachers of the sixteenth until the eighteenth century have interfered [with the free development of the language during the shift from Early New High German to High German] to regulate and standardise. They have worried seriously about 'linguistic correctness' in the German language. As a consequence, in addition to many (at this early point still forgivable) misjudgements, many useful rules have been formulated. Eventually these have caught on through school teaching and many writers and they have continued to be valid until today, [my emphasis]

Von Polenz's formulation attempts to interpret both, the character of the grammarians' work and their influence as prescriptive. The motivation of the grammarians, however, is left aside. An explicit categorization of their work as prescriptive is avoided, without fully dismissing the idea (another example is the term normative, e.g. in referring to the time in question as the 'Zeitalter der normativen Sprachbetrachtung' - the era of normative linguistics, loc. cit.

Maria Barbara Lange

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p.04). The awareness of possible negative norms13 (proscriptions) at this early stage is exceptional, since these are usually ignored even today. CHRISTOPHER J. WELLS (1985) is even more careful; by avoiding direct judgements on the grammarians' intentions, work, or influence, his account does not challenge the prescriptive interpretation. On the contrary, it supports the probability of a direct influence through normative works, ascribing a major role to the creative work of Schottelius (loc. cit. p. 224):14 In short, Sprachkunst

('grammar'), as in classical times one of the seven liberal arts,

is inextricably tied to Kunstsprache.

Indeed, Schottel himself expressly set out to

establish, codify, and actually to create this Kunstsprache,

which was not to be left

to the archaic naivety of usage as found in the Pöbelsprache

or

Altagessprache.

[bold fonts in the original]

Wells agrees with Jellinek in assigning Schottelius a superior importance for the codification of German (loc. cit. p. 192). In his account, Wells refers to the anomalia-analogia debate (e.g. loc. cit. p. 308) but he does not dwell on the events. GERHARD WOLFF (1990) n a m e s a c l e a r d a t e f o r t h e b i r t h o f t h e m o d e r n G e r m a n l a n g u a g e ( 1 9 9 0 , p. 133): We had chosen with H. E G G E R S (1977, et passim) the turning-point

around

1650,

since around this time the shift from "Misnian German" to "High German" became visible. In this process grammarians like Harsdörffer ("Hochteutsche Sprache") and Schottelius ("Teutsche HaubtSprache") are involved significantly, [emphasis added]

This was, incidentally, the time when language societies were at the peak of their activity and the anomalia-analogia debate from 1638 was still going on (see above). Wolff believes it is impossible to understand the standardization of the German literary language without the numerous efforts of grammarians and lexicographers to bring about linguistic standardization and the purity of language (loc. cit. p. 142). The nature of these efforts, however, is not explained, and thus the traditional view of the grammarians' prescriptiveness is not challenged.

13

14

E.g. von Polenz (1978: 109): 'Das Gebot der Vermeidung von Dialektischem, von Obelklingendem (Hiatus, Häufung einsilbiger Wörter, von inhaltsleeren Flickwörtern, von Unklarheiten und Gewaltsamkeiten in der Wortfolge) ergänzt das Programm [von Opitz 1624] nach der negativen Seite hin. Daß die 'unsaubere' Art, in deutsche Gedichte fremde Wörter einzumengen, streng verurteilt wird, ist selbstverständlich.' Cf. also Wells's choice of words in the following statement, which describes the intention to consciously manipulate language 'In erster Linie war ihnen [den Sprachgesellschaften] vielmehr daran gelegen, Normen für die literarische Sprache aufzustellen, sowohl hinsichtlich der Form als auch des Stils.'(1990: 308) [my emphasis]

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It is, once again, Schottelius who is seen to be the main character in the standardization process. Wolff claims that around 1650 the national efforts to bring about standardization of the German language had progressed so far 'that for the first time it became possible that J. G. Schottelius could summarise it systematically and in a normative way in his "Teutsche Sprachkunst" (1641)' (loc. cit. p. 164). This would suggest that Schottelius's intentions and work are predominantly descriptive - if it were not put into perspective by the following claim that it really was Schottelius who constructed a standardised written German language (loc. cit. p. 143; cf. Wells 1990: 241 as cited above): In his fundamental books "Teutsche Sprachkunst" (1641) and "Ausfuhrliche Arbeit von der Teutschen HauptSprache" (1663), J. G. Schottelius pursues linguistic correctness [Sprachrichtigkeit]. H e pays attention to word formation, inflections, etymology, orthography, and punctuation. In his work he tries to formulate a systematic set of rules for the High German language, "with neglection of country speech" (i.e. dialects). [...] Not only did Schottelius thus create a model for all German grammar books, but at the same time he actually outlined a German

literary

language

homogeneous

for the first time (on the basis of Misnian and Upper

German), [italics added, M B L ]

An artificially conceived literary language can hardly be interpreted as anything other than the result of prescriptive intentions, uttered in prescriptive works, and established prescriptively. A rather different picture is drawn by PETER VON POLENZ (1994). The role of the grammarians' work (this could include both the nature of their work and their influence) is seen to be clearly descriptive (loc. cit. p. 149): Thus around 1600 the great time of grammarians and orthography teachers began. Their influence was effective not so much through the creation or imposition of linguistic norms, but rather through taking stock, through justification, spreading

and through

usages on a didactic and popular scientific level which to a large extent

had already been conventionalised by exemplary groups of language users, [my emphasis, MBL]

Von Polenz regrets that the real influence of the grammarians' work has not satisfactorily been explained, but he firmly repeats that direct influence on the German language through grammar writing did not take place before the mideighteenth century (loc. cit. p. 168). Also in this history of German, the possibility of negative value judgements is taken into account, but the form and consequence of stigmatization are not considered a matter of interest (loc. cit. p. 224):

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Maria Barbara Lange

When treating the topic of linguistic cut-throat competition [SprachVerdrängung], we already highlighted the language used every day by the silent majority of the population. It was already ignored by the movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth century that strove to cultivate the German language, stigmatising it as the opposite of High German and deriding it as provincial language, rural language, dialect or language of the mob [Provinzsprache, Landsprache, Dialekt oder Pöbelsprache], and describing it with adjectives such as low, mean, dirty, vulgar [niedrig, grob, unsauber, vulgär],

(In the examination of three grammar books in part two of this article we will look out for such value judgements.) In WILHELM SCHMIDT Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (82000) it is pointed out that Schottelius strove for a grammar oriented towards correct language (Sprachrichtigkeit, loc. cit. pp. 120), which could be interpreted as prescriptive in its intention. The anomalia-analogia debate, however, is not mentioned. In its assessment of Schottelius's importance for grammar writing, this language history agrees with von Polenz (1994), claiming that he specified already existing norms; according to this description Schottelius is not so much a creator but rather a compiler15 (cf. Jellinek 1913: 141 and von Polenz 1994: 149). For the authors of this textbook, the real merit of the grammarians is the fact that they created an awareness of the need for generally accepted linguistic norms (loc. cit. p. 121): Admittedly, the orthographic and grammatical ideas of these grammarians are often way beyond linguistic reality. But this causes no harm, what is important is that they create an awareness for the necessity of a unified language and its codification. This is how they lead to the standardization of the German language.

This demonstrates a remarkable shift in the focus of research interest towards the history of ideas, rather than factual history or the history of reception as in earlier linguistic histories of German. In Schmidt 2000 only Schottelius's ideal of a normative grammar are mentioned - his work and influence are not considered. From this sociological point of view, the question of the prescriptivity or descriptivity of Schottelius's work and influence has lost its interest. Other less detailed textbooks on the German language, such as Stedje 1989 and König 2001, do not differ in their description of the standardization process. Stedje stresses that the main impetus of standardization happened after 1700 (1989: 144 and 147). König emphasises the normative influence of the grammarians through their grammatical compilations, as well as their role in

15

Schmidt (2000: 121): 'Er [Schottelius] hat aber eine große Wirkung, denn er verkörpert bzw. vereinigt in sich die wesentlichen sprachtheoretischen Meinungen seiner Zeit.'

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transmitting grammatical rules due to their work as school teachers (2001: 104). König rejects the idea of the invention of prescriptive norms by the grammarians: Only in very few cases can the grammarians be seen as trendsetters' {loc. cit.). Since Schottelius's work on the German grammar is considered to be the most influential of his time, any search for direct intervention in the linguistic standardization processes (i.e. statements that particular forms or constructions are incorrect and should not be used) should start with a look at his texts on language. From what we have seen so far it is already clear that simply labelling Schottelius as prescriptive is unlikely to do justice to his work.

2. Negative value judgements in the work of seventeenth-century German grammarians We have seen from textbook histories of the German language from the past century that evaluations of seventeenth-century grammarians as prescriptive creators of a written standard language have given rise to their depiction as important compilers of latently existing norms who changed the linguistic awareness of their time. Creative contributions from the grammarians to the set of linguistic norms of German are, however, seen to be the rare exception (cf. König 2001: 104). It remains to be asked, whether under these circumstances it is still possible to suggest that negative value judgements found today originated in the seventeenth century, and if so, whether they can be attributed to known grammarians. Of the scholars quoted above, von Polenz is the only one to consider the existence of proscriptions. He locates a general stigmatization of everyday language in the desire to attain linguistic standardization (Sprachkultivierungsbewegung) during the seventeenth and eighteenth century (1994: 224). According to his portrayal the language of the vast majority of the population during these centuries was 'ignored and stigmatised with attributes such as low, rough, dirty, vulgar being the opposite of High German' (loc. cit,).16 A number of questions remain, however: exactly which linguistic features were stigmatised, how were they selected, by whom, and for what reason? In his account of Martin Opitz's groundbreaking poetology (Buch von der teutschen Poeterey, 1624), von Polenz finds the following features to be subject to negative evaluation (1978: 109; see footnote 11): dialectal features, unpleasant sounds (this refers mainly to phenomena found in poetry like hiatus, accumulation of monosyllabic words, use of expletives to construct rhymes),

16

In section 2.1 it will become evident how everyday language was ignored. The extent to which the language spoken by ordinary people was stigmatised at this early stage is, however, uncertain.

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Maria Barbara Lange

imprecision, forced word order (gezwungene Wortfolge), and the use of foreign words. If applied to prose texts, most of these features would be considered stylistic in nature, thus referring to relative beauty - a question of taste - rather than absolute correctness (even the forced word order could be seen to be artificial rather than incorrect). In the context of negative value judgements, it is the dialectal features that are of interest, as they could refer to the negative evaluation of both regional and social variants. Since Opitz was among those who claimed that the variety used in Meissen was the best, he would naturally have excluded elements that originated from other regional varieties. On a social level, elements that were clearly attributed to lower classes would be the target of negative criticism. Like questions of good or bad style, this evaluation was based on personal perceptions, and it remains to be explained how negative stigmatization was put into effect in the grammarians' works. Following Wolffs suggestion, who identifies the time around 1650 as the moment of the shift from the variety used in Meissen to the High German standard variety (see above: 1990: 133), and considering the high level of activity of the linguistic societies at this time, I have chosen three texts concerned with correct and refined German published around the middle of the century for closer examination. Due to the importance of Schottelius's work, two of the three books considered are by him: Teutsche Sprachkunst (164117) and Der Teutschen Sprache Einleitung (1643). The second author is Christof Arnold, whose work, Kunstspiegel (1649), is in many respects typical of the texts concerning language written at the time.

2.1 Der Teutschen Sprache Einleitung (1643) The Einleitung was published two years after the first edition of Schottelius's Teutsche Sprachkunst. Although later editions of the latter eventually became more famous, 18 the Einleitung is interesting in that it elaborates on some of the ideas initially put forward in the Sprachkunst, which had been hastily published in 1641. The need for linguistic codification is often postulated in the Einleitung (sometimes with reference to the Sprachkunst of 1641).19 Although passionate and expressive language is often used in this text, the implications are much

17

The second edition dating f r o m 1651 will b e used here.

18

We will look at the extended second edition of the Sprachkunst

19

Schottelius 1643, p. 64: Unsere Muttersprache hat j a in Warheit auch die gewißesten und festesten G r ü n d e

under 2.3.

und kunstlichsten eingepflantzeten Eigenschaften / n a c h welchen

sie

richtiger unfehlbarer W e i s e in F o r m der Sprachkunst kan begriffen / und grundrichtiglich bekant werden / wie zu deßen beweislicher A n z e i g e und etwa einer L e g u n g eines solchen hochstnohtigen G r u n d e s die T e u t s c h e S p r a c h k u n s t heraus gegeben ist.

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less radical than we might have expected from the accounts found in histories of German (cf. 1.). The following passage provides an example of the preliminary texts of the Einleitung (pp. 14): [...] daraus unfehlbarlich folget/ daß/ gleich wie man ehe eine feste Kette aus Sande flechte als aus sothaner armseligen Pobelkunst und Alamodereien einige grundrichtige kunstmeßige Gewisheit in Teutscher Sprache aufbawen mochte/ also gleichfals ein großer Unterscheid sei Teutsch reden oder verstehen können/ und hinwieder/ der Teutschen Speache [sie!] gründlich kündig und mechtig zu sein. Der altages Gebrauch wird von wiegen an eingefloßet und durch sich selbst erlernet; Die Sprache aber mit nichten anders als durch erfoderten fleiß und Nachsinnen erlernet. Es were Demnach ja hochnotig/ diese Haubtsprache/ welche wie unbehabig/ unvermögend/ pobelfrei/ klotzig und Sprachkunstlos muß gehalte/ und nur menglingsweis/ gebrauchet sein/ auch also aus ihrem eigenen zuheben/ die Gründe also darinn zupflantzn und die Springqwellen zuofhen/ damit sie zu dem rechten/ festen/ einigem/ völligem Stande der Sprache gerahten/ das ist/ daßelbige sein möge/ was andere Sprachen durch künstliche Ausübung geworden sein. Nicht zwar also/ dz man müßete anders schreiben/ als man redet/ oder daß man wolte den rechten Gebrauch durch Sprachkunstregulen meisteren; Nein/ sonderen daß eine jede Sprache/ wo man die in beschreibung der Künsten/ Wißenschaften und anderen hohen Sachen/ so wol nach gebundener als ungebundener Art/ recht gebrauchen wil; müße nicht in sich ungewiß/ gestückelt/ unerkant und nur aus dem Maule des Pobels genomen sein; Sonderen sie müsse zuvor nohtwendiglich in eine gewiße Kunstform gebracht und die Mittele und Wege darin recht kunt/ beliebt und gangig sein/ wodurch man ein wenig hoher steige/ die Grentzen der Künsten ümsehen/ und alle Erfindungen und geburten unsers Verstandes durch Hülfe solcher Sprache erst lebendig machen könne. In this creed on the form and function of grammar, Schottelius distinguishes very clearly between everyday usage (altages Gebrauch) and refined language {kunstvolle Haupt-Sprache).20 It is not his intention to discredit or even eradicate the former, however, but to promote the latter by refining its form (eine gewisse Kunstform) and thereby ultimately promoting its prestige. In doing so, he is simply attempting to assign the German language a status comparable to others. The core of his concern is expressed in the following statement (pp. 118):

20

Schottelius also states that the Romans and Greeks achieved a certain elevated degree of cultivation, from which point onwards they distinguished between everyday language and real language (preliminary texts, pp. 10). - The tendency to refer to similarities between German and prestigious ancient languages is frequently used to revalorise the German language (since the older languages are less corrupted by usage and therefore closer to the original language given to man by God, cf. footnote 6).

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Maria Barbara Lange

Durch erkundigung der natürlichen Gründe und Kunstqwellen/und durch erlerntes vermögen der Worter/ist jede Sprache aus ihr selbst zu Kräften kommen. Und solches muß eintzig und allein auch mit Teutscher Sprache geschehen, [emphasis in the original]

This is to say that only through the study of a language's origins and its characteristics one could bring it to perfection - a belief that was to be the core of Schottelius's future argument, and the reason for his dispute with Gueintz. A metaphor frequently used by Schottelius and his contemporaries to illustrate this aim is that of a young sapling that needs to be protected and nurtured to become a fruit-bearing tree (e.g. Schottelius 1643, dedication cf. Thomas 1991: 19ff.). The grammarians thus assume the role of solicitous gardeners.21 The terms Alltags- and Pöbelsprache (language associated with lower registers and lower classes, e.g. preliminary texts, p. 11) are used synonymously to refer to everyday language. Clearly, the main objective of the Einleitung is to promote the status of the German language and to highlight the benefits of standard variety. Attempts to provide norms for this standard variety are, however, rather tentative, and are secondary to the concerns of status and the desire to convincingly outline the demand for linguistic norms. There are few negative formulations in the Einleitung, and even fewer stigmatizations. The rare negative value judgements are directed towards inferior poets of common origin {gemein), who excessively use the same colourless, inexpressive words (Flickwörter) to produce rhymes. Schottelius agrees with Opitz in his criticism (cf. von Polenz 1978), and writes (p. 126): §115 Diese Flickworter lahn/ hahn/ thun/ nun/ fein/ frist etc. müssen allezeit bei den gemeinen Liedertichtere und Reimschmieden vorn im Stalle [...] stehen ... Es ist aber ein gewis Zeichen des Flickens/und eine Deutung auf ein sparsames Vermögen! wo diese und derogleichen Wörter immer forthelfen und die Thür schließen müssen, [my emphasis, MBL]

It is only in the area of orthography, which particularly concerned Schottelius, that we find a proscriptive rule, as Schottelius condemns the wrong division of words, which in his eyes represents a hypercorrection (and as such represents an unnecessary devaluation of the language, pp. 50):

21

Cf. also Lampert (1998: 37) on the difficulties of translating terms like Sprachpflege Sprachkultivierung into English.

and

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[... die] Teutschen composita in rechter Schreibung durch den Mittelstrich nicht müßen zertrennet werden / als Zanck=suchtig/Mon=tag/ Uber=bringen/Noht=fall. etc. Es ist solcher Zertheilung die Eigenschafft der Worter zuwider!und wird solch misbrauchliches Wesen mit dem rechten Gebrauche des Mittelstrichleins verwirret!davon satsamlich in der Sprachkunst ist gesaget worden. Letzlich auch/welches hie zubeweisen war/wird verhoffentlich abzumercken seinIdaß unsere Haubtsprache nach dero Gründen allemahl ihr eigen und völlig gewesen/und gar nicht bedarf des Zwackens und Drehelens / dadurch ihre Wurtzelen/Ableitungs= und Doppelungsarten anderen viel neweren Sprachen/als uhrgeberinnen/zueignet werden, [my emphasis, MBL] The only proscriptive rules that concern language use in the Einleitung thus appear in the fields of poetic style or orthography. It is, however, interesting to see how the last quotation demonstrates the typical concern of the time: to prove the value of the German language as original and perfect, eigen and völlig. It may also be worth pointing out that the strong emphasis in the Baroque text (the negative criticism is repeated several times: compound nouns are not to be split up, it is against the character of the words, this is wrong and misleading use, the language is perfect as it is and does not have to be manipulated) may have led to an erroneous reception of this text in later times. The emphatic language and repetition may have appeared excessively prescriptive to readers used to the stylistic conventions of twentieth-century German.

2.2 Kunstspiegel

(1649)

Christof Arnold's Kunstspiegel (1649) provides a useful comparison with Schottelius's early work, as it is typical of much writing about language in this period. Arnold (1627-1685), who had studied theology in Altdorf, became professor of rhetoric, Greek and history. He was a member of the Pegnesischer Blumenorden, a Nuremberg-based language society (founded in 1644 by Harsdörffer and Klaj) which was predominantly interested in poetry rather than grammar (Wilpert 1989: 632). Arnold corresponded actively with many of his contemporaries (Jones 1995: 420). Although Arnold is not one of the main literary figures of his time, his Kunstspiegel is representative in a number of ways: its focus on poetry (hence its scorn for bad poets), its devaluation of other languages, its personified depiction of the German language, the use of certain metaphors and lines of reasoning, and the atmosphere of eager expectation of a glorious era for the German language. He may therefore be seen as representative of the contemporary approach to language.

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Like Schottelius, Arnold points out the need for linguistic norms, and great emphasis is put on the standardization of orthography. This concern is not unusual for the grammarians,22 nor is it hard to comprehend, since a lack of uniform spelling would provide the most obvious target for initial normative efforts. It is also typical that the desire to achieve a unified orthography is greater than the effort put into its implementation, as we can see from Arnold's final remark (p. 64): Günstige Lesere: Die neue Rechtschreibung anlangend/ ist zu wissen/ daß es schwer zu seyn scheinet/ immittelst wollet ihr zu diesen geschehenen Drükkfehlern selbst das beste reden/ oder also ändern.

In other words, Arnold denies any responsibility for the orthography in his book. This quotation underlines the need to distinguish very clearly between the self-image of the grammarians (i.e. as heroes who set out to standardise the language) and the actual results of their efforts (increased awareness, first steps towards standardization). Arnold's book is, above all, designed to promote the status of German, and his enthusiasm shows that he perceives this to be a task of historic dimensions. This is (not only in Arnold, but also Schottelius) sometimes shown through the devaluation of other languages, especially French, Latin, and Greek. The German language is thus assigned the role of a female victim who is attacked by other languages that want to corrupt her; the grammarians assume the roles of heroes who rescue her and help her to preserve her purity. The following passage is part of a dedicatory poem by Sigmund von Birken (Arnold, preliminary texts, p. 14): Nun dannoch soll die Sprache nicht erliegen/ wie sehr sie wird beschmeist von Neidesfliegen. wird ihrer Zier schon fremdes angelappt/ hier lasse sie sich noch schauen unverkappt. Muß etwan gar sich lassen von den Teutschen das arme Teutsch mit Schmähungsrutenpeitschen: [...]

Another strategy used to defend the German language from possible devaluation is to refer to criticisms made by foreign authorities of their own prestigious languages - instead of devaluing these languages directly (see above), it is simply pointed out that they, too, have their flaws. Similar flaws in the German language are thus considered as pardonable (pp. 58: Petrarch on

22

Cf. the importance given to orthography in the language histories quoted above: Wolff (1990: 143), von Polenz (1994: 149), Schmidt (2000: 121).

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lexical gaps in Italian; the debate between Seneca and Cicero as to whether Latin or Greek has more words). The derivation of the German language from ancient history, and the reference to important historical figures (e.g. Charlemagne, Kaiser Rudolph, Aventin, Luther) are also used to increase the prestige of the language. Further subjects touched upon by both Arnold and other grammarians are the wealth of vocabulary (Stammwortreichtum, p. 29), the misuse of foreign words (Fremdwortmissbrauch, p. 31) and the proximity of the sound of German words to the character of the objects they denote (Ureigentlichkeit der deutschen Sprache, p. 37). The German language is also typically compared to a tree (second Loblied·. "Nun soll der Sprachbaum sich mächtig ausbreiten'; see also p. 44). Like Opitz and Schottelius, Arnold also criticises incompetent poets. Arnold's scorn is directed towards inept 'clumsy rhyme makers and tyrannical language torturers' (p. 27: o f f t untichtigen Tichtern/ dolpischen Reim-schmieden / und dergleichen Tyrannisches Wortpeinigern). While the bad use of language is despised on the one hand, it is also confidently asserted that the time for change has now come, and that the German language will enter a more refined era (Arnold quotes a poem by H. Rumpler, pp. 27): [...schlechte Dichter] meinen [...] es lassen sich die Reimen In Teutscher Muttersprach so wol zusammen leimen/ als etwan Hobelspan: Es sey ein leichtes Ding/ daß einer diß und das in Teutsche Reime bring: Wer Teutsch nur reden kon/ hab weiter nichts von nothen. der ist in ihrem Sinn ein Meister der Poeten [...] [...] Ο allzuweit geirret! Man ist in Nichtigkeit und falschem Wahn verwirret. Es ist nicht mehr die Zeit/daß unsre Teutsche Sprach tief auf dem boden kreicht/und geht den Sprachen nach: Sie weiß sich allbereit hoch übersieh zu schwingen/ Es will kein Schusterreim mehr in den Ohren klingen. Das Muster ist itzund viel besser an dem Tag/ die Richtschnur/die uns lang zuvor verborgen lag/ wird immermehr gestrekkt: Nach solcher lernet richten/ und wann die Verse sich gerade darnach richten/ So sprecht dann noch einmal: Es sey ein leichtes Ding/

Arnold's work on German contains no proscriptions concerning actual language use. The only occasion when he, like the other members of the grammarians' circle, resorts to explicit language and makes negative value judgements, is - as a matter of principle - on the subject of using foreign words in German texts. This article will not examine this complex topic - research literature on lexical

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purism is abundant.23 It should be noted, however, that interpretations of the grammarians' purist fervour as simply nationalist and xenophobic are unsatisfactory. Considering that their concern was to achieve an promotion of the German language by defining an elevated literary language, it is not surprising that they found the use offoreign words most irritating.

2.3 Teutsche Sprachkunst (first edition 1641, second edition 1651) The Sprachkunst was the first of the grammar books written by Schottelius,24 and was published hurriedly in July 1641 in response to Gueintz's Deutscher Sprachlehre Entwurf. The edition used here is the widely read second edition, a good third larger than the first one (i.e. by more than three hundred pages). For this reason, I consider the expanded volume to be a different work, and later than both the Einleitung and the Kunstspiegel, exceeding them in more than simply its volume.25 On pages 22-34 of the preliminary texts we find various carmina gratulatoria dedicated to Schottelius by friends and co-members of language societies. There are also words of praise for the work by many well known figures of the literary scene (Birken, Klaj, Moscherosch, Rist, Harsdörffer, and even Gueintz). The gratulatory poems all address Schottelius as the man who has used simple words to lay the foundations of the German language. One author (Johann Vogel) uses an elaborate mining metaphor, comparing Schottelius to an experienced miner who leads the other miners with a bright light to explore the mine of the German language discovered by Martin Opitz: 'Ist nicht der Welt bekand Es sey die Teutsche Sprach ein silber=swangres Land?' The picture of Schottelius lighting a lamp to help find the roots of the German language is also used by Johannes Rist: '[...] Schottel ein berühmter Mann/Der ein Liecht hat angezündet/Und die Teutsche Sprach ergründet/Daß man sie recht finden kan.' Of particular interest is the poem by M. Samuel Gerlach, 'Pfarrer zu Osterwyk [...] im Danziger Werder': 9. H e r r S u c h e n d e r / I h r solt d e r F i n d e n d s e y n g e n a n t / W e i l ihr e r f u n d e n h a b t / w a s v o r n i e w a r b e k a n n t ; D e r T e u t s c h e n S p r a c h e K u n s t . W o n i e m a n d an g e d a c h t / D a s h a b t ihr a u s d e m G r u n d a n s T a g e l i e c h t g e b r a c h t .

23 24

25

For more details cf. Jones's comprehensive bibliography (1995), and also Kirkness (1998). The huge final edition from 1663 appeared under the title Ausfiihrliche Arbeit von der Teutschen Haupt-Sprache (cf. Schildt 1976: 124) and is considered by many to be the epitome of the grammatographical efforts of the seventeenth century (cf. Wells 1990: 309). The three parts of the Sprachkunst (three Bücher, the first divided into ten so-called Lobreden) comprise around nine hundred pages. For details on the additions see Jellinek (1913: 130).

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Herr Schottel/das heist recht: Wer sucht/derselbe findet; Ο sucht und findet mehr! das Liecht ist angezündet/ Die Bahn habt ihr uns nun gebrochen und gegraben/ Wir sind der meisten Muh durch euch nun überhaben.

Gerlach uses the word erfunden (in Modern German invented) to mean gefunden (found, of. Grimm, vol. 3, columns 798-800) in order to underline the importance of Schottelius's new way of presenting grammatical rules. In Gerlach's use of the word the prefix er- is adding a perfective value to the act of finding (cf. erschießen, erschöpfen). Similarly, Rist says that Schottelius has explained the German language, using ergründet, easily mistaken for gegründet, meaning founded. The question arises as to what extent these images created by his enthusiastic fellow grammarians have influenced the reception of Schottelius's work, and whether in fact they caused misinterpretation. Among the pictures used in the Sprachkunst, we once again find the image of language as a tree which needs to be tended in order to reach its full beauty (see Einleitung). However, there is no painful pruning or clipping to be detected in Schottelius's description, and in his Sprachkunst he produces a surprisingly modern and comparatively objective set of grammatical rules. He often follows the pattern of introducing a rule, giving examples and mentioning possible exceptions. The following passage on formation of plural nouns is exemplary (Umlaut, pp. 483): IV. Welche in der einzelen Zahl haben a/o/u/die pflegen in der mehreren Zahl diese selblautende zuverenderen in ihren verwanten Kleinlaut/ nemlich das a in ä/ das ο in o/ und das u in u/ als: Ein Mann/die Männer [...] Sohn/Sohne/ [...] Tukk/Tükke/Sprung/Sprunge. (Es werden allhie ezliche ausgenommen/ welche den Lautbuchstab behalten/ als der Tag/die Tage/ der Aff/die Affen/ der Ochs/die Ochsen/ braun/roht/Nacht/ (Opitz sagt auch Nächte) mahl/Zahl/rc.) (Man findet auch zum oftern/ das a in e verendertl oder vilmehr also gedrukkt sey/ als Beume/Zeune/Gesenge/für Bäume/Zäune/ aber nach dem Grund der Sprache ist ä zu setzen.) [my emphasis, MBL]

In his extensive presentation of the grammatical rules of the German Hauptsprache, he includes various German dialects (Mundarten), among them he also counts Dutch. This example is taken from the section concerning the formation of diminutives, where Schottelius adds non-standard forms and quotations from exemplary authors to his account (p. 499):

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Maria Barbara Lange Es befinden sich noch etliche andere Endungen/ als: ist/sche/le/lin/chen/ken/ die doch keine Hauptendungen machen mogen/weil ist nach fremder Form gebildet, sehe aber vielleicht nur in Sachsen für die Endung inn gebraucht wird. Le mag in Swaben brauchlich seyn: lin in der Sweiz: ichen mag etwa spielweis/ oder sonst in gemeinen reden .scAerzwegen/gebrauchet werden. Nach Niederländischer und Niedersächsischer Mundart/ wird auch ken in verkleinerungs Art gebraucht/ als: Vogelken/Männeken/Dingelken/Sohnken. Opitz sagt Wäldichen. Lutherus sagt Sonichen/und Hänsichen/Tütlichen. [...] [my emphasis, MBL]

Instead of stigmatization we find the careful attempt to collect all possible forms found in everyday speech (gemeine Rede), which is followed by an effort to outline the best use of refined language (kunstreiche Sprache, cf. 2.1). Here is another example of descriptive grammar writing concerning agreement between adjectives and nouns (p. 411): Also wurde man nicht unrecht sagen: der gnädiger/gutiger und barmhertziger HErr: und mit besserem Wollaute/dXs wenn man spreche: Gnadige/gütige und barmhertzige HErr. [my emphasis, MBL]

It is not uncommon for Schottelius to recommend the variant that was not adopted in the long term, and which is excluded from the modern standard. This does not strengthen the credibility of those who claim that he created the German standard language (neither does it weaken the credibility of those who declare his work exemplary). Where we do find negative value judgements is in the two areas of orthography and style, the latter of which is demonstrated in the following example (p. 886): Anzeigung etlicher

Mißbräuche.

1. Schrecklich/greulich/grausam/oder grausamlich/werden in Zuwortsart oftmals gar übel in die Rede/und zu solchen Dingen gesezzet/da nichts weniger/als solche harte erschreckliche Worter notig/ja wol unnatürlich sind/als: Er war schrecklich lustig. Sie ist schrecklich schon. Ich muste greulich lachen. Wir waren grausam froh/rc. [my emphasis]

Again, Schottelius criticises constructions that are still in use today and that are still subject to folk linguistic criticism; constructions such as schrecklich schön (terribly beautiful), for example, are still considered bad style today. Despite the exceptional use of negative formulations in the works examined here, it is hardly possible to interpret them as proscriptive in nature. Schottelius's choice of the title copperplate for the Teutsche Sprachkunst (21651) supports this

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observation: it shows the personifications of consuetudo and ratio26 (here standing for usage and norm) in the form of two respectable women who hold a banner bearing between them the title inscription of the book. While Consuetudo holds the sapling of the German language in her hand, Ratio uses a stick to draw a perfect circle in the sand. The choice of this conciliatory picture alone is enough to challenge the view of Schottelius as a rigid theorist.

3. Conclusion Surprisingly, when comparing accounts of seventeenth-century grammarians in various histories of German, assessments of their work as either prescriptive or descriptive are hard to find. Apart from one fairly early and general statement about the grammarians' work being normative (Jellinek 1913), the question of prescriptivity or descriptivity is dealt with rather elusively. Although the textbooks considered never explicitly state that the grammarians' works are considered to be prescriptive (Moser 1957, von Polenz 1978 and Wolff 1990 admit a normative influence), Jellinek's evaluation was not challenged until recently. Furthermore, descriptions of Schottelius's efforts to design a Kunstsprache (Wells 1985, Wolff 1990) indirectly foster the idea of an artificial idiom, prescriptively installed against everyday usage. Even König (2001), who rejects the idea of the grammarians' actively shaping the grammar, sees them as performing a normative function through their transmission of grammatical rules. The history of German by von Polenz (1994) is the first of the textbooks considered here to contradict the traditional view of prescriptive seventeenthcentury grammar writing. Von Polenz states very clearly that it was rather the collection, explanation, and processing of norms for further transmission that marked the work of the grammarians - not the creation of a new set of linguistic rules. The authors of Schmidt (2000), the most recent language history considered here, adopt a similar view to von Polenz; in both we see a shift in the focus of academic interest towards more sociologically oriented questions. Here, the explanation of the nature of the grammarians' work loses interest. In all the histories of the German language cited here, Schottelius is the unchallenged protagonist of seventeenth-century grammar writing. It is not an exaggeration to say that in textbooks his person stands for the grammarians. Bearing in mind the portrayal of Schottelius as the heroic discoverer of German grammar by his contemporaries, and the role he is given in accounts of the anomalia-analogia debate, it is quite possible that the perception of seventeenth-century grammarians as prescriptive came into being simply

26

Consuetudo: Lat. habit; ratio: Lat. reason.

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through portrayals of him alone. Schottelius's postulations of a strongly normative grammar, underlined by Gueintz's polemic reproaches of his prescriptive ideas, seem to have influenced the perception of the work and reception of this whole generation of German grammarians. The tolerant and minutely descriptive character of Schottelius's grammar observed in our sample texts provides a strong contrast to the portrayal of his work in textbook accounts before 1994. The analysis of three seventeenth-century works concerned with correct language provides us with results that are in line with the more recent textbook accounts. An author chosen as representative of a strongly poetry-oriented approach is Christof Arnold. As we saw in his Kunstspiegel (1649), Arnold repeatedly postulates the need for norms in literary production. More effort is spent describing the need for linguistic standardization and the desire to increase the image of the German vernacular for literary and academic purposes than outlining grammatical rules. This underlines what we have already seen in Schottelius's case, namely that we must clearly distinguish between postulation and the self-image of the grammarians on the one hand, and their actual work and influence on the other. Their activities should be rated on the level of language politics as well as on their merits in actual grammar writing. For Arnold, as for the other grammarians, improving the status of the language is a task of historic dimensions. The Baroque language used in their works often has a strikingly emphatic tone, which - perceived from the less emotional perspective of modern language - may have led to further misinterpretations of the grammarians' intentions. (Similarly, in the gratulatory poems in Schottelius's Sprachkunst, the word erfunden used to praise the author for having found the foundations of the German language may have been mistaken for the word to invent.) Arnold's scorn towards the bad use of language is targeted towards incompetent poets, and it is here, and here only, that we find negative expressions in the form of general disparagement. Style and orthography are areas of strong concern, but even here proscriptions of actual grammatical constructions cannot be found. In Schottelius's Einleitung (1643), the earlier of his two works examined above, the author distinguishes between everyday usage and refined language. While his concern is for the latter, the former is not even considered as a subject for grammatical criticism. Schottelius explicitly mentions that everyday usage is not considered in his work. If we take this to be the general opinion of his contemporaries, we see that the distinction between literary and spoken language was much more rigid than it is today. While written and spoken German are considered varieties of the same language in our time, Schottelius believed the two to be so different that they were beyond comparison. Indeed, we can verify Schottelius's statement in his work: proscriptions are hard to find in the Einleitung, and if negative formulations occur at all, they are

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found in the areas of orthography, style, and the use of foreign words (literary language). Everyday spoken German is not subject to criticism, thus explaining the absence of attacks on everyday usage; this reduces the possibility that value judgements on everyday language originated from this period. However, Schottelius's use of the once neutral expression Pöbelsprache to mean Volkssprache (in the sense of Alltagssprache or Umgangssprache) may, in later times, have added farther negative connotations to the word Pöbel. Since this word has now shifted its meaning and acquired strong negative connotations, it would be easy to conclude that Schottelius was concerned with everyday language, and that he was uttering negative value judgements on 'the people's language', when in fact, he was only referring to it. In conclusion, the small corpus of works considered here, provides little evidence to suggest that Schottelius or other seventeenth-century grammarians were responsible for the birth of linguistic norms. In light of this evidence, the idea that a set of prescriptive norms came into being, or was put to use, during this time seems unlikely (let alone the idea that prescriptive rules were made up and introduced by the grammarians).27 The origin of linguistic stigmatizations, their purpose, and their nature, clearly lie elsewhere.

4. References 4.1 Primary Sources Arnold, Christof. 1649. Christof Arnolds Kunst=spiegel/ Darinnen die Hochteutsche Sprach nach ihrem merckwürdigen Uhraltertuhm/ ersprießlichen Wachstuhm/ und reich=volligen Eigentuhm/ auf Fünfferlei Gestalten Denkzeitweis außgebildet. Nürnberg. HAB M: Ko 162. Schottelius, Justus Georgius. 1643. Der Teutschen Sprache Einleitung/Zu richtiger gewisheit und grundmeßigem vermugen der Teutschen Haubtsprache/samt beygefügten Erklärungen. Ausgefertiget Von Justo Georgio Schottelio, Dicasterij Guelphici Assessore. Lübeck / Gedruckt durch Johan Meyer/In Verlegung Matthaei Düncklers Buchh. in Lüneburg Anno 1643. HAB 96.7 Gram. Schottelius, Justus Georg. 1651. Justi-Georgi Schotteiii J. V. D. Teutsche Sprach Kunst/Vielfaltig vermehret und verbessert/darin von allen Eigenschaften der so wortreichen und prächtigen Teutschen Haubtsprache ausfuhrlich und gründlich gehandelt wird. Zum andern mahle heraus gegeben im Jahr 1651. Braunschweig In Verlegung Christof=Friederich Zilligern. HAB 75.3 Gram.

27

Langer's (2001) findings on the active stigmatization of the (»«-periphrasis from the sixteenth century onwards (see introduction) should therefore considered to be an exception.

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Opitz, Martin. 1624. Buch von der deutschen Poeterei. (Abdruck der ersten Ausgabe aus Brieg, gedruckt von A. Gründern, Verleger David Müller, Breslau) 1913. Halle an der Saale: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

4. 2 Secondary Sources Duden. 61998. Grammatik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache, edited by the Dudenredaktion. Mannheim: Dudenverlag. DWB = Grimm, Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm (eds.). 1854-1971. Deutsches Wörterbuch. URL: http://www.DWB.uni-trier.de/index.html (accessed: Feb. 2004). Jellinek, Max H. 1913/1914. Geschichte der Neuhochdeutschen Grammatik von den Anfingen bis auf Adelung. Vol. I—II. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Jones, William Jervis. 1995. Sprachhelden und Sprachverderber. Dokumente zur Erforschung des Fremdwortpurismus im Deutschen (1478-1750). Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Kirkness, Alan. 1998. 'Das Phänomen des Purismus im der Geschichte des Deutschen.1 In: Besch, Werner, Anne Betten, Oskar Reichmann & Stefan Sonderegger (eds.). Sprachgeschichte. Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung. 2nd edition. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 407-416. Kluge, Friedrich. 231999. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, edited by Elmar Seebold. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. König, Werner. lo 2001. dtv-Atlas zur deutschen Sprache. München: dtv. Konopka, Marek. 1996. Strittige Erscheinungen der deutschen Syntax im 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Langer, Nils. 2001. Linguistic Purism in Action. How auxiliary tun was stigmatised in Early New High German. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Lampert, Günther. 1998. "'To hell with the future, we'll live in the past": Ideas and Ideologies of Language Culture in Britain.' In: Greule, Albrecht & Franz Lebsanft (eds.). Europäische Sprachkultur und Sprachpflege. Tübingen: Narr. 37-62. Moser, Hugo. 31957. Deutsche Sprachgeschichte. Stuttgart: Curt Ε. Schwab. Moser, Hugo. 5 1965. Deutsche Sprachgeschichte. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Paul, Herrmann. 102002. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Polenz, Peter von. 91978. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Polenz, Peter von. 1994. Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Vol. II. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.

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Polenz, Peter von. 22000. Deutsche Sprachegeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Band 1, 14. bis 16. Jahrhundert 2. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Schildt, Joachim. 1976. Abriß der Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Zum Verhältnis von Gesellschafts- und Sprachgeschichte. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Schmidt, Wilhelm. 82000. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Stuttgart: S. Hirzel Verlag. Stedje, Astrid. 1989. Deutsche Sprache gestern und heute. Einführung in die Sprachgeschichte und Sprachkunde. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Takada, Hiroyuki. 1998. Grammatik und Sprachwirklichkeit von 1640-1700. Zur Rolle deutscher Grammatiker im schriftsprachlichen Ausgleichsprozeß. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Thomas, George. 1991. Linguistic Purism. London, New York: Longman. Wells, Christopher J. 1985. German: A Linguistic History to 1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, translated 1990: Deutsch: eine Sprachgeschichte bis 1945. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Wilpert, Gero von. 71989. Sachwörterbuch der Literatur. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. Wilpert, Gero von. 31988. Deutsches Dichterlexikon. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. Wolff, Gerhard. 21990. Deutsche Sprachgeschichte: ein Studienbuch. Tübingen: Francke.

Joachim Scharloth

The revolutionary argumentative pattern in puristic discourse: The Swabian dialect in the debate about the standardization of German in the eighteenth century.1 1. Argumentative Patterns in the Puristic Discourse about Standard Languages The research on linguistic purism has focused recently on the classification of its various types (Geers 2003, Thomas 1991). A promising method of this approach is the analysis of discoursive strategies and argumentative patterns in the debates about language and culture. In this paper I would like to shed light on the argumentative patterns that can arise within the puristic discourse about standard languages. In the following, I distinguish between two major patterns: the conservative and the revolutionary. Using a definition from Gerorge Thomas's "Linguistic Purism" (1991), the common discoursive pattern can be characterized as follows: "We, a section of the speech community want to preserve a language from, or rid it of, putative foreign elements or other elements held to be undesirable, including those originating in dialects, sociolects and styles of the same language" (Thomas 1991: 12). This implies that the standard language had once been in a pure state, before it degenerated through foreign elements. People with expert knowledge have the ability to decide by which qualities the desirable state of language is defined and in what ways the speech community can return to this state of purity. Because these arguments aim to keep a certain state and defend it against new developments, I call this argumentative pattern "conservative". This is indeed the most common and most influential discoursive figure in the history of German puristic discourse.

1

I am most indebted to Emily Krueger for helping me with my English, any mistakes are of course my responsibility alone.

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Yet in the history of purism we find another discoursive pattern, which I will refer to as revolutionary. It can be characterized by the following statement: "Through borrowings from foreign languages or from language change induced by an illegitimate social group the standard language has degenerated to such an extent that it is impossible to restore it. We, a section of the speech community, believe that this standard language is an insufficient instrument for true and authentic communication. Thus it has to be abandoned and replaced by a new standard language." While the conservative position believes that somewhere in the past or in a particular textual tradition there existed a state of 'purity' that the language can and should return to, the revolutionary position denies this possibility. This much more radical argumentative pattern in puristic discourse is often found among alternative social movements, which aim for a complete revision of culture, life and political order, such as the student movement of the 1960s. In this article I focus on this second pattern, which was held by a minority of grammarians and lexicographers in the last third of the eighteenth century. In order to understand the contemporary conditions of its emergence it is necessary to first outline the debate about the standardization of German.

2. The Debate about the Norm of Standard German in the Late Eighteenth Century2 2.1

Johann Christoph Adelung

In the period that succeeded Johann Christoph Gottsched's death in 1766 the dominant position in this debate, acknowledged by his contemporaries (cf. Heynatz 1771-76, V: 127, Rüdiger 1782/93, I: 32f.), was taken by Adelung. Like his predecessor he was of the view that the Upper Saxon dialect should serve as a standard language. This can be shown by a quotation from the introduction of his famous "Versuch eines grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuchs" published in 1774: Diejenige, welche in jedem großen Lande die Stelle einer [...] allgemeinen Sprache vertritt, ist allemahl nur die Mundart einer Provinz, aber der blühendsten, cultiviertesten und durch Geschmack und Wohlstand am meisten ausgebildeten Provinz [...]. In Deutschland ist es seit der Reformation die Mundart der südlichem Chursächsischen Lande [...]. (Adelung 1774: VHIf.)

2

For a more detailed description of this debate cf. Scharloth 2003.

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(The dialect which represents the common language in every great country is always the vernacular of only a single province, but the most flourishing, most cultivated and through taste and wealth most developed province. In Germany since the Reformation it is the vernacular of Southern Saxony.)

In his attempt to codify standard German, he granted predominance to linguistic usage rather than to linguistic correctness in controversial cases: Der Sprachgebrauch ist die höchste und unumschränkteste Macht, was dieser einmahl entschieden hat, ist unwiderruflich entschieden, er müßte es denn selbst fur gut befinden, in seinen einmahl getroffenen Verfügungen eine Änderung zu treffen. (Adelung 1971,1: 109) (Linguistic usage is the highest and most sovereign authority, what it disposes once is disposed forever, unless it would fit its own needs to change a once disposed order.)

He justified this procedure by claiming that "in no other province of Germany do the people speak so purely and correctly as here; both for the reason that good taste is nowhere more widely spread than in this province."3 However, he did not consider linguistic usage from all strata of society as representative of standard German. On the contrary, he assumed that the highest linguistic competence was in the upper strata. In his conception, the upholders of a refined culture were also in possesion of the most elaborate and sophisticated language. Adelung concluded the dominance of Saxony over all other German provinces from a process in Germany's cultural history that he describes as follows: Dagegen bildete sich das südliche Sachsen durch Bergbau, Manufacturen und Kunstfleiß zu der blühendsten Provinz Deutschlandes aus, zog durch seinen Wohlstand Einwohner aus allen übrigen Provinzen an sich, und nahm dadurch an Volksmenge und Reichthum sichtbar zu. Hierzu kam nach und nach noch der Flor der Wissenschaften und des Geschmackes, und wie weit diese in kurzer Zeit in Ober-Sachsen erhöhet wurden, beweiset die große Revolution in dem menschlichen Verstände, welche [...] von Sachsen ausging, und sich von hier nicht allein über ganz Deutschland, sondern selbst über einen großen Theil Europens verbreitete; ich meine die Reformation, welche nicht allein Reformation der Religion blieb, sondern

3

"In keiner Provinz Deutschlands wird [...] im Ganzen genommen, so rein und so richtig gesprochen [...], als eben hier; beydes, weil der gute Geschmack in keiner Provinz so allgemein verbreitet ist, als in dieser." (Adelung 1782: 25)

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sich nach und nach auch über alle Wissenschaften und Gegenstände des Geschmackes erstreckte. [...] Es hätte ein Wunder erfolgen müssen, wenn alle diese Umstände nicht auch sehr mächtig auf die Sprache hätten wirken sollen. (Adelung 1974,1: 49f.) (Through mining, manufacturing and industry in trading, Southern Saxony became the most flourishing of Germany's provinces, attracted citizens from all other provinces because of its wealth and therefore grew in population and prosperity. Little by little it became a centre of sciences and good taste. How far these two were raised in a short period of time in Upper Saxony is proved by the great revolution in man's thought which [...] emerged from Saxony and spread from here not only through the whole of Germany, but through a large part of Europe: I refer to the Reformation, which turned out to be not only a reformation of religion but also a reformation of sciences and taste. [...] These circumstances could hardly remain without a very strong effect on the language.)

Cultural and linguistic hegemony, as claimed by Adelung, provokes opposition. Therefore, it is not surprising that his ideas were fiercely criticized by linguists and authors from other parts of Germany.

2.2

The Swabian Opposition4

The most profound opposition formed in Swabia, a province that was considered at the bottom end of the cultivation scale. Linguists like Friedrich Carl Fulda and Johannes Nast and authors like Gottlieb David Hartmann, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart and Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz rejected Adelung's conception of standard German by contradicting his arguments for the predominance of the Upper Saxon vernacular. In their eyes, the origin of the Upper Saxon vernacular proved that it was unsuitable as a sample of standard German: Schwäbische uralte gemeine Innsasen; slavische vormals Herrn, nun Knechte; ein Zulauf aus allen Gegenden Teutschlands; und das regierende NiederSächsische, welches sich HochTeutschen Befehlen unterzog [...] errichteten endlich im zehenden Jahrhundert eine neue HochTeutsche Mundart, die Meisnische (Fulda 1776: 7). (In the tenth century, ancient Swabian natives, former Slav rulers, now slaves; flocked in from all provinces of Germany; and the reigning Lower Saxon which

4

Unlike Helmut Henne (1968:115ff.) and von Polenz (1994:166), who consider Wieland the strongest opponent of Adelung, I hold the view that the Swabian linguists provided the most severe and elaborate critique.

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came under the rules of Upper German [...] finally built a new Upper German vernacular, Upper Saxon.)

According to Fulda, in the 10th century the Saxon dialect developed from the mixing of the Swabian dialect with other varieties, such as Lower Saxon and Slav, and by borrowing from all other German vernaculars. It was therefore regarded as "irregular" and "poor" (Hartmann 1774b: *36), an argument common to purists. However, Upper Saxon was not branded as an irregular mixed language because of its historical roots alone. The Swabian linguists also turned against actual linguistic developments in Saxony. Schubart, for instance, complained in the "Deutsche Chronik" that Saxons and Prussians were anxious to "sweeten the bitter juices" of the German language and "cross-breed tasty branches from France into the wild oak tree" (Schubart 1975, II: 702f.).5 He therefore called Upper Saxon "französierendes Sachsendeutsch" ("French Saxon German"). Keeping Adelung in mind, Fulda accused the Upper Saxon grammarians of making fundamental mistakes in what they called cultivating their language: Endlich Leipzig. Sie finden hier Ausschuß der besten Kraftwörter, Tyrannei über das Lehrvolle Provinziale, bis auf den heutigen Tag; eine Ohrfeige des Priscians über die andere; französisch-italiänische Terminologie; mit englischen durchwebt. (Fulda 1774a: 81) (Leipzig at last. Here one can find the elimination of strong language; the tyranny of the instructive provincial, which continues today; a slap in the face of Priscian, one after another; and French and Italian terminology, mixed with English.)

Leipzig is a synonym for a linguistic usage which mocks precise codification (grammaticography) and in which nonstandard words are eliminated and replaced by foreign words. This linguistic usage was the object of fierce criticism because Fulda and his companions were advocates of the analogy principle. Fulda pointed out: Denn die wahre einzige Quelle der Sprache ist die Natur und das Wesen der Sprache selbst, so wie es die Geschichte der Wortbildung, der Wortabänderung und der Wortverbindung gibt [...]. (Fulda 1778: 28f.) (The only true source of a language is the nature and essence of the language itself, as shown by the history of word formation, declination and word order [...].)

5

"[...] so bittere Säfte zu versüßen, und diesem wilden Eichenstamme schmackhafte Zweige aus Frankreich einzupfropfen" (Schubart 1975, II: 702f.).

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Unlike Adelung, who followed the anomaly principle, the Swabian linguists stressed the importance of correctness and regularity. By means of these linguistic arguments, they tried to brand the Upper Saxon vernacular as poor, irregular and contaminated with borrowings from other languages, especially French. In their eyes, it therefore could not serve as a model for standard German. Yet, these linguists did not base their rejection of Adelung's conception of standard German on linguistic arguments alone. The Saxon lexicographer and grammarian had claimed that Leipzig, Saxony's cultural metropolis, was Germany's Athens, the hometown of sciences and muses, and the capital of good taste and manners. His Swabian rivals in fact acknowledged that in Germany the Saxon culture was the most refined, yet they interpreted this fact in a completely different way. Fulda distinguished three stages in the development of culture and language which he designated as "child, young adult and old man" ("Kind, Jüngling und Greis") or elsewhere "shepherd, hero and weakling" ("Hirte, Held und Weichling") (Fulda 1776:27). With these metaphors he described a global model of the rise and fall of cultures. Since the year 1350 he considered German culture to be in old age, that is in the stage of the weakling. He further distinguishes this stage of German cultural history into three periods and characterizes them with only the catch-words "Luther, Opitz and Leipzig". From this we can conclude that in the eyes of the Swabian linguists, Saxony represented the final stage of a cultural development that led to decline. Furthermore, from this point of view Saxony's cultural refinement was in fact decay. This decay arose from and was accelerated by the influence of French culture. The Swabian linguists blamed the Saxons for imitating or, in their words, for aping French customs and therefore gave Leipzig the epithet "Little Paris" and called its citizens not of German but of French kind (cf. Schubart 1975, II: 464). Whereas French culture was prestigious among the upper strata of society, it was considered an effeminate, immoral and dying culture among large numbers of non-aristocratic citizens in all other German provinces but Saxony, including the Swabian linguists. They claimed that the French influence on Saxon culture had naturally had an effect on the Upper Saxon vernacular. They believed that French words, loan constructions and loan translations of French phrases could be found in linguistic usage to a large extent. To fully understand why these linguists from Southern Germany rejected Adelung's conception of standard German, it is necessary to consider the contemporary reflections on the connections between language, thought and customs. Lenz, an author of the "Sturm und Drang"-movement characterized language as the "topsoil of the mind" ("mütterlicher Boden des Geistes"). He therefore warned his fellow countrymen that if they enriched their language

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through borrowings from foreign languages, it would have a great effect on their ways of thinking: Mir scheinen in unserer Sprache noch unendlich viele Handlungen und Empfindungen unserer Seele Namenlos, vielleicht weil wir bisher als geduldige Bewunderer aller Fremden uns mit auswärtigen Benennungen für einheimische Gefühle begnügt haben, die denn nicht anders als schielend ausgedruckt werden konnten. [...] Nur ein kleines Beyspiel geben die Wörter intereßiren, frappiren, saisiren, die alle einem grossen Theil von Menschen nur durch weitläufige Umschreibungen können verständlich gemacht werden, und deren wir doch im gemeinen Leben so nöthig haben.[...] sollten unsere alten Schriftsteller, wenn man sie studirte, für ähnlich Umstände keinen Namen gehabt haben, und werden wir, wie verständige Cameralisten, unserm Vaterlande nicht unsterbliche Dienste erweisen, wenn wir Landesprodukte nicht in fremden Ländern aufsuchen, auf Kosten unserer ganzen Art zu denken, zu empfinden, und zu handeln, auf Kosten unsers NationalCharakters, Geschmacks und Stolzes? (Lenz 1776: 60ff.) (From my perspective, in our language a tremendous number of actions and sensations of our soul seem nameless. The possible reason for this is that we, as patient admirers of all foreigners, were content with foreign designations for native sensations, which could only be expressed bluntly. [...] To give a short example, the words intereßiren, frappiren, saisiren, which we require urgently in everyday life, can be explained to a large part of the people only through long-winded paraphrases. Should our ancient writers - if we studied them - not have had names for similar states? And will we not do our native country great service, if we do not seek native products in foreign countries, at the expense of our way of thinking, feeling and acting, at the expense of our national character, taste and pride.)

The Swabian grammarians feared that with the assertion of Upper Saxon as a standard language in all provinces, French ways of thinking and customs would also penetrate Germany and would encourage cultural degeneration and moral corruption. Thus linguistic and cultural purism went hand in hand. From this fundamental critique of the Upper Saxon vernacular, the Swabian linguists concluded that it could not serve as a standard language. Yet the borrowings from French were not the only reason for this rejection of Adelung's conception of standard German. The Upper Saxon dialect was rather regarded as a mixed language from its very beginnings. No puristic effort could turn it into a regular and correct language. At this point the argumentative pattern of the puristic discourse which I previously named as the revolutionary position comes into play. The pronounced standard language has degenerated to an extent from which it is impossible to restore. Therefore, it has to be replaced completely by a different variety. But where is this new standard variety to be sought?

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3. The Alternative Conception of Standard German Since the Swabian linguists interpreted cultural development as decay from a certain reference point, only a variety that had kept its ancient qualities could then serve as standard German. Not surprisingly, the Swabian grammarians regarded the Swabian dialect as a language with these qualities. Nast, for instance, called the Swabian dialect "archaic" (Nast 1777: *12) and stressed that it had never mixed with other languages during its long history. Fulda praised the Swabian vernacular as follows: "The Swabian language is (and why should it not be allowed to say it publicly) [...] the proper High German language", it is the "most regular" and "the dialect most adequate to the nature and the genius of the German language".6 According to thinkers like Nast and Fulda, only the Swabian vernacular could then claim to reflect the natural order of the German language and therefore be applied as a standard to linguistic innovations, exceptions and deviations. While Adelung regarded the linguistic usage of the upper strata as the exemplary variety, the Swabian linguists urged their contemporaries to pay more attention to the linguistic usage of the lower strata. Lenz suggested: Wenn wir in die Häuser unserer sogenannten gemeinen Leute giengen, auf ihr Interesse, ihre Leidenschaften Acht gäben, und da lernten, wie sich die Natur bey gewissen erheischenden Anlässen ausdrückt, die weder in der Grammatik noch im Wörterbuch stehen; wie unendlich könnten wir unsere gebildete Sprache bereichern, unsere gesellschaftlichen Vergnügen vervielfältigen? (Lenz 1776: 66) (If we went into the houses of our so called common people, if we paid attention to their interests and passions and learned from them, how nature expresses itself in certain situations, which can neither be found in grammars nor in dictionaries; how tremendously could we enrich our refined language and multiply our social pleasures?)

The Swabian linguists considered the lower strata as the "archive of antiquity" (Hartmann 1774a: 138). Therefore, Lenz believed that from the people's linguistic usage he could still learn the remnants of the so-called "Gothic" ("gothische") language, an original and authentic language, which had been more suited for the expression of feelings than the "sterilized" ("entmannt") German of the Saxon grammarians, as Herder had stated (Herder 1985,1: 35).

6

"[...] die schwäbische Sprache, (und warum soll man es nicht öffentlich sagen dörfen?), welche die rechte hochteutsche Sprache, welche die regelmäsigste, welche dem hochteutschen Genius oder der Natur der höheren teutschen Sprache die angemessensteist" (Fulda 1774b: 77).

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If we recall the connection between language, mind and customs it becomes clear that the final objective of the efforts of the Swabian linguists was to achieve a reform in the customs of their fellow countrymen. They intended a repression of French influence and a revival of ancient German customs. Thus linguistic purism was a remedy for an intended cultural revolution.

4. Conclusion By studying the debate about the norm of standard German in the last third of the eighteenth century we learn about two aspects of puristic discourse. The first is concerned with the role that dialects play within debates on language. Influences from dialects can be the target of puristic criticism but dialects can also be a model of purity and serve to criticize the standard language. The second conclusion we can draw is that we were able to distinguish two constant argumentative patterns of puristic discourse, a conservative and a revolutionary. The revolutionary argumentative pattern is based on the language ideology, that the speakers' intellectual and emotional capacities are determined by the quality of their language. It characterizes the actual language as degenerated to an insufficient instrument for true and authentic communication. In the logic of this pattern it thus has to be abandoned and replaced by a new language which contributes to the invention of new forms and contents of communication, better ways of living and - in the most extreme cases - the creation of new man. The revolutionary argumentative pattern usually appears among social movements that intend a complete renewal of the actual culture. Like the Swabian grammarians these social movements may aim for conservative political, social or cultural goals. However, the way of achieving these objectives is always radical, uncompromising and thus revolutionary. It seems that the revolutionary argumentative pattern is also an indispensable ingredient of Utopias and dystopias (cf. Saage 1997, Steiert 1985: 260). In Utopias like "bolo'bolo" by P.M., new languages emerge in criticism of the language of power. In dystopias like "1984" by George Orwell repressive and authoritarian political systems invent new languages in order to control their citizens. In both cases the new languages are a medium for the intended renewal of the culture, the political systems and of man himself. Thus from the analysis of the revolutionary pattern in puristic discourse it has become evident that in order to understand linguistic purism it is always necessary to study its cultural and social reasons.

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5. References Adelung, Johann Christoph. 1774. 'Vorrede.' In: Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches der Hochdeutschen Mundart, mit beständiger Vergleichung der übrigen Mundarten, besonders aber der oberdeutschen. Erster Theil. Leipzig. I-XVI. Adelung, Johann Christoph. 1782. 'Was ist Hochdeutsch?' In: Magazin für die deutsche Sprache. Erster Band, erstes Stück. Leipzig. 1-31. Adelung, Johann Christoph. 1971. Umständliches Lehrgebäude der Deutschen Sprache, zur Erläuterung der Deutschen Sprachlehre fiir Schulen. Zwei Bände. Nachdruck der Ausgabe Leipzig 1782. (= Documenta Linguistica, Reihe 5). Hildesheim, New York: Olms. Adelung, Johann Christoph. 1974. Über den deutschen Styl. 3 Teile in einem Band. Nachdruck der Ausgabe Berlin 1785. Hildesheim, New York: Olms. Fulda, Friedrich Karl. 1774a. 'Einige Bemerkungen zur Kenntniß der teutschen Sprache.' In: Litterarische Briefe an das Publikum. Zweites Paquet. 74-82. Fulda, Friedrich Karl. 1774b. 'Untersuchung der schwäbischen Mundart.' In: Gelehrte Ergötzlichkeiten und Nachrichten. Herausgegeben von Balthasar Haug 1. 67-83. Fulda, Friedrich Karl. 1776. Sammlung und Abstammung germanischer Wurzelwörter, nach der Reihe menschlicher Begriffe, zum Erweis der Tabelle, die der Preisschrift über die zween Hauptdialekte der deutschen Sprache angefugt worden ist, von dem Verfasser derselben. Herausgegeben von Johann Georg Meusel et. al. Halle. Fulda, Friderich Carl. 1778. Grundregeln der Teutschen Sprache. Stuttgart. Geers, Maria. 2003. Linguistic purism in the history of England and Germany. Diss. Tver State University. Hartmann, Gottlieb David. 1774a. 'Über Fuldas Preisschrift über die beyden Hauptdialecte der teutschen Sprache.' In: Litterarische Briefe an das Publikum. Zweites Paquet. 126-152. Hartmann, Gottlieb David. 1774b. 'Vorbericht.' In: Litterarische Briefe an das Publikum. Drittes Paquet. Altenburg. *l-*62. Henne, Helmut. 1968. 'Das Problem des Meißnischen Deutsch oder "Was ist Hochdeutsch" im 18. Jahrhundert.' In: Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 35. 109-129. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1985. Schriften zur Literatur. Herausgegeben von Regine Otto. 2 Bände in 3 Teilbänden. Berlin, Weimar. Heynatz, Johann Friedrich. 1771-76. Briefe, die deutsche Sprache betreffend. 6 Bände. Berlin.

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Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold. 1776. 'Über die Bearbeitung der deutschen Sprache im Elsaß, Breisgau, und den benachbarten Gegenden. In einer Gesellschaft gelehrter Freunde vorgelesen.' In: Flüchtige Aufsäzze von J. M. R. Lenz. Herausgegeben von Kayser. Zürich 1776. 55-69. [reprinted in: Lenz, Jakob. 1987. Michael Reinhold: Werke und Briefe in drei Bänden. Hrsg. von Sigrid Damm. Band 2. Leipzig: Insel. 770-777.] Nast, Johannes. 1777. Vorrede. In: Der teütsche Sprachforscher. Allen Liebhabern ihrer Mutersprache zur Prüfung vorgeleget. Stuttgart. *3-*20. Polenz, Peter von. 1994. Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Band 2. 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Rüdiger, Johann Christian Christoph. 1782/93. Neuester Zuwachs der teutschen, fremden und allgemeinen Sprachkunde in einigen Aufsätzen, Bücheranzeigen und Nachrichten. Stück 1, Leipzig 1782. Stück 2, 1783. Stück 3, 1784. Stück 4, 1785. Stück 5, Halle 1793. Saage, Richard. 1997. Utopieforschung. Eine Bilanz. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Scharloth, Joachim. 2003. 'Der Deutschfranzose. Zu den mentalitätsgeschichtlichen Bedingungen der Sprachnormierungsdebatte zwischen 1766 und 1785.' In: Androutsopoulos, Jannis & Evelyn Ziegler (eds.). "Standardfragen". Soziolinguistische Perspektiven auf Sprac-geschichte, Sprachkontakt und Sprachvariation. Festgabe zum 60. Geburtstag von Klaus J. Mattheier. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. 27-49. Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel. 1975. Deutsche Chronik. Augsburg und Ulm. Faksimiledruck mit einem Nachwort herausgegeben von Hans Krauss. 4 Bände. (= Deutsche Neudrucke, Reihe: Goethezeit). Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider. Steiert, Rudolf. 1985. 'Kritik und Gegenbild: Zur Funktion und Struktur der Sozialutopie.' In: Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen 14. 253-263. Thomas, George. 1991. Linguistic Purism. London: Longman.

Maria Geers

A Comparative Study of Linguistic Purism in the History of England and Germany The present paper will deal with the general characteristics of linguistic purism in England and Germany from the sixteenth to the seventeenth, and in the nineteenth centuries. It will reveal the similarities and differences in the way this phenomenon manifested itself in the history of the English and German languages. During these periods in the history of English and German the manifestations of linguistic purism were more intense than, for example, in the eighteenth century. This paper will present an aspect of my doctoral thesis 'Linguistic Purism in the History of England and Germany'. I was drawn to this topic because there is no general study of linguistic purism in the history of English (although some attempts have been made to study certain aspects of linguistic purism at specific periods). Secondly, it is interesting to compare this linguistic phenomenon and its manifestations in two Germanic languages which have evolved as differently as have English and German. Before turning to the main topic of the paper it is necessary to introduce some terminology which will occur frequently. In this paper, linguistic purism is treated as a phenomenon which depends on the language situation, or a totality of all the forms of existence of a native language, as well as other languages prevalent on the same territory, whose status and interaction are determined by specific social, political, economic, geographical, historical and cultural conditions, as well as internal regularities of language development (Logutenkova 1996: 17-18). The former (e.g. various economic systems, socio-political situations, different political ideologies, e.g. nationalism, literary and cultural aesthetics) are extralinguistic factors of language development, whereas the latter constitute intralinguistic factors in language development. The latter include, for example, the grammatical structure of a language (analytic or synthetic); the level of development and flexibility of a language and its functional subsystems (phonetic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, etc.); the development stages of a standard language, the evolution type of a language, as well as interaction between the standard language and other linguistic varieties: dialects, sociolects, slang, etc., that is in which way the standard language influences

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other varieties and vice versa. For example, in nineteenth-century England standard English had a strong influence on the dialects, so that the latter became forms of regional speech of wider communication. They were brought closer to the standard language (Görlach 1999: 102). Another example of such interaction is that some elements of the professional slang: per, via, etc. entered English standard in the nineteenth century and they have remained a part of it ever since. As the main topic of the present paper is linguistic purism, it is necessary to provide a definition on which my discussion of this complex phenomenon in the history of English and German will be based. A classification of the types of linguistic purism helps to reveal its various aspects. One of the basic terms in the study of linguistic purism is puristic substitution (henceforth PS), i.e. a lexical formation composed and proposed by purists instead of 'unnecessary' lexical units already in the language, which, in their opinion, have been polluting it. According to the direction of puristic activity, linguistic purism can be internal (or social), aimed at the 'impurities' of native origin (dialecticisms, neologisms, archaisms, slang, cant elements, etc.) and external (or xenophobic) 'struggling' against external influences, such as foreign words, loanwords, caiques, internationalisms. Depending on the types of PSs and the means and sources of their formation we can single out: • • •

archaising purism, when purists make use of the vocabulary and wordbuilding elements of the past; ethnographic purism, with the use of rural dialects and popular speech as sources of puristic substitutions; elitist purism, which preserves the speech of the elite from dialectal and archaic elements and prefers loanwords.

Therefore, internal (or social) purism often coincides with elitist purism, and external (or xenophobic) purism with archaising and ethnographic types of linguistic purism. As to the aims of puristic activity, linguistic purism can be: • • • • • •

reformist, helping to reform and resuscitate a language; protective, making an effort to safeguard the language from any possible or already existing influences, both external and internal; traditional, which is part of language policy (cf. linguistic purism in Iceland); nationalist as part of nationalist political movements; pedagogical in an effort to educate the masses; playful in an effort to attract the attention of society to puristic reforms (Geers 2002: 37-38).

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Taking all of this into consideration, linguistic purism can be defined as an activity, usually based on an unscientific (i.e. nonlinguistic) approach to language reform and determined both by extralinguistic and intralinguistic factors of language development; it aims to purify above all the lexical system of a language from loanwords and other 'harmful' language units, replacing them mainly out of the native resources of a language, which conform to the language standard (ibid, p. 38). The evolution of the English and German standard languages during the Old English / Old High German and Middle English / Middle High German periods consequently provides for the emergence of linguistic purism in its different types in England and Germany, for the differing intensity of puristic activity and its success or failure in these two countries. The evolution of English during the Old and Middle English periods was not smooth. The Norman Conquest, and especially its political and social consequences as well as the popularity of French all over Europe in the Middle Ages, meant there was a break with the Anglo-Saxon linguistic and literary traditions which resulted in the radical change of the whole structure of English (Baugh & Cable 1993: 131, 164). The move towards a more analytic structure of English grammar made the assimilation of borrowings in English much easier. With the massive lexical borrowing from Latin and French, English acquired foreign suffixes and prefixes that became productive in time and partially replaced the native ones. Besides, Latin and French remained prestigious languages among the English upper classes and the educated - a fact which resulted in the social differentiation of English vocabulary: the native English elements were good enough for everyday usage, whereas borrowed ones were used in the communication of the elite and the educated. Therefore, at the later stages of development of standard English there existed in England linguistic purism of the xenophobic and social types. Xenophobic purism (in its archaising and ethnographic forms) aimed at reviving the lost Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and re-establishing its high status, as it was before the Norman Conquest. The representatives of elitist purism, on the other hand, tried to preserve in English the prestige of the borrowed vocabulary of Romance origin. Various language situations after the emergence of linguistic purism in the sixteenth century and a certain combination of extra- and intralinguistic factors contributed to the differentiation of each manifestation of linguistic purism in England and its effectiveness. Unlike English, the evolution of the German standard language during the first two stages of its development was rather linear, without any radical changes to its inner structure. Different political, economic and cultural events in the early history of Germany influenced the shift of language powers and prestige from one German variety to another. However, such interrelation and substitution of German varieties tended to contribute to the levelling of the

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German standard language and to the preservation of its Germanic origin. Besides, the synthetic structure of German grammar, becoming slightly more analytic during the Middle High German period, as well as the rich wordformation potential of Old and Middle High German, added to the smooth development of German. It determined the emergence mainly of xenophobic purism at later periods in the evolution of German. There are two main types of language situations which determine the emergence of linguistic purism. They are, as Thomas rightly says, language contact and language standardisation (in its pre-standardisation, standardisation and post-standardisation stages) (Thomas 1991: 116). Various forms of language contact caused the emergence of linguistic purism in England and Germany at the different periods of their history. For example, the first stage of linguistic purism in England in the sixteenth century was preceded by trilingualism, when French, Latin and English shared nearly the same domains of language. In Germany, on the other hand, the first stage of linguistic purism followed after triglossia, when French, Latin and German had separate spheres of usage. So, Latin was the language of science and literature, French was the means of communication of the upper classes and German (in the form of its various dialects) was the medium of the poor. As for standardisation, in both England and Germany linguistic purism emerged for the first time during pre-standardisation and was reformist in its goals (sixteenth century for English, seventeenth century for German). At the time of pre-standardisation, both languages faced three main problems: (1) recognition in the fields where Latin (and French) had for centuries been supreme; (2) the establishment of a more uniform orthography, and (3) the enrichment of the vocabulary so that it would be adequate to meet the demands that would be made upon it in its wider use (Baugh & Cable 1993: 198). The puristic activity of English and German purists of the time was connected with the written form of English and German, as the most fixed one. Acute nationalistic feelings played an important role in the emergence of linguistic purism: in England they were caused by the separation of England from the Pope and the victory in the war with Spain. In Germany the rise of nationalistic feelings was due to the defeat in the Thirty Years War. As to the inner situation of English and German, chaos still dominated in the functional subsystems of these two languages: no rules, no proper norms that could be a guide for the speakers. The representatives of reformist purism in England, such as John Cheke, Raphe Lever, George Puttenham, Roger Ascham, Richard Verstegan engaged in the enrichment of the English vocabulary with the help of native

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means and resources, excluding dialects. They did not insist on the absolute use of their PSs, but offered their readers a free choice between the loans and their lexical proposals. John Cheke introduced his PSs, often of Anglo-Saxon origin, in his translation of the Gospel of Matthew and part of the Gospel of Mark: •

•

archaisms as PSs: crossed instead of crucified, wiseards instead of magi, waite on instead of servant, biwordes instead of parables, hundreder instead of centurion, etc.; caiques from Latin and Greek as PSs: freshman from proselyte, gainsbirth from regeneration, gainrising from resurrection, etc.

Raphe Lever, the most radical of the English purists of the time, tried to substitute the Latin terminology of logic in English with his own coinages, using compounding as the main means of PS formation: an endsay instead of Latin (later on - L) conclusio, an inbeer instead of L accidens, a naysay instead of L negatio, saywhat instead of L definitio, speechcrafte instead of L rhetoric, etc. None of Cheke's or Lever's PSs has ever reached the active vocabulary of standard English. Besides reformist purism, in sixteenth - seventeenth-century England there existed archaising-ethnographic purism, but it was restricted to the English poetic language only. Under the influence of the linguistic programme of the Pleiade (a group of French poets) Edmund Spenser made great use of: •

• •

obsolete native English words and forms: accoy 'appease', algate 'always', sicker 'certainly' (cf. German sicher), hight 'is called', whilere 'a while before', etc.; dialectal elements, especially from Lancashire: wae 'woe', gate 'goat', sike 'such', games 'causes', warre 'worse', etc. so called Chaucerisms (or old-fashioned English words and borrowings found in works by Chaucer and his contemporaries): displeasance, gan tel, areed, lustyhed, etc.

In sixteenth-century England there were attempts on the part of the English purists to 'translate' unintelligible scientific terminology (usually of Latin or Greek origin) and replace it with native English terms, so that the thoughts and achievements of the world of science would be comprehensible to the growing reading masses. Such, for example, were the efforts of Robert Recorde, who in his books on arithmetic and geometry ('Grounde of Artes', 1543, or 'The Pathway to knoledg', 1551, to name some of them) created PSs for mathematical terminology: gemowe lynes instead of paralleles·, stringline instead of cord, plumme line instead of perpendicular, touch lyne instead of tangent, cinkangle instead of pentagon, etc.

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In Germany the idea of the enlightenment of the masses was often the dominant one among the purists, although it was frequently mixed with their patriotic views: German, as the language of the German nation, must be able to express any idea or nuance from its own resources. Linguistic purism in seventeenthcentury Germany was not an exception in that respect. In the prestandardisation situation it was also of the reformist type. But, unlike in England, German purists organised special language societies, such as the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft and the Teutschgesinnete Genossenschaft and made it their duty to purify and reform the German language. Although the collective puristic activity of the societies was not fruitful (as the name of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft may imply), the popularity of the language societies in Germany contributed to the success of their members, especially of Justus Georg Schottel, Georg Harsdörffer and Philipp von Zesen. These purists tried to replace French and Latin borrowings with their own PSs, coined with the help of the rich resources of German affixation: Bescheidenheit instead of Discretion, Ausrede instead of Elocutio, beobachten instead of observieren, Geschmack instead of Gusto, etc.; and composition: Jahrhundert instead of Säkulum, Schauspieler instead of Komödianten, Mittelpunk instead of Centrum, Irrgarten instead of Labyrinth, etc. They particularly engaged in the formation of the native German academic terminology, especially in the field of grammar: Selbstlauter instead of Vokal, Mitlauter instead of Konsonant, Zeitwort instead of Verb, Abwandlung instead of Derivation, Sprachlehre instead of Grammatik, Wortforschung instead of Etymologie, etc. The puristic activity of Philipp von Zesen differs from that of Justus Georg Schottel und Georg Harsdörffer in its extremeness and radicalism, which was often a cause for ridicule and mockery, both on the part of his colleagues and his readers. But such extremeness as presented in his works may be partially excused if looked at from the perspective of the poetic needs of the German language. Thus, the archaising-ethnographic purism of Philipp von Zesen, although radical in its manifestation, may be considered as Zesen's effort to enlarge the expressive abilities of the German poetic repertoire, replacing even loans which had been assimilated for centuries, such as Fenster (Zesen's Tageleuchter) or Natur (Zesen's Zeugemutter / Zeugemutter aller Dinge), or germanising the names of the ancient Greek gods: Lustinne / Liebinne instead of Afrodite, Rötinne instead of Aurora, Bluminne instead of Flora, etc. In the nineteenth century, English and German purists carried on the efforts of their predecessors to some extent. By the end of the eighteenth century, the norms and standards of the English and German languages were nearly fixed. Therefore, the efforts of the purists in the post-standardisation situation were, to a greater extent, directed at the preservation of these standards and their defence from possible foreign influences. Furthermore, the representatives of

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xenophobic purism in England saw it as their duty to anglo-saxonise the English standard. Nineteenth-century Britain saw great changes in political, economic and social life. But the most decisive influence on the language came from the rapid development of science and different branches of industry with their new notions, objects and inventions to be denoted. The experience of the past was taken into account as new terms were derived with the help of Greek and Latin morphemes: -meter, -graph, -ous, auto-, di-, -itis, -tomy, mono-, post-, poly-, pre-, tele-, trans-, -nomy, -phone, -scope, etc. or words were borrowed from these languages: excursus, opus, ego, omnibus, sanatorium, aquarium, consensus, referendum, bacillus; myth, pylon, etc. (Bailey 1996: 140). A new flood of loans from the classical languages resulted in the emergence of two types of linguistic purism: xenophobic, represented by William Barnes and the poets G. M. Hopkins and W. Morris and supported by R. Ch. Trench, and elitist, represented by G. Graham, A. Bain, A. Ellis and other language critics. William Barnes, the most conservative and thorough English purist of the nineteenth century, saw the reform of Victorian English in its Anglo-Saxon past and tried to anglo-saxonise the complex borrowed words or their components. He was very well acquainted with the works of his German colleagues and he followed their example, inventing PSs for the everyday and scientific vocabulary of Romance origin. The poets G. M. Hopkins and W. Morris directed their efforts at reforming English poetic language only. Barnes, Hopkins and Morris made great use of the following four means and sources of PS formation: •

•

revival of Old English (OE) words: gleecraft instead of music, inwit instead of conscience, wort instead of plant (Barnes); chapman instead of merchant, lustyhead instead of pleasure, abye instead of to suffer (Morris), etc. or OE affixes: to for-free-en instead of to absolve; folkdom instead of democracy, breaksome instead of fragile (Barnes); astray, abide, unhouse, unbake (Hopkins); to-wearied 'extremely wearied', bewooed 'allured, attracted', ungreedy 'generous' {Morris), etc. use of dialectal words and elements: doughty instead of active, fall instead of autumn (cf. AmE fall), sprack instead of energetic, toilsome instead of industrious, (Barnes); cringe, dings, dint, flanks, gash, hack, hempen, housel (Hopkins), etc.

