Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, Volume 2: The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts 0195392450, 9780195392456

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HANDBOOK OF

Language and Ethnic Identity VOLUME 2

The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts

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HANDBOOK OF

Language and Ethnic Identity VOLUME 2

The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts

Edited by

JOSHUA A. FISHMAN and

OFELIA GARCÍA

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Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. CIP data is on file with the Library of Congress ISBN-13: 978-0-19-539245-6

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

:‫פֿאר געלען‬ ,‫שײן װי רי לבנה‬ ,‫ליכטיק װי רי שטערן‬ ‫פֿון הימל א מתנה‬ !‫ביסטו מיר צוגעשיקט‬ (‫שיקל )עד מאה־עשריס‬

[For Gele Lovely as the moon Bright as the stars A gift from heaven You have been sent to me!] Joshua (till 120 years)

Para Ricardo Porque la identidad y la lengua se forjan con amor Ofelia

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Contributors

Neville Alexander is the Director of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is a member of the Governing Board and of the Assembly of Academicians of the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN). He is the author of many texts on the language question In South Africa: Language Policy and National Unity in South Africa/Azania (1989); English: Unassailable But Unattainable (2000); An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa (2001). E. Annamalai is Director Emeritus of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India, and is currently Visiting Professor at The University of Chicago. His research interests include the study of language policy and its implementation in its linguistic, social, and political dimensions, language contact, and lexicographic and grammatical description of Tamil. His recent books are Lectures on Modern Tamil (1999) and Managing Multilingualism: Political and Linguistic Manifestations (2001), Social Dimensions of Tamil (2010). He is the Chief Advisor to the Dictionary of Contemporary Tamil (2008). Maria-Jose Azurmendi is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of the Basque Country (Basque Autonomous Community, Spain). From 2001–2006, she was Director of the BAT Soziolinguistika Aldizkaria [Basque Journal of Sociolinguistics BAT], and now serves on its Editorial Board. Some of her publications include: Psicosociolingüística (2000); Reversing Language Shift: The Case of Basque (et al. 2001); The Case of Basque: From the Past toward the Future (et al. 2005); The Case of Basque: Past, Present and Future (et al. 2006); Bilingualism, Identity and Citizenship in the Basque Country (et al. 2008); and La inmigracion emergente en la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca (CAV) desde la sociedad de acogida: la aculturación (et al. 2008).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Richard B. Baldauf, Jr., is Professor of TESOL Education in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. From 1999 to 2008, he served on the Executive Board of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA). He has co-authored Language Planning from Practice to Theory; Language and Language-in-Education Planning in the Pacific Basin; and Planning Chinese Characters: Reaction, evolution or revolution?; and co-edited Language Planning and Education in Australasia and the South Pacific as well as nine volumes in the Language Policy and Planning Series. Arnetha F. Ball is Professor of Curriculum Studies, Teacher Education, and Educational Linguistics in Stanford University’s School of Education and the Visiting Sizemore Distinguished Professor in Urban Education at Duquesne University. Her research focuses on language/literacy studies of culturally and linguistically diverse populations in the United States and South Africa and the preparation of teachers to work with diverse students. Habib Borjian has written on the history and cultures of Persia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. His work has appeared in various journals and reference works, including Encyclopaedia Iranica, to which he is a regular contributor and an editor. He has authored Orthography of Iranian Languages, Tabari Texts, and Median Dialects of Ishahan. He is also the Associate Editor of Journal of Persianate Studies. His current research focuses on the documentation of endangered languages. Maryam Borjian is Academic Language Coordinator and Assistant Professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research areas are Language Teaching Education, Teacher Education, Sociolinguistics, and Language Policy. Her work has appeared in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Iranian Studies, Oriental Archive, and Iran and the Caucasus. David Bradley works at La Trobe University in Australia on sociohistorical linguistics and language endangerment, maintenance, and policy in Asia. He is author or editor of thirty books, including Language Endangerment and Language Maintenance (Routledge-Curzon, 2002) and was Visiting Professor at Mahidol in Thailand, CNRS in France, and SOAS in England. Tove Bull is Professor of Scandinavian linguistics at the University of Tromsø, Norway, since 1990. She has also served as Rector of the University and Chair of the Norwegian Language Council. She has published many books and papers on sociolinguistics, language and gender, language history, language policy and planning, and language contact, particularly among the Sámi and Nordic languages. Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew is Associate Professor of English Language Methodology and Sociolinguistics at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological

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University, Singapore. She is widely published in many international journals and has been an invited keynote or plenary speaker at many international conferences. Her latest book is Emergent Lingua Francas: The Politics and Place of English (Routledge 2009). In 2010–2011 she was Fulbright Research Fellow at Harvard University. Serafín M. Coronel-Molina is Assistant Professor at Indiana University. He is an educational linguist and sociolinguist. He received his B.A. from the Ricardo Palma University in Peru, his M.A. from The Ohio State University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He has published articles in Quechua, English, and Spanish, and presented papers internationally. Mohamed Daoud holds a Ph.D. from UCLA (1991). He is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis (ISLT), Tunisia. He has published several articles in English and Arabic on the language situation in Tunisia and was instrumental in promoting EFL/ESP by leading curriculum design projects and authoring textbook series. His research interests include reading and testing in ESP and language policy and planning. Madhav M. Deshpande, born in Pune, India, received his B.A. (1966) and M.A. (1968) in Sanskrit from the University of Pune. He completed his Ph.D. in 1972 at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Since 1972, he has served on the faculty of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics. Nancy C. Dorian is retired from Bryn Mawr College, where she was Professor of Linguistics in German and Anthropology. She is the author of Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect (1981) and Investigating Variation: The Effects of Social Organization and Social Setting (2010). She edited the collection Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death (1989). Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth is Director of Doctoral Programs in Multilingual Multicultural Studies at New York University. She has also taught classes on ESL research and pedagogy in Puerto Rico. A native Yiddish speaker born in New York, her research interests include sociolinguistic aspects of second language acquisition and second language writing. Timothy John Ebsworth is Associate Professor in the Masters Programs in Multilingual, Multicultural Education at The College of New Rochelle. A native of Wales, he spent twenty years in Puerto Rico and taught ESL at the University of Puerto Rico, Ponce. His research interests include intercultural pragmatics and second language pedagogy. Sabine Ehrhart is a specialist on language contact and educational policy in plurilingual settings. She completed M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Augsburg University. She is currently Professor of Ethnolinguistics at Luxembourg University. She leads

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CONTRIBUTORS

the LACETS research project studying the linguistic ecology of the multilingual classroom environment of Luxembourg. Her research interests include migrational linguistics and the social implications of educational policies. Moha Ennaji is one of Morocco’s leading sociolinguists with research interests in education, gender issues, and migration. He is the author and/or editor of numerous books and articles on language and culture. His most recent publications are: Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco (Springer, 2005), Language and Gender in the Mediterranean Region (2008), and Migration and Gender in Morocco, co-authored with F. Sadiqi (Red Sea Press, 2008). He is Professor at Fès University and a Visiting Professor at Rutgers University. Fernand Fehlen is known as a pioneer in the still-young field of empirical research dedicated to the Luxembourg society. The scope of his research ranges from statistical and demographic work to cultural and political sociology. In 1993, he co-founded an interdisciplinary research unit on Luxembourg society (STADE), and was head of this body from 2000–2007. Since 2003, he has taught sociolinguistics and sociology at the University of Luxembourg. In recent years, his research has focused on nation building, language history, and language policy. Joshua A. Fishman is Distinguished University Research Professor of Social Sciences, Emeritus at Yeshiva University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In recent years, he has also been Visiting Professor and Scholar at Stanford University, at New York University, and at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. He is credited with being the founder of the field of sociology of language or macrosociolinguistics, and has made significant contributions to the fields of language and ethnicity, language planning, bilingualism and bilingual education, Yiddish, and medical anthropology. He is a prolific author with over 1,000 publications that include over 85 books and over 900 articles and chapters in books. Among his seminal contributions that have become classic publications on the topic of this book are Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective (1989), In Praise of the Beloved Language (1996), Reversing Language Shift (1991), Can Threatened Languages be Saved (2001), Do Not Leave Your Language Alone (2006), Ideology, Society and Language (1987), Ethnicity in Action (1985), Advances in Language Planning (1973), Advances in the Sociology of Language (1972); Language in Sociocultural Change (1972), Bilingualism in the Barrio (1975), Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective (1976), Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction (1970), and Language Loyalty in the United States (1966). He has been honored many times around the world and in 2004 received the Linguapax Prize. Ofelia García is Professor in the Ph.D. program of Urban Education and the Ph.D. Program in Spanish and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has been Professor of Bilingual Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and at The City College of

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New York, and has been Dean of the School of Education in the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University. Among her most recent books are Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective (2009), Educating English Language Learners as Emergent Bilinguals (2010, with J. Kleifgen), Negotiating Language Policies in Schools (2010, with K. Menken), Imagining Multilingual Schools (with T. Skutnabb-Kangas and M. Torres-Guzmán). With Joshua A. Fishman, she also co-edited the first volume of this series, Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity: Disciplinary and Regional Perspectives (2010). Jala Garibova is Professor of Linguistics at Azerbaijan University of Languages. She has published numerous articles locally and internationally in the history of Azerbaijani, language issues in the Turkic countries, and language policy in Azerbaijan. She received her doctorate in Azerbaijan in the field of Turkology. She was a visiting scholar at UCLA in 1995 and a Fulbright scholar at ETSU in 2007. Currently, she holds the position of Vice Rector for International Relations at Azerbaijan University of Languages. Marc L. Greenberg received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1990. He is Chair and Professor of Slavic Languages, University of Kansas. His work mainly concerns the historical dialectology of the South Slavic languages as well as topics in Slavic historical linguistics and language contact. He is author of a book on the historical phonology of Slovene and a grammar of contemporary Slovene. M. Obaidul Hamid is Lecturer in ESL in the School of Education at the University of Queensland in Australia. Previously he taught at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is interested in English as a second/foreign language; English and English-in-education policy in the context of national development; social perspectives on second language acquisition and the sociology of English learning. Michael Hornsby completed a Ph.D. at Southampton University, UK, on the effects of globalization on the Breton-speaking community in Brittany, France. After completing a research project on Scots dialects at Aberdeen University, Scotland, he joined the Celtic department of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznanˊ , Poland, in October 2009, where he teaches Welsh and Breton He also teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in sociolinguistics at the University of Torunˊ , Poland. He is currently working a special edition of invited contributions on the Breton language of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Robert B. Kaplan is Emeritus Professor, Applied Linguistics, University of Southern California. He was founding editor of Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, founding co-editor of Current Issues in Language Planning, and editor for applied linguistics entries, first and second editions of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. He has written or edited 54 books, 170 articles, 94 book reviews, and 10 government reports. He was President of NAFSA (1983– 1984), TESOL (1989–1990), and AAAL (1993–1994).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Miquel Àngel Lledó, a member of the Secció de Llengua i Lliteratura Valencianes de la Real Acadèmia de Cultura Valenciana (RACV), is the author of Fonaments científics de la llengua valenciana (The scientific foundations of the Valencian language). He has helped to compile the Diccionari General de la Llengua Valenciana (The Unabridged Dictionary of Valencian Language, RACV Press, 2010). Aurolyn Luykx is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Teacher Education at the University of Texas, El Paso. She is the author of The Citizen Factory: Schooling and Cultural Production in Bolivia (SUNY Press, 1999) and numerous articles about indigenous education in Bolivia. She was also part of the original faculty team that established PROEIB Andes at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia. David F. Marshall, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of North Dakota (Grand Forks), is co-editor of Overcoming Minority Language Policy Failure: The Case for Bulgaria and the Balkans (2006). He is Editor of Language Planning (John Benjamins). Iñaki Martinez de Luna is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Basque Country (Basque Autonomous Community, Spain) and Director of the Course of Language Planning HIZNET (University of the Basque Country and Asmoz Foundation). He is also on the Editorial Board of BAT Soziolinguistika Aldizkaria [Basque Journal of Sociolinguistics BAT]. His most recent publication is Ikasleen eskola giroko hizkuntza erabileraren azterketa [Students’ language use in the school context] (2009). Sipra Mukherjee is Associate Professor of English at West Bengal State University, India. Her areas of research include religion, language and identity, religious conversion in east India, and Asian Christianity. She has co-edited Calcutta Mosaic: Essays and Interviews of the Minority Communities of Calcutta (Anthem, 2009), and Events and Publications of the 20 th Century (Jadavpur University, 1999). J. Shaun Nolan specializes in language policy, the investigation of language attitudes in minorized sociolinguistic communities, and language emancipation. He is currently at the Department of International Culture and Communication Studies (IKK) at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and is also teacher of English and French at CPH West, Copenhagen (Ishøj), Denmark. Django Paris is Assistant Professor of English in the English Education program at Arizona State University. He is also a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College. His work has appeared in the Harvard Educational Review, the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, and the journal English Education. His first book, Language across Difference (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), explores language and pluralism in multiethnic high schools in the United States.

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Anthony R. Rowley is a native of Skipton-in-Craven, England. After studying German and Linguistics at Reading (UK) and Regensburg (Germany), he worked as a Researcher and Lecturer at Bayreuth University, graduating there in 1981. Since 1988, he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Bavarian Dictionary at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Professor of German Linguistics at Munich’s LudwigMaximilans-University. Fatima Sadiqi is Senior Professor of Linguistics and Gender Studies. She has written extensively on Moroccan languages and Moroccan women’s issues. She is the author of Studies in Berber Syntax (Konigshaussen and Neumann, 1986), Grammaire du Berbère (L’Harmattan, 1997), and Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco (Brill Academic Publishers, 2003). She is the Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Languages and Linguistics, and a co-editor of the anthology Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region (The Feminist Press, 2009). She was a Harvard Fellow in 2007. Marián Sloboda is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Slavic and East European Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. His interests are in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and Slavic languages. He has conducted research in Belarus on Belarusian language shift, language management, and linguistic identities in Belarusian borderlands. He is currently a member of the Committee of the International Association of Belarusianists (MAB). Giedrius Subačius is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (Endowed Chair of Lithuanian Studies) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, Vilnius. His primary scholarly interests are historical sociolinguistics, development of standard languages, history of Lithuanian, and the development of alphabets. He has published two monographs on the history of nineteenth-century Lithuanian (1998, 2001) and several critical editions of nineteenth-century Lithuanian linguistic manuscripts. His latest monograph is Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle (Rodopi, 2006). Peter Unseth is an Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics in Dallas, TX. He has worked with SIL International for thirty years, much of the time in Ethiopia. He sees a strong link between communities’ identities and their choice of scripts. He edited an issue of IJSL on “The Sociolinguistics of Script Choice.” Erling Wande is Professor Emeritus of Finnish at Stockholm University. He grew up bilingually with Meänkieli and Swedish in the Tornedalen area, with Swedish as the main school language (and Meänkieli for periods forbidden to be used at school). He was on the board of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association and of the corresponding Swedish association, and is presently a member of the STR-T and Chair of the Academia Tornedaliensis (Meän akateemi), conducting work with syntactic research and lexicography of Meänkieli.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Anna Veronika Wendland is presently Researcher at the Herder Institute for Eastern Central European Studies, Marburg, Lecturer at Justus Liebig University in Giessen (Germany), and Co-Editor of Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung. Prior to that she was a Researcher at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich (2003–2006), and Researcher and Lecturer at the Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe, Leipzig University (1997–2003). Her principal research areas are nationalism and the social and cultural history of national movements in East Central and Eastern Europe, regional and urban history of Eastern Central Europe, and traveling concepts in the history of ECE. Shouhui Zhao completed his Ph.D. at the University of Sydney and works on Chinese language/cultural education and language planning. His work has appeared in Language Policy, Current Issues in Language Planning, Language Problems and Language Planning and numerous other journals. His recent work was published by Springer (2008, with R. B. Baldauf, Jr.) and Cengage Learning Asia (2010, with Dongbo Zhang). Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, D.Phil. (Oxford), Ph.D. (titular; Cambridge), M.A. (Tel Aviv), is Professor of Linguistics of Endangered Languages and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is also the 211 Visiting Professor at the Shanghai International Studies University and serves as Editorial Board member of Journal of Language Contact. His books include the bestseller Israelit Safa Yafa [Israeli – A Beautiful Language. Hebrew As Myth] (Am Oved, 2008), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Language Revival and Multiple Causation (Oxford University Press).

Contents

Foreword Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García xix

6.

The Survival of French in Tunisian Identity Mohamed Daoud 54

7.

Hebrew Revivalists’ Goals vis-à-vis the Emerging Israeli Language Ghil’ad Zuckermann 68

Introduction 1.

The Americas

Examining Contrarianism: The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts Joshua A. Fishman 3

8.

African American Language in U.S. Education and Society: A Story of Success and Failure Django Paris and Arnetha F. Ball 85

9.

Learning English in Puerto Rico: An Approach-Avoidance Conflict? Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth and Timothy John Ebsworth 96

Africa and the Middle East 2.

Afrikaans: Success or Failure? Neville Alexander 11

3.

Invention of Scripts in West Africa for Ethnic Revitalization Peter Unseth 23

4.

5.

10. The Reforming of English Spelling David F. Marshall 113

The Teaching of Amazigh (Berber) in Morocco Fatima Sadiqi 33

11. Sociohistorical Perspective of Quechua Language Policy and Planning in Peru Serafín M. Coronel-Molina 126

The Promotion of Moroccan Arabic: Successes and Failures Moha Ennaji 45

12. Paradoxes of Quechua Language Revitalization in Bolivia: Back and

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CONTENTS

Forth along the Success-Failure Continuum Aurolyn Luykx 137

Asia 13. North Korea’s Language Revision and Some Unforeseen Consequences Robert B. Kaplan and Richard B. Baldauf, Jr. 153

22. A Pan-Turkic Dream: Language Unification of Turks Jala Garibova 268

Europe 23. Luxembourgish: A Success Story? A Small National Language in a Multilingual Country Sabine Ehrhart and Fernand Fehlen 285

14. Simplifying Chinese Characters: Not a Simple Matter Shouhui Zhao and Richard B. Baldauf, Jr. 168

24. Bavarian: Successful Dialect or Failed Language? Anthony R. Rowley 299

15. Problems of Orthography Development for the Yi in China David Bradley 180

25. The Regional Languages of Brittany Michael Hornsby and J. Shaun Nolan 310

16. Planning for Failure: English and Language Policy and Planning in Bangladesh M. Obaidul Hamid 192 17. The Emergence, Role, and Future of the National Language in Singapore Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew 204 18. Efforts to Vernacularize Sanskrit: Degree of Success and Failure Madhav M. Deshpande 218 19. The Political Rise of Tamil in the Dravidian Movement in South India E. Annamalai 230 20. The Politics of Language and Dialect in Colonial India: The Case of Asamiya Sipra Mukherjee 242 21. Plights of Persian in the Modernization Era Maryam Borjian and Habib Borjian 254

26. Success-Failure Continuum of Euskara in the Basque Country Maria-Jose Azurmendi and Iñaki Martinez de Luna 323 27. The Independent Standardization of Valencian: From Official Use to Underground Resistance Miquel Àngel Lledó 336 28. The Failure of “German Language Advocacy” among Yiddishspeaking Eastern European Jews prior to and since the Holocaust: The Major Travails and the Minor Triumphs of an Unprotected Language Joshua A. Fishman 349 29. The Illyrian Movement: A Croatian Vision of South Slavic Unity Marc L. Greenberg 364 30. Belarusian Marián Sloboda 381

CONTENTS

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Concluding Thoughts 31. The Ukrainian-Ruthenian SuccessFailure Continuum in Austrian Galicia Anna Veronika Wendland 399 32. From Tornedal Finnish to Meänkieli: A Tornedalian Success Story? Erling Wande 420 33. Samnorsk Tove Bull

432

34. The Forgotten Model of a Separate Standard Lowland Lithuanian: Jurgis Pabrėža (1771–1849) Giedrius Subacˇius 445

35. The Ambiguous Arithmetic of Language Maintenance and Revitalization Nancy C. Dorian 461 36. Exploring the Variables in Successes and Failures of Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts (L&I Efs) Ofelia García 472 37. Dubious Arithmetic, Hugging the Center, and Never Say Die! Joshua A. Fishman 484 Index 489

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Foreword

This book is a companion volume to Language and Ethnic Identity: Disciplinary and Regional Perspectives (Volume 1, 2nd edition). In the first volume, we considered the different disciplinary lenses that have been used to study language and ethnic identity. We also included a number of cases that exemplify issues of language and ethnic identity in different geographical contexts. This second volume goes beyond the first in attempting to understand why it is that different forms of language and ethnic identity efforts succeed, and why others fail. We also intended to gauge the different degrees of success and failure in these efforts. By inviting contributions from all over the globe of well-known and lesser-known cases, some in the present, some in the past, we attempted to develop theoretical understandings of who was involved in language and ethnic identity efforts when and where, and why some succeeded and others failed. We’ve arranged the cases in this volume by geographical areas. The authors were asked to rate their language and ethnic identity efforts on a scale of 1 (failure) to 10 (success). Those ratings are included in each of the conclusion sections. It is instructive to realize that in many cases, authors were unwilling to give a global score, pointing to the many ways in which success and failure could be defined. Thus, the picture that emerges from a comprehensive read of the volume is more complex and unpredictable than what we had imagined at the beginning. Our concluding chapters attempt to make sense of the theoretical understandings that emerge from the many cases included in this volume. This volume is an invitation to others to continue to study language and ethnic identity efforts in ways that advance our theoretical understandings and that give life and light to the hard work of many individuals and groups throughout history. We want to express our gratitude to Kathryn Fangsrud and Luz Herrera, and especially to Nelson Flores and Heather Woodley for their help in the preparation of this manuscript. We also would like to thank our editor, Brian Harley, and the Oxford University Press staff for their support throughout this project. Joshua A. Fishman Ofelia García xix

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INTRODUCTION

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1 Examining Contrarianism: The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic-Identity Efforts JOSHUA A. FISHMAN

In the real world, the unexpected often happens. The good die young, the dead come back to life, the weak survive, and the strong go down to defeat. This volume represents an effort to examine such contrary-to-expectation occurrences in the world of language and ethnic identity. Having just gone through a quarter century or more of ethnolinguistic triumphs over adversity the world over, we may need to be reminded that this is not and has not always and everywhere been the case. Furthermore, we may want to pause and reflect why such contraryto-expectation occurrences come to pass. In essence, we are asking humanists and the social scientists in their midsts whether they learn lessons from history. We generally prefer to believe that we are not doomed to constantly repeat our past mistakes. Indeed, we believe that we may learn not to do so by becoming more aware of the consequences of our actions. However, there are a number of difficulties that keep us from finding the keys to contrarianism (“betting on the wrong horse”) in human affairs—some of them definitional, some of them tactical, some of them resource-related, and, finally, some due to contrarianism itself, among the very ones who might attempt to study and rectify it. Human beings, social scientists and sociolinguists among them, often find it difficult to agree on what the “expected consequences” might be pertaining to any undertaking. As a result, the unexpected always happens to some extent (we call them “unexpected side effects”), and all efforts to avoid the unexpected completely are ultimately failures. Perhaps, if we could only agree on a typology of “kinds of cases of unexpected outcomes” and if we could only assemble enough cases of each kind, and if we could then agree on their likely outcomes if what might have been expected actually occurred, then perhaps we could make some

3

4

INTRODUCTION

headway on the historical or retrospective analysis of outcomes that are contrary to the expectations of those who pursued them. This, then, approximates the basis on which the present collection of studies has been assembled, and its outcomes should be suggestively interesting even if inevitably far from definitive. We will return to this issue in the Conclusions section at the very end of this volume, leaving this issue at this point with the observation that every case of successful language and ethnic identity efforts also inevitably entails the penumbra of lack of success of its counterpart or opposite efforts. To study one allows us simultaneously to learn about the other, just as defining the half-empty glass simultaneously defines the full half (where only two complementary outcomes are possible).

The Selection of Cases The cases encountered in this volume are neither accidental nor purposive. While we cannot claim that they were selected fully at random from within the worldwide universe of language and ethnic identity cases (indeed, there is no way that we know of in which this could have been the case), they were selected so as to deliberately represent all continents in various periods of history. Although Europe is overrepresented here, this reflects the centrality of the Western world from which most intellectual and sociocultural trends (including language and ethnicidentity efforts) have flowed in modern times. This imbalance from a purely mechanical sampling point of view may be somewhat mitigated by our efforts to also sample various historical periods and disciplinary perspectives. One other independent variable that has been utilized in the selection of cases is the type of language situation being analyzed, although at the same time, efforts have been made to encourage the participating authors to pursue non-linguistic causes and explanations for the language mobilization successes/failures that constitute the major dependent variable under scrutiny in this volume.

Types of “Failures” Investigated Viewed sociolinguistically, most types of failures involve failed Ausbau/Einbau efforts. Ausbau, now a widely accepted term in the macro-sociolinguistic literature, was a term initially proposed by Heinz Kloss (1954), in order to designate societal efforts to further develop language varieties that have hitherto been generally perceived as “mere dialects” into varieties perceived as being independent languages. The Ausbau direction of desired development is contrasted to two others, on the one hand Einbau (Fishman 2008), designating the bringing together of two varieties that have hitherto been widely conceived of as being separate entities) and, on the other hand, Abstand (again Kloss 1954), designating two or more varieties that are already widely thought of as being so dissimilar that one cannot conceivably be considered a dialect of the other (although they may still be viewed as requiring other kinds of societal repair). Of course, successes and failures can be experienced in connection with all three directions of possible policy

EXAMINING CONTRARIANISM

5

efforts. Varieties on behalf of which efforts were expended so that they would become more clearly and widely differentiated do not succeed in doing so. Varieties that were planned to be combined into one do not come together. Varieties that were though to be naturally and clearly different, nevertheless, meld and combine. Furthermore, there are non-Ausbau/Einbau–related dimensions to be taken into consideration when searching for unexpected contrarianisms, for example, failed revivals, failed revernacularizations, failed language maintenance efforts, and, last but not least, failed reversals of language shift. All of these too will be examined at least once in the chapters that follow.

The Perspectival and Time-Delimited Nature of “Failure” “Failure” is not what psychologists call a “unit trait”, that is, it not only depends on the eyes of the beholder, but the same beholder may evaluate it differently on two different occasions separated by little if any elapsed time. The request of the editors that authors rate the degree of failure of the case that they are describing on a 1–10 scale does not solve this problem by any means, but it permits us to review the question of whether particular solutions are viewed by particular “viewers” as being more or less successfully solved at present. Furthermore, what is considered to be a failure at Time 1 may subsequently come to be considered to be less so or more so at Time 2 by the very same viewers. Issues of language and ethnic identity are quite notoriously of this unstable nature. In general, explaining why and how a glass of water came to be half full is neither an easy nor a popular thing to do. Indeed, we may either make or lose friends in this process, but we hope to have at least made the clarification of such unstable judgments part of the research agenda of language and ethnic identity from which it has been conspicuously absent heretofore.

Some Other Problems from Which We Cannot Hope to Escape Although it is not easy to disentangle social, economic, political and cultural, geographic, demographic, and yet other factors (“causes”) one from the other, it is clear that the reasons for success or failure must be found within that causal cluster rather than within the sociolinguistic parameters that have been adumbrated before. Language factors are not in and of themselves causal within the world of individual or societal human behavior. Thus, it is to the latter realm, the world of human and societal interpretation and evaluation, to which we must ultimately turn in our causal quests relative to the success or failure of sociolinguistically classifiable occurrences. With the wisdom of hindsight some may ask today “How could any one even have ever thought that efforts on behalf of X, Y, or Z might possibly succeed?” But it should be obvious now that some segment of society did think so in former days and, therefore, what we may now recognize as an improbable venture was then undertaken and the human struggle against great odds (part

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INTRODUCTION

of the very struggle for life itself, which will ultimately also end in failure) was continued for yet another round.

Language Names Even the very names by which languages and/or language varieties are (or should be) called is neither an obvious nor perspectivally innocent matter. The names utilized by various parties reveal attitudes, biases, and conscious or unconscious views toward the speakers of these varieties, the worthiness of their varieties in polite society, and their conceivable ephemerality or permanence. It is particularly small and weak languages that repeatedly encounter the rejection and the negativity of the latter kind, and it is only with difficulty and reluctance that the high and mighty have learned that each speech community may seek and deserve to choose its own preferred name (and then to change its mind thereafter, even if it fails to convince all of its own members on either of these occasions). We ourselves must, at times, change the language names we have become accustomed to use, just as the language usage of our childhood may need to be revised in order for us to appear to be members of today’s world, rather than of the “world of our fathers.” All of this needs to be done repeatedly, humbly, and without a scintilla of smugness or self-satisfaction. Our standing instruction to all authors participating in this volume is that if the community of speakers or its recognized spokespersons prefer a particular name rather than another, that the community-preferred name be used, along with a single footnote referring to other, less-preferred names. Certainly, discontinuity in language names cannot automatically be interpreted as language change, just as continuity in language name cannot be taken as conclusive evidence of language continuity per se. “The name is not the thing” is still a worthwhile adage (Korzybski 1958) for all who are concerned with the validity of the “success”/“failure” judgments pronounced by different segments of frequently contentious societies and the disparate cultures contained within them. If we have not yet been involved in one kind of failure or another in the language arena, our time too will surely come. Live and learn, and the realm of success and failure in ethnolinguistic identity is one that will certainly catch up with us, as it does in connection with life as a whole. Ultimately, this is a book about ourselves, our families, and our neighbors in a global world, rather than about peoples, countries, and cultures far away and long ago. The more we can recognize ourselves in the problems and problematics of all parts of the world, the more competent we will become to cope with them. The more those concerned with the full half of the glass can understand those who are mainly concerned with the half-empty part (their pains, their aches, their worries, and their trepidations), the more hope there is that such understanding will somehow contribute to common decisions, values, and actions. Ethnolinguistic contrarianism is, was, and always will be part of our lives!

EXAMINING CONTRARIANISM

References Fishman, Joshua A. (2008). Rethinking the Ausbau-Abstand dichotomy into a continuous and multivariate system. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 197: 176–226. Kloss, Heinz (1954). Die Entwickling neuer germanischer Kultursprachen. Munich: Pohl.

Korzybski, Alfred (1958). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to NonAristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 4th ed. Lakeville, CT: International Non-Aristotelian Library.

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2 Afrikaans: Success or Failure? NEVILLE ALEXANDER

Whose “Afrikaans”? In 2003, the South African historian and publicist Hermann Giliomee published an essay entitled The Rise and Possible Demise of Afrikaans as a Public Language (Giliomee 2003b). The title reveals much about the dilemma of Afrikaans in general and in post-apartheid South Africa in particular. It speaks of the sense of disempowerment that has gripped the traditional white Afrikaans-speaking community (the “Afrikaners”), since they believe that for all practical purposes they have “lost power.” At the same time, however, it suggests the hope that all is not yet lost. It also asserts implicitly the belief that as an oral medium confined to the primary domains of life, the language will retain its vitality. The latter element points to an aspect of this question that is discussed only tangentially in Giliomee (2003a),1 namely, the very definition of the language. The rise and possible demise of Afrikaans—as defined by whom?—is at issue here. As in other similar contexts, this is by no means a simple question, and it is essential that we focus briefly on the evolution of the language known as Afrikaans before we attempt an answer to our own question about the success or failure of the language. Because of the racial order that evolved in South Africa in the course of three centuries of colonialism and half a century of apartheid, which was based explicitly on the assumption of a population consisting of four “races,” it is to be expected that, as in virtually everything else in this strange country, the language question, too, is shot through with racial ideology and racial prejudice. In sociolinguistic studies, the English language, for example, is perceived, analyzed, and described, in addition to the more usual ways, in terms of categories such as Standard South African English, which, it is assumed, is spoken almost exclusively by “white”

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AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

first-language English-speaking South Africans—rather than acknowledging the contributions of varieties that have been labeled Black English, Indian English, and, less explicitly, Coloured English. Much of the debate about the origins of Afrikaans is, thus, obfuscated by questions such as whether it is a Dutch-based creole or a Dutch dialect and whether the Europeans, the local African people, or the slaves of Asian and other African background made the largest or most significant contribution toward shaping it. These are not uninteresting questions in themselves, but they have their source in the indefensible assertion by Afrikaner nationalists that the language (“die taal”) belongs to the white speaker community. In the case of Afrikaans in South Africa and of Flemish in Belgium, ironically, the respective language movements at their most intense stages were conducted under the inspiring nationalist slogan: Die taal is gans die volk, that is, the language embraces the entire people. Language and identity are brought into a coterminous relationship in this formulation, and it is most peculiar to observe how race thinking blinded the leadership of the Afrikaner nationalist movement to the fact that they were transgressing this first principle of “Risorgimento nationalism”2 by deliberately and systematically excluding all non-white first-language speakers of die taal. It is all the more paradoxical when one considers, as a sage commentator has noted, that Afrikaans came into being because: the Dutch—not the English or the Portuguese—settled at the Cape in the seventeenth century . . . [and] we are speaking Afrikaans today because of the influence of the slaves and Khoikhoi3 who had to learn this new language. (Groenewald, cited in Giliomee 2003, 4; emphasis in the original)

Had it not been for this contingent set of circumstances, one of the languages of the Cape and of South Africa today would, naturally, have been Dutch or some variant of it, similar in its relationship to metropolitan Dutch as that between American and British English. It is even more paradoxical when we recall that it was the literate priests (imam) of the Muslim slave population who in the 1830s first wrote the language—in the Arabic script—in order to illuminate the precepts of the Quran for their followers and proselytes. Dutch priests would follow in their footsteps only some forty-five years later, incidentally for similar reasons, that is, to facilitate the Christianization and the “moral education” of the “coloured” labourers in the Paarl Valley to the north of modern Cape Town. Although there continue to be very and many different theories about the evolution of the language, the balance of evidence points in the direction of the correctness of the semi-creole hypothesis, as described most recently by Roberge (2002). From this perspective, the origins and development of Afrikaans as a language can be summarized simply. By the time the Dutch East India Company decided to establish the halfway house at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, the (Khoe- and San-speaking) aboriginal peoples had had intermittent contact with European mariners—mainly Dutch and English—for some 150 years. In the course of these interactions, a kind of pidgin, known as “Hottentots-Hollands,” had evolved, so that a few of the people whom

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13

Jan Van Riebeeck, the Dutch “founder” of the Colony, first met had a sufficient vocabulary of English and Dutch as well as of other European languages to be able to interpret rudimentary passages or instructions. These men and women, most famously Autshumao, “the Ottentoo who speaks English” (Van Riebeeck) and Krotoa, also known as “Eva,” became invaluable, if unwitting, partners in the Europeans’ mercantilist project. During the next 150 years (1652–1806) of Dutch rule, three recognizable varieties on the language continuum took shape. There was Cape Dutch, spoken by slaves, Khoe servants, and the Dutch burghers4 (when they communicated with their subordinates, as well as imperceptibly and incrementally when they interacted with one another). In this variety, the influence of Malay, various pidgins and lingua francas of Asian provenance was very marked. The second variety, spoken north of the Olifants River, whither the dispossessed Khoekhoe clans retreated, although it retained the Dutch base, showed much more syntactical, lexical, and especially phonological influence of the Khoesan languages. This cluster came to be labeled “Orange River Afrikaans” by modern linguists. The third cluster, now labeled “Eastern Frontier Afrikaans,” is the one that eventually served as the base dialect for the standardization of Afrikaans, which was initiated by members of the Afrikaner elite in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was the variety that the free burgher agriculturalists and herders (the so-called Trekboers) took with them, as it were, when they embarked on the epic “Great Trek” away from the Cape into the interior because of their resistance to, among other things, the anglicizing and allegedly egalitarian policies imposed by the British governors at the Cape after the second British occupation of the colony in 1806. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, therefore, the British Cape Colony had the following linguistic profile: Afrikaans was the most widely spoken language, even though the descendants of the original Dutch conquerors and settlers continued to think of it as a low-status variety of Dutch and, indeed, the wealthy and powerful farming and administrative strata looked down on those of their community for whom it had become the mother tongue. Nobody wrote in Afrikaans, since the written language continued to be Dutch, which, until the imperial fiat of English only, was the language of the civil administration, the courts, the schools, the legislative councils, and the Church. There was still a sizable minority of people who spoke the Khoesan languages, but these were under pressure, as increasingly their speakers either retreated beyond the borders of the colony or were integrated into its labor processes. As the colony expanded eastward and northward, the colonists and the administration in their wake came into contact with Nguni-speaking people on the coast and Sotho-speaking people in the interior, and this contact eventually had some slight, mainly lexical, influences on the development of the Afrikaans language.

Afrikaner Nationalism and the Racialized Standard Political and economic developments that began to take shape shortly after the annexation of the Cape by Britain were the proximate cause of the next phase in

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the development of Afrikaans as a public language. Because of the rigid and consequential policy of anglicization implemented by the British, especially during the rule of Lord Charles Somerset (1814–1825) and subsequently, Afrikaans not only remained a language of low status (a “kitchen” language), but Dutch as a public language was also downgraded, a fact that caused much resentment and discomfort among lower-middle-class burghers. On the other hand, the landowning Afrikaner gentry in the Western Cape as well as those who joined the British civil service and other institutions of imperial rule gradually succumbed to the dominance of English. This tendency climaxed in a notorious statement by Chief Justice J. H. De Villiers, a scion of this Anglo-Afrikaner elite. In the mid1870s, he told an audience that: although the time is still far distant when the inhabitants of this colony will speak and ackno wledge one common mother tongue, it would come at last, and when it does come, the language of Great Britain will also be the language of South Africa. (cited in Wilson and Thompson 1969, 283)

It was the convergence of the charitable and cultural interests of Afrikaansspeaking white intellectuals and missionaries on the one hand and the economic and cultural interests of the Dutch-orientated landed gentry on the other hand that gave birth to what is referred to in South African cultural history texts as “the first Afrikaans language movement,” beginning in 1875. Initially, under the impetus of a Dutch immigrant, Arnoldus Pannevis, an attempt was made (in 1874) to get the British and Foreign Bible Society to support the Reverend S. J. Du Toit of Paarl to translate the Bible into Afrikaans. But the group of friends and associates, who came together as the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (Society of True Afrikaners) to consider this proposal, soon decided that it was premature and that it was necessary first to establish the rules (grammar) of the language, to standardize the way of writing it (orthography, spelling rules, etc.), and to decide on accepted and acceptable words (the lexicon). It was in this series of discussions, beginning on 14 August 1875, that the fateful agreement was reached that, among other things: [it] was not enough . . . to write and read “Hottentots” Afrikaans; the time had come to discover how the “civilized part of our people” speaks Afrikaans and to formulate rules for the language. (Giliomee 2003, 5)

Reverend Du Toit, who was the acknowledged leader of this first Afrikaans language movement, distinguished between the three Afrikaans varieties supposedly spoken by what he called the notables (Here), the (white) farmers or burghers (Boere) and the “Hottentots” or servant class, and made it explicit that in his pioneering literary work, he deliberately held to the language of the Boere. It is indisputable, therefore, that at the outset, the standard was deliberately racialized and that this “Afrikaans” was indeed a “white man’s language,” as many an Afrikaner nationalist would proudly proclaim in subsequent years. “White” in this context was equated with “civilized” and in a later phase and for a short period, the standard language was insensitively referred to asAlgemeen Beskaafde Afrikaans (General Civilized Afrikaans). By way of taking this thought to its logical conclusion, it ought to be obvious why in the period of intensified and militant

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15

political resistance to the racist policies of the apartheid regime, the standard language became known as “the language of the oppressor.” A few years of intense research and literacy work followed, and the first Afrikaans newspaper Di Afrikaanse Patriot, beginning in 1876, was issued regularly for a number of years. It became much more popular than De Zuid- Afrikaan, the Dutch-language paper that had been appearing regularly since 1830 and was geared to the information and social needs of the educated classes. However, for various reasons linked to the political vicissitudes of the Afrikaner Bond, the first modern political party to be formed in South Africa, the “movement” soon ran out of steam. The paranoid personality of Du Toit, the leader of the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners, who was a “control freak” and a genuine narcissist, also contributed to its rapid demise. According to Giliomee (2003, 6): As a written language Afrikaans was considered to be morsdood (as dead as a dodo) in the final years of the (19th N.A.) century. In Cape Town only the Muslims were reported to be still loyal to Afrikaans. Observers believed that within a generation Afrikaans would no longer be spoken in the cities and only by the poorly educated classes in the rural areas.

Indeed, Pannevis, one of the founders of the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners, even after the first inspirational meetings of that body, when trying to persuade the British and Foreign Bible Society of the need to promote and support the translation of the Bible into Afrikaans, made it clear that he had no real love for the language and that it would in all probability be displaced by English in the long run (cited in duP. Scholtz 1964, 200).5 It was through the bitter struggles between “Boer” and “Brit” after the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1884) that the Afrikaner nationalist movement and the concomitant “second Afrikaans language movement” came to a head. At this stage, the Boer republics have to be brought into the overall picture. These administrative entities had come about as the result of the Great Trek, that flight (“emigration”) of the Eastern frontier Boers from the policies of the British occupation, especially after the emancipation of slavery in 1834–1838. Not unlike modern oil states, they were suddenly confronted with the unwelcome attentions of the very predatory occupying force from which their fathers and mothers had hoped to escape when first diamonds and then gold were discovered in the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (later, the Transvaal), respectively. After a series of blatantly imperialist maneuvers on the part of Great Britain, these Boer republics were driven into what became known as the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), which, inevitably, they lost, after often heroic guerrilla struggles, with devastating consequences for the Afrikaner Boers and their families. The obverse side of the unity that came about because of the common struggle against British imperialism was the deepening of class divisions among the DutchAfrikaans-speaking population in the Republics. Bywoners (tenant farmers) as well as landless families dispossessed as the result of British scorched-earth tactics resented the large landowners who moved quickly to reassert their property rights after the compromise reached between the imperial power and the defeated Boer generals in the Treaty of Vereeniging in 1902. Boer family life was disrupted

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as bywoners were pushed off the land, young boys and girls fled to the emerging cities and towns and lost touch with the hallowed traditions established over generations of migration across the land and of often bitter conflict with indigenous African peoples. According to Hofmeyer (1987, 101–102), an ensemble of churchbased moral brokers, rebellious small farmers, teachers, artists, and journalists (“organic intellectuals”) tried to initiate the revival of the language movement as an integral aspect of the Afrikaner nationalist movement, which, under the vehement and passionate leadership of some of the Boer generals (foremost among whom were Generals J. B. M. Hertzog, Christiaan De Wet, and Koos De la Rey) was opposed to the politics of compromise and reconciliation pursued by Generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. The most immediate reason for the revival of the language movement was the incredibly jingoistic policy of forced anglicization imposed by Lord Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner in Southern Africa from 1897 until 1905. In the educational domain, Dutch- and Afrikaans-speaking parents reacted to this policy by removing their children from the government schools and educating them at home and in community schools that followed a Christian-National curriculum. In the course of the ensuing struggles against the hegemony of English and between Dutch- and Afrikaans-oriented groups for paramountcy, a few artistic and journalistic rebels, in particular Eugene Marais and Gustav Preller, in newspapers such as Die Brandwag (The Sentinel) and De Volkstem (Voice of the People), established Afrikaans as a language of modern poetry and serious information.6 Another important personality with respect to the entrenchment of Afrikaans media was the author and parliamentarian, C. J. Langenhoven. In her study of the emergence of Afrikaans as a public language, Hofmeyer (1987) stresses the fact that the educated Afrikaans-speaking white middle class had a vested economic interest in establishing a language industry centred on the spoken form of “Dutch” that was known as “Afrikaans.” For many of these people, the establishment of such an industry was not simply a matter of pride and identity but of physical survival in “a world that was brutally British” (Hofmeyer 1987, 102). She points to the core of the dilemma of Afrikaans that is the topic of this chapter: [To] professionalise Afrikaans was no small task. Before this goal could be attained, a number of preliminary battles had to be fought on various fronts. The first of these was to make Afrikaans respectable, to reinvent it as a standard language, ‘n algemeen beskaafde taal (a standard language). To accomplish this aim one had to shake off the very strong associations of poverty and particularly ‘colouredness’ which clung to the language. The second task entailed giving the language some substance by creating books and written material in Afrikaans. These, in turn, required markets, publishers, printers and distributors. (emphasis added)

The “Success” of Afrikaans If one takes the above as a set of criteria for gauging the success of Afrikaans, there is absolutely no doubt that the ideologues, planners, and practitioners of the

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Afrikaner nationalist movement, beginning, roughly, in 1900, succeeded in transforming “kitchen Dutch” into a language of science, technology, and higher education within the space of two generations. According to La Ponce (cited in Giliomee 2003, 3), it is, next to Hindi, Hebrew, and Bahasa in Malaysia and Indonesia, one of the few languages to have managed to attain the status of a standard language capable of all the “higher” functions associated with international languages such as English, French, German and Russian. Some external features of the success of Afrikaans are the existence, in the heyday of Afrikaner nationalism, of no fewer than four (whites-only) Afrikaansmedium universities catering to a population of between 1 and 2 million people, besides the huge bilingual distance-education University of South Africa; a fullyfledged (Afrikaans-English) bilingual civil service; a television service that provided for both English and Afrikaans programmes on a basis of equality. Above all, there developed a thriving publishing industry with a large variety of Afrikaans newspapers, books, magazines and journals. In this sphere, Afrikaans as a language became so strong that even after 1994, when a systematic downgrading of the language was initiated as a matter of official policy and social practice, the statistics remained very impressive. Citing Francis Galloway,7 Giliomee (2003, 23) gives comparative figures relating to texts published in South Africa in 2003 (see table 2.1). It ought to be clear, however, that these “successes” of Afrikaans,8 which were vaingloriously celebrated and eternalized in the creation of aTaalmonument (language monument) on a hilltop in Paarl, where Reverend Du Toit and his group of “true Afrikaners” had established the first Afrikaans language movement, were an illusion. For, at the heart of Afrikaner nationalism and of the Afrikaans language movement, there resided an abiding enigma, a contradiction that was the manifestation of its anti-humanistic logic: Die taal is gans die volk! This formulation of language-based nationalism, which is a distillation of the historical experience of national democratic revolutions in Western Europe during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has haunted the Afrikaans language and its various movements. Though this fact is often overlooked, the exclusive character of the Afrikaans standardization process, with its implicit identity meaning of a whites-only Afrikaner nation, was albeit often opportunistically opposed by Afrikaner intellectuals at various stages. With reference to the importance of the (Afrikaner) National Party (NP), founded in 1914, for the promotion of Afrikaans as a public language, Giliomee (2003b, 11) formulates the core issue as follows:

Table 2.1 Language of texts, South Africa, 2003 Language Afrikaans English Multilingual African Languages

Poetry

Drama

Fiction

Total

283 302 34 342

53 127 20 283

2464 545 109 635

2800 974 163 1260

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During the entire twentieth century activists for Afrikaans used the NP as their vehicle. These language activists, however, never squarely confronted a key issue: Did the Afrikaner community form a racial community whose language struggle was subordinate to the entrenchment of white supremacy? Or did Afrikaans-speakers form a language community whose social identity was shaped by the struggle for the acceptance of Afrikaans as a public language co-equal with English? If the latter was the case, the salience of race had to diminish and the creed Die taal is gans die volk . . . , which activists often cited, had to be made across racial boundaries.

