The Politics of Language Purism 9783110868371, 9783110117103

Table of contents :
The texture of language purism: an introduction
A political approach to language purism
The politics of purity and exclusion: literary and linguistic movements of political empowerment in America, Africa, the South Pacific, and Europe
Francophonie: purism at the international level
Language reform movement and its language: the case of Persian
Purism and correctness in the Bengali speech community
Language purism in Korea today
Hieratic components in Soviet dictionaries of Yiddish, Dungan, and Belorussian
Linguistic scapegoating: the pure and impure of American poetry
Purism, language, and creativity: the Sri Lankan experience
Purism and alienation in recent Taiwanese fiction
Language purism as a type of language correction
The linguistic and social dimensions of purism
Subject index

Citation preview

The Politics of Language Purism

Contributions to the Sociology of Language

54

Editor

Joshua A. Fishman

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

The Politics of Language Purism

Edited by Björn Η. Jernudd Michael J. Shapiro

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1989

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Politics of language purism / edited by Björn Η. Jernudd, Michael J. Shapiro. p. cm. — (Contributions to the sociology of language ; 54) Includes bibliographies and index. ISBN 0-89925-483-7 1. Language purism. 2. Languages—Political aspects. I. Jernudd, Björn Η. II. Shapiro, Michael J. III. Series. P40.5.L354P65 1989 306.4'4—dc20 89-12410 CIP

Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloging in Publication Data The politics of language purism / ed. by Björn Η. Jernudd ; Michael J. Shapiro. - Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1989 (Contributions to the sociology of language ; 54) ISBN 3-11-011710-X NE: Jernudd, Björn Η. [Hrsg.]; GT

® Printed on acid free paper.

© Copyright 1989 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form — by photoprint, microfilm or any other means — or transmitted or translated into a machine language without written permission from Mouton de Gruyter, a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. Typesetting: Asian Research Service, Hong Kong. — Printing: Ratzlow, Berlin. — Binding: Mikolai, Berlin. — Printed in Germany.

Contents The texture of language purism: an introduction Björn Η. Jernudd

1

A political approach to language purism Michael J. Shapiro

21

The politics of purity and exclusion: literary and linguistic movements of political empowerment in America, Africa, the South Pacific, and Europe Manfred Henningsen

31

Francophonie: purism at the international level Brian Weinstein

53

Language reform movement and its language: the case of Persian Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak

81

Purism and correctness in the Bengali speech community Monsur Musa

105

Language purism in Korea today Nahm-Sheik Park

113

Hieratic components in Soviet dictionaries of Yiddish, Dungan, and Belorussian Paul Wexler

141

Linguistic scapegoating: the pure and impure of American poetry Rob Wilson

169

Purism, language, and creativity: the Sri Lankan experience Wimal Dissanayake

18 5

Purism and alienation in recent Taiwanese fiction Wen-Hsiung Hsu

197

vi

Contents

Language purism as a type of language correction J. V. Neustupn}

211

The linguistic and social dimensions of purism E. Annamalai

225

Subject index

233

The texture of language purism: an introduction Björn Η. Jernudd Preamble This volume consists of the contributions of political scientists, linguists, and scholars of literature to a meeting on the politics of language purism.1 The rich texture of language purism is reflected in both the variety of approaches that the papers take to open up perspectives on purism and the variety of concrete situations that the papers describe. Revelation of discursive practices enables Shapiro and Henningsen to relate language purism to changing relations of power, authority and control between Self and the Other. Weinstein elucidates the specific political, social, and economic interests behind the institutions of Francophonie on a global basis. Karimi-Hakkak, Musa, Park, and Wexler describe puristic projects in Persian, Bengali, and Korean, and in Soviet dictionary representations of Yiddish, Dungan, and Belorussian. Two literary scholars, Wilson and Dissanayake, discuss, respectively, the problem of the poetically pure in American poetry and the problem of lack of compatibility between language purism and novel writing in Sinhalese. In another literature paper, Hsu demonstrates how language as a source of alienation is reflected in recent Taiwanese fiction. The volume closes with two theoretical contributions by linguists. Neustupny deals with purism in discourse as acts of correction of inadequacies, and seeks to relate puristic idioms and ideological purism to purism in discourse. Annamalai privileges assertion of identity of Self in his exploration of the relationship between the linguistic and the social in purism, an understanding similar to that of Shapiro and Henningsen. In this introduction, I wish to give the reader a sense of the variety of behaviors and statements that the meeting dealt with as the participants sought to come to grips with each others' various understandings of the politics of language purism. At the same time, I want to anticipate some of the concrete dimensions of analysis that the papers offer. Together, the examples and their possible analyses (or at least similarities of description and domain) may help to reveal what can be studied as "language purism."

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A concrete example of purism is the Editorial Comment in Newsreview June 4, 1983, reproduced from The Korea Herald and titled "Linguistic Milieu": Language is the soul of the nation as the crystalization of its inherited culture and living modus. So we can feel the breath of other people through verbal contact. . . . This compels the contemporary generation to further refine our lingual asset . . . nine associations of Korean linguists and writers have jointly recommended that the government set up a 'National Korean Language Research Institute' [to engage in] comprehensive research on orthographic rules, standard language, loanwords and Romanization of Korean personal and place names, among others. These are required to purify our language [of] . . . words that betray the cause of purity and decency in our linguistic expression. We are not inclined to be chauvinistic at all. . . . The job of purifying our language does not belong to linguists alone. We, all using it, must be participants in the work. Korea presents a case of contemporary purism (for details, see Park, this volume: 113) but purism in talk and action can be seen to occur at different times in history. For example, since the early spread of Islam in the last millennium with its overwhelming impact on society, Iran has sought to regulate the amount of Arabic borrowing into the Persian language, just as Iran in modern times seeks to harness the best of European and American technology and thought through the systematic correction of the Persian language (see Karimi-Hakkak, this volume:81). Or when a secularizing Turkey modernized in the 1920s, Atatürk embarked on a massive state-led campaign to replace what was Arabic and Persian in Turkish in order to rid Turkey of what he regarded as undesirably traditional and therefore an impediment to secularization and Westernization. Ironically, this task proved to be so massive and potentially disruptive of communication that after a first surge to purge the lexicon and to introduce the Latin alphabet and therefore new spelling, he eventually had to endorse a point of view that allowed limitless openness to, and therefore incorporation of, words from Arabic as well as other languages into the Turkish language. Atatürk and his language managers justified this "new policy of moderation" both by empirical claims and by the formulation of new theory: they declared Turkish to be the source of all languages (Heyd 1954:33-4).

The texture of language purism: an introduction 3 It is in periods of transition such as the period of early modernization in Turkey that puristic responses are especially likely to arise. A clearly defined dominance by a High Language of the Great Tradition, god-given, is eroded by a mobilization of colloquial language and borrowing of foreign usages into the language, to accompany deliberate modernization or contact-induced socio-economic and/or political change. A period of generally agreed standards for the language of literature and public usage would follow the mobilization/change period as societies claim success of standardization and national consolidation. Later yet, a period of accommodation of marginal groups of people into broader society (i.e., of the so-called minorities, rural "deviant" dialect speakers, immigrant laborers, refugees) may again upset "standards." In the former period of transition into modernization, some people may feel empowered by knowledge bestowed by a Past to protect the community and language from the New and the Foreign as well as to protect their own positions; in the latter period of accommodation of marginal groups and "democratization," some seek privilege in their construction of a different Future while others brace to resist further erosion of communal values and standards of language. In either case, purism may provide the appropriate political gestures of expression and evaluative constraints on language correction. Purism may constitute the ideology that provides a source for adjustment strategies to resist or replace exogenous language norms with the indigenously self-asserting in periods of communal or national resistance and self-empowerment, or to uphold norms felt to be threatened by erosion within the society. Thus, purism occurs at particular historical times to defend, demarcate, and protect that which constitutes Self. Such times could be periods of rapid social change, of perceived external pressure on the community, of national authentification and consolidation, of class and ethnic conflict over resource distribution, or of "war cry." Purism may be more or less explicit and it would take different forms under different conditions of historical time, and social and economic circumstance.

Focussing language purism as a scholarly project In the most general terms and in essential agreement with Paul Wexler (1974; and as projected in this volume: 141), Annamalai (1979:36) defines purism in the following way:

4

Björn Η. Jemudd Purism in language then may be defined in terms of the opening and closure of sources for enrichment. . . . Purism is the opening of the native sources and closure of the non-native sources.. . . Though the native sources are open in general, the dialectal and literary sources are often treated differently. . . . The opening and closure can be seen as applied to materials and to models. Models are the derivational, compounding and syntactic patterns. The factors which lead to purism may be, theoretically, internal or external to the language. . . More important than any structural consideration is the attitude of speakers toward native and non-native elements.. . . The attitude . . . is determined by socio-cultural, political and historical factors which are external to language. There are certain conditions some or all of which must be present for the puristic regulations to emerge in any langliage [e.g., when thel social order is undergoing change with power relations redefined.

The factors and conditions which Annamalai postulates are sources of not necessarily negative evaluation of speech in puristic correction acts in discourse. (On the question of negative evaluation, see also Neustupn^, this volume:213). While the extra-linguistic factors and conditions that give rise to purism, consequences in languages usage of correction of language systems because of purism, and puristic idioms have received some attention in the literature, there is no sociolinguistic theory of purism that connects extra-linguistic motivation and differential interests, ideologies and idioms with linguistic outcome through correction acts in discourse. The application of a correction theory (Neustupny 1978 and this volume:211; Jernudd and Neustupn^ 1987) to purists' language management may provide one approach to constructing a sociolinguistic theory of purism. "Puristic idioms" and "ideologies of purism" make up the expression and content of discourse about language. Interestingly, contemporary thought deals centrally with discourse as a simultaneous means and end of human organization and thought. 2 To this extent, a theory is available for the study of purism as discourse, as explicated by Shapiro in the following paper. Studying purism as discourse about language enables its scholars to place puristically informed correctives in discourse, i.e., in language use, in the relevant contexts of peoples' interests, to quote Ray (1961:228): a language never exists in the same sense that any material object or an individual animal exists, it exists only as a sense of direction

The texture of language purism: an introduction

5

in the inclusion and exclusion as well as the dissociation and association of forms and meanings in elaboration of a group decision to identify and distinguish itself. In other words, the existence of a language is an existential 'project'... a sociological 'value.' Ray here argues for balance in language (with reference to standardization) in that language must have configuration as well as demarcation, that there must be cultivation of intercommunication between sections of the people, and there must be change and adaptation to other languages.3 In this introduction, I shaft cite manifestations of purism of language that arise under widely different conditions, drawing primarily on data found in clippings from newspapers in Sri Lanka, the state of Maharashtra in India, and Australia.4 My most important purpose is to provide these data qua data that require description and explanation under a heading of the study of purism. With the help of these data, I shall also attempt to convey the sense of the meeting that language purism must not be dismissed as always "bad" in its causes and effects because of experience with particular social and political movements that justly deserve condemnation. Language purism can be understood as a corrective to systematic inadequacies that particular individuals note in language communication. Under congruent conditions, purism can be understood as an articulation of changes in relations between Self and Others in the medium of language.

Observations on Sinhalese language purism in Sri Lanka today In the last forty years, dismantling colonialism has entailed circumscribing use of the colonial languages and developing endogenous national languages — as a matter of national policy and substantial government intervention by language planning — only to see these same foreign languages creep back in with First World products, technology and pop culture. In Sri Lanka, as in some other post-colonial countries,5 the government decided to bring English back into publicly sponsored and subsidised domains in order to support industrial and commercial development. The renewed salience given to English as one of Sri Lanka's measures to support economic growth brought renewed salience also to Sinhalese.

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Björn Η. Jernudd

Newspaper clippings reflect some aspects of the continuing need to manage English acquisition and use in a very complex and conflictridden indigenous language situation. One aspect of this complexity concerns the relationship between English and Sinhalese, the majority population's native language. A government minister was reported in the Sinhala newspaper Dtvaina (in 1983) to have pronounced a fear of English overrunning Sinhalese.6 It is a report of the proceedings of a function organized by the English literature association of the Royal College of Colombo, which is the leading elite school, in Sri Lanka. The report has a very revealing headline, the translation of which is: "We will not allow English to be a threat to the Sinhalese language—Minister of Trade." The relevant sections of the report translate as follows: "We will not allow the English language to be a threat to our mother tongue, the Sinhalese," said the Minister of Shipping and Trade Mr. Lalith Athulathmudali yesterday . . . we should look at the world with a broadened perspective and that the need of learning the English language is felt all over the world. Mr. Athulathmudali also pointed out that President Jayawardene had emphasized the need for giving a prominent place to English. He further said that we all should understand the reasons as to why we need English. The Minister had to assure his audience that English would not be allowed to be a threat to the Sinhala language. Obviously, it is the policy of the government to expand English education. The government may well support the acquisition of English in schools, and schooling benefits some more than others, but it is unclear how these facts relate to the use of Sinhalese and English in everyday discourse. What is clear is that there is a perception of a threat by at least one segment of Sri Lankan society. This perception is salient enough and attributed to or expressed by people who can excite ministerial comment. These people espouse an interest focussed on the Sinhalese language as a symbol of Sinhalese identity, hopes and aspirations both in the context of the Sinhala-Tamil race relations conflict and in the context of modernization. In the latter, the conventional nationalist argument that "Western culture," normally understood to include the English language, threatens indigenous culture and values continues to be held at least by nationalist-oriented Sinhala Buddhists.

The texture of language purism: an introduction 7 A letter under the heading, "What has happened to the Official Language Department?" (Divaina May 21, 1983) attacks the Official Language Department for its inefficiency in promoting Sinhalese, which is the official language of Sri Lanka. The writer, who supplied no name, says that the Department is virtually defunct: Even if it existed, it does not have enough powers to implement the Official Language Act. No explanations are called for from the heads of the departments who do not send out official correspondence in the official language. . . . It has become almost a joke to work in Sinhalese in government departments. English is essential to obtain employment. Those who come from the rural areas and know only Sinhalese can not get their business done in the government offices. The writer blames the politicians for not protecting the native language. "Even the Buddhist monks are silent about the fate of the Sinhalese language," laments the anonymous Sinhalese patriot. Piyadasa Velikannage in the Sunday edition of Divaina (March 4, 1983) under the headline "A Nation without a Goal" angrily notes that "there is nobody today who speaks for the Sinhalese language and Buddhism." As a Sinhalese nationalist, he also links the fate of the Sinhalese race to the fate of Sinhalese language and Buddhism: If the Sinhalese language, Buddhism, and Buddhist culture are destroyed, the Sinhalese race will inevitably become helpless. Everybody talks about the English language, not about the Sinhalese. The nation's attention is drawn to learn English, not to learn Sinhalese. The writer argues against the need for English as a prerequisite for Sri Lanka's modernization. Only "selfish hypocrites" can say that English is essential to gain modern knowledge in the technical and scientific fields. "Did the Russians and the Japanese achieve their scientific and technical progress through English?" asks an angry Welikannage. His answer is a clear "No." Professor Ediriweera Sarachchandra's article, titled "The Sinhalese Fallen from the Sky" (Divaina, May 22, 1983) is a critique of those Sinhalese people who are alleged to have disregarded the national culture, language, and other native legacies. Sarachchandra reminds the reader how, in the past, the urban upper classes who had "imitated English customs and manners, and spoke in English among themselves" were ridiculed by national revivalists. He also points out, how, as a

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result of the sentiments of national pride generated by nationalism among the Sinhalese people some people began "to give up foreign names, to wear national dress, and to use the Sinhalese language." But, according to Sarachchandra, this national revivalism was confined only to the Sinhalese educated middle classes, such as school teachers, native doctors, and Buddhist monks: The native capitalist class did not have a native cultural heritage. Nor did it have proper cultural roots. Being a mercantile class, they remained loyal to the British Empire. They accepted English names and sent their children to missionary schools in order to teach them the English language and European manners. Sarachchandra's essay appears to be a veiled attack on the present rulers in Sri Lanka, who are subject to severe criticism by certain nationalist elements for the neglect of national culture, including the Sinhalese language. Yet, the Sinhalese are themselves a dominant group of people on the island of Sri Lanka, and although in conflict with the Tamils, self-empowering. This Sinhalese language defense, indeed, chauvinism, provided momentum for puristic ideology and discourse. It is not as powerfully articulated or intensely presented in contemporary Sri Lanka as it was a few decades ago, but the voices of explicit Sinhalese language purism are still heard. An article in Divaina (March 2, 1983) with the title "The Great Scholar who Revived Sinhalese Literature" celebrates the 39th anniversary of the death of Kumaratunga Munidasa — the pioneer of the Sinhalese language purist movement He la Hawula. He developed the Sinhalese language to the level of a scholarly language, explained the grammar of the Sinhalese language scientifically, interpreted the classical Sinhalese literature correctly, and created a meaningful children's literature. The article is written in the kind of Sinhalese idiom that Mr. Kumaratunga developed more than six decades ago. Kumaratunga advocated the revival of classical and pure Sinhalese idiom. The Hela Hawula idiom was popular among certain sections of the Sinhalese nationalist elite for some time, but it never became popular on a mass scale, basically because of its rigidity in adhering to the grammatical structure of the classical "pure" Sinhalese. Dissanayake (this volume: 185) demonstrates how ultimately only approaches based in a realistic appreciation of heteroglossia will succeed, at least in literary develop-

The texture of language purism: an introduction 9 ment. Yet, every year the Sinhalese language purists make use of Kumaratunga's death anniversary in their crusade for a "pure and uncorrupt" Sinhalese language. The last paragraph of the article carries precisely this message: One way of honouring his efforts to improve the Sinhalese language is to learn, and to teach others, how to speak and write the Sinhalese language correctly. In an interview in the Sunday edition of Divaina (March 13, 1983), Munidasa Senerath Yapa, a well known Sinhalese writer, blames those who do not use the Sinhalese language correctly. He is especially critical of radio newscasters who do not use the language in a grammatically "correct" manner. As much as a legal system is essential to the society, grammar is essential for the correct use of a language: The anti-social elements consider the legal system as a constraint to them. Similarly, grammar is an impediment to the traitors to the language. It is such traitors who say 'no' to grammar. There is no civilized language in the world without grammar, and it is difficult to understand why some people claim that the Sinhalese language does not need a grammar? Munidasa argues that the reason for the confusion in the Sinhalese language today is that people who do not know Sinhalese properly are working in Sinhala. He blames the radio commentators for popularizing what he calls "solecism" (he gives the English word!). Then, he lists Sinhalese words popularized by radio newscasters and which he considers grammatically incorrect. One cause for the weakness in the knowledge of Sinhalese language among the school children, argues Munidasa, is the use of grammatically incorrect words on the radio. If indeed there is such a gap between Sinhalese-speaking children's usage, educational practice, and radio exposure, Munidasa may well have a contribution to make which, with the help of puristic idiom, may mobilize and make available to individuals correctives to remove unmotivated differentiation in language use on the basis of one systematic view of grammatical norm. His action may also assist systematic correction by teachers, textbook authors and other educational language managers in native language teaching. The puristic movement provides a source of evaluation of discourse in a particular grammatical system. Depending on the relationship of this grammatically explicit evaluation base to certainties or insecurities in

10 Björn Η. Jernudd current usage, it may or may not help people to communicate. Purism may rationalize usages to enable their systematic incorporation into a stable language system that is accessible to most people at minimal additional cost to individuals or institutions. On the other hand, it may reinforce sociolinguistic differentiation exclusively or primarily in favor of those people who hold the puristic ideology in social, political, or religious opposition to others. Through this latter effect, purism hinders social communication. The teaching of Sinhalese has constantly been under the critical scrutiny of the purists, and they have been very aggressive in attacking language curricula in schools and school text-books for want of what they consider the correct Sinhalese grammar. The newspaper Silumina (May 29, 1983) prints an article titled "School Text Books that Corrupt the Language Knowledge of Students" by Mr. A.A. Gunatilleke, a lecturer at a teachers' training college. Gunatilleke is obviously of the Hela Hawula school of language purists, and therefore, he writes in the Hela Hawula idiom. The writer examines the Sinhalese language school text-books published by the government. He starts out with a patriotic note. Sri Lanka is the only country, he says, where the Sinhalese language exists. The Sinhalese language has its own unique characteristics, traditional and cultural, inherited from the past. Therefore, if the school children are allowed to learn the language through text books that disregard those unique features of the language, that would ultimately contribute to corrupt and confuse the national, cultural and tradition-bound sentiments of future generations. He gives a series of examples of grammatical mistakes in the language textbooks. There are instances of the subject and the predicate not grammatically corresponding to each other, grammatically incorrect use of comparatives and superlatives and mistakes in spelling and punctuation. What is seen as "incorrect" is relative to one's norms of evaluation. Gunatilleke's and the textbook authors' and users' norms may not coincide, but there may be room for negotiation which may benefit the students. Explicit criticism of language from a puristic point of view may provide an opportunity for explicit language correction in the interest of opening the language for widening groups of Sinhalese speakers. But reaching into the past may also derail motivated changes in the language to cause disruption of usage

The texture of language purism: an introduction

11

through the introduction of competing overt norms of evaluation which are based in narrow ideological group interest opposed to modern or integrated society. The idea of preservation and protection of the Sinhalese language had been a considerably appealing political and cultural slogan, in relation to Tamil as well as in relation to English. It returned with the English resurgence. Then, as now, one challenge to Self (Sinhalese) from Another (English) may be met in ways that reproduce meeting the challenge from another Other (Tamil). And if Sinhalese purism had focussed attention on one relationship, that attention is inevitably deflected to the other.

Observations on Marathi In the Indian state of Maharashtra, there was a debate in newspapers about purity of the Marathi language during the period of clipping (November 1983 to February 1984). Thid debate about purism brings into explicit focus the matter of balance and openness of the language system under conditions of language contact and rapid change in social communication. In a letter to the editor (The Maharashtra Times, November 7, 1983), many examples are given of Hindi words and phrases found in Marathi. Examples are quoted from the answer papers of graduate students and the writer comments that many of them are not even aware that they write such a "muddled" Marathi. He offers certain hypotheses for the unknowing influence of Hindi on Marathi. "As students are exposed to Hindi through movies, radio, and television all the time, their Marathi gets highly influenced by Hindi even without their knowledge." He expresses a deep concern over this "bad hybrid" Marathi and feels that this problem needs serious attention. Another writer (The Maharashtra Times, November 18, 1983) responds that "languages do come in contact and do influence each other which cannot be stopped or arrested. Once cannot dream of keeping language pure." He cites many influences of English on Marathi on various linguistic levels: vocabulary, direct-indirect constructions, relative clauses, etc. He states that not only these other languages, but different dialects of Marathi are influencing the Marathi language. He cites the context of Dalit literature in which new words and ex-

12 Björn Η. Jernudd pressions unknown to certain speakers of Marathi are becoming widely known and assimilated in the Marathi language. He also states that Hindi is being influenced by Marathi, and gives as an example Bombaiyya Hindi, a variety of Hindi spoken in Bombay, the capital city of Maharashtra, where Marathi is the dominant code. All the languages in contact are constantly influencing each other: the changes taken place in languages in contact situations are perfectly natural and healthy. However, there should be a limit to this flexibility and especially writers should be careful about purity of language. The debate continued (The Maharashtra Times, December 8, 1983): "It is very hard to understand where the boundary of pure Marathi ends and how flexible the pure language should be." This writer says that attitudes should change and those Marathi speakers who do not have a very good command of Marathi should be given encouragement and complete freedom to write in their less authentic Marathi. A more tolerant attitude towards "pure Marathi" would encourage more people to write. Opening the public and written norms of Marathi to allow hitherto proscribed usage will not make Marathi any less "authentic" because these proscribed usages are Marathi in any case. The proscribed forms of usage originate in the use of low and vulgar language in Dalit protest literature, in the use of "dialect" (and dialect is by definition an authentic variety of a language), and in the fact that some individuals do not have a very good command of Marathi, presumably because of their lower standard of education. Marathi authenticity is not challenged by opening the language to accommodate these various usages. However, Marathi authenticity is challenged by Hindi. Closing Marathi norms to Hindi would meet this challenge. In the Indian linguistic federation, Hindi is both a regional (state) language on a par with Marathi and it is a union language both de jure and de facto (sharing that role with English). The very existence in the Indian federation of the state of Maharashtra and its delimitation in physical space vis a vis other states to a considerable degree depends on the demarcation of a Marathi language vis a vis Hindi and on the location in physical space of speakers of Marathi who identify themselves as such. That some people are sensitive to Hindi influence on Marathi is therefore hardly surprising, nor is it surprising that Marathi purism argues for closure of Marathi to Hindi language influence of any kind.

The texture of language purism: an introduction

13

Observations on Australian English In Australia, purism is articulated in the entire society's search for authenticity in language (and in other areas, including history). Australia is in search of a Self. Participants in the project create purity by discovering a self for themselves and for their society. A major theme during the period of study of newspapers (late 1969 — early 1970)7 involved demarcating an Australian English, vis ä vis both the formerly dominant British English models and the contemporarily threatening, yet admired, American language. Broadcast language is noted by the public ear in Australia just as in Sri Lanka and Maharashtra. The Australian Broadcasting Commission's Standing Committee on Spoken English is the arbiter of pronunciation for the public radio and TV system. The committee meets every three months. Two of its members are university professors of English, the third is the Director of News, and the fourth is dubbed the "custodian of correct day-to-day pronunciation on the ABC." According to the latter (The Australian, October 24, 1969), the committee's guidelines are directed towards "accepted educated Australian usage." If newscasters get "too colloquial," she says, people call up to complain. The committee helps the broadcasting personnel find an acceptable balance between Australian English vernacular usage and the emerging norm for public speaking, helping to create the latter in the process.8 In spite of the influence of the committee and public radio/TV on pronunciation, a letter to the editor in The Age (4 December, 1969) laments "that the standard has so much deteriorated" in radio newsreaders' sessions. The writer had earlier sent letters to eight private radio stations, and received replies from four which "claimed it was impossible to enhance the standard, implying that it was, in fact, word perfect." The other four had ignored his letters. He charged that diction is the problem. He refers to himself as "one . . . who speaks, reads and understands The Queen's English'" and thus makes explicit the language norm on which he based his evaluation of radio/TV language. "The Queen's English" used to be the public norm of speaking in Australia. It was the norm taught and acquired in adolescence and early adulthood mainly through school. Some schools taught it more effectively than others. However, the norm was itself so articulated as to normally unmistakably identify the Australian to an Englishman. Today's emerging Australian English norm is motivated

14 Björn Η. Jemudd by the vernacular that most people born in Australia acquire as they grow up. Australian vernacular usage has broad colloquial acceptance but only towards the end of the 1960s did it start to be generally acceptable for public speaking. The news of a weekly class for overseas students at the University of New South Wales "in Strine" triggered a strong reaction precisely along the lines of divergent adherence to these two alternative norms. A Mr. Bates claims (The Australian, 8 November, 1969) that foreign students' main problems are the neutral vowel and the unaccented syllable that characterize Strine. They come here expecting us to speak like a nation of BBC announcers and their first contact with Strine classics like 'Emma Chisit' and 'Gloria Soame' bewilders them. Radio Australia announcers aren't Strine types. They've all got British accents.... We must accept that Strine is Australian.... Mr. Bates believes that Australians must finally drop the idea that British plum-in-themouth style is the only correct way to speak. Instead of taking over BBC English we should start exporting Strine. [The article ends with a footnote:! assprad — houseproud; pazeyouenna — pay as you enter; Emma Chisit — how much is it; Gloria Soame — glorious home. A correspondent replies (in The Australian) with the suggestion that we export Mr. Bates . . . to live with the Cockneys, from whom most of his Strine rubbish has been culled. Another letter, signed "Malaysian student, St. Lucia, Qld," seriously suggests that should I speak Strine at home, people will question my credibility, [and] cannot recall any difficulty in understanding my lecturers.. . . Maybe it's because they speak good English. Afferbeck Lauder (Alistair Morrison), author of Let Stalk Strine, Nose Tone Unturned, joined the debate "in the true spirit of Australian mateship," springing "to the defence of Ron Bates." Don't blame him for Strine — "it is entirely my invention." (In a letter in The Australian, 25 November 1969) This peculiar speech is a stereotyped Australian idiom, yet, it endorses the Australian vernacular by its cutting humor. And he added,

The texture of language purism: cm introduction

15

All over the English-speaking world, Strine is recognised as a joke. The Oxford Dictionary (5th Pocket Edition) defines Strine as 'the name given to comic transliteration of Australian speech.' The important word is 'comic,' and so Mr. Bates does seem to have missed the point. Mr. Bates has not missed the point but perhaps he should not have used the name "Strine" to refer to the kind of Australian speech as kept the author of this paper from using the telephone for two years after his first arrival in the country. The spelling norm is explicit and can therefore easily be used to define Australian English as different from British English. A change of spelling norm served to liberate and to demarcate the Australian language from dependence on England.9 The period of newspaper study begins with the announcement of a spelling reform in the State of Victoria (The Age, October 6, 1969): From next year State school students will be taught to spell words such as 'color' and 'honor' without an OUR' ending. And in another spelling change the ΊΖΕ' ending will be dropped in favor of 'ISE.' The changes have been made to simplify spelling. [The] Education Department has declared a two-year 'amnesty' period to allow for the changeover. In this period no child will be penalised for using either version. But this particular spelling change held the meaning for some people of a reorientation of dependency rather than of assertion of self. In a letter to the newspaper (The Age, October 9, 1969) a writer asks: what right has the Victorian Department of Education to change the spelling of 1349 words in the English language? We speak English in this country [so] therefore why should our spelling be changed to follow the American pattern? He also claims that the spelling change will make for a "wider gap between State and private school education" and that as a result "this [new] spelling . . . [will] be considered the uneducated way to spell." Unless the new spelling finds endorsement among the groups of people who have privileged access to positions of power in society, the spelling reform may enhance existing or projected sociolinguistic differentiation in Australia by introducing yet one more of its indicators. The ultimate success of the spelling reform depends, thus, on the acceptance of the new spelling norm by all educational institutions

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Björn Η. Jemudd

which in turn, as the writer suggests, depends on the abandonment of an English oriented language norm in favor of the emerging Australian one as the preferred public speaking style for graduates of the private schools. In the absence of an Australian ethos that embraces the same public speaking norm, this new state school spelling norm may reinforce existing sociolinguistic stratification, signifying social and educational inequalities. There is sensitivity and resistance to American influence. Especially names are noted and evaluated. Names characterize an Australian language and incorporate judgement of identity. For example, Australia "adopted the name 'dollar' very happily" following the currency reform, as a letter to the editor of The Australian (October 23, 1969) notes. But a suggestion that a 50 cents coin be called a "halfdollar" brought forth two letters {The Australian, October 27 and 29, 1969), one declaring this "the most repulsive suggestion . . . that we should use American terms . . . " and the other declaring in agreement that there are "Australian-style" terms available such as, "florin and crown." The Australian language purism forms part of a socially, politically, and artistically comprehensive project which redefines Australia's relationship to Britain in Australia's search of a unique history and independence of identity. Finding an authentic Australian language gives rise to a purism that takes the form of rejecting what constituted the norms that emulated British-oriented ideals rather than the form of positive identification and endorsement of desirable vernacular expression. In finding alternatives to what has been rejected, it runs the risk of being seen to fall into new dependency. The case of the coins shows how even the old English can be reappropriated in definition and defense of Australian English to resist American English!