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•

•

calquing words of Romance origin: twymeaning instead of ambiguous; mistiming instead of anachronism; headbishop instead of archbischop; or using the words of related Germanic languages as a model: mayly from German (G) möglich instead of possible, toothdoctor from G Zahnarzt instead of dentist·, worksome from G arbeitsam instead of industrious (Barnes); battle-board from Old Norwegian (later on ON) gunn-bord 'shield', helm-bearer from ON hjälm-beri 'helmbearer' (Morris), etc. compounding: fireghost instead of electricity, earth-fire instead of volcano, starlore instead of astronomy, yearday / yeartide instead of anniversary (Barnes); leafwhelmed, field-flown (Hopkins); battlecrafty 'clever in war', all-boun 'prepared', wood-wrath 'furiously angry' (Morris), etc.

The elitist purism of G. Graham, A. Bain, A. Ellis consisted in objections to the elements of professional cant, jargon, slang and American English in standard English: e.g. ditto, per, via, sundries, concern. As A. Ellis pointed out, the use of a wrong word in a specific situation could amount to 'linguistic suicide', as it could betray the speaker's low origin (Görlach 1999: 98). Opposition to American English elements was a feature of nineteenth-century British elitist purism. Loans from American English seemed to be foreign words for British English, rather than internal borrowings: back-woods, blizzard, Indian-file, snow-plow, to strike oil, grave-yard, loafer, lynch-law, gerrymander, carpetbagger, law-abiding, etc. (ibid, pp. 103-105). The prevalent opinion about American lexical units was that they marred the true English language, i.e. British English, and were unworthy to enter standard usage. Although some of the critics, for example Graham, admitted that some Americanisms would enter British vocabulary, he was sure that their 'low' origin would not allow them to enter the received standard (Crowley 1991: 166). The nineteenth century saw two separate stages of linguistic purism in Germany: first of all, the puristic activity of Joachim Heinrich Campe and some other purists in the first half of the nineteenth century; secondly, puristic activity after the establishment of the Second Empire towards the end of the nineteenth century. The first stage of puristic activity in Germany is characterised by the archaising-ethnographic purism of Joachim Heinrich Campe. At the end of the eighteenth century, German was again flooded with borrowings from French thanks to the French Revolution and the growing popularity of Napoleon Bonaparte. A new French influence provoked Francophobia and the rise of nationalistic feelings in Germany with linguistic purism as one possible manifestation of this.

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Campe was the most productive purist in the history of German. He wrote a number of works on the problem of linguistic purism in Germany and compiled a dictionary of his own PSs (Wörterbuch zur Erklärung und Verdeutschung der unserer Sprache aufgedrungenen fremden Ausdrücke, 1801). He composed about 3000 PSs, but only 10% of them reached the active German vocabulary. Using two main means of word-building - affixation and compounding Campe germanised French and Latin borrowings of everyday vocabulary: altertümlich instead of antik, Anschrift instead of Etikett, Bankbruch instead of Bankrott, Bartpfleger instead of Barbier, Deckengemälde instead of Plafond, dienstunfähig instead of invalid, Kerbtier instead of Insekt, Mundtuch instead of Serviette, Musterbild instead of Ideal, prickelnd instead of pikant, etc.; and the Latin scientific terminology: Sprachtum instead of Philologie, Denklehre instead of Logik, Einzahl instead of Singular, Mehrzahl instead of Plural, Nachsilbe instead of Suffix, ursächlich instead of kausal, Befehlswort instead of Imperativ, Lichtmesser instead of Photometer, etc. Besides Campe's puristic activity, the puristic movement in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century took various forms and followed various trends: the aesthetic purism of Karl Kolbe, the rational purism of Christian Wolke and Karl Krause, the nationalistic purism of Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, just to name some of them. But their influence on the development of German and its lexical system was not as effective as that of Campe. The second stage of linguistic purism in Germany followed the establishment of the Second Empire. Thanks to the Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein, founded at the end of the nineteenth century, and the activity of German officials, linguistic purism in Germany became a movement of the newly united Germany. New branches of the society were constantly being established in various parts of the country, and the number of their members grew rapidly. Just a few years after its foundation the society had about 160 branches all over Germany with about eleven thousand members (Kirkness 1975: 370). A feature of the puristic activity of the time was playful purism, revealed in various competitions for the formation of the best PS of a loanword. Such efforts to attract the attention of the public to the problems of the German language didn't have any lasting results. At the end of the nineteenth century, the German vocabulary was enriched with native German words (i.e. PSs) in the fields of architecture, construction, transport, post, law, etc. So, GeneralPostmaster Heinrich von Stephan introduced his PSs in the field of postal communication and services: postlagernd instead of French (F) poste restante, Rückschein instead of F Retour-Recepisse, Postkarte instead of F Correspondenzkarte, eingeschrieben / Einschreiben instead of F recommandiert, Umschlag instead of F Couvert, etc. Otto Sarrazin germanised French borrowings in the field of construction and railway communication:

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Fahrschein instead of F Passagierbillet, Abteil instead of F Coupe, Bahnsteig instead of F Perron, Fahrgast instead of F Passagier, Fahrkartenausgabe instead of F Billetexpedition, Nebenbahn instead of F Sekundärbahn, Schranke instead of F Barriere, etc. The present brief survey of the characteristics of linguistic purism in England and Germany from the sixteenth to the seventeenth and during the nineteenth centuries has allowed me to single out certain similarities and differences in English and German purism. In both England and Germany linguistic purism was a result of the language situation as a whole. It appeared for the first time in the language situation of pre-standardisation. It was connected with a certain combination of intra- and extralinguistic factors, which constitute every language situation. Peculiarities of the inner structure of these two languages and their functional subsystems as well as certain events in the history of the English and German nations drastically influenced the character and intensity of puristic activity. Language contact also caused the emergence of linguistic purism in England and Germany. In both England and Germany linguistic purism was socially determined. Its social stratification was ordained by the fashion for the French language in the upper classes of English and German society and widespread Gallomania in general. In the nineteenth century the confrontation between British and American varieties of English added to the social stratification of linguistic purism in England. Both English and German purists chose nearly the same means and sources of PS formation. The representatives of external (xenophobic) purism preferred affixation with the help of native word-building elements and compounding and, to a lesser extent, calquing. And, although they often spoke about the riches of the archaic and dialectal vocabulary, they made (with a few exceptions) little use of them themselves. As for the representatives of elitist purism, they borrowed or used the most productive word-building material, regardless of whether it was of native or foreign origin. The changes in the system of English which had taken place during the first two periods of its development contributed greatly to the effectiveness of elitist purism and the failure of xenophobic purism in England at later periods in the history of standard English. The social differentiation of the English vocabulary, where borrowed elements had a higher status than the native ones, meant that the effectiveness of xenophobic purism in England was negligible, because after the Norman Conquest the ties with the Anglo-Saxon language and literary traditions had been severely weakened. Unlike xenophobic purism, elitist purism had much more success in England. Nearly from the very beginning of its formation, the English standard was represented by the language usage of the upper classes (the social elite) and the educated. Elitist

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purism kept the English standard safe from the influence of other social groups (dialects, sociolects, professional slang, cant, etc.). Thus, the vocabulary of the English standard still remains prestigious, not mixed with elements of other varieties. Thanks to the undisturbed evolutionary development of German, the Old German language and literary traditions were preserved in German. Different types of German declension and conjugation with their numerous inflections hampered the assimilation of borrowings in German. Besides, the history of the German nation, marked by the struggle for national identification, added to the effectiveness of xenophobic purism in Germany. The social organisation of puristic activity in Germany (in the form of the numerous language societies) and the participation of the higher German officials in it added to its success. PSs, composed by German purists, were often transparent for German-speaking society and therefore had more chance of being accepted into German vocabulary. They didn't always fully oust the foreign loans but formed doublets with them. Such is, for example, the case with the German scientific terminology when native German terms and their foreign equivalents are functionally and stylistically differentiated. Thus, the native ones are used in everyday usage and elementary education, whereas the borrowed terminology remains in scientific vocabulary and is mostly used in the sphere of higher education and science. Elitist purism, however, was not so popular in Germany. Nearly from the very beginning of its formation, the German standard was identified with the usage of the literate (upper) middle classes (or the bourgeoisie that was not the social elite of German society) and the educated. Therefore, the activity of the German purists was rather of a populist, pedagogical character, aiming to make the achievements of science, technology and culture intelligible and open to the broadest circles of German society. PSs for Romance borrowings were composed with the help of native German word-building material or out of dialectal and archaic vocabulary. In such a situation, elitist purism had little chance of succeeding. To sum up: the history of the English and German standard languages saw different manifestations of linguistic purism, with one set of aims and ideologies, greater intensity and power during one period and with different motivations and challenges during the other. During some periods of the evolution of the English and German standard languages linguistic purism existed in one particular form, with a certain choice of means and sources of PS formation; others witnessed puristic activity of some other types, depending on the existing language situation and the combination of extra- and intralinguistic factors. But no matter how intensely or weakly linguistic purism manifested itself, it remained an important constituent in the formation and evolution of the English and German standard languages.

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References Bailey, Richard 1996. Nineteenth-Century English. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press. Baugh, Albert C. & Thomas Cable. 1993. A History of the English Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Crowley, Tony. 1991. Proper English? Readings in language, history and cultural identity. London: Routledge. Geers, Maria. 2002. Yazykovoj purizm ν istorii Anglii i Germanii (Linguistic Purism in the History of England and Germany). Doctoral Thesis, Tver State University. Unpublished manuscript. Görlach, Manfred. 1999. English in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirkness, Alan. 1975. Zur Sprachreinigung im Deutschen 1789-1871. Eine Historische Dokumentation. Tübingen: Narr. Logutenkova, Tatiana. 1996. Istoriko-tipologicheskoe issledovanie drevnikh germanskikh literaturnykh yazykov. (Historical-typological research of the old Germanic languages (Old English, Old High German and Old Icelandic). Postdoctoral thesis. Moscow: MGU. Thomas, George. 1991. Linguistic Purism. London: Longman.

II. Nationhood and Purism

Felicity Rash

Linguistic purism in German-speaking Switzerland and the Deutschschweizerischer Sprachverein 1904-1942 The Deutschschweizerischer Spachverein (DSSV), now renamed the Schweizerischer Verein ßr die deutsche Sprache (SVDS), was founded in 1904 by a group of thirteen men with the common objective 'zäh für eine gute, schweizerische Sache einzutreten' ("to take up the cause of a good Swiss matter") (Spuler 1964: 73). The concept of language protection was from the outset linked with the reinforcement of national consciousness as can be seen in the DSSVs original mission statement: Der Deutschschweizerische Sprachverein ist ein Bund von Schweizerbürgern zur Pflege und zum Schutz der deutschen Sprache in der Schweiz. Er will Liebe und Verständnis für die deutsche Muttersprache wecken, das im Sprachgefühl schlummernde Volksbewusstsein kräftigen und der deutschen Sprache auf schweizerischem Boden zu ihrem Recht verhelfen. Die Mitglieder des Vereins machen sich zur Aufgabe: l.im eignen Sprachgebrauch, sowohl in der Mundart als in der Schriftsprache, Reinheit, Eigenart und Schönheit der deutschen Sprache zu pflegen und 2.in ihrer Umgebung für diese Bestrebung einzutreten und Freunde zu werben. (Weber 1984: 6) ("The DSSV is an association of Swiss citizens who aspire to maintain and protect the German language in Switzerland. It aims to awaken the love and understanding of German-speaking Swiss people for their mother tongue, to strengthen the national consciousness which lies dormant in their feeling for their language, and to help the German language on Swiss soil gain the rights due to it. The members of the society undertake: 1. to maintain the purity, individuality and beauty of the standard language and the dialects through their own usage of both, and 2. to make their efforts public and win friends for their cause.")

Despite the society's official recognition of the equality of all Swiss national languages, its original aims set the German language in direct competition with

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French and the concept of 'national identity' was directly equated with the spirit of the germanophone population. The phrase: 'das im Sprachgefühl schlummernde Volksbewusstsein' was deleted from the DSSV statement of objectives in 1940. T4he DSSV has branches in Luzern, Bern, Zürich and Basel, an information service (Sprachauskunft) in Basel (originally in Luzern), and an advisory service (Sprachberatungsstelle) for the Federal Administration in Bern (Müller-Marzohl, 1994). A number of other language societies (befreundete Vereinigungen) foster a close relationship with the DSSV: • • •

Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache in St. Gallen, founded in 1911; Rottenbund, based in the canton of Wallis and founded in 1948; Deutschfreiburgische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, founded in 1959.

The DSSV publishes its own periodical, which was called Mitteilungen des Deutschschweizerischen Sprachvereins from 1917 until 1944, and from 1945 has borne the title Sprachspiegel. Through these publications, and through the efforts of Eduard Blocher,1 the DSS V aimed from the beginning to advise and instruct the lay population as well as academics in matters of language protection (Sprachschutz) and language maintenance (Sprachpflege). The DSSV has always regarded the Swiss German dialects (SG) and Swiss Standard German (SSG) as equally deserving of support and protection, and this paper will summarise its efforts to maintain both the standard language and the dialects as separate and unadulterated language varieties. It will also describe the specific contributions of Eduard Blocher and August Steiger2 to the debate over linguistic purity.

1. The protection of standard German in Switzerland The need to protect and support the standard language in Switzerland first became a pressing issue in the early twentieth century, when observers predicted the death of the dialects, and the resultant backlash gave rise to a so-called Mundartwelle (wave of dialect fervour) (Schläpfer et al. 1991: 25). Members of the DSSV saw a need to safeguard SSG from incursions from other languages and the dialects, and from ignorance (speakers' inadequate knowledge of SSG and lack of practice in using it).

1

Blocher was secretary of the DSSV from 1905 to 1912 and president from 1912 until his death in 1942.

2

Steiger was secretary from 1916 until 1942 and editor (Schriftleiter) periodicals Mitteilungen des Deutschschweizerishen Sprachvereins Sprachspiegel (1944-1954)..

of the society's two (1917-1944) and

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1.1 The protection o f the standard language from foreign influence Both the standard language and the dialects in Switzerland are renowned for being more open to foreign influences than the language varieties elsewhere in the German-speaking (GS) area. Except for the most extreme purists, members o f the DSSV generally advocated moderation in matters o f language protection. A balance was recommended between linguistic xenophobia and the use of so many foreign words that people o f average education could not understand their o w n language: Switzerland is a nation fiercely proud o f its democratic traditions and its population has for centuries regarded the over-use o f foreign words as antidemocratic. As early as the sixteenth century Huldrich Zwingli called for the use o f plain German in church, unadulterated with grandiose Latin vocabulary: Ich weiß, daß der gemein lieblich Christ der warheit vil frölicher loset, wo sy in jrer eignen kleidung kummt, weder mit ze vil zier oder mit ze hochmüetigem gepöch. [...] Es ist unter tusenden kum einer, der recht verstände, was diß wort (sakrament) heiße — nenne einer ein ding mit dem namen, den er wol verstat, und belade sich fremder Worten nüts — was bekümmert uns Tütschen, wie die welschen Totenpfyffer die heiligen zeichen [...] nennend [...]. (Lesefrüchte 1936: 1) ("I know that the ordinary Christian much prefers to hear the truth if she comes dressed in her own clothes, devoid of all ornament and vain pomp. [...] There is hardly one person in a thousand who fully understands what this word (sacrament) means — one should name a thing with the word that is easily understood, and not make lavish use of foreign words — why should we Germans care what the Romance-speaking (= Catholic?) pipers of death call the holy signs?") In 1538 Ägidius Tschudi expressed a similar fear with regard to the language o f the chanceries, believing that excessive use o f Latin vocabulary would put the law beyond the comprehension o f the c o m m o n man: Und so nun tütsche spraach zuo eigner gschrifft gebracht, ouch aller dingen worten an iro selbs volkommen gnuog ist, so wollend yetz die tütschen Cantzler, ouch die Consistorischen schryber uns wider zuo latin bringen, könnend nit ein linien one latinische wort schryben, so sy doch der tütschen genuog hettend, machend, das menger gemeiner man, so kein latin kan, nit wissen mag, was es bedüt [...] wollend also unsrer tütsch, so ein erliche spraach ist, verachten, bruchind ouch etwa wälsche wort [...]. (from Tschudi's Rhaetia, quoted from 'Lesefrüchte', p. 1) ("Now that the German language has its own written form, and it has in itself words enough to express all concepts, the German chancery and consistorial scribes want to foist Latin upon us again. They are incapable of writing as much as a line without using

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Latin vocabulary, as if they did not have enough German words at their disposal, and this has the effect that many ordinary men, who know no Latin, cannot understand what they write [...] they thus show contempt for our German, which is an honourable language, and even use some words from the modern Romance languages [...].")

While such commentators showed opposition to Latin lexical influences at an early date, much less concern was shown about French and Italian borrowings, and one finds few complaints about these before the twentieth century. Nowadays, of course, the chief foreign influence is from (American) English. In his article Für und wider die Sprachreinigung (1912), Eduard Blocher sets out the views on foreign lexical influences which have since become accepted as the general puristic tenets of the DSSV. Following the lead of the German Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein, Blocher adopted the principle: 'Kein Fremdwort für das, was deutsch gut ausgedrückt werden kann' (p. 44). As one might expect, his article makes an enthusiastic case for linguistic purism and a very weak case against it. He gave five major reasons for avoiding foreign lexical influences: a. F O R 1. In language, as in all areas of human existence, only what is pure can be beautiful. Mixing things which do not belong together, such as words from different languages, results in ugliness. Higher literary forms, such as belles lettres and religious texts, avoid impurities; lower forms of language are marred by them: Am unreinsten ist die Sprache des Tingeltangels, des Variete- und des Corso-Theaters, mit ihrem komischen Ensemble, ihren Artisten, ihren Sensationen und Attraktionen, ihren Toreros, Bouffons, Clowns, Potpourris, Records und dem ganzen russischen Salat ausfranzösischen,spanischen und negerenglischen Schnitzeln, (ibid, p. 39) ("The least pure of all is the language of the second-rate night-club, of the variety and corso theatre, with their comic ensemble, their artistes, their sensations and attractions, their toreros, buffoons, clowns, potpourris, records, and the whole Russian salad of French, Spanish and Nigger-English titbits.") 2. Foreign words are difficult to understand, and to use them is undemocratic. Blocher quotes the German Eduard Engel: Die Fremdwörterei ist die granitne Mauer, die sich in Deutschland zwischen den Gebildeten und den nach Bildung ringenden Klassen erhebt, (ibid, p. 41) ("Over-use of foreign words is the granite wall that in Germany separates the educated from those who aspire to education.")

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Switzerland, with its long history of democracy, would do well to produce language that all GS citizens can understand. This is a view that still holds today. Furthermore, the francophone Swiss, now as when Blocher was writing, do not find that the German language is improved by large numbers of foreign words, especially when these are incorrectly used French words, (ibid, pp. 52f.) 3. Less educated people habitually make themselves look foolish through inexpert use of foreign words ('Ungeschicklichkeiten') (ibid, p. 41). 4. Foreign words hamper clear expression and are a symptom of muddled thinking (ibid, p. 42). 5. Using foreign words is a moral flaw ('sittliche Makel'), the manifestation of which is vanity ('Eitelkeit') and pomposity ('Wichtigtuerei'), (ibid, p. 42) b. AGAINST Blocher's arguments against purism consisted largely of long-standing objections quoted only in order to counter them. In each of his points he makes it clear that he only objects to unassimilated Fremdwörter (foreign words) and not to fully assimilated and well-established Lehnwörter (loanwords): 1. Many foreign words are necessary to the study of the natural sciences, especially chemistry, but many scientific terms have German equivalents or could be given them. Blocher complains about words such as Perityphlitis for Blinddarmentzündung and Epoche for Zeitabschnitt, (ibid, p. 43) 2. A total eradication of foreign words is impossible; here Blocher agrees that well-established words such as Natur, Religion and Interesse need not be replaced words. This does not mean, however, that one should continue to let foreign words enter the German language without trying to germanize them (ibid, p. 44). 3. German has always taken foreign words into its lexicon and it would be a sin against tradition and the spirit of the German language to replace these. Blocher, however, reminds us of the high proportion of foreign words (99%, according to him) which have been fashionable in German only for a short time before disappearing again, so that they remain as witnesses of past foppery and foolishness ('Zeugen vergangener Geckerei und Torheit' (p. 44)). Words like Nase, Keller, Pflaume and Essig are examples of words of foreign origin that are long-established, linguistically adapted and therefore acceptable; new borrowings should adapt to the sounds and orthography of German: 'Da heißt es: Wenn du bei uns leben willst, mußt du dich fugen in Laut und Schrift, für Ohr und Auge deutsch werden' ("The rule is: if you wish to live with us you must fit in properly from the point of view of your sounds and spelling, you must be German for the eye as well as the ear") (ibid, p. 45). 4. Few germanizations fully match the original meaning of a loanword. In other words, foreign words are necessary to express nuances of meaning. Blocher argues that it is not necessary to match every foreign word with a German word.

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He gives as an example the French words pastor and abbe, which do not match German Pfarrer {Pfarrer can mean a Protestant as well as a Catholic priest), claiming that no-one suggests German-speakers should give up the word Pfarrer (ibid, p. 47). 5. Germanizations are ugly and violent (häßlich and gewaltsam) (ibid, p. 47). Blocher suggests that a bad germanization is worse than no germanization at all ('Wer nicht richtig verdeutschen kann, der lasse es lieber bleiben' (ibid, p. 49)) but advises that it takes time to get used to a germanization if one already uses the foreign equivalent: it is necessary to take this time if the German language is to be freed from unnecessary foreign words. The first step is to police one's thoughts: if one thinks in foreign words it is difficult to find a German alternative when one gives voice to one's thoughts. 6. Germanizations are symbols of Germany's revived national pride after political unification in 1871 and therefore signify a dangerously xenophobic frame of mind. Blocher states that the Swiss should not fear succumbing to this sentiment and that aversion to Prussia is not a linguistic point of view ('Abneigung gegen Preußen is kein sprachlicher Gesichtspunkt' (ibid, p. 48)). Swiss Germans may choose to accept or reject German germanizations, or they may choose their own, such as Fürsprech (German Anwalt) or Gangbahn (German Fußsteig) (ibid, p.48). Talk of 'Verpreußung' ("Prussianization") is, however, out of place in Switzerland, and not a sign of patriotism (ibid, p. 54). 7. Foreign words have the advantage of being international and are especially appreciated by other Swiss language communities (ibid, p. 50). Blocher counters this objection by asserting that the French-speaking Swiss in particular are on the side of the linguistic purists: 'Sie haben besseren Geschmack, feineres Sprachgefühl als wir' ("They have better taste and a finer feeling for language than we") (ibid, p. 52). Blocher's overall message in his 1912 article is that, whatever one's point of view, it is germanizations rather than foreign borrowings which enrich a language: 'Nicht die Einschlepper von Fremdwörtern, sondern die Verdeutscher haben die deutsche Sprache unaufhörlich bereichert' ("It is not the importers of foreign words that have continuously enriched the German language but the Germanisers") (p. 50). Blocher continued to promote moderate germanization throughout his career with the DSSV, in 1936 rejecting accusations that he was as fervent a purist as Adolf Hitler. He eventually claimed that he was more puristically inclined than Hitler, whom he accused of thoughtless over-use of foreign words; Blocher particularly objected to tautologies such as evolutionäre Entwicklung (evolutionary development) which he translated as entwickelnde Entwicklung (developmental development). (Hitler did indeed favour foreign words in his political rhetoric. Cornelia Berning puts this down to his desire to destroy the

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continuity and clarity of his message and thus force uncritical acceptance in his audience (Berning 1961: 181). I also believe that he intended to impress his audience with his apparently adept use of 'difficult' words.) Not all Swiss linguists agreed with Blocher's support of a germanization of the Swiss Standard German language. Ernst Tappolet, for example, criticised the mission of the DSSV as having too much in common with the nationalistic, nonlinguistic aims of the ADSV:

Vom schweizerischen Standpunkt aus haben wir keine Veranlassung, die Fremdwörter auszumerzen. Jenseits des Rheins haftet ihnen das Odium eines ausländischen Imports an, bei uns nicht, dort sind undeutsch und unnational gleichbedeutend, in der Schweiz nicht. (Tappolet 1919: 678) ("From the Swiss point of view we have no reason to eliminate foreign words. On the opposite bank of the Rhine the odium of a foreign import clings to them, but not here; there 'un-German' and 'anti-national' are synonymous, but not in Switzerland")

While Tappolet did not believe that foreign words were ugly or unnecessary, he felt that their overuse was. He claimed that pure German can become a stylistic monster (Stilungeheuer) if too many similar words are amassed: 'Die Schriftleitung unserer Zeitung hat die Verschiebung der Verhandlungen bis zur Feststellung der Bedingungen beschlossen' ("The editorial department of our newspaper has decided upon a postponement of negotiations until there has been a confirmation of the conditions") (ibid, p. 673). Tappolet advises the 'Entwelscher' ('de-romanizers') to exercise common sense in their choice of vocabulary and to base this solely on stylistic criteria: [...] man treffe seine Wahl rein stilistisch, man befrage sein eigenes Sprachgefühl, unbekümmert um die Zuflüsterungen von Sprachvereinen und Verdeutschungswörterbüchern. Was gut ist, wird sich von selbst durchsetzen, (ibid, p. 680) ("[...] one should base one's choice on purely stylistic criteria, one should consult one's own feeling for language without having to worry about the promptings of language societies or dictionaries which provide German equivalents for foreign words. What is good will always win through.")

1.2 The protection of the standard language from dialect influence

The philosophy of the DSSV has always been to affirm the equal status of the SG and SSG, and to keep both pure and separate. Blocher's statement to this effect in 1923 illustrates the high regard in which society held both dialect and the standard language:

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Kerndeutsch ist die Sprache des Schweizers, seine knorrige Mundart und seine unbeholfene hochdeutsche Rede wie seine geschriebene Amtssprache und seine Dichtung, kerndeutsch sind ihre Fehler und Härten, kerndeutsch ihre Kraft, Urwüchsigkeit, Biegsamkeit und Anschaulichkeit. (Blocher 1923a: 176). ("The language of the (German) Swiss is German to its core. His rugged dialects, his awkward spoken HG, his written official language and his literature: all of these are German to the core. Their faults and harshness are German to the core, as are their vigour, their primeval character, their flexibility and vividness.")

With this accolade Blocher declares both varieties of his native tongue as occupying a central position among the varieties of German. Both are part the cultural heritage of German-speaking Switzerland and both are equally legitimate and authentic. The dialects are generally seen as enriching SSG. Traugott Vogel (1941), for example, uses a type of horticultural metaphor commonly associated with seventeenth-century German purists to illustrate how the vernacular (Volkssprache) can fortify the written language (Kultursprache): Es wird [...] das Menschenwort mit der Pflanze verglichen, hat wie sie Wurzel, Zweig und Stamm, wächst aus den Gründen der Volksrede in die Luft der Hochsprache, und wie im Leben der Kulturpflanzen, finden sich auch hier Verfall und Erneuerung; es wachsen Wildlinge aus der Mundart in den Adel der Schriftsprache und bewahren mit ihrer neuen Kraft die obern Schichten vor Verkrustung. ("Human language can be compared to a plant. Like a plant it has roots, twigs and trunk; it grows out of the soil of colloquial language into the heady atmosphere of the standard language, and as with cultivated plants it undergoes decay and renewal. Wild plants grow up from the dialects into the noble written language and with their newly found strength they protect the upper echelons from encrustation.") (Vogel 1941, p. 12)

While the DSSV aimed to protect both the dialects and the standard German language in Switzerland, its main efforts have always been directed towards the Swiss German standard language (SSG), which contains a large number of dialect words and words which have become archaic in Germany - so-called 'Helveticisms'. In 1912, Eduard Blocher wrote in defence of words which were a part of the German language yet foreign to Germany, such as Fürsprech ('solicitor'), Hosensack ('trouser pocket'), Währschaft ('strong, solid, hearty') and allewege ('everywhere'). He was, however, against a total alemannization of the German language in Switzerland. He opposed dialect fanatics such as Emil Baer, who in 1937 founded the Schwizer Schprach-Biwegig,3 a society whose main aim

3

Succeeded by the Bund Schwyzertütsch (since 1990 the Verein

Schweizerdeutsch).

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was to develop a unified written Alemannic language, formed from an amalgam of existing dialects, with a simple, phonetically-based orthography. This 'common Alemannic' would exist alongside the German standard language and would be taught in schools (Baer & Baur 1937; Weber 1984: 115). Francophone (FS) and italophone compatriots would be required to learn Alemannic at school as their first foreign language in place of standard German (Weber 1984: 113). Baer claimed that the SG dialects were in danger and that if the German-speaking Swiss lost their dialects they would lose their 'Alemannic soul'. The DSSV could not possibly support any move which would disempower the standard German language and result in an adulteration of the dialects. In 1936 the DSSΚ replied to Baer's publication, 'Rettung der alemannischen Seele' in an article by the same name, possibly written by Blocher. Baer was accused of slandering ('Verunglimpfung') the Swiss people by claiming that their souls (the 'Kultur der Seele') were more primitive than those of other cultures because they had no standard written mother tongue. The author of this article claims that the FS community has managed to remain loyally Swiss despite the loss of their dialects and that the GS community does not have to become part of Nazi Germany just because it uses the same language. He is adamant that the DSSV is as keen to keep the SG dialect alive and pure as Baer with his proposed 'Schweizer-Esperanto'.

2. The protection of the dialects 2.1 The protection of the dialects from foreign influence While most members of the DSSV did not welcome the incursion of large numbers of foreign words into the standard language, some considered them to be at home in the dialects. Eduard Blocher saw the dialects as a type of nature reserve ('Naturpark') which had 'keinen Anspruch auf Schönheit, Reinheit, Regelrichtigkeit und Würde' ("no claim to beauty, purity, correctness or dignity"), and could therefore admit foreign words (Blocher 1923b: 2). The SG dialects have a long tradition of accepting foreign influences: for many centuries, words have been transferred from the neighbouring Romance dialects at the language boundaries (Rash 2002: 125f.) and Latin transfers are also to be found in early written texts. Until the 1940s, however, when English took over, the chief foreign influence was French. As in all of the DSSVs recommendations, moderation was and still is advised in the use of foreign words: some foreign words were considered to dwell naturally in the nature reserve of the dialects while others were too exotic to be admitted: '(...) wer Elefanten oder Schakale in einen schweizerischen Naturpark einführen wollte, dem würden wir den Weg zu Hagenbecks Zirkus weisen' ("[...] if anyone wanted to introduce elephants or jackals into a Swiss nature reserve, we

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would show him the way to Hagenbeck's circus") (Blocher 1923b). It has been suggested that the use of French words in particular, which is frequently said to be more pronounced in German-speaking Switzerland (in both the dialects and SSG) than in Germany, signals antipathy for the Germans and a desire to demonstrate that, despite a certain cultural affinity, Switzerland is not Germany (Weber 1984: 35). The presence of French loan-words in SG, on the other hand, has been seen by some linguists as a sign of sympathy on the part of GS Swiss for their FS compatriots: Wenn verschiedene Dialekte eine ganze Anzahl französischer Worte aufgenommen haben, so bedeutet dies gewissermassen eine Geste der Sympathie für unsere welschen Miteidgenossen. Wir dokumentieren dadurch, daß wir nicht Deutsche sind, dass wir, obschon wir selber zum deutschen Kulturkreis gehören, uns trotz unserer anderen Sprache dem romanischen Wesen verbunden fühlen. (Guggenbühl 1937: 21) ("If some dialects have adopted a large number of French words, this can, in a way, be seen as a gesture of solidarity with our francophone compatriots. It is a signal that we are not Germans; that, although we belong to the German cultural area, and despite the fact that we speak a different language, we feel very close to the Romance mentality.")

2.2 The protection of the dialects from standard German influence The ASS Κ has since its foundation encouraged the GS Swiss to take as much care when speaking their dialects as they do when speaking standard German. Eduard Blocher, who is best known for his patronage of the standard language, wrote in 1923 of the 'gesunde(n) Erdgeruch' [healthy smell of the soil] of the dialects, which, though they are criticised for their harsh sounds, have better withstood the levelling effects of time than the written language: 'Ob schön oder unschön, es ist an dieser Sprache alles echt-, alt- und urdeutsch' ("whether beautiful or not, everything about this language is genuine, ancient and archetypal") (Blocher 1923a: 167). One of the most detailed accounts of standard German influence on the SG dialects is the transcript of Wilhelm Bruckner's 1929 lecture to the Schweizerische Gesellschaft fiir Volkskunde. Bruckner lists standard German influences going back as far as the sixteenth century. All aspects of the dialects have been affected: phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical. Examples include: the change of to as in Habe > Hafe, Turbe > Torf; the change of and (Baseldeutsch ) to and as in Sun, Sin/Sün > Sohn, Söhne and Chüng (also Kenig and Kinig) to Kchönig-, the change of to as in Chilche > Chirche·, the change of some strong verbs to weak verbs, as in belle", er billt, er häp

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bulle > belle", er bellt, er hat geheilt; changes of gender, as in die > der Floh, die > der Schoß, der > die Bank ('bench'); lexical changes, such as manne"/eheliche" > hirote" and übercho > kriege" (Bruckner 1929: llff.) Bruckner puts some lexical changes down to snobbery, with people preferring Butter to Anke and thinking that Rahm (itself a Helveticism) tastes better than Nydle (ibid, p. 19). It is usually city dialects that are affected first, after which changes radiate out into the surrounding rural areas (ibid, p. 13). Bruckner notes that standard German influence increased after the introduction of universal schooling in the nineteenth century and that the Church was responsible for a number of changes to theological terminology, e.g. Gnode > Gnade and Omen > Amen (ibid, p. 14). Eduard Blocher (1923a) objected to borrowed standard German words such as Mädchenheim and Brausebad which failed to make a complete transition into SG, namely to Meitliheim and Brusbad, but were only partially adapted, resulting in the forms Mädcheheim and Brausibad. In 1924, August Steiger suggested that men who said Kardoffle instead of Härdöpfel and Treppe instead of Steige should be disenfranchised and women who did so should never be given the vote (Steiger 1924: 5). Fortunately speakers of SG still say Härdöpfel and Nydle, and women now have the vote. A major danger to SG was considered to be the use in the public arena of what Otto von Greyerz called 'Großratsdeutsch' (von Greyerz 1936: 39). This was a 'Mischsprache' of SG and SSG, 'nicht Fisch und nicht Vogel', which arose when a person thought out and wrote down a speech in SSG and translated it into SG as he or she spoke. To illustrate his point, von Greyerz composed a speech in Großratsdeutsch and an equivalent (not an exact translation) in the dialect of Hasliberg: SSG [...] Nur etwas vom altbewährte Schwizertum wei mer übererette i di kommendi Zit: d'Gesinnungstreui, wie si verkörperet isch im alte Rächt. Vergässe mer aber näbem geschribene Rächt das ungeschribene nid, das jeden i sir Bruscht treit: die Stimme des Gewissens, last not least! [...]. (von Greyerz 1936: 40) ("We will preserve one aspect of our traditional Swissness for the future: loyalty as it is embodied in our ancient laws. Last but not least, let us not forget the unwritten laws that exist alongside the written ones and which each man carries in his heart: the voice of his conscience.")

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SG [...] Eis wein mer aber mid is nän vum Alten: Triwwi, so wie si steid i gschribnem Rächt. Derbie terfen mer nid vergässen: Näb gschribnem Rächt gits es ugschribes: Ds eigena Gwissen. War däm nid lost, chan gschribes Rächt nid halten, (von Greyerz 1936:41) ("There is one tradition that we will take with us: loyalty as it is described in our written laws. But we must not forget one thing: alongside the written laws we have one unwritten law: our own conscience. Those who do not listen to their consciences cannot obey the written laws.")

Guggenbühl continues with an appraisal of the version in Hasliberg dialect, claiming that the subtlest concepts and most intense feelings can be expressed effectively and eloquently in SG: Das denke ich, ist schweizerische Beredsamkeit. Da ist kein Wort, kein Ton, der sich an der Mundart versündigt. Alles ist schlicht und bündig, nicht glänzend, nicht blumenreich; aber das Innere wird fühlbar, das Beben des Herzens. Sie ist selten geworden, diese treuherzige Beredsamkeit; aber sie ist möglich. Aus dem Geiste der echten Mundart heraus ist sie möglich, (von Greyerz 1936: 41) ("This is what I think of as Swiss eloquence. It has no word or sound which sins against dialect. It is simple and concise, not brilliant, not flowery; but it makes one feel what is going on inside one, the trembling of one's heart. This innocent eloquence has become rare, but it is possible. It springs from the spirit of genuine dialect.")

2.3 The protection of the dialects from one another The levelling of the SG dialects has long been recognised as an ongoing process. Societies such as the DSSV and the Bund Schwyzertütsch (the latter more than the former) regularly warn against the neglect and hence loss of more distinctive dialect grammatical forms and lexis. In 1924, August Steiger blamed the influence of the standard language for much of the levelling that he had observed. To him, the end result of dialect levelling would ultimately be the total take-over of the dialects by the standard language: Und was wir heute sehen, der äußere und der innere Uebergang von der Mundart zur Schriftsprache, ist nur das letzte Glied einer Kette, das Schlußergebnis

einer

Bewegung, die wir durch vier Jahrhunderte zurückverfolgen können. (Steiger 1924: 7) ("And what we see today, the outer and inner transition from dialect to the standard language, is only the last link in a chain, the end result of a process which we can trace back over four centuries.")

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Thus levelling in the direction of standard German was seen in the 1920s as well under way (Steiger quotes Ernst Tappolet as having predicted the death of SG around the year 2000). Even so, as Steiger points out, the SG dialects are recognised as less assailable than most, as the 'festeste Burg' [the most solid stronghold] of the dialect world (ibid, p. 9). Fortunately for us they are still in rude health. In 1924, Steiger charged teachers with the task of keeping local dialects alive, stating that the Schweizerisches Idiotikon, the SG dialect dictionary, could not serve as a reference work for the average citizen (ibid, p. 19).

3. Conclusion The main aim of the DSSV was to keep the German language varieties in Switzerland pure and distinct from one another. During the first half of the twentieth century, the main enemy of the German language in Switzerland was French. The use of foreign words was seen by most members of the DSSV as antidemocratic, therefore un-Swiss and contrary to the principles of Swiss freedom. Moderation was the key principle in defending the SG dialects and standard language from both external threats and the mixing of varieties. The SG dialects were recognised as being the language variety that is closest to the hearts of the GS Swiss, 'die Stimme der Heimat' ("the voice of home") (Steiger 1924: 12f.). The German Swiss standard language had and still has a vital role in public life, in literature and in communication with non-native speakers of German. The DSSV still works for the preservation of SSG and against the notion that it is like a foreign language to most GS Swiss: they should not be afraid to recognise their historical and cultural link with the rest of the German-speaking world.

4. References 'Alemannisch. Die Rettung der eidgenössischen Seele' (1936). In: Mitteilungen des DSSV20, Nr. 3/4: no page numbers. Baer, Emil (1936), Alemannisch. Die Rettung der eidgenössischen Seele. Zürich: Rascher. Baer, Emil and Arthur Baur (1937), Sribed wien er reded! Ifiierig i d swizer folchssrifi. Züri: Rigi-ferlag. Berning, Cornelia (1961), 'Die Sprache der Nationalsozialisten.' In: Zeitschriftflir deutsche Wortforschung 17. 171-182. Blocher, Eduard (1912), 'Für und wider die Sprachreinigung.' In: Jährliche Rundschau des DSSV: 39-55.

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Blocher, Eduard (1923a), Die deutsche Schweiz in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (= Schriften des Deutschen Ausland-Instituts 8). Stuttgart: Ausland und Heimat Verlags-Aktiengesellschaft. Blocher, Eduard (1923b), 'Fremdwörter in der Mundart.' In: Mitteilungen des Deutschschweizerischen Sprachvereins. 7, Nr. 5/6: 2. Bruckner, Wilhelm (1929), 'Veränderung unseres mundartlichen Wortschatz.' In: Basler Nachrichten, 24.3.1929. Greyerz, Otto von (1936), 'Unsere Pflichten gegenüber Mundart und Schriftdeutsch.' In: Jährliche Rundschau des DSSV: 29-50. Guggenbühl, Adolf (1937), Warum nicht Schweizerdeutsch? Gegen die Missachtung unserer Muttersprache. Zürich: Schweizer Spiegel. 'Lesefrüchte über Sprachreinheit. Aus den Werken berühmter Schweizer' (1936). In: Jährliche Rundschau des DSSV. Bern: Flück. Müller-Marzohl, Alfons (1994), 'Der deutsche Sprachdienst des Bundes und sein Architekt Werner Hauck.' In: Sprachspiegel vol. 50. 161-167. Rash, Felicity (2002), 'The German-Romance Language Borders Switzerland.' In: Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Vol. 23: 1&2. 112136. Schläpfer, Robert, Jürg Gutzwiller und Beat Schmid (1991), Das Spannungsfeld zwischen Mundart und Standardsprache in der deutschen Schweiz. Spracheinstellung junger Deutsch- und Welschschweizer. Eine Auswertung der Pädagogischen Rekrutenprüfung 1985. (= Wissenschaftliche Reihe 12). Aarau/Frankfurt a.M.: Sauerländer. Spuler, Linus 1964, 'Sechzig Jahre deutschschweizerischer Sprachverein.' In: Sprache, Sprachgeschichte, Sprachpflege in der deutschen Schweiz. Sechzig Jahre Deutschschweizerischer Sprachverein, 2nd, revised edition, Geschäftsstelle des DSSV, Zürich, 73-77. Steiger, August (1924), Was können wir für unser Schweizerdeutsch tun? (= Volksbücher des DSSV 11). Basel: Finckh. Tappolet, Ernst (1919), 'Kritik der Fremdwörter-Bewegung.' In: Wissen und Leben XII, Heft 21. 660-681. Vogel, Traugott (1941), 'Sprechen und Sprache', Lob der deutschen Sprache. Ansprachen von sechs Schweizer Autoren am 6. März 1941 im Zunfthaus zur Meise, Atlantis, Zürich. Weber, Daniel Erich (1984), Sprach- und Mundartpflege in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz (= Studia Linguistica Alemannica 9). Frauenfeld: Huber.

Evelyn Ziegler

Language Nationalism in the Schiller Commemoration Addresses of 1859 1. Introduction This paper analyses the construction of a national language ideology by studying the ritual of civic festivities during which Germans collectively represented their formation as a cultural entity ('Kulturnation'). One of the most important public rituals in this context is the celebration of the centenary of Schiller's birth in 1859. Not only does it play a central role in the growth of German national awareness, but it also offers a unique window on popular linguistic views, for it brought together diverse sectors of the urban population in a single ritual space. A study of this occasion will cast new light on how Schiller is brought into play to prop up the Germans' sense of national identity and to promote the idea of a national language as a crucial defining characteristic. Two questions are addressed: (a) What are the argumentative techniques used to stage Schiller as a cultural figure and national symbol? (b) What are the dominant collective attitudes displayed to reify the abstract idea of a national language? The paper is structured as follows: as my argument uses the theory of ritual as a foundation for studying the social origin, manifestation and diffusion of language attitudes, I will start with a brief survey of central aspects of this theory. Then I shall explicate the role of civic rituals in the process of nation formation and language standardisation. Next I will sketch out the empirical basis of my research. The results of my analyses are presented in two blocs: first, the dominant collective beliefs and attitudes concerning the idea of language standardisation in general and linguistic purity in particular are outlined; second, special attention is paid to the key rhetorical strategies used to emphasise and popularise these ideas. Finally, the findings are discussed and evaluated.

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2. Theoretical foundations: civic festivities as rituals of collective self-representation Following Hugger (1987), civic festivities can be described as forms of expression in which the collective articulates and celebrates itself. They represent significant instances of the symbolic construction of identity. Occurring in a bracketed time and social space civic festivities communicate cultural values and practices to which the participants may jointly subscribe. It hence follows that the production of consent across boundaries of class, region, profession and confession provides experiences of integration and cohesion. The power of civic celebrations is therefore twofold: cognitive as well as affective meanings are evoked and serve to reaffirm social order and build solidarity. These two dimensions are inextricably linked. To put it in the words of Assmann, unity and uniformity are 'semiotized through ceremonial communication' (Assmann 1991: 23). According to Dürkheim (1981), symbolic public activities are essential for any collectivity. This premise implies that social sense cannot be communicated or maintained without symbolic enactment. Against this background, commemoration celebrations are of particular importance because they shape the 'collective memory' by promoting the idea of a common past as a trait of belonging. The homogenising effect is built up as the past, that is prominent events or acknowledged exponents, is put stage-managed to enforce a specific interpretation. Consequently, a fundamental linkage is posited between such apparently diverse cultural categories as, for example, a common language and a social formation. But social sense is not only articulated and transmitted, it is also produced during these joint actions. This indicates that civic festivities are means both of presenting a common past and of shaping a future identity. Condensed in 'symbols of memory' ('Erinnerungsfiguren', Assmann 1999), these recollections illuminate the present and provide a retrospective basis for new conceptions of social relations. Framed by the historical context and shaped by specific societal needs and interests, these ideological constructions are instruments 'of a rhetoric of legitimacy by power-holding or power-seeking groups' (Bell 1992: 190). As such, they produce a strong stabilising and mobilising effect. In general, the organisation of civic rituals follows a dramatic complex with roles and rules of conduct. Constitutive elements are: use of symbols, ceremonial speeches, recitations, prayers, music, parades. These ritual elements are composed around a common focus of interaction. Ceremonial addresses play a central role in ritual procedures, because they constitute a primary medium of articulating collective ideas and endeavours. According to Paris (1999), the main purpose of the addresses is not the (re)production of consent,

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but the establishment of its illusion. 1 As a consequence, agreement need not necessarily be reached, but must be experienced. With that in mind, the speaker has to solve two problems: contouring the belief system of the audience and avoiding specifications in order not to fracture it. Oscillating elegantly on the vagueness - conciseness continuum is his main task. Consequently, the speaker does not so much speak to the audience as speak in its name. In so doing, he communicates aspects of self-reflexive awareness and reveals the underlying political character attached to civic festivities.

3. The importance of civic rituals in the process of nation formation and language standardisation The role of civic rituals in the formation of peoples' loyalties to state and nation has long been recognised. 2 Dann (1996: 120) characterises the political significance of such rituals in pre-nation-state Germany as follows: 'Cultural festivities had become central modes of expression of the national movement. The bourgeoisie actually yearned for such forms of communication and national representation.' ('Das kulturnationale Fest war zur bevorzugten Ausdrucksform der nationalen Bewegung geworden. Die bürgerlichen Schichten verlangten geradezu nach einer solchen Kommunikation. Sie wollten sich als Nation erfahren und darstellen.') A great deal of research has already been done in the field of social history (cf. Hugger 1987, Düding et al. 1988, Friedrich 2000). Much of this work focuses on civic festivities as major settings for middle-class nationalism, where dissatisfaction could be channelled and political aspirations masked as cultural awareness (cf. Mosse 1975, Hettling & Nolte 1993, Schneider 1995a). However, the pursuit of a shared cultural basis as a substantive hub of nationalism varies from festival to festival, depending on the contemporary reception of the personality in question as Hohendahl (1977), Mandelkow (1980) and Noltenius (1986) have illustrated for the Heine, Goethe and Freiligrath festivities. From this point of view, Oellers (1970), Noltenius (1988), Schneider (1995b) and Lindner (2001) stress that the Schiller anniversary in 1859 is the most important one in the cycle of bourgeois public rituals. They present several facts to support this claim:

1

In the words of Paris (1999: 274), ceremonial addresses serve the 'cultivation of a fiction of consent' ('Pflege von K o n s e n s f i k t i o n ' ) .

2

For a history of civic festivities in nineteenth-century G e r m a n y see M o s s e (1975) and Schneider (1995a).

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1. The Schiller festivities represented the first festivities that were not decreed, 'imposed' festivals, to put it in the words of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn,3 but self-organised by liberal parts of the bourgeoisie. 2. They took place although in 1854 the Prussian Board of Education had enacted a decree prohibiting primary school-teachers from reading Schiller. 3. They were the first localised mass activities, attracting more participants than any other poet's celebration before. As such, they contributed to the gradual overcoming of exclusively regional factors of identification. 4. They were celebrated not only in Germany but also in about 50 cities abroad, e.g. in Paris and New York, uniting even further the celebrating masses. 5. They laid the foundation for a secularised national liturgy and served as a prototype for subsequent national festivals. On the whole, the Schiller festivities are looked upon as a link between culture and freedom, between local organisation and the general will. As a contemporary recalled: 'This day gets its true significance from the consciousness - manifested all around - that the whole of Germany helped to celebrate this festival [and] that all of those who participated and enjoyed themselves here were the representatives of the entire people.' 4 Against this background, it is somewhat surprising that little research has been done up until now in the field of historical linguistics to investigate the Schiller addresses as central documents giving insight into the linguistic foundations of a national identity. In general, Jacob Grimm's famous address delivered to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin is the only text referred to and discussed as 'pars pro toto' (see Mattausch 1980). Nevertheless, generalised statements dominate, and little attention is paid to the argumentative techniques applied and the attitudes articulated fostering the idea of a national language. Oellers (1970), editor of the Schiller addresses delivered between 1782 and 1966, gives an insight into this practice as well as a justification. He points out that the addresses were valued (and hence chosen for analysis) according to the social importance of their producers. For that reason, a linguistic investigation of these texts still remains a desideratum. In order to work towards a sociolinguistic approach to these texts it is necessary to define first the interlocking themes of nationalism, identity and standard language. The concept of nationalism has a long history as a subject of academic discourse (see Ozkirimli 2000, Wehler 2001). For Smith (2001), the term 'nationalism' denotes a sociopolitical movement and an

3 4

Quoted in Mosse (1975: 90). Quoted in Brose (1997: 211)

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ideology of the nation. Smith suggests the following definition: 'An ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity for a population which some of its members deem to constitute an actual or potential "nation".' (Smith 2001: 9) Based on the view that nationalism is a modern ideology, many sociologists agree that nations are not built upon objective criteria, but on subjective, 'imagined' factors. National identity, then, is a sociopsychological tendency (see Billig 1995) discursively constructed in the process of nation formation. In those communities where language plays a vital role in the framing of an ideological consciousness (as was the case in Germany), national languages have to be imagined as well. This means they are to be imagined as discrete, authentic, invariable entities encapsulating the so-called 'national spirit'. To concretise the abstract notion of national language, civic festivities provide a perfect setting, as they contribute to the experience of a collective mentality by transforming the abstract idea of a unifying language into a personified illusion of linguistic identification5. In other words, the desire for national unity is conceptualised in cultural symbolism and underpinned with national sentiment. From this perspective, the notion of standard language contains a strong element of ideology. This ideological dimension underlies current sociolinguistic approaches to standard language. It is captured, for example, in the definition of Milroy, who stresses that standard languages are 'high level idealisations' (Milroy 1999: 27), i.e. 'not empirically verifiable realities' (Milroy 1999: 18). Coupland similarly describes standard languages as 'ideological formations, abstract reifications and idealisations of elite or at least establishment linguistic practice' (Coupland 2000: 624). From this follows that standard languages are constructed as social values. This process involves setting up a standard language ideology as 'the backbone of the "legitimate language'" (Watts 1999: 66). Standard language ideology connotes a set of shared attitudes and beliefs about what constitutes a standard and what constitutes the social and communicative functions associated with it. Viewed in this way, the fabrication of such convictions also embraces the selection of a sociocultural leading figure who represents the desired ideals, adds prestige to them and serves as a linguistic model.

5

For a different approach to the link between ritual and standardisation see Deumert (2003). Deumert focuses on linguistic aspects, that is on the ceremonial ritualization of normativity and correctness in the context of nation formation.

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4. The Schiller festivities of 1859 The sociohistorical context around mid-century can be roughly characterised as an overlapping of three tendencies:6: a conservative current, usually referred to as a 'time of keeping quiet' ('Stillhaltezeit') and marked by political lethargy, ingrained habits of obedience, rigid censorship of the press and bureaucratic centralism; a progressive current marked by humanistic educational ideas and national aspirations; finally, a modernistic current marked by industrialisation, technical innovation, urbanisation and migration. Thus, integrative sociocultural developments and coexisting stagnating political conditions formed the sociohistorical background of the Schiller celebrations. The festivities took place between November 9 and 11 and had a strong sacral undercurrent. Firstly, because Schiller's anniversary fell on Martin Luther's birthday (November 10) and secondly, because they also coincided with 'St. Martin's Day' (November 11), a cultural tradition, especially popular amongst Germany's young population. More than 500 towns took part with almost all classes joining in. However, not all social groups reacted positively to Schiller's anniversary. For various reasons members of the clergy, military and aristocracy did not participate in many cities: the clergy because of the antireligious attitudes attributed to Schiller; the military and aristocracy were also said to be hostile, which was understandable, as Schiller was a symbol of freedom and national consciousness and as such a destabilising social force. Many festivities presented a bust of Schiller, often complemented with a mock up of Germania. Wide usage was also made of various well known elements of the sacral and secular realm: fire and flames as symbols of Germanness,7 oak leaves as symbols of liberty,8 flags and emblems as representations of different regions and professions. The standard procedure included: an opening procession, sometimes enlivened by floats representing themes from Schiller's plays, presentations of the choirs, a bonfire and a speech full of pathos. The festivities usually ended with toasts proposed to Schiller and the German nation.9

6 7

8

9

For a more detailed discussion of the sociohistorical background see Nipperdey (1993). In Christian symbolism fire and flame indicate life, represented by the eternal light over the altar. Flames and fire also signify the Holy Ghost. The secular annexation of this symbol dates back to the celebrations of the German victory over Napoleon in 1815 (cf. Mosse 1975: 40) Oak leaves characterise strength. The oak is the strongest and most enduring of all trees and was one of the most sacred trees in primitive times. It is also a symbol of liberty. The symbolism of the oak was made familiar through the French Revolution. In Christianity the oak is looked upon as the tree from which the cross was made. It is a symbol of Christ. Wilhelm Raabe, in his novel Der Dräumling (1872), gives a masterfully satiric account of the Schiller festivities.

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5. Corpus The corpus is based on 37 texts. The text producers cover a wide range of professions and include academics, writers, teachers, priests and actors. The locations of presentation differ accordingly: academic institutions, schools, theatres, public places, churches and literary societies. The texts can be characterised as manuscript-based addresses, that is products of secondary orality, oscillating on the oral-literate continuum (Koch & Oesterreicher 1990) between conceptual orality and medial literacy. The text length varies between one and thirty pages. As it seems highly unlikely that thirty-page speeches were delivered, one must assume that the texts were expanded in the print version, especially on the syntactic level. In my analysis I have opted not to focus on Jacob Grimm's famous address delivered to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, the reason being that this text has already been discussed so that very little is to be gained from a reanalysis. Instead I am going to investigate the lesser known addresses, especially those given by teachers, who, as members of a so-called pressure group, reflect and mediate collective social norms. This approach will provide an insight into key texts at mass level expressing mainstream attitudes.

6. Findings: Rhetorical Strategies Given the facts (a) that the centenary of Schiller's birth is generally regarded as a key event in the process of nation formation, (b) that language is a central factor in the construction of a German identity10 and (c) that Schiller as well as various other German classical writers had a great impact on the standardisation process," one would assume that language was a dominant topic in the Schiller addresses. The analysis reveals a striking result: only 17 texts out of 37 deal with the complex of language as a unifying bond, a total of 46%. Language, specifically Schiller's use of language, is clearly an important issue, but not the only one, for the majority of texts centre around topics such as Schiller's life, his oeuvre as a reflection of German virtues, his understanding of art and his attitude towards religion. Trivial as this result may be, it indicates the secondary role language played in the cultivation of a national consciousness,

10 11

For a discussion of language as the most common cultural element binding the Germans together see Mattheier (1991), Stevenson (1993), Barbour (1998) and Gardt (2000). This is one of the commonplaces in German historical linguistics (cf. Wells 1985, von Polenz 1999, Schmidt 2000) and in earlier studies this view is often metaphorically conceptualised as 'blooming time' ('Blütephase'). For a critical discussion of the so-called 'Klassikerthese' see Ziegler (1998, 1999).

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at least on this occasion. The 'bond of language' is just one among a multitude of themes and its choice apparently depends on who the target audience is. For instance, a German teacher like Karl Schmid, who speaks to students, is obviously more likely to muse on Schiller as a personification of the linguistic nation than a priest like Theodor Hofferichter, who preaches a sermon on Schiller. Is there yet another way of introducing and bringing the language-nation theme into focus? The strategy most often applied is the use of Ernst Moritz Arndt's famous phrase 'as far as the German tongue rings out' ('soweit die deutsche Zunge klingt'). Usually, this line is quoted right at the beginning of the addresses, thus defining the audience as a speech community. But it is noteworthy that this phrase is quoted no more than six times, which means in only 16% of all texts. These results imply that the commemoration addresses utilise Schiller in many ways to mould a national consciousness. Nevertheless, the staging of Schiller as an exemplary writer and a symbol of linguistic unity is a key concern treated both explicitly and implicitly. Explicitly and preferably the idea of linguistic identification is presented as a topic in its own right; implicitly it is dealt with in the form of Ernst Moritz Arndt's popular phrase. Besides, this technique also serves territorial aspirations, for it communicates pan-German dreams. Necessitated by political circumstances, however, the so-called German question is addressed only covertly, that is in poetic terms. Based on these findings the next step involves a closer look at those texts which focus on the link between Schiller and the German language. It aims at the question of how Schiller is introduced as a model of linguistic unity, more specifically if his linguistic authority is presented as a socially shared belief. The textual analysis reveals that the general trend is in line with this assumption, but a few text producers prefer to introduce Schiller as a controversial person by including past or present criticism. I call this technique the 'discursive approach'. In contrast to this, the 'non-discursive approach' refers to a strategy which presents one's own beliefs, attitudes and desires as objective conclusions in order to create a kind of 'we-rhetoric' and 'weperspective'. As expected and indicated above, most speakers (91 %) choose the nondiscursive approach to shape Schiller as a model of linguistic unity, purity and nobility. In their texts the existence of a standard language ideology is presupposed and presented as a majority view. Schiller is apostrophised as one of the best German writers and portrayed as a personification of the linguistic nation. Appealing to the entire audience and reaching out for a maximum consent, most text producers posit the following simplifications: firstly, the German language is treated as a clear-cut, invariant entity (despite linguistic diversity); secondly, Schiller's use of language is perceived as uniform (which,

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of course, it was not); thirdly, it is equated with standard German despite gross differences between poetic diction and non-literary language; fourthly, no linguistic features are seized on to describe his style; instead, evaluative and highly elevated statements dominate. This tendency is indexed by stereotypical nominations and attributions, serving as entextualisation cues to sum up Schiller's linguistic authority in a single word. Hence, the topic of Schiller as a linguistic model is presented as a 'certum', as an indisputable social fact. A good example to illustrate this non-discursive approach is Ludwig Doederlein's address entitled 'Allgemein Menschliches und individuell Deutsches bei Schiller' ("The universally human and the peculiarly German in Schiller's work"), delivered to the senate of the University of Erlangen. Ludwig Doederlein, a philologist, was one of the few speakers with any personal contact to Schiller. The main theme of this address is Schiller's 'folksiness' ('Volkstümlichkeit'). Ludwig Doederlein claims that Schiller's 'folksiness' is reflected in his use of language which, he points out, has 'come to power' all by itself. Building on the notion of 'folksiness' Ludwig Doederlein characterises Schiller's use of language by stating that it has not been 'formed and fixed by science and art' (Doederlein 1859/1905: 35). He thus introduces the topos of naturalness, a key concept in the debate over what constitutes being German, especially in contrast to being French. From the perspective of the speaker, the strategy applied is as simple as it is effective: the reasoning comes as a propositional act complex, designed to convince the audience of the acceptability of the expressed opinion. Yet, deviating from well reasoned argumentation, the preceding and following text passages do not offer any justification for the conclusions drawn. Instead, Ludwig Doederlein presents subjective beliefs as generally accepted facts. He thus posits a national unity of opinion by creating a collective experience of cultural homogeneity. This strategy is further indexed by the abundant use of 'we', which occurs on various levels, not only in Ludwig Doederlein's address, but also in many others. 'We' is used in the following ways: We^ we as the festival community We2: we as the urban community of e.g. Erlangen, Stuttgart, Halle, Wiesbaden (including visitors from other regions and cities) We3: we Germans as a cultural entity (not only in the German-speaking area but also abroad, e.g. in Paris, London, New York) We4: we Germans as a nation in spe This highly differentiated cluster of 'we' ranges from a deictic 'we', referring to the festival community, to greater entities such as the 'community of the educated' ('Bildungsgemeinschaft') and stretches out to the national level, the 'national community' ('Volksgemeinschaft').

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Contrary to this, the second approach, which I call the discursive approach, is applied only three times and adopted by those speakers who reflect on the differing attitudes towards Schiller's use of language. These attitudes are weighed against each other with the aim of convincing the audience of Schiller's significant impact on language standardisation. The following passage illustrates this practice. It is taken from August Stoeber's address entitled 'Schiller's Beziehungen zum Elsass' ("Schiller's links with the Alsace"), delivered to the literary society of Miihlhausen/Alsace. August Stoeber, a professor and librarian, reflects on the reception of Schiller's early works in Germany and Alsace. This topic serves two aims: 1. To describe Alsace as an important part of Germany and establish a cultural bond. 2. To provide an example of false estimation, serving as a foil in order to emphasise Schiller's true nature as an 'enthusiastic teacher of truth', a 'passionate herald of freedom and dignity' and a 'truly God-inspired priest in the sphere of beauty'. Quoting from a critique published in the 'Strassburger Gelehrten Anzeiger' in 1784, August Stoeber recalls the negative reception of Schiller in Alsace. The critique runs as follows: 'When will our audience develop a real sense for truth, beauty, and grandeur, so that it can express its displeasure at the outgrowth of our scribblers' eccentric imagination and give to understand that a good poet is not he who uses a language deviating from everyday usage' (August Stoeber 1859/1905: 58). ' W a n n wird doch unser P u b l i k u m einmal einen so richtigen G e s c h m a c k f ü r das Wahre, S c h ö n e und in der Tat G r o s s e b e k o m m e n , dass es unseren Dichterlingen durch sein Missfallen an den A u s w ü c h s e n ihrer verstiegenen E i n b i l d u n g s k r a f t zu verstehen geben wird, d a s s m a n d e s w e g e n eben n o c h kein guter Dichter ist, weil m a n eine S p r a c h e führt, die v o n d e r g e w ö h n l i c h e n Sprache der M e n s c h e n g a n z verschieden ist.' (Stoeber 1859/1905: 5 8 )

The extract tackles Schiller's use of language as a deviation from the common use of language, as an 'outgrowth of his eccentric imagination'. It echoes a popular metalinguistic stereotype relating to Schiller's 'Storm and Stress' period. The most famous representative to express such objections was Johann Christoph Adelung (1782). According to him good usage was synonymous with the language use of the upper-middle class in Meissen. Consequently, he found the language use of the 'Storm and Stress' writers unacceptable, as it lacked taste, purity and linguistic correctness. These writers could not claim the right to take the lead in the development of German culture and language. Before August Stoeber goes on to give a positive description of Schiller he frames the quotation by commenting: 'However, one year later (1785) the

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otherwise well edited magazine ceased to exist' (ibid.: 58). ('Allein im folgenden Jahre schon (1785) ging die sonst gewissenhaft geführte Zeitschrift ein' ibid.: 58). As a text-structuring device this acerbic statement serves to demarcate the quotation from August Stoeber's own point of view and thus helps to present Schiller in an ever brighter light. August Stoeber's positive portrayal of Schiller reads as follows: 'Schiller was an enthusiastic teacher of truth, a passionate herald of freedom and dignity, and a truly God-inspired priest in the sphere of beauty' (ibid.: 59). 'Schiller war ein begeisterter Lehrer der Wahrheit, ein feuriger Verkünder der Freiheit und Menschenwürde, ein reiner gotterfüllter Priester im Heiligtum des Schönen.' (ibid.: 59)

His overall evaluation comes as a highly emotional characterisation with no particular attention paid to the linguistic issue raised above. Far from being idiosyncratic, this tendency corresponds to the norm. The picture that emerges from the complete analysis of attitudes displayed reveals extraordinary uniformity, in several ways. Firstly, most speakers refer to Schiller's use of language in a highly passionate manner. Secondly, relatively few qualities are referred to. Thirdly, the assumed qualities are more or less at the same level of description and fall into three categories: naturalness, nobility and peculiarity. Repeatedy mentioned are the following attributes, the majority of which revolve around the notion of nobility: Naturalness: vivid, naturally true, simple Nobility: glorious, sublime, royal, dignified, impressive, gorgeous, golden, perfect, magnificent, marvellous Peculiarity: German, folksy, homelike These stereotypical attributions serve to reify the abstract notion of national language. They describe qualities ranging from low-level rhetoric (such as 'vivid' and 'simple') to high-key rhetoric, often loaded with sacral associations (such as 'glorious' and 'dignified'). A special category consists of adjectives referring to synaesthetic perceptions of Schiller's style. A good example is the frequently incorporated 'golden' which evokes the experience of a visual sensation and elevates the sentiments of the audience. Generally speaking, the attributes help to legitimise Schiller as a linguistic symbol. As most of the assumed qualities do not carry denotative as much as connotative meaning they can appeal to all social groups, thus providing an effective resource to establish maximum consent. Equally, Schiller himself is conceptualised in metaphors of the secular and sacral realm, which expresses his leading position: he is a 'majesty', a 'prince'

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and a 'king' on the one hand; an 'apostle', a 'prophet', a 'priest' and a 'redeemer' on the other hand. Symbolically, a member of the bourgeoisie is enthroned as a leader of the Germans. The arguments adopted to support these attributions and labels cover a limited set of strategies. By their very nature, these strategies are composed of very common forms of reasoning, which are employed in the following ways:

Historization: Speakers using this strategy stress the fact that Schiller's language use marks a peak in the development of German and should therefore be cherished as a heritage. Schiller is metaphorically perceived as a 'reformer' ('Reformator') in the cultural realm. This places him in a genealogy with Martin Luther (,In the works of this century Schiller has his place right beside Luther' Wilhelm Jungclaussen 1859: 8) ('In der Arbeit dieses Jahrhunderts hat Schiller seine Stelle neben Luther', Wilhelm Jungclaussen 1859: 8) and invents an unbroken tradition of national heroes. For example, Adolf Bacmeister, a school principal, signals his high estimation for Schiller's use of language by arguing in the form of a rhetorical question: 'Is there anyone, provided he is educated, who does not enjoy the manifold riches of the German language and the German people [...] He may bear in mind that these riches of thoughts and deeds are mainly a heritage of Schiller and Goethe [...]' (Bacmeister 1858: 8) 'Welcher Mensch, der nicht ausserhalb jeglicher Bildung steht, genießt nicht seinen Antheil an den mannigfaltigen Reichthümern der deutschen Sprache und des deutschen Volkes [...] Er m ö g e bedenken, dass dieser Reichthum in Gedanken und Worten zum großen Teil noch eine Erbschaft ist, die wir von Schiller und von Goethe angetreten haben [ . . . ] ' (Bacmeister 1859: 8)

Addressing the educated elite, Adolf Bacmeister leaves no doubt about the fact that bourgeois language use should be oriented towards Goethe's and Schiller's style, which he regards as a supreme national value.

Glorification: In line with this reasoning is the glorification of Schiller's linguistic accomplishments. His impact on the standardisation of German is seen in terms of refinement and improvement. 'The nobility of language, the choice of expression, which everywhere corresponds to an ideal character and an ethical pathos, the vividness and plasticity of concrete descriptions, the poetic power of metaphors, the fire of rhetoric [...]' (Jungclaussen 1859: 4) 'Der Adel der Sprache, die Wahl des Ausdrucks, der überall dem idealen Charakter und dem sittlichen Pathos entspricht, die Anschaulichkeit und Plastik der concreten

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Schilderungen, die poetische Kraft der Bilder, das Feuer der Rhetorik [...]' (Jungclaussen 1859: 4)

A similar strand of argumentation is used by Friedrich Vischer, who points out: 'What the German language ows to Schiller, as far as vitalisation, elevation and elegance are concerned, cannot be measured' (Vischer 1859/1905: 49) 'Was das Deutsche Schiller verdankt an Belebung, Schmeidigung und Erhöhung ist nicht zu berechnen.' (Vischer 1859/1905: 49).

And Leopold Stein, a rabbi, exclaims euphorically: 'Rejoice, newborn, German Israel, rejoice in your houses of God at the German language and celebrate the most German of all German singers! Celebrate, oh synagogue, celebrate happily and cheerfully the remembrance of the sublime singer, who has adored the German language as no one else has done' (Stein 1859: 5). 'Freue dich, neugebornes, deutsches Israel, freue dich in deinen Gotteshäusern der deutschen Sprache zur Feier des deutschesten der deutschen Sänger! - Feiere, ο Synagoge, feiere froh und freudig mit das Andenken jenes erhabenen Sängers, der die deutsche Sprache [...] verherrlicht hat, wie kein Anderer.' (Stein 1859: 5)

On top of that, Schiller's style is perceived as comprehensible to everyone due to its simplicity and clarity, often cultivated to the 'heights of purity'. Authentication: Ultimately, this results in stylising Schiller as being truly German. Karl Schmid, a teacher, describes Schiller in the following words: O n e of the most German of our poets - for he is, among the most excellent poets, the one who represents best the essence of German character and mentality in his works' (Schmid 1859: 2). 'Einer der deutschesten unserer Dichter - denn unter den hervorragenden derselben ist Schiller derjenige, der vorzugsweise des deutschen Volkes eigenste Art, den Inhalt und die Grundrichtungen seines Geistes und Gemüths in sich darstellt und in seinen Schöpfungen verkörpert' (Schmid 1859: 2).

Building on the idea that culture is a mirror of the soul of a nation, Schiller is regarded as the most German of German poets, representing 'ideal character' and 'ethical pathos' and as such the essence of German mentality. He is portrayed as a homogenous person, his life depicted as an ideal vita and his works regarded as products of a sole commitment to national matters. In many formulations Schiller is placed right beside his dramatis personae and staged as a historical personality. To give proof of his national-humanistic preoccupation,

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numerous quotations of his often decontextualized aphorisms are incorporated in the addresses. 12 Closely connected to this tendency is the attempt to liberate German culture from foreign influences. In many cases, German identity is defined in opposition to being French. The addresses reveal a preoccupation with the eighteenth century and a focus on the Francophile aristocracy. But the demarcation of German culture not only displays anti-aristocratic sentiments, it also creates a division between aristocracy and a bourgeoisie said to have felt ashamed of its Frenchified literature and mother-tongue in those days. Heinrich Marr, an actor who delivered his speech in the Thalia-Theatre in Hamburg, retrospectively characterises this unsatisfactory situation as follows: 'An independent literature we did not have; it was Frenchified as was the aristrocracy which accepted only French taste and French literature' (Marr 1859:4). ' e i n e selbststaendige Literatur hatten wir nicht, sie w a r franzoesisirt, wie der Adel in dessen Kreisen n u r f r a n z o e s i s c h e r G e s c h m a c k und f r a n z o e s i s c h e S p r a c h e G e l t u n g f a n d ' (Marr 1859: 4).

Similarly Wilhelm Wiedasch, who goes even a step further in his evaluation, claiming that 'German mentality, German tradition and language succumbed almost to an overwhelming foreign influence' (Wiedasch 1859: 10). 'deutsches Bewusstsein, deutsche Sitte und Sprache u e b e r m a e c h t i g e n E i n f l u s s des F r e m d e n ' ( W i e d a s c h 1859: 10).

erlagen

fast

dem

This kind of rhetoric lays the groundwork for introducing Schiller as a 'saviour' delivering the Germans from foreign customs. His style reflects a 'magnificent language of the mind purifying, chastening and lifting the people' ('prächtige Geistessprache, die das Volk reinigt, läutert und erhebt', Wilhelm Falckenheimer 1859: 14). As an expression of a nation's aspirations Schiller's art is thought to have a moral purpose and a political significance. Many text producers stress Schiller's 'pure nationalism' and put him on equal footing with other famous Germans searching for internal liberty such as Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Gottfried Herder, Christoph Martin Wieland and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. This sets the matrix for a cultural tradition and moulds the 'collective memory', in particular the common consciousness of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Alongside this, goes a tendency to apply the concept of purity in a wide range of discourses. These discourses include the political, moral and ethical

12

The most often quoted aphorisms are 'seid einig, einig, einig' and 'ans Vaterland, ans teure, schließ dich an' both from Wilhelm Tell.

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spheres and allude to bourgeois values. The political realm is referred to in constructions such as 'struggle for purity and liberty', in metaphorical expressions such as 'purifying spurt of fire darting from the sky' ('reinigender Strahl des vom Himmel stürzenden Feuers', Spieß 1859: 9) and 'pure fire of reformatory efforts' ('reines Feuer reformatorischen Eifers', ibid.: 11) and in attributes such as 'purest patriotism'. Schiller's ballad 'Die Glocke' is interpreted as an 'expression of purest poetic transfiguration of German bourgeois thinking' ('Ausdruck reinster poetischer Verklärung des Denkens des deutschen Mittelstandes', Schmid 1859: 5). The ethical realm is referred to in constructions such as 'purity of the heart' and 'purest peace of the soul', with Schiller's ambitions being conceived of as attempts at 'ethical purification'. Besides, the high frequency of 'pure' mirrors bourgeois language behaviour. As one of its key words it serves as a 'social marker' indicating the jargon of education. In general, expressions like 'pure', 'simple' and 'serene' are associated with the language of Classicism, i.e. the language use of Goethe and Schiller who favoured employing words emulating Greek aesthetic ideals (see Langen 1957, Schmidt 2000).

7. Evaluation The results of the textual analysis can be summed up as follows: the ritualised celebrations present Schiller as one of the touchstones of German national culture. In most addresses Schiller is utilised to promote cultural nationalism and to rationalise linguistic distinctiveness as core values of identity. The construction of a national language ideology displays strong emotional undercurrents, expressed in lofty terms of glory and sanctity. With some exceptions, Germany is constructed as spiritually united and Schiller's linguistic authority presented as an indisputable social fact. To support the act of (re)constructing and popularising the abstract notion of national language the text producers portray Schiller as a model writer and posit the following simplifications: Schiller's literary language is equated with standard German and his language use is not linked to anything specific. As such it is an ideal choice and everyone can identify with it. The notion of purism is introduced on various levels, including the cultural, political and ethical realms. When treated as a linguistic topic, the diachronic perspective dominates the synchronic perspective. Schiller is perceived as a 'saviour' liberating the Germans from an overwhelming French influence, which is linked not only to an enemy without but also to an enemy within. Accordingly, the addresses foster a programme for conserving a pure national language and not for enforcing purist tendencies. As indicated above, a few texts do not really fit into this account, because they either treat other topics or present Schiller as a cultural figure who is

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controversially discussed. 13 Such evidence supports recent sociohistorical studies claiming that the partly unenthusiastic reaction to the Schiller festivities indicate the indifference or even rejection among the participants in parts of the country, for example in the Rhine provinces (see Schneider 1995 a, Brose 1997). In Cologne a commentator described the festivities as follows: 'Boozing, drinking and carnival yelling and romping' 14 . Such a 'conflict of interests' illustrates both the caesura in the development of public festivities as well as the difficulty of establishing a unity and uniformity of interests despite regional, social and religious differences. Given these facts, a somewhat different conclusion comes to mind. Not only did the text producers join in a collective construction of a national celebration but so did the nineteenth-century commentators (including (language) historians) who perpetuated the fantasy of a national cult.

8. References 8.1 Primary Sources Bacmeister, Adolf. 1859. Festrede an Schiller's hundertstem Geburtstage. Gesprochen zu Reutlingen am 10. Nov. 1859. Reutlingen: C. Fr. Palm's Buchhandlung. Doederlein, Ludwig. 1905. 'Festrede an Friedrich Schillers hundertjährigem Geburtstag, gehalten am 10. November 1859 im Auftrag des Königlichen akademischen Senats zu Erlangen.' In: Kerler, Heinrich (ed.): SchillerReden. Ulm: Heinrich Kerler Verlag. 27-44. Falckenheimer, Wilhelm. 1859. Festrede, bei der Feier von Schiller's hundertjährigem Geburtstag im Hanusch'schen Saale gehalten. Cassel: Doli und Schäffer. Hofferichter, Theodor. 1859. Festrede zur Schillerfeier. Gehalten am 13. November 1859 vor der freien christlichen Gemeinde zu Schweidnitz. Lauben: M. Baumeister. Jungclaussen, Wilhelm. 1859. Rede zur Säcularfeier Schillers. Gehalten am lOten November 1859 in der Aula des neuen Schulgebäudes bei der Gelehrtenschule zu Meldorf. Heide: Pauly.

13

14

A good illustration of public criticism can be found in the famous magazine 'Kladderadatsch', which mocked the exclusive and excessive bourgeois adoration of Schiller (see Noltenius 1988). Quoted in Schneider (1995a: 153).