Giliomee (2003b, 12–13) goes on to consider the case of J. H. H. de Waal and Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman at one of those tipping points in history when, according to a beautiful phrase of the Afrikaner poet N. P. Van Wyk Louw, there is “a balance of arguments,” that is, when the choice that is made determines the future trajectory of a people’s social experience. De Waal, who was an NP member of parliament, wrote the first Afrikaans novel but, much more significantly, against the overwhelming majority of Afrikaner intellectuals, including most clergymen, stood for an inclusive definition of the Afrikaner people-nation, one which would include all its “non-white” speakers. He saw the Afrikaans-speaking “coloured” population as “fellow Afrikaners” who spoke the same language, were equally and passionately committed to South Africa as part of the “permanent population” who were being “hoodwinked by the same friends.” In his view, the struggle was one between “sons of the soil” and British imperialism. Some of the Afrikaner elite, including General Hertzog, also accepted that the “coloured” population of the Cape were part of the Afrikaans-speaking component of the population; however, they viewed the “coloured” population as socially inferior and urged that they be segregated from their white compatriots. In general, one can observe a clear tendency toward an increasingly racist and purist definition of social identity that was, inevitably, accompanied by a tendency toward “Dutchification” of the standard language. This tendency became stronger as the weight of the “coloured vote” in the electoral constituencies of the Western Cape was reduced, first by the enfranchisement of white women in 1930 and, after 1948, by the complete removal of “coloureds” and the few qualified “natives” from the “common voters’ roll,” which had been a concession to the Cape Colony and Natal, agreed to by the vanquished Boer Republics during the negotiations that led up to the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Once the corrupted voting power of these non-white people had been negated, most of the ambivalent sentiment about their identity vanished and they were assigned their “proper” place in the racial order. Only after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 was this submerged current in Afrikaner political thought to resurface in the form of a group of verligte (enlightened) intellectuals and radical artists and writers such as Breyten Breytenbach, Ingrid Jonker, Andre Brink, and a few others.

The “Failure” of Afrikaans Before we close the circle, however, it is necessary to consider the developments in the so-called “coloured” community with respect to the language question. In

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general, it can be said that the majority, up to 90 percent, of those who came to be labeled and later classified as “coloured” were (and continue to be) Afrikaansspeaking. Although there were many occasions when people labeled “coloured,” especially after the introduction of compulsory mother tongue education in 1953, were episodically involved in language-based struggles, these were never as important to them and to other oppressed people as were issues of racial discrimination and class exploitation. Their attitudes to their mother tongue were not as intense and sentimentally anchored as were those of white Afrikaans speakers, for whom it had assumed an iconic significance as the result of their anti-imperialist struggles. A well-known academic and political figure, Jakes Gerwel, once aptly remarked that most of these people would die in but not for Afrikaans. In fact, especially after the coming to power of the NP in 1948 and even more so after the Soweto uprising in 1976, many non-white Afrikaans-speaking intellectuals had profoundly contradictory and conflicted feelings about being “Afrikaans speaking”; so much so, in fact, that a short-lived movement for the creation of an “alternative Afrikaans” came into being in the early 1980s (van den Heever 1987). Although this failed, its point of departure was correct and, in practice, the demand for the re-standardization of Afrikaans, as part and parcel of the struggle for democracy and for the empowerment of ordinary people, including ordinary Afrikaans-speaking people, gained momentum. This moment also saw the convergence of the young Afrikaner rebels and the layer of “coloured” authors and intellectuals who published more or less serious literary and journalistic work in Afrikaans. This had always been a minority group, since most black—including so-called “coloured” or “mixed race”—intellectuals worked in English. In this respect, they were no different from the Afrikaner intelligentsia during the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth. British imperial rule and the dependence of the economy of South Africa on the British-controlled markets simply meant that all remunerative employment was conditional on reasonable proficiency in the English language. And, even though this always involved only a small minority of individuals, English hegemony was firmly established and it became the language of aspiration for all black people who, unlike the white Afrikaans-speaking community, did not elevate their own languages to emblematic status, since their issues were systemically defined by the specificities of the racial order that had evolved in South Africa in the course of three centuries and which had become institutionalized by means of apartheid legislation and practices. At about the same time that de Waal was promoting a common identity for all Afrikaans speakers, Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman, the most prominent leader from about 1905 until 1940 of those labeled “coloured” in South Africa, came out strongly and clearly for English, mainly because he equated the emerging standard Afrikaans language with the racial habitus and racist politics of the Afrikaner elite. Oblivious to the fact that his position could only benefit a few middle-class people, he maintained in the run-up to the establishment of the Union of South Africa that: The question naturally arises which is to be the national language. Shall it be the degraded forms of a literary language (Dutch N.A.), a vulgar patois; or shall it be that language which Macaulay says is “In force, in richness, in aptitude for all the highest purposes of the poet, the philosopher, and the orator inferior to the

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tongue of Greece alone?” Shall it be the language of the “Kombuis” (kitchen N.A.) or the language of Tennyson? That is, shall it be the Taal (Afrikaans N.A.) or English? (cited in Alexander 1989, 29)

The sociological untenability of the decision by the missionary-educated black intelligentsia for English is manifest in the fact that whenever they had to approach the poor in their communities, they reverted to the mother tongues. Paradoxically, Abdurahman himself penned a series of witty and informative critical articles and commentaries in Afrikaans on the goings-on in parliament for the regular readers of the newsletter of his political organization, the African Political Organisation (APO). It was entitled Straatpraatjes (Street talk) and was conceived as a kind of serial riposte to de Waal’s Parlementse Praatjes (Parliamentary talk), which was published in De Zuid-Afrikaan. Ultimately, the anglocentrism of the black intelligentsia was determined by the same historical and sociological forces that entrenched the hegemony of English, French, and Portuguese in all of sub-Saharan Africa before and after political independence. Eventually, the hegemony of English in the liberation movement in South Africa was justified by the alleged “neutrality” of the language—as against the status of Afrikaans as “the language of the oppressor”—and by the fact that it served as the lingua franca of the elites, which facilitated communication across linguistic and ethnic boundaries. For most young black people, it became self-evident that all “important” transactions, especially in the public sphere, including the marketplace, had to take place in English. Among middle-class people labeled “coloured,” a shift from Afrikaans into English began soon after the NP came to power. This accelerated after Soweto in 1976. More interestingly, a similar, if very halting, trend is becoming evident among working class people. To that extent, there can be no doubt that, however we choose to define it, the Afrikaans movement has failed for now. This does not mean that the language is doomed, as I shall show in conclusion. After 1994, Afrikaans was not only reduced to equality with the 10 other official languages of the new South Africa; it has actually lost more ground than even the normal restoration of balance from the highly unequal and privileged situation that had existed under apartheid would lead one to expect. Afrikaans as a sole medium of teaching at public educational institutions no longer exists, except in a few schools. According to Giliomee (2003, 23) Even before the transition to democracy in 1994 scientific publication in Afrikaans had declined precipitously. The Afrikaans share of Masters and Doctoral theses written at South African universities in the natural sciences dropped from 35,8% [sic] during 1960–73 to 9 percent [sic] in 1996. In the case of dissertations in the humanities and social sciences the Afrikaans component between 1975 and 1996 declined from 62 percent to 48 percent. . . . The Afrikaans share of articles in selected academic journals in 1996/7 is on average 20 percent.9

Conclusion: A Language of Reconciliation and Unification? To all intents and purposes, Afrikaans has failed both with respect to the original Afrikaner constituency, which is now more divided than ever before, and with

AFRIKAANS

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respect to uniting the entire speaker community. In spite of an almost optimally democratic language policy that, among other things, has made it possible for Afrikaans-speaking plaintiffs to take the government or the private sector to court for alleged violations of language rights, there is a general feeling of resignation among Afrikaners about the inevitable loss of power of the language. On the other hand, the very “sins” of Afrikaans may turn out to be its strength. Apartheid, it is accepted among serious analysts, was an affirmative action policy for white, especially Afrikaans-speaking, South Africans. The development of Afrikaans itself was facilitated and accelerated because of state and quasi-state support for the language and its (white) speakers. In the course of this period of forty-five “golden years,” scholars and technicians gained valuable skills and experience, which under favorable conditions they are now able to transmit to others, especially to African language scholars and technicians. This is happening on a large scale in domains such as lexicography, human language technology, journalism, and literacy campaigns and programs. One of the most innovative and passionate programmatic projects that are working in this direction is theStigting vir Bemagtiging deur Afrikaans (SBA) (Foundation for Empowerment through Afrikaans). Its activists have realized that the disadvantaged Afrikaans-speaking communities of rural South Africa and of the urban townships can only be mobilized and organized, as the Afrikaners had done in the first half of the twentieth century, by means of their own languages. It focuses on Afrikaans but not to the exclusion of other poor communities.10 Because of the systematic downgrading of Afrikaans, especially in the public sector and in tertiary educational institutions, the dated modus operandi (ethnic nationalist rhetoric) is no longer effective. Afrikaans is once again “threatened” by English, the preferred language of the elite. Its survival and maintenance as a public language depend critically on a more inclusive standard on the one hand, and an “alliance” with the other African languages of South Africa on the other hand. Human language technology (IT, interpreting, and translation, among other things) constitutes a third cluster of possible empowerment and maintenance. Only a radical and consequential inclusiveness in the process of reinventing Afrikaans, which would encompass all its speakers, including second-language speakers, will finally remove the stigma of the “language of the oppressor.” In these ways, Afrikaans, instead of being the divisive force that it became in the second half of the twentieth century, could become a language of reconciliation and empowerment. Scales to evaluate the success or failure of language movements must have different dimensions. I consider three important dimensions for Afrikaans: success of the racialized standard, success in unifying the speaker community, and success in terms of maintaining vitality. My personal evaluation (using a scale of 1–10) for the success-failure of Afrikaans appears below. Success of racialized standard = 10 Success in terms of unifying speaker community = 6 Success in terms of maintaining vitality = 7

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Notes 1. Giliomee’s comprehensive study of the Afrikaners (2003a) delves into the detail of many of the issues he merely mentions in his shorter essays and other politicalhistorical works. 2. This refers to the view that “a nation” is constituted by all those people who share a common territory, language, and culture. The understanding is based on a very reduced version of the historical experience of nationalist movements in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 3. “Khoikhoi” refers to those people who in earlier texts are labelled “Hottentots.” They were herders who owned mainly sheep and used the pastures of the Cape Peninsula on a seasonal basis. 4. “Burghers” refers to the group of former servants of the Dutch East India Company, who were released from its service in order to farm with livestock and vegetables so that the supply of these items to the mariners in the passing ships would be guaranteed. They were the first “colonists” in South Africa. 5. J. du P. Scholtz (1964) is one of the main secondary sources for the early history of Afrikaans. 6. This process has been described in great detail in many Afrikaans studies. A succinct and nuanced study in the English language is Hofmeyer 1987. Also see Giliomee 2003a. 7. Statistical trends in South African book publishing in the 1990s, Alternation 9(1), 21. 8. Giliomee 2003b, 14–16 gives more examples of the “triumph” of Afrikaans. 9. More detail of this disempowerment is given in Giliomee 2003, 20–23. 10. See SBA (2009), Gids vir Skoolverlaters (Guide for School-leavers) (Cape Town: Stigting vir Bemagtiging deur Afrikaans).

References Alexander, Neville (1989). Language Policy and National Unity in South Africa/Azania. Cape Town: Buchu Books. duP. Scholtz, Johannes (1964). Die Afrikaner en sy Taal, 1806–1875. Cape Town: Nasou Bpk. Giliomee, Hermann (2003a). The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Giliomee, Hermann (2003b). The Rise and Possible Demise of Afrikaans as a Public Language. (PRAESA Occasional Papers No. 14). Cape Town: Project for the Study of Alternative Education, University of Cape Town. Hofmeyer, Isabel (1987). Building a nation with words: Afrikaans language, literature and ethnic identity,

1902–1924. In The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in TwentiethCentury South Africa, Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (eds.), 95–123. London and New York: Longmans. Roberge, Paul T. (2002). Afrikaans: Considering origins. In Language in South Africa, Rajend Mesthrie (ed.), 79–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SBA (2009). Gids vir Skoolverlaters (Guide for School-leavers). Cape Town: Stigting vir Bemagtiging deur Afrikaans. van den Heever, Randall (ed.) (1987). Tree Na Vryheid. ‘N Studie In Alternatiewe Afrikaans. Cape Town: KPO. Wilson, Monica, and Leonard Thompson (1969). The Oxford History of South Africa. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3 Invention of Scripts in West Africa for Ethnic Revitalization PETER UNSETH

Introduction Creating unique scripts has often been used as a tool of ethnic revitalization efforts around the world. Because the use of a different script can instantly identify any written item as being allied with a different identity, scripts have sometimes been employed as tools in ethnic revitalization movements. By writing their language using a script that is uniquely theirs and instantly identifiable as distinct from those around them, a number of ethnic communities have created scripts as part of an effort to strengthen their ethnic identities (Unseth 2005, 2008). West Africa is unique, in that over a dozen scripts have been invented there in a relatively short time, all with some degree of ethnic revitalization as part of their impetus. In this paper, “WAIS” (West African Indigenous Scripts) will be used as a label to refer to this group of indigenous scripts created in West Africa. These are fully functional, sound-based writing systems, either alphabets or syllabaries. (This is in contrast to the Adinkra symbols in which each symbol stands for a concept, such as “peace.”) It is not a coincidence that almost all of these scripts were invented during the period of time between World War I and independence for much of West Africa, a time of great political aspiration and social change. During that same time, local religious movements (often some form of Christianity) were also proliferating, separating themselves from foreign-linked churches and religious institutions. It is not a coincidence that at least three WAIS are directly linked to new religious groups. These WAIS have been used as tools for ethnic revival on two levels. Sometimes the focus has been revival of the specific ethnic group, distinguishing it from other nearby ethnic groups (Dalby 1968, 166). Other times, the focus of the ethnic revival has been to separate the African ethnic groups from outsiders, Europeans and Arabs, and their scripts.

23

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Some of these WAIS have been very successful as writing systems, and therefore these scripts have also been the most successful as tools of ethnic revival, the most prominent examples being Vai and N’ko. A few WAIS are still in limited use, but several are no longer in use, as we will see below. Dalby (1969, 180) discusses the motivation for these WAIS: Many—if not all—of the inventors were impelled by the desire to demonstrate the ability of Africans to create their own forms of writing, independent of either European or Arabic systems. In this respect, the scripts have a motivation that is comparable to that of the indigenous African churches. This search for African “independence” is reflected in the way that Kantè maintains the independence of his script from either the occidental or oriental influence . . . and by the claim that both the Wolof and Dembélé’s Fula script are suitable for writing all [emphasis in original] African languages.

Book titles such as Black People’s Book and Mandombe: Black African Script, make it clear that such scripts are Black African, distinct from the European and Arabic scripts. Maurice Tadadjeu observed “part of African identity” is “reflected in the writing systems devised by Africans over the centuries for their own languages” (Mafundikwa 2004, ix).

Necessary Conditions for Scripts to Succeed For a script to be a successful part of an ethnic revival, certain conditions must be fulfilled. First, and obviously, there must be adequate desire for change among a significant number of members of the ethnic community for a revival to succeed. Second, a script must be successfully implemented and developed as a writing system. In keeping with other studies in this volume, objective criteria have been selected to measure the success of these scripts. For this study, the objective criteria are concepts from the field of language planning: “status and domain planning,” “corpus planning,” and “acquisition planning” (Cooper 1989). The first and foundational concept is status and domain planning. For a script to be successfully adopted, a critical mass of the language community must decide that they want to use their language in written form, using the script. (For almost all of the languages involved, there was no prior literacy in the language in another script, so they had to choose to write their language.) The community will have to choose some functions, some social domains, for which they will use their written language, domains such as genealogical record keeping, personal letters, education, government documents, religion, and so on. Choosing to implement their script in these new ways is a change of status. If the status and domain decisions are too limited, or if the people making the decisions are too few, a script will not be used widely enough to be a tool for ethnic revival. The second relevant concept from language planning is that there must be what language planners call a “corpus,” a codified form of the script and also a body of literature using the script. Those scripts that have been more successful (both as tools of ethnic revival and as writing systems) are those that have been accepted

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by enough of the community and have been used to publish larger bodies of literature (larger in number of titles and topics, and numbers of copies produced). Third, there must be what language planners call “acquisition planning,” provision for some sort of efforts to teach others to use the script. Those scripts for which some form of teaching was carried out had greater chances of being successfully acquired by significant numbers of people, and greater chances of being successfully used in ethnic revivals. For example, the Fula script of Adama Ba was taught only to a small circle, but the N’ko script is taught in elementary schools in Guinea (Wyrod 2008). Obviously, these three points are closely related; deciding which takes precedence will sometimes lead to a chicken-and-egg dilemma. But the three separate concepts will be shown to be relevant in studying which scripts have been most successfully used in ethnic revivals. Comparing the fate of the various WAIS, it becomes clear that those that have been most successful as tools for ethnic revival have been those that have succeeded in the three areas labeled by language planners. That is, no matter how much desire there was for ethnic revival, unless a script is supported by a decision to use it in writing for a variety of functions, and there is a large body of literature using the script, and there is a system for teaching the script, the script will contribute little to an ongoing ethnic revival movement. However, an indigenous script can still be a powerful symbol in ethnic revitalization even if now used only in symbolic ways and no longer as a functional writing system, such as Bamun. This paper examines the success of these WAIS as tools of ethnic revival by examining the empirical evidence of their varying degrees of success as writing systems. The success of scripts as instruments of ethnic revival and the degree to which they have succeeded as scripts is closely intertwined, a symbiotic relationship.

Syllabary vs. Alphabet Because most of the WAIS are “syllabaries,” the distinction between syllabaries and alphabets must be explained. Alphabets are composed of consonants and vowels, such as the Roman alphabet used for writing English. When writing with an alphabet, the syllable “ko” is composed of two symbols, a consonant and a vowel. Syllabaries are composed of symbols that represent syllables, a single symbol encoding both a consonant and a vowel. Using a syllabary, the symbol “ko” is a single symbol. Because alphabet symbols represent more analytical units of sound, alphabets consist of smaller numbers of symbols; because syllabary symbols represent whole syllables, syllabaries consist of larger sets of symbols. The very first of these WAIS was the Vai syllabary. Since the Vai syllabary was such a strong source of inspiration for the other WAIS, it is not a coincidence that almost all of the subsequent WAIS were syllabaries. (The exceptions are from creators who had extensive exposure to an alphabet, such as the Bassa alphabet, which was developed in the 1920s by Dr. Thomas Lewis, a Liberian studying in the United States.) Most newly created scripts are syllabaries rather than alphabets, especially those created by those with little education (Daniels 2008, 35). It may seem counterintuitive

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to many who know only alphabets, but learning to read a syllabary has been seen as easier to learn in many places. Readers learned to read the Mende syllabary in “only a fraction of the time” that it took to learn to read it in a Roman-based spelling (Tuchscherer 1995, 183). This is related to the fact that the syllable is psychologically more readily accessible than consonants and vowels (Bennett and Berry 1995).

Scripts Invented in West Africa All creators of WAIS had previously been exposed to linear writing in the Arabic and/or Roman alphabets (Dalby 1968, 160). Also, all of the later script creators were aware of the Vai script, and often one of the other WAIS that it had inspired. For several WAIS, this awareness was a key factor leading to their creation. The first of the WAIS was the Vai script from Liberia (created about 1833), but even this script can be shown to have been at least partially inspired by another syllabary: the Cherokee syllabary from the United States. A Cherokee man named Austin Curtis, literate in Cherokee, emigrated to Liberia, living there four years before Momolu Duwalu Bukele’s creation of the Vai syllabary (Tuchscherer and Hair 2002). It was when Lieutenant Forbes of the British navy noticed a Vai inscription on Curtis’s house that the outside world learned of the Vai script. Dalby’s description of ten of the WAIS is instructive: With the exception of the inventor of the Bassa script, “they all appear to have been young men, with an average age of about 25 at the time of their inventions. They all lived in areas where Christian missions had been active, and they were all aware not only of the practical advantages of the Roman script but also of its regular association (especially in the West African context) with a revealed religion and with a ‘holy book.’ ” (Dalby 1968, 163)

Several of the script inventors explicitly wanted to catch up to Europeans in the matter of having a written form of their language (Dalby 1968, 164). In an era when Christianity and Islam were displacing local religions “some search for reconciliation between Christianity and traditional beliefs was certainly a major factor” for two of the scripts, Djuka and Oberi Okaime (Dalby 1968, 165). “Most of the scripts are remarkably free from any close imitation of either the Roman or the Arabic script, and as such they stand in contrast to the much less original forms of the Cherokee and modern Somali scripts” (Dalby 1968, 169). None of the other script creators claimed any antiquity for their script. The majority of these script creators claim that their script had been inspired or revealed by divine revelation (Dalby 1968, 161, 162), not uncommon for creators of a new script (Cooper 1991).

Relative Success of the WAIS The WAIS included in this study (listed in table 3.1), have had varying degrees of success. Below they are described in groups: viable, hopeful, and failed.

Table 3.1 West African Indigenous Scripts and Their Current States Language

Origin date

Community acceptance

Domains

Corpus

Acquisition

Scale of 1–10

N’ko

c. 1950

Broad

Broad

Extensive

Vai

c. 1833

Broad

Several

Includes New Testament and Quran, computer fonts

Schools and informally Young learning it, not well organized

1978

Within a denomination

Mostly religion

Computer fonts, small corpus

Within the church denomination

4

Variety formerly, now symbolic cultural Correspondence Correspondence Religion, Unknown Unknown Correspondence Unknown Correspondence Unknown Unknown Unknown Religion Religion

Broad, but all old Very small Very small Very small Very small Very small Very small None Unknown Few ms. Few ms. Few ms. Few ms. Few ms. Few ms.

Very weak

2

none none none none none none none none none none none none none none

2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Viable 8 7

Hopeful Mandombe Failed Bamun

c. 1895

Bassa Kpelle Loma Mende Wolof Afaka Bagam Bete Fula (Adam Ba) Fula (Dita) Gola Masaba Oberi Okaime Yoruba Holy Writing

1920s 1930s 1930s 1921 1961 1910 Early 1900s 1956 1958–1966 pre-1968 1930 c. 1930 1926–1928

Very few Very few Very few Very few Very few Very few Very few

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Viable Scripts Only two of these WIAS seem to be established and viable as scripts, N’ko and Vai, here rated on a 10-point scale as 8 and 7, respectively. Their situations will be briefly described to contrast with the unsuccessful scripts. N’ko and Vai both score high on all three of the categories from language planning, with Mandombe far behind though hopeful, while all the other scripts are being used little, if at all. N’ko and Vai have been adopted by a significant portion of their communities for use in publishing a number of domains. Both have received some level of governmental recognition at different times. Both of these scripts have passed far beyond the immediate circle of their creators, unlike most of the failed scripts, and have spread much farther than any of the failed WAIS. Both communities generally follow Islam, but both scripts are used by Muslims and Christians to teach their faiths. The push to use these scripts for Christianity has been aided by outsiders who have recognized the fact that these scripts have become established as the scripts of local loyalty and identification. Both scripts have been used to publish translations from the Koran and the New Testament (though only in Vai are either available in complete form). Though such languages as Bassa and Kpelle were used to print small portions of scripture over fifty years ago, no other WAIS has been used since then to publish Christian scripture except N’ko and Vai. They both have computerized fonts available; the first Vai computer font was developed specifically for publishing scripture, and one of the N’ko fonts also was prepared by programmers with scripture in mind. Both scripts have also been used to publish a variety of literature, though “the production of published literature in N’ko probably exceeds the published literature in all the other West African scripts combined” (Tuchscherer 2007, 50), including proverbs, poetry, history, pharmacopoeia, biographies, politics, and religion. In contrast, the corpus for the failed scripts generally consists of handwritten manuscripts: correspondence, records, and items not intended for broad distribution. Programs of acquisition for both N’ko and Vai were and are more vigorous than for the failed scripts. Early on, both of these successful scripts were spread quickly through officially promoted formal teaching. Vai was promoted by the king (Dalby 1967, 11) and N’ko by Sékou Touré, Guinea’s head of state after independence (Wyrod 2008, 34). Both are still being taught, though today only N’ko is taught in formal schools, and only to a limited extent (Wyrod 2008, 39,40).

Hopeful Script Only one of the scripts is classified as “hopeful”: Mandombe, which I score at 4. It is important to note that though it is still used in a limited circle, the script is gaining users and visibility. It was created in 1978, by a member of the Kimbangui church (Church of Jesus Christ of the Prophet Simon Kimbangu). It was not intended to revive an ethnic identity in the narrow sense, but the Kimbangui church has a strong emphasis on

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restoring a broader African identity, establishing distinctive leadership and forms. As part of this strengthening of a separate African identity, the church promotes the Mandombe script. It has been used to write Kikongo, Lingala, Chiluba, and Swahili and several other languages of Central and Southern Africa. This church-based community has adopted and promoted the script, where it is used for church functions. Despite hopes for it to spread to other domains, it is not clear that it has. There is little available evidence of published materials, though a computer font exists for printing Mandombe. The script is taught in Kimbaguist church schools in Angola, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also promoted by CENA (Centre de l’Ecriture Négro-Africaine); it is not clear how separate CENA is from the Kimbangui church. In 2009, conferences to promote awareness and use of Mandombe were held in Liège, Brussels, and Cologne. In two categories of language planning, Mandombe appears to be gaining momentum, but it still seems to be very weak in producing a corpus, a body of published literature. Mandombe is not yet as strong as N’ko or Vai, but since it is gaining users and usage, it is certainly in an entirely different category from the scripts classed as “failed.”

Failed Scripts The rest of the WAIS are all classified here as failed: most are no longer used and the rest hardly used at all, with no real hope of being revived. Whether they are totally unused, or still used by a few, they are all failed scripts. Some were more widely used in the past, some were never used beyond the immediate circle of their creators. Some have been officially opposed by national governments, for example Bamun. The Bamun earlier used their script (scored 2) to write their record of the first German officials, the founding of the Bamun kingdom, and to describe their religion that combines Christianity, Islam, and African tradition (Musa 1999, 30). However, Roman script is now used for writing Bamun, including for the complete Bible in 1988 by the Bible Society of Cameroon. The Bamun script is only actively used by one last person, but it is still proudly used “in art and ritual for public display,” even though those who transcribe it do not understand what they write. “It has retained its meaning as an important trademark of Bamun cultural and artistic identity” (Tuchscherer 2007, 48,49). The failure of a script to continue is also seen poignantly among the Mende. Two children of the Mende script’s chief promoter learned to read Mende in Roman script, as they were unable to read the script that their father had so actively promoted (Dalby 1967, 21). None of these language communities currently shows much evidence of community adoption of the script. In none of these is literature being produced in the WAIS; now Roman script is used to write many of them. In addition, none of these language communities has meaningful programs to teach the script to new readers.

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Summary We have seen that a number of scripts were created in West Africa, most in the era leading up to independence. These scripts were created not merely for recording thoughts, but also as instruments of ethnic revival. It is not clear how important Unicode recognition will be for these scripts to continue. So far, only Vai has been accepted into Unicode, and N’ko is in process. It appears that computer fonts have also been prepared for Mandombe, Afaka, Loma, and Bassa, Most of the scripts score 2 or lower, and one is rated as high as 8. The ones showing most hope are N’ko and Vai, with Mandombe showing some promise, though its future is still uncertain.

Indigenous Scripts in Ethnic Revivals Elsewhere In other parts of the world, also, scripts have been used as tools for ethnic revitalization, especially in peninsular Southeast Asia (see Smalley, Vang, and Yang 1990; Smalley and Wimuttikosol 1998; Womack 2005; Enwall 2008; Sidwell 2008; Unicode 2009). As in West Africa, the creation of a script for ethnic revival by one group seems to be a catalyst for other groups in the area. In all of these cases, certain patterns seem to be repeated. First, after the creation of a distinctive script, there is enthusiasm by a small circle of ethnic revivalists. In order to persuade more of the community to adopt the script, they work to propagate and implement the script. They quickly produce a few initial documents and begin to teach the script in their local areas. Then comes a more difficult task––to impress their community they must produce an adequate amount of literature, both in terms of titles and total copies. Since they must now compete with scripts (and ethnic groups) that have large bodies of literature, script promoters have a harder time persuading the community to adopt and use the script if there is inadequate printed literature in the script. Too often, new scripts have not progressed beyond this stage. Literature produced for the community by outsiders, such as religious publications, though helpful in creating a critical mass of literature, may not be as useful as if insiders produce literature, both in terms of topics of interest and in terms of local ownership and initiative. It appears that for a script to be a useful tool in an ethnic revival, the literature produced in the script does not have to be directly linked to activities related to ethnic revival, such as ethnic history, calls for ethnic solidarity, or traditional stories and poems (though such literature can be helpful). Rather, for a script to be useful in an ethnic revival, it must succeed as a script. That is, there must be an adequate corpus, a body of literature (on any topic) that will be used by the community. For a new script to succeed, the ability and commitment to use it must be spread as far as possible. Again, in the initial days of a script, it is easier to teach a few eager learners, but creating and maintaining a program of teaching the new script is a great challenge. Nowadays, any new script will find itself in competition

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with more established script(s) and educational systems. To be successfully carried on, a community will need to devise alternative teaching programs to teach their script, as has been done by the three non-failed WIAS.

Conclusion We have seen that a desire for reinforcing ethnic identity has been a significant motive for the creation and use of the WAIS. In many cases, the creation and use of a script has been part of an effort to strengthen a local ethnic identity in contrast to that of the Arabs and Europeans (who had literature). In some cases, such as Wolof and Fula (Dita), the effort has been more widely focused, in an attempt to unite African ethnic groups (a motivation not unrelated to raising themselves in the face of Arabs and Europeans), though these scripts are now dead or dying. In a few cases, such as N’ko, Loma, and Gola, it was more narrowly focused, trying to nurture an ethnic identity in contrast to neighboring groups. N’ko has been very successful in galvanizing a Manding identity, but as a writing system, it has now even spread to other ethnic groups (Wyrod 2008, 41). In almost all cases, these efforts to create and use a new script to strengthen ethnic identities have not succeeded. Few of the scripts have had any lasting acceptance or impact beyond the creator’s circle of acquaintances. However, the Vai and N’ko scripts have not only endured, they have prevailed, functioning as both writing systems and as symbols of ethnic identity. In both cases, the scripts were supported by the endorsement of an adequate portion of the community, the provision of an adequate corpus of literature in the script, and the establishment of some sort of schooling to teach the script to others. It may be helpful to state the conclusion in the negative: a new script will not be successful (as a tool for ethnic revival or any other purpose) if the community does not endorse it, if there is no sufficient corpus of literature in the script, and if there is no system to teach it to new readers. These three factors by themselves may not be adequate, but they are necessary. Acknowledgments I am grateful for the assistance of Konrad Tuchscherer in my research. It is customary for authors to thank their spouse, but in this case my gratitude to my wife Carole is more deserved than for most authors. References Bennett, Jo Anne, and John W. Berry (1991). Cree literacy in the syllabic script. In Literacy and Orality, David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (eds.), 90–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, Robert (1989). Language Planning and Social Change.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, Robert (1991). Dreams of scripts: Writing systems as gifts of God. In The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought: Essays in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman’s 65th

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Birthday,Robert Cooper and Bernard Spolsky (eds.), 219–226. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Dalby, David (1967). A survey of the indigenous scripts of Liberia and Sierra Leone: Vai, Mende, Kpelle, and Bassa. African Language Studies 8: 1–51. Dalby, David (1968). The indigenous scripts of West Africa and Surinam: Their inspiration and design. African Language Studies 9: 156–197. Dalby, David (1969). Further indigenous scripts of West Africa: Manding, Wolof, and Fula alphabets and Yoruba holy-writing. African Language Studies 10: 161–191. Daniels, Peter (2008). Grammatology. In Cambridge Handbook of Literacy, David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (eds.), 25–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enwall, Joakim (2008). Script choice among the Miao in China. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 192: 153–170. Mafundikwa, Saki (2004). Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika. West New York, NJ: Mark Batty. Musa, Tansa (2006). Cameroon—for those who say Africa had no writing system. New African 450: 30–31. Sidwell, Paul (2008). The Khom script of the Kommodam rebellion. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 192: 15–26. Smalley, William, Chia Koua Vang, and Gnia Yee Yang (1990). Mother of Writing: The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic Script. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smalley, William, and Nina Wimuttikosol (1998). Another Hmong

messianic script and its texts. Written Language and Literacy 1: 103–128. Tuchscherer, Konrad, and P. E. H. Hair (2002). Cherokee in West Africa: Examining the origins of the Vai script. History in Africa 29: 427–486. Tuchscherer, Konrad (1995). African script and Scripture: The history of the Kikakui (Mende) writing system for Bible translations. African Languages and Cultures 8(2): 169–188. Tuchscherer, Konrad (2007). Recording, communicating and making visible: A history of writing and systems of graphic symbolism in Africa. In Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art, Christine Mullen Kreamer, Mary Nooter Roberts, Elizabeth Harney, and Allyson Purpura (eds.), 37-53. Washington, DC: Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art. Unicode (2009). http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/ sc2/wg2/docs/n3589.pdf. Unseth, Peter (2005). Sociolinguistic parallels between choosing scripts and languages, Written Language and Literacy 8(1): 19–42. Unseth, Peter (2008). The sociolinguistics of script choice: An introduction. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 192: 1–4. Womack, William (2005). Literate networks and the production of Sgaw Karen and Pwo Karen: Writing in Burma, c. 1830–1930. Dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies. Wyrod, Christopher (2008). A social orthography of identity: The N’ko literacy movement in West Africa. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 192: 27–44.

4 The Teaching of Amazigh (Berber) in Morocco FATIMA SADIQI

Introduction Morocco is characterized by a great deal of linguistic diversity. Four major languages are used in this country: Standard Arabic, French, Amazigh,1 and Moroccan Arabic.2 The use of these languages carries specific political and sociocultural meanings. Standard Arabic is the official language; it is associated with authority in public institutions such as religion, the government, education, administration, and a large part of the media. French is a second language; it is associated with business, education, the military, and elite media. As for Amazigh and colloquial Arabic, they are largely associated with home, the street, and popular media (see Sadiqi 2003, Ennaji 2005, and Boukous 2001 for more details on this). In September 2003, Amazigh officially entered the Moroccan educational system, a powerful public space, for the very first time in its history. This spectacular entrance marked the transition of Amazigh from the private sphere to the public arena of authority.3 Three major factors were behind the teaching of Amazigh: the Amazigh cultural movement, the work of academics, and the king’s will to integrate this language into the country’s development. The combination of these factors has been assisted by an overall process of democratization that Morocco launched in the last decade or so. From 2003 to 2009, the teaching of Amazigh in Morocco witnessed ups and downs. In spite of the fact that there is no going back in the process of teaching the language, the overall enthusiasm of its beginning is now fading. This paper looks at the ebb and flow of Amazigh through the lens of teaching the language. It consists of five sections that feed into each other: (1) the relevant characteristics of the Amazigh language, (2) the sociopolitical background to the teaching of the Amazigh language, (3) the progress made in the teaching of the Amazigh language, (4) the

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regression in the teaching of the Amazigh language, and (5) the future of the teaching of the Amazigh language

The Amazigh Language There are two major ethnic groups in Morocco: the Arabic-speaking group and the Amazigh-speaking one. Historically, the latter group constituted the first inhabitants of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Tunisia, and Libya), whereas the former one came from the Arabian Peninsula in the eighth century and brought with it a new political system, the Arabic language, and a new religion, Islam (see Brett and Fentress 1996). According to Ennaji (2007, 66): [Amazigh] is an Afro-Asiatic language that is mainly used north of the Great Sahara and in North-West Africa. [Amazigh) is the mother tongue of the first inhabitants of North Africa. It is spoken in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad.

Throughout North and sub-Saharan Africa, Amazigh is spoken in discontinuous areas surrounded by Arabic and other language speaking communities. The biggest Amazighophone community is found in Morocco (around 10 million speakers). Algeria has about 6 million Amazighophones. The Tuareg people (inhabiting Mali, Niger, and Libya) constitute about 1 million people and are speakers of Amazigh. And around 140,000 Amazigh-speaking people are scattered in isolated areas in Siwa (Egypt), Tunisia, and Mauritania (see Chaker 1983 and El Moujahid 1989). The varieties of Amazigh are numerous.4 Three major ones are used in Morocco: Tashelhit in southern Morocco, Tamazight in central Morocco, and Tarifit in northern Morocco. In spite of their phonetic and lexical diversity, Amazigh varieties share the same morphological and syntactic structures. The long absence of a unifying writing system has accentuated the mutual unintelligibility between Amaziphones in the sense that unwritten languages are not standardized, and has, until recently, excluded the language from the educational system of the countries in which it is used. On the other hand, the historicity and mother tongue status of Amazigh allowed it to survive for over 3,000 years. Amazigh is used basically in rural areas. In urban areas, it is mainly used in homes and the street. Like Moroccan Arabic, Amazigh is a language that has for a long time remained non-codified and non-standardized (see Sadiqi 1997), but the situation has recently changed, as will be shown below.

Official Attitudes toward Amazigh There is a clear evolution in the official attitude toward Amazigh. In the two decades that followed Morocco’s independence from France in 1956, the official attitude was rather indifferent, if not straightforwardly negative. The state-building process of that era needed a “one nation, one language” slogan to build a national

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identity and forge a place in the Arab Ummah (nation). From the mid-1980s onward, and with Morocco’s gradual opening and democratization in the face of Islamic extremism, the call for human rights, including linguistic rights, intensified and, consequently, the official attitude toward Amazigh started to change for the better. However, the real turning point in the official attitude toward Amazigh was the late King Hassan II’s speech on August 20, 1994. In this speech, the king, for the first time in the history of Morocco, declared that teaching and learning Amazigh “dialects” was mandatory for all Moroccans. Following this speech, the already existing Amazigh associations duplicated their efforts to promote the Amazigh language and culture, and new NGOs were created with the aim of implementing the royal decision. Television news programs in the three varieties of Amazigh were launched in 1997. This buoyant Amazigh civil society was backed by human rights organizations and started to attract international attention. Another important follow-up of the August 20, 1994, royal speech was the creation of the “Pôle Amazigh” (Amazigh Pole) of the BMCE (Banque Marocaine de Commerce Extérieur) Foundation, a private national bank. This foundation started an innovative model of construction and management of rural community schools where Amazigh was taught. The success of this endeavor led the foundation to fund the first textbook manuals on the teaching of Amazigh.5 The spectacular revival of Amazigh language and culture came at a time when Islamic extremism started to gain space in the Moroccan political landscape. The then political elite saw in the promotion of Amazigh, a secular language, a shield against the growing Islamist ideology and the Middle Eastern homogenizing PanArabism. The official attitude toward Amazigh became even more positive after King Mohamed VI’s speech on October 17, 2001, in Ajdir,6 in which he clearly stated that, “the promotion of Amazigh is a national responsibility.” This date was also the occasion of sealing the royal decree creating and organizing the Royal Institute for Amazigh culture (IRCAM).7 According to this royal decree, IRCAM is charged with “safeguarding, promoting and reinforcing the place of our Amazigh culture in educational, socio-cultural and national media.” The creation of IRCAM marked a new phase in the history of Amazigh: the institutionalization of the language. In 2003, IRCAM signed a cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Education whereby programs integrating Amazigh in school curricula and training sessions for teachers were to be elaborated. In September 2003, Amazigh entered Morocco’s public schools. The teaching of Amazigh was officially motivated by two things: the necessity to safeguard it as a token of Morocco’s ancestral identity, and the fact that millions of children spoke it as a mother tongue.8 This view was resisted by conservative forces, but generally speaking, it was supported by large portions of the ruling elite. This positive attitude proved to be indispensable to the continuity of the Amazigh language. Thus, the ebb and flow in the continuity of Amazigh depends on the changes in official attitude toward this language. In order to better understand this dynamic, it is important to consider the sociopolitical background of the teaching of the Amazigh language.

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The Teaching of the Amazigh Language The demand for teaching Amazigh needs to be situated in the overall Moroccan socioeconomic context. From the mid-1980s onward, the Moroccan educational system has had to face a genuine challenge: the growing demand for more human rights, including linguistic rights. During this period, Moroccan society experienced rapid change, whose implications are myriad. The majority of Morocco’s population (56 percent) now lives in urban areas, with the figure steadily rising at an annual rate of 3 percent. There has been a spectacular drop in Morocco’s population growth rate—from a steady 3 percent annual rate in the 1960s and 1970s, to 1.3 percent at present. The rate of female illiteracy in rural areas is still appallingly high: 63 percent, while in urban areas it has dropped to 49 percent.9 Alongside these changes, Morocco has been witnessing a steady democratization process, including an “opening” on Amazigh with the aim of teaching it at school. Amazigh was becoming increasingly politicized, and its codification gave rise to the 2002 heated media debates between conservatives (who preferred the Arabic script) and modernists (who wanted the Latin script). The ultimate choice was that of Tifinagh, which was the first alphabet that Berbers used (see table 4.1). The new language policy on Amazigh was also motivated by the need to reform the Moroccan educational system. In the 1999–2000 school year, the National Charter for Education and Training was adopted with the agreement of all political parties and syndicates. This charter aimed to define the future steps toward higher performances in national education and to break with the past. The new Charter explicitly mentioned the need to have an open approach toward the Amazigh language. It also made reference to the importance of improving the educational system and the teaching of foreign languages. Finally, the Charter underlined the fact that language policy needed to be compatible with the country’s sociolinguistic reality and with educational practice. The language planners, thus, opted for a multi-sector language policy in which the teaching of Amazigh was perceived as a token of modernity and diversity. It is interesting to note that Amazigh was excluded from the school system in the postcolonial era in the name of unity, and it is in the same name that it was now introduced into the system. Likewise, the previous association of Amazigh with tradition started to shift to associating this language with modernity. This shows that the continuity and failure of Amazigh are linked to the concepts of tradition and modernity. The pre- and post-independence failure of Amazigh was blamed on tradition, and the relatively recent continuity of the language is being linked to modernity: as Amazigh is not backed by a holy book, it becomes secular, thus modern. This is proof that the concepts of tradition and modernity, just as those of continuity and failure, are not fixed; they are constantly recreated in specific historical environments and for specific sociopolitical aims. The presence of French and now Amazigh in the Moroccan educational system strips teaching from the religious connotation that is associated with Standard Arabic. Further, not being supported by a holy book, Amazigh is further secularizing the Moroccan educational system. In order to solve the problems of training instructors, designing curricula and pedagogical materials, and so on, the king created the Royal Institute of the Amazigh Culture.

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Table 4.1 Appendix Tifinagh Alphabet (adapted by the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture in January 2003)

Thus, with the advent of globalization, “linguistic authority,” just like religious authority, is no longer placed in one single language. New dynamics between Moroccan languages are being attested: the initial rivalry over symbolic power between Standard Arabic and French, on the one hand, and Standard Arabic and Amazigh, on the other hand, is giving way to a drastic reduction of the space of Arabic in education, with the emergence of Amazigh in schools as a sign of “opening” and democratization,” the adoption of French by conservatives as a sign of “pragmatism” (French, more than any other language leads to jobs), and the

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emergence of once “foreign” languages, namely English and to a lesser extent Spanish, as strong languages of education, especially in private schools. Against this overall socio-political context, three major factors have propelled the teaching of the Amazigh language to the forefront of the Moroccan political scene: Amazigh activism, language research, and the royal will. The royal will was discussed in the preceding section, Amazigh activism and research on Amazigh will be discussed in the following two sub-sections.

Amazigh Activism After the independence of Morocco from France, activists started to call for the recognition of Amazigh as a specific identity. For example, the “Association Marocaine de la Recherche et de l’Echange Culturel” (The Moroccan Association for Research and Cultural Exchange) was founded in 1968 with the goal of promoting Amazigh identity and preserving Amazigh language and culture. The 1980 “Tafsut n Imazighen” (The Spring of Amazighs) demanded cultural and linguistic rights. For Amazigh-language activists, Amazigh needs to be revitalized through teaching it and using it in formal and informal settings. However, for conservative Arabophones, the promotion of Amazigh may be a danger to national unity and political stability (cf. Boukous 2001, Sadiqi 1997, Ennaji 2005).

Research on Amazigh Of the three countries of the Maghreb, it is in Morocco that research on Amazigh language and culture has been best carried out. This research started during the Protectorate with the work of pioneering linguists such as David Cohen, Camps, and others. After independence and with the rise of humanities and social sciences, a number of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations were written on the phonology, sociology, and grammar of Amazigh in both French and English. This gave rise to the setting up of research groups such as GREL (Groupe de Recherche en Linguistique et Littérature, or Research Group on Linguistics and Literature), which was created at the University of Fes in the early 1980s. These groups have contributed greatly to motivating students to write their monographs, theses, and doctoral dissertations on Amazigh language and culture.

Progress in the Teaching of the Amazigh Language Another factor that helped propel Amazigh into education is the linguistic proximity between Amazigh and Arabic. The two languages share more or less the same phonological and grammatical systems.10 In terms of reference, the teaching of Amazigh is based on three things: Al-Mithaq11 (Agreement) which is sanctioned by all decision-makers (the king, the parliament, and civil society), the October 17 Ajdir royal speech, and the decree by virtue of which the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture was created. According

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to these legal and constitutive references, the teaching of Amazigh is to be based on universal values and human rights. There has also been cooperation between the IRCAM and the Ministry of Education at the level of pedagogy and teacher training. This cooperation has resulted in considerable progress in the teaching of Amazigh. Thus, in 2005, 140 teachers and inspectors were trained in some 32 centers. In 2007, this number rose to 2,000 and then dropped to 75 in 2008.12 The number of beneficiaries from Amazigh teaching reached 807 in 2003 and 1,140 in 2008. Progress was also made in curriculum development: the number of hours allocated to Amazigh in the primary school curriculum was fixed at three hours per week.13 This allowed syllabus makers to include various components of the Amazigh curriculum, such as text comprehension, grammar, math, and paralinguistic activities. The syllabus designers also allowed for a progression in the teaching of these items. Thanks to the rigor and efficiency of these pedagogical materials, the teaching of Amazigh has now reached the sixth and final year of the primary school level. Efforts are being made to extend the teaching of Amazigh to the secondary level and beyond. Amazigh has been present as a topic of research in Moroccan universities since the 1970s. In the last couple of years or so, a partnership between the IRCAM and three Moroccan universities (Agadir, Fes, and Oujda) resulted in whole department-like branches (called “filières”) of Amazigh. This new development allowed both students and teachers to study Amazigh and prepare its future teachers.