Concluding words The language purism meeting brought together political scientists, literary scholars, and linguists. The data in this introduction show how purism politicizes language in discourse and as discourse in order to open and to close the linguistic medium and what its use and users represent. Purism epitomizes what is political in language and in linguistics. The political scientists' papers in this volume have opened

The texture of language purism: an introduction

17

a debate not only about the legitimization of meanings through their studies of purism but also about the legitimization of boundaries and therefore centers of concern of scholarly disciplines. This is evident in the difference between the discursive approaches that Shapiro and Henningsen take to political science and to purism, as compared to Weinstein's institutional approach. It is my conviction that knowledge about purism will accrue precisely because of these kinds of tensions between approaches to the study of seemingly equivalent behaviors, statements (idioms and ideologies), and thoughts. The discursive approach in political science and the contemporary humanities has much in common with the techniques and even goals of study of literature. There is a difference comparable to that among the political scientists between the approaches that Dissanayake and Wilson take in this volume to the problems of purism in novel-writing and poetry, respectively, and, for example, Hsu's critical approach to the body of Taiwanese writing. The former focus on purism as a problem of formation of the novel and poetry, the latter focuses on purism as a problem of reference in a particular body of literature. The multiplicity of approaches will bring us knowledge. Clearly there are gains to be had in cooperation between political scientists and literary scholars; but above all, there are gains to be had in the literary study of purism, especially because there are so much data that are suited to techniques of literary analysis both in literary texts and in texts of puristic idiom and ideology. There is also an obvious need for papers that combine description and analysis in the manner of Karimi-Hakkak's exposition of the case of Persian (this volume:81). It is obviously the linguists' job to provide the descriptive linguistic details of language purism. Wexler has devoted much of his career to' this task, and his work benefits this volume as well. Park and Musa add depth to the linguistic details of purism and also put these details in their institutional-linguistic contexts. Neustupny and Annamalai raise a key problem in contemporary linguistics. The problem is how to model, measure, and eventually explain the link that undoubtedly exists between talk about language and use of language by the individual. Political scientists may explicate the politicization of language and its institutions, literary scholars may explicate genres and ecologies of literary activity, but linguists are obliged to connect the formers' knowledge about texts and contexts with language use in discourse. People project puristic ideologies and puristic idiom on discourse, but how does puristic thought, opinion and talk have an effect on language use?

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Björn Η. Jernudd

Notes 1. The papers in this volume were presented to a meeting at the East-West Center in September 1985. I convened the meeting in cooperation with my co-chair, Michael Shapiro, to discuss the politics of language purism. We had directed the participants to come prepared to contribute answers to especially the following questions in the study of language purism: Under what conditions do authenticity-seeking, puristic movements with effects on literary languages arise? Who are the players? What are the outcomes? What is the rhetoric? 2. I am referring here to Foucault's impact. Michael Shapiro, my co-chair of the meeting, presents a political scientist's perspective on purism from a Foucaultian perspective in his paper in this volume (p. 21). 3. Cf. Manfred Henningsen (this volume:31) on how "the empowerment of a people's SeZ/can derail into the overpowerment of the Other" 4. Newspaper clippings are selected from papers written for the Project on Modernization and Language Development at the East-West Center by Björn Η. Jernudd, Monsur Musa, K.S. Rajyashree, Elizabeth Thuan and J. Uyangoda. For newspaper sources and method, see Jernudd and Thuan (1980). 5. For example, Tanzania, see Khamisi (1987). 6. Divaina is one of several Sri Lankan newspapers studied during the period March to May 1983 for debate on language and mention of language problems. For a fuller report on newspaper clippings dealing with English in Sri Lanka, see Jernudd and Uyangoda (1987). These notes do not make independent reference to the major conflict in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. See Musa (1981) for a history of the conflict in its language manifestation. 7. In Australia, one dominant theme found in the newspaper clippings in the period around 1970, our period of study, related to the political and social project of incorporation of inmigrating peoples into larger society. The majority of newspaper clippings, however, reflected creative writers' challenge of public morality by their deliberate use of obscene language. While the deliberate display of obscenity could likely be revealed as a puristic project to remove political corruption and social double standards, the use by actors of a few lexical items on stage is a mere index of much different concerns than that of language and do not converge on systematic correction in a language system. 8. Miss Williams maintains a file of "contentious words," dictionaries and guides to pronunciations. It is also part of her job to enquire about pronunciation from "consulates, linguists and English professors" (especially of names, e.g., "Ghugh — a tiny island . . .," "Soyuz"). Interestingly, this article includes a stereotyped Strine ( < Australian) word in its headline: "She won't let them sound too 'fraffly.'" 9. The Australian language project forms but part of a broad historic process of Australian self-empowerment.

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References Annamalai, E. 1979 Movement for Linguistic Purism: The Case of Tamil. In Language Movements in India, ed. by E. Annamalai. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages, 35-59. Fishman, J. 1970 Sociolinguistics. A brief introduction. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Heyd, U. 1954 Language reform in modem Turkey. Jerusalem: Israel Oriental Society. Jemudd, Β., E. Thuan 1980 Reflections of language problems in some Australian newspapers. An interim report for fiscal year 1980. East-West Center: Culture Learning Institute. Jemudd, B., J. Neustupny 1987 Language planning: for whom? In Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Language Planning. Publication A-21 of the International Center for Research on Bilingualism, Quebec: Les presses de l'universitö Laval, 70-84. Jernudd, B., J. Uyangoda 1987 The power of English in Sri Lanka: a survey of newspaper content and text. In Perspectives in language planning, ed. by Udaya Narayana Singh and R.N. Srivastava. Calcutta: Mithila Darshan, 60-94. Khamisi, A. 1987 Language planning strategies in Tanzania. In Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Language Planning. Publication A-21 of the International Center for Research on Bilingualism, Quebec: Les presses de l'universitö Laval, 193-201. Musa, Monsur 1981 Language planning in Sri Lanka. Dacca: Bhuiyan Muhammad Imran. Neustupny, J. 1978 Post-structural approaches to language. Language theory in a Japanese context. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Ray, P.S. 1961 The value of a language. Lingua 10:220-33. Wexler, P. 1974 Purism and language: a study in modern Ukrainian and Belorussian Nationalism (1940-1967). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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A political approach to language purism

Michael J. Shapiro

"Here we are together," says the group photograph (Fig. 1). But the solidarity that the photograph seems to represent is more a function of the representational practice of photography, which generally functions as an integrative mode of representation, than it is an expression of the intellectual solidarity among participants at our conference. Indeed, the idea of the "political" audaciously evoked in the title of our gathering, "The Politics of Language Purism . . .," probably created more discomfort among participants than it did intellectual motivation. As a result, the photograph is ideological inasmuch as it encourages a misreading of our proceedings. Much of the discussion involved a struggle between those who would politicize language purism movements, treating them within a political problematic, and those who would depoliticize them, treating them within a technical and/or administrative problematic. But while the photograph is ideological, conveying a false image of solidarity, it is a useful mode of expression for our purposes because it has a kinship with language purification. Group portraits and language purification can both be viewed as part of a broader and very basic play of forces in a society, those that produce identity among persons and those that create differences. In general, when we ascend to this level of abstraction, dealing with the interplay of identity and difference, it becomes possible to see connections among seemingly disparate phenomena. For example, Levi-Strauss (1966:32) creates a framework within which games and contests can be interpreted within the frame of this basic social process. Games . . . appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and losers. Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse; it conjoins, for it brings about a union . . . or in any case an organic relation between two initially separate groups. . . . In the case of games the symmetry

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Michael J. Shapiro

. . . is preordained and it is a structural kind since it follows from the principle that the rules are the same for both sides. Asymmetry is engendered; it follows inevitably from the contingent nature of events, themselves due to intervention, chance or talent. The reverse is true of ritual. There is an asymmetry which is postulated in advance between profane and sacred, faithful and officiating, dead and living, initiated and uninitiated, etc., and the 'game' consists in making all the participants pass to the winning side by means of events, the nature and ordering of which is genuinely structural. What Levi-Strauss's analysis here demonstrates, at a minimum, is the intelligibility we enjoy when we introduce a level of abstraction; we are able to "read" two seemingly disparate social processes within the same linguistic/conceptual currency. If we take this epistemological insight and add it to Levis-Strauss's substantive focus on games and rituals, we have an entree to an initial political problematic we can lend to language purism movements. Recognizing that we must interpret language purism movements as events by contextualizing them within a broader, on-going social process, we ask about their constituting motivations. These are motivations understood not as individual/causal or psychological phenomena but as social level phenomena, for such a movement has a collective significance; it has the effect of identifying certain members of the community within an inherited linguistic social caste while placing others outside of this membership. It thus involves both identification and differentiation. Language purification movements also have a marked, ideational impetus which relates, among other things, to the term "purification." If we look at the history of the term purification and view it from the point of view of its metaphoricity, "purification" loses its innocence, for its most powerful historical role has been its use as a representation for overcoming sin. Inasmuch as sin has been represented or figured as a kind of "stain," which Ricoeur (1967:46) had identified as "the first 'schema' of evil," it is clear that purification has functioned in part as a moral term applied to actions aimed at overcoming evil. When a term with a pointedly moral valence is put into play in social processes, it cannot wholly lose that valence, even when efforts are made to neutralize its moral force. Every society is involved to some degree with identity politics, with separating people into groups with identities which form a hierarchy of worthiness, and one's language group membership is an important part of many of these identity politics processes. Clearly, then, attempts to "purify" a language

A political approach to language purism

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implicitly promotes those who can most closely identify themselves as belonging to the language base toward which the change is aimed to a position of moral superiority. And because purification implies getting rid of stain and thus evil, purification movements imply at some level that the impure language elements belong to impure persons. This impurity ascription makes it then possible to put people who cannot claim affiliation with the privileged language in a lesser moral space. In the first instance, then, we can develop a political perspective on language purification movements by both placing the movement as a whole within the power and authority-related process of the interplay of identity and difference, which creates solidarity within certain groups and differences between those groups and others, and by noting the symbolic charge placed on such movements when the explicit activity is "purification" of a language. The next instance involved in developing a political understanding of language purification requires us to adopt a particular approach to language, one which rejects the traditional idea that language is a neutral medium of communication and treats language as "discourse." In the more familiar approaches to political phenomena, language is treated as a transparent tool; it is to serve as an unobtrusive conduit between thoughts or concepts and things. A discourse approach, on the contrary, treats language as opaque. As a result, it encourages an inspection of both linguistic practices within which various phenomena — political, economic, social, biological, etc. — are embedded (in fact, from a discourse point of view various disciplines are linguistic practices) and also enables us to raise questions about the political implications of discursive practices. The inspection of those practices can be either atemporal, emphasizing the grammatical, rhetorical, and narrative mechanisms responsible for recognition of those phenomena treated as the referents of statements in various disciplines, or historical, emphasizing the process by which various phenomena find their way into language. In either case, it can be shown that discursive economies, which privilege various linguistic operators are associated with the circulation of persons in connection with relations of power, authority and control. In short, once the transparency metaphor for language is exchanged for the opacity metaphor, analysis becomes linguistically reflective. What this implies can be demonstrated if we take a simple example, the phenomenon of the "attitude," which has found its way into the

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Michael J. Shapiro

speech/writing practices and analyses of the political science profession (indeed, it is one of the most highly funded "objects" of attention in the discipline). Rather than asking the question about why it is that this or that person holds this or that attitude, the typical question posed by analysts, one can ask about what dimensions of power and authority are implicated in the attitude's emergence in the language of the social sciences. Undoubtedly the attitude's emergence as an attribute of persons has coincided with the development of the use of mass media to sell public policy and those who perpetrate it. When legitimation processes were more indirect, in that they involved the control over the individual through the control over group and occupational or religious membership, there was no question of influencing anything as unmediated as an individual, mental orientation (e.g., Spain sold a docile self-consciousness in the Philippines by laundering it through Christianity. It was the institution of the Church that mediated the Filipino's relationship to Spanish authority) (cf. Rafael 1984).1 In addition, important political events, e.g., the rise to power of Hitler, motivated studies of the phenomenon of obedience to rigid systems of authority. Accordingly, a landmark study (Adorno et al. 1950) of the attitude was explicitly directed toward the cognitive dimension of the acceptance of fascist appeals, and even the less overtly anxious studies (e.g. Campbell et al. 1960) that helped to found the phenomenon known as the political attitude of extreme positions. In many ways, the discursively oriented question is more politically acute than the empirically oriented one because it recognizes a domain of political relationships that is fugitive within the transparency understanding of the language of inquiry. The volubility of relationships immanent in speech practices is silenced in the non-discursive approaches. What, then, is discourse? There is a familiar version that contains a misleading bias. Traditionally there is a strong bond between the idea of discourse and the concept of communication. Within this tradition, discourse emerges from the distinction between viewing language as a system of signs and as an instrument of communication. For example, Emile Benveniste noted that once we leave the individual sign or word and deal with the sentence, we are concerning ourselves with discourse, for discourse involves employing language in order to communicate. But Benveniste privileged only one dimension of discourse, for the communication function assumes a speaker and listener whose presence and intentional consciousness governs the

A political approach to language purism 25 meanings of the discourse. There is, however, a dimension of meaning that is not generated in the interlocutory relationship. This is the meaning that is already resident in the linguistic practices to which individual speakers resort in making their utterances and listeners resort in their interpretations (cf. Easthope 1983:40-42). Thus an utterance such as "we now know more about sexual perversions than ever before," operates on at least two levels. As communication, it is clear what is conveyed, namely those already constituted phenomena, which have come to be regarded as sexual perversions are now more firmly connected to modes of knowing, e.g., there are probably more "case histories" of persons who have been recruited into the role of the sexually perverse. But what remains silent and thus unthought within such a communicative perspective are the processes wherein "sexual perversions" are constituted and incorporated into a form of authority and control. To take such a view, we have to overcome the disabling view of discourse as transparent communication between subjects about things, a view within which the value of the statements of a discourse is wholly absorbed in a statement's truth value. Michel Foucault who stresses the silent and unthought dimensions of discursive practices, suggested (1972:120) a politicized alternative to the traditional preoccupation with the truth value of individual statements and discursive formations as a whole: To analyze a discursive formation is to weigh the "value" of statements, a value that is not defined by their truth, that is not gauged by a secret content but which characterizes their place, their capacity for circulation and exchange, their possibility of transformation, not only in the economy of discourse, but more generally in the administration of scarce resources. This view of discourse alerts us to the political content sequestered in the subjects (kinds of persons), objects and relationships about which we speak. It shows that statements can be evaluated as political resources, for discourse is, in Foucault's terms, an "asset." For example, the creation of the phenomenon of the "sexual perversion" is understood, within Foucault's perspective, as a "perverse implantation," representing a step in the processes whereby medicine took charge of explaining the increasing number of kinds of sexual abnormalities that were constituted and administered by a society increasingly interested in rendering conduct more predictable (Foucault 1978:48). From a Foucauldian perspective on discourse, the invention

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Michael J. Shapiro

and medicalization of sexual perversions represents the creation of a kind of medicalized subject whose sexual modes of conduct are penetrated by a discipline engaging in a form of surveillance supporting prevailing modes of power and authority. For example, as Foucault points out, in the older codes, sodomy was a forbidden act. After medicine's penetration into the field of such acts a wholly new, more complex sexual actor/subject was contrived. "The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, a morphology, with an indiscrete anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology (Foucault 1978:43). Foucault thus demonstrates how the "homosexual" was constituted. To the extent that we merely communicate about such things we engage in a discourse that simply reproduces an existing structure of power and authority. This alternative approach to discourse, one that stresses its constitutive rather than its communicative dimension alerts us to the process wherein things come into speech and the mechanisms or elements of a discourse in which they reside. For this purpose, one needs a focus that is almost wholly unfamiliar to contemporary political science, which predicates its approaches to inquiry on the view that language is transparent and thus on the apprehension of phenomena that have already made their way into speech. Within the traditional language conceits of political science, language purism movements have political significance only to the extent that those with recognized "political" positions get involved. But if one focusses on the politics of discourse, the political dimension of language purism inheres in the privileging of various phenomena which are allowed to come into language. Much of this discursive approach to language is based on a particular conception of language and meaning, that introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, which predicates meaning not on the relationship between a word and object but on the relational structure of signifiers. For those influenced by the Saussurean linguistic tradition, in which meaning is predicated on the structure of difference among signifiers rather than the word-object relationship, the signifier precedes the signified. This implies that those phenomena (signifieds) about which we have understandings arise as a result of our signifying practices. Christian Metz has represented this precedence of the signifier with a remark on how the love experienced by some men is predicated on a mental projection about its endurance. He says (1982:11), ". . . far from the

A political approach to language purism

27

strength of their love guaranteeing it a real future, the psychical representation of that future is the prior condition for the full amorous potency in the present." Whatever credence one might give to this particular view — that it is the network of signifiers in which love and an imagined future participate that produces the phenomenon we identify as "love" — the epistemological implication is clear; an understanding of the phenomena about which we speak is to be gained not by formulating precise, technical rules to translate ideas into observations or to translate observations into the conscious intentions of an actor. What is to be recovered, rather, is a non-conscious set of linguistic practices, which are constitutive of the things one is conscious of. Moreover, insofar as we recognize how things are constituted, we are in a position to regard the "things" in the world: the unities, equivalences, and coherences represented by prevailing speech practices, not as natural or transcendental but as things contrived and produced by human practices. We are then licensed to move in a different direction from mainstream political understanding. Rather than privileging scientific communication with its commitment to clarity and precision about things political, we can question the authority of the certainties that operate within consensual speech about the political world and about the world that is thought of as being other than political. There is yet another aspect of language that lends itself to a politicizing of language purification movements. This is the perspective offered by Bakhtin, who spoke of the degree of pluralism or, in his terms, heteroglossia within a society. In speaking about the way language functions in various genres of writing, Bakhtin (1981:271) sets up a tension between centripedal forces, those "forces that serve to unify and centralize the verbal-ideological world," and the centrifugal forces which operate against this unifying tendency. There is, in any society, what Bakhtin (1981:271-272) calls "heteroglossia" (many voices): At any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word . . . but also . . . into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations and so forth. Bakhtin identifies the novel as that form of writing which exemplifies the internal stratification of language (heteroglossia), which manages to be maintained in the midst of the unifying, centripedal tendencies

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Michael J. Shapiro

of a society. He points out (1981:272-273) that while various poetic genres of writing, developed under the influence of unifying, centralizing, centripedal forces of verbal-ideological life, the novel — and those artistic-prose genres that gravitate toward it — was being shaped by the current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces. While Bakhtin's emphasis here is on the novel as a genre which counters various centralizing tendencies within a society's verbal-ideological system, the insight can be transferred usefully to the problem of language purism. A purification movement is representative of a centripedal tendency. Diversity is under attack, and the discursive economies that result can only enhance a centralizing tendency within the society's system of power and authority. In general, then, a political understanding of language purification movements is possible even when that movement is encoded within depoliticizing — e.g., technically oriented — discourses. What is required, at a general level, is an appreciation that language is a resource. The locations it creates for kinds of person/speakers partakes of the more general economy of place and status within a society, and its grammatical, rhetorical, and narrative structures deploy responsibilities and authoritative forms of control. And policy aimed at unifying a society's language system is itself a political gesture inasmuch as it denies and delegitimates various forms of difference or otherness. At many levels, a society's approach to the Other is constitutive of the breadth of meaning and value it is prepared to tolerate. Language purism is a move in the direction of narrowing legitimate forms of meaning and thereby declaring out-of-bounds certain dimensions of otherness. It is not as dramatic and easily politicized as the extermination of an ethnic minority or even so easily made contentious as the proscription of various forms of social deviance. But the Other is located most fundamentally in language, the medium for representing selves and other. Therefore, any move that alters language by centralizing and pruning or decentralizing and diversifying alters the ecology of Self-Other relations and thereby the identities that contain and animate relations of power and authority.

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Note 1. Rafael's analysis is an exemplar of a discourse oriented approach. He shows, among other things, how the meaning of Christian encounters, e.g., the confessional, were affected when refracted through a translation from the Spanish into the Tagalog language.

References Adorno, T.W., Ε. Frenkel-Brunswick, D.J. Levinson, and R.N. Sanford 1950 The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Row. Bakhtin, M.M. 1981 The Dialogic Imagination. (Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans.). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes 1960 The American Voter. New York: Wiley. Easthope, Anthony 1983 Poetry as Discourse. New York: Methuen. Foucault, Michel 1972 The Archeology of Knowledge. (A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans.). New York: Pantheon. 1978 The History of Sexuality (Robert Hurley, trans.). New York: Pantheon. Levi-Strauss, Claude 1966 The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Metz, Christian 1982 Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti, trans.). London: MacMillan Press. Rafael, Vicente L. 1984 Contracting Christianity: Conversions and Translations in Early Tagalog Colonial Society. Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University. Ricoeur, Paul 1967 The Symbolism of Evil. Boston: Beacon Press.

The politics of purity and exclusion: literary and linguistic movements of political empowerment in America, Africa, the South Pacific, and Europe*

Manfred

Henningsen

On June 3, 1769 Johann Gottfried Herder started a sea voyage in Riga on the Baltic Sea that took him all the way to Paris. This journey of the young Protestant German minister and writer from Eastern Europe to the capital of European enlightenment in pre-revolutionary France can be looked upon as the beginning of an exodus of the peoples of Europe from the universalizing influences of that enlightenment. Herder's journey of self-discovery, as described in the journal of the voyage, turned into his search for the symbolic manifestations of the people's mentalitä in folk songs, language patterns, literature, laws, and customs. His philosophical ideas about the empowerment of the people through the conscious search for its symbolic universe had an emancipatory meaning. However, the emancipatory impetus of Herder's archaeology of the people's knowledge had a strange career in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fewer public outlets this knowledge found for the purpose of self-representation and the less respectability it gained from the state-obsessed Hegelians and the class-obsessed Marxists, the more it became the armory for assertive movements of exclusionary nationalism. Herder's people became through tortuous detours of the spirit Hitler's race. The genocidal fate of Herder's originally emancipatory discovery is not a specifically German option. How the empowerment of the people's Self can derail into the overpowerment of the Other is a process of deformation that can be seen in other historical contexts. The discussion of linguistic and literary movements of political empowerment in America, Africa, the South Pacific, and Europe will reveal comparable patterns and processes. The core, semi-periphery or periphery location of the particular culture in the modern world system—to borrow Wallerstein's vocabulary—has not much impact on the degree of openness or closure experienced in that culture. The politics of purity and exclusion originates in the quest for the

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Manfred Henningsen

identity and authenticity of a cultural Self that feels threatened by the hegemonic presence of another culture which may or may not be in a core position vis-ä-vis the struggling Self. However the relations may be, the experience of Überfremdung—of being dominated by a foreign Self—is constitutive for the countercultural movement to develop some kind of symbolic identity for the emerging cultural Self. All four movements of linguistic and literary empowerment to be discussed in this paper share this existential situation.

1. The most powerless case of the four movements of empowerment is that of Black America. Whatever strategy Black Americans have pursued during the more than 360 years of their American history, they never managed to overcome the fate of marginality within the dominant culture. Being a minority group in relative and absolute terms, their struggle for authenticity retained, even during their more successful period since the 1960s, the features of involuntary separatism. The public American response to ideological separatists such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X or Louis Farrakhan confirms this involuntary aspect since it locates, out of a sense of White racist paranoia, identity where it does not exist. For white America, Black separatists represent a threat because they pierce through the veil of invisibility that has separated Black culture from the dominant culture and they demand attention until they get kicked out of the country, thrown into prison, or silenced. Yet as paradoxical as it may sound, the invisibility of Black America for most of American history assured the growth of a separate Black culture. The relatively recent arrival of Black writers, singers, and comics on the national culture scene is not the American success story of still another ethnic group. A separate culture that evolved parallel with the hegemonic culture becomes visible and interpreted through its own texts. The national marketing of these texts recognizes also, if only indirectly, the existence of a language which does not accord with the linguistic patterns of Standard English. The Black English that the creators of the texts use has become the focus of extensive studies in the social sciences and the humanities. Yet for these scholars and researchers Black English is primarily interesting in the context of contemporary urban America. To many among them, Black English is still another feature of the damaged life Black Americans live in the wasteland of American cities. They

The politics of purity and exclusion 3 3 do not always retrace the connections of this separate language with the historical stages Black culture has moved through over the centuries. The roots of Black English, in the culture of the slaves for example, are not examined. The resistance of the slaves, however, to the apartheid culture of the slavers expressed itself in a linguistic medium of their own. Like their religion, oral literature, music, and dance, the language necessarily gave primary meaning to their existence. This culture of the slaves empowered their community with a sense of future that transcended the misery of slavery. The dominant culture was largely ignorant of the slaves' culture and language or, at best, had a distorted picture of them. The more segregated and racist the post-civil war US became in the late 19th and early 20th century, the greater the positive identification of Black Americans with a separate Black America and its distinct culture. It was the symbolic and accepted legacy of an historically experienced "other" America which manifested itself in Black religion, folklore, music, art, literature and language. In his Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Lawrence Levine has summarized the dimension of language in this culture: Living in the midst of a hostile and repressive white society, black people found in language an important means of promoting and maintaining a sense of group unity and cohesion. Thus while the appropriateness and utility of speaking Standard English in certain situations was understood, within the group, there were frequently pressures to speak the vernacular. (Levine 1977:153) Levine recognizes Black English as a Creole-like complete language; and he sees that Black English is not a post-World War II cultural deficiency in the inner cities of the North but a link between slavery and contemporary America. Black English, that had developed under slavery, remained the linguistic vehicle of large groups of Black Americans. It survived the migration of Blacks from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North. It never received recognition as a full language but gave, on the contrary, its users the social stigma of being illiterate fools. Using Black English was for most speakers of Standard English the clear sign of illiteracy or, worse, mental deficiency. Black comics and writers have changed the symbolic, not the social status of Black English. In the radio and TV show Amos and Andy people laughed about the two comedians Andy and Kingfish because

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they seemed to match the stereotypes Whites had of Blacks. Blacks had mixed feelings about these characters because they seemed to ridicule them by conforming to the behavioral role models provided by the racist society. Comics like Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy are not bothered by these inhibitions. They are using Black and Standard English as equal languages. They consider themselves equals and portray white idiots and imbeciles in the same way they deal with black fools. A similar process has taken place in literature. One part of Alice Walker's novel in letters, The Color Purple (1982), is written in Black English and the other part in Standard English. Black English is treated by comics and writers as a full language with which people grow up and which they use as a primary vernacular. The stigma remains but the decolonization of the language of colonized America has begun. How language is used in the colonization of Black culture by the hegemonic culture becomes clear in the report about Black language behavior in inner cities in the US by the linguists from the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of William Labov. The Pennsylvania linguists have found that "(the) Black English vernacular of urban America . . . is evolving in its own direction despite earlier predictions that television, radio and the movies would exert a homogenizing influence on language in the United States." "The black vernacular," the report continues, "appears to be steadily diverging not only from standard English as spoken, for example, by radio and television announcers, but also from regional and white dialects." The conclusion of the study indicates ". . . increasing racial segregation and isolation of urban blacks. . . ." and ". . . that ordinary communication between whites and blacks was becoming increasingly difficult and that the problems of many black children in school might be worsening." Labov comments: There is evidence that far from getting more similar, the black vernacular is going its own way. It's a healthy living form of language. But separate development is only made possible by separate living. (Stevens 1985) Apartheid, one should say, is not a language quality but an ideology that defines and dominates a world in a certain way. The protection of Standard English against Black English, therefore, does not primarily stem from the concerns for the purity of a certain language versus the impurity of another. The politics of banning Black English was

The politics of purity and exclusion 3 5 a subplot of the major apartheid story that has characterized American history from its inception in the seventeenth century to its revolutionary founding in the late eighteenth century. The "first new nation" (S.M. Lipset) was built on racial exclusivity. Its culture and language were protected against the impurity of the separate Black culture and language. The Black empowerment movement in the USA could never succeed in overcoming the hegemonic culture. The weapons of all encompassing purity and exclusion were constantly used to keep them in their place. Apartheid reigned supreme in America.

2. The founding processes of post-colonial nations since World War II very often culminate in projects that intend to overcome the apartheid of the colonial regime. Decolonization of the mind becomes the goal of the post-colonial culture. In the process of ridding the new society of all vestiges of the colonial mind, language and literature receive special attention. The language and literature of the colonizer symbolize and demonstrate the pervasive power of the colonial regime. To purge the post-colonial society from the colonial past and to establish its own cultural identity, radical changes in language and literature are launched. Some of the most interesting manifestations of these cultural endeavors can be found in African and South Pacific island nations because so many of their best writers participated in these projects. In the case of Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiong'o (the author of Petals of Blood who was detained after its publication in 1977) formulated in October of 1968 a modest proposal "On the Abolition of the English Department." In that proposal, drafted with two colleagues at the University of Nairobi, Ngugi and his friends questioned the ideological foundations of any English department in Africa by attacking the ". . . basic assumption that the English tradition and the emergence of the modern West is the central root of our consciousness and cultural heritage. Africa becomes an extension of the West. . . ." Their main question was: If there is need for a 'study of the historic continuity of a simple culture', why can't this be African? . . . already African writing, with the sister connections in the Caribbean and the Afro-American literatures, has played an important role in the African renaissance. . . . J u s t because for reasons of political expediency we have kept English as our official language, there is no need to substitute a

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Manfred Henrdngsert study of English culture for our own. We reject the primacy of English literature and culture.