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Marr, Heinrich. 1859. Festrede zur hundertjährigen Geburtstagsfeier Friedrich Schiller's, gehalten am 11. November 1859 im Thalia-Theater zu Hamburg. Hamburg: Otto Meissner. Schmid, Karl Adolf. 1859. Rede bei der Schillerfeier des Gymnasiums zu Stuttgart. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Spieß, August. 1859. Rede zur Feier des hundertsten Geburtstags Schiller's gehalten im Kursaale zu Wiesbaden. Wiesbaden: A. Stein. Stein, Leopold. 1859. Die Glanzsterne am Lichthimmel des Geistes. Festrede zur Schiller-Feier gehalten am Samstag, den 12. November 1859, in der Synagoge zu Frankfurt am Main (israelitischem Andachtssaale). Frankfurt am Main: Franz Benjamin Auffahrt. Stoeber, August. 1905. 'Ansprache gehalten am 10. November (1859) in der literarischen Gesellschaft (zu Mühlhausen im Eisass). Mühlhausen.' In: Kerler, Heinrich (ed.): Schiller-Reden. Ulm: Heinrich Kerler Verlag. 56-60. Wiedasch, Wilhelm. 1859. Wodurch ist Schiller der Lieblings dichter der deutschen Nation geworden? Festrede, gehalten am 10. November 1859 bei der Schulfeier des Lyceums. Hannover: Rümpler. Vischer, Friedrich. 1905. 'Schillers Freiheitsgedanke in seiner Entwickelung und Vollendung. Rede zur hundertjährigen Feier der Geburt Schillers am 10. November 1859 in der St. Peterskirche zu Zürich gehalten.' In: Kerler, Heinrich (ed.): Schiller-Reden. Ulm: Heinrich Kerler Verlag. 44-56.

8.2 Secondary Sources Adelung, Johann Christoph. 1782. Umständliches Lehrgebäude der deutschen Sprache zur Erläuterung der deutschen Sprachlehre für Schulen. 2 Vols. Leipzig. Reprint Hildesheim & New York: Olms 1971. Assmann, Jan. 1991. 'Der zweidimensionale Mensch: das Fest als Medium des kollektiven Gedächtnisses.' In: Assmann, Jan (ed.). Das Fest und das Heilige. Religiöse Kontrapunkte zur Alltagswelt. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlag. 11-30. Assmann, Jan 1999. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: C. H. Beck. Barbour, Stephen. 1998. 'Sprache und Nation im deutschsprachigen Raum aus der Sicht der englischsprachigen Wissenschaft.' In: Cherubim, Dieter, Siegfried Grosse & Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.). Sprache und bürgerliche Nation. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. 46-55. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory. Ritual Practice. Oxford: OUP. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Brose, Eric Dorn. 1997. German History 1789-1871. From the Holy Roman Empire to the Bismarckian Reich. Providence & Oxford: Berghahn.

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Coupland, Nikolas. 2000. 'Sociolinguistic prevarication about 'standard English'.' In: Journal of Sociolinguistics 4. 622-634. Dann, Otto. 1996. Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland 1770-1990. München: C. Η. Beck. Deumert, Ana. 2003. 'Standard Languages As Civic Rituals - Theory and Examples.' In: Sociolinguistica 17. 31-52. Diiding, Dieter, Peter Friedemann & Paul Münch, (eds.). 1988. Öffentliche Festkultur. Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Dürkheim, Emile. 1981. Die elementaren Formen des religiösen Lebens. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Friedrich, Karin. 2000. Festive Culture in Germany and Europe from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. Lewiston: Mellen. Gardt, Andreas, (ed.). 2000. Nation und Sprache. Berlin & New York: De Grayter. Hettling, Manfred & Paul Nolte. (eds.). 1993. Bürgerliche Feste. Symbolische Formen politischen Handelns im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hohendahl, Peter. 1977. 'Erzwungene Harmonie. Bürgerliche Heine-Feiern.' In: Grimm, Reinhold & Jost Hermand (eds.): Deutsche Feiern. Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlags-Gesellschaft Athenaion. 123-142. Hugger, Paul. 1987. 'Einleitung - Das Fest - Perspektiven einer Forschungsgeschichte.' In: Hugger, Paul (ed.). Stadt und Fest. Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart europäischer Festkultur. Stuttgart: Metzler. 9-25. Koch, Peter & Wulf Oesterreicher. 1990. Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Langen, August. 2 1957. ,Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart.' In: Deutsche Philologie im Aufriss. Band I. 931-1395. Lindner, Erik. 2001. 'Deutsche Juden und die bürgerlich-nationale Festkultur. Die Schiller- und Fichtefeiern von 1859 und 1862.' In: Gotzmann, Andreas (ed.). Bürger, Juden, Deutsche. Zur Geschichte von Vielfalt und Differenz 1800-1933. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 171-191. Mandelkow, Karl Robert. 1980. Goethe in Deutschland. Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers. Band. I: 1773-1918. München: C. H. Beck. Mattausch, Josef. 1980. 'Klassische deutsche Literatur und Entwicklung des deutschen Sprachstandards. Zu einem Kapitel Wirkungsgeschichte.' In: Linguistische Studien. Reihe A. 121-177. Mattheier, Klaus J. 1991. 'Standardsprache als Sozialsymbol. Über kommunikative Folgen gesellschaftlichen Wandels.' In: Wimmer, Rainer (ed.). Das 19. Jahrhundert. Sprachgeschichtliche Wurzeln des heutigen Deutsch. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. 41-73.

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Milroy, James. 1999. 'The consequences of standardisation in descriptive linguistics.' In: Bex, Tony & Watts, Richard J. (eds.). Standard English. The widening debate. London & New York: Routledge. 16-40. Mosse, George L. 1975. The Nationalization of the Masses. Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through The Third Reich. New York: Howard Fertig. Nipperdey, Thomas. 1993. Deutsche Geschichte 1800-1866. Bürgerwelt und starker Staat. München: C. Η. Beck. Noltenius, Rainer. 1986. Dichterfeiern in Deutschland. Rezeptionsgeschichte als Sozialgeschichte am Beispiel der Schiller- und Freiligrath-Feiern. München: C. H. Beck. Noltenius, Rainer. 1988. 'Schiller als Führer und Heiland. Das Schillerfest 1859 als nationaler Traum von der Geburt des zweiten deutschen Kaiserreichs.' In: Düding, Dieter et al. (eds.). Öffentliche Festkultur. Reinbek: Rowohlt. 237-258. Oellers, Norbert. 1970. Schiller - Zeitgenosse aller Epochen. Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte Schillers in Deutschland Teil I: 1782 - 1859. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Verlag. Ozkirimli, Umut. 2000. Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Paris, Reiner. 1999. 'Konsens, Fiktion und Resonanz. Über einige Wirkungsbedingungen ritueller Kommunikation.' In: Kopperschmidt, Josef & Schanze, Helmut (eds.). Fest und Festrhetorik. Zu Theorie, Geschichte und Praxis der Epideiktik. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. 267-280. Polenz, Peter von. 1999. Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Vol. 3. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Raabe, Wilhelm. 1872/1953. Der Dräumling. Christoph Pechlin. Freiburg i. Brsg. & Braunschweig: Verlagsanstalt Hermann Klemm. Schmidt, Wilhelm. 8 2000. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Stuttgart: S. Hirzel. Schneider, Ute. 1995a. Politische Festkultur im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Rheinprovinz von der französischen Zeit bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (1806-1918). Essen: Klartext-Verlag. Schneider, Ute. 1995b. '"Concordia soll ihr Name sein!" Die Schillerfeiern 1859 in Köln.' In: Geschichte in Köln 38. 67-80. Smith, Anthony D. 2001. Nationalism. Theory, Ideology, History. Cambridge: Polity. Stevenson, Patrick. 1993. 'The German language and the construction of German identities.' In: Flood, John L. (ed.j. 'Das unsichtbare Band der Sprache'. Studies in German language and linguistic history in memory of Leslie Seiffert. Stuttgart: Akademie Verlag. 333-356.

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Watts, Richard J. 1999. 'The social construction of Standard English: Grammar writers as a "discourse community".' In: Bex, Tony & Richard Watts (eds.). Standard English. The widening debate. London: Routledge. 40-69. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 2001. Nationalismus. Geschichte, Formen, Folgen. München: C. H. Beck. Wells, Christopher 1985. German: A Linguistic History to 1945. Oxford: OUP. Ziegler, Evelyn. 1998. 'Zur Entwicklung der Standardsprache und der Vorbildfunktion der Klassikersprache.' In: Der Deutschunterricht. 24-32. Ziegler, Evelyn. 1999. 'Deutsch im 19. Jahrhundert. Normierungsprinzipien und Spracheinstellungen.' In: Bister-Broosen, Helga (ed.). Beiträge zur historischen Stadtsprachenforschung. Wien: Edition Praesens. 79-101.

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Standard Afrikaans and the different faces of 'Pure Afrikaans' in the twentieth century 1. Introduction This paper deals with one of the youngest of the Germanic languages. Afrikaans is one of four languages standardized during the twentieth century.1 In his Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Languages and Linguistics Crystal (1992: 10) provides the following short description of Afrikaans: Ά West Germanic language, a derivative of Dutch, spoken by c. 6 million people in the Republic of South Africa (c. 5 million), Namibia, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, with some through immigration in a few other countries (e.g. Australia, Canada and England), also sometimes called Cape Dutch. It is a derivative of the language which was brought by settlers in the seventeenth century, and n o w shows many differences from European Dutch, especially as a result of its contact with local African languages. Afrikaans is now the first language of c. 60% of the White population and c. 90% of the Coloured (mixed race) population. It has been an official language in South Africa, since 1925, and there is a developing Afrikaans literature. It is written in the Roman alphabet.'

Although Crystal's definition captures the essence of Afrikaans it needs some updating: (i) The historic term Cape Dutch only refers to Afrikaans of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. (ii) Since 1994 Afrikaans and English are two of the eleven official languages of South Africa, the other nine being African languages like Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho.

1

The other three are Hindi, Indonesian and Modern Hebrew.

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(iii) The existence of more than 200 technical dictionaries of Afrikaans and the fact that Afrikaans was used as medium of communication for the executing of the first heart transplant, as well as for developing a process for the synthetising of fuel from coal are proof enough of the scope of scientific practice in Afrikaans. (iv) Currently there is a well-developed Afrikaans literature. Many Afrikaans literary works have been translated, some of them in eight or more nonSouth-African languages. The correlation between the topic of this article and the title of this book is explained by the strong relation between the concept standard language and the concept linguistic purism. Both Thomas (1991: 12 and 18) and Crystal (1992: 322) justifiably emphasise the inextricable bond that exits between linguistic purism and the cultivation, codification and planning of standard languages especially in languages like Afrikaans and Modern Hebrew that were consciously developed at a time when virtually no writing tradition existed. In the definitions of linguistic purism cited below, the parts linking the concept standard language with the concept purism, have been italicised: 'Purism is the manifestation of a desire on the part of a speech community (or some section of it) to preserve a language from, or rid it of, putative foreign elements or other elements held to be undesirable (including those originating in dialects, sociolects and styles of the same language). It may be directed at all linguistic levels but primarily the lexicon. Above all, purism is an aspect of the codification, cultivation and planning of standard languages' (Thomas 1991: 12, my italics, RB). "purism. A school of thought which sees a language as needing preservation from external processes that might infiltrate it and thus make it change. Purist attitudes are a normal accompaniment to the perception, which each generation represents, that standards of language (as social standards generally) are deteriorating. Purists are conservative in matters of usage, emphasize the importance of prescriptive rules in grammar and pronunciation, and insist on the authority of dictionaries, grammars, and other manuals" (Crystal 1992: 322, my italics, RB).

In spite of the existence of a variety of definitions of the concept standard language McArthur (1997: 13-14) and Carter (1995: 149) justly indicate that two notions have been linked to the term standard language consistently:

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standard language as the language used by those with authority, power and prestige, symbolized by the King's flag or standard2 standard language as the common norm of correct language (I.e. if standard language is regarded as being an idealised form of language) or standard language as the common norm of appropriate language usage (I.e. if the standard language is seen as a form of actual language usage).

It is evident that a strong link exists between the concept linguistic purism and the notion of standard language as a form of correct language. The link between linguistic purism and the first of these two notions becomes clear when one realises that the purity or desirability of language forms are to determined by external sociopolitical power relations, not by internal linguistic factors (cf. Combrink 3 1984: 98-100; VanBree 1996: 34-39; Brand 2003: 16). The viewpoint of this presentation is unusual in that the focus falls not only fall on the role that political and social power relations played in the Stigmatisation of non-standard varieties of Afrikaans, but also in the Stigmatisation and destigmatisation of the standard variety of Afrikaans, as well as of the language as a whole.

2. The views of'pure' Afrikaans: phases in the development of Standard Afrikaans Three phases can be distinguised in connection with the development and existence of Standard Afrikaans (corresponding to the different views of the nature of 'pure' Afrikaans held since the turn of the century):

2

The power and prestige of the people using the language are transferred onto the language itself. It is external sociopolitical factors that determine which variety of a language will become the prestigious standard variety of a language. This is inter alia evidenced by the fact that Standard English developed from the sociopolitical dominant courtly East Midland dialect during the fifteenth century (Stubbs 1980: 126; Romaine 1994: 85; McArthur, 1998: 107; and by the fact that Standard Dutch developed from the daily speech of the higher classes in the province Holland which flourished economically and sociopolitically during the second half of the sixteenth century (Daan 1990: 154; Van der Wal 1990: 120).

3

Combrink (1984: 98-99) argues that linguistics per se cannot provide any reason for the recommendation of linguistic purism. He emphasizes that using pure language isn't the purpose of language usage, but effective communication - regardless of the purity or impurity of the language structures used for communication.

The different faces of 'Pure Afrikaans' in the twentieth century

•

•

•

147

the progress of Afrikaans from a stigmatised vernacular (referred to as 'Kitchen Dutch') to an official language of which the standard variety is a fully codified status form that can be used in all high-function communication situations; the re-stigmatisation of Standard Afrikaans (and of Afrikaans as a whole) on a social and political level since the coming into power of the National Party in 19484; the gradual destigmatisation of Standard Afrikaans during the last decade of the twentieth century - on the one hand through the liberation of Afrikaans as a whole from its apartheid stigma, and, on the other hand, through the tempering of the exclusive nature of Standard Afrikaans.

2.1 From stigmatised kitchen language to full-fledged standard and official language: 1902- 1925/1948 2.1.1 The origin of Afrikaans For the purpose of this article the diverse theories on the origin of Afrikaans are not relevant, but the heterogenous nature of the composition of the early South African (Cape) population, which impacted on the lexicon and grammar of the current standard variety of Afrikaans should, however, be considered. Afrikaans owes its origin to the need for a lingua franca in a language contact situation in which people belonging to three divergent language groups had to communicate with each other. The early South African population (16521795) consisted of (i) the indigenous population of the Cape (the Khoi), (ii) the imported slaves who were speakers of 7 main languages and 14 dialects from the Malayo-Polynesian language family and of a variety of Portuguese Creoles (cf. Davids 1994: 113), (iii) the Dutch colonists (speakers of seventeenth century dialectal Dutch), and the German and French immigrants.

4

Van Rensburg (1999) regards the period between 1925 and 1994 to be a single phase in the development of Afrikaans, a phase of official 'white Afrikaans'. In my opinion this period cannot be regarded as a uniform period in the development of Afrikaans because this period includes not only a decade (i.e. the regime of Smuts, 1939-1948) during which strong antinational and anti-Afrikaans sentiments prevailed (cf. Steyn 1987: 91), but also the coming into power of the National Party in 1948, the birth of the Republic of South Africa in 1961 and the Soweto uprisings of 1976.

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Dutch was the dominant language that had to be acquired by the European and non-European speakers of the other languages - everyone on the basis of his or her own mother tongue - resulting in a variety of interlanguages and the simplification of the grammatical structure of Dutch as is inter alia evidenced by the loss of conjugation in Standard Afrikaans. (In Standard Afrikaans the verb 'to be' only has one form in the present tense, and only one of the three forms of the past tense used in Dutch, i.e. simple past, present perfect and past perfect, remained.)

2.1.2 The first proper5 cultivation and standardization of Afrikaans Although conscious efforts, be it to a limited degree, were made by a number of Europeans and non-Europeans during the nineteenth century to use Afrikaans as written language, no writing tradition6 (i.e. no spelling system) existed (Roberge 2003: 22-23). The variety of spoken language was either reproduced in Arabic orthography (by the Muslim slaves) or in accordance with the Dutch writing tradition (by the Christian slaves and white colonists) (cf. Belcher 1987: 26-30; Raidt 1991: 242; Davids 1994 and Van Rensburg 1999: 79-80 for an explanation of the circumstances leading to the usage of these orthographies). Since the official colonization of the Cape, English, and to a lesser degree Dutch, were used as high-function languages. Afrikaans was the colloquial language (Raidt 1991:238-244). After the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902, currently referred to as the South African War), which replaced the fragmented political order in South Africa with a unified state and brought British imperialism sharply into focus, Afrikaner nationalism flourished (Ponelis 1993: 53). In the years directly following the war a whole range of intellectuals argued for the elevation of Afrikaans. In 1909 the South African Academy for Language, Literature and Arts

{Zuid-Afrikaansche

Akademie

voor

Taal,

Letteren

en

Kunst)

was

established. The Academy united the pro-Dutch and pro-Afrikaans camps and,

5

6

The term 'proper' refers to the third of four stages of standardisation distinguished by Thomas (1991: 113-122), i.e. the stage that involves 'the institution of a single prestigious autonomous standard'. This third stage is preceded by a stage of minimal standardisation and a stage of prestandardisation. Measured against the four stages of standardisation distinguished by Thomas (1991: 113-122), the nineteenth century, in my opinion, cannot be described as the pre-standardisation phase of Afrikaans because no move as yet had been made in the direction of a standardised idiom based on a single dialect, a compromise of dialects or a koine. As a result of the openness that still existed towards enrichment from all sources and because of the first attempts to use the spoken dialects and interlanguages as written language, the nineteenth century could rather be regarded as a stage of minimal standardisation.

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through its Language Commission, devised a standardised Afrikaans orthography. In 1917 the first edition of the Afrikaans Word List and Spelling Rules (Afrikaanse woordelys en spelreels) was published in order to make these norms commonly accessible and conveyable through the school system7 (A WS 1917: iv). The A WS, of which eight revised editions have been published since 1917, is commonly regarded as the most important tool for the standardisation of written Afrikaans (Raidt 1991: 254; Carstens 1999: 369 and Roberge 2003: 31). During the first four decades of the twentieth century Afrikaans had gradually become a language of learning and culture.8 The cultivation of Afrikaans inter alia entailed the following aspects: • • • • • •

Afrikaans newspapers and periodicals were established; Afrikaans became a medium of instruction at primary, secondary and tertiary level between 1908 and 1913; Afrikaans was recognized as an official language in 1925; Afrikaans has been used as a church language since 1914 and the Bible was translated into Afrikaans during 1933; Extensive terminological work contributed to the lexical enrichment of Afrikaans; Since the publication of Eugene Marais's poem "Winternag" in 1905, and especially since the 1930s, literary works of outstanding quality contributed towards the fostering of pride in the language.

2.1.3 The developing of Standard Afrikaans based on its eastern dialect At the end of the nineteenth century the discovery of diamonds (ca. 1870) and the hugely productive main gold reef on the Witwatersrand (1886) brought a shift in the economic base of the Afrikaans-speaking community from farming to mining (Mesthrie 2002: 18). This led to: • •

rapid urbanization, an increased population density in the Johannesburg-Pretoriaarea, and

7

Although Van Rensburg (1999) judges the first attempts to regulate Afrikaans to have started as early as 1835, and although normative works like Eerste beginsels van die Afrikaanse taal ('First Principles of the Afrikaans Language') were published as early as 1876 (Roberge 2003: 27), the actual standardisation of Afrikaans, in my opinion, couldn't have started before Afrikaans became a medium of instruction at primary and secondary level between 1908 and 1914 because schools are the main conveyors of the codified norms of standard languages.

8

Scholtz (1980: 15-25); Raidt (1991: 249-256) and Ponelis (1993: 51-57) provide detailed discussions of the cultivation of Afrikaans.

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the shifting of the economic and sociopolitical centre of gravity of South Africa from the South (the Cape) to the North (Johannesburg-PretoriaWitwatersrand).

The shifted centre of gravity of the country, together with the fact that the densest Afrikaans-speaking community was situated in this sociopolitically and economically dominant area, led to the standardisation of Afrikaans based on its eastern dialect, i.e. the dialect spoken in this area at that time. 9 Consequently Orange River Afrikaans and Cape Afrikaans, the two historical dialects 10 of Afrikaans spoken predominantly by non-European speakers of Afrikaans, became stigmatised as non-standard varieties of Afrikaans. The presence of the eastern 11 variety in Transvaal (currently named Gauteng) resulted from the Great Trek (1838), i.e. from the decision of a number of Afrikaans-speaking farmers living on the eastern frontier of the Cape colony to move away from British rule. This eastern variety was based on Standard Dutch, distancing Standard Afrikaans from colloquial Afrikaans. The geographical area of Cape Afrikaans (see map) indicates that most of the slaves preferred to stay in the Cape under British rule, whereas the Khoi decided to move north in order to be able to own their own land (Ponelis 1992: 112).

9

10 11

In England, the courtly East Midland dialect (the dialect from which Standard English developed) gained the same ascendancy after the Middle Ages (McArthur 1998: 107). In the same way the daily speech of the higher classes of the province of Holland, i.e. the province of the Netherlands gaining sociopolitical dominance during the sixteenth century, formed the basis of Standard Dutch (Van der Wal 1990: 120). (See Botha 1989: 146; Ponelis 1992: 112-113 and Ponelis 1993: 52-53 for a explanation of the sociopolitical factors contributing to the development of Standard Afrikaans from the historical eastern dialect of Afrikaans.). Van Rensburg (1989: 436-463) and Van Rensburg (1997: 1-42) discuss the geographical areas and the characteristics of these historical varieties extensively. Some scholars of Afrikaans question the existence of Eastern Afrikaans as a historically and geographically unique entity and argue that the 'dimensions of variation in the Afrikaans speech community are preponderantly social, not geographic' (Roberge 2003: 31 and Grebe 2002).

T h e d i f f e r e n t f a c e s o f ' P u r e A f r i k a a n s ' in t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y

Learners' variety of Afrikaans/Cape Dutch spoken predominantly by the Khoi

Learners' variety of Cape Dutch spoken by the slaves (Muslims)

151

Based on the eastern dialect of Cape Dutch modelled on Standard Dutch

2.1.4 The view of 'pure' Afrikaans At this stage 'pure' Afrikaans was regarded as free from language forms characteristic of its non-standard varieties (Orange River Afrikaans and Cape Afrikaans). Features of the learner varieties of Afrikaans were not given recognition in any of the editions of the A WS (the most important standardizing tool for Afrikaans) published during this first phase in the development of Standard Afrikaans. According to the first edition of the A WS (1917: ix), one of the fundamental principles of the Afrikaans orthography was to "deviate as little as possible from the Simplified Dutch Spelling". This modelling of the Afrikaans orthography on Standard Dutch remained one of the groundrules of the Afrikaans spelling system until 1964, when the seventh revised edition of the Α WS was published. Two opposing views of 'pure' Afrikaans existed between 1902 and 1948: On the one hand, English words were freely Afrikaansified to supplement the lexicon of Afrikaans during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The speakers of Afrikaans did not regard English as a big rival of Afrikaans at that stage (Coetzee 1982: 282).

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In the first editions of the A WS, the fact that foreign words formed part of the Afrikaans lexicon was taken for granted. The correct spelling of these foreign words was the only concern of the members of the Language Commission (cf. AWS 1921: v). In the 1931 edition of the AWS the Language Commission justified the inclusion of questionable foreign words by stating that those words were needed by the "studying youth" and by the language community as a whole (AWS 1931: ν ) . On the other hand, the recognition of Afrikaans as an official language during 1925 brought with it a ferocious Stigmatisation of borrowings from English and a new Dutchification of Afrikaans (Coetzee 1982: 282-283 and Ponelis 1993: 53). The champions of Afrikaans, as well as the speakers of Afrikaans, desperately wanted Afrikaans to be seen and experienced as a unique linguistic entity, differing strongly from English (Ponelis 1999: 76). The Academy even decided to award a prize for the best doctoral thesis on Anglicisms in Afrikaans (Combrink 1984: 101 and Donaldson 1991: 65). A highly exotic variety of Afrikaans was at this stage idealized as a 'pure' form of Afrikaans. 'Pure' Afrikaans was regarded as free from Anglicisms (at that stage a term referring to undesirable words or structures within Afrikaans originating from English and replacing structures modelled on Dutch). Borrowings from English like dagdroom (Eng. daydream) and dit sal die dag wees (Eng. that will be the day), which are presently regarded as examples of 'pure' Afrikaans, were heavily stigmatised at that stage (Ponelis 1953: 57).

2.2 The political and social re-stigmatisation 12 of (Standard) Afrikaans: 1948-1994 2.2.1 The National Party and (Standard) Afrikaans The year 1948 marked the coming into power of the National Party that made use of state machinery to benefit Standard Afrikaans in the public sector. With the financial backing of the government, Standard Afrikaans (home language and public language of most of the representatives of the National Party) was developed as a language of science and technology 13 (cf. Raidt 1991: 256 and Van Rensburg 1999: 54).

12

Steyn (1980: 255-305) provides a detailed discussion of the sociopolitical factors contributing to this Stigmatisation of (Standard) Afrikaans.

13

The immense and rapid progress made by Standard Afrikaans since 1948 is inter alia evidenced by the publication of nine volumes of Afrikaans's extensive standard reference dictionary, the Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse (aal (Dictionary of the Afrikaans Language) between 1950 and 1994 (covering the letters A to M), and by the publication of more than 200

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In accordance with the National Party's policy of separate development (apartheid) the coloured speakers of Afrikaans were disenfranchised in 1956, leading to a growing division between white and coloured speakers of Afrikaans. This, together with the establishing of separate schools for different language and racial groups caused the alienation of many coloured speakers of Afrikaans from Afrikaans (Raidt 1991: 256; Ponelis 1993: 60 and Van Rensburg 1997: 54) and the labeling of the Afrikaans Word List and Spelling Rules (A WS), regarded to be the most important norm of written Afrikaans, as a reflection of "exclusive white Afrikaans" (Davids 1991: 6). The National Party's aggressive promotion of Afrikaans as medium of instruction and as a compulsory school subject led to the Soweto uprising of 1976 and consequently to the attachment of a strong apartheid stigma to Afrikaans as a whole - not only to the standard variety of Afrikaans. The damage to the language resulting from the link between Afrikaans and apartheid was enormous (Odendal 1984: 214; Steyn 1987: 92-94 and Van Rensburg 1999: 81). During the late 1980s, non-white speakers of Cape Afrikaans formed the Movement for Alternative Afrikaans that protested against the unilateral favouring of 'white' Afrikaans/Establishment Afrikaans/Standard Afrikaans by the National Party, especially as the sole medium of instruction in Afrikaansmedium government schools. These non-white people used Cape Afrikaans, a non-standard variety of Afrikaans to protest against apartheid and by doing so dissociated themselves from Standard Afrikaans (regarded by them as 'white' Afrikaans due to the ideological bond between Standard Afrikaans and Afrikanernasionalism), but not from Afrikaans (Du Plessis 1987; Louw 1988; Ponelis 1992: 120 and Van Rensburg 1999: 17 and 54). Ponelis (1993: 60) justly indicates that the insistence on the revaluation of Standard Afrikaans (restandardisation) resulting from a greater appreciation of the vernacular varieties, especially the Afrikaans of the southwestern Cape, is an important aspect of this alternative ideological use of Afrikaans.

2.2.2 The view of 'pure' Afrikaans According to the seventh edition of the Afrikaans Word List and Spelling Rules (1964: 1), Standard Dutch remained14 the model to judge the correctness of

14

technical dictionaries during the latter half of the twentieth century (cf. Raidt 1991: 225 and Carstens 2000: 388-392). In the following editions (1991 and 2002) no reference is made to Standard Dutch in the groundrules of the Afrikaans spelling system. Instead of Standard Dutch 'the tradition according to which Standard Afrikaans words are spelt' (AWS 1991: 11) has become the model for the spelling of new Afrikaans words.

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language forms by, but the bond between the Afrikaans and Dutch orthographies gradually became weaker. 'As little deviation as possible from the Simplified Dutch Spelling' (AWS 1917: ix) changed to 'take the current Dutch orthography into consideration' (AWS 1964: 1). Since 1956, an increasing number of Afrikaans linguists have begun to question the validity of correspondence with Standard Dutch as a norm to judge the purity of Afrikaans words and phrases by, seeing that English (not Dutch) has become the second language of the majority of Afrikaans-speaking South Africans (cf. inter alia Boshoff 1963: 39; Combrink 1984: 102-103; Botha 1989: 150-151; Combrink 1991: 13). Linked to the gradual economic and polical emancipation of the Afrikaansspeaking South Africans since 1948 and the corresponding decreasing antiEnglish15 sentiments amongst the Afrikaners, the acceptability of borrowings from English forming part of 'pure' Afrikaans gradually increased. During the first ten to fifteen years of the second phase in the development of Standard Afrikaans, purism still entailed an anti-English sentiment and the Stigmatisation of borrowings from English (Anglicisms). Proof of this attitude can be found in the first volume of the WAT (1950: iv) within which borrowings from English are referred to as "foreign intrusions". The second volume of the WAT (1956) shows more leniency towards borrowings from English in that no other attention is given to Anglicisms than the listing of an abbreviation for the term Anglicism amongst the more than 200 abbreviations used by the editors of the WAT for the labeling of words (e.g. med. for 'medical' and geselst. for 'gestelstaal' or 'colloquial language'). In the 1970s De Villiers (1970: 245-246) warned against the negative consequences of purism taken to extremes and advised the speakers of Afrikaans to "borrow AND translate" from English in the same way that the Germanic languages became enriched by the Romance languages. Combrink (1984: 97-100) not only supports De Villiers's view of borrowing and translating from English, but he also regards the influence that English had (and still has) on Afrikaans as a "natural fact". He argues that the influence of English cannot be stopped seeing that: (i) (ii) (iii)

15

English is the second language of all Afrikaans-speaking South Africans; speakers of Afrikaans and speakers of English communicate with each other on a daily basis; new knowledge, inventions, processes and theories mostly reach speakers of Afrikaans through English;

This has been true especially since 1961 when the Union of South Africa became an independent republic leading to more confidence amongst the Afrikaners who felt threatened by English in a lesser degree at that stage.

The different faces of 'Pure Afrikaans' in the twentieth century

(iv)

155

English is the Afrikaans-speaker's means of communication with the outside world.

Combrink emphasizes that the only alternative to borrowing, with or without translating, is the coining of neologisms,16 and justly indicates that the coining of neologisms is a very slow and demanding process that cannot provide rapidly enough for the need for new words. Thus, only unnecessary borrowings from English (i.e. forms offering no enrichment to Afrikaans) were regarded as 'impure' forms of Afrikaans at this stage in the history of Standard Afrikaans, whereas borrowings and translations enabling speakers of Afrikaans to express themselves accurately in Afrikaans about anything in the world are as regarded worthy contributions to the corpus of 'pure' Afrikaans lexicon. Only unnecessary borrowings17 from English were (and still are) regarded as 'impure" forms of Afrikaans, because only English posed (and still pose) a threat to the purity of Afrikaans. Very few speakers of Afrikaans have knowledge of African languages (like Zulu, Xhosa and Setswana) or of European languages (like German and French), making the chance of these languages influencing Afrikaans very small. Foreign words stemming from these languages are therefore seen as (harmless) enrichments. The inclusion of foreign words like genre and manjifiek (borrowed from French), babelas (a Setswana word for "hangover") and indoena (a Zulu word for "headman" or "tribal leader") in the A WS (1964) - without qualifying labels - is proof of the fact that words from these languages are regarded as examples of 'pure' Afrikaans. At this stage in the development of Standard Afrikaans no recognition had been given in the A WS to words from the learner varieties of Afrikaans, because features of the learner varieties are, judged from the perspective of the users of Standard Afrikaans, seen as 'impure' Afrikaans.18 Judged from the perspective of the non-white speakers of learner varieties of Afrikaans, it is not their varieties that are 'impure', but Standard Afrikaans (as codified in the A fVS, WAT and in various grammar books) that is too exclusive and too much a child of white Afrikaner nationalism (cf. 2.2.1 above).

16

17 18

Donaldson (1991: 76) provides examples of neologisms successfully coined by speakers of Afrikaans. One of these is the word moltrein (= "mole train") for the English word underground. A borrowings was regarded as unnecessary if a 'pure' Afrikaans expression for the particular concept already existed. In the same way that these learner varieties were regarded as non-standard (and 'impure') forms of Afrikaans, literary works written in these varieties, or by speakers of these varieties, were not accepted as part of the canon of Afrikaans literature (Willemse 1993 and 1999).

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2.3 The renewed political and social destigmatisation of Standard Afrikaans: 1990/1994-2003 2.3.1 Liberated from its apartheid stigma In the same way that Standard Afrikaans was previously stigmatised as the apartheid language, Standard Afrikaans (and Afrikaans in its totality) since the release of Nelson Mandela and the legalizing of the ANC during 1990, but especially since the first democratic elections of 1994, has been destigmatised.19 The link between Standard Afrikaans and apartheid has become significantly weaker (Ponelis 1994: 67). After the 1994 elections and the coming into power of the ANC the damaging link between Afrikaans and apartheid is disappearing. Afrikaans is no longer the main language of the government and the lingua franca of South Africa, it is one of eleven official languages and is gradually becoming accepted by non-Afrikaans speakers as one of the languages of South Africa (Van Rensburg 1999: 87-88). Non-white politicians like Patricia de Lille, Dular Omar, Alan Boesak, Cheryl Carolus, who dissociated themselves from Afrikaans during the apartheid era, once again speak Afrikaans in public and even President Mbeki exhibited a positive attitude towards Afrikaans by speaking a few words of Afrikaans at the opening of the 2002 ANC Congress. This new attitude towards Afrikaans was probably started by president Nelson Mandela, who recited an Afrikaans poem during his inaugural speech, and given momentum by the publishing of an anthology of Afrikaans poetry written by Mathews Phosa, the premier of one of the provinces of the New South Africa.

2.3.2 Post-apartheid views regarding Standard Afrikaans Since the last decade of the twentieth century several scholars of Afrikaans pleaded for a form of Standard Afrikaaans that all speakers of Afrikaans could identify with. Tony Links (1992), a well-known non-white linguist, advocated the recognition of the heterogenity and cultural diversity of Afrikaans and predicted that a less formal and more inclusive form of Standard Afrikaans reflecting the new sociopolitical order in South Africa - will gradually develop.

19

Van Rensburg (1999: 87-93) gives a very good account of the sociopolitical factors impacting on the status and acceptability of the different standard and non-standard varieties of Afrikaans and of Afrikaans as a whole).

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Van Rensburg (1991, 1992) supported Links's view. He argued that Standard Afrikaans should be a symbol of all its speakers (white as well as non-white) and proposed the broadening of Standard Afrikaans with elements of its north and southwestern varieties predominantly spoken by non-white speakers of Afrikaans (i.e. Orange River Afrikaans and Cape Afrikaans). Ponelis (1998: 68) even goes one step further in proposing the re-standardisation of Afrikaans based on its southwestern dialect (Cape Afrikaans, i.e. one of its two Afrocentred dialects) making it accessible to more of its speakers. In my opinion the changed sociopolitical dispensation will, because of the sociopolitical status gained by the speakers of these varieties, lead in a natural way to the kind of opening up of the norm proposed by Van Rensburg. Wolfram & Fasold (1974: 17-18) were the first to distinguish between the formal and informal standard varieties of languages, the former being the codification of the norms of the standard variety and the latter being the result of subconscious imitation of the speech of prestigious speakers of a specific language by other speakers of that language. The sociopolitical status gained by non-white public figures (politicians, academics, economists), making them prestigious speakers of Afrikaans, will in a natural way lead to the imitation of their speech by other speakers of Afrikaans. In this way the informal standardization of Afrikaans will result in the incorporation of more features of Cape Afrikaans and Orange River Afrikaans into Standard Afrikaans. It is interesting to note that the compilers of the WAT have given special attention to regional varieties of Afrikaans since the publishing of the ninth20 volume (covering the letter L) in 1994. Although words from the regional varieties of Afrikaans are included in the various volumes of the WAT, they are qualified by means of labels. This means that these words are not (yet) regarded as examples of Standard Afrikaans (cf. paragraph 1.2 of the eleventh volume of the WAT). The inclusion of words from regional varieties of Afrikaans (used in written and spoken communication) in the WAT is proof of the recognition of the diverse nature of Afrikaans and of the regarding of these words as examples of 'pure' Afrikaans. It is not only the speakers of Cape Afrikaans and Orange River Afrikaans who have gained status since 1994, but also the varieties per se. Since it has been recognized that Afrikaans belongs to all its speakers, sub-varieties of Cape Afrikaans and Orange River Afrikaans (the historical southwestern and northwestern learner varieties of Afrikaans) are being used in public more widely. It is heard on radio and television (though not yet used by announcers), at sport gatherings and at political and community meetings (Van Rensburg,

20

Three volumes have been published since the 1994: the ninth volume (covering the letter L), the tenth volume (covering the letter M) and the 11th volume (covering the letters N-O).

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1999: 88-90). Literary works written in these varieties of Afrikaans are gradually becoming part of the canon of Afrikaans literature. This is shown by the inclusion of poems written in these varieties in the Groot Verseboek (the most prestigious anthology of Afrikaans verse) and by the publication of an increasing number of short stories and books displaying features of these varieties and depicting characters who are speakers of these varieties. Some educators and linguists even been voiced the possibility of using these varieties as media of instruction together with Standard Afrikaans in a bi-dialectal model (Van de Rheede 1994). Characteristic of post-apartheid South Africa is the easier and more frequent contact between the speakers of different languages and consequently a greater tolerance of borrowing (Van Rensburg 1999: 88). The extent to which Standard Afrikaans has become open to borrowings from English is evidenced by the fact that Combrink's (1995) prediction that the next edition of the A WS would include about 5,000 words from colloquial Afrikaans - which is heavily influenced by English - did come true. Many words from colloquial Afrikaans, including a large number of English words in Afrikaans apparel (e.g. blerrie from "bloody", okei from "okay", gekoller en getaai or gecollar en getie for "dressed smartly"), were indeed codified in the 2002-A WS - admittedly in a separate section, but still recognized by the Language Commission as Afrikaans. This tolerance towards borrowings from English is echoed by the three volumes of the WAT published since 1994 in which no mention is made of Anglicisms (not even in the list of abbreviations used as labels by the editors). Inspite of the special attention that is still given to accurately defining the term Anglicism in the glossary of the 2002-edition of the A WS, significantly more words of English origin21 that have become generally adopted are recognized in the most recent editions of the A WS (1991 and 2002) than was the case in previous editions (Prinsloo 2002: 11). The fact that the Language Commission found it necessary to devote a section of the most recent A WS (2002) to the spelling of borrowings from African languages,22 is in itself a recognition23 of the existence of these borrowings within Standard Afrikaans. In agreement with the spirit of

21

This is, of course, very difficult to determine exactly. My view is, however, supported by Van Rensburg (1999: 88), as well as by Ponelis (1999: 77). In my opinion any mother-tongue speaker of Afrikaans, who has some knowledge of English, will immediate recognize words like the following while looking through the AfVS: poster, steak, kwilt (from "quilt"), belt, blues.

22

Examples of these are indaba (a meeting for discussion), impala (a kind of buck), sangoma (traditional healer), ubunlu (caring for and repecting each otherj, boendoe (primitive rural area). In his discussion of the ninth edition of the AWS Carstens (1999: 370) confirms that special attention was given by the Language Commission to borrowings from African languages.

23

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reconciliation holding sway since the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 (and especially since the first democratic elections of 1994) the Language Commission of the South African Academy removed offensive racist words from the Α WS. Tony Links and Randall van der Heever, a member of the Movement for Alternative Afrikaans (see paragraph 2.2.1) expressed their appreciation for the Language Commission's sensitive handling of offensive racist words (Anon. 1990a: 3 and Anon. 1990b: 8). The editorial policy of the WAT regarding the handling of sensitive and offensive lexical items, discussed in the introduction to the tenth volume of the WAT (1996), concerns not only sensitive race-orientated lexical items, but also sensitive lexical items referring to stigmatized sexual phenomena and practices, to stigmatized physical and psychological phenomena and to social, political and religious structures. In contrast to the Language Commission's decision to remove race-orientated sensitive and offensive items from the A WS, sensitive lexical items will be included in the WAT. These lexical items will be explained and qualified by labels, but no references, quotes or offensive synonyms will be given in the printed version24 of the WAT. The omission of offensive racist words from the A WS and the underplay regarding the stigmatizing offensive words in the WAT have got the same purposes: (i) contributing to the improvement of human relations within South Africa and (ii) the minimising of the usage of these words (cf. Killian, 1990: 3 and the introduction of the 10th volume of the WAT). In my opinion, neither the inclusion, nor exclusion of these offensive words in these sources of norms, has anything to do with the purity of Afrikaans. These words do not originate from other languages or from dialects or sociolects of Afrikaans (cf. the definitions of purism, cited in paragraph 1). These words used to belong to Standard Afrikaans and have from the start been regarded as 'pure' Afrikaans words. The omission of these words from the A WS does not mean that they are no longer regarded as 'pure' Afrikaans words, but only as inappropriate for usage in high-function communication situations. Although offensive, these words still fit into the structural pattern of Afrikaans perfectly. The omission of these words does indicate though, that they are no longer regarded as part of the lexicon of Standard Afrikaans.

2.3.3 The current view of 'pure' Afrikaans The following characteristics of current 'pure' Afrikaans can be deduced from the preceeding discussion of the sociopolitical situation in post-apartheid South

24

The missing information will be made available on request, but only in electronic format.

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Africa, as well as from the views regarding Standard Afrikaans prevailing since 1994: • The strong influence of English on colloquial Afrikaans is accepted as a natural fact. The codification of a fairly large number of Afrikaansified English words in the most recent edition of the A WS is proof of the fact that these words are regarded as 'pure' Afrikaans used in informal situations. • Seeing that the Afrikaans colloquial is the source of Standard Afrikaans, the inclusion of more words of English origin than ever before in the 2002-A WS does not come as a surprise. These words (e.g. poster, steak, top) are regarded as examples of 'pure' Standard Afrikaans. • Due to the status gained on a sociopolitical level by non-white speakers of Afrikaans and resulting from the increasing usage of sub-varieties of Cape Afrikaans and Orange River Afrikaans as high-function languages, 'pure' Afrikaans will in future probably contain more elements from its historical nonEuropean varieties. • 'Pure' Afrikaans includes a fairly large number of words that originate from African languages - sometimes in original form (like ubuntu), but mostly Afrikaansified (like boendoe). For the first time a separate section on the spelling of borrowings from the African languages is included in the Α WS (cf. AWS 2002: 203-208) which proves that a more positive attitude towards borrowings from the African languages has developed amongst speakers and scholars of Afrikaans. • The acceptance of words from the regional varieties of Afrikaans within the corpus of 'pure' Afrikaans lexicon (understandably not as part of the lexicon of Standard Afrikaans) is evidenced by the inclusion of a increasing number of words from the regional varieties of Afrikaans (of which many are sub-varieties of the historical northwestern and southwestern dialects, i.e. sub-varieties of Cape Afrikaans and Orange River Afrikaans) in the WA Τ since the last decade of the twentieth century when the building up of an extensive corpus of lexical items from the regional varieties became one of the focal points of the compilers of the WAT. • Although offensive words regarding race, sexuality, religion, physical and psychological disabilities are excluded from the most recent editions of the A WS, as well as from the most recent volumes of the WAT, such words have not become examples of 'impure' Afrikaans. These words (which do not originate in foreign languages or in regional varieties of Afrikaans) are only excluded from 'civilized' or high-function communication through the medium of Afrikaans, i.e. these words are excluded from the lexicon of Standard Afrikaans.

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3. Conclusion In this paper the different faces that 'pure' Afrikaans had during the course of the twentieth century were examined and discussed. The views of 'pure' Afrikaans that prevailed during each of the three phases in the development of Standard Afrikaans distinguished in this paper (1902-1948; 1948-1994; 1994today) were based on an analysis of: • • •

the most important sources of norms for Afrikaans (the A WS and the WAT), views expressed by leading scholars of Afrikaans, the sociopolitical situation of speakers of Afrikaans within each stage.

It has become clear that the different views of 'pure' Afrikaans held since the turn of the century were to a large extent determined by the sociopolitical situation experienced by the speakers of Afrikaans within the three stages distinguished in this paper. These views concern sociopolitically-inspired judgements regarding the desirability of the inclusion of foreign elements, as well as of elements originating in regional and sociolectal varieties of Afrikaans, in the lexicon of 'pure' Afrikaans. Although purism is strongly linked to the concept of a standard language and sources of norms in both definitions cited in the introductory section of this paper, linguistic purity and standard language can only be regarded as synonyms if the standard language is seen as the purest form of a language (i.e. as an idealized form of a particular language). During three quarters of the twentieth century, Standard Afrikaans (as codified in the Α WS) was regarded as the purest form of Afrikaans, excluding putative foreign elements (i.e. borrowings from English), as well as elements from the non-standard varieties of Afrikaans (dialects and sociolects). Correspondence to Dutch was the test for the purity of Afrikaans lexical items. With regard to the concept 'pure' Afrikaans, languages other than English were not even mentioned, because these languages (European and African) did not pose any treat to the rather exotic form of Afrikaans idealized as the 'pure' form of Afrikaans at that stage. In the world of linguistics the 1970s have become associated with Labov and his emphasis of the linguistic equality of standard varieties and non-standard varieties of languages. In accordance with developments within the world of linguistics, broader views of 'pure' Afrikaans have gradually developed amongst Afrikaans linguists since the 1970s: (i) First of all the need for borrowing and translation from English - the second language of almost every speaker of Afrikaans - was recognised (cf. De Villiers 1970).

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(ii) Approximately ten years later, borrowing and translation from English became accepted as a natural fact (cf. Combrink 1984). (iii) The extent to which elements of the English language have become accepted within the corpus of 'pure' Afrikaans lexicon is evidenced by the inclusion of more borrowings from English in the most recent editions of the A WS (1991 & 2002) than was the case in previous editions. Further proof is the codification of a fairly large number of Afrikaansified English words often used in colloquial Afrikaans in the latest edition of the A WS. It is not only with regard to openness to the influence of English that 'pure' Afrikaans has become a broader concept since the last decade of the twentieth century (and especially since the first democratic elections of 1994), but also concerning linguists' acceptance of elements originating in the regional varieties of Afrikaans (previously regarded as inferior to the standard variety) within the corpus of'pure' Afrikaans lexicon.

4. References Anon. 1990a. 'Kwetsende woorde uit Afrikaans.' In: Die Burger: 3, Jan. 18. Anon. 1990b. 'Links verwelkom nuwe taallys.' In: Die Burger. 8, Jan. 12. A WS {Afrikaanse woordelijs en spelreels.) 1917. Bloemfontein: Nasionale Pers. also the following revised editions: 3rd (1921), 4th (1931), 7th (1964), 8th (1991), 9th (2002). Belcher, R. 1987. 'Afrikaans en kommunikasie oor die kleurgrens.' In: Du Plessis & Du Plessis. 17-36. Boshoff, S.P.E. 1963. Radiopraatjies oor Afrikaans. Johannesburg. Botha, T.J.R., J.G.H Combrink & F.F. Odendal (eds.). 1984. Inleiding tot die Afrikaanse taalkunde. Pretoria: Academica. Botha, T.J.R., F.A. Ponelis, J.G.H. Combrink & F.F. Odendal (eds.) 1989. Inleiding tot die Afrikaanse taalkunde. Pretoria: Academica. Botha, T.J.R. 1989. 'Afrikaans sedert die negentiende eeu.' In: Botha, T.J.R. et al. 127-154. Brand, G. 2003. 'Die knaende gekla oor Engfrikaans help nie.' Rapport: 16, Sept. 7. Brink, A.P. 2000. Groot Verseboek 2000. Orginally compiled by D.J. Opperman. Kaapstad: Tafelberg. Carstens, W.A.M. 1999. 'Die 9de A WS: Afrikaanse spelling in die nuwe millennium.' In: Journal for language teaching, 33(4): 367-375. Carstens, W.A.M. 4 2003. Norme vir Afrikaans: enkele riglyne by die gebruik van Afrikaans. Pretoria: Van Schaik. Carter, R. 1995. Keywords in language and literacy. New York: Routledge.

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Coetzee, A.E. 1982. "'n Herorietering van die begrip standaaardtaal en 'n voorstudie van die ontwikkeling van standaard-Afrikaans gedurende die 20e eeu. " In: Tydskrifvir Geesteswetenskappe, 22(4): 271-289. Combrink, J.H.G. 1984. 'Wat is 'n Anglisisme?' In: Botha, T.J.R. etal. 83-106. Combrink, J.H.G. 1991. 'Nederlandse spelling geen reddingsgordel vir Afrikaans nie.' In: Die Burger. 13, Jul. 17. Combrink, J.H.G. 1995. 'Engels as bron van Afrikaans.' In: S.A Linguistics. Papers delivered at the 31st Annual Congress of the Linguists' Society of South Africa. Port Elizabeth: UPE. 37-43.) Crystal, D. 1992. An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. Daan, J. 1990. 'The relation between dialect and standard language in the Netherlands in the past as a key to the present.' In: Van Leuvensteijn & J.B. Berns. 147-161. Davids, A. 1991. 'Taalkommissie se Afrikaans "eksklusief wit".' In: Vrye Weekblad- 29, Jun. 13) Davids, A. 1994. 'Afrikaans - die produk van akkulturasie.' In: Olivier & Coetzee. 110-119. De Villiers, M. 1970. 'Die vreemde woord in Afrikaans. Is Afrikaans bestand teen Engels?' In: Tydskrifvir Geesteswetenskappe, 10(4): 28-37. Donaldson, B.C. 1991. The influence of English on Afrikaans: a case study of linguistic change in a language contact situation. 2nd. ed. Pretoria: Academica. Du Plessis, L.T. 1987. 'Die politiek van Standaard-Afrikaans - twee gevalle.' In: Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrifvir Taalkunde, 5(4): 1-19. Du Plessis, Η & Τ. Du Plessis (eds.) 1987. Afrikaans en taalpolitiek: 15 opstelle. Pretoria: HAUM. Grebe, H.P. 2002. 'Standaardafrikaans: daar's 'n vlieg in die salf.' In: Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 20: 37-46. Killian, B. 1990. 'Gee 'n steak, milkshake en lekker Afrikaans.' In: Beeld: 3, Jan. 23. Links, T.H. 1992. 'Afrikaans: die huis met vele wonings.' Paper delivered at a conference on "Taal en identiteit", June 1992, Leiden, The Netherlands. Louw, C. 1988. "'Alternatiewe' Afrikaans: woelinge random lastige kwessie." In: Die Suid-Afrikaan: 19-21 Jun. McArthur, T. 1997. 'The printed word in the English-speaking world.' In: English today, 13(1): 10-16, Jan. McArthur, T. 1998. The English languages. Cambridge: CUP. Mesthrie, R. 2002. 'South Africa: a sociolinguistic overview.' In: Mesthrie, R. (ed.). Language in South Africa. Cambridge: CUP. Odendal, F.F. 1984. 'Taal en die gemeenskap.' In: Botha, T.J.R. et al. 262-281.

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Olivier, G. & A. Coetzee (eds.). 1994 Nuweperspektiewe op die geskiedenis van Afrikaans. Dedicated to E.H. Raidt. Halfweghuis: Southern. Ponelis, F.A. 1992. 'Standaardafrikaans inoorgang.' In: February, V. (ed.). Taal en identiteit: Afrikaans en Nederlands. Leiden: Centre for Africa Studies. 91-106. Ponelis, F.A. 1993. The Development of Afrikaans. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. Ponelis, F.A. 1998. Standaardafrikaans en die Afrikaanse taalfamilie. Stellenbosch: University of Stellenbosch. Ponelis, F.A. 1999. Taaltrots: purisme in 'n veertigtal talen. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact. Prinsloo, A. 2002. 'Ou Ingelse nou Boere.' In: Volksblad: 11, Nov. 22. Raidt, Ε. H. 3 1991. Afrikaans en sy Europese verlede. Cape Town: Nasou. Roberge, P.T. 2003. 'Afrikaans.' In: Deumert, A & W. Vandenbussche (eds.) Germanic Standardizations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Romaine, S. 1994. Language in society: an introduction to sociolinguistics. Oxford: OUP. Scholtz, J du P. 1980. Wording en ontwikkeling van Afrikaans. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Steyn, J.C. 1980. Tuiste in eie taal: die behoud en bestaan van Afrikaans. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Steyn, J.C. 1987. 'Afrikanernasionalisme en Afrikaans.' In: Du Plessis & Du Plessis. 73-97. Stubbs, M. 1980. Language and literacy: the sociolinguistics of reading and writing. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Thomas, G. 1991. Linguistic Purism. London: Longman. Van Bree, C. & A. van Santen. 1996. Leidse Mores: aspecten van taalnormering. Den Haag: Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Van Bree, C. 1996. 'Taalverandering en normverandering.' In: Van Bree & Van Santen. 30-44. Van de Rheede, I. 1994. 'Afrikaans in die onderwys.' In: Journal for language teaching, 28(2): 166-175. Van den Berg, M. 2001. Die konsep Standaardafrikaans: 'n kritiese oorsig en 'n Hallidayaande perspektief. PhD-thesis. Potchefstroom: Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education. Van der Merwe, H.J.J.M. (ed.) 1972. Afrikaans - sy aard en ontwikkeling. Pretoria: JL van Schaik. Van der Wal, M.J. 1990. 'Dialect and standard language in the past: the rise of the Dutch standard language in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.' In: Van Leuvensteijn & Berns. 147-161. Van Leuvensteijn & J.B. Berns (eds.). 1990. Dialect and standard language in English, Dutch, German and Norwegian language areas. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.

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Van Rensburg, M.C.J. 1989. 'Soorte Afrikaans.' In: Botha 1989. Van Rensburg, M.C.J. 1991. 'Wat van 'n nuwe Afrikaans?' In: Acta Academica, 23(3): 13-33. Van Rensburg, M.C.J. 1992. 'Die demokratisering van Afrikaans.' In: Webb 181-197. Van Rensburg, M.C.J, (ed.). 1997. Afrikaans in Afrika. Pretoria: Van Schaik. Van Rensburg, M.C.J. 1999. 'Afrikaans and Apartheid.' In: International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 136: 97-120. WAT (Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse taal.) 1950. Vol. 1 (A-C), 1956. Vol. 2 (D-E), 1992. Vol. 9 (L), 1996. Vol. 10 (M), 2000. Vol. 11 (N-O) Stellenbosch: Büro van die WAT. Webb, V.N. 1992. Afrikaans ηά apartheid. Pretoria: Van Schaik. Willemse, H. 1993. 'Erken die ander stem.' In: Karring, 1993: 12-14, Winter. Willemse, H. 1999. " n Inleiding tot buite-kanonieke Afrikaanse kulturele praktyke.' In: Van Coller, H.P. (ed.) Perspektief en profiel: 'η Afrikaanse literatuurgeskiedenis. Pretoria: Van Schaik. Wolfram, E. & R.W. Fasold. 1974. Social Dialects in American English. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

Kristine Horner

Reimagining the Nation: Discourses of Language Purism in Luxembourg1 1. Identification with the Luxembourgish language: Sign of the Times? The language situation in Luxembourg is frequently referred to as 'triglossic' in reference to the three languages recognised by the language law of 1984: Luxembourgish (Letzebuergesch), French and German. The spoken/written distinction has always been pivotal to understanding language use in Luxembourg, with spoken functions being dominated by the use of Luxembourgish and written functions carried out primarily in French or German (Hoffmann 1996: 107). However, the increasing use of French as a spoken language coupled with the more frequent appearance of Luxembourgish as a written language has led to a partial inversion of the roles of Luxembourgish and French in the Grand Duchy. 2 The rise of Luxembourgish as a written medium often has been linked to the desire to create greater sociocultural distance from Germany, particularly in the aftermath of World War II (von Polenz 1990: 11-14, Clyne 1992: 117-122). Although this historical event is of major significance, it must be stressed that the momentum behind Luxembourgish has increased dramatically over the past two decades, precisely at the time when a series of major social, political and economic transformations altered the linguistic landscape (Weber 2000). In brief, these events include the rise of the banking industry, the arrival of EU institutions and employees and, more generally speaking, record levels of

1

2

I would like to thank my Letzebuergesch colleagues, Claudine Moulin, Agnes Prüm and Jean Jacques Weber, as well as my PhD advisor David Fertig for their comments on drafts of this paper and for their words of encouragement. I am also grateful to Nils Langer and Wini Davies for their helpful editorial suggestions. For a more detailed account of the increased use of Luxembourgish as a written medium, see Berg (1993) and Newton (1996). For a recent analysis of shifting language patterns in the Grand Duchy, including the role of French as a spoken language, refer to Fehlen et al. (1998).

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immigration. According to recent demographics (Statec 2003), 38% of the residents in Luxembourg are not Luxembourgish nationals, i.e. passport holders. Moreover, 36% of the workforce consists of border-crossing commuters (frontaliers) from Belgium, France and Germany. 3 Although some of these people speak Luxembourgish, others cannot and often resort to using French as a lingua franca with Luxembourgish and non-Luxembourgish speakers alike. It is in this context that the Luxembourgish language has become subject to a number of interrelated and emotionally charged debates. Analysing debates about language allows us to locate and understand contradictions and inconsistencies with respect to case-specific sociolinguistic issues. Along those lines, this paper will explore discourses of language purism in Luxembourg in relation to the following questions: • • •

Why has Luxembourgish been targeted for politicisation at this particular time? Who are the key players or 'ideology brokers' in this process? How are 'internal' and 'external' manifestations of language purism discursively linked to Luxembourgish national identity? 4

2. Language, Ethnicity and the Nation The practice of politicising national languages has frequently served as a core component in the discursive process of 'imagining' the nation (Anderson 1991). One manifestation of the politicisation of language is the ideology of language purism, which is claimed to be most visible in moments of transition and change (Jernudd 1989: 3) and during periods of intense language contact (Thomas 1991: 133). As purism has been 'defined in terms of the opening and closure of sources for enrichment' (Jernudd 1989: 4, citing Annamalai 1979), it involves a struggle against the Other and the construction of boundaries (Burke 1998). Boundaries are also central to the negotiation of ethnic identity, which is most salient in times of change and increased intergroup contact (Roosens 1989).

3

4

This situation is peculiar to Luxembourg due to its small geographical size (2,586 square kilometres) and the status of the three languages recognised by the law of 1984, with French and German being used for numerous (written) functions, particularly in professional contexts. 'External' purism, which targets lexical items perceived as 'foreign', is the type more frequently associated with purist movements. However, there also exists the 'internal' variant of purism, framed in terms of 'standardisation' rather than 'purism', which also is prescriptive and strives towards homogenising the language (see Milroy, this volume).

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There exist two juxtaposed interpretations of ethnicity. According to the essentialist approach, ethnicity is based on a fixed set of criteria, which determine group membership. From the constructivist viewpoint, ethnicity is something malleable, which is negotiated in the process of intergroup relations. Variations on the second paradigm currently dominate academic work in social anthropology and highlight the flexible nature of ethnicity, just as they do with other types of Self-identification and categorization of the Other. However, the first view permeates popular or 'folk' conceptualisations of ethnicity. This theoretical incongruence is crucial with regard to language debates, including those about linguistic purism. May (2001) and Jenkins (1997) make a convincing argument for combining elements from both poles in order to understand how ethnicity works and why it continues to play a role in the construction of ethnic and national identities.5 Approaching ethnicity in this manner focuses on the situatedness of ethnicity, but also takes into account what Barth (1969) refers to as the 'cultural stuff. The process of linking language and ethnicity may be observed in relation to the various discursive strategies used to construct the nation along the ethniccivic continuum. 6 Movement along the ethnic-civic continuum of the nation plays a major role in language debates, as certain discourses about language gravitate towards the ethnic model of the nation based on kinship and shared homeland (connected to an essentialist view of ethnicity) and other discourses towards the civic model of the nation based on duties and citizenship (related to a constructivist view of ethnicity).7 I will illustrate this movement and negotiation by comparing and contrasting discursive approaches to the question: what is to be done with Luxembourgish? Blommaert's (1999: 425f.) concept of 'the material view of language' is significant with regard to language purism, because there is competition for 'ownership' of the language, or as he puts it: 'whenever language is drawn into nationalist struggles, it becomes more than "just language'" (ibid, p. 429). The key players in the debate, or Blommaert's (ibid.) 'ideology brokers', view

5 6

7

The final section of this article deals more explicitly with the relationship between ethnicity and national identity. According to Oakes (2001: 14), '[c]learly all nations rely on ethnic and civic dimensions, albeit in different degrees.' Situating the model of the nation on a continuum allows us to explore how different dimensions are discursively foregrounded or backgrounded at given moments. McDonald (1993: 227) points out that the twin discourses of 'positivism and romanticism gave enduring and systematized expression [to the definition of self and other] in which nation could define itself against nation [...].' Discourses gravitating towards the civic model of the nation often rely on positivism whereas those moving towards the ethnic model of the nation draw on romanticism.

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language as a resource which they can possess and manipulate if given the opportunity and authority to do so. An analysis of language debates provides us with insight into who is approaching the debate from what angle and what is at stake. Furthermore, we can ask what role ideological apparatuses, such as the mass media, play in the construction and reproduction of language ideologies. In Luxembourg, the print media are central to this process as it constitutes one of the primary sources consulted for domestic affairs. Consideration of extralinguistic factors helps us to understand the timing and appeal of purism movements as well as the appearance of multiple and (seemingly) contradictory discourses. This paper will highlight patterns as well as inconsistencies by dealing with one specific case of purism at one historical moment. Having said that, it is crucial that the concepts of time and, more specifically, history are viewed as 'mulitlayered' rather than in a linear fashion (Blommaert 1999: 425f.).

3. Legitimising and Promoting Luxembourgish Language debates are most salient in times of change and particularly in the process of nation-building (Blommaert 1999: 427f.). In the current context of demographic changes and fluctuating language patterns in the Grand Duchy, Luxembourgish has become a major target of debate. Popular discourses linking Luxembourgish (national) identity with monolingualism rather than trilingualism have become increasingly salient. A pivotal historical moment in this connection was the ratification of the 1984 language law. In part, this law is connected to the perceived need for a legitimate national language to justify the continued existence of an autonomous nation-state as well as of Luxembourgish identity. There is a lot of talk about Luxembourgish dying out: it is not uncommon to come across statements expressing concern about Luxembourgish becoming an endangered language (see Horner 2004). This state of affairs cannot be attributed to competition from the increased use of the German language but rather from French. However, much of the purist discourse targets so-called German lexical items. I would argue that the purpose of this purist discourse is to establish a clear boundary between Luxembourgish and German. 8 As a language, rather than a Germanic dialect, Luxembourgish is positioned as a valid competitor with French. In some respects, this presents a

8

This illustrates to what extent language ideologies are central to purist discourses, as they refract the belief that the language in question exists as its own system. See Milroy (this volume) regarding the view that a language exists as a 'self-contained object that has welldefined outer boundaries differentiating it from all other languages - a system oü tout se tient'.

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situation similar to that of Corsican as described by Jaffe (1999: 132-135), who argues that certain discourses construct Corsican as different from Italian so that it is perceived as a language which can stand up to the hegemony of French.9 Jaffe (1999:120-121) discusses two strategic positions in relation to language debates about Corsican: the first is the 'essentialist' perspective, which is oriented towards the aesthetics of language and is inherently puristic in nature. Discourses of this first type emphasise the 'biological' continuity and separateness of the language, and they construct the language-identity link as 'natural'. Jaffe (121) refers to the contrasting point of view as 'sociolinguistic' and describes its proponents as follows: 'the language activists in this camp locate the definition of language in society and its linguistic practices.' Discourses of this type do not target 'foreign words' because the goals are highly functional in nature. I will apply a similar framework to discourses about Luxembourgish, and I will also illustrate how some of these discourses refract the construction of Luxembourgish (national) identity. The juxtaposed discourses about language echo bipolar discussions on ethnicity and move along the ethnic-civic continuum of the nation accordingly. The goals of Actioun Letzebuergesch (AL) for example, are intertwined with an aesthetic notion of language, and gravitate towards the ethnic model of the nation, whereas those of the Conseil permanent de la langue luxembourgeoise (CPLL) are based on a functional approach to language and gravitate towards the civic model of the nation. 10 Actioun Letzebuergesch is a non-profit organisation which was founded in 1971, and it was one of the main lobby groups pushing for the language law of 1984. Its mission statement is as follows {AL 1978: 63): Den Zweck vun der Verenegong as fir alles anzetrieden, wat letzebuergesch as, apaart fir d'Sprooch ('The purpose of the association is to promote the cause of everything that is Luxembourgish, especially the language.') 11 This statement

9

It must be emphasised that all languages may be viewed as ongoing sociopolitical constructs (Blommaert 1999: 431-4, Jaffe 1999: 132-133). In contrast to Corsican, however, Luxembourgish cannot be classified as a minority language within the current sociopolitical context of the Grand Duchy.

10

Jaffe's description of the 'essentialist' perspective is very similar to the position of AL. However, the goals of CPLL do not map out directly onto the Corsican 'sociolinguistic' perspective. This may be attributed to the fact that Luxembourgish is the language of the 'ethnic core' in the Grand Duchy rather than of a linguistic minority, as is the case of Corsican speakers within the French state. Translations from the original Luxembourgish and German texts are my own. As I have attempted to keep the translations as literal as possible, they may appear rather stiff or 'wooden' at times. The original Luxembourgish quotation by AL reflects spelling conventions

11

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constructs the Luxembourgish language as a part of something else, i.e. Luxembourgish (national) identity. In this connection, AL's discourses are based on a primarily ethnic model of the nation and rely on romanticist discourses that essentialise Luxembourgish (national) identity. As such, their statements have a certain degree of 'folk' appeal. AL's views on language, and the link between language and identity, are highly visible because they run a monthly column in the Luxemburger Wort}2 Many of AL's articles lament the use of 'foreign' lexical items in Luxembourgish, particularly items which are perceived to be German. Along similar lines, AL published a book entitled Greng a Rout Leschten 'Green and Red Lists' (Roth 1998), which consists of prescriptive suggestions regarding the use of certain lexical items and phrases. Almost fifteen years after the ratification of the language law, the Ministere de la Culture, de l'Enseignement superieur et de la Recherche created the Conseil permanent de la langue luxembourgeoise. Its mission statement is as follows (CPLL 1998): The CPLL protects the Luxembourgish language and, more particularly, has the mission of carrying out research on the language, fixing it orthographically and propagating it. It organises the activities of various working groups which have been set up by the government in order to create new Luxembourgish dictionaries and furthermore to ensure that the Luxembourgish language becomes more widely known.

The goals of the recently created CPLL are presented as instrumental in nature, i.e. to work on issues primarily related to the standardisation of Luxembourgish. Its first task was to create and implement the 1999 spelling reform. Their next project, which is now pending, is the creation of a new Luxembourgish dictionary (Moulin 2003). CPLL's discourses rely on positivism and tend to construct the nation in civic rather than ethnic terms. CPLL is not nearly as visible or vocal as AL, a point which has earned the government some criticism for not doing enough for Luxembourgish. Furthermore, the presentation and implementation of the spelling reform was not without its critics. In contrast to the German orthographic reform of 1996, the latest series of changes to the Luxembourgish spelling system in 1999 was not debated at great length. From the present-day point of view, the immediate relevance of the reform seems limited in scope. Institutional apparatuses, such as the educational

12

prior to the 1999 reform. The essentialist link between language and identity expressed in AL's discourse is reminiscent of the Corsican bumper sticker that reads Sö Corsu, Parlu Corsu ('I'm Corsican, I speak Corsican') (cited in Jaffe 1999: 123). The Luxemburger Wort is the national newspaper with by far the highest circulation in the country (Hirsch 1997: 147, Schroen 1986: 66-67).

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system, continue to rely on the use of German and French as the dominant written languages.13 It appears that the immediate effects of this reform were more directly applicable to the teaching and learning of Luxembourgish as a foreign language. A new Luxembourgish textbook (Quaring et al. 2000) reflecting the latest orthographic changes was produced by the Centre de langues Luxembourg (CLL) immediately following the spelling reform. 14 On the other hand, the textbook (Rasquin et al. 1994) used with pupils in the Luxembourgish lycee has not yet been updated since the reform. 15 Writing in Luxembourgish remains a rather self-regulated activity, although the use of written Luxembourgish is being propagated on many levels outside of institutional settings.16 In this respect, it would be unwise to claim that the reform is irrelevant with regard to future use and value of Luxembourgish, the issue which lies at the heart of current debates about the national language.

4. Transforming or Preserving the National Language? This section will turn to discourses linked to the question: what is to be done with Luxembourgish? It will be shown that certain discourses about Luxembourgish gravitate towards the ethnic model of the nation, and link with the term Stackletzebuergesch ('rooted Luxembourgish', i.e. authentic

13

14 15

16

Luxembourgish is taught as an obligatory subject for one hour per week during the first year (septieme) of secondary-school (lycee), and the course objective is as follows (Ministere de I'Education Nationale, de la Formation Professionnelle et des Sports 2003): 'Among other things, the pedagogical task of the subject of Luxembourgish should include showing the students in the septieme that the country of Luxembourg has its own language and literature.' Although students are also taught orthographical rules, the following remarks are made about evaluation: Ά maximum of one sixth of the total points may be deducted for spelling errors.' CLL is a language school for adults, which is funded by the Ministere de I'Education Nationale, de la Formation Professionnelle et des Sports (MENFPS). The textbook was last revised in 1990 and was reprinted in 1994 with minor changes, including new maps. However, pamphlets and brochures delineating the new spelling rules have been produced, including the publication commissioned by MENFPS entitled Eng kleng Hellef fir Letzebuergesch ze schreiwen (Braun et al. 2001). The Luxembourgish supermarket chain, Cactus, produced and distributed a revised version of their workbook entitled Mir ttiere Letzebuergesch schreiwen (2002), which outlines the new rules and includes a number of exercises with an answer key. In spite of such efforts, there exist Luxembourgish speakers who are unaware that a spelling reform took place in 1999. A number of my students at the Universite du Luxembourg knew nothing about it and upon discussion, many of them asserted that the advantage to writing in Luxembourgish was that one could write however she or he pleases. Others claimed that the promotion of written Luxembourgish was crucial at this stage and were in favour of expanding the instruction of Luxembourgish as a school subject.

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Luxembourgish). 17 Other discourses gravitate towards the civic model of the nation and are linked to the concept of 'integration'.

4.1. Form and Function: Instrumentalising Luxembourgish A few months prior to the implementation of the spelling reform, a page-length article appeared in the Warte, which is a weekly cultural supplement in the Luxemburger Wort. Berg, a linguist affiliated with the Institut Grand-Ducal, takes a highly pragmatic approach to the spelling reform, highlighting what must and must not be done with Luxembourgish by the government and the public alike. 18 He begins by drawing a distinction between scholars and laypersons (Guy Berg in Luxemburger Wort, 18 March 1999, die Warte Nr. 11/1879: 1): 'In the history of written Luxembourgish, its spelling system was the only grammatical category that researchers and amateur linguists, and also politicians really worked on and dealt with seriously.' In this manner, he indirectly secures his position as a voice of authority with regard to language issues. In the form of positivist discourse, he argues that it is necessary for the new spelling to (continue to) be modelled on the German orthographic system: The search for the best possible orthography should therefore be based less on a rigid perfectionism than on practical aspects of language use [...] At school, however, literacy is still taught through the German language. Therefore it is necessary in principle for the Luxembourgish spelling system to be based on German. In his series of arguments for a user-friendly orthography, the author makes numerous references to non-native speakers of Luxembourgish and to people who may wish to learn Luxembourgish as a foreign language: 19

17

18 19

The term Stackletzebuergesch appears frequently in discourses of (external) language purism. It embodies an interesting metaphor, as the Stack- element has biological connotations and expresses a sense of rootedness. The Institut Grand-Ducal is a research institute under the auspices of the Ministere de la Culture, de I 'Enseignement Superieur et de la Recherche. Ironically, the author is not concerned about the continued use of German to teach basic literacy to non-Luxembourgish-speaking pupils. The optional use of French for this purpose has been debated since the 1970s, but no significant changes have been made to the primaryschool curriculum in this respect. Given the lack of emphasis on written Luxembourgish in schools, it is the use of German that creates problems for some romanophone pupils (see Horner & Weber 2002).

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Even more important is the fact that it is not only the language of the mother-tongue speakers, but that it is also used in one way or another by large numbers of nonLuxembourgers living either in the country or in the border areas [...] Not only do politicians point to the integrative quality of our language, but also the foreign residents demand via their associations ASTI and CLAE that the integration of foreigners, and especially the children, be promoted even more intensively through the learning and the more active use of Luxembourgish. Therefore a spelling reform must make the learning of Luxembourgish as easy and attractive as possible for den auslännische Matbierger [the fellow foreign citizen] [...] It is also important to promote the positive social aspects of the language, such as communication, community, understanding and information transfer. Within the particular national context, this means that the acknowledged integrative qualities of the language need to be valorised as much as possible, while at the same time respecting the importance of French and German in their impact on the linguistic situation, and in full awareness of the multilingual environment within which our language is positioned. In other words: eis Sprooch muss integrativ an auslännerfrendlech sin [our language must work towards integration and be open to foreigners]. In this article, there is n o explicit reference to identity, but the author emphasises the role o f the L u x e m b o u r g i s h language with regard to the 'integration of foreigners', hinting at a malleable interpretation of Luxembourgish identity. In other words, anyone can b e c o m e a ' L u x e m b o u r g e r ' if they adhere to certain linguistic norms, which m e a n s that they must learn Luxembourgish. Therefore, this process should b e m a d e as easy as possible for those w h o are willing to be 'integrated'. A reply to this article appeared in the paper called the Letzebuerger Journal.20 T h e author of this piece does not directly engage with the issue of identity, but rather criticises attempts to shoehorn Luxembourgish into the mould of a ' s t a n d a r d ' language (Ernst Zweifel in Letzebuerger Journal, 20/21 March 1999: 6): For Luxembourgish is a dialect, ever since it has been spoken and as long as it will be spoken - there is not the least scientific or practical doubt about it. But dialects, as long as they are alive, are marked by the fact that, unlike standard languages, they grow wildly and refuse [to submit to] any spelling norms.

20

Most newspapers in Luxembourg are affiliated with political parties or trade unions. The

Luxemburger Wort is linked with the Chreschtlesch Sozial Vollekspartei (CSV), the conservative or 'Christian Social' party, whereas the Letzebuerger Journal is connected to the Demokratesch Partei (DP), a centre-right party referred to as the 'Liberal' party in Luxembourg (Hirsch 1997: 147).

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Zweifel relies upon medical metaphors in order to ridicule people such as the author of the aforementioned article for behaving like 'quack doctors' who are tending to a spelling system in need of medical attention: Failing to recognise Luxembourgish honestly and modestly as a dialect and forcing it willy-nilly and with German efficiency into the corset of an exclusive orthography is a sign of a really severe inferiority complex [...] out of this inferiority complex the self-appointed language-doctors play around with [what they see as] the chronically sick spelling system of Luxembourgish [...].

This passage is of particular interest because similar images are frequently used to describe so-called purists (Thomas 1991: 22). However, Berg makes no claims to lexical purification in his article in the Warte, particularly as he is approaching the issue as a linguist, providing 'expert' advice on what should be done with Luxembourgish to propagate its use as a written language. The reply to the linguist, on the other hand, provides an opposing voice which rejects the use of Luxembourgish for certain functions and refers to its value as oral, or 'dialectal'. The self-appropriated authority of the linguist is challenged by the positivist argument that there is no 'scientific or practical doubt' that Luxembourgish is a dialect rather than a language. In spite of mixed opinions about the use of Luxembourgish as a written language, the government felt compelled to do something with Luxembourgish, perhaps due to the insecurity about its future since it is being used by an increasingly smaller proportion of the employment sector as well as the resident population as an oral means of communication. CPLL's response was to execute the spelling reform already mentioned above and they went about this task at top speed. A CPLL press release explains the proposed modifications to the existing orthography as follows (Luxemburger Wort, 8 April 1999: 4): These simplifications are intended to be [part of] a minor spelling reform of unserer Landessprache [the language of our country] which, above all, involves making it easier to use written Luxembourgish, making writing in Luxembourgish more practical, as was stated during the press conference. The orthography is intended to become more user-friendly and ambiguities in the orthography will be eliminated. As a basis for its work, the Conseil permanent de la langue luxembourgeoise relied upon the orthography proposed by Robert Bruch and codified by [Grand Ducal] decree in 1975. The Conseil permanent de la langue luxembourgeoise wants to put the proposed modifications up for public discussion. Until 1 May we welcome reactions and suggestions, on the basis of which the simplifications will be compiled in [the form of] a ministry document and implemented.

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These modifications are often referred to as 'simplifications'. The discourse is highly functional in nature and at the end of the statement, the floor is left open for the general public's reactions and suggestions regarding the pending spelling reform. However, the public has only a few weeks to respond. The following quotation from a letter to the editor takes issue with the speed with which the spelling reform was executed or, as the author puts it: 'Now it is the beginning of July 1999 and the hedgehog in the fairy tale calls out "I'm already there"!' {Luxemburger Wort, 10 July 1999: 13). In addition to criticising the speed with which the spelling reform was executed, the same letter expresses dissatisfaction with the top-down decision-making process: How representative were the people dobaussen [on the outside] who were asked for their advice? Do we have to take kindly to the fact that a few people are rushing towards a 'grand-ducal' regulation at turbo speed, in order to get their changes ratified as quickly as possible? [...]. I also think that the 'top-speed' proposed changes are a slap in the face of everyone who helped to improve eis Heemeschtssprooch [language of our homeland] in the last decades and deserves credit for it (our novelists, authors of short stories, etc.). Who the heck discovered that the new 'proposals' were all more logical and easier to learn than our legal language of 1976 (Memorial η. 13659)?21

What is most striking in this letter is the discursive connection the author makes between language, identity and homeland: We Luxembourgers are travelling by fast train: in less than no time we have made a whole bunch of orthographic changes ('simplifications'?). Congratulations! [...] One could laugh if it weren't so sad. The identity and culture of engem Vollek [a people] is carried by their (oral and written) language, and we are jumping around with ours, wei wa mird'Hiem geife wiesselen [just as if we were changing a shirt].

The symbolic value of Luxembourgish is considered to be so great that nobody should be making changes without careful reflection and public discussion. In an attempt to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, the author of this letter oscillates between positivist/instrumental and romanticist/symbolic discourses, while at the same time essentialising the language-nation link.