Setbacks in the Teaching of the Amazigh Language The perceived setbacks in the teaching of the Amazigh language are due to various factors. First, a reason for this regression is often attributed to the way that Amazigh is presented in the 2000 Moroccan National Charter of Education. In this charter, the reason for introducing Amazigh was reduced to “facilitating” the learning of Arabic in the primary schools. This “light” treatment of Amazigh in the National Charter caused anger among Amazigh activists who called for a more adequate place for this language in the Moroccan educational system. Furthermore, Amazigh is not uniformally made an obligatory item in the school curriculum. Second, the cooperation between the IRCAM and the Ministry of Education has not resulted in strong official texts explicating and supervising the strategies of integrating the Amazigh language in the Moroccan educational system. There are only mudhakkirats (circulars), which organize exams. In such a context, not all academies follow and adhere to the teaching of Amazigh in the first place. We can speak of high, average, and weak cooperation by academies. Third, the follow-up to the teaching of Amazigh is rather weak. In a sense, the weakness of the follow-up is both vertical and horizontal. Vertically, there are very few specialized inspectors who supervise the teaching of Amazigh at a time when all other components of the school curriculum are supervised by such inspectors. In the absence of this supervision, some academies teach three hours a week of

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Amazigh, others only two, and yet others one or none. Horizontally, there are 4 million pupils in Moroccan primary school, but only 500,000 are taught Amazigh. Over twenty years are needed to achieve horizontal generalization. Thus, in the academic years 2006–2007, 298,000 pupils were exposed to Amazigh; in 2007–2008, 349,712, and 2008–2009, the number rose only to 496,782 with 10,000 classes. Fourth, the Ministry of Education is slow in supplying continuous teacher training. The teacher training sessions launched in July 2003 by the Ministry of Education have not been followed by many other training sessions and workshops. While teachers of Arabic and French benefit from training sessions in institutions that have been created for this purpose, such as the CPR or Centre Pédagogique Régional, those of Amazigh have benefited from only a few training sessions and workshops. The IRCAM tries to ensure continuous training and retraining. However, the time allotted to teacher training is insufficient. The sessions are infrequent and seldom focus on teachers’ pedagogical needs. Fifth, the time allotted to the teaching of Amazigh language (three hours a week) is not enough, and in some schools only the alphabet (Tifinagh) is taught, and sometimes classes of Amazigh are replaced by classes of drawing, and so on. The main reasons for this state of affairs are a lack of teachers and a lack of motivation on the part of the administration or teachers. Sixth, the teaching of the Amazigh language is not even throughout all of Morocco; it is not generalized to the entire territory. Oftentimes, this state of affairs is blamed on lack of infrastructure and local will. Seventh, the teaching of the Amazigh language is attributed to weak media support, which is still lagging behind. The realization of the Amazigh channel project has finally been realized but functions only part of the day and the initial enthusiasm of the media in promoting the language has started to cool off. For many Amazigh intellectuals and activists, the Ministry of Communication needs to support the efforts being deployed to teach Amazigh. Eighth, the Tifinagh script is often a problem after the second year in primary school, for it is difficult to read a long text in Tifinagh. Audiovisual aids are also lacking in most schools, for there are few multimedia tools to help teach Amazigh. Ninth, the standardization of the Amazigh language is at the center of debates, despite the endeavors made by the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture and the BMCE Foundation. Neologisms are often excessive, while the problem of the dialects’ convergence ought to be addressed with the aim of standardizing the language progressively. Overall, just as progress in the teaching of Amazigh promotes the language and gives it legitimacy, regression in the teaching of the language mirrors regression in the political will to go ahead with promoting Amazigh. This lack of political will is revealed in the perceived slackness on the part of the Ministry of Education and Communication with respect to the implementation of the various agreements and conventions signed between the Royal Institute of the Amazigh Culture and these institutions. Although royal support has been secured, the implementation apparatus is lagging behind.

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Future of the Teaching of the Amazigh Language In the light of the progress and decline in the teaching of the Amazigh language, the question is: What is the future of the teaching of Amazigh? In principle, there is no going back on teaching Amazigh in Morocco. For the majority of researchers and activists, only the official recognition of Amazigh in the Constitution of Morocco can give meaning to these endeavors. Both strategic and pedagogical aspects must be addressed to guarantee the continuity of Amazigh in the face of serious challenges.

Strategic Aspects The first priority in teaching Amazigh is to secure the collaboration of the Ministry of Education and the IRCAM to ensure the generalization of the formation of the “cadres” (instructors and inspectors) that would supervise the teaching of Amazigh. According to 2009 IRCAM estimates, around 9,000 such cadres are needed to generalize the teaching of Amazigh to the level of the baccalaureate. In parallel, partnerships with Moroccan universities need to be intensified. Furthermore, effective coordination between the formation of primary- and secondary-level instructors, on the one hand, and university-level formation, on the other hand, is much needed. Likewise, and in order to save time, the Ministry of Education and IRCAM need a strategy for attracting interested unemployed BA holders and establishing contracts with them to teach Amazigh. The quality of the formation needs to be constantly assessed to ensure continuous formation in the interest of professionalism. In addition to the Ministry of Education, other parties, such as the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Communication need to be actively involved in helping implement and monitor the teaching of Amazigh. For this to be possible, the teaching of Amazigh needs to be based on education in its larger meaning, which involves cultural and media means of promotion, such as theater, cinema, and the like. In addition to the publication of books on Amazigh grammar and lexicography, research should be extended to other areas. Books should be translated from and into Amazigh. Colloquia and “Open Doors” events need to be organized. Also, old documentation should be restored and oral poetry revived. Finally, there should be an updated database of various statistics on Berber usage in schools and other official institutions. Another possibility is the creation of a museum for collective memory, focused on Amazigh writings, archaeology, and ancient documents. Amazigh book exhibitions (especially the Casablanca annual book fair) need to be promoted. The Amazigh channel needs to be strenghtened with more serious TV programs and documentaries should be created. There should also be more films, and folkloric music and arts programs. All these possibilities will ensure the continuity of Amazigh. The rewriting of major books in Tifinagh and the rescue of books and documents that are threatened by extinction are examples of means that will ensure the continuity of Amazigh.

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Pedagogical Aspects On the pedagogical front, various strategies can be either consolidated or designed anew. Textbook manuals need to be congruent with the strategic aims of the future teaching of the Amazigh language. Hence, the inclusion of pre-Islamic history textbooks that valorize ante-Islamic Amazigh rulers, values, and so on, will boost Amazigh identity and ensure continuity. Likewise, the promotion of Amazigh artistic expressions, such as plays and paintings, the use of traditional Amazigh games, and the creation of media and literary spaces and textbooks will enhance Amazigh. All in all, instructors, inspectors, and researchers in Amazigh need to devise a special pedagogy for Amazigh, a pedagogy that is congruent with the macro-political factors that affect the continuity of Amazigh. Succeeding in maintaining the teaching of Amazigh is not an administrative and pedagogical endeavor only; it is interlocked with political decisions at the highest levels of authority.

Conclusion The continuity and failure of the teaching of Amazigh in Morocco may be ranked 5 in a scale of 1–10; it shows that a language is not a mere means of communication; it is a means through which speakers are related to the sociopolitical forces in the overall environment where they live. As such, a language is a social group’s symbol of culture and identity and a cement of the social, emotional, and spiritual foundations of a community that are transmitted from generation to generation. The continuity or failure in language use is greatly dependent on these issues. In the twenty-first century, with the advent of technology that sometimes narrows the gap between the written and spoken forms of a language, teaching Amazigh is a way of preserving it and valorizing its speakers. It is only by introducing Amazigh in the educational system of Morocco that we can guarantee its survival and continuity (Fishman 1990). The difficulties that block the teaching of Amazigh can be greatly attenuated by more legal support for Amazigh, which would bestow the language with added economic value. Only a constitutional amendment allowing Amazigh to be introduced in the highest spheres of decisionmaking can guarantee its future continuity. Education has been instrumental in the social, economic, and political development of Morocco in the post-independence decades. It served to form the elite. From the 1990s onward, Morocco has been witnessing grounding-breaking democratic reforms that need to be consolidated by the Constitution and reflected in education. The teaching of Amazigh is both a modernizing and democratizing endeavor; it is congruent with ground realities and should not continue to be hindered by ideological conflicts between conservatives and modernists. The roles of the state, the intelligentsia, and the media are more crucial than ever for the preservation of the Amazigh language and culture. The next battle is bound to be legal:

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the recognition of the language in the Constitution. This recognition alone will guarantee the teaching, and hence continuity, of Amazigh. Notes 1. The term “Amazigh” is nowadays preferred over the term “Berber” as the latter is associated with negative connotations of “barbarus” (savage) used by the Greeks, Romans, and subsequent civilizations to refer to whoever spoke a language other than theirs. 2. At least seven languages and dialects interact in this context, namely: Berber, Moroccan Arabic, Classical Arabic, Standard Arabic, French, Spanish, and English. Of the important features of multilingualism in Morocco, it is worth mentioning the phenomenon of diglossia. This notion specifies that in the Arab world there are two varieties of Arabic, a high variety (Classical Arabic) and a low one (Colloquial Spoken Arabic). Other researchers think that today there are at least three varieties of Arabic (triglossia), Classical and Standard Arabic, which are high and intermediate respectively, and colloquial Arabic (the low variety). See Ferguson (1959) for further details on diglossia. 3. In previous work (Sadiqi 2003, 2006), I drew a parallel between the transition of Amazigh from the private to the public sphere and a similar transition for women. 4. In addition to the three Moroccan varieties, Ennaji (2007) mentions six more: Kabyle in Tizi-Ouzou (Algeria); Mzab in Ghardai (Algeria); Shawiya in Aures (Algeria); Tuareg in North Africa, Niger, and Mali; Tamashek in Niger, Mali, and Nigeria; and Tamahaq in Libya and Nigeria. 5. Six Moroccan linguists co-authored these manuals: Ahmed Boukous, Moha Ennaji, Fatima Sadiqi, Mohamed Chami, Fatima Agnaou, and Sabah Taibi. 6. A locality in the Middle Atlas mountains. 7. IRCAM is based in Rabat, the capital of Morocco. It has an annual budget of about 70 million dirhams (US%8.5 million). Its academic personnel consists of eminent Amazigh researchers who work in seven research centers: Language Planning, Didactic Research and Educational Programs, History and Environment, Anthropology and Sociology, Arts, Literary Expressions and Audiovisual Production, Informatics Studies, and Translation and Communication. The overall task of IRCAM is to rehabilitate Amazigh to meet the needs of its speakers at an age of globalization and modernity. 8. Research has shown that when a child learns in his/her mother tongue, he/she obtains better results as cognitive development and capacity to learn are better stimulated. 9. Taken altogether, nearly one-third of Moroccan women are illiterate, as compared to 41 percent of men. 10. Both languages have the guttural, laryngeal, and pharyngeal sounds, and both of them are VSO languages with an SVO variant. 11. Al-Mithaq is an official text that traces the conceptual foundations of the teaching contents in the Moroccan educational system. 12. The statistics given in this section are taken from Mohamed Baghdadid (2009). 13. There is discrepancy between academies (which represent the ministry of local education) as to the number of hours allocated to Amazigh teaching. In general, the more academies are situated within Amazighophone areas, the more hours they allocate to Amazigh teaching.

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References Baghdadi, Mohamed (2009). The teaching of Amazigh. MS. IRCAM. Boukous, Ahmed (2001). Language policy, identity and education in Morocco. Languages and Linguistics 8: 17–27. Brett, M., and E. Fentress (1996). The Berbers. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Chaker, Salem (1983). Textes en Linguistique Berbère. Paris: Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique. El Moujahid, Elhoussaine (1989). Syntaxe du Groupe Nominal en Berbère Tachelhit. Université Mohamed V, Rabat. Thèse de Doctorat d’Etat. Ennaji, Moha (2005). Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco. New York: Springer. Ennaji, Moha (2007). Berber language teaching and literacy in North Africa:

Challenges and prospects. Journal of the African Language Teachers Association 9: 65–79. Ferguson, Charles (1959). Diglossia. Word 15: 325–340. Fishman, Joshua (1990). What is reversing language shift (RLS) and how can it succeed? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 11: 5–36. Sadiqi, Fatima (1997). Grammaire du Berbère. Paris: L’Harmattan. Sadiqi, Fatima (2003). Women, Gender and Language in Morocco. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers. Sadiqi, Fatima, with Moha Ennaji (2006). The feminization of public space: Women’s activism, the family law, and social change in Morocco. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) 2(2): 86–114.

5 The Promotion of Moroccan Arabic: Successes and Failures MOHA ENNAJI

Introduction Morocco is a multilingual society in that seven languages and varieties are used in various domains: Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Amazigh (Berber), French, Spanish, and, recently, English. The multilingual facets of Morocco have ramifications for both Arabic sociolinguistics and for education, as each field is characterized by many paradoxes and contrasts. The language policy adopted in Morocco is based on Classical Arabic as the official language and Arabic-French bilingualism in education. However, French is an important factor in social mobility, as it is predominant in vital domains like education, administration, media, business, science, and technology. Tension exists not only between Franco-Western values and Arabic-Islamic beliefs, but also within the Moroccan context between Berber and Arabic languages and cultures. In fact, it is Islam that imposed the unity of religion and language, a concept based on the principle of the unity between the sacred text and Classical Arabic. To alleviate this tension, Amazigh (Berber) has recently been officially recognized as part of the national cultural identity, with the creation of the Royal Institute of Berber Culture. Accordingly, the authorities have decided to introduce Amazigh into schools and to increase the number of hours allotted to Amazighlanguage radio programs. Amazigh has also been introduced on television, particularly for news broadcasting (see Sadiqi 1997 and chapter 4 of this volume). Thus, Morocco today is experiencing two sorts of revival: the revival of the Arabic language and Arab-Islamic culture; and the attempts to promote mother tongues, especially Moroccan Arabic and Amazigh. 45

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This chapter deals with the rehabilitation of Moroccan Arabic, a colloquial form of the Arabic language. It presents its status, functions, and domains of use. Moroccan Arabic is predominantly a spoken language, as it is used in everyday conversation and in informal settings but does not often appear in academic or formal settings, or in its written form. Thus, despite considerable endeavors made to revitalize Moroccan Arabic, it has not yet found its way to schools, universities, and public administration. Because Classical Arabic has religious connotations, it has been established as the official language of the nation. For this reason and also because it is associated with written history, Classical Arabic is venerated by both Moroccan Arabic speakers and native Amazigh speakers, although very few Moroccans are fluent in it. Classical Arabic is the variety used in formal religious sermons and in the Quran, whereas Modern Standard Arabic is mostly associated with modern written culture. Both differ linguistically and functionally in their written varieties. Linguistically, Modern Standard Arabic is a simplified and a modernized form of Classical Arabic; for instance, Modern Standard Arabic does not include many inflectional endings and uses fewer foreign loans and lexical innovations than does Classical Arabic. The conceptual approach in this chapter is that there is an important interaction between the languages in use and the cultural components, namely the historical background of Morocco, its socioethnic makeup, Islam, the oral tradition, and political power. Bearing in mind this language-power relation, factors like ethnicity, cultural identity, education, literacy, gender, social stratification, and Westernization intermingle in the everyday life and linguistic transactions of Moroccans.

Arabic Diglossia Ferguson (1959) states that the Arab-speaking world, in general, is characterised by diglossia in the sense that two varieties of Arabic coexist, namely Classical Arabic (or “high” Arabic) and Dialectal Arabic (or “low” Arabic). The first is codified, standardized, associated with the Holy Quran, and embodies a great literary tradition. Dialectal Arabic (in our case, Moroccan Arabic) is the language of everyday conversation, and is neither codified nor standardized. In North Africa, diglossia predates French colonization, and according to Ennaji (2005), bilingualism and multilingualism are not the outcome of French colonialism, since they existed well before colonization. Two varieties of Arabic (Classical and Moroccan Arabic) coexisted alongside Amazigh for centuries. Ferguson’s (1959) classification of Arabic varieties into high and low does not really correspond to the linguistic situation in Morocco and the Maghreb at large, for we have four Arabic varieties that are in a polydiglossic relation: Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Educated Spoken Arabic, and Moroccan Arabic, as well as Amazigh. Classical Arabic is used in the mosque, in the Ministry of Justice, in the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, in official speeches, in classical poetry,

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and in literature. Modern Standard Arabic (not Classical Arabic, as Ferguson claims) is employed in writing a personal letter, in political or scientific discourse, in the media and administration. Educated Spoken Arabic is used in the everyday colloquial style of learned people. Educated Spoken Arabic is an elevated form of colloquial Arabic that is much influenced by the vocabulary and expressions of Modern Standard Arabic. Moroccan Arabic is used in informal settings, at home, in the street, and with friends and relatives (Ennaji and Sadiqi 1994, Ennaji 2001). Like Moroccan Arabic, Educated Spoken Arabic is neither codified nor standardized; in addition, it is not widely used by the Moroccan speech community. This fourth variety, which is used by educated people in their everyday speech, is not yet fully developed and widespread. It is a polished and polite form of Moroccan Arabic whose lexicon is affected by that of Standard Arabic. Youssi (1995) refers to it as “1’arabe marocain moderne” (modern Moroccan Arabic). Educated Spoken Arabic is usually heard on radio, television, and in academic circles. At times, lectures, talks, plays, and discussions are given in this variety. Thus, Educated Spoken Arabic adds a fourth dimension to yield a form of polyglossia. In terms of Arabic, there is a quadriglossia in which four varieties of Arabic are actually in use, with each variety fulfilling a set of functions (Ennaji and Sadiqi 1994). However, given the high illiteracy rate in Morocco (48 percent, according to the Department of Statistics in 2010), Educated Spoken Arabic is not that popular and widespread, as it is limited to learned people. The Arabic varieties mentioned above are in a conflicting situation. Many students and intellectuals suffer from linguistic insecurity when they speak, for they have to make sure that they use the appropriate Arabic variety in the right context. When they are in a formal setting, they use Modern Standard Arabic; when they are in a semi-formal setting, they use Moroccan Modern Arabic; and in an informal situation, they use Moroccan Arabic. For writing purposes, Modern Standard Arabic is preferred, and for prayers, the use of Classical Arabic is compulsory. At times, there is interference from the colloquial Moroccan variety in formal contexts and in written texts. The difficulty increases when speakers want to move from the colloquial variety to the written standard variety. As a result, many educated Moroccan people resort to code-switching, in which Moroccan Arabic and Standard Arabic are mixed. At times, speakers also code-switch between Arabic and French for lack of the exact idioms (Fishman 1977, Ennaji 2005).

The Sociology of Moroccan Arabic Moroccan Arabic is spoken by the Arabophone population and as a second language by nearly 50 percent of Moroccan Berbers. Moroccan Arabic is almost completely a spoken language, although some informal letters, plays, or texts may be written in this variety using the Arabic script. It is referred to as darija, or the language of the people. Moroccan Arabic can be divided into urban and rural Arabic. The latter is spoken in rural areas, small towns, and agglomerations, whereas urban Arabic is

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used in the cities. Until recently, there was not much contact between speakers of the rural variety and those of the urban variety. But today, with the help of transportation facilities and the relative industrialization of the cities, many rural people have taken to the cities in search of a better life. As a result, rural Moroccan Arabic speakers can be encountered even in large cities. Rural and urban varieties can be further subdivided into other varieties. For instance, the urban dialect of Moroccan Arabic has its own regional varieties: in the north, the northern dialect is spoken in Tangiers, Tétouan, and Larache. In central Morocco, there is the Fassi variety, spoken in Fès. There is also the Moroccan dialect of Rabat and Casablanca. In the south, the Marrakeshi and Agadiri dialect is much influenced by Tashelhit Berber; it is spoken in Marrakesh, Essaouira, and Agadir. In the Moroccan Sahara, the dialect of Hassaniya is used. These regional dialects are mutually intelligible to Moroccans. The main distinction between Moroccan and Modern Standard Arabic comes from the fact that Moroccan Arabic is more flexible in its phonology, morphology, and syntax in many ways. First, it lacks the case marking affixes (e.g., Standard Arabic kutubun [books] → Moroccan Arabic ktub [books]). Moroccan Arabic also exhibits a new alternative word order (Subject-Verb-Object) in addition to the Verb-Subject-Object word order of Standard Arabic, which is an apparent influence of French morpho-syntax. Finally, Moroccan Arabic has borrowed a host of words and phrases from French (e.g., French colonel → Moroccan Arabic al- kolonel; French hélicopter → Moroccan Arabic lilikopter). For more such examples, see Ennaji (1988, 2005). Unlike Modern Standard Arabic, which is usually associated with sectors like education, administration, and media, Moroccan Arabic is linked to popular culture and authenticity. The low status of Moroccan Arabic can be ascribed to the fact that it is neither codified nor standardized. Berbers generally speak it as their second language. It is viewed by the masses and the elite alike as a corrupt form of Modern Standard Arabic. Linguistically, it is characterized by vowel drop and the overuse of the schwa (e.g., Modern Standard Arabic kataba [write] → kt¶b in Moroccan Arabic; Modern Standard Arabic faaʔiz [winner] → fayz or fay¶z). Lexically, Moroccan Arabic also differs from Modern Standard Arabic (e.g., Modern Standard Arabic i(naani [two] → juj; šaay [tea] → atay). Moroccan Arabic has borrowed immensely from French (e.g., French vest → fista, French machine → makina), as well as from Amazigh (e.g., the following Amazigh loans are used in Moroccan Arabic: waxxa [all right], tabqqalt [being a grocer], sarut [key]). The /q/ phoneme is considered a dialect maker because of its importance as a major distinctive linguistic variable among Moroccan Arabic varieties. There are three main varieties that present different realizations of this phoneme. In one case, it is realized as a voiced velar stop /g/, notably in the urban dialect of Casablanca and parts of southern speech in the area of Settat, Béni Mellal, and Marrakech (Abbassi 1977, Ennaji 1988). It is realized as a glottal stop /ʔ/ in most of the northern dialects, especially in Tétouan and Tangiers. In the third instance, it is an emphatic glottal stop, as in the dialect of Fès and some northern sub-varieties. Another distinction between Modern Standard Arabic and Moroccan Arabic is cultural, not linguistic. Modern Standard Arabic is based on Classical Arabic,

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which is supported by a Holy book, the Quran. Bon Contrast, Moroccan Arabic has no religious connotation because it was not the language in which the Quran was revealed. Notwithstanding, the above contrastive analysis of Modern Standard Arabic and Moroccan Arabic linguistic systems is not sufficient to describe Arabic diglossia. There are also religious, political, and educational reasons that make Modern Standard and Moroccan Arabic two different varieties of Arabic (Ennaji 2005, Chapter 3). Moroccans (and Arabs on the whole) consider Modern Standard Arabic a prestigious language and the only form worth learning in schools, while they see colloquial Arabic as a corrupt and vulgar dialect (El biad 1991, Ennaji 1991, Ruiter 2004, Ferguson 1959). As mentioned earlier, Modern Standard Arabic is generally associated with literacy and learnedness, and Moroccan Arabic with illiteracy and Orality. At the political level, the struggle for Moroccan independence evolved around Islam. During the colonial period, Modern Standard Arabic was used by the nationalists as a unifying and learned language. It was also used to underline the sociocultural difference between the Moroccan people and the French rulers. In addition, the nationalists wanted to achieve independence and acquire a sense of cultural identity across the Arab world, which contributed to creating pan-Arab feelings essentially based on the Arabic language bond. Modern Standard Arabic is the essential medium of instruction in the Arab system of education. Dialects throughout the Arabic-speaking world are viewed by Arabists as divisive because they encourage regional and political separation, which is against the cause of Arab unity (al-waHda al-arabiya). Thus, Modern Standard Arabic serves as a means to achieve the reunification of the Arab countries by replacing the European languages in use, such as French or English. Thus Moroccan Arabic and other regional Arabic varieties have been disparaged and relegated to an inferior role in the presupposed linguistic hierarchy. At the educational level, Moroccan children face the dilemma of speaking one Arabic variety at home with their parents and in the street with their peers, while learning Modern Standard Arabic reading and writing in school. Berber children, who speak Amazigh as their native language and Moroccan Arabic as their second language, are in a much more complex situation because they have to learn an additional language that is different from their native tongue. The transition is hard for them, as well as for adult learners. Many of them drop out of school and develop a negative attitude toward the written form of Arabic and Arabic literature in general (Ennaji 2005, Chapter 3). There is an important difference between Modern Standard Arabic and Moroccan Arabic; in the former, people tend to pay more attention to style than to content, whereas Moroccan Arabic is used for pragmatic purposes and, thus, both style and content are crucial. For instance, many Arabic newspapers written in Modern Standard Arabic are criticized by intellectuals for lack of quality topics and articles. The problem is amplified by the traditional and outdated methods used for teaching Modern Standard Arabic. In general, teachers are not adequately trained,

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and the teaching methods are based on memorization and an overemphasis on grammar. The problem is also caused by the rigidity of the Arabic structure and inflection. Added to this are the effects of diglossia, which is widespread among the literate and the elite. Because there are four varieties of Arabic, literate people tend to confuse these varieties, mixing or using them in the different domains (Ennaji 2002).

The Continuum Issue Failure and Its Causes In the past, the Moroccan government has worked to marginalize Moroccan Arabic and spread Modern Standard Arabic in the whole country. For the most part, their attempts have not been successful. However, the existence of Moroccan Arabic as a vital mother tongue is a reminder that Moroccans have a rich oral literature and cultural tradition. The fact that Moroccan Arabic is excluded from schools, coupled with the inadequate textbooks and methods used to teach Modern Standard Arabic, and the weight allotted to the teaching of the Islamic religion have created anxiety among the youth and their parents because the educational system is divorced from the Moroccan sociolinguistic and cultural context. Moroccan Arabic, one of the major mother tongues, is excluded from education. Moroccan Arabic is stigmatized chiefly because it is associated with illiteracy. A person who speaks only Moroccan Arabic is considered illiterate. Historically and in religious contexts, writing has been the exclusive domain of Classical Arabic; for this reason, the average Moroccan would not write in his own mother tongue. Thus, even an individual who speaks Moroccan Arabic fluently will opt for Modern Standard Arabic or French to write a letter or an administrative document in an effort to appear educated. One clear example of how Moroccan Arabic was marginalized may be found in the discontinuation of the Moroccan Arabic daily Axbar As-suq in the 1980s because it was very close to the concerns of the poor and it provoked their interest in change. Conservative Arabists view Moroccan Arabic as a degenerate variety that is not worth describing or studying linguistically. The majority of the masses support this view for three reasons: (1) Moroccan Arabic is neither codified nor standardized; (2) it is not directly associated with religion, as the Quran was not revealed in it, and (3) it is not the language of a great literary tradition (Ennaji 1995). Students’ attitudes toward Moroccan Arabic reflect the general attitude held by officials and people alike. In his survey, El biad (1991) reveals that 71.4 percent of students disagree with the idea that Classical Arabic should be replaced by Moroccan Arabic. The introduction of Moroccan Arabic in schools is disfavored by almost all Moroccans (72 percent) (Ennaji 2005). While 75 percent of Moroccans consider Standard Arabic rich and beautiful, only a small number of them (12 percent) think the same about Moroccan Arabic (Ennaji 2005). On the other hand, almost

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all respondents state that Standard Arabic cannot be substituted for Moroccan Arabic at any level of education, although most of them are in favor of introducing Moroccan Arabic in primary schools informally in order to explain new notions and concepts to pupils. Most respondents (89 percent) view Moroccan Arabic as a “dialect” that is not worth introducing in schools (Ennaji 2005). Although Moroccan Arabic is one of the essential distinguishing characteristics of Moroccan culture, and the mother tongue of more than half of the population, it is excluded from education, official settings, and the printed media, as mentioned earlier. Additionally, the viability of Moroccan Arabic is threatened by the new information technology and the audio-visual media, from which it is generally excluded (Ennaji 2005).

Success and Its Causes From the beginning of the new millennium, Moroccan Arabic has witnessed relative success in terms of its widespread use in the media, transactions, and politics. It is widely employed on radio and television, especially for the rubrics of sports, debates, interviews, talk shows, and so on, but not for news broadcasts, which are only in Modern Standard Arabic. It is also the language of transactions in the public market and in informal business settings. Political parties use Moroccan rather than Standard Arabic to communicate with the people in their rallies and election campaigns. This positive evolution of Moroccan Arabic, which used to be almost banned from the media and politics, has to do with the evolution of society, the expansion of education, and the advent of human rights. Most progressive intellectuals, who hold a favorable attitude toward Moroccan Arabic, argue that linguistic rights are human rights, and view Moroccan Arabic as the expression of Moroccan authenticity and cultural identity. They view Moroccan Arabic as reflecting the daily lives and concerns of Moroccans, expressing their problems, aspirations, and ways of life. It is also the vehicle of a rich oral literature. Indeed, there exists a wealthy legacy of songs, stories, anecdotes, poetry, and theater in Moroccan Arabic. These genres are much appreciated by Moroccans because they are intimately linked to their culture and traditions (El biad 1991; Ennaji 1985, 1991; Gravel 1979; Youssi 1995). For effective communication to be achieved, many scholars and intellectuals today acknowledge the importance of Moroccan Arabic. The eminent Moroccan actor and dramatist Tayeb Seddiqi is one of the fervent defenders of Moroccan Arabic language and culture. Although Moroccan Arabic has implicitly been recognized as part and parcel of the national cultural identity, civil society is still fighting for official recognition. As a token of the revival of Moroccan Arabic, the number of linguistic preservation associations has multiplied, with the aim to preserve the language, revitalize its culture and literature, and sensitize people and the government to the linguistic and cultural importance of Moroccan Arabic. One of the most important associations is AMPATRIL, founded in 1998 by university professors Zakia Iraqi-Sinaceur, Abderrahim Youssin, and Mohamed Dahbi, among others. They organize conferences and publish books and articles about Moroccan Arabic language and culture.

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They demand the use of Moroccan Arabic in schools, media, creative writing, theater and cinema (Iraqi-Sinaceur: personal communication). A few writers have written novels in Moroccan Arabic, namely Mohamed Choukri and Youssouf Alami. Journalists and activists have brought this problem to the attention of decision-makers (see the Francophone weekly magazine Tel Quel of May 15, 2009). To satisfy these growing linguistic and cultural demands, measures have been taken. The media have recently introduced Moroccan Arabic in many of their programs. It is now taught to foreigners in private language centers and foreign cultural centers for communication purposes, as Moroccan Arabic is necessary for communication with the locals, businesses, and people in general. Moroccan Arabic plays a strong symbolic role in the national linguistic market (Bourdieu 1991) and is a language of wider communication and transactions. However, even though Moroccan Arabic represents an essential part of national heritage and cultural authenticity, there is no plan to teach it in public or private schools. Moroccan Arabic may expand and become more widespread in the future, given its growing place in the mass media and the rural exodus. Many Amazighspeakers adopt Moroccan Arabic when they move from rural to urban areas because it is the language of transactions in urban areas. Radio and television at times use Moroccan Arabic alternatively with Modern Standard Arabic, which will, in the long run, reduce the gap between speakers of Moroccan and Modern Standard Arabic. The adoption of Moroccan Arabic by the media will eventually lead to its spread across the country. Although Moroccan Arabic is in competition with other languages and varieties, it occupies an important position as the oral language par excellence. It is the dominant colloquial form, used in conversations and informal situations. It is the mother tongue of the majority of the population, and in this capacity it reflects Moroccan cultural authenticity. Hence, it is essential to preserve Moroccan Arabic and to reinforce it in formal and informal situations of use (Ennaji 2002).

Conclusion Since Moroccan independence, the debate over the country’s national language has cenetred on one major dichotomy: learned languages like French and Modern Standard Arabic on the one hand, and popular languages like Moroccan Arabic and Amazigh on the other. The advocates of learned languages think that Modern Standard Arabic represents Muslim identity, literature, and erudition, and that French is the language of social mobility and modern culture. For them, Moroccan Arabic is inadequate for modern needs, whereas Modern Standard Arabic and French are more adequate in knowledge and science, respectively. The advocates of popular languages think that Amazigh and Moroccan Arabic are the nation’s mother tongues, and that they express authenticity and people’s daily life. On one level, the promotion of Moroccan Arabic has failed because it has a very strong competitor or parent (Modern Standard Arabic) and it is neither codified nor standardized. A positive approach to Moroccan Arabic would mean its codification, standardization, and use, alongside Modern Standard Arabic, in formal situations.

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On the other hand, although Moroccan Arabic has been considered a degenerate form of Arabic by the conservative ruling elite, attitudes toward it have favorably evolved in recent years. Moroccan Arabic is now widespread in the media and transactions, and it has been indirectly introduced in schools to facilitate Arabicization. Moroccan Arabic is expected to gain more ground, especially as more and more intellectuals defend its introduction into vital socioeconomic sectors. I would place the present-day promotion of Moroccan Arabic as a 5 on a failure-success scale of 10 points. References Abbassi, Abdelaziz (1977). A sociolinguistic analysis of multilingualism in Morocco. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. London: Polity Press. El biad, Mohamed (1991). The role of some population sectors in the progress of Arabization, in Morocco. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 87: 27–44. Ennaji, Moha (1985). English, Moroccan Arabic and Berber Complex Sentences. Wurzburg: K & N. Ennaji, Moha (1988). Language planning in Morocco and changes in Arabic, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 74: 9–39. Ennaji, Moha (1991). Aspects of multilingualism in the Maghreb. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 87: 7–25. Ennaji, Moha (2001). De la diglossie à la quadriglossie. In Languages and Linguistics 8: 49–64. Ennaji, Moha (2002). Comment on Hudson’s outline of a theory of diglossia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 157: 71–83. Ennaji, Moha (2005). Multilingualism, Cultural Identity and Education in Morocco. New York: Springer. Ennaji, Moha (ed.) (1995). Sociolinguistics in Morocco.

International Journal of the Sociology of Language 112 (entire issue). Ennaji, Moha, and Fatima Sadiqi (1994). Applications of Modern Linguistics. Casablanca: Afrique-Orient. Ferguson, Charles (1972 [1959]). Diglossia. In Language and Social Context, Pier Paolo Giglioli (ed.), 232–251. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fishman, Joshua (1977). Language and ethnicity, in Language and Ethnicity in Intergroup Relations, Howard Giles (ed.), 16–53. London: Academic Press. Gravel, Louis (1979). A sociolinguistic investigation of multilingualism in Morocco. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University Teacher’s College. Ruiter, Jan Jap de (2004). Quel arabe pour communiquer? Passé et présent. In Ultra Mare. Mélanges Offerts à Aubert Martin, Frédéric Bauden (red.). Association pour la Promotion de l’Histoire et de l’archéologie Orientales. Mémoires, 3. Louvain/ Paris/Dudley: Peeters, 30–39. Sadiqi, Fatima (1997). The place of Berber in Morocco, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 123: 7–21. Youssi, Abderrahim (1995). The Moroccan triglossia: Facts and implications. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 112: 29–43.

6 The Survival of French in Tunisian Identity MOHAMED DAOUD

Introduction When Tunisia gained its independence from France in 1956, after seventy-five years of colonial rule, the framers of the constitution asserted two key elements of national identity for the new nation: language and religion. Thus, the Tunisian constitution stipulated that “Tunisia is a republic; its language is Arabic, and its religion Islam.” Paradoxically, the nationalist leaders adopted ambivalent language and education policies that promoted Arabic and yet maintained French as an adjuvant language for access to knowledge and modernity, both out of necessity as well as a European/French cultural orientation. This approach has not been without its consequences in shaping the Tunisians’ representation of themselves. For in addition to using French in key educational disciplines and the economy, there has been a deliberate effort to promote a “modernist” pro-French social model in the school curriculum, the media, and the cultural environment (Daoud 1991). The current sociolinguistic situation—characterized by, on the one hand, a continuing rivalry between Arabic and French and an increasing rivalry between French and English as a global language, and on the other, a growing concern, often expressed by educators and employers, that competence in French is deteriorating—raises questions about the status of French and its future prospects in Tunisia. The current discourse on these issues remains politically and socioculturally charged and reflects three tendencies. The first, though not systematically opposed to foreign language instruction, defends the full promotion of Arabic as the official language and anchor of a “pure” and “authentic” Tunisian identity. The second does not question the official status of Arabic, but associates the language with traditionalism and religious conservatism while associating French

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with modernity, rationalism, and secularism. The third is a more recent, more pragmatic tendency, which tries to defuse the identity question and promote teaching French as an instrumental communicative resource. However, this tendency is no less charged because it belies some wariness of any gains made by English in the context of globalization. All of this begs the question of whether French is a defining element of Tunisian identity and if it will remain so in the foreseeable future. Based on recent interview data, published literature, and informal observation, this chapter evaluates the status of French in the sociohistorical context that has shaped how Tunisians view themselves and the other (i.e., the French), assesses whether this language is gaining or losing ground, and considers its future prospects in Tunisia, taking into account the ideological and pragmatic aspects of the issue.

A History of Linguistic Diversity The sociolinguistic history of Tunisia, which has developed over three millennia, shows that linguistic diversity and assimilation, rather than antagonism, have been the rule. The indigenous people of this country (Lybics) spoke Libyc1 but it was the invading Romans who designated both the people and their language as Berber (i.e., barbarous). Initially, Libyc/Berber-Punic bilingualism developed when the Phoenicians, who came from Tyre (Lebanon), established the Carthaginian Empire (814–146 BCE). Then the situation evolved into Libyc-Latin bilingualism during the Roman domination of the area (146 BCE–349 CE), thus allowing Latin to replace Punic as the official language. After a brief Vandal (Germanic) interval (439–533 CE), the country saw a revival of Roman culture during the Byzantine Empire (533–647), but with a heavy Hellenic influence, which led to the spread of Greek. Arabic was introduced in 647 with the spread of Islam to North Africa and took about 500 years to become the dominant, official language of Tunisia. Thus, the linguistic situation was multilingual, with substrates of Berber, Punic, Latin, and Greek surviving until today in the dialectal vocabulary as well as in the names of many cities and villages all over Tunisia. The near total conversion of the indigenous Lybics/Berbers to Islam by the middle of the eleventh century contributed to the dominance of Arabic, leading Berber to subside considerably. Berber is now considered a dying language in Tunisia. The spread of Arabic was not so smooth, however, for two reasons: (1) the diglossic development of its literary and spoken varieties, and (2) the contact with the European languages of the subsequent invaders and neighbors of Tunisia. While the classical/literary variety of Arabic owed its spread to the dissemination of Islamic teachings and the use of the language in government and education, several mutually intelligible spoken varieties were brought along by the Arab tribes that settled in the country since the seventh century. Gradually, Arabic evolved into a complex diglossic situation (see figure 6.1) and remains today the country’s official language as well as the anchor of its identity, in close association with Islam.

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ARABIC DIGLOSSIA HIGH

+ Written Classical Arabic

ARABIC FRENCH CODE SWITCHING

Literary Arabic

FRENCH DIGLOSSIA HIGH Metropolitan French

Modern Standard Arabic

Educated Arabic

Tunisian Arabic + Spoken with LOW regional TA varieties

English (and other European languages) Franco Arabic LOW North African French

Figure 6.1 A schematic representation of the current language situation in Tunisia

As for contact with the European languages, it started with Spanish with the exodus of the Arab-Berber Moors from Spain over a period of four centuries (11th–14th). Spanish vocabulary is still noticeable in the names of some Tunisian families and towns as well as particular vegetables, fruits, crafts, and card and board games. In the next three to four centuries, Christians (Spaniards) and Muslims (Turks) competed for power and trade in the Mediterranean basin. The Ottoman Turks managed to establish their authority from the end of the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries and promoted the use of Turkish in the administration and the military and enriched both literary and spoken Tunisian Arabic with a substantial musical, clothing, and culinary vocabulary. (The Tunisian monarchy remained subservient to the Ottoman Empire until the early 1860s.) In the early nineteenth century, the Italians and French joined the competition, with nationals from both countries managing to settle in Tunisia by the thousands. While the French settlers were the precursors of French colonial rule, they were momentarily outnumbered by Italians, who also left their mark on the local language. Italian words are now easily recognizable in Tunisian Arabic, particularly in the construction, agriculture, and marine sectors, as well as in the arts. From the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, and owing to intense merchant marine activity in the Mediterranean basin, with Tunis as its southern hub, the language

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mix had reached a hiatus with the development of a pidgin, called lingua franca (a French matrix with embedded Spanish, Moorish, Italian, Corsican, Maltese, Berber, Turkish, and Arabic expressions), which was widely spoken and even used for drafting commercial contracts. The French language took hold in Tunisia under the French protectorate regime (1881–1956). By the time Tunisia gained its independence, French was so widely used in government, education, and the media, as well as in general everyday interaction, that it was generally perceived as a threat to the country’s Arab-Islamic identity and provided grounds for the nationalist leaders to promote the use of Arabic to fulfill administrative, educational, and sociocultural functions as a means of nation building, hence the notions of Arabization and Tunisification (see Daoud 1991, 2007). Despite sustained Arabization efforts, French has remained until today the language of instruction in the science and economics disciplines in secondary and higher education and vocational training, and it is the predominant working language in all areas of economic activity. French is also fairly well-represented in the local media (paper and web-based), in advertising, as well as in literary publications (novels, biographies, chronicles, and even children’s books). It has also spread to oral everyday interaction, involving a French diglossic range of use that somewhat parallels that of Arabic, coupled with a high amount of Arabic-French codeswitching and code-mixing (see figure 6.1 and Daoud 2007, 262–266 for a description of this situation, cf., Walters 1996). But rather than accepting the situation of French in Tunisia today as a forced by-product of colonization, historical evidence shows that the Tunisians themselves chose to adopt French as an adjuvant communicative resource as well as a contributing factor to their identity.

Institutionalizing the Use of French A historical analysis of the dominant views and attitudes toward French and the ensuing educational reforms and sociocultural developments in Tunisia going as far back as the 1840s, well before the protectorate regime was established in 1881, reveals that the conditions were, in fact, set by the Tunisians themselves for institutionalizing the use of French and promoting the cultural representations associated with it. The circumstances were such that this option had to be taken, but without abandoning the dream of promoting Arabic (in association with Islam) as the essential element of ethnic identity. As argued by Benhamida (2003),2 the post–World War I period of 1920–1927 provided suitable circumstances for identity restructuring in Tunisia. First, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, compounded by the abolition of the Caliphate in Turkey under Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, undermined the notion of belonging to the Muslim Nation (the Umma) as a frame of reference. Second, the lack of attractiveness of pan-Arab nationalism, which prevailed in the Arab Middle East, then under Anglo-French domination, encouraged the notion of building a “modern nation” that was more open to European influence (as was, in fact, contemplated by the Wefd Party in Egypt in 1919). Third, colonial repression against the new

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Tunisian “evolutionary” movement, particularly in 1911–1912, precipitated the birth of the first modern political party, the Tunisian Free Constitutional Party, or the Destour (Arabic for “Constitution”), which adopted European liberal constitutional principles. Finally, the nationalist trade-union movement, which evolved separately from the Destour Party but eventually joined forces with it, espoused the universalist, egalitarian European/French trade-union values and principles that opposed exploitation and alienation. Thus, the nationalist elite leading the struggle for independence developed the notion of a new nationist/nationalist identity that opposed colonial France, but did not necessarily feel any hatred toward the French people3 or feel the need to reject everything French. There was, therefore, a deliberate choice to take advantage of what might be called the “benefits of colonization,” including: (1) the French language as an adjuvant communicative resource to access modern scientific knowledge, (2) the French educational and economic model as a means of development and wealth production, and (3) a set of sociocultural values like work and organization ethics, rationalism, and openness. As shown in Daoud (1991), this was not simply a pragmatic choice, but the consequence of a strong appreciation of, if not fascination with, the French model of modernity. From Benhamida’s review of the Destour’s manifesto (Thaalbi 1920), we learn that the notion of a pro-French identity began to take shape even before the installation of the protectorate régime in 1881.4 A major political and educational reform was introduced in the middle of the nineteenth century under the Tunisian Islamic monarchy with the promulgation of the Fundamental Pact of 1857 (‘ahd el-amen) and the Constitution of 1861. While acknowledging European support,5 these documents bore “a declaration of the rights and obligations” of the citizens and underscored the full reliance on Islamic law, which preceded modern European public law in adhering to universal democratic principles and guaranteeing individual freedoms. Regarding education, the manifesto took stock of European-style, secular reforms dating back to the 1840s, which included the establishment of a modern war college (École polytechnique de l’art militaire), and the restructuring of the University of Tunis, endowing it with an autonomous board charged with curriculum review and staff appointment and supervision. Thaalbi also reported that, even though Tunisia was under military occupation, the Tunisian government sponsored twelve students from al-Madrassa al-Sadiqiyya (a modern bilingual high school established in 1875) to study for liberal professions at the Lycée SaintLouis in Paris. At the time, there were already about twenty French and Italian congregational schools in Tunis, catering to children of the Tunisian social elite. Thus, the curriculum was evolving under a complementary Tunisian/European guise, while “modern” culture was steadily spreading to the confines of the Islamic University, epitomized by the famous Al-Zaytuna Mosque, established in 670. Concerning the French language, the educational reform required the use of Arabic in primary education, but made it compulsory for state-run secondary and highereducation institutions to teach foreign languages, with a preference for French. In sum, the nationalists, including enlightened religious leaders, French-educated professionals, and leading trade-unionists, adopted two principles relevant to the

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issue at hand, which set the foundation for defining the identity of modern Tunisia: (1) the distinction between opposing colonial rule and reaping the “benefits of colonization”; and (2) the need to implement educational reforms inspired by the French system and to promote foreign language teaching, giving priority to French. The same attitudes toward the French language and the sociocultural model associated with it have prevailed after independence and until today (see Daoud 1991, 2007 for a discussion of the language policy and planning choices made by the former and current Tunisian governments), which is further proof that French has, indeed, been locally institutionalized at the level of use as well as selfrepresentation. The Arabization efforts seem to have run their course, and present-day Tunisia seems to have settled into an Arabic-French bilingual era, while remaining open to other foreign languages (English, in particular, but also Italian, Spanish, German, and even Russian and Chinese). Even so, the position of French today is not so secure, particularly in the eyes of Francophiles and academics of the language. It is threatened by two persistent factors: (1) the lingering debate over language and identity, and (2) the unstable status of French, given its unequal distribution across Tunisians and growing competition from English. The first factor is clearly ideological while the second is pragmatic, having to do with finding the ways and means to promote the teaching and use of French. The next section will deal with this ideological pragmatic dilemma, drawing on the literature, recent media articles, and interview data6 gathered specifically for this paper. (The interview guide appears as an appendix at the end of this chapter.)

The French Dilemma The Ideological Factor French continues to enjoy high status in Tunisia and to be associated with openness and modernity, particularly among educated, urban, wealthier Tunisians. With colonization behind us by more than half a century, the association of French with colonial France seems to have dimmed, making the language less of a threat and more of a contributor to Tunisian identity. Miled (2008, 2–3) argues that: even though there are no significant surveys on how French is perceived, one may observe that negative representations seem to be subsiding and that conflicting relationships between the language of national identity and that of the ex-colonizer are fading. . . . A sociolinguistic evolution favorable to foreign languages . . . leads some to say that the languages in contact, and correlatively their cultures, also partake of this identity. (Author translation)

The subjects interviewed for this chapter generally agreed with this view, some considering the identity issue practically settled (“a matter of the past”) and underscoring the prevailing functional distribution of Arabic and French. However, a majority felt that there was ongoing rivalry between the two languages, not on the

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functional, but the ideological level. Note the following impassioned statements made by some of the most Francophile among the respondents (all responses are cited in translation from French by the author): • Rivalry is in people’s minds because of politics, but even the Arabic language and culture are not so well-mastered. Arabic is the language of religious identity. • There shouldn’t be [any rivalry] because French adds to Tunisia’s richness and openness, but Arabization created this rivalry. We can’t talk about globalization and yet go back to Arabization. • No, French is on the way to extinction. . . . It is the national language that is gaining ground. • There is no rivalry. Arabic is predominant. French is in a free fall. • My dream is that the masses would be more interested in the French media rather than in those that broadcast brainwashing programs in Arabic which are suitable for little people who are ill at ease and in search of an identity. Such statements are the reflection of a lingering ideological debate that strongly associates Arabic with religion and backwardness and views French as the main antidote to the resurgence of a religious, traditionalist trend. In the media as well as more academic forums, there are occasional expressions of concern about this resurgence. One such example is a Tunisian philosopher’s conference talk (Mahjoubi 2009, 18) that praised Western democracy and criticized traditional Arab despots for conniving with Muslim religious authorities to “spread a system of thought that resulted in a closed mindset and mass orthodoxy, imposed silence on intellectuals and squashed any innovative ideas.” It was only in the nineteenth century that Arab reformers, having “discovered Western Democracy,” managed to introduce “a radical reform of the educational system.” According to this philosopher, the lesson to be learned from this today is for the educational systems in the Arab world to “truly allow for reason and critical thinking to prevail.” This argument harkens back to a similar plea made by another philosopher who complained vociferously about the Arabization of the philosophy curriculum in high school in 1976–1977 (see Daoud 1991, 19). Despite repeated assertions that Tunisia has established its identity and authenticity as an Arab-Muslim nation as well as a modern, open country at the crossroads of East, West, South, and North, the above views indicate that the polemic over identity is not fading. For, on the other side, equally impassioned voices are quickly raised to defend the purity and vitality of Arabic and to warn against “leaving the doors wide open for identity drifts” (Leaders.com 2009a). This particular view was expressed in the context of public complaints against codeswitching in the Arabic media. Two discussants commented as follows on the same phenomenon, which has spread to classrooms: • This is due to a kind of loss of one’s roots that threatens a young generation which is being pulled apart by multiple cultural currents and which

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has not been able to develop a pure Tuniso-Tunisian personality . . . it’s a true identity battle that has to be fought. • Francarabe is a residue of the colonial era (Leaders.com 2009b). The official reaction to such complaints indicates a high level of vigilance, as illustrated by the following presidential statement: As regards our identity, we have consistently endeavored to preserve its attributes, most particularly our Arabic language. . . . The media, most particularly, the audio-visual media given their wide audience, are exhorted to be the first defenders of its purity and vitality. (President’s speech of July 11, 2008, Leaders. com 2009a)

Such vigilance is probably justified because the public attitude in defense of Arabic (and Islam) may be fed by a number of internal and external political, economic, social and cultural factors. Thus, the ideological factor in the dilemma cannot be discounted because of the paradoxical attitudes that associate traditionalism/modernism with language: Arabic is claimed by some as an identity marker, but rejected by others as a throwback to traditionalism, while French is still regarded by some as a colonial language, but by others as a mind liberator. There are Tunisians who seem to have overcome this debate and have come to terms with their identity (as Arab, Muslim, Mediterranean, and neutrally bilingual or biliterate), but it is very difficult to say how many, or to identify them based on any one parameter alone (educational background, degree of religiosity, professional domain, etc.).