Ngugi and his colleagues suggested "A. That the English Department be abolished; B. That a Department of African Literature and Languages be set up in its place." In response to anticipated criticism they added that "we are not rejecting other cultural streams, especially the western stream." (Thiong'o 1972:146ff) They wanted a department of comparative African, Western and Asian languages, and a department in which the oral African tradition, Swahili literature with Arabic and Asian literatures, modern African literature and a selected course in European literature would be taught. Their intellectual program called for a reduction of influence, not a total purge of English language and literature. The collapse of the British empire had, after all, brought an end to the aggrandizement of English culture. Without the power of empire the culture of the former colonial masters had to compete with others, but especially with indigenous cultures, for meaning. The loss of imperial grandeur revealed the hollowness of the colonial culture. The Kenyan intellectuals, however, did not pursue a strategy of purity and exclusion, they did not persecute the emperor without clothes—though they were successful in creating the new departments. Nigerian intellectuals promoted such a course of action by publishing their manifesto in 1983 as the first volume in a planned series directed Toward the Decolonization of African Literature. This volume on "African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics" can be read as an indictment of patronizing Western but especially British literary critics in the field of comparative African literature. In that respect the book is a remarkable analytical summary of Western clich6s, ignorance and prejudices concerning historical and contemporary African culture. But Chinweizu and his colleagues are not satisfied with this exhaustive survey of false Western consciousness and the exposure of its scholarly representatives. Their program is quite simple: The cultural task in hand is to end all foreign domination of African culture, to systematically destroy all encrustations of colonial and slave mentality, to clear the bushes and stake out new foundations for a liberated African modernity. This is a process that must take place in all spheres of African life - in government, industry, family and social life, education, city planning, architecture, arts, enter-

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tainment, etc. This book is intended as a contribution to this process in the realm of African letters. (Chinweizu et al. 1983:1) This total clearing of the cultural landscape is motivated, to be sure, by a longing for an African culture of authenticity. The emergence of this new culture, however, is not only threatened by the West and, in the case of literature, Eurocentric British critics who use the modernist poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and the pre-modernist novels of Charles Dickens and Honor6 de Balzac to spell out their arbitrary standards of literature. Chinweizu and friends heap contempt on African intellectuals whom they suspect of collaboration. The Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and critic Wole Soyinka became a prime target for their attacks. The charges of "obscurantism" and Shakespearean "archaism" (Chinweizu et al. 1983:156) or "neoTarzanism," (p. 236) however, lose some of their vitriolic quality when seen in the context of cultural power politics in Nigeria. Chinweizu and his friends resented the institutional power base—Soyinka—the 1986 Nobel prize winner and his friends had in Nigerian universities, theatres, and journals. This power base, they claimed, was not used by Soyinka and his group to accelerate " . . . the decolonization of African literary culture. . . ." "Might they not," Chinweizu and his colleagues asked, ". . . have dis-established these English Departments and as Ngugi and his colleagues have done in Kenya, replaced them with afrocentric Departments of Literature?" (p. 205) In an interview, Soyinka responded indirectly to some of the charges of the Chinweizu group: . . . (there) is one so-called literary critic in Africa who said . . . that I once declared that I wanted to be thought of just as a writer, not as an African writer. He has failed till today to reveal his source for that canard . . . I do not see how any writer, any artist in fact, can fail to be identified with his sources, with the origin of his inspiration. This is normal. If I'm thought of as a writer for Africa, I enjoy that even more than being thought a writer for Nigeria because I've always insisted that Africa is my constituency. It is one of the reasons why I have advocated . . . a common language, Swahili, for the whole of black Africa. (Gates 1985:28) When the interviewer by telling Soyinka that works and was familiar and artistic forms, or

seemed to refer to the Chinweizu argument he had read "the extreme left criticism" of his with the thesis "that imitating Western literary allowing those forms to influence one's work

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is a pernicious, subtle form of neo-colonialism," Soyinka conceded a "certain prima facie simplicity" of the statement. I'm used to that. You have a situation here where my work in common with the works of a number of other African writers, has been translated into Polish, Russian, into French and into Italian, Spanish, Chinese. What other languages can I think of? Yoruba, of course. African indigenous languages, Swahili, for instance; a small language, I think, in Kenya, a small language spoken by a very, very, small group of people. What I'm trying to say is that we are being translated into the cultures of other societies constantly.. . . Literature, art, is a sociological phenomenon; it does not merely exist in theory; it does not exist merely as material for critics and ideologues to chew over. . . . It gets translated, it gets sold; it gets consumed by people, it affects people in many ways. I think these very narrow, assertive, pontificating people should go and really follow right through the sociological phenomenon of literature. (ibidem) Soyinka's answer will be interpreted by the Afrocentric decolonizes as being either evasive or outright contemptuous of their goals. But Soyinka's commitment to change in post-colonial Africa is tempered by an experience that is central to his and to the work of his fellow Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe who has, contrary to Soyinka, always preferred exile to imprisonment. The repetitive experience of betrayal, of failure, in Africa today surrounds us in every event. The reality is one of betrayal. Now, as a writer, I cannot present a facile portrait even of my own optimistic vision. (ibidem) While Soyinka refuses to be enlisted in a drive for cultural purity and exclusion, purity and exclusion are at the center of the Chinweizu group when they move from the deconstruction of false Western models in poetry, novels, theatre, and criticism, and from the rediscovery of African continuities in orature and literature, to the new "parameters". It is difficult to not call them parameters of an African socialist realism in the making when they are spelled out like this: The need to capture the flavor of African life, past and present, for an African audience, imposes several constraining parameters upon African traditionalist experimentation. Among these are salutary constraints on the writer's craft and his language by the

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characteristics of his audience, the writer's commitment to his society and its well-being, and the consequences of such commitment for his treatment of his themes. (Chinweizu et al. 1983:241) The spirit of a culture purge is dictating statements like these: "Let the educated elite worry about the many layers of rich meaning. . . (p. 250) "A responsibility to art, whatever that is, cannot take precedence over his responsibility to his society to play his role in it as a citizen. And even his art has social value only insofar as it is a means for serving his society." (p. 250) "That you are an artist does not exempt you from your citizen responsibility . . . Why an exemption for artists but not for farmers, carpenters, or cooks? There may indeed be other grounds for individual exemptions, e.g., for cripples, cowards, pacifists, or the insane; but such exemptions, surely, must apply to all professions alike." (p. 251) Chinua Achebe said all of this twenty years earlier in an article entitled "The Role of the Writer in a New Nation," without losing the sensibility of a writer and becoming a purging commissar. Achebe wrote: The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writer's duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost. There is a saying in Ibo that a man who can't tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he dried his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them. After all the writer's duty is not to beat this morning's headline in topicality, it is to explore in depth the human condition. In Africa he cannot perform this task unless he has a proper sense of history. (Achebe 1964:8) Seventeen years later, at a meeting of Nigerian writers in Nigeria Achebe confirmed this "sense of history" when telling his colleagues: I am saying that . . . a writer who must be free, whose second nature is to dance to a 'different drummer' and not march like a Boy Scout, such a person has no choice really but to run great risks. And we had better know it and prepare for it. (Writers in Society 1981) The self-assertion of the African writers—Ngugi and Achebe, Chinweizu and Soyinka—leads to the emancipation from the hegemonic culture of the colonizer and the rediscovery and legitimation of the orally mediated culture of the past. The past, however, cannot be

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revitalized without resurrecting features that contributed to the conquest and obliteration of the old culture itself. Besides, the emancipation project was partly articulated in and through radical Western discourse. The culture of the new Self transcends the old culture of tradition and the culture of the colonizer. In discarding the false universalism of colonization the new Self celebrates true universalism. Yet that moment of truth is threatened by the need of translating its meaning into strategies of cultural politics. The struggle over purity and exclusion reveals how tempting it is to let the cultural revolution be managed by a Machiavellian purge brigade.

3. Achebe's "free writers" found themselves in the new society of Papua New Guinea in a situation Mandarins of other societies always dream about. In 1975 when Papua New Guinea gained its independence from Australia, writers began to run the state and major social movements too. Krauth lists writers and their accomplishments: . . . the first Minister for Defense and Foreign Affairs was the first Papua New Guinean to write a book (. . . Maori Kiki who published 10,000 Years in a Lifetime in 1968); the first Papua New Guinean High Commissioner to Australia was the first Papua New Guinean novelist (Vincent Eri and The Crocodile)·, the second major autobiographical work was that of the first Chief Minister (Michael Somare and Sana); the first play by a Papua New Guinean was written by the Bougainville secessionist leader Leo Hannet; the most outspoken Papua New Guinean poet returned to his home area to found the politically significant Kaleisawali movement (. . . John Kasaipwalova, the author of Reluctant Flame); and the head of the Papua New Guinean mission in Washington was the novelist Paulius Matane. (1978:45) What is remarkable about the founding period of the new nation is not only the commitment of this select group of writers, wedding imagination to political power. They, or at least some of them, never lost sight of the crucial role language and, to a lesser degree, literature had to play in this enterprise of political creation. After all, in a society with about 700 independent languages and more than 1200 dialects, no political leader could ever escape the insight that the absence of a common language was a major problem. Compounding this lack of a shared linguistic medium was the phenomenon that all of these

The politics of purity and exclusion 41 individual language communities were oral cultures. Papua New Guinea had to find its identity in and through a language that did not exist for the majority of its new citizens. The language had to be taught in a way which respected the oral culture but undermined it at the same time. The issues of purity and exclusion which seem to follow from certain projects of decolonization, almost as a matter of course, become rather complex in the Papua New Guinean setting. The choice of language, for example, was not between the language of the foreign colonizer and the colonized native but between those languages and the stigmatized Creole languages. What kind of language will finally be chosen in a society of many indigenous languages that give structure and meaning to oral communities will depend on the decisions of the writer-politicans. One of them, the editor of the defunct "Journal of New Guinea Literature" Kovave, Apisai Enos, aired his views: . . . (It) has . . . been a task for Niuginian writers to write in a popular language. This means they have to create their own language which will accommodate their local experiences and images. Unfortunately the diversity of languages forces them to use English (a language that does not really reflect their cultures) as the alternative form which gives them a wider audience than their own linguistic group. English being the universal language has the advantages over Pidgin and Motu: if Niuginian writers want to write for a bigger audience outside and inside Niugini, and want to participate in international literature, it is the language they have to use. However, there is a need for creating an acceptable Niuginian English, just as there is an American English and an Australian English. . . . Despite tribal or regional differences, a national type of English has to be created which will be understood and which is flexible for national communication. On the other hand, Pidgin, and Motu must not be disregarded; nor must local languages. (Enos 1972:48) Enos is moving along Soyinka lines yet doing so with a bad conscience. He wants to write for a metropolitan audience but cannot completely dismiss the main Pidgin, Tok Pisin, the special Pidgin of the Motu area, Pisin Motu and the local languages. In the same issue of Kovave John Waiko promotes the teaching of vernacular languages in the communities, including Creole. His goal is the empowerment qf community. The ". . . role of literature

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should be to destroy the present basis of the education system" (1972: 43). His program of a cultural revolution is to help . . . the people to establish vernacular schools through which we can understand the 700 pockets of thinking of the people in this country. Volumes of literature in the different languages need to be produced before we can hope to find a common tradition in this country. (Waiko 1972:4345) The local community empowerment became expounded by John Kasaipwalowa at the Sixth Waigani Seminar in 1972 at Port Moresby that discussed "Priorities in Melanesian Development." The author of the long poem Reluctant Flame—the poem was influenced by Eldrige Cleaver's Soul On Ice and published 1971 in Nigeria (Krauth 1978:52)—uses the Pidgin word "wantok" to refute the foreign "understanding of what modernising a society is." Wantok has been defined as speaking the same language but this is just one restricted definition: how is it that I don't speak some of the highland languages and yet I have highland wantok? Historically, 1 wantok systems have been built up — they are existing right now and they are realities, social and political realities; even though they are not legitimised, they are not recognised, they are there. They have grown up as a response to black people having to confront a situation where they are unsure of themselves and where they feel miseries. For instance, in the plantations, where black people have been recruited as wokboi, they have worked there on a minimum salary. Part of the intention of the wantok system is that when someone is in need, their wantok just simply give. This is how it has come about — wantok has, in fact, been an organic responsive growth to an exploitative colonial system. (Kasaipwalowa 1972) Wantok epitomizes the experiences of primary tribal people who were forced into plantation work. Because of their lack of a common language they had to develop one in talk. But it was a talk in empathy recognizing the shared experiences of dislocation, forced labor and community disruption. Out of the talk in empathy emerged the new community of sharing. It remains to be seen whether the culture of wantok will be able to engender a language that transcends and, at the same time, unites the diverse linguistic communities. As of now, English is the de facto language of administration, academic instruction, news communication

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and creative literature. If this de facto situation should ever become formalized, i.e. English becoming the official language of Papua New Guinea, tremenduous problems of social unrest may occur. This is at least the position of a native linguist at the University of Papua New Guinea who presented a "nationalist viewpoint" on "Language Planning in Papua New Guinea" at a conference in 1980 (at Lae, Papua New Guinea). . . . (In) view of the mounting social problems and the present state of lawlessness," he explained at Lae (PNG), "I have been prompted . . . to question the validity and relevance of the apparent pro-English trend." This trend perpetuates, in his words, an "opportunist and/or elitist education system." The "English only policy is largely responsible for the present social, educational and economic disparity." As a warning he added: . . if the current English centered system is not changed, the victims of the present education system will continue to engage themselves in activities that may not be pleasing to law abiding citizens. . . . If the number of victims of the English centered system continue to multiply every year and if the state of lawlessness or 'rascalness' also multiplies every year, I hate to dream about the kind of society we are building ourselves into. (Nekitel 1980) His proposal: to adopt the two Creole languages of Papua New Guinea —Tok Pisin and Pisin Motu— as national languages and modernize,

graphicize, and standardize them according to general language planning criteria. A conference on "Pacific Languages Directions for the Future" which was held on Vanuatu in August 1984 concluded with a similar recommendation, namely, to give official status to the various Pidgin languages of Melanesia. (Report 1984:32) Whatever course of action will be taken in Papua New Guinea will not basically change the fundamental configuration of that society. The move toward the acceptance of the two Creole languages would simply confirm the precarious situation. Unlike the Creole of Black English, the Pidgins of Papua New Guinea have not only the credentials of the colonized. The missionaries, traders, plantation managers, and colonial officers—among them many Germans—contributed their share of grammar and syntax, metaphors and vocabulary to these languages too. They used them to proselytize, to do business, to issue orders, and to give commands, However, since they were for the colonizers only instrumental languages, in pursuit of a profession,

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the experiences of the colonized have enriched them to their wholeness and vitality as full languages. These languages have served the communication needs of an emerging national society for decades. Their colonial origin is not forgotten but less damaging than the image of colonial English. The quest for authenticity which expressed itself in other decolonizing societies in the return to native languages found its limits in the need for a language that could transcend the diversity of 700 different language communities. The languages of victimization became the vehicles of cultural empowerment. In the longing for purity Papua New Guineans could go only so far until they encountered the necessity of living in linguistic impurity. However, the die is still not cast. The choice between English and the two Pidgins extends the struggle for the new Self into the future of the new society. The confrontation between colonizer and colonized that has characterized all decolonization processes becomes in the case of Papua New Guinea symbolically transferred to the new English-speaking elites and the Creole-speaking majority. Their post-colonial struggle, however, over the identity of the new cultural Self may turn into a new struggle over political domination. The absence of either a native or an imposed language that could have unified the colonized forced the decolonized Papua New Guineans to continue their search for a linguistic medium that would allow them to actualize the promise of cultural empowerment. In the process of this search, the privileging of English by the elites may provoke a rebellion of the Pidgin-speaking majority. The exclusionary behavior of the elites will generate exclusionary behavior among the majority.

4. The discussion of literary and linguistic movements of empowerment above focussed on colonized peoples in the modern world system. Moving to Germany, I want to discuss a comparable culture project in a core context of that modern system. This shift of attention from the periphery to the center will underscore the irrelevance of the systems approach regarding the cultural identity of a society. The materialistic reductionism of that approach fails to make clear why certain implications became actualized in the German project which ran, over the centuries, through various stages of literary and linguistic authentication. The German process manifests the range of political possibilities inherent in the empowerment of a cultural Self until it finally culminates in the physical extermination of the cultural Other.

The politics of purity and exclusion 45 The German cultural identity project unfolds before the backdrop of the chaotic structure of German politics from the thirteenth to the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Prussians took charge of German affairs. The absence of unifying structures for long periods of German history helps to explain the discontinuities in some of the movements for purity and exclusion that I want to introduce as illustrations in the core or semi-periphery. Martin Luther's reformation in the early sixteenth century is conventionally described as a theological rebellion. Though there is certainly nothing wrong in identifying the existential center of his reformatory acts as primarily theological, the political implications of the reformation become visible in the peasant wars of the 1520s and the brutal suppression of the peasant rebels. However the peasants became touched by Luther's rebellion because he had empowered them by undermining the authority of the religious and secular establishment and doing that in the native language of the people. Luther's translation of the Bible into German and his exclusively German public discourse had helped legitimate once more the use of native German as a language of writing. This almost sacred legitimation of German through the translation of the Bible and the attack on the hierarchical structure of the Roman church was not revoked by either Luther or the Protestant princes he was siding with. Luther's legitimating use of the German language did not create splits along class lines. German became the religious language of the Protestant part, Latin remained the ritual language of the Catholic part of the country until Vatican II. The second language issue in this context is the struggle for the independence of German language and literature from French intellectual hegemony in the eighteenth century. This German struggle with the French was started long before the French revolution, became intensified by it, survived it and has, in an interesting way, affected many emancipatory movements of colonized peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The German rebellion against the dominating influence of French culture in the eighteenth century engendered a series of literary and intellectual movements that liberated German and made it, in the nineteenth century, gradually replace French as a language of European reflection. This process of replacement was not caused by linguistic or literary factors alone. The politics of language and literature in Germany reinforced a general trend against the reductionist rationalism of French enlightenment. The

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celebration of the authentic person and the historically grown society versus universal man and universal mankind became the central theme of the German romantics and the practicing hermeneutic schools in the various humanities. Many of these movements started in the late eighteenth century and became affected, in one way or the other, by the French revolution which was originally greeted by most German intellectuals for its emancipatory impact. Though this image became soiled by terror and the armies of Napoleon, the collapse of obsolete structures of privilege, administration, land tenure, military service, law, education, etc. was still praised. However, the longer the occupation of Germany by France lasted, the more resentment of the French developed and the more structural changes were initiated by German reformers who used the anti-French sentiments to bolster their own revolutionary changes from the top. The liberal reform movement, for example, in Prussian politics, education, the military, etc. was legitimized by the anti-Napoleonic wars of liberation and became stalled when Napoleon was finished. What lasted was the interest in the origins and patterns of the life worlds of the common people and the continuities of their mentalis. Hegel, who was interested in the unfolding of meaning in the process of universal history, treated this Volksgeist (the people's mentalitä) somewhat disparagingly by relegating it to lower levels of meaning that lacked in conceptual clarity. Vox populi, the voice of the people, held no promise for him of any truth of any aspect of the process of human history. Truth would emerge from the negation and overcoming of this commonsensical type of knowledge. For Johann Gottfried Herder and the Brothers Grimm, whom one could call the founding figures of the historical approach towards the study and understanding of human history, truth could only be found in the original manifestations of human self expression—namely in language, folk songs, oral stories, legends, fairy tales, and in the traditions of case law. The closer one could get to the original sources of these manifestations, the more one would understand their uniqueness and the unique character of the people who produced them. The encyclopaedic quality of the Grimms' scholarship in linguistics, law, and folk literature conceals their romantic notion of truth, and makes them appear to be obsessed by an almost enlightenment temperament. But Herder, the Brothers Grimm, and the scholars and the philosophers that followed them attracted the revolutionary nationalists from the colonized people of Eastern, Southeastern, and Southern Europe who were

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trying to prove to themselves and the outside world that they existed. The confirmation of their birthright as a unique people depended on the kind of evidence the German hermeneutics were interested in to refute the universal generalities of enlightenment rationalism. Marx, who had upgraded the proletariat to the status of universal class and carrier of historical meaning, while Hegel had still called it the rabble, was not much interested in the question of ethnos and nation. The thrust of his speculative drive was directed toward universal redemption of humankind beyond the class struggle of hitherto know history. The affirmation of the historical uniqueness of particular societies and people would deviate from that direction. And because Marx and the socialist movement were not particularly interested in these issues, the theme of the people's historical and ethnic uniqueness was picked up by the right and successfully sold by socialist nationalists or, as they became better known under their German trade name, the Nazis, the national socialists of Germany. It is only proper to finish these reflections on the politics of purity and exclusion with the movement that was obsessed with ethnoracial purity and carried out its program of exclusion by exterminating the impure. The irony in the German case is that in November of 1940 Hitler stopped rabid language purists from pursuing their language cleansing goals. He ordered through his minister for science and education an end to the purification because he felt restricted by them in his own linguistic behavior (v. Polenz 1967:138). Stopping the linguistic purifiers did not change the deadly war against impurity. From the social theory of racial purity to the practice of the gas chambers was only a small step. However, what the Nazis did one should always consider a potential consequence of all social movements of purity, be they located in core, periphery, or semi-periphery societies of the modern world system. From his political awakening in Vienna until his suicide in Berlin, Hitler was obsessed with the idea of exterminating the Jews of Europe. In his own perspective, the historical judgment on his creation of a Nazi world was based on the successful execution of the final solution. Whatever metaphorical language he may have used throughout his career, the extermination of the Jew as the impure Other was always at the center of his thinking. The destruction of the Jews was essential for his world creation. Enslavement as a colonizing strategy for an ethnic proletariat was not working for Jews; it was conceivable for Russians. A few months after the invasion of the

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USSR by Germany (June 1941) Hitler said, for example, during a table conversation: The essential thing, for the moment, is to conquer. After that everything will be simply a question of organization. When one contemplates this primitive world, one is convinced that nothing will drag it out of its indolence unless one compels the people to work. The Slavs are a mass of born slaves, who feel the need for a master. (1961:60) In early 1942, when the death camps were starting to work, he said in another conversation: The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! . . . We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew. Everything has a cause, nothing comes by chance. (1961:320) Hitler was speaking in metaphors but the metaphors were for him the real thing. There was a terminal clarity to his language that had still been absent from the language of the Germanic-Aryan authenticity seekers who had preceded him in Austria and Germany and created the impoverished climate of opinion in which he had grown up. Even if it is questionable whether . . les principes du völkischer Gedanke et l'appel ä la rassische Reinhaltung sont exactement equivalents," (Faye 1972:591), Hitler was the articulate heir to this abhorrent consciousness of the authenticity movement. What had started in the late eighteenth century as a search for the authentic structures of the people's mentaltä had in the early twentieth century degenerated to biologistic racism couched in the language of authenticity. Hitler's use of the language of cultural authenticity appealed to many intellectuals who had lost their critical sense. Hitler's ideological interests, however, were much better served by the language of racism that the pure scientists had developed to spell out their anthropological preferences. The scientists in genetics, anthropology, medicine, biology, psychiatry, psychology, and so on, who were sitting in judgment over human beings long before Hitler came to power, provided the Nazis with a scientific framework for their ideological project of purity and exclusion. In addition, they

The politics of purity and exclusion 49 offered to execute the ideological project under scientific conditions, and they added Gypsies, German Blacks, Communists, Slavs, homosexuals, young delinquents, religious sectarians, mental patients, lefthanded people, etc. to the prime target of extermination, namely the Jews. The scientists dictated the language of Der Ahnenpaß, the ancestry passport, that each German had to obtain in order to prove the purity of his or her ancestry. In the Ahnenpaß we read about the race principle that . . it is the prime obligation of a people to keep its race, its blood pure of alien influences (rein zu halten) and to eliminate (ausmerzen) all traces of alien blood that have penetrated the people's body (Volkskörper). . . This idea, it says, ". . . is based on the scientific insights of genetics and race scholarship." This scholarship answers the question of ancestry in a no less authoritative way: "Of Aryan ancestry is therefore that human being who, seen from the German people, is free of racially alien touches of blood. As alien blood figures here especially the blood of Jews and Gypsies who are also living in the European settlement area, of Asiatic and African races and of the original inhabitants of Australia and America. . . ." Scientists of all disciplines assisted the Nazis in carrying out their purification project. (see Müller-Hill 1984) After the initial expulsion of Jewish teachers, civil servants, writers, musicians, artists, and the like, the scientists willingly and voluntarily participated in the next stage of the empowerment of the German Self, namely the extermination of the Jewish and non-Jewish Other. Top university scientists such as Josef Mengele looked at the mass extermination as scientific experiments on a grand scale. The purification of the German Self found its dramatic realization in the scientifically planned and supervised extermination program. Most of the scientists who participated in this program and in human experiments inside concentration camps did so out of true scientific conviction. Their radicalism was epistemological reductionism and only remotely connected with the authenticity quest of scholars in the humanities, writers and artists. But not much had survived of Herder's or the Brothers Grimm's initial range of interests in the people's authentic mentalitä anyway. The reductionism of the scientists corresponded with the one-dimensional, biologistically colored culture chauvinism of the scholars, writers and artists. They all believed that they would gain through the destruction of the Other the consciousness of Self that they lacked. Hitler symbolized their vacuous Self quite well. His spirit, however, casts a shadow over the contemporary political scenarios of purity

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and exclusion, too. Hitler, however, was neither colonized nor colonizer when he set out on his path to genocide. The Jews of Europe and the other people of impurity became for him the negative core in his personal universe and he had to destroy them in order to overcome the feeling of being peripheral. A German writer with a degree in German literature delivered this speech at the meeting of the Reichs-Chamber of Culture and the Strength Through Joy organization in Berlin, November 26, 1937: The abolition of art criticism was proclaimed at the congress held last year. This act was directly related to the goal-directed purging and coordinating of our cultural life. The responsibility for the phenomenon of degeneration in art was in large measure laid at the door of art criticism. In the main, art criticism had created the tendencies and the isms. It did not judge artistic development in terms of a healthy instinct linked to the people, but only in terms of the emptiness of its intellectual abstractness. The people had never taken part in it. It had only turned away in horror from an art tendency which could no longer be brought into harmony with its healthy sensibility and could be appraised only as the abortive product of a snobbish decadence. The abolition of art criticism and the introduction of art observation, which has for almost a year now been decried by large sectors of world public opinion as barbaric and impracticable, has in the meanwhile been affected everywhere in our country. Now the public itself functions as critic, and through its participation or non-participation it pronounces a clear judgment upon its poets, painters, composers, and actors. The purging of the cultural field has been accomplished with the least amount of legislation. The social estate of creative artists took this cleansing into its own hands. Nowhere did any serious obstructions emerge. Today we can assert with joy and satisfaction that the great development is once again set in motion. Everywhere people are painting, building, writing poetry, singing, and acting. The German artist has his feet upon a solid, vital ground. Art, taken out of its narrow and isolated circle, again stands in the midst of the people and from there exerts its strong influences on the whole nation. ("Freedom and Organization." Quoted in Mosse 1968:154) The speaker was a Nazi who could have delivered his speech, with only a few changes, in many contemporary societies of the First, Second, and Third World. The speaker lacks Hitler's use of metaphors,

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he talks like a German intellectual. But in this case, Hitler's propaganda minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels means the same thing. His praise of the people's "healthy instinct" and "healthy sensibility" is the beginning of the process to exclude the others, to get rid of them in any way possible, preferably through killing. When I read some of the contemporary material on language and literature purism around the world, I cannot help but associate this material with the forms of radical exclusion practised in the Third Reich. I am not envisioning Hitler behind all the language and literature reformers I have discussed. But I see some parallels between the type of thinking that prepared or accompanied Hitler with metaphors that are similar to those that one can find in the decolonization debate.

Note *I wish to thank KAH and Graham Parkes for advice and assistance.

References Achebe, Chinua 1973 The Role of the Writer in a New Nation, in: G.D. Killam (ed.), African [1964] Writers on African Writing. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike 1983 Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, Vol. /: African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. DerAhnenpaß Ed. by Reichsbund der Standesbeamten Deutschlands e.V., Ausgabe 63. Berlin: Verlag für Standesamtswesen Berlin. Enos, Apisai 1972 Niugini Literature. A View from the Editor, in: Kovave: A Journal of New Guinea Literature, 4.1, November 1972. Faye, Jean Pierre 1972 Languages totalitaires. Paris: Hermann. Gates, H.L., Jr.. 1985 Wole Soyinka, Writing, Africa and Politics, in: The New York Times. Book Review, June 23. Goebbels, Joseph 1968 Freedom and Organization, in: George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich. New York: The Universal Library.

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Hitler's Secret Conversations, 1941-1944 1961 With an introductory essay by H.R. Trevor-Roper. New York: Signet. Kasaipwalowa, John 1972 Priorities in Melanesian Development: The Sixth Waigani Seminar. Port Moresby (PNG). Krauth, Nigel 1978 Politics and Identity in Papua New Guinea Literature, in: Mona Review, 2.2.

Levine, Lawrence W. 1977 Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Müller-Hill, Benno 1984 Tödliche Wissenschaft. Die Aussonderung von Juden, Zigeunern und Geisteskranken 1933-1945. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Nekitel, Otto M. 1980 Language Planning in Papua New Guinea: Α Nationalist Viewpoint. Paper presented at Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea Conference, Lae, PNG 1980. Report on the conference 1984 Pacific languages: directions for the future. Held in Vila, Vanuatu, August 27-30 1984. Vila: Komuniti Printeri, for the Pacific Languages Unit, University of the South Pacific. Stevens, W.K. 1985 Language Gap Grows For Black Americans, in: The International Herald Tribune. Paris Edition, March 20. Thiong'o, Ngugi Wa 1972 Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics. London/Ibadan/Nairobi: Heinemann. von Polenz, P. 1967 Sprachpurismus und Nationalsozialismus, in: Germanistik-eine deutsche Wissenschaft. Beiträge von Ε. Lämmert—W. Killy—K.O. Conrady— P.v. Polenz. Frankfurt: edition suhrkamp. Waiko, John 1972 The Place of Literature in Papua New Guinea Education, in: Kovave: Α Journal of New Guinea Literature, 4.1. Writers in Society 1981 in: South, November.

Francophonie: purism at the international level

Brian

Weinstein

Francophonie is an international language movement led by government and nongovernment elites in over thirty countries where French is official or used by a significant population. The maintenance and extension of a standard spoken and written French language purified of unacceptable English language borrowings and local idiosyncracies is one general goal. The other is the maintenance and extension of French as an official or co-official language. For the most militant supporters the corpus and status goals are inseparable. The movement, which is now two decades old, draws strength from the fact that it serves important but varying and sometimes contradictory domestic and external political, economic and social interests of all participants some of whom are relatively indifferent to the issue of purism. Those who contribute most to Francophonie and seem to gain the most from it live in Quebec Province of Canada and France.

Aspects of purism According to Wexler (1974:2) purism is an effort to "purge the language of elements considered to be nonnative . . . " and nonstandard. Francophone purism did not emerge in reaction to a vague sense of drift but, rather, from a perception of a conscious external attack on the French language and its status from nonnative and nonstandard varieties. Where is the attack coming from? Wexler (1971:346) describes how excessive borrowing and the increasing use of a "rival written form" lead to "the native speaker's fear that his language could be displaced as a politically recognized language of the community (and hence replaced by another language). . For the Flemish in Belgium (but not in the Netherlands) French is the rival; for their Afrikaner cousins in South Africa English is the rival. For French the written rival is English.

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Theorists of purism explain that the threat can also come from the Low variety of language in a diglossic situation. The user of the High variety fears that the Low variety will alter and ultimately replace his own. Defenders of written Arabic who have felt challenged by the spoken dialect forms used by lower classes are an example. For the French, the Low variety is the regional language such as Breton; in Quebec it is 'joual." In Africa it is Wolof, Pular and a host of other languages plus local varieties of French; in Haiti it is Creole. Replacement of one written prestige language by another is perceived as changing the ethnic or national identity of the society. Replacement of a High variety by a Low variety is seen as a loss in control over the society by one class. Each change alters the defining symbols of the society and affects access to power, wealth, and prestige. Purists know the enemy very well. As a result, there is probably no such thing as absolute purism — only purism with respect to the challenging language. Reportedly, Catalan purists who struggle against Castilian influence, accept English borrowings. Greek defenders of Katharevusa could accept the French word for "tea" in order to remove the Demotic word for it (cf. Mirambel 1964:415). What should be called "selective closure" is also at work among French purifiers who do not object to the study of German and are increasingly willing to accept some contributions to the French lexicon from Low varieties of language as long as French dominance is assured. As Wexler (1974:11, 32) points out, this apparent inconsistency is due to the non-linguistic motivations behind purist movements. German is now less of a threat than English because Germany is in no position to threaten France politically or culturally; Germany is France's most important trading partner, and cooperation between the two countries within the European Economic Community is seen as mutually beneficial and essential to peace and development. Wolof in Senegal is also less of a threat than English because it has become clear that this African country is dependent on French assistance and because Senegalese people and others apparently feel that French is more useful in important domains than their mother tongues. Realization that important elites outside of France are loyal to French and an understanding that Africans and others are increasingly proud of their mother tongues have wrenched Francophonie away from its original xenophobic posture. Because America has a history since World War II of trying to dominate France politically; because of important economic rivalries between France on the one hand and the British and the

Francophonie: purism at the international level 55 Americans on the other in Africa, the Middle East and Asia; and because of the extraordinary attraction of American popular culture, English, the instrument of American politicians, business people and singers, is perceived as the great threat. Thus, although since 1975 many supporters of the movement believe that there are ways for French to coexist with Low varieties of language, the struggle against English must be intensified. What are the specific political, social and economic interests behind Francophonie? For the French, their language is inseparable from their identity and thus their sense of independence, which they believe they must defend vigorously since their defeat in 1940. Fernand Braudel, eminent historian and member of the Acad6mie Frangaise, put it best: France is the French language. Insofar as it is no longer preeminent, the way it was during the 18th and 19th centuries, we are in the midst of a crisis of French culture. Have we the means to revive ourselves? I am not sure, but I have some hope. The colonial empire that we lost has remained faithful to the French language. (Le Monde, 24-25 March 1985:8) This independence of the French colonies in the early 1960s left French elites with the sense that they were being forced back into the narrow confines of the "hexagon" or European France, thereby undermining France's ambition to be a world power which could not be ignored by the USA and the USSR. They also feared shrinking markets because they imagined that American business and Soviet agents were poised to embark on an economic penetration of Africa. The war in Vietnam and the war in Algeria coming immediately after the devastating Second World War severely weakened the French economic system and undermined French prestige and power. Without direct control over the educational systems in the colonies, intellectuals, teachers, journalists and a large corps of former colonial officials feared that either English or African languages would quickly take the place of French. Within Europe the entry of Great Britain into the Common Market so frightened the Secretary General of the Alliance Frangaise (1972:15) that he proclaimed "England [has] certainly decided to impose its language on the continent." None of these dire predictions has proved to be true, but new dangers have emerged. Scientists have sounded a warning that in the domain of advanced research, English is rapidly replacing French in

56 Brian Weinstein France itself. Intellectuals at a 1980 colloquium debated the question "English, the Language of French Science?" One participant pointed out that at a 1979 meeting of physicists and chemists, held in France, 73% of whom spoke French, all research papers, except for two, were presented in English (Le Monde Diplomatique, August 1980:28). Following the best Whorfian tradition, another observer complained that French scientists could not possibly do their best work or express their most cogent thoughts through English. French science would be permanently inferior if English were used, no matter how brilliant an individual scientist might be. Furthermore, using English meant that one was loyal to the Anglo-Saxons in this view. The prestigious Academy of Sciences published a more sober analysis in 1982. This institution perceived a three-pronged threat to the French language: The first is the cultural and scientific dynamism of the United States of America, whose products have entered Europe, overwhelming and "weakening our cultural originality." One reason for this, it said, is that the French government does not provide adequate research funds. Both the status of the French language in culture and science and its corpus have been weakened by a subsequent mixing of French and English words producing the "franglais" which the writer Etiemble first denounced in his vitriolic 1964 book Parlezvous Franglais? The second threat is more internal — "the result of the incapacity of our people to maintain the traditional purity and standard of their language." Blaming the laziness and carelessness of the masses is a theme that recurs in France and in Quebec. The third and most serious threat is that with the further development of media of communication French speakers in France and Africa will be swamped with information, publicity and entertainment in English during the coming years. Without a vital language the "genius of our people" will be unable to express itself (cf. Acadfemie des Sciences 1982:7-8). The Academy rejected any effort to isolate French science. A strengthened French science must play its role in the world. More support for research would be necessary; researchers must insist on using French when they can; scientists must translate their works into English so that they will be known, but good journals must be promoted as a vehicle for French articles. English articles must be translated into French to provide access and to assist in the expansion of the French scientific lexicon. The Academy also insisted on the global aspect of the problem — an effort for French must be made

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wherever French is an important language (Acad6mie des Sciences 1982:18-19). In Quebec, where French has been the most important language since colonial days, intellectuals needed no urging from France to take action, but they have been strengthened in their own efforts through their ties with Francophone French intellectuals and political elites all of whom feared that the status of French in all public domains could not be assured. The entire political and cultural identity of the province was under attack through an attack on the French language. As long as the approximately five million French speaking Qu6b6cois were living in rural areas relatively isolated from English-speaking cities and producing large families devoted to the French controlled Roman Catholic church and schools, French seemed well protected even though big industry and business in Montreal were controlled by native or foreign English speakers. A sense of threat emerged when people moved off the farms into Montreal, gave up their regular practice of religion and discovered that the urban based industries required their employees to know English. They suddenly found that as a group they were far behind other language groups in level of education and personal income; they found they were low on the Canadian "scale of regard." A brand new factor added to the growing political, cultural, and economic insecurity, namely the arrival of immigrants who spoke neither French nor English but who chose to learn English rather than French and to send their children to English speaking schools. This development and the decline in their own birthrate convinced French-speaking intellectuals in the 1960s that eventually they might be outnumbered in their own homeland. The result would be the disappearance of Quebec's French identity and absolute cultural, economic and political control by Anglophones. The anguish of elites sharpened when they discovered that the spoken language of many of their compatriots had evolved into a mixture of English, slang, and French in place of what they accepted as standard international French. Visitors from France also complained they could not understand Quebec French. A book summarized the distress: The author of Les insolences du Frkre Untel accepted the epithet "joual" for the variety of language spoken by poor urban dwellers because that is how they seemed to pronounce the word for horse, cheval. He lamented that change in the language meant a decline in the group's status.