21

This is a reference to the (previous) officially recognised orthography that was ratified in 1975 and went into effect in 1976. Luxembourgish laws are published in the Mimorial: Journal

Officiel du Grand-Duche de Luxembourg.

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4.2. Authenticity and Aesthetics: Symbolising Luxembourgish The following series of extracts is taken from an editorial in the Luxemburger Wort, in which the author quotes an immigrant f r o m Italy who has proudly learned Luxembourgish. T h e ironic point that is made is that native speakers of Luxembourgish do not have mastery of their own language, and the author provides 'evidence' of this phenomenon by referring to the use of 'English' lexical items instead of 'Luxembourgish' ones {Luxemburger Wort, 20 December 2000: 3): 22 'You make us foreigners learn Luxembourgish, and you Luxembourgers don't manage to speak correctly yourselves. They say News instead of Noriichten [news < Luxembourgish], Background for Hannergrond [background < Luxembourgish] and so on. You can hardly listen to them any longer.' [...] Then one hears things such as language supposedly evolves, you have to move along with the times, you can't get far in the world with Luxembourgish, Luxembourgish is a farmers' language from the previous century [...]. Our language [Luxembourgish] also adapts to its new environment - which doesn't mean however that it has to give up everything that already exists and doesn't need to be invented from scratch, (original emphasis) The author of this text rejects the idea that language 'evolves' or changes over time. This scientific notion is discredited and the boundaries are firmly closed to unnecessary borrowing of 'foreign' lexical items. In the interest of aesthetics, it is crucial to retain all that is Stackletzebuergesch. Caretakers of the language are to be praised and the people attacking them are unjustified and meanspirited: It is even claimed that the people who (apparently without justification) call themselves the defenders of the language try to impose their rules on the language [...]. That hurts - as it was certainly intended to do. It hurts all those who absolutely want nothing else but to hold on to the simple and the beautiful things that exist in a language. They try to keep out foreign words, if there are already good and appropriate Stackletzebuerger [rooted, authentic Luxembourgish] words for the same thing [...]. As the association that regularly uses and writes in Luxembourgish, AL didn't play the role that one would expect from it with regard to the Luxembourgish spelling reform, which was implemented in 1999 and neither modernised the language nor made it easier [...]. In spite of this, one wishes for [the sake of] Luxembourgish that AL doesn't become marginalised [...]. It is true that spoken

22

Glosses in the following quotation and passim reflect subjective perceptions regarding the linguistic origins of the targeted linguistic items.

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Luxembourgish today has reached a catastrophic level and it risks turning into just a Puzzle [jigsaw puzzle] of German, French and English words - a langue moderne ä part entiere [a fully modern language], to quote the letter to the editor once again. Is that supposed to be the modern Luxembourgish, the Luxembourgish of the future? (original emphasis) In the author's final c o m m e n t s , it is argued that AL should b e doing even m o r e for Luxembourgish of their o w n accord but also that they should have been more involved in the recent spelling reform. There is a call for AL to b e c o m e more proactive b e c a u s e the ' m o d e r n ' version of Luxembourgish is undesirable. Modernity on the w h o l e is firmly rejected and this text is aligned squarely with romanticism. T h e following extracts are taken from Actioun Letzebuergesch's monthly column in the Luxemburger Wort, called eng KLACK fir eis Sprooch or the metaphorical bell ringing f o r 'our language' (AL in Luxemburger Wort, 27 January 2001: 21): No reasonable person has anything against [the fact] that a language moves along over time and with the world, developing in a reasonable and normal way [...]. When our children, for example, now see Kugelen [balls < German] instead of Bullen [balls < French] on the Christmas trees, then that has nothing to do with 'evolution' but just with 'television' [...] such examples can be given by the hundreds, especially because 30 German language TV channels are disseminated onto our little language [...] therefore one shouldn't exploit the term 'evolution' for one's own loose language habits. As is often the case, this piece targets a ' G e r m a n ' lexical item, b l a m e s the m a s s media for the ongoing corruption of Luxembourgish, and criticises the concept of 'evolution'. There are a n u m b e r of disclaimers about language purism, particularly in relation to the fight for 'our identity'. 2 3 T h e author criticises language ' e x p e r t s ' for n o t taking u p the battle call in the following manner: And why is one labelled so quickly a purist, a conservative fanatic, a fascist(oid) moron by Sprooch-Strummerten [so-called language 'experts', who really know nothing], if one fights for eis Identiteit [our identity] in this manner? If somebody just doesn't care, then he/she should say so honestly. We are, fortunately, in a free country [...] and above all: we are not ashamed of our language.

23

In this manner, AL claims to be speaking for the collectivity (the nation of Luxembourg) and draws a boundary between those inside and outside this circle.

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A lengthier article in KLACK begins by listing ungrammatical utterances in German and French and later makes the enormous leap to 'unacceptable' lexical items and expressions in Luxembourgish (Lex Roth in Luxemburger Wort, 29 December 2001: 18): If one insists that nobody says *ich habe meinen Onkel begegnet me rappelte

de cela in French

in German or *je

[ . . . ] then one is a language do-gooder, w h o keeps

his/her French and his/her German in order. However, if one does the same thing in Luxembourgish [ . . . ] then one is a nationalistic fanatic, a purist or some other istist [ . . . ] w e have loads o f German or French words in Luxembourgish, for which our language simply never invented another. Whoever wants to change something about that today, should indeed be labelled a fanatic; w e are only against the

muttwellst

Futti-maachen

[spurious

[intentional wrecking], and against the fuddeleg

Ursaachen

justifications]. N o reasonable person has anything against 'integrated' expressions [...].

According to the author, certain 'foreign' words and expressions are acceptable, as long as they are 'integrated'! The final words of this article are most significant as there is a reference to the Nazi-German occupation of Luxembourg as well as the collaboration of some Luxembourgish nationals: Why should w e have Giddo Lenkstaang

um Fuerrad

um Velo [handlebars on a bicycle < French], when

[handlebars on a bicycle < German] also does the trick; in

the same breath w e could also mention all car expressions dei no Fransiisch

riehen

[that smell of French]: out of Pneu [tyre < French] w e could make a ' R e e f [tyre < German], out of Demarreur out of Bougie

[ignition < French] an 'Anlasser' [ignition < German],

[spark plug < French] a 'Käerz' [spark plug < German], out o f Mall

[trunk < French] a ' K o f f e r r a u m ' [trunk < German], Then the collaborators in 1940 were right! Fussy? Justifications are there, in order to ...

In this manner, the overrunning of the Luxembourgish language is discursively linked to physical and political occupation, a process with which some Luxembourgers cooperated in the past (the Other is within). However, at present, the threat is not that Germany is preparing to invade Luxembourg but rather that the demographic composition of Luxembourg (and its workforce) is changing dramatically. The essentialist link between language and identity is vivid throughout the text. Moreover, Blommaert's (1999: 425f.) concept of 'multilayered' time comes into play here: the past event of Nazi-German occupation is linked implicitly to the current 'occupation' of Luxembourg by

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foreign residents and border-crossing commuters with the help of Luxembourgish 'collaborators'. 24 The final excerpts are taken from a letter to the editor in the Tageblatt, which is a more 'left-wing' or 'liberal' newspaper, with a much smaller readership than the Luxemburger Wort.25 Nevertheless, this letter follows a similar pattern to the previous column printed in the Luxemburger Wort. In the letter from the Tageblatt, the author begins by citing spelling rules imposed during Nazi-German occupation (Tageblatt, 19/20 February 2000: 16): 'After η, I, r, don't forget, there is never tz and never cW (German orthography rule). During the war, this rule was applied [to family and place names] in Luxembourg by the German Gauleitung [regional government administration]. This link between language and the occupation is followed by a historical reference to the 1941 census commonly referred to as dräimol Letzebuergesch·}6 A slap in the face of our ancestors, 97% of whom responded to the question of 'mother tongue' with Luxembourgish instead of German on the (false) census of 10 October 1941 in spite of intimidating threats and terror. The author also refers to the Albert Ungeheuer association, which is made up of Zwangsrekrutierten, Luxembourgish citizens who were forcibly recruited to fight for the German army during World War II. Incidentally, members of such associations were key lobbyers for the language law of 1984:

24 25

26

The use of three dots at the end of the passage signals a possible connection between past, present and future time frames. The Tageblatt has close links with trade unions and the Letzebuerger Sozialistesch Aarbechter Partei (LSAP), the 'Social-Democratic' party (cf. Hirsch 1997). Along with the CSF and DP, the LSAP is one of the three major political parties in Luxembourg and is not to be confused with dei Lenk 'the left' party. In 1941, during Nazi-German occupation, Gauleiter Simon initiated a census of the Luxembourgish population which, among other things, included questions on Jetzige Staatsangehörigkeit 'current nationality', Muttersprache 'mother tongue', and Volkszugehörigkeit 'ethnicity'. Many people answered these three questions with Letzebuergesch, thus symbolically resisting incorporation into the Third Reich, though the exact numbers of people who responded to the census and percentage of people who answered in the above way are matters of historical debate.

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I can still remember that the Albert Ungeheuer association had already denounced the Germanisation of Luxembourg and the overrunning of our country with German experts in a similar resolution in the general assembly in 1996.

After constructing this historical framework in the text, the author targets lexical items from German and, at this point in the letter, notably codeswitches from German into Luxembourgish. Examples from his list of unacceptable words and phrases include: • • •

when Rendez-vous [meeting < French] becomes a Treff [meeting < German] when the Chamber [chamber < French] of deputies becomes a Kummer [chamber < German] and when a gudde Rutsch [a New Year's greeting < German] has been wished for the New Year for a number of years, after 'Helleg Owend' [Christmas Eve < German] has been said on the radio a hundred times

After listing a lengthy series of unacceptable 'German' words, the author ends the letter as follows: All of that is, as a well-known Germanist wrote, 'a Luxembourgisation of High German'. Gaston Scheidweiler writes: 'High German is in the process not only of supplanting a lot of words of Romance origin, but also the old Luxembourgish vocabulary.' A danger for the identity of the Luxembourgish language!

From an essentialist perspective, the language-identity link should be securely locked in place, but is being threatened by change. As is the case with the three previous texts in this section, this letter employs romanticist discourses and relies on symbolic historical events, including the collective memory of World War II.

5. Reimagining the Nation: Eis Sprooch, eis Identiteit, eis Kultur... An analysis of the above excerpts throws some light on different constructions of the language-ethnicity link. AUs and other 'folk' discourses connect the Luxembourgish language directly with the 'homeland' and essentialise Luxembourgish identity. Official ministry discourses, such as the CPLL press release, and the article written by a linguist instrumentalise the Luxembourgish language, which in turn suggests that Luxembourgish identity is something malleable. As 'folk' perceptions of ethnicity and language tend to gravitate towards the more essentialist end of the continuum, it may not be surprising that

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AL's discourses tend to have more popular appeal than those based on scientific or positivist discourses. I would argue that it is necessary for the researcher to acknowledge 'folk' beliefs about language and ethnicity.27 In everyday social life, people often construct their understanding of language and ethnicity with reference to an essentialist framework. As a result, researchers cannot simply ignore this dimension of language and ethnicity. The essentialist views of so-called purist discourses, such as those expressed by AL, are often perceived as nationalistic and as a magnet for extreme rightwing groups. However, it may be argued that 'intellectuals' and 'liberal' governments also participate in the process of nationalism, but in a very different manner, which is not always perceived as such. Although 'liberal' discourses do not perpetuate the ethnolinguistic type of nationalism, they may well be politically nationalistic, especially when they require complete assimilation (linguistic and otherwise) in order for one to participate as a fully fledged citizen. In the end, both types of discourses linked to different types of nationalism strive towards homogenisation, but frame their arguments in different ways. According to Jenkins (1997: 160), national identity is 'the ethnicity to which nationalist ideological identification refers'. In contrast to the essentialist conceptualisation of ethnicity, the constructivist formulation allows for various kinds of change, but only under potentially hegemonic conditions. In this way, discourses linked to the civic model of the nation are linked to a different type of nationalism, a seemingly open and democratic model, which nevertheless seeks to homogenise. As the role of the state is to legitimise and institutionalise nationhood, it has the duty of achieving the three goals of nationalism: national identity, unity and autonomy (May 2001: 74). The modernist view of nationalism (akin to the constructivist model of ethnicity) helps 'debunk' nationalist claims based on essentialism. However, the modernist position conflates the nation with the state, i.e. the state is permitted to legitimise the ethnicity of the dominant group, usually through the rhetoric of 'integration'. 28 Just as there are different dimensions to nationalism, a similar duality can be found in relation to language purism. Nationalism of the political type (based on the civic model of the nation) often goes undetected, and the label of 'nationalism' is then only applied to ethnolinguistic movements (based on the ethnic model of the nation). In a similar fashion, external purism (targeting 'foreign' words) is labeled as 'purism', whereas internal versions of purism are

27 28

For a discussion of popular versus scientific views on language, see Johnson (2001). On the importance of 'folk linguistics', see Niedzielski and Preston (2000). Although 'integration' is substituted for 'assimilation', it does not necessarily signal the tolerance of societal heterogeneity (see Blommaert & Verschueren 1998: 111-116).

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covered by the umbrella-term 'standardisation'. In this manner, ethnicity is always involved in the construction and legitimation of the nation-state as well as its language policies. The process of 'imagining' the nation relies on a combination of elements from both poles of the ethnic-civic continuum, with the civic dimension of the nation emphasised in official discourses and the ethnic one in 'folk' discourses.

6. References Actioun Letzebuergesch. 1978. 'Statutten.' In: Eis Sprooch 9. 63. Annamalai, E. 1979. 'Movement for linguistic purism: The case of Tamil.' In: Annamalai, E. (ed.). Language Movements in India. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages. 35-59. Anderson, Benedict. [1983] 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Barth, Fredrik. 1969. 'Introduction.' In: Barth, Fredrik (ed.). Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Bergen, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. 9-38. Berg, Guy. 1993. 'Mir welle bleiwe, wat mir sin': Soziolinguistische und sprachtypologische Betrachtungen zur luxemburgischen Mehrsprachigkeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Blommaert, Jan. 1999. 'The debate is closed.' In: Blommaert, Jan (ed.). Language Ideological Debates. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 425438. Blommaert, Jan & Jef Verschueren. 1998. Debating Diversity: Analysing the Discourse of Tolerance. London: Routledge. Braun, Josy, Jerome Lulling, Othon Neuens, Pierre Reding, Francois Schanen & Geroges Wirtgen. 2001. Eng kleng Helleffir Letzebuergesch ze schreiwen (Numero special du Courrier de I'Education Nationale). Luxembourg: Ministere de 1'Education Nationale, de la Formation Professionnelle et des Sports. Burke, Peter. 1998. 'Langage de la purete et purete du langage.' (translated by Claudie Voisenat). In: Terrain 31. 103-112. Clyne, Michael. 1992. 'German as a pluricentric language.' In: Clyne, Michael (ed.). Pluricentric Languages. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 117147. Conseil permanent de la langue luxembourgeoise. 1998. Reglement grandducal. URL: http://www.cpll.lu/cpll/regl.html (Accessed: 15.03.2004). Cactus. 2002. Mir leiere Letzebuergesch schreiwen. Luxembourg: Editioun Cactus.

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Fehlen, Fernand, Isabelle Piroth, Carole Schmit & Michel Legrand. 1998. Le Sondage BALEINE: Une itude sociologique sur les trajectoires migratoires, les langues et la vie associative au Luxembourg, Hors Sirie 1. Luxembourg: Recherche Etude Documentation. Hirsch, Mario. 1997. 'Luxembourg.' In: Ostergaard, Bernt Stubbe (ed.). The Media in Western Europe: The Euromedia Handbook. London: Sage. 144152. Hoffmann, Jean-Paul. 1996. 'Letzebuergesch and its competitors: Language contact in Luxembourg today.' In: Newton, Gerald (ed.). Luxembourg and Letzebuergesch: Language and Communication at the Crossroads of Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 97-108. Horner, Kristine. 2004. Negotiating the Language-Identity Link: Media Discourse and Nation-Building in Luxembourg. PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo. Horner, Kristine & Jean Jacques Weber. 2002. 'J'accuse! Oder: die Wahrheit über den Sprachunterricht in Luxemburg.' In: Praxis des Neusprachlichen Unterrichts 49. 94-98. Jaffe, Alexandra. 1999. Ideologies in Action: Language Politics on Corsica. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Jenkins, Richard. 1997. Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations. London: Sage. Jernudd, Björn Η. 1989. 'The texture of language purism: An introduction.' In: Jernudd, Björn Η. & Michael J. Sharpiro (eds.). The Politics of Language Purism. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1-20. Johnson, Sally. 2001. 'Who's misunderstanding whom? Sociolinguistics, public debate and the media.' In: Journal of Sociolinguistics 5. 591-610. Letzebuerger Journal Ernst Zweifel, 'Die endlose Schreibgeschichte.' (20/21 March 1999: 6). Luxemburger Wort Guy Berg, 'Letzebuergesch a seng Orthographie.' (18 March 1999, Die Warte Nr. 11/1879: 1). Conseil permanent de la langue luxembourgeoise, 'Vereinfachung der Orthographie unserer Landessprache wird angestrebt.' (8 April 1999: 4). 'Hokuspokus ... een neit Letzebuergesch!!' (10 July 1999: 13). 'Wat ass d'Letzebuergesch vu mar?' (20 December 2000: 3). Actioun Letzebuergesch, 'Evolutioun?' (27 January 2001, eng KLACK fir eis Sprooch 67: 21). Lex Roth, 'Net esou kriddeleg?' (29 December 2001, eng KLACK fir eis Sprooch 76: 18). May, Stephen. 2001. Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language. Harlow: Pearson.

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McDonald, Maryon. 1993. 'The construction of difference: An anthropological approach to stereotypes.' In: Macdonald, Sharon (ed.). Inside European Identities. Oxford: Berg. 219-236. Milroy, James. 2005. 'Some effects of purist ideologies on historical descriptions of English.' (In this volume). Ministere de ΓEducation Nationale, de la Formation Professionnelle et des Sports. 2003. Horaires et programmes 2003-2004. URL: http://www.men.lu/edu/fre/hor (Accessed: 15.03.2004). Moulin, Claudine. 2003. 'Letzebuergesches Handwierderbuch.' In: Städtler, Thomas (ed.). Wissenschaftliche Lexikographie im deutschsprachigen Raum. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 519-528. Newton, Gerald (ed.). 1996. Luxembourg and Letzebuergesch: Language and Communication at the Crossroads of Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Niedzielski, Nancy A. and Dennis R. Preston. 2000. Folk Linguistics. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Oakes, Leigh. 2001. Language and National Identity: Comparing France and Sweden. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Polenz, Peter von. 1990. 'Nationale Varietäten der deutschen Sprache.' In: International Journal of the Sociology of Language 83. 5-38. Quaring, Ines, Guy Bentner, Muriel Funck, Pierre Marson, & Alexis Werne. 2000. Letzebuergesch fir all Dag. Luxembourg: Ministere de l'Education Nationale, de la Formation Professionnelle et des Sports. Rasquin, Fernand, Jean Rinnen, Jos Schmit & Paul Schumacher. [1990] 1994. Letzebuergesch Texter. Luxembourg: Ministere de l'Education Nationale, de la Formation Professionnelle et des Sports. Roosens, Eugeen. 1989. Understanding Ethnicity: The Process of Ethnogenesis. London: Sage. Roth, Lex. (ed.). Greng a Rout Leschten (Eis Sprooch Extra-Serie Nr. 20). Letzebuerg: Sankt-Paulus-Dreckerei. Schroen, Michael. 1986. Das Großherzogtum Luxemburg: Porträt einer kleinen Demokratie. Bochum: Studienverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer. Statec. 2003. Le Luxembourg en chiffres. Luxembourg: Service Central de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques. Tageblatt: 'Schluss mit der Germanisierung des Luxemburgischen!' (19/20 February 2000: 16). Thomas, George. 1991. Linguistic Purism. London: Longman. Weber, Nico. 2000. 'Multilingualism and language policy in Luxembourg.' In: Deprez, Kas & Theo Du Plessis (eds.). Multilingualism and Government: Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, former Yugoslavia, South Africa. Pretoria: Van Schaik. 82-91.

III. Modern Society and Purism

Dieter Stein

On the role of language ideologies in linguistic theory and practice: purism and beyond.1 1. Context of approach My own personal entry to the topic of the conference was a preoccupation with the respective roles of internal and external factors in linguistic change (Gerritsen & Stein 1992), as the issue was current in the 1980s. The predominant attitude at the time was that the internal forces were the "natural" ones, only checked, or slowed down or accelerated by external forces. Logically primary were the internal ones, whatever was to be understood by "internal". Amongst the external ones were the so-called Labovian ones, including prestige, power, identity and style. Amongst the ones recognized were also the ones involving standardization, as elaborated in an exemplary fashion by Milroy and Milroy (1999). In addition to the forces inherent in standardization, including a powerful ideology of the standard language, purism is a dominant force. These attitudinal forces are powerful determinants of linguistic change, the choice of languages, of varieties and of individual linguistic items. The present paper will take purism as a point of departure, but will then concentrate on an ideology of language that has always appeared to me to have a major impact on the image of language of most non-linguists, the people who are influential in determining the course and funding of linguistics, as well as its standing in society. It would appear that the ideology of standardization, as well as purism, and the language ideology that will be at the center of this paper, the "fixed code" ideology or "segregationalism", although logically separate, do tend to occur together in Germany, Britain and France, in individuals and in social and occupational groups, such as lawyers.

1

I'm grateful to Theresa Wilfert for invaluable help with the preparation of the manuscript.

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2. Ideology What, then, is an "ideology"? The term has a complicated history, and there are different versions of the concept of ideology (cf. Schieffelin et al. 1998, especially the "Introduction" by Woolard). "Ideology" should not be understood in the political sense, probably familiar to most of us, such as in "Communist" ideology. I will follow Verschueren in his broader definition of this term: The relationship between conceptualizations and practices of linguistic action, in spite of the surface reflection of some of its properties in patterns of lexicalization, is to be situated at the more subliminal level of metapragmatic awareness. It forms the basis of language ideologies, i.e. habitual ways of thinking and speaking about language and language use which are rarely challenged within a given community. Verschueren (1999: 197f.)

and later on: [...] we define an ideology as any constellation of fundamental or commonsensical, and often normative, beliefs and ideas related to some aspect(s) of (social) 'reality'. The commonsense nature of the beliefs and ideas is manifested in the fact that they are rarely questioned, within a specific group of people in a given society or community, in discourse related to the 'reality' in question, often across various discourse genres. Their not being questioned means that the beliefs and ideas in question are often [...] carried along implicitly rather than to be formulated explicitly. Rhetorically constructed or supported ideological webs serve the purpose of framing, validating or legitimating attitudes and actions in the domain to which they are applicable" (p.238).

Although Verschueren (1999: 198) cautions against a sweeping assumption that ideologies influence behaviour very directly, this does appear to be so in the cases to be discussed below. In other words, ideologies make a difference to practical action, even very indirectly so, and very certainly in the fields under discussion here. There is at least theoretically a choice in practical action on several levels, and a particular ideology implies opting for ONE choice, rather than another. The very use of the term "ideology" carries with it a presumption that an ideology-free discussion or scientific inquiry is possible. In this view, ideology is in a way a "marked" way of looking at things. In fact, it could be argued that a degree-zero kind of view is not logically possible, and that all manner of discussion is ideology-driven, which would amount to an "absolute" view of the notion of ideology. The matter cannot be taken up here in further detail. The view underlying the discussion in this paper is perhaps best characterized by saying that there is some sort of a fullest possible view of the facts to the best

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and utmost of our scientific knowledge from multiple perspectives. For heuristic and pragmatic purposes shortcuts have to be taken. Ideologies would then have their place as beliefs that confuse views arising from pragmatically and heuristically necessary reductions with, and losing sight of, what actually goes on, say in language use, constituting a "relative" view of "ideology". To the extent that these views form part of the public discourse about language, they constitute linguistic ideologies, definable as "any sets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use" (Silverstein 1979:193). Whether or not an absolute or relative view of "ideology" is taken does not really matter in the present context of discussion. However, tendentially, a relative view is taken here. This "reductionist" connection of ideology to purism will figure prominently in part of the following discussion.

3. Language internal purism Two very obvious aspects of language ideology have been frequently discussed. One is the existence of an ideology of the standard language, the other one is purism. Purism has mostly been seen in terms of resistance to another language (cf. the discussion in Thomas 1991, particularly the collection of definitions pp. lOff). Language mixing - arguably the most natural of all processes in which languages are involved - is seen as the major infringement of purity, both on the level of folklore beliefs about language and the level of scientific inquiry. But there is another, more vicious version of this: don't mix your dialects in pedagogical contexts. In German academic teaching of English there is still a tendency to regard a particular version of English as "the best" English. This is part of a deeply embedded ideology about varieties of English, involving stereotypes and perceptual dialectology. Interestingly enough, the proponents of this attitude in academia often call this version of English "British English". One wonders what "British English" might sound like, since surely British English exists in a large number of varieties. But, more interestingly in our context, there is an insistence that one should speak one of the good varieties, with English standard English as the best, pure and undefiled, without traces and admixtures of other varieties, an attitude that is still the predominant one in non-native contexts. This amounts to nothing else but a language-internal version of purism ideology. There is really no rational or linguistic argument against speaking a mixture of English English and, e.g., American Midwestern. Often pedagogical arguments are proposed, such that secondary school pupils should not be "confused". I contest that. No one will ever be confused (cf. Thomas 1991, 49-61 for a summary of arguments for "purity"). Interestingly enough, the very same people would not object to using rock, rap

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and pop music in the lessons, with the varieties used in rap obviously not being perceived as a potential source of confusion. This version of purist ideology is very deeply ingrained in grammar school teachers and is also staunchly defended by school administrators, and even university professors, mostly of literary studies, however, who see objections against this ideology as an attack on themselves personally: if egos, academic or otherwise, are symbolized by accents, then one would not wish to see oneself defined by an accent that is other than pure and undefiled, and British at that, of course. This attitude is even more widespread amongst English language lectors. It is still very common in German departments of English to have only a very small number of non-English (not: non-British) language lectors in their department. Lacking adequate (socio-)linguistic training, they are mostly an important source in the establishment of this type of purism. Americanisms are still frowned upon. This type of purism is also very widespread amongst administrators, as well as the business community, and certainly in academic professors from other departments. Most of the language teaching by freelancers and so-called "language schools" is rife with it. In fact, one will be hard put to find any language teacher who teaches a non-English standard variety at all, or with a good, non-apologetic, conscience. There are many self-appointed arbiters of "good usage" especially in the non-linguistic disciplines who jealously hold on to this kind of internal purism.

4. Segregationalism and its consequences In his much underestimated book, "Signs, Language and Communication", with the significant subtitle "Integrational and segregational approaches" (1996), Roy Harris elaborated a fundamental critique of current approaches to the nature of the linguistic sign in linguistics. His metatheoretical analysis is not popular since it lays bare, and for most linguists of course threateningly bare, the underlying assumptions of present mainstream approaches. Segregationalism, as opposed to an integrationist view of communication and the linguistic sign, separates or hypostasizes as a separable entity a linguistic sign, which leads an independent existence, has an ontic place independent of the actual and contextual circumstances of the particular act of communication, where "context" is understood as the relevant and salient perceptions of the communicants at a given moment in an act of communication. Segregationalism holds that there are "invariant pairings of form and meaning, signifiant and signifie" (Harris 1996: 157), that there is an "autonomy of the sign vis-ä-vis its users and its uses" (Harris 1996: 6) and that it is characteristic of segregationist models that "if they do not treat systems of signs as de facto fixed codes, [they] treat the fixed code as an ideal towards which our imperfect systems of human communication should aspire, or in terms of which they can

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and should be described"(Harris 1996: 146). It takes apart what cognitively, socially and psychologically occurs and functions together simultaneously as a unity, and can only so function, and it abstracts, reifies, "verdinglicht" entities, ascribing to them properties and tendencies. Ehlich (1994) has the same view in mind, as it is fostered by "post-scriptorial" ("post-skriptoral", 21) theory. He refers to this segregationist process as "eine Dissoziierung der in sich homogenen Sprechsituation" (Ehlich 1994: 19): "Der Logos verliert seinen komplexen Charakter als Einheit von Geschehen, Geschichte und Wort...." [The logos loses its complex character as a unity of current event, history and word, D.S] (Ehlich 1994: 19). The process is attributed to a large extent to the effect of writing. The prototypical case of segregating out elements from the act of communication is syntax, which is typically set up as a layer in its own right. Another one is the notion of "word", as part of an abstract system in langue. In principle, our notion of "text" is intimately tied to a static notion of "word" in a related reductionist view of language. In a number of publications Silverstein (1979, 1985, 1996) has proposed a parallel argument for the notion of the "text" which he considers a "metadiscursive notion" (Silverstein 1996: 2), a construct that "carries a meaning independent of its situation within two now distinct co(n)texts." It has a "despatialized and detemporalized meaning - [...] a deprocessualized one [,..]"(Silverstein 1996: 1). What Silverstein claims for the notion of the "text", alive and with meaning only in "an entextualization uptake" (Silverstein 1996: 81), would appear to apply in the same way for an autonomous notion of "word" and "meaning": both notions, "text" and "word" appear to be part and parcel of the same "ethnophilological" (Silverstein 1996: 3) tradition that is intimately tied up with standardization. A key term in the above quotation from Harris is, of course, the "fixed code" phrase. It relates easily to all the topics in this book, and certainly to the ideology of standardization. For most of the rest of this article the focus of discussion will be on a particular offshoot of segregationalism in the area of reference: the idea of the "fixed code" as it applies to referential expressions, to "words" and "meanings", as it is current, or rampant, in much of linguistic thinking, certainly amongst philologists, as much as in applied linguistics and in folk linguistics. This aspect of the "fixed code" view will be referred to as the "word ideology". More specifically, the component elements of fixed code ideology are: 1. A belief that fixed meanings are automatically tied to words, and therefore something more "objective", such as the image projected by dictionaries and codification activities fostered by standardization: words "are" the meanings: "referential categories, with all their autonomous formal structure, are perceived to be not formal categories, nor even notional ones, but as directly referential", "[sjtandard language both is and ought to be a truthful reference-guide to "reality", a basic fact about our own Standard

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Average European (SAE) Anglophone culture's overall ideology of the nature of language" (Silverstein 1985: 241). 2. These elements are stable and static, they provide security and protection. They are the invariant building blocks, and not subject to re-creation and permanent re-negotiation in the minds of speakers. 3. Related to the aforementioned: language is what appears on the surface, in morphemes, in words. More precisely: what is segmentalized. All the information that is communicationally relevant comes from words and morphemes on the surface. This idea can be called the "morphememeaning" aspect of the word ideology, or the "omnia in verbis" belief. The fact that meanings and information may come from non-verbalized, focused interactional knowledge is therefore a priori suspect. Harris (1996) does not use the term ideology himself. He refers to theories. But given the properties of these beliefs as outlined by Verschueren (1999) in the earlier quotation, that these are largely unreflected beliefs, shared by groups, with practical actional consequences, the term "ideology" seems more appropriate. The term "myth" as it is used by Bauer & Trudgill (1998) appears to refer to more local phenomena. The set of segregationist-based ideologies cohabits easily with the ideology of standard language as elaborated by Milroy & Milroy (1999). Thomas (1991: 35) points to the "close association between purism and standard languages". It is therefore not easy to tease apart standard language ideology, other ideologies based on segregationalism, myths and folklore linguistics. But this syndrome is a powerful agent in public life and opinion to the (very large) extent that it involves language. It would be difficult not to call it an ideology. These beliefs constitute essential parts of a folk linguistics that informs to a large extent not only the practice of linguistics itself, but also the practice and status of applied linguistic disciplines, as well as, most significantly, the attitudes of politicians and administrators who decide the fate of linguists, and the scope of influence of linguistics in the public debates, - which amounts more or less to zero.

5. The fixed code ideology in law There is arguably one domain of language use where the belief that fixed meanings are automatically tied to words is most basic, and where it arguably also has the most serious consequences for a discipline so extremely dependent on language, and that is the domain of law. Lawyers believe (and judges just as much as solicitors) that in order to ensure precision and exactly shared concepts and propositions it is necessary to depart from normal referential habits and resort to expressions richer in intension, such as full nouns, and fewer intensionless expressions, such as proforms, pronouns, ellipsis and zero

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proforms. If the full noun is repeated, nothing can possibly go wrong referentially. There is, by the way, a similar tendency in linguistics itself: for most modern theorists of reference resolution the default assumption is that all information must come from the morphemes, and not from cognitive focusing. Assuming it to come from a focused, cognitively given context is only a lastresort and somewhat disreputable procedure. The confusion underlying this procedure is that the referential process - as a cognitive operation - is not more precise with intensional expressions. Intensions, richness in langue meaning as formulated in terms of componential features, are a matter of langue only, and referential precision does not come from richness in intension, but from exact calculation of the contents of cognition, of mutual knowledge, by communicants. If one assumes that reference is tied to words, as the "morpheme-meaning" ideology does, then this belief is understandable: it would be a safe way to "lock in" meanings. To the extent that law discourses are about subsumption of individual events under case types and findings into categories, this is even more understandable: it is of course very worrying if these categories have to be thought of as unstable and open to ad hoc negotiation. If cases, case types and categories are not packaged, in fixed code manner, into linguistically autonomous concepts, then this must be a very disturbing thought for the practice, and even more for the theory of law. Alas, this is the case. There is probably no discipline which is therefore so inextricably interlocked with segregationalist thinking as law. The very spectre of integrationalism and the consequences for subsumption raise fundamental questions for the discipline. This is why these questions are hardly ever made explicit. There are, however, cases where the need to negotiate meanings does come up on the surface. Alcaraz & Hughes (2002) cite the famous case of "grievous bodily harm" (pp. 25ff.), where a decision had to be negotiated with the jury about exactly what was meant by "grievous". It is instructive to see what criteria are used to determine meaning if the embarrassing situation arises that meaning cannot easily be determined. Predictably, resorting to a common hermeneutics of meaning is much dispreferred. What counts for much more, if at all possible, is taking refuge in autonomously existing and purportedly more objective "langue" meanings. The idea of their existence is paramount in law, and they are the place of last resort. Alcaraz & Hughes (2002: 24ff.) give an instructive list of criteria used in "construction", by which is meant the construction of propositional meaning, everything else being relegated to the waste bin of "interpretation". Needless to say, "construction" itself involves much interpretation, such as the resolution of reference and explicatures. Interestingly, high on the list of admitted procedures in law is the "literal rule" (Alcaraz & Hughes 2002: 28), "[wjords that are reasonably taken to have a single meaning are to be given that meaning, however anomalous the result (e.g. Shakespeare leaving his 'secondbest bed' to his wife in his will)." The

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force of the fixed code ideology is seen in the "no matter how anomalous the result" part of the quotation. And the idea is that there is something like a literal sense, which for whatever reason takes priority. In a similar vein, the "Golden Rule" states that "ordinary words are to be given their ordinary meanings" (Alcaraz & Hughes 2002: 28). But what is "ordinary" in any linguistically feasible sense? One wonders how much this ideology influenced the court's decision in the famous "Let him have it, Chris" case (Alcaraz & Hughes 2002: 45): During the exchange of fire, the police several times urged him to give himself up and to hand over the pistol, and according to police evidence given at the trial, the man who was in police custody called out 'Let him have it, Chris' seconds before the second gunman shot and killed the officer. Unfortunately for the older defendant, the police maintained that the meaning of these words was not 'Hand over the gun,' as the accused claimed, but 'Shoot him'. Of course, in the parlance of law, the meaning of the utterance was "constructed", no matter how much this is a case of interpretation. And one wonders in what way the "ordinary" or "literal" meaning was chosen, what it would be in this case, and one also wonders if a linguist was consulted, and one wonders, finally, if her or his advice would have made a difference to the court's ruling. It has become clear by now that there is no discipline that is as shot through with the communicationally counterfactual fixed code ideology, so heavily biased toward an idea of fixed code, towards an abstracted "linguistic meaning", and so heavily resting on it in its foundations as is the field of law. Notice however, that notions of "literalness" have repeatedly surfaced in linguistics, even, and, somewhat surprisingly, in pragmatics, such as in the shape of the "literal force hypothesis" (Levinson 1983, §5.5, 263ff.) and in relevance theory, with its contrast between "looseness" and "literalness" of utterance interpretation.

6. Language teaching and special language An effect of the very same attitude to terminology, but with significant effects on the academic standing of the discipline of the ideology under discussion may be seen in several areas of applied linguistics. If there is a stable and automatic relationship between words and their meanings, life is made very easy for research in and the teaching of special languages. The prevailing attitude is that all there is is terminology, and the subject is consequently reduced to terminology, which can be handled by the computer in any case. So it is a so-called "practical" job. The sophisticated syntactic, functional, and

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pragmatic aspects are rarely addressed in serious linguistic research (e.g. Ehlich 1994).

This is quite an extreme case of the effects of a language ideology on the standing of a discipline, a very direct consequence of the opinions and the rating of the discipline by fellow academics and administrators - they love cheap disciplines. But it should be equally clear that the discipline is also putting itself down, by not questioning the language ideologies to which it has fallen prey. There is arguably another, more serious long-distance effect of the fixed code theory as it affects education, at least identifiable in the writer's home country, Germany. If languages, including foreign languages, are reduced to a finite set of learnable items, then it is clear that language teaching is really a cheap pursuit, more or less doable by everyone who can read and write. And teaching these items is a practical and cheap job, eventually to be relegated to "Fachhochschulen", i.e. Colleges of Higher Education, and not Universities, with concomitant status effects on teacher training and teacher pay. In particular, in Germany, there is a notable absence of in-service-training, including a check on if and how teachers keep up with the language. Since words and their meanings are forever glued to each other, why bother to go to England to catch up with new meanings and new practices of meaning? No other professional discipline (let alone law or medicine) would make do with such a lowly attitude towards its core skills.

7. Interlude: ideologies and shortcuts In the light of the preceding discussion it may be appropriate to forestall a potential misunderstanding. The aim of this paper is to identify ideologies. In the case of the "word" ideology, this does not necessarily mean that we will not continue to behave as if there was an automatic, fixed and inseparable unity between words and their meanings. The pragmatics of real life and application contexts will always force us to make shortcuts. But the force of metaphors is very strong in directing our view and research aims. Just as in the case of the evolutionary metaphor, talking about the "evolution of language", the anthropomorphization of language may well lead us down the garden path in asking wrong questions, so talking about words "having" meanings is leading us to ask the wrong questions. For instance, it is not the "words" that change their meanings, but it is speakers that change their habits of getting other speakers to make reference. In the case of meaning change of words, the question to ask would be: given that words and meanings are habitualized and frozen ways of getting other speakers to identify a referent, or move it into cognitive focus, why do speakers use a given phoneme sequence to have the

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hearer refer or cognitively identify an entity that is different from the previous set of entities? And what makes speakers agree on the same type of new object, in the same direction of deviation? For otherwise no change in the speaker community or in "the language" would result - on the assumption that there is polygenesis of deviations and changes. Questions about change in syntax and phonology would have to be phrased in an analogous way, rather than on the level of abstractions like systems or even formal, entirely static approaches. Systems do not have tendencies. In other words, a particular ideology makes us ask questions at certain loci of the meaning apparatus, with predictable differences in the answers. For instance, von Polenz (1980), in his call for a "pragmatization" of explanations in the area of language change, has been a largely unheeded, non-mainstream voice. This more integrationist-based view is diametrically opposed to most current explanation in linguistics, including historical linguistics. The present mainstream stance is to give default preference to endogenous explanations. This view is a direct outflow of segregationist thinking in linguistic change theory, a major ideological force in historical explanation pointed out by Milroy (this volume) and, in the context of a specific syntactic change, by van der Auwera (2002). To make my position clear, in order to handle the everyday practical problems of life and probably also lots of theoretical problems in physics it is surely not necessary to constantly go back to the Einsteinian mass energy equation, i.e. going to or departing from the fullest possible view of things, but ignoring it in basic research on physics will be disastrous. In the same way, we will certainly continue to talk about words, and about terminologies, and using computers in language research, and the practice of law will continue as it is. These shortcuts are vital in our practical academic and other lives. But if this is done in an uninformed and unreflective way, it can have disastrous consequences for explanation and wreak havoc in the areas down the line from science into applied fields and into areas dominated by folk linguistics.

8. Translation There is arguably no area where the "word" ideology - and, of course, literalness - has wrought more havoc than in translation. There seems to be a widespread idea that translation is about words with their fixed meanings, and translation is little more than a terminological exercise. Practical translation needs shortcuts. The problem is that the academic study of translation is all too often not even theoretically aware that the shortcuts are there for practical purposes, and not communicational reality. Any attempt at presenting a realistic theory of equivalence such as presented by Reiß and Vermeer (1984) to students, let alone philologists, is as hard an uphill struggle against the word

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ideology as it is to try to make the point clear to non-academic, educated business people or administrators, who, of course, have been academically reared under the very reign of this ideology. A couple of factors as diverse as the computer, current notions of "information" and a Latin-based image of language conspire to reinforce this ideology. Latin as a dead language with only "texts" and words is not normally evocative of a communicative situation that would make one aware of the dynamic interpretive processes involved in getting someone else to successfully make reference. The history of Bible translation is another source of the word ideology. The word of God must not be changed. The traditions of literalness in religious texts are very different from culture to culture, with the Koran tradition the strictest of all, with consequences for linguistic ideology. Part of the notion of a "truthful" translation is certainly a preservation of what are considered the word-meaning pairings, together with preservation of constituent order. The deep entrenchment of ideology is also manifested by the difficulty of teaching even such a comparatively conservative approach to translation as Coseriu's (1978) concept of translational equivalence, entitled "Falsche und richtige Fragestellungen in der Übersetzungstheorie". Basically, Coseriu makes a distinction between "Bedeutung" [meaning, D.S.] und "Bezeichnung" [designation, D.S.], with the former located in language and the latter involving concrete reference in discourse. While still, of necessity, subscribing to a reasonably weak segregationalist, fixed code idea in the shape of "Bedeutungen", his approach represents a significant advance in a theory of translational equivalence against the backdrop of what was there before: it shifts equivalence a step away from being concerned with fixed code elements. Still, teaching his approach is quite an uphill fight against deeply dug-in word ideology in students, and, of course, fellow teachers. Since texts in the sense of Silverstein's "entextualization" (Silverstein 1996: 81) are the loci of creating new meanings, word ideology creates a number of curious effects. A standard difficulty in trying to teach translation is the famous "sticking to the word". As befits a fixed code ideology, the meanings are automatically and forever tied to the words. There is a default assumption, much cherished in the use of translation in schools, itself a heritage of Latinbased translation, that the default is the "literal" translation. Departures are only allowed under duress. If the uphill fight against the word ideology and literalness is the daily bread and butter of an enlightened training of translators, the other major obstacle and source of bad translation is the meaning-and-morpheme approach: all information sources of meaning are surface morphemes only, leading to another side of literalness. Notorious cases in point are, apart from real cultural differences, the particles in the German language, such as "ja" or "doch" , which segmentalize much information either not segmentalized in English or

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part of the meaning contribution of other expressions. Other cases are misuses of the definite article. Notoriously, the definite article appears much less often in English than in German. The difference between the two languages is here one in the explicitness of the segmentalization of the definiteness status, - something unheard of for the word-based mind. So deeply ingrained from school times onwards is the morpheme-meaning ideology that students would even argue with their teachers. Where there is a word in one language, there has to be one in the other, as another important aspect of literalness: parallelism of constituent structure, causing many bad translations littered with interferences. The point here is not simply the fact that there are differences between the languages, but that students' ideas of language are so shot through with the effects of this ideology that the particular ideology under discussion here leads to an idea of literalness that is very difficult to fight, even in teaching, because of its pervasiveness but also because it dominates the image of language in the rest of academia.

9. Widening the ideological context In the cases of doch and ja discussed in the preceding section, students' reaction is often a statement like "Aber da steht doch der bestimmte Artikel."2 The use of doch is the best possible indicator of the presence and the effect of ideologies that work beneath the surface of explicitation and rationalization, but with recognizeable effects on language use: in this case the morpheme-meaning ideology. In addition to this particular view of language, another reason for at least German students' reluctance to use particles to make explicit elements of pragmatic and presuppositional meaning is the traditional fight against particles in German, which obviously has quite a history. The reason is apparently related to the decorum of the written language, which ought not to smell of the oral. The issue points to a deeper connection of the ideologies discussed here with the dominance of written language in our perception of language, or what it ought to be, and as a central component of folk linguistics. One of them, here termed the morpheme-meaning aspect of segregationalism, the "omnia in verbis" ideology, is based on a confusion between coherence - cognitive continuity of focused knowledge - with cohesion, the extent to which this knowledge, essentially mutual knowledge, is represented by morphemes on the surface.

2

The problems of the translatability of doch make it a very difficult to render this sentence into English but the following should capture most of the German meaning: "But isn't there a definite article?"

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The larger issue involved here is the concept of autonomy of language styles or varieties: the more information comes from morphemes, from verbalized information, the more autonomous the language style is. And the preferred language style, the "best", the most highly valued variety is of course the most autonomous style - typically written varieties. This may or may not be a totally wrong perception, but it is an important element of folk linguistics and harmonizes very easily with the word ideology: if all meaning comes from words, those words had better have stable meanings built into them. At the same time, the preference of autonomous varieties explains the normative injunctions against particles: they refer to non-verbalized presuppositions. In a way, they threaten to bring to the cognitive surface beliefs that are normally left buried, and in some discourses intentionally so, beneath the surface. Some of these meanings are in fact social in nature, such as the particle "like": "I took, like, that train from Reading". In fact, the purportedly most modern and comprehensive (in the words of the publishing company) grammar of English did not even mention this quite salient use of "like" ("The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language", by Huddleston and Pullum, Cambridge 2002). The general short shrift given by grammars to this sort of item shows how intimately a common language ideology links the written language bias of modern, especially syntactic, theory and folk theories about language, really a very uneasy idea.

10. Grammar Another related ideology, which is part and parcel of what we have to struggle with, concerns grammar. If the preferred language mode is to have meanings stable and security-locked in words, immune from the danger of changes, then this applies with a vengeance to grammar. The basic ideological beliefs that apply to the notion of the word apply equally to grammar: here too the effects of segregationalism, particularly level segregation, have taken over wholesale. A semantic approach to syntax, and syntactic change, is a priori suspect. Above all, stability and unchangeability are the paramount virtues of a fixed code. Grammar is highly visible and salient: any departures from a moralized, codified standard, no matter how accidental historically, are considered a threat to the social identity of those who hold power, arguably more so in Britain than in Germany. It is a common experience in teaching grammar or syntax with a realistic sociolinguistic background that teaching the distinction between correctness and grammaticality in a technical sense is a very difficult enterprise. This vital distinction points to the arbitrary nature of the borderline and its historical and developmental flexibility. In fact, a lot of what we class as linguistic change is a passing of elements into or out of the realm of correctness, and much less so

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into and out of the realm of grammaticality (explanations which are more social than structural). An awareness of this fact does not sit easily with the static ideologies described, and this is why it is so deeply ingrained with students (and all others) that I was told by an American colleague that she had given up trying to teach this essential difference. She feared she would ruin her evaluations if she carried out what students felt amounted to an attack on their deepest social ideologies: telling them that "grammatical" should better be replaced by a notion of "correctness", and "grammatical" reserved for what is structurally possible in a language.

11. Wrapping up: Some further perspectives Needless to say, the "fixed code" view of grammar and words creates a pervasive kind of "internal purism", related of course to power and dominance. It is somewhat ironic that the very tradition, Foucaultian deconstruction, that sets out to deconstruct and lay bare the relationships between power and language does so in the language and variety of that language that practises internal purism like no other language. The deconstructional exercise would be more convincing if it took place in a powerless local vernacular. If deconstruction has as its legitimate object "discourse", it abstains from deconstructing the mechanisms of constructing and negotiating meanings in each act of communication. Also the well known claims in cultural theory about the hybridity of the modern media, particularly the Internet, show little knowledge of the nature of spoken and written communication. What they do is fall prey to the same unrealistic segregationist views of much modern theorizing about language: it is only if one assumes the autonomy of a linguistic sign and an "omnia in verbis" ideology that the two traditional language media will appear in unison in terms of where information comes from and meaning arises or is constructed. In other words, if you do not see the hybridity of normal communication in terms of the sources of meaning in context and how they are constructed ad hoc, then, of course, the new media would appear to be particularly hybrid. Thus a myopic view of the polyphony of information sources causes modern constructionists to overlook the constructional character of spoken and written communication, and construct a non-existing contrast to the new media.

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12. References Alcaraz, Enrique, Brian Hughes (ed). 2002. Legal Translation Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. Auwera, Johan van der & Inge Genee. 2002. "English do: On the convergence of languages and linguists." English Language and Linguistics 6:2, 283307. Bauer, Laurie & Peter Trudgill (eds). 1998. Language Myths. London: Penguin. Coseriu, Eugenio. 1978. „Falsche und richtige Fragestellungen in der Übersetzungstheorie." In: Grähs, L., G. Korlen & B. Malmberg (eds.) Theory and Practice of Translation. S. 17-23. Ehlich, Konrad. 1992. "Scientific texts and deictic structures." In: Dieter Stein (ed.) Cooperating with written texts: the pragmatics and comprehension of written texts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 201-229. Ehlich, Konrad. 1994. "Funktion und Kultur schriftlicher Kommunikation." In: Schrift und Schriftlichkeit. Writing and Its Use. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch internationaler Forschung. Ed. Jürgen Baurmann et al., Vol. 1, ed. Hartmut Günther & Otto Ludwig. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. 18-41. Gerritsen, Marinel & Dieter Stein (eds). 1992. Internal and external factors in syntactic change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Harris, Roy. 1996. Signs, Language and Communication. Integrational and segregational approaches. London: Routledge. Huddleston, Rodney D. & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English language. Cambridge: CUP. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP. Milroy, James & Leslie Milroy. 31999. Authority in Language. London: Routledge. Polenz, Peter von. 1980. "Zur Pragmatisierung der Beschreibungssprache in der Sprachgeschichtsschreibung". In: Horst Sitta (ed). Ansätze zu eine pragmatischen Sprachgeschichte. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 35-51. Reiß, Katharina & Hans J. Vermeer. 1984. Translationstheorie. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Sager, Juan C., David Dungworth & Peter F. McDonald. 1980. English Special Languages. Principles and practice in science and technology. Wiesbaden: Brandstetter. Schieffelin, Bambi B., Kathryn A. Woolard & Paul V. Kroskrity. 1998. Language Ideologies: Practices and Theory. Oxford: OUP. Silverstein, Michael. 1979. "Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology". In: Paul Clyne (ed). The Elements. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 193248. Silverstein, Michael. 1985. "Language and the Culture of Gender: At the Intersection of Structure, Usage and Ideology." In: Elizabeth Mertz (ed). Semiotic Mediation. New York: Academic Press. 219-259.

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Silverstein, Michael. 1996. "The Secret Life of Texts." In: Michael Silverstein & Greg Urban (eds). Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 81-105. Silverstein, Michael. 1997. "Syntax and varieties". In: Jenny Cheshire & Dieter Stein (eds). Taming the vernacular. From dialect to written standard language. London, New York: Longman. 35-50. Thomas, George. 1991. Linguistic Purism. London: Longman. Verschueren, Jef. 1999. Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.

Peter Hohenhaus

Elements of traditional and "reverse" purism in relation to computer-mediated communication 1. Introduction In his book Language and the Internet, David Crystal (2001: 77) remarks that certain Internet style-guide manuals were "doing the reverse" of traditional prescriptivism which, however, "is prescriptivism nonetheless". Having recently worked on purism and prescriptivism (Hohenhaus 2001, 2002) and having also investigated certain genres of computer-mediated communication (henceforth CMC), albeit within a completely different context (Hohenhaus, 2004), this remark got me interested in following up the link between those two lines of research. This article thus aims at exploring the question of what new "reverse" forms of purism we may indeed find with regard to the various CMC genres, and what elements of traditional purism persist as well.

2. Traditional vs. "Reverse" Purism In Hohenhaus (2002), I outlined what constitutes traditional purism and prescriptivism1 by way of the following list of characteristic leitmotifs - the underlying assumptions that are the hallmark of prescriptivism:2

1

2

I will use 'purism' and 'prescriptivism' almost interchangeably here, even though the former is often restricted to a much narrower reading with regard to traditional, non-CMC language; in CMC, however, such a differentiation would hardly be possible as there isn't any single CMC-variety that could count as "pure". CMC has been quite heterogeneous from its very beginning. Actually, (h) did not feature as a separate entry in the original list in Hohenhaus (2002: 155) and it can in fact be taken to be linked to (e) and (c) in a way; furthermore it specifically pertains to English (cf. Welte 1985: 136ff.), but perhaps not as much to purism in other languages.

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(a) linguistic value judgements are possible and desirable: there is 'good' vs. 'bad' usage (b) speakers need guidance (preferably by some authority): normative rules have to inform people how they should speak/write (c) the model of tradition (including, in the most extreme version, the notion of linguistic perfection): 'older' = 'better' (d) the primacy of written language over spoken language: language = writing (e) confusion of language and classical logic: 'logical' vs. 'illogical' language (f) the word as the basic unit: language = words (g) the language of literature as the ideal: literary language is "exemplary", it is the "highest" form of language (= the 'best writers' tradition, especially from the eighteenth century) (h) there is a model language that other languages [English] should conform: Latin Of these, (a) is obviously the core assumption of (in)correctness of language use, and it serves as justification for (b). In (c) we recognise the characteristic interpretation of language change as decline, which in turn involves the "Golden Age" myth of purism (cf. for instance Milroy & Milroy 1999: 40, Watts 2000: 35); (d), and its extreme form (g) have not only been characteristic of most prescriptivism (especially so in the eighteenth century), but literary written texts have also been the preferred object for grammarians working descriptively - until structuralism began emphasising an opposite axiom: 'language is speech not writing' (or rather more accurately: speech is the primary system); (e) is the basis of arguments such as the one stigmatising double negation as "wrong" because it would be equivalent to an affirmative (which it clearly isn't!) and (h) has given us stigmatisations of for example split infinitives, stranded prepositions or the insistence that it has to be it is I and not it is me (because Latin required the nominative case in subject complements); (f), finally, was/is not only a central characteristic of traditional language description but also one of purist folk-linguistics and can still be seen, for instance, in the fact that most complaints about the recent German spelling reform focussed on individual words (such as instead of previous ) but hardly ever on the principles and rules that motivated various aspects of the reform (cf. Langer 2001). If we accept this list of features as appropriately characterising traditional purism, then "reverse" purism should involve the individual inversions of these leitmotifs to read (tentatively) as follows:

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(a)r value judgements are not possible or desirable; or even: language should be 'bad' (b)r people do not need guidance/authority/normative rules (c)r newer = better (d)r language = speaking (e)r language need not be logical (f)r basic unit = ? - something other than 'the word' (g)r literature is not the exemplary model for usage (h)r Latin is not the model The inversion of (a) to (a)r could be understood either as the absence of value judgements, so that everything is regarded as equally good/bad, i.e. neutral, or as promoting bad language (still begging the question of what is "bad" as opposed to "good"); (b)r, absence of authoritative guidance could mean freedom, or anarchy, which has indeed been claimed to characterise much of CMC (that, however, is far too sweeping a generalisation, as we will see); (c)r would promote progressiveness rather than conservatism, innovation rather than preservation; (d)r implies the motto 'write as you speak' (physically, though, CMC is still bound to typing); (e)r could perhaps be toned down to "there is no direct link between language and logic, so language does not necessarily have to match logic"; and both (g)r and (h)r could again be understood as the absence of any model at all, i.e. total "freedom'V'anarchy", or as suggesting an alternative different model (such as "everyday colloquial English"); (f) r likewise begs the question of what, if not the word, could be taken to function as a 'basic unit' - and indeed the central unit under consideration, both by professional linguists and participating "folk" linguists, seems to be 'the message' (especially in email and chat). Our task, then, is to find out whether or not (or to what respective degrees) we do indeed find these inverted characteristics of "reverse" purism in comments, recommendations, etc. about CMC. Before we come to that, however, we have to set the scene by taking a brief look at what different incarnations CMC comes in.

3. Genres of Computer-Mediated Communication and their linguistic characteristics It has to be stressed that CMC does not constitute a homogeneous language variety but consists of rather different varieties, partly distinguished by technological aspects in the first instance, some of which have distinct linguistic

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repercussions. Here, I will follow Crystal's (2001) distinction of five3 "Internet situations": A) B) C) D) E)

-

the Web email asynchronous chat (bulletin boards, newsgroups, mailing lists, etc.) synchronous chat (esp. Internet Relay Chat - IRC) virtual worlds (esp. MUDs 4 )

Written language on the Web (in full: the World-Wide Web) reflects the whole range of traditional writing (on paper) - in fact, a good proportion of the latter has been put on the Web in electronic formats (cf. text archives such as Project Gutenberg5), so the Web actually includes older forms of language. Whatever is new about this particular medium either has to do with aspects of layout/webdesign rather than linguistic novelties, or results from overlaps with the other situations mentioned above. Email is probably so familiar to the readership of this article that there is no need to illustrate its language in detail (but see below for attitudes towards usage in email). Asynchronous chat can overlap with email, in fact often the very same technology is utilised. The difference is that mailing, or rather "posting", to lists, Usenet groups, bulletin boards, etc. makes the communication a one-tomany mode (as opposed to the one-to-one mode typical of emailing in the narrower sense). Again, the typical reader will probably be familiar with at least one such mailing list, although most likely with academic lists. However, nonacademic lists, naturally, can look very different. Linguistically, asynchronous chat can be seen as lying somewhere in between email and synchronous chat. Synchronous chat is perhaps the most intriguing from a linguistic point of view as this is a truly new mode of communication: quasi-real-time conversation of a number of participants simultaneously taking part (either actively through typing contributions or only passively, i.e. merely following

3

4

5

As Crystal (2001) notes as well, this is by no means an absolute number, as a) overlaps between aspects of the different genres exist, and b) more varieties may have to be added such as CMC by means of voice recognition and synthesis, which may well grow out of its infancy in the near future and warrant extra attention. The acronym stands for Multi-t/ser Dungeon, as the medium was originally invented for Dungeons-and-Dragons-derived role-play games conducted over the Net (see the guide at ), but its principles/uses were also taken beyond "merely" playful settings (see e.g. for some such proposals/descriptions); hence the acronym MUD is sometimes also explicated as 'multi-user dimension' or domain'·, cf. Crystal (2001: 12). See

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others' contributions on the screen, which is referred to in chat communities as "lurking"). Because previously typed lines scroll off the screen (due to the technology typically involved), there is also a characteristic restriction to the "space-bound-ness", or permanence, of what is written, unlike in other forms of writing. On the other hand, contributions in IRC (or other chat) are not as fleetingly time-bound as real spoken conversation either (and there is also the possibility of recording chat in so-called chatlogs). Furthermore, due to the linear nature of line-by-line display on computer screens, real overlaps are not possible, or rather: if two contributions are in fact typed and then sent at the same time, they still have to be posted on everybody's screen one after the other. If a chatroom is very active, i.e. several contributions come in at roughly the same time, this has the effect of disrupting the adjacency of turn-taking, which can be further aggravated by lag (delays in transmission due to technological reasons). In addition, different exchanges between different participants take place and one can even conduct exchanges with different "interlocutors" at the same time, all of which is displayed in the following excerpt, taken from Herring (1999) - note in particular the distances between turns in the exchange between Ashna and Jatt 6 (and the fact that the latter also converses with Kally in line 13): 1. hi jatt 2. *** Signoff: puja (EOF From client) 3. kally i was only joking around 4. ashna: hello? 5. dave-g it was funny 6. how are u jatt 7. ssa all 8. kally you da woman! 9. ashna: do we know eachother?. I'm ok how are you 10. *** LUCKMAN has left channel #PUNJAB 11. *** LUCKMAN has joined channel #punjab

6

These names are "nicks" (from "nickname"), i.e. nearly always not the real-life names of the participants. Nicks are automatically inserted by the software in angle brackets in front of every contribution for identification. If a chatter wants to unambiguously address a single other chatter, the latter's nick is typically (but not always) put at the front of a line followed by a colon. Some researchers of IRC make a point of anonymising their material, and there is indeed the issue of privacy. Here, nicks are retained, as the examples had been published elsewhere before anyway.

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12. dave-g good stuff:) 13. kally: so hows school life, life in general, love life, family life? 14. jatt no we don't know each other, i fine 15. ashna: where r ya from The linguistic nature of chat has been described extensively over the last few years, so I won't go into further detail here (cf. e.g. Herring 1996, Crystal 2001, Beißwenger 2001). MUDs and other forms of what Crystal subsumes under "virtual worlds" can look similar to synchronous chat, but are quite different in that they are about creating imaginary worlds on a text-basis. However interesting this quite distinctive genre may be linguistically, I will not discuss it further here, as this form of CMC is least likely to involve prescriptivism in a normal linguistic sense. "Rules" in games (in MUDs or elsewhere) have a completely different role anyway, which are thus not really comparable to prescriptive rules of language usage in the non-virtual world (whether in "cyberspace" or the nonelectronic real world).7 In general, it has often been claimed that many forms of CMC, in particular IRC, closely resemble spoken language - and indeed they share some obvious stylistic features. Overall, however, as Crystal (2001: 4Iff.) makes clear, CMC still has more in common with writing than with genuinely spoken language.8 What cannot be disputed, on the other hand, is that CMC does undermine conventional co-operative principles. Thus, the Gricean maxim of quality (truth) is affected firstly by the anonymity of chat (and even more so MUDs) through the choice of nicks, and the resulting possibility of assuming a different identity (or even gender). Furthermore, it is affected by "spoofing" (especially in MUDs: messages of suspect origin; cf. Crystal 2001: 52) and "trolling" (esp. on mailing lists/newsgroups: posting a question not for information but in order to trigger a certain reaction from other users - if they do not see through the "troll").9 7

Moreover, MUDs may be undergoing significant change as increasingly audio-visual elements are being introduced which necessarily reduce their characteristic text-based nature. It can even be speculated that it will at some point cease to be a linguistic genre altogether and maybe merge with video-games.

8

Most obviously in the physical sense, as Baron (2000: 251) illustrates entertainingly: as she was explaining to her "computer-sawy" son some speech-like features of email, he interrupted: "But you still have to write it."

9

The striking example that Crystal (2001: 52f.) makes up for illustration aimed at linguists is: imagine sending the message "I've heard that the Eskimo language has 1,000 words for snow - then sit back to enjoy the resulting explosions." Another example can be found on a sort of "satirical" fake FAQ ('frequently asked questions') site, which consists mainly of comments of a meta-linguistic nature on asynchronous chat in the format of a traditional "agony aunt

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The maxim of quantity is affected by "lurking" (too little) and "spamming" (too much - as will be familiar to most Internet users, esp. in the form of "junkemail"); the maxim of manner ("be perspicuous") is also affected: the "orderliness" of communication is heavily disrupted in chat by lag and nonadjacency of turn-taking. Lastly, the maxim of relevance also doesn't seem to be of such relevance in much of informal CMC - IRC often appears random and drifts off-topic. By and large, it seems to fulfil the social role of "chit-chat" rather than that of exchange of information. There are also frequent metadiscussions about what is to be deemed appropriate and relevant - or about what constitutes "flaming" (in general: linguistically rude, insulting behaviour).

4. Purism on the Net Given the apparent lack of agreement over such matters, how can a CMC participant, esp. if a "newbie" (a CMC beginner), know how to behave linguistically on the Net? Is there any authoritative guidance specially geared towards the medium? And if so, is it like "conservative", normative prescriptivism? These questions take us to the heart of our topic.

4.1 Modes of purism In order to answer the questions just raised, it is first useful to distinguish between two principal modes that purism can take: from "above", through some sort of (imposed) authority, or from "below", as it were, or rather: from within (virtual communities) by way of meta-communication (e.g. meta-flaming). A - comparatively mild - example of the latter can be seen in the following excerpt (adapted from Hutchby 2001: 178) in which a participant "guilty" of typing in capital letters is openly admonished to adhere to the "purist rule" apparently established as standard which proscribes such "shouting":

column" entitled "Dear Emily Postnews" (; here's the relevant excerpt: "Q: Somebody just posted that Roman Polanski directed Star Wars. What should I do? A: Post the correct answer at once! We can't have people go on believing that! Very good of you to spot this. You'll probably be the only one to make the correction, so post as soon as you can." This is of course plain irony, i.e. suggesting, on the surface, the opposite of what one should really do. Correct "netiquette" (see section 4.2) would rather be: best ignore the troll (here: the deliberately posted wrong information that Polanski had directed the film "Star Wars") - rather don't post anything in response to it at all, let alone lengthy corrections.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Balou Gal: Timgodden: EGLV: Timgodden: EGLV: EGLV: Panther: Timgodden: [···]

how is everyone MICHAEL JOLLIFFE I want to go to school and major in advertising HES COOL lol Fan tim please lower your caps what time is it up there then? MICHAEL JOLLIFFE

13 DragonRder: 14 15

Timgodden, UPPERCASE is normally used for adding EMPHASIS! Otherwise it's considered SHOUTING (and is harder to read)!

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Purism/proscription, even censorship, from "within", but executed with significantly more authoritative force, is also exemplified in the following excerpt (adapted from Hutchby 2001: 179f.) from a chatroom with a noswearwords-policy: I JayBee: [···]

jack - change that nick please

4 Jack_Shit: [···]

5 + 5 = 11

try = www. 11.com 8 Jack Shit: [...] II aninha: since when, jack-shit? 12 Nikki4 ho there GC aninha has been kicked off the channel by GateCrashed (u came, u saw, u swore so I kicked ya) 13 Jack_Shit: since today jack - 60 seconds to change that nick, otherwise 14 JayBee: I'll kick you out 15 16 GateCrashed: alio nikki:) 17 Nikki4: how r u GC? 18 Jack_Shit: UUUUHHHHH im so scared Nikki4: 19 kick him 20 Rianda: you should be..lol JackJShit has been kicked off the channel by JayBee (sort yer life out)

Here, one participant's nick includes a "banned" word (lines 4, 8 etc), which he is thus first asked to change (line 1 - apparently the nick was used before, outside this excerpt, or there was lag involved). He is then given an ultimatum

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(in line 14): comply or face the consequences, namely being "kicked" (i.e. electronically excluded from further participation in this chatroom). The response to this is overt disregard for authority (in line 18). This in turn triggers support on the part of two other participants encouraging the enforcement of the rule (in line 19 and 20), which is precisely what then happens. (Note, however, that it first happens to another, quite innocent participant, namely , who had merely used the real perpetrator's nick in addressing him - which is, as we have seen, necessary for unambiguous reference in more active chatrooms.) Here, the kicking was apparently done by participants wielding that power (a "class-society" of differently privileged participant levels is not uncommon in chatrooms), but there is also authority more clearly from "above", namely in the form of "moderators", and in some cases of CMC even non-human, technological authority is applied, such as in "censorware" that automatically scans for "bad" language and "filters", i.e. blocks this. However, in practice such software is so inept that typically it just "beggars belief' (Crystal 2001: 211), when for instance a firewall containing "censorware" prohibited lawyers from accessing web searches containing the innocent word analysis because of its first four letters.10 Interesting and even entertaining as these things may be, it is of course of more relevance to the (socio-)linguist to see what forms of purism there may be that are exerted from "above" in a way more comparable to traditional modes of prescriptivism, namely in style-guides specifically aimed at usage on the Net.

4.2 Netiquette and Style-Guides Probably the best-known such specific style-guide is Wired Style (Hale & Scanlon 1999), and it is here that we do indeed find elements of traditional purism reversed. The guide is subdivided into ten "principles", which are,

10

See for highly amusing material on this issue. A much more serious and widespread form of imposed software interference, if not censorship, is of course familiar to anyone who has ever used common word-processors such as Microsoft Word without its "grammar", "style" and spell-checkers' automatic settings switched off. The prescriptivism and arbitrariness of these software components are not just annoying. Crystal (2001: 212) convincingly speculates that it may actually influence the linguistic behaviour of a good proportion of people using such software who don't bother to switch the interfering "checkers" off and who just give in to whatever the software happens to demand. For the more resilient users, on the other hand, there is at least a certain entertainment value to be derived. And accordingly there is an essayist's niche in writing satirically about this, as exemplified for instance by Bryson (1998) for English and Zimmer (1997) for German.

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however, of greatly varying "principleness"11 and relevance to actual linguistic usage, and the titles more often than not tend to mask what is meant. (That is also why I won't go through every single one of their principles here.) For instance, principle 1 is entitled "the medium matters" - which is a commonplace if meaningful at all. What actually is meant here is a strong call for brevity and non-literary style, which becomes clear from the further comments under this heading, e.g. "think blunt bursts and sentence fragments", "not long-form literature", "cut lines that are looser, grabbier, more tabloidy" (Hale & Scanlon 1999: 3ff.). As part of this, we can see an explicit reversal of our principle (g) of section 2 into (g)r: 'literature is not the model.' Even more clearly, principle 5, "capture the colloquial" (Hale & Scanlon 1999: 1 Iff.), which includes the instruction "write the way people talk", reverses our purism-principle (d) into something like (d)r - i.e. spoken language is now declared the point of orientation and not, as has traditionally always been the case, more formal forms of written language. Not quite so easily pinpointed as a direct reversal of any single one of our leitmotifs, but still clearly a reversal of the general thrust of traditional purism, is Hale & Scanlon's (1999: 9) principle 2, "play with voice", which is further characterised as "not the clear-but-oh-so-conventional voice of Standard Written English" (my italics, P.H.). This call for playfully creative language, which is "reinforced" by principle 7's call for "unruliness" and "inconsistency" in "grammar and syntax" [sic!], does not so much advocate anything that problematic as such, but can, of course, not be generalised across the board and it would, if indeed followed as a general principle, run against its own underlying idea, because "if everybody breaks the rules, rule-breaking ceases to be novel" (Crystal 2001: 78). While such attempts at being "modern" through adopting an "anti-norms attitude" can be described as "reverse" purism, other recommendations in Hale & Scanlon (1999) remain rather of a conservative prescriptive nature. Obviously this runs into contradictions. Thus, on the one hand, non-hyphenated spellings of words such as webmaster, telnet, startup, email are advocated, although this has not (yet) been standardised. On the other hand, "fads" such as the e-prefix (as in e-motion) are condemned as "overused" and advised against. Both the proscriptions of one out of two or more spelling-variants and the

11

One cannot help but get the impression that 10 had to be the number of "commandments" to arrive at from the outset. For instance, principles 3 and 4 ("flaunt your subcultural literacy" and "transcend the technical", respectively, Hale & Scanlon 1999: 9ff.) could easily have been conflated into a single principle, as it amounts to a call for using the jargon of the target group Wired is aimed at. Similarly, it is difficult to see why principles 2 and 7 ("play with voice!" and "be irreverent", respectively, Hale & Scanlon 1999: 9,15ff.) have to be kept separate, as both ultimately call for creative, rule-bending usage.

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prescriptions of others are directed against variation as such, and in that are quite like traditional purism in spirit. The condemnation of something that is "overused", and thus obviously not only a linguistic reality but probably even one favoured by a majority, could be likened to traditional prescriptions regarding double negatives, split infinitives or proscriptions of it is I - i.e. Stigmatisation despite the usage being normal in reality. And, like classic prescriptivism, such judgements even assume an authority that is sold as rocksolid - e.g. when the online self-advertising for Wired Style hails it as offering "the final word on hundreds of specific usages that were unresolved until now."12 How authoritative such style-guides actually are, or what degree of circulation and following they have amongst real life e-language users, remains an open question, though. Internet searches (e.g. by google™) reveal that Wired Style is indeed widely referred to, and quite often positively.13 However, it is telling what kind of people offer positive customer reviews, for example on amazon.com: copy editors, web writers and other people likely to have a professional interest in obtaining advice from such guides.14 By far the majority of language users online, however, will not share such specific interests, and most of them will not be affected by style-guides at all - if they even know about their existence. More widespread, and obviously also more widely accepted, are various rather pragmatic rules of net-conduct, as spelt out by hundreds of "netiquette" guide pages on the Net (especially pertaining to chatrooms).15 These usually include advice against "shouting, spamming, flaming, and trolling" (see section 3) - or the overuse of smileys/emoticons.16 On "lurking" there is mixed advice; typically new visitors to a chatroom are encouraged to first lurk for a while to get a feel for the specific chatroom before starting to contribute. Persistent

12 13

14

15 16

At: Although by no means exclusively - see, for instance, the critical remarks in Kies (1997) about Wired Style's companion website (whose home URL is ). This is naturally a very crude way of evaluation - also because only some of the customers who have their reviews posted on amazon.com also have entries in the database that state their profession. Interestingly, the reviewers giving Wired Style (very) bad marks are not identifiable by personal details in the database (see

and the associated list of (clickable) reviewer details. An example is at These started out as character combinations to serve as iconic depictions of facial expressions; most widespread are :-) for a simple smile, ;-) for a winking smile, and :-( for 'unhappy'. There are numerous more complex, often less iconic ones, which have a far lower circulation (amongst "insiders" only).

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lurking, however, is still frowned upon. The point is also made regularly that one should be carefiil with irony or humour, usually on the grounds that it can easily be misunderstood due to the absence of extralinguistic cues that tend to accompany humour in face-to-face communication.17 But as far as linguistic norms are concerned, little direct purism seems to be exerted, especially not from "above" (whether traditional or "reverse"), and a lot of variation can still be seen, even though certain usage standards appear to be developing, at least for specific chatrooms, from "within". The nature of chat language has received increasing attention from linguists and sociologists alike, but again the reader is referred to the relevant literature.18 Here, however, we will finish this section with a few remarks on email. Email is the genre of CMC which displays the widest variation these days (in its earlier days it may have been more uniform and closer to some asynchronous chat), ranging from brief, colloquial non-capitalised one-liners just as in IRC to the stiff, traditional, formal style of business letters and the like. Any dogmatic pre-/proscriptions of particular usages can thus never hope to apply generally to the medium and necessarily disregard variation (cf. in particular Baron 2000: 247ff. or Crystal 2001: 94ff.). Controversial areas of usage pertaining especially to email include: should one use greetings/farewells, or signatures?19 Should there be white (i.e. empty) lines between paragraphs?20 How much editing (at least spell-checking) should go into email? (As all email-users will know, spelling accuracy ranges from the absolutely immaculate to the almost indecipherable, depending on typing-speed and -ability and degree of subsequent editing.) "Framing", or "quoting", i.e. inserting individual points of reply in between lines of the original message(s), is an option that is absolutely new in electronic written correspondence, cf. Herring (1999):

17 18 19

20

On the other hand, humour is a common phenomenon in CMC in reality - see e.g. Baym (1995). See in particular Callot/Belmore (1996), Werry (1996), Yates (1996), Herring (1999), Hutchby (2001), Crystal (2001), Beißwenger (2001). The satirical "Dear Emily Postnews" site (cf. footnote 9) has various references to overuse of long and detailed "signatures" (as predefined by a user and then inserted automatically by the software). The obvious argument in favour is clarity of layout; however, it must not be overlooked that this runs a risk: if an empty line appears as the last line in the recipient's screen window, and that recipient is used to emails finishing abruptly without farewells or signatures, then the white line could be misunderstood as the end of the message and a user in a hurry may fail to scroll further down to check.

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Quoting creates the illusion of adjacency in that it incorporates and juxtaposes (portions of) two turns - an initiation and a response - within a single message. When portions of previous text are repeatedly quoted and responded to, the resulting message can have the appearance of an extended conversational exchange [...] allowing] interactants to maintain and track patterns of turn-taking despite overlapping exchanges and delayed responses. However practical and widespread "framing" may be in principle (cf. e.g. Crystal 2001: 115ff.), this still remains controversial: there is some outspoken disapproval of the practice, not only in style manuals, i.e. purism "from above", but as far as my own user experience goes, also "from below/within" (I have had some very dismissive meta-communicative comments on my own tendency to exploit this new feature of "framing").

5. Two special aspects of German CMC So far we have looked only at English. Two additional aspects that specifically pertain German shall be briefly mentioned here as well: One question is the form of address in German, which requires a choice between two possible personal pronouns, namely either the informal "Duzen" or the more formal "Siezen" (using Sie or clu for you, respectively). As can be expected in these "new media", there is a tendency towards the more informal; but often a degree of uncertainty remains. This is noted by several Germanlanguage "netiquette" guides, and they speculate that "Vielleicht ist diese Netiquette also der letzte Artikel im Netz, in dem Sie geSIEzt werden..." 21 ('perhaps this is the last article on the Net in which you are addressed in the formal fashion'). A particular "problem" for many Germans is also the (degree of) use of anglicisms. There is already considerable controversy about this outside CMC (cf. Hohenhaus 2001, 2002); within CMC, however, the "problem" can be even greater, since the jargon of the medium, and computer lingo in general, is dominated by English terms (including such CMC-specific acronyms as lot for 'laugh out loud'). The (over-)use of anglicisms can also be a bone of contention in rather informal IRC, as can be seen from meta-discussions, as reported, for instance, by Androutsopoulos & Ziegler (2003: 12ff.). And the "folk-linguistic"

21

E.g. at the University of Bremen at under point 17; the same line can be found at various other sites (so it remains unclear which source it is originally from).

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debate about anglicisms in German generally also carries over into the electronic medium of chat. 22 An extreme (and probably not altogether serious) example of an anti-anglicisms point of view can be seen in the chatroom rules of a Christian (?) site,23 which not only includes the unequivocal ban on any anglicisms ("Das Verwenden von Anglizismen ist strengstens untersagt!"), but also translates even the most fundamental terms into German (nonce) equivalents, in particular chat itself, namely as Redekanall

6. Conclusion Apart from some elements of purism/prescriptivism in rather more traditional forms we do indeed also find elements of "reverse" purism, especially in "styleguides" on online usage such as Hale & Scanlon (1999). If we refer back to the tentatively reversed principles of purism of section 2, we can say that this is particularly true for (g)r, (c)r and (d)r in that non-literary, innovative and speechlike styles are encouraged. In advice like "be irreverent", "welcome inconsistency", "celebrate the colloquial" we can perhaps see aspects of (a)r and (b)r. In chat and email the focus does seem to be on "the message" (posting, contribution), but we find pre-/procriptions referring to individual words as well, so the status of (f) r is not so clear. Finally, (h)r doesn't seem to be of much relevance; nor is (e)r24 - anti-purist calls for illogical language usage would in fact be the most bizarre "reversal", so this is not surprising. However, relatively few people consciously heed either traditional or "reverse" purist recommendations on CMC, but rather adapt their styles according to what they encounter online themselves (cf. Baron 2000: 235). Hence there is a considerable degree of variation. This is particularly true for email, where several distinct sub-styles are developing and the fall range from completely formal, traditional-(business-)letter-like writing to IRC-like loose and ludic style can now be found (even in the same user, exploiting this range of different email-registers in a similar fashion to one's range of spoken language according to different situations). One thing is becoming increasingly apparent, though. The linguistic differences between the various Internet situations, and those between (functionally distinct) sub-styles within more

22 23 24

Cf. e.g. the discussion group log at

With the possible exception of the rejection of anglicisms in some German chatrooms.