The Pragmatic Factor Partly in response to real communicative demands and partly in an attempt to defuse the ideological debate, Tunisian Francophonists are tactfully trying to cultivate a new pragmatic orientation, as shown in the following interviewee response and the subsequent citation. • There is indeed rivalry between Arabic and French in Tunisia. The predominance of Arabic, supported by a political decision in this sense, is countered by a training/development reality (in French) at the level of decision makers and civil servants. • This change toward a serene, less impassioned attitude is essentially ascribed to the emergence of new needs for foreign languages, French in particular; to a more complementary, even subjacent, distribution of the roles of Arabic and French; and to extending the number of potential users of the latter at schools and universities. (Miled 2007, 5) This orientation attempts to focus on the instrumental role of French as a language needed for specific communicative purposes in specialized academic and professional domains, much like English for Specific Proposes (ESP). However,

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presenting the issue in terms of a rivalry between Arabic and French, and new communicative demands, is intriguing because the functional distribution of Arabic (in the social and administrative domains) and French (in the scientific, economic, and professional domains) is well established. If French is challenged, it is by English, not Arabic. In this light, French faces two serious challenges: (1) carving out an instrumental role for French, to face competition from English; and (2) balancing the unequal distribution across users, which is exacerbated by a deteriorating competence in French. Concerning the first challenge, the interviewees who chose to respond to Q6 (on rivalry between Arabic and French) and Q9 (on strengthening French) in functional terms joined academics and employers in voicing concern about the deteriorating status of French, which is expected to slide from being a “privileged second language,” to a mere “second language,” or to a “foreign language,” (see Miled 2007). Some even thought it would be overtaken by English. The responses are instructive in this regard: • English could gain even more terrain. Arabic would acquire more importance with the future generations and French would lose the aura it has had until now. But all this would depend on our economic policy with France. • There will be three languages in this order of importance: Arabic (for historical, political, ideological, identity reasons) and French, which would lose its importance to give way to English. • There would be a predominance of English. • With globalization, it’s English which will take its place more and more. Besides, France is disinterested in the level of French in its former colonies. The first and last comments assign some blame to the French government for abandoning support of their language. Indeed, the role of the French Cultural Center in Tunis in promoting the French language and culture has been severely downgraded since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 (Bourguiba Benrejeb, personal communication). France seems to have adopted the same policy as Britain and the United States, which consisted in shifting most of its educational and cultural support to Eastern European countries (Romania and Poland, in particular) and in making French language teaching a locally self-financed enterprise. The second challenge concerns the variable mastery of French by Tunisians, ranging from native-like ability to near illiteracy, in spite of years of instruction and accessibility in the general environment. Such variability has always been there and is due to a combination of geographical, socioeconomic, educational, professional, cultural, and even individual motivational factors, but it has never been systematically studied or reliably measured on the national scale. What is more cause for concern is the deteriorating level of competence in French, particularly among younger Tunisians (under 40–45). This was mentioned, not without dismay, by some interviewees:

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• We have doctors and engineers who cannot write a report. • It’s a real shame to find in our universities instructors who master neither the accent nor the grammar of French. • It is quasi impossible at this time to recruit Francophone journalists in Tunisia. I have personally canceled the workshop which I was running . . . for lack of competence. • It would be a pity to lose a language, whatever it may be. The phenomenon has also been noted by employers of young college graduates and documented through standardized tests that showed the level of French of college students to be generally below the standards set in the Common European Framework for language learning (Miled 2007). The deteriorating competence, particularly in secondary education, is causing both teachers and students to resort more and more to code-switching, which might further exacerbate the situation and raise concern about the quality of teaching and learning.

Appraisal and Future Prospects The fate of French in Tunisia has been determined by successive educational reforms which constituted roughly three phases of development/change: 1956– 1970, 1971–1986, and 1987–present. Since independence in 1956, French was willfully chosen as the vehicle for access to scientific and technological knowledge and for professional communication. Until the early 1970s, educational reforms provided the conditions for it to be mastered to the point at which it became automatic for most Tunisians with a university education to develop near-native competence. Many of the teachers were French, even in primary school, and the Tunisian teachers themselves, several of whom had studied in France, were very proficient in the language. All subjects were taught in French, except for the religious or civic education courses. All these elements helped create an immersion environment that was conducive to Arabic-French biliteracy. The decade from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s was the Arabization decade. French was gradually phased out as the language of instruction from primary school (grades 1–6) and then from middle school (grades 7–9) and was only taught as a foreign language. Additional social science subjects were Arabized even in high school (grades 10–13), leaving only the hard sciences and economics courses to be taught in French. At university, French retained a prominent role in most disciplines. By 1980, the teachers’ corps was totally “Tunisified,” but their proficiency in French could still be counted on, though not for long, as they were gradually replaced by university graduates who had already gone through the Arabized school system. Furthermore, there was a shortage of teachers of French, and the government resorted to non-specialists (graduates from other humanities and social science disciplines) to fill secondary school teaching positions.

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The third phase of the reforms basically maintained the Arabization choices. In order to remedy the situation, it was decided to increase the number of French class hours in basic and secondary school and make French classes compulsory in all higher education tracks, but little has been done to improve the teaching materials or the teaching. Overall, the scope for using French has been gradually limited to specific academic domains at university and economic/professional domains in the wider context, specifically in areas where Arabic could not expand. But in these domains, French is facing increasing competition from English. On the sociological level, French is clearly thriving only among the bettereducated, urban, upper- and middle-class Tunisians. In some families that fit in this category, French is the language of everyday communication and is only occasionally interspersed with Tunisian Arabic, even though both parents are Tunisian. The children in this category are often sent to private, French-medium schools and then to French or Canadian universities. Interestingly enough, these Tunisians are also more eager to learn English and more likely to send their children to American universities. (However, the current trend indicates that many of these future French/Canadian/U.S. graduates are not likely to return to work in Tunisia.) If the authorities decide to allow a free public debate on language in education policy and planning, ensuring wider participation and a greater sense of ownership of the issues and decisions, everyone will benefit and French will probably gain some ground, along with more English. If there is “silence and inaction,” as one interviewee put it, “this will lead to a stronger elite that masters French, with all the privileges and opportunities associated with it, and a linguistically handicapped mass. This split may get worse if we add to it functional abilities in English” (see Daoud 2007 for further discussion of this point). The informants for this paper produced an average of 3.5 out of 10 in estimating the overall degree of success of the linguistic policy in Tunisia with respect to French. Some actually assigned a much higher rating to the first phase of reforms. The informants also concurred on a generational split in terms of proficiency in French, judging Tunisians above forty to forty-five years of age as more proficient. This seems to be the direct result of the Arabization policy; however, as explained above, it may also be the consequence of poor curriculum design and teacher training for French.

Conclusion In Tunisia, a country with such a diverse linguistic and cultural history and a great ability to assimilate outside influences, French is considered an educational, economic, and sociocultural asset. It still enjoys high prestige and is increasingly dissociated from the colonial period. French seems to have done well vis-à-vis Arabic in Tunisia, especially in comparison to other polities with substantial Arabic-Muslim influence like Algeria and Morocco in North Africa, or Syria and Lebanon in the Levant. The Tunisian nationalist rulers did resort to Arabic to assert national identity, but not to the extent that it was resorted to in Algeria to oppose complete annexation to France, or in Morocco to claim ethnic/religious

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legitimacy for the monarchy, which is genealogically related to Prophet Mohammed. Moreover, multilingualism was never seen as a problem in Tunisia, which, unlike Algeria and Morocco, did not have a substantial Berber-speaking population that often showed pro-French tendencies in order to oppose excessive Arabization and claim ethnolinguistic rights (see Benrabah 2007). Compared to Syria and Lebanon, Tunisia, being ethnically homogeneous and 99 percent Sunni-Muslim, did not have to contend with the ethnic and religious (sectarian) heterogeneity of these countries, nor did it opt for the Pan-Arab ideology that has marked their sociopolitical development. More and more Tunisians nowadays consider multilingualism a necessity in the context of globalization. In addition to English, there is a genuine interest in learning other world languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, and even Russian and Chinese. It seems that this desired multilingualism will be the key to giving Arabic (the anchor of Tunisian identity) and French (a language not without a local historical and cultural heritage) their proper place on the local scene. The challenge in achieving this balance remains at the level of policy and planning. Notes 1. Libyc is the ethnic label for the Berber family of languages and dialects spoken by the aboriginal people of North Africa. Amazigh (or Thmazight) specifically designates the standard Berber variety spoken in Central Morocco, but it is increasingly used today to refer to Berber as a whole (see http://www.amazigh-voice.com/Mass_Media_ Amazigh.htm). 2. Benhamida’s (2003) argument is based on an analytical review of two landmark publications: La Tunisie martyre: ses revendications (Thaalbi 1920) and Les travailleurs tunisiens et l’émergence du mouvement syndical (Haddad 1927). The first reference (Tunisia the martyr: Its demands) was a collective publication attributed to Abdelaziz Thaalbi (the leading figure of an enlightened religious elite) and initially published in French in Paris in 1920. It was considered the manifesto of the first Tunisian nationalist party, which was founded in 1919 and called the Tunisian Party, then renamed in 1920 the Tunisian Liberal Constitutional Party (commonly referred to as the Destour [Arabic for “Constitution”]) Party. The second reference by Haddad (Tunisian workers and the emergence of the trade-union movement) was first published in Arabic in Tunis in 1927 and then translated into French, in part in 1962 and in full in 1985. Haddad himself was an early member of the Destour Party, which has in one guise or another ruled Tunisia until today. 3. Haddad’s (1927) critical description of the trade union movement in Tunisia vehemently opposed the colonial regime, but had much praise for the universalist, egalitarian values and principles of European/French trade unionism and argued for good relations with the French people, who prized justice and liberty but were simply misled by their colonial leaders. 4. The French protectorate regime started officially in 1881, but a de-facto occupation had already been in place since the early1830s. 5. Kaaniche (2009) maintains that rather than simply receiving “European support,” these documents were imposed on the Tunisian monarch (the Bey) by the French and British consuls in Tunis in order to protect citizens of all faiths, following the hanging of a Jew who had insulted Islam. However, Kaaniche reminds us that Tunisia had already enjoyed a constitution that guaranteed the people’s sovereignty and equality in

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citizenship regardless of race, gender, social background, or wealth in the Carthagenian era. Such a constitution was praised by Aristotle himself as better than the Greek constitutions of his time. 6. An interview comprising ten open-ended questions (see appendix to this chapter) was administered via e-mail to a small, targeted sample of twenty Tunisian professionals, including French and English academics (mostly applied linguists), conference interpreters, and a medical professional. Due to time constraints, these informants were chosen among the author’s colleagues/acquaintances because of their more immediate contact with the issue at hand and their presumed ability to judge the level of French that is used in academic classes as well as in professional conferences involving Tunisians from a wide range of specialty areas and activity domains.

References Benhamida, Abdesslem (2003). Identité tunisienne et représentation de l’autre à l’époque coloniale. Cahiers de la Méditerrannée, 66. Retrieved from http://cdlm.revues.org/index100.html. Benrabah, Mohamed (2007). The language planning situation in Algeria. In Language Planning and Policy in Africa, Vol. 2:Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Tunisia, Robert B. Kaplan and Richard B. Baldauf Jr. (eds.). 25–148. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Daoud, Mohamed (1991). Arabization in Tunisia: The tug of war. Issues in Applied Linguistics 2: 7–29. Daoud, Mohamed (2007). The language situation in Tunisia. In Language Planning and Policy in Africa, Vol. 2:Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Tunisia, Robert B. Kaplan and Richard B. Baldauf Jr. (eds.), 256–307. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. [Previously published under Daoud, M. (2001). The language situation in Tunisia. Current Issues in Language Planning 2(1): 1–52.] Haddad, Tahar (1927). Les travailleurs tunisiens et l’émergence du mouvement syndical [Tunisian workers and the emergence of the trade-union movement]. Tunis: Imprimerie Arabe de Tunis/Maison Tunisienne d’Edition. Kaaniche, Adel (2009). La constitution du 1er juin 1959: une naissance difficile [The constitution of June 1st,

1959: A difficult birth]. Retrieved from http://www.leaders.com.tn/ article.php?aid=854. Leaders. com (2009a). Media: Ne perdez pas ma langue [Media: Do not lose my language]. Retrieved from http:// www.leaders.com.tn/article. php?aid=290. Leaders. com (2009b). Le francarabe: Ce vice impuni [Franco-Arabic: This unpunished vice]. Retrieved from http://www.leaders.com.tn/article. php?aid=237. Mahjoubi, Ammar (2009). Démocracie grècque et démocratie occidentale: Les handicaps historiques du Monde arabe [Greek democracy and Western democracy: the historical handicaps of the Arab World]. Réalités 1233: 16–18. Miled, Mohamed (2007). Le français langue seconde: une évolution sociolinguistique et didactique spécifique (Le cas du français en Tunisie) [French as a second language: A specific sociolinguistic and didactic evolution (the case of French in Tunisia)]. Le Français Aujourd’hui January–March 2007: 1–9. Miled, Mohamed (2008). Evolution sociolinguistique et opportunité d’une didactique intégrée appropriée: l’exemple du français et de l’arabe dans le contexte maghrébin [Sociolinguistic evolution and opportunity for an integrated appropriate approach: The example of

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French and Arabic in the Maghrebian context]. In Plurilinguisme et enseignement, identités en construction, Pierre Martinez, Danièle Moore, and Valérie Spaëth (eds.), 1–9. Paris: Riveneuve éditions. Thaalbi, Abdelaziz (1920). La Tunisie Martyre, ses revendications [Tunisia

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the martyr: Its demands]. Paris: Editions Jouve. Walters, Keith (1966). Gender, identity, and the political economy of language: Anglophone wives in Tunisia. Language in Society 25(4): 515–555. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/4168737.

Appendix Interview request: Cher(e) collègue, Veuillez répondre aux dix questions suivantes concernant la langue française en Tunisie à présent. Je vous prie de bien vouloir me renvoyer vos réponses par e-mail avant la fin du mois de juin au plus tard, tout en sachant que votre contribution restera confidentielle. Merci infiniment, Mohamed Daoud E-mail: [email protected]

Questions 1. D’après vous, quel est le niveau général du français en Tunisie? [In your view, what is the general level of French in Tunisia?] 2. Quelles sont les raisons qui expliqueraient cette situation ? [What are the reasons that would explain this situation?] 3. Comment voyez-vous le niveau du français dans les médias? [How do you see the level of French in the media?] 4. Quel est le profil type de quelqu’un qui lit le journal La Presse ? (e.g., âge, éducation, niveau socioéconomique) [What is the typical profile of someone who reads La Presse (the leading French daily newspaper)? (e.g. age, education, SES)] 5. A quel point le français fait-il partie de l’identité tunisienne? [To what extent is French part of the Tunisian identity?] 6. Peut-on parler d’une rivalité entre le français et l’arabe en Tunisie? [Would you say there is rivalry between French and Arabic in Tunisia?] 7. Peut-on parler d’une rivalité entre le français et l’anglais en Tunisie ? [Would you say there is rivalry between French and English in Tunisia?] 8. Sur une échelle de 1 à 10, indiquez le degré du succès de la politique linguistique en Tunisie. [On a scale of 1–10, indicate the level of success of the language policy in Tunisia.] 9. Faut-il renforcer le français en Tunisie ? Si oui, comment? [Should French be strengthened in Tunisia? If yes, how?] 10. Comment voyez-vous l’évolution future de la situation linguistique ? [How do you see the future development of the linguistic situation?]

7 Hebrew Revivalists’ Goals vis-à-vis the Emerging Israeli Language GHIL‘AD ZUCKERMANN

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. John Adams, 1735–1826, second president of the United States

A Senegalese poet said: ‘In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.’ We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage. Cellist Yo Yo Ma, White House Conference on Culture and Diplomacy, 28 November 2000

Introduction Five Jews changed the way we perceive the world: Moses said, “the Law is everything”; Jesus said, “Love is everything”; Marx said, “Money is everything”; Freud said, “Sex is everything”; and then Einstein astutely added, “Everything is relative!”

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Unfortunately, some people see the world in black-and-white terms. However, Judaism is all about “on the other hand.” In the famous play Fiddler on the Roof, after Tevye’s daughter Hodel and her radical student lover Perchik announced their engagement, Tevye, a religious Jew opposed to the match, memorably reckons: “He loves her. Love, it’s a new style . . . On the other hand, our old ways were once new, weren’t they? On the other hand, they decided without parents, without a matchmaker! On the other hand, did Adam and Eve have a matchmaker? Well, yes they did. And it seems these two have the same matchmaker!” (cf. Stein 1964, 113). “Modern Hebrew” (henceforth, Israeli; see Zuckermann 1999) is the most quoted example of a successful language revival. On the other hand, if we are to be brutally truthful with ourselves, the modern-day vernacular spoken in downtown Tel Aviv is a very different language—both typologically and genetically—to that of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or of the Mishnah, the first major redaction of Jewish oral traditions. Hebrew has been spoken since approximately the fourteenth century BCE. It belonged to the Canaanite division of the northwestern branch of the Semitic languages, which constitutes a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Following a gradual decline, it ceased to be spoken by the second century CE. The failed BarKokhba Revolt against the Romans in Judea in 132–135 CE marks the symbolic end of the period of spoken Hebrew. I believe that the Mishnah was codified around 200 CE, among other reasons, because Hebrew was then dying as a mother tongue. Rabbi Judah haNasi and his collaborators might have realized that if they did not act then to redact the oral tradition, it would soon have been too late because Jews were already speaking languages other than Hebrew. (In fact, the Gemara, the other component of the Babylonian Talmud, which was codified around 500 CE, was written in Aramaic, rather than in Hebrew.) For approximately 1,750 years thereafter, Hebrew was not spoken. A most important liturgical and literary language, it occasionally served as a lingua franca—a means of communication between people who do not share a mother tongue—for Jews of the Diaspora, but not as a native language. Fascinating and multifaceted Israeli, which emerged in Palestine (Eretz Israel) at the end of the nineteenth century, possesses distinctive sociohistorical characteristics such as the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli, the non-Semitic mother tongues spoken by the Hebrew revivalists, and the European impact on literary Hebrew. Consequently, it presents the sociolinguist with a unique laboratory in which to examine a wider set of theoretical problems concerning language genesis, social issues like language and politics, and practical matters, such as whether it is possible to revive a no-longer-spoken language. The genetic classification of Israeli has preoccupied scholars since its genesis. The still regnant traditional thesis suggests that Israeli is Semitic, Hebrew revived. The revisionist antithesis defines Israeli as Indo-European, Yiddish relexified; that is, Yiddish, the revivalists’ mother tongue, is the “substratum,” while Hebrew is the “superstratum” providing the vocabulary (cf. Horvath and Wexler 1997). According to my own mosaic (rather than Mosaic) synthesis,

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“genetically modified” Israeli is a “semi-engineered,” multilayered language, which is a Semito-European, or Eurasian, hybrid; it is both Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) and (Indo-) European. It is based simultaneously on “sleeping beauty”/“walking dead” Hebrew and máme lóshn (mother tongue) Yiddish, which are both primary contributors to modern Hebrew, and the many other languages spoken by revivalists, such as Russian, Polish, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Arabic, German, and English. Israeli is therefore not a case of rétsakh yídish (Israeli for “murder of Yiddish”) but rather of yídish rédt zikh (Yiddish for “Yiddish speaks itself” [beneath Israeli]). Was the Hebrew revival then a failure? Einstein reminds us that “everything is relative!” For example, in the famous “duckrabbit” picture (cf. Wittgenstein 1953, Part 2, Section 11), one could see either a duck or a rabbit. Similarly, the American consul in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly claims, “non ho studiato ornitologia” (I have not studied ornithology). Hence, I propose that one see in the rare bird Israeli either a phoenix rising from the ashes (Hebrew) or a cuckoo laying its egg in the nest of another bird and tricking it into believing that the baby cuckoos are its own offspring (Yiddish). Israeli is thus a “phonenicuckoo” cross with some characteristics of a magpie, the latter representing the ongoing borrowing—or rather “copying” or “stealing”—for example, from American English. The Hebrew revival cannot be considered a failure tout court, because without the zealous, obsessive, enthusiastic efforts of the symbolic father of Israeli, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (born Perelman), and of teachers, writers, poets, journalists, intellectuals, political figures, linguists, and others, Israelis would have spoken a language (such as English, German, Arabic, and Yiddish) that could hardly be considered Hebrew. To call such a hypothetical language “Hebrew” would have not only been misleading but also wrong. To call today’s Israeli “Hebrew” may be misleading but not wrong: Hybridic Israeli is based on Hebrew as much as it is based on Yiddish. So, although the revivalists could not avoid the subconscious influence of their mother tongue(s), they did manage at the same time to consciously revive some components of clinically dead Hebrew. On the other hand, had Arabic-speaking Moroccan Jews arrived in Israel before Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, and provided that they had similar ideology and motivation to those of Ben-Yehuda and his collaborators, there is no doubt in my mind that the language resulting from their hypothetical revival would have been much more Semitic than is Israeli. Did the guardians fail in this particular respect more so than in other areas of the national ethos? That is still to be determined by various interdisciplinary scholars, but I hypothesize that the answer is negative. Multiple causation and the often-camouflaged impact of the Diaspora can be found in each and every component of Israeli society, for example, in music, popular songs, film, economics, urban geography, architecture, political system, and more. For instance, Rami Kimchi (personal communication) explores the parallels between the allegedly mizrahi “burekas films,” which feature Moroccan Jews living in Israeli slums, with the Ashkenazic shtetl life that can be found in works by Mendele MoikherSforim. In fact, the directors of such mizrahi films are often of Ashkenazic heritage. Furthermore, I strongly believe that linguistic insights such as the Congruence

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Principle below can be usefully employed by researchers of other areas of scholarship. Why use the term “Israeli?” Several days before the publication in Tel Aviv of my most recent book (Zuckermann 2008a), I finally received its cover. Whereas the title of the book was Israelít safá yafá, that is, Israeli—A Beautiful Language (challenging and modeled upon the old Zionist slogan ivrít safá yafá, “Hebrew is a beautiful language”), the last sentence on the back cover was “this is his first book in Hebrew!” Worried, I called the publisher, Am Oved, and was given an ultimatum: either we leave it as “this is his first book in Hebrew” or change it to “this is his first book in Israeli and his last book at Am Oved!” Eventually, the compromise was “this is his first book published in Israel.” This is an example of a case in which the (meta-linguistic) name is extremely important because it determines the way in which people perceive the thing it stands for. Just as thought influences language, language can shape thought. For example, 2,500 years ago, Confucius said that the first thing one has to do is “to rectify names” (Analects, Book 13, Verse 3). Had I continued to call Israeli “Modern Hebrew,” “Israeli Hebrew,” or merely “Hebrew” tout court, you might have assumed that my model is yet another wiseguy version of the view that Israeli is simply an evolution of Hebrew, influenced by “foreign languages” such as Yiddish. But that’s a far cry from the two main arguments proposed here: hybridity and native speech.

Hybridity and the Congruence Principle If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. Nelson Mandela

Israeli is not an evolutionary phase of Hebrew but rather a new hybrid language, based simultaneously on Hebrew, Yiddish, and a plethora of other languages spoken by Jewish pioneers in Palestine in the 1880s–1930s. Thus, Yiddish is not a “foreign language” vis-à-vis Israeli, and the word intuítsya (“intuition”)—to give but one example of thousands of alleged loan words—is not a loan word (from Yiddish intuítsye, Russian intuítsiya, Polish intuicja, etc., all meaning “intuition”) but rather an integral part of Israeli from its very beginning. According to the Congruence Principle, the more revivalists speak contributing languages with specific linguistic features, the more likely these features are to prevail in the emergent language. Based on feature pool statistics, this principle weakens August Schleicher’s famous Family Tree theory in historical linguistics, which often gives the wrong impression that every language has only one parent. For example, most revivalists spoke languages, mainly Yiddish, that lacked that Semitic pharyngeal gulp ‘ayin (represented, for instance, by the apostrophe in my Christian—actually Jewish—name Ghil‘ad). Naturally, their children—the ones

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who, in fact, shaped the real character of Israeli—could not buy the argument “do as I say, don’t do as I do!” The result is that most Israelis do not have this sound in their speech. Similarly, má nishmà, the common Israeli “what’s up?” greeting, looks like a calque—loan translation—of the Yiddish phrase vos hért zikh, usually pronounced vsértsekh and literally meaning “what’s heard?” but actually functioning as a common greeting. However, a Romanian-speaking immigrant to Israel might have used má nishmà because of Romanian ce se aude, a Polish-speaker Jew because of Polish co słychać and a Russian-speaker Что слышно (chto slyshno), all meaning the same thing and functioning in the same way. The distinction between forms and patterns is crucial here as it demonstrates multiple causation. In the 1920s and 1930s, gdud meginéy hasafá, “the language defendants regiment” (cf. Shur 2000), whose motto was ivrí, dabér ivrít “Hebrew [i.e. Jew], speak Hebrew,” used to tear down signs written in “foreign” languages and disturb Yiddish theater gatherings. However, the members of this group only looked for Yiddish forms, rather than patterns in the speech of the Israelis who did choose to speak “Hebrew.” The language defendants would thus not attack an Israeli speaker saying má nishmà. To varying degrees, Israeli differs from Hebrew in all components of language, including sounds (phonetics and phonology) (Zuckermann 2005), meaning (semantics), word order (syntax), words (lexis), and even in word formation (morphology) (Zuckermann 2009). Some elements, however, are more revivable than others. Words and conjugations, for example, are easier to revitalize than intonation, discourse, associations, and connotations. My research analyzes the hitherto-overlooked camouflaged semantic networking transferred from one language to another. Whereas mechanisms as calques (loan translations such as superman, from German Übermensch), phono-semantic matches (e.g., crayfish, from Old French crevice, a cognate of crab that has little to do with fish) (Zuckermann 2003) and portmanteau blends (e.g., motel, from motor+hotel, or sprummer, from spring+summer) have been studied, there is a need to uncover concealed semantic links between words in the Target Language which reflect—often subconsciously—semantic networking in the Source Language. Consider the Israeli word gakhlilít (“firefly, glow-worm”)—coined by poet laureate Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934). This word is semantically and etymologically linked to the Biblical Hebrew word gaħelet (“burning coal, glowing ember”). Morphologically, Israeli gakhlilít derives from Hebrew gaħelet plus the reduplication of its third radical [l]. However, no Israeli dictionary reveals the crucial semantic networking aspect, namely that the Israeli concoction, gakhlilít, in using an element associated with “glow,” in fact replicates a European mind-set, apparent for example in the Yiddish word glivórem, or “firefly,” literally “glow” (cf. gaħelet) + “worm,” or in German Glühwürmchen. And yet contemporary Israelis are indoctrinated to believe that they speak the same language as the Prophet Isaiah, “with mistakes.” It is thus high time to acknowledge that Israeli is very different from ancient Hebrew. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld, “not that there’s anything wrong with that!” We should embrace—rather than chastise—the many sources of Israeli!

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Almost all revivalists were native Yiddish-speakers who wanted to speak Hebrew, with Semitic grammar and pronunciation, like Arabs. Research should be conducted on the Hebrew revivalists’ perception of the “noble savage” Arab, who was, on the one hand, an enemy and, on the other, an enviable Semite riding a Middle-Eastern camel, entering a biblical city and speaking a Semitic tongue with autochthonous pharyngeal consonants. Not only were the revivalists European, their revivalist campaign was inspired by European—for example, Bulgarian—nationalism. At the time, although territory and language were at the heart of European nationalism, the Jews possessed neither a national territory nor a unifying national language. Zionism could be considered a fascinating manifestation of European discourses channeled into the Holy Land (cf. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, 1876). Reversing language shift (RLS) (Fishman 1991, 2001; Hagège 2009; Evans 2010) is a crucial issue. In his seminal work, Reversing Language Shift, Fishman (1991, 287) argues that RLS efforts often originate in Europe. In the case of Hebrew, he is even more right than he might have thought. RLS efforts in the case of Hebrew are not only sociological—the mind-set behind the motivation to revive the language was a reflection of a European nationalism—but also linguistic—the mind-set of the emerging language itself is European. The revivalists’ attempt to (1) deny their (more recent) roots in search of Biblical antiquity, (2) negate diasporism and disown the “weak, persecuted” exilic Jew, and (3) avoid hybridity (as reflected in Slavonized, Romance/Semitic-influenced, Germanic Yiddish itself, which they despised) could not fully succeed. Ironically, although they have engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity, the emerging Israeli language often mirrors the very scorned syncretism and despised diasporism the revivalists sought to erase. The reason is simple: the revival of a no longer spoken language is most unlikely without influences from the mother tongue(s) of those at the forefront of the revival. Thus, when most native Israeli-speakers speak Israeli, their intonation is much more similar to that of Yiddish, the mother tongue of most revivalists, than to that of Arabic or any other language belonging to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family.

Native Israeli Speech and the Academy of the Hebrew Language On a bus in Tel Aviv, a mother was talking animatedly, in Yiddish, to her little boy—who kept answering her in Hebrew. And each time the mother said, “No, no, talk Yiddish!” An impatient Israeli, overhearing this, exclaimed, “Lady, why do you insist the boy talk Yiddish instead of Hebrew?”

Replied the mother, “I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.” (Rosten 1970, xxi)

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Since its conception, Israeli has been the subject of purism (the dislike of foreign words, as in Icelandic: Sapir and Zuckermann 2008) and the enforcement of correct pronunciation. Brought into being by legislation in 1953 as the supreme institute for “Hebrew,” the Academy of the Hebrew Language (known in Israeli as haakadémya lalashón haivrít) is funded by the Ministry of Education, which increasingly suffers from budgetary cutbacks. It superseded the (Hebrew) Language Council (váad halashón (haivrít)), which was established in 1889—as a branch of Safá Brurá (Clear Language)—by Ben-Yehuda and colleagues. As described on its web site, the Academy, based in Giv‘at Ram, Jerusalem, “prescribes standards for Modern Hebrew grammar, orthography, transliteration [in fact, transcription], and punctuation [vocalization, vowel marking] based upon the study of Hebrew’s historical development” (http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/ english.html). The Academy’s plenum, which holds five or six annual sessions, consists of twenty-three members and an additional fifteen academic advisors. These are either scholars from the disciplines of languages, linguistics, and Jewish studies, or accomplished writers and translators. The Academy’s decisions are binding upon all governmental agencies, including the Israel Broadcasting Authority. As defined in its constitution, the Academy’s functions are: (1) To investigate and compile the Hebrew lexicon according to its historical strata and layers; (2) To study the structure, history, and offshoots of the Hebrew language; and (3) To direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, requirements, and potential, its daily and academic needs, by setting its lexicon, grammar, characters, orthography and transliteration [in fact, transcription]. The first goal is most useful, as Israeli is indeed a multilayered language. For example, one could say both (a) khashkhú enáv, literally, “his eyes became dark,” meaning “he saw black” (“black” in this context meaning “bad news”), and (b) niyá/naasá lo khóshekh baenáim, meaning the same, albeit structurally different. While khashkhú enáv is Hebrew, niyá lo khóshekh baenáim is a calque of the Yiddish phrase siz im gevórn fíntster in di óygn, which might in turn be an adaptation of the very Hebrew khashkhú enáv (transcribed here in its Israeli form, which would have been almost unintelligible for an ancient Hebrew-speaker). Israeli has many other minimal pairs, such as asá din leatsmó and lakákh et hakhók layadáim, both referring to a person violating the law, with the latter being more colloquial, as well as yamím kelelót, literally “days as nights,” and misavív lashaón, literally “round the clock,” both often referring to hard work. Somewhat resembling the “catastrophic success” of the 1928–1936 Turkish Language Revolution (see Lewis 1999), many referents have several Israeli signifiers, one of which is puristically Hebrew and the other, often more commonly used, “foreign” (in fact, Israeli ab initio). These include many “internationalisms,” such as opozítsya (“opposition”; according to the Academy, the word should be negdá—cf. Hebrew néged, “against”) and koalítsya (“coalition”; according to the Academy: yakhdá—cf. Hebrew yaħad, “together”).

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However, goal three, to direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, though intriguing (cf. Zuckermann 2008b, 139), is oxymoronic. If the nature of a language is to evolve in a specific direction (cf. Sapir’s “drift,” the pattern of change in which the structure of a language shifts in a determinate direction), why direct its evolution by language policing? Despite such intensive efforts toward grammatical enforcement, Israeli is by now a fully-fledged language, and can never be Hebrew. Some prescriptive purists—for instance, Sarid (2008), Hitron (2008) and Levitan (2009)—argue that the current generation of Israelis is reckless and that Israeli used to be much better. I, on the other hand, view many alleged “reckless changes” within Israeli as recognition that the language was never Hebrew ab initio. For example, unlike the common myth that such a development is recent, Israeli-speakers “made mistakes” in the numeral-noun polarity-of-gender agreement from the very inception of Israeli. I once asked an old man, “Have you changed throughout your life?” His response was very telling and relevant to the Israeli language: “I haven’t changed but I suddenly realized who I was.” Every live-and-kicking language changes through time, but the most important change I predict for Israeli is that the myth that we speak the language of Isaiah will eventually be replaced by a more sober, syncretic analysis of Israeli genesis. There is no good reason to force a Hebrew grammar on native Israeli-speakers, simply because they already speak their mother tongue perfectly, according to internalized grammatical rules. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the term “habitus” to refer to a social convention; for example, eating with chopsticks versus a knife and fork. Unlike literary language, which is indeed a “habitus,” the native spoken tongue is not learned but rather acquired automatically and effortlessly. This is the diametric opposite of the admired, albeit mistaken, claim, made in 1953, by the former president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language Ze’ev Ben-Hayyim: “One learns his spoken language in years of effort, in very hard work throughout one’s life” (83). The relationship between hybridity and native speech is complex. Supporting one of them does not necessarily imply accepting the other. For example, I might convince some that Israeli is a wonderful mishmash of many languages yet they would still prefer enforcing an elitist standard on Israeli-speakers. Overlooking its hybrid vigor, others might continue to blindly believe that Israeli is Hebrew but would still allow Israelis to speak as they wish. Nevertheless, the main innovation here, besides the hybridity model, is the link between hybridity and native speech: Even if there are numerous Israelis who believe that we must enforce a standard, might they eventually be convinced to modify the characteristics of that standard? Who said that it must be based on Hebrew?

Let My People Know! Do Israelis Really Understand Hebrew? Language is a guide to “social reality”. Though language is not ordinarily thought of as of essential interest to the students of

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social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. (Sapir 1921)

One of the arguments against my synthesis has been that Israelis can easily understand the Hebrew Bible. The otherwise perspicacious intellectual Avi(ezer) Ravitzky wrote that “Modern Greek, for example, boasts many similarities to its ancestor, yet a speaker of the current language must struggle to read ancient texts. The modern Hebrew speaker, however, moves smoothly through the Bible” (2000, 13–14). Leaving aside the crucial difference between the evolution of Classical into Modern Greek and the unparalleled genesis of Israeli, the alleged smoothness is mere myth. Israelis not only do not understand the Bible, but much worse: they misunderstand it without even realizing it! By and large, Israeli-speakers are the worst students in advanced studies of the Bible. Notwithstanding, Israel’s Education Ministry axiomatically assumes that Israeli is simply an organic evolution of Hebrew and that the Bible is thus written in the very same language – albeit in a higher register, of course – spoken by Israeli pupils at primary and secondary schools. The publishers of Hartom-Cassuto, and other volumes providing numerous glosses to the unfathomable Biblical verses, have benefited from such a purism prism, which might be related to self-righteousness, hubris, simple conservatism, or blindness on behalf of Israel’s educational system. Israelis might understand the most general meaning of bereshit- bara ’elohim ’et hashamayim we’et ha’arets (Genesis 1:1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth) but very few would be able to explain the construct-state nomen regens (nismákh) bereshít: in the beginning of what? And how many Israelis could fathom this sentence from the perspective of the temporal sequence of creation: Were the heaven and the earth created at the same time? Is it, therefore, possible that the expression “the heaven and the earth” here refers to “the world” in general? And which Israeli-speaker uses a verb-subject-object word order (a.k.a. constituent order) as in “created God the heaven and the earth”? Ask Israelis what ’avaním shaħaqú máyim (Job 14:19) means and they will tell you that the stones eroded the water. On second thought, they might guess that semantically it would

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make more sense that the water eroded the stones. Yet such an object-verb-subject order is ungrammatical in Israeli (see Zuckermann 2008a, 2009). How many Israelis can really fathom tohu wavohu or təhom (Genesis 1:2), the Israeli misleading senses being “mess” and “abyss,” respectively? Or haşvi yisra’el ‘al bamotekha ħalal (II Samuel 1:19: The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places)? Most Israelis understand yéled sha‘ashu‘ím (Jeremiah 31:19, King James 20) as “playboy” rather than “pleasant child.” Bá’u baním ‘ad mashbér (Isaiah 37:3) is interpreted by Israelis as “children arrived at a crisis” rather than as “children arrived at the mouth of the womb, to be born.” ’Adam lə‘amal yullad (Job 5:7) is taken to mean “man was born to do productive work” rather than “mischief” or “trouble”—in the Bible this sentence stands as an accusation of the inherent wickedness of mankind. Some Hebrew normativists repeat the red herring that if we correct Israelis’ alleged “grammatical mistakes” they would be more likely to understand Classical Hebrew. Does an Israeli saying asará shkalím (10 shekels) have more chance to understand the unfathomable egla meshulleshet (“a heifer of three years old,” Genesis 15:9) than if he stuck to the actually more commonly grammatical éser shékel? Just as the “Jerusalem artichoke” has nothing to do with either Jerusalem or artichoke (even though some Jerusalem restaurants take pride in serving it), what Yossi Sarid—to mention but one linguistic right-winger—calls “mistaken Hebrew” is neither mistaken nor Hebrew: it is grammatical Israeli! Obviously, one could give thousands of other examples, and from post-Biblical Hebrew, too. For instance, how many Israelis can follow the meaning of the Passover Haggadah or the Hanukkah hymn “Ma‘oz Tsur Yeshu‘ati?” Is Hebrew menabeaħ (blaspheming) indeed related, after all, to Israeli novéakh (barking)? Most importantly, however, the available examples are far from being only lexical: Israelis are incapable of recognizing moods and aspects in the Bible. For example, nappíla goralót wened‘á (Jonah 1:7, “let us cast lots”) was thought by some Israelis to be the rhetorical future rather than the cohortative verb tense, the latter apparent, for example, in Israeli yeushar hataktsiv! (may the budget be approved!). Despite eleven years of Biblical training, Israeli-speakers still understand the perfect aspect (e.g., ’amar, “said” as in “I will have said . . .”) as if it were past tense. The imperfect aspect (e.g., yomar, “would/will say” as in “I thought I would say . . .”) is misunderstood as the future tense. In reality, a Biblical verb in the perfect aspect can refer to a completed action in the future—cf., mutatis mutandis, the Israeli colloquial question záznu? (literally, “have we gone/moved?”), utterable instead of yala bay, meaning “let’s go.” I remember my tironut (IDF recruit training) commander ordering us in a sadaút session (“fieldcraft,” etymologically unrelated to sadism): od khamésh dakót hayítem kan! (within five minutes you will have been here), hayítem being, in Israeli, grammatically past but actually referring, in this specific colloquial case, to an action in the future. In the Bible, heyitém refers regularly—not only colloquially—to an action that has been completed, regardless of whether or not it is in the past or future—hence the term “aspect” rather than “tense.” Such Biblical mindset is in harsh contradistinction to the Weltanschauung of the Homo sapiens sapiens (the human who knows s/he knows) israelicus vulgaris, and to the way Israelis read the Hebrew Bible.

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Negating the Diaspora, Ben-Yehuda would have been most content had Israelis spoken Biblical Hebrew. Had the Hebrew revival been fully successful, Israelis would indeed have spoken a language closer to ancient Hebrew than Modern English is to Middle English because we would have bypassed more than 1,750 years of natural development. On the other hand, let us assume for a moment that Hebrew had never died as a spoken language by the second century CE and that it continued to be the mother tongue of generations of Jews. They would eventually have returned to the Holy Land, continuing to speak Hebrew. From the perspective of mutual intelligibility, it might well be the case that that Hebrew would have differed more from Biblical Hebrew than does Israeli, but this says little about the genesis of modern Israeli. Given such a magnificently hybridic yíkhes (heritage), as well as the omnipresent misunderstandings of the Hebrew Bible by Israelis, Israel’s Education Ministry should revise the way it teaches the Bible and instead teach the Bible the way Latin is taught, employing the most advanced methods of second language teaching, which can be most joyful and memorable. Such a measure has the potential to reduce Israeli pupils’ disdain for Bible lessons, as well as to attract more secular Jews to Biblical scholarship. Thus, Tanakh RAM—a project recently launched by the experienced Bible teacher Avraham Ahuvia, as well as the insightful publisher Rafi Mozes, acronymized in this biblionym—fulfills the mission of red ’el ha‘am not only in its Hebrew meaning (go down to the people) but also, more importantly, in its Yiddish meaning (red meaning “speak!”). Ahuvia’s translation (2010) is most useful and dignified. Given its high register, however, I predict that the future promises biblical translations into more colloquial forms of Israeli, a beautifully multilayered and intricately multisourced language, of which we should be proud. On the other hand—and as if the picture were not complex enough—Yadin and Zuckermann (2010) demonstrate the success of Zionism in deifying the Israeli State by shrewdly employing divine Hebrew terms and turning them into signifiers for nationalist referents. For example, Biblical Hebrew mishkån meant both “dwelling-place” and “Tabernacle of the Congregation” (where Moses kept the Ark in the wilderness) and “inner sanctum” (known as ’ohel mo‘ed). Israeli mishkán haknéset, however, refers to “the Knesset (Israeli parliament) building.” Translating mishkán haknéset as “the Knesset Building” (as on the official Knesset web site) is lacking. The word mishkán is loaded with holiness and evokes sanctity (cf. sanctuary), as if members of Knesset (cf. MPs) were, at the very least, angels or seraphim. Another example, not mentioned by Yadin and Zuckermann, is mékhes: whereas in the Hebrew Bible it was a tribute to God (e.g., Numbers 31:37), in Israeli is it “customs” paid to the state.

Conclusion I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an

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interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so. (Haldane 1963, 464)

The fin-de-siècle Hebrew revivalists had several advantages compared with revivalists of indigenous languages such as no-longer spoken Aboriginal languages in Australia. For example, (1) extensive documentation (e.g., the aforementioned Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah); (2) Hebrew was considered a most prestigious language (as opposed to Yiddish, for example); and (3) Jews from all over the globe only had Hebrew in common, whereas there are dozens of “sleeping” Aboriginal languages to be revived and it would obviously be extremely hard to choose only one unifying tongue, unless one resorts to Aboriginal English. And yet, the Hebrew revivalists—who wished to speak pure Hebrew—failed in their purism prism. The language spoken in today’s Israel is a multifaceted and fascinating fin-de-siècle hybrid, based not only on “sleeping beauty” or “walking dead” Hebrew but also on the revivalists’ mother tongues such as Yiddish. The vernacularization of Hebrew—a language lacking native speakers between the second and nineteenth centuries—was partially a success and partially a failure. It is hard to provide an exact quantification for such a multivariable enterprise, but I would roughly estimate that on a subjective 1–10 scale, 10 being a complete success and 1 being a complete failure, the Hebrew revival is at 6 or 7. More specifically, I propose the following continuum approximations––on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being European and 10 being Hebrew––for the extent to which “Israeli” can be considered Hebrew: mind-set/spirit and discourse (communicative tools, speech acts): 1 (i.e., European); sounds (phonetics and phonology): 2; semantics (meaning, associations, connotations, semantic networkings): 3; word order (syntax): 4; general vocabulary: 5; word formation: 7; verbal conjugations: 9; and basic vocabulary 10 (i.e., Hebrew):. The factors leading to the partial failure of the Hebrew revival have little to do with a lack of motivation or zealousness, or with economic or political variables not even with the fact that the revivalists, such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, were not as linguistically sophisticated as contemporary linguists. It is simply the case that one cannot negate one’s most recent roots, be they cultural or linguistic, even if one is keen to deny one’s parents’ and grandparents’ heritage (diasporic Yiddish) in search of cultural antiquity (Biblical Hebrew). It is thus most unlikely to revive a clinically dead language without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s). From the perspective of cultural heritage, attempts to revive a no-longer-spoken tongue should be supported and celebrated. But we should refrain from a purist’s approach and feel no shame about hybridity. References Ahuvia, Avraham (2010). Tanakh RAM (The Hebrew Bible with translation into Israeli). Even-Yehuda: Rekhes.

Ben-Hayyim, Ze’ev (1953). Lashón atiká bimtsiút khadashá (sikhót al beayót balashón haivrít hakhayá) [An ancient

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tongue in a new reality. Discussions on issues in the living Hebrew language]. Leshonénu La‘am 4.3–5 (35–37): 3–85. (The Academy of the Hebrew Language) Ben-Hayyim, Ze’ev (1992). Bemilkhamtá shel lashón [The struggle for a language]. Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language. Eliot, George (1876). Daniel Deronda. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. Evans, Nicholas (2010). Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Fishman, Joshua A. (1991).Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.) (2001). Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift, Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Hagège, Claude (2009). On the Death and Life of Languages. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson (1963). Review of The Truth about Death. Journal of Genetics 58: 463–464. Hartom, Elia Samuele, and Moses David Cassuto (1956–1961). Tanakh [The Hebrew Bible with Commentary]. Tel Aviv: Yavneh (15 volumes). Hitron, Hagai (2008). Meshakhnéa, nekhmád, mazík [Convincing, cute, harmful]. Haaretz (24 December 2008). Horvath, Julia, and Paul Wexler (eds.) (1997). Relexification in Creole and Non-Creole Languages: With Special Attention to Haitian Creole, Modern Hebrew, Romani, and Rumanian (Mediterranean Language and Culture Monograph Series, vol. xiii). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Levitan, Amos (2009). Dalutá shel haisraelít [The poverty of Israeli]. Iton 77 (March-April 2009).