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This absence of language, that joual represents, is an example of our own non-existence, we French Canadians. We can never study language enough. Language is the focus of all meaning. Our inability to affirm ourselves, our refusal to look toward the future, our obsession with the past, all that is reflected in joual which is truly our language, (cited in Weinstein 1983:48) Some intellectuals and teachers insisted that standard international French, defined as the language of the "cultivated Paris bourgeoisie," (Valdman 1983:668) must be used as a standard for correction in Quebec. Others insisted that Quebec experience dictated the acceptance of words and some divergence in pronunciation from the Paris standard. Writer and critic Jacques Godbout (1975:48) complained that efforts to adhere rigidly to a Paris standard inhibited Quebec literary creativity and spontaneity. The debate intensified, but everyone agreed that language status and development goals could not be completely separated. The battle would have to take place simultaneously on two fronts, and allies joined forces with the French and Qu6b6cois. Like the Qu6b6cois, French-speaking Belgians perceived a threat to their existence as the numerically superior Flemish speakers began to assert their language rights and as the economy in the French heartland of Wallonie declined. French was obliged to give up its previously superior position officially, and people of Flemish ancestry who had been using French shifted back to Flemish. In addition, linguists worried about local Belgian expressions or "belgicismes" in their French. They, too, felt the parallel need to defend the status of French while holding it to an international standard. An international standard would link them with other countries where French was used, thus giving them a sense of strength when dealing with the Flemish. In Lebanon, Haiti, and in the former French colonies of Africa, where educated minorities spoke French and used it in important official, banking and commercial activities, demands for the use of Arabic, Creole, and African languages became louder in the 1960s and 1970s. Some leaders blamed school failures on the fact that French had been the medium of instruction; they said French threatened authentic indigenous values thus turning the French complaint about English around; French economic and political influence was decried; and some critics said that English would be more useful than French in any case. In Lebanon, French was perceived as helping insure Christian dominance over Muslims. These complaints and demands were a direct challenge to French-speaking elites who were thus encouraged to

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seek outside support. They also observed changes in French usage after the departure of teachers from France and called for new ways to preserve the standard. In Louisiana, U.S.A., French had already lost its official status to English, and two local spoken varieties of language, Cajun and Creole, incomprehensible to standard French speakers, were popular means of expression. In 1968, a Committee for the Defense of French in Louisiana or CODOFIL was founded in the midst of a general ethnic revival in the United States to promote French ethnic identity through the revival of standard French as one official language. Its founders denounced Cajun in particular as "red neck French" and brought in teachers from France, Belgium, and Quebec to teach standard French. Elites in all these countries felt personally threatened by a challenge to the status of French and by a divergence from the standard they knew and used. They agreed with the French linguist Alain Guillermou (1964:20) who said that only "high quality French, free from a collection of idiosyncracies, saved from English madness and respectful of the rules. Only that kind of French can bring about the unity of francophones." They also felt they could not do battle alone. Outside assistance would be needed to insure homogeneity of neologisms and to provide money, teachers and linguists. The French government hesitated to support all these efforts at the international level at first because it feared accusations of neocolonialism and, in any case, had more faith in unilateral or bilateral efforts rather than the multilateral projects proposed. As a result, linguists, historians, journalists, university administrators, legislators and others established nongovernmental organizations with members from most of these countries. Unity in favor of linguistic projects, even if it were in the form of nongovernmental organizations would, many thought, encourage a web of contacts which would eventually lead to assistance of a financial and even political nature. France, Belgium and Quebec could supply essential support. From the perspective of France a sense of linguistic unity would help the French in their dealings with fellow members of the Common Market, America and the Soviet Union. They could claim to speak in the name of almost 200 million people, the inhabitants of countries where French was official even if only a minority actually knew the language. The Qu6b6cois and Belgians, struggling to assert or maintain their identities could use the international connection as a form of "oxygen," in the words of Quebec leaders.

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Francophonie would give them an international identity. Recognized outside their countries, their position at home would be strengthened.

Institutions, organizations The nongovernmental organizations took on an increasing importance as their members proposed terms to replace English terms at the same time as they promoted cooperation of a non-linguistic nature. The Conseil International de la Langue Fran^aise proposed terms and gave linguist members encouragement to put pressure on their governments for language legislation. AUPELF (Association of Universities Partially or Entirely of French Language), founded by Qu6b6cois, linked universities around the world and provided a framework for the standardization of programs in French and French literature, for efforts to produce textbooks in areas where dependence on English was particularly acute and for efforts to encourage student exchanges. The AIPLF (International Association of French Language Legislators) provided a link with the powerful. Governments created an intergovernmental francophone organization, the Agence de Coop6ration Culturelle et Technique or ACCT, in 1970. Altogether Francophonie is today institutionalized in over 100 national, intergovernmental, private, and public organizations which work in partially coordinated fashion to maintain a standard French within their own countries and in international organizations while promoting cooperation in politics, economics and culture among all users of the French language. The interstate bodies work with local organizations. The multilateral ACCT, which attempts to coordinate economic and cultural projects at the interstate level now boasts 30 members: Belgium, Benin, Burundi, Central Africa, Canada, Comoro Islands, Congo, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Dominica, France, Gabon, Guinea, Haiti, Burkina Faso, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Mali, Mauritius, Monaco, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Chad, Togo, Tunisia, Vanuatu, Vietnam, and Zaire. Six states regularly attend meetings but are not full members because of local opposition. They include Cameroon which is officially bilingual — French and English, Guinea-Bissau, Laos, Morocco, Mauritania, and St. Lucia. In order to provide for a representative from Quebec and New Brunswick without offending

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Canada, the two provinces participate as "governments" rather than as states. The ACCT has evolved from an organization primarily concerned with promoting French to one concerned with education problems and general development, particularly in Africa. Beginning in 1975, this new orientation meant the promotion of African languages alongside French as part of a larger effort to "promote and diffuse the cultures of the signatories and to intensify cultural and technical cooperation among them" (ACCT, Convention et Chartre: 1, Art. 1). Subsequently the ACCT sponsored the introduction of modern audiovisual techniques for the teaching of Wolof and for teaching through Wolof in Senegal; it has paid for conferences on the use of African languages elsewhere alongside French; it has run a business school in Bordeaux and has given subventions for the publication of materials on language and education questions in many francophone countries. It participates in rural development projects. Thus far, the ACCT, with a rather modest budget, is as far as these countries can go in institutionalizing Francophonie. Efforts in 1980 to set up a type of Commonwealth were aborted because of disagreement between Canada and France over the status of Quebec. In February 1986, 42 delegations from 38 different countries finally assembled in France for the first worldwide "Francophone Summit." They agreed to intensify communication among themselves using the most advanced satellite and cable television technology. In a book published on the eve of the conference, President Franfois Mitterand reminded delegates that preserving French is valuable for its own sake: "At a time of accelerating movement pushing people behind the strongest, a contrary force leads them to cultivate their differences and to perpetuate what is unique about themselves" (Le Monde, 31 January 1986:2). A second summit took place in Quebec in September 1987.

Purifying efforts These multilateral efforts are more important for maintaining the status of French than in purifying it. Purification is mainly a unilateral effort by France and Quebec. France and Quebec coordinate their research and proposals more closely than do any other states. French experience dates back to the thirteenth century when intellectuals

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and others promoted a standard for purposes of political and economic unity as well as for ease of communication. The debate on the meaning of "standard" has revolved around the issue of everyday usage by a certain elite or a frozen written language. The Acad6mie Fran^aise probably represents the frozen written form. Founded in 1635 its purpose was and is to "work with all the care and diligence possible to give definite rules to our language and to make it pure, eloquent and capable of dealing with the arts and sciences" (cited in Wolf 1983: 114). It is fair to say that supporters of Francophonie rejected the slowness of the Acadfemie and moved somewhat hesitantly toward a corrected educated usage as standard. Thus, France began to create additional institutions to purify the standard by official efforts. In 1966 President Charles de Gaulle and his Prime Minister Georges Pompidou created the Haut Comit6 pour la Dfefense et l'Expansion de la Langue Frangaise. Attached to the prime minister's office the Committee had the authority to propose methods of purifying French within France. In 1972 terminology commissions were created within the various ministries of the government. Their purpose was to make lists of needed French terms in their own areas of specialization and then "To propose needed terms either to name a new reality or to replace undesirable borrowings from foreign languages" (Decret No. 72-19 of 7 January 1972 "relatif ä l'enrichissement de la langue fran^aise", in JORF 9 January 1972: 388). The commissions sent their proposals to the Haut Comit6 which sanctioned them. The proposals would be arranged in two lists: List one contained words that must be used, while list two words were suggested only. The lists would affect most directly the reports and documents and correspondence of the civil service. Also, list one would affect the language of any contracts to which the state was or would be a party; the words would be used in government supported schools, at least in the books. (Article 6). The fact that members of the Haut Comit6 had links with nongovernmental organizations of Francophonie insured some diffusion of the innovations outside government. In 1975 the French parliament adopted the Bas-Lauriol law, the first law concerning the purification of French outside the government and administration. The lawmakers specified that the French language must be used to publicize, explain, guarantee and confirm the sale of any goods or services. "The use of any foreign term or any foreign expression is prohibited when an approved expression or term exists

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according to the terms of the decree No. 72-19 of 7 January 1972" (Loi No. 75-1349, 31 December 1975, 'relative ä l'emploi de la langue frangaise, Article 1, in JORF 4 January 1976:189). In other words, if the word appeared on list one, as provided by decrees coming out of the Haut Comit6, it had to be used. Infractions of this law would be punished in the same way as fraud as explained in a law passed on 1 August 1905. Moreover, all labor contracts must be written in French, and they must conform to the rules concerning individual words. (Article 4). Any notice put on a public building must be written in a French free from foreign words although there may be a translation into another language alongside the original French text. (Article 6) Any person or any organization receiving public funds must also abide by the rules concerning the use of pure French. A year later Prime Minister Raymond Barre explained in a circular that the parliament wanted to protect consumers from misleading and incomprehensible advertising or instructions. The use of foreign terms made it difficult for most French people to understand. He was accused of weakening the thrust of the law by admitting there may be no French equivalents for many words, however. He even gave examples: beefsteak, sandwich, spaghetti, toast, blue jeans, and so forth (JORF 19 March 1977:1483). On the other hand, the prime minister supported the use of anti-fraud legislation to deal with infractions and named the personnel responsible for applying the law. Ministerial commissions had already been set up in 1972 in the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Transportation, Ministry of Post Office and Telecommunications, in the Office of French Radio and Television (ORTF) in order to propose words. These commissions worked with linguists outside government, members of their own staff and others to produce lists specifically and explicitly designed to replace English words in common usage. A decree of 12 January 1973 dealt with the "enrichment of audiovisual vocabulary" and construction vocabulary. A week later decrees concerning space technology, nuclear vocabulary, and petroleum vocabulary appeared. Beginning in 1977 lists have appeared every year, without regard to which political party was in power, and these lists are fully sanctioned by the state. In 1982, for example, the Ministry of Education issued words related to aerospace technology. List one or mandatory words included capteur for the English remote sensor, tpreuve-minute for quick look ("Terminologie de la t616d6tection aerospatiale" in JORF 9 June 1982:

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5408). The Ministry of the Post Office and Telecommunications published a list the same month mandating canal banalis4 for CB or citizens

band, tiUmesure

for telemetry,

brouillage for

interference

(JORF 24 June 1982:5980). In 1983 the Ministry of Communication issued a list called the "Enrichment of the vocabulary of the audiovisual and of advertising." Among the new and required words are amplificateur

de sonorisation

for public

address

amplifier,

baladeur

for

Walkman, particularly discouraged because it is a trademark, travail de terrain for fieldwork. The ministry published a very long list of recommended words, as well: cine-parc for drive-in cinema, en arriäre for flash-back {JORF 18 February 1983:1938).

retour

At the beginning of 1984, President Mitterand reorganized the Haut Comit6, putting in its place a General Commissariat and an Advisory Committee of the French Language. The advisory committee now undertakes studies of the use of French, the Francophone movement, the languages of France (a new feature since it is only recently that any language other than French has been recognized in any way), and French policy with respect to foreign languages. The general commissariat has a much more important mission which is to "encourage and coordinate all actions and public and private organizations working for the spread and defense of the French language" (Decret No. 84-91 of 9 February, Article 6, in JORF 10 February 1984:555). The commissioner specifically "coordinates work with respect to terminology, actions aimed at education and the spread of French by means other than school, as well as action in the international arena for the development of the use of French." (ibid.) This person has both status and corpus responsibilities. Like the old Haut Comit6, the new commissariat and committee are attached to the office of the prime minister. In March 1986 the prime minister created a General Commission of Terminology within the General Commissariat in order to speed up work on terminology, particularly where no ministerial commission seemed to be active, and to coordinate work being done in the ministries on language. At a meeting called for 28 November 1986 representatives of various ministries, the Acad6mie Frangaise, the newly created Secretariat for Francophonie, Larousse publishers, the nongovernmental Conseil International de la Langue Frangaise, the Academy of Medicine and others discussed the proposed sponsorat as a replacement for the English word sponsoring. Most participants seemed to approve of the new word, but it was brought to their atten-

Francophonie: purism at the international level 65 tion that the Qu6b6cois preferred commanditaire. Members expressed the desire to maintain a high degree of coordination with the Qu6b6cois. Then, they agreed to accept such terms as surdose for overdose, and vitements sport for sportswear. Other words proposed by members required further research. One rather amusing example was fun board: the French Funboard Federation opposed a change because it is apparently accepted worldwide and because the world funboard championships were to take place in the French Antilles in 1987.1 President Mitterand created a third organization called the Haut Conseil de la Francophonie to insure the participation of several representatives of French speaking communities. The purpose of the Haut Conseil is to "define the role of Francophonie and the French language in the modern world. . . . It distinguishes the stakes and the urgent tasks and proposes actions to be taken. Each year, it prepares a report on the state of Francophonie." Thus, even if there is no French commonwealth, a French organization will bring together representatives of the French-speaking world. The chair of this body is the President of France, and the 28 members are divided among France, the West Indies, Africa, the Indian Ocean, S.E. Asia, Arab countries, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, and Quebec. The vice chair is the former president of Senegal, L.S. Senghor, who is now also a member of the Acadfemie Fran?aise. Other members are journalists, writers, a Nobel prize winner in chemistry, lawyers, retired political figures, and university professors, (cf. Le Monde 18 January 1985 and Decret No. 84-171 of 12 March, in JORF 13 March 1984: 830) The original list of members did not include a Haitian. After protests from Haitian intellectuals and the press of Port-au-Prince that Haiti was an outpost of French culture, a Haitian writer was added to the organization. This gesture shows the importance accorded by elites outside France to any Francophone organization. The Haut Conseil met for the first time on 6 March 1985 with the French promising new support for "interfrancophone co-operation" (Le Monde 7 March 1985:6). Reenforcing these trends in 1985, Belgium, Canada, France, Quebec, and Switzerland agreed to share a television channel broadcasting through ECSI, a European space satellite (cf. Le Monde 22 April 1985:22). Some countries or states exchange representatives who specialize in cultural and language matters. The French community of Belgium sends a "general delegate" to Paris as does Quebec (Le Soir 6 July 1985).

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On its own the Quebec government has created institutions to maintain the status of French and to purify it of foreign terms and local expressions which diverge significantly from the educated Paris standard. Elections in 1960 brought to power a reformist Liberal Party which in 1961 created the Office de la Langue Fran^aise. Its major purpose was to promote a French standard in Quebec based exclusively on standard international French. The motto was to follow France. The purpose was the removal of English and joual terms. They stood firmly opposed to spoken Quebec usage. Although Qu6b6cois wanted their language to be lexically close to the French of France, they took pride in educated Quebec pronunciation (cf. Daoust 1983: 23-24). These somewhat divergent tendencies between the government and the educated population probably diminished the influence of the first Office. In other words, there were signs that Qu6b6cois saw French as their property, just as much as it was seen as the property of France. Law 63, passed in 1969, gave the OLF responsibility for improving the status of French by expanding its use in both the private and public domains. Fearful of the cultural revival and a dynamic separatist movement then developing, the government of Canada made French co-official with English for the whole country, insuring that federal laws and federal courts would be bilingual. This action also encouraged French speakers to look for jobs in the federal civil service. The choice of a Qu6b6cois, Pierre Trudeau, as Liberal Party leader and then prime minister was made partly to undercut the separatism. Trudeau was also considered to be an extremely effective leader. Quebec continued to take its own initiatives. In 1972 its Gendron Commission recommended, among other things, that the only way to safeguard French was to transform it into the official language of the province. This legal action would help Francophones in their places of work and would force Anglophones and "Allophones" or speakers of third languages to learn French in school. In 1974 the Liberal government responded to these recommendations by passing Law 22 confirming French as official and setting up a mechanism to force children into the French language schools. The law also insured French labeling of products, French advertising, French in business and a basic knowledge of French to be licensed — as a professional nurse, for example. The law further transformed the OLF into the R6gie de la Langue Frangaise whose purpose was to guard over the status of French, but it had corpus responsibilities as well:

Francophonie: purism at the international level 67 Law 22 provided for the creation of terminology commissions to make inventories of English technical terms in current use and to propose equivalents in French that the R6gie would standardize and whose use it would make mandatory within the Administration and within all texts and documents approved by the Ministry of Cooperation. (Daoust 1983:23-24) Departing from the attitude of the old OLF, "the Rfegie declared that the francophones of Quebec and the French were equal partners in the matter of the evolution of the language" (Daoust 1983:41). Since there was to be a political and possibly economic advantage from close ties with France, the R6gie and others insisted that Quebec and France should cooperate as much as possible in linguistic matters. In 1976 the separatist Parti Qu6b6cois took power and replaced Law 22 with the Charte de la Langue Frangaise, adopted as Law 101 in 1977. The new legislation clarified and strengthened the status of French as official; it forced all private enterprises employing fifty or more persons to obtain a "Certificat de Francisation" attesting to the fact that French was being used in documents and in oral communication. No French speaking worker could be denied the right to communicate in French with factory owners and managers, many of whom were Anglophones; no literate French speaking consumer would be unable to read labels, advertisements, instructions, street signs or contracts. The Rfegie was renamed Office de la Langue Frangaise which proceeded to continue the idea of terminology commissions. The work of these commissions was diffused by the OLF in the form of two lists, required terms and recommended terms. Diffusion took place and takes place today through the publication of brochures available to the public and through the Official Gazette of Quebec. According to Article 118 of the Charter: "Upon publication in the Gazette Offlcielle du Quebec their use becomes obligatory in texts, documents, signs and posters emanating from the civil administration, and in contracts to which it is a party and in teaching manuals and educational and research works published in French in Quebec and approved by the Minister of Education." The Charter set up a Conseil de la Langue Frangaise to undertake general studies of the language situation; and it set up the Commission de Surveillance de la Langue Francaise to punish those who failed to abide by the new law. An important extant lexical source for the work of the OLF has been the Banque de Terminologie of Quebec, created in 1974 for the purpose of providing French terms to the civil service, businesses

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and schools. The Bank is actually a computer with forty terminals arranged in different localities in the province. It works with the federal terminology bank. In 1982 the French set up their own computer containing technical terms: FRANTERM, which was linked with the Quebec bank, provides instant comparisons between technical terms and greatly facilitates efforts to adopt a common French word in France and Quebec. Variation is still possible because the OLF recommends that a Quebec French term may enter the Bank and may be used legitimately if it is already widely used; if it does not affect the accepted grammar; if it does not compete with existing French terms (Daoust 1983:64). In other words, Quebec does not have to wait for France to choose a term and, in practice, many Quebec terms remain with the sanction of the OLF because they are perfectly French in form even though they were created in North America. The OLF also has a telephone and postal service to answer questions about correct usage of French. Since English is a much greater threat to the status of French in Quebec than it is to the status of French in France, the OLF has probably been more rigid in its refusal to accept English terms. The result is that the French accept the word stop on signs at intersections while the Qu6b6cois insist on the word arret. For CB radio the Qu6b6cois are supposed to use bände publique while the French accepted canal banalis0 permitting them to continue to say CB (Bedard and Maurais 1983:443). The adoption of a new Canadian constitution with its bill of rights has permitted English speakers to challenge successfully some status provisions of the law, and Francophones have also made the law more flexible. Purifying efforts have not been affected by these changes (Rondeau 1983:433). Belgium has also made an effort within the Francophone population to remove English terms, but since Flemish is the direct threat, English is often accepted as a neutral lingua franca in Belgium. From time to time another country where French is important bans a non-standard or a nonnative word. When L.S. Senghor was President of Senegal, the country officially banned the expression mass media and replaced it with mediat (New York Times 1 February 1976). Reportedly, the government of Zaire, a former Belgian colony, has taken pains to remove Belgian French expressions from official French in favor of the Parisian standard (Nyunda ya Rubango 1985:6).

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69

Implementation Unlike these other countries, France and Quebec have methods to enforce their purification decisions. The Qu6b6cois are keen to force compliance to the use of French; the French are keen to force compliance to the use of a certain kind of French. Using the 1975 law and its provisions concerning the misuse of French to be a form of fraud, a nongovernmental organization brought a restaurant chain to court. The General Association of Users of French denounced the restaurants for using English terms to describe their dishes such as Kingfish and Big Cheese·, they claimed that because these terms were not French, Francophones would not properly understand them and thus they could be deceived. The court fined the restaurant chain the equivalent of $370.00, and this decision, according to the press, was only one of a series recently taken against private businesses which do not respect the language legislation (Le Devoir 14 May 1984:11). It is, however, difficult to believe that such a small fine will deter businesses if they consider English terms attractive and fashionable. In 1982 officials of the Direction de la Consommation et de la Repression des Fraudes which is, among other things, responsible for the enforcement of the 1975 law, examined 8,442 documents and found 1,576 infractions {Le Devoir 21 July 1983:3). One serious problem is that many people consider enforcement of language purism to be a humorous anomaly. Even officials break the law, as do the media. In the French National Assembly one d6put6 complained bitterly in 1984 that a television speaker had used the English words sponsor and sponsoring. He demanded that this practice cease and that "they speak French on television" (Assemble Nationale, Däbats, 27 August 1984 entry 49054). During the month of July 1985 France's leading newspaper, Le Monde, published a special study on the entertainment world which it called Le Showbiz. A French journalist reported that French banks, which have been nationalized, "correspond among themselves in English or respond in that language to some foreign customers who have written to them in French," telecommunications enterprises have announced on large posters a "graduate training programme," and even the French Journal Officiel has been found to use certain English words such as camping. Privately owned newspapers seem to make a point of ignoring prescriptions (Wolf 1983:132). As a result, there is a call for more legislation, even a type of 101 similar to Quebec's French (P6roncel-Hugoz in Le Monde

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1 March 1985:6). The legislation which has already appeared is relatively unknown in the general public. A recent survey of 204 lyc6e teachers in France showed they knew about the Acadfemie Frangaise but that they had not heard about contemporary organizations set up to purify French. Moreover, the most popular dictionaries, published by Robert, include English words in common use. Most people do not consult prescriptive dictionaries such as those published by the Acad6mie Frangaise (Wolf 1983:131-132). The Qu£b6cois have probably been more energetic about the enforcement of the status of French under Law 101 than they have been about the use or avoidance of specific words. They cannot forget they are a small minority in North America, and they must protect their identity. Individual citizens appear to be more highly motivated to report violations of the language legislation in Quebec than in France. From 1977 to 1983 individual citizens made a total of 15,400 complaints to the Commission de Surveillance concerning the alleged lack of respect of the provisions of the law. On balance most businesses conformed to the law once their errors were brought to their attention, or there were compromises. One company, called Warehouse agreed to change the spelling of its name to Ouerasse, but the Park View Restaurant refused to Frenchify its name and "had to pay two penalties of $500." Very few enterprises are actually fined, (Lfevesque, in Le Devoir 28 November 1983:3) but Francophone workers seem to know their language rights better than ever before. Some people explicitly reject purism or particular forms of purism. In Quebec the OLF proposed that hotels use the standard French term complet for the English term no vacancy, and nothing at all when there was a vacancy. The word complet was accepted, but managers, accustomed to putting up vacancy signs created the expression incomplet, a legitimate French word which is not used in this way in France (Bedard and Maurais 1983:450). In 1981 the Senegalese government rejected the CLAD (Centre de Linguistique Appliqu6 de Dakar) method of teaching French which was designed to draw Senegalese pronunciation close to standard French. French speakers of Louisiana reject efforts to purify their language of Cajun expressions. Stanley A16ong found in a study of automobile technical schools in Quebec that although students were increasingly aware of new French terms, they preferred to continue using "a mixture of English and French terms set in a French linguistic structure." The main reason is that English continues to be important for these students because

Francophonie: purism at the international level

71

their favorite magazines are in English and many new automotive developments around the world are described in the English language. They want to be "au courant" (A16ong 1982:47, 68). The continuing popularity of Anglo-American television, magazines and music puts a brake on terminological purity, and the purifiers know it. The classes with the most prestige in Quebec and in other Francophone countries follow these media and pay less attention to purism than the supporters of Francophonie wish. Another problem affects cooperation among Francophone areas and that is an alleged superior attitude by the French. Some Qu£b6cois believe the egoism of Parisian intellectuals inhibits the reading of books produced by Qu6b6cois or Haitians or Senegalese. During a meeting of the World Congress of French Teachers in 1984 participants "denounced the 'cultural and literary imperialism' of France, which forces other francophone countries to study only French authors" (Le Devoir 17 July 1984:8). What they meant is partly that French publishers seem uninterested in publishing and promoting books from Canada, Belgium, Haiti and Africa. Because the works of French authors are easily available, schools outside France are tempted to depend on them exclusively, particularly in their French language and literature programs. The Quebec Minister of Cultural Affairs took advantage of his attendance at the meeting to denounce the idea of one standard international French. He asserted "the need to conserve linguistic and cultural particularisms of each francophone country and no longer to promote a unification of the means of communication." (ibid.) Many supporters of Francophonie are sensitive to these complaints, and their growing understanding of the need to maintain and strengthen African languages — partly to avoid the accusation of cultural imperialism — has encouraged them to undertake projects showing that the French do not wish to dominate Francophonie. African additions to French vocabulary and Africanisms in French are being collected and published (Brann 1983). In 1984 the Bordas publishing company produced a three-volume Dictionary of French Language Literatures (plural) which helped legitimize French literature produced outside France for the French literary public. Authors from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, Africa, the West Indies, North Africa, Egypt, and Lebanon were included (Le Monde 21 March 1985:18). Linguists have collected regional expressions within France, and the Conseil International de la Langue Frangaise has published them (Bfeguin, in Le Devoir 9 September 1980). The popular Petit Robert dictionary

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has already accepted some regionalisms as well as words from Belgium and Canada. For example, they accepted a Belgian word for beer, gueuse (Le Devoir 14 Sieptember 1977:13). In those countries where French is not the mother tongue of the majority of the population supporters of Francophonie now say the "national languages and French must coexist in a complementary way, rather than in opposition, in all domains of life" (Revue des Parlementaires de Langue Frangaise 1982, 46:15). This is in partial response to the call for the use of mother tongues in education which is increasingly heard. In 1983, the African ministers of education in Frenchspeaking countries produced a "Methodology for the formation of teachers in charge of the teaching of national languages." Meetings in 1984 in Senegal and Gabon, two countries very closely allied with France, called for African languages as media of instruction, at least at the primary school level (S6minaire sur les Langues Nationales 1984). Local pressures which include high rates of school failure are partially responsible for the new rhetoric, but results from the use of African or other national languages in Senegal, Guinea, and Madagascar have not been promising. Guinea suddenly switched back to French from African languages in 1984, and Madagascar, which proclaimed a type of cultural revolution 10 years ago, is now increasing the study of French in schools.

Other endogenous languages Since the symbolic Deixonne Law of 1951, French regional languages within France itself have been given slightly more status. From the symbolic teaching of Breton for one hour a week these languages have bee'n given more time and attention. In 1985, the French government created a National Council for the Languages and Cultures of France to advise the government and to coordinate activities promoting regional languages and languages of large minorities without a regional base. The first category includes Basque, Breton, Alsatian, and the second includes Arabic (cf. Bernstein, in New York Times 18 August 1985:6E). In 1985 the government also announced that future secondary school-teachers, who need the CAPES or Certificat d'Aptitude au Professorat de l'Enseignement de Second Degrfe, can offer the Breton language as a specialty at the same level as other subjects such as French

Francophonie: purism at the international level 73 or history. This action will permit job openings for students who have advanced degrees in Breton language and literature. However, the Breton teachers must also have another specialty in the event there are not enough students to study Breton. Other languages will soon be added (Pferoncel-Hugoz Le Monde 9 August 1985:15). These innovations are quite extraordinary in the heretofore highly centralized state and culture in France, but some observers point out that the reason may be the decline in the numbers of people who speak the regional languages and thus the weakened threat to French supremacy (cf. Destrade, in Le Monde, 12 June 1985:2; Jacob and Gordon 1985:129). These languages would be perceived as harmless folklore.