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general CMC varieties, esp. in emailing and asynchronous chat, have implications for literacy education.25 This final point can be illustrated by the outrage, widely reported in the media,26 that the following text caused, which was handed in by a Scottish teenager as her school essay on how she had spent her summer holidays: My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we usd 2 go 2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 kds FTF. ILNY, its gr8. Bt my Ps wr so {:-/ BC ο 9/11 tht they dcdd 2 stay in SCO & spnd 2wks up N. Up N, WUCIWUG -- 0. I ws vvv brd in MON. 0 bt baas & ΛΛΛΛΛ. AAR8, my Ps wr :-) -- they sd ICBW, & tht they wr ha-p 4 the pc&qt...IDTSÜ I wntd 2 go hm ASAP, 2C my M8s again. 2day, I cam bk 2 skool. I feel ν Ο:-) BC I hv dn all my hm wrk. Now its BAU [...]

As should be obvious, this is "SMS code"27 - however, the condemnation of this style by the teacher who received this to mark (and wasn't able to decode it - due to a lack of knowledge of this code on the teacher's part, NB!), and similarly by parts of the media and educationists, namely that this was a worrying sign of diminishing literacy or linguistic abilities in general, is of course completely off the mark. In fact, the techniques of such coding are quite clever.28 The only thing that this teenager was indeed guilty of is that she picked an inappropriate register for the required task. But the register in itself is neither inherently "wrong", nor is it a real threat to other uses of language (as it is in fact rather limited and formulaic - and has to be, otherwise it runs the risk

25 26 27

28

See for instance Hawisher & Seife (2002) or Snyder (2002). E.g. or . Here's a translation into standard spelling: "My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York, it's a great place. But my parents were so worried because of the terrorism attack on September 11 that they decided we would stay in Scotland and spend two weeks up north. Up north, what you see is what you get - nothing. I was extremely bored in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but sheep and mountains. At any rate, my parents were happy. They said that it could be worse, and that they were happy with the peace and quiet. I don't think so! I wanted to go home as soon as possible, to see my mates again. Today I came back to school. I feel very saintly because I have done all my homework. Now it's business as usual..." Various techniques can be distinguished here, e.g. omission of vowels and function words; use of acronyms; use of emoticons as words (e.g. :-) for happy)·, numbers for homophonic syllables (whether as parts of words as in or as function words like for to); and iconic graphics such as < Λ Λ Λ Λ Α > to mean mountains.

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of unintelligibility even for the in-group). Thus a less panicky interpretation of this anecdote (such as Worley's 2003) is certainly more appropriate.29 We can only hope that in these, as well as in not quite so extreme cases, less inadequate, traditional or "reverse" purist evaluation may have the upper hand in the end ;-)

7. References URLs: All internet addresses were correct at the time of writing (March 2004) Androutsopoulos, Janis & Evelyn Ziegler. 2003. 'Sprachvariation und Internet: Regionalismen in einer Chat-Gemeinschaft.' In: Androutsopoulos, Janis & Evelyn Ziegler (eds.). 'Standardfragen': Sozio-linguistische Perspektiven auf Sprachgeschichte, Sprachkontakt und Sprachvariation. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 251-280. Baron, Naomi. 2000. Alphabet to Email. London: Routledge. Baym, Nancy. 1995. 'The performance of humor in computer-mediated communication.' In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 1 Number 2. URL: Beißwenger, Michael (ed.). 2001. Chat-Kommunikation. Stuttgart: Ibidem. Bryson, Bill. 1998. 'Lost in Cyber Land.' In: Bryson, Bill. Notes from a big country. London: Black Swan/Transworld Publishers, 350-354. Callot, Milena & Nancy Belmore. 1996. 'Electronic Language: A new variety of English.' In: Herring 1996, 13-28. Crystal, David. 2001. Language and the Internet. Cambridge: CUP. Hale, Constance & Jessie Scanlon. 1999. Wired style: principles of English usage in the digital age. New York: Broadway Books. Hawisher, Gail E. & Cynthia L. Seife (eds.). 2002. Global Literacies and the World-Wide Web. London/New York: Routledge. Herring, Susan (ed.). 1996. Computer-mediated communication - linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Herring, Susan. 1999. 'Interactional Coherence in CMC'. In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 4, Number 4. URL:

29

There is even an SMS-code version of the Lord's Prayer (cf. Worley 2003): "dad@hvn, ur spshl. we want wot u want &urth2b like hvn. giv us food & 4giv r sins lyk we 4giv uvaz. don't test us! save us! bcos we kno ur boss, ur tuf & ur cool 4 eva! ok?" - for a decoding of this go to

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Hohenhaus, Peter. 2001. '"Neuanglodeutsch" - Zur vermeintlichen Bedrohung des Deutschen durch das Englische.' In: German as α Foreign Language 1/2001. 57-87. URL: < http://www.gfl-journal.de/l-2001/hohenhaus.html> Hohenhaus, Peter. 2002. 'Standardisation, language change, resistance and the question of linguistic threat: 18dl-century English and present-day German.' In: Linn, Andrew R. & Nicola McLelland (eds.). Standardization - Studies from the Germanic languages. Amsterdam: Benjamins (= Current Issues in Linguistic Theory volume 235), 153-178. Hohenhaus, Peter. 2004. 'Identical Constituent Compounding - a Corpus-Based Study.' In: Folia Linguistica 38/3-4, 297-331. Hutchby, Ian. 2001. Conversation and technology - from the telephone to the internet. Cambridge: Polity. Kies, Daniel. 1997. Review of Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. Newsletter of the American Dialect Society, April 1997. URL:

Langer, Nils. 2001. 'The Rechtschreibreform - A Lesson in Linguistic Purism.' German as a Foreign Language 3/2000. 15-35. URL: Milroy, James & Lesley Milroy. 3 1999. Authority in Language. London & New York: Routledge. Snyder, liana (ed.). 2002. Silicon Literacies - Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age. London/New York: Routledge. Watts, Richard J. 2000. 'Mythical strands in the ideology of prescriptivism.' In: Wright, Laura (ed.). The Development of Standard English, 1300-1800 Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts. 29-48. Welte, Werner. 1985. Die englische Gebrauchsgrammatik. Teil 1. Geschichte und Grundannahmen. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Werry, Christopher C. 1996. 'Linguistic and Interactional Features of Internet Relay Chat.' In: Herring 1996. 47-63. Worley, Becky. 2003. 'The Changing Face of Language.' URL:

Yates, Simeon J. 1996. Oral and written linguistic aspects of computerconferencing.' In: Herring 1996. 29-46. Zimmer, Dieter E. 1997. 'Grammätik - über Fehler und wie man sie garantiert nicht vermeidet.' In: Zimmer, Dieter E. Deutsch und anders. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 252-266.

Patrick Stevenson

Once an Ossi, always an Ossi: language ideologies and social division in contemporary Germany 1. Introduction The unprecedented rapidity of political developments during the 1989-90 Wende in Germany and the abruptness of their culmination favoured a conception of the Wende in prevailing political discourses as a caesura, a sharp break from the divided past, marking a return to an underlying consensus of a united nation. In the context of the historical narrative of post-1945 Germany, this view was given a superficial plausibility through the constructed symmetry provided by the apparently equally sudden act of division in 1949.1 However, the semantic debates that were ignited at the first mention of political unification in the autumn of 1989 over the appropriate designation of the process - as 'unification' or (the preferred term in official west German discourse) 'reunification' 2 - made it clear how problematic this neat

1

Since the Wende has become virtually synonymous in popular memory with the opening of the Berlin Wall, it may perhaps be argued that it is more appropriate to derive this symmetry from the 'other' act of division represented by the erection of the Wall in 1961. However, the 12year interval between these two 'decisive' moments - in 1949 and 1961 - hardly supports the catastrophic view of division.

2

Hans Modrow, Ministerpräsident (Prime Minister) of the GDR from November 1989 to April 1990, declared emphatically in December 1989: Unsere Verbündeten sagen ebenso wie meine Regierung, daß eine Vereinigung der beiden deutschen Staaten zu einem Staat nicht auf der Tagesordnung steht. Und von einer Wiedervereinigung sollte man richtigerweise überhaupt nicht reden, weil das Wort wieder ein Anachronismus ist und berechtigte Bedenken, ja Ängste vor großdeutschem Chauvinismus weckt. (From Neues Deutschland 9/10 December 1989, cited in Teichmann-Nadiraschwili 1993: 60) [Both our allies and my government say that a unification of the two German states in a single state is not on the agenda. And strictly speaking there should be no talk of a re-unification, because the word 're-' is an anachronism and arouses concerns and fears of chauvinistic German expansionism.] For a brief discussion of this debate, see Stevenson (2002: 53-4); and for a more detailed analysis, see Herberg (1997) and Hahn (1995: 333-8).

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conceptualisation was in reality. Not surprisingly, therefore, continuing social divisions between 'east' and 'west' in Germany in the years following unification in 1990 led to competing assessments of the Wende, so that it is now remembered by some as a hiatus - a temporary suspension of continuing division, masking an underlying conflict between two discrete societies. However, while this conflictual representation of social relations in contemporary Germany may be easier to reconcile with the lived experience of many (perhaps most) 'ordinary people' in Germany, it entails a further problem in itself: the risk of essentialising an east/west contrast as a fundamental dichotomy. As Streeck mischievously argues: Wie an anderen dichotomen Menschenklassifikationen (z.B. Schwarz/Weiß oder Abendland/Morgenland) besticht an dem Kategorienpaar Ossi/Wessi seine einfache, aber perfekte poetische Konstruktion. Das Paar ist zu schön, um nicht zuzutreffen. (Streeck 1995: 434) (As with other ways of classifying people in terms of dichotomies -

e.g.

Black/White or Occidental/Oriental - the categorical pair OssiAVessi is almost irresistible in its simple but perfect poetic construction. The pair is too beautiful not to be true.)

The consequence of this - especially in the early years following unification was, some would argue, the foregrounding of the relevance of 'east versus west' as the primary social categorisation in encounters between east and west Germans, more significant than occupation, class, age, or gender (see, for example, Heinemann 1995: 392). The more political discourses emphasised unity, the more individual experiences underscored division. Indeed, the perception of - continued social and economic imbalance and inequality aroused or re-awakened in many people the need for palpable markers of difference, and language appeared to provide a rich resource for this process of social differentiation (Paul 1995, Kramer 1998, Wolf 1995). Political disunity on the one hand, and language as a political factor helping to shape German identities on the other, are twin themes of modern German history. Language and ideas about language feature in many ways in the history of the 'German question', and as Peter von Polenz (1967) argues, in his discussion of linguistic purism during National Socialism, at each moment of major social crisis in modern Germany a 'language question' of some kind emerges (see also Stevenson 2002: 15-24). In this chapter, I shall explore a contemporary manifestation of this process - which I would like to refer to as sociolinguistic purism - by focusing on one particular question: how did perceptions of language use contribute to the sustaining of social difference between eastern and western Germans after the Wendel I shall begin with some remarks on language ideologies as my theoretical framework and a brief

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discussion of their relevance to the contemporary German context, and then give some illustrations of this in relation to research on language in interaction in Germany in the 1990s.

2. Theoretical framework: language ideologies The approach I am adopting here draws on ideas developed over the last 10-15 years primarily by European and American linguists and linguistic anthropologists such as Jan Blommaert, Susan Gal, Judith Irvine, Paul Kroskrity, Bambi Schieffelin, Michael Silverstein, and Kathryn Woolard.3 Their work starts from the recognition of language as the primary site of political processes, and its project is to explore 'the linkage of microcultural worlds of language and discourse to macrosocial forces ... relating the models and practices shared by members of a speech community to their politicaleconomic positions and interests' (Kroskrity 2000b: 2-3). In common with critical discourse analysis, its aims are to undo the 'surgical removal of language from context' that was associated with much linguistic study in the twentieth century and which had produced 'an amputated "language"' (ibid: 5). While no single manifesto has emerged from these theoretical discussions, there is a broad agreement on how language ideologies may be understood, albeit with different emphases. Kroskrity (ibid.), for example, cites two more or less complementary definitions. First, according to Silverstein (1979: 193), language ideologies are 'sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use': in other words, they are concerned with ways in which people try to rationalise an irrational position on language by investing conventional beliefs and evaluations with an axiomatic status. Second, Irvine (1989: 255) proposes that language ideologies are to be understood as constituting 'the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests': from her perspective, therefore, it is important to emphasise the moral and political embeddedness of language attitudes. Kroskrity (ibid: 8) summarises these various conceptions: 'language ideologies represent the perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group', while Woolard & Schieffelin (1994: 55) add the - for my purposes - crucial specification that language

3

Although it is not widely noted in these studies, there are in fact close intellectual links between this work on language ideologies and other theoretical traditions in European contexts, especially critical discourse analysis (see, for example, Fairclough 1995 and Wodak et al. 1999).

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ideologies function as a 'mediating link between social structures and forms of talk' (see also Blommaert 1999). In the contemporary German context, the relevant social structures are constituted by the complex matrix of relationships that are distilled and condensed in the vernacular terms Ossi and Wessi. As Paul (1995: 306) argues, when these concepts first gained currency in the early days after the Wende they were no more than two-dimensional constructs, caricatures with little substance, which offered an insufficient basis for sustained opposition as a fundamental dichotomy. However, there is evidence from research conducted in the early 1990s (see, for example, Beneke 1993, Dittmar & Bredel 1999, Schönfeld 1996) that these rudimentary models were not derived entirely from random personal encounters or media representations, but were also developed in part from a store of impressions and assumptions built up over time before the Wende. The survival and active perpetuation of the Ossi/Wessi opposition to the present day therefore suggests that the process of familiarisation that the two populations underwent after the Wende was, for many Germans, a process not of accumulating evidence to undermine and dismantle a 'false' image but rather of substantiating and refining the prototypical 'other'. This process took many forms (for example, through explicit comparisons of dress styles, consumption practices, social behaviours and so forth) but perceptions of linguistic behaviour patterns appear to have been salient in this respect because of their accessibility through personal interaction - people reveal themselves through talk - and, as Woolard & Schieffelin (1994: 61-2) argue, because of the greater acceptability of disparaging forms of linguistic behaviour rather than the social actors themselves: Language varieties that are regularly associated with (and thus index) particular speakers are often revalorized [...] not just as symbols of group identity, but as emblems of political allegiance or of social, intellectual, or moral worth. [...] Moreover, symbolic revalorization often makes discrimination on linguistic grounds publicly acceptable, whereas the corresponding ethnic or racial discrimination is not.

An example of 'symbolic revalorisation' in the German-German context is provided by an account given by west German journalist Wiete Andrasch, in which individual words and phrases appear to take on an 'iconic' function (see section 4, below) as emblems representing whole speech varieties and - by extension - social groups. At a party in east Berlin in the early 1990s, she found herself in a fractured conversation with a local woman, who at one point enthuses about the practice of socialising on rooftops, using a characteristically eastern expression: 'urst schau da oben!' (it's really cool up there). Andrasch recounts her reaction like this:

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Ich hielt mindestens das dritte Glas Wein fest umschlossen in meinen Händen, als ich merkte, daß sich zwei Worte in meinen Gedanken verfangen hatten, deren Bedeutung mir rätselhaft war. Was heißt 'urst'? Und was 'schau'? Während der gesamten Unterhaltung fielen diese Worte unzählige Male. Abgesehen davon, daß ich fand, sie klangen ein bißchen russisch und ziemlich albern, konnte ich nichts mit ihnen anfangen. Ich verriet dieser Frau nicht, daß mir ihre Sprache fremd war. Die Selbstverständlichkeit, mit der sie jene Worte in den Mund nahm, schüchterte mich ein. (Andrasch 2000: 69; my italics) (I was holding at least my third glass of wine firmly in my hand when I noticed that two words had got entangled in my thoughts, whose meaning was a mystery to me. What does 'urst' mean? And 'schau'? During the whole conversation these words cropped up over and over again. Apart from the fact that they sounded a bit Russian and rather silly to me, I couldn't make any sense of them. I didn't let on to the woman that her language was foreign to me. The way she uttered these words so naturally intimidated me.)

Although the rest of the context makes it quite clear that she understood the woman perfectly well, she claims that two words were sufficient to make the other person's language strange or alien to her. The only way to make sense of such a statement, it seems to me, is to understand it as a concealed declaration of her feeling of alienation or detachment from the woman herself: it is her, not really her language, which Andrasch perceives as foreign. But if this is the case, why does she not say so? After all, she is not speaking directly to the other woman, this is an 'interior dialogue'. She seems to be articulating a potentially offensive opinion about an individual or social group in terms of a particular attribute: the intention is to mitigate the underlying proposition ('easterners are strange people') by expressing it as an observation about an apparently isolated aspect of their behaviour ('easterners speak strangely'). In this particular case, the anecdote is not intended merely as a portrayal of an 'amusing' incident but as an illustration of the broader thesis of the article: 'Wir sind außen ähnlicher, aber innen nicht gleicher geworden' (on the outside, we have become more similar to each other, but on the inside, we have not become more alike) (ibid: 77). So the party guest is standing in for 'exotic easterners' in general, and the 'two words' that trigger Andrasch's reaction represent a whole 'way of speaking'. In such processes of social categorisation as 'eastern' or 'western', then, ways of speaking developed a particular resonance not only as markers of group identity but also through being considered emblematic of political allegiance or social worth, and this is manifested in both informal and more formal contexts. Schönfeld & Schlobinski (1997: 134), for example, report a west Berliner interviewed on television in 1992 as insisting 'die [Ostberliner] ha'm die Einheit je wollt un müssen sich nun unsren Jargon aneignen' (they [the

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east Berliners] wanted unity, so now they must learn to speak like us). Similarly, Hellmann (1997: 83-4) refers to the interruption of an eastern MP's speech by a western MP during a Bundestag debate: the former had used the term Zielstellung (objective, aim), and the latter had interjected 'das heißt hier Zielsetzung!' (Here we say Zielsetzung]).4 From a language ideology perspective, direct expressions of linguistic prescriptivism such as these do not necessarily have a didactic or corrective function in terms of language use they are not intended to change people's behaviour - but rather articulate a social evaluation of particular language users in a specific historical context. In the next section, I shall develop this argument, first with reference to research on ways in which perceptions of speech or speech behaviour have functioned as a means of sustaining the social categories 'east' and 'west' in Germany by cultivating a separate sense of shared cultural knowledge within each speech community, and secondly by discussing how these linguistic perceptions serve as the basis of social discrimination.

3. Perceptions of speech behaviour, language ideologies and social discrimination One of the widely held, but as far as I am aware not much researched, folk beliefs in divided speech communities is that differences in speech behaviour develop systematically to the extent that particular features fulfil the diagnostic function of identifying speakers as 'belonging' in one part or segment of the community or the other. In the German context, a virtual sub-discipline grew up from the early 1950s through to the late 1980s concerned with debates over the existence and nature of linguistic differences between German in the GDR and in the Federal Republic (see Stevenson 2002: 24-42). These studies are prime examples of what Blommaert (1999) calls language ideological debates, and the substance and tenor of many contributions to this field place them in the longer tradition of linguistic purism in Germany. However, despite the sometimes grandiose and comprehensive claims made about east/west differences in this literature, the focus of study is almost exclusively on lexical features and

4

In discourse analytical terms, the use of the word 'here' in this context is actually more interesting than the pedantic insistence on Zielsetzung. From a synchronic perspective, this can only refer to (unified) Germany, but since the objection is based on the fact that the eastern MP had used a synonym preferred in the (at the time of speaking no longer existent) GDR rather than the equivalent more commonly used in the (pre-1990) Federal Republic, the implication appears to be that the western MP makes no distinction between 'old' and 'new' Federal Republic and that he interprets the other M P ' s language choice as subversive. (For a detailed discussion o f ' h e r e ' and 'there', and 'now' and 'then', as social deictics, see Hausendorf 2000, Liebscher 2000, and Stevenson 2002: 215-9).

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textual or discursive patterns in written material drawn from a limited range of genres and domains. For obvious practical reasons, virtually no comparative work on everyday speech was possible before 1989, with the rare exception of some intrepid and partly clandestine research such as Peter Schlobinski's pioneering study of language use in east and west Berlin in the early 1980s (see Schlobinski 1987). However, as I suggested in the previous section, patterns of speech behaviour are one of the most striking forms of self-representation and as the literature on language attitudes shows, interlocutors and other observers not only consciously register them but also readily classify and evaluate them (see, for example, Coupland & Jaworski 1997: Part V; for recent surveys on language attitudes in Germany, see Stickel & Volz 1999, Stickel 2000). In other words, judges appear to believe that they have both the ability to locate individual speakers geographically and/or socially and, more importantly, access to a store of knowledge about what these locations imply: Berlinishspeakers, for example, are 'quick-witted', 'coarse' and 'insensitive', while Swabian-speakers are 'slow', 'earnest' and 'dependable'. But over the last decade or so, evidence has begun to accrue that individual speakers socialised in the GDR or the (old) Federal Republic believe they can identify 'eastern' and 'western' speakers not merely on the basis of regional accents or isolated lexical shibboleths (such as urst schau or Zielstellung/Zielsetzung, discussed above), but in terms of what Eroms (1997: 8) calls a characteristic Diktion (style or manner of speaking). More specifically, a common feature in much of this research is an association between perceptions of linguistic patterns or behaviours and perceptions of social practices: a particular way of speaking is held to be indicative of a particular way of being - and, as Härtung (2002) argues critically, both researchers and their informants often even interpret 'speaking differently' as tantamount to 'belonging to a different culture' (see, for example, Auer 2000a, b). The relationship between the identification of speech patterns on the one hand and social categorisation or evaluation on the other is clear in much of the material from this research. For example, east German students in Ruth Reiher's surveys expressed various degrees of admiration for their western counterparts' apparent fluency, confidence in public speaking, and sophisticated rhetorical skills, but at the same time there is a thin line between this and a sense of pomposity, condescension, and superciliousness (1996: 503). Their praise for western students' abilities implies deficits in their own, but these perceived deficiencies are offset by other, more positive attributes: a more open, honest, and direct manner in discussions, a greater willingness to engage in genuine dialogue rather than concentrating on self-presentation. Western students often concurred with this contrast:

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Da würd' ich schon sagen, hab' ich festgestellt, daß im Osten äh die Kommunikation einfacher läuft. Also es is' mir meistens aufgefalln, daß die Leute viel offener sind und viel direkter auf auf Leute zugehn äh. ... Ich hatte schon das Gefühl, daß man leichter Leute kennengelernt hat und daß sie ebn auch nich' so dieses, zu Anfang jedenfalls nich' so dieses Imponiergehabe hattn, was also was man hier [i.e. in the west] oft hat, wenn man Leute kennenlernt, daß man erstmal durch 'ne unheimlich harte Schale durch muß, um überhaupt zu den Menschn vorzudringn. Und da hatt' ich das Gefühl, daß sie etwas natürlicher warn, und das hat sich natürlich in der Sprache niedergeschlagn. (Reiher 1996: 52) (Well, I'd certainly say I've found that communication is easier in the east. I mean, it's generally struck me that people are much more open and they approach people much more directly. ... I had the feeling that you got to know people more easily and that they didn't, at least at the start they didn't do all this posturing, like you often get here [i.e. in the west] when you meet people, the way you have to break through an incredibly hard shell just to get through to the real person. And I had the feeling that they were a bit more natural, and that obviously came through in their language too.)

These mixed perceptions are also evident in many of the 'language biographies' of east Germans interviewed by Fix and Barth. W.B., for example, acknowledges the greater apparent fluency of west German speakers, but attributes this to different educational traditions and considers the surface impression misleading: W.B.: Ich glaube, ... daß der Westdeutsche scheinbar fließend spricht, aber mit sehr viel Worthülsen operiert; während der Ostdeutsche stolpernder spricht, aber sorgfältiger auf die Wortwahl achtet, mühsamer drum ringt, was er sagt. (Fix & Barth 2000: 359-60) (I think that west Germans appear to speak more fluently but they use a lot more empty words; while east Germans speak more awkwardly but choose their words more carefully and struggle more laboriously over what they say.)

Similarly, D.B. identifies a 'special manner of speaking' in western students in particular: they talk and talk but always say the same thing, while eastern students speak more slowly but what they say 'hatte Hand und Fuß' (made sense) (ibid: 393). This is seen as part of a more general superficiality in the public performance of the self in west German contexts and the exclusively western communicative genre of small talk: 'Sprechen ohne Informationen, ... Aneinanderreihen von Worten .... Was die alten Bundesländer uns als, wie sagen sie, Funktionärssprache ankreiden - sie haben 'ne Wohlstandssprache' (speaking without information, ... stringing words together ... What people in the old Federal states hold against us as, what do they call it, the language of

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functionaries - well, they have a language of affluence) (M.K.; ibid: 305-6). For S.S., a teacher in her late 40s, this feeling that 'Konversation spielt 'ne größere Rolle als bei uns' (chatting/ small talk is more important than it is for us), and the sense of helplessness and inferiority that overcame her amongst her western relatives, were so extreme that they had the effect of making her feel positively dysfunctional (ibid: 414-5). In spite of the methodological limitations of some of this research, it is striking how similar so many of these remarks from different sources are, both in their substance and in the ways they are formulated. This suggests two things: first, that they may have a relatively high degree of validity as perceptions, in the sense that they would be acknowledged as legitimate by many members of the relevant population, and secondly, that they are only in part personal evaluations, that they derive to some extent from what Jäger (1997) calls 'inter-discourse' - the discursive flow of ideas, opinions, and representations within a society, typically in the form of interaction between media products and media consumers. As ideas are circulated in this way, opinions become crystallised into 'facts', contestable claims are naturalised as 'common sense' notions that have an axiomatic quality and therefore require no further justification: 'easterners don't know the meaning of work', say, or 'westerners are arrogant and insincere'. Already in 1989, Resendiz (1992) found that individuals moving between east and west brought with them certain assumptions and perceptions of manners of speaking that they considered characteristic of east and west Germans respectively. In her experimental study, conducted during the Wende, judges were asked to identify the origin of speakers recorded on radio broadcasts, and while accent and lexis contributed to their judgements, syntactic and prosodic features and aspects of textual structure seemed to be at least as important. In a subsequent study, Pätzold & Pätzold (1998) used roleplays as their raw material: students at the Humboldt University in Berlin were asked to perform a series of scenes as 'teachers' and 'school students', and the recordings of these scenes were then played to another set of students, who were asked to identify the participants as eastern or western purely on the basis of their speech. In their analysis, Pätzold & Pätzold adopt a concept from Bühler (1934) Sphärengeruch, the 'scent' of particular 'spheres' or domains of social activity - arguing that certain linguistic features or speech patterns may be imbued with a particular 'scent' which not only activates certain associations in the minds of speakers/hearers but also constrains the possibilities of interpretation by specifying the context in which they 'normally' occur. For example, Solidarität carries the general, positive implications of co-operation and support, but for those socialised in the GDR it very likely also bears the 'scent' of 'struggle'

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through familiar, ritualised collocations such as 'die internationale Solidarität der Arbeiterklasse' (the international solidarity of the working class). Sphärengeruch therefore has the effect of what Gumperz (1982) calls contextualisation cues: it triggers associations but also structures how the hearer may interpret the whole text. Consider the following examples (taken from Pätzold & Pätzold 1998: 85, 88). Example 1 'School student' 3: Ja, das würde ich auch noch bestätigen wollen, das ham wa vorher zwar nich' gesehen, aber das Bild hier vom Zeichenunterricht, wo man wirklich kreativ sein kann, das finde ich schon sehr positiv, daß dieses/ die Möglichkeit der Individualität auf jeden Fall im Unterricht erhalten bleiben sollte. Judge (east German)·. Drei halte ich, denke ich, ftirn fürn Wessi: Zeichenunterricht, kreativ, Individualität - also, viel Schrütz um Nüscht. {'School student' 3: Yes, I would like to confirm that too, admittedly we didn't see that before but the picture that we have here of art lessons where you can be really creative, I find it very positive that this/ the possibility of individuality should definitely be maintained in lessons. Judge (east German)·. I'd say number 3 is a Wessi, I think: art lessons, creative individuality - a lot of waffle in other words.)

The east German judge reacts to the Sphärengeruch attaching to the words Zeichenunterricht (art lessons), kreativ (creative), and Individualität (individuality) and collocates them in an associative bundle that represents for him/her a particular speech practice (viel Schrütz um Nüscht, a lot of waffle), which s/he considers characteristic of westerners. In the second example, another eastern judge identifies a 'teacher' as a fellow east German: Example 2 'Teacher' 2: Es geht auch darum, erstmal rauszufinden, wieviel Leute das Fotolabor überhaupt nutzen. Wenn ich daran vorbeigeh', dann seh' ich 'n eingeschworenes Grüppchen von drei vier Leuten, die immer dieselben sind. Es macht, es hat keinen Zweck, wenn es nur 'n paar Leute sind, die ihre Privatfotos entwickeln, ja, es sollen 'n paar mehr Leute daran beteiligt sein und es ist wichtig rauszufinden, wieviel Leute das sind, auch um die Mittel besser planen zu können und die Effektivität erstmal. Judge (east German): Dit is' ooch wieder typisch ossihaft, also man kann nicht etwas einrichten, was nur zwei Leute nutzen, sondern das muß von der gesamten Gemeinschaft genutzt werden, hm, und 'die Effektivität erstmal', also irgendwas muß effektiv sein, also dis kann nicht aus Spaß an der Sache einfach, sondern das muß effektiv sein, genau wie wa äh wie wa unsern Plan immer erfüllen mußten, so

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muß dieses auch effektiv sein und nicht nur von zwei bis drei Leuten genutzt werden. Also L2 is' Ossi. ('Teacher' 2: What we need to do is first of all find out how many people actually use the darkroom. Whenever I go past it I see a closely knit little group of 3 or 4 people, always the same ones. There's no point if it's just a few people developing their private photos, there should be a few more people involved and it's important to find out how many there are, also so that we can plan the use of resources better and the effectiveness in the first place. Judge (east German)·. This is typically 0.?.s/-likc again - you can't set up something that is only used by two people, it must be used by the entire community, hmm, and 'the effectiveness in the first place', so things have to be effective, they can't just be because people enjoy doing them, they have to be effective, just like we always had to fulfil our plan, so this has to be effective too and not just be used by two or three people. So L2 is an Ossi.) Here, the east German judge responds first to the general proposition that 'resources must be used effectively', but this seems to have been prompted by the specific formulation 'die Effektivität erstmal' (the effectiveness in the first place), which s/he quotes. This in turn triggers associations with the requirement to 'unseren Plan erfüllen' (fulfil our plan; quite possibly in reaction also to the teacher's use of planen), which, as the use of the past tense form (mußten, had to) clearly implies, is a linguistic and social practice rooted in the social and historical context of the GDR. Reactions such as these, elicited under experimental conditions with the participants explicitly required to search for linguistic markers of difference, clearly should not be understood as a reflection of everyday behaviour. Furthermore, the accuracy of the judgements made in such exercises is not the issue, nor is the question of whether there 'really is or was' a distinctive eastern or western manner of speaking. What these judgements do suggest is that 'east' and 'west' have a psychological reality for many individuals as primary, discrete categories, and that people believe that these social categories are discoverable through patterns of linguistic behaviour. In other words, they are (in Silverstein's terms: see Section 2, above) rationalising their perceptions of language use by articulating a relationship between linguistic patterns and social practices. The indexical function of particular linguistic forms and behaviours therefore goes beyond the identification of a speaker's place of origin to locate them within social categories and evaluate them accordingly. In real-world encounters between westerners and easterners (as opposed to the decontextualised experimental situations discussed above: see Stevenson 2002: 172-185, 212-225), social categorisation is effected within a framework dominated by western values. Social relationships contracted under these circumstances are therefore asymmetrical since the onus is on easterners either

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to adapt and accommodate or to justify their forms of behaviour, including their 'manner of speaking'. Quite soon after the Wende, negative stereotypes of easterners coalesced into the cliche of the Jammerossi (the whingeing easterner) and in the light of my discussion here it is no coincidence that this preferred image constructs the easterner in terms of a particular speech style. However, as Shethar & Härtung (1998: 50) argue: Eine Diskursideologie, die den 'Ost-Diskurs' als jammernd identifiziert, privilegiert klar einen bestimmten Typ von Erfahrung, Autorität und Berechtigung und schafft so eine 'separate Öffentlichkeit', deren Rede weniger mächtig ist. (A discourse ideology that identifies the 'eastern discourse' as whingeing clearly privileges a particular kind of experience, authority, and legitimacy, and in this way creates a 'separate public', whose talk is less powerful.) The creation of a 'separate public' is part of the process of symbolic domination or cultural hegemony (Gal 1993, Woolard 1985), which rests not on actual forms or patterns of behaviour but on perceptions of authority and legitimacy vested in one particular segment of society or one particular public (see also Gal & Woolard 2001b). One manifestation of this is what Jennifer DaileyO'Cain (2000) calls the 'western standard language ideology', a form of institutionalised sociolinguistic purism which operates on two fronts simultaneously - the 'good' is located in the west, and the 'bad' in the east: Eastern Germans, and particularly central eastern Germans [i.e. Saxon dialect speakers], are not only told that their way of speaking is wrong, but that there is a particular right way of doing so in the west, and that they must change their language in order to overcome an inferior social position. (Dailey-O'Cain 2000: 265) So this ideology not only serves to locate the 'source' of what is 'correct' and therefore 'good' in the west but also has the deeper function of disparaging eastern social traditions by denying the legitimacy of 'eastern' language. Furthermore, this form of cultural hegemony is apparent not only in 'folk beliefs' about 'good' and 'bad' language, it also appears to underlie much of the linguistic research conducted since the Wende, especially by west German researchers (see, for example Auer 2000a, b, Dittmar & Bredel 1999; and for a critique of this position, Härtung 2002, Shethar 2002).

4. Conclusions My aim in this chapter was to sketch a model of 'sociolinguistic purism' in the specific historical context of east-west relations in Germany in the early years

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following unification. In particular, I hope to have shown some ways in which language ideologies may provide an interpretative frame for understanding the role of (perceptions of) language in use in sustaining social division in Germany since 1990. This process operates at two levels: primarily at the level of the individual language user, but secondly also at the level of the researcher of language use. For one of the critical issues that has divided researchers over the last 10 years is the extent of sociolinguistic difference (as opposed to perceptions of it) and its significance5. As Irvine and Gal (2000) argue, 'there is no "view from nowhere", no gaze that is not positioned', and there is in my view a risk that western researchers, in particular, mistake a symptom of social conflict for the problem itself (or misrepresent it as such): a fundamental conflict of interests between social groups that has arisen as a result of particular historical conditions may be rationalised by exaggerating allegedly inherent behavioural contrasts (such as in speech patterns), as Antos and Richter (2000: 77) concede (and see again in this respect Härtung 2002): Man projiziert die politischen, ökonomischen und soziokulturellen Probleme, die durch die Vereinigung vor allem für den Osten relevant waren und sind, also die Unterschiede in der Sache, auf den Diskurs, der darüber gefuhrt wird, also auf Unterschiede in der Sprache. (The political, economic, and socio-cultural problems that as a result of unification were and still are of particular relevance for the east, in other words material differences, are projected onto the discourse that is conducted about them, that is, onto linguistic differences.)

The role of language here is therefore indirect: linguistic forms and practices are less significant than what they are taken to represent and how representations of them are conscripted into service in developing competing discourses of 'Germanness'. This is what I take Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) to mean by language ideologies functioning as a 'mediating link between social structures and forms of talk' and illustrates how Kroskrity (2000b) suggests the study of language ideologies can identify and analyse 'the linkage of microcultural worlds of language and discourse to macrosocial forces' (both referred to in section 2, above). In particular, we see here examples of the process that Irvine & Gal (2000: 37) refer to as 'iconization', whereby 'linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them', and which they see as one of the key processes by which 'people construct ideological representations of linguistic differences'. Identifying these processes as

5

I discuss this issue at greater length in Stevenson (2002: 230-8).

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ideological is important, because it exposes the constructed nature of what becomes represented as natural or inherent properties of language use or behaviour - in this case, an 'eastern' or a 'western' style: it 'reminds us that the cultural conceptions we study are partial, contestable and contested, and interest-laden ..., that cultural frames have social histories' (Woolard & Schieffelin 1994: 58).

5. References Andrasch, Wiete. 2000. 'Mitten im Niemandsland. Wieso es in Brandenburg keine netten Westler gibt.' In: Simon et al. 65-77. Antos, Gerd & Stefan Richter. 2000. '"Sprachlosigkeit" Ost? Anmerkungen aus linguistischer Sicht.' In: Jackman & Roe. 75-96. Auer, Peter. 2000a. 'Changing communicative practices among east Germans.' In: Stevenson & Theobald. 167-188. Auer, Peter. 2000b. 'Was sich ändert und was bleibt: Vorläufiges zu stilistischen Konvergenzen Ost-West am Beispiel von Interviews.' In: Auer & Hausendorf. 151-75. Auer, Peter & Heiko Hausendorf (eds.). 2000. Kommunikation in gesellschaftlichen Umbruchsituationen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Barz, Irmhild & Marianne Schröder (eds.). 1997. Nominationsforschung im Deutschen.

Festschrift

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Wolfgang

Fleischer

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75.

Geburtstag.

Frankfurt/Main: Lang. Beneke, Jürgen. 1993. '"Am Anfang wollten wir zueinander ..." - Was wollen wir heute? Sprachlich-kommunikative Reflexionen Jugendlicher aus dem Ost- und Westteil Berlins zu einem bewegenden Zeitthema.' In: Reiher & Läzer. 210-238. Blommaert, Jan (ed.). 1999. Language Ideological Debates. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bühler, Karl. 1934. Sprachtheorie. Jena. Clyne, Paul, William Hanks & Carol Hofbauer (eds.). 1979. The Elements: A Parasession

on Linguistic

Units and Levels. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic

Society. Coupland, Nikolas & Adam Jaworski (eds.). 1997. Sociolinguistics: A Coursebook and Reader. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Czyzewski, Marek, Elisabeth Gülich, Heiko Hausendorf & Maria Kastner (eds.). 1995. Kommunikative

Nationale Selbstund Fremdbilder im Gespräch. Prozesse nach der Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands und

dem Systemwandel in Ostmitteleuropa. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Dailey-O'Cain, Jennifer. 2000. 'Competing language ideologies in Germany: when east meets west.' In: Stevenson & Theobald. 248-266.

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Dittmar, Norbert & Ursula Bredel. 1999. Die Sprachmauer. Die Verarbeitung der Wende und ihrer Folgen in Gesprächen mit Ost- und Westberlinerinnen. Berlin: Weidler. Eroms, Hans-Werner. 1997. 'Sprachliche "Befindlichkeiten" der Deutschen in Ost und West.' In: Der Deutschunterricht 1. 6-16. Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. Harlow: Longman. Fix, Ulla & Dagmar Barth, (eds.) 2000. Sprachbiographien. Sprache und Sprachgebrauch vor und nach der Wende von 1989 im Erinnern und Erleben von Zeitzeugen aus der DDR. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Gal, Susan. 1993. 'Diversity and contestation in linguistic ideologies: Germanspeakers in Hungary.' In: Language in Society 22. 337-359. Gal, Susan & Kathryn Woolard (eds.). 2001a. Languages and Publics. The Making of Authority. Manchester: St Jerome. Gal, Susan & Kathryn Woolard. 2001b. 'Constructing languages and publics: authority and representation.' In: Gal & Woolard 2001a. 1-12. Grewenig, Adi. (ed.). 1993. Inszenierte Information. Politik und strategische Kommunikation in den Medien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hahn, Silke. 1995. 'Vom zerrissenen Deutschland zur vereinigten Republik. Zur Sprachgeschichte der "deutschen Frage".' In: Stötzel & Wengeler. 285353. Härtung, Wolfdietrich. 2002. 'Über die Wahrnehmung sprachlicher Unterschiede. Methodologische Anmerkungen zu "Ostdeutsch" und "Westdeutsch".' In: Härtung & Shethar. 147-168. Härtung, Wolfdietrich & Alissa Shethar (eds.). 2002. Kulturen und ihre Sprachen. Die Wahrnehmung anders Sprechender und ihr Selbstverständnis. Berlin: trafo. Hausendorf, Heiko. 2000. Ost- und Westzugehörigkeit als soziale Kategorien im wiedervereinigten Deutschland.' In: Auer & Hausendorf. 83-111. Heinemann, Margot. 1995. 'vorher war das alles irgendwie organisiert: Verhaltensmuster im deutsch-deutschen Diskurs.' In: Czyzewski et al. 38995. Hellmann, Manfred. 1997. 'Sprach- und Kommunikationsprobleme in Deutschland Ost und West.' In: Schmirber. 53-87. Herberg, Dieter. 1997. 'Beitritt, Anschluß oder was? Heteronominativität in Texten der Wendezeit.' In: Barz & Schröder (eds.). 109-116. Irvine, Judith. 1989. 'When talk isn't cheap: language and political economy.' In: American Ethnologist 16. 248-267. Irvine, Judith & Susan Gal. 2000. 'Language ideology and linguistic differentiation.' In: Kroskrity. 35-83.

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Jäger, Siegfried. 1997. 'Political discourse: the language of Right and Left in Germany.' In: Stevenson. 233-257. Jackman, Graham & Ian Roe. (eds.). 2000. Finding a Voice. Problems of Language in East German Society and Culture. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi. Kramer, Undine. 1998. '"Wir und die anderen". Distanzierung durch Sprache.' In: Reiher & Kramer (eds.). 273-298. Kroskrity, Paul (ed.). 2000a. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Kroskrity, Paul. 2000b. 'Regimenting languages: language ideological perspectives.' In: Kroskrity 2000a. 1-34. Lämmert, Karl, Walther Killy, Carl Otto Conrady & Peter von Polenz. 1967. Germanistik - eine deutsche Wissenschaft. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Liebscher, Grit. 2000. 'Arriving at identities: positioning of speakers in German television talkshows.' In: Stevenson & Theobald. 189-205. Pätzold, Margita & Jörg Pätzold. 1998. '"Sphärengeruch" der Sprache - eigener und fremder.' In: Reiher & Kramer. 67-128. Paul, Ingwer. 1995. 'Schismogene Tendenzen des Mediendiskurses nach der deutschen Einheit.' In: Czyzewski et al. 297-327. Polenz, Peter von. 1967. 'Sprachpurismus und Nationalsozialismus. Die "Fremdwortfrage" gestern und heute.' In: Lämmert et al. 111-165. Reiher, Ruth. 1996. 'Ein Ossi - ein Wort; ein Wessi - ein Wörterbuch. Zur Bewertung von Sprache und Sprachverhalten der Deutschen Ost und West.' In: Reiher & Läzer. 32-54. Reiher, Ruth & Antje Baumann (eds.). 2000. Mit gespaltener Zunge? Die deutsche Sprache nach dem Fall der Mauer. Berlin: Aufbau. Reiher, Ruth & Undine Kramer (eds.). 1998. Sprache als Mittel von Identifikation und Distanzierung. Frankfurt/Main: Lang. Reiher, Ruth & Rüdiger Läzer (eds.). 1993. Wer spricht das wahre Deutsch? Erkundungen zur Sprache im vereinten Deutschland. Berlin: Aufbau. Reiher, Ruth & Rüdiger Läzer (eds.). 1996. Von 'Buschzulage' und Ossinachweis'. Ost-West-Deutsch in der Diskussion. Berlin: Aufbau. Resendiz, Julia Liebe. 1992. 'Woran erkennen sich Ost- und Westdeutsche? Eine Spracheinstellungsstudie am Beispiel von Rundfunksendungen.' In: Welke et al.. 127-139. Schlobinski, Peter. 1987. Stadtsprache Berlin. Eine soziolinguistische Untersuchung. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Schmirber, Gisela (ed.). 1997. Sprache im Gespräch: zu Normen, Gebrauch und Wandel der deutschen Sprache. Munich: Hans-Seidel-Stiftung. Schönfeld, Helmut. 1996. 'Heimatsprache, Proletendeutsch, Ossi-Sprache oder? Bewertung und Akzeptanz des Berlinischen.1 In: Reiher & Läzer. 70-93.

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Schönfeld, Helmut & Peter Schlobinski. 1997. 'After the Wall: social change and linguistic variation in Berlin.' In: Stevenson. 119-136. Shethar, Alissa. 2002. 'Foreign in the mother tongue? The problem of culture in "east/west" contrastive sociolinguistics.' In: Härtung & Shethar. 169-194. Shethar, Alissa & Wolfdietrich Härtung. 1998. 'Was ist "Ostjammer" wirklich? Diskurs-Ideologie und die Konstruktion deutsch-deutscher Interkulturalität.' In: Reiher & Kramer. 39-66. Silverstein, Michael. 1979. 'Language structure and linguistic ideology.' In: Clyneetal. 193-247. Simon, Jana, Frank Rothe & Wiete Andrasch (eds.). 2000. Das Buch der Unterschiede. Warum die Einheit keine ist. Berlin: Aufbau. Stevenson, Patrick (ed.). 1997. The German Language and the Real World. Sociolinguistic, cultural, and pragmatic perspectives on contemporary

German, revised edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stevenson, Patrick 2002. Language and German Disunity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Patrick & John Theobald (eds.). 2000. Relocating Germanness: Discursive Disunity in Unified Germany. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Stickel, Gerhard. 2000. 'Was West- und Ostdeutsche sprachlich voneinander halten.' In: Reiher & Baumann. 16-29. Stickel, Gerhard & Norbert Volz. 1999. Meinungen und Einstellungen zur deutschen Sprache. Mannheim: Institut für Deutsche Sprache. Stötzel, Georg & Martin Wengeler (eds.).1995. Kontroverse Begriffe. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Streeck, Jürgen. 1995. 'Ethnomethodologische Indifferenz im Ost-WestVerhältnis.' In: Czyzewski et al. 430-436. Teichmann-Nadiraschwili, Christine. 1993. 'Von der deutschen Zweistaatlichkeit zur Konzeption "Deutschland, einig Vaterland" - Versuch einer linguistischen Beschreibung.' In: Grewenig. 56-72. Welke, Klaus, Wolfgang W. Sauer & Helmut Glück (eds.). 1992. Die deutsche Sprache nach der Wende. Hildesheim: Olms.

Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl & Karin Liebhart. 1999. The Discursive

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University Press. Wolf, Ricarda. 1995. 'Interaktive Fallen auf dem Weg zum vorurteilsfreien Dialog. Ein deutsch-deutscher Versuch.' In: Czyzewski et al. 203-231. Woolard, Kathryn. 1985. 'Language variation and cultural hegemony: toward an integration of sociolinguistic and social theory.' In: American Ethnologist 12 (4). 738-748. Woolard, Kathryn & Bambi Schieffelin. 1994. 'Language ideology.' In: Annual Review of Anthropology

23. 55-82.

IV. Folk Linguistics and Purism

Betsy Evans

"The Grand Daddy of English": US, UK, New Zealand and Australian students' attitudes toward varieties of English 1. Introduction Previous research on attitudes to English has consistently shown that raters prefer UK English over other varieties (for example Huygens & Vaughan 1983, Bayard 1990, Stewart et al. 1985, Ladegaard 1998, Van der Haagen 1998, Ray & Zahn 1999, Jarvella et al. 2001). However, Bayard et al. (2001) recently conducted research on this issue using verbal guises of US, UK, Australian and NZ English and concluded that US English is "well on its way to replacing RP as the prestige—or at least preferred variety" (p. 22). Is it possible that attitudes about the high status of UK English are changing? This paper explores this question by attempting to gauge attitudes to English without the use of voice guises. Respondents indicated that they associate higher status with UK English than US English. This higher status rests on the respondents' strong feelings that UK English is the most correct or standard variety of English. In addition, the relevance of purism and language attitudes to current debates within globalisation theory is briefly discussed.

Language attitude studies Language attitudes studies in social psychology since the 1970s have historically been dominated by the matched guise and verbal guise techniques accompanied by questionnaires using semantic differential scales. Space prohibits a full treatment of these methods here (see Garrett et al. 2003). Thus only a brief summary of pertinent research on attitudes to English will be

Many thanks to Peter Garrett and Angie Williams who commented generously on earlier versions of this paper and to colleagues Michelle Aldridge, Cindy Gallois, Janet Holmes, Susan McKay, and Dennis Preston, who so kindly assisted in data collection. The research for this paper was enabled through funding by Leverhulme Trust (grant no. F/00 407/D) to the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, for a larger project on Language and Global Communication.

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discussed. One of the earlier studies of this type, conducted by Stewart et al. (1985), involves matched guises of middle class US and UK male speakers. Respondents were asked to complete three tasks that involved listening to voices, accompanied by a description of the individual or a scenario and rating them on scales. Their results showed that the UK English speakers received higher ratings on status but lower ratings on solidarity than the US English speakers. More recently, the area of language attitudes study labeled 'folk linguistics' has also proved to be successful in acquiring language attitude data (Niedzielski & Preston 2000). This type of research centres around talk about language. It has taken as its data comments (via recordings, questionnaires, etc.) by non-linguists from different levels of society about many varieties of language, the way an individual speaks, the lexicon, etc. Preston (1986), for example, asked US respondents to draw dialect boundaries on a map of the United States and to label the variety of speech used in the regions indicated. Respondents produced evaluative rather than descriptive words for the varieties such as "normal, standard, pidgin, drawl" (p. 238) demonstrating that this method is well suited for acquiring language attitudes data.

Attitudes and purism Folk conversations about language often involve discussions that directly or indirectly hint at prescriptivism. In their research on standard English, Milroy & Milroy (1999) explore the long history of non-linguists' arguments about standard language, or the "complaint tradition". They describe the complaints about correctness as fitting loosely into two categories (p. 33). Type one complaints have at their core the belief that there is one and only one proper way to speak and that to ignore the rules of proper speech is a sign of ignorance deserving discrimination. Type two complaints focus on the superior clarity and efficacy of standard English. While both of these types of complaint figure in folk descriptions of language, in his folk attitudes research, Preston (1996: 5459) has found that "correctness" is an important dimension of language attitude research in the US and discusses at length the "fixation" that non-linguists have on correctness. This paper assumes a key characteristic of purism to be correctness/prescriptiveness, which principally involves the belief that there is a variety that is superior to all others and that that variety must be maintained and taught. As with all linguistic research, language attitudes studies assume the notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. That is to say, language itself does not have inherent value. Rather it is individuals who assign value to it. This notion is widely rejected by non-linguists who see as natural the notion that one variety of language is superior (e.g. sounds nicer, is clearer) than another. That is, as Niedzielski & Preston (2000: 18) have found, "non-linguists use prescription (at nearly every linguistic level) in description". Linguists such as Niedzielski and

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Preston (2000: 18) find that the sources for prescription are "power, esteem, tradition, and the like" thus by exploring language attitudes, we get at the roots of purism by discovering to whom non-linguists assign power, esteem, and tradition.

2. Methods Participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire with open-ended questions and were not presented with any audio samples of voices. They were asked to "name countries around the world where you know English is spoken as a native language". Secondly, they were asked "what kind of impression do you get when you hear these varieties?". While this open-ended answer format does not lend itself to statistical techniques commonly employed with data from rating scales, these questions enable respondents to determine the categories themselves. Further treatment of the differences between the matched-guise technique and the open-ended questionnaires such as the one used in this study can be found in Garrett et al. (2003). Questionnaires were distributed to university students enrolled in language and psychology courses in the US (Michigan), the UK (Cardiff, Bangor), Australia (Brisbane) and New Zealand (Wellington) (see Table 1). Country

Number of respondents

UK US Australia New Zealand Table 1: Participant demographics

152 192 103 70

Mean age 20 20 21 20

The responses were content analyzed. Comments written on the questionnaire about the English of a particular country were counted and allocated to categories according to consistent frequent themes. The categories arise from patterns of comments that are consistent with well-documented evaluative dimensions (e.g. solidarity, status, dynamism) that have emerged from previous research (for example Zahn & Hopper 1985). Because the questions were openended, the subjective and sometimes idiosyncratic nature of the answers was best treated as general categories consistent with these dimensions. Thus the answers were grouped into the broad categories of status and solidarity that were further divided into negative and positive. There were other statements that did not fit status/solidarity dimensions but were consistent and numerous enough to merit new categories. Such categories include the description of a variety by comparison with another one, the inability to characterize a variety, and media stereotypes. This method enabled percentages to be calculated for total comments in a category made by participants from an individual country.

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3. R e s u l t s This paper is limited to results from the second question: "What kind of impression do you get when you hear these varieties?". 3.1 UK English Participants consistently gave UK English (UKE) positive comments for status. Positive status was indicated by comments on correctness and competence like "correct English" and "intelligent" and accounted for the majority of comments on UKE. As much as fifty-nine percent of comments from US respondents fit this category (see Table 2). High status, it seems, is the most salient characteristic of UK English for these respondents. Comments like "the grand daddy of English",1 "most standard", and "ultimate correct way" indicate that respondents feel that UK English is the original version of English and thus the variety by which every other should be measured. In order for a standard to exist, there must be a model for it, and it seems these respondents feel that it is UKE. Therefore it is not surprising to find negative comments about solidarity such as "snobbish", "rude", "prissy" as they often go hand-in-hand with perceived high status (Ryan et al. 1982). The high status/low solidarity judgements are also consistent with ratings by US respondents reported by Stewart et al. (1985). US respondents indicated no awareness of variation in UK English while twenty-seven percent of comments from NZ participants related to variation (e.g. "lots of different accents"). Higher awareness of variation in the UK on the part of the NZ participants may account for their lower percentage of positive status comments (by comparison to the US and Australia) since, as described above, status is tied to standardsation and variety could be perceived as a lack of standardness. Undoubtedly, more data should be collected to shed light on NZ respondents' heightened awareness of variety in UKE. The positive comments indicating attractiveness such as "Nice to listen to", "Very fluent, flowing", "Poetic", "Mellow", and the lack of negative status comments (such as those given for Australia in Table 3) reflect a generally positive attitude toward UK English from all participants when considered alongside the relatively small percentage of negative comments in the data.

1

Although respondents were not available for interview, it seems reasonable to assume that "the grand daddy" is synonymous with 'an archetypal example' e.g. the Grand Canyon is the "grand daddy of North American whitewater" (www.cyberwest.com).

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Positive status

Negative solidarity

Positive solidarity

Awareness of variation

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USA n=361 59% Proper Most standard Grand daddy of English Ultimate correct way Original English Intelligent Rich 14% Snobbish Prissy Stuck up

Australia n=143 45% Proper English Correct English Ah, proper use of language... Refined Rich

New Zealand n=103 41% Proper Original accent The original English High class

13% Snobbish Pompous Poms

17% Ponsy Snooty British Poms

3% I love British accents! Pleasant to listen to I like it 0%

8% Nice to listen to, Very fluent, Flowing Poetic Soft 9% Depends on what kind they speak-can be refined, classy or joking Caribbean, Disparate class and regionally based accents Depends on region

4% I love the English accent

27% There are heaps of different versions spoken in England Lots of different accents A wide range of accents and dialects that is easy to hear

Table 2: Comments on UK English

3.2 Australian English The paucity of positive status comments such as "proper" or "correct" (see Table 3) indicates that these respondents assign very little positive status to Australian English (AE). While some negative status comments (e.g. "incorrect", "lower class", "less proper") appeared, the largest percentage of comments falls into the positive solidarity category (e.g. "friendly", "laid back"). AE is seen by U S and U K respondents as "friendly" and "laid back" but not very correct or sophisticated. The US respondents appear to have some difficulty making comments on AE as they indicated the highest percentage of "don't know" types of comments. The strength of media representations such as film and soap operas is apparent in the high percentage of responses like " G ' d a y

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mate", "Neighbours" (an Australian soap opera) and "Crocodile Dundee". If the percentage of NZ respondents' media stereotype comments (12%) are compared to that of the US and UK (22% and 23% respectively), it seems that these respondents are more reliant on media representations than the NZ respondents. That is, the closer proximity of New Zealand to Australia provides more opportunities for personal contact. This close contact may also account for the fact that respondents did not agree on characteristics of AE to the same degree. The US and UK respondents made similar comments on AE with regard to negative status, positive solidarity and media stereotypes dimensions. NZ participants, however indicated stronger negative solidarity feelings about AE ("bastards", "bloody awful"), made fewer comments about media stereotypes and indicated that AE is similar to NZE ("like us mostly"). The NZ participants' comments may reflect familiarity and antagonism felt toward a more powerful neighbour, similar to that between Wales and England (Garrett et al. 2003), or Canada and the US. USA

Positive status Negative status

Negative solidarity

n=296 3% Proper, Upper class 9% Uncivilized Less proper Unintelligent 0%

Positive solidarity

23% Friendly, Fun Nice accent Laid back I like it a lot

Comparison to another variety Inability to characterize

0%

Media stereo-types

17% Different accent Don't know Accented foreign 22% G'day mate Crocodile Dundee Crocodile Hunter Down Under

Table 3: Comments on Australian English

UK

n=198 0%

8% Informal register Lower class Hard to respect 3% Irritating Whiny

37% Friendly Funny Laid back Relaxed Lovely to hear 0%

5% Different accent Different pronunciation 23% G'day mate "Neighbours" Barbeques Crocodile Dundee

New Zealand n=97 0% 1% Incorrect Slangy Unrefined 35% Bastards Bloody Aussie Slap-in-your-face Bloody awful, Yuk 4% Relaxed Down-to-earth

10% Similar to New Zealand Like us mostly 8% Different sounding Unusual 12% Dingos Crocodile Hunter

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3.3 US English Comments from all three groups about US English were neutral to negative in general. A mere three percent of comments indicated positive status while positive solidarity comments did not amount to more than thirteen percent (see Table 4). Some comments in the negative categories were unequivocal such as "don't like Americans", "can't stand American way of being too extroverted". In the category of negative solidarity, "annoying" and "loud" was found often in responses from each country. Negative status comments related to incorrectness such as "modified version", "slang" and "grammatically incorrect". The majority of the positive comments (the highest percentage coming from UK participants) hinted at solidarity such as "cool" and "friendly". Also few in number (6%) were comments relating to media stereotypes (especially by comparison with Australia which had 23% of comments from UK respondents falling into that category). There was less comment (5-9%) on regional variety than mentioned for UK English (0-27%). Given the ubiquity of US media in the respondents' countries, these percentages are smaller than might be expected. However, it could be postulated that the longstanding presence of US media and other contact with people from the US enables respondents to characterize US English at this point in time without the need to draw on these resources. Certainly, more data on US English are needed to clarify this issue. UK Positive status Negative status

Positive solidarity

Negative solidarity

n=214 0%

13% Modified version Incorrect, nonstandard Slang They don't speak it properly 13% Friendly Enthusiastic Motivated 35% Annoying Loud Brash Artificial Rubbish

New Zealand 0%

n=139

10% Perverted English Broken sentences Slang

4% Cool accent Smooth way of talking Quite nice to listen to 29% Annoying Loud Don't like Americans Not a very nice accent to listen to

Australia n=158 3% Words are ended properly 13% Slang Lazy Grammatically incorrect Try to break with tradition (UK)

6% Animated Laid back Friendly 42% Annoying Loud Ugly Farcical tripe

Students' attitudes toward varieties of English

Media stereotypes

6% Language of film and media Jerry Springer Cowboys

Inability to characterize

0%

Awareness of variety

5% Various types of English differing across country in same manner to England

8% I hear this accent too much on TV McDonalds Carnival ride announcers and hot dog sellers 3% Accented The accent 9% A wide range of accents Lots of accents Regional accents

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7% TV Mass produced Hollywood

9% Don't know Answers left blank Different 5% Depending on dialect Variety of accents

Table 4: Comments on US English

3.4 New Zealand English A large number of the US and UK participants either did not write anything or indicated that they didn't know what to say about New Zealand English (NZE) (see Table 5). The inability to characterize NZE (e.g. "don't know", "accented") especially for US and UK participants, is also emphasized by the large percentage of comments that simply compared NZE to some other variety. The UK and US respondents also differed from Australian respondents by indicating a higher percentage of positive solidarity comments (e.g. "pleasant", "cheery") for NZE. Australian respondents, however, were able to give specific examples of pronunciation differences ("fush η chups") and were the only group to supply negative solidarity type comments. As discussed for AE above, proximity may explain the Australian respondents' familiarity with and attitudes toward NZE. US participants indicated the highest percentage of positive status comments (e.g. "proper", "intelligent") about NZE.

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USA

Positive status

Negative status Positive solidarity

Negative solidarity

n=117 8% Proper Intelligent Upper class 3% Lower class Hard to understand 15% Pleasant Rugged personality I like listening to them Sexy 0

Comparison with other variety

40% Similar to Australian Similar to Irish Similar to British

Inability to characterize

21% Don't know Accented Not easy to identify

UK

n=129 0%

Australia n=118 1% Close to correct Normal

0%

8% Lower class Backwards cousin 1% Friendly Relaxed

19% Laid back Appealing Cheery Sexy rugby players 0

41% Similar to Australian Like English English 23% Don't know Answers left blank Very distinct

10% Harsh Annoying Very off 18% Like Australian Practically Aussies

15% Don't know Answers left blank Pronounced differently

Table 5: Comments on New Zealand English

4. Summary In summary, these respondents accord high status to UK English. They accord negative status and negative solidarity traits to US English. The US and UK respondents accord positive solidarity traits to Australian English while NZ participants associated it with strong negative solidarity traits. In addition, the US, the UK and NZ respondents draw on media stereotypes in order to characterize Australian English. With regard to NZ English, respondents from all countries surveyed showed a reluctance to consistently characterise this variety. As can be seen in the above results, this research demonstrates strong evidence of notions of correctness/prescriptiveness with regard to varieties of English around the world among respondents in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. As described in the introduction above, these notions are synonymous with linguistic purism and are often the features non-linguists use to describe

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language. Comments about correctness, labelled either positive or negative status in Tables 2-5, figured prominently in the responses. Recall that respondents were asked about their 'impression' of the varieties they listed and were not obligated to comment on correctness, however, forty-five to fifty-nine percent of comments on UK English were categorised as positive status comments. These respondents seem to rely to some degree on notions of correctness for measuring all varieties. Especially telling are the strong puristic attitudes reflected in answers such as "Grand Daddy of English", "ultimate correct way", etc., expressed by the US respondents about UK English. These US respondents live in a region of the US that has been found to be linguistically secure: when surveyed about language correctness, respondents from this region ranked the English from their state the highest of all the US states (Niedzielski & Preston 2000: 66). Yet they, when asked about English in the global setting, assign high status to UK English (59% of comments were positive status), and appear to concede correctness to a variety other than their own.

5. Purism and English as a world language These results have special relevance to the very popular scholarly subject of globalisation. Currently, the status of the English language is a topical theme in discussions about globalisation and is demonstrated by the numerous books that have been devoted to this subject (such as Crystal 1997, Graddol 1997, Phillipson 2003). The discussions often centre around the spread of the use of English around the world and sometimes discuss a hegemonic influence of US English. According to Phillipson (2003: 72), in entertainment, popular culture, 'lifestyle', and consumerism, Americanization and McDonaldization are massively influential. Hollywood products are ubiquitous on television screens, either dubbed or in the original language, on both private and public service channels.

Phillipson (2003: 166) isn't alone in believing that '"World Standard Spoken English' is bound to be based on Anglo-American mother tongue norms". Barber (1996: 84) states [...] the global culture speaks English - or, better, American. In McWorld's terms, the Queen's English is little more today than a high-falutin dialect used by advertisers who want to reach affected upscale American consumers. American English has become the world's primary transnational language in culture and the arts as well as science, technology and commerce.

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The high percentage of positive status comments for UKE described above from these young university students from three English-dominant countries seems to contradict the notion that UKE is little more than a "high falutin dialect" aimed at "upscale American consumers". The positive status comments shown in Table 2 coupled with the absence of comments for UKE such as old-fashioned, archaic or out-of-date may be an indication that its status as a contemporary variety is not yet challenged. Folk attitudes toward varieties of English have been neglected when contemplating the status of English as a world language. What some globalisation theorists have overlooked is the very important influence of attitudes on the status of a language that has been described by research on language attitudes (such as Giles & Ryan 1982, Cargile, Ryan & Bradac 1994). Because language status is intricately intertwined with language attitudes, the status of global varieties of English cannot be accurately described without this information. Globalisation theorists often discuss the pervasive presence of US English and predict the outcome as a homogenized world English that resembles that of the US. The results reported here, in addition to previous research, indicate that attitudes to US English are not as favourable as those toward UK English. The state and effect of attitudes must be considered alongside the complex mixture of politics, economics, language planning policies and the like that play a role in the status and future of languages. More research from populations around the world on attitudes to varieties of English and other languages in a global setting is necessary to have a better understanding of how purism and the complexities of globalisation play a role in the status of English as a world language.2

6. References Barber, Benjamin. 1996. Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Ballantine Books. Bayard, Donn. 1990. 'God help us if we all sound like this': Attitudes to New Zealand and other English Accents'. In: A. Bell & J. Holmes (eds.). New Zealand ways of speaking English. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 67-96. Bayard, Donn, Ann Weatherall, Cynthia Gallois & Jeffery Pittam. 2001. 'Pax Americana? Accent and attitudinal evaluation in New Zealand, Australia and America'. In: Journal of Sociolinguistics 5,1: 22-49. Cargile, Aaron, Howard Giles, Ellen B. Ryan & James J. Bradac. 1994. 'Language Attitudes as a social process: a conceptual model and new directions'. Language and Communication 14, 3. 211-236. Crystal, David. 1997. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2

As only participants for whom English is a first language have been included, it is acknowledged that the view from communities for whom English is a second language is necessary for a completely global view. Data collection in these communities is currently underway.

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Garrett, Peter, Nikolas Coupland & Angie Williams. 2003. Investigating Language Attitudes: Social meanings of dialect ethnicity and performance. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Giles, Howard & Ellen Ryan. 1982. 'Prolegomena for developing a social psychological theory of language attitudes'. In: Ryan, Ellen & Giles, Howard (eds.). Attitudes toward language variation. London: Arnold. 208223. Graddol, David. 1997. The Future of English? London: British Council. Haagen, Monique van der. 1998. Caught between norms: The English pronunciation of Dutch learners. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics. Huygens, Ingrid & Graham Vaughan. 1983. 'Language attitudes, ethnicity and social class in New Zealand'. In: Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 4. 207-223. Jarvella, Robert, Eva Bang, Amt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger Mees. 2001. 'Of mouths and men: non-native listeners' identification and evaluation of varieties of English'. In: International Journal of Applied Linguistics 11, 1. 37-56. Ladegaard, Hans. 1998. 'National stereotypes and language attitudes: the perception of British, American and Australian language and culture in Denmark'. In: Language and Communication 18. 251-74. Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy. 31999. Authority in language: Investigating standard English. London: Routledge. Niedzielski, Nancy & Dennis Preston. 2000. Folk Linguistics. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Phillipson, Robert. 2003. English only Europe? London: Routledge. Preston, Dennis. 1986. 'Five visions of America'. In: Language in Society 15. 221-40. Preston, Dennis. 1996. 'Whaddayaknow?: The Modes of Folk Linguistic Awareness'. In: Language Awareness 5, 1. 40-74. Ray, George & Christopher Zahn. 1999. 'Language Attitudes and Speech Behavior New Zealand and Standard American English'. In: Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18, 3. 310-319. Ryan, Ellen Bouchard, Howard Giles & Richard Sebastian. 1982. 'An Integrative perspective for the study of attitudes toward language variation'. In: Ellen Bouchard Ryan & Howard Giles (eds.) Attitudes toward language variation. London: Edward Arnold. 1-9. Stewart, Mark, Ellen Bouchard Ryan & Howard Giles. 1985. 'Accent and social class effects on status and solidarity evaluations'. In: Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 11. 98-105. Zahn, Christopher & Robert Hopper. 1985. 'Measuring language attitudes: the speech evaluation instrument'. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 4. 113-123.

Nancy Niedzielski

Linguistic Purism from several perspectives: views from the "secure" and "insecure" 1. Introduction Researchers from various different fields have used several different methods in the investigation into what a pure form of a given language might be. For instance, the work of perceptual dialectologists (e.g., Preston 1989, Preston 1999, Long & Preston 2002 and the authors therein) on US English provides information about non-linguists' impressions of dialect boundaries, regional definitions of standard English, and the regions in which respondents believe that "correct" English is spoken. Social psychologists (e.g. myriad studies including and since Lambert 1967, Giles 1970, Giles and Powesland 1975) investigate attitudes towards speakers of various dialects, and the perceived standardness of those dialects is revealed through the degrees and types of prestige assigned to their speakers. Language attitudes work (e.g. Lippi-Green 1997) has provided ample information about the forms that are considered "incorrect" or nonstandard, and the perceived users of such forms. And there is ample evidence that nonlinguists discuss and politicize this issue - the ubiquitous discussions of in the media of, for instance, "Spanglish" is but one example. There is a long and rich history, then, the exploration of prescriptivist ideas about language; however, defining in positive terms exactly what constitutes the standard or pure form of a given language is difficult, and perhaps impossible. As Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1998 point out, "standard American English seems to be determined more by what it is not than by what it is" (12, emphasis in original). Below, I present data that suggests that the difficulty may be due to the fact that for speakers, there are several separate, and not necessarily congruent, ways of conceptualizing, for instance, standard American English. That is, while respondents are able to assign standardness rankings to regions of the US, actual forms used in those regions, even by speakers ranked as overtly prestigious, may in fact be labeled as nonstandard in perceptual tests. Furthermore, as work on the issue of overt versus covert prestige has shown, there is evidence to suggest that a dialect that is perceived to be pure or correct

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is not necessarily the most desirable one, and that speakers displaying different levels of linguistic security may in fact display different levels of awareness of nonstandard features. For instance, respondents from regions marked by lower levels of linguistic security, may be more accurate on recognizing features of their own speech. Finally, I suggest that linguists themselves may be unintentionally complicit in the mislabeling of certain forms as "impure," in for instance discussions about borrowings and the perceived globalization of American English. I end with a brief discussion on the real-world consequences of labels like "impure" or "incorrect," offering one more set of data to the growing research that reveals that notions of impurity in language are more than mere academic issues, but that oftentimes speakers pay serious prices speaking varieties labeled in negative terms.

2. The view from the "secure" A. Michigan We begin our discussion with an examination of the white, middle-class speakers of southeastern Michigan. In a number of studies (e.g. Preston 1989, Niedzielski and Preston 1999), this group of speakers has demonstrated high degrees confidence in the correctness of their own variety of American English, or what Labov 1966 called linguistic security. Perhaps the clearest demonstration of this is Figure 1 below. In this figure, results of a ranking task are presented: subjects from southeastern Michigan were asked to label the correctness of the dialects spoken in each state, with the darker shades representing the highest degrees of "correctness." As is apparent from an examination of the figure, Michigan - and only Michigan - receives the highest correctness ranking. This phenomenon of ranking their own speech as the most correct is confirmed by the interviews presented in Niedzielski and Preston 1999. Michigan residents unequivocally offer their variety as an example of what correct American English, often referring to theirs as the variety closest to what dictionaries or grammar books prescribe.

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• NeruYorkCily #"Ί7ϊΛίη jton.D.C.

Fig. 1. Michigan map of correctness means scores ratings (Preston 1989) where respondents rated each area on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 = least correct; 10 -= most correct).

However, the vowel systems of speakers from this area are rapidly diverging from what most Americans - including most Michiganders - consider "standard." As participants in the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), which encompasses speakers from not only Michigan but Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York, their vowels have shifted dramatically away from values offered as those found in "standard American English" (SAE), for example those offered in Peterson and Barney 1952. The question then becomes, do speakers of Michigan English consider the NCS vowels to be standard? In their self-categorization as speakers of standard English, do they include the vowels that have diverged from what most speakers consider "standard"? The results of a series of studies that I conducted over several years (see Niedzielski 1995, 1999, and 2001 for details) with speakers of southeastern Michigan varieties suggest that the answer is no. Figures 2 and 3 present the results of a perception task given to 42 Michigan residents, in which they were asked to choose from a list of synthesized vowels the vowel that best matched a vowel that they heard in a Michigan speaker. Specifically, after hearing a Michigan speaker produce a sentence containing the words 'last' and 'pop' (both of which contain a shifted vowel: /ae/ and /a/ respectively), the subjects were asked to listen to a set of six synthesized tokens, and to choose the token that they thought the speaker produced. They were given the option of listening to the sentence as many times as they wished (although few listen more than once), and were then to record their choice.

Views from the "secure" and "insecure"

255

These figures reveal that few of the respondents chose the token that was the actual vowel the speaker produced. In fact, none of the respondents chose the vowel that matched the speaker's /as/, and only two of the respondents chose the actual token representing the speaker's /a/. Instead, most respondents chose tokens that were produced from formants that matched those found in Peterson and Barney 1952 - vowels that are considered "standard." Even more intriguing, the remainder of the respondents chose tokens that I have labeled "hyper-standard." This label refers to the fact that these tokens are farther from the actual token then even the standard token - farther back and lower in the case of /as/, and farther back in the case of /a/. Token #

Fl

F2

label of token

# and % of respondents who chose each token

1 2 3

900 775 700

1530 1700 1900

hyper-standard canonical /ae/ actual vowel produced

4(10%) 38 (90%) 0

Fig. 2. Formants of tokens of 'last' played for respondents (N=42) and responses.

Token

Fl

F2

label of token

770 900 700

1050 1400 1600

hyper-standard canonical /a/ actual vowel produced

# 1 2 3

# and % of respondents who chose each token 4 (10%) 36 (86%) 2 (5%)

Fig. 3. Formants of tokens of 'pop' played for respondents (N-42) and responses

In other words, the respondents did not chose the NCS token as the one that best-matched the vowel of a fellow Michigan speaker, but rather chose the one that represented one that conforms a standard. While it did not conform to what the speaker produced, it is consistent with the notion that Michigan speakers are SAE speakers. This gives us a picture of speakers who believe that they are speaking a "pure, "standard" variety of a language, but who do not in fact find actual features in their own dialect to be standard. Their notions of purity come not from the acoustic evidence they are presented with every day as they talk to their cohorts, but from other sources - perhaps from historical beliefs, or the media, or the fact that their sense of linguistic security allows them to filter out evidence incongruent with their beliefs (see Niedzielski 2001 and 2002 for a discussion of each of these hypotheses). Whatever the cause of the phenomenon is, these studies suggest that even from the point of view of the very linguistically secure, a definition of standard in positive terms is difficult.

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Β. California A second group of speakers that displays relatively high levels of linguistic security is examined in Fought 2002. Fought uses methodology from perceptual dialectology in her attempt to discover Californians' attitudes towards dialect variation, specifically asking them to draw their notions of dialect boundaries on a map of the United States. Although no instruction was given to the subjects regarding the labeling of the regions they denoted, several of them did in fact offered labels and explication of their regions, and these labels are of particular interest, since they reveal an interesting facet of the subjects' linguistic security. First, as an illustration of the linguistic security of the subjects, Fought includes a composite map which includes the states given labels such as "good English" or "best English," and paralleling the Michigan subjects discussed above, California receives the most such labels. In providing their state as the primary example of good English, they reveal a relatively high degree of linguistic security. An additional parallel to the Michigan subjects is that the states surrounding the subjects' home states seem to receive some reflected glory: for the Michigan residents, the speakers from states surrounding them were almost as likely to use "correct" English as them; for the California residents, the speakers from the states surrounding them were almost as likely to use "good" English. The only other part of the country that receives such labels is New England and states surrounding it (but not Michigan). There was a second set of labels, however, that some of Fought's subjects used: several of them labeled some regions as places where "correct" or "proper" English was found. Interestingly, none of them used such a label for California, or any of the surrounding states. Instead, New England states received the most votes, with several surrounding states (and in fact Michigan) receiving almost as many. The inclusion of New England in both the "correct" and "good" groups suggests that there is some interaction between these two ideas; nonetheless, the fact that that they do not completely overlap, in that a state can be "good" but not "correct" (i.e., California), and "correct" but not "good" (i.e., Michigan) suggests that there are distinct types of positive associations for these speakers. This is different from straightforward notions of overt and covert prestige, however. First, Fought reports that most of the labels given to Californian English were positive, and second, California is generally associated with both correctness and pleasantness by speakers in other regions of the country (Preston 1989). The picture that emerges then is one whereby Californian's self-stereotypes - such as 'laid-back,' 'relaxed' and 'surfer' (Fought 2002: 131) are the very features that at once make it 'good,' but not 'proper.'

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Having taught sociolinguistics classes myself in California for six years, I can attest to the linguistic security of the students from California whom I encountered. Almost all of the native Californians would offer their state as an example of one in which "accent-free," good English was spoken. In fact, most students would outright reject the notion that they themselves used such southern Californian features such as fronted /u/, or that their /a/ and /O/ had merged (so that 'cot' and 'caught' are homophonous). Since these features may be perceived as nonstandard, and since they perceive themselves as speakers of standard English, they do not perceived these features to be part of their system (again, parallel to the case of the Michigan speakers examined above).

3. Views from the "insecure" A. Texas White middle class speakers in Houston, Texas provide a contrast to the situation described above regarding Michiganders and Californians. The basic difference, for the purpose of the comparison being made here, is that Texans do not feel that they speak "correct" or "good" English. In fact, in the four years that I have had students perform perceptual dialectology work in various classes, less than 1% of the respondents to their surveys have included Texas among the states that use most correct English. Texas often scores above other southern states, but it is rarely scored the highest. Respondents do give its speakers labels such as 'honest' or 'real' (similar to what one expects from speakers of canonical covertly prestigious varieties). But they also willingly offer examples of why the dialect of their fellow Texans is not correct. Their reaction to illustrations of specific features in the varieties of white middle class Houstonians is markedly different from the reactions of the Californians described above. They immediately accept as features that they have heard variants such as fronted /o/, merged IV and /E/ before nasals (so that 'pin' and 'pen' are homophonous) , and merged /a1 and /O/. In fact, I have now begun to ask students about differences that they perceive, before I present them, and have been surprised to have them offer the fronted /o/ and the mergers themselves (and while the merger before nasals is somewhat of a stereotype, neither of the other two seem to be). They are therefore much more aware of specific features of their own variety, and I suggest that this is due to the fact that they do not have such a stake in perceiving only 'standard' features in their speech. They do not start with the assumption that they are speakers of SAE, and are therefore less threatened by having nonstandard features pointed out to them.