Lewis, Geoffrey L. (1999). The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ravitzky, Aviezer (2000). Religious and Secular Jews in Israel: A Kulturkampf ? Position Paper, Jerusalem: The Israel Democracy Institute. Rosten, Leo (1970). The Joys of Yiddish. London: W. H. Allen. Sapir, Edward (1921). Language. An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Sapir, Yair, and Ghil‘ad Zuckermann (2008). Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching. In Globally Speaking: Motives for Adopting English Vocabulary in Other Languages, Judith Rosenhouse and Rotem Kowner (eds.) 19–43. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Sarid, Yossi (2008). Kof lekóf yabía ómer [Monkey to monkey, will the message be lost?]. Haaretz (28 December 2008). Shur, Shimon A. (2000). Gdud meginéy hasafá beérets israél 1923–1936 [The Language Defendants Regiment in Eretz Yisrael 1923–1936]. Haifa: Herzl Institute for Research and Study of Zionism. Stein, Joseph (1964). Fiddler on the Roof (based on Sholom Aleichem’s stories). New York: Crown. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2001 [1953]). Philosophische Untersuchungen [Philosophical Investigations]. Blackwell. Yadin, Azzan, and Ghil‘ad Zuckermann (2010). Blorít: Pagans’ Mohawk or Sabras’ Forelock?: Ideologically Manipulative Secularization of Hebrew Terms in Socialist Zionist Israeli. In The Sociology of Language and Religion: Change, Conflict and Accommodation, Tope Omoniyi and Joshua A. Fishman (eds.). London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (1999). Review Article of The Oxford English-Hebrew

HEBREW REVIVALISTS’ GOALS VIS-À-VIS THE EMERGING ISRAELI LANGUAGE

Dictionary, Nakdimon Shabbethay Doniach and Ahuvia Kahane (eds.). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. International Journal of Lexicography 12: 325–346. Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2005). Abba, why was Professor Higgins trying to teach Eliza to speak like our cleaning lady?: Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, prescriptivism and the real sounds of the Israeli language. Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 19: 210–231.

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Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2008a). Israelít safá yafá [Israeli – A Beautiful Language. Hebrew as Myth]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2008b). “Realistic prescriptivism”: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, its campaign of “good grammar” and lexpionage, and the native Israeli speakers. Israel Studies in Language and Society 1(1): 135–154. Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2009). Hybridity versus revivability: Multiple causation, forms and patterns. Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2: 40–67.

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8 African American Language in U.S. Education and Society: A Story of Success and Failure DJANGO PARIS ARNETHA F. BALL

Introduction In this chapter we explore the ongoing tension between the vitality of African American Language (AAL) in and beyond African American communities and the general failure of education in the United States to successfully use AAL as a tool for the educational achievement of AAL speakers. It is our goal to discuss this tension as a means of showing AAL as a socially successful linguistic variety, even as it continues to face grave challenges to being broadly accepted as a valid, culturally and educationally valuable language form. As public institutions where young people come into contact with and are meant to learn the dominant language of a nation, schools are an ideal window through which to view the relative social and political success of language use. There are few places where this is truer than in U.S. schools where culturally marginalized students from a variety of linguistic and ethnic backgrounds come together, with the goal of learning the Dominant American English (DAE) varieties needed for success in school and society. Before beginning a full exploration of this tension between the social success of AAL and its educational failure, we will briefly summarize what constitutes AAL and give an account of its history.

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Table 8.1 Selected Characteristic Features of AAL 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Use of habitual be marker to denote habitual action (e.g., She be talkin’ fast.) Verbal -s absence to indicate present tense with third person singular verbs (e.g., He walkø home.) Plural -s absence (e.g., They clap their handø.) Possessive -s absence (e.g., We saw our girlfriendø house.) Copula is and are absence (e.g., She ø so happy ‘cuz they ø gone.) Omission of /r/ sound following vowel (e.g., “poor” pronounced /po/) Pronunciation of the voiced and unvoiced /th/ sound as voiced or voiceless /d,t/ sound (e.g., “they” pronounced as “dey” and “thing” pronounced “ting”) Reduction of word-final consonant clusters (e.g., “test” is pronounced /tes/) Multiple negation (I don’t want nothing from nobody)

Overview of AAL Features and History African American Language is a systematic variety of English that is spoken as at least one of the language varieties of most African Americans. Like any language, AAL is socially and culturally learned and used, so only people who learn AAL and have reason to use it do so. Although this learning is often tied to race for reasons of residential segregation and cultural solidarity, it is crucial that we point out up front that not all African Americans are speakers of AAL and not all speakers of AAL are African American. AAL is also known as African American Vernacular English, African American English, Black Language, and Ebonics. We use the term AAL in this chapter, as it is consistent with current usage and foregrounds the distinctive linguistic and cultural characteristics of the variety. AAL has been recognized as the most studied variety of English in the world, with decades of scholarship investigating the history, grammar, semantics, phonology, usage, social, and political implications of the language (Labov 1972, Smitherman 1977, Baugh 1999, Alim 2004). This research has yielded vast knowledge about the features of AAL that make it distinct from DAE (DAE is also known as Standard English). We include table 8.1 above to illustrate some of the most prominent features of AAL that make it distinct from DAE. It is important to note that each of these features is optional for speakers of AAL and are dependent on both social context (e.g., with whom, where, and about what a speaker is communicating) and linguistic context (e.g., what precedes and follows the feature in an utterance). Therefore, in AAL as with all language varieties, speakers vary how much of the vernacular they use, depending on sociolinguistic factors. It is also important to note that some features of AAL are shared with other languages and with other non-dominant varieties of English (like Chicano English or some varieties of Southern White English), though they are generally marked as AAL in contexts where AAL is a primary language of interaction. There are two competing hypotheses about the origins of AAL. Most linguistic scholars believe AAL is a creole language resulting from the language contact between African and African-Caribbean slaves in America and the dominant English

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language of their European American masters and/or overseers. Creole languages form when two language communities come into contact and need to develop a mutually intelligible language to communicate. The creole hypothesis argues that the large proportions of African and African-descended slaves in the Southern British Colonies and the early United States (in the 1700s slaves represented upwards of 50 percent of the entire population in many Southern colonies like South Carolina) meant that many features of African language and culture must have been retained in contact with the dominant English language of whites. Caribbean nations such as Jamaica had even higher percentages of Africandescended populations (as much as 90 percent of the population in the 1600s) and developed English creole languages with many African features retained in the English variety (Rickford and Rickford 2000). An alternative supported by other scholars is the Anglican hypothesis. These scholars see the relatively small number of African slaves in the earliest British colonies of the 1600s and the relatively large number of white British indentured servants from lower socioeconomic classes who worked alongside slaves in those colonies as evidence that the non-dominant varieties of English from indentured servants influenced the language spoken by early African Americans. Whatever their hypothesis, most scholars compromise on the fact that African, AfricanCaribbean, and non-dominant English influences were important in the development of early AAL. Both camps also agree that AAL is the linguistic legacy of American slavery and its aftermath.1 How has AAL persisted as the primary language variety of many African Americans over 140 years after the abolition of slavery in the United States? The fact that slaves were systematically separated from others who spoke their language, segregated from dominant society, and denied education and literacy was crucial to the development of AAL as a unique variety. Continued legal residential and educational segregation meant that until the civil rights decades of the 1950s and 1960s, few African Americans had adequate access to or contexts for use of DAE language or literacy. To the present day, residential and educational segregation have remained prominent features of the U.S. landscape (Massey 2001, Ladson-Billings 2006). These historic and continuing macro level factors have led to AAL remaining a primary means of communication throughout African American communities. This includes the use of AAL in music, literature, community institutions (e.g., churches) and, of course, in the everyday lives of millions of AAL speakers.

AAL in Education In 1979 a federal court judge in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ruled in a case that has become known simply as the “Black English Trial.” The case was brought by families of eleven African American students who had been diagnosed as “linguistically handicapped” by the district’s speech pathologist. The families contended that the children had been misdiagnosed and miseducated as a result of their strong use of AAL. The judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, acknowledging that

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the school had failed to provide adequate teaching, teacher preparation, or curriculum to support AAL speaking students in gaining mastery over the DAE required for school success.2 Whereas other groups of linguistically marginalized children received special educational support using their heritage language as a bridge to DAE proficiency, the judge ruled that AAL speaking children should also receive such instruction. The Black English Trial ruling was greatly influenced by sociolinguistic research, which had shown AAL as a systematic variety and had shown the mismatch between educational tests and instructional materials and the linguistic abilities of AAL speakers. In a famous example, prominent sociolinguist William Labov (1972) showed how a common educational test of verbal ability given by a white DAEspeaking school psychologist in New York City showed a young African American student as verbally deficient. Labov then showed how the same child displayed considerable verbal skill and ingenuity when asked questions by a black AALspeaking adult and when in conversation with AAL-speaking peers. Such evidence showed that it was not the child and his AAL that was failing the test, but rather that the test questions and situation were failing to access and utilize his linguistic ability. The Black English Trial was a major moment in the story of AAL and education. In effect, it set as legal precedent that the failure does not reside in the language of the students, but in the school’s response to the language. Subsequent research has documented that attention to AAL in the classroom can help students legitimize their heritage AAL language while becoming more proficient and literate in the DAE needed for access in school and society. For example, researchers have shown the ways in which features of AAL carry into the writing of AAL-speaking students (Ball 1995, 1999) and have demonstrated how including AAL structures in the study of literature can improve students’ literary analysis skills (Lee 1995). Studies have also shown the positive educational outcomes associated with teaching that explicitly contrast AAL features with DAE features so that students can see the differences in their everyday language and the language required for school (Godley, Sweetland, Wheeler, Minnici, and Carpenter 2006). In the current decade many scholars and educators have successfully used the language and culture of hip-hop as a means of engaging urban students (many of them AAL-speaking students) in reading and writing about language, power, identity, and culture (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade 2002, Kirkland 2007). Unfortunately, the most contemporary research on AAL in education continues to show that even in schools with committed, well-prepared teachers, use of AAL in classroom instruction as a means toward critical language awareness and the acquisition of DAE literacy is still lacking (Alim 2004, Paris 2009). Another touchstone moment in the relationship of AAL and educational equity came in 1996 and 1997 during the Ebonics controversy.3 In December 1996 the Oakland, California, School Board passed a resolution that called for the use of Ebonics (what we call AAL in this chapter) in the instruction of the many thousands of African American students in the district as a means of helping them master standard English (what we call DAE in this chapter). The school board was attempting to require teachers to understand, validate, and use AAL in the instruction of African American students to remedy the fact that African American

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students continued to score lower than any other group on all measures of performance. Unfortunately, the original Oakland resolution characterized AAL as a “language other than English” that had more in common with West African languages than with DAE. What is more, the resolution cited sociolinguistic research for support. In January the school board revised the resolution, backing off the claim that AAL was not English. The new resolution stated that AAL was more than a simple dialect of English and had roots in slavery and structures found in West African languages. Consistent with the first resolution, the new resolution stated that teachers and teacher assistants must be knowledgeable in AAL and be able to provide language support to AAL speaking students that mirrored that given to students who were speakers of other languages (like Spanish). A media and political firestorm ensued. National and international news outlets covered the story for weeks. The poorly worded resolution, originally intended to remedy the educational failure of thousands of students, became an opportunity for people from all backgrounds and social and political positions to voice negative attitudes about AAL. The result was that the winter of 1996–1997 became an important moment in understanding how U.S. society viewed AAL. The attitudes expressed about AAL were overwhelmingly negative by media, politicians, Black leaders and entertainers, and everyday people, with Ebonics humor denigrating AAL and major figures like Maya Angelou and Jesse Jackson rejecting the resolution as a backward step in African American progress (Rickford and Rickford 2000). Secretary of Education Richard Riley quickly renounced the resolution in an apparent attempt to make sure Title VII funds (federal funds for bilingual education) were not allocated to AAL-speaking students. Although Jesse Jackson later reversed his opinion and supported the general push of the resolution to use AAL as a springboard for learning DAE, the fact that he, Maya Angelou, Bill Cosby, and others had such negative initial reactions shows the complex relationship between some in the African American community and the primary language of many African Americans. We will take up this complex relationship in our discussion of success-failure factors below. On the whole, during the Ebonics controversy, people of all walks of life took up the position that AAL was an illegitimate speech form that had no place in education or upwardly mobile society. It was clear in 1997 that attitudes about AAL remained predominantly negative. What got mainly lost in the public uproar following the Ebonics resolution was that African American students, most of them speakers of AAL, continued to fail in large numbers in Oakland, California, and across U.S. public schools. What also got shrouded was the fact that many educational interventions and innovations had shown that AAL could be successfully used in the process of gaining DAE proficiency and maintaining positive ethnic identity.

Factors Helping and Hindering the Success of AAL Previously in this chapter we described the macro factors of the historic and continuing widespread residential and educational segregation of African Americans from their white DAE-speaking fellow citizens as explaining why many

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children learn and use AAL as a primary means of communication. There are other important factors as well that keep the language vibrant in African American culture and beyond. One major arena of AAL use that is seen and heard beyond African American communities is hip-hop music. Many rap lyrics are laden with the grammar, sound system, lexicon, and rhetorical traditions of AAL. It is also true that the majority of hip-hop music consumers are white youth who do not reside in urban centers and are not part of AAL speech communities. While AAL in rap lyrics creates a space for African American and other youth of color in urban communities to speak, write, maintain, and change AAL, their white peers are also listening to, reciting, and being influenced by the AAL of hip-hop (Alim 2006). Other popular culture mediums, like movies (e.g., Soul Food, Meet The Browns, or other African American dramas and comedies), television shows (e.g., The Game, Everybody Hates Chris or many other African American sitcoms), and stand-up and sketch comedy (e.g., the immensely popular Chapelle Show, which ran from 2003–2005 on Comedy Central) also provide a forum for the use of AAL by African Americans and for showcasing AAL outside African American communities. We should note that not all musical artists, characters, or comedians who are African American use features of AAL in their performance, nor are they necessarily speakers of AAL, though many are and do. In addition to popular media, literature is also a factor in the continuing practice of AAL and sharing it outside AAL speech communities. Although literature reading audiences are far smaller than those of popular media, books like Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Color Purple (written entirely in AAL), the now canonized Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston, or many of the novels by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison employ features of AAL. Readers of these books are exposed to AAL through the voices of characters. The study of these books in high schools, colleges, and universities ensure that many students are exposed to AAL. As we have previously discussed, the vast sociolinguistic research on AAL linguistics and educational applications are other important factors in legitimating and exposing those inside and outside the African American community to the practice and value of AAL. The fact that audiences—African American as well as those from other backgrounds—are entertained by actors, comedians, and authors who employ AAL through their crafts does not necessarily mean these audiences perceive AAL as a valid and equal system of communication, just as the mass of sociolinguistic and educational knowledge about AAL does not mean that schools use and respect the variety. Negative attitudes about AAL reach back 300 years in U.S. history to a view of AAL as the uneducated, error-ridden language of slaves. These attitudes were bolstered over later centuries through mimicry in white-supremacist comedy shows in the 1800s and early 1900s in which white performers put on blackface makeup and mocked the language and African Americans. Black performers, too, have participated in such mockery in stage performances and movies as these roles have historically been the only ones available to them. In addition to negative depictions of AAL as uneducated, error-ridden speech is the reality that African Americans have since slavery been discriminated against in U.S. society in education, housing, and political rights. While the civil rights decades

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certainly won many rights, and the election of Barack Obama as the first African American, multiracial, and multiethnic president certainly shows great progress, these things have not yet done enough to change the dire economic and educational reality for the majority of African American families. As the everyday language of many African Americans, AAL is intimately tied to this history of discrimination and to general negative perceptions about African Americans. To add support to the connection between ethnicity, language, and discrimination, a new strand of empirical evidence supports the view that many in dominant society make negative judgments based solely on a speaker’s use of AAL. Experiments have linked widespread housing discrimination to the sound of a person’s voice over the phone (described as linguistic profiling in Baugh 2003). In these studies, AAL speakers who phoned housing listings were systematically denied appointments to see open housing units, while speakers of DAE were given appointments to see the same open units. Interestingly, African American speakers who were speakers of DAE or who could shift to DAE were given more access to open housing units, but still less than white speakers of DAE. The research also showed that AAL speakers were more likely to be given appointments in lower income, predominantly African American neighborhoods than to wealthier white or integrated areas (Fischer and Massey 2004). What is clear from this new line of research is that negative attitudes about AAL persist and have serious consequences for the opportunities of AAL speakers. Beyond the discrimination and negative attitudes of white Americans toward AAL, African Americans themselves also have a complex relationship to the everyday language spoken by many in their communities. African Americans, like other ethnically marginalized groups of color in the United States, rightly see DAE proficiency as a key to economic access and upward social mobility. Combined with an educational system that has historically denigrated AAL and seen it as a barrier to school success, the real need for DAE proficiency has created a false linguistic shame (Baugh, 2000) that AAL is not systematic, valid, and useful, and so it need not be maintained and fostered. This position has been most famously argued by Bill Cosby and Maya Angelou (though, ironically, both have used AAL in their performances and writing), but many less famous African Americans in communities across the United States concur that AAL is simply a slang that needs to be left behind in the pursuit of access to upward mobility. Even while the negative attitudes of some African Americans persist, AAL continues to be used in everyday communities, in institutions (e.g., the African American church), in literature, in entertainment, and in music, as it has been for centuries. This is a push-pull (Smitherman 1977) relationship that many marginalized communities feel as they face the reality of linguistic assimilation for economic attainment on the one end and the close relationship to their primary way with the language of their ethnic groups on the other. While many African Americans (including famous people like Toni Morrison and everyday folks throughout the U.S.) embrace and celebrate AAL, it is not universally supported as equal in the African American community. The failure of educational policies and practices to use AAL as a resource, the prevailing negative attitudes about AAL in dominant society, and the complex

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relationship of African Americans themselves to AAL all combine to create a murky backdrop to what is actually a socially successful, widespread mode of communication across the United States.

The Success and Challenge of AAL Today . . . and Tomorrow Language planning efforts by linguists, educators, and policy activists continue to be needed to combat the negative educational and social consequences we have discussed in this chapter (DeBoce 2007). Yet the success of efforts to work for the educational achievement of African American AAL-speaking students and against housing and other forms of linguistic discrimination faces new challenges and possibilities in the twenty-first century. The demographics of many urban centers that were once predominantly African American have become predominantly Latino/a, often with significant populations of other immigrants communities of color, like Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians (Klein 2004, Zhou 2001). As a result, in many communities and schools AAL shares space with other Englishes (like Chicano English) and many other languages. Add to this the reach of hip-hop across these communities and beyond into the white suburbs, and the story of AAL, already four centuries old, is beginning to write a new chapter. In current research in the urban West, for example, Paris (2009) has documented the use of AAL among Latino/a and Pacific Islander youth in addition to their African American peers. Table 8.2 provides evidence of this sharing of AAL features across traditional ethnic boundaries. We see the dominance of hip-hop across the United States and the world and the changing demographics of urban communities as a challenge and an opportunity to increase efforts to provide critical language education using AAL and other Englishes and languages as resources for access and understanding. We also see these changes as suggesting a push toward more interethnic understanding about AAL in addition to continuing to focus on African American speakers and communities.

Conclusion AAL continues to be successful when viewed in terms of speakers of the language, and there is some indication of this use broadening through mass media and demographic shift. Seen from this vantage, we put AAL as a 9 on the failure-success continuum. There are no indications that the language is in any danger of being less used in U.S. society. Yet when viewed in terms of general attitudes, attitudes of some African Americans, and the failure of schools to use AAL as a resource to turn the tides of educational struggle, we place AAL as a 4. The Ebonics controversy and new research on linguistic profiling show us that decades of scholarship and educational intervention have done little to change the negative perceptions of AAL.

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Table 8.2 AAL Features Used by Latino/a and Pacific Islander Youth Student

Feature Used

Examples

Zero copula

Next year my classes ø gonna be different It’s some girls

Carla (Latina) Existential it is Julio (Latino) Regularized agreement Existential it is

People generally call you by the race you is It’s really like nothing to do on my block

Carlos (Latino) Zero copula Regularized agreement Habitual be Existential it is

You ø sorry Some dudes that was stealing cars Cause they be tripping about that It was a lot of Black people

Ela (Samoan) Regularized agreement 3rd person singular “s”/ Zero copula Habitual be Multiple Negation4

That’s how the teachers in Samoa is Every time he wake up, he ø always turning My big mouth be saying, “Uh uh, uh uh” I don’t got no “F.” I don’t got no “B”

Rahul (FijianIndian) Existential it is Regularized agreement Zero copula Habitual be 3rd person singular “s” Multiple negation

It’s times you have to use it When you was growing up They ø keeping me on check We be talking about cars He just come in my room I can’t spit no rhymes

From Paris (2009). Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. For more information, please visit www.harvardeducationalreview.org. Reprinted with permission.

African American Language will persevere and flourish in the face of negative perceptions from dominant society and a lack of use in education. It will continue to be an important language in many African American homes and churches and school yards. It will continue to be played and celebrated over radio airwaves and downloaded in rap lyrics off iTunes. It may even be pushing into use by youth of other ethnic backgrounds. By all these indicators, AAL is alive and well and continuing a centuries old struggle for legitimacy. But there is a long way to go before it is viewed as a legitimate form of communication, a useful resource for education, and as a rich variety in art and culture by all Americans.

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Notes 1. See Rickford and Rickford (2000) and Wolfram and Thomas (2002) for complete discussions of the origins of AAL. 2. See Smitherman (1981) for a full rendering of the Black English trial. 3. See Baugh (2000) and Rickford and Rickford (2000) for a complete account of the Ebonics controversy. 4. All of the Latino/a students in Paris’s research used multiple negation structures often. We do not represent them here, as such constructions are also a feature of Chicano English.

References Alim, H. Samy (2004). You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of a Black American Speech Community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alim, H. Samy (2006). Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture. New York: Routledge. Ball, Arnetha (1995). Text design patterns in the writing of urban African American students: Teaching to the cultural strengths of students in multicultural settings. Urban Education, 30(3): 253–289. Ball, Arnetha (1999). Evaluating the writing of culturally and linguistically diverse students: The case of the African American Vernacular English speaker. In Evaluating Writing, Charles Cooper and Lee Odell (eds.), 225–248. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Baugh, John (1999). Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baugh, John (2000). Beyond Ebonics: Racial Pride and Linguistic Prejudice. New York: Oxford University Press. Baugh, John (2003). Linguistic profiling. In Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Politics in Africa and the Americas, Sinfree Makoni, Ball

Smitherman, and John Spears (eds.). London: Routledge. DeBoce, Charles E. (2007). The Ebonics phenomenon, language planning, and the hegemony of standard English. In Talkin Black Talk: Language, Education, and Social Change, Samy Alim and John Baugh (eds). New York: Teachers College Press. Fischer, Mary J., and Douglass S. Massey (2004). The ecology of racial discrimination. City and Community 3(3): 221–241. Godley, Amanda J., Julie Sweetland, Rebecca S. Wheeler, Angela Minnici, and Brian D. Carpenter (2006). Preparing teachers for dialectally diverse classrooms. Educational Researcher 35(8): 30–38. Kirkland, David E. (2007). The power of their texts: Using hip hop to help urban students meet NCTE/IRA national standards for the English language arts. In Closing the Gap, Karen Jackson and Sandra Vavra (eds.), 129–145. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Klein, Herbert S. (2004). A Population History of the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Labov, William (1972). Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ladson-Billings, Gloria (2006). The meaning of Brown . . . for now. In With More Deliberate Speed, Arnetha

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F. Ball (ed). 298–313. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Lee, Carol D. (1995). A culturally based cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching African American high school students skills in literary interpretation. Reading Research Quarterly 30(4): 608–630. Massey, Douglass S. (2001). Residential segregation and neighborhood conditions in U.S. metropolitan areas. In America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, Neil Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (eds), 391–434. Washington DC: National Academies Press. Morrell, Ernest, and Jeffery DuncanAndrade (2002). Promoting academic literacy with urban youth through engaging in hip-hop culture. English Journal 91(6): 88–92. Paris, Django (2009). “They’re in my culture, they speak the same way:” African American language in

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multiethnic high schools. Harvard Educational Review 79(3): 428–447. Rickford, John R., and Russell J. Rickford (2000). Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Smitherman, Geneva (ed). (1981). Black English and the Education of Black Children and Youth. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Smitherman, Geneva (1977). Talkin and Testifyin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Wolfram, Walt, and Erik R. Thomas (2002). The Development of African American English. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Zhou, Min (2001). Contemporary immigration and the dynamics of race and ethnicity. In America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, Neil Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (eds.), 200–242. Washington DC: National Academies Press.

9 Learning English in Puerto Rico: An Approach-Avoidance Conflict? MIRIAM EISENSTEIN EBSWORTH TIMOTHY JOHN EBSWORTH

The history of the English language in Puerto Rico is a decidedly peculiar one, characterized by incessant conflict and chaotic change. English has long been viewed on the island as both a tool of liberation and an instrument of oppression. —(Alicia Pousada 1999, 33)

Introduction Acquiring English in Puerto Rico (PR) is much more than learning another language. For the Puerto Rican learner, it involves not only acknowledging the power of English in local and global terms, but also confronting the complex psychological and social stresses and pressures that its history and associations entail. For some Puerto Ricans, resistance to English is a conscious decision. For others, difficulty learning English is the result of how their speech communities are structured. Yet, despite the existence of a majority of Puerto Ricans whose command of English is limited or nonexistent, there are successful bilinguals with excellent knowledge of both Spanish and English. In this chapter we will consider the processes and outcomes of English acquisition in PR as they have evolved to the present day. To provide a rich understanding of why learning English has been and continues to be so challenging in the Puerto Rican context, we will draw on the history of English in Puerto Rico and on research data reflecting more current processes and outcomes. We will also

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consider attitudes toward English and Spanish as markers of distinctive cultural identities, as reflections of political viewpoints, and as represented by teacher and learner perspectives.

How Many Puerto Ricans Speak English? The 2000 US Census showed that in PR a total of 481,410 people (16 percent) reported speaking English very well (56,660 speak only English), 539,555 (17.9 percent) speak English well, 630,900 (21 percent) speak English not well, and 1,356,700 (45.1 percent) say they do not speak English at all. Thus, the number of Puerto Ricans who say they speak English either not well or not at all is just below two-thirds of the population. This is unexpected in a place where English is taught throughout schooling on a daily basis. Fayer (2000) cautions that census data may slightly underestimate English acquisition, as Puerto Ricans five years and over are counted. Since they have just begun their schooling, there would be no expectation of English proficiency developing for some time. Secondly, census data records self-ratings. While self-rating can provide a general sense of language ability (Wolochuk 2009), comparison with other measures is needed. In 1992, the Ateneo Puertorriqueño surveyed language use in Puerto Rico. Of 1,000 individuals sampled, 97 percent preferred government communications in Spanish, 20.6 percent considered themselves bilingual, and only 25 percent rated their English as good or excellent (Del Valle 1993). To gain insight into this outcome, it is useful to contrast less successful English learners with more successful ones. Pousada (2000) studied functional bilinguals in PR and reported that those who succeed in learning English are often privileged, with access to good bilingual schooling and native speaker input and interaction. The bilinguals acknowledged that unfortunately, “island-raised Puerto Ricans often mocked the speech and cultural values of US-raised Puerto Ricans and viewed English-speaking Puerto Ricans on the island as snobs or colonialists” (p. 116). This begins to give us a sense of the barriers to English acquisition for the majority of Puerto Ricans. It is hoped that this exploration will provide insights not only into English acquisition in Puerto Rico, but also into second language acquisition in other post-colonial settings.

Overview of History and Language Policy A brief glance at PR history reveals the evolution of the current situation. The original Amerindian population was decimated or assimilated by the Spanish within 100 years of their arrival at the end of the fifteenth century. During Spanish rule, English was spoken by a small number of people for diplomacy, travel, and trade. The 1898 Treaty of Paris gave the United States political control of PR; there was a change in the linguistic landscape. Spanish had been the language of schooling for the small percentage who attended. U.S. policy was to offer free education

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for all (Maldonado 2000). However, the recommendation was to recruit North Americans and teach in English (García Martínez 1976). The ultimate goal was to instill American cultural values in the populace. English acquisition was the cornerstone of this endeavor. From this time to the present, language teaching policy in PR has seesawed between English only, Spanish only, and varying degrees of each. For many years PR itself had little influence on policy, while learners remained the victims of inconsistent pedagogical practices and unreasonable expectations. The 1900 Foraker Act established a civil government on the island and created the Department of Public Instruction. In 1902, the PR Legislature passed the Official Languages Act, making English and Spanish official languages in PR. Both languages have had a role in Puerto Rico ever since. Subsequent educational policies included the 1905 “Philippine Plan,” providing professional development in English for PR teachers and including the outrageous rule that those who did not pass an English examination two years in a row would lose their jobs. Ultimately, such policies were protested by the PR Teachers Association, which questioned the practice of teaching literacy skills and content in a language that children did not know. A bill introduced in the PR House of Representatives proposed to make Spanish the introductory medium of instruction in grade one, with both Spanish and English taught until the eighth grade. Although the bill did not pass the PR Senate, it remains a milestone in raising local concerns regarding the hegemony of English and the United States. U.S. citizenship was granted to Puerto Ricans in 1917, and the Americanization approach continued. Jose Padín, commissioner of education in 1930, favored Spanish maintenance and English acquisition. Luis Muñoz Marín, the first elected governor of Puerto Rico in 1948, made Spanish the medium of instruction at all levels, with English a required language. The current policy in Puerto Rican schools continues to be based on this principle. In 1952 Puerto Rico became a self-governing Commonwealth of the United States. Nevertheless, the shift in status did not substantially affect language education on the Island. A dramatic change was instituted in 1991 by Governor Rafael Hernández Colón, who described the official use of English as “a source of confusion” and a threat to Puerto Rican identity (Estrado-Resto 1993). Spanish was declared the sole official language in PR although the language policy of the schools was not altered (Vélez 1991). This decision was short-lived; in 1993, Governor Pedro Rosselló reinstated the two-language policy. Irrespective of the official policy, studies reveal that the PR educational system has not delivered on goals for English acquisition and/or bilingualism. Del Valle (2003, 20) states: “While language policies came and went, children were dropping out of school in droves.” As early as 1916, the Padín Study (Leibowitz 1989) determined that eighth grade students, despite having been taught in English, had low English proficiency. The landmark 1925 Columbia University report also uncovered serious limitations in school policies and learner outcomes. The recommendation (not followed) was to delay English teaching for several years. Additional research continued to document the fact that Puerto Rico has remained a largely Spanish-speaking entity, with small pockets of bilinguals in particular regions and contexts.

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The Experience of Learners Torruellas (1990) investigated three PR private high schools, believed to be places where students successfully acquired English. When Torruellas asked learners if acquiring English was important, the response was positive. However, observations told a different story. One of the schools, an elite prep school, boasted teachers with excellent English skills. The community valued English, and students strived to excel. Graduates developed English proficiency and often went on to study in U.S. colleges. However, in the two middle-class schools, students who tried to do well in English were regularly disparaged by their peers. This indicates a contrast between expressed attitudes favoring English acquisition and actual behavior blocking it. Schweers and Vélez (1992) confirm that this is the experience of youngsters in Puerto Rican schools, particularly during adolescence. Learner attitudes reflect those of local speech communities, with socioeconomic status as a mediator of input and prospects for higher education and employment. The researchers recommend intervention when children are young and their attitudes are more flexible. What happens when Puerto Rican young adults reach the college level, where some English proficiency is required? It is not surprising that in light of the limitations of elementary and secondary settings, many students arrive at college with weak English skills, as demonstrated by their scores on the English as a Second Language Achievement Test of the PR College Board. In 1993, the University of Puerto Rico investigated the development of English skills among undergraduates (Arzan 1999). While students finishing their second year of English improved, those initially placed in lower-level courses achieved modest gains, often constrained by negative experiences in English elementary and secondary classes and lack of articulation between high school and college curricula. For some, college is just too late. Sánchez Gutiérrez (1999, 11) comments that in PR, particularly at the elementary level, “materials are lacking, the methods may not be the best, and teachers are often unqualified to teach English.” She reports that even her college ESL students who say they want to learn English often do not follow through. Echoing the behavior of the youngsters described above, they deride those who use English rather than Spanish and don’t study for English classes. This research indicates a dichotomy in Puerto Rico. Many individuals state the belief that learning English is important. Yet, they also respond to social and psychological forces that act against its acquisition.

Language and Identity in Puerto Rico Puerto Ricans on the Island take their Spanish seriously. A couple of weeks ago, I was buying groceries with my son at a supermarket in San Juan. We were speaking English, Spanish, Spanglish. All of a sudden, a middle-aged man . . . cried out to us, “Aquí se habla español, estás en Puerto Rico” . . . I have encountered this situation more than a dozen times in different places on the Island. (Hernández 2002, n.p.)

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Studies continue to document overt and covert resistance to acquiring and using English in PR. Just as there are multiple types of resistance, this resistance has evolved for a variety of reasons and motives. At the core is the resolve of the PR community to preserve its language, heritage, and identity, inextricably intertwined with Spanish (Ramírez González and Torres 2000). Morris (1995, 15) describes Puerto Rico as, “a self-defined community of people who share a sense of solidarity based on a belief in a common heritage.” Spanish is considered an integral part of the Puerto Rican persona, essential to its very soul. Researchers and observers repeatedly comment that many Puerto Ricans fear greater English usage will result in language shift and the reduced use of Spanish. Resnick (1993) confirms that the social and psychological pressure common on the Island also reflects the belief on the part of some members of the monolingual Spanish community that learning English is unnecessary in order to manage in Puerto Rico. Although Spanish was originally a colonial language, it is rarely seen that way in PR. Spanish is viewed as a valuable high-prestige language of wider communication in Europe and the Americas, and as a key to high culture (Vélez 2000). ClampittDunlap (2000) focuses on the role of the educated elite on the island in promoting Spanish and linking English to language loss and potential Americanization. She cites the crucial influence of journalists, poets, politicians and educators both today and yesterday, who have eloquently and persistently associated Spanish with Puerto Rican identity and English with a threat to all that is Puerto Rican. She explains that many members of the PR intelligentsia were also journalists for local newspapers whose ideas were made available to a mass audience: The presentation of English as the language of the United States rather than a language of various countries (and the lingua franca of many more) seems to have been extremely influential in the current status of English on the island. (Clampitt-Dunlap 2000, 32)

Vélez (2000) concurs and adds that children, adolescents, and adults from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds participate in discouraging English use in Puerto Rican settings. Nevertheless, among the English-speaking minority of the Island there is a view that English has additive value in Puerto Rico. Furthermore, Dayton and Blau (1999) identify a local variety of English which they believe reflects the unique Puerto Rican experience. Resnick (1993) also observes that while the PR capacity to resist has overcome the attempts of language policy makers, one exception is English cable TV. From this perspective, the jury is still out on what effect cable television may have on English language input in PR as this medium becomes more widely affordable.

Language and Puerto Rican Politics Del Valle (2003, 17) has said: The politics of language is played out nowhere more graphically than Puerto Rico, where the island’s continued intermediate status as neither an official colony of the US nor a recognized state is intricately tied to the place of Spanish on the island.

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She concludes that the relationship with the United States has included economic exploitation and political pressure to teach and use English while inculcating U.S. values. A historical footnote—early on, Puerto Rico was unsuccessfully renamed “Porto Rico,” marking its changed U.S. affiliation and reinforcing the view that the United States wanted to remake the Island in its own image. In 1965, the PR Supreme Court ruled that Puerto Rican courts must use Spanish in their judicial procedures. However, under U.S. law, all federal court proceedings in Puerto Rico are still carried out in English, with interpreters provided when necessary (García Martínez 1976). Vélez and Schweers (1993) also discuss the association of language policy with alternative political stances on the island. All three major parties favor maintenance of Spanish as the primary language of the island. The Independence party is most resistant to English officially, despite the fact that many of its members are bilingual. The Progressive, pro-U.S. party favors bilingualism, with the Popular party less consistent about English (Schweers and Vélez 1992). Puerto Ricans have had several opportunities to vote on their political preferences: statehood, commonwealth, or independence (Barreto 2000). In 1993, 48.6 percent favored commonwealth, 46.3 percent statehood, and 4.4 percent independence. The 1998 vote on the future status of Puerto Rico was 47 percent for statehood, 2.5 percent for independence, and 50 percent for “none of the above,” the choice suggested by the Partido Popular, as they disputed the term “Territorial Commonwealth.” All votes to date have been interpreted as support for the status quo (Report by the President’s Task Force on the Status of Puerto Rico 2007). But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Party affiliation (and therefore, the linguistic party line) is tied to many aspects of people’s lives and is integrated into the workplace, academia, and social life.

English Use in the Workplace One issue disputed in PR is the importance of English proficiency for obtaining employment. The 1992 Ateneo Puertorriqueño survey indicated that of those who were employed, 52 percent claimed to use English at work but only 11 percent to use it frequently. Fayer (2000) found that from 1976 to 1996 the use of English reading at work daily increased from 29 percent to 47 percent and speaking daily increased from 20 percent to 27 percent. Respondents also used English for communication with family members. Watching TV or movies in English increased substantially. Fayer also associates cable TV with greater English exposure. A variable with current and future significance is the increasing effect of Internet use on exposure to English in PR. Barnes (1993) found English proficiency was often the deciding factor in hiring and/or promotion at a PR pharmaceutical firm. Cuadrado Rodríguez (1993) reports that in business, health, industry, and social services, the greater the percentage of English speakers in a field, the higher the salary. And 98 percent of professionals surveyed considered English a necessity in PR. What is unclear is whether the desire to learn English translated into success, or whether those who had learned English were more positively disposed toward the language.

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Sánchez Gutiérrez (1999) studied the use of written English in the Puerto Rican workplace noting the interconnections between US and PR economies. For example, from 1990–1994, 87 percent of PR exports went to the U.S. mainland and 67 percent of imports came from there. One need only glance at any street or mall in PR to see that American franchises permeate the Island. Sánchez Gutiérrez also found written English used at least daily in 100 percent of federal government agencies and 60.6 percent of local government settings. It was used 97 percent of the time in manufacturing, and 91.4 percent in services. Those with higher level jobs and salaries were more likely to use English than lower–level, less well-paid peers. Participants also remarked on the poor English proficiency of themselves or others. Often noted were expressions of “fear, shame, and embarrassment when trying to communicate in English” (Sánchez Gutiérrez 1999, 193). This demonstrates that while those who believe one can get along without English in Puerto Rico may be correct, English proficiency is a definite advantage in some sectors of employment and becomes more important at higher levels.

Pragmatic Conflict with English Speakers A rich literature reports the linguistic and sociolinguistic uses of language among the Puerto Rican community in the United States (Fishman 1971; Otheguy, Zentella, and Livert 2007). Studies of Puerto Rican English in New York City include work by Wolfram (1974), Zentella, (1997), and García and Fishman (2002). Compelling personal narratives such as When I Was Puerto Rican, by Esmeralda Santiago (1993), document PR community struggles on the mainland. Featured are experiences of misunderstandings between members of the PR and Anglo communities, which have different rules and norms for how to appropriately convey particular functions and ideas, a feature of pragmatics. When a speaker from one community thinks message A is being sent, but message B is received by the listener from another community, the underlying cause may be pragmatic failure (Thomas 1983). Since pragmatics tends to be acquired subconsciously, most individuals are unaware that what is polite in one language, if translated literally, may be perceived as rude in another. Since contact with English speakers and return migrants in Puerto Rico is common, contrasts in the pragmatic language, norms, and strategies may leave speakers from these communities with misunderstandings resulting in pragmatic failure and the development or reinforcement of negative stereotypes about people who speak English. Surlin (1993) notes values differences between individuals encultured in Puerto Rico and North America. Such distinctions often underlie contrasts in the pragmatics of speech acts that have been found to reflect community norms, values, and relationships (Eisenstein Ebsworth and Ebsworth 2000). Examples of speech acts include promises, questions, expressions of appreciation, complaints and apologies (Cohen 1996). In addition, individuals from the same community often share expected scripts of how discourse will evolve (Tannen 1984), when to keep silent, and what nonverbal communicative elements to use (Nine-Curt 1995).

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Kryston-Morales (1997) contrasted compliments and responses by native English speakers in the US, and in English and Spanish by Spanish speakers in PR. She uncovered substantial distinctions and opportunities for pragmatic failure. Differences such as these could damage relationships and perceptions between Puerto Ricans encultured on the Island and English speakers including return migrants to PR. Irizarry Muñoz (2000) confirmed this, using role plays to investigate PR migrant and nonmigrant students’ apology performance; pragmatic differences were a major source of conflict. PR perceptions of appropriateness and respectfulness were highly correlated, demonstrating the value of respect in Puerto Rican culture. Some apologies offered by the return migrants were “not considered appropriate or respectful remedies to an offense” (p.188). The researcher records PR claims that migrants are “too aggressive, disrespectful, and do not know either English or Spanish well” (5). For example, on tripping over somebody’s leg, a return migrant commented, “Permiso, la próxima vez ¿puedes mover la pierna?” [Excuse me, next time could you move your leg?]. Bicultural experts’ ratings showed potential for pragmatic failure in 56 percent of the return migrants’ utterances. Eisenstein Ebsworth and Ebsworth (1997, 2000) and Ebsworth (1992) investigated the pragmatics and perceptions of English-speaking Puerto Ricans on the Island (IPRs), Continental Americans (CAs), and Multicultural Puerto Ricans (MPRs: return migrants and Puerto Ricans encultured on the mainland). A survey presented five critical incidents (sensitive situations) and four solutions for each (twenty alternatives in all). One incident, for example, involved how to respond to a stranger asking about someone you know. CAs could explain that they did not give information to strangers, but it was “nothing personal.” IPRs found that strategy unacceptable, wishing to avoid the inference that the individual might not be trustworthy. Factor analysis revealed three independent factors that captured CA judgments but a two-factor solution for IPRs. The evaluation factor (how good was the solution?) and the social cooperation factor (did the solution take others into consideration?) were separate for CAs but highly correlated for IPRs. (A third dynamism factor was found for both groups.) Bicultural experts interpreted this as greater freedom to act as an individual for CAs versus greater pressure on IPRs to consider the impact of behavior and language on community members, friends, and family. In addition, while MPRs shared many similarities with IPRs, there were areas where they differed. These included MPRs’ greater tolerance for expressing anger, more directness than IPRs find appropriate, and greater willingness to confront an unfair authority and resort to the legal system if necessary. Like the other researchers, Ebsworth and Eisenstein Ebsworth identify potential for pragmatic failure between CAs and IPRs. What is surprising is that, although the data show that MPRs are less like CAs and more like their island cousins in pragmatic judgments, interviews reveal that these differences are magnified in the perceptions of IPRs. Is there a relationship between pragmatic failure and resistance to English acquisition in Puerto Rico? While most of the literature regarding resistance focuses on the fear of US mainland hegemony and the possible shift toward English

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if the population becomes more bilingual, a fear echoed in other places and settings, an additional dimension may derive from the dissonance between the pragmatic systems of CAs, IPRs, and MPRs. Indeed, return migrants report experiencing problems in communicating and interacting with local Puerto Ricans (Acevedo 2000). At the same time, IPRs are dismayed over the dissonance of PRs with their own sociocultural norms, often using the pejorative label “New Yoricans.” We suggest that the pragmatic dissonance displayed here is among the factors that account for Island-encultured Puerto Ricans’ desire to distance themselves from English speakers. They seem to interpret pragmatic failure as evidence that neither Continental American English speakers nor return migrants who have acquired English reflect local Puerto Rican values.

Language Anxiety in Puerto Rico Some of the difficulties related to English acquisition in PR may be tied to linguistic insecurity. Spanish speakers in PR express concern over English borrowing in Puerto Rican Spanish. Contributing to this view, and to English resistance, may be concern regarding what is commonly referred to as “Spanglish,” a normal result of language contact. While Anglicisms are unevenly distributed in usage of Puerto Rican Spanish in terms of context, registers, and users (Mellado de Hunter 1981), the general sense that “Spanglish” should be avoided is shared by many Puerto Ricans (Muñoz et al. 2008). Also connected to the challenge of acquiring English in PR are language learning anxiety and communication apprehension, an “individual level of fear or anxiety associated with either real or anticipated communication with another person or persons” (McCroskey and Beatty 1986: 279). McCroskey, Fayer, and Richmond (1985) revealed that Puerto Rican students often experienced high stress levels when they were required to communicate in English. Aneiro (1988) also reports anxiety in listening comprehension among Puerto Rican English learners. Meléndez (1997) studied circumstances that contributed to language learning anxiety in 502 English learners in PR. Three factors emerged: fear of losing face, group anxiety, and affinity. Fear of losing face included apprehension about English production and understanding in a range of settings including fear of being laughed at in the classroom. Group anxiety had to do with concern about the group, relationships, cooperation, and solidarity, consistent with Ebsworth and Eisenstein Ebsworth’s data on social cooperation. The affinity factor related to reduced anxiety speaking English in the company of those with whom learners had a relationship. Respondents felt more comfortable speaking English in class after the students had gotten to know each other. Some participants claimed that having been humiliated by teachers in English class as children contributed to current language anxiety levels. Most said they had never spoken to PR classmates in English. Interestingly, Meléndez found statehood supporters experienced greater anxiety than others if they did not believe their English was sufficiently proficient, again showing the influence of politics. Compared with English, teachers report less anxiety in learning other foreign languages. Álvarez (2000) compared students’ reports of French study at the university with English. Participants favored French and

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reported that teachers spoke French in class all the time, while English teachers often spoke Spanish in their English classes. Learners expressed resentment regarding the imposition of English as a required subject. Barrows (2008) studied fifty adult English learners in PR, many of whom were motivated by the need to improve their English for employment. Adult anxiety regarding language learning and use often harkened back to negative classroom experiences as youngsters and continued fear of committing errors as adults, two familiar refrains.

What Do Teachers Think? López Laguerre (1997) investigated attitudes toward bilingualism among San Juan high school teachers (26 percent considered themselves bilingual). The sample was divided into those positively inclined toward bilingualism, negatively inclined, and undecided. The most popular option was for English to be a required course. Offering an English elective was a close second, and one of five thought that English should be part of a Spanish/English bilingual program. The teachers with the most positive views of bilingualism were those most proficient in English. Nevertheless, these same teachers generally viewed English as a language with limited use in PR, once again reflecting contradictory attitudes. Eisenstein Ebsworth and Ebsworth are currently researching the attitudes of English teachers in Puerto Rico today regarding factors that may impede or support English learning. Based on focus-group sessions and interviews with English and bilingual teachers, a questionnaire was developed in which teachers responded to statements on a 5-point scale: 1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree. The last item invited teachers to list the most crucial areas where improvement in English teaching is needed. To date, twenty-five highly experienced English teachers in Puerto Rico have responded. As a group, participants have taught English in PR for an average of twenty years (range: 8–37 years). See table 9.1. There was strong agreement among participants about the following: • Few Puerto Ricans learn English successfully. The history of English teaching in PR has a current impact on its learning. • Private schooling is superior to public schooling, though neither is highly effective. College is slightly better. College students need good English reading and writing skills. • For adults, reading with understanding is the most important English skill. • Knowing English is most helpful for employment in the United States and in the military and for global communication. Access to English media is helpful, as is access to English speakers and bilinguals. • Puerto Rican politics is not helpful in promoting English. • English is considered a threat to Spanish and PR culture. • English teachers are poorly paid and don’t always have strong skills. • Resources for English teaching and learning are inadequate. • Methodology should be more communicative. • The Internet has a positive effect on English acquisition in PR.