Results The results of the work on the corpus of French have probably been most visible in official documents, in books published with government money and in contacts in which the state is one party in both France and Quebec. The spoken language has not been very much affected, I suspect. Most interesting is the loyalty to French which has become clearer since Francophonie began, and this probably surprised the French people, It is also essential to know that this loyalty is often expressed to a local variety of French which shares a standard grammar but differs in pronunciation and in some lexical features. In Cameroon, Senegal and Ivory Coast speakers of local varieties of French recognize the differences and are loyal to them: "The French of Senegal has therefore become a concrete linguistic reality. This is to say that it can be described and analyzed" (Dumont 1983:192). Another possibly unexpected result of Francophonie is that countries like Guinea, which a decade ago rejected French as a medium of instruction in primary schools and then returned to French, knew they would receive help because of the francophone movement. A certain infrastructure exists because of the movement. Purism efforts have intensified language consciousness in some environments although this does not seem to be true in France, as stated above. Whether the debaters agree or disagree, the debate about a standard international French versus local varieties has helped increase the sense of francophone identity among francophone minorities.

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The sense of a worldwide debate and thus a worldwide self-conscious French speaking community - no matter how loosely linked — has encouraged French speaking minorities in Switzerland, Northern Italy, Canada, Belgium, and the USA to assert identities and demand rights. The personal status of individual French speakers in Quebec has changed; French schools are stronger; the requirement that French speakers know English to get good jobs has declined in Quebec (Maurais 1984:9). In this province more Anglophones and Allophones are learning French, and job opportunities for French speakers in management have opened. The wage gap between English speakers and French speakers has narrowed as French speakers now occupy some of the highest posts in private enterprises which must conduct their business in French (Descöteaux in Le Devoir 22 October 1983:1). "Between 1976 and 1982 the percentage of allophones studying in French in the [primary and secondary schools] jumped from 18% to 45% . . ." (Proulx, in Le Devoir 28 September 1983:1) even though at the university level the English language institutions are most popular. Some linguists do not believe there has been an improvement in the status or the corpus of French (Castonguay 1984). They are exasperated with compatriots who still use English; they disdain popular choices of entertainment; they claim to know what is best for the masses. The Quebec linguist Michel Amyot presented a paper on language planning in Quebec at the 7 th World Congress of the International Association of Applied Linguistics in 1984. He admitted that his data showed an increase in French use in factories and other enterprises, but he was dismayed that francophones respond in English in shops and in the administration if they are addressed in English. In other words, they are more governed by their own rules of courtesy than by language ideology. He blamed ordinary people for watching English language programs on television and for not using the pure French proposed by the Office de la Langue Franyaise. He said the people must develop more loyalty to French, and he begged them to be vigilant. Suspicion of the masses and a sense they are easily misled is typical of many purist ideologues, and there is an element of it in Francophonie (Amyot 1984:7, 10, 18, 21). A 1986 poll of French people showed great support (88%) for the idea that the French language should be developed in the world but very little support for or knowledge about francophone organizations (IPSOS 1986: 12, 16, 30). What are the tangible results of Francophonie in non-linguistic terms? Reaching the purely linguistic goals — even in part — will be

Francophonie: purism at the international level 75 inadequate motivation for maintaining a long term loyalty to French, or a certain kind of French. Francophonie has facilitated cultural exchanges between Quebec and France but has not provided many jobs. From 1968 to 1985, 5,000 professors and more than 50,000 students and young people have crossed the Atlantic either toward France or toward Quebec for visits, study missions, conferences, and so forth. During the same period there was no upsurge in the purchase of Quebec books or television programs by the French although the Qu6b6cois purchased French cultural products (de LaGrange, in Le Monde 7 March 1985:7). One problem is that private French businesses have not been swayed by francophone ideology and have continued to invest where they are sure of making a profit. However, after the nationalization of the Pechiney aluminum company a decision was made to build a huge aluminum plant in Quebec. Other possibilities are being investigated, but in the meanwhile the Renault company announced it was closing its only operation in Quebec. The economic benefits of Francophonie to Quebec have not been very impressive, and over the years efforts have been made to improve them. In 1986, Michel Aurillac, Minister of Cooperation, called for the creation of an industrial network among French and African private enterprises (de LaGrange, in Le Monde 23 May 1986:4 cf. also Le Monde 18 September 1986:2). France maintains a favorable balance of trade with all but one or two of the French speaking states of Africa while West Germany and the USA are becoming more important importers of African goods. The Haitian economy is dominated by North America, and the United States is also Quebec's and Canada's single most important trading partner. Unemployment in France and growing racism directed mainly at blacks have disturbed workers and students from francophone African states. Francophone organizations are not in the forefront of the effort to combat racism although other organizations are struggling to fight this disease. An example of the inability of linguistically based organizations to deal with very basic problems is the International Association of Francophone Mayors which met in July 1985 in Kinshasa, Zaire. Twenty-six countries sent representatives showing the hope they have for this organization. Mayors from very poor cities asked for help from the mayors of rich cities, but other than a few exchange visits, a few scholarships, what could be done, a French journalist asked:

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Ould Cheikh Ahmed, governor of Nouakchott (600,000 inhabitants) begged Mr. Chirac [mayor of Paris] to help him create municipal services which, as yet, do not exist. The mayor of Paris promised to send to Mauritania a 'high level envoy.' (Ambroise-Rendu, in Le Monde 28-29 July 1985) Such a gesture is practically useless.

The future? Although France is by far the most important francophone state, its own economic limitations prevent it from providing the huge amount of aid that several states in Africa appear to need. Even though Jacques Chirac cannot resolve the problems of the capital of Mauritania, the leaders of that African state know that France maintains a long-term interest in their country — while other European or North American countries do not — in large part because of Francophonie. That interest may from time to time make the difference between survival and economic or political collapse. Even though France and Canada cannot offer to Haiti what the USA can offer, belonging to francophone organizations gives the government a little leverage, room for maneuver and a small window to a world beyond the English and Spanish speaking Caribbean. If support for Francophonie is a price for that window, it is a very reasonable price to pay, and they will support it as long as it is not too rigid or purist. An increasing number of supporters of Francophonie are reformulating the language corpus and status goals in more modest ways. Not everyone agrees, but the voices are important ones. First, they realize that even those Francophones with mother tongues other than French are very loyal to French because of solid interest and an intangible affection. Second, they realize it is impossible to maintain a rigid spoken standard French all over the world, and they are suggesting there be a "teaching standard" to serve as the basis of standard international French. Pronunciation would be less standard so that people would never be ashamed of local variations which are inevitable in any case (Dumont, citing Corbeil, 1983:250-251). This also means the expansion of educational systems so that more children and adults are exposed to French. More than anything else the emphasis should

Francophonie: purism at the international level

77

be placed on standard grammar, according to Valdman, who doubts that there will ever be mutually incomprehensible varieties of French (Valdman 1983:700). These suggestions by Corbeil, Dumont, Valdman and others will not please the rigid purists who dispair at any variation. Decisions about the medium of instruction in schools are more important in the short run than purism decisions. As troublesome as bilingual education seems to many, it is emerging as an acceptable solution in those countries where French is not the mother tongue: the question then is where French and where Wolof, Arabic, Creole, Vietnamese? Even in Belgium and Quebec where French is a mother tongue, learning English and Flemish are obviously important for personal advance and national harmony. Purist ideologies, like other ideologies, must compromise with reality in order to be taken seriously. Francophonie is in the process of compromising and that is a source of its vitality. By sharing its status as official with other languages the corpus of French is bound to be influenced by these languages as it will continue to absorb English words. The struggle for a more pure corpus will continue at the international and national levels, but the likely effect is to ensure the status of French as an official tongue and as an important method of international communication.

Note 1. M. Lo'i'c Depecker of the General Commissariat generously gave me a copy of the minutes of the meeting. For the decree creating the Commission, see JORF, 16 March 1986, p. 4255.

References Acactemie des Sciences 1982 Rapport de l'Acadämie des Sciences sur la langue franqahe et la rayonnement de la science frangaise. Paris. A16ong, Stanley 1982 "The role of the technical school in the knowledge and use of prescribed automotive terminology among students in Quebec, Canada." International Journal of the Sociology of Language 38:45-70. Alliance Frangaise 1972 "Allocution du President et Rapport du Secrdtaire Gönörale Sur la Situation d'Ensemble-Ann6e 1971." Assemble G^nörale, 26 March, p. 15.

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Amyot, Michel 1984 "La planification linguistique qu£b6coise — bilan et orientation." Unpublished paper. Presented at the 7th World Congress of the International Association of Applied Linguistics, 7 August 1984, in Brussels. Bedard, Edith, and Jacques Maurais 1983 "Reflections sur la normalisation linguistique au Quebec." Pp. 435459 in Edith Bedard and Jacques Maurais (eds.), La norme linguistique. Quebec: Government of Quebec; Paris: Le Robert. Brann, C.M.B. 1983 "French Lexicography in Africa: A Three-Dimensional Project." Journal of Modern African Studies 20(2):353-359. Castonguay, Charles 1984 "The Anglicisation of Canada, 1971-1981." Unpublished paper. Presented at the 7th World Congress of the International Association of Applied Linguistics, 5-10 August 1984, in Brussels. de Chambrun, Noelle and Anne-Marie Reinhardt 1980 "La science en patois." Le Monde Diplomatique (August) p. 28. Daocust, Denise 1982 "La planification linguistique au Quebec: Un apergu des lois sur la langue." Revue Qukbkcoi&e de Linguistique 12(1): 9-75. Dumont, Pierre 1983 Le franqais et les Ungues afraicaines au Senegal. Paris: Agence de Coopdration Culturelle et Technique and Karthala. Godbout, Jacques 1975 Le reformiste: Textes tranquilles. Montreal: Quinze. Guillermou, Alain 1964 "La Föderation Internationale pour la Sauvegarde et l'Unitö de la Langue Fran^aise." Culture Franqaise (2): 16-28. IPSOS 1986 Les Franqais et la Francophonie. Report prepared for Haut Conseil de la Francophonie. Paris: Ipsos. Jacob, James E., and David C. Gordon 1985 "Language Policy in France." Pp. 106-133 in William R. Beer and James E. Jacob (eds.), Language Policy and National Unity. Totowa, N.H.: Rowman and Allanheld. Maurais, Jacques 1984 "Le bilinguisme de masse au Quebec." Unpublished paper. Presented at the international symposium on "Problemes de glottopolitique," 20-23 September 1984, in Rouen. Mirambel, Andre 1964 "Les aspects psychologiques du purisme dans la Grece moderne." Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique (4) (Oct-Dec): 405436. Nyunda ya Rubango 1985 "Le franfais au Zaire: Langue 'superieure' et chances de 'survie' dans un pays africain." Unpublished ms.

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Rondeau, Guy 1983 "La normalisation linguistique, terminologique et technique au Qu0bec." Pp. 415434 in Edith Bedard and Jacques Maurais (eds.), La norme linguistique. Quebec: Government of Quebec; Paris: Le Robert. Söminaire sur les Langues Nationales 1984 "Dialectique des langues nationales et etrangeres." Unpublished document. Prepared for Söminaire sur les Langues Nationales, 7-9 June, 1984. Dakar: Ecole Normale Sup6rieure de Dakar. Valdman, Albert 1983 "Normes locales et francophonie." Pp. 667-706 in Edith Bedard and Jacques Maurais (eds.). La norme linguistique. Quebec: Government of Quebec; Paris: Le Robert. Weinstein, Brian 1983 The Civie Tongue: Political Consequences of Language Choices. New York: Longman. Wexler, Paul N. 1971 "Diglossia, Language Standardization and Purism: Parameters for a Typology of Literary Languages." Lingua 27:346-354. 1974 Purism and Landtage: A Study in Modern Ukrainian and Belorussian Nationalism (1840-1967). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wolf, Lothar 1983 "La normalisation du langage en France: De Malherbe ä Grevisse." Pp. 105-137 in Edith Bedard and Jacques Maurais (eds.), La norme linguistique. Quebec: Government of Quebec; Paris: Le Robert.

Language reform movement and its language the case of Persian Ahmad

Karimi-Hakkak

In the discourse on linguistic change, the motives and consequences, the nature and character of man's manipulation of that process have proved too complex to allow much precision in research, or even in terminology. Phrases like language reform, language planning or language engineering have been used in reference to the culture and content of conscious human interference in the course of the evolution of man's languages. The interrelatedness of such concepts has defied many scholarly attempts at unravelling the diverse strands that run through each designation. In our time, the challenge of making languages expressive of the concepts that distinguish our century from the rest of human history and the solutions sought to the problem have further complicated these interrelations. How does "language modernization" fit in that multifaceted sociocultural network? Purism, both as a general tendency to open up those resources of language which are perceived as native and as (in specific periods and places) an organized social movement bent on redirecting linguistic change toward those resources, has added to the complexity of that intricate web. To speak with any degree of exactitude about the case of a language whose history within the past century or so has involved all the above issues, we need, it seems to me, to historicize as much as possible the language problem and the solutions proposed by successive generations of men who have addressed the issue. Beyond chronicling linguistic change, such an approach may also lead to a fresh understanding of the changes in an ethnic, social or political group's attitude toward its most powerful symbol of identity, its language. A social history of linguistic change in pre-modern and modern Iran and the accompanying debate on the state of the Persian language assumes further socio-cultural importance as well. Not only are the changes that Persian has undergone during the last one hundred years or so by far the most radical since that language found currency in the Iranian plateau in the wake of the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century A.D., but the discourse on the state of the language

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as a most telling index of Iranian cultural identity has moved to the forefront of every literate Iranian's consciousness. Of course, Persian has historically played a crucial role in the emergence and development of an Iranian sense of identity. Nevertheless, it was largely as a result of Iran's encounter with the West that it began to regain its historical status as the most fundamental component of Iranianness. In its present condition, even though Persian can be said to have become equipped with the means to accommodate the steady stream of new concepts that find their way to its domain by the awesome force of modern science and technology, the sense of crisis continues to be evident in the discourse on the state of the language and the nature of its mechanisms of accommodation and assimilation. The process of language reform, articulated initially as a quest for greater simplicity and precision, has in time attained an impressive level of sophistication, itself assuming a degree of significance as a socio-cultural barometer. At each stage in the process, the accompanying discourse has borne within it the basic ideological and political underpinnings that have guided the general thrust of efforts at effecting social change. Thus the early chorus of pleas for simplicity and precision led by an emergent secular intelligentsia reflects a unified drive ultimately toward the disenfranchisement of the clerical elite as social leaders, while the rise and gradual predominance of the idea of purification of the language, culminating in the establishment of the Farhangestän (the Iranian Academy of Language) in 1935 can be viewed as an integral part of the nationalistic sentiments that aimed at the incorporation of Iran in the idea of an Aryan race during the decade preceding World War II. Finally, the appearance of cautious and careful deliberations on the character, history and possibilities of Persian, the search for a reasonable synthesis of modernization and tradition evident in the linguistic discourse during recent decades reveals that general cultural reappraisal of the place of language in the aggregate of the national culture that characterizes the attitude of Iranian intelligentsia in our time. A historical survey of language reform as a social process, and the manner in which the language problem has been presented at each stage in that process are therefore ultimately part of the social and intellectual history of Iran in modern times. As an Indo-European language current among a non-Arab people tied by the strength of their faith to the language of the Qur'än, Persian has had an eventful history in the course of which it has gradually absorbed a variety of influences from Arabic, by far the most im-

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portant being a gradual admission into its lexicon of words of Arabic derivation. However, it can be said to have by and large steered free from deleterious syntactical and grammatical interference of Arabic in its texture or structure until the sixteenth century when the Safavids (1502-1736) succeeded in establishing Shi'ism as the state religion and, to a degree, turned it into a pillar of national identity in their constant struggles against their Sunni enemies, the Uzbeks and other Turkic peoples in the northeast and the powerful Ottomans in the northwest. The success of that effort, itself partly the result of a migration by Shi'ite clergy from diverse Arab-speaking regions to the margins of the Safavid court, had a twofold impact on the historically established limits of Arabic influence on Persian. First, a general neglect of language as an essential component of Iranian sense of identity removed many consciously-erected barriers in the path of further importations of Arabic elements into the Persian lexicon. Second, the need to forge and advance a corpus of Shi'i lore and the necessity to bestow upon it an aura of authenticity by wrapping it in Arabic phraseology meant that, at least in theological writings, the extensive use of Arabic derivations in the composition of Persian prose was no longer an effect to be shunned, or be kept in check, but rather an ideal to be pursued piously and pompously. There were other reasons for this also, with which we cannot be concerned here: the classical tradition in Persian literature, through which Persian had found its most eloquent expression in the previous centuries had begun to wane, court patronage of secular literature had come to an end, and most importantly, a number of significant changes in the basic structures of Iranian society (cf. Savory 1980) had begun to elevate to power a hierarchy of clergymen with a vested interest in religious studies based on a solid grounding in Arabic, a fact which was perforce disseminated through their writings and utterances. Slowly but steadily, Arabic grammatical constructions began to creep into the texture of the Persian prose of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. It was against this background that Persian entered into its most critical phase in a millennium as a result of Iranian society's encounter with the West. The shockwaves that followed the country's earliest awareness of the West as a civilization left no aspect of its culture unaffected. The vehemence with which Europe's achievements in philosophy and literature, in social and political sciences, and above all in science and technology, struck the Iranian society of the nineteenth century rocked the consciousness of its rulers out of its centuries-long slumber.

84 . Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak Awakened and aroused on the one hand, shocked and awed on the other, the ruling elite responded by attempting to incorporate what ideas it could while at the same time reclaiming its own cultural heritage, one that had been glorified for over a century by European historians, writers and Orientalists. Such measures as the establishment of the first printing presses and the subsequent appearance of newspapers and periodicals, the founding of the Dar al-Fonun, the first European-style institution of higher education and technical training, and the dispatch of an ever larger group of students to Europe were among the most visible events in the process that came to be known in Iran's history as the "awakening." On a less visible plane, the Iranian elite strove to combine modern Europe and the native culture into a new amalgam vigorous enough to rise up to the challenge of forging a stable self-definition in the midst of the flux created by so vast a crisis. The idea that in the cultural history of Iran a great literary tradition, at once simple and brilliant, had given way to a period of tinsel and bombast was not entirely homespun. Beginning with Sir William Jones, the first great European Orientalist to concern himself mainly with the Persian language and literature, many notable scholars of the Romantic Movement had come to that conclusion. In his ϋέflexions sur l'Etude des Langues Asiatique, A.W. Schlegel had put the case in these words: I

La po6sie des Persans est plus riche et plus vari6e que celle des Arabes. lis ont un grand poöme nationale, dirai-je 6pique ou romanesque? Iis ont des romans pleins de sentimentalit6; ils ont des morceaux lyriques, oü respire l'enivrement de la voluptfe. Mais leur literature est aussi tombfee dans des grands 6carts; le gout manure y domine. La prose a usurp6 les ornements les plus ambitieux de la po6sie. (Schlegel 1832:13) What the Iranian elite of the latter part of the century accomplished was to use such judgments as evidence that the need for reforming the Persian prose was not only real but also authentic. Already, the Qajar court and bureaucracy had more than once found itself embarrassed when various official correspondences had on occasion proved incomprehensibly complicated to their recipients, even after being simplified through translation (Aryanpur 1972:48-50) . Already, Iranian students sent abroad had come to know the value of direct expression and exactitude in their pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Language reform movement and its language: the case of Persian 85 Already, the nascent Iranian press was attempting to make its meager content accessible to larger segments of the literate population. What had yet to be achieved was somehow to bring these two issues — the practical need to produce simple prose and the intellectual desire to restore the language to its original state — together. Early efforts at the reform of the language, roughly from the midnineteenth century through the Constitutional Revolution (19051911), were thus concentrated mainly on the simplification of Persian prose by restoring it to its original strength, defined as a return to the style of the master practitioners of the language between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries. The assumption that that goal could be reconciled with a kind of linguistic democratization — i.e., making the written idiom accessible to larger groups of literate or semi-literate people — was often taken for granted but rarely demonstrated cogently. At any rate, a new prose style was being advocated, and to the extent that the language of the classical period contained fewer Arabic words and had absorbed virtually no structural influence from that language, the goal of the early language reformer can be said to have coincided with the tendency toward language purification. Essentially, however, linguistic change in nineteenth century Iran was inspired by the desire of the fledgling group of secular intellectuals to communicate with the people. In practice, movement toward language simplification proved both desirable and relatively easy to effect. The florid style of the Indian school, current in the recent past, had already been abandoned by the poets of the "Return Movement." In prose, a succession of writers in and around the court of Näser-al-din Shah (r. 1846-1896), including the king himself, had begun to move away from the overarabicized diction in their correspondence and journals. But it was most of all in the act of translation from European languages, mainly French, that the Persian prose of the period realized its full potential for exactitude and simplicity. In their search for Persian equivalents for scientific terminology, Iranian translators of French textbooks had hit upon a store of half-forgotten loan translations and loan blends made by medieval scientists writing in Persian. Literary translators had similarly revived the simplicity latent in the classical tradition of Persian literature. Such works as Habib Isfahan!'s translation of James Morrier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Isphahan are by common consent considered to embody the most salient features of nineteenth century Persian prose. Mohammad-TaqI Bahär, a prominent poet and literary scholar of the early twentieth

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century, speaks of the language of that work as combining the best features of contemporary European and classical Persian prose styles: In its felicity and solidity, in its tenderness and craftsmenship, the prose of Haji Baba recalls [Sa'dl's] Golestan [written in 1258]. At the same time, in its power to move the mind and excite the feelings of the reader it resembles European prose. It is at once simple and technical, in accord both with principles of old masters of [Persian] prose, and with new methods and styles. In sum, it is one of the masterpieces of the thirteenth century Hejira. (Bahär 1958:366) At the same time, vehement attacks were launched against the hyperbolic style of the post-classical period and its contemporary practitioners by a growing number of "new intellectuals." In his vehement satire on the preoccupations of traditional Iranian elite, entitled Ferqehye Kajblnän (The Order of the Crooked Vision), Malkom Khan ridiculed, among others, those who in their writing were concerned more with displaying their mastery of such devices as rhyme and parallelism than with communicating ideas. His character, a naive outsider ushered into an assembly of such men, sees them as those who believed that language is not a tool for the expression of ideas but one invented ultimately for the purpose of whiling away: These latter madmen, better known to people as nonsense-mongers that is, poets — were committed by the article of their faith never to seek sense, whether in speech or in writing. Their goal in life was to attain the ultimate bliss of uttering incomprehensibly complex phrases, and devote their lives to the study of complicated phraseology. When they listened to a speaker it was not with the idea of finding out what it was he was saying; rather they were impatient to see what far-fetched conceit he might use in his speech. (Malkom Khan, quoted in Äryanpur 1972:32ο)1 In a similar assault on Tärikh-e Vassäf, a history of the Mongol rule in Iran written in the thirteenth century which became the model of the over-ornamented prose of later times, Zayn-al-äbedln Marägheh-Ί, the most prominent Iranian fiction writer of the turn of the century, makes his central character in Slähatnämeh-ye Ebrählm Bayg (Ebrahim Bayg's Travel Diary), a young merchant with as good an educational background as possible for his generation, lament that that historical work has remained incomprehensible to him:

Language reform movement and its language: the case of Persian 87 I read the Vassäf History three times, and I still cannot recall a word of it. In return for all his labor, the man . . . has brought blame rather than praise upon himself. There is nobody who would read the work and not chide the author, for it is totally' incomprehensible. (Marägheh-I 1974:230) Behind these and similar incessant pleas for comprehensibility, simplicity, and meaning-oriented prose, lie the lines of a historical battle for social power between the custodians of an old mystico-religious vision and a fledgling group of secular intellectuals schooled in nineteenth-century European ideas and basically nativist in their cultural orientation. Whereas the Shi'i tradition, whose influence in Persian prose had grown with the rise in social status of a clerical hierarchy, maintained that words can conceal as well as reveal, that the meaning of a text, particularly of a mystical or religious nature, can therefore become available to the public only as a result of the theologian's (or the initiate's) interpretation of the esoteric aspects of its language, the new intellectuals asserted, on the basis of their experience of European languages, that words must have specified, definable realms of meaning, that language is essentially anchored to specific cultural and ethnic entities, that ultimately even the furtherance of such causes as democracy, enlightenment and progress depends on the power of a language to articulate the mission and place of a people in the world. Malkom Khän's use in mockery of a religious imagery — "order," "article of faith," "devotion", etc. — in the passage quoted above is not without a certain poignancy in this regard. From that essential tendency, the secular intellectuals endeavored to move toward a notion of language "reform" as the pursuit of simplicity, direct expression, and naturalness which, they argued, characterized both the speech of the man in the street as well as that of the great poets and prose-stylists of a glorious past. If from one, the advocate of "language reform" drew legitimacy for his cause, the other gave him a strong sense of pride. Out of these rudiments the new secular elite gradually forged a theory of language reform which, by focusing attention on the lexicon, on words in relation to their meanings, was at once working to reform a deformed — in the sense of ambiguous, imprecise and incomprehensible — lexicon, and in the process took definitive steps toward razing the very foundations on which its rival in the struggle for social power, the theologian, had historically based his authority.

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It is all too obvious that this notion of language reform had vast literary implications as well. To this day, Iranian poets and writers, both classical and contemporary, are evaluated as much by linguistic criteria as by purely literary ones. However, the two goals envisioned by the movement for the reform of the Persian language that was taking shape in this early stage were not always compatible. Nor could the desire to communicate with the common man, even were it totally in line with the intellectual agenda for the gradual secularization of the society, be in itself responsive to the increasingly perceptible need for social — and therefore linguistic — modernization. Iran was entering the twentieth century with a consciousness that the reform of its official language, Persian, was an integral part of the total social drive toward democracy within the framework of a modern nationstate. In translating the ideals of the French Revolution into their equivalents within the Iranian context, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 had brought with it new legal, political and social institutions that needed to be called by new names. The existing bureaucracy, modelled after the Ottoman Tanzlmät system in the previous century, had carried with it names of Arabic derivations common in neighboring Turkey. As the forms and functions of such institutions were modified and redefined, new words were coined, more or less arbitrarily, out of Persian stems in use at one time or another during the classical period. Thus DädgostarJ (from Persian dad 'justice' and the verb gostardan 'to extend) came to replace Adllyyeh for the ministry of justice, Shahrdari (from Persian shahr 'city' and the verb däshtan 'to have', 'to hold', 'to administer') was given to Baladlyyah for municipality, and Shahrbänl (shahr + the Persian suffix ban 'keeper') took the place of Nazmlyyeh for the police department. Examples of these early coinages are too numerous to recount, their pattern too erratic to support any generalization. Nevertheless, the common denominator in such early neologisms, the use of a combination of classical Persian affixes and nouns, was to remain constant in a great many subsequent coinages. In its almost constant utilization of classical native resources, the fact of word coinage provided the first links between the need for the modernization of Persian and a growing tendency toward language purification. The ease with which these early attempts at modernizing Persian by using its native resources had taken hold encouraged some important pioneering studies into principles of word-formation in that language. Anxious to systematize the manner of new coinages, language

Language reform movement and its language: the case of Persian 89 scholars like ZabTh Behruz, Ebrählm Purdävud and Mohammad Moqaddam (who later changed his last name, a word of Arabic derivation, into the Persian Moghdam) began to conduct studies in the history of the Persian language and the course of its evolution. But although such undertakings, based largely on individual initiative, had yielded fresh insights into possibilities of new word combinations, any systematic effort in this area had to await the general stabilization of the political climate which began to materialize with the rise of Reza Khan, later Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925-41) to power. A military officer himself, Reza Shah directed his modernizing scheme from the beginning toward the military establishment, and this at a time when nationalistic sentiments were on the rise in the society at large. As the "New Iranian Army" was being shaped, and its procedures for induction and promotion were outlined, the obvious need for new terms to accompany and accommodate the new military apparatus grew more pressing. The solutions to the problem soon proved to be as varied as the military men charged with the task of finding new — and pure Persian — words for the divisions, ranks, operations and equipments with which the men in that "perfect speech captive community" (cf. Perry 1985), the armed forces, had to deal daily. In naming the ranks, for instance, such words as sotvän 'lieutenant', sarvän 'captain' and sarhang 'colonel' as well as the various generals (sartlp, sarlashgar and sepahbod), were more or less arbitrary combinations of diverse Persian stems vaguely signifying groups of armed men with Persian affixes connoting leadership or headmanship. Coined and adopted because of their abiding virtue of being "pure", such terms found immediate currency and are still in use in their precise designations. Among the hundreds of such purified coinages current in the armed forces, two are especially noteworthy for our purposes in that they help shed light on an interesting instance of puristic zeal as manifested in Iran in the early decades of this century. The word afsar, meaning 'crown' in classical Persian, was taken by uniformed purifiers to be cognate with French officier and English officer (Persian, after all, was an Indo-European language), and thus selected as their equivalent in Persian to refer to a commissioned officer, replacing sahebmansab, a compound word of Arabic derivations meaning the holder of a military rank. More interestingly still, arteshtär (middle Persian for 'charge-leader') was thought to consist of two segments, artesh and tär. The latter was then taken to be an ancient form of dar (imperative

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stem for däshtan 'to have')· On that basis, artesh was taken to mean military force, and by extension 'the armed forces'. Later research has shown that the word arteshtär is composed of art, meaning 'chariot' and eshtär, meaning 'stander'. The word is thus a middle Persian compound of Babylonian origin, and means "charioteer" (Taqlzädeh 1948:19). Interestingly, afsar, artesh and hundreds of other adapted and coined words still enjoy currency in Persian with precise significations, especially within specified professional vocabularies of the army and the bureaucracy. From the start, however, both the army and the civil administration system felt the pressure from the scholarly community to adopt a moderate stance, or in the words of Sadeq Rezäzädeh Shafaq, a "measured path", to limit their coinages to new concepts with which they came into contact and to coordinate their effort with the Ministry of Education, itself grappling with the sensitive issue of textbook writing to meet the needs of the nation's expanding network of elementary and secondary schools. In 1933, a group of faculty and students at the newly founded Dar al-Moallemln-e 'All (Teachers' Training College), later renamed Däneshsarä-ye All according to the new Persianifying tendency of language purists, formed a society to undertake the development of a standard vocabulary for new scientific terms. The society made a significant contribution to the shaping of a terminology of the sciences, an area in which Persian had been historically deficient (Meskub n.d.: 190-212). The college also compiled a French-Persian dictionary particularly rich in words related to mathematics and natural sciences. Many of its neologisms were later accepted by the Iranian Academy of Language and publicized in classrooms and through textbooks. Around the same time, the Ministry of Education, headed byEsmäil Mer'at, himself an advocate of language purism, began to fund and support a series of professional associations which, among other activities, would propose Persian words—either coinages or old words no longer in use—for concepts, activities, procedures and categories related to diverse arts, crafts and professions. The most successful of these was that formed by Iranian physicians which not only revived and publicized many medical words once current in Persian, but also coined many new equivalents for modern medical vocabularies on the basis of loanshifts and loan translations from French. It also undertook a variety of other efforts ranging from the composition and translation of medical texts to conducting research into the names, qualities and local usages of