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Β. New Zealand The case of New Zealand English (NZE) - and specifically the alleged adoption of American or British forms, is a different type of linguistic insecurity. In this case, researchers have been perhaps responsible for the perception of New Zealanders as linguistically insecure, based in their presentation of certain lexical and phonological borrowings as evidence for the fact that New Zealanders are opting for American or British forms over NZE forms. For instance, much has been made of the fact that words such as 'butter' and 'water' are increasingly being produced with flapped, rather than unvoiced, /t/, and that Ν undergoes debuccalization word-finally (e.g. Holmes 1994). Additionally, words such as 'biscuit,' 'bonnet,' and 'boot' appear to be being replaced by 'cookie,' 'hood,' and 'trunk' (Bayard 1989). These innovations are said to be the result of American and British English having more social, economic, and cultural dominance in New Zealand than NZE, and thus, more overt prestige. New Zealanders, in other words, are adopting American variants, with the (subconscious) desires of attaining the types of prestige associated with them. However, Meyerhoff & Niedzielski 2003 calls this interpretation into question. First, there are several problems with this hypothesis with regard to the phonological borrowings, including the fact that the phonetic naturalness of voicing assimilation and word-final debuccalization needs to be taken into account, and that these variants come from two different sources (American and British English respectively), meaning NZE speakers were simultaneously targeting two different varieties. Second, in Meyerhoff & Niedzielski 2003, we report on research which suggests that some lexical variants that are borrowed from American English are no longer perceived as "American," but rather as New Zealand forms. In this study, subjects were asked about how much a part of NZE certain constructions were (see below): Sample question and possible responses in attitudes survey. He got sick of waiting for the lift, so he walked up instead. ° Not at all New Zealand. ° A little bit. ° Not entirely. ° Somewhat. ° Very. ° Absolutely New Zealand.

While some pairs clearly fostered NZE versus American associations, and there were high rates of agreement on these associations (such as 'biscuit' versus 'cookie'), there were in fact several lexical pairs for which there was no such agreement (such as 'lorry' versus 'truck'). In addition, there were several pairs for which one item was clearly marked as NZE, but the its counterpart was not marked as American (such as 'lift,' seen as NZE, but 'elevator,' not marked as American, and 'torch,' which was marginally seen as representative of NZE, but

259

Views from the "secure" and "insecure"

'flashlight,' not marked as American). We suggest these results indicate that while these items may have been borrowed from American varieties, for current NZE speakers, they no longer signal an identification with American prestige. Speakers are not trying to "sound American" when they use such forms, but rather, are merely using one of the several lexical variants available to them. A final alleged borrowing into NZE that we examine in this paper is the quotative 'be like.' In this paper, we suggest that several of the varieties of English (and in fact several other languages) which are said to have borrowed this construction) may have in fact developed such a construction independently. An examination of a few of the languages for which this construction has been attested (shown in Figure 4) reveals that this type of construction is fairly common in a wide range of languages, from a number of varied and different language families. Finding this construction in different varieties of English does not necessarily mean that such varieties are orienting towards American English norms, or that their speakers are identifying with Americans. It may in fact be a natural development in these varieties. Discourse function Comparison

Bislama

Cerebon

Br. Portuguese

Japanese

Buang

English

olsem

kaya

como

nanka

(na) be

like, as

Complementiser with verbs ofspeech or perception

olsem

ka, konon [speech]

como [perception]

nanka

(na) be

(be) like

Hedge

olsem

(ka?)

cipo

nanka

be

like

Fig. 4. Discourse functions of LIKE lexemes in a range of languages. (Thanks to Clarissa Surek-Clark, Mike Ewing, Mie Hiramoto, Gillian Sankoff.)

C. Consequences for the disenfranchised I end this discussion of views from the linguistically insecure by focusing on a different, and perhaps more serious, consequence of using a variety that is afforded little overt prestige. In the United States, varieties associated with African-Americans are ranked lower that varieties used by EuropeanAmericans, in almost every study, and with almost every group of subjects. There is evidence for this in more tangible, non-academic arenas, however. For instance, Adger et. al. 1999 report that while African-Americans make up approximately 12% of the US population, they make up an astounding 41% of the students in American schools labeled "educably mentally retarded." Further, they state that the determination of this status is based primarily on language use. African-American children are placed in special education programs in US

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public schools in numbers disproportionate to their numbers in the general population, based on their use of language varieties that are perceived to be inherently incorrect, impure, and pathological. Even an examination of less heinous cases demonstrates this. Figure 5 contains data from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) on who gets sent to hearing specialists in US public schools (and selfreferrals, from college students, for comparison). Children get referred by their teachers again based on their language variety, and African-American children are sent again in proportions double their actual numbers in the US population. Hearing loss is not more prominent in African-Americans - in fact, ASHA reports that there is less hearing loss in the African-American populations (ASHA 1997) - but their use of a perceived "impure" variety misleads teachers into believing that their language used is based on a pathology.

White African-American

School 50% 28%

(University) (81%) (9%)

Fig. 5. Race/ethnicity of individuals in a typical monthly caseload: audiologists ( A S H A 1997)

4. Summary I began this paper by examining two groups of what I called "linguistically secure" speakers: white middle class Mighiganders, and white middle class Californians. While both groups believed that the variety that they used represented pure, standard American English, defining SAE in positive terms was difficult. First, there are features in each of these groups' varieties are seen as nonstandard, even by the speakers themselves. Second, the idea of pure or good American English was different for these two groups: for Michiganders, 'good' equates with 'correct,' but for Californians, it does not. Next, I compared these more secure groups' knowledge of features in their own varieties to the knowledge that less linguistically secure speakers possess, suggesting that these speakers may have a greater awareness (or acceptance) of the features found in their varieties. Next, I used the case of borrowings in New Zealand English to suggest that certain perceived "impurities" may be the result of language researchers superposing this belief on speakers, and that the speakers themselves may not view these items as such. Finally, I included a cautionary note regarding some real-world consequences for speakers who use varieties deemed "impure" by the dominant society. Notions of purity, as revealed by each of us who work on ideas of standardness in language, are never straightforward, but rather, are messy and perhaps impossible to define in positive terms. However, we are also aware of

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the fact that there are groups of speakers who pay great prices for the varieties that they use. We owe it to them, then, to continue to examine this messiness, and to find creative ways to bring our conclusions to a more public forum.

5. References Adger, Carolyn, Walt Wolfram, Jennifer Detwyler, & Beth Harry. 1999. Confronting Dialect Minority Issues in Special Education: Reactive and Proactive Perspectives 1. Paper presented to the Third National Research Symposium on Limited English Proficient Student Issues: Focus on Middle and High School Issues. URL: http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/ncbepubs/symposia/third/adger.htm ASHA = Janota, Jeanette. 1997. Omnibus Survey: Caseload Report A: Caseload characteristics of Audiologists. Rockville, MD: ASHA Science and Research. Bayard, Donn 1989. '"Me say that? No way!": The social correlates of American lexical diffusion in New Zealand English.' In: Te Reo 32. 17-60. Fought, Carmen. 2002. 'California Students' Perceptions of, You Know, Regions and Dialects?' In: Long & Preston. 113-134. Giles, Howard. 1970. 'Evaluative reactions to accents.' In: Educational review 22. 211-227. Giles, Howard & Peter F. Powesland. 1975. Speech style and social evaluation. London: Academic Press. Holmes, Janet 1994. 'New Zealand flappers: An analysis of Τ voicing in New Zealand English.' In: English World-Wide 15. 195-224. Labov, Bill. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Lambert, W. E. 1967. Ά social psychology of bilingualism.' In: Journal of social issues 23. 91-109. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. English with an accent. London: Routledge. Long, Daniel & Dennis Preston, eds. 2002. Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology. Vol. 2. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Meyerhoff, Miriam & Nancy Niedzielski 2002. 'Standards, the media and language change.' Paper presented at NWAV31, Stanford University. Niedzielski, Nancy. 1995. 'Acoustic analysis and language attitudes in Detroit.' In: Miriam Meyerhoff (ed). (N)WAVES and Means: University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 3,1:73-86. Niedzielski, Nancy. 1999. 'The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables.' In: Journal of Language and Social Psychology (Special Issue: Attitudes, perception, and linguistic issues, ed. by Milroy, Lesley & Dennis R. Preston) 18(l):62-85.

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Niedzielski, Nancy. 2001. Chipping away at the perception/production interface. In: University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 7.3. 247-251. Niedzielski, Nancy. 2002. Attitudes towards Midwestern English. In Long & Preston. 321-328. Niedzielski, Nancy & Dennis Preston. 2000. Folk Linguistics. Berlin: de Gruyter. Peterson, Gordon & Harold Barney. 1952. 'Control methods used in the study of vowels.' In: Journal of the acoustic society of America 24. 2175-2184. Preston, Dennis. 1989. Perceptual dialectology. Dordrecht: Foris. Preston, Dennis. 1999. Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology. Vol. 1. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Wolfram, Walt & Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1998. American English. Maiden, MA: Blackwell.

Klaus J. Mattheier

Dialect and Written Language: Change in Dialect Norms in the History of the German Language 1. Dialect change: use, contact, awareness "Ir wizzet wol, daz die Niderlender und die Oberlender gar unglich sint an der spräche und an den siten. die von Oberlant, dort her von Zurich, die redent vil anders danne die von Niderlande, von Sahsen. die sint unglich an der spräche: man bekennet sie gar wol von einander die von Sahsenlande unde die von dem Bodensewe von dem Oberlande, unde sint ouch an den siten unglich und an den cleidern." "Also stet ez umbe die niderlender und umbe oberlender, daz manic niderlender ist, der sich der oberlender spräche an nimet". (Socin 1888: I I I ) 1 "Wir können alles - außer Hochdeutsch." (we are good at everything - except Standard German) 2

These two texts, which span eight centuries of the history of the German language, both refer to the topic of the following paper. For once, the focus of this paper will be on dialects and not - as is typical in the written histories of most languages - the standard variety. Judgements about and evaluations of dialect and especially the change in such 'dialect attitudes' in the course of the history of the German language will be dealt with. In Berthold von Regensburg's statement from the thirteenth century, it is not the fact that two different regional languages existed in the German language area at this time which is of greatest interest, but rather the particular value placed on the Oberländische (Upper German), which can be recognised by the fact that it is adopted by the Niederländer (people from northern Germany) in addition to their own variety.

1 2

All German quotations are translated and listed in the appendix. TV-advertisement for the regional state of Baden-Württemberg, broadcast in 2003.

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And in the advertising slogan for Baden-Württemberg, we are interested in the social upgrading which the use of dialect here indirectly undergoes. To begin with, I will consider what is generally to be understood by 'changes in dialect norms'. I will attempt to discuss this question in the framework of a 'sociopragmatic history of language' as outlined by von Polenz (cf. von Polenz 1995). At the centre of this article is the process of change which the evaluation of dialect undergoes in the history of the German language and the repeated 'reevaluation' of dialect use. In the first section, I will discuss the 'pre-standard phase of the history of the German language' (cf. Wiesinger 1990), i.e. the period in which no standard language existed and the dialects competed with each other. The second part of this paper deals with the rise of 'dialect stigmatization syndrome', which parallels the emergence and acceptance of the standard variety at a written and spoken level (cf. Mattheier 2003). And the third part is dedicated to those approaches to a re-evaluation of dialect varieties parallel to the standard whose result we can observe today as a dialect renaissance (cf. Löffler 1997). What do we think of when we think of the phenomenon 'change in dialect norms' and what aspects of such change in dialect norms should be discussed here? Through von Polenz's conception of a sociopragmatic history of language, the history of the German language has been diverted from the previously commonly accepted focus on standard language. In this approach, language history is the history of varieties and language styles, how they can be observed in the architecture of the language as a whole and how they change (Mattheier 1998). Subject areas of this 'new' language history are use, contact, awareness, as well as structure. The history of the German language is comprised of - for example - the history of the structure of plural formation, the use of youth language as well as the history of German-French language contact in early modern history. And the change which German dialects undergo is also part of the history of the German language. By this - which is crucial for our line of argument - we mean not only the history of individual dialects on a structural level but also the expansion of different dialects at the expense of others in the area and, in particular, the gradual suppression of dialects by regional and larger varieties. And thirdly, changes in the societal evaluations which different dialects have experienced in the course of time are also part of the history of a dialect. This third aspect, dialect awareness, will be discussed here. Without going into any complex theoretical discussion of the concept of language awareness (cf. Scharloth 2001), it is assumed here that language awareness entails knowledge about language rules as well as sociolinguistic knowledge about

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appropriate language use and knowledge about the rules and norms of variety evaluation. What is meant by 'variety evaluation'? Evaluation contributes positive or negative value to an individual language phenomenon, a variety or a language style during language use; in other words, it is viewed as desirable or undesirable or inappropriate by the language user and his/her partner in communication. In many cases, the user of such a language phenomenon will be classified as belonging to a regional, social or situative group or constellation as a consequence. If, for example, as in our first example above, Niederländer adopted the language of the Oberländer in the thirteenth century, then one can draw conclusions about the status of the oberländische language. Language evaluations are a kind of steering unit for the changes within individual varieties and also between different varieties of one language. We do not claim that any change within the architecture of a language is determined by differences in evaluation - however, the evaluation of single forms and of entire varieties do play a role which should not be underestimated (Milroy & Milroy 1985). For example, the standard German variety established itself within the language community only after it was positively evaluated as the symbol of the emerging German nation in the nineteenth century (Mattheier 1991). In the German-speaking area of Switzerland, where this factor is missing, the development has not resulted in a unified language, but rather in a dialect/standard diglossia according to medium (Sonderegger 1985), within which the standard variety is evaluated in a problematic and ambivalent way. This paper will not describe the changes in evaluation of the emerging standard variety, but rather the evaluation of the dialects. It deals with changing dialect attitudes in the history of the German language and with the function which these developments fulfil within the history of the German language. Since the twelfth/thirteenth centuries, dialects or lantsprachen as they were labelled in their time, have been the subject of written transmission. In addition to lists of dialects or groups of dialect speakers, which appear in literary texts or their prefaces without further evaluation, there are texts in which a relatively solid evaluation hierarchy of the various regions can be recognised (Socin 1888: 100-108). Albrecht von Halberstadt's preface Ovid to his works on Metamorphosis from the year 1210 will serve as a typical example here. The author apologises because he is not from the Upper German region, but from Saxony, which causes him to depart from the norm (Socin 1888: 107):

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Der sin sinne an ditze büch zu rechte hat gevlizzen, der er ist suit ir wizzen: enweder dirre zweier, weder Swäp noch Beier, weder Dürinc noch Franke. Des lät ü sin zu danke ob ir fundet in den rimen, die sich zeinander limcn, valsch oder unrecht: wan ein Sachse, heizet Albrecht, geboren von Halberstadt ü ditze büch gemachet hat von latine zu düte.

2. Dialect evaluation in German pre-standard We find early evidence for the fact that certain varieties were already viewed as superior to others in the Middle Ages in a text by Neidhart, when he speaks of a 'Vlaeminc' (Fleming), who assumes 'vlaemischen hövescheit' (Flemish courtliness) and 'mit siner rede vlaemet' (talks like a Fleming) (cf. Socin 1888: 74). This has to be seen in the context of the specific significance which Flanders and Brabant had for the reception of Romance chivalrous culture in Germany. And this dialect norm is given an ironic twist in Meier Helmbrecht, when the protagonist attempts to improve his social standing through the sporadic use of broken Flemish (cf. Socin 1888: 74). Early on, a relatively stable rank order can be seen among the different regional varieties, in which the 'oberlendischen' and the 'niderlendischen' areas are distinguished from each other. One of the many pieces of evidence for this position is the above-mentioned text by Berthold von Regensburg, in which the implicit difference in status is evident. But a relatively stable hierarchy also develops within the Oberländischen' with the Swabian dialect assuming the highest position followed by the Franconian and the Rhenish and finally the Bavarian dialect. The unquestionable prestige of the Swabian dialect at least until the fourteenth century compared to all other dialects also becomes obvious in a text by Teichner (Socin 1888: 109): Sö spricht der dritt: "Ez waere kluoc, swaz er ret von manegen sachen, künde erz niuwan swaebisch machen, nach der lantspräch üf und ab".

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This topos of the outstanding prestige of Swabian dominates the discourse relating to the evaluation of regional varieties through the late Middle Ages; however, it has to be noted that what is meant by the label 'Swabian' varies. While the term 'Swabian' originally denoted the Staufer-Alemannic area of chivalrous culture, the area around the city of Augsburg later takes its place, whose high standing was due to the sociocultural and economic significance of the city. In the fifteenth century and at the beginning of the sixteenth century, we often find ironic remarks about Swabian, which point to the problematising of this topos. In Pauli's 'Schimpf und Ernst', for example, we find the following statement: er ist ein Zunftmeister worden, er ret nie me sein Sprach; er nimpt sich an, Schwebisch zu reden und ist nie recht fur das Thor kumen. (Socin 1888: 180)

How long such a prestige topos can survive becomes obvious as the great literary-cultural past of the Swabians and Alemannics are evident in the works of Bodmer and Breitinger in the middle of the eighteenth century, who used this argument against Gottsched's dictating of norms (Henzen 1954: 138-40). Dornblüth's arguments for Augsburg and Swabian (Kluge 1918: 282-52) in the development of the New High German language also bring the great culturalhistorical significance of this regional variety into play. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the topos of the specific role of the regional variety of the south-western area of Germany competes with the concept of a decentralised language-value system adopted from the Middle Ages in which the individual larger areas which have a writing tradition, i.e. Low German, Rhenish, Alemannic, Bavarian, and East Central German, are treated equally. This position culminates in the demand that a chancery writer should be able to use not only his own chancery variety but also all the other major regional written varieties (Socin 1888: 174-75). However, by comparing the numerous contemporary remarks on this topic, one sees that subliminal evaluations and hierarchies usually come into play. For one thing, a preference for one's own regional written language is evident in many cases. Secondly, Müller (Müller 2000: 174-75) has shown in his analysis of the so-called addressee-orientation of the Cologne written language of the late Middle Ages that - at least during the fifteenth century - status differences played a role. While letters from Cologne to the Upper German area were clearly orientated towards the local written variety, letters from the south did not reveal any attempt to use the written language of Cologne. Therefore, we can assume that value and prestige differences between the central regional languages already existed before the beginning of the development of a standard variety on the level of language awareness (Mattheier 1986).

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With the development of the standard variety, the architecture of the German language as a whole experiences a fundamental re-organization. From the horizontal existence of five to six equal regional varieties, which underwent homogenization on the written as well as the oral level, the German standard language emerges from around 1450 to the end of the eighteenth century in a process of vertical movement (Reichmann 1988). The Early New High German period in the history of German (1350-1650) is characterised by two fundamental processes of change in the area of the dialects: first, by the development of a supra-regional written standard in a complex process of levelling and stratification, which culminates in the loss of regional diversity on the written level which is typical for the late Middle Ages; secondly, by the development of a dialect stigmatization syndrome on the oral level, which has fundamentally influenced the architecture of the German language and still does to this point.

3. Dialect awareness and evaluation in early modern times The first development will not be discussed any further here, as its main focus lies on research into the Early New High German period. Instead, we will focus on dialect stigmatization and the fact that, since then, not individual dialects, but rather dialects in general have been disregarded and viewed as inferior with respect to the standard variety. On the basis of an analysis of contemporary metalinguistic statements and similar sources, five strands of argumentation could be determined so far, in which such stigmatization of dialect is topicalized and discussed. In Laurentius's Albertus (1573), the speakers of a dialect are the 'simpliciores et incultiores' (simpler and less educated) or the 'inculti et agrestes' (uneducated and rustic) (Socin 1888: 275). Rivius (1576) speaks of the 'homines imperiti et patriae suae fines nunquam egressi1 (inexperienced men who have never left the confines of their home country) (cf. Knoop 1982). The prime interest of this position lies in the sociohistorical argumentation. The theologically and philosophically rooted disregard for the lowest class, i.e. the peasant, forms the basis of this discourse, which simultaneously was identified with disregard for the forms of expression of the peasants, i.e. their dialects (Knoop 1982: 2-3). In addition, we find a polarization between the farming class and its distance from education on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie and 'educatedness', on the other hand, in the process of a changing class structure in the late Middle Ages. This topos of the 'dialect-muttering ignorant peasant' has emerged since the late Middle Ages, even though explicit metalinguistic statements about the social devaluation of dialect and its speakers are found relatively late. In the seventeenth century, in a polemic by Kaspar

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Schoppe (Scioppius) against the Bavarians and the Bavarian dialect, there is at least indirect evidence for a socially motivated devaluation when he emphasises the fact that not only the craftsmen and peasants speak broad dialect there, but also members of higher social circles were ridiculed and looked down upon even at court (cf. Socin 1888: 327). The second strand of argumentation targeting dialect stigmatization concerns language norms and language correctness. The grammarian Fabian Frangk (1530), for example, is the first one to contrast the 'rechte reine Deutsch' (correct pure German) with many 'Landsprachen' (regional varieties), which all contain 'tadelnswerte Abweichungen' (reprehensible deviations), confusion and splitting (Socin 1888: 253). The common dictum of dialect as a corrupted standard language also factors into this context. The third strand of the argument concerning dialect stigmatization is the literary-stylistic argument, claiming that the dialect is not a full literary language. It is limited to the comical genres and is used primarily for the characterization of 'the ignorant peasant'. In a dramatic story by Johann Kaspar Weißenbach (1672) set in Switzerland, for example, everything is written in High German except for the dialogues between the maid, Anneli, and the peasant's son, Joggeli, the conversation of the soldiers at Murten and a comic song interlude (Trümpy 1955: 164). The fourth argument, closely connected to the second, could be labelled the 'moral' argument. Dialect is seen as the place that fosters the rough language of the masses, which is characterised by the worst vulgarisms and therefore should not be part of the description of a language (Socin 1888: 362). A final dialect stigmatization argument could be labelled the 'enlightenment of the people' argument. This argument has come up regularly since the turn of the nineteenth century, at least indirectly. Its most precise formulation is found in works by Ludolf Wienbarg (1834), who specifically refers to the Low German dialect. Due to the fact that there has been no written language since the sixteenth century, the Low German language has declined and is bound to become extinct. It is not part of intellectual and material progress and therefore keeps its speakers in a state of immaturity, rawness, and lack of interest. Wienbarg expects the school to remove these obstacles on the path to an enlightened society since the primary task of the school is to anchor the High German language in the students. The combined effect of these five argumentation strands creates and stabilises dialect stigmatization.

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4. Dialect stigmatization and renaissance in the nineteenth century So far we have seen an overview of dialect stigmatization in the history of the German language. However, this is not the only development which can be observed in the area of dialect evaluation during this period. Knoop and Reichmann (Knoop 1982: 5-6; Reichmann 1993), among others, have pointed out a number of developments which run contrary to the processes laid out thus far, i.e. they reveal a positive re-evaluation of dialects. I shall comment on these developments only briefly. The positive re-evaluation of dialect was conditioned by the fact that linguistic variation manifested itself as a matter of historical, societal, or general cultural interest. This happened first in academia. Insofar as dialects contained stocks of words no longer present in the standard language and increased the number of root words this way, and insofar as dialect made old texts understandable, it seemed reasonable to collect dialecticisms and provincialisms, as Leibniz had already suggested (cf. Knoop 1982: 6). In the eighteenth century, the discipline of compiling idioticons developed from this approach, the first partial and still pre-scientific approach to dialects (cf. Haas 1994). We speak of dialectology as an independent discipline since the early nineteenth century with the works of Andreas Schmeller and Eduard Stalder. A second argument for the positive re-evaluation of dialects, which was particularly significant for the nineteenth century, was the development of a dialect literature. Already in the middle of the eighteenth century, dialect in literature is no longer used only for the comic genre and to characterise the 'ignorant peasant'. Following Herder's musings on the 'Volkskonzept' (conception of the folk), a differentiated and sophisticated dialect literature emerges, which plays an important role in the positive re-evaluation of dialect in the framework of the enlightenment of the people. A third area in which the significance of dialects was discussed, has been overlooked thus far. From 1820 to around 1870, there was intense discussion of the significance of dialect in schools in the German-speaking area, which has yet to be analysed by researchers. Positions such as Wienbarg's formed only one side of the argument. On the other side stood those who were more or less in favour of not ignoring dialects in schools, which entailed a significant positive re-evaluation of the dialects. An informative overview of this position can be found in the work, 'Morgenstimmen eines naturgemäßen und volksthümlichen Sprach- und Schulunterrichts in niederdeutschen Volksschulen' which was published by the head of the 'Bürger- und Volksschulen zu Wismar', Heinrich Burgwardt, in 1857 in Leipzig. After this broad overview of the developmental dynamics in the area of dialect evaluation, I will continue with an outline of dialect evaluation in the nineteenth

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and at the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In this, I will assume a different situation with regard to the sources and also apply a different method. So far, the sources for dialect evaluation have consisted exclusively of randomly found metalinguistic reflections on dialects. For the outline of dialect evaluation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, autobiographies were chosen of persons who were young during the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century and who experienced primary and secondary language acquisition. A large number of these people, who come from very different circles of society, mention their dialect or the dialect of their surroundings in the context of the description of their youth. This enabled me, at least to a certain extent, to approach my data collection systematically. Apart from a chronological order, autobiographies from the north, the centre, and the south of the German-speaking area were chosen. An additional social differentiation of the authors might be possible. In analysing these texts, I will not discuss the numerous remarks about the use of dialect and its changes, unless they contain evaluations. The discussion of different preferences for various dialects are also disregarded. We are only concerned with evaluating remarks about dialect in general here.3 What kinds of dialect evaluations do we find in these texts? And how are they related to the different motivations for positive or negative evaluations of dialect during the past centuries? In these texts, dialect stigmatization also occurs primarily through a connection of dialect with low social class. Lovis Corinth reports, for example, on East Prussia in the 1860s: Ich wurde immer wegen meines bäuerischen Dialektes gehänselt. Da faßte ich den festen Entschluß, von jetzt ab nur noch Hochdeutsch in der Art zu sprechen, wie die feinen Stadtkinder.

Ludwig Curtius reports about the 1870s in Augsburg: "Zu Hause [Vater ist Arzt] sprachen wir Hochdeutsch, da wir mit Kindern aus dem Volk in Augsburg keinen Verkehr hatten." Lena Christ outlines the social dynamics connected to dialect and dialect change: Meine Mutter [...] sprach immer sehr gewählt; denn sie war jahrelang Köchin in adligen Häusern gewesen. Darum schalt sie nun täglich über meine bäuerische Sprache, wodurch sie mich so einschüchterte, daß ich oft den ganzen Tag kein Wort zu sagen wagte.

3

The autobiographical quotations are taken from Kirsch 1989.

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But there are also instances where the connection between dialect and a lack of education is negatively evaluated. Adolf Erman writes about Berlin in the 1860s: "Neben diesen zivilisierten Kindern gab es dann bei Tappe auch einige weniger zivilisierte". Fritz Mauthner reports on his father: Er verachtete und bekämpfte unerbittlich jeden leisen Anklang an Kudelböhmisch oder an Mauscheldeutsch und bemühte sich [...] uns eine reine übertrieben puristische hochdeutsche Sprache zu lehren.

Robert von Mohl describes one of his high-school teachers in Stuttgart at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Er hatte einen feinen natürlichen Geschmack, und er drang namentlich auf die Beseitigung der dem Schwaben so geläufigen Provinzialismen und örtliche Sprachfehler.

These texts clearly demonstrate that in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century the stereotype of dialect as the mode of expression of 'the ignorant peasants' and the resulting dialect stigmatization still prevailed. Other arguments of dialect stigmatization such as 'dialect as corrupted High German' or 'dialect as an obstacle in the way of enlightening people' are not present in the texts which were investigated. However, this may be due to the kind of sources used. What about those arguments for the positive re-evaluation of dialect and its significance within society which ascribe important functions to it? We do not find any evidence in the texts to support the assumption that dialect has gained importance as a literary language or as a subject of scientific investigation. Only once is the connection between dialect and school mentioned, and the advantages of dialect competence for the acquisition of the native language discussed. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Gerd Eilers reports from Oldenburg that all people there spoke dialect at that time: Der Unterricht in der deutschen Sprache wurde dadurch nicht wenig gefördert, daß das Hochdeutsche fast wie eine fremde Sprache gelernt werden mußte, was natürlich die Aufmerksamkeit auf Rechtschreibung und Satzbildung schärfte.

However, in most texts dealing with a positive re-evaluation of dialect, three new arguments for an increasing prestige of the dialects are mentioned: the integration argument, the emotion argument, and the identity argument. Rudolf Eucken writes for example about the "frischen und knappen, dabei traulichen Art, die das Niederdeutsche besitzt". Hermann Bahr speaks of the "vollblütigen, dumpfen Brandung unserer homerischen Mundart" and Gerhard

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Hauptmann of the "sinnlich-seelenvollen Dialekt und dem sinnlich-armen [...] entseelten Schrifltdeutschen". Here, the positive evaluation of the emotional aspect of dialect is mentioned, which has been addressed before, mostly in the area of dialect literature. The integration argument emphasises the possibility of integrating oneself into society with the help of dialect. Günther Denn, who was born in 1887 in Berlin and moved to Constance in 1895, writes for example: Meine Schwester [...] machte es viel gescheiter. Nach einem halben Jahr beherrschte sie den Konstanzer Dialekt so gut, als ob sie eine Eingeborene sei, und sie war damit vollkommen in die Klasse eingegliedert. And the industrial entrepreneur, Emil Fischer, writes about the Rhineland in the middle of the nineteenth century: Mit dem zahlreichen Dienstperonal, besonders mit den Knechten, standen wir auf vertrautestem Fuße, und die Unterhaltung wurde hier ausschließlich in dem derben niederrheinischen Dialekt geführt. Anna Malberg reports on a partially failed attempt at integration by means of dialect in Berlin in the 1930s: Das erste, dessen ich mich unter ihnen [den Mitschülern] zu schämen anfing, war mein besseres Sprechen. Aber so sehr ich mich in den Freiviertelstunden bemühte, diese bedauernswerte Eigentümlichkeit loszuwerden und die Ausschmückungen 'mang', 'det' [...] sowie einige falsche Kasus passend anzubringen, Mutters gutes Deutsch brach immer wieder durch, es gelang nicht. Da sah mich eines Tages Betty Sannier, das Arbeiterkind, mit einem unergründlichen Lächeln an und sagte: "Warum gibst du dir eigentlich so'ne Mühe, gemein zu sprechen?" I shall label the third dialect prestige argument the 'identity argument'. This means the signalling of a prestigious identity by means of dialect. Felix Dahn writes for example about his Swabian dialect, which he had learned f r o m a Swabian maid: Sie war eine prächtige gescheute, kraftvolle, musterhaft treue und fleißige und frohgelaunte königlich württembergische Schwäbin, mit blitzenden dunkeln Augen: von ihr hab ich jenes hervorragende Schwäbisch gelernt, welches ich [...] sprach und das ich [...] so fließend rede, daß sogar Seine Majestät der König von Württemberg an seiner Tafel anerkennend darüber sich zu äußern geruhte. Friedrich Spielhagen reports that the immigrants in Stralsund around the middle of the nineteenth century "nach dem Verdikt der Eingeborenen [sich] schon dadurch als Fremdlinge auswiesen, daß sie nicht einmal das heimische Platt regelrecht zu sprechen vermöchten". Regional identity can therefore only be

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achieved through dialect, which enhances the significance of the dialect tremendously. So much for the subject of stigmatised dialect and prestigious dialect in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The stigmatization of dialect is still rooted in the unfortunate connection between dialect with 'ignorant peasants' today. The other stigmatization arguments mentioned above are rather academic in nature and therefore do not appear in the sources. A surprising new development can be found in the area of positive dialect re-evaluation. Here, the dialect assumes new functions and shows new prestigious characteristics. Dialects are evaluated very positively in the emotional realm, and they enable integration and an identification with prestigious positions within society. By dealing with the dialect renaissance that we can observe in German since the 1970s, it should be possible to open a further chapter in the history of German dialect and its evaluation. My assumption is that the positive reevaluation of the dialects as seen in the nineteenth century can be found again in the dialect renaissance of today. I thus conclude my remarks on a 'marginal area' within the history of the German language, the evaluation of its dialects and the historical changes it has undergone. These considerations should also point to the fact that many other subjects in language history outside the history of the standard languages are waiting to be investigated within the vastness of the architecture of the language as a whole.

5. References Haas, Walter (ed.). 1994. Provinzialwörter. Deutsche Idiotismensammlungen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Henzen, Walter. 1954. Schriftsprache und Mundarten. Ein Uberblick über ihr Verhältnis und ihre Zwischenstufen im Deutschen. Bern: Franke . Kirsch, Ingrid. 1989. Der Bürger und die Dialekte: Untersuchungen autobiographischer Zeugnisse des 19. Jahrhunderts zur Dialektbewertung. MA thesis. University of Heidelberg. Kluge, Friedrich. 1918. Von Luther bis Lessing. Aufsätze und Vorträge zur Geschichte unserer Schriftsprache. Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer. Knoop, Ulrich. 1982. 'Das Interesse an den Mundarten und die Grundlegung der Dialektologie.' In: Besch, Werner et al. (ed.). Dialektologie. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. 1-23.

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Löffler, Heinrich. 1997. 'Dialektverfall oder Mundarten-renaissance? Podiumsdiskussion.' In: Stickel, Gerhard, (ed.). Varietäten des Deutschen. Regional- und Umgangssprache. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. 348-410. Mattheier, Klaus Jochen. 1986. 'Das Kölner Styngyn und die Dialekte im Spätmittelalter.' In: Cox, Heinrich L. (ed.). Wortes Angst - verbi gratia. Donum natalicum Gilbert A. R. de Smet. Leuwen, Amersfort: De Gruyter. 308-318. Mattheier, Klaus Jochen. 1991. 'Standardsprache als Sozialsymbol.' In: Wimmer, Rainer (ed.). Das 19. Jahrhundert. Sprachhistorische Wurzeln des heutigen Deutschen. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. 41-72. Mattheier, Klaus Jochen. 1998. 'Kommunikationsgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Überlegungen zum Forschungsstand und zu Perspektiven der Forschungsentwicklung.' In: Cherubim, Dieter, Siegfried Grosse & Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.). Sprache und bürgerliche Nation. Beiträge zur deutschen und europäischen Sprachgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. 1-47. Mattheier, Klaus Jochen. 2003. 'German.' In: Deumert, Ana & Wim Vandenbusche, (eds.). Germanic Standardizations - Past to Present. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 211-244. Milroy, James & Lesley Milroy. 1985. 'Language change, social network and speaker innovation.' In: Journal of Linguistics 21. 339-84. Müller, Robert. 2000. 'Rheinische Sprachgeschichte von 1300 bis 1500.' In: Macha, Jürgen u. a. (ed.). Rheinisch-Westfälische Sprachgeschichte. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau. 165-181. Polenz, Peter von. 1995. 'Sprachsystem und soziopragmatische Sprachgeschichte in der Sprachkultivierungsepoche.' In: Gardt, Andreas, Klaus J. Mattheier & Oskar Reichmann (eds.). Sprachgeschichte des Neuhochdeutschen. Gegenstände - Methoden - Theorien. Tübingen: Niemeyer . 39-68. Reichmann, Oskar.1988. 'Zur Vertikalisierung des Varietätenspektrums in der jüngeren Sprachgeschichte des Deutschen.' In: Munske, Horst Haider (ed.). Deutscher Wortschatz. Lexikologische Studien. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. 151-180. Reichmann, Oskar. 1993. 'Dialektale Verschiedenheit: zu ihren Auffassungen und Bewertungen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert.' In: Mattheier, Klaus J. (ed.). Vielfalt des Deutschen. Festschrift für Werner Besch. Frankfurt: Lang . 289314. Scharloth, Joachim. 2001. Sprachnormen und Mentalitäten. Sprachbewusstseinsgeschichte in Deutschland im Zeitraum von 1765 bis 1785. MA thesis. University of Heidelberg.

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Socin, Adolf. 1888. Schriftsprache und Dialekte im Deutschen nach Zeugnissen alter und neuer Zeit. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Heilbronn: Henninger. Sonderegger, Stefan. 1985. 'Die Entwicklung des Verhältnisses zwischen Standardsprache und Mundarten in der deutschen Schweiz.' In: Besch, Werner et al. (eds.). Sprachgeschichte. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. 1873-1929. Trümpy, Hans. 1955. Schweizerdeutsche Sprache und Literatur im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Basel: Krebs. Wienbarg, Ludolf. 1834. Soll die plattdeutsche Sprache gepflegt oder ausgerottet werden? Gegen Ersteres und für Letzteres beantwortet. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe. Wiesinger, Peter. 1990. 'Zur Periodisierung der deutschen Sprachgeschichte aus regionaler Sicht.' In: Besch, Werner (ed.). Deutsche Sprachgeschichte. Grundlagen, Methoden, Perspektiven. Festschrift für Johannes Erben. Frankfurt: Lang. 403-414.

6. Appendix 1.

Berthold von Regensburg, um 1200(Socin 1888: 111) Ir wizzet wol, daz die Niderlender und die Oberlender gar unglich sin an der spräche und an den siten. die von Oberlant, dort her von Zürich, die redent vil anders danne die von Niderlande, von Sahsen. die sint unglich an der spräche: man bekennet sie gar wol von einander die von Sahsenlande unde die von dem Bodensewe von dem Oberlande, unde sint ouch an den siten unglich und an den cleidern. Also stet ez umbe die niderlender und umbe oberlender, daz manic niderlender ist, der sich der oberlender spräche an nimet. You probably know that the lowlanders and the highlanders speak pretty differently and have very different customs. Those who come from the highlands, from Zurich, talk very differently from those who come from the lowlands, from Saxony. They don't speak the same: one can easily distinguish them from each other, those who come from Saxony and those from the Lake Constance area, from the highlands, and they also differ in customs and dress. It's the case that quite a few from the lowlands adopt the language of the highlands.

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Albrecht von Halberstadt, Ovid, Metamorphosen (1210) (Socin 1888: 107) Der sin sinne an ditze Büch zu rechte hat gevlizzen, der er ist suit ir wizzen: enweder dirre zweier, weder Swäp noch Beier, weder Dürinc noch Franke. Des lät ü sin zu danke

ob ir fundet in den rimen die sich zueinander limen, valsch oder unrecht: wan ein Sachse, heizet Albrecht, geboren von Halberstadt ü ditze büch gemachet hat von latine zu düte

He who has industriously worked at this book is - you shall know it - he is neither a Swabian nor a Bavarian, neither a Thuringian nor a Franconian. I should be grateful to you if you could spot anything wrong or incorrect in my rhymes which are like glued to each other since a Saxon called Albrecht, born in Halberstadt, made this book for you, from Latin into German.

3. Teichner (Socin 1888: 109) Sö spricht der dritt: Έ ζ waere kluoc, swaz er ret von manegen sachen, künde erz niuwan swaebisch machen, nach der lantspräch üf und ab. Thus spoke the third: 'It would be good if, whataver he says about various things, if he could just do it in Swabian, according to the regional language used everywhere.'

4. Corinth, Lovis; 1926 (Kirsch 1989) Born in 1858 in a village in East Prussia, the son of wealthy farmers. When the grammar-school year began he went to live with relatives in Königsberg. Ich wurde immer wegen meines bäuerischen Dialektes gehänselt. Da faßte ich den festen Entschluß, von jetzt ab nur noch hochdeutsch in der Art zu sprechen, wie die feinen Stadtkinder. I was always mocked because of my rustic dialect. I decided from then on to speak only High German like the elegant town children.

5. Curtius, Ludwig; 1950 (Kirsch 1989: 39) Zu Hause sprachen wir Hochdeutsch, da wir mit Kindern aus dem ,Volk' in Augsburg keinen Verkehr hatten, und die Eltern beide, der Vater mit schwachem oberbayerischen Einschlag, die Mutter mit schwäbischem, hochdeutsch sprachen. At home we spoke High German, since we didn't mix with the children of the 'common people' in Augsburg and both parents spoke High German, father with a light Upper Bavarian accent, mother with a Swabian touch.

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6. Christ, Lena; 1970 (Kirsch 1989: 43) Born in 1881 in Glonn, the daughter of a maidservant. Meine Mutter war damals eine sehr schöne Frau und sprach immer sehr gewählt; denn sie war jahrelang Köchin in adligen Häusern gewesen. Darum schalt sie nun täglich über meine bäuerische Sprache, wodurch sie mich so einschüchterte, daß ich oft den ganzen Tag kein Wort zu sagen wagte.

My mother was at that time a very beautiful woman and always spoke in a very refined manner, for she had been a cook for years to noble families. For that reason, she scolded me daily because of my rustic language and by so doing intimidated me so badly that I often didn't dare say a word all day.

7. Erman, Adolf; 1929 (Kirsch 1989: 51) Born in Berlin in 1874, probably the son of an officer. Depiction of a private pre-school: Neben diesen zivilisierten Kindern gab es dann bei Tappe auch einige weniger zivilisierte. So ,Icke' Deichmann, dessen Vater einen Tanzboden in der Schumannstraße hatte und der so berlinisch sprach, daß wir ihm danach seinen Vornamen (icke = ich) gaben. In addition to these civilised children there were also some who were less civilised to be found at Tappe's. For example ,Icke' Deichmann, whose father had a dance hall in Schumann Street and who spoke with such a strong Berlin accent that he was nicknamed Icke (icke = Berlin form of ich, I).

8. Mauthner, Fritz; 1918 (Kirsch 1989) Born in 1849 in Horzitz, grew up in Prague as the son of a factory owner. Er verachtete und bekämpfte unerbittlich jeden leisen Anklang an Kudelböhmisch oder an Mauscheldeutsch und bemühte sich [...] uns eine reine übertrieben puristische hochdeutsche Sprache zu lehren. He despised and fought bitterly against the slightest sign of Czech or Yiddish-influenced German and tried to teach us an exggeratedly pure form of High German.

11. Mohl, Robert von; 1902 (Kirsch 1989: 74) Born in 1799 in Stuttgart, the son of a lawyer. He mentions a grammar-school teacher: Er hatte einen feinen natürlichen Geschmack, und er drang namentlich auf Beseitigung der dem Schwaben so geläufigen Provinzialismen und örtlichen Sprachfehler. He had good natural taste, and he insisted on trying to eliminate those provincialisms which are so common in Swabian and local linguistic errors.

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12. Eilers, Gerd; 1856 (Kirsch 1989: 30) Born around 1790, the son of a farmer near Oldenburg, where according to him everyone spoke dialect: Der Unterricht in der deutschen Sprache wurde dadurch nicht wenig gefördert, daß das Hochdeutsche fast wie eine fremde Sprache gelernt werden mußte, was natürlich die Aufmerksamkeit auf Rechtschreibung und Satzbildung schärfte. Lessons in German benefited from the fact that High German had to be taught almost like a foreign language which, of course, meant that one focused more attention on spelling and sentence formation.

13. Eucken, Rudolf; 1922 (Kirsch 1989: 17) Born in 1846 in Aurich, the son of a high-ranking civil servant in the postal service. Ich selbst habe einmal meinen Mitschülern vorgeschlagen, wir möchten in der Schule uns untereinander des Hochdeutschen bedienen, um jene Kluft zu überwinden. Die Mehrzahl der Kameraden trat anfänglich meiner Auffassung bei, aber eine Minderzahl hielt fest am Niederdeutschen, Tag für Tag gewann diese Minderzahl an Boden und schließlich den Sieg. Es erklärt sich das leicht aus der frischen und knappen, dabei traulichen Art, die das Niederdeutsche besitzt. Manche Redensarten und Lieblingswendungen sind kaum hochdeutsch wiederzugeben. Auch ich selbst verwende sie im häuslichen Leben gern. I myself once suggested to my fellow pupils that we should use High German with one another at school in order to overcome that distance. Most of my fellow pupils agreed with me to start with but a minority stuck with Low German. Day by day this minority gained ground and finally won the day. That can easily be explained by Low German's freshness and conciseness, as well as its intimacy. Some turns of phrase and favourite sayings can hardly be translated into High German. I, too, like using it in the home.

14. Bahr, Hermann; 1923 (Kirsch 1989: 10) Born in 1863 as the son of a notary public in Linz; both parents came from Silesia. [Die Mutter] hat die vollblütige dumpfe Brandung unserer homerischen Mundart nicht hören können, sie war jedesmal wieder von neuem entsetzt, was aber mich geborenen Widerspruch eben darum nur desto linzerischer schwelgen ließ. Ich wuchs sozusagen in zwei Sprachen auf und daß mir die befohlene der Bildung von vornherein verdächtig, die verbotene des Volkes reizend klang, hat bis auf den Erwachsenen nachgewirkt, ich furcht' ich werde beim Jüngsten Gericht, Gott verzeih mir die Sünd, auch noch linzerisch Rede stehn. [The mother] couldn't bear to listen to the full-blooded muffled sound of our Homeric dialect breaking like waves on her ears, every time she got indignant all over again, which only encouraged me, full of inborn contradictions as 1 was, to make even greater use of the Linz dialect. I grew up in two languages in a manner of speaking and even as an adult I was suspicious of the one I was ordered to use, the one associated with education, and found that the one that was forbidden to me sounded charming. I am afraid that at the Last Judgement I shall be justifying myself in the Linz dialect.

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15. Hauptmann, Gerhart; 1937 (Kirsch 1989: 36) Born in 1862 in Bad Salzbrunn, the son of a spa director. Auch von Vater und Mutter erlitten wir keine moralische Erniedrigung, außer wo wir mit Recht oder Unrecht gescholten wurden. Aber es lag nun einmal im Geiste des oberen Bereichs, daß man sich nicht natürlich betragen konnte. Der Unterschied zwischen unten und oben war so groß, wie der zwischen dem sinnlich-seelenvollen Dialekt und dem sinnlich-armen, nahezu entseelten Schriftdeutsch ist, das als Hochdeutsch gesprochen wird. Unten im Hof erzog die Natur, oben wurde man, wie man fühlte, auch einem bewußten menschlichen Plan für irgendeine kommende Aufgabe zugerichtet. We weren't humiliated morally by our father or mother either, except when we were scolded justifiably or not. But it was in the nature of the upper sphere that one couldn't behave normally. The difference between above and below was too large, like the difference between the sensual-soulful dialect and written German, spoken as High German, which lacked sensuality and was almost lifeless.

16. Denn, Günther; 1962 (Kirsch 1989: 31) Born in 1887, the son of a high-ranking postal official in Berlin, in 1895 he moved to Constance. Meine Schwester, die allerdings vier Jahre jünger war als ich, machte es viel gescheiter. Nach einem halben Jahr beherrschte sie den Konstanzer Dialekt so gut, als ob sie eine Eingeborene sei, und sie war damit vollkommen in die Klasse eingegliedert. My sister, who was admittedly four years younger than I was, went about things much more cleverly. After six months she could speak the Constance dialect like a native, and because of that she was fully integrated into the class.

17. Fischer, Emil; 1922 (Kirsch 1989: 5) Born in 1852 in Euskirchen, son of a grocer. Mit dem zahlreichen Dienstpersonal, besonders mit den Knechten, standen wir auf vertrautestem Fuße, und die Unterhaltung wurde hier ausschließlich in dem derben niederrheinischen Dialekt gefuhrt. We were on very familiar terms with the many servants, epecially with the labourers, and the only variety we used with them was the Lower Rhenish dialect.

18. Malberg, Anna; 1909 (Kirsch 1989: 55) Born in Berlin in the mid 1830s, the daughter of a high-ranking railway official. She writes about her secondary-school: Das erste, dessen ich mich unter ihnen zu schämen anfing, war mein besseres Sprechen. Aber so sehr ich mich in den Freiviertelstunden bemühte, diese bedauernswerte Eigentümlichkeit loszuwerden und die Ausschmückungen mang, det, man (statt nur), sowie einige falsche Kasus passend anzubringen, Mutters gutes Deutsch brach immer wieder durch, es gelang nicht. Da sah mich eines Tages Betty

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Sannier, das Arbeiterkind, mit einem unergründlichen Lächeln an und sagte: 'warum gibst du dir eigentlich so'ne Mühe, gemein zu sprechen?' The first thing I began to be ashamed of amongst them was my better speech. But however much I tried to get rid of this regrettable characteristic in the free quarter hours and to embellish my speech appropriately with forms like 'mang' (standard German 'zwischen'), 'det' (standard German 'das'), 'man' (instead of 'nur') , as well as some incorrect cases, my mother's good German would always surface, I just couldn't' manage it. One day, Betty Sannier, a working-class child, looked at me with an unfathomable smile and said: 'Why do you try so hard to speak common?'

19. Dahn, Felix; 1980 (Kirsch 1989: 146) Born in 1834 in Hamburg, son of actors, grew up in Munich. He describes a maid: Sie war eine prächtige, gescheute, kraftvolle, musterhaft treue und fleißige und frohgelaunte königlich württembergische Schwäbin, mit blitzenden, dunklen Augen: von ihr hab ich jenes hervorragende Schwäbisch gelernt, welches ich, neben dem Französischen lange bevor ich Deutsch lernte, sprach und das ich, später in Friedrichshafen es vervollkommnend, so fließend rede, daß sogar Seine Majestät der König von Württemberg an seiner Tafel anerkennend darüber sich zu äußern geruhte.' She was a splendid, bright, energetic, exemplary loyal and industrious and good-natured Swabian from the kingdom of Württemberg, with flashing dark eyes; it was from from her that I learnt that excellent Swabian which I spoke, along with French, long before I learnt German, and which I now speak so fluently, having perfected it later in Friedrichshafen, that even his Majesty, the King of Württemberg, was good enough to mention it approvingly at his table.

20. Spielhagen, Friedrich; 1890 (Kirsch 1989: 26) Born in 1829 in Magdeburg, the son of a high-ranking official. In 1835 he moved to Stralsund. Auf solche Erbschaft hatten die Zugewanderten nicht den mindesten Anspruch, sie, die sich nach dem Verdikt der Eingeborenen schon dadurch als Fremdlinge auswiesen, daß sie nicht einmal das heimische Platt regelrecht zu sprechen vermöchten. Dem war leider in der That so. Von den Eltern konnte freilich nicht wohl verlangt werden, daß sie sich in so späten Jahren des nie zuvor gehörten Idioms nachträglich bemächtigten; aber auch meine älteren Geschwister lernten es nur eben verstehen; und wenn wir jüngeren es auch fließend sprachen - wir sprachen es als eine fremde, angelernte Sprache, ohne den Ton zu treffen, der die Musik und auch eine Sprache macht. The incomers hadn't the least claim to such a heritage, they who, according to the natives, betrayed themselves as strangers by not even being able to speak the local dialect properly. That was unfortunately true. It could of course hardly be expected of our parents that they should learn the language they'd never heard before so late in life, but even my older siblings only learnt to understand it, and although we younger ones spoke it fluently, we spoke it like a foreign language, without being able to strike the right notes, which is what distinguishes music and a language.

Zoe Boughton

Investigating puristic attitudes in France: Folk perceptions of variation in standard French 0. Introduction France is a nation with a long history of linguistic purism and prescriptivism. For example, there is evidence from as far back as the twelfth century that the only 'good' French is that of the area around Paris (Rickard 1989: 41f.); various contemporary writers refer to the pre-eminence of the language used at the King's court: Mis lengages est bons car en France fui nez "My language is good because I was born in the Ile-de-France" (Guernes de Pont Sainte-Maxence, La Vie de Saint Thomas Becket, c. 1175, cited in Lodge 1993: 98).

The prestige and acceptance of this variety amongst the social elite continued to grow throughout the Old and Middle French periods, and the codification process, begun in the sixteenth century, reached a peak of activity in the seventeenth, with the establishment of the Academie Frangaise, sponsored by Richelieu, in 1635, as well as the development of the notion of bon usage. During the eighteenth century, there was a conceptual shift away from the 'best French' as that spoken by the 'best people', to the ideological myth of the codified standard as the clearest, most logical language, i.e. the language of Reason; this is exemplified by Rivarol's well-known declaration in a prizewinning essay of 1784 that 'la syntaxe franfaise est incorruptible' ('French syntax is incorruptible') (Rickard 1989: 118). Added to this is the weight of the linguistic ideology and policy of the Revolution of 1789: 'one Republic, one language'. From that point on, the language was to be unified throughout all French regions and social strata as a symbol of a united republic; to speak or write a variety that differed from the centralised, state-sponsored form was thence to be a traitor. In view of this exceptionally prescriptive past, it is easy to see the truth of Judge's (1993: 7) remark that 'France is famous for the degree of state interference in linguistic matters'; but what impact has this unique

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history had on the sociolinguistic landscape of contemporary metropolitan French, and in particular on folk attitudes towards non-standard speech? This article presents some results from a project investigating the extent of phonological uniformisation in standard (i.e. northern, urban, metropolitan) French. Though inscribed within the quantitative variationist paradigm, the project unusually incorporates an experimental qualitative study of folk perceptions of a particular variety, namely that of the city of Nancy in the Lorraine region of north-eastern France (Armstrong & Boughton 1998, 2000; Boughton 2001). This perceptual test demonstrates a crossover approach between traditional language attitudes methodology and work in the emerging and developing field of perceptual dialectology (e.g. Kuiper 1999). The methods used will therefore be evaluated, and results presented and compared with those obtained by Kuiper. The importance of this comparison is that it will allow for a critical evaluation of the differing kinds of results which can arise from studies which ostensibly seek to explore similar questions, but employ different means and stimuli. Furthermore, in contrasting these two research projects, a broader insight will be gained into speakers' perceptions of, and attitudes towards, deviation from the spoken norm in present-day metropolitan France.

1. Perceptions of deviation from the norm (Kuiper 1999) Before describing the method and presenting the results of the perceptualattitudinal test introduced in the preceding section, Kuiper's (1999) study of Parisian perceptions of regional French will be outlined in order to provide a point of comparison and a basis for critical discussion (cf. section 3 below).

1.1 Method Kuiper's research was concerned with contemporary metropolitan French speakers' "conscious perceptions of regional varieties of their language" (1999: 244), especially in view of the long tradition of prescriptivism sketched above. In order to investigate this, the perceptual dialectology techniques described in Preston (1989) for the examination of non-linguists' perceptions of language variety were adapted to the French context. It is important to note that this type of research has chiefly explored native speakers' ideas, beliefs and mental images about variation in language without the use of any linguistic stimuli such as samples of speech (although the methodology is evolving; cf. Kerswill & Williams 2002); the alternative tools employed are described below. The group of non-linguists whose perceptions were tested in Kuiper's experiment consisted of 76 respondents born and living in the Ile-de-France or Parisian region, i.e. the area of France most commonly associated with the

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linguistic norm. Both genders were represented, as well as three age groups and two broad social class groups. They were requested to carry out two main tasks: firstly, a perceptual mapping task of the kind commonly adopted in this type of research, and secondly, a series of rating tasks. For the perceptual mapping task, the respondents were provided with a map of France marked with certain cities, as well as the chief mountain ranges and rivers. They were then asked to "circle and identify in writing any regions 'where people have a particular way of speaking'" (Kuiper 1999: 244). This deliberately broad question elicited a wide range of responses which will be briefly outlined in section 1.2. The rating tasks on the other hand were rather more tightly constrained. A list of 24 regions, including francophone Belgium and Switzerland, was drawn up and the respondents had to rate these according to three different criteria. Firstly, informants rated the 24 regions according to the perceived degree of difference between their own (i.e. Parisian) French and the variety they associated with that region; the lowest rating implied that the French was similar to theirs, and the highest rating that they found it incomprehensible. The second rating task elicited judgements of the correctness of the French spoken in the regions listed, from 'not at all correct' to 'completely correct', and the third and final task required respondents to rate pleasantness on a similar sort of scale.

1.2 Results It was noted above that the perceptual mapping task allowed for the elicitation of a broad range of responses and this did indeed prove to be the case, from a single line drawn across the middle of the map with two or three regions circled above and below, to extremely detailed labelling which left almost no unmarked space; the average number of regions demarcated was ten. All responses were collated into a single composite map (Kuiper 1999: 249), showing boundary lines drawn as well as areas and cities circled, along with numerical labels or scaled shading to show the number of respondents who made that demarcation. In the following brief presentation of the results of the mapping and rating tasks, particular attention will be given to designations of the Lorraine region so that clear comparisons may later be drawn between the beliefs about this variety of French elicited by Kuiper's tests and the identifications and evaluations made by respondents in the experiment conducted by the present author, to be discussed below in section 2.3. With regard to the perceptual mapping task, Kuiper's composite map shows two significant findings concerning Lorraine: (i) that this region was always closely associated with, and often perhaps subsumed by, the wholly Germanic-

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substrate area of Alsace1, and (ii) that Lorraine and Alsace were very frequently circled by the Parisian respondents as a region 'where people have a particular way of speaking' (Kuiper 1999: 244): 55 out of 76, i.e. 72% of informants, demarcated the region thus. Only Provence, in the extreme south-east, was more frequently designated (63 out of 76, or 83%) (cf. Paltridge & Giles 1984); the third most often circled area was the Nord, the region surrounding Lille in the far north of the country, adjacent to the border with Belgium (44 out of 76, or 58%). As to the judgements of Lorraine in the rating tasks, the results are very negative. Out of 24 regions listed, comprising 22 regions of France plus francophone Belgium and Switzerland, Lorraine was rated 20th for degree of difference from the respondents' own (Parisian) variety, followed by Provence, Alsace, Belgium and Switzerland. The correctness of Lorraine French was rated 21st out of 24, followed by Alsace, Switzerland and Belgium, and with regard to pleasantness, Lorraine received its lowest rating: 22nd out of 24, followed only by the Nord and Alsace. When all three ratings are taken together and the 24 regions are arranged hierarchically (Kuiper 1999: 251), Lorraine emerges in lowly 21st place; Alsace is the only metropolitan region ranked lower, in 22nd place, and the two non-French regions, Switzerland and Belgium, are the lowest-rated. These results demonstrate quite conclusively that in the minds of Kuiper's Parisian respondents, Lorraine French is largely very negatively perceived and the region is thus consigned to the bottom of the attitudinal heap with the lowest of the low, namely Germanic Alsace and the two francophone areas lying beyond national borders. To summarise the general findings resulting from Kuiper's test, the informants appear to have strong mental perceptions of the linguistic characteristics of the regions as follows: firstly, the areas most closely associated with the norm are Paris, and the Loire valley, focused on the city of Tours, the mythical origin of 'the best French'; secondly, Provence is generally perceived as a region with a characteristic variety which, although quite different from the norm and viewed as incorrect, is nevertheless judged extremely positively with regard to pleasantness (1st out of 24); finally, Lorraine and Alsace, and, to a lesser extent, the Nord, are widely viewed as having characteristic spoken varieties which are not only very divergent from the Parisian norm, and therefore incorrect, but also extremely unpleasant to the ear.

1

'Although many respondents named Alsace without naming Lorraine as well [...], no respondent indicated Lorraine without also drawing in Alsace. This means that on no respondent's perceptual map is there a reference to Lorraine without one to Alsace as well, whether the two are marked separately or combined into one region' (Kuiper 1999: 250).

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2. The Nancy-Rennes project: perceptions and behaviour The methods and findings of Kuiper's (1999) study of Parisian perceptions of variation from the norm have been summarised here in order to broaden the picture of puristic attitudes amongst non-linguists in France as well as to provide a comparison with the research which will now be discussed. Whereas Kuiper's experiment was designed to elicit informants' existing ideas, beliefs and mental images of variation in French without the use of any form of linguistic data as stimulus, in the project presented below respondents are instead confronted with actual speech samples of a variety of Lorraine French. An important question is whether similar findings emerge from the two types of study. 2.1 Hypothesis The perceptual experiment was conducted as part of a wider quantitative variationist project designed to test impressionistic observations found in the literature which imply that differences between French regional accents have been attenuated in recent times. For example, Battye, Hintze & Rowlett (2000: 270) remark that 'there has undoubtedly been considerable levelling of regional accents over the last half century', and Armstrong (2001a: 118) notes that 'French pronunciation has been levelled to a high degree'. The principal research hypothesis is therefore that the pronunciation of standard French (here defined and understood as non-peripheral northern or langue d'o'il, urban and metropolitan) is relatively homogeneous, particularly when compared with that of other standardised western languages such as British English.

2.2 Method In order to test this hypothesis, as well as the above-cited impressionistic comments, by means of empirical research, urban dialect surveys in the Labovian tradition were carried out in two medium-sized cities: Nancy, in the Lorraine region of north-eastern France, and Rennes, in Brittany, north-western France, in 1997 and 1998. The choice of research locations was governed by a number of considerations. They are situated in the northern langue d'o'il dialect zone, which excludes both southern (langue d'oc or Occitan) varieties as well as northern non-French substrates such as Breton, Flemish and Alsatian. Although Lorraine does have a Germanic substrate area (lorrain germanique), this is restricted chiefly to the north and east of the Moselle dipartement adjacent to Luxembourg and Germany; Nancy however lies squarely within the Romance part of the region where the historical dialect is one of the langues d'o'il, namely lorrain roman (cf. Walter 1988: 135). Similarly, though Rennes is

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regarded by many as the capital of Brittany, it has never been Breton-speaking, the isogloss lying some distance to the west; rather, the substrate dialect of its surrounding region is gallo, another of the northern Romance varieties which share many features in common with the antecedent of standard French. The two cities are also of a comparable size (approximately 250,000 to 300,000 in each conurbation) and demographic profile, being administrative centres within their respective regions, having large universities, and thus large student and professional populations, and employment focused chiefly in the tertiary sector. Furthermore, they are more or less equidistant from Paris, the focus of the linguistic norm, though in opposite directions; some 700 kilometres lie between them, almost on an east-west latitude, and they are both about three hours from the capital by train. The methodology of the linguistic surveys carried out in the two locations was designed to be identical, and was adhered to as consistently as possible. Semi-structured interviews of the type pioneered by Labov (cf. Milroy & Gordon 2003: 57-68) were conducted in order to elicit and record both spontaneous and scripted speech from a single informant; each interview was of a minimum duration of 45 minutes. The size and social stratification of the speaker samples, shown in Table 1, was the same in both Nancy and Rennes; 32 interviews were selected from those carried out in each location, thus yielding an overall sample of 64 informants. MALE AGE 16-25 40-60

WC 4 YWM 4 0WM

FEMALE MC 4 YMM 4 OMM

WC 4 YWF 4 OWF

MC 4 YMF 4 OMF

Table 1: Size and structure of speaker samples in Nancy and Rennes

Key: YWM = Younger Working-Class Male, OMF = Older Middle-Class Female, etc.

2.3 The perceptual test It was mentioned above that although the Nancy-Rennes project is chiefly concerned with a variationist study of the pronunciation of contemporary spoken French, it is unusual in also incorporating a qualitative perceptualattitudinal experiment. It is the methodology and results of this test which are the focus of interest here, and these will therefore be outlined, prior to a comparative discussion of the Nancy-Rennes results and Kuiper's study in the light of the findings obtained. The perceptual experiment was motivated principally by the researcher's desire to test her own preliminary observations as a non-native fieldworker concerning the markedness of the Nancy accent, which was surveyed first,

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against those of native non-linguists interviewed subsequently in the second research location. This sub-study of identification and evaluation of the Nancy accent therefore constitutes the key difference between the fieldwork carried out in the two cities. A total of 40 Rennes respondents took part in the test, which was conducted subsequent to the usual interview dialogue. As these respondents were being recorded in the context of the variationist project described in section 2.2, the group is socially stratified as shown in Table 1, though certain cells contain more than four informants. The method used in the perceptual test was tailored to meet the specific needs of the sub-project, that is to elicit folk perceptions of the extent of phonological uniformity in contemporary standard French. As such, it demonstrates a crossover approach between traditional language attitudes methodology, centred around use of the matched-guise technique (cf. Lambert 1967), and work in perceptual dialectology, which has seen the development of the practice of mapping mental images and beliefs about language variety, as exemplified by Kuiper (1999). In the present study, authentic spoken language data were used as a stimulus to identification and evaluation reactions, but unlike those employed in classical matched-guise experiments, they were not recordings of a single actor assuming multiple 'guises' or identities, nor scripted speeches given by a carefully chosen group of individuals. Rather, a test tape was constructed consisting of eight extracts, randomly ordered, each of approximately one minute's duration, taken from interviews carried out previously in Nancy; one speaker was selected to represent each cell of the sample shown in Table 1. Although these interviews did include reading exercises, the extracts were taken from spontaneous, rather than scripted, speech; they were not controlled for content, but care was taken to ensure that no place names or other obvious clues as to the regional origin of the speakers were mentioned. Following each interview with the Rennes respondents, the nature of the perceptual test was briefly explained and the stimulus tape played. After each extract, the tape was paused and the listeners were asked a few short questions to elicit their immediate reactions to the speech they had just heard. The responses to three of these questions will be presented and discussed here, as follows: A Β C

Is the person more likely to be working-class or middle-class? Can you identify the person's region of origin? Do you find the person's accent pleasant?

It will be recalled from section 1.2 above that some striking results emerged from Kuiper's (1999) study with regard to his Parisian informants' mental images of the French spoken in Lorraine: principally, it was very frequently considered, along with that of Alsace, as being very different from their own

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speech, i.e. the (Parisian) norm. Let us examine whether the reactions of the Rennes respondents to the Nancy speaker sample bear out this finding.

Figure 1 illustrates the main result of the Nancy-Rennes perceptual test by demonstrating the contrast between the responses to questions A and Β above: while the social-class identifications of the speaker sample were in general accurate, the listener-respondents' attempts to pinpoint the regional origin of the Nancy speakers were strikingly inaccurate. The upper line in Figure 1, labelled 'Perc. WC', shows the proportion of Rennes respondents, expressed as a percentage, who replied 'working-class' to question A, 'Is the person more likely to be working-class or middle-class?', for each of the eight Nancy speakers. The speakers are arranged along the horizontal axis in descending order of perception as working-class from left to right. It is immediately apparent from the order of the labelled Nancy speakers that there is quite a strong correlation between a real and a perceived workingclass socio-economic background. This can be seen most clearly at the extreme left and extreme right of the figure, where the Rennes respondents' perceptions of the YWM, OWM, OMM and YMF speakers' social-class provenances were almost entirely correct. The most salient anomaly here is the crossover in perceptions of the OMF and YWF speakers; this will be discussed further below. The lower line, labelled 'Region', indicates the percentages of 'correct' responses to question B, 'Can you identify the person's region of origin?', though it is important to note that accuracy was 'generously' interpreted: any mention of eastern or north-eastern France was counted as a correct regional identification. If only those replies mentioning Nancy, or even Lorraine, had been included, the result would have been zeros for all speakers except the OWF and the OMF who would each have received just 2.5% (i.e. 1 out of 40)

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correct regional identifications. In fact, by far the most common answer to this question was 'don't know' or 'no idea' (approximately 61% of responses), and moreover a considerable proportion of replies identified the speech of the Nancy sub-sample with Rennes / Brittany / western France, the listenerrespondents' own region of origin. The seemingly anomalous perceptions of the OMF speaker, mentioned earlier, can be explained with reference to the biography of this individual, who, though in white-collar employment all her adult life, and married to a retired bank clerk, was from a strongly working-class family background and had never left the area of Nancy in which she was born and brought up. There is therefore a sense in which the class perceptions of the Rennes respondents were more accurate than the researcher's socio-economic categorisation of this speaker, which was based chiefly on occupation and current, rather than former, status. The working-class origins of this OMF informant are still signalled occasionally by certain accent features, one of which, a shift of stress to a nonstandard position with concomitant vowel lengthening, featured prominently in the chosen extract. However, this occurred only once in the one-minute speech sample, after approximately 45 seconds of talk had elapsed; nevertheless, this non-standard trait enabled 20% (8 out of 40) of the Rennes respondents to identify the speaker with eastern France, as shown in the lower line of Figure 1. To reiterate the main result of the Nancy-Rennes perceptual experiment, while the social-class perceptions of the speaker sample were in general correct, this did not entail accurate identification of their regional origin, which might have been expected for a similar sample of British English speakers owing to the close correlation between socio-economic background and accent localisation which exists in the U.K. (cf. Trudgill 2000: 32). The reactions to the OMF speaker, discussed above, show that even when the listenerrespondents noticed non-standard accent features, the majority were still unable to pinpoint the region of origin; so what spoken language features enabled them nevertheless to identify social class with such a degree of accuracy?

2.4 Consonant cluster reduction Previous research on both metropolitan and other varieties of French, such as Belgian and Canadian (e.g. Armstrong 2001a: 28, 56; Laks 1980, 1983; Francard 2001: 252; Kemp et al. 1980; Hume 1988) has suggested that the deletion of the liquid consonants, IV and /R/, in post-obstruent word-final clusters, is both socially and stylistically important. This long-standing feature of spoken French, exemplified by reductions such as table [tabl] > tab' [tab] and quatre [katR] > quat' [kat], has commonly been associated with both informal French (frangais familier) and lower-class usage (frangais populaire) (cf. Gadet 1992: 40ff., 1997: 78, and Leon 1993: 202, 206ff.).

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While none of the Rennes respondents commented on this feature overtly during the perceptual test, several of them did make relevant observations regarding the working-class Nancy speakers such as the following: 'il bouffe les mots' ('he scoffs words'); 'eile mange des lettres' ('she eats letters'); 'il finit pas ses mots' ('he doesn't finish his words'). Although such remarks are imprecise and evidently non-technical, it is likely that the respondents were referring to (relatively high rates of) deletion of various segments in the stream of speech. In the light of these comments, as well as the research outlined above, word-final post-obstruent liquid deletion was therefore selected for quantitative analysis in the Nancy-Rennes corpus of spoken French, and the results (not presented here) clearly confirm the status of liquid deletion in this context as a stable sociolinguistic marker in contemporary metropolitan French. Clear patterns of style-shift were observed — as formality of style increases, the proportion of liquid deletion decreases — and these co-vary with both social class and gender, though the latter is less clearly marked, implying that the variable is stable (cf. Labov 2001: 266); this surmise is confirmed by the fact that there was virtually no age-related differentiation. Nancy speaker

YWM OWF OWM YWF OMF YMM YMF OMM

% Liquid

deletion

83.7 69.1 67.5 54.8 44.4 39.6 28.6 25.0

Table 2: Liquid deletion rates of Nancy speakers arranged hierarchically

To return to the speech samples used in the perceptual test, the liquid deletion rates of the eight Nancy speakers illustrate clearly the correlation between this pronunciation feature and social class. Table 2 shows the proportion, expressed as a percentage, of liquids deleted in the relevant context by the eight speakers throughout their recorded interviews (i.e. not only in the one-minute extracts used). The hierarchical arrangement demonstrates clearly that working-class speakers tend to delete at a considerably higher rate than middle-class speakers; the mean deletion score is 51.6% and the dotted line emphasises the divide between the social-class groups, as all the working-class speakers delete at more than the average rate, whereas the middle-class speakers are all below average, favouring the prestige 'liquid-full' variant.

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100

90 80

70 60

50 40 30

»

Perc. WC Liq. Del.

20 10

0 YWM OWM OWF OMF YWF YMM OMM YMF Fig. 2: Perceived social class alongside liquid deletion rates in Interview Style

Although, as mentioned above, the Rennes respondents did not explicitly refer to this type of consonant cluster reduction in association with their social-class judgements of the speaker sample, it can nevertheless be seen that there is a clear correlation between the perception of a speaker as working-class and the liquid deletion rate observed for that speaker. This is demonstrated in Figure 2, where the deletion scores given in Table 2 above are shown alongside the rates of perception as working-class previously seen in Figure 1. It is uncontroversial to note the relationship between speech behaviour and social-class perception, and while the data in Figure 2 do not prove that this pronunciation feature was the most salient socially diagnostic trait, it is likely that this is one of a number of cues (cf. Labov 1972: 144) which enabled the respondents to successfully identify the class of each speaker. It is also evidence, along with the 'he eats words'-type comments listed above, of the sensitivity of French native speakers to correctness in speech as a marker of socio-economic status: in deleting such liquids, speakers veer from the prescribed spelling pronunciation, and when deletion rates are high, this may lead to classification as less well-educated and thus lower class.

2.5 Pleasantness, social class and non-standard pronunciation The Rennes respondents' replies to question C, which was designed to elicit an aesthetic judgement of the Nancy speakers' accents, are more obviously revelatory of puristic attitudes amongst this socially-stratified group of nonlinguist informants. Figure 3 shows, in addition to the information given in

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Figure 2, the proportion of respondents who replied 'yes' to the third question listed above, 'Do you find the person's accent pleasant {agriable)T.

The close relationship between perception as working-class and behaviour with regard to variable word-final post-obstruent liquid deletion is here shown to be in stark contrast to an inverse correlation with perceived pleasantness of speech. It is immediately apparent that those speakers generally (and correctly) perceived to be working-class, who have high liquid deletion rates, are least likely to be thought to speak pleasantly. Thus the OWM and OWF speakers, who receive the lowest aesthetic ratings, can be contrasted with the OMM and YMF speakers who are extremely rarely judged as lower-class, have relatively low liquid deletion rates, and are perceived by a majority of respondents (60% and 67.5% respectively) as having a pleasant way of speaking. It seems extremely unlikely that this inverse relationship between 'correctness' of speech patterns and perceived pleasantness (and social class) is coincidental; this finding therefore serves to support the proposition that puristic attitudes amongst French non-linguists are related to ideas of correctness expressed as conformity to the linguistic norm. It is also important to note that this norm, the standard language, is closely tied in the national consciousness to the written code and therefore to orthographic forms of words. It is furthermore of great interest that the above judgements were all made more or less without reference by the Rennes respondents to the regional identity or origin of the speaker sample, which remained a complete mystery to the vast majority of them; such a finding seems almost unthinkable in comparison with the British English context. It will moreover be recalled that Kuiper's Parisian informants imagined Lorraine French to be strongly divergent from the norm, as well as incorrect and unpleasant. While the Rennes respondents did not in general associate the unpleasantness of certain of the Nancy speakers' accents

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with their identity as Lorrains, they did nevertheless use various pejorative terms in referring to some of the working-class speakers which reveal other attitudes and ideas. For example, while perhaps more polite listenerrespondents labelled the French of the lower-class speakers 'rather informal' or 'rural', others stated that they must be 'from a poor area', 'uneducated', 'a prole' or a 'country bumpkin' (paysan) (cf. Boyer 1991: 44). In fact, those speakers perceived to have non-standard accents were frequently judged to be from a rural background, even though they had all been born and brought up in the city, and yet this supposedly rural accent was not positively perceived, being often denominated an accent tralnant or 'dragging accent'; this is in marked contrast to the common perception of southern French accents as chantant, 'singing'.

3. Discussion At this point it is appropriate to compare critically the Nancy-Rennes experiment with Kuiper (1999), before discussing what these studies reveal about puristic attitudes amongst non-linguists in contemporary France. It may be imprudent to draw a direct comparison between the studies outlined in sections 1 and 2 as they have differing aims and methods, and yet this very fact illustrates the usefulness of complementary approaches in building a picture of perceptions of, and attitudes towards, deviation from the norm. While Kuiper's perceptual dialectological approach succeeds in eliciting informants' mental maps and beliefs about regional variety, the identification and evaluation experiment conducted in Rennes using authentic speech stimuli allows the researcher to challenge some apparently commonly held assumptions about the French spoken in the Lorraine region. For example, while Kuiper's Parisian informants frequently imagined Lorraine French, together with that of Alsace, to differ markedly from the norm, the almost complete inability of the Rennes respondents to correctly identify the regional provenance of the Nancy speaker sample demonstrates that, for these listeners at least, this variety does not diverge nearly as much as might be believed; or, even if it does diverge, it does not have a high enough profile, nationally, to be recognised for what it is. Yet there is partial confirmation of the degree of difference from the norm of Lorraine French in the reactions of the Rennes respondents to the Nancy OMF speaker, whose nonstandard stress patterns led a few to identify her regional origin as eastern. However, it must be borne in mind that this feature occurred only once in the stimulus extract, and that the majority of listeners guessed its origin incorrectly - some thought Switzerland or Belgium or even Canada, others thought the far north, near Lille, but 20% identified her with their own region, Brittany, 700 kilometres from Nancy, and 40% had no idea at all.

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When the results of the two studies are taken together, there is, on the other hand, some more conclusive confirmation of the perceived unpleasantness of Lorraine French. Kuiper's informants ranked this variety 22 nd out of 24 from an aesthetic viewpoint, and the qualitative data elicited by the Nancy-Rennes perceptual experiment are testimony to the pejorative (and often inaccurate) associations of the non-standard pronunciation of certain speakers with a lack of education and a rural, uncultured background. The 'dragging accent' of some of the lower-class speakers was often considered disagreeable to the ear and is thus the antithesis of the singing, sunny, southern accent so favourably imagined by Kuiper's respondents (cf. Lafontaine 1988: 67; Gadet 2003: 111). To return now to a question posed at the outset of this article, what has been the impact of the history of the French national language, with its long normative tradition, on contemporary attitudes of non-linguists towards deviation from the norm? The results of both Kuiper's mapping and rating tasks as well as the Nancy-Rennes perceptual and behavioural data show that the grip of the ideology of the Parisian standard language continues to be strong and widespread in metropolitan France, and that notions of linguistic correctness still loom large in the national psyche. Kuiper's informants' ratings of the Provence variety demonstrate that correctness and pleasantness are not necessarily inextricably linked: while aesthetics appear to be related to mental images and associations with different geographical areas (again, cf. Lafontaine 1988) rather than any objective linguistic characteristics, correctness seems much more closely tied up with degree of divergence from the standard code. Thus although consonant cluster reduction of the type reported in section 2.4 is just one feature of negatively perceived linguistic behaviour, which, when highly frequent (cf. Leon 1993: 206) or co-occurring with other diagnostic traits, may lead to the categorisation of a speaker as lower-class, it is important to understand why this is judged to be undesirable by listeners. The ideology of the Revolution, which equated linguistic unity with political unity and therefore national identity, was central to the ethos of the state-sponsored primary education that became free and obligatory for all in the late nineteenth century. Since that time, the institution of the school has perpetuated a model of grammar teaching based on the fixed written code as an absolute reference point, and focused to a considerable extent on the mastery of correct spelling. Gadet (1999: 636-7) notes the importance of primary French manuals as a keystone of national unity; one of these, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, first published in 1877, reached its 411 th (sic!) edition in 1968, and the spelling manual Cours d'orthographe, first published in 1945, has sold more than 40 million copies. Given the inculcation at an early age of the importance of correct spelling and the continued prominence of the dictation exercise in school curricula, it is unsurprising that French speaker-listeners should react unfavourably to any salient gulf between written and spoken forms, such as frequent consonant cluster reduction. As Armstrong (2001b: 55) notes, such variables may be

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socio-stylistically important in French because of 'their capacity to mark, through their representation in the spelling, what Laks (1983) refers to as the "social trajectory" of a speaker, perhaps most obviously through his or her orientation to the value of the attribute of "educatedness"'. In other words, a noticeable disregard for 'correctness' in pronunciation as it is underpinned in the orthography may be negatively perceived as a lack of education, intelligence or proper effort on the part of the speaker.