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Table 9.1 Questionnaire on Learning English in Puerto Rico 1. The history of English teaching has an important impact on English learning today. 2. The current policy for English teaching and learning is effective: a. In public elementary schools b. In private elementary schools c. In public secondary schools d. In private secondary schools e. On the college level 3. It is important for Puerto Ricans to get along in English: a. For children b. For college students c. For adults 4. It is important for Puerto Ricans to speak well in English: a. For children b. For college students c. For adults 5. It is important for Puerto Ricans to read English with understanding: a. For children b. For college students c. For adults 6. It is important for Puerto Ricans to write clearly and accurately in English: a. For children b. For college students c. For adults 7. a. In PR nearly all Puerto Ricans learn English successfully. b. In PR very few Puerto Ricans learn English successfully. 8. Each of the following is currently effective in supporting Puerto Ricans learning English: a. Studying it in elementary school b. Studying it in secondary school c. Studying it in college 9. It is widely believed in PR that knowing English will help you: a. get a job in Puerto Rico b. get a job on the U.S. mainland c. communicate globally d. succeed in the military e. enrich your life 10. The following has a positive impact on learning English in PR: a. The availability of media in English b. The association of English with U.S. values c. Politics in Puerto Rico d. Economic realities in Puerto Rico e. Social class status of particular learners in Puerto Rico

M 4.64

SD .57

2.04 3.24 2.16 3.48 3.56

.89 .89 .94 .92 1.00

2.84 4.16 3.68

1.31 .75 .99

2.20 3.84 3.48

.96 .90 .65

3.08 4.64 4.08

1.19 .64 .91

2.44 4.16 3.72 1.56 4.12

1.00 .75 .94 .77 .88

2.40 3.04 3.72

1.11 .98 .94

3.76 4.60 4.16 4.12 3.12

1.13 .64 .75 1.10 .78

4.44 2.20 1.64 2.68 3.24

.92 .82 .64 1.03 .97

LEARNING ENGLISH IN PUERTO RICO

f. Access to English speaking speakers in PR. g. Access to bilingual English/Spanish speakers in PR. 11. The following is true of Puerto Ricans’ experiences learning English a. English is considered a threat to maintaining Spanish in PR. b. English is considered a threat to maintaining authentic PR culture. c. Some people will not accept you if you know English too well 12. The problems with English teaching and learning in Puerto Rico include: a. Poor pay for English teachers b. Teachers whose English is not strong c. Teaching approaches that do not encourage communication d. Lack of adequate resources for teaching English 13. The following are barriers to English learning in PR: a. The association of English with US values b. Politics in Puerto Rico c. Economic realities in Puerto Rico d. Social class status of particular learners in Puerto Rico e. Lack of access to English speakers in Puerto Rico f. Lack of access to Bilingual English/Spanish speakers in PR 14. a. The circular migration has a positive effect on English learning. b. The circular migration has a negative effect on English learning. 15. a. The U.S. military has a positive effect on English learning in PR. b. The U.S. military has a negative effect on English learning in PR. 16. a. The Internet has a positive effect on English acquisition in PR. b. The Internet has a negative effect on learning English in PR. 17. In PR Puerto Ricans mostly listen to music in Spanish rather than English 18. In PR Puerto Ricans mostly watch TV and movies in Spanish rather than English. 19. Regarding a Puerto Rican variety of English: a. There is an identifiable Puerto Rican variety of English. b. PR English is a positive force in English learning in PR. c. PR English interferes with learning standard U.S. English.

3.96 4.12

4.20

107 .98 .73

87

4.44

.71

3.36

1.11

4.84 4.68 4.52 4.64

.47 .56 .59 .49

3.76 4.52 3.60 4.00 3.72 3.64 3.80

1.01 .65 1.04 1.08 1.21 1.08 1.08

2.52

1.00

2.84

.90

3.36

.86

4.64

.86

1.44 3.60

.82 .65

3.52

.71

3.52 3.08 2.16

1.33 1.50 .94

1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree, N 25

In response to the open-ended question on the most effective things that can be done to improve English teaching and learning in Puerto Rico, the most frequent themes (mentioned by five or more participants) were:

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• • • • • • •

English teachers should be paid better to attract more qualified individuals. Teaching conditions and availability of materials should be improved. More teachers should have good English skills in all four areas. Methods should be more interactive and communicative. English teaching in the early grades must be dramatically improved. Content should be more meaningful and connected to learners’ culture. A more entertaining learning environment is needed, including games, drama, clubs. • English media and Internet should be more widely available to all learners. • We must challenge the perception that English is a threat to Spanish and PR culture. Additional suggestions included summer camp experiences with Englishspeaking peers, having high-interest books in English in school and local libraries, educating teachers and learners about intercultural pragmatics, and insisting on mutual respect in and out of the classroom. We see that, for the most part, teachers’ perspectives support the issues highlighted in the literature. Interestingly, while teachers did not rate English ability as important on the elementary level, they criticized the lack of adequately prepared elementary school teachers and listed it as a priority in the open-ended question. Research shows that while it is important to deliver content and provide for primary literacy experiences in the learner’s first language, developing childhood bilingualism is an effective foundation for adult language learning success (Eisenstein 1980).

Conclusion The data show that many Puerto Ricans live with contradictions in their views regarding the impact of English on Puerto Rican language and culture. While Spanish continues to be associated with cultural celebration and preservation, English and U.S. culture are often linked and viewed contemporaneously as conveying both a threat and an advantage. English schooling in PR remains differentiated by socioeconomic status. While there are successful English learners in Puerto Rico, in light of the official policy mandating English classes throughout schooling, it is unfortunate that successful acquisition is largely restricted to those who attend elite schools and/or have substantial contact with native speakers and strong family support in becoming bilingual. The troubled history of English imposition in PR and the constant changes in educational policy have affected the collective memory (Halbwachs 1992) of Puerto Ricans. Kramsch (2003) explains that linguistic identity incorporates a particular view of history merged with the perception of contemporary reality. As a result of this and other realities, we rate English in Puerto Rico as 4 on the success-failure continuum. This reflects the fact that while a substantial number of speakers are functionally bilingual, the majority still have only limited English proficiency. To be sure, there is continuing work on innovative programs for teaching English in Puerto Rico (Krasinski 1996). Tucker (2005) addresses the need for a

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special approach to teaching English in PR, along with greater capacity in the educational system. Researchers have recommended and developed more engaging curricula in English at all levels. Ariza (2002) stresses collaboration between learner and teacher, to help Puerto Rican learners overcome barriers to acquisition. Vargas Batista (2005) used creative approaches, including drama in the ESL classroom, to create a non-threatening learning environment. Finally, Guiñals Rodriguez (2005) is among those who suggest using local content to support English development. However, improved curricula and resources remain necessary but insufficient conditions for broader development of bilingualism in PR. They would need to be accompanied by a shift in the sociolinguistic and psychological realities of the Island. A consideration of Canagarajah’s (1999) work on “a politics of location” reveals that the competing discourses associated with English learning in Puerto Rico are not unique (Lee and Norton 2009). Rather, the interplay of colonial power, globalization, and the acquisition of English is relevant to many settings worldwide, as diverse as Singapore, the Philippines, South Africa, and India. Despite ample evidence that bilingual programs result in positive outcomes (Eisenstein Ebsworth 2009, García 2009), the association of language with political stance and social solidarity cannot be underestimated in the highly politicized Puerto Rican society. Attention must be given also to attracting more proficient English teachers whose practice reflects the state of the art in foreign language teaching and learning, particularly in the public schools, and sensitive economic and cultural issues raised by the PR/U.S. relationship must continue to be acknowledged and addressed. Until this happens, for the majority of Puerto Ricans, acquiring strong English proficiency remains a goal rather than a reality. References Acevedo, Gladys (2000). A look at how mainland Puerto Ricans believe themselves to be Perceived by their Island counterparts and its impact on their ethnic self-identity and group belongingness. PhD dissertation, City University of New York. Álvarez, Myrta (2000). Experiences of Puerto Rican students in learning English as a second language and French as a foreign language. PhD dissertation, New York University. Aneiro, Stella M. (1988). The influence of receiver apprehension in foreign language learners on listening comprehension among Puerto Rican college students. PhD dissertation, NewYork University. Ariza, Eileen (2002). Old language learning methods to reduce anxiety

for new language learners: Community language learning to the rescue. Bilingual Research Journal 26(3): 717–728. Arzan, Ángel (1999). Final Report of Interfaculty Project: Desarrollo de competencia lingüística del estudiantado del recinto de Rio Piedras. Rio Piedras: University of Puerto Rico. Barnes, Dora (1993). Bilingual Communication Use in a Puerto Rican Daily Business Environment. New York: Fordham University. Barreto, Amílcar A. (2000). The Politics of Language in Puerto Rico. Gainesville: University Press of Flordia. Barrows, Elizabeth (2008). Puerto Rican attitudes towards the acquisition of English as a second language: The

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case of adults in private education. MA thesis, University of Puerto Rico. Canagarajah, A. Suresh (1999). Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clampitt-Dunlap,4 Sharon (2000). Nationalism and native language maintenance in Puerto Rico. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 142(3): 25–34. Cohen, Andrew (1996). Speech acts. In Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching, Sandra McKay and Nancy Hornberger (eds.), 383–420. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Cuadrado Rodríguez, Donato (1993). Bilingualism among eastern professionals in Puerto Rico. MA thesis, University of Puerto Rico. Dayton, Elizabeth, and Eileen Blau (1999). Puerto Rican English: An acceptable non-native variety? Milenio 3: 176–193. Del Valle, Sandra (1993). Los boricuas prefieren el español. Claridad (Jan. 15–21): 3. Del Valle, Sandra (2003). Language Rights and the Law in the US: Finding Our Voices. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ebsworth, Timothy (1992). Cross-cultural expectations and interpretations of appropriateness: Comparing English usage by people encultured in Puerto Rico with that of people encultured in the New York metropolitan area. PhD dissertation, New York University. Eisenstein, Miriam (1980). Childhood bilingualism and adult language learning aptitude. International Journal of Applied Psychology 29: 159–174. Eisenstein Ebsworth, Miriam (2009). True progress is bilingualism for all: A response to Porter. Puerto Rico TESOL-Gram 35(3): 24–26. Eisenstein Ebsworth, Miriam, and Timothy Ebsworth (1997). Responses

of Island Puerto Ricans and continental Americans to critical incidents: A crosscultural pragmatics study. Research on Language and Social Interaction 30(3): 193–234. Eisenstein Ebsworth, Miriam, and Timothy Ebsworth (2000). The pragmatics and perceptions of multicultural Puerto Ricans. The International Journal of the Sociology of Language 142(3): 119–155. Estrado-Resto, Nilka (1993). Aboga RHC por su controversial legado. El Nuevo Día. January 14, 15. Fayer, Joan (2000). Functions of English in Puerto Rico. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 142(3): 89–102. Fishman, Joshua A. (1971). Advances in the Sociology of Language. The Hague: Mouton. García, Ofelia (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell. García, Ofelia, and Joshua A. Fishman (2002). The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City, 2nd ed. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. García Martínez, Alfonso (1976). Idioma y política. San Juan, PR: Editorial Cordillera. Guiñals Rodriguez, Iris (2005). The use of local content and standard content based literature for advanced reading and writing English skills within an intercultural society: An exploratory comparative analysis of student learning performance in a UPR college basic English course. EdD dissertation, University of Puerto Rico. Halbwachs, Maurice (1992). On Collective Memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hernández, Manuel (2002). Aquí se habla español: estas en Puerto Rico. Retrieved from http://puertoricans. com/city/MANNY/vitae.asp. Irizarry Muñoz, Vanessa (2000). Puerto Rican return migrant and nonmigrant

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students’ apology performance and evaluation: A cross-cultural pragmatics study. PhD dissertation, New York University. Kramsch, Claire (2003). Identity, role and voice in cross-cultural (mis) communication. In Misunderstanding in Social Life: Discourse Approaches to Problematic Talk, Juliane House, Gabriele Kasper, and Steven Ross (eds.), 129–154. London: Longman. Krasinski, Emily (1996). Summary of results of student questionnaire. Appendix C. Proposal for an English Institute at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, Phase One. Rio Piedras, PR: University of Puerto Rico. Kryston-Morales, Carolyn (1997). The production of compliments and responses in English by native Spanish speakers in Puerto Rico. PhD dissertation, New York University. Lee, Ena, and Bonny Norton (2009). The English language, multilingualism, and the politics of location. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 12(3): 277–290. Leibowitz, Arnold H. (1989). Defining Status: A Comprehensive Analysis of US Territorial Relations. Dordrecht: Kluwer. López Laguerre, María M. (1997). El bilingüismo en Puerto Rico. San Juan: Editorial Espuela. Maldonado, Norman (2000). The teaching of English in Puerto Rico. One hundred years of degrees of bilingualism. Higher Education in Europe 25(4): 487–497. McCroskey, James, and Michael Beatty (1986). Oral communication apprehension. In Shyness: Perspectives on Research and Treatment, Warren H. Jones, Jonathan M. Cheek, and Stephen R. Briggs (eds.), 279–293. New York: Plenum. McCroskey, James, Joan Fayer, and Virginia Richmond (1985). Don’t speak to me in English:

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Communication apprehension in Puerto Rico. Communication Quarterly 33(3): 185–197. Meléndez, Aurora (1997). Language learner perceptions on the circumstances and factors that contribute to language learning anxiety in Puerto Rico. PhD dissertation, New York University. Mellado de Hunter, Elena (1981). Anglicismos profesionales en Puerto Rico. Rio Piedras: UPR Press. Morris, Nancy (1995). Puerto Rico: Culture, Politics, and Identity. Westport, CT: Praeger. Muñoz, Aníbal, Maubel Hernández, Jennifer Ríos, and Bryan Rodíguez (2008). New Spanishes: The revolution of Americanisms in Puerto Rico and in other Spanish speaking countries. Presented at Annual Puerto Rico TESOL Convention: The Next Generation of ESL: Tapestry for Success. November 21–22, Rio Grande, PR. Nine-Curt, Carmen Judith (1995). Nonverbal Communication in Puerto Rico, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Evaluation, Dissemination and Assessment Center. Otheguy, Ricardo, Ana Celia Zentella, and David Livert (2007). Language and dialect contact in Spanish in New York: Towards the formation of a speech community. Language 83(4): 770–802. Pousada, Alicia (1999). The singularly strange story of the English language in Puerto Rico. Milenio 3: 33–60. Pousada, Alicia (2000). The competent bilingual in Puerto Rico. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 142(3): 103–118. Ramírez González, Carlos M., and Roame Torres (2000). Editor’s preface. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 142(3): 1–4. Resnick, M. C. (1993). ESL and language planning in PR. TESOL Quarterly 27(1): 259–273.

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Report by the President’s Task Force on Puerto Rico’s Status. (2007). Maggie Grant and Steven Engel, co-chairs. Retrieved from www.usdoj. gov/. . ./2007-report-by-thepresident-task-force-on-PuertoRico-status.pdf. Sánchez Gutiérrez, Lillian (1999). The use and importance of written English in the workplace in Puerto Rico. PhD dissertation, New York University. Santiago, Esmeralda (1993). When I Was Puerto Rican. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Schweers, C. William, Jr., and Jorge A. Vélez (1992). To be or not to be bilingual in Puerto Rico. TESOL Journal 2(1): 13–16. Surlin, Stewart H. (1993). Crosscultural analysis of values and communication. In Puerto Rico Communication Studies, Joan Fayer (ed), 127–138. Puerto Rico: Fundación Arqueológica, Antropológica, e Histórica de Puerto Rico. Tannen, Deborah (1984). Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends. New York: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Jenny (1983). Crosscultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics 4(2): 91–112. Torruellas, Rosa (1990). Learning English in three private schools in Puerto Rico: Issues of class, identity and ideology. PhD dissertation, New York University. Tucker, G. Richard (2005). Innovative language education programs for heritage language students: The special case of Puerto Ricans. International Journal of Bilingual

Education and Bilingualism 8(2): 188–195. US Census Bureau (2000). Census data on Puerto Rico. Retrieved from http:// www.doleta.gov/reports/censusdata/ LWIA_by_State.cfm?state=PR Vargas Batista, Gladys (2005). Teaching units to lower language anxiety for 8th and 9th Grade ESL students in Puerto Rico. MA thesis, University of Puerto Rico. Vélez, Jorge (1991). The Spanish law and the teaching of English: Old assumptions, new implications, and possible effects. TESOL-Gram (Spring): 3–4. Vélez, Jorge (2000).Understanding Spanish language maintenance in Puerto Rico: Political will meets the demographic imperative. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 142(3): 5–24. Vélez, Jorge, and Chester William Schweers (1993). A US colony at a linguistic crossroads: The decision to make Spanish the official language of Puerto Rico. Language Problems and Language Planning 17(2): 117–139. Wolfram, Walt (1974). Sociolinguistic Aspects of Assimilation: Puerto Rican English in New York City. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. Wolochuk, Alexandria (2009). Adult English Learners’ Self-Assessment of Second Language Proficiency: Contexts and conditions. PhD dissertation, New York University. Zentella, Ana Celia (1997). Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

10 The Reforming of English Spelling DAVID F. MARSHALL

What makes it standard is that some speakers of American English have the social power to impose the variety of English they happen to use on speakers of other varieties. —(Kövecses 2000: 81)

Introduction: Methods for Spelling Reform Hundreds of proposals have been offered on how to reform the spelling of English; these attempts can be grouped into four categories: standardizing uses familiar letters but uses them more regularly, sometimes adding digraphs (two letters for one sound); augmenting adds new characters, diacritic markings under or over letters, and invented letters; supplanting uses all new characters matching sounds, requiring relearning how to read; regularizing does away with many inconsistencies and focuses on “restricted areas of the writing system” (Crystal 2003, 276). The options boil down to: (a) make a new alphabet (supplanting); (b) keep the same letters but add digraphs or diacritics, for example sh for the initial sound in chivalry (standardizing); (c) make new characters to match English sounds written the same but pronounced differently, such as in rough [ruf] and through [thru] (augmenting); (d) do away with inconsistencies so tune would be spelled like moon [cf. cartoon] (regularizing). Multiple approaches, with problems and advantages, have been proposed, often with several combined.

Old English and Middle English In the Old English period (449–1100), King Alfred the Great’s (849–899) campaign for literacy was aimed at the clergy, but his efforts did not stress spelling, since

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words were then written as they sounded. Often the same word would be spelled differently in the same text (Baugh and Cable 1978, 69–70). Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1340–1400) admonition in Troilus and Cressida (V, 1793–1796) demonstrates how sensitive medieval authors were to potential copying errors: And for ther is so greet diversitee In English and in wryting of our tonge, So preye I god that noon miswryte thee, Ne thee mismetre for defaute of tonge. One medieval attempt at reform was that of Orm (ca. 1200), an Augustine monk; his Ormulum, an incomplete sermon collection, illustrates reform, probably to help preachers read them aloud (Crystal 2004, 196). He doubles consonant letters after short vowels (the initial vowel in any is short, the latter long), with some exceptions, changing initial thorn þ into t after words ending in -d, -dd, -t, and -tl; using an acute accent (´) over a vowel, sometimes single, double, or triple, usually marking vowel length (Holt 1878, lxvii–iii). The orthographic regularity in the Ormulum demonstrates an analysis of spelling based on “a pure letter-sound basis” (Venezky 1970, 30). Unfortunately, Orm had no imitators; his attempt stands alone, rating on a scale of 1 to 10 for success only a 1. Diversity in Middle English spelling existed for several reasons. There were relics of noun and verb endings. English had undergone infusions from other languages; at first aboriginal languages existed, replaced by prehistoric invasions of the Celts. Celtic languages—Breton, Irish, Cornish, Scots Gaelic, and, until recently, Manx—superseded these aboriginal tongues. Some Celts were conquered in turn by Roman legions and later by Germanic tribes: Jutes, Saxons and Angles. The latter provided the toponym, Angle’s land becoming England. This invasion, which began in 449 CE, progressed for over a century (Beason 2006, 55–63; Baugh and Cable 1978, 43–50). With the introduction of Roman Christianity in 597, written English became heavily influenced by Latin, remaining so until modern times (Baugh and Cable 1978, 46, 75–88). Beginning in 787, attacks by Nordic raiders (Vikings) began. By 878, a large part of Anglo-Saxon England was conquered, but the Nordic invasions were halted by Alfred the Great and his descendants, until Nordic kings in turn conquered; Canute (d. 1035) inherited the Kingdom of the North Sea, including England, in 1016 (Beason 2006, 64–68, Baugh and Cable 1978, 91–104). Canute was succeeded by Edward the Confessor (d. 1066), raised in Normandy, who “was almost more French than English” (Baugh and Cable 1978, 108). Under Duke William, the Normans, who spoke a dialect of French influenced by their native Danish, conquered England in 1066, making Anglo-Norman, a French patois, the upper class language (Baugh and Cable 1978, 107–124). In the next three centuries, intermarriages, the rise to prominence of French culture, as well as the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), caused French influences to make perhaps the greatest linguistic impact on English vocabulary. Most English nobility spoke some dialect of French until the end of the fourteenth century (Baugh and Cable 1978, 113–124, 129–139). Thus Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Nordic, and French influenced English spelling with many words spelled in their original forms (Maguire 2006, 142–149; Essinger

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2007, 148–212; Beason 2006, 69). Word pairs illustrate this, first Anglo-Saxon, then Danish: wish—want; shirt—skirt; starve—die; hide—skin (McCrum et al. 1987, 72). Although French had the greatest impact on vocabulary, Danish impacted “closed classes” of words: “pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, and even part of the verb to be. Such parts of speech are not often transferred from one language to another” (Baugh and Cable 1978, 101). English regained supremacy during the 1300s.

The Renaissance By the 1500s, English spelling was nothing short of chaotic. For example, “in the 1609 first printing of [Shakespeare’s] Sonnets, mistress is spelled five ways, and there are thirteen known spellings of his name” (Shipley 1977, 126), some in his own signatures. New technology added to the problem with the arrival of the printing press from the Netherlands in 1476, most printers being non-native English speakers (for example, we get silent -h- in ghost and ghastly from Dutch printers). Foreign printers’ spellings expounded problems; at first, “spellings that were close enough were good enough” (Wolman 2008, 45). The problem was that no accepted system existed to create uniformity. Spelling “was neither phonetic nor fixed” (Baugh and Cable 1978, 207). An alternate spelling would easily fit a composited line for a typesetter seeking even margins. “Early printing houses are a major factor in the story of English’s convoluted spelling code” (Wolman 2008, 45). One Renaissance scholar, Richard Mulcaster, one of the Orthoepists, “was so unimpressed by printing practice that he decided to base his spelling rules on handwritten texts and not printed ones, because ‘the printers, setters, and correcters . . . letteth manie errors abide in their work’ ” (Crystal 2007, 30). The Renaissance introduced borrowings from other languages: Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish; influences of Latin and Greek were extensive. With the discovery of the New World, its languages came into contact with English; global explorations and trade added a plethora of American, African, and Asian borrowings. Rapid change in English became widespread. “Together with his contemporaries . . . Shakespeare went ballistic with linguistic experimentation. There was a pyrotechnic playfulness with which Shakespeare and other writers broke rank with language constraints” (Wolman 2008, 65). Renaissance English was written to fit the idea, not the form. Some English vowels had shifted in pronunciation (beginning in late 1400s and lasting over a century), creating spelling problems when the word was already “fixed” prior to this Great Vowel Shift (Beason 2006, 91). For example, sane was pronounced as in sanity prior to the shift. English was pliable, cascading in change, its writing system unpredictable, vocabulary constantly being augmented, spellings changed. Three types of additions to Renaissance English were debated extensively: inkhorn terms—words from classical Latin and Greek; Chaucerisms—antique terms from older English; and oversea language—foreign words and phrases (Baugh and Cable 1978, 185).

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This confusion, along with the printers’ differing spellings (Hogg and Denison 2006, 289) created a demand for conformity. Printing was centered in London, aiding the rise of London dialect as standard (McCrum et al. 1987, 85–87). Printers’ spellings slowly became more standardized. Spelling in private, informal correspondence, however, remained largely non-standard (Essinger 2007, 213– 237), as it continues so today. Renaissance England saw spelling reform attempts by scholars such as Sir Thomas Cheke, Sir Thomas Smith, and John Hart, followed by William Bullokar, Alexander Gil, and Richard Mulcaster (Crystal 2004, 266). These scholar reformers, termed Orthoepists, viewed writing as a mirror for speech, but a few like Bullokar and Gill proposed alphabets based at least in part upon etymology and the desire for graphic distinction of homophones (Venezky 1970, 31). For Orthoepists, “correct English was the English of aristocrats like themselves,” but their proposed phonetic proposals “failed to overcome an essential flaw . . . one of the same problems that haunts modern-day reformers . . . That is, phonetic to whom?” (Wolman 2008, 61). Whose pronunciation do you match? The standard might be written, but does anyone speak the standard? There was also the problem of too many proposed solutions. With the Orthoepists, “no two systems agreed as to what would be the best way of ‘improving’ English. And there is . . . a natural reluctance to adopt an innovator’s new and unfamiliar symbols” (Crystal 2007, 32). Crystal elsewhere notes: None of the proposals from any of the reformers were taken up, despite Hart and the others devoting a great deal . . . to articulating the arguments . . . The reason then is the same as the reason in later centuries, when many more proposals for spelling reform arose. The new symbols and the conventions introduced by the different reformers were unfamiliar, complex, idiosyncratic, and not entirely self-consistent. No two systems agreed in what counted as the best set of “improvements.” (Crystal 2004, 268)

At this time, the English alphabet added two new characters, -i- was separated from -j- and -u- from -v-. This change, plus some Orthopedists’ suggestions, made spelling a little clearer, and some conformity finally arrived in printing. However, the reforms of the Orthoepists were not very extensive, rating at best a 3 on the 1 to 10 success scale.

Samuel Johnson The reform debate seems to have abated during the English Civil War and Interregnum, for Britain had many new problems: the economic rise of the middle class and the “squirarchy” represented by Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) with parliamentary constraint on nobility and the regicide of King Charles I; the dissolution of the final vestiges of feudalism, creating increased urbanization; continuing Jacobite rebellions in Scotland and wars with Holland and later with France against Louis XIV; the deposition of the Stuarts and the adoption of the House of Orange and later of the House of Hanover for the monarchy; global expansion of

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empire and trade—all ignited social forces changing English society and the way it spelled. From 1650 to 1800, there was a demanding appeal to authority; attempts at creating a language academy were tried but failed; social class distinctions increased (Baugh and Cable 1978, 253–272). There was increased distancing of educated from uneducated, and spelling errors became crucial, for “at all times, spelling was one of the areas of language use that closely corresponded to the writer’s level of literacy” (Hogg and Denis 2006, 290) and thus marked one’s education, wealth, and social status. Society felt a need for certainty, for stability, for a stop of too rapid change, for “ascertainment.” The establishment demanded standards, set rules of behavior, including in language. This attitude can be seen in Jonathan Swift’s 1712 essay, “Fixing our Language Forever” (in Gerber 1968, 183–195). Some writers and scholars (such as Swift) sought to establish an Academy imitating the Italians and French but were unsuccessful, primarily because King William was Dutch and the succeeding House of Hanover was German. Dare an Academy comment on correct pronunciation when the crown spoke with a marked foreign accent? In answer to the demand for governance in language, there arose three succeeding “literary dictators” whose views and works influenced tastes and culture and, in turn, how English was written: John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson (Baugh and Cable 1978, 253–287). Of these arbitrators of taste for those seeking social and linguistic certainty, the most important for spelling reform was Johnson and his dictionary of 1755. As Whelan (2002, 1) noted: For centuries English spelling had been in the gradual process of reforming itself without any plan . . . Well into the eighteenth century spelling remained highly idiosyncratic, even among the literary elite, and no reader coming upon an odd spelling would draw unflattering conclusions about the writer’s education or intelligence. No dictionary was sufficiently impressive to establish one spelling as correct and all or most deviations as incorrect.

All that changed with the publication, in 1755, of Samuel Johnson’s monumental, scholarly Dictionary of the English Language (Whelan 2002, 1). Johnson “was the first really authoritative lexicographer, and by all odds the most influential figure of the time.” Johnson planned to bring order to English spelling by eliminating “inconsistencies rather than by innovations,” preferring in the few changes he made, “to go back to old models” (Robertson and Cassidy 1955, 339; see Johnson’s “The Plan of an English Dictionary” [1747] in Gerber 1968, 197–209). Johnson’s aim was “to ‘ascertain’ English spelling . . . to make it consistent and uniform . . . preferably by conformity with long established custom.” He overutilized analogy but had to compromise, creating more inconsistency; for example: moveable, immovable; uphill, downhil; distil, instill; deceit, receipt; deign, disdain; install, reinstal” (Robertson and Cassidy 1955, 339). For several generations, Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) served as the authority for spelling. In spite of its errors, it was “a masterpiece and a landmark, in his own words ‘setting the orthography, displaying the analogy, regulating the structures, and ascertaining the significations of English words.’ ” (McCrum et al. 1986, 135–136).

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Spelling in colonial America imitated Britain’s; for example, halfe for half or yeare for year. Even in the Declaration of Independence, nouns were still capitalized (States but not united) and there were older spellings. Their principal authority, Johnson’s Dictionary, was contradictory and conservative, because he attempted to preserve “the genius of the language.” Johnson had tried a few reforms and “gave his imprimatur to many spellings based upon false etymologies and pointless analogies” (Mencken 1937, 380). With the American Revolution, a slow process of language change began with new ideas, revolutionary changes, and thus even new spellings.

Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster Congruent with the rise of American “independency” were two major reformers; the first was Benjamin Franklin, signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Franklin advocated major spelling changes; in A Scheme for a New Alphabet and Reformed Modes of Spelling (1768), he dropped letters presenting pronunciation problems: c, j, w, q, x, y. Franklin advocated new letter combinations (Wolman 2008, 87). He proposed short vowels have one letter and long vowels two, but his proposals were too innovative to be adopted (Mencken 1937, 380, see n.1 for a list of new characters). Franklin’s reform proposals seemed too radical for adoption. On a scale of 1 to 10 measuring success, Franklin’s attempt rates only a 2. Webster dedicated his Dissertations on the English Language (1789) to Franklin and added Franklin’s 1768 letter to a transcriber in answer to criticism of Franklin’s changes (Webster 1789, 408–410). Noah Webster had some success in initiating spelling reform. He proposed changes in spelling the “Federal” or American language in his Dissertations (1789), which included the following: (1) the omission of all superfluous or silent letters; for example: bread to bred; (2) substitution of a letter with a definite sound for one more vague; for example: -ee- for -ea- or -ie-; for example: meen (mean), speek (speak), zeel (zeal), greev (grieve); others proposed were kee (key), dawter (daughter), plow (plough), tuf (tough), proov (prove), blud (blood) and draft (draught); Greek derivatives with -ch- would substitute -k-: karacter, korus, arkitecture; (3) altering a letter or adding of a diacritic would mark differing sounds; vowel sounds would be separated by diacritics (Webster 1789: 394–396). More influential for American spelling was publication of Webster’s A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783–1785): a spelling book, a reader and a grammar, to be backed later by an American dictionary. Webster recognized the plethora of new words coming into American English, and that students needed to learn to read and write this emerging speech, differing from British English. He felt a need for an American language reflecting the new republic. Working in politics, he hobnobbed with the founding fathers, attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and had an essay in the Federalist Papers supporting adoption (Wolman 2008: 85). In Webster’s Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), he sought to stifle “palpable inconsistencies and preposterous anomalies” (Wolman 2008,

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93, citing From Noah Webster to Merriam-Webster, 2006, 14). He changed words ending from -ck to -c; -our- words became -or-. Interestingly, this was a return to an older spelling, for “in the first three folios of Shakespeare . . . honor and honour were used indiscriminately and in almost equal proportion” (Mencken 1937, 383). Webster changed words to match pronunciations: gaol to jail, and final -e was often omitted; verb endings: -ise to–ize; noun endings: -ce to -se (Crystal 2007, 165–166). With all his detailed work, unfortunately, the 1806 dictionary failed, public reception and sales were dismal (Wolman 2008, 93). Critics widely denounced Webster’s changes as too extreme; with his 1806 failure, Webster began to compromise his radical spellings to meet buyer demand. Webster realized he had gone too far; his American Spelling Book (1783), part of the Institute, had become a runaway best seller, but in it he had not followed his proposed changes until the 1806 dictionary (Mencken 1937, 386–387). Most but not all innovations were soon dropped or modified, and the speller remains in print today, the number-three best seller after the Bible and Chairman Mao’s quotations (Beason 2006, 152). Webster, after twenty years labor, in 1827 published his American Dictionary of the English Language. Enough time had passed for Johnson’s 1755 dictionary to seem dated, and with increasing American national self-consciousness, the 1827 American Dictionary became “a welcome addition to nineteenth-century American homes” (Wolman 2008, 95). Webster’s triumph was not immediate. Critics attacked him widely in print and went so far as to publish rival dictionaries, creating “a war of dictionaries” (Lounsbury 1909, 252). In spite of continuing attacks, Webster’s 1827 dictionary and its heirs “gradually conquered the country, and many, though certainly not most, of the reformed spellings he advocated . . . are the American standard today” (Mencken 1937, 387–388). Perhaps Webster’s reforms may be termed a success; it was the most far-reaching reform in United States English, even up to the present, and it did reform American spelling, although inconsistencies still exist. Webster in his modified spelling reforms was “one of the few people ever to have done so successfully” (Crystal 2002, 249); even in his limited changes, his was “the only successful English spelling reform of modern times” (Crystal 2007, 165). Webster’s attempt on a scale of 1 to 10 rates a 7.

Other Nineteenth-Century Attempts at Reform Supplanting the alphabet was also a major British interest in the second half of the nineteenth century, starting with Sir Isaac Pittman’s invention of Stenographic Soundhand (1837), providing an alternate method to facilitate transcription. Prior to Pittman’s, there were 210 systems of shorthand published, beginning with John Willis’s in 1602. Shorthand’s application to spelling reform seems obvious, and “the unceasing efforts by Sir Isaac Pittman, including . . . collaboration with Alexander J. Ellis from 1843 to 1856, are the chief landmark of English spelling reform in Great Britain in the nineteenth century” (Dewey 1971, 19). After their collaboration, “Ellis moved step by step toward a no-new-letter notation” published in 1870 as Glossic,” considered “a prototype of the New Spelling (NS) of the

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Simplified Spelling Society (SSS)” (Dewey 1971, 20). Pittman published in 1895 his The New Speller, which used “no new letters and almost no diacritics.” Pittman’s grandson, Sir James Pittman, invented the ITA (Initial Teaching Alphabet), designed for English speakers to learn to read (Dewey 1971, 20). Stephen Pearl Andrews brought Isaac Pittman’s books to the United States; in 1844, he published the first American instruction book on Pittman shorthand (1846). Six years later, Benn Pittman settled in the United States, championing his brother’s Isaac’s system (Dewey 1971, 20). Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) used a shorthand he termed “phonographic alphabet” and wrote an essay, “A Simplified Alphabet,” in which he stated, “I myself am a Simplified Speller” (Maguire 2006, 172). George D. Watt came to the United States and “devised a thirty-eight character alphabet” with “not one of the letters from the Standard English system”—now known as the Deseret Alphabet (Wolman 2008, 103). The American Philological Association in 1875 appointed a committee of five noted scholars to study reforms in spelling. In 1876, they declared “a revision of spelling was urgent” and needed major attention; their first step “proposed that eleven new spellings be adopted at once: ar, catalog, definit, gard, giv, hav, infinit, liv, tho, thru, and wisht. . . . During the same year, there was an International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography and out of it grew the Spelling Reform Association, which immediately endorsed the eleven new spellings” (Mencken 1937, 399). In 1886, the American Philological Association recommended about 3,500 words be respelled; some of these derived from Webster and some had already entered American usage, such as deletion of -u- in -our- words, rearranging final -re to -er and deleting -ll- to -1-. “The trouble with the others was that they were either too uncouth to be adopted without a long struggle or likely to cause errors in pronunciation”; “the result was that the whole reform received a setback” (Mencken 1937, 399–400). Top-down spelling reform had failed, and on a scale of 1 to 10, the American Philological Association’s attempt rates a 2. Twelve years later, the National Education Association began and proposed twelve changes; then in 1906, the Simplified Spelling Board was organized, receiving a grant from Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) for $15,000 per year, later raised to $25,000. This grant was brought about by a request from Melville Dewey, SSB secretary (Wolman 2008, 112). Dewey (or as he preferred, Melvil Dui, see cover of Buletinz ov the Speling Reform Asoshiashun from 1877 tu 1880) was a genius polymath who, at the age of twenty-one, devised the Dewey Decimal System organizing all knowledge. Besides Dewey, the SSB boasted a “formidable list of members and collaborators” and issued a list of 300 revised spellings (Dewey 1971, 25). These became the infamous 300 words.

The Twentieth Century In August 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered their adoption by the Government Printing Office, arousing widespread rancor, witty comments, political cartoons, and stiff opposition from most national government departments (Mencken 1937, 400), Congress, and the Supreme Court. Opposition to

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Roosevelt’s executive order was fierce; the New York Times “vowed to correct Roosevelt’s ‘freak spellings’ ” as typographic errors; the Baltimore Sun “asked if the president would now spell his name Rusevelt”. . . . But the British press made the American media response look friendly by comparison” (Wolman 2008, 115). In Congress, the House of Representatives “passed a resolution directing the public printer to ignore Roosevelt’s orders; later, in December, when the issue was headed for a Senate floor debate, the President “rescinded the order” (Wolman 2008, 116–117). Roosevelt and the SSB’s attempt would only rate on our scale at best a 2; it set back spelling reform in America for several decades. Nine years later, A Dictionary of Simplified Spelling Based on the Publications of the United States Bureau of Education and the Rules of the American Philological Association and the Simplified Spelling Board (1915) by Vizetelly was published. Again, top-down spelling reform failed; memories of Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” were still fresh in America’s political mind. This attempt on our scale of spelling reform success rates a paltry 1. In 1919, Carnegie and Roosevelt died and funding for the SSB became scarce; it moved its office to Lake Placid and became moribund, and in 1921, the National Education Association stopped endorsing the Board’s reforms (Maguire 2006, 173). In spite of this setback, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, changed some spellings in the newspaper; for example, iland, nite, frate, and cigaret (Bryson 1990, 131). McCormick died in 1955 and in the 1970s, the Chicago Tribune returned to regular spellings, announcing in its headline: “Thru is Through, and So is Tho” (Maguire 2006, 174). In the old Tribune Tower in Chicago, you can still find an elevator marked “frate” (Zorn 1997, 3A, 14). Spelling reform persisted on both sides of the Atlantic (Pyles and Algeo 1982, 230). In Great Britain, similar ferment surrounded spelling reform. The Spelling Reform Association (SRA) was founded in 1876. The Simplified Spelling Society (SSS) was inaugurated in 1908, again with help from Carnegie. In 1910, the SSS published “Proposals for Simplifying the Spelling of English, beginning what became known as the “New Spelling.” R. E. Zachrisson’s Anglic (an alphabet to make learning English easier), proved useful for SSS proposals. In 1946, the SRA and the SSS formed the current Simplified Spelling Association (SSA), their programs leading to Sir James Pittman’s ITA (Initial Teaching Alphabet) and other spelling reforms, following a policy of seeking the middle ground (Dewey 1971, 27). These attempts by the Spelling Reform Association (SRA), Simplified Spelling Society (SSS), and the Simplified Spelling Association (SSA) led to the “New Spelling” tried out in British schools, while the Initial Teaching Alphabet aided students to learn to read. These educational efforts rank a 6 on our 1 to 10 scale of success, although their influence on formal English spelling as opposed to initial learning alphabets has had little effect. Spelling reform again gained headlines when playwright George Bernard Shaw died in 1950. Shaw bequeathed the bulk of his estate for creation of a new English alphabet, but “death duties ate up almost everything, and the whole business would likely have been forgotten except that his play Pygmalion was transformed into the smash hit My Fair Lady and suddenly royalties poured in” (Bryson 1990,

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131). Kingsley Read won the competition for the Shavian alphabet; still, nobody took this spelling reform (in this case, at a brand-new alphabet) very seriously (Vachek 1973, 59). Interest in Shavian is more for its namesake than for its utility; it necessitates that English readers learn to read all over again. The Shavian attempt at spelling reform, a supplemental, rates only a 1 on our success scale. There have been other foreign attempts at spelling reform, such as the academies, the Academie française (1635) and Italy’s Accademia della Crusca (1582), which regulate spelling by law. These are seldom successful; for example, the French Academy debated a reform in 1990; its members soon disagreed with each other as well as with the office originating the list (Beason 2006, 138). Most academy rulings rate, at best, a 3, for few are adopted. In 1995, Germany proposed making spellings look more German. This reform “was not ambitious. Even after the reforms . . . As often in spelling reforms, the reforms have so far done little more than increase the number of ways words can be spelled” (Beason 2006, 139). This recent reform also faced marked opposition (Beason 2006, 145), and rates a 3. Finland (Suomi) provides “one instance when large-scale reforms achieved notable success by regularizing an entire spelling system” (Beason 2006, 140). Suomi is a language where, if you see the word, you know how to pronounce it. Suomi spelling reform was perhaps easier as it occurred in a variety solely devoted to formal communication, especially writing, that is, kirjakieli (Beason 2006, 140–142). Finnish reform rates a solid 9 on our success scale. Another successful reform was in Turkey through modernizations by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the nation exchanging its Arabic script for Latinate, but there were drawbacks. Few Turkish citizens today can read texts produced before the reform (Beason 2006, 144–145). The shifting to a new alphabet raises the question of whether this is really spelling reform; the supplementing of Latin for Gothic in German in 1946 solved few spelling problems in Deutsch.

Conclusion: Is Spelling Reform Necessary? Arguments for spelling reform are that reform might make the language easier to learn and to read, and may save space and thus printing costs. Arguments against reform are that supplanting robs future generations of past literature unless transcribed, etymological history contained in the spelling is lost, and there might be an increase of words spelled the same but pronounced differently (compare the present and past tenses of read). With electronic printing, cost concerns diminish in importance, and learning to read has been facilitated through the Initial Teaching Alphabet and other innovative educational aids. A major problem for spelling reform is that reading comprehension does not require words be spelled correctly. “Experienced readers read by making very rapid, even almost instinctive, association between the way a word looks on the page and a particular meaning. This being so, the illogicality of English spelling is not necessarily a major problem once the spelling system of English has actually been learned” (Essinger 2007, 280). (For proof of why spelling is not crucial, see

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the Cambridge University experiment at: http://www.write.co.nz/mainsite/ ThePaomnnehalPweorOfTheHmuanMnid.html.) Morphological instead of phonetic analysis demonstrates a negative perspective on reform. When viewed not on a letter to sound correspondence, English spelling is better than perceived. Note how the past tense morpheme {-ed} is realized phonetically as [-t], [-d] or [schwa d], but the meaning is clearly apparent. Meaning takes precedence over sound. Noam Chomsky notes that what a learner of language “must learn (except for true irregularities) is simply the elementary correspondence between the underlying phonological segments of his internalized lexicon and the orthographic symbols.” He notes, “The conventional orthography corresponds closely to a level of representation that seems optimal for the sound system of a fairly rich version of standard spoken English” (Chomsky 2003, 367). Our system is more optimal than we realize. Correct spelling remains important in creating social status. Even so, it seems that “all attempts to reform English spelling have one thing in common: they are failures” (Essinger 2007, 280). Crystal (2004, 268) notes that: Spelling reform kingdoms have always been divided against themselves. Nor does English (i.e., the English people) seem to favour “top down” proposals, made by authoritative individuals or institutions . . . The English linguistic temperament seems to be more laissez-faire. When English spelling did standardize (between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries), it did so ‘bottom–up’, with a consensus of usage gradually favouring some traditional spellings at the expense of others.

What we need to realize is that “spelling reform has been quietly going on for centuries, in a small but not insignificant way, and without the benefit of any outside agencies” (Bryson 1990: 131). English spelling has been, for the most part, naturally reformed and seemingly a superior system to either French or German. Where then is spelling reform headed? Wolman (2008, 172–185) notes that electronic texting with very limited fields for message length brings / causes changes in informal messages. When was the last time you texted “you” instead of U? Spelling in private documents has always been less strict, providing an ideal locus for “ground-up” change. In either electronic or hard copy, correct spelling becomes more important in proportion to increasing formality. The history of planned spelling reform has shown that it must be done very carefully, slowly, with incremental steps. Language change is modification of human behavior, and should be cautiously treated as such. Spelling reform remains one of the most difficult language changes to plan or accomplish, especially in English; at best, even with Webster in American English, it has been only somewhat successful, rating only a 5 overall. As Anatoly Liberman, the Oxford etymologist (at Oxford University Press), blogged: Other countries have had successful spelling reforms, even sweeping reforms . . . Only one reason stands in the way of change: the attitude of those who do not want to adjust to new conditions . . . We constantly hope for change and give everybody and everything a chance, even a second chance if need be, but the line must be drawn somewhere, and we have drawn it at spelling. So what about

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the future of spelling reform in the English speaking world? The reform has no future. Long live the spellchecker! (Liberman 2008 [Jan. 16], 3)

References Baugh, Albert, and Thomas Cable (1978). A History of the English Language, 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Beason, Larry (2006). Eyes before Ease: The Unsolved Mysteries and Secret Histories of Spelling. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bryson, Bill (1990). The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. New York: William Morrow. BULETINZ ØV THE SPELING REFORM ASOSHIASHUN FRØM 1877 TU 1880 (1881). Vicrøi: St. Luis, MO. Chomsky, Noam (2002). Chomsky on Democracy and Education. New York: Routledge Falmer. Crystal, David (2002). The English Language, 2nd ed. London: Penguin. Crystal, David (2003). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David (2004). The Stories of English. New York: The Overlook Press. Crystal, David (2007). The Fight for English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dewey, Godfrey (1971). English Spelling: Roadblock to Reading. New York: Teachers College Press. Essinger, James (2007). Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling. New York: Bantam Dell. From Noah Webster to Merriam-Webster: Celebrating 200 Years of American Dictionary Making (2006). Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster. Gerber, Philip (ed.) (1968). Lessons in Language. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Hogg, Richard, and David Denison (2006). A History of the English

Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holt, Robert (ed.) (1878). The Ormulum with the Notes and Glossary of Dr. R. M. White. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kövecses, Zoltán (2000). American English: An Introduction. Petersborough, ON: Broadview Press. Lounsbury, Thomas (1909). English Spelling and Spelling Reform. New York: Harper and Brothers. Liberman, Anatoly (2008). The oldest English spellings, or, the future of spelling reform, at http://blog.oup. com/2008/01/spelling-3 (January 16). Maguire, James (2006). American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds. Emmaus, PA: Rodale. McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil (1987). The Story of English. New York: Viking. Mencken, Henry L. (1937). The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. New York: Knopf. Pyles, Thomas, and John Algeo (1982). The Origins and Development of the English Language, 3rd ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Robertson, Stuart, and Frederic Cassidy (1955). The Development of Modern English, 2nd ed. New York: Prentice-Hall. Shipley, Joseph (1977). In Praise of English: The Growth and Use of Language. New York: Time Books. Vachek, Josef (1973). Written Language: General Problems and Problems of English. The Hague: Mouton. Venezky, Richard (1970). The Structure of English Orthography. The Hague: Mouton.

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Vizetelly, Francis (ed.) (1915). A Dictionary of Simplified Spellings: Based on the Publications of the United States Bureau of Education and the Rules of the American Philological Association and the Simplified Spelling Board. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. Webster, Noah (1789). Dissertations on the English Language. Boston: I. Thomas. Microfiche. Chicago: Library Resources, 1970 (Library of American Civilization: LAC 12109).