Language reform movement and its language: the case of Persian 91 medicinal herbs for use in the new science of medicine as it was taking shape in Reza Shah's modern Iran. In the atmosphere of the 1930s in Iran, with Ataturk's "sun-language theory" in full swing in neighboring Turkey, purism was in the air, and whether through the Physicians' Association or the 'Teachers' Training College, whether through textbooks prepared by the Ministry of Education or through recent treatises written on different aspects of the Persian language, the language problem was fast becoming the focus of the literate society of Iran, occupying historians as well as politicians, military men as well as bureaucrats, social commentators and journalists as well as various doctors of language. All that was needed to make language purism part of the official state policy was an appeal from the ministry of education to the Shah, recently back from a trip to Ataturk's modern state, where he had witnessed the feeling of pride that goes with efforts at puristic modernization. The royal decree for the establishment of the Farhangestän (this neologism, a compound of Persian Farhang 'culture' and a Persian suffix connoting place, itself soon became a subject of controversy between advocates and opponents of language purification). Iran's Academy of Language modelled organizationally after the Acadkmie Franqaise, was issued in 1935, ushering in a new stage in efforts at language reform in Iran. The pursuit of language reform was of course by no means limited in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution to the initiation of scholarly studies in the Persian language, the appearance of new coinages on the scene and the rise of puristic sentiments. As an important part of the intellectual agenda for social reform, the drive toward language simplification continued with redoubled speed in the early part of this period until it was overshadowed by the emergence of puristic tendencies. Predictably, the new literary intellectual, heir to the preoccupations and concerns of Malkom and Marägheh-ϊ, bore the standard in this field. With the Constitutional Revolution had come a stunning proliferation of the press, firm in its resolve to reach the hearts of those who had hitherto received their inspiration from the pulpit only. The young literati, led by such influential poets and prose-writers as Dehkhodä, Bahär, I raj MIrzä, Farrokhl, Eshqi, and NasTm-e Shomäl, had all taken to the wonderful new medium of the press of the Constitutional era, bringing their ideas for social reform, progress and justice to "the people". Although varied in their ideologies and social views, they shared a profound interest in the cause of language simplification, which they continued to view as

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an indispensable part of their quest for liberty and democracy. Some had also attempted to tap the poetic potential of regional dialects, preaching such political virtues as freedom, democracy and participation of the citizen in the affairs of the country. Satire had emerged as a dominant mode of literary discourse in the intellectual battle against ignorance, indifference and superstition. In all such writings, the language employed had to be familiar to the barely literate common man. In his brilliant Charand Parand sketches in the newspaper Sur-e Esräfil, written in 1907-8, Dehkhodä had frequently levelled poignant attacks on the Arabicized language of the clergy. In one particular piece, he had posed as a naive journalist who receives a letter written in Arabic, has it translated into Persian by a mullah and still fails to understand the translation. When the turbaned translator tries to justify his translation as good Persian, he utters so many Arabic words and defends his text with such gusto that the narrator, fearing the brawl might end in a fist-fight, decides to publish the translated letter intact. The letter appears not only virtually incomprehensible but ridiculous in comparison with the vibrant buoyancy of Dehkhoda's diction in the Charand Parand sketches (Dehkhoda 1958:50-53). The admixture of classical Persian syntax and spurts of Arabicisms once again points to a revised strategy on the part of the religious leaders of the society for continuing to keep their discourse inaccessible to the masses of people. Driven out of its bastion of the old style — marked by a florid syntax intermingled with highfalutin Arabicisms — the custodian of the faith has now taken refuge in a hybrid admixture of classical Persian and Arabic words to avoid the charge of being non native while still keeping his distance from the language of the public. Adding to the effect is the content of the letter, supposedly a clergyman's Persian translation of another clergyman's letter to a progressive forum of the secular intellectuals. It contains a threat against the secular, staunchly democratic newspaper enjoying tremendous popularity in a rapidly secularizing society. In style and in substance, this brief sketch epitomizes the secular intellectual's perception of the language battle between the religious forces, determined to maintain their social function of intermediation between the individual and his environment, and the new intellectual, trying to bring about social change by disenfranchising that traditional force. The rise of purism had only complicated the terms according to which the language battle was being waged. But even before facing

Language reform movement and its language: the case of Persian 93 the purist on the social battlefield, the literary writer had to fight a civil war with a breakaway faction of the secular elite which had given in to the temptation to import many words and phrases from French, the new language of reference for the intellectual community. The speech and manners of the educated Iranian returning from Europe had already become the butt of many jokes in the Tehran society of early twentieth century. When Mohammad-'Ali Jamälzädeh, the acknowledged founder of modern Persian fiction, wrote his now classic short-story Färsi Shekar Ast (Persian Is Sweet) in 1919, he directed his satiric intent as much against the Europeanized intellectual as against the religious leaders of the society. There we see in a makeshift prison-cell, a brilliantly conceived microcosm of Iranian society, a poor illiterate local man confounded out of his meager wits by the speech of the mullah and the Westernized Iranian alike. The narrator is present too but because of his Western attire he is dismissed forthwith by Ramazän as a European. After the mullah's Arabicized Persian and the young man's Frankified Persian in turn fail to communicate to him an answer to his question of why he has been thrown in that jail, Ramazän falls into a fit of hysteria from which he is rescued by the narrator who explains to him that he is an Iranian in spite of his Western clothing. But when he also attempts to explain that, in spite of their bastardized versions of Persian, the mullah and the Europeanized young man are also Iranians, he finds himself faced with the stony face of disbelief. As the cell-door is opened and the detainees are freed without explanation, the narrator finds himself incapable of explaining to the poor man that even the dialect spoken by a passing man is also a form of Persian. In spite of freedom, Ramazän's confusion continues (cf. Jamälzädeh 1958:22-41). "Persian Is Sweet," one of the best and most popular short-stories ever written in Persian, thus contains in its theme a representation of the language problem in early twentieth century Iranian society. The binary opposition of the earlier generation had by now been complicated by the relative success of the new intellectual in marginalizing the well-trenched religious elite. Politically, the Constitutional Revolution had loosened the hold of the traditional social leaders on the means of communication. Linguistically, however, the new intelligentsia, schooled in Western concepts and ideas, had not yet closed ranks in translating the terms of its conviction into the language of the average man in the street. As such, even as one Persian was being gradually pushed to the sidelines, a new bastardized Persian, this time

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tainted with French, a language far less accessible to the general public than Arabic, was taking its place. While the original attempt was still being resented by the tradition-bound forces of the society, massive infiltration of new terminologies from the West was threatening to overwhelm the advocates of language simplification. Obviously, the mutually incomprehensible varieties of Persian caricatured in "Persian Is Sweet" pointed to a new intensification of the language problem in a rapidly changing society. Jamälzädeh's concern with the problems facing Persian in postConstitutional Iran went beyond his depiction of the chaos governing it in a short-story. In fact, in all the six short stories published in Yekl Bud-o Yekl Nabud (Once Upon a Time), published in Berlin in 1921, the author's intimate involvement with a proper language for the emerging modern literary tradition, his consciousness of the problem of the language of literature forms an abiding presence (see Baläy and Cuypers 1983). In his "preface" to the volume, the young writer had linked his vision of a new literature for modern Iran, his ideal of "literary democracy" to the development of a language whose universality arises from the very fact of its being simple, direct and precise: Commonly the very substance of the Iranian political despotism, which is well-known the world over, dominates the matter of literature as well; that is to say, when a writer holds his pen in his hand, his attention is directed solely to the group of the learned and the scholars, and takes no interest whatsoever in others. He even ignores the many who are fairly literate and can read and comprehend plain, uncomplicated writings quite well. In short, the writer does not subscribe to "literary democracy." (Jamälzädeh 1984:110) Deploring such a state of literary affairs, and lambasting those men of letters who "still write the masses o f f ' and produce writings that are "obscure and difficult for the common man to comprehend," he had held up the example of those "civilized countries" in which "it's plain composition that is praised" and not cumbersome pieces in which the writer is more concerned with displaying his craftsmanship than with communicating ideas. Quoting from Victor Hugo's "preface" to Cromwell, Jamälzädeh makes an eloquent plea toward the end of this landmark manifesto on the language-of-literature problem for an attitude of tolerance toward linguistic change, specifically for the admission of Persian equivalents of the argot in literature, and thus gradually making them a part of "the literary language."

Language reform movement and its language: the case of Persian 95 Finally, Jamälzädeh had closed his "preface" by cautioning his countrymen in tackling the language problem not to settle for such ready-made solutions as the establishment of an academy which would sanction or prohibit the use of certain words. He had reminded the advocates of a "Persian Academy" that "the function of the French Acadtmie is limited to compiling a dictionary for the French language," and that "there are many great, civilized countries with distinguished literary achievements which have no literary societies similar to the French Acadkmie." To support his argument here he had quoted from a 1915 * address by Mohammad 'All Forughl, later a moderating influence in the Farhangestän, a position that is illuminating in its later effect, as we shall see presently, on the course of that institution's activities. The passage is worth citing in full because it reveals why the idea of an Iranian Academy of Language, proposed and pushed by language purists, eventually steered free of purist excesses advocated by its initiators: Another one of the strange ideas which has occurred to some of our friends is that in order to perfect the Persian language we should establish scientific and literary societies, or in other words an academy, to coin new words and create new idioms, thinking that in foreign countries where there are academies and literary and scientific societies they do such things. These people are not aware that coining words and idioms is not the function of such societies, but rather the scholars and learned people in the process of writing and lecturing may, according to their taste and sensibility, when it is proper and necessary, adopt expressions, and if the adoption is made properly and discriminatingly the expression will naturally be accepted and will find currency. If scientific and literary societies work for the advancement of science and literature, it is in a different way. Their duty is to incite and encourage the seekers of perfection, and to facilitate their affairs. (Jamälzädeh 1984:110) Others besides Jamälzädeh and Forughl had also warned against the institutional solution to the language problem. But even as these objections were being raised, new coinages of the kind previously mentioned were gaining currency and being propagated by the bureaucracy and the educational establishment as much out of need as out of puristic zeal. Shortly before his 1934 trip to Turkey, Reza Shah had begun personally to use such words as artesh, afsar and other recent coinages. Heartened by their king's implied support,

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many purists, led by General Nakhjavän in the army and Esma'll Mer'at in the Ministry of Education, began to call in their writing for the use of pure Persian in all government documents, and advocates of an Academy of Language renewed their effort and eventually, as we have seen, won royal assent in the form of a decree addressed to premier Forughi to inaugurate the Farhangestän. The institutional nature and structure of the Farhangestän cannot detain us here. Suffice it to say that originally its twenty-four members, a combination of linguists, literary scholars, educators and government officials, most with published views on the language question, were divided into several committees each charged with a different area of official activities concerning the use of neologisms. The general assembly would consider the proposals, usually consisting of lists of new words coined or accepted for use in official correspondence put forward by the various committees — or referred to them from sources outside the Farhangestän. The reports and recommendations of the assembly would then be sent to the Shah who invariably supported them with his signature. Circulars were then issued to the press and the state bureaucracy which publicized the new words or required their use both internally and in the society at large. It is significant to note, however, that even though the idea of the Farhangestän was the brainchild of radical purists, moderate proponents of language reform, including premier Forughi, had eventually supported it and joined the academy with the express purpose of taking what one had called "the measured path." While the purists based their argument in favor of a more or less total purge of Arabicates from Persian on the historical role played by the Persian language in the preservation of Iranian national identity, the moderates pointed to the language in use among the people who, heedless to the deliberations of any learned body, would go on propagating Persian by the mere fact of using it in their daily lives. While determined not to antagonize those in favor of drawing on the newly uncovered resources of Persian in the act of modernizing the language, the latter were determined also to limit neologisms to words designed for novel concepts in sciences and medicine, in technological and military fields, as well as words required in the conduct of an expanding state bureaucracy. While vehemently opposing the substitution of new combinations of Persian elements for existing Arabicates such as was being done in neighboring Turkey or in Germany under the national socialist rule, they favored a gradual return in textbooks to words and word com-

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binations originally in use in classical Persian which in recent centuries had fallen out of use. While inside the Farhangestän, the debate between the two factions continued with increasing fervency, eventually entrenching each side deeper in its own position, outside allegiances began to shift in all sorts of directions in response to the outcome of the Farhangestän , s deliberations. In an early and now-famous speech before the assembly, Forughl articulated his position in favor of moderation and gradualism. Calling the Farhangestän one of the most important institutions founded and supported by Reza Shah, he maintains that the essential task entrusted to it was nothing less than "the preservation of the Persian language and Iranian culture and thus the Iranian sense of identity" (Forughl 1974). He concedes that the intermingling of Persian with various Arabic elements has gone too far as the result of a complex of historical and cultural occurrences, but insists that a return to pure Persian — even if that could be defined — is an exercise in impossibility. After a sweeping survey of Persian poetry and prose from the point of view of its impact on the language, Forughl concentrates on contemporary Persian and its shortcomings. He sees no reason, he stresses, why words of Arabic origin, naturalized in Persian through the centuries, should be expelled from it. Such a reckless design would doubtless impoverish the language and weaken the culture enshrined in it. In practical terms, any movement in that direction would isolate the Farhangestän and seal its doom. Returning to the historic task before the assembly, Forughl argues that the Farhangestän must not think it its task to coin certain words and thus become merely a "word-manufacturing factory." Rather, it should initiate research on the ways and means devised by Iranians of diverse walks of life in coming to terms with the flood of new concepts, methods and objects. A major part of the Farhangestän's energy ought to be channeled toward research into the capabilities of Persian, to uncover the rules according to which this language behaves and from there to reach conclusions about its potential for word coinages. At the same time, Forughl tries to respond to the charge, frequently levelled against the Farhangestän, that it is motivated by extralinguistic sentiment, more specifically antireligious feelings. "If we expel European words," he says, "this is in no way based on enmity with Europeans, and if we replace Arabic words we are not at all motivated by animosity toward our religion or the Arab people." He argues that borrowings from Arabic have played a positive role in the enrichment of Iranian

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thought, and cautions the members to avoid undue sensitivity toward these borrowings. He concludes once again by recommending gradualism, moderation and coordination with the popular attitude toward language reform. Language, he observes, belongs to the people and not to any select group, however knowledgeable or powerful; nor can any scholar claim to be in possession of enough answers to as complex a network of interrelated problems as that of language. Throughout its active years (1935-1941), the Farhangestän was being watched closely and criticized vehemently by as diverse an assortment of social forces as Iranian society could muster. The religious leadership, whose opposition to that institution was an integral part of its commitment to resist the combined agenda of the secular intellectual and the modernizing state for social secularization, saw in the efforts of the Farhangestän little more than a plot to sever the linguistic links between Iran and Islam. Forughl, as we have seen, had tried to allay such fears in his speech. Still, many sentiments were being expressed by the secular elite linking Iran's backwardness to its racial impurity, to its religion, and to the part which the clergy had played in keeping people ignorant of — even antagonistic to — modern sciences. The religious leaders of the society, for their part, viewed the Farhangestän as one more effort to sever the masses from their faith. They thus dismissed the entire movement for language reform as a disguise for chauvinistic antagonism directed by the state against Islam. Secondly, many of those who accepted the premises on which the Farhangestän was founded, came to have serious misgivings about the manner in which it was tackling the language problem. By far the most prominent and positive opposition to the Farhangestän''s approach came from Ahmad Kasravi, a solitary but tireless crusader for language purification as part of a comprehensive program for the rational reshaping of Iranian society. A self-taught linguist and specialist of ancient Iranian languages, Kasravi had begun, even before the establishment of the Farhangestän, a series of articles in his journal Payman (1934-1941) simply entitled "The Persian Language" (Kasravi 1934). Dedicated to the Ministry of Education, the articles began with the assertion that the task of language reform should be conducted solely under the supervision of that ministry. Based on the now-widelyaccepted notion that Persian had been corrupted over the centuries, and that the situation demanded immediate attention, Kasravi advocated what he called a "scientific approach" free from all ethnic and

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chauvinistic zeal, to language reform. He had singled out for an early dismissal the notion, advanced by a majority of the purists, that the intermingling of Persian and Arabic had been an inevitable historical result of the introduction of Islam to Iran. Current linguistic usages were impure, in his view, in the same way that contemporary religious practices manifested latter-day deviations from a pure religion. Emphasizing that language is a "scientific subject," Kasravi had set out to show the scientific approach to language reform. At this early stage, at least, Kasravi's view of language reform consisted basically of a gradual movement toward the purity of the Persian language in its classical usage. At the outset, he argued, several steps could be taken to facilitate the process of return to classical Persian. First, those Arabicates that had replaced pure Persian words now out of use should be allowed to stand in the Persian lexicon. Secondly, defining semantic ambiguity as a fundamental element of impurity, he advocated the assignment of exact meanings, close to the original sense of the word, to those words which had lost their original sense. His ideal of a pure lexicon, Kasravi argued on many occasions, was one in which every word should convey a clearly definable denotation and no more than one universally agreed upon connotation. Thirdly and most significantly, Kasravi devoted much of his own time to finding and recording those half-forgotten Persian affixes which had once had specific functions and generalized them to make new words for hitherto unknown concepts. At this stage in the evolution of his theory of Zabän-e Päk (pure language) (cf. Yazdänian 1978), Kasravi's approach to language purification was based, therefore, almost entirely on tapping the native sources of word-making in Persian. In time, however, Kasravi's linguistic theories became entangled in his notion of overall cultural regeneration as conceived by his rigidly rationalistic frame of mind. The emergence of his notion of regeneration through reform, whether in language or religion or in culture was itself a consequence of his tendency to seek purity in the fountainheads of social and cultural phenomena. In every field his mind habitually pitted current practice, which he viewed as degenerate, deformed and corrupt, against a supposed purity that must have characterized its original manifestation. Current linguistic usages appeared impure to him in the same way that contemporary religious practices were deviant from a sacred manifestation of faith. As a result, even though he had initially emphasized gradualism in linguistic change, in a few years he would move to the introduction of a radically new lexicon used

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in his own writing and understood by none except his close associates and followers. A comparison between his writings in Payman (19341941) with those in Parcham (March — September 1943), a shortlived fortnightly journal devoted to the propagation of Kasravi's later ideas, demonstrates the excess to which his pursuance of the idea of "purism" had succumbed in a few short years. Whereas in the former journal, Kasravi had more or less regularly demonstrated the use to which various Persian affixes can be put in contemporary usage, in the latter he had found himself forced more than once to explain the meanings of the words which by now had become part of his own vocabulary. In his dealings with the Farhangestän, too, Kasravi had moved from criticizing the institutionalization of language reform to accusing the members of not instituting a radical enough change in remedying the many deficiencies of Persian. Others criticized the Farhangestän for attempting to induce such changes in the language as would ultimately sever Persian from its classical heritage. In a rare instance of complete cultural turnabout, Hasan Taqlzädeh, who in his youth had advocated a total Westernization of Iran, including the adoption of the Latin alphabet for Persian, in the years following the Farhangestän's activities expressed the fear that that body's intervention in the texture of the language might affect the continuity of Persian and result in a break with the past. In a seminal essay written in 1948, he poked fun at the efforts of the Turkish government under Ataturk to purge Turkish from Persian and Arabic words, and sarcastically suggested that perhaps Iranians, too, should purge their language of all the elements borrowed through the millennia, from Indian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Armenian, Greek, Arabic, and Turkic, and reinstitute the pure language of the earliest Aryan tribes that set foot on the Iranian plateau. He concluded his essay, entitled "The Necessity of the Preservation of the Eloquent Persian Language" by admonishing his fellow Iranians to steer free from what he called "the new shu'ubl tendencies" which aim to negate Iran's Islamic heritage and glorify the pre-Islamic civilization of the country. Others, from creative writers like Sädeq Hedäyat to scholar-educators such as Abbäs Eqbäl Ashtiyäni, levelled various criticisms at the work of the Farhangestän. The common denominator in all these criticisms revolved around the common perception that the Farhangestän had indeed, as Forughl had feared, become a "word-making factory." And it is true that that body failed to carry out any significant research

Language reform movement and its language: the case of Persian 101 either in the history of the Persian language or in the present state of the living language of the people. Nevertheless, the outcome of the Farhangestärfs activities in the area of neologisms, collected in a book entitled Väjehhä-ye Now (New Words) (Farhangestän-e Iran 1940), shows a remarkable degree of moderation in an intellectual climate charged with puristic sentiments. Of about three thousand words, coined or accepted by the body and assembled in this book, over half are Persian equivalents for French words that had gradually found their way into such areas of Iranian public life as economics, banking or trade. The fact that the Farhangestän seems to have confined its activities to specialized areas of the Civil Administration, the Army and diverse scientific terminologies such as medicine, physics, geology, mathematics and natural sciences, thus by and large refraining from any notable interference with the more general areas of discourse, must be attributed not only to such internal moderating influences as that of Forughl, but also to critics like Taqlzädeh and Iqbäl. The Farhangestan's close association with Reza Shah's brand of nationalism and the growing perception of its activities as essentially motivated by chauvinistic zeal makes it extremely difficult to judge its record objectively. Nevertheless, there remains little doubt that its efforts had a perceptible impact on the general course of the evolution of the Persian language. A great majority of its coinages have in time been incorporated in the Persian lexicon, canonized by such influential reference works as Dehkhodä's Loghat Nämeh and Mo'in's Persian Dictionary. The most important achievement of the Farhangestän, however, was the creation of a climate in which every literate Iranian became conscious of his language, and many began actively to offer solutions to the problems facing it. The Farhangestän, in other words, made it possible for a whole generation of scholars to pursue such entangled issues as language reform, language planning and language modernization in the light of the emerging debate on linguistic and social implications of the concept of purism. Thus, although in the volatile political atmosphere of Iranian society in the aftermath of World War II, the institutional approach to the language problem was virtually abandoned, many individual scholars and linguists contributed to the debate in their writings. Meanwhile, modern Persian literature, fast coming of age in the post-war period, had its own unique impact on the language. In the works of such poets and writers as Nlmä, Shämlu, Akhavän, Äl-e Ahmad, Behazln and Chubak, the language of the intellectual elite

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and the language of the man in the street were being made to coexist within a structure that because of its very nature, strives for coherence and unity. Scientific and literary translators also had to find ways of expanding the resources of Persian to enable it to contain the consequences of a greatly heightened contact with Western cultures. When we attempt to bring together such diverse strands and generalize on their total effect on linguistic change, a very complex picture emerges of a culture not so much bound by purist concerns but a struggle to use what resources its language can muster to ensure its survival. And a movement from purist concerns for their own sake toward a struggle to equip Persian with an expressive power sufficient for communication in the modern world has been the basis of all individual efforts of creative writers, linguists and translators of the present generation in Iran. As a result, the language debate has grown in sophistication, transcending all purist concerns of a generation ago, while at the same time committed to the utilization of all native linguistic resources. The clearest evidence of this maturing process can be seen in the near total failure of a second attempt at the institutional approach to language reform. Almost three decades after the activities of the Farhangestän, the consolidation of political power allowed Mohammad Reza Shah to resume many of the ideas initiated but left inconclusive by his father. In 1970 a royal decreee was issued, commissioning the establishment of a "Royal Foundation of Iranian Academies" with the objective of "expanding the Farhangestän founded during the reign of our illustrious father His Majesty Reza Shah the Great" (cf. Bonyäd-e 1972). On that basis, the Iranian Academy of Language, known as the second Farhangestän, was established, declaring it its aim to "maintain the beautiful and powerful Persian language in its perennial high position, ready to fulfil all the diverse and ever-increasing cultural, scientific and technical needs of the country" and to "conduct research in all the Iranian languages and dialects, whether living or ancient, particularly in the service of enhancing acquaintance with, and advancement of, the Persian language." When we compare this inflated language with the meager accomplishments of the second Farhangestän, a picture emerges of the glittering emptiness which characterizes many of the social and cultural institutions of the final decade of the late Shah's rule. To conclude, as a result of over a century of individual and institutional efforts at language reform, Persian has once again occupied its

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original status as the most enduring component of Iranian cultural identity. The psychic resistance to linguistic change has been overcome, and purism had found its place as a tendency to utilize the native resources of the language in an effort to make it expressive of the concepts that are inevitable to contemporary life. Beyond that, the rhetoric of linguistic change has been made compatible with linguistic demands rather than as symbolic expressions of extralinguistic concerns.

Notes 1. A translation of this writing appears in Hamid Algar's biography of Malkom (1973). Cf. Appendix B, pp. 278-99. 2. The Loghat Nämeh also contains several surveys of the history and achievements of the Farhangestän. Cf. The Loghat Nämeh, Vol. 1, Moghaddemeh [Preface] especially pp. 97-103 and 104-109.

References Algar, Hamid 1973 Mirza Malkum Khan. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Äryanpur, Yahyä 1972 Az Saba täNlmü [From Saba to Nima]. Tehran: Ketäbha-ye JTbl Inc. Bahär, Mohammad-TaqI 1958 Sabk-Shenasi [Stylistics]. Tehran: Amir Kabir. Baläy, Christopher and Michel Cuypers 1983 Aux Sources de la Nouvelle Persane. Paris: Institut Frangais d'lranologie. Bonyäd-e Shähanshähl-ye Farhangestänhä-ye Iran 1972 Farhangestän-e ZabSn-e Iran [Iran's Language Academy], Tehran: Bonyäd-e Shähanshähl-ye Farhangestänhä-ye Iran. Dehkhodä, AlT-Akbar 1958 Charand Par and. Tehran: Känun-e Ma'refat. Third printing. Dehkhodä, AlT-Akbar 1946Loghat Nämeh [A Persian Encyclopaedia]. Tehran: Majlis Press. Farhangestän-e Iran 1940 Vafehha-ye Now [New words]. Tehran: Dablr-khaneh-ye Farhangestän. Forughf, Mohammad-All 1974 "Payäm-e Man beh Farhangestän" [My Message to the Farhangestän]. Pp. 101-169 in Maqälät-e ForughJ [Forughl's Essays]. Volume 1. Tehran: Yaghmä.

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Jamälzädeh, Mohammad-All 1965 Yekl Bud-o Yekl Nabud [Once Upon a Time]. Tehran: Känun-e Ma'refat. 7th edition. Kasravi, Ahmad 1934 "Zaban-e Far si [The Persian language]." Paymän 1 (13):49-55. Marägheh-I, Zayn al-abedln 1974 Slähatriämeh-ye Ebrahlm Bayg [Ebrahim Bayg's Travel Diary]. Edited by Bäqer Mo'menl. Tehran: Andlsheh Press. Meskub, Shährokh nd MellJyyat va Zabän [Nationality and language] Mo'in, Mohammad 1977 Farhang-e FärsJ [A Persian Dictionary]. Tehran: Amir Kabir. 6 volumes. Perry, John R. 1985 "Language Reform in Turkey and Iran." International Journal of Middle East Studies 17:295-311. Ricks, Thomas M. (ed.) 1984 Critical Perspectives on Modern Persian Literature. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press. Savory, Roger 1980 Iran under the Safavids. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schlegel, A.W. 1832 Reflexions sur I 'Etude des Langues Asiatique. Paris: Ν. Maze. Taqlzädeh, Hasan 1948 "Lozum-e Hefz-e Färsi-ye Fasih" [The necessity of the preservation of the eloquent Persian language]. Yädegär 6 (Feb-Mar):19. Yazdänian, Hosayn (ed.) 1978 Neveshtehhä-ye Kasravi dar Zamlneh-ye Zaban-e FürsT [Kasravi's writings concerning the Persian language]. Tehran: Sepehr.

Purism and correctness in the Bengali speech community

Monsur Musa

1. Purism Speakers of certain languages may consider their languages to be of divine origin, to be specific gifts of supernatural power to facilitate communication with the fellow members of their communities. For example, the people of ancient India used to believe that the goddess of speech or Sarwasati came out of the mouth of Paramatma, Supreme soul. She controls human language power. She has been consistently adored by poets at the very beginning of their poems all through pre-modern times. It became a convention to employ pleasing words to make adoration effective. Two great Indian poets, Valmiki and Kalidas, are often cited as examples of fortunate poets whose adoration became successful. It was told that they became great because of her blessings. During the middle ages, many poets seemed to believe that poetic excellence was a direct blessing from the goddess. Thus, when a poet composed his poem, he seemed to have thought that he was possessed or blessed by Sarwasati. Perhaps, in this way, words became supernatural gifts and the capacity to play with words became a rare gift of god. It is conceivable, therefore, that purism would be attached to language by virtue of holiness.

All languages are not pure All languages are not equally pure. In the Bengali speech community, some people consider Sanskrit to be Devabhasha or the language of gods, while others consider Arabic, the language of the Qu'ran, to be the heavenly language. Yet, the Bengali speech community is not bilingual in Arabic or Sanskrit. The individual's problem is solved because Muslims of Bengal believe that every Muslim will speak

106 MonsurMusa Arabic after death. God would make them competent in spoken Arabic. Thus, they would not face any problem with the lingua franca of Paradise. Bengali, the spoken language of Bengali Muslims, is not considered to be a pure language. It is generally held that it is a mixed language, a sonker bhasha. How can a mixed thing be pure?

Apology for impurity Many Bengali poets who wrote long narrative poetry from the beginning of the advent of Muslim rule (1201 AD) down to the eighteenth century apologetically explained time and again in their compositions the reasons for selecting a deshi bhasha or vernacular (i.e., Bengali) for their poetry, Kabya. They expressed the view that the majority of the people of their community could not understand the high languages, so they had chosen the language of the people. They explained that the god, Allah, would forgive them, because they were circulating god's messages to ignorant people. The last great medieval poet, Bharat Chandra (1712-1760), who had doubtful faith in gods, said, It will neither be elegant nor aesthetically permissible, Therefore, I speak (write) in foreign-mixed language. "Foreign-mixed language" means that variety of Bengali which is characterized by a high frequency of Perso-Arabic elements. It should be mentioned that the Sanskrit Pundits had negative attitudes to vernaculars, because these were deviant from Sanskrit. Bengali borrows words from Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and English. Nevertheless, borrowing has always been resisted in literary writings. Disproportionate borrowing has always been negatively marked on aesthetic grounds. Long before Bharat Chandra, the poet Shah Mohammad Sagir (1389-1410) frankly stated that he was very hesitant initially to render Arabic words into Bengali, for fear of pollution. But later on, he decided that languages would not matter if the Truth were there. Therefore, the first Muslim poet wrote his narrative poetry in Bengali (Huq 1957:59). Another fifteenth century poet, Muzammel, said that the people could not understand Arabic, so he decided that he should write in the vernacular. Similar explanations were to be found among different poets of the Medieval period.

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Locative purism It is commonly believed that the Bengali language spoken in Nodiya, an old capital of Bengal where the Vaisnava Cult was developed during the sixteenth century, is more pure than Bengali spoken in other parts of Bengal. Nodiya was a renowned seat of learning of Sanskrit at the time of the consolidation of Muslim rule. The great Chaitannya Dev (1486-1534), who reinforced the Bhakti Cult in Eastern India, lived in Nodiya. His followers used to consider him as the latest incarnation (avatar) of Lord Krisna. All his activities were explained in terms of his superhuman qualities. He gave up his Sanskrit learning in favor of Bhakti and closed down his school to propagate the Cult. Chaitannya Dev was reported to be travelling all over Eastern Bengal at the very beginning of his new career as an incarnated person. When he had finished his year-long tour, he could imitate the dialects of East Bengal. He was reported to have joked about the pronunciation of Eastern dialect speakers. His followers and biographers marked the dialects of East Bengal negatively. Most probably this negative marking had a tremendous effect in selecting the standardized prose style in the 20th century which became the normative variety for elegant spoken Bengali. Mir Musharraf Hossain, a nineteenth century novelist born in East Bengal, went to Nodiya. He accepted the negative marking by Chaitannya as true and agreed that the Nodiya dialect was a pure Bengali dialect. The superiority of the Nodiya dialect had been argued by Promatho Chowdhury while he was selecting a prestige dialect to be the standard spoken and literary dialect of Bengali. This prestige variety, chalito bhasha, introduced by Chowdhury (1868-1946) and Tagore (1861-1941) is said to be based on the dialect of Nodiya, Shantipur, and nearby places. Many Bangladeshi educated people still believe that the dialect of Nodiya is the pure Bengali language. This attitude came to be related more to correctness than to purism, but it is still associated with religion.