4. Conclusion Few would argue with the fact that linguistic purism has been expressed and pursued in France in many different ways over the last several centuries, but to what extent it still persists is a question that merits further investigation. At governmental and institutional level, there appears to have been a certain softening and an increased tolerance of linguistic diversity. For example, the official body concerned with the use, promotion and preservation of the French language has in recent years seen its remit expanded to include the 'other' languages of France, as evidenced by its lengthened name: 'la Delegation generale ä la langue franijaise et aux langues de France'2. It is notable however that while in May 1999 the State lent its signature to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages 3 , in June of the same year, its ratification was declared to be contrary to the French constitution, Article 2 of which states that the language of the Republic is French; the government has therefore signed, but not ratified, the Charter. Hence there has been a certain official recognition of, and concomitant rise in, the prestige of other languages in France. Yet it is clear that the ideology of the standard continues nevertheless to exert a powerful influence. This is evidenced by the beliefs of Kuiper's respondents as well as by the perceptual and behavioural data elicited by the Nancy-Rennes project. The results of both of these studies echo the expressions of linguistic insecurity felt by many speakers of non-standard varieties, as shown for example in Gueunier et al. (1978). Moreover, the deep reverence for the standard language (cf. Lodge 1993: 3) and passion for correctness in its use is witnessed by the continuing immense popularity of the national televised dictation competition, Les Dicos D'Or, which in 2003 attracted 500,000 entrants, millions of viewers and has given rise to a best-selling book. 4

2 3

http://www.dglfIf.culture.gouv.fr/ (Accessed: April 2003.) http://www.coe.int/T/E/Legal_Affairs/Local_and_regional_Democracy/ R e g i o n a l _ o r _ M i n o r i t y _ l a n g u a g e s / (Accessed: April 2003.)

4

'Dictation TV holds French spellbound.'

The Times, M o n d a y

27 January 2003.

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Walker (2003) contends that 'the French people are simply not as purist as their reputation might have us believe'. However, in the light of the research presented here, we can agree with Gadet's (1999: 638) declaration, 'purisme pas mort' ('purism lives'). While few French citizens could be described as militant purists, it is doubtless true that the deep-rooted influence of standardlanguage ideology has resulted in a widespread sense of 'right and wrong' in linguistic behaviour. The concepts of norm and purism may therefore be so closely linked in French culture as to profoundly affect folk perceptions of, and attitudes towards, deviation from the linguistic standard.

5. References Armstrong, Nigel. 2001a. Social and stylistic variation in spoken French: a comparative approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Armstrong, Nigel. 2001b. 'The influence of spelling pronunciation in two areas of oil French: an indication of social convergence?' In: Hintze, Marie-Anne, Tim Pooley & Anne Judge (eds.). French accents: phonological and sociolinguisticperspectives. London: AFLS / CILT Publications. 45-72. Armstrong, Nigel & Zoe Boughton. 1998. 'Identification and evaluation responses to a French accent: some results and issues of methodology.' In: Revue PArole 5/6. 27-60. Armstrong, Nigel & Zoe Boughton. 2000. 'Absence de reperes regionaux et relächement de la prononciation.' In: LINXA2. 59-71. Battye, Adrian, Marie-Anne Hintze & Paul Rowlett. 2 2000. The French language today. London: Routledge. Boughton, Zoe. 2001. 'Methodological approaches to the study of French accent identification.' In: Hintze, Marie-Anne, Tim Pooley & Anne Judge (eds.). French accents: phonological and sociolinguistic perspectives. London: AFLS / CILT Publications. 218-39. Boyer, Henri. 1991. Elements de sociolinguistique. Paris: Dunod. Bradac, James. 1990. 'Language attitudes and impression formation.' In: Giles, Howard & W. Peter Robinson (eds.). Handbook of language and social psychology. Chichester: John Wiley. 387-412. Francard, Michel. 2001. '"L'accent beige": mythes et realites.' In: Hintze, Marie-Anne, Tim Pooley & Anne Judge (eds.). French accents: phonological and sociolinguistic perspectives. London: AFLS / CILT Publications. 251-68. Gadet, Franfoise. 1992. Le frangais populaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Gadet, Frangoise. 1997. 'Classe sociale.' In: Moreau, Marie-Louise (ed.). Sociolinguistique: les concepts de base. Liege: Mardaga. 76-81.

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Gadet, Franipoise. 1999. 'La langue fran9aise au XX e siecle: 1. L'emergence de l'oral.' In: Chaurand, Jacques (ed.). Nouvelle histoire de la langue franqaise. Paris: Editions du Seuil. 583-671. Gadet, Fran?oise. 2003. 'La variation: le franfais dans l'espace social, regional et international.' In: Yaguello, Marina (ed.). Le grand livre de la langue franqaise. Paris: Editions du Seuil. 91-152. Gueunier, Nicole, Emile Genouvrier & Abdelhamid Khomsi. 1978. Les Franqais devant la norme. Paris: Champion. Hume, Elizabeth. 1988. 'The realization of /R/ in Canadian and standard European French.' In: Ferrara, Kathleen et al. (eds.). Linguistic change and contact: proceedings of the 16th annual conference on New Ways of Analysing Variation. Austin: University of Texas. 143-51. Judge, Anne. 1993. 'French: a planned language?' In: Sanders, Carol (ed.). French today. Language in its social context. Cambridge: CUP. 7-26. Kemp, William, Paul Pupier & Malcah Yaeger. 1980. Ά linguistic and social description of final consonant cluster simplification in Montreal French.' In: Shuy, Roger & Anna Shnukal (eds.). Language use and the uses of language. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. 12-40. Kerswill, Paul & Ann Williams. 2002. 'Dialect recognition and speech community focusing in new and old towns in England: the effects of dialect levelling, demography and social networks.' In: Long, Daniel & Dennis Preston (eds.). Handbook of perceptual dialectology, volume 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 173-204. Kuiper, Lawrence. 1999. 'Variation and the norm: Parisian perceptions of regional French.' In: Preston, Dennis (ed.). Handbook of perceptual dialectology, volume 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 243-262. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change, volume 2: social factors. Oxford: Blackwell. Laks, Bernard. 1980. Dijferenciation linguistique et differenciation sociale: quelques problemes de sociolinguistique franqaise. These de troisieme cycle, Universite de Paris VHI-Vincermes. Laks, Bernard. 1983. 'Langage et pratiques sociales. Etude sociolinguistique d'un groupe d'adolescents.' In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 46. Paris: Editions de Minuit. 73-97. Lafontaine, Dominique. 1988. 'Le parfum et la couleur des accents.' In: Franqais Moderne 56. 60-73. Lambert, Wallace. 1967. Ά social psychology of bilingualism.' In: Journal of Social Issues 23. 91-109 (cited in Bradac 1990). Leon, Pierre. 1993. Präcis de phonostylistique: parole et expressivite. Paris: Nathan. Lodge, R. Anthony. 1993. French: from dialect to standard. London: Routledge.

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Milroy, Lesley & Matthew Gordon. 2003. Sociolinguistics: method and interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell. Paltridge, John & Howard Giles. 1984. 'Attitudes towards speakers of regional accents of French: effects of regionality, age and sex of listeners.' In: Linguistische Berichte 90. 71-85. Preston, Dennis. 1989. Perceptual dialectology. Dordrecht: Foris. Rickard, Peter. 1989. A history of the French language, second edition. London: Routledge. Trudgill, Peter. 4 2000. Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Walker, Jim. 2003. Review of: Oakes, Leigh. 2001. Language and national identity: comparing France and Sweden. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. In: Journal of French Language Studies 13. 152-3. Walter, Henriette. 1988. Lefrangais dans tous les sens. Paris: Robert Laffont.

IV. Linguists and Purism

Katja Leyhausen

"Vorsicht ist nicht immer der bessere Teil der Tapferkeit"1 Purism in the historiography of the German language2 1. About historiography Looking with Gerard Genette (1969) at the history of the novel, we find a simple recipe for a successful narrative.3 One should first consider the ending and the aesthetic effect one wishes to lend the story and then act according to the principle: the end justifies the means ("la fin doit justifier le moyen"). To read how a sad princess sees her lover disappear forever through the garden gate was, for the reader in classical France, no satisfactory ending to a chain of events, which, up to that point in the plot, must have been absolutely scandalous. That the Princesse de Cleves gave her love away to her husband's rival and that this situation provoked a death through jealousy contravened all models of the contemporary aptum. Such a story was, although tragic for the husband, in no way meant to rouse the public to high levels of emotion. On only one premise did the outrageous confession of Mme de Cleves appear to be acceptable: as in the wonderful adventures of the heroic-gallant and pastural novels it could have been grouped with the merveilleux, it could have led the heroine to happiness and fulfilment in love and at the same time entertained the public. But at the end of this novel we see only the voluntary renunciation of love. The readership felt betrayed by this and could summon up neither despair nor pleasure as a result. Literary critics judged harshly that the story was bizarre and extraordinaire, since it was wholly ineffective when discussed in the framework of contemporary genre theory and psychology.

1 2 3

"Caution is not always the better part of valour" (Hirt 1925: 25) I wish to record m y gratitude to Anya Turner (Totland Bay) who translated this text into English. I am here referring to Genette's study on contemporary criticism of the novel La Princesse de Cleves (1678), which leads him to the theory of determination retrograde. Genette claims that a narrative should be judged according to whether it conforms to a text-intrinsic aim and to a fonction globale which transcends the text. (Genette 1969; compare also Adam 1994: 103).

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The functional narrative theory outlined here is still valid today (Genette 1969). One starts to write a story at its end ("la fin doit justifier le moyen"), then carefully chooses the exact events which will appear to lead unequivocally to this end and which bring about the desired effects along the way. Genette speaks, though, as a literary scholar, who, confronted by the dizzy freedom of the narrator's fictional material, is challenged to repeatedly question or even redefine the rules of writing. Historians could not even begin to take part in such a discussion, because we expect "true" narratives from them, which are completely free from subjectivity and the observer's bias. To rescind this in favour of a radically pragmatic aesthetic of effect bound to an appropriate inner coherence to the plot, would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The theoretical discussion of these questions is as old as historiography itself.4 It is repeatedly claimed that the historian should not be solely guided by "the truth" (in the sense of the correspondence theory of truth, Craig 1998: 472), but that it is also his task to develop "criteria that make sense of life [...] that is, guiding perspectives on self-interpretation and the interpretation of the world" (Riisen 1990: 62). The historiographer is also compelled to communicate a meaning of history to his readership. The reader can gain much more from a story told than he can from a mere description, chronology or explanation of certain events (Danto 1965: 112). Danto, in his analytical philosophy of history, uses the process of narrative description to explain this gain (ibid., p. 143). This procedure is, above all, the result of the fact that the historian, in contrast to the contemporary observer, knows what has happened between the event he or she describes in history and the present day. He or she will therefore be able to describe the event with the history to come in mind. This knowledge enables him or her "to pronounce apparently conclusive, definitive judgements on individual historical phenomena, to give them an ultimate meaning" (Faber 1971: 167). He or she does indeed tell the story, then, with its end as his starting point, because he or she of course knows the outcome of the story. This knowledge lends him or her authority. However, one should deeply mistrust this authority, since it is only concerned with seemingly definitive judgements. This is not only due to the fact that everything may look different in tomorrow's light, but also because even in today's light every story can have many different endings. Every author is only part of a diverse communicative context. The author is therefore "neither the lonely, theoretically constructing Ί ' , nor the lonely, contemplatively observing Ί ' , but the human among humans, who communicates with the others about the meaning of human life before the background of their common life experience"

4

This is not the place to reproduce a history of the debate. An overview is given by, amongst others, Baumgartner (1972), Rüsen (1990: 135) and Harth (1996).

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(Baumgartner 1972: 254). The historian does not just construct his or her stories around his or her core of academic knowledge and theories; indeed he or she also inserts practical insights, maxims and needs. Narrative is therefore "retrospective construction, which is motivated by current communication and has a practical intention" (ibid., p.250). Historical comments have always taken on the historian's perspective of the events concerned; the apparently reconstructed events therefore only really take on their true identity when viewed from this perspective. Indeed, historical events can never be seen as a reality independent from the mind through which they were processed; they are without exception interpretations (which must of course be made plausible through reference to historical documents).5 However, the theory of historiography has also established that we, the readers of the narrative, normally see historical comments as reconstructed descriptions. There are consequences to this, which should not be underestimated: historiography has the very great potential to stabilise existing norms and values by means of statements of seemingly neutral facts about the past. It is not without reason that the theory of narrative description was an annoyance to historical theory in the 1970s: it was thought that narrative historiography manipulated school children to become uncritical and passive (Schörken 1990: 137).

2. The meaning of purist statements in histories of the German language 2.1 Preliminaries It is necessary to examine from which endpoint the historiographers of the German language wrote their histories and to investigate the meaning that the purist statements point to. In this context we will primarily be dealing with the purist with regard to the linguistic influences of foreign languages on German. I will formulate my argument within the framework of pragmatic text linguistics and confine the problem to the question of the communicative function of relevant texts from language historiography. In Genette's study la fin has different meanings. In his structuralist, text-intrinsic view the word often means . In a pragmalinguistic perspective, however, we can see the "ending" {la fin) of historiography in its practical function. In order to analyse the texts I will therefore use the concept of communicative intention, which

5

"History is all of a piece", says Danto (1965: 115) to emphasise this point, "in the sense that there is nothing one might call a pure description in contrast with something else to be called an interpretation."

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may be defined as the will of an author to move his readers to specific conclusions, to cultivate or reinforce certain opinions about the topics dealt with, to create or intensify the reader's will to behave in a certain way (Leyhausen 2003). Both the reader and the academic observer may deduce this intention from the structure of the text, which they see as a complex of signs created by the author for the reader to interpret. The following understanding of communication is the basis upon which this is built: Communication in the sense relevant here means to influence fellow human beings, and this by means of signs (in the widest sense of the word) which bring the others to recognise where you would wish to lead them, in the hope that this knowledge might be a reason for them to be influenced in the desired way. It is important [...] firstly that communication is a form of influence and, secondly, that the influence only represents a case of communication if it is produced by a process of recognition. (Keller 1995: 105)

The methodical path to a text's communicative intention proceeds therefore over the various steps of textual interpretation, which, in the context of pragmatics, is seen as the making of inferences (Levinson 1983). According to Genette's narrative theory, inferences are produced in particular by the events that the author constructs. One should therefore first determine the topics that have been selected for the text and examine what is being said about them. These propositions do not only appear in the text as explicit assertions; one should also "read between the lines" for implicit meaning (Polenz 1988). The following types of questions should be aimed at the text: What does the author mean by the term the German language? Which aspects of the language does the author decide to discuss? Which other topics (apart from language) does he relate the case of language to? According to which historical path does language develop? The way in which authors speak about the links between German and other languages provides us with valuable information as to the communicative intention. In my understanding, purist statements are assertions through which the author presupposes or explicitly claims that the German language is ideally, normally, naturally, expectedly, etc., closed off to the outside and internally homogenous - that is, free from so-called "foreign" elements. The adjective purist is here used as a marker of content. I do not go as far as Kirkness (1975: 15), who equated the term purism with the "striving for language purity" or "language purification". The aims named by Kirkness are long-term goals and can only be achieved indirectly by influencing the thoughts and minds of broad

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groups of recipients. They should therefore be strictly distinguished from the communicative intention recognisable in the text (Heinemann & Heinemann 2002: 15). This does not mean that we will not find statements campaigning against loanwords and appealing for a language free from "foreign influences" in language historiography texts. However, one must under no circumstances take these statements out of the context of the text and see them per se as proof of a struggle for language purity, since an appeal for purity is not always aimed at practical implementation, especially so in the case of historiographical texts. We can only make a fair evaluation of such statements, appeals and assessments by impartially putting them into context and evaluating them within our interpretation (Leyhausen 2003). My corpus consists of 15 Histories of the German Language. It covers relatively evenly the timespan from the establishment of German and Germanic studies as a university discipline (first by Grimm in 1848) up to the present day (Polenz 22000 / 1994 / 1999). The comparability of the texts is ensured by two factors: (i) the intention stated in the title is to present a complete history of the German language (though of course each with a different area of emphasis) and (ii) all texts stem from German studies within the native-speaking area. For each text, I examined the last version edited by the named author. The exceptions to this are Bach (1938) and Sperber (1926) whose last editions differ drastically from their first editions. Therefore Bach (91970) should be viewed independently from its first edition. Similarly, Sperber's ninth edition, which was written and edited by Peter von Polenz, is seen as an entirely different text and hence referred to as Polenz (1978). Such considerations about the textual correspondence between earlier and later editions of a text, or rather a title, can be readily applied to Behaghel (51928), Feist (21933) and Moser (61969). Any revised edition of a text must, in principle, be viewed as a separate text, and in a pragmalinguistic textual analysis this should be taken into account.

2.2 Results According to the classification criteria of communicative intention, the above mentioned language histories can be divided into three ideal text types, which I will label 'texts focusing on national education' (nationalpädagogische Texte), 'texts focusing on linguistic education' (sprachpädgogische Texte) and 'texts focusing on cultural education' (kulturpädagogische Texte). I emphasise that these text types have the status of ideal types, which, although they are empirically tested, are calculated as "pure types" - academic constructions with clearly defined characteristics. An ideal type as described here is for this reason rarely found in "text reality". To allocate a given individual text to a text type is

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difficult, for various intentions may overlap each other.6 The language histories with a cultural bias will show that these overlaps can even form the essential characteristic of a text type. This can only be explained by looking at the scientific and the sociohistorical background of German language historiography, with the inherent forming and breaking of traditions. This system could easily form the starting point of a history of the academic discipline; however, I shall focus on the systematic description of the text types and will abstain from a historical classification and differentiation. A classification of text and text type must nevertheless be undertaken, despite the theoretical reservations just stated: National education G r i m m 1848 Förstemann 1 8 7 4 / 7 5 2

Scherer

1878

Linguistic education

Cultural education

2

S p e r b e r 1926

Hirt

1925 5

Behaghel 1928 Stahlmann 1940

2

Feist2193 3 Moser

6

1969

2

Kluge 1925

T s c h i r c h 1 9 7 1 / 75

B o j u n g a 1926

Polenz'1978

Bach 1938

P o l e n z 2 2 0 0 0 / 1994 / 1 9 9 9

Classification of the histories of the German language

2.3 Texts focusing on national education (nationalpädagogische Texte) Texts focusing on national education are based on the idea of nationhood (Volkstum) and organised around the promotion or stabilisation of the reader's national identity. An author who writes a language history of this kind publicly supports the idea of German nationhood (deutsches Volk / Deutschtum). He desires to carve out and prove what is specifically German (Deutsch) in the language and the people through the understanding of its genesis. Such an author uses the style and content of his or her text to promote the glorification of a past focused on the nation, which we may term monumentalisation;

6

The observation that text types cannot as a rule be clearly distinguished (and that individual texts cannot therefore be clearly assigned to a single text type) should not unsettle us, for it is recognised to be a construction for interpretative purposes. Recent text linguistics (especially the cognitive-orientated) has nonetheless perceived "the fuzziness of texts / text types" to be a problem and talks of text types as prototypes (compare for example Krause 2000: 31 and 46). In contrast to this prototype theory it appears to me that one should hold on to the possibility of creating clearly defined terms as instruments of analysis. I prefer to speak, therefore, of ideal types ["Idealtypen"], a term I have borrowed from Max Weber (1922 / 1972).

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thereby he produces a text within which we may find a "doctrine of national treasures and duties" ("nationale Güter- und Pflichtenlehre"),7 which commits the reader less to concrete behaviour than to the national ideology itself.8 It is a hallmark of these texts that with the German language (die deutsche Sprache) the German people (das deutsche Volk) is quite naturally elevated to be a prevailing focus of the text and is consequently made a subject of the history. A presumed correlation between the language and the people or the nation can be seen as an indisputable basis for any understanding with the reader. This correlation will be repeated and asserted in prominent parts of the text - and this not to put it to discussion and to support it with argument, but to provide a binding premise for all further argument and narrative (compare the mirror metaphor below). Through syntactic connections and the recurrence (Linke & Nussbaumer 2000) of the lexical units Sprache and Volk / Nation this correlation is assumed throughout the whole text and is expanded - in line with the specific national programme - to the important units of Sprachgebiet (language area), Sprachgeist (language spirit), Macht (power) of a language and Volkszahl (population), Volkstum (nationhood), Menschenrasse (human race), Herrschaft (rulership) (of one people over another), amongst others. Such correlations are made possible by the fact that language labels (Deutsch, Germanisch) are also always the name of a people or a tribe (the same applies to labels used for state and race, culture and cultural heritage [Kulturraum]). For example, Grimm (1848: 656) speaks of "Low Germans", "High Germans" and of "High Germany". The identifying function of the names of languages and peoples appears not only in the manner usual for proper nouns ('the language of the name x', 'the people of the name x'), but also comes from the fact that language historiographers relate the notions of Sprache and Volk

7

Here I take on Wilhelm Scherer's formulation from his dedication to Karl Müllenhoff (dedication of the first edition): "Was Jeder für sich wünschen und in bescheidener, aber gründlicher Ueberlegung zu seiner und zu des Ganzen Wolfahrt anstreben darf, das wünschen und erstreben wir noch in viel höherem Masse für den menschlichen Verein, dem wir alles Grösste und Beste danken was wir besitzen und was unseren echtesten Werth ausmacht: für unsere Nation. [...] Der Verlauf einer ruhmvollen, glänzenden Geschichte stünde uns zu Gebote, um ein Gesammtbild dessen was wir sind und bedeuten zu entwerfen: und auf diesem Inventar aller unserer Kräfte würde sich eine nationale Güter- und Pflichtenlehre aufbauen, woraus den Volksgenossen ihr Vaterland gleichsam in athmender Gestalt ebenso strenge heischend wie liebreich spendend entgegenträte." (Scherer 1890: IX)

8

The tone is not always as mild as that of Grimm, when he says in the review of Gervinus' literary history about the mission of teaching German in schools: "es wäre doch zu verwundern, wenn den knaben, welcher die bestimmung hat, .erwachsen und mann geworden' [Grimm quotes Gervinus, K.L.], die alltägliche prosa unseres eingeengten lebens zu treiben, nicht manche züge der vorzeit treffen, dauernder bewegen und in vaterländischer gesinnung stärken sollten." (Grimm 1871: 183). One could compare this to the emotive, even war-like tone of Kluge (1925).

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('people of the language called x' or 'language of the people called x') (Durrell forth). The we customarily used in these texts to address the reader binds him or her to an assumed language community as if to a community of people; the addressee is spoken to exclusively through his national affiliation, not through a specific social role. The way in which these correlations are projected in time and the course of history is shown by the polyvalency of the commonly cited mirror metaphor: Die Sprache ist der Spiegel einer Nation. Sehen wir in diesen Spiegel, so tritt uns darin ein großes, herrliches Bild von uns selbst entgegen. Da sehen wir die Wurzeln unserer Kraft, wie sie sich in der Jugend unseres Volkstums zeigten, und die Kraft des Geistes, die fremde Kultur zu deutschen Eigenbesitz wandelt. (Kluge 1925: 3) 9 (Language is the mirror of a nation. Looking into this mirror we come across a large, wonderful picture of ourself. There we see the roots of our power, as they appeared in the youth of our nation, and the power of the mind, which transforms foreign culture into German property.)

On the one hand, this metaphor makes possible a closely parallel course of language and national history and asserts reciprocal causal relationships between both entities. In this understanding, the language is at all times in its past the expression of the historical state of the people affiliated to it and can also be appropriately explained by this state. On the other hand, the German language allows for a form of "palaeontology" (Tschirch 1971, 13) of the assumed German character of the language and people. The history of the German language and of the German people is interpreted as a development towards a Germanic or German character (germanische / deutsche Eigenart). This development is broadly handled under the banner "prehistory of the German language". Language histories of this type speak of "drastic differences", "special laws" (Sondergesetze), "real and true differences between languages", "real and important traits to characterise our nationhood" (Volkstum) (Kluge 1925: 44), "radical markers, through which we differentiate ourselves from all other people" (Grimm 1848: 1031), "trenchant changes" and "a noticeable linguistic isolation [Absonderung] of the Germanic" (Tschirch 1971: 43). Word formation, sound shifts, Germanic proper nouns, etc., are marks of quality of the German language and are portrayed as the property of the German people (Eigenbesitz des deutschen Volkes, Kluge 1925: 29). They offer the reader the chance to identify with this carefully constructed

9

See also Bach (1938: 234), Stahlmann (1940: 86) and Tschirch (1971: 13). The latter two are used as representatives of other text types (see below).

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Germanness {Deutschtum)}0 The line of development towards this aim of history is explicitly formulated as a historical principle," so that the reader gains the impression that language history follows a course, which is "understandable and logically consistent" (Kluge 1925: 171). Since here the development of Germanic or German individuality (Sonderart, Eigenart) is what is considered to be natural, rule-governed and physically inevitable, foreign elements have the effect of unnatural intruders from outside which hinder the language's development. Palaeontology and monumentalisation take the trouble to painstakingly isolate the "foreign" elements from the language's "own" elements, even after the presumed phase of the original cognate (Urverwandtschaft), "when the languages, separating off from one another, took their own individual paths, on which they became more or less estranged from each other"12 (Grimm 1848: 8). Gurgel and Körper are, according to Kluge (1925: 14), "younger foreign words" {jüngere Fremdwörter). This method is best illustrated in the case of the words Pflug and Arbeit which are suspected of being of non-German origin {der undeutschheit verdächtig, Grimm 1848: 56; cf. also Förstemann 1874: 606). This sort of suspicion must be investigated if one is to realise the communicative intention of national edification, particularly since the meaning of each word is concerned with an important cultural treasure and can help us to decide, by for example tracing the etymology of the word Pflug, whether the Germans or the Germanic - as ein Naturvolk ("primitive people") - played a part in the invention of the word and object or not. Etymology and the history of the lexicon therefore form an important focus of the content of the texts; "the examination and classification of vocabulary" is "the basic requirement of all linguistic research"13 (Kluge 1925: 14). Whole chapters are dedicated to the listing of borrowed words (see for example Förstemann 1874 / 1875, Stahlmann 1940,

10

"Die erste Lautverschiebung beschließt die vorgerm. Stufe und wird zugleich das erste Ereignis in dem Entwicklungsgang unserer völkischen Eigenart. Sie ist ein wesentliches Kennzeichen aller germ. Sprachen den andern idg. Völkern gegenüber geworden." ("The first sound shift ends the pre-Germanic stage and at the same time becomes the first event in the development of our national character. The shift is an essential marker of all Germanic languages in contrast to other Indo-European peoples.") (Kluge 1925: 54)

11

"Jede Einzelsprache lebt unter eigenen Lebensbedingungen und Kultureinflüssen, entwickelt volkhaft und sprachlich ihre erbliche Art zu geschichtlicher Eigenart." ("Every individual language exists under its own living conditions and cultural influences, nationally and linguistically develops its own hereditary means to historical individuality") (Kluge 1925: 38). "als die sprachen von einander sich abtrennend jede ihren eigenthümlichen weg einschlugen, auf dem sie sich mehr oder minder entfremdeten." "So ergibt sich Sichtung und Schichtung unseres Wortschatzes als die Grundbedingung aller Spracharbeit."

12 13

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Tschirch 1971 / 1975). We additionally detect a clear endeavour, even in theory, to illuminate and differentiate any "foreign influence".14 Out of all of this a contradiction becomes apparent: If the language histories with a national bias maintain both a correlation between language and people and an inner homogeneity and "individuality" {Eigenart), but also if the history of German and the German people must be presented as a history of "blendings", "takings" and "foreign influences", then the German language would logically have to be understood as an accident of history. If the opposite is the case, then the following question arises: How do the authors reconcile "foreign influence" with the monumentalisation of the nation's past? We may distinguish between three positions: 1. "Foreign" elements, and even elements that are linguistically similar, are blended out through the use of rhetorical detours. Sometimes they are even completely omitted. In this vein, Kluge's Indo-European (Indogermanisch) language comparisons (Kluge 1925: 6) contain primarily examples from Indian and Germanic (Old Saxon, Old High German, Gothic), with some from Greek or Latin, but rarely forms attributed to other languages. A linguistic relationship to the Slavonic or Romance languages is here not clearly brought to the reader's attention. Elements that must be classified "foreign" are weakened and played down. It is often implied or spelled out that the "foreign influence" was not deeply embedded, only existed at the language area's borders, only reached the language of an elite minority or another single variety, it was only the material culture that was affected, not the imagination (Vorstellungswelt), it was only exoticisms that were adopted. Over and over again we are assured as in Bach (1938: 75) - that "the inner structure of the German language" was "hardly touched by foreign influences". The vagueness of language names opens up the opportunity to change the linguistic elements recognised as "foreign" back to "German" elements if so desired: with the label Deutsch the author can make reference to the form and meaning of the individual linguistic element, to appearance or origin, to the original or target language of the loaning process, to specific linguistic characteristics of German or to linguistic elements which are also attributed to other languages but are nonetheless claimed as their own. The contradictions these authors become entangled in, because the categories "foreign" and "own" are not suitable for the description of prehistoric times, are tendentiously resolved in favour of the German language (see for example Kluge (1925: 24) on the German ablaut). Furthermore, loan words into German are set off against the borrowings which

14

See the difference between "loan word" and "foreign word" in Stahlmann (1940: 36); the theory of "the language of others" in Hirt (1925: 114); on "a second degree for foreign words (Fremdwörter 2. Potenz)" in Förstemann (1874: 137).

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other languages made from Germanic and German15. This sort of Germanocentric perspective is ideally suited to the monumentalisation of language history. 2. "Foreign" languages and linguistic borrowings are - often in direct comparison with German - debased: this can happen subtly, cynically, ironically, openly or aggressively; these assessments can even leave an impression of chauvinism. According to Kluge (1925, 100), "Latin proper nouns have a surprising sobriety in comparison to the full sound and content of so many Germanic names". Considering how positive the adjective eigen (individual) is for Kluge, it is easy to understand the cynicism in the comment that German does not have the advantage of a "most individual achievement of Rome" (einer eigensten Errungenschaft des Römertums), namely "names such as Cicero (pea man), Fabius (bean man), Piso (vetch man), Asinius (donkey man) and Agricola (farmer)". Comments such as those made by Hirt (1925: 106; 130), that in the medieval monasteries German was "stretched on a bed of anguish", draw us nearer to the conclusion that the influence of other languages was to be prevented even in current language usage. In agreement with this, emotive calls for language purification, in the sense of a "fight for the continued existence and purity of our mother tongue", Bach 1938: 234), form an integral part of the introductory and concluding sections of these texts. Because of the harsh stigmatizations and misinterpretations (see 1.) it seems to me that these direct and indirect appeals are not, however, based primarily on practice. It is not the intention to avoid using Pflug, Gurgel and Körper as part of everyday language. Instead it is purely a move to link foreign elements with a notion of alienation or even hostility; the demands for language purity serve primarily to bind the reader to national ideology. Hypostatizations and deagentivisations in the stylistic formulation of such appeals build on this (Bach 1938: 224; Kluge 1925: l). 16 3. However, the attitude towards the "foreign" can also be anything from positive to euphoric. Basically the position one takes is unimportant (variatio delectat), as long as in a narrower context it is made clear, through argument or association, that the Germanic people or the Germans and their language are ultimately better than the others. In the presentation of language contact the methods of revaluation used are so ambiguous in scope that we often do not know exactly at which language the praise and euphoria are aimed. Bach (1938: 82) sees "revolutionary powers in Christianity and in the FranconianCarolingian empire which will be soon purposefully working hand in hand". He

15 16

"Der Wortschatz des durchschnittlich gebildeten Polen weist etwa 16 % Wörter deutscher Provenienz a u f ' (Tschirch 1975: 281). On hypostatization and deagentivisation see Polenz (1988).

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sees both in a positive light as responsible for the "reordering of the German view of the world and the German mindset" {Neugestalter von Weltbild und Geisteshaltung der Deutschen). In general, contact with other languages can bring massive advantages for German: one is pleased to learn from a cultural language such as Latin, particularly since the early borrowings from Classical Latin raise German above the French language, for that has only taken on the later Vulgar Latin words (Kluge 1925: 137). At this point the comments veer round again to cynicism. This is the case for the theory that the Germanic language or the German language has "without difficulty taken on foreign elements and made them German" (hat sie eingedeutscht), has "truly appropriated them", has "incorporated" them {hat sie sich einverleibt) (Hirt 1925: 82; 103; as historical law: Bach 1938: 16). This also is monumentalisation. 2.4 Texts focusing on linguistic education {sprachpädagogische Texte) Texts with a linguistic bias focus on theoretical language teaching and / or practical language instruction. The concept behind this kind of language history stems from the old paradigm of historicism that a language can only be understood if viewed from the perspective of its origins and history and can therefore only be described and / or taught in its systematic nature with an eye on its history.17 In contrast to the texts focusing on national education, in texts with a linguistic agenda the German language is the sole subject of the text. The reason behind the fact that the oldest historical periods are given particular attention is the ambition to describe the development of the phonological, morphological and lexical aspects of the language system. Modern historiography is also given heavy weighting, most pointedly as a history of language usage and language attitudes. The topics of spelling, correctness of language {Sprachrichtigkeit), the history of dialects as the history of the displacement of the "natural language", the "pure, uncontaminated dialect" (Hirt 1925: 213), but also the history of syntax and style, as well as the issue of "foreign words", are all connected to a fixing of values and the standardization of opinion. Two branches of this text type may be distinguished: texts such as those by Behaghel (51928) are concerned with the widening of theoretical linguistic knowledge within the framework of university research and teaching; they therefore have an informative character. In addition we see texts of a more popularist nature which want to have a clear normalizing impact. The latter are aimed at teachers at more advanced schools and at student teachers (Hirt 1925, Stahlmann 1940), who are provided with instructions on the teaching of

17

This is programmatically formulated in Paul (1880 / 1995).

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historically appropriate language usage. The reader is continually put under the obligation to commit himself or herself to the principle of Sprachpflege (language purification): on the one hand, we see the history of languagecleansing, unifying and normalizing Sprachpflege·, on the other hand, we are advised of obstacles {Hindernisse) to the development of the German language, particularly from other languages. Hirt (1925: 124; 182) judges that the language needs "purposeful nursing" (zielbewußte Pflege) and therefore one should excuse the "deformed products" (Auswüchse) of puristic endeavours in German history; one should not "make fun" of them, but should "go after the real achievements". One "cannot be thankful enough" to "the great rulers, the Carolingians, who provided the stimulus to purify the German language".18 The history of language purification is seen as a history of success: "the worst in these foreign influences" was "conquered" (überwunden). The reader is directly mobilised through appeals: "Every person [...] who concerns himself more deeply with the history of the German language must recognise that this work must not stop". The school pupil should "put only half as much effort as he puts into learning Latin phrases, into building upon his German style" (Hirt 1925: 124; 182). In contrast to the texts with a national agenda, popularist texts with a linguistic bias have, thus, a clearly appellative character. In language histories aimed at promoting a linguistic focus we find as a rule overlaps with the matters of concern of the historiography with a national bias. This is found not only in the process of monumentalisation, where we can include the construction of a success story for Sprachpflege (language purification; see below for more on this). The prerequisite of homogenity and self-sufficiency, which is also common in texts focusing on linguistic education, does not come only from the idea that language has a well-defined, logical structure, but is accounted for - in reserved to all too obvious terms, selectively or continuously - by the acceptance of the constitutive interrelation of language and people. In dealing with loan words the values outlined above for texts aimed at a national agenda are called upon. Also in relation to this closeness to national historiography a contrast must be drawn between the informative and normalizing language histories with a linguistic bias: language pedagogy and national pedagogy merge into one another when Stahlmann (1940: VII) demands that "in all matters relating to language, in all language teaching a good proportion of folklore (Volkskunde) should be conveyed", whereby for him the only teachers who are suited to the task are those who "can see New High German in a historical perspective". In the informative texts the two views can be seen next to each other in a fairly

18

"Wir können jedenfalls dem großen Herrschergeschlecht, den Karolingern, nicht dankbar genug sein, daß sie die Anregung zur Pflege der deutschen Sprache gegeben haben."

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unconnected manner. At no point, however, do we encounter a conflict between the two opinions, which engulfs the authors in contradictions.

2.5 Texts focusing on cultural education (kulturpädagogische Texte) In Tschirch (1971 / 1975) we read the following comment about the contact between German and other languages: T h e language o f the p e o p l e of central E u r o p e w a s o p e n to linguistic f o r e i g n i n f l u e n c e as the c o n s e q u e n c e and precipitation of cultural and civilising i n f l u e n c e s f r o m outside at all times. In t h e age of ever intensifying e c o n o m i c e x c h a n g e and a m a l g a m a t i o n , in particular of t h e E u r o p e a n p e o p l e s in e c o n o m i c c o m m u n i t i e s such as the bilateral e c o n o m i c a n d cultural a g r e e m e n t s , this o p e n n e s s s e e m s h a r d l y to h a v e declined in recent times. In a n y case, neither b a r b e d - w i r e f e n c e s , d e a t h strips and b o r d e r w a l l s n o r a t y p e of l a n g u a g e p u r i s m bred out of a m i s u n d e r s t o o d love for t h e m o t h e r t o n g u e c o u l d halt this d e v e l o p m e n t ; in fact it h a r d l y i n f l u e n c e d the l a n g u a g e at all [ . . . ] . (Tschirch 1975: 259) 1 9

So, w i t h o u t the individual speaker n o t i c i n g it, the languages g r o w e v e r closer together in their v o c a b u l a r y - as a clear c o n s e q u e n c e of the historical and, in particular, e c o n o m i c d e v e l o p m e n t of t h e world, w h i c h forces the p e o p l e s to c o m e together with increasing strength, o f t e n despite their national obstinacy. ( T s c h i r c h 1975: 285) 2 0

Tschirch apparently takes the following as given: the German language is the "language" of the German "people". The languages (as languages of individual "peoples") are separated and distinguishable (otherwise they would not be able to "grow ever closer together" and the German would not be able to "stand

19

"Die Sprache des Volkes in der Mitte Europas hat sprachlichen Fremdeinflüssen als Folge und Niederschlag kultureller und zivilisatorischer Einflüsse von außen zu allen Zeiten offengestanden. Im Zeitalter und Zeichen eines immer intensiveren wirtschaftlichen Austausche und Zusammenschlusses insbesondere der europäischen Völker zu Wirtschaftsgemeinschaften wie der zweiseitigen Wirtschafts- und Kulturabkommen erscheint diese Offenheit in jüngster Zeit kaum geringer als früher. Jedenfalls haben weder Stacheldrahtzäune, Todesstreifen und Grenzmauern noch ein aus falsch verstandener Liebe zur Muttersprache hochgezüchteter Sprachpurismus diese Entwicklung aufzuhalten, ihr im Gegenteil so gut wie nichts anzuhaben vermocht. [...]"

20

"So wachsen die Sprachen in ihrem Wortschatz aufeinander zu, ohne daß der einzelne Sprecher das bemerkte - als klare Folge der geschichtlichen, insbesondere der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung der Welt, die die Völker, oft gegen ihren nationalen Eigensinn, immer stärker zueinander zwingt."

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open" to "influences from outside"). He recognises that there is such a thing as the "love for the mother tongue" and the unity of a people (otherwise "the peoples" could show no "national obstinacy"). But he can agree neither with this concept of "national obstinacy", nor with the "misunderstood love for the mother tongue", with the "language purism" "bred" from it, or with "barbedwire fences", etc. On the contrary, from his perspective the languages seem to "grow ever closer together" only "in their vocabulary", the openness between the languages does not do away with their mutual foreignness ("linguistic foreign influence") and the only thing he has to set against "national obstinacy" is that "economic development [...] forces the peoples to come together". It is typical that the author explicitly and (with effective recourse to "barbed-wire fences", "death strips" and "border walls") credibly argues for the acceptance of contact between languages; his attempt is, however, not a complete success, because his formulations again and again express the idea that such contact is in need of explanation and legitimisation and therefore cannot be seen as an acceptable normal occurrence. The closeness to historiography with a national bias is as apparent as the author's attempt to distance himself from it. In order to deal with the communicative intention I will discuss Tschirch's language history with others from the text group focusing on cultural education. We can categorise these texts as aimed at promoting a cultural focus if by the term culture we understand a great range of models of thought and behaviour, but in particular of values and norms. In addition, in these texts language is, on the one hand, related to these kinds of values and norms ('der menschliche Geist' ("the human spirit") in Tschirch (1971: 13), 'das poetische Kunstwerk' ("the poetic work of art") in Sperber (1926: 109)) and, on the other hand, language is itself stylised as a value and a norm. In their definition of language and establishment of values and norms, the texts however achieve nothing like the degree of coherence found in texts aimed at promoting a national focus. As we have seen in Tschirch, aspects of national thought make a particularly regular appearance in these texts; language is repeatedly presented as the language of a people and / or the well-being of the German people is elevated to a measure of quality. In view of this the term cultural education (kulturpädagogisch) appears to me to be particularly suitable for these texts, for the word culture is, as Hermanns (1999) has shown, a term of totality ("Totalitätsbezeichnung"). With this, Hermanns means to say that the word culture is not concerned with a homogenous, locked-in system of norms and values, but with a mere totality of such cognitive and emotive dispositions. Cultures are therefore reciprocally porous and not without internal contradictions. In texts focusing on cultural education the German language can therefore be simultaneously calculated as

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part of different, even contradictory cultures, as part of a national, an educated ["bildungsbürgerlich"], a liberal or democratic, a learned culture and so forth. The key to this lies in the ambivalence of the author's cultural affiliations, which can only be explained historically. In view of the complexity of historical relationships, language historians have different, contradictory intentions, for example, to identify with their nation, but to distance themselves from national thinking. These contradictory intentions are constitutive for this particular text type, in contrast to texts with a linguistic bias in which the overlappings are incidental. The position on language contact fluctuates incredibly. I quote some examples of common ground with historiography aimed at promoting a national agenda: Foreign words appear to the authors to be "strange" {merkwürdig) or "important" (bedeutsam). They are described as occurring "in hosts" (in einer Unzahl) or "massively" (massenhaft), "to a considerable or unusual extent" (in beträchtlichem / ungewöhnlichem Ausmaß) (for example Sperber 1926: 43, Tschirch 1975: 60, Moser 1969: 134, Polenz 1994: 49)21. We read of "foreign yoke" (fremdes Joch), of "a flood of foreign words" (Fremdwortflut), of "an obsession with foreign words" (Fremdwörtersucht), of "Latin word cohorts" (lateinische Wortkohorten) and of "Latin loans' routes of military advance" (Anmarschstraßen des lat. Lehnguts) (Tschirch 1971: 112, Feist 1933: 27, Sperber, 1926: 103, 107). "Foreign" words are found to be responsible for "the death of native words" (Worttod der einheimischen Wörter), they signify "the death march of inherited words" (Todesreigen für Erbwörter) (Tschirch 1975: 31). The purification (Sprachpflege) of the mother tongue is in this context damage limitation, the authors implicitly regret that there are no natural barriers that could obstruct the language contact (Sperber 1926: 62, 103). Polenz (1994: 55) appears impatient when dealing with the definite replacement of Latin terms with German at universities: the intention of bringing about the "destruction of the compulsory use of Latin, an obstacle in the path of cultural and scientific progress" came about "only at the end of the eighteenth century". The middle of the eighteenth century signified "a break between eras, when the German language, as a language of science, specialist areas and education, surmounted its centuries-old direct dependence on Latin (and French)". His affirmative position on "the construction of German loan words", which he sees as a "surge of development, which was important for the German system of vocabulary", is supported in Polenz (1994: 77), by the use of the nationalistically discredited Goethe quotation: "Die Gewalt einer Sprache ist nicht, daß sie das Fremde abweist, sondern, daß sie es verschlingt." ("The

21

Tschirch (1975: 280) later attributes this to "basic errors by radical lexical purists" (to "Grundirrtümern der eingefleischten Fremdwortgegner").

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power of a language is not in the turning away of the foreign, but in the consuming of it.") In language histories with a national bias the important historical contexts contrast quite strikingly with the narrow, limited contexts behind the presentation of "foreign influence". In texts with a cultural bias the loans are also given hardly any historical anchorage. The history of Sprachausbau (Kloss 1987) is, however, treated very differently. Comprehensive processes or continuous developments with various stages are constructed around events such as the establishment of a German "original prose" (Sperber 1926: 69), Luther's Bible translation or the formation of a unified German written language. Events of this kind were, in the words of the authors, "of decisive importance for the development (Weiterentwicklung) of the German language". Smaller events were judged according to whether they had "a role to play" in, say, "the emergence {Entstehung) of chivalric poetic language" or in "the emergence of the New High German written language". The "beginnings (Anfänge) of German original prose" and the "transition (Übergang) of German into a literary language" are carved out; "forerunners" (Vorboten) and "precursors" (Vorläufer) anticipate "highlights" (Höhepunkte) (evidence in Sperber 1926). In order to be able to evaluate the events in this way, various perspectives overlap deliberately: the Bible translation, the unified language, etc., are, from the subjective standpoint of the creator, the "task" (Aufgabe) and the "aim" (Ziel) behind their "endeavours" (Bestrebungen) (to translate, to Germanise, to create norms); at the same time they are, in the eyes of the language historian, "profit" (Verdienst), "success" (Erfolg) and a "gift" (Geschenk) for the German-speaking community. The author can legitimise his assessment through the method of narrative description, meaning that the historian can make judgements about the later objective success of earlier efforts and endeavours. That it is likewise the author who attributes this kind of struggle (Ringen) or fight (Kampf) with these kinds of aims (Ziele) to historical figures is of course not verbalised, and counts less as an evaluation than a description, which is also the case in the assessment of global courses of history. In this way, the history of language purification (Sprachpflege) is presented as a real history of success, for the work of the language purist is not just any work with just any subjective base, but appears to be the propelling force of history. At these points, we are therefore given the impression that the authors are talking not only about a historical event, a great historical event (which developed over a long course of time and was central to language history), but at the same time about the notion that language purism is worthwhile, that it

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generally leads to success and can bring about great historical achievements.22 A German Bible translation, German books and linguistic unity become historiographical catchwords, which open up a promising future to the reader looking forward, and communicate the certainty of a successful history, a great past to the reader looking back. In contrast, we could almost say that foreign words and loanwords are anecdotes of history. Individual examples of loans are occasionally described as having had "a sustained effect or having farreachingly changed the face of German". However, these catchwords do not have positive connotations - and this is not surprising, since what the loan words are missing is a meaning in the language history. The monumentalisation of language purism {Sprachpflege) and the trivialisation of language contact are the key premises upon which national narrative technique, or indeed national education, is based. It must therefore be said that the rehabilitation of loanwords as shown for example in Peter von Polenz's language history ( 2 2000 / 1994 / 1999) is all the more believable because he brings them back to their place in the course of history: he explains "the tendency towards the use of foreign languages in the age of German Absolutism" as "the modernising continuation of the empire's traditional legislation on languages" ("die modernisierende Weiterentwicklung des traditionellen Reichssprachenrechts"). The "multilingualism" of the Alamode in the seventeenth century is, in connection with discoveries overseas, brought back to "an old multilingual tradition of foreign traders" (Polenz 1994: 51 and 59). Sperber (1926) interprets certain borrowings used in verse techniques and stylistics, for example the end rhyme, as the expression of a "taste striving for more pleasing and mobile forms" and thereby integrating them with the general development towards a "poetically ennobled form of language" (Sperber 1926: 54 and 109). In contrast to Polenz, who uses expressions with positive connotations such as modernising and types of tradition, Sperber is here hesitant to speak of progress in the way that he does of indigenous developments (Sperber 1926: 55). According to Sperber, Notker's mixed prose is seen as a "risky innovation", which Notker "approaches with fortuity" and against which Sperber harbours misgivings (Sperber 1926: 55). By and large Sperber is, then, both a stylist and an author whose work focuses on national education; however, in individual cases his stylistic evaluation can far outflank his national thought. He reserves to himself the right to take up a different position every time he considers one matter or another.

22

In Hirt (1925: 195) this is conveyed to the reader as the morale of history: those "Germanisations" by Campe which have remained in language usage show "us clearly how much purposeful, logical work in this area leads to wonderful results".

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3. Conclusion In this article I have applied the concept of Zweckrationalität as defined by Weber (1972)23 to the interpretation and classification of the texts of my corpus and have maintained that historiographers of German did indeed act with their aim and purpose in mind, and hence acted neither "affectionally" nor "traditionally" (Weber, 1972). An example of this is my description of texts focusing on cultural education: I have maintained that the authors of this text group consciously weigh up different opinions against each other. They deliberately express different opinions, even though these opinions contradict one another. So the authors desire to educate their readers to form some sort of national identification and at the same time they desire to preserve them from national pride. However, it may be criticised that we find indications that the authors follow the established traditions of linguistic historiography (of the texts with a national bias), i.e. that they act traditionally. For this reason my classification may very well appear to be violent homogenisation. The overall aim of my research is a critical account of the academic historiography of German which crucially includes modern texts. Maintaining the primacy of rationality in academic writing and research demands of the historiographer to reflect on his or her own historical bias and that s/he does not act in a reactionary way (in its literal sense). This is part of the historiographer's duty since the interpretation of history must respect current interests not just of the writer but also of the reader. In order to accomplish this, academic historiography needs to comply with Genette's functional principle of literary narratives ("the end justifies the means") alluded to in the introduction to this article. For this reason I feel justified in ignoring the possibility of simply following historiographical traditions (traditional acting). The analysis of the histories of German in this article has shown that the topic of national identity and the connection between nation and language is not confined to the past but still features in modern accounts of German - the suspicion lingers that this is not necessarily accidental but part of the desire of modern historiographers.

23

"A person who acts in a manner rational to function orientates his actions towards purpose, means and side-effects and in the course of this weighs up the means against the purpose, as well as the purpose against the side-effects and finally also weighs up the various possible purposes against themselves: in any case he or she acts neither affectionally (and particularly not emotionally) nor traditionally." (Weber 1972: 13)

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4. References 4.1 Primary Sources Bach, Adolf. 1938. Geschichte

der deutschen Sprache. (1st ed.). Leipzig:

Quelle und Meyer. Bach, Adolf. 9 1970. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Leipzig: Quelle und

Meyer. Behaghel, Otto. 5 1928. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. (1st ed. = 1891). 5 th ,

improved and extended edition with a map. Berlin, Leipzig: de Gruyter. Bojunga, Klaudius. 1926. 'Werden und Wesen der deutschen Sprache in alter Zeit. Die Fremdsprachenherrschaft und der Freiheitskampf der deutschen Sprache.' In: Nollau, Hermann (ed.). 1926. Germanische Ein

Werk

über

die

germanischen

Grundlagen

Wiedererstehung.

unserer

Gesinnung.

Heidelberg: Winter. 486-546. Feist, Sigmund. 2 1933. Die deutsche Sprache. Kurzer Abriss der Geschichte unserer Muttersprache von der ältesten Zeit bis zur Gegenwart (1906). 2 nd ,

completely reworked and extended edition [...]. München: Hueber. Förstemann, Ernst. 1874 / 1875. Geschichte

des deutschen Sprachstammes.

2

volumes. Nordhausen: Förstemann. Grimm, Jacob. 1848. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. 2 volumes. Leipzig:

Weidmann. Hirt, Hermann. 2 1925. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. (1st ed. = 1919).

München: Beck. Kluge, Friedrich. 2 1925. Deutsche Sprachgeschichte. Werden und Wachsen unserer Muttersprache von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. (1st ed. =

1920). Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer. Moser, Hugo. 6 1969. Deutsche

Sprachgeschichte.

Mit einer Einführung in die

Fragen der Sprachbetrachtung. (1st ed. = 1950). Tübingen: Niemeyer. Polenz, Peter von. 9 1978. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Erweiterte

Neubearbeitung der früheren Darstellung von Hans Sperber. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Polenz, Peter von. 2 2000 / 1994 / 1999. Deutsche Sprachgeschichte. Vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. 3 volumes. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Scherer, Wilhelm. 2 1890. Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1868). 2 nd ,

substantially revised edition (1st ed = 1878). New impression. Berlin: Weidmann. Sperber, Hans. 1926. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. Berlin, Leipzig: de

Gruyter. Stahlmann, Hans. 1940. Vom Werden und Wandel der Muttersprache. Ein Hilfsbuch für Studierende, Lehrer und Freunde unserer Muttersprache.

Leipzig: Brandstetter.

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Tschirch, Fritz. 2 1971/ 1975. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. 2 volumes (1st ed. = 1966 / 1969). Berlin: Schmidt.

4.2 Secondary Sources Adam, Jean-Michel. 1994. Le texte narratif. Traite d'analyse pragmatique et textuelle. Nouvelle ed. entierement revue et completee. Paris: Editions Nathan. Baumgartner, Hans Michael. 1972. Kontinuität und Geschichte. Zur Kritik und Metakritik der historischen Vernunft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Craig, Edward. 1998. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 9. London, New York: Routledge. Danto, Arthur C. 1965. Analytical Philosophy of history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Durrell, Martin, forth. 'Deutsch: Teutons, Germans or Dutch? The Problem of Defining a Nation.' In: Watts, Sheila & Chris Young (eds.): Landmarks in the history of the German Language. Stuttgart: Heinz. Faber, Karl-Georg. 1971. Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft. München: Beck. Genette, Gerard. 1969. 'Vraisemblance et motivation.' In: Genette, Gerard. Figures II. Paris: Editions du Seuil. 71-99. Harth, Dietrich. 1996. Geschichtsschreibung'. In: Ueding, Gert (ed.). Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Mitbegründet von Walter Jens. Vol. 3. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 832-870. Heinemann, Margot & Wolfgang Heinemann. 2002. Grundlagen der Textlinguistik. Interaktion - Text - Diskurs. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hermanns, Fritz. 1999. ,Sprache, Kultur und Identität. Reflexionen über drei Totalitätsbegriffe.' In: Gardt, Andreas / Ulrike Haß-Zumkehr / Thorsten Roelcke (eds.). Sprachgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 1999. 351-391. Keller, Rudi. 1995. Zeichentheorie. Zu einer Theorie semiotischen Wissens. Tübingen, Basel: Francke. Kirkness, Alan. 1975. Zur Sprachreinigung im Deutschen 1789-1871. Eine historische Dokumentation. Tübingen: Narr. Kloss, Heinz. 1987. ,Abstandsprache und Ausbausprache. / Abstand-Language and Ausbau-Language.' In: Ammon, Ulrich, Norbert Dittmar & Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.). Soziolinguistik / Sociolinguistics. [...] An international Handbook of the Science of Language and Society. Vol. 1. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. 302-308. Krause, Wolf-Dieter. 2000. Textsorten. Konfrontationslinguistische und konfrontative Aspekte. Frankfurt: Lang.

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La Fayette, Madame de. 1989. La princesse de Cleves (1678). Paris: Pocket classiques. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leyhausen, Katja. 2003. französische Sprachgeschichten als Typen kommunikativen Handelns. Kommunikative Absichten in der Sprachhistoriographie.' In: Gil, Alberto & Christian Schmitt (eds.). Aufgaben und Perspektiven der romanischen Sprachgeschichte im dritten Jahrtausend. Akten der gleichnamigen Sektion des XXVII. Deutschen Romanistentages München (7.-10. Oktober 2001). Bonn: Romanistischer Verlag. 85-121. Linke, Angelika & Nussbaumer, Markus. 2000. ,Rekurrenz (Recurrence).' In: Brinker, Klaus, Gerd Antos, Wolfgang Heinemann & Sven F. Sager (eds.). Text- und Gesprächslinguistik / Linguistics of text and conversation. [...] Handbook of contemporary research. Vol. 1. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. 305-315. Paul, Hermann. 101995. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. (1st ed. = 1880). Tübingen: Niemeyer. Polenz, Peter von. 21988. Deutsche Satzsemantik. Grundbegriffe des Zwischenden-Zeilen-Lesens. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Rüsen, Jörn. 1990. Zeit und Sinn. Strategien historischen Denkens. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch. Schörken, Rolf. 1990. Geschichte erzählen heute. In: Niemetz, Gerold (ed.). Aktuelle Probleme der Geschichtsdidaktik. Stuttgart: Metzler. 137-158. Weber, Max. 51972. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, edited by J. Winckelmann. (1st ed. = 1922). Tübingen: Mohr.

James Milroy

Some Effects of Purist Ideologies on Historical Descriptions of English 1. Introduction It is generally assumed that purist beliefs about language are held only by members of the general public - i.e., by non-specialists - and not by professional language scholars. Linguists, we like to think, are scientists - objective observers of language who can dissociate themselves from the ideologies current in the society around them. But this comforting view is certainly erroneous: it is quite clear that linguists can be, and often are, affected by ideological positions that may greatly influence their interpretation of research results. Indeed, according to Joseph & Taylor (1990: 2), the whole subject of linguistics is 'covertly ideological and value-laden'. In this paper, I am concerned with an area that is particularly likely to be affected by ideological positions - historical language description - and the ideology I am interested in is linguistic purism. I want to look at its effects on language description and at its role in creating what we generally accept as the authoritative histories of languages. I will refer chiefly to the conventionally accepted history of English. First, we need to consider what is meant by the term 'purism'.

2. The first kind of purism There is probably a very wide range of disparate language-based activities and attitudes that might be called purist, so - simplifying greatly - I will begin by noticing two very general kinds of purism - and this classification is not meant to be definitive or exhaustive. The first is what might be called sanitary purism. This is aimed at sanitizing language, or, as Cameron (1995) has put it, practising 'verbal hygiene'. It is about cleanliness and orderliness eliminating what are thought to be corruptions or mistakes in usage, and cleansing or purifying extant records of language and, hence, the descriptions of language history that are based on these records. The metaphor is that of

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physical cleanliness or tidiness: language is implicitly likened to physical objects and substances. Just as physical substances can become dirty, contaminated or impure, so, it is believed, language in use can also become contaminated or impure, and just as physical substances can be cleansed or purified, so language in use can be cleansed or purified. It is important, however, to bear in mind that this is indeed a metaphor, for a language is absolutely not a physical object or substance. It is an abstract entity, and as such it cannot be shown to be impure or corrupted unless we can define beforehand what we believe would constitute purity in an abstraction of this kind. This is not self-evident, and our definition, as we've already noticed, will often be based on analogies with physical objects. It may also depend on implicit comparisons with some idealized form of language (perhaps a standard or classical variety), which in reality may never have existed in speaker usage. Here, we commonly enter the territory of myth - the myth of eternal decline - in which a language is always in a state of degenerating from some idealized perfect state that existed in some Golden Age. I do not aspire to a discussion of myth; it is simply the idealization 'language' that we need to consider more closely here. The most important structural property of this idealization is invariance or uniformity, and this is despite the fact that language in use is never invariant or uniform: it always incorporates variability. Thus (by this reasoning), in comparison with an idealized state, any actual state of language, being variable, must be impure and in need of cleansing. Purist activity, therefore, may be seen as one of the strategies by which uniformity is promoted in language, and this in turn is associated with the process of language standardization, which involves the imposition of uniformity on variable states. So far so good; yet, there is something resembling a paradox in all this, because when one usage (e.g., you were) is accepted and another (e.g., you was) rejected, there is no valid linguistic criterion for this decision and no internal linguistic argument by which one usage can be shown to be 'purer' than the other. The criteria used are always external to language structure they commonly have to do with society, literature, history, or logic, and any linguistic justifications offered are post hoc. As for standardization, the only purpose of adopting one form and rejecting another is to bring about uniformity. It does not matter in principle which form is the one adopted, nor does it matter whether the form is considered to be pure or impure. All that matters is that the resulting state of language should be a uniform state. Thus, although purist activity may be involved in the process of standardization, it is in itself quite distinct from that process. In historical language description, the cleansing metaphor can be extended (or subtly changed?) into the notion of what is genuine and real and what is not

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genuine and real. Much attention has been given to establishing what are reliable 'genuine' forms of the language in the past and establishing a canon for the history of a language (Milroy 1994: 23; 2002: 8). Those things that are considered to be not genuine are excluded. The reasoning used here is similar to that used by Biblical scholars, and also by traditional literature scholars and textual scholars, because in this dimension, historical linguistic description has been much affected by the fact that it was traditionally associated with textual scholarship - particularly the study of ancient and medieval texts. Thus, the arguments arose originally from aspects of literary study, rather than from factors internal to language. Textual editors were much occupied with establishing authoritative texts for the work of ancient and medieval authors, and this involved ridding them of errors and corruptions by establishing what were believed to be the genuine or original readings. Historical descriptions of language took over some of their methods and principles, and the effect of these language-purifying efforts was to erase alleged impurities from the record - to exclude them from the canon. This, it seems to me, involves another paradox: variants that actually exist in the record are expunged from the record; i.e., although they are there, they are regarded as being not there. Thus, sanitary purist activity, which, as we have seen, is an important strategy in any process of language standardization, is equally important in the retrospective imposition of uniformity on historical language states, and this is, in effect, retrospective standardization. As uniformity or invariance is valued above all things, a high value is placed on any argument that has the effect of expunging variability from the retrospective canon. Conventional histories of English have been much influenced by this.

3. The second kind of purism So much then for sanitary purism. We now move on to a second, somewhat different, kind of purism, which we might call genetic purism. In a genetic purist account, the alleged corruptions result exclusively from the effects of other languages, and are not necessarily the result of what is believed to be error, or vulgarity, or barbarism. One important consequence of genetic purist attitudes as applied to the history of language is the desire to show that the language in question has not been hybridized (another metaphor!) by excessive borrowing from, or mixing with, other languages. This has had many effects, a rather subtle one being that in conventional historical linguistics, changes in a language are preferentially explained as endogenous, as internally triggered in monolingual states, and as coming from within the nature and structure of language as a phenomenon, but within a single language. The role of speakers

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and society, and the role of language contact, are in these accounts relegated to a supplementary position, or argued away, or ignored. As Andrei Danchev (1988) noted, there has been an ' international scholarly prejudice [my italics]' in favor of internal explanations and against external explanations, and although there have recently been effective dissenting voices (see, for example, Farrar and Jones (2002), Tuten (2003)), this 'prejudice' is still quite powerful. More immediately salient, however, are the overt ideological positions that have been adopted, which happen to be consistent with this idea of languageinternal change. These include especially nationalism, which can extend to racial purism and stigmatization of minorities, and sometimes, in the wake of the Romantic Movement, the idealization of certain groups in society (e.g., the peasantry). 1 Hybridization is especially to be deplored: hence English, despite its history of close contact with Old Norse and Norman French and its acquisition of a huge Classical lexicon, is commonly argued to be 'not a mixed language'. Comments like the following are attested from as long ago as the mid-nineteenth century: Though English thus [through contact with French: JM] received its vocabulary, it still remained essentially a German (sic) tongue language is not the result of a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and sometimes represented to be [...] (W. Smith, cited in Marsh 1865:

vast additions to [...] The English French, as it is 37).

Notably, similar views on English have been expressed much more recently. Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 263-331) have argued very vigorously and in great detail that English is 'not a mixed language'. This is probably still the standard view. The view that English is unmixed (i.e., 'pure') is, however, implicitly contradicted by a somewhat different brand of etymological purism. This is represented by those purists who have actively attempted to change the English language - to purify it by replacing French and Classical borrowings with Germanic words. These purists seem to have considered it obvious that English is mixed, because if it were unmixed, there would be no need to purify it. The most extreme attempts of this kind occurred during the vigorous Germanic purist movement of the late nineteenth century. The work of William Barnes, in particular, has been widely noticed. R.W. Bailey (1991:

1

Jakob Grimm himself in 1812 praised the supposed purity of peasant speech: "The eye of these shepherds, who live in the free air, sees further, their ear hears more sharply - why should their speech not have gained that living truth and variety?' (cited by Max Müller 1861: 60f., presumably in his own translation).

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192-4), for example, discusses Barnes's Early England and the Saxon-English (1869: 101), in which Barnes lamented the effects of foreign languages on English through the needless inbringing of foreign words instead of words which 'might be found in the speech of the landfolk (my italics). He progressively used more and more nonce-words based on Anglo-Saxon or Norse roots in preference to Latin, French and Greek imports, and in later works, he referred to grammar as speech-craft and logic as rede-craft (see also Milroy 1977: 76ff.). Actually, although we may consider this kind of purism to be an archaizing purism, the language that Barnes produced was a new variety - an exotic kind of English that had never actually existed. There are many other purist comments from this period, including comments on Barnes's work by the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins: 'It makes one weep to think what English might have been; for in spite of all that Shakespeare and Milton have done [...] I cannot doubt that no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity. In fact I am learning Anglo-Saxon and it is a vastly superior thing to what we have now' (Abbott 1935, 26 November 1882). Sometimes, purist attitudes can become overtly racist or xenophobic, as in the following: Let me say to the young American student, who will some day go to Congress, guard the precious Saxon element as a beloved heirloom that has come to us directly from our forefathers - it is our proper and just inheritance; the rest is only brought in by oppression, cruelty, and pedantry ... Our forefathers lost the Battle of Hastings in the year 1066; they stood all day like a stone wall against the numerous foreign intruders (Molee 1890: 13).

In these more extreme statements, language purism is harnessed to serve racist and nationalist ideologies. But again we should notice the contradiction that was mentioned with respect to Barnes's language: the 'pure Saxon English' that Molee proposed bore little resemblance to the Anglo-Saxon that he claimed to model it on. As we have noted, it was so obvious to these purists that English is mixed that they thought it unnecessary to prove it. For Hopkins, Victorian English lacked 'purity', Barnes was explicit in calling it a 'mongrel' (R.W. Bailey 1991: 194), and there were many other lamentations about the malign effects of French on English. But as we have also suggested, the dominant view in rather more recent scholarship has been quite the opposite: it has been strongly affirmed that English is not mixed, and much learned ingenuity has been devoted to demonstrating this. These two opinions about English cannot both be right.

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Before we leave these preliminary comments, we notice an important functional difference between genetic or etymological purism and the sanitary purism that we discussed above. It was suggested that sanitary purism is functional in the process of language standardization, in that it assists in the drive towards uniformity. Genetic purism, however, does not function in this way. The restoration of obsolete native forms is not part of the process of standardization, and the eighteenth-century standardizers of English were not Anglo-Saxon purists. Thus, if we can agree that genetic purism does have a function, it is functional in a completely different way: the aim of genetic purist approaches is not primarily to standardize; it is to legitimize the language by giving it a (preferably long and glorious) history and, in some cases, to move towards restoring the language to its ancient lawful state of purity. However, although genetic purism is not part of a process of standardization, it is certainly involved in what we have elsewhere called the ideology of the standard language (Milroy & Milroy 1999: 18). The legitimacy of a language is especially promoted by a historical pedigree, and it is the pedigree of standard English that is considered especially important. It is important that English (as represented by its standard variety) should be shown to be a legitimate offshoot of a respected family of languages, and not a hybrid, and that it should have a long and uninterrupted history. We shall return to this. First, we move on to consider how far some purist ideas may have influenced, or even arisen from, some basic characteristics of twentiethcentury linguistics itself.

4. Purism in theoretical approaches According to twentieth-century structural linguistics, a language is a selfcontained entity that has well-defined outer boundaries differentiating it from all other languages - it is a system oil tout se tient. For many purposes, it is perfectly reasonable to define a language in this way, but it does not follow from this that that is actually what a language is. It doesn't prove anything: it is quite possible to view a language as not a system oil tout se tient. The immediate purpose of the structuralist definition is methodological: it makes it possible to analyze a language as though it were a static object that is selfcontained with well-defined boundaries (which of course it isn't). It is an idealization - a convenient methodological fiction - that facilitates analysis of language, chiefly synchronic analysis. However, when we consider the real world in which language is used, these structuralist principles seem to be repeatedly violated. We find, for example, that there are dialect continua,

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which straddle the territories of two or more 'languages', and which violate the principle of self-containedness. A well-known example is the Germanic continuum. As Trudgill (2000: 3f.) points out, 'the ability of speakers from either side of the [Dutch-German] border to understand each other will often be considerably greater than that of German speakers from this area to understand speakers of other German dialects from distant parts of Austria or Switzerland'. In these continua (and they are numerous), it is only the idealizations (e.g., 'Dutch' and 'German' as they appear in grammar books) that may be thought to be not mutually intelligible, and the well-defined boundaries between languages appear to be properties of these idealizations in particular. Further afield, linguists working among Pacific languages have found many of the assumptions of structuralism to be quite unsatisfactory. Mühlhäusler (1996: 328) points out that certain beliefs underlying these approaches have not been 'particularly helpful in the study of the traditional languages of the Pacific area'; he lists some of these, and two of them are relevant here: 'the belief in the separability of language and other nonlinguistic phenomena' and 'the belief in the existence of separate languages'. According to Heryanto (1990: 41), cited by Mühlhäusler (1996: 334) 'Language is not a universal category or cultural activity though it may sound odd, not all people have a language in a sense of which this term is currently used in English', and George Grace comments in many places on the uncertainty about boundaries between languages and, sometimes, speakers' uncertainty as to which language they are speaking: O n e of the things I found most puzzling', he notes, 'was that in some areas the people seem to have no conception of what their language is and no sense of belonging to a linguistic community' (Grace 1991: 15). I have quoted sparingly from the extensive literature on this topic, but even from these few remarks, it looks very much as though Eurocentric ideas have been imposed on Pacific languages and others, and of course we know that these Eurocentric ideas cannot be independent of ideological presuppositions. Amongst other things, European imperialism has required that any particular language should ideally be co-terminous with a single nation-state, despite the fact that the boundaries of states were usually drawn by the imperialist powers themselves: indigenous populations may have had little idea of a nation-state and, sometimes, the boundaries between what were described as languages were indeterminate - either structurally or geographically, or both. Colonial administrators and missionaries tended to describe language situations as if they were similar to the (idealized) standardized situations of Western Europe (on which see, for example, Blommaert & Verschueren 1998), preferring to regard language situations as

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monolingual rather than multilingual, and languages as having definite boundaries. They also evaluated different languages and varieties of language as more or less 'pure' (for an illuminating account see especially Irvine & Gal (2000)). Taking all these points together, it seems that we must make some reservations about the structuralist position: a language may not in every way be a self-contained object that has well-defined outer boundaries differentiating it from all other languages, and it may not necessarily be a system of interdependent parts ow tout se tient. It seems to be especially the idealized standard varieties of languages that display the qualities required by a structuralist definition. What is particularly important here, however, is that, because of these methodological assumptions, structuralism in linguistics was for a long time noticeably hostile to explanations based on language contact, to the concept of code-mixing, and to the idea that a language can be mixed. Retrospectively, it seems remarkable that two great pioneers of language contact studies, Uriel Weinreich and Einar Haugen, should have shared some of these ideas about separability of one language from another and the integrity and boundedness of separate languages. However, they were both structural linguists, working in the heyday of American and Prague School structuralism. What is of particular interest in the following quotation is its choice of words: [...] a bilingual's speech may sujfer from the interference of another vocabulary through mere OVERSIGHT, that is, the limitations on the distribution of certain words to utterances belonging to one language are violated. In affective speech, then the speaker's attention is almost completely diverted from the form of the message to its topic, the transfer of words is particularly common (Weinreich 1953: 60; my emphasis).

Haugen also (1950: 211), effectively, says that, when language mixing occurs, it is

abnormal.3

It is clearer now than it was in the 1950s that there is a kind of purism here - prioritizing the integrity of one or more languages as separate entities, rather than prioritizing the speakers who are faced with communicative problems in multilingual situations and who use linguistic phenomena as a resource. Structuralism is of course language-based and not speaker-based. It requires the integrity of a single language system where everything holds together, and it does not have a place for mixed or open-ended systems. Thus, it has tended to support the idea of a language as a pure integrated system. However, Weinreich's comments are also judgemental and potentially prescriptive. They

3

I am grateful to Lesley Milroy for these references.

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say, in effect, that if you mix languages, you are violating its rules and your speech may suffer as a result of interference. One effect of this is to deny the systematic nature of language mixing in bilingual speech. As for the history of English, conventional accounts give the impression that it was a smooth continuum in time, purely English structures being passed down from one generation to the next with little or no language-mixing - one language being quite distinct from any other languages that might be used in the community. However, the work of Laura Wright on 'macaronic' texts suggests that this is not a sufficient account of the medieval language situation. The following example of language mixing is chosen at random from a very large number: (a) Ordinaco fact' pro lez lighterssmen ... ρ Thotnam Cook Maiorem Aldror' & Coitatem quatu lez lightermen capient pro cariag' In primis for a tonne tighte of all maner' of m 'chandisez Rykened by the tonne tighte from the Pole to the Citee of Straungers . iij denar' Of ffremen . ij denar ... [Ordinance made for the lightermen ... by Thomas Cook Mayor Aldermen and Sheriffs how much the lightermen shall charge for carriage. Firstly for a ton tight of all manner of merchandise reckoned by the ton tight from the Pool to the City of Strangers 3d, of freemen 2d.] (London commercial document (1463), cited from Wright 1996: 180 (certain superscripts omitted))

This is mainly in English and Latin, but with some Anglo-Norman also. Wright further comments: The majority of material that survives from the period is not written in monolingual English, but in a mixture of either Latin and English or Anglo-Norman and English. In such 'macaronic' texts [...] the languages are not simply mixed at the level of vocabulary, but are intermingled at a morphological level [...] To ignore business texts because of their foreign element [...] imposes modern views of language purity on a culture which demonstrably did not regard functional bilingualism as unusual (Wright 1996: 3).

Middle English scholars have normally edited texts that can be said to be in 'English', excluding Anglo-Norman, and mixed, texts. But they have often gone further than this - they have also purified these English texts by emending many of the readings, often claiming that the scribe was a firstlanguage Anglo-Norman speaker whose command of English was poor. Here is Joseph Hall on Genesis and Exodus, which dates from seven or more generations after the Norman Conquest:

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'The scribe of our manuscript was probably faithful to his exemplar, for he was imperfectly acquainted with the language.' (Hall 1920 II: 637)

The text is highly variable, and although Hall recorded this faithfully, many editors seem to have disliked variability, and so they normalized the texts. They seem to have believed that they knew Middle English better than the scribes did, and that they were therefore entitled to correct their spelling to whatever they believed to be the uniquely correct form. Comments similar to Hall's are quite widely found in editions dating from before 1950 or so and occasionally thereafter. Arrogant as this may appear, it is also a symptom of purism, and it is appropriate now to consider the effects of purism on histories of English in particular.

5. Purifying the history of English Languages like English are copiously attested from the past, and, as Η C Wyld himself observed, a full history would be an account of every linguistic event that occurred throughout history. In practice, however, it has been necessary to select from the data - and this is where ideological positions have entered in. One strategy is to idealize. In this way, we can make the object that we are dealing with - the changing language - into a simpler phenomenon than it actually was. One way of doing it is to focus exclusively on one variety of a language, and when this is done, the variety chosen is almost always what is regarded as the standard variety. The historical account that is based on this is mainly single-stranded, i.e., great care is taken to exclude forms that might seem 'vulgar' or 'dialectal' so that the development will appear to be of one variety throughout the history. Furthermore, this variety is presented as having been only weakly influenced by other varieties, with most of the changes within it arising internally. This tendency has greatly influenced what is still regarded as the authoritative history of English. In modern linguistics, including historical linguistics, the temptation to regard the standard language as the whole language has been overwhelming. In accounts of the history of English, it is usually merely implicit; however, early historians of English, including Henry Sweet, were quite explicit on the superiority of the standard variety and its greater suitability for their purposes. Η C Wyld's views were extremely influential for several decades. This is what he said:

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Fortunately, at the present time, the great majority of the English Dialects are of very little importance as representatives of English speech, and for our present purpose we can afford to let them go, except in so far as they throw light upon the growth of those forms of our language which are the main objects of our solicitude, namely the language of Literature and Received Standard Spoken English. (Wyld

1927: 16) By this means (deliberate exclusion of most varieties) a language can be understood to be a determinate and well-defined entity, and this entity can be given a history. This history becomes a unilinear history of standard English (presented as though it were the history of the whole language) and is entwined with literary history (literary achievements are believed to confirm the importance and the legitimacy of English as a language). The standard language, as it happens, is the easiest to deal with because it is in principle a uniform-state entity (so we do not need to account for variability), and in its modern written form it is easily accessible. Indeed, still today many linguists apparently see no reason why the standard variety should not be the main focus of historical description. To adopt this position, however, runs the risk of importing into our 'objective' description a large amount of ideological baggage, and as a result of this, our description may have functions additional to the intended descriptive function. One of these is something we have already mentioned: legitimization. Conventional histories of this kind contribute to the process of legitimization of the standard language. By giving it a history, they have the effect of confirming that the standard variety is the lawful variety. Conversely, by imposing the lawful variety retrospectively, they confer legitimacy on the history of English. On the matter of legitimacy, however, it must be conceded that Wyld did also recognize provincial rural dialects as legitimate forms - he merely viewed them as unimportant. Urban varieties that are not identical with a narrowly defined 'Received Standard', however, were to be totally excluded. According to Wyld and subsequently many others (including even dialectologists), these are not dialects of English at all: they are 'Modified Standards', and their differences from standard English are not 'provincialisms', but mainly 'vulgarisms'. Wyld's universe of language is one in which the standard language is like the centre of a solar system with provincial varieties orbiting around it, but with urban varieties non-existent. Historicity is the key concept here: one of the implications of all this is that, as ignorant or careless attempts to imitate the standard, these modified standards have no histories of their own: they are degenerate forms of the Standard. Thus, they are illegitimate and can be safely ignored. The exclusion of urban varieties, following Wyld, was

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usual for many decades, and it affected many dialectologists. Although purist ideas of corruption and degeneration of language have often been brought into the arguments, the focus on standard literary English, together with principled exclusion of urban varieties, has been a primary strategy. One of the ideological processes involved here is what has been called erasure. This is 'the process in which ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible. Facts that are inconsistent with the ideological scheme either go unnoticed or get explained away. So, for example, a social group or a language may be imagined as homogeneous, its internal variation disregarded' (Irvine & Gal 2000: 38). Much effort has been devoted to 'explaining away' erasing, by various post hoc arguments, inconvenient evidence that doesn't fit the ideological position of the historian. Explicit as Wyld's approach may have been, this emphasis on the standard is usually more subtle: it is implicit or taken for granted. The writer does not seem to be particularly aware of it, and to that extent can be said to be in thrall to the ideology of the standard language. This covert influence is important, as it affects dozens of grammars, handbooks and descriptive histories. The centrality of standard English is implied in that the language described as 'English' is the idealized standard unless otherwise specified; other varieties are marked by modifiers, as in 'northern English, non-standard English, dialectal English' and so forth. The following comments were made by a scholar who was an enthusiastic student of dialects and who might therefore be expected to have risen above the standard ideology: Many consonants have disappeared in Modern English. Perhaps the most important change of this kind is the loss of r medially before consonants and finally unless the next word begins with a vowel [...]. Initial h is generally pronounced as an aspirate in present-day English. (Brook 1964: 98, 99)

These comments, although typical, are actually quite misleading unless one is already brainwashed by the social processes involved in standardization, because many regional varieties and most American English are rhotic (so there is no 'loss of r ' in them), and most regional varieties in England and Wales have no initial [h] (so h is not 'pronounced as an aspirate'). Brook, as a dialectologist, knew both of these facts, so why did he neglect them here? The reason seems to be the assumed centrality of the standard - what Silverstein (1996: 284) calls its hegemonic position. In the discourse of historical language description, it is assumed that everyone will understand that what one has in mind is the standard variety alone and accept without comment that other varieties are not taken into account, and, further, that it is acceptable to

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ignore other varieties. Typically, changes that affected only the standard or high prestige varieties are then presented as though they had taken place in the whole language. More explicit efforts at purification, however, are not hard to find, and these are generally retrospective. I have noted above what Cecily Clark has called 'the myth of the Anglo-Norman scribe' (Clark 1992; Milroy 1984, 1992). This refers to the strategy whereby many variant readings in Middle English texts are expunged from the record (for eight or nine generations after the Norman Conquest) on the grounds that the 'Anglo-Norman' scribes had imperfect knowledge of English. However, although Middle English as a whole was affected by Norman French spelling conventions, there is no direct evidence as to whether the scribes were Anglo-Norman or not, or which copyists were Anglo-Norman and which were not, and it is by no means clear that even if they had been of Anglo-Norman descent, their written English would have been full of errors caused by their ignorance of English. The result of these editorial efforts was purification of the record and numerous derivative comments in handbooks and grammars to the effect that certain recorded forms are unreliable as they are 'Anglo-Norman'. Actually, lying behind the Anglo-Norman argument itself was a more general reluctance to accept that a language is a variable phenomenon. As Middle English is exceptional in the amount of variability recorded, it made good sense to these scholars that it should be cleaned up, i.e., retrospectively normalized. The Anglo-Norman scribe argument gave them a post hoc rationalization for their normalizations. Perhaps the most explicit and extensive attempt to purify the evidence is E. J. Dobson's account of the pronunciation of early modern English based on the testimony of early writers on pronunciation ('the orthoepists'). Testimony that Dobson considered to be from 'vulgar' or 'dialectal' sources is repeatedly excluded, as the variety reconstructed is what he calls Early Modern Standard English (spoken by the 'educated' in the sixteenth century). Unfortunately, it is not clear that any such well-defined uniform variety existed at the time, but one effect of Dobson's work was to strengthen the argumentation for an unbroken continuous history of a single variety since 1500, with other varieties largely ignored (see further Milroy 1996, 2002).