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Whelan, Richard (2002). The American spelling reform movement. Verbatin, 27(4) (Autumn): 1, 3–7. Wolman, David (2008). Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling. New York: HarperCollins. Zorn, Eric (1997). “Moves for simplification turn Inglish into another langwaj” Chicago Tribute (June 8), 3A: 14.

11 Sociohistorical Perspective of Quechua Language Policy and Planning in Peru SERAFÍN M. CORONEL-MOLINA

Introduction This article offers a brief account of the interactions of Quechua and Spanish in Peru throughout their history of contact, including both covert and overt language policies and planning efforts (henceforth referred to as LPP). This includes the efforts of various organizations, agencies, movements, and so forth, instigated both from the top down (official or governmental) and from the bottom up (grassroots; the indigenous peoples themselves).

LPP in Colonial Times Before the Spanish Conquest, Quechua, Aymara and Puquina were the three primary languages of many that were spoken in Tawantinsuyo, the Inca Empire in South America. Over a period of about 500 years, Quechua expanded to the point where it significantly displaced the others, including Aymara and Puquina (CerrónPalomino 1989). With the arrival of the Spaniards, the linguistic landscape changed again. Early on, the Spaniards used Quechua as a lingua franca to facilitate communication with these new subjects. There was no declared language policy (Cerrón-Palomino personal communication, January 24, 2002), but the use of Quechua as lingua franca showed a practical acceptance of its utility within the Empire.

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Councils of Lima In the early years, many Catholic missionaries argued for evangelization in Quechua so effectively that they convinced King Philip II to declare it as official policy (Adelaar and Muysken 2004), because “only in their own language would it be possible to transmit to the Indians the mysteries of faith and convince them to abjure their paganism” (Cerrón-Palomino 1989, p. 20). This new policy was the ultimate outcome of the First Council of Lima (1552). There followed two more Councils; the Second Council (1567) mandated that the clergy learn the Indian languages, and established significant sanctions for failure to do so (Heath and Laprade 1982). In terms of LPP, however, the most significant of the three Councils was the third, held in 1583. In addition to mandating the translation of standard catechism texts into Quechua and Aymara, this Council also promoted the creation of “a new standardized form of Quechua, in which certain phonetic complications of the southern Peruvian dialects were disregarded in order to gain wider acceptance” (Adelaar and Muysken 2004, 182–183). It was also due in part to this Council that “chairs . . . and underchairs . . . of Quechua were created” in universities and religious institutions (Cerrón-Palomino 1989, 20). Clearly, then, the Third Council of Lima made considerable contributions to corpus planning and the codification of Quechua, as well as increasing its status and acquisition (cf. Mannheim 1991). In fact, these new rulings helped Quechua spread to new domains of use, including “written materials, religious rituals, and sermons” (Heath and Laprade 1982, p. 125). In short, the Crown was promoting an additive language policy at this time.

Quechua as Lengua General Before the turn of the seventeenth century, a number of Spanish officials were using Quechua for political, economic and religious matters. These Spaniards were not simply being altruistic, but had their own motives for wanting to learn the language: to subjugate and evangelize the newly conquered people more rapidly and effectively (Heath and Laprade 1982). In fact, the Spaniards borrowed a practice from the Incas that further helped the spread of Quechua: they maintained some of the Incan administrative structure and personnel such as the kurakas (ethnic chieftains), paying them for their services to ensure their loyalty to the Spanish state. Through these Incan administrative structures, the Spaniards could leave the administration to the native leaders, thus spreading “Quechua in commercial and political affairs” (Heath and Laprade 1982, 125). During this time, codification also received a boost in the form of development of numerous lexicons, grammars, and other written materials in Quechua. There was even some limited literary production during the colonial period, which could be considered a contribution to status planning as well as corpus planning. In fact, the period between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries was a fairly productive one for Quechua literature.

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Despite this production, the acquisition of Quechua by some notable Spanish scholars and clergy, and the language’s use as a lengua general, it is clear from an examination of who was using Quechua that in reality, the language was never widely spoken by the ruling Spanish class. Rather, a pattern was started that continues today: those natives most concerned with communicating with the Spaniards were the ones who made the effort to become bilingual (Cerrón-Palomino 1989), while most Spaniards remained monolingual. Within the Spanish-speaking world, Quechua was spoken primarily by indigenous and mestizo interpreters (Adelaar and Muysken 2004), rather than by Spaniards or criollos. Bilingual Quechua interpreters came mostly from the ranks of the growing mestizo class and from the conquered indigenous nobility. It was generally only the Spanish clergy and landowners who felt the necessity to communicate with the indigenes in their own languages (Heath and Laprade 1982). Furthermore, concurrently with all this activity in favor of Quechua, more and more Spaniards at higher administrative levels began insisting that their new subjects learn Spanish, with the intent to acculturate them and “wean” them away from their ancestral cultures. Despite the support that Quechua received, there were always other voices arguing against the use of indigenous languages in any capacity in Spanish territory. These anti-Quechua sources alleged that not insisting on Spanish undermined the empire-building effort, encouraged the Andeans to maintain their pagan ways, and hindered the spread of Christian morals (CerrónPalomino 1989). Finally, in 1643, the Spanish Crown reversed its previous position and mandated Castilianization of the entire population, intending to eliminate native languages and consolidate all Spanish subjects under a single language (Adelaar and Muysken 2004). Given this position, a first casualty of the new language policy was the teaching of Quechua by universities and religious organizations, with the Quechua chairs and subchairs being eliminated. With this move, Quechua was effectively removed from the educational domain.

Bottom-up Efforts and Ethnic Vindication All of these linguistic activities did not happen in a vacuum, and throughout the colonial period, indigenous groups mounted numerous rebellions against Spanish and criollo colonials to protest their treatment (Heath and Laprade 1982, Klarén 2000). While these revolts were not usually motivated by linguistic factors, they did ultimately have an impact on colonial LPP, but typically negatively. After stamping out so many insurrections, the Spaniards and criollos harshly repressed any further literary production in Quechua and reinforced their efforts to eliminate the language, believing both to be representative of political nationalism and revolutionary movements (Mannheim 1991). In the meantime, the struggle surrounding the policy of Castilianization was a long and slow one. Despite Philip IV’s 1643 decree, no institutional support was given for Spanish instruction to the indigenes, and Quechua continued to be used. At the same time, it was difficult for Quechua speakers to find any formal means of learning Spanish. This situation exemplifies a covert policy of “separate but

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unequal” regarding Spanish/criollo and indigenous/mestizo populations. This covert policy did not encourage social intercourse between the two groups, and thus prevented the spread of Spanish to the indigenes, and of Quechua to the Spaniards and criollos. In fact, it seems likely that the majority of the Spaniards and criollos who did learn Quechua were the friars who controlled fortified villages, or landowners who used the Andeans as forced labor. Thus, it was to their advantage for the Andeans not to learn Spanish and adopt Castilian norms. Their own knowledge of Quechua enabled them to more easily exploit the indigenous peoples and consolidate their own local positions of power (Mannheim 1991; Heath and Laprade 1982). Additionally, these harsh new policies had a significant impact on official religious literature in Quechua, resulting in a gradual decline in the publication of catechisms and sermons in Quechua, as well as any other linguistic work, until by the middle of the seventeenth century such production virtually halted. So one more domain of use that had been opened to Quechua—religion—was once again closed. Even so, not all Spaniards or criollos opposed the use of Quechua. In Cuzco, the provincial elites made a consciously nationalistic effort to cultivate Quechua language and literature. Although these elites were criollos of Spanish origin, holding Spanish titles, speaking the Spanish language and accumulating their wealth at the expense of the indigenous peoples, the landowners considered themselves thoroughly Andean and attempted to establish their political legitimacy by laying claim to the Inka past. . . . When wealthy Criollos identified themselves with the Inka past, they did so to legitimize their possession of estates and wealth; to claim political autonomy from the Spanish administrative apparatus; and to deny any connection between coeval Quechua peasants and the achievements of the Inkas. (Mannheim 1991, p. 71)

Thus, these elites did not really have any vested interest in the well-being of the indigenous peoples; it was simply that they saw the advantage to themselves in promoting the Quechua culture and language.

LPP from Independence to Contemporary Times Peru was liberated from Spain in 1821, but it was not a true liberation for the new country’s people. The reality of independence for the indigenous majority meant simply a transfer of power from the Spanish Crown to the elite of Peruvian criollo society, which adopted its social norms and values from its parent, Spain (CerrónPalomino 1989). Furthermore, even the indigenous elite no longer held the prestige and power it once had, and “all Indians were lumped together, in the eyes of the Creoles, as a monolithic, ethnic underclass” (Klarén 2000, 147). Given this situation, it is not surprising that throughout the nineteenth century, official LPP continued to be one of Castilianization, and covert policy encouraged disregard or contempt for the indigenous languages and their speakers. In fact, there was an interesting covert policy that guaranteed that the indigenes would continue in their lower socioeconomic status in the new republic:

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Castilianization was carried out through schooling, but the educational system was elitist and did not encourage attendance by the indigenous underclass. Thus, they were caught in a double-bind: they were required to learn Spanish, but denied the means to do so. So “in a society where the individual retained his most elementary rights only through the official language, vast sections of the vernacular-speaking population—the very basis of the plurilingual society—were reduced to a condition of political nonentity” (Cerrón-Palomino 1989, 23). Things improved somewhat when Augusto Leguía became president (1919–1931). He proclaimed a policy of “official indigenismo” and formed the Tawantinsuyo Committee for Pro-Indigenous Rights. This was a national project that united indigenistas and self-identified indigenous leaders from around the country who “pushed for the (re)presentation of Indians as literate, modern citizens who were proud to be indigenous, and who would work toward a progressive Peru through indigenous emancipation” (García 2005, 69). Despite his support for indigenous rights, Leguía’s desire to modernize the country ultimately had a negative impact on the rural Andean way of life, which furthered the already growing shift from Quechua to Spanish. Leguía modernized communications and transportation systems throughout the country (Klarén 2000), and in connecting all parts of the country with better roadways, he ultimately made migration and communication among different regions of the country much easier. This brought the Quechua-speaking areas much more into contact with Spanish and necessitated that many Quechua communities adopt Spanish for economic survival. Castilianization was thus spread not only through the schools, but also “through . . . internal migration towards the coast or provincial capitals, the growth of transportation networks, the revolution in mass communications in the countryside, obligatory military service, etc.” (Cerrón-Palomino 1997, 62). This enforced contact led to the concomitant rise in Quechua-Spanish bilingualism among Quechua speakers and in many cases the eventual shift completely from Quechua to Spanish. In succeeding decades, the force of indigenist movements faded and was replaced once again by “the old Hispanist position inherited from the colony,” which reconceptualized the “Indian question” in terms of incorporating them into mainstream society (Cerrón-Palomino 1989, 25). Experimental bilingual education programs were instituted in the mid-1940s as one means of educating the masses. These first attempts at bilingual education were transitional in nature, with the expressed goal of educating the “Indians” in their native tongues while they were learning Spanish. Once they became fluent enough in Spanish, bilingual education ceased and they were taught exclusively in Spanish. Despite all of this, there was some small concern for having a standardized alphabet for Quechua. The original standardized alphabet from colonial times, it should be remembered, did not take into account all the phonetic and phonological differences among dialects, while the new attempt intended to do just that. To that end, a standardized alphabet was proposed by Ministerial Resolution, but this alphabet was never enforced (Cerrón-Palomino 1989). This was one small move in the direction of codification of Quechua, one of the purposes of corpus planning. A more successful effort was made later, during the military regime of General

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Juan Velasco Alvarado in the first half of the 1970s, resulting not only in a more uniform spelling system but also in didactic materials and textbooks (CerrónPalomino 1989).

Neo-indigenism Velasco came to power in 1968 after a military coup. Although he was a dictator, he did seem to have the interests of the indigenous masses at heart. Velasco took seriously the education of his citizens, passing the General Education Law, which instituted bilingual education and indigenous language maintenance (Godenzzi 1992). He then enacted Government Decree 21156 in 1975, which promoted Quechua to the status of official national language, together with Spanish. It also made teaching Quechua obligatory at all educational levels, as well as requiring that “all legal proceedings involving monolingual Quechua speakers . . . be conducted in Quechua” (García 2005, 75). Thus, the law effectively extended Quechua to new domains: education and law, “two areas where language had been previously used as a mechanism of domination over indigenous speakers” (García 2005, 76). This was quite a victory for Quechua status and acquisition planning. Unfortunately, “the measure to promote Quechua failed before more than a few steps toward its implementation were taken” (Cerrón-Palomino 1989, 25). By the end of 1975, Velasco’s reforms were causing growing discontent among the elite classes. General Francisco Morales Bermúdez ousted Velasco, and promptly abandonded Velasco’s neo-indigenist stance. He passed a new constitution in 1979 that retracted the previous law and reduced Quechua and Aymara to “official use zones” and made Spanish the only official national language. Despite the overthrow of Velasco’s projected reforms, his original actions still served the purpose of reviving linguistic awareness among indigenous groups. Thus, future efforts by these groups to demand equal rights included linguistic rights, among them “a recognition of Quechua as a national and official language together with Spanish” (Cerrón-Palomino 1997, 61). So although Velasco’s attempts may have failed at the official and political level, he did succeed in raising the awareness of both criollos and indigenous peoples. In this sense he was ultimately a positive influence for indigenous rights.

Beyond Neo-indigenism With the government’s effective withdrawal from such ideals as official Quechua and bilingual education programs, institutions such as GTZ (German Technical Cooperation Society) and numerous NGOs took up these banners, in collaboration with the educational branch of the government. These collaborations were by nature local and experimental, such as the Project of Experimental Bilingual Education (PEBE), which was financed by GTZ, and based in Puno, one of the departments of the southern Peruvian highlands. This project offered a maintenance bilingual education program in which children were taught in both Quechua

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and Spanish throughout elementary school, in an attempt to help them maintain the former and become proficient in the latter (cf. Hornberger 1988). PEBE contributed significantly to Peruvian LPP. Its contribution to status planning was made by valorizing the native language for use in formal education, a revitalized domain for Quechua. The elaboration of textbooks and pedagogical materials in Quechua aided corpus planning. Finally, PEBE contributed to acquisition planning by revitalizing language use and encouraging native speakers to maintain their language rather than shifting to Spanish (Cerrón-Palomino 1997). Once the experimental project ended, the government was supposed to take over the program and extend it throughout the southern region. Unfortunately, however, this never happened, and so a comprehensive, wide-scale bilingual education program has yet to be implemented (Cerrón-Palomino 1997). García (2005) suggests that this failure on the part of the government may have been deliberate. The rise of the guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso, its apparent connections— linguistic and otherwise—with indigenous communities, and its recruitment activities in educational institutions tended to give multilingualism a bad reputation. Thus, this was not a time when linguistic rights held great priority. Even so, LPP made some progress. Of particular significance to both corpus and status planning was the officialization of a Quechua alphabet in 1985, under President Alan García. It was a boon for corpus planning because the writing system became standardized, and for status planning because the alphabet was officialized in the legal code. Furthermore, in 1987, President García reopened the National Office of Bilingual Education, after nearly ten years of inactivity (García 2005). It was under Alberto Fujimori’s leadership that Sendero Luminoso was finally disbanded and its leader captured in 1992. Fujimori took drastic measures politically and economically to begin rebuilding the country. His actions ultimately paid off in a number of ways (García 2005), and it was within this context that indigenous rights activists again slowly began advocating for linguistic rights. Under the Alejandro Toledo administration (2001–2006), linguistic rights continued to make gains. Not only were new laws passed regarding education in students’ native languages, but also for teachers to speak the language of the region in which they are teaching. Additionally, teachers were to be trained in BIE so they could fulfill the letter of the law (Ley General de Educación, Art. 19–20). Furthermore, a new law was passed that made explicit the legal linguistic rights of non-Spanish-speaking Peruvian citizens (Ley Nacional de Lenguas 2005). Finally, since 2001, BIE has gained greater acceptance among indigenous organizations and indigenist advocates, if not among the indigenous communities themselves. Many highland communities still reject the idea of BIE, arguing that to become fully accepted members of the nation, they need to be proficient in Spanish, and learning in Quechua will take this opportunity away from them (García 2005). Interestingly, these are the same reactions that Hornberger (1988) found over twenty years ago when she researched the PEBE program in Puno. Zúñiga and her colleagues, however, have a different perception, based on innumerable conversations with parents and teachers in different Andean zones: “The majority of parents, and even more so the teachers, admit bluntly that Quechua- and Aymara-speaking children learn better if they are taught in their indigenous languages and Spanish. . . .

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The demand for bilingual education is, then, in the majority in all the departments” (Zúñiga, Sánchez, and Zacharias 2000, 67; emphasis mine).

Recent LPP Efforts All of these renewed efforts to design and implement BIE curricula represent attempts to revalorize Quechua, which furthers both status and acquisition planning goals. Other recent initiatives include the top-down planning implied in the constitutional and juridical measures previously mentioned; greater inclusion of indigenous languages in mass media, particularly radio and in some areas, newspapers; and increasing exposure on the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Hornberger and Coronel-Molina 2004). Heath and Laprade seem to take an optimistic view of the situation of Quechua, going so far as to assert that “Quechua is gaining in ideological acceptance and in some practical uses as a language capable of performing many of the same functions as Spanish” (1982, 135). To some degree, it would seem that Hornberger and King (2006, 185–186) might agree that Quechua is making progress in terms of more widespread acceptance. I have mixed feelings about these assessments, since even at the height of the neo-indigenist movement, it would be difficult to claim that any large number of the mainstream population had experienced an ideological change to accept Quechua in public spaces. At most, it could be said that they were more willing to accept that Quechua speakers not give up their own language in favor of Spanish, but certainly monolingual Spanish speakers were (are) not rushing at the gates to make Quechua a part of their lives. Due to migration to coastal cities in search of a better life, the number of Quechua speakers in cities like Lima and Callao has increased greatly in recent decades, and in fact the percentage of Quechua speakers is higher there than anywhere else in Peru (Chirinos Rivera 2001). However, their presence in these cities does not mean that the language is becoming more valorized there; rather, although they may still be considered Quechua speakers by themselves and others, the pressure not to speak Quechua in coastal cities is a driving factor in language shift and language death among Quechua speech communities (cf. Marr 1998). In fact, only 1 percent of the population born within the department of Lima are considered to be mothertongue speakers of Quechua—and those are from more rural provinces within the department (Chirinos Rivera 2001). Further, the fact that they are native speakers of Quechua does not mean that they necessarily speak it freely in public. This is true because the covert policies of the citizens themselves are much more powerful than any governmental decree, simply because they are based on unconscious, unrecognized attitudes and ideologies that generally lead to linguistic discrimination. Godenzzi (1997, 240) highlights its far-reaching societal effects: “The southern Andean region constitutes an area of strict social hierarchy, with the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Quechua population often serving as a pretext for social discrimination and exclusion from national political life.” Unquestionably, Quechua speakers are being told without words that their language is not a valuable resource for participation in national life.

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Over the course of history, then, we see a progressively decreasing value placed on Quechua by the dominant class. Through both covert and overt language policies carried out at all levels of society, this devaluation has been communicated to Quechua speakers, effectively convincing them that in order to survive, it is best to speak Spanish. Such economic and social forces are contributing to the slow death of Quechua (cf. Cerrón-Palomino 1989, López 1990, von Gleich 1994, Marr 1998, Albó 1999, Hornberger and Coronel-Molina 2004), and the current trend to try to revitalize it faces a difficult challenge. On the other hand, there have been and continue to be concrete LPP efforts for Quechua, particularly in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Corpus planning has probably received the most attention, with focus on standardizing the written language both orthographically and lexically (cf. Albó 1987, 1995; CerrónPalomino 1988, 1991, 1998a and b; Coronel-Molina 1999, 2000, 2005; Godenzzi 1992; Hornberger 1988, 1993, 1995; Hornberger and Coronel-Molina 2004; Normalización . . . 1989; Weber 1998; Wölck 1991). Such work is critical for the maintenance of Quechua, since an oral language will always be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis a written one (Cerrón-Palomino 1989). However, considerable work has also been done in the areas of status planning and acquisition planning: witness all the language laws and bilingual education efforts previously discussed. This conflict between what is seen and heard on the streets and what is proposed and passed by policymakers points to the obvious dichotomy that has always existed between rhetoric (overt policy) and practice (covert policy) at both the top-down and the bottom-up levels. The research cited above shows how much work is going into LPP by governments, NGOs, linguists and language planners, and in some cases, even by the Quechua communities themselves. This end of the dichotomy represents overt, explicitly stated, and highly visible policy, or rhetoric. The other end of the dichotomy is manifested in the attitudes and actions of the average citizen, whether they speak Spanish or Quechua. This end represents implicit, covert policy, the norms of daily practice. For Quechua to have a fighting chance of survival, the covert level is the one most in need of changing in all sectors of society. Of course, it can only help for top-down and bottom-up groups to learn to work together as well.

Conclusion In short, if LPP efforts over time for the Quechua language were rated on a scale of 1–10, I would have to place their overall success at about a 5. If the purpose of Quechua LPP is to revitalize the language, then it has to be shown to be a valuable language for some reason, whether that be social, economic, or historical. Until people at all levels, native and non-native speakers, from bottom-up as well as top-down sectors of society, are convinced that it has some value in their lives— and at this point, I would say economic factors will be the strongest indicator of value to most people––then despite all efforts to the contrary, Quechua will slowly fade away.

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References Adelaar, Willem F. H., and Pieter C. Muysken (2004). The Languages of the Andes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Albó, Xavier (1987). Problemática lingüística y meta-lingüística de un alfabeto quechua: Una reciente experiencia boliviana. Indiana 11: 233–262. Albó, Xavier (1995). Bolivia plurilingüe: Guía para planificadores y educadores. La Paz, Bolivia: UNICEF/ CIPCA. Albó, Xavier (1999). Iguales aunque diferentes: Hacia unas políticas interculturales y lingüísticas para Bolivia. La Paz: Ministerio de Educación/UNICEF/CIPCA. Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (1988). Hacia una escritura quechua. Progreso 8: 77–98. Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (1989). Language policy in Peru: A historical overview. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 77: 11–33. Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (1991). Normalization in Andean languages. In Standardization of National Languages, Utta von Gleich and Ekkehard Wolff (eds.), 33–40. Hamburg, Germany: UNESCO Institute for Education and Research Centre for Multilingualism and Language Contact. Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (1997). Pasado y presente del quechua. Yachay Wasi 4: 49–64. Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (1998a). Normalización y uso idiomáticos. In Sobre las huellas de la voz: sociolingüística de la oralidad y la escritura en su relación con la educación, Luis Enrique López and Ingrid Jung (eds.), 248–252. Madrid: Morata/PROEIB-Andes. Cerrón-Palomino, Rodolfo (1998b). Las primeras traducciones al quechua y al aimara. In Sobre las huellas de la voz:

Sociolingüística de la oralidad y la escritura en su relación con la educación, Luis Enrique López and Ingrid Jung (eds.), 96–114. Madrid: Morata/PROEIB-Andes. Chirinos Rivera, Andrés (2001). Atlas lingüístico del Perú. Cuzco: Ministerio de Educación/Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas.” Coronel-Molina, Serafín M. (1999). Planificación del corpus del quechua sureño peruano. In Las causas sociales de la desaparición y del mantenimiento de las lenguas en las naciones de América, Anita Herzfeld and Yolanda Lastra (eds.), 189–204. Hermosillo, Sonora, México: Universidad de Sonora/Editorial Unison. Coronel-Molina, Serafín M. (2000). Piruw malka kichwapiq hatun qillqa lulay/ Planificación del corpus del quechua del Perú. Amerindia 24: 1–30. Coronel-Molina, Serafín M. (2005). Lenguas originarias cruzando el puente de la brecha digital: Nuevas formas de revitalización del quechua y el aimara. In Lenguas e identidades en los Andes: perspectivas ideológicas y culturales, Serafín M. CoronelMolina and Linda L. Grabner-Coronel (eds.), 31–82. Quito: Abya Yala. García, Maria Elena (2005). Making Indigenous Citizens: Identity, Development, and Multicultural Activism in Peru. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Godenzzi, Juan Carlos (1992). El recurso lingüístico del poder: Cuartadas ideológicas del quechua y el castellano. In El quechua en debate: ideología, normalización y enseñanza, Juan Carlos Godenzzi (ed.), 51–77. Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas.” Godenzzi, Juan Carlos (1997). Literacy and modernization among the

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Quechua speaking population of Peru. In Indigenous Literacies in the Americas: Language Planning from the Bottom Up, Nancy H. Hornberger (ed.), 237–249. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Heath, Shirley Brice, and Richard Laprade (1982). Castilian colonization and indigenous languages: The case of Quechua and Aymara. In Language Spread: Studies in Diffusion and Social Change, Robert L. Cooper (ed.), 118–147. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hornberger, Nancy H. (1988). Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris Publications. Hornberger, Nancy H. (1993). The first workshop on Quechua and Aymara writing. In The Earliest Stage of Language Planning, the “First Congress” Phenomenon, Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), 233–256. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hornberger, Nancy H. (1995). Five vowels or three? Linguistics and politics in Quechua language planning in Peru. In Power and Inequality in Language Education, J. W. Tollefson (ed.), 187–205. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hornberger, Nancy H., and Serafin M. Coronel-Molina (2004). Quechua language shift, maintenance and revitalization in the Andes: The case for language planning. International Journal of Sociology of Language 167: 9–67. Hornberger, Nancy H., and Kendall King (2006). Quechua as lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 26: 177–194. Klarén, Peter F. (2000). Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ley General de Educación, Ley No. 28044 (2003). Diario Oficial El Peruano, July 29, 2003, 248, 944–956. Retrieved from http://www.minedu.gob.pe/ el_ministerio/dir.php?obj=leyes.htm.

Ley Nacional de Lenguas, Ley No. 28106, Ley de Reconocimiento, Preservación, Fomento y Difusión de las Lenguas Aborígenes (2003). Archivo digital de la legislación en el Perú. Retrieved from http://www.congreso.gob.pe/ ntley/Imagenes/Leyes/28106.pdf. López, Luis Enrique (1990). El bilingüismo de los unos y los otros: diglosia y conflicto lingüístico en el Perú. In Diglosia linguo-literario y educación en el Perú, Enrique Ballón-Aguirre and Rodolfo CerrónPalomino (eds.), 91–128. Lima, Peru: CONCYTEC / GTZ. Mannheim, Bruce (1991). The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion. Austin: University of Texas Press. Marr, Timothy (1998). The language left at Ticlio: Social and cultural perspectives on Quechua loss in Lima, Peru. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Liverpool. Normalización del lenguaje pedagógico para las lenguas andinas. Informe final (1989). Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Producciones Cima. von Gleich, Utta (1994). Language spread policy: The case of Quechua in the Andean republics of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 107: 77–103. Weber, David J. (1998). Ortografía. Lecciones del quechua, 2nd ed. Yarinacocha, Pucallpa, Peru: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. Wölck, Wolfgang (1991). The standardization of Quechua: Some problems and suggestions. In Proceedings of Standardization of National Languages, Utta von Gleich and Ekkehard Wolff (eds.), 43–54. University of Hamburg, Germany. Zúñiga, Madeleine, Liliana Sánchez, and Daniela Zacharías (2000). Demanda y necesidad de educación bilingüe: Lenguas indígenas y castellano en el sur andino. Lima: Ministry of Education of Peru/GTZ/KfW.

12 Paradoxes of Quechua Language Revitalization in Bolivia: Back and Forth along the Success-Failure Continuum AUROLYN LUYKX

Introduction This chapter1 focuses on recent RLS2 efforts around Bolivian Quechua and their implications for Quechua’s future vitality.3 Bolivia and Peru share a common colonial past, characterized by the displacement, economic subjugation, and forced acculturation of indigenous peoples. In both countries, this oppressive legacy is offset (though not erased) by recent policies to acknowledge and preserve each country’s cultural and linguistic diversity. However, history tells us that language planning efforts may have unintended or even contradictory outcomes. In this unprecedented moment in Bolivia’s history, it should not surprise us that emergent social changes may have paradoxical effects, or that Quechua speakers’ choices may be beyond what language planners can predict.

Distribution and Variation of Quechua in Bolivia As late as the 1950s, Quechua was the most widely spoken language in Bolivia; by the 1970s, however, over half of the population spoke Spanish (INE 1980), and many Quechua speakers were no longer passing the language on to their children. Today, over one-fourth of Bolivia’s 8 million inhabitants are Quechua speakers. Most are bilingual (Quechua-Spanish), but a significant number—mostly the very old and the very young—are monolingual.

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Despite a robust presence throughout large areas of the country, Quechua can be considered endangered in the long term. Census data show a clear decline in the number of speakers (INE 2008). This decline is slower in rural areas; however, like most of Latin America, Bolivia displays a strong trend of rural-to-urban migration. Today, nearly half of the indigenous population lives in urban areas (Tuchschneider 2006, 274), where children tend to grow up Spanish-dominant, even if their parents speak Quechua. Children of migrants, even those who retain their Quechua into adulthood, are likely to raise their own children mainly in Spanish. In parts of Bolivia, intense and prolonged contact between Quechua and Spanish has given rise to a creolized variety known as quechuañol (Guarachi 1996; Sichra 2003). Conversely, Andean Spanish displays noticeable Quechua influence, even among Spanish monolinguals (Michenot 1985). One can consider these intermediate varieties as points along a continuum, with standard Spanish at one pole and more conservative varieties of Quechua at the other. In contrast to the Peruvian situation, all Quechua dialects within Bolivia are mutually intelligible, deriving from the “Cuzco-Collao” branch (Quechua IIC, according to Torero’s [1964] classification). The fact that Quechua speakers from any part of Bolivia can communicate with one another is important to RLS efforts, since it affords the language more possibilities for extra-local use. It is also significant to issues of corpus planning and bilingual education (discussed below).

Quechua Communities before and after Schooling Prior to Bolivia’s popular revolution of 1952, most indigenous people lived in conditions of serfdom. Some rural landowners learned Quechua, to communicate with “their” Indians, but peasants were denied access to formal schooling and thus to Spanish, the language of power and prestige. The government displayed little concern for rural education. When indigenous people established their own schools, they were often brutally attacked by rural whites and mestizos eager to defend the country’s rigid racial hierarchy. After the revolution, rural schools multiplied, but instruction was exclusively in Spanish. Speaking Quechua, even during recess, was considered “uncivilized” and was harshly punished. The abusive and racist atmosphere drove most students to drop out within a few years; those who continued were strongly pressured to abandon their native language. Economic and social mobility meant not only speaking Spanish, but not speaking Quechua. Thus, one paradox of Quechua’s history is that the very isolation and marginalization of peasant communities helped keep Quechua vital through 500 years of oppression, whereas political enfranchisement, educational opportunity, and new possibilities for social mobility led many indigenous people to abandon it in favor of Spanish. As Bolivian society became less segregated, more Quechua speakers learned Spanish and came to see it as superior, at least for public purposes.

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Quechuas with more formal schooling, who presumably would have more political and economic clout to exercise on behalf of their language, were the most likely to have left it behind in their quest for greater opportunities. While many continued to use both languages, others avoided speaking Quechua in public, or even denied knowing how to speak it. Before the revolution, most Quechua speakers were monolingual. Afterward, with the spread of mass schooling, most eventually became bilingual. The shift to Spanish is particularly acute during children’s school years, as children start using more Spanish among themselves and parents use it more with them at home. Younger siblings of school-aged children are likely to hear more Spanish at home than Quechua (Luykx 2004b). Also, many bilingual parents choose to raise their children solely in Spanish, hoping to give them an academic advantage and shield them from the discrimination that they themselves suffered.

Early Educational Efforts in Support of Quechua In the 1960s and 1970s, many countries began to experiment with mother-tongue education for indigenous language speakers. In Bolivia, rural literacy campaigns reached thousands with materials and instruction in Quechua and Aymara (Bolivia’s second-largest indigenous language); even remote communities could follow the lessons on indigenous language radio stations. Thus, long before bilingual education was implemented in rural primary schools, many adults had already learned to read and write in Quechua. Subsequently, UNICEF, USAID, the World Bank, and various charitable and missionary organizations established school-based bilingual programs, with or without government support. The most extensive was the Proyecto de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (PEIB), carried out by UNICEF and Bolivia’s Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC). Between 1988 and 1994, the PEIB reached Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní children in 114 schools. These early initiatives suffered many limitations (Briggs 1985; Nucinkis 2006), but they helped build public understanding and support for mother-tongue instruction. They also trained dozens of indigenous educators; later, when the Bolivian government decided to pursue bilingual education on a large scale, it was able to draw on an existing pool of indigenous language speakers who had participated in the PEIB and other such programs. The PEIB experience was also notable for allowing indigenous people to have real input on the educational policies affecting them. As the web site of Bolivia’s Consejos Educativos de los Pueblos Originarios (CEPOS) indicates: One of the most significant aspects of the PEIB was the social support that it achieved by incorporating delegates from the National Confederation of Rural Schoolteachers of Bolivia (CONMERB) and the Confederation of Peasant Unions of Bolivia (CSUTCB) . . . . . . CONMERB was the first organization to affirm the need for rural schools to implement bilingual-intercultural education at the national level, and to call for more effective participation of the [indigenous] community in education. (CEPOS 2007)4

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The Educational Reform of 1994 By the 1980s, due to increases in both rural schooling and urban migration, many schoolteachers were themselves Quechua or Aymara speakers. However, dominant educational practices did not encourage use of their bilingual skills in the classroom. But in 1994, a reformed national constitution explicitly affirmed Bolivia’s cultural and linguistic diversity.5 That same year, after several years of planning and consultation with international agencies, the government of Jaime Paz Zamora passed the Ley 1565 de Reforma Educativa, a sweeping measure with profound consequences for virtually all aspects of the educational system. Though hotly contested (especially by the urban teachers union), it steadily gained adherents, and resistance dwindled after a few years. A centerpiece of the reform was its mandate to implement bilingual-intercultural education throughout the country. By 2002, over 192,000 Bolivian children were receiving bilingual instruction— 11 percent of all primary school students, including 38.4 percent of Quechuaspeaking children aged six to eleven (Albó 2004, 131). The 1994 reform also mandated the creation of indigenous educational councils (Consejos Educativos de Pueblos Originarios, or CEPOs), for Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní, and the smaller languages of the Amazon. The CEPOs were not just token entities, but decision-making bodies whose leadership included seasoned veterans of the long struggle for bilingual education and indigenous rights (CEPOS 2007). As a bridge between the Ministry of Education and the indigenous grassroots, the CEPOs played a key role in the planning, implementation, and monitoring of Bolivia’s new language policies. Also important was the role of the asesores pedagógicos (pedagogical advisors). These mid-level professionals were to help classroom teachers understand and implement the reform, including the use of indigenous-language school texts. Many were former principals or departmental supervisors, some with experience in the PEIB or past rural literacy campaigns. The four to five months of additional training that they received included aspects of bilingual-intercultural education but, inexplicably, did not include instruction on writing Quechua or teaching Spanish as a second language. Although these topics were eventually incorporated, only about half of the 1,600 asesores received (limited) instruction in these areas as part of their initial preparation (Nucinkis 2006, 51). The job performance of the asesores pedagógicos was uneven, and confusion about their role was widespread (Valentín Arispe, personal communication; see also Albó 2004, 134, and Nucinkis 2006, 52). Additionally, their high salaries provoked resentment among teachers and principals. Nonetheless, they were the main link between educational planners and rank-and-file schoolteachers; without them, the reform would have little chance of success, especially in rural schools. However, in April 2003, the government discontinued their position, due to lack of resources (as external financing ran out) and pressure from the teachers union. To many observers, this symbolized the beginning of the end of the government’s commitment to bilingual education. Throughout its duration, the reform was the target of numerous criticisms, many directed at the new indigenous-language school texts (known as módulos).

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The government had contracted well-known linguists to develop standard orthographies for indigenous languages, and produced various materials in Quechua, Aymara, and other languages. However, critics charged that the language used in the módulos reflected Spanish grammatical, semantic, and discursive conventions rather than indigenous ones (Arnold and Yapita 2006; Luykx 2003, 2004a), while schoolteachers, students, and parents complained that they omitted common Spanish borrowings in favor of archaic indigenous terms that were unfamiliar to most speakers. The official orthography also provoked widespread skepticism. Designed to reflect etymological and morphological relationships rather than modern-day pronunciations, it was perceived by many native speakers as difficult and foreign. Some complained that the módulos used “Peruvian” rather than Bolivian Quechua; while not quite accurate, this sentiment reflects not only speakers’ rejection of a written Quechua for which they felt little affinity or ownership, but also the preponderant influence of Peruvian linguists in Bolivian language planning. Standardization and uniformity are key values of states (Bourdieu 1975; Scott 1999), but not necessarily of speech communities. While expanding Quechua written practice is certainly a worthy goal, it is debatable whether a standardized orthography was a necessary prerequisite. As Albó (2004, 126) notes: [T]he legitimate efforts of linguists to achieve [a standardized written Quechua] sometimes bump up against local resistance. There are complaints that the norm, created in an office somewhere, “isn’t the Quechua that we speak”; “it must be from some other country, it’s not ours”; or even “it’s the Reform’s Quechua,” uttered in a dismissive tone. The premature insistence on an interdialectal norm—undoubtedly useful in the long term, if not imposed in a dogmatic manner—can thus turn out to be counterproductive . . . Positive motivation [among users] is more important than strictly linguistic considerations.

The 1994 education reform was the largest official undertaking ever in favor of Bolivia’s indigenous languages. Teacher training institutions were revamped to prepare bilingual teachers, new opportunities emerged for bilingual teachers already in service, numerous indigenous language materials were produced, and dozens of indigenous professionals engaged in language planning activities. In yet another paradox of Bolivian language planning, this proliferation of RLS activity occurred under administrations that were not generally perceived as friendly to indigenous interests. The neoliberal6 governments of the 1990s and early 2000s contained few indigenous advocates (aside from Aymara intellectual Victor Hugo Cárdenas, who was vice president from 1993–1997 and a key supporter of the educational reform). However, they contained many advocates of technological progress and the development of Bolivia’s human capital. Such goals required an effective educational system, and Spanish-only schooling had been an unmitigated failure in rural areas. Despite widespread social prejudice against indigenous languages, key members of Bolivia’s political class supported bilingual-intercultural education as the key to improving schooling’s effectiveness and fostering indigenous people’s social and economic integration. Pressure from international lending institutions such as the World Bank no doubt influenced their position as well.

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However, the reform suffered from persistent difficulties in administration, instruction, teacher preparation, and public support. Student outcomes were mixed. Certainly, the atmosphere in schools became less racist and repressive—a significant improvement for the hundreds of thousands of indigenous children who spend their days there. Teachers reported an upsurge in Quechua students’ creativity, comprehension, verbal participation, and enthusiasm, compared to pre-reform classrooms (Albó 2004, Urzagaste 1999). Some bilingual schools showed improvement in the promotion and retention of students; others did not. Many indigenous parents complained that inadequate attention was given to teaching Spanish. While there were some positive indicators of students’ academic achievement in bilingual classrooms, the lack of adequate assessment tools made this hard to measure. The most relevant question for our purposes is whether the reform’s substantial investment in bilingual-intercultural education helped to maintain children’s use of Quechua beyond the classroom; lamentably, there is little information available on this point. The reform originally proposed to expand bilingual education until the eighth grade, but it was never widely implemented beyond the fourth grade. Thus, many children became literate in Quechua, but had few opportunities to develop these skills beyond primary school and into their own childbearing years. One would hope that the school’s positive reinforcement of Quechua would have some lasting effect on children’s later language use; but given the realities of migration, social and economic pressures in favor of Spanish, and persistent prejudice against Quechua, this is far from certain. Hopefully, future research will shed light on this important question.

RLS Efforts outside the School Education is not the only arena for language revitalization. Especially in remote areas where other media are scarce, radio is a crucial means of communication. During periods of dictatorship, rural radio served to organize resistance among Quechua and Aymara peasants and miners. Today, Quechua-language stations broadcast news summaries, soap operas, music, sports events, and educational programs. ERBOL (Escuelas Radiofónicas de Bolivia) was established in the 1980s with a half-hour news program in Quechua, broadcast by twenty-one affiliated stations; in 1990, ERBOL became the Red Quechua Nacional (National Quechua Network), which by 1995 had become the Red Quechua Satélite Continental (Continental Quechua Satellite Network), with affiliates in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador (Luykx 2001). The network’s headquarters rotates yearly among the three countries; producers and announcers engage in conscious language planning as they strive to make their programs accessible to speakers of many different dialects. This “bottom-up” language planning is much less normative in character than the efforts associated with the educational reform. Although Quechua has been written since colonial times, its literary tradition is limited, aside from literacy materials and religious tracts.7 However, the bimonthly, bilingual (Quechua-Spanish) newspaper Conosur Ñawpaqman has been published by the non-governmental Centro de Desarrollo y Comunicación

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Andino, or CENDA, continuously for over twenty-five years. Its editors, though familiar with standardized Quechua, have opted for “an alternative perspective on writing, closer to oral speech, which allows us to capture the unique voice of individuals, communities, and organizations” (Sichra 2008, 137). Some of Bolivia’s Spanish-language newspapers also contain weekly supplements in Quechua, and a niche market has developed for small books of Quechua poetry and fiction. The use of Quechua in higher education remains limited, but has seen significant advances in the last decade. At the Universidad Mayor de San Simón (UMSS) in Cochabamba, Quechua has long been a required subject for students in medicine and agronomy, since professionals in those fields must often interact with Quechua speakers. In contrast, the Languages and Linguistics department has traditionally focused on English and French. In the 1990s, while I was a professor there, a few students approached me wanting to write theses about Quechua or Aymara. Despite scant support from other faculty, these students produced valuable work on language planning and the mutual influences between Spanish and indigenous languages. Nowadays, such topics are seen as acceptable for student theses in linguistics—though the thesis must still be written in English or French. This shift in attitude was helped along by the presence within UMSS of PROEIB Andes (Programa de Formación en Educación Intercultural Bilingüe para los Paises Andinos), which offers an international master’s program for indigenous educators. PROEIB incorporates numerous indigenous languages into its academic program to an unprecedented degree. During its first cohort, Quechua students from several countries met weekly to compare dialects and practice writing in Quechua. A few even attempted to write their theses in Quechua, but this proved difficult, given the lack of a developed academic register (Luykx 2000). Nonetheless, it eventually became standard practice for PROEIB student theses to include a summary in the indigenous language, of which Quechua was the most common (see Pari 2002). Although Quechua’s presence in the university was initially viewed with curiosity and skepticism, it eventually became a source of pride and prestige (due in part to PROEIB Andes’ international credentials and reputation for academic rigor). In 1998, students and faculty witnessed a speech in Quechua by a UMSS dean— something unprecedented in the institution’s history. Outside the university as well, attitudes toward indigenous languages were changing. Growing numbers of indigenous people were elected to Parliament, where they occasionally challenged the hegemony of Spanish by addressing their fellow deputies in Quechua or Aymara. The impact was mainly symbolic—most deputies are Spanish monolinguals and translation is not provided—but the message was clear: indigenous people are moving into positions of power and are prepared to push for their linguistic rights.

The “Evo” Phenomenon and the Future of Quechua The past decade has been a turbulent time in Bolivian politics, with five presidents between 2001–2005 and three ministers of education in the space of a single year. The upheaval culminated with the election of Evo Morales in 2006. Though his status as Latin America’s first indigenous president is debatable, Morales’s

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victory was widely hailed as a triumph for indigenous Bolivians, and he enjoys strong support from peasants and the urban working class. Morales rose to prominence, not via the traditional indigenous/peasant organizations, but as leader of Bolivia’s coca growers’ union. (Coca, besides serving as the precursor for cocaine, is an important element of indigenous social and religious practice and a central symbol of indigenous identity). Though not an indigenous language speaker, he has spoken out strongly for the revalorization of indigenous cultures, and against the economic and political marginalization of Bolivia’s pueblos originarios (“original peoples”). However, Morales’s presidency has not been especially kind to RLS efforts, particularly those associated with the 1994 educational reform. The reform law survived five administrations, a rare feat in a country where new governments habitually denounce and discontinue the policies of their immediate predecessors. While one might have expected Morales to consolidate or even deepen the government’s commitment to bilingual education, one of his first official acts was to suspend the reform, denouncing it along with the other neoliberal policies of his disgraced opponents. In its place, the Ministry of Education proposed the Nueva Ley de la Educación Boliviana “Avelino Siñani y Elizardo Pérez” (named for the founders of Warisata, a 1930s experimental school that was a watershed in indigenous education). Characterizing the 1994 reform as “an expression of the anti-indigenous, antipopular, neoliberal market economy” (MEC 2006, cited in Sichra 2008, 150), the new law emphasizes not “interculturalism” but the need to “decolonize” education. Although publicly supportive of indigenous languages and cultures, Morales dismissed several government officials with extensive training and experience in bilingual education, declaring it to be “cosa de gringos” (a white people’s thing). Bilingual education did in fact have a long history of involvement by foreign NGOs, and the 1994 reform depended heavily on foreign expertise and financing. Prior to the 1980s, Bolivia’s political class had little interest in promoting bilingual education or indigenous cultures, and few indigenous communities had the resources to undertake such projects. Thus, initiatives came from outside, or not at all. Three years later, the new education law has yet to be approved by Parliament; in the meantime, the 1994 law remains nominally in effect, but ignored by both the Ministry and teachers. As Sichra (2008, 157) explains: Faced with this legal gap . . . educational authorities from departmental directors down to classroom teachers returned to the institutional and educative practices of the pre-reform era . . . The [indigenous language] modules that were not distributed in 2005 not only go unused, they have disappeared from the Ministry’s warehouses. Their physical disappearance complements the disappearance of the term “interculturalism,” whose use is prohibited in government education offices.

Correspondingly, the CEPOs’ role in promoting bilingual education has diminished: Their functions now focus on legislation, not on the consolidation or practice of bilingual education. But they have also lost their starring role as agents of language planning. The members of the Quechua CEPO, in their dwindling everyday labors, no longer write nor speak in Quechua . . . Some claim not to have learned

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to write it—something that the schoolchildren educated under the Reform did do. The publications and newspapers of the CEPOs are not of their own production, they told me, but are “delegated” to [university-educated] indigenous intellectuals to write. (Sichra 2008, 153)

In fact, the CEPOs website (www.cepos.bo) has content only in Spanish—although Quechua has a significant (if mostly symbolic) web presence elsewhere, including on Wikipedia. Sichra (2008, 153) continues: Indigenous written culture, rather than spreading and becoming a more permanent part of daily life, has become a kind of symbolic capital of social differentiation among indigenous people themselves . . . With the de facto disappearance of bilingual-intercultural education as a state policy . . . entities created to promote BIE and indigenous languages have lost not only their main reason for being, but also their interlocutory function as educational actors.