Purism attached to exogenism A sense of purism is very high among the Muslims of Bengal regarding Arabic. Being a religious language, Arabic is considered as the sacred language in which Allah spoke His words through Muhammad. This sentiment is so strong that one is not allowed to read or write without

108 MonsurMusa washing one's hands and face with clean water. If a Muslim of Bengal finds a piece of paper written in Arabic script, he should immediately take it, touch the paper to forehead and chest and keep it in a proper place, or burn it, or throw it into the water. Many people are not aware of the difference between a paper written in Arabic, Persian, or Urdu and consider it all Arabic, and therefore sacred. It is a joking matter that these people show respect to Urdu or Persian pornographic writings or cinema advertisements because they do not understand the content. There is a folk belief that since the Qu'ran is a holy book it is never burnt in a fire accident, it just flies away and remains intact. Arabic is an exogenous language in Bengal.

Purism attached to the script Many Hindus believe that the Devanagari script in which Sanskrit is written is more sacred than the Bengali script. It should be noted that although there is a general attitude of respect for printed documents, more so than for written ones, sometimes old written material is venerated as more sacred than contemporary written document. This is particularly observable in the language used in Bengal witchcraft. The Sorcerer in Bengal traditionally uses Sanskrit or Arabic as the medium of witchcraft. Hindu Baidyas write Tabis, Maduli, or Montro in Sanskrit, i.e., in Devanagari script. Muslim Baidyas or Mollahs ordinarily use Arabic script in their Tabis or in Maduli. Belief in witchcraft is still very strong in rural Bangladesh (cf. Blanchet 1984) The sense of Purity and pollution is generally very strong in most of Bengal society. The languages and scripts that are used as controlling mechanisms for Bhut, or spirit, are generally held to be the languages of supernatural power.

Purism and ritual language of religious agents Brahmins in the Hindu community and Mollahs in the Muslim community have traditionally been considered as the agents of all the religious rites, rituals and ceremonies that are observable throughout the year. Rules regarding the religious performances are particularly controlled by these two sections of the two communities. These rules and their interpretations are laid down in Sanskrit or in Arabic, as

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the case may be. It is generally held that the Brahmins and the Mollahs derive their authentication from these two ecclesiastical languages. Bengali is not commonly used at the core of the religious rituals. It should however be noted that the speakers of Bengali observe a unique but secular ritual called The Ekushe, a memorial observance of the martyrs of 21 February, 1952, authenticating Bengali identity through a celebration of the Bengali language. The core language of this ritual is of course Bengali (Musa 1985).

2. Correctness Correctness seems to be a normative demand by its users on the appropriate performance of features of a language. Any deviation from the norm that is applied is ordinarily considered to be inadequate. Bengali has a history of over a thousand years as a literary language. All pre-modern literature was expressed in the form of poetry. Poetry normally enjoys great freedom in employing various speech forms to fulfill its aesthetic and mnemonic necessities. It was, therefore, very difficult for grammarians to establish normative linguistic rules for the pre-modern poetic Bengali language. It appears that they tried to prescribe a number of optional rules to explain variability in usage. It is also not known if there was any concern at all during the earlier period to assert a single normative rule for the language use. Concern for a single preferred form came about during the transition period in Bengali literary history, i.e., at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Fort William College was established by the British East India Company in 1801 to facilitate training for the young Civilian. It was in that College that Bengali became an object of inquiry and a subject of learning for the English administrators. In order to learn Bengali, the students were thought to need grammar and rules for learning the language. William Carey (1761-1834), the celebrated professor of the College, wrote grammars for Indian languages. He started writing a grammar for Bengali following the model of Persian and Latin grammars. Although the grammaticization of Bengali had begun a few decades earlier, it was Carey who was instrumental in popularizing grammatical studies in modern India. Before Carey, Nathanial Brassey Halhed and before Halhed, Assumpcao were the persons to be men-

110 MonsurMusa tioned as the contributors to the grammaticization of Bengali. In a recent study, Qayyum (1982) presented textual evidence of the crisis faced by Halhed and Carey in preparing the Bengali grammar.

Transformation of purism into the grammaticization of Bengali The first Englishman to write a Bengali grammar for his fellow countrymen residing in Bengal was Nathanial Brassey Halhed. As there were no literary prose specimens for him to extract rules from and there was no tradition of Bengali grammar-writing, Halhed had to face the serious problem of selecting the standard norm for Bengali. He had engaged two tutors to assist him in learning Bengali and in developing a Bengali grammar. One of his tutors was a Sanskrit Pundit, a proud Brahmin who believed in the purity of Sanskrit. He seemed to have persuaded Halhed to make use of an increasingly greater number of Sanskrit words in order to master pure Bengali. Halhed had another tutor, an East Bengali Munshi, supposedly conversant in Persian and Arabic languages. The Munshi insisted that Halhed employ a greater number of Perso-Arabic words in Bengali. It .is not unlikely that one tutor rejected the Bengali taught by the other tutor. Halhed must have had serious problems in determining which Bengali to select as the purer form. An inquisitive researcher found out that the Sanskrit Pundit had been able to exert influence on Halhed and that as a result the East Bengali Munshi had lost his job. It was a victory of Sanskrit purism over Perso-Arabic pursim.

Puristic compromise by a correction rule in word selection Nowadays, the use of Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic words is still a matter of considerable debate, but the debate does not center on the question of purism. Rather, excessive use of words from a single source is rejected on grounds of intelligibility. There is a simple unstated rule in selecting words from the competing Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic sources. The rule goes like this: if one selects a Perso-Arabic word in an expression, follow or complete it with another Perso-Arabic word, and again if one selects a Sanskrit word in an expression, follow or complete it with another Sanskrit word. For example, Allah take beheste noshib korun is acceptable and Iswar

Purism and correctness in the Bengali speech community 111 tar- monggol korun, tini swarge jawun (Let God take him to heaven)

is correct. The sequence of words in the former sentence is acceptable because beheste is followed by noshib. The selection of words in the latter sentence is also congruent by source. However, although beheste jawun may be acceptable, swarge noshib will be categorically rejected.

A correction rule regarding style Although there were two styles in Bengali prose, i.e., literary not spoken and literary spoken, from the very beginning of the nineteenth century, there existed no correction rule concerning the interpolation of stylistic features of one into the other style. In the 1930s, Calcutta University had ruled that students should not mix the styles in question papers. They could choose any style they preferred but mixing would be considered a mistake and points would be deducted from their scores. Now it became a well-established rule that one should either write in Shadu bhasha or Chalito bhasha. Let us exemplify this. In pre-modern poetry and prose written before the twentieth century it was admissible to use tar and tahar 'his', kore and koria 'doing', in the same sentence. But now one is supposed to write tar and kore in one style and tahar and koria in another style. Both the styles would be acceptable as correct but mixing of tar and koria and tahar and kore would be considered incorrect. There was once no obligatory rule to maintain a correlation between short and long forms, but it then became obligatory to maintain a clear distinction. It has been considered correct for long forms to cooccur and short forms to cooccur but any mixing of short and long is not permissible.

Puristic success by correction in spelling During the early 19th century, there was a widespread belief among the educated elite that knowledge of Sanskrit is essential for writing pure (and thus correct) Bengali. Optionality in the Middle Bengali spelling system was denounced as incorrect, and some obligatory rules regarding the use of NO ( J ) SHO ( ) were applauded. The rules of nottwo bidhan and showatto

bidhan, i.e., the rules regarding

the precedence of retroflex η and sh before a retroflex letter, were

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introduced into Bengali from Sanskrit. The rule is now an obligatory one and every school and college student must learn it. There are some secular and linguistic arguments justifying the rule, but the introduction of these "bidhans" or rules was the result of puristic reformism by Sanskrit pundits at the time of formation of written norms for Bengali, in the early modern period.

Contemporary ambiguity of the terms for purism and language correctness The words that carry the meaning of purism in Bengali are bishoddo, suddho, khanti, nirbhul, and pobitro. Except the last one, all the terms have the meaning of both pure and correct. The last word is rarely used. Its meaning is holy or holiness. Therefore, the meanings of purism and correctness are context-bound in Bengali. In contextfree situations, such as mere enumeration of words, the words mean both pure and correct.

References Blanchet, Therese 1984

Meanings and Rituals of Birth in Rural Bangladesh. Dacca: University Press. Huq, Enamul 1957 Muslim Bangla Shahitya (Muslim Bengali Literature) Dacca: Pakistan Publications. Musa, Monsur 1985 The Ekushe: a ritual of language and liberty. Language Problems and Language Planning 9:3:200-14. Qayyum, M.A. 1982 A Critical Study of the Early Bengali Grammars. Dacca: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.

Language purism in Korea today

Nahm-Sheik

Park

Introduction In this paper, we will discuss Korea's experience with language purism, especially as it relates to written or literary Korean. Since the advent of language purism in Korea more or less coincides with the beginning of her modernization, we will be talking mostly about twentieth century Korea. Although we will have occasion to refer to North Korea, our discussion will relate exclusively to South Korea unless otherwise indicated. This limitation is due largely to the limited nature of our access to data relating to North Korea. We will begin our discussion with a look at the sociopolitical context that has helped foster language purism in Korea today. Here we will consider some of the major participants in the Korean language purification movement with specific reference to their roles in the advancement of Korean language purism. We will then consider the rhetoric that Korea's language purists have used in justifying their cause. That is, we will here concern ourselves with the rationales that Korea's purists have resorted to in their advocacy of a purer Korean language. Following this discussion of the rhetoric of language purism in Korea, we will dwell at some length on such domains of language as are affected by purification. As we shall see, all domains of language are subject to puristic scrutiny although certain domains are more or less so than others. In the next section, we will deal with aspects of the implementation phase of the language purification movement in Korea. Here we will talk specifically about the strategies frequently employed in Korea for language purification and the outcomes that these strategies and other variables have led to. The final section of this paper is in the nature of a critique of language purism, as it is currently practiced in Korea. This section will be followed by a short annotated bibliography on language purism

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in Korea, which can serve as a guide to further reading for outsiders with an interest in Korea's language purification movement.

1. Sociopolitical context The recent history of Korea appears to throw considerable light on the advent of language purism in present-day Korea. This section will deal with some major factors in the recent history of Korea that have combined to produce a sociopolitical context that is conducive to the birth and growth of the language purification movement in Korea.

1.1 Waning of Chinese influence As is well known, Korea had long been in the shadow of China until rather recently. This Chinese influence in Korea, which was especially pervasive during the Yi Dynasty (1392-1910), suddenly began to wane around the turn of the century, more or less simultaneously with the Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). With the Chinese shadow so omnipresent for much of her history, the bulk of Korea's traditional literature was rendered and preserved in classical Chinese. So were virtually all major publications and documents, both private and public. Furthermore, all government examinations, including the higher civil and military service examinations, were essentially examinations of competence in classical literary Chinese. This dominance of classical Chinese in Korea continued century after century right down to the fall of the Yi Dynasty in 1910. Thus Chinese characters, as used in classical literary Chinese, had long been the only important medium of writing in Korea. Under these circumstances, the Korean alphabet Hangul, invented in the fifteenth century as a substitute for the difficult Chinese characters, was relegated to the harem section of Korean society. Suffice it to say here that Yi Dynasty Koreans had to acquire an excellent command of classical literary Chinese if they aspired to achieve anything of significance. Given this historical context, the waning of Chinese influence in Korea is of immense interest to students of language purism in Korea.

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For the first time in centuries, Koreans were able to enjoy a fair measure of liberation from the yoke of classical literary Chinese. They finally found themselves in a position where they could win literary independence from China, so to speak, by moving away from classical Chinese toward Korea's native linguistic resources, including Hangul. It is to be understood in this light that the Korean Language Research Institute was established in 1907 by the Yi Dynasty under its Ministry of Education. This Institute had as its mandate the study of Korean orthography, word-formation, and syntax for educational usage.

1.2 Japanese colonial rule Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945) figures as a major factor in any discussion of language purism in Korea today. With her annexation of Korea in 1910, Japan effectively established hereself, and thus replaced China, as the ultimate arbiter of all important affairs affecting Korea. In the first years of her rule in Korea, Japan allowed the use of Korean as a medium of instruction in the Korean school system. In a Copernican turn from this policy, however, the Japanese colonial authorities soon banned Korean not just as a medium of education but also as one of official communication. The Japanese Colonial Government evidently pursued this policy of Korean-language annihilation as part of its scheme to assimilate and absorb Korea into the Japanese Empire. This policy backfired, however, as it only served to intensify Korea's hostility toward Japan and awaken the Korean people to the grave danger of extinction that faced their language. It was under these conditions that many members of the Korean Language Society were imprisoned in the 1930s and 1940s for their activities related to the purification and preservation of the Korean language. The Society declared its celebrated principles of "Unified Korean Orthography" and "Standard Korean" in 1933 and 1936 respectively, in the midst of Japanese attempts to eradicate the Korean language. Japanese colonial rule also bears on language purism in Korea in a more straightforward way. Naturally enough, Japanese words came flooding into Korean during the thirty-six years of Japanese rule in

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Korea. This wholesale influx of Japanese words into Korean was then and is still regarded as a serious threat to the purity and integrity of the Korean language.

1.3 Birth of an independent and democratic Korea Korea's liberation from Japan in 1945 is of direct relevance to the growth and development of language purism in Korea. So is the birth of a democratic Korea in 1948. The birth of an independent Korea provided a perfect sociopolitical climate for the development of Korean as a national language. In fact, the immediate post-liberation years saw Koreans in many walks of life clamoring for a unique national language that is completely independent of foreign elements such as Chinese characters and Japanese loans. The subsequent birth of a democratic Korea made a universal elementary education an urgent necessity almost overnight. All Koreans somehow had to be made literate in a hurry if they were to function adequately as citizens of a new-born democracy. This situation called for a writing system that was far less difficult than Chinese characters. This gave a tremendous impetus to the already existing demand from some purist quarters for the ouster of Chinese characters in favor of the exclusive use of Hangul. For Korea's very own alphabet Hangul, which had hitherto been languishing in the shadow of Chinese characters, was precisely the kind of writing system the country needed. The democratization of Korea has also necessitated the democratization of its language. It is in this context that the Korean Government has recently been trying to rid its documents of turns of expression that are either not egalitarian in tone or not readily comprehensible to the average citizen.

1.4 Enhanced mobility With the recent development of transportation and communication in Korea, contact between different parts or segments of Korean society has been rapidly increasing. This has led to an unprecedented intermingling of the country's diverse dialects, which in turn has

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resulted in a serious dialectal contamination of standard Korean. Claiming that serious damage has already been done, many Korean intellectuals are urging that this situation be immediately rectified.

1.5 Expanding international relations Korea's ever expanding international relations also deserve mention in connection with our discussion here. With her very survival as a nation hinging on friendly and cooperative relations with other countries, Korea has been expanding and diversifying her international relations over the last forty years or so. This expansion of Korea's foreign relations has inevitably brought into the Korean language large numbers of foreign/loan words. This large-scale "intrusion" of words from other languages is regarded with alarm by many purists as posing a threat to the purity and security of the Korean language.

1.6 National division The division of the Korean peninsula into North and South Korea since 1945 has led to a bifurcation of the Korean language. The two Koreas now have two separate standard "languages," which are mutually intelligible and yet differ quite noticeably in lexicon. The two Koreas also have two different writing systems with the North using Hangul only and the South a combination of Hangul and Chinese characters. Should the country be reunified, the two standard languages with the two different writing systems must be reconciled in one way or another. This reconciliation will almost certainly involve a process of language standardization and purification. Some Korean linguists are already beginning to suggest that this process can and should get under way now in preparation for eventual national reunification.

1.7 Vacillation in language policy The Korean Government has shifted from one writing-medium policy to another. At one time, the Government leaned quite heavily toward the exclusive use of Hangul. After years of this policy, the Government

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suddenly changed course and opted for a combination of Hangul and Chinese characters. It then reverted to the Hangul-only policy only to shift back to the combination policy a few years later. This policy vacillation has given rise to a state of flux and confusion on the Korean educational scene for quite some time. As a result, those who started to school after 1945 generally experience varying degrees of difficulty with Chinese characters, for example, when they read daily newspapers. Thus should this policy vacillation continue, consumer-sensitive purification (see 5.2.2) may eventually force Chinese characters out of use.

2. Major participants The Korean language purification movement has had many active participants, individual or otherwise. In this section, we will take a look at these participants with specific reference to the roles they have played in the movement.

2.1 Individual scholars and educators We will discuss here three of the most outstanding individual advocates of language purism in modern Korea: Chu Si-Gyung, Choi HyunBai, and Huh Woong. 2.1.1 Chu Si-Gyung Perhaps Chu (1876-1914) was the first major Korean linguist to call on the nation to join in the purification of the Korean language. He devoted his life to the study, teaching, and popularization of a pure and authentic Korean language. He did this at a time when all Korean society regarded classical literary Chinese as the only respectable repository of writing and scholarship. Chu demonstrated the superiority of Korea's native linguistic resources, including Hangul, through his publications on the orthography, pronunciation, and grammar of the Korean language. He also wrote for the Korean Independence Daily four editorials, all in 1897,

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appealing to the nation at large for the adoption of Hangul as the sole legitimate medium of writing in Korea. 2.1.2 ChoiHyun-Bai One of Chu's students, Choi (1984-1970) also devoted much of his life to the advocacy of a pure and authentic Korean language. Like Chu, Choi also argued that a pure and authentic Korean language was predicated, among other things, on the use of Hangul as the only medium of writing in Korea. He also preached that a pure Korean language should be completely clear of all foreign matter, especially Japanese and Sino-Korean words. He preached that the Korean language would be restored to its original purity and integrity if all foreign elements in it were replaced by their pure Korean equivalents. Choi may very well be the fountainhead of the fundamentalist purist camp in Korea that to this day demands that all foreign elements be weeded out in the name of a purer Korean language. 2.1.3 HuhWoong One of Choi's students, Huh (1919-) is the torchbearer of fundamentalist purism in Korea today. As president of the Hangul Society, he spearheads the purist movement for the adoption of Hangul as the sole legitimate medium of writing in Korea. Also a prolific contributor to journals, magazines, and newspapers, he employs all his writings as a vehicle for his gospel of Korean language purism. 2.1.4 Other educators Countless other scholars and educators have joined in as individual crusaders for the purist cause. Of these other individual crusaders, those teaching at elementary and secondary schools have often set inspiring examples for other purist individuals and groups. According to the Society for Korean Language Education, some eighty-five (micro-)purification projects have been carried out at elementary and secondary schools throughout Korea over a fifteenyear period, that is, from 1960 to 1975. The titles of these projects include: (1) Language Purification through the Teaching of Writing, (2) Purification of Student Slang and Jargon, and (3) Eradication of Foreign and Loan Words.

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2.2 Learned societies A fair number of learned societies have taken part in the Korean language purification movement. We will talk about some of these societies below with specific reference to their puristic activities. 2.2.1 Hangul Society The most assertive purist group in Korea today is the Hangul Society, whose purist activities have been directed or coordinated by Choi and Huh (see 2.1). Predictably enough, the Society's language purification movement agrees with the two scholars' individual crusades for purism on all points of substance. Thus the Society attaches utmost importance to its crusade for Hangul as the sole official medium of writing in Korea. It also stresses the eradication of foreign/loan elements as a means of purifying the Korean language. In order to promote the cause of Korean language purism, the Hangul Society periodically sponsors workshops for Korean-language teachers, seminars on Korean linguistics, and Hangul writing contests for students. Besides publishing a newsletter loaded with purism-related information, it also maintains an active lobby for Korean language purification. 2.2.2 Society for Korean Language Education Compared to the Hangul Society, the Society for Korean Language Education is a rather conservative purist group. Unlike the Hangul Society, this Society does not call for an outright ban on either Chinese characters or Sino-Korean words. The Society for Korean Language Education directs most of its purification efforts at the removal from standard Korean of such impurities as foreignisms, dialectalisms, and indecent language like cheap slang. It also attempts to restore purity and decency to the Korean language by doing repairs to its honorific system, which it claims is rapidly falling apart. 2.2.3 Other learned societies Of the other linguistic and literary societies involved in Korean language purification, the following may be noted as worthy of mention here:

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(2) the Korean Language and Lierature Society, (3) the Linguistic Society of Korea, (4) the Society of Korean Literary Writers, (5) the Society of Korean Radio and Television Authors, (6) the Society for the Teaching of Korean Language and Literature, and (7) the Korean Society for Research in Language and Literature. These societies, taken individually, are not quite as formidable as the Hangul Society or the Society for Korean Language Education. They could collectively act as a powerful pressure group, however, as they did when they pressured the Government into establishing the Korean Language Research Institute in 1984.

2.3 Mass media establishment With its heavy reliance on language, the Korean mass media establishment, understandably enough, is actively involved in the language purification movement. We will here discuss some of the more important language purification activities undertaken by the various branches of the Korean mass media. 2.3.1 Newspapers and magazines Newspapers and magazines often feature articles on language purification. The Hankuk Ilbo Daily, for one, carried in 1984 a long series of articles designed to help purify the language of etiquette. It also occasionally carries articles calling for the eradication of indecent language, dialectalisms, and foreignisms. Newspaper copy editors also participate in deliberations on matters pertaining to language purism in the areas of orthography, Koreanization of foreign words, and Romanization of Korean words. 2.3.3 Radio and television The Korean Broadcasting System airs three language purification programs. Comprised of a daily one-minute prime-time television program, a weekly thirty-minute television program, and a daily threeminute radio program, they deal mostly with matters of usage and style using examples from novels, poems, and other literary pieces. In addition to these broadcast programs, the Korean Broadcasting System also conducts through its Korean Language Purification Com-

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mittee an in-house purification program for its employees, mostly its announcers, reporters, and scriptwriters. Although in-house, this program has national consequences, as the results thereof are reflected in all of the System's programming. The Korean Broadcasting System also conducts occasional purification workshops in the major Korean cities, mostly for elementary and secondary school teachers. In June, 1985, the Korean Broadcasting System staged a novel campaign for the purification of the language of pop songs. Based on an error analysis of some Korean pop songs, the campaign took the form of a workshop for pop artists. The organizers of this campaign felt that language errors in pop songs are highly contagious and thus need to be rooted out.

2.4 Government-related organizations The Korean Government is also an active participant in purification movement with the Ministry of Education center. The Ministry coordinates Government-initiated programs with assistance and cooperation from various agencies and national academies/institutes.

the language as its nerve purification Government

2.4.1. Government Agencies The various agencies of the Government submit to the Ministry of Education lists of words that they have targeted for purification. The Korean Language Screening Committee at the Ministry then deliberates and passes judgment on these lists, the results of which are sent back to the respective agencies in the form of recommendations on how each item on the lists is to be purified (see 5.1.1 below). 2.4.2 Academies and institutes The Ministry of Education often turns to national academies and institutes for expertise on matteis pertaining to purification. Of these, the following three are under the direct jurisdiction of the Ministry: (1) the Korean Academy of Sciences, (2) the Academy of Korean Studies, and (3) the Korean Language Research Institute. Often on their own initiative and sometimes at the request of the Ministry, these academies and institutes conduct research and hold

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public hearings on matters relating to language purification. Among the themes they treat most frequently are (1) Koreanization, (2) Romanization, (3) orthography, (4) the Korean alphabet Hangul vs. Chinese characters, and (5) foreignisms and language purism.

3. Target domains of language In this section, we will concern ourselves with such domains of language as are affected by language purism. They are the domains of use, structure, medium, skill, and formality. 3.1 Domains of use Here we will discuss different functional categories of language use that are subject to purification. 3.1.1 Language of government Government documents have long been under critical examination for purification purposes. Purists have often demanded that the following impurities be expunged from government documents: (1) difficult Chinese characters and Sino-Korean expressions, (2) other foreign elements, especially those of Japanese origin, and (3) authoritarian turns of expression. 3.1.2 Language of education The language of education, as used in textbooks, is perhaps the most thoroughly purified language in Korea today. Purified in the name of universal literacy and education, textbooks steer clear of such impurities as foreignisms and dialectalism. They also use only a bare minimum of Chinese characters, which are always parenthesized following their Hangul renderings. 3.1.3 Language of the mass media The language of the mass media also tends to be highly purified. Impure elements almost always get blue-penciled in accordance with the

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purification guidelines recommended by the Government, learned societies, and in-house purification committees. Evidently to better accommodate their readers, many magazines now ask their contributors to minimize Chinese characters and other foreignisms. 3.1.4 Language of literature The language of literature is also subject to similar purification. Works of literature tend to be clear of Chinese characters. Novels and plays avoid Chinese characters almost completely while poems and essays do sometimes use them moderately. This may be because the readers of poems and essays tend to be more exclusive and erudite (and thus better versed in Chinese characters) than those of novels and plays. 3.1.5 Language of learning The language of scholarship, science, and technology is also frequently targeted for purification. There is currently in every field of specialization a call for terminological purification through removal of nonKorean terms, especially those of Japanese origin. For example, there is a fairly persistent demand in Korea today for purification of linguistics terminology. The term "transformationalgenerative grammar," for one, has at least five Korean equivalents, which is extremely confusing, to say the least. At least one of these five Korean equivalents is thought to be Japanese in origin, and purists are demanding that this Japanese-tainted equivalent be immediately struck out of the Korean language. 3.1.6 Language of the trades The language of such trades as carpentry and mining is so heavily "contaminated" with Japanese words that outsiders and newly initiated members find it almost totally unintelligible. With the situation so bad, not just purists but also members of the trades in question seem to agree that the language of these trades is in need of a thorough purification. 3.1.7 Language of religion The language of religion, as used in the holy scriptures, apparently needs to be purified, especially if they are to reach the largest

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possible audience. This may lie at the root of the ongoing endeavor of the Korean Buddhist leadership to produce annotated Hangul versions of the traditional all-Chinese Buddhist scriptures, which are literally all Chinese to even the more erudite Korean intellectuals. Interestingly enough, the Christian Bible has apparently been published in Hangul all along, without using a single Chinese character. This must have resulted from the desire of the Christian church to come into contact with the maximum number of people in Korea. This completely purified language of the Bible may account, in no small measure, for the immense following that Christianity enjoys in Korea today. 3.1.8 Language of advertising Advertisers similarly purify their language voluntarily in an effort to better accommodate their consumers. Thus signboards and billboards, which used to be fairly overrun with Chinese characters until about two decades ago, are now almost entirely free of them. Admittedly, advertisements in newspapers and magazines still flash a fair number of Chinese characters, apparently as an attention-getting device. However, even these advertisements appear to be using fewer and fewer Chinese characters, a development which may be inevitable given the need for them to appeal to the largest possible number of readers. Trademarks and brand names, especially those on articles of clothing, have become infested with Western or Western-sounding words. This tendency has been under heavy fire from all purist quarters for quite some time. 3.1.9 Language of entertainment The language of entertainment sometimes gets targeted for purification, as in the case of the pop music purification campaign referred to in 2.3.2. The language of comedy also occasionally comes in for puristic criticism in the Korean press. Currently the Korean Broadcasting System is working with a university in Seoul on upgrading broadcast comedy, which supposedly includes refining the language of comedy. The main issue in the purification of entertainment language seems to center around the question of its decency.

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3.2 D o m a i n s of structure In structural terms, we may speak of at least four domains, i.e. those of phonology, lexicon, syntax, and semantics. As we shall see below, all these structural domains are targeted for purification in Korean today. 3.2.1 Phonological domain Purists often demand that the pronunciation of standard Korean be decontaminated of dialectal and other non-standard elements. They frequently point out that broadcast language, which is especially contagious, is becoming increasingly polluted by dialectal pronunciation. 3.2.2 Lexical domain The lexical domain is the structural domain most pervasively affected by purification. High on the purification list are foreignisms, especially Japanese and Sino-Korean words. Japanese words are always automatically recommended for outright eradication. Sino-Korean words are recommended for purification only when they are extremely difficult or readily replaceable by their pure Korean equivalents. Slang and other indecent words are often placed on the purification list. So are substandard dialectal and archaic words. Although of native Korean origin, these words/phrases of a lowly nature are evidently perceived by purists to be a serious menace to the purity and decency of the Korean language. 3.2.3 Syntactic domain Many Korean linguists have stressed the necessity of purification of Korean grammar. They often refer to the fact that plural suffixes on nouns, passive markers on verbs, and gender markers on personal pronouns are often used superfluously under the influence of Western languages, such as English. They contend that such alien superimpositions must be removed because they threaten the purity and even the stability of the grammatical system of the Korean language. 3.2.4 Semantic domain Some purists in Korea are trying to do the impossible in the name of semantic purification of the Korean language. They urge that words

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and phrases be purged of all undesirable meanings, where the meanings in question are often associated with cheap slang. These same purists also claim that all tautologous expression should be struck out of the Korean language if it is to become a truly pure language semantically.

3.3 Domains of medium Human language involves two major mediums, i.e. speech and writing. Although both domains of medium are subject to purification, writing tends to be more frequently affected by purism than speech, at least in Korean. 3.3.1 Domain of speech In this domain, pronunciation and diction appear to be the two major concerns of language purists in Korea. They devote much of their attention to eliminating dialectal and other inauthentic elements from the pronunciation and diction of standard Korean. 3.3.2 Domain of writing Within the domain of writing, the biggest purist issue in Korea today is whether to adopt Hangul as the only medium of writing or to use it in tandem with a few thousand Chinese characters. The former option, i.e. the general purist position, is favored by most Koreans under 45 years of age or thereabouts while the latter option has the support of some older Koreans, who are distinctly in the minority. Another major issue relating to the domain of writing centers around Koreanization, i.e. transliteration into Korean, of foreign words. One group, purist in orientation, contends that Korean renderings of foreign words should comply maximally with the rules of Korean graphophonology. Another group counters that these renderings should be maximally faithful to the original foreign words, of which they are mere renditions. It appears that the purist group is beginning to gain the upper hand here. Still another issue that belongs in the domain of writing has to do with Romanization, i.e. transliteration of Korean words into the Roman alphabet. Here a purist-leaning camp is fighting for a Koreaninitiated system of Romanization. Another camp favors one of the

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two convenient American-initiated systems already in existence, i.e. either the McCune-Reischauer System or the Yale System. There is no predicting at this point which camp will eventually emerge victorious. 3.4 Domains of skill Language involves the receptive skills of listening and reading, on the one hand, and the productive skills of speaking and writing, on the other. Purification apparently applies to the productive aspects of language use only. In this respect, it is very much like error analysis, as practiced in applied linguistics. In fact, purification involves error analysis of sorts as its major component. 3.5 Domains of formality The binary distinction between formal and informal language is relevant to our discussion here in that purists often frown upon the contamination of formal language by informal language, but not usually vice versa. Incidentally, this may mean that purification is directional with respect to formality. Purification also appears to be directional with respect to politeness and decency. It is thought that polite and decent language can be contaminated by impolite and indecent language, but not vice versa. This directionality may stem from the general assumption that formal, polite, and decent language is somehow purer and more authentic than informal, impolite, and indecent language.

4. Rhetoric of purification Korean language purists resort to a number of rationales in justifying their activities. Here we will attempt to present a fairly exhaustive list of these rationales. 4.1 Decontamination Decontamination is the rationale most frequently cited for language purification in Korea. Purists often call for a complete eradication of

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foreign/loan elements from the Korean language, contending that such elements pose a serious threat to the purity of not just the language but also of the Korean psyche.

4.2 National identification National identification is another rationale very frequently cited for language purification in Korea. The argument here is that, as the most distinctive symbol of Korea as a sovereign nation, Korean must be maximally clear of foreign elements.

4.3 National harmony The rationale of national harmony is often resorted to in justification of language purification in Korea. Purists often contend that conspicuous dialectal forms are destructive of national harmony and hence need to be expunged from formal contexts where standard Korean is required. Many people are beginning to worry about the bifurcation of vocabulary between North and South Korea that is becoming more and more noticeable. Claiming that this bifurcation may stand in the way of national harmony if and when Korea is reunified, they urge that a large-scale study be undertaken now to work out a solution to this potential problem. However this problem may be resolved, it will involve some measure of purification.