6. The continuity of English As it is so important to show that the language is ancient, one of the most inconvenient facts that the conventional historian encounters is the apparently sharp break between late Old English and the earliest texts in Middle English.

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Amongst those who wish to give the language an ancient pedigree, this discontinuity must somehow be denied or explained away. Therefore, the continuity of English has often been simply affirmed, as in the following: [...] eyes should be opened to the Unity of English, that in English literature there is an unbroken succession of authors, from the reign of Alfred to that of Victoria, and that the English which we speak now is absolutely one in its essence, with the language that was spoken in the days when the English first invaded the island and defeated and overwhelmed its British inhabitants (Skeat 1873: xii, cited by Crowley 1989: 48).

Here we see the association with the history of literature, which is so common, and the identity of language with race or nation, which is also common, but we additionally have a determination of the age of 'English': it was then about 1400 years old, and its history is continuous and uninterrupted. According to this, the fifth-century settlers of Britain spoke a West Germanic dialect or dialects, which miraculously became 'English' the moment they set foot on British soil (so it is presumably not any older than this), but - most importantly - this was the same language as the language we speak today. Here, however, is a specimen of ninth-century Old English (Anglo-Saxon): Alfred kyning hateö gretan Waerferö biscep his wordum luflice ond freondlice; ond öe cyöan hate öast me com swiöe oft on gemynd, hwelce witan iu wasroti giond Angelcynn [...]

This, according to the tradition, is 'English'. However, Anglo-Saxon, unlike modern English, had (amongst other things) three genders, four cases with residues of a fifth, several different active declensions of nouns, strong and weak adjectives, a full subjunctive mood, variable but mainly Germanic wordorder (verb-second and SOV in subordinate clauses), and a set of verbal aspectual prefixes (as in other West Germanic languages) which largely disappeared in Middle English. The first substantial ME text, which dates from around 11544, has lost all signs of grammatical gender and all case inflexions save the possessive, and the aspectual prefixes are much reduced. Some syntactic features, such as relative clauses, are greatly changed. Subsequently the other features noted were also lost, and fairly rapidly after about 1250, the language of the texts becomes recognizable to modern observers as 'English'. Prima facie, it seems obvious that there was a sharp break in transmission, and

4

This is the second Peterborough continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The best edition is by Cecily Clark (1970).

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one scholarly strategy could have been to accept this at face value - and then attempt to explain how this came about and what its effects were. The purist strategy, however, has been to explain away the apparent discontinuity by reasoned argument, claiming, for example, that many of the characteristics of Middle English had already appeared in late Old English, but did not generally surface in the conservative written forms. This is the main argument of Kemp Malone's (1930) paper, and it became the conventional view thereafter (usually focusing on the effects of the Norman Conquest, rather than those of the earlier Scandinavian incursions). Above all, it is important for the continuity argument to reject explanations for morphological simplification that are based on language-contact arguments, as these will violate the principle of 'genetic' purity. Typically, the argument is that, although there was indeed close contact with Old Norse and Norman French, the morphological simplifications would have taken place anyway without such contact. In fact, there is very little reliable evidence to demonstrate this, and, if there were not a strong predisposition to believe in continuity, this view might well be rejected; however, the typical strategy of the more purist scholars has been to attack their opponents for not having sufficient evidence for a contact-based explanation, even though they themselves do not have enough evidence for their own explanation. What is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. Indeed, it is as though scholars are unaware that language contact and language mixing are such commonplace events in the histories of languages that they should be expected to occur, that they occurred in early English, and that they are important in explaining language change. It therefore remains entirely reasonable to suggest that a language-contact explanation accounts for the facts more successfully and more economically than a purist internalist explanation, and that there was indeed a serious break in the transmission of English at some time in the late Old English period. However, this was presumably due chiefly to the Scandinavian incursions in the north and Midlands rather than to the Norman Conquest. 5 In conventional accounts, however, the integrity and boundedness of English as a language has to be maintained, and its transmission has to be presented as smooth and uninterrupted. Reasons have to be found for rejecting the idea that modern English is based, for example, on an Anglo-Norse contact variety or even a creolized variety. To allow these possibilities would be to destroy the argument for unbroken continuity, but, even worse, it might further suggest that English is a hybrid language with dual ancestry, and not a full member of the West Germanic group with single ancestry. This would weaken

5

The possibility of the rise of a mixed Anglo-Norse language has been advocated by Poussa (1982). See also Milroy (1996: 178-184; 1997: 317-321), McWhorter (2002).

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the noble pedigree of English, the long history extending back to the fifth century would be foreshortened, and English might no longer be seen to have the genetic purity that is so strongly desired.6 But now, after all this sound and fury, I ought perhaps to add that, although many scholars have considered this question to be of vital importance, it does not actually matter whether English, or any other language, is pure or impure. What matters is that the conventionally accepted history of English and other languages should be as full and accurate as possible, and that it should not be influenced as much as it has been to date by ideologically biased interpretations. It can be suggested also that it should not be so completely in thrall to the traditional 'genetic' model and the family-based metaphors that are associated with this: after all, languages do not have genes and they cannot reproduce.

7. Concluding remarks My main purpose in this paper has been to demonstrate some of the ways in which our knowledge of the history of English has been affected by purist attitudes. Information that might seem to make that history less glorious or less respectable has been relegated to footnotes or expunged from the record. Forms defined as non-standard or 'vulgar' have been systematically erased, and influential scholars of an older generation have also projected modern prescriptive ideas backward, e.g., treating Middle English texts as though they really should be invariant in spelling and morphology. In these activities, I have suggested, scholars have been indulging in sanitary purism, effectively cleaning up the record. They have also been concerned with the legitimacy of English as a language: they have, for example, projected the standard variety backwards, e.g., recognizing a pronunciation known as early modern Standard pronunciation, although it is not clear that such a pronunciation existed around 1600. Saussurean structuralism also has had a limiting effect on what scholars have been allowed to regard as relevant - even though in the real world welldefined linguistic boundaries may be the exception rather than the rule. In these respects, genetic purism has played a part: it has been usual to represent English as 'not a mixed language' and as a language of ancient origin that has had an uninterrupted history in which the influence of other languages has not been enough to alter its special character. On the other hand, certain other purists have considered English to be a hybrid and have actively attempted to

6

For an elaborate argument that Middle English is the beginning of a new language family separate from Germanic, see C-J Bailey (1996: 309-368).

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restore its pure Germanic character. Indeed, as the Family Tree model requires that a language should have single parentage, English in this view has to be directly descended from West Germanic, not from both Romance and Germanic, and not from both Old Norse and Old English. Thus, although it may be heretical even to contemplate the possibility that English is a mixed language that does not have single parentage, and that it may not fit well with the traditional model of direct descent, I think we must be willing to cut through the metaphorical haze that surrounds the subject and accept that the descent of English may not be 'pure' in the traditional sense. I hope to have shown, at the very least, that it is worth investigating the profound effects that purist ideologies have had on the historical description of English.

8. References Abbott, Claude C. (ed.). 1935. The letters of Gerard Martley Hopkins to Robert Bridges. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bailey, C-J. N. 1996. Essays on time-based linguistic analysis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bailey, Richard W. 1991. Images of English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Barnes, William. 1869. Early England and the Saxon-English. London: John Russell Smith. Blommaert, Jan & Jef Verschueren. 1998. 'The role of language in European nationalist ideologies'. In: Schieffelin, Bambi B., Kathryn A. Woolard & Paul V. Kroskrity (eds.). Language ideologies. New York: Oxford University Press, 189-210. Brook, G. Leslie. 1964. A history of the English language. New York: Norton. Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge. Clark, Cecily (ed.). 2 1970. The Peterborough Chronicle 1070-1154. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clark, Cecily. 1992. 'The myth of the Anglo-Norman scribe'. In: Rissanen, Matti, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). History of Englishes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 117-129. Crowley, Tony. 1989. Standard English and the politics of language. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Danchev, Andrei. 1988. 'Language contact and language change'. In: Folia Linguistica 22:1-2, 37-53. Dobson, Eric J. 2 1968. English pronunciation 1500-1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Farrar, Kimberley & Mari C. Jones. 2002. 'Introduction'. In: Jones, Mari C. and Edith Esch (eds.). Language change: the interplay of internal, external and extra-linguistic factors. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1-16. Grace, George. 1991. 'More on "aberrant languages'". Paper given at the Sixth International Conference on Austronesian linguistics. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i. Hall, Joseph (ed.). 1920. Early Middle English texts (2 vols.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. Haugen, Einar. 1950. 'The analysis of linguistic borrowing'. In: Language 26. 210-231. Heryanto, Ariel. 1990. 'The making of language: developmentalism in Indonesia'. In: Prisma 50. 40-53. Irvine, Judith & Susan Gal. 2000. 'Language ideology and linguistic differentiation'. In: Kroskrity, Paul V. (ed.). Regimes of language. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 35-63. Joseph, John E. & Talbot Taylor. 1990. Ideologies of language. London: Routledge. Malone, Kemp. 1930. 'When did Middle English begin?' In: Hatfield, J. T , W. Leopold & A. J. F. Zieglschmid (eds.). Curme Volume of Linguistic Studies (Language Monographs 7). Baltimore: Waverley Press. 110-117. Marsh, George P. 1865. Lectures on the English language. London: John Murray. McWhorter, John H. 2002. 'What happened to English?' Diachronica XIX:2. 217-272. Milroy, James. 1977. The language of Gerard Manley Hopkins. London: Andre Deutsch. Milroy, James. 1984. 'On the sociolinguistic history of /h/-dropping in English'. In: Davenport, Michael, Erik Hansen & Hans Frede Nielsen (eds.). Current topics in English historical linguistics, Odense: Odense University Press. 37-53. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic variation and change. Oxford: Blackwell. Milroy, James. 1994. 'The notion of "standard language" and its applicability to the study of Early Modern English pronunciation'. In: Stein, Dieter & Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.). Towards a standard English 16001800. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 19-29. Milroy, James. 1996. 'Linguistic ideology and the Anglo-Saxon lineage of English'. In: Klemola, Juhani, Meija Kytö & Matti Rissanen (eds.). Speech past and present·, studies in English dialectology in memory of Ossi Ihalainen. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 169-186. Milroy, James. 1997. 'Internal vs external motivations for linguistic change'. Multilingua 16-4. 311-323.

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Milroy, James. 2002. 'The legitimate language: giving a history to English'. In: Watts, Richard & Peter Trudgill (eds.). Alternative histories of English. London: Routledge. 7-25. Milroy, James & Lesley Milroy. 3 1999. Authority in language. London: Routledge. Molee, Elias. 1890. Pure Saxon English. Chicago and New York: Rand McNally. Mülhäusler, Peter. 1996. Linguistic ecology. London: Routledge. Müller, Friedrich Max. 1861. Lectures on the science of language, First series. London: Longman, Green & Co. Poussa, Patricia. 1982. 'The evolution of early standard English'. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 14. 69-86. Silverstein, Michael. 1996. 'Monoglot "standard" in America: standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony.' In: Brenneis, D. & R. Macaulay (eds.). The matrix of language: contemporary linguistic anthropology. Boulder CO: Westview Press. 284-306. Skeat, Walter W. 1873. Questions for examination in English literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomason, Sarah & Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Trudgill, Peter. 3 2000. Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tuten, Donald. 2003. Koineization in medieval Spanish. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton. Wright, Laura. 1996. Sources of London English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wyld, Henry C. 3 1927. A short history of English. London: John Murray.

Oskar Reichmann

Usefulness and Uselessness of the Term Fremdwort1 1. Preliminary Remarks and Introduction to Recent Research 1.1 The following, rather diverse remarks provide the framework for this article. (1) The term Fremdwort (foreign word) used in the title above should not be taken to suggest that I am concerned with an exclusively lexical phenomenon. What I shall present on the following pages should and indeed must be applicable to the areas of phonology, morphology, syntax and text linguistics. However, given space restrictions, I will not be able to tackle any of the questions which follow from this claim, e.g. whether an application of my model to other linguistic disciplines would result in findings analogous to the results from the lexical investigation or whether the findings would differ from each other in type. In addition, it should be noted that by restricting myself to lexis, I am moving on the mostly well-trodden paths of German languagecontact research. Whether this field of linguistics only says something about the professional interests of linguists or whether it actually tells us something about the object 'German', I will simply pose as a contributory question to our debate. (2) Using the term Fremdwort, does not mean that I wish to see this in opposition to the term Lehnwort (loan word) - an opposition much discussed in the secondary literature. Whilst the contrast between Fremdwort and Lehnwort is a useful one in some discussions, it has only minor relevance to the purposes of this article. (3) The third preliminary remark is of a biographical nature: The topic Fremdwort and with it, the overarching theme of Language contact have a particularly motivating effect on me, in particular in the context of my work on the Early New High German Dictionary {Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, FWB). One of the most exciting findings relates to the dictionary entry on

1

This article was translated by Nils Langer, with the help of Winifred Davies.

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arche\ because of its high degree of polysemy (I identified fourteen (!) different meanings), it was necessary to question the lexical unity of the entry: should I enter the word under one headword or was it necessary to posit several headwords? Arche did not simply mean Noah's Ark but also, amongst other things, a type of ship, the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, any chest or box, e.g. a treasure chest, a coffin, a buttery, a chest-like enclosure for catching fish in lakes and streams, a torture clamp, and a particular trap for hunting. In pursuing the question of 'homonymy or polysemy?', a quick look at the European contexts shows us that the wide range of meanings already applied to the Latin source for arche, and we find a similar range of meanings in the Romance daughter languages of Latin but also, e.g. in English - and there are striking similarities to the Early New High German (ENHG, 1350-1650) meanings of the word. Just as in ENHG, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes for English that ark meant 1. "A chest, box, coffer [...]", also figuratively "casket, treasury"; 2. "The wooden coffer containing the tables of the law"; 3. [...] vessel in which Noah was saved"; 4. A ship, boat"; 5. "An enclosure for catching or confining fish." (OED 1: 632). We find another example of this phenomenon in ENHG arbeit. Whilst today the word principally means work, its range of meanings included - until the seventeenth century - "labour pains". This meaning for arbeit can be found in other European languages, too: Dutch arbeid up to the end of the Middle Dutch period, though it survives in figurative use and in some dialects, English labour since the sixteenth century, French travail since the twelfth century, and some archaic uses are still attested today, and Middle Latin labor. Similarly we find parallels in other meanings of ENHG arbeit, e.g. with regard to its meaning of "fermentation" (FWB 2, Col. 39, Position 9) which we encounter in the OED entry for work·, "a froth produced by fermentation of the manufacture of vinegar" (OED II, 21). I found a large number of similar cases, which frequently crossover to other etyma, too, which clearly are not coincidental but which, following my hypothesis, demonstrate a degree of relationship between the lexicons of European languages which so far has been completely underestimated by researchers. 1.2 Lexical borrowing and other instances of language contact are a wellknown phenomenon in European languages, as can be seen by the wealth of ideas, publications and research projects devoted to this subject. Prominent examples, to name but a few, include Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter by the historian of literature and culture E.R. Curtius, the term NeoEuropäismus coined by F. Miklosich as early as 1868, the contact typology of W. Betz (last revision 1974), B.L. Whorf s Standard Average European (1941) and the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe by Ο. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Kosellek focusing on Europe, the Mannheimer Beiträge zur Lehn-Wortbildung, as well as finally, the project Euro type or the old idea of drawing up a Atlas

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linguarum Europae.2 However, at least as regards the publications on lexis, the underlying theorising on language is always aimed at the individual languages. Often all we find are theoretical statements and declarations of intent - the approach to think cro.w-linguistically has hardly ever been given priority, and where contact-linguistic research projects have actually been carried out, then from the perspective of discrete individual languages and hence stayed behind the real aims of the theoretical ambitions. This can be said even of the research on contact linguistics initiated by Betz. Despite his emphasis on the inter- and transferences between European languages, he distinguishes throughout between the indigenous and the foreign, between native words (Erbwort) and loan / foreign words (Lehn- and Fremdwort). He speaks of the personal characteristics of individual languages (Eigentümlichkeiten der Einzelsprachen), of geographical inroads {Einfallswege) which paved the way for Latin words to enter into the Germanic languages, of a longlasting process of Latinisation, and of the vitality (Lebenskraft) and transience (Lebensschwäche) of particular borrowings. We continually read about confirmations, enrichments and modifications of existing language material - despite the fact that the terminology conflicts with, if not misleads the intended aim of the research, namely the emphasis on language contact. A commitment to a fundamentally contact-oriented theory (or, if you like, ideology) which does not simply view contact as an addition to individual languages is nowhere to be found. Indeed, statements such as the following which, from the point of view of linguistics focused on individual languages might well sound 'heretical', are definitely absent: maybe individual languages do not have such a thing as idiosyncratic characteristics; this core of static features indigenous to a particular language, something which scholars constantly and consistently presuppose as given for any language, may well have a rather different ontological status: after critical analysis, what is conceived of being an actual static, individual and characteristic property of a language may turn out to be a concept or even a fiction of a well-established but ultimately misguided approach to language(s).

2. Two contact-linguistic models of lexical semantics Given these thoughts, I felt the need to redefine the concept of language contact, as applied to the European context, in more radical ways (cf. Reichmann 2001 for a longer discussion of this). For these reasons, I suggest the existence of two models, on the one hand, a model which focuses on individual languages (das einzelsprachbezogene Modell (EM)) and, on the other hand a model which prioritises the contact between languages (das kontaktbezogene Modell (KM)). Although there may well be some differences

2

For full references, cf. Reichmann 2001.

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of detail, it is the model which relates to individual languages which is usually used by Germanists and by other European linguists who focus on individual languages to describe national languages, i.e. it is the model which is pressed into service in the national interest (or in the national context), whereas the contact model (KM) is not instrumentalised in the same way. In what follows, I will aim to sketch out both models along some general lines with regard to all hierarchical levels of the linguistic system, i.e. from the smallest linguistic unit to the text - however, I will only go into more detail with regard to lexical semantics. In this, I do not, of course, rule out the possibility that when applying the models to other linguistic levels, e.g. grammar, 3 other problems may spring up which may have to result in a fundamental revision or abandonment of these models. 2.1. According to EM, the history of a language is the history of a system of communicative means which - from a structural point of view - is characterised by its own (here: lexical) inventory and its own grammatical rules which in principle only apply to that language, and this at any given point of its development. In a similar way, any individual language has its own specific means and habits of language use as well as a particular language awareness (Sprachbewusstsein) which only applies to that language.4 The very opposite would apply to KM: the history of (a) language is the history of a system, the units and rules of which are the result of its speakers' contact with speakers of other means of communication at any time in its development. Similarly, the guiding principles of language use and language awareness need to be adapted to include the notion of contact. 2.2 After 200 years of the continuous dominance of the E M 5 1 believe it is fair to see how well the KM would do: on the one hand, I feel actual linguistic reality is better reflected by the contact model than by the individual-language approach, at least for those parts of language under investigation in this paper. If this were to prove correct, all puristic thinking and activities as found in most parts of Europe especially in the seventeeth century, but also in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would land in the dustbin of history. I feel justified in postulating such a bold claim also on the basis of von Polenz's (1967 and later

3

The particular problem of grammar is related to its much higher degree of regularity compared to, say, lexical semantics, and therefore it is much more difficult to relate changes in grammar to cultural changes. Cf. Askedal (2000) who discusses common features and differences between European languages with regard to their syntactico-typological properties.

4

For a distinction between Sprachsystem, Sprachgebrauch (language use), and Sprachbewusstsein, cf. Mattheier 1995. The Baroque period, too was dominated by a focus on individual languages. The Enlightenment period is somewhat different in this respect as it was oriented more towards universalist, rather than EM approaches.

5

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publications) hypothesis that the ever-present foreign-word / indigenous word discussion is largely a sociolinguistic concern (rather than a systemic one) and that its place in the history of German should be relativised and reduced. We find a similar scepticism towards the distinction between indigenous words and foreign words and their theoretical motivations in Kirkness (e.g. Kirkness 1986). Most recently, Hinderling and Hasselblatt (2004: 327Iff.) agreed with this line of argument, basing their concerns on evidence from Baltic languages: they argue that the contact phenomena between German and the Baltic languages cannot be viewed as a bilateral event but rather have to be seen as part of a single, overarching European paradigm, a European setup of borrowing, a European framework and a symbiosis between languages which lasted for seven centuries and which is in no way restricted to particular levels of language but which encompasses the history of the languages' phonology, morphology, word-formation and word semantics. Where there are features in the Baltic languages which are unambiguously German, my contention would be that this German is not a pure and individual German language but rather a Romanised, Latinised, Graecosised, or, in short, a Europeanised German, in the same way as we can say that the Baltic languages are Germanised. Bellmann (2004: 3240) argues along similar lines for German and the Slavonic language contact in the context of puristic attempts to replace loanwords in the nineteenth century, when a substantial number of composite loanwords with two prefixes (Bikomposita) were introduced into Polish as direct loan translations (i.e. as words which Polish native speakers would be unlikely to recognise as the product of interference). Ironically (this is my interpretation), this type of compound is a type of word-formation which is systemically alien to the system of the derivational language Polish. A few lines below, Bellmann says that, given these facts, it appears that we are faced with a European Sprachbund of loan translations, which is clearly so strong that it manages to affect even the typological characteristics of a member language.6 In such findings we witness the theoretical foundations of contact linguistics. 2.3 In what follows, I will apply the contact model firstly to the semantic plane of lexis, secondly to the expression plane of lexis and finally to the degree of transparency of word-formations. Well aware of the contentiousness of the contact model, I will aim for maximum objectivity in my discussion. My first example concerns the European word for German Haus:

6

Of course, in such a Sprachbund, from language to language.

the cultural importance of its member languages will differ

Language

Engl. house

s c Ν % s % s

Ν

s

s

s

s

s.

s

s

7. "household"

8. "dynasty"

9. in reference to persons

s

6. "family"

Port. casa

Russ. dorn

S S S c

Czech dum % S s S c

Swed. hus S S s s.

Hung. häz S \

S

s

s

s s s

\ s

S S S

S S S.

S

S s

S \

10. star sign

French Ital. maison \ casa %

s

5. "people assoc. with a building; audience, parlament, company"

s

4. "all inhabitants of a house"

Dutch huis s

3. "personal home"

Germ. Haus s

2. "other type of building"

1. "building for dwelling"

Word Meaning

348 Oskar Reichmann

\

OS

S

S

% \ s S. \ \ \

% s C s s \ s

\ s s \

C %

c s

ιο m 00 os

C α KS β JS 'S

S T3 ω

X) 3 α,

\ τ glauben). (3) A structural characteristic of members of the indigenous lexicons is that the semiotic value of a unit is preserved despite its phonological changes across time and space, e.g. in the vowel system, we find monophthongisations, diphthongisations, raisings, lowerings, palatalisations, umlautings and ablautings; in the consonant system, we find spirantisations, lenitions, velarisations, rhotacisms, etc. (4) Word stress for indigenous words is completely determined by the principle of stressing the root syllable, the necessity of having a metrical foot, as well as the distribution of full and reduced syllables (Eisenberg 1998: 139). 3.2 The reason for listing these features for our present purposes is immediately obvious: in determining the structural properties and features of the expression plane of the lexical units of a language, namely the indigenous words properties and features which generally persist over a long period of time - one

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obtains a means of testing whether languages and varieties which are in contact with German share the same structural properties or not. If they do, the whole concept of foreign word, as applied to the plane of expression of a language, becomes nonsensical; if not, the concept of foreign word retains its full justification. And it is the latter case which is true. Eisenberg sums it up: exogenous words display radically different properties from the indigenous ones (Eisenberg 1998: 139): increased use of polysyllabic words, no reduced syllables except for the ultimate syllable, the importance of stress for foreign suffixes (cf. also Eisenberg 2001: 190ff.), greater difficulty in distinguishing between morphologically simplex and complex foreign words. Although we acknowledge all these findings without reservation, it still presents us with the opportunity to weight them in a different way. Depending on how much structural weight we are prepared to allocate to the foreign word, one could either speak of a scenario where there is a general core system which dominates everything and of which foreign words will become part or at some point, or, in other words, established: this scenario would follow the view focussed on individual languages. However, one might also imagine a scenario involving two or more systems where one would be the indigenous one and all other ones could be conceived of as a conglomeration of all sorts of linguistic origins and structural properties which would display tendencies towards building their own systematic regularities and which would influence the indigenous system: this scenario would attribute more weight to exogenous influences. For the case of German, it is hardly feasible to deny the language the existence of a working core system - despite the high number of foreign words. For the purism debate this means that our considerations about the content side of the German lexicon may apply to the plane of expression in individual cases, but not in any general systemic or structural sense.

4. On word-formation So far we have discussed how useful of the concept of foreign word is with respect to the semantic content and lexical expression of the lexicon and we have suggested different answers. 4.1 In what follows, I will briefly turn to a particular aspect of the lexicon, namely word-formation, and discuss it with regard to the factor of transparency. I will follow the recent research by Splett (1993, 2000) and Augst (2000, 2001). Both presuppose the existence of a particular number of core words (Kernwörter) such as Abend, Affe, Mann, Frau for Old High German (Splett) and Modern Standard German (Augst), and investigate how frequently these core words occur in word-formation. In both Old High German (OHG) and Modern Standard German (MSG) this occurs fairly frequently (c. 72% for

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OHG, c. 52% for MSG). What is striking, however, is that in MSG the number of singles, i.e. lexical units which do not partake in any word-formation processes, is significantly higher (30%) for exogenous words than for indigenous ones (Augst 2000: 11). In other words, members of the indigenous lexicon have a much higher probability of taking part in word-formation processes than exogenous words. Secondly, the depth of complexity in complex words is much higher in indigenous words than in exogenous ones, and, thirdly, the average number of tokens formed by word-formation is higher for indigenous words than for exogenous words. These results were found for Modern Standard German - for older periods of German, no comparable figures are available. This means that, for MSG, we can say that indigenous units of the lexion have a higher degree of productivity in word-formation processes than exogenous lexical units, and hence a higher degree of integration in the word-formation part of the German grammar.9 This confirms the need for or the usefulness of the term foreign word, although, of course, only with the caveat that individual cases do not always correspond to the overall probabilities.

5. The corpus problem Looking back to what we said so far, we notice the following in particular: my discussion of the expression plane and the semantics of the lexicon, as well as my remarks on the degree of transparency of compounded and derivational lexical units rest on material from dictionaries, thus abstractions, or linguistic analyses of abstractions (i.e. abstractions from abstractions). In other words: the object of my deliberations was the langue German, i.e. the inventory and particular structural characteristics of an abstract-virtual, linguistic entity. To what extent this entity has any status in the real world or can be applied to linguistic reality is a question we will not discuss here. 5.1 Dictionaries have the following characteristics. • For all historical stages of a language they rely on written sources; • Due to the scriptivism of our educational ideology, even for the modern stage of a language, they are more dependent on written sources than would seem necessary; • Within the corpora of written sources, literary and educated text types have a particular importance;

9

I refer the reader to a range of interesting details in Augst's (2000, 2001) research which, however, cannot be discussed here.

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Given these characteristics, it follows that our discussion so far only applies to the written part of the German standard language and those varieties which were either its predecessors or correspond to its functions; somewhat overstating the case, we might even say that our discussion only applies to that part of High German which was conceived to be written.10 Put more critically: all those varieties which have no chance of being put to paper, i.e. all dialects and sociolects, all oral registers - which after all form an important foundation of the language - are excluded from these considerations. And even if an extract of these varieties is occasionally found in writing, the chance of such a text being included in the corpus of a dictionary of (standard) German is rather slim. This is indeed what we find in the lexicography of German. Sandhop concludes from his semanctic comparison of 200 German nouns with their Czech, French and English heteronyms that overall those polysemic nouns which refer directly to people, human culture, conceptual thought and the human view of the natural world show above-average interlingual parallels. What humans are and what they create are interpreted in more similar ways across linguistic boundaries and in Sandhop's four languages of European cultural nations, than aspects of the external world of humans (Sandhop 2003: 213). The outside world of objects, concrete items of use, the animal and plant world are at the other extreme of the Europeanisation scale.11 This observation appears to confirm that evidence from written sources has dominated our discussion so far; this (unwanted) dominance had already been alluded to on several occasions above, e.g. in our discussion of the role of European literature in the creation of Europeanisms (cf. section 2.3.2). 5.2 In the light of all this, we may arrive at the following working hypothesis: the proposed semantic European (cf. section 2.3.1) applies most readily to higher registers, in particular to the prestigious and written domains and registers of a developed culture. With this assumption, we immediately ask ourselves whether there is a similar construct - in sociological terms - below this educated and standard language domain and - in pragmatic terms - used in everyday oral communication. As a hypothesis, we might phrase this as follows: there are communalities in lower registers and in oral language use but

10

11

Conceptual, rather than mere medial, literarcy refers to those forms of written language which are characterised by distance to the reader, deliberate planning, logical and grammatical correctness, formality, completeness etc. Conceptual orality, on the other hand, conveys opposite notions, e.g. closeness, spontaneity, pragmaticality, incompleteness. Cf. Wulf & Oesterreicher 1994 for discussion. Bellmann arrives at an analogous conclusion in his study of loan translations and semantic loans in German-Russian language contact of the twentieth century: loans rarely occurred with material objects but rather refer to abstractions of different degrees, especially with regard to the areas of ideology, education, administration, organisation, etc. where the linguistic form of the source language would typically be a complex one (Bellmann 2004: 3244).

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the further we move downwards in registers, the fewer communalities we find. This observation of a thinning-out from top to bottom might be subject to particular factors yet unknown and will result in the demarcation of different vocabularies for each language or regional variety. 12 Consequently, this separation would be strongest in the most regional dialects, and hence we would expect to find that those lexical entities with the narrowest geographical range are also most closely associated sociologically with speakers of the lowest prestige and pragmatically with everyday oral communication. 13 To name but a few examples, cf. things such as humming top from the world of concrete objects, dandelion or stinging nettle from the botanical world, tadpole from the children's world. In this context, it might well make sense to apply our hypothesis to the diachronic dimension, i.e. the older a lexical item, the more geographically separated it is and the fewer cross-linguistic parallels we can find; however, we cannot actually test this line of thought: if anything the problems of tracing the actual history of a word make this impossible. 5.3 If we leave to one side this last point, which relates to the diachronic aspect, we end up with the following diagrams: German European standard and prestige languages

English

Czech

Hungarian

Polish

->

conceptual orality Middle Class / Lower Class varieties (e.g. dialects)

Key strong semantic overlap between meaning of word in different languages intermediate stage between dotted and continuous line strong demarcation between languages

12

It is at least theoretically possible that we might find correspondences between unrelated language varieties which are not due to language contact but rather due to accidental similarities, e.g. of their natural environments. Of course, our considerations do not apply to such cases.

13

We should note in passing that W. Mitzka, who compiled the list of examples to be used for the German Word Atlas (Deutscher Wortallas) applied exactly these hypotheses in the selection process, e.g. Ahorn ("maple"), Ameise ("ant"). Anemone ("anemone"), Augenbraue ("eyebrow"), Augenlid ("eyelid"), auswringen ("to wring out"); cf. Barth 1971 for the complete list.

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Independent of the extent to which we believe in this framework of hypotheses: the question of the usefulness and uselessness of the concept of foreign word applies in a particular way to • prestige varieties and written varieties • languages for special purposes • the complete range of (conceptual and non-conceptual) orality • dialects (not least because of their phonological, prosodic, syllabic and morpho-syntactic structural deviations from the standard language). Note, e.g., the consequences of the Upper German apocope for the syllabic structure and prosody of the language and, with this, its structural disposition towards the adoption and assimilation of foreign words. 5.4 All of this points to a sociological problem with particular relevance for language politics and language pedagogy: what is the (linguistic) goal of our educational process? In trying to show the controversial nature of the reflections presented in this article, I chose to phrase my argument in particularly pointed, on occasion maybe even exaggerated ways - as shown already by the formulation of the title of this paper. However, what was important to me was to show the linguistic and ideological explosiveness of our central concerns and to suggest some initial working hypotheses, rather than simply to refer to findings which have already been shown to be correct.

6. References Askedal, John Ole. 2000. 'Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede in der grammatischen Struktur europäischer Sprachen'. In: Sprachgeschichte 2. 1136-1143. Äugst, Gerhard. 2000. 'Die Mächtigkeit der Wortfamilien - Quantitative Untersuchungen zum „Wortfamilienwörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache".' In: Barz / Schröder / Fix. 1-18. Äugst, Gerhard. 2002. 'Gefahr durch lange oder kurze Wörter?' In: Stickel, Gerhard (ed.). Neues und Fremdes im deutschen Wortschatz. Aktueller lexikalischer Wandel. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. 210-238. Barth, Erhard. 1972. 'Deutscher Wortatlas 1939-1971. Eine Bibliographie.' In: Wortgeographie. [Marburg], 125-156. (Germanistische Linguistik 1). Barz, Irmhild, Mariane Schröder & Ulla Fix (eds.). 2000. Praxis und Integration der Wortbildungsforschung. (Sprache - Literatur und Geschichte 18). Heidelberg: Winter. Bellmann, Günter. 2004. 'Slavisch / Deutsch.' In: Sprachgeschichte 4. 32293260.

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Betz, Werner. 3 1974.'Lehnwörter und Lehnprägungen im Vor- und Frühdeutschen.' In: Maurer, Friedrich & Heinz Rupp (ed.). Deutsche Wortgeschichte. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. 136-164. Duden. 3 1999. Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache in zehn Bänden. Completely revised and extended edition; edited by the Wissenschaftlichen Rat der Dudenredaktion. Mannheim: Dudenverlag. Eisenberg, Peter. 1999. Grundriß der deutschen Grammatik. Band 1: Das Wort. Stuttgart: Metzler. Eisenberg, Peter. 2001. 'Die grammatische Integration von Fremdwörtern. Was fängt der Deutsche mit seinen Latinismen und Anglizismen an?' In: Gerhard Stickel (ed.). Neues und Fremdes im deutschen Wortschatz. Aktueller lexikalischer Wandel. (Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Sprache). Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. 183-209. [FWB =] Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch. General editors Ulrich Goebel & Oskar Reichmann, volumes 1-3 (1989-2002) prepared by Oskar Reichmann. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Hinderling, Robert & Cornelius Hasselblatt. 2004. 'Baltisch / Deutsch.' In: Sprachgeschichte 4. 3269-3282. Kirkness, Alan. 1986. 'Vom Fremdwörterbuch zum Lehnwörterbuch und Schwerwörterbuch - auch zum allgemeinen einsprachigen deutschen Wörterbuch.' In: Schöne, Albrecht (ed.). Kontroversen, alte und neue. Akten des VII. Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses Göttingen. Volume III. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 53-163. Koch, Peter & Wulf Oesterreicher. 1994. 'Schriftlichkeit und Sprache.' In: Günther, Hartmut & Otto Ludwig (eds.). Schrift und Schriftlichkeit. Writing and its Use. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. 587-604. Mattheier, Klaus J. 1995. 'Sprachgeschichte des Deutschen: Desiderate und Perspektiven.' In: Gardt, Andreas, Mattheier, Klaus & Oskar Reichmann (eds.). Sprachgeschichte des Neuhochdeutschen. Gegenstände, Methoden, Theorien. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 1-28. [OED =] The Oxford English Dictionary. 2 1989. Prepared by J. A. Simpson / Ε. S. C. Weiner. Vol. I. Oxford: OUP. Polenz, Peter von. 1967. 'Sprachpurismus und Nationalsozialismus. Die 'Fremdwortfrage' gestern und heute.' In: Germanistik - eine deutsche Wissenschaft. Beiträge v. Eberhard Lämmert, Walther Killy und Peter von Polenz. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. 111-167. Reichmann, Oskar. 1998. 'Sprachgeschichte: Idee und Verwirklichung.' In: Sprachgeschichte 1. 1-41. Reichmann, Oskar. 2001. Das nationale und das europäische Modell in der Sprachgeschichtsschreibung des Deutschen. (Wolfgang Stammler Gastprofessur für Germanische Philologie, Vorträge 8). Freiburg (Switzerland): Universitätsverlag.

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Reichmann, Oskar. 2003. 'Hauptaspekte des Ausbaus und Umbaus des Wortschatzes in der Geschichte des Deutschen.' In: Sprachgeschichte 3. 2539-2559. Sandhop, Martin. 2003. Von Abend bis Zunge: Lexikalische Semantik des Deutschen, Tschechischen, Englischen und Französischen im Vergleich. (Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe I, 1849). Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang. Schmidt, Horst-Michael. 1982. Sinnlichkeit und Verstand. Zur philosophischen und poetologischen Begründung von Erfahrung und Urteil in der deutschen Aufklärung (Leibniz, Wolff, Gottsched, Bodmer und Breitinger, Baumgarten). (Theorie und Geschichte der Literatur und der schönen Kunst 63). München: Fink. Splett, Jochen. 1993. Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch. Analyse der Wortfamilienstrukturen des Althochdeutschen, zugleich Grundlegung einer zukünftigen Strukturgeschichte des deutschen Wortschatzes. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Splett, Jochen. 2000. 'Wortgeschichte und Wortstrukturgeschichte.' In: Barz / Schröder/Fix 107-130. Sprachgeschichte. Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung. 1998-2004. Second, completely revised edition. Edited by Besch, Werner, Betten, Anne, Reichmann, Oskar & Stefan Sonderegger. (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 2, 3). four volumes. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Vennemann, Theo gen. Nierfeld. 1995. 'Der Zusammenbruch der Quantität im Spätmittelalter und sein Einfluß auf die Metrik.' In: Fix, Hans (ed.) Quantitätsproblematik und Metrik. Greifswalder Symposion zur germanischen Grammatik. (Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 42). Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 185-224.

V. Index

Key Terms, Languages, and Place Names accent, 192, 231, 244-248, 258, 262, 278f., 290ff, 295-299 adjectives, 6, 70, 80, 135, 339 adverbs, 9, 35-40, 42 aesthetic, 106, 139, 171, 295, 297, 304f. affixation, 103, 106f. Afrikaans, 13, 145-166 als, 21, 35f., 40, 49 American, 6, 10, 105, 107, 114, 191,201,224, 237,244,247, 251-255,259-263,330,333, 337, 343 Americanisms, 105, 192 analogy, 64, 327 Ancient, 5, 29 anglicisms, 218f. Anglicisms, 8, 153, 155, 160 anomaly, 64 apartheid, 148, 154, 157ff., 161 Arabic, 10, 149, 354 arbitrary, 5ff., 201 archaising, 99-105 archaisms, 24, 99, 102 asynchronous, 209, 211, 217, 220 Australia, 145, 243f., 246f., 250f. Australian, 241, 245, 247, 249f. Austria, 32f., 35, 331 authority, 65, 87, 132f., 139, 146f., 169, 174, 176, 207, 212, 214, 216, 233,237, 305 Basque, 7 Belgicisms, 50, 57 Belgium, 47, 56-61, 168, 186, 286f., 297, 352

Bible, 7, 55, 150, 199, 320,352 borrowings, 86, 90-92, 100, 102108, 114-116, 153, 155f., 159164,254,259, 261, 314f., 321, 329, 347, 354 Britain, 104, 189,201, 339 British, 14, 105, 107, 149, 151, 191f.,245, 250, 259, 288, 292, 296, 339 caiques, 99, 102 Canada, 145, 246, 297 Cape, 145, 148-154, 158-162 Cape Afrikaans, 15 If., 154, 158162 cases, 8, 12, 22f., 29, 38f., 71, 87, 94, 138, 190, 195, 199f., 214, 221,261,266, 268, 281,321, 331,339, 346,355-359 Catholicism, 54 Central German German, 15, 2833, 39, 65,268 chat, 208f., 21 If., 217-220 Chaucerisms, 102 codification, 3, 8, 9, 13, 24, 58, 68, 70, 73, 90, 146, 158, 161, 164, 193,284 codified, 4,5, 11, 12,57, 63, 148, 150, 157, 159, 163, 176, 201, 284 colloquial, 4, 8, 23, 26, 29-42, 118, 149, 151, 155, 159, 161, 164, 2 0 8 , 2 1 5 , 2 1 7 , 2 1 9 compound, 75, 349 compounding, 102, 105-107

Index

correctness, 15, 24, 29, 67, 69, 72, 87, 90, 120, 129, 135, 155,201, 207, 242,244, 251, 254f., 257, 269, 286f., 294f., 297ff., 315, 358 cultural, 5ff., 13, 49, 59, 88, 90, 92ff., 98, 100, 109, 118, 120, 124-139, 158, 169, 174, 199, 202, 224, 227, 233f., 259, 268, 271,309f., 312, 315-319, 322, 332, 348f., 352, 358 descriptive, 39, 45, 64f., 69, 80ff., 143, 242, 336, 337 destigmatisation, 147f., 157 deviations from, 9, 50, 360 dialect, 6, 13, 15, 24, 27f., 31-36, 47, 64, 70, 85, 87, 89, 92, 112, 118, 122f., 147, 149-151, 158, 165, 170, 175f., 204, 234, 242, 248, 2 5 I f f , 256ff., 264-282, 288,301,315,331,339 dialect evaluation, 270ff. dialectal, 3, 12, 54, 72, 99, 102, 104, 107f., 149, 159, 176, 335, 337,338 dialectology, 191, 257f., 263, 271, 285,290,301,343 double negatives, 29ff., 42, 216 Dutch, 5, 8, 12, 2 9 f f , 34, 38, 43, 46-61, 80, 145-155, 163, 324, 331, 346, 351 Early New High German, 16, 31, 39, 44, 63, 67, 269, 345 East Central German, 28, 30, 33, 39, 65, 268 East Midland, 147, 151 education, 10, 24f., 28, 30, 32, 35, 37, 108, 113, 115, 139, 197, 220,261,269,272,280, 297f., 308f., 315-322, 352, 358 elitist, 30, 99f., 104-108 ellipsis, 194 email, 208f., 21 If., 215, 217, 219

363 English, 5-10, 13ff., 29f., 45, 74, 85, 90, 98, 99-109, 114, 120, 142-166, 178, 185, 191f., 199203, 206ff., 214f., 218, 241263,288, 292, 296,304, 326, 328-346,351,354,358-361 ethnicity, 169, 171, 181ff., 261 ethnographic, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105 European, 145, 149, 151, 156, 162f., 185, 194,224, 260, 298, 312f., 317, 332, 342, 346-352, 358f. Europeanisms, 35Iff., 358 external, 4, 14, 99, 107, 124, 146f., 168, 174, 183, 189, 203,327, 329, 343, 358 fixed-code theory, 14 Flanders, 12, 31, 46f., 51, 53f., 5761,267 Flemish, 6, 12, 46-58, 267, 289 folk linguistics, 1, 182, 193, 194, 198-201,242 foreign words, 6, 72, 77f., 83, 90, 99, 105, 113, 115ff, 120, 123, 153, 156, 171, 178, 312-315, 319,321,329, 347,349,356, 360 formal, 1,9, 12,35,40, 67, 158, 193, 198, 215, 217f., 219, 227, 355 France, 7f., 64, 89, 168, 186, 189, 284-288, 292, 296-300, 304 Francophobia, 105 Fremdwörter, 115, 117, 124, 313 French, 2, 5f., 10-15, 24, 46-50, 53, 57f., 76, 89-93, 100-107, 111, 114ff., 120, 123, 130, 133, 138f., 149, 156, 167f., 170-175, 178f., 180, 182,265, 282, 284301,315,319, 329f., 338, 340, 346,351,353,358 Gallicisms, 6, 4 9 f f , 57f.

364

Louise Hughes and Nils Langer

Gallomania, 107 gender, 6, 121, 211, 223, 293, 339 genetic, 15, 328-331, 340f., 344, 35 If. German, 5-16, 20-44, 55f., 62-144, 149, 156, 167f., 170-184, 191f„ 199f., 207, 214, 218f., 222-238, 264-282,304, 306-331,345, 348-360 Germanisation, 181 Germany, 61, 9, 11, 13, 24f., 28, 30-35, 43, 62, 64f., 87-95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105-109, 115f., 118, 120, 127-130, 134, 139, 142f., 167, 180, 189, 197, 201, 222f., 227f., 234, 236f., 264, 267f., 289, 311 globalisation theory, 241 glorification, 136, 310 Golden Age, 207, 327 grammarians, 5, 8, 9, 12, 22, 24, 26, 29-41, 63-94, 207 grammars, 8f., 24-31, 37, 42, 63, 65,67, 93, 146, 201,337, 338 Greek, 5, 10, 29, 76f., 102ff., 139, 313, 330 Hasliberg, 122 Hebrew, 145, 146 Hindi, 145 historiography, 2, 23, 26, 42, 304308,316-319, 322 impure, 4, 156f., 162, 254, 261f., 327, 341 indigenous, 3, 4, 5, 31, 148, 321, 332, 347f., 353-356 Indo-European, 312f., 351 Indonesian, 145 informal language, 1,12, 23, 30, 35, 39,42, 158, 161, 212, 218f., 227, 293, 296 internet, 20, 32, 35f., 39, 221 Italian, 5, 21,77, 90, 114, 171,353 Italy, 7, 177

language conflict, 47 language histories, 76, 308, 313, 316,319 language ideologies, 170, 189, 190, 197, 222, 224, 227, 234ff. language maintenance, 112 language protection, 11 Iff. language reality, 20, 27, 29, 37 Latin, 5, 10, 24, 29, 76f., 100-106, 113f., 120, 199, 207f., 278, 313-319,330, 334, 346f., 353f. legitimization, 336 Lehnwörter, 115, 361 Letzebuergesch, 13 literary language, 20, 26f., 39, 42, 52, 56, 63f., 67, 69, 76, 78f., 82f., 98, 100, 107f., 114, 131, 133f, 139, 146, 150, 157, 192, 207,215,219, 266, 268,270, 273,305,310,320, 322,328, 336f., 352, 357 loan, 4, 10, 13,91, 120,313,316, 319,321,345,347, 349,353, 358 loan constructions, 91 loanwords, 4, 10, 313, 316, 319, 321 Low German, 5f., 1 If., 28, 30-34, 66, 268,270,280,310 Luxemburg, 185f. Malawi, 145 Malayo-Polynesian, 148 Middle Ages, 14, 64, 100, 151, 267ff. Middle High German, 55, 64, 100, 101, 355 Middle Latin, 346 monolingualism, 170 monumentalisation, 310, 313, 314, 315, 316, 321 mood, 339 morphemes, 104, 194f, 199f. mother-tongue, 138, 160, 174

Index

Namibia, 145 national, 6f., 13, 15, 23, 25, 47, 49, 52, 69, 92, 108, 111, 116f., 125-140, 148, 168-173, 175, 183, 287, 29ff., 308-322, 347, 352 national identity, 47, 111, 125, 128, 168f., 183,297, 309, 322 nationalism, 98, 127ff., 138, 139, 149, 157, 183, 329 naturalness, 133, 135, 259, 354 negative value, 62f., 70-74, 78, 81, 83, 265 Netherlands, 6, 46, 48, 53, 59, 151, 165, 166 New High German, 16, 20, 23, 26f., 29, 3 1 , 3 9 , 4 1 , 4 4 , 63,67, 268f., 316, 320, 346 New Zealand, 241, 243ff-252, 259, 261 f. non-prestigious, 4 non-standard, 2, 14, 21, 22, 29f., 33,38,40, 80, 147, 151ff., 157, 163, 247, 285, 292, 295f., 297, 299, 337, 341 Norwegian, 6, 16, 105 nouns, 75, 80, 194, 311, 314, 339, 358 Old English, 100, 104, 109, 338f., 340, 342 Old High German, 56, 100, 109, 313, 355, 356 Orange River Afrikaans, 15If., 158f., 161 f. orthography, / also see spelling 25, 53, 60, 64, 69, 75f., 81, 83, 101, 115, 119, 149-152, 155, 174177, 181,298 Ossi, 222-225, 232, 238, 342f. particles, 35, 40, 42, 199ff. particularists, 48-55, 58

365 perception, 6, 9f., 14, 65, 82, 146, 200f., 223, 225, 255, 259f., 263, 291, 294f. Persian, 10 politicisation, 168 positivism, 169, 172 prefixes, 31, 100,339, 349 prepositions, 35, 37, 40, 42, 207 prescriptive, 5, 8f., 12, 23, 27ff., 35, 37,41, 50, 63, 65, 68ff., 75, 8 Iff., 146, 168, 172,211,215, 284,333,341 prescriptivism, 7f., 12, 20, 23, 29, 41f.,48,206f., 211-216, 219, 227, 242, 284f. prestige, 3-11, 46-49, 74, 77, lOOf., 129, 147, 189, 241, 253, 257, 259f„ 267f., 273f., 284, 294, 299, 338, 359f. prestigious, 5, 8, 74, 77, 91, 100, 108, 147, 149, 158f., 253, 258, 274, 358 professional, 99, 105, 108, 168, 197, 208,216, 289,326, 345 preforms, 194 pronouns, 194, 218 pronunciation, 7, 55, 146, 247, 249, 288f., 293-299, 338, 341ff. Prussia, 116, 272, 278 rational purism, 106 reverse purism, 14 Romance Languages, 29, 100, 104f., 108, 113f., 120, 155, 182,267,289,313,342, 346, 351 Russian, 114, 226, 351, 358 sanitary, 15, 326, 328, 330, 341 segregationalism, 189, 193, 194, 200f. Setswana, 156

366

Louise H u g h e s and Nils Langer

simplifications, 133, 139, 176f., 340 slang, 8, 98f., 105, 108, 247 sociolects, 3, 24, 86, 98, 108, 146, 161, 163, 358 Sotho, 146 South Africa, 145-166, 186 Spain, 64, 101 spelling, / also see orthography 48, 53, 56, 60, 76, 115, 149, 152f., 155, 160, 162, 165, 1711 8 1 , 2 0 7 , 2 1 6 , 2 1 7 , 220, 279, 294,298,299,315,335,338, 341 spelling reform, 53, 172-179, 207 split infinitives, 207, 216 standard variety, 13, 15, 23, 29, 31,42, 49, 63,67, 72, 74, 92, 147f., 154, 158, 164, 192,241, 264-269, 331, 335ff., 341 standardisation, 2, 4f., 8, l l f . , 14, 45f., 54, 58, 101, 103, 107, 125, 127, 129, 131, 134, 136, 143, 149, 150, 151, 158, 168, 172, 183 Stigmatisation, 5, 12, 32f., 65, 147f., 153, 155,216 suffixes, 100, 356 Swiss, 13, 11 If., 115-123 Swiss German, 112, 116, 118 Switzerland, 13, 35, 111-118, 120, 123, 186,266, 270, 286f., 297, 332, 352, 361

synchronous, 209, 211 systems, 53, 94, 98, 192, 198, 255, 333,352,356 teachers, 7, 9, 14, 15, 26f., 41f., 57, 67, 69,71, 123, 128, 131, 192, 197, 199f., 2 3 1 , 2 6 1 , 2 7 2 , 315f. tan-construction, 32, 33, 41 Turkish, 10 unification, 116, 222ff Upper German, 28, 30, 32f., 36, 39, 69, 89, 264, 266, 268, 360 Upper Saxon German, 87-92 USA, 28, 244, 246, 250 verbs, 6, 31, 32, 121, 260 vernacular, 32, 63, 82, 87-92, 118, 148, 154,202, 204, 225 vocabulary, 50, 54, 77, 99, 100108, 113, 117, 182, 312, 317ff., 329, 333f., 354 Wales, 1 1 , 2 4 6 , 3 3 7 wegen, 20, 22, 25, 37, 40, 272, 278 Welsh, 7, 11, 16 Wende, 222, 224f., 231, 233ff. wie, 21, 35f. 36 word-building, 99, 106ff. xenophobic, 78, 99, 100, 101, 104, 107, 108, 116, 330 Xhosa, 146, 156 Zambia, 145 Zulu, 146, 156

Index of Names Abbott, Claude C, 330, 342 Adam, Jean-Michel, 16, 236, 304, 324 Adelung, Johann Christoph, 23, 3 1 , 3 5 , 3 7 , 4 0 , 42, 86-94, 134, 141 Adger, Carolyn, 260, 262 Admoni, Wladimir, 26, 29, 42 Aitchison, Jean, 29, 43 Alcaraz, Enrique, 195, 203 Anderson, Benedict, 168, 184 Andrasch, Wiete, 226, 235 Androutsopoulos, Janis, 96, 219 Annamalai, E., 168, 184 Anon, 160, 164 Antos, Gerd, 235f, 325 Armstrong, Nigel, 21, 285, 288, 293, 298f. Arnold, Christof, 16, 72, 76ff., 82ff., 204 ASHA = Janota, Jeanette, 26If. Askedal, John Ole, 348, 360 Assmann, Jan, 126, 141 Auer, Peter, 228, 234-237 Augst, Gerhard, 356f., 360 Auwera, Johan van der, 198, 203 Bach, Adolf, 308f., 311-314, 322 Bacmeister, Adolf, 136, 140 Baer, Emil, 119, 124 Bailey, C-J. N, 329f, 341f. Bailey, Richard, 103, 109, Barber, Benjamin, 251, 252 Barbiers, Sjef, 43f. Barbour, Stephen, 131, 141 Barnes, William, 104f., 329, 330, 342

Baron, Naomi, 211, 217, 219 Barth, Dagmar, 169, 184, 229f., 236, 359f. Barth, Erhard, 169, 184, 229f., 236, 359f. Barth, Fredrik, 169, 184, 229f., 236, 359f. Barz, Irmhild, 236f., 360, 362 Battye, Adrian, 288, Bauer, Laurie, 15, 43, 194, 203 Baugh, Albert C., lOOf., 109 Baumann, Antje, 238 Baumgartner, Hans Michael, 305f., 324 Baur, Arthur, 119, 124 Bayard, Donn, 241, 252, 259, 262 Baym, Nancy, 217 Becker, Karl Ferdinand, 23, 24, 43 Behaghel, Otto, 25f., 38, 40, 43, 308, 309, 315, 323 Beiß wenger, Michael, 211,217 Belcher, R, 149, 164 Bell, Catherine, 126, 141,252 Bellmann, Günter, 349, 358, 360 Belmore, Nancy, 217 Beneke, Jürgen, 225, 236 Bentner, Guy, 186 Berg, Guy, 13, 145, 167, 174, 176, 184f. Berning, Cornelia, 117, 124 Berns, J.B., 165 Betz, Werner, 346, 361 Bex, Tony, 2, 15, 45, 143f. Billig, Michael, 129, 141 Blackall, Eric A , 22, 43 Blocher, Eduard, 112-121, 124

368

Louise Hughes and Nils Langer

Blommaert, Jan, 169ff., 180, 183f., 224f., 228, 236, 332, 342 Boeder, Winfried, 5, 10, 12, 15 Boeva, Luc, 53, 59 Böhm, Hermann, 25, 43 Bojunga, Klaudius, 309, 323 Boshoff, S.P.E., 155, 164 Botha, T.J.R., 151, 155, 164ff. Boughton, Zoe, 2, 15, 284f., 299f. Boyer, Henri, 296, Bradac, James J., 252, f. Brand, G., 147, 165 Braun, Josy, 173, 184 Bredel, Ursula, 225, 234, 236 Breindl, Eva, 38, 43 Brincat, Joseph, 2, 4, 10f., 15f. Brink, A.P., 165 Brook, G. Leslie, 337, 342 Brase, Eric Dorn, 128, 140f. Bruckner, Wilhelm, 121, 124 Bryson, Bill, 214 Bühler, Karl, 231, 236 Burke, Peter, 168, 184 Cable, Thomas, lOOf., 109 Callot, Milena, 217 Cameron, Deborah, 1, 9, 15, 326, 342 Cargile, Aaron, 252 Carstens, W.A.M., 150, 154, 160, 165 Carter, R., 147, 165 Cheshire, Jenny, 29f., 43, 204 Clark, Cecily, 260, 338f., 342 Clyne, Michael, 167, 184, 203, 236 Clyne, Paul, 167, 184, 203, 236 Coetzee, A.E., 153, 165f. Combrink, J.G.H., 147, 153, 155f, 159, 164f. Conrady, Carl Otto, 238 Coopman, Theophiel, 53, 59 Cornips, Leonie, 43 f. Coseriu, Eugenio, 199, 203

Coupland, Nikolas, 16, 129, 142, 228,236 Couvreur, Walter, 53, 59 Craeybeckx, Jan., 59, 61 Craig, Edward, 305, 324 Crowley, Tony, 105, 109, 339, 342 Crystal, David, 1, 4, 15, 145f, 165,206, 208, 209, 211,214f., 217f., 251 Czyzewski, Marek, 236ff. Daan, J., 147, 165 Dailey-O'Cain, Jennifer, 234, 236 Dal, Ingerid, 39, 43 Danchev, Andrei, 328, 342 Dann, Otto, 25, 127, 142 Danto, Arthur C., 305f., 324 Davids, Α., 148f., 154, 165 Davies, Winifred, 1, 9, 15f, 167, 345 Detwyler, Jennifer, 262 Deumert, Ana, 2, 11, 16, 61, 129, 142, 275 Dittmar, Norbert, 225, 234, 236, 324 Dobson, Eric J., 338, 342 Doederlein, Ludwig, 133, 140 Donaldson, B.C., 153, 156, 165 Düding, Dieter, 127, 142, 143 Dungworth, David, 203 Dürkheim, Emile, 126, 142 Durreil, Martin, 24, 43, 62, 311, 324 Ebert, Karin H, 34, 43 Ehlich, Konrad, 193, 197, 203 Eichhoff, Jürgen, 32, 43 Eisenberg, Peter, 38, 43f., 355f., 361 Elspaß, Stephan, 12, 20, 27, 35, 41, 44 Eroms, Hans-Werner, 228, 236 Faber, Karl-Georg, 305, 324 Fairclough, Norman, 224, 236 Falckenheimer, Wilhelm, 138, 140

Index

Farrar, Kimberley, 329, 343 Fasold, Ralph, 158 Fehlen, Fernand, 167, 184 Feist, Sigmund, 308f., 319, 323 Fertig, Ludwig, 25, 44, 143, 167 Fix, Ulla, 229f„ 236, 360, 362 Fleischer, Jürg, 39, 44, 236 Förstemarm, Ernst, 309, 312f., 323 Fought, Carmen, 257, 262 Francard, Michel, 293, Friedemann, Peter, 142 Fröbing, Johann Christoph, 40, 44 Fulda, Friedrich Karl, 89-95 Funck, Muriel, 186 Gadet, Fran^oise, 293, 297ff. Gal, Susan, 212, 224, 233-237, 332, 337, 343 Gallois, Cynthia, 241 Gardt, Andreas, 131, 142, 276, 324,361 Garrett, Peter, 241, 243, 246 Geers, Maria, 13, 85, 95, 98, 100, 109 Genee, Inge, 203 Genette, Gerard, 304f., 307, 322, 324 Genouvrier, Emile, 299 Gerritsen, Marinel, 189, 203 Giles, Howard, 252f., 262, 287 Glück, Helmut, 38, 44 Gordon, Matthew, 263, 289, 301 Görlach, Manfred, 99, 105, 109 Gottsched, Luise Α. V., 23, 32, 39, 44, 87, 268, 362 Grace, George, 332, 343 Graddol, David, 251 Grebe, H.P, 151, 165 Grewenig, Adi, 237 Greyerz, Otto von, 122 ff. Grimm, Jacob, 64, 79, 128, 131, 142, 308-312, 323, 329 Groof, Jetje de, 12, 46, 48, 57, 59 Gueunier, Nicole, 299f.

369 Guggenbühl, Adolf, 120, 122, 124 Gülich, Elisabeth, 236 Gumperz, John, 231, 237 Haagen, Monique van der, 241 Haas, Walter, 271,275 Haegemann, Liliane, 30, 31, 44 Haeseryn, Walter, 38, 44, 47, 49, 5Iff., 61 Haest, Reinhilde, 57, 59 Hahn, Silke, 223, 237 Hale, Constance, 214f., 219 Hall, Joseph, 109, 334f., 343 Hanks, William, 236 Harris, Roy, 192, 193f., 203 Harry, Beth, 262 Harth, Dietrich, 305, 324 Hartmann, Gottlieb David, 89, 93, 95 Härtung, Wolfdietrich, 228, 233, 234f., 237 Hasselblatt, Cornelius, 349, 361 Haugen, Einar, 8, 11 f., 16, 58, 333,343 Hausendorf, Heiko, 227, 236f. Hawisher, Gail Ε., 220 Heinemann, Margot, 223, 237, 308, 324f. Heinemann, Wolfgang, 308, 324 Hellmann, Manfred, 227, 237 Henne, Helmut, 16, 88, 95 Henzen, Walter, 268, 275 Herberg, Dieter, 223, 237 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 93, 95, 138,271 Hermanns, Fritz, 318, 324 Herring, Susan, 210f., 217 Hettling, Manfred, 127, 142 Heynatz, Johann Friedrich, 87, 95 Hinderling, Robert, 349, 361 Hintze, Marie-Anne, 288, 299f. Hirsch, Mario, 172, 175, 181, 184 Hirt, Hermann, 304, 309, 313ff., 320, 323

370

Louise Hughes and Nils Langer

Hofbauer, Carol, 236 Hofferichter, Theodor, 132, 140 Hoffmann, Jean-Paul, 167, 185 Hoffmann, Walter, 31, 44 Hohendahl, Peter, 127, 142 Hohenhaus, Peter, 14, 206, 218 Holmes, Janet, 241, 252, 259, 262 Hopper, Richard, 243 Horner, Kristine, 13, 167, 170, 174, 185 Huddieston, Rodney D., 201, 203 Hugger, Paul, 126f., 142 Hughes, Brian, 195, 203 Hume, Elizabeth, 293, 300 Hundsnurscher, Franz, 41, 44 Hutchby, Ian, 212f., 217 Huygens, Ingrid, 241 Irvine, Judith, 224, 234f., 237, 332,337,343 Jackman, Graham, 236f. Jaffe, Alexandra, 171f., 185 Jäger, Siegfried, 230, 237 Jahr, Ernst Häkon, 6, 16, 273, 281 Jansen, Wim, 7, 16 Jarvella, Robert, 241 Jaworski, Adam, 16, 228, 236 Jellinek, Max H., 64-70, 78, 81 Jenkins, Richard, 169, 183, 185 Jernudd, Björn H., 168, 185 Johnson, Sally, 7, 182, 185 Jones, Mari C., 2, 12, 16, 76, 78, 329, 343 Jones, William Jervis, 2, 12, 16, 76, 78, 329, 343 Joseph, John E., 15, 34, 45, 60, 326, 334, 343 Judge, Anne, 231, 232, 284, 299, 300 Jungclaussen, Wilhelm, 136, 137, 140 Kastner, Maria, 236 Kaufman, Terrence, 329, 344 Keller, Rudi, 115,307, 324

Kemp, William, 293, 300, 340, 343 Kerswill, Paul, 285, 300 Khomsi, Abdelhamid, 300 Kies, Daniel, 216 Killian, B„ 161, 166 Killy, Walther, 238, 361 Kirkness, Alan, 78, 106, 109, 308, 324,349, 361 Kirsch, Ingrid, 272, 275, 278, 279, 280,281,282 Kleij, Susanne van der, 43, 44 Kloss, Heinz, 320, 324 Kluge, Friedrich, 64, 268, 275, 309-315,323 Knoop, Ulrich, 269f., 275 Koch, Peter, 131, 142, 361 König, Werner, 71, 82, 274, 282 Konopka, Marek, 63 Kramer, Undine, 223, 237, 238 Krause, Wolf-Dieter, 106, 309, 324 Kroskrity, Paul V., 203, 224, 235, 237, 342, 343 Kuiper, Lawrence, 285-291, 296f., 299f. Labov, William, 163, 254, 262, 289, 293f., 301 Ladegaard, Hans, 241 Lafontaine, Dominique, 297, 301 Laks, Bernard, 293, 298, 301 Lambert, Wallace, 96, 253, 262, 290,301 Lämmert, Karl, 238, 361 Lampert, Günther, 74 Langen, August, 139, 142 Langer, Nils, 1, 5, 9, 16, 29, 32, 44, 63, 84, 167, 207, 345 Läzer, Rüdiger, 236, 238 Legrand, Michel, 184 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold, 89, 91,93,95 Leon, Pierre, 293, 297, 301

Index

Levinson, Stephen C., 196, 203, 307, 324 Leyhausen, Katja, 2, 12, 15, 302, 307f., 324 Liebscher, Grit, 227, 238 Lindner, Erik, 127, 142 Lindow, Wolfang, 5, 16 Linke, Angelika, 310, 325 Links, T.H., 158, 160, 164, 166 Linn, Andrew, 2, 11, 16, 23, 44f., 59f. Lippi-Green, Rosina, 253, 262 Lodge, R. Anthony, 284, 299, 301 Löffler, Heinrich, 7, 11, 16, 265, 275 Löffler, Marion, 7, 11, 16, 265, 275 Logutenkova, Tatiana, 98, 109 Long, Daniel, 253, 262f., 300 Louw, C., 154, 166 Lulling, Jerome, 184 Malone, Kemp, 340, 343 Mandelkow, Karl Robert, 127, 142 Marr, Heinrich, 138, 141 Marsh, George P., 329, 343 Marson, Pierre, 186 Mattausch, Josef, 128, 142 Mattheier, Klaus J., 6, 14, 96, 131, 141 f., 264-268, 275f., 324, 348, 361 May, Stephen, 169, 176, 183, 185, 298 McArthur, T., 147, 151, 166 McDonald, Maryon, 185 McLelland, Nicola, 2, 11, 16, 23, 44f., 59f. McWhorter, John H., 340, 343 Meert, Hippoliet, 49-52, 59, 60 Mesthrie, R., 150, 166 Meyerhoff, Miriam, 259, 262f. Meynen, Alain, 59, 61 Milroy, James 1, 7f., 15f., 27, 30, 42, 128, 142, 184, 188, 193,

371 197,202,206, 241,265,274, 325, 327, 329f., 337, 342f. Milroy, Lesley, 1, 7, 8, 16, 188, 193, 202, 206, 241, 262, 265, 274, 288, 330 Molee, Elias, 330, 344 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 40, 45, 106, 132 Moser, Hugo, 6 5 f f , 81, 3 0 8 f , 319, 323 Moskova, Anna, 6, 16 Mosse, George L , 127f, 130, 143 Moulin, Claudine, 167, 172, 186 Mülhäusler, Peter, 344 Müller, Friedrich Max, 34, 45, 112,268,276, 329, 344 Müller, Joseph, 34, 45, 112, 268, 276, 329, 344 Müller, Robert, 34, 45, 112, 268, 276, 329, 344 Müller-Marzohl, Alfons, 112 Münch, Paul, 142 Muyldermans, Jacob, 52, 53, 60 Nast, Johannes, 89, 92, 95 Neuens, Othon, 184 Newton, Gerald, 167, 185, 186 Niedzielski, Nancy, l f , 14, 16, 182, 186, 242,251-256,259, 262f. Nipperdey, Thomas, 130, 143 Nolte, Paul, 127, 142 Noltenius, Rainer, 127, 140, 143 Nussbaumer, Markus, 310, 325 Oakes, Leigh, 169, 186 Odendal, F.F., 154, 164, 166 Oellers, Norbert, 127f, 143 Oesterreicher, Wulf, 131, 142, 358, 361 Olivier, G , 165f. Opitz, Martin, 64, 68, 72, 74, 77, 7 9 f , 90 Ozkirimli, Umut, 128, 143 Paltridge, John, 287, 301

372

Louise Hughes and Nils Langer

Paris, Reiner, 91, 127f., 133, 143, 284, 287, 289, 300f., 324 Pätzold, Jörg, 231,238 Pätzold, Margita, 231, 238 Paul, Hermann, 324 Paul, Ingwer, 222, 237 Peeters, Constant, 47, 50, 60 Phillipson, Robert, 251 Piroth, Isabelle, 184 Polenz, Peter von, 24, 3Iff., 40, 45,65, 67-74, 76, 8If., 88,95, 131, 143, 167, 186, 198,203, 223,238,265,276, 307f., 314, 319, 3 2 1 , 3 2 3 , 3 2 5 , 3 4 8 , 3 6 1 Ponelis, F.A., 149-154, 157f., 160, 164, 166 Poussa, Patricia, 340, 344 Powesland, Peter F., 253, 262 Preston, Dennis, 1,2, 16, 182, 186, 241 f., 251-255,257, 262f., 285, 300f. Prinsloo, Α., 160, 166 Protze, Helmut, 39, 45 Pullum, Geoffrey Κ , 201, 203 Pupier, Paul, 300 Quaring, Ines, 173, 186 Raabe, Wilhelm, 131, 143 Raidt, Ε. H., 149f., 154, 166 Rash,Felicity, 13, 111, 120 Rasquin, Fernand, 173, 186 Ray, George, 241 Reding, Pierre, 184 Reichmann, Oskar, 2, 6, 15, 44, 268, 270, 276, 345ff., 352, 355, 361f. Reiher, Ruth, 229, 236, 237f. Reimann, Ariane, 34, 45 Reiß, Katharina, 198, 203 Resendiz, Julia Liebe, 230 Richter, Stefan, 235, 236 Rickard, Peter, 284, 301 Rinnen, Jean, 186 Roberge, P.T., 149ff.

Rödel, Michael, 34, 45 Roe, Ian, 23 6f. Romaine, Suzanne, 147 Roosens, Eugeen, 168, 186 Roth, Lex., 172, 179, 185, 186 Rowlett, Paul, 288, 300 Rüdiger, Johann Christian Christoph, 87, 95 Rüsen, Jörn, 305, 325 Ruwet, Joseph, 53, 60 Ryan, Ellen B., 244, 252 Saage, Richard, 94f. Sager, Juan C, 203, 325 Sandhop, Martin, 351, 358, 362 Sauer, Wolfgang, 38, 44 Scanion, Jesse, 214f., 219 Schaeder, Burkhard, 16 Schanen, Franfois, 184 Scharloth, Joachim, 13, 85f., 95, 265,276 Schärpe, Lodewijk, 53, 59 Scherer, Wilhelm, 309f., 323 Schieffelin, Bambi B., 190, 203, 224f., 235, 342 Schildt, Joachim, 65, 67, 78 Schilling-Estes, Natalie, 253, 263 Schläpfer, Robert, 112 Schlobinski, Peter, 227, 228 Schmid, Karl Adolf, 131, 136 Schmidt, Horst-Michael, 361 Schmidt, Wilhelm, 70, 82, 136 Schmirber, Gisela, 237 Schmit, Carole, 183, Schmit, Jos, 185 Schneider, Ute., 126, 139 Scholtz, J du P , 150 Schönfeld, Helmut, 225, 227 Schörken, Rolf, 306, 325 Schötensack, Heinrich August, 29 Schottelius, Justus Georgius, 6484 Schröder, Marianne, 22, 37f., 23 6f., 360, 362

Index

Schroen, Michael, 172, 186 Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel, 89, 91, 96 Schumacher, Paul, 186 Seife, Cynthia L., 220 Shethar, Alissa, 233f., 237 Sijs, Nicoline van der, 2, 4, 6, 10, 16 Silverstein, Michael, 191, 193f., 199, 203f., 224, 233, 337, 344 Simon, Jana, 181, 235 Skeat, Walter W., 339, 344 Smith, Anthony D., 128, 143, 329, 342 Snyder, liana, 220 Socin, Adolf, 264, 266-270, 276ff. Sonderegger, Stefan, 44, 266, 276, 362 Sperber, Hans, 308f., 318ff., 323 Spieß, August, 139, 141 Splett, Jochen, 356, 362 Spuler, Linus, 111 Stahlmann, Hans, 309, 311, 313, 315f., 323 Stedje, Astrid, 71 Steiert, Rudolf, 94, 96 Steiger, August, 112, 121-124 Stein, Dieter, 188, 202f., 342 Stein, Leopold, 136 Steinert, W., 25, 43 Stevenson, Patrick, 6, 14, 131, 143, 222f., 227f., 233f., 236ff. Stewart, Mark, 241, 244 Steyn, J.C., 148, 153, 154 Stickel, Gerhard, 228, 275, 360f. Stoeber, August, 134f., 141 Stötzel, Georg, 237 Streeck, Jürgen, 223 Stubbs, M., 147 Takada, Hiroyuki, 63 Tappolet, Ernst, 117, 123 Taylor, Talbot, 326, 343

373 Teichmann-Nadiraschwili, Christine, 222 Theobald, John, 236, 238 Thomas, George, 2ff., 13, 15f., 24, 74, 85f., 96, 101, 109, 143, 146, 149, 168, 176, 186, 191, 194, 204, 284, 334 Thomason, Sarah, 329, 344 Trask, R. Larry, 3, 7, 16 Trudgill, Peter, 7, 15, 16, 43, 194, 203, 292, 331, 344 Trümpy, Hans, 270, 276 Tschirch, Fritz, 309, 311, 3 1 3 f , 317ff., 323 Tuten, Donald, 329, 344 Vandenbussche, Wim, 2, 6, 1 lf., 16, 46f., 53, 58, 60f. Vanhecke, Eline, 12, 46, 57, 60 Vaughan, Graham, 241 Vennemann, Theo gen. Nierfeld., 355,362 Vermeer, Hans J , 198, 203 Verschueren, Jef, 183, 184, 190, 194, 204, 332, 342 Vischer, Friedrich, 137, 141 Vogel, Traugott, 79, 118, 122 Volz, Norbert, 228 Vreese, Willem de, 50, 60 Walker, Jim, 299 Walter, Henriette, 44, 59, 61, 275, 289, 324, 344 Watts, Richard, 2, 15, 45, 62, 129, 143f., 207, 324, 344 Weber, Daniel Erich, 110, 118f. Weber, Jean Jacques, 166, 184 Weber, Max, 310, 321,324 Weber, Nico, 166, 185 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich., 128, 144 Weinreich, Uriel, 333, 344 Wellemans, Yves, 53, 60 Wells, Christopher J., 64f., 68f., 78, 82, 131, 144

374

Louise H u g h e s and Nils Langer

Welte, Werner, 206 Wengeler, Martin, 237 Wermke, Matthias, 8, 17 Werne, Alexis, 186 Werry, Christopher C., 217 Wiedasch, Wilhelm, 138, 141 Wienbarg, Ludolf, 270f., 276 Wiesinger, Peter, 44, 265, 276 Willemse, H., 157 Willemyns, Roland, 12, 46-59, 61 Williams, Angie, 241, 285, 300 Williams, Ann, 241, 285, 300 Wilpert, Gero von, 66, 76 Wirtgen, Geroges, 184 Witte Eis, 59, 61 Wodak, Ruth, 224

Wolf, Ricarda, 223f. Wolff, Gerhard, 65, 68f., 72, 76, 81, 362 Wolfram, E., 158, 253, 262f. Wolfram, Walt, 158, 253, 262f. Woolard, Kathryn Α., 190, 203, 224f., 233, 235, 237, 342 Worley, Becky, 221 Wright, Laura, 334, 344 Wyld, Henry C., 335ff., 344 Yaeger, Malcah, 299 Yates, Simeon J., 217 Zahn, Christopher, 241, 243 Ziegler, Evelyn, 6, 13, 96, 125, 131, 144,219 Zimmer, Dieter E., 38, 214