4.4 Economy Language purists in Korea often use the argument of economy in defence of their call for purification. They claim, for example, that the use of a foreign/loan word, which has a Korean equivalent, is uneconomical and therefore totally unwarranted. They often use this argument in calling for the eradication of foreign/loan words. Purists also resort to this economy rhetoric in defence of their demand for the adoption of Hangul as the sole official medium of writing in Korea. They argue that Hangul is far more economical than Chinese characters. Hangul can be mastered in a matter of hours or,

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at most, days, while learning to use enough Chinese characters normally takes years of hard work. 4.5 Comprehensibility Purists often argue that opaque Sino-Korean words, for example, should be replaced by their more transparent equivalents, preferably those of pure Korean origin. They claim that expressions of low comprehensibility hinder communication and should thus be purified. 4.6 Refinement Purists sometimes argue that obscenities, profanities, vulgarisms, and other indecent elements must be obliterated from the Korean language if it is to attain to a state of decency worthy of a respectable national language. 4.7 Democratization The rhetoric of democratization sometimes figures prominently as a rationale for purification. The Government has recently been trying to democratize its documents by ridding them of expressions that are not egalitarian in tone or not readily comprehensible to the average citizen. 4.8 Universal literacy Language purists in Korea sometimes resort to the need for universal literacy in justifying their cause. They use this rhetoric especially in connection with their claim that Hangul should become the only legitimate medium of writing in Korea. The contention here is that, as a democracy, Korea needs universal literacy, which is attainable only with an easy medium of writing, such as Hangul. 4.9 Automation Purists often call for the exclusive use of Hangul by citing automation as a factor that favors Hangul over Chinese characters. They argue

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that Hangul, with a mere 24 simple letters, is easily amenable to automation while thousands of complicated Chinese characters are not.

5. Strategies and outcomes Korean language purists have used many different strategies to achieve their goals. In this section, we will discuss some of these strategies and the outcomes that they and other factors have helped to produce.

5.1 Strategies The language purification strategies used in Korea are varied, ranging from purification lists to governmental decrees concerning radio and television programs. 5.1.1 Purification lists Lists of items to be purified are often used to direct purification along certain prescribed lines. The Ministry of Education, for one, has published fairly extensive lists of such items over the last ten years or so. Items on such lists are usually recommended for purification along one of the following three lines. (1) X - + 0 (2) X - * Y / X (3) X - * Y The first formula states that X is to be zeroed out, i.e., the item in question must not be used. The second formula is to be interpreted as saying that X is preferably replaced by Y, i.e., the item in question is preferably replaced by its alternative suggested on the right-hand side of the arrow. The third formula means that X must be replaced by Y, i.e., the item in question must be replaced by its alternative suggested on the right-hand side of the arrow. Purification lists can be published in book form, as is the case with the Ministry of Education lists. They can also comprise just a few items, posted daily on bulletin boards or carried occasionally in newsletters, as in the case of the Korean Broadcasting System. Book-length lists tend to be used for macro-purification and shorter lists for micropurification.

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5.1.2 Purification handbooks Handbooks are sometimes used to provide guidelines for the purification movement. Some of these books are essentially handy dictionaries of usage (cf. Park). Others are collections of papers on purist themes (cf. Huh). Still others are practical guides to the theory and practice of purification, as is the case with Nahm and the Society for Korean Language Education. 5.1.3 Governmental decrees Governmental decrees are sometimes used as strategies for language purification. The late President Park Chung-Hee, for example, ordered in the late 1960s that the Government take measures for the gradual adoption of Hangul as the exclusive medium of writing in Korea. He also ordered then that the Korean statutes be stripped of such Chinese characters and Sino-Korean words as are not readily comprehensible to the average citizen. On several occasions in the middle to late 1970s, the Ministry of Home Affairs instructed the national police to have all signboards and billboards purified of blatant foreignisms. 5.1.4 Newspaper and magazine articles Newspapers and magazines sometimes carry articles designed to promote language purification. We have already referred in 2.3.1 to the Hankuk Ilbo Daily, which carried a long series of such articles in 1984. 5.1.5 Radio and television programs Broadcast programs, both radio and television, are often employed to carry the message of language purification to the people. We have already referred in 2.3.2 to the broadcast purification programs currently on the air. 5.1.6 Slogans Slogans are often used by language purists in reaching out to the people. Perhaps the best known of these slogans is "Love your country, love your language," which can be seen on school gates and walls all over Korea. Most slogans call on the nation to cleanse the Korean language of all impurities.

Language purism in Korea today 133 5.1.7 Declarations of principles Declarations of principles are sometimes used to set guidelines for purification in certain areas. For example, the Korean Language Society declared its celebrated principles of Unified Korean Orthography (1933) and of Standard Korean (1936). These two sets of principles serve to this day as the basis for the standardization and purification of Korean. Principles for both Koreanization and Romanization have also been declared by both the Government and learned societies on a number of occasions. 5.1.8 Workshops Sometimes workshops serve as instruments of language purification in Korea. We have already referred in 2.3.3 to the language purification workshops of the Korean Broadcasting System. The Phonetic Society of Korea and other organizations also sponsor similar purification workshops on an occasional basis. 5.1.9 Name campaigns Name "pageants" are held annually at some Korean universities with a view to popularizing pure Korean first names. These pageants of pure Korean names are usually sponsored by activist student groups calling themselves "the Students for the Korean Language." Some purist groups in Korea are committed to the revival of pure Korean place-names. Their goal is to restore original Korean placenames and persuade the authorities to substitute them for the SinoKorean place-names that have ousted them at different points in Korean history.

5.2 Outcomes We will now turn our attention to the outcomes of Korea's language purism. Those outcomes which are due to the strategies of the sort discussed in 5.1 may be referred to as strategy-dependent. Strategydependent outcomes are usually straightforward in that they follow the lines prescribed by the strategies in question. Thus we will not have anything more to say on them here.

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Instead we will concern ourselves with those outcomes which are not directly dependent on the strategies of 5.1. These strategyindependent outcomes differ from the strategy-dependent ones in that they are not quite as premeditated and thus not quite as purposive. 5.2.1 Producer-dependent outcome The producer of language, i.e., the speaker-writer-editor, is among the crucial variables that determine the outcome of language purification. The producer variable comprises, among other things, the age, sex, and education of the producer. It is interesting that writings by Koreans in their mid-forties or younger tend to be far freer of Chinese characters and Sino-Korean words than those by older Koreans. The forces of purism have apparently touched the former age group far more forcefully than they have the latter. This evidently has to do at least in part with the fact that the voice of purism has been especially loud and clear in the post-1945 Korean school system. Other things being equal, female Koreans tend to purify their language more than male Koreans do. Thus female Koreans tend to use fewer Chinese characters, foreignisms, and dialectalisms than male Koreans do. Female Koreans also tend to use more decent and refined language than male Koreans do. This may indicate that females are generally more puristically inclined than males are, at least in Korea. The education of the producer also appears to affect the outcome of language purification. The language of less well-educated Koreans tends to contain fewer Chinese characters and fewer foreignisms than that of their better-educated brethren. On the other hand, well-educated Koreans generally use fewer dialectalisms than less well-educated Koreans do. 5.2.2 Consumer-dependent outcome The consumer of language, i.e., its hearer-reader, often plays a crucial role in determining the outcome of purification. In determining the extent and direction of language purification, the producer normally takes account of the consumer's age, sex, education, and so on. For example, the producer tends to use Chinese characters and Sino-Korean words more sparingly with a young consumer than with

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an old one, with a female consumer than with a male one, and with a less learned consumer than with a more learned one. This helps explain why women's magazines use more purified language than men's and why children's newspapers use more purified language than adult newspapers. This consumer-dependent outcome is perhaps best exemplified by the language of signboards and billboards. As noted in 3.1.8, this area of language has become almost completely free of Chinese characters because they had become virtually all Chinese (and thus inconvenient) to many Koreans. Sometimes the consumer variable may conflict with the producer variable. When there is such a conflict, the consumer variable often takes precedence. Thus although generally well versed in Chinese characters, literary writers and magazine editors usually opt for the near exclusive use of Hangul. This is evidently another interesting example of consumer-sensitive purification. It is interesting to note here that newspaper editors have been generally resistant to the wave of language purism in Korea. Thus many of them have made the point of using numerous Chinese characters in their newspapers. This may be cited as a case of the producer variable taking precedence over the consumer variable. However, times are changing, with even the most anti-purist newspaper editors beginning to use fewer Chinese characters. This movement away from Chinese characters may be inevitable considering that their newspapers would not be as well received by their average readership should they continue to use many Chinese characters. Thus even here the producer appears to be losing the battle to the consumer. 5.2.3 Authority-dependent outcome The outcome of language purification can often be affected by language authorities such as broadcasts, literary masterpieces, grammars, dictionaries, newspapers, and magazines. This is because, rightly or wrongly, people regard them as the ultimate paragons and arbiters of authentic usage and style. 5.2.4 Domain-dependent outcome The outcome of language purification is often domain- or topicdependent. A less serious domain tends to be freer from Chinese

136 Nahm-SheikPark characters and Sino-Korean expressions than a more serious domain. Thus informal Korean is generally freer from Chinese characters and Sino-Korean expressions than formal Korean. A less serious topic tends to use fewer Chinese characters than a more serious one. Thus the sports page in a newspaper tends to avoid Chinese characters to a greater extent than, say, the cultural page in the same newspaper. A book about cooking is likely to employ far fewer Chinese characters than one on history. Speaking of the structural domains, the essentially contentive domain of lexicon is targeted for purification far more than the formal domain of either grammar or phonology. This may mean that content tends to be more amenable to alien contamination and hence more subject to purification than form is. Within the lexical domain, different parts of speech may be differentially subject to purification. For example, the noun, especially the proper noun, is apparently more likely to be written in Chinese characters and thus is more frequently targeted for purification than other parts of speech. This may have to do at least in part with the fact that the noun, especially the proper noun, is far more contentive than other parts of speech. Purification applies to the productive domains of speaking and writing, not usually to the receptive domains of listening and reading. One may, however, speak of receptive purification in the sense of the consumer affecting the language of the producer, that is, in the sense of 5.2.2. 5.2.5 Ideology-dependent outcome Ideology also plays a role in determining the outcome of language purification. Thus such words as are associated with the communist ideology of North Korea are generally banned or avoided in South Korea, torfimi 'friend/comrade' and inmin 'people/masses' are cases in point. These words, which were perfectly respectable in all of Korea prior to national division in 1945, are now replaced in South Korea by their respective synonyms Cinku and kukmin.

6. Critique In this final section, we will attempt a short critique of language purism in Korea, especially its fundamentalist version. To begin with, we

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may point out that Korean language purists are often excessively nationalistic or even chauvinistic. They tend to assume that theirs is the only language in the world that is truly pure and beautiful. These purists thus often contend that foreign elements in Korean so contaminate the Korean psyche that they must be eradicated. They may have a point here, but they seem to carry their argument a little too far. For each and every language is pure and beautiful in its own way. Korean language purists are also often too simplistic. For example, they claim that the use of a loan word, of which Korean has an equivalent, is uneconomical and hence must not be allowed. However, they should also remember that the presence of a loan equivalent alongside a pure Korean word can add significantly to the expressive power of the Korean language. Many Korean language purists appear to be too unrealistic. For one thing, they often propose using overly contrived pure Korean coinages for perfectly natural, well established Sino-Korean words. They also seem to be oblivious to the fact that normal exchanges between nations are bound to involve linguistic exchanges also so that loan words are in fact inevitable in the modern world. Furthermore, they naively believe that they can turn back the tides of language by, say, expurgating Korean of all indecent elements such as coarse slang. Fundamentalist Korean language purists are often too radical. Claiming that theirs is the only true version of purism, they insist upon immediate, across-the-board purification strictly on their fundamentalist terms. They flatly refuse to settle by compromise their differences with other purists. If they are to be more acceptable to a larger segment of the Korean population and thus more effective, fundamentalist Korean language purists should take a more moderate, sensible stance. They could do so by stripping their purism of such (ultra)nationalism, simplism, unrealism, and radicalism as we have discussed here. We may note in this connection, that, of the rationales discussed in 4., decontamination and national identification are almost always resorted to by most radical fundamentalists. We may further note that these two rationales, especially the former, may not always be entirely rational and thus may not make as much sense as the other rationales. Korean language purists also apparently attach far more importance to strategy-dependent than to strategy-independent purification.

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However, they should not forget that strategy-independent purification can often be far less painful and far more effective than strategydependent purification. It may very well be the case that laissez-faire purification is preferable to enforced purification.

Annotated

bibliography

Huh, Woong 1979 Outpourings of Love for the Korean Language. Seoul: Moongsung Publishing Company. A collection of Huh's papers previously published elsewhere, this book addresses the entire spectrum of purist issues. Some of the major themes covered in the volume are: (1) In Defence of Purification, (2) Arguments Against Chinese Characters, (3) Arguments Against Foreignisms, (4) Language and National Identity, and (S) Arguments for Hangul as the Sole Official Medium of Writing. Nahm, Eul-Woo — Soo-Kil Kang — Kwon In-Yong — Chung Moon-Soo 1983 Korean Language Purification Data for Social Education. Seoul: Ministry of Education. This volume is a book-length list of purification items. It resulted from the deliberations of the Education Ministry's Korean Language Screening Committee on items submitted to it for purification decisions by other Government ministries. Nahm, Kwang-Woo 1970 Aspects of Contemporary Written Korean. Seoul: Qchokak Publishing Company. A conservative purist, Nahm here offers his views on such matters as (1) Hangul vs. Chinese Characters: Pros and Cons, (2) Problems in the Koreanization of Foreign/Loan Words, (3) Problems for Korean Language Purification, and (4) Problems in the Use of Native Korean Resources for Purification Purposes. Park, Kap-Soo 1984 Korean Language Errors and Purification. Seoul: Korean Broadcasting System Business Department. A result of Park's daily radio program "Good and Correct Korean," this book is essentially a handy dictionary of usage, which draws heavily on works of Korean literature for examples. Society for Korean Language Education 1976 Korean Language Purification: From Theory to Practice. Seoul: Se woonmoonwhasa. This is in the form of a handbook on the theory and practice of language purification with special reference to Korea. The first of its three chapters deals with the theory of purification. The second chapter cites exemplary purification experiments by elementary and secondary school teachers. The third chapter presents an extensive list of items that the Society recommends for purification.

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Yoo, Chang-Kyun (ed.) 1979 Korean Language Purification and Education. Seoul: Academy of Korean Studies. This is a collection of papers on themes relating to Korean language purification and education. Among the purist themes dealt with here are: (1) Problems for Korean Language Purification, (2) Language Purification with Reference to the National Psyche, and (3) Methodology of Language Purification.

Hieratic components in Soviet dictionaries of Yiddish, Dungan, and Belorussian Paul Wexler

Introduction Soviet languages offer the student of prescriptive intervention a fertile field for investigation. The fascination of Soviet language planning lies in the fact that central government planning can be followed uninterruptedly in well over a hundred speech communities over a time span of over sixty years. Topics of interest include the impact of Soviet language planning (a) on languages with a pre-Soviet literary tradition (e.g., Georgian, Armenian, Lithuanian, Yiddish) as opposed to those which have only a Soviet literary tradition (e.g., Dungan, Yakut) (b) on related Slavic languages (e.g., Belorussian, Ukrainian) and unrelated languages, (c) on languages which are spoken both within and beyond the borders of the USSR (e.g., Armenian, Yiddish, Uigur, Dungan; Belorussian and Ukrainian up to 1939). In the case of languages spoken on both sides of the Soviet border, Soviet linguists frequently elevate a dialect to the level of a standard language in the USSR which has no such status abroad (e.g., West Belorussians in Poland of the 1920s and 1930s preferred central and southwest dialects as the basis of the literary language vs. a central and northeast basis in the USSR; consider also the sharp differences cultivated between East and West Armenian). One can also study (d) the creation of areal Sprachbunde (e.g., Caucasus, Central Asia), and (e) the creation of new literary languages from non-Soviet speech forms which lacked written expression altogether (e.g., Moldavian, only a spoken language in Rumania; Dungan, only a spoken language in the People's Republic of China). Because of the official position that Russian is the privileged source of enrichment for all Soviet languages, it is extremely difficult for Soviet linguists to study objectively periods characterized by some degree of (anti-Russian) purism (e.g., the 1920s, late 1960s). Soviet language planning is therefore an area particularly suited to examination by Western scholars.

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Despite the unique features of the Soviet language scene, little research has been done in the West on many aspects of Soviet language planning — either in individual languages or in a comparative framework. 1 Comparative studies, which would be fascinating in a diachronic framework, must await the preparation of detailed individual case studies. The present paper has the modest aim of offering a preliminary comparison of one aspect of Soviet language policy: the status of traditional hieratic languages (i.e., unspoken languages of liturgy and culture) as sources of enrichment for spoken languages in the Soviet Union. Since this subject is largely terra incognita, the present paper must be regarded as partly speculative; wherever possible, we will try to formulate topics for future research.

1. The languages of Jews, Muslims and Christians in the USSR Three languages are examined here: Yiddish, Dungan and Belorussian — a "Jewish," "Islamic," and "Christian" language respectively. The epithets "Jewish," "Islamic," and "Christian" are not altogether parallel in meaning. A Jewish language is a non-Jewish language which has been adapted to the needs of a Jewish speech community; this is done by building on substratal elements of previous Jewish languages while showing relative openness to Hebrew and Aramaic enrichment. For example, Yiddish is a Judaicized version of High German dialects, formed in the German lands around the ninth to tenth centuries by Jews speaking Judeo-Romance, Judeo-Slavic and Judeo-Greek. Islamic languages, i.e., languages spoken by a wholly or partly Muslim population, are characterized by broad receptivity to Arabic (and sometimes also Persian) enrichment. To the best of our knowledge there is no comparison of Islamic languages spoken exclusively by a Muslim population (e.g., Uzbek) and "Islamic communal dialects" — i.e., languages spoken by a mixed population (e.g., Albanian, Serbian, Chinese). Like most Jewish languages, some Islamic languages may also comprise elements of a foreign language substratum spoken by the original community. For example, the Chinese Muslims may in part be descended from Arabs or Turkic groups. While Jewish and Islamic languages differ broadly in their genesis, they occasionally follow similar patterns in the integration of Semitic loans, e.g., both

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groups often have a periphrastic verbal conjugation (see below, p. 153). A Christian language resembles an Islamic language, except that the single favored source of hieratic enrichment is usually either Latin and/or Greek. There are at least five Jewish languages spoken in the USSR, representing three language families: Germanic (Yiddish); Iranian (Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Tadjik); Turkic (Karaite, KrymCak). It is unclear if Georgian Jews ever created a distinctly Judaicized variant of Georgian. Soviet languages spoken by traditionally Muslim communities comprise mainly languages of Turkic, Caucasian, and Iranian stock. 2 The three languages chosen for examination in this study form a useful grouping for a preliminary comparison since all three languages enjoy enrichment from unspoken hieratic languages, yet differ broadly in historical development and formation and in their relationship to languages spoken outside the Soviet Union. Yiddish first came into contact with languages spoken in the present confines of the Soviet Union in the late fourteenth century — i.e., with Belorussian and Ukrainian. Yiddish began to receive Russian influence only in the latter half of the eighteenth century, but extensive Russification began only in the Soviet period when Jews were permitted to settle in large numbers in Russian-speaking areas. Today there are approximately 400,000 speakers of Yiddish in the USSR. Dungan (or Zhunyanese) is a northwest dialect of Mandarin which was brought into the Asian territories of Czarist Russia (now Kazaxstan and Kirghizistan) by settlers from Shaanxi and Gansu provinces in the 1870s. Today Dungan speakers in the USSR number approximately 50,000. Both Yiddish and Dungan are spoken by a far larger population outside the USSR. The only indigenous language of the three, Belorussian, is the official language of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and counts at most 8,000,000 speakers; there is a small minority of Belorussian speakers in Poland and the neighboring Soviet Republics. The changing norms of language planning applied to Yiddish, Dungan, and Belorussian are understandably affected to some extent by Soviet conceptions of how Yiddish, Dungan, and Belorussian are "related" to their closest cognates — German and non-Soviet Yiddish; Chinese dialects of Mandarin and Russian respectively. While the conceptions (both among natives and non-natives) from the nineteenth century to the present have yet to be explored in depth, the outlines are clear. Of the three languages, Czarist officials seem to have taken a stand only on the status of Belorussian, which was regarded as a territorial variant of Russian. As such, Belorussian was denied the right of written

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expression until the first abortive Bolshevik Revolution in 1905. While all linguists in the Soviet period have been prepared to grant Belorussian an independent position within the family of Eastern Slavic (alongside Russian and Ukrainian), they tend to regard Belorussian as an outgrowth of an alleged "Old Russian" language after the fifteenth century. With full official recognition, Belorussian is regarded as being particularly receptive to Russian influence, due to the close structural links between the two languages.3 While Czarist Russia offered Yiddish no official status, its independent position within Germanic languages was not challenged. The official government status and cultivation of Yiddish by linguistic academies began in Kiev and Minsk in the 1920s, though the Stalinist purges of the 1950s brought an end to Yiddish scholarly and most publishing activity in the USSR. Yiddish has never enjoyed the status of an official state language in any other country. Despite the official recognition of Yiddish as a Soviet minority language, we still encounter occasional pronouncements that Yiddish is a distorted form of German. 4 While Soviet Yiddish has at no time been regarded as distinct from non-Soviet dialects of the language, there have been attempts since the 1930s to create barriers between Soviet and non-Soviet Yiddish, through the cultivation of a strong Russian imprint (in the form of loans and models for loan translations) and a distinctive orthography (see details below, p. 151). As to the classification of Dungan, Soviet scholars have usually insisted that in the Soviet period Dungan can no longer be considered a dialect of Mandarin, from which it derives.5 The "separate language" status of Soviet Dungan is argued for on the basis of (a) the non-Chinese writing systems used in the USSR (originally Arabic, then Latin and now Cyrillic), (b) massive international vocabulary of Greco-Latin origin, (c) multilingual character of the Soviet Dungan populace (bilingual in Kazax or Kirghiz and Russian); (d) it is also alleged that the speakers themselves do not "identify" themselves with China any longer.6 The materials discussed below have been taken primarily from the recent Soviet Yiddish and Dungan dictionaries of M. Sapiro et al. (1984); Imazov et al. (1981) and JanSansin and Sinlo (1959) (abbreviated below as R-Y 1984, R-D 1981, 1959). No attempt was made here to explore Soviet written norms or to interview informants. While some diachronic considerations are raised below, we must leave this aspect of Soviet language planning to a future study. In the case of Yiddish, there are standard dictionaries both from the pre-Revolutionary and pre-World War II periods which could form the basis of a diachronic

Hieratic components in Soviet dictionaries 145 study. Eventually, comparison of hieratic components in Soviet and non-Soviet forms of Yiddish and Dungan should be carried out.

2. Hieratic languages A common feature of Jewish and Islamic languages is the use of two languages for liturgical expression. For the Jews this usually means Hebrew and Aramaic exclusively;7 Arabic, and in Asia Persian, are the hieratic languages of non-Arabic-speaking Muslims. European Christian languages tend to be receptive to one language, Latin or Greek, depending on whether the speakers are either Roman Catholic or Orthodox. In the Belorussian speech community, split between the Catholic and Orthodox churches since the late sixteenth century, Catholic terms are generally derived from Polish or Polonized Latin (since Catholicism was introduced to the West Belorussian lands from Poland), while Orthodox terms are predominantly of Greek origin.8 Historically, the alphabet of the hieratic language was employed for vernacular Jewish, Christian, and Islamic languages. For example, Catholic Belorussians tended to write their language in a Latin orthography while Orthodox Belorussians favored a Cyrillic alphabet; only the latter was sanctioned in the USSR. The tiny Tatar Muslim community in Belorussia traditionally wrote Belorussian in a Turko-Arabic script.9 Hieratic languages tend to have unique functions. In Jewish and Islamic speech communities especially, they are very often an unrestricted source of lexical enrichment; thus, any word in the hieratic language is a potential loan in the colloquial language. The hieratic component often fills positions in the domain of religion, but not exclusively so. Hence a hieratic language serves to divide speakers of a common language on religious grounds. The status of loans from the liturgical language(s) in the colloquial language of a Jewish, Islamic, or Christian speech community in the Soviet Union is complex, since the three organized religions have never enjoyed a favorable position in the USSR, where atheism is officially promulgated. In fact, upon the annexation of the former Polish areas of Western Belorussia and the Western Ukraine to the USSR in 1939, the Catholic (Uniate) church in those lands was dissolved. Today, the Jews and Roman Catholics in the USSR, but not the Muslims, are allowed no central administrative structure of their own. The hieratic languages enjoy

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no official status in the USSR, and the teaching of Hebrew and Aramaic by the Jews is expressly impeded by the Soviet authorities. While Soviet lexicographers have continuously excluded religious concepts from their dictionaries, they have shown, in a number of recent dictionaries, a greater inclination to admit loans from the hieratic languages in non-religious domains.

3. Status of religious terminology in Soviet languages The hostile attitude of Soviet language planners toward religious terminology may be illustrated by the corpus of terms relating to Christian and Jewish religious practice in Soviet dictionaries of Belorussian and Ukrainian. In the selected listing in 3.1, pre- and non-Soviet dictionaries are occasionally cited for comparison. Special attention is given to Belorussian Catholic terminology in view of the Soviet ban on the indigenous Belorussian Roman Catholic church; frequently, different terms for concepts shared by both Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches are rarely distinguished in the entries (e.g., 'Pentecost,' 'mass'). Where such terms are cited at all in Soviet dictionaries, they tend to be restricted to etymological or dialect dictionaries. The abbreviations "RC" and "O" preceding the examples denote "Roman Catholic" and "Orthodox"; dictionaries are abbreviated by date as follows: 1863-6 = Dal'; 1870 = NosoviC; 1882-6 = Zelexovs'kyj and NedilVkyj; 1897 = Nikiforovskij; 1907-9 = HrinCenko; 1914 = Dobrovol'skij; 1925 = Bajkow and NekraSeviö; 1927 = Kas'pjaroviC; 1929a = DruckiPadbjarfccki; 1929b = Saternik; 1932 = JidiS — vajsrusiSer taSn-verterbux; 1940 = Roxkind and Skljar; 1941 = ReSeti; 1953 = Kolas et al; 1957 = Andrusyshen and Krett; 1962 = Krapiva; 1963 = Sadnik and Aitzetmüller; 1965 = HorbaC; 1972 = Zdaniukiewicz; 1977-84 = TlumaCal'ny slownik belaruskaj movy; 1978 = Martynaw; 1982 = Krapiva. Non-Soviet dictionaries after 1917 appear with "non-Sov." 3.1 The status of fifteen Christian terms in Soviet Belorussian dictionaries 1 .Terms not admitted a) 'Holy Ghost': svjaty dux b) 'Jesus': RC Jezus vs. Ο Iisus10

Hieratic components in Soviet dictionaries 147 c) 'parthenogenesis': parUnahen6z{is) (1953ff give only the botanical meaning) d) 'Pentecost': zjalenyja svjata (see also category 6c below). This term may also denote 'Jewish Pentecost.' 2. Terms listed only in 1925 a) 'communion': RC sakrament (1870); sakrament (also non-Sov. 1941); sakramant (literary) is listed in 1977-84 as something holy, ritual; talisman.' See Polish sakramänt. 3. Terms cited in most or all Soviet Belorussian dictionaries a) 'communion wafer': RC aplatka (1925, 1977-84); defined only as 'capsule' in 1953, 1962, 1982. From Polish opiatek < Latin oblatio; see also Belorussian aplatak, which is not listed in any dictionary. b) 'Holy Week': peradvelikodny tydzen' (1925, 1953, 1982) c) 'Palm Sunday': Verbnica (1925, 1977-84); verbnaja njadzelja (1962, 1977-84, 1982); neither term appears in 1953.11 d) 'priest': RC ksendz (glossed only as 'Polish Catholic priest' in 1977-84; see Polish ksiqdt) vs. general sv'jatar (Lastowski 1924; 1925), ajcec (archaic in 1977-84); pop (colloquial in 1977-84), svjaScönnik Orthodox priest; priest of any religious cult'(1977-84). 4. Terms admitted for the first time in 1953 a) 'confirmation': kanfirmacyja (1953; 1982 as ecclesiastical and archaic; both Protestant and Roman Catholic associations are given in 1977-84).12 b) 'Epiphany': vadoxrySCa (1870 as vodoxreSCe\ 1953ff, but in 1977-84 defined only as 'one of the church's winter holidays') 5. Term admitted for the first time in 1962 a) 'chalice': pacir (marked as ecclesiastical) 6. Terms admitted for the first time in 1977-84 a) 'baptistery': baptisteryj b) 'mass': RC imSa (defined as RC, from Polish msza< Latin missa) vs. Ο abednja (defined as 'Christian religious service in the morning or afternoon' — but not designated as O) c) 'Pentecost': semuxa13 (defined simply as an'Orthodox holiday': see also (1 d) above) d) 'rosary': RC only ruianec (accompanied by a derisive citation)

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Paul Wexler

4. The status of Slavic terminology with Jewish associations Both Belorussian and Ukrainian have for centuries had a modest corpus of native terms with exclusive or partial Jewish associations. While this corpus is cited in pre-Soviet dictionaries, it is largely missing from Soviet dictionaries — except for occasional non-Jewish meanings.

4.1 Fourteen native Belorussian and Ukrainian terms with Jewish associations a) Belorussian bahamolle (Cerven' dialect) 'Jewish prayer garment' (1929b; 1978:261); Ukrainian bohomilje (1882-6) b) Ukrainian balabux (Western dialect) 'Jewish twisted, braided bread' (non-Sov. 1965:25) c) Belorussian baznica 'synagogue' (non-Sov. 1972-122); the meanings given in most Belorussian dictionaries are 'icon board on the wall; prayer room, house; church for sectarians and non-Christians' (1929a; 1963); Ukrainian boznycja (Western dialect) (non-Sov. 1965:27) d) Ukrainian bebexy 'featherbed and pillow (especially of Jews); intestines' (1882-6); Russian bebexi (1914); Belorussian bebuxi 'large Jewish featherbeds and pillows' (1870) e) Ukrainian bohomil'nycja 'synagogue' (1882-6); also 'devout woman; oratory; place of prayer' (in non-Soviet dictionaries, e.g., 1957) 0 Belorussian bosiny 'Yom kippur; 8-day mourning period upon a relative's death' (1870); Ukrainian bosyny (1907-9) g) Belorussian budki 'Sukkot; booths' (1870) h) Ukrainian darnyj 'kosher; error-free' (1882-6) i) Belorussian kuCki 'Sukkot' (1870, 1925); Ukrainian kuCky (19079); Southwest Russian kuSCi, kuCki (1863-6; Ukrainian is intended?). The last Soviet dictionary to cite Russian kuSCi is 1940. j) Ukrainian kurij 'Jewish chicken slaughterer; capon' (1882-6) k) Ukrainian okip (2ytomyr), okopySCe, okops'ko (Western dialect) 'Jewish cemetery' (1907-9). 1) Ukrainian Salamejka, salamok 'Jew's cap' (1882-6) m) Belorussian stojany, styjany 'ceremony of repentance by a riverside before Yom Kippur' (Vicebsk 19th century) (1897:9, fn.

Hieratic components in Soviet dictionaries 149 141). See also Russian stojan'e 'nocturnal vigil in church on Thursday and Saturday of the 5th week of Lent; recitation of the 12 Evangels; praying while standing' (1863-6) n) Belorussian Skola 'synagogue; school' (1927 cites the form for the Vicebsk dialect; 1932); Ukrainian Skola (1882-6) Curiously, Russian dictionaries are sometimes slightly more receptive to Jewish terminology than dictionaries of Yiddish or other Soviet languages. Thus, R-Y 1984 and the monolingual Belorussian dictionary of 1977-84 lack Hebraisms which are cited in the most compendious monolingual Russian dictionary, the Slovar' sovremennogo ... (1950-64), e.g., Russian pejsy 'ritual sidelocks worn by Orthodox Jewish males' (