The euphoria of Morales’s election seems to have generated a sense of complacency regarding indigenous language planning. As political opposition to Morales intensified, indigenous organizations opted to close ranks behind him rather than express their own criticisms. Indigenous activist Iván Ignacio commented in the Bolivian monthly Pukara (March 29, 2008; cited in Sichra, 2008, 152): “Having an indigenous president functioned like an anesthetic on the critical spirit of the indigenous and other social organizations.” Still, Morales’s election resulted in an unprecedented number of Quechua (and Aymara) speakers in high government positions. Although his presidency constitutes a serious setback for bilingual education, this may be offset somewhat by the increased prestige and political power that he has brought to indigenous Bolivians more generally. If his administration can produce sustainable improvements in indigenous people’s economic and social standing, this may slow Quechua’s decline more effectively than policies specifically targeting language. As minority language advocates have long argued (Crawford 1996; Fishman 1991; López 2007; Luykx 2003, 2004a), language loss is a symptom of broader social and cultural dislocation. Even today, 84 percent of Bolivia’s monolingual indigenous language speakers live in poverty (Tuchschneider 2006, 276). If Quechua continues to be associated with backwardness and marginalization, language revitalization will be an uphill battle. Conversely, if Quechua speakers carry their language with them as they move in from the margins of society, it will likely improve Quechua’s status. There is another complicating factor, however: the powerful backlash against Morales from Bolivia’s wealthier, whiter sectors. Dozens have died in violent clashes between Morales’s supporters and opponents, and regions where opposition is strongest have threatened to secede. While alarms of a pending civil war may be overblown, Bolivia is more racially polarized than it has been in decades. As indigenous identity comes to be associated with Morales’s fiery rhetoric and particular brand of leftist militancy, this may not be to Quechua’s ultimate benefit. Given that his political triumph may eventually end in disgrace and defeat— always a strong possibility for Bolivian presidents—one wonders if the status of Bolivia’s indigenous languages may decline along with him.

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Conclusions Despite its shortcomings, the 1994 educational reform made significant progress with regard to indigenous languages. Numerous school texts in indigenous languages were produced and distributed, and thousands of teachers learned to use those languages in the classroom. Nearly 200,000 indigenous children received instruction in their mother tongue. Indigenous organizations weighed in regularly on the government’s educational proposals, and countered with their own. The emphasis on bilingual-intercultural education constituted a substantive, if flawed, response to indigenous demands. The blatant and unapologetic racism that characterized Bolivian schooling for most of its history was challenged from above and below, and the long-established mission of “civilizing” the Indian was replaced by the multiculturalist slogan of “unity in diversity.” Despite this, Quechua still carries negative social connotations. Ethnic discrimination has diminished, but not disappeared. This was made abundantly clear on May 24, 2008, when a group of Quechua peasants and unionists were stripped, beaten, spat upon, and publicly humiliated in the city of Sucre by an anti-Morales mob shouting racist epithets.8 Apparently, the “unity in diversity” rhetoric has not penetrated as deeply as we might wish. Given both the real progress and the serious limitations of Quechua revitalization efforts, it is hard to rank their success on a simple 1–10 scale. RLS efforts, like language loss itself, occur in many domains at once, with uneven and often contradictory results. At the peak of the educational reform, Quechua’s long-term prospects might have rated around 6 or 7. Today, I would hesitate to rate them above a 5. The most discouraging aspect is perhaps not the withdrawal of official support from bilingual education—after all, RLS efforts cannot depend indefinitely on external resources—but the fact that so little is left to show after such abundant investment in language planning efforts. The crux of any language revitalization movement is whether the language community itself embraces it and carries it forward. In Bolivia, there is little evidence of this. While many Quechua language activists remain committed, they have not managed to popularize their cause among a critical mass of everyday speakers. This is partly due to the “top-down” nature of government language planning efforts, which consistently subordinated the perspectives of everyday speakers to those of “experts.” Another error was the near-exclusive focus on formal education as the site of RLS efforts. The school is but one front in the battle for endangered languages. The root cause of language loss is declining minority language use in the home—in Fishman’s (1991) terms, a breakdown in “inter-generational mother tongue transmission.” If this problem is not addressed, no amount of bilingual education will ensure Quechua’s future. In fact, it may have the opposite effect, by helping children acquire the dominant language more effectively (Luykx 1999). Currently, bilingualism is on the rise among Quechua speakers. This in itself is not a bad thing, but census data indicate that for many Quechua families bilingualism is a transitional phase, leading to Spanish monolingualism within two or three generations. Given the social pressures favoring Spanish, it is hard to see

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how Quechua’s decline can be reversed without a comprehensive language policy based on a different set of priorities than in the past. To date, there have been few government-sanctioned efforts to promote Quechua outside of schools. It is still a difficult and humiliating experience for a monolingual Quechua speaker to seek service in a bank or government office. Quechua television is limited to the occasional religious program. For the most part, Quechua remains the language of private, domestic, oral domains, while Spanish reigns in the public, official, high-status world. Of course, Quechua could survive and thrive in the domains that have always constituted its stronghold. Such is the case of Guaraní in Paraguay, where most people are bilingual and the functional distribution of Spanish and Guaraní is stable and generally non-conflictive. In my opinion, the best strategy to ensure Quechua’s future vitality would not only target formal education, but would build on Quechua’s traditional strengths: its powerful emotional link to family and community settings; its importance in popular religious practices; its aesthetic value, not only in the narrow domains of poetry and literature, but also in folkloric music, popular theater, and speech play. A televised soap opera in Quechua would undoubtedly find an audience. To accomplish this, language planners need more information about when, where, how, and why speakers continue to use Quechua. Emerging research is shedding light on vernacular Quechua literacies (de la Piedra 2009, 2010; Hornberger 1997; von Gleich 2004), but language planners seem to have taken little notice of it. More studies of the popular uses of Quechua—urban as well as rural, innovative as well as traditional—would help to develop RLS strategies “from the bottom up.” Such strategies might stand a better chance of being carried forward by Quechua speakers themselves. In a classic article, James Crawford reminds us that “if language shift reflects a change in values, so too must efforts to reverse language shift” (1996, 55). Such a change in values seems—or seemed—well under way in Bolivia. We can only hope that current political conflicts do not lead to a re-entrenchment of the country’s most divisive tendencies. Should that happen, RLS efforts are likely to encounter even more resistance. Crawford (1996, 56) also notes that “language shift cannot be reversed by outsiders, however well-meaning.” For RLS efforts to succeed, minority language speakers themselves must rally around them. In Bolivia, public support is too often limited to stirring declarations (in Spanish) about Quechua, rather than actual sustained use of the language. When even committed language activists do not use Quechua consistently with their children, this does not bode well for the future. Nevertheless, one encouraging outcome of recent RLS efforts is the substantial number of Quechua speakers who understand what is at stake and know enough about language planning to plot a path toward their goals. Perhaps the abundance of foreign resources for the 1994 education reform in some sense hindered the development of autonomous RLS efforts. Promising local initiatives emerged, but were overshadowed by huge official programs. With those programs now in disarray, perhaps there is room for a thousand flowers of Quechua revitalization to bloom, each according to its own local vision.

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Notes 1. My thanks to Valentín Arispe—friend, colleague, and advisor to the Quechua CEPO—for his valuable input on the events and processes described herein. Thanks also to María Teresa de la Piedra for her comments on an earlier draft. 2. Reversing Language Shift, after Fishman (1991). 3. I will not discuss Quechua’s history or colonial language policies, as CoronelMolina (chapter 11 of this volume) addresses these. Before independence in 1825, the area now known as Bolivia constituted the colonial administrative region of Alto Perú. Thus, Coronel-Molina’s discussion of language policies in colonial Peru applies to Bolivia as well. 4. All translations of Spanish sources are my own. 5. Here I provide only a brief summary of the reform’s achievements and limitations. For detailed analyses, see Albó and Anaya (2004); Contreras and Talavera (2004); López (2005); Nucinkis (2006); and Yapu and Torrico (2003). 6. The term neoliberal, common throughout Latin America, should not be confused with (social) liberalism. It refers instead to economic liberalism, which supports privatization over government-subsidized industries and reduced regulatory barriers to the free movement of capital and commodities. 7. During the 1960s–1970s, Wycliffe Bible Translators (a.k.a. Summer Institute of Linguistics) produced Quechua-language Bibles, which one still occasionally encounters in rural areas. 8. These events are documented in the video Humillados y Ofendidos by César Brie. The DVD was distributed informally throughout Bolivia, and can be found on YouTube.

References Albó, Xavier (2004). El futuro del Quechua visto desde una perspectiva boliviana. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 167: 119–130. Albó, Xavier, and Amalia Anaya (2004). Niños alegres, libres, expresivos: La audacia de la educación intercultural bilingüe en Bolivia. La Paz: CIPCA/ UNICEF. Arispe, Valentín (interview, conducted by the author). July 27, 2008, Cochabamba. Arnold, Denise, with Juan de Dios Yapita (2006). The Metamorphosis of Heads: Textual Struggles, Education, and Land in the Andes. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1975). Le fétichisme de la langue. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 4:2–32. Briggs, Lucy T. (1985). Bilingual education in Bolivia and Peru. In Language of Inequality, Nessa

Wolfson and Joan Manes (eds.), 297–310. New York: Mouton. Consejos Educativos de los Pueblos Originarios (CEPOs) (2007). Antecedentes. Retrieved from http:// www.cepos.bo/ver1.0/index. php?option=com_content&task=view &id=14&Itemid=40. Contreras, Manuel, and María Luisa Talavera (2004). Examen parcial: La reforma educativa boliviana, 1992–2002. La Paz: Fundación PIEB. Crawford, James (1996). Seven hypotheses on language loss: Causes and cures. In Stabilizing Indigenous LAnguages, Gina Cantoni (ed.), 45–60. Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University. de la Piedra, María Teresa (2009). Hybrid literacies: The case of a Quechua community in the Andes. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 40(2): 110–128.

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de la Piedra, María Teresa (2010). Religious and self-generated literacy practices in the Peruvian Andes. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 13(1): 99–113. Fishman, Joshua. A. (1991). Reversing Language Shift: Theory and Practice of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon : Multilingual Matters. Guarachi, Marta Lía (1996). Quechuañol: A linguistic variant or a creole language? Thesis, Dept. of Applied Linguistics, Universidad Mayor de San Simón (Cochabamba). Hornberger, Nancy. (1997). Quechua literacy and empowerment in Peru. In Indigenous Literacies in the Americas: Language Planning from the Bottom Up, Nancy Hornberger (ed.), 215–237. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) (1980). Resultados del censo nacional de población y vivienda, 1976. La Paz: INE. INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) (2008). Resultados del censo nacional de población y vivienda, 2001. La Paz: INE. López, Luis Enrique (2005). De resquicios a boquerones. La educación intercultural bilingüe en Bolivia. La Paz: Plural Editores/PROEIB Andes. López, Luis Enrique (2007). Top-down and bottom-up: Counterpoised visions of bilingual intercultural education in Latin America. In Can Schools Save Indigenous Languages? Policy and Practice on Four Continents, Nancy Hornberger (ed.), 42–65. New York: Palgrave. Luykx, Aurolyn (1999). The historical contradictions of language maintenance: Bilingual education and the decline of indigenous languages. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, Nov. 17–21.

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Luykx, Aurolyn (2000). Use of indigenous languages in higher education: Shaping round pegs to fit square holes. Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation Fall Fellows Forum, New York, Oct. 11–13. Luykx, Aurolyn (2001). Across the Andean airwaves: Satellite radio broadcasting in Quechua. In Endangered Languages and the Media: Proceedings of the Fifth Foundation for Endangered Languages Conference, Christopher Moseley, Nicholas Ostler, and Hassan Ouzzate (eds.), 115–119. Bath, UK: Foundation for Endangered Languages. Luykx, Aurolyn (2003). Whose language is it anyway? Historical fetishism and the construction of expertise in Bolivian language planning. Current Issues in Comparative Education 5(2), May. Retrieved from: www.tc. columbia.edu/cice/articles/al152.htm. Luykx, Aurolyn (2004a). The future of Quechua and the Quechua of the future: Language ideologies and language planning in Bolivia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 167: 147–158. Luykx, Aurolyn (2004b). Children as socializing agents: family language policy in situations of language shift. In ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, J. Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, K. Rolstad, and J. MacSwan, (eds.), 1407–1414. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. MEC (Ministerio de Educación y Culturas) (2006). Nueva ley de la educación Boliviana “Avelino Siñani y Elizardo Pérez”: Anteproyecto de Ley. La Paz: MEC. Michenot, Elizabeth (1985). Bilingüismo y educación. Faces 1: 43–69. Cochabamba. Nucinkis, Nicole (2006). La EIB en Bolivia. In La EIB en América Latina

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bajo examen, Luis Enrique López and Carlos Rojas (eds.). 25–110. La Paz: Plural Editores/Banco Mundial/GTZ. Pari, Adán (2002). Enseñanza de la lectoescritura en quechua (L1) en Rodeo, Cochabamba. Unpublished master’s thesis, Universidad Mayor de San Simon (Cochabamba). Scott, James (1999). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sichra, Inge (2003). La vitalidad del quechua: Lengua y sociedad en dos provincias de Cochabamba. La Paz: Plural Editores/PROEIB Andes. Sichra, Inge (2008). Cultura escrita quechua en Bolivia: Contradicción en los tiempos del poder. Revista Página y Signos 2(3): 133–158.

Torero, Alfredo (1964). Los dialectos quechuas. Anales científicos de la Universidad Agraria VI(3–4): 446–478. Tuchschneider, David (2006). Social inclusion of indigenous peoples. In Bolivia: Public Policy Options for the Well-Being of All, Victor Fretes-Cibils, Marcelo Giugale, and Connie Luff (eds.), 273–288. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Urzagaste, Nancy. (1999). Levantamiento línea de base EIB: Informe final. Sucre: UNICEF. Von Gleich, Utta (2004). New Quechua literacies in Bolivia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 167: 131–146. Yapu, Mario, and Cassandra Torrico (2003). Escuelas primarias y formación docente en tiempos de reforma educativa. La Paz: PEIB.

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13 North Korea’s Language Revision and Some Unforeseen Consequences The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic-Identity Efforts ROBERT B. KAPLAN RICHARD B. BALDAUF, JR.

Introduction The “butterfly effect” suggests, metaphorically, that the beating of a butterfly’s wings in the Brazilian jungle may cause extensive and unexpected consequences elsewhere in the world. Like the butterfly effect, a lack of formal planning may have unintended consequences. Kaplan and Baldauf (1997, 297–299, following from Baldauf 1994; Baldauf and Luke 1990; see also Eggington 2010), have suggested that “unplanned” language planning may involve: (1) language modification affected by accident; (2) a shared set of laissez-faire attitudes toward a language situation; (3) an ad hoc solution to an immediate problem— (Eggington 2010). The North Korean case is a perfect example of unplanned, politically inspired, top-down language planning; it evolved out of Kim Il Sung’s ideas, opinions, and personal preferences, thus being ad hoc rather than emerging from systematic and long-term formal planning processes. However, once the ad hoc decisions were made, all the resources of the state were used in their implementation.

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Gal and Irvine (1995, 968) have stated “our conceptual tools for understanding linguistic differences still derive from [the] massive scholarly attempt to create the political differentiation of Europe.” The fields of anthropology and linguistics emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and during the early years of the twentieth century, when the legitimating of discrete national states was an intellectual project of vast perceived importance and equally great practical consequences, thus coinciding with the emergence of the nation-state and of the one-nation/one-language myth. The leaders of several socialist states absolutely accepted the one-nation/onelanguage myth (though ironically the myth clearly had capitalist origins). The charismatic leaders of socialist states—usually early in the organization of such states—often undertook to shape the language spoken in their polities so that it might be used in the building of the socialist state and in promoting the socialist message (e.g., see Clyne 1997). Fidel Castro (Cuba, 1959–2008), Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948–1994), Mao Zedong (China, 1949–1976), and Joseph Stalin (USSR, 1929–1953) were among those who believed in reinventing the language to serve the needs of the emerging socialist state.

Soviet Language Planning As the Soviet Union came to be regarded as a model for all other Communist states to emulate, understanding the history of language planning in the USSR is essential to understanding developments in other Communist states. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, Soviet authorities maintained that recent Soviet policy was Leninist policy in action, while others argued that recent policy represented a major departure from Lenin’s original views and owes much more to Stalin than to Lenin. The aim of Soviet authorities prior to the collapse of the USSR was to promote a particular kind of bilingualism—namely, “first language plus Russian,” since Russian had been designated the language of “inter-nationality” communication. It can be argued that this Stalinist perspective was contrary to Lenin’s view stressing the absolute equality of all languages in a multilingual state, since Lenin opposed the imposition of any single mandatory state language. Given that, in his view, Communism would ultimately emerge as a global phenomenon, it was important not to saddle socialist ideology with a single super-language. Lenin charged with chauvinism those colleagues who argued that Russian should be the sole official language of the state, urging and personally supporting an ambitious program for the study of all languages of the former Russian Empire and the creation of orthographies for those communities that lacked one (Isaev 1977). However, he understood that, in a newly emerging socialist state, literacy was an essential vehicle needed to promote modernization and to support the spread of socialism. The mass spread of literacy was one of the major achievements of the early Soviet period. During the three-quarters of a century between the 1917 Russian Revolution and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, language planning in the Soviet Union went through five phases: the Lenin period (12 years, 1917–1929), the Stalin

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period (24 years, 1929–1953), the Khrushchev period (11 years, 1953–1964), the Brezhnev period (18 years, 1964–1982), and the post-Brezhnev period (9 years, 1982–1991) (Kirkwood 1990). Although there was no consistency in policy over these periods, the purposeful formation of national Russian bilingualism was the key element in work in the area of internal national relations since there could be no administrative restriction of Russian. For example, the 1984 school reform proclaimed as its goal full mastery of Russian for every graduate of secondary school. The Soviet language (Russian) could be used at all levels in all registers and for all purposes anywhere in the USSR (Comrie 1981). Despite growing language demands by the nationalities in the latter years of the USSR, there was no official retreat from the basic principles as articulated in the 1958–1959 educational laws. No regional varieties of Russian were permitted; on the contrary, dialect variation was regarded as a violation of Russian norms. However, during the post-Brezhnev period, the language policies of the Soviet Union were gradually overturned due to pressures generated by two reforms 1: perestroika, whose goals included combating corruption and the abuse of privilege by the political classes; and glasnost, which focused on a program of economic restructuring. As these new policies weakened the system of internal repression, the ability of the central government to impose its will on the republics was substantially undermined and the languages of the constituent republics were reinstated, replacing the long-standing policy of imposing Russian (see Arutiunov 1998; Haarmann 1998). Calls for greater independence from Moscow also grew, especially in the Baltic States, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The Baltic States withstood authorities from Moscow and thus exposed an irresolute Kremlin. Supported by Boris Yeltsin, the Baltic republics asserted their sovereignty and the right to use their language, rejecting the long-standing central policy (Hogan-Brun et al., 2007). Thus, the Soviet Union provided a strong model of language development for socialist purposes, literacy, and a contradictory policy of both language centralization around Russian and support for minority languages. These are themes that can be found to greater or lesser degrees in the language planning of other socialist polities, including North Korea

North Korean Language Planning Imitating the language planning in the Soviet Union under Stalin, whom he greatly admired, Kim Il Sung undertook to remake North Korea’s language to fit its Communist ideology.2 The modern history of language planning in North Korea can be divided into three periods: the Preparation Period (8 years, 1945–1953), the Transition Period (9 years, 1954–1963), and the Munhwae [Cultured Language] Period (45 years, 1964–the Present) (Kaplan and Baldauf 1997; Moon 2000; see also “Keeper of Korean Language” 2008; see Han 2008, for the parallel history of Republic of [South] Korea and of the Korean language). These three periods were characterized by a series of activities:

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• a literacy campaign (most active in the Preparation Period and gradually decreasing because of alleged declining need); • language standardization (marked primarily by the elimination of Chinese characters); • revision of orthographic rules; • dictionary compilation; and • vocabulary management involving: (1) the deletion of words of Chinese origin, other foreign words, and words conflicting with socialist ideology, (2) the coining of new words—for example, place names, product names, technical terminology, and sociopolitical terminology, as well as appropriate ways of alluding to Kim Il Sung. Although it is often suggested that language-in-education policy should arise from national language policy articulated at the highest level of government and should have, as a primary objective, the implementation of such a national language policy (Kaplan and Baldauf 1997), this ideal condition does not often occur. In North Korea it did, and the government undertook official, sustained, and conscious efforts to shape the Korean language to its political needs. From 1949, the government recognized the sociopolitical value of the national language as the means for: • implementing socialist policy; • shaping the thinking and behavior of the populace; and • representing the will of the Party to the citizenry. Language planning, then, at the highest levels of government was structured by the objectives of socialist state-building (see, e.g., Kumatani 1990) as seen through the lenses of Kim Il Sung.

The Preparation Period (1945–1953) The most important feature of the Preparation Period was the national literacy campaign, seen as an urgent national task to establish the foundation for the construction of the socialist state. (It was estimated there were 14,250,000 illiterates in 1945—about 30 percent of the population, most of them in the rural sector.) This enormous task was accomplished in three stages: • the increase in literacy in Korean script; • the officialization and standardization of the Korean script (Hangul); and • the elimination of Chinese characters (hanja) in the written language. Increase in literacy was conceived exclusively as the elimination of illiteracy. (For a discussion of problems created by such an approach see, e.g., Kaplan and Baldauf 1997, 142–150.) The movement was strongly based on Marxist/Leninist principles. In November 1946, the Preliminary Peoples’ Committee (later the

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North Korean Peoples’ Committee) adopted what was called the “Winter Illiteracy Eradication Movement in Rural Areas”—a four-month program running from December 1947 to March 1948. All persons between twelve and fifty years of age were required to participate. A second campaign was adopted immediately following the close of the first. The entire population was involved either as teachers or as learners: • college students and teachers became literacy teachers through adult schools (specially organised Sengin hakkyo) at night and during vacation periods in every workplace; • the Youth Organization, the Women’s League, and the Peasant’s League were all involved; and • enrollment in the Sengin hakkyo jumped from 8,000 in 1945 to 40,000 by 1947. While literacy education was the central feature of these activities, ideological education was also an important objective. Simultaneous with the literacy program, a second program was implemented—“The Movement for Total Ideological Mobilization for Founding the Nation [Kenkwuksasang chongtongwen wuntong].” The government claimed that it had achieved 100 percent literacy in less than four years after independence—that is, by 1949. In addition, in December 1946, the Preliminary Peoples’ Committee also mandated Russian language schools in major cities, and by 1948 the study of Russian was compulsory at middle school level; all upper-level officials of the Party were required to be fluent in Russian. Until 1964, Russian was the only language taught in secondary schools, but from that time until the early 1970s, Russian and English were taught on a 50/50 basis. No verifiable evidence of the impact of these programs is available but, as relations with the Soviet Union diminished in the mid-1970s, English emerged as the main foreign language in secondary schools (Song 2004). The second important activity of this period involved the elimination of Chinese characters from written Korean. If the literacy objectives previously summarized were to be achieved in an extremely brief period, elimination of Chinese characters was essential on the grounds that learning the Hangul alphabet was one thing, but learning the thousands of Chinese characters necessary for basic literacy was quite another. If characters had not been eliminated from the written language, literacy could not have been so quickly achieved. Furthermore, the use of Chinese characters had historically divided the intelligentsia from the masses; consequently, the use of Chinese characters was condemned as obsolete and reactionary. It was also noted that Chinese characters constituted a foreign writing system; thus, the need for rapid transition to full literacy was coupled with patriotic (nationalistic) and socialist dogma. The process began in early 1947 by promoting a Hangul-only policy for newspapers, magazines, and school textbooks; the use of Chinese characters was officially banned in 1949 (with the exception of their use for scientific and technical purposes). Characters, if used, had to be presented in parentheses. However, the abolition of characters created a linguistic

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boundary at the 38th parallel, since characters had not been abolished in the south (Eggington 1987). The mandatory use of Hangul-only as the language of government, education, and cultural activities required standardization. Standardization was achieved by revising the grammar of Korean, creating new terminologies, writing new dictionaries, and by language purification—Chinese terms as well as Japanized Chinese terms were either expunged or nativized. In 1949, the Academic Terms Decision Committee was created in the Department of Education, and the implementation of the Committee’s work was made mandatory. This activity was not so easily accomplished; indeed, it went on well beyond the Preparatory period. There was a somewhat confused flurry of publication during this period. The New Korean Orthography was announced in 1948; its most dramatic change involved the introduction of six new graphemes ( yukcamo). Thus, the basic graphemic structure—19 consonants and 17 vowels + 6 new graphemes—consisted of 42 graphemes, but the new graphemes did not gain wide acceptance, and the new orthography was never fully implemented. A new plan, represented in Korean Orthography, was disseminated in 1954. Despite the existence of the New Korean Orthography, the Unified Plan (Hangul macchwumpep thongilan), originally promulgated in 1933, was considered the standard language description prior to 1954, since the New Korean Orthography (Cosene sinchelcapep) had been condemned by Kim Il Sung himself. In October 1948, the government called for the compilation of a Korean dictionary; in response, the Standard Language Orthography Dictionary was published in March 1947, and another Korean Dictionary (Cosenesacen) was compiled in 1949. In addition, a Russian/Korean bilingual dictionary (Rocosacen) was published in 1954. To a certain extent, the Korean War temporarily interrupted all this activity. None of these dictionaries was perceived as definitive because the standardization of the language was not really completed until some twenty years later.

The Transition Period (1954–1963) The “transition” period signaled a transition from “old” Korean (i.e., the Korean of the colonial period—that is, of the Japanese occupation—and the Korean used in the South) to “new” Korean (i.e., a variety permitting the language to function as a cultural weapon). There was another spate of publication activity, the objective of which was to standardize the language, an activity seen to require a grammar and a dictionary and to promulgate standard rules for Romanization.3 All of this activity was based on the principles laid out earlier in the Korean Orthography, intended to codify words that had been introduced over a decade of socialist state development (e.g. “workers’ party,” “people’s army,” “people’s front,” “people’s economy,” “people’s liberation war,” “soviet,” etc.) and to alter the meanings of other words (e.g. “capitalist,” which took on all the negative semantic connotations common in socialist literature), all based on Marxist/Leninist principles. The Concise Korean Dictionary (Cosene sosacen) was the first work to adopt North Korea’s language rules as distinct from the language rules prevalent in the South and to provide “notes” elaborately limiting meaning (e.g. “. . . in the Southern part

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under the puppet government”). Kim Il Sung defined the enormous language planning activity conducted in the North in the two decades between 1945 and 1965, involving both corpus planning and status planning, all coming to fruition in the third period. The Concise Dictionary captures the gradual migration of the standard from • “modern speech of the middle class in Seoul,” to • “modern speech most commonly spoken by Koreans” to • “language of workers and revolutionaries in Pyongyang.” Language-planning decisions have rarely rested in the hands of linguists of any persuasion; North Korea provides concrete evidence of the absolutely political nature of language-planning decisions,4 and a striking example of the impact that an individual can have on the development of the image and prestige of a language (see, e.g., Baldauf and Kaplan 2003; Haarmann 1998).

The Munhwae Period (1964–the Present) In 1963, the term munhwaseng, meaning “cultured nature and attitude”— quickly simplified tomunhwae, meaning “cultured language”—was introduced as the most important element of the new Korean standard, a variety based essentially on that spoken in Pyongyang. The term, assigned to the new standard, was announced by Kim Il Sung himself in 1966 to mark the fruition of all the corpus and status planning undertaken in the preceding twenty years. Kim explicitly stated his thoughts (kyosi, leader’s words [literally, “enlightened teaching”]) about language, thereby providing the ultimate rationale for all subsequent language planning activity in North Korea—the promotion of a Socialist state and the adulation of its leader Kim Il-Sung and his successor and son Kim Jong-il. Kim’s kyosi include: • People of the same racial makeup, the same culture, living in the same territory could not be considered a nation if they spoke different languages—thus, the need for a “nationalistic,” “pure” standard (i.e., one nation/one language); • People speaking the same language but living under different political systems can be seen as belonging to the same nation—thus leaving open an opportunity for reunification of the two Koreas;5 • The earlier total proscription of Chinese characters was reversed on the grounds that the characters continued to be used in the South, so that banning them would remove one of the common bonds between the two Koreas—leaving open the possibility of reunification of the two Koreas; • The teaching of Chinese characters was defined as part of foreign language education, proscribing their use in national language classes and in school textbooks;

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• South Korean language practices were deemed unacceptable on the grounds that influences from Chinese, Japanese, and English were allowed to coexist with Korean, thereby threatening the eventual extinction of Korean; • South Korean language practices resulted in the perpetuation of the undemocratic gap between spoken and written language resulting from the skewed distribution of power; • South Korean language practices were deemed to be sexist since they retained features marking women as subordinate to men. On the basis of these views, Kim steered Korean language planning, insisting that the first principle of developing munhwae was that it must be nationalistic (including words deriving from rural dialects of Korean which were seen as a rich source of “pure” lexicon). While dialects were used as a source of native terms, it seems to have escaped notice that some dialects might be “purer” Korean in the sense that they might not have been contaminated by invaders and capitalists. That first principle necessitated purificationthat is, the removal of “foreign” influences. Kim classified “foreign” influences as: (a) Words of Chinese origin: Words of Chinese origin fully assimilated into Korean would to be retained (though how “full assimilation” was to be determined was not clarified); Words of Chinese origin that had not been assimilated would be perceived as “foreign” and eliminated; Words of Chinese origin that had not been assimilated but that were widely used in scientific, technical, and political contexts would be retained, but the numbers would be kept to an absolute minimum; (b) Words of other foreign origin: Words of foreign origin fully assimilated into Korean would be retained; Words of foreign origin not assimilated into Korean would either be eliminated or be “translated” into Korean; Words of foreign origin that had not been assimilated but that were widely used in scientific, technical, and political contexts—as well as such new words as might enter Korean in future contacts with other languages—would be replaced with Korean equivalents. The second principle in the development of munhwae was the requirement that it should be “democratic” in the sense that it would serve the needs of the working class. In this context, Kim meant to emulate China’s “Cultural Revolution”; those who used “scholastic” and “pedantic” language should be shunned since the language was to be simple and clear in spoken and written registers; it was to be based on the language of socialist revolutionaries (cf. Kirby 2008). (Some saw this idea as promoting the dialect of Pyongyang perhaps because the “dialect of Pyongyang” meant the speech of the central point of revolutionary ideas.) In sum, munhwae must be nationalistic, democratic, and socialist.

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One of the first fruits of this linguistic revolution was the 1966 Korean Language Prescription (Cosenmalkyupemcip), intended to revise the 1954 Korean Orthography, dealing specifically with orthography, word spacing, and punctuation and pronunciation. The Prescription retained the forty-grapheme definition of the 1954 Korean Orthography, but not because there was a demonstrated scientific reason for doing so; rather, because Kim expressed a preference for that definition of the graphemic structure. Additionally, Kim preferred omitting “unnecessary” spaces between words to enhance reading efficiency. Writing Foreign Languages (Oylwukmalcekkipep) of 1969 and its amendment in 1982 was intended to update Writing Loan Words (1958) to enhance reading efficiency. Vocabulary management played a major role in this linguistic revolution: • Loan words would be replaced with indigenous Korean words. • Words that did not reflect the views of the North Korean regime (i.e., words that carried feudalistic and bourgeois ideology) would be purged. • Words that reflected North Korean socialist ideology would be added to the lexicon in order to achieve linguistic self-reliance. • Chinese words that were difficult to understand because they were rarely used would be purged. The intent was to press South Korea to recognize the error of its ways and to reform its language as well. Successful implementation of these reforms was intended to lead the Korean people to use their language in an intelligent and cultured way. The first step in this process involved the elimination of Chinese words that were perceived as the major source of lexical hierarchy (i.e., Korean words were perceived to be less cultured and polite than their Chinese counterparts; consequently, an H variety would be eliminated in favor of an L variety). Such Chinese words were seen as preventing common people from controlling their own language and depriving them of national pride in the use of their own language. Since some Chinese words had no Korean equivalents, they would be purged depending on their “degree of nativization,” but there was no standard measure for the degree of nativization, so considerable confusion ensued and the determination of words lacking an appropriate degree of nativization appeared to be rather arbitrary. Loan words of non-Chinese origin were seen to fall into three groups: (1) Words needed for science and technology and for communication with other countries would be retained. (2) Words introduced by bourgeois intelligentsia or by Japanese colonialists would be purged and replaced by native or nativized words which would help to establish linguistic self-reliance (juche). (The criteria in this context were not terribly clear; the preservation or elimination of these words was fairly arbitrary.) (3) Words not in accord with socialist ideology would also be purged.

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(a) All personal titles (characteristic of feudalistic or capitalistic societies) would be purged in favor of socialist and democratic terms representing harmonious social relations. (b) Words expressing sexist ideology, in conflict with the socialist spirit seeing women as revolutionary comrades of men, would be purged in favor of words reflecting the enhanced status of women. (c) The term comrade, unmarked for gender, would replaced personal titles, sexist words, and words implying a hierarchical social order. Personal names would be modified. Parents were urged not to follow the Chinese practice of combining characters to produce attractive names for children (e.g. in Japanese [Kyoko Kikuoka] Chrysanthemum of Chrysanthemum hill), but rather to choose: (1) names supportive of socialist concepts, (2) names symbolizing the qualities expected of a fighter in the socialist cause, or (3) names expressing devotion and loyalty to the Leader and the Party (e.g., Chwungseng = Loyalty; Chwungpok = faithful servant). (4) Native Korean words were deemed appropriate sources for names, despite the past custom of assigning such names only to children of the lower classes (e.g., Puekhnye = kitchen woman).6 Place names would be similarly modified; the practice of naming places after locales in China, to praise feudal dynasties and kings, or in honor of landowners, bureaucrats, and the rich would be abandoned. (1) Place names would be chosen to mark the peoples’ admiration for the Leader, to commemorate Kim’s visits, to reflect the development of North Korean society under Kim’s guidance, or to honor revolutionary heroes (including members of Kim’s family). Product names would be modified to avoid linguistic “flunkeyism”: (1) More native or nativized words would be exploited. (2) Agricultural products would be named for the place in which they were produced. (3) Manufactured products were given names reflecting the socialist spirit. Sociopolitical terms would be created in three categories: (1) words describing Kim’s political ideology, (2) words describing the Party’s method of ruling, (3) words relating to socialist institutions. This process would not be limited only to the coining of new words but also to the semantic reorientation of existing words; for example, swuyang, originally meaning

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“to cultivate one’s mind” (thus, a function of the privileged class) was reoriented to mean “ideological struggle.” Since what was in fact under way was the creation of a new standard language, dialects had to be leveled because non-standard varieties constituted a residue of the old society. The reasons for the selection of Pyongyang dialect as the basis for Munhwae were political and unrelated to linguistic criteria normally involved in the selection of a national language.7 Vocabulary management was implemented through the creation of the National Language Screening Committee and its eighteen subcommittees for revising technical terms, one committee for each of the seventeen technical fields and one for general terms. New vocabulary was required in three sectors: (1) Party and government organizations were directed to take the initiative in using the new vocabulary. (2) Educational bodies were seen as strategic centers for the circulation of the new words (Kim [undated] had said “To spread our indigenous words, primary school is a springboard”). (3) The mass media were required to assume responsibility for the rapid and successful dissemination of the new vocabulary. Of course, the new words found their place in the dictionaries produced in the Munhwae period. In the Hyentaycosenmalsacen [Modern Korean Dictionary—MKD], second edition, published in 1981, entries were selected from the writings of Kim Il Sung, from Party documents, and from revolutionary literature.

Conclusion Can North Korean language-planning activities be declared successful? Given the vast complexity of national language planning, it is not possible to draw a single conclusion. Language planning in North Korea was modeled on the Soviet Union, where the basic purpose and objectives of language planning changed with every change in the General Secretary of the Communist Party over the seventy-five years of the USSR. Those objectives that appear to have influenced Kim Il Sung the most were the early literacy campaigns and the increasingly central role of Russian, as well as the modification of specific aspects of language to meet the needs of the emerging socialist state. In North Korea, Kim Il Sung was the driving force for language planning. The plan varied as Kim changed his mind over the forty-six years of his control of political power. Nevertheless, Kim consistently held that the language needed to be corrected to support the emergence of a socialist state. To serve his political objective, the language had to be cleansed of foreign influences, notable Chinese characters, which obstructed the rapid development of total literacy. Over the years between 1947 and 1964, under Kim’s direction, a vast publishing activity

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employed the population of Korean linguists and philologists producing dictionaries, grammars, and phonological materials to: • • • • •

assure universal literacy, assure correct pronunciation, assure correct grammar, assure correct translation into and out of Korean, and increase the vocabulary.

The activity was intended to serve the needs of a socialist state; that is, to make the language reflective of the speech of the working classes and to purge it of elite linguistic practices—because elite speech prevented common people from controlling their own language and deprived them of national pride in the use of their own language. Kim Il Sung did not object to encouraging the people’s admiration for the Leader, to commemorating his visits around the country, to reflecting the development of North Korean society under his guidance, or to honoring revolutionary heroes (including members of his family). As Mao had tried in China through the Cultural Revolution to put responsibility in the hands of soldiers, workers and farmers, Kim tried to create a kind of “Cultural Revolution” in Korea intended to enact the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Kim regarded the entire country as backward and in desperate need of modernization; he tried to improve affairs by forcing a communist social and political order on the society. To a certain extent he succeeded: • He built an enormous military structure. • He flaunted his (and his son’s) ideas against the western establishment (Moon and Bae 2005, Yuk 2009). • He collectivized agriculture (resulting in a drop in production causing extensive hunger in the population—although the military received adequate supplies of food). • He cut off intercommunication with the world beyond his borders, achieving an isolation from the modernization he sought to achieve. (Language planning exercises can be complex and their goals may be conflicting; see, e.g., Youmans 2007.). • He sought self-reliance in Korea and among Korean people, rejecting international communication. But, as is often the case with government-imposed language planning, he did not in any way seek the participation of the community of speakers; the activity in North Korea was absolutely top-down. North Korean planning largely emphasized the written language; except for significant lexical development, the spoken language was little affected. Lexical and intonational differences exist even within South Korea; nonetheless, there are differences between North and South Korean varieties, in part because many foreign borrowings have been translated into Korean in the North. Consequently some lexical differences hinder comprehension for South Korean speakers, but context

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would normally allow mutual intelligibility. Since Koreans are not legally permitted to communicate with each other in any medium, nor to have physical contact, they have very limited knowledge of each other and linguistic influence one way or the other is unlikely. Thus, even given the information from other socialist polities, it is presently impossible to predict how these differences may play out in the future. In achieving a language variety specifically designed to support the emergence of a communist state, the policy may be said to have succeeded. At the same time, in plunging the polity into isolation, hunger, economic insufficiency, the policy may be said to have succeeded at an unacceptable cost. As in many language-planning activities, it is not easy to decide what has succeeded and what has failed. As in the “butterfly effect,” outcomes may be surprising. There may be some confusion between the whims of a charismatic absolute ruler and the orderly way in which planning is normally carried out. The implementation of the leader’s notions was highly organized; the leader’s language planning–related notions were whimsical. Kim Il Sung’s North Korean language planning might be compared with that in China; Mao and other senior political figures interfered, but there was an organized planning body with a history and a defined set of objectives that were essentially pursued with only occasional lapses. In the cases of both the Soviet Union and North Korea, the political goals were substantially realized, but the human costs were not calculated and the policy goals may be said to have failed; indeed, in North Korea the success of the language policy served to isolate the polity from its sister polity (South Korea) and from the broader global community. Notes 1. Attributed to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR (1985–1990) and the last head of state of the USSR—president of the Soviet Union from March 15, 1990, to December 25, 1991. 2. The sources for this material are somewhat limited; however, relatively rare references on North Korean language planning are available in several other languages. 3. Other linguistic publications produced during this period included: the Korean Orthographic Dictionary (Cosenechelcapepsacen) in 1956, Writing Loan Words (Oylaye phyokipep) in 1956/1958, Korean Dictionary (Cosenmal sacen) in 1960/1962, standard rules forRomanization of Korean, standard rules forthe Koreanization of Foreign Words, a multivolume Korean Dictionary (Cosenma lsacen) between 1960 and 1962, the Korean Language Grammar 1 (Cosene munpep 1) in 1960, theNew Dictionary of Chinese Characters (Sayokphyen) in 1963, and a Russian Phrasal Dictionary (Loeswukesacen). 4. There is no evidence that Kim Il Sung had had any training in linguistics or language planning. There is also no evidence that Marx or Lenin had had any such training. However, language planning in the former Soviet Union was conducted on the basis of Marxist-Leninist political thought (as later interpreted by Stalin); just as language planning in Korea was based on Kim’s interpretation of Marxist-Leninist thought. Professional linguists in both polities apparently found it prudent to adjust their thinking to that of the leaders. 5. Kim later abandoned this fairly extreme argument as he came to see that the time for one worldwide socialist state had not yet come. He was disillusioned by the SinoSoviet disputes based on national interest rather than on socialist principle.

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6. During the Japanese occupation, as part of the policy of Korean assimilation as Imperial Japanese subjects, Koominka Seisake, the Name Order, was proclaimed in November 1939, requiring Koreans to change their names to Japanese style names. Some Koreans selected Chinese character names. Most Koreans resisted the name law; however, by August 10, 1940, the deadline for compliance, some 80 percent of the population had complied. It can be assumed that the North Korean government changed the law, but specific information is not available (see Maher 2000). 7. This is not to claim that national languages are invariably selected on linguistic reasoning; on the contrary, there are many instances of the selection of the variety spoken in the capitol city as the national language (e.g., Manila Tagalog Filipino; Parisian French universal proper French; Cairo Arabic Modern Standard Newspaper Arabic; London English received pronunciation, etc.).

References Arutiunov, Sergei (1998). Linguistic minorities in the Caucasus. In Linguistic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, Christina. B. Paulston, and Donald Peckham (eds.), 135–159. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Baldauf, Richard B., Jr. (1994). “Unplanned” language planning. In Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 14:Language Policy and Planning, William Grabe, Charles Ferguson, Robert B. Kaplan, G. Richard Tucker, Merrill Swain, and Henry G. Widdowson (eds.), 82–89. New York: Cambridge University Press. Baldauf, Richard B., Jr., and Robert B. Kaplan (2003). Language policy decisions and power: Who are the actors? In Language: Issues of Inequality, Roland Terborg and Phyllis M. Ryan (eds.), 19–40. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Baldauf, Richard B., Jr., and Allan Luke (1990). Language Planning and Education in Australasia and the South Pacific. Clevedon, Avon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Clyne, Michael (ed.) (1997). Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Comrie, Bernard (1981). The Languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Eggington, William (1987). Written academic discourse in Korean: Implications for effective communication. In Writing across Languages: Analysis of L2 Text, Ulla M. Connor and Robert B. Kaplan (eds.), 153–168. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Eggington, William (2010). Unplanned language planning. In Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics, 2nd ed., Robert B. Kaplan (ed.), 452–462. New York: Oxford University Press. Gal, Susan, and Judith T. Irvine (1995). The boundaries of languages and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference, Social Research 62(4): 967–1001. Haarmann, Harald (1998). Multilingual Russia and its Soviet heritage. In Linguistic Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, Christina B. Paulston and Donald Peckham (eds.), 224–254. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Han, Young-woo (2008). History of the Republic of Korea: A review of causes and effects. Korea Focus 16(3): 98–109, Hogan-Brun, Gabrielle, Uldis Ozolins, Meilut Ramonien , and Mart Rannut (2007). Language politics and practices in the Baltic States. Current Issues in Language Planning 8(4): 469–631. Isaev, Magomet I. (1977). National Languages in the USSR: Problems

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and Solutions. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Kaplan, Robert B., and Richard B. Baldauf, Jr. (1997). Language Planning from Practice to Theory. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters. Keeper of Korean Language Celebrates Centennial (2008). The Chosun Ilbo (Editorial) reprinted in Korea Focus 16(3): 56–57. Kim Il Sung (undated). Complete Collection of Kim Il Sung’s Work. Pyungyang: Workers’ Party of Korea Publishing House. Kirby, William C. (2008). On Chinese, European and American universities. Daedalus (Summer), 139–146. Kirkwood, Michael (ed.) (1990). Language Planning in the Soviet Union. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kumatani, Akiyasu (1990). Language Policies in North Korea. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 82: 87–108. Maher, John C. (2000). Marriage, naming and the state. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 10(2): 313–329.

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Moon, Chung-In, and Jong-Yun Bae (2005). The Bush Doctrine and the North Korean nuclear crisis. In Confronting the Bush Doctrine: Critical Views from the Asia-Pacific, Melvin Gurtov and Peter Van Ness (eds.), 39–62. New York: Routledge Curzon. Moon, Hyun Hee (2000). Language and ideology in North Korean language planning. Unpublished MA thesis, Department of Linguistics, Australian National University. Song, Jae Jung (2004). English language teaching in North Korea: Pragmatism meets ideology (but not vice versa). In Global English and Primary Schools: Challenges for Elementary Education, Penny Lee and Hazita Azman (eds.), 115–128. Melbourne: CAE Press. Youmans, Madeleine (2007). Chicano-Anglo Conversations: Truth, Honesty, and Politeness. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Yuk, D.-M. (2009). Pyongyang’s brinkmanship no longer effective. Korea Focus 17(1): 6–7.

14 Simplifying Chinese Characters: Not a Simple Matter SHOUHUI ZHAO RICHARD B. BALDAUF, JR.

Introduction In this chapter we trace the trajectory of hanzi simplification movements. Out of three commitments to simplification in 1935, 1956, and 1977, only the 1956 Table of Simplified Characters was implemented and continues today. The First Scheme in 1935 was strangled in its cradle. The Second Scheme (1977), an extension of the 1956 Table of Simplified Characters, was stifled right after it was publicized and was formally abolished in 1986. Furthermore, starting from the mid-1980s, the 1956 Table of Simplified Characters itself was seriously challenged by neoconservatives in the Hanzi Cultural Debate, and was criticized by information technology professionals as unsystematic. Through sociolinguistic analysis, this chapter endeavors to show that the limitations that have stemmed from socio-cultural-political dimensions have impacted on the ultimate success of this language-planning activity. Chinese Character reform is an historical phenomenon that should be judged in terms of its long-term consequences.

The First Attempt in the 1930s: Simplification for Modernization While it is generally agreed that Chinese hanzi simplification was formally enacted by the Communist Party government in the 1950s, it was based upon previous successive efforts that had occurred since the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly the short-lived list sanctioned by the Ministry of Education of the former Nationalist Party (Kuo Min Tang) government in 1935. The first attempt at

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simplifying the traditional writing system started with the 4th of May Movement in 1919, and was spurred on by a deeply rooted desire to reform cultural institutions after six decades of successive failures and desperate efforts to modernize the military, industry, politics, and education. The 1935 Scheme was composed of a moderate 324 simplied characters largely collected from handwritten short forms. This first simplification scheme is the least discussed among the three officially enacted attempts. Superficially, its withdrawal after half a year of formal promulgation stemmed from the fierce opposition from the conservative camp and a highranking senior official. Zhao and Baldauf’s (2008, 28) investigation attributed this straightforward failure to deep cultural and political roots, noting that “the traditionalists’ struggle to keep the writing system intact is by its very nature a manifestation of linguistic ‘purism.’ ” Of the three simplification lists promulgated by the consecutive governments in Chinese modern history, which is conventionally considered to have started in 1840, the 1935 First Scheme was characterized by two features. First, when compared with the two subsequent official simplification schemes, the First Scheme is basically a bottom-up operation. Although the simplification movement was initiated by elite scholars such as Lu Feikui (educationist) and Qian Xuantong (linguist), prior to and during the movement grassroots amateur enthusiasts such as Chen Guangyao played a significant role in amassing short forms of characters from a wide variety of handwritten sources (Barnes 1988). Second, this scheme took an extraordinary long time to prepare and propagate before it gained the momentum needed to bring it to the government’s attention. Despite the failure of the first governmental attempt to change the shape of the modern hanzi system, the well-prepared scheme is widely agreed to be technically successful, and it (i.e., the First Simplification Scheme) has been regarded as a precursor of subsequent simplification efforts. It has served as the basis for future reforms, and was a success if success is measured in terms of its far-reaching effects upon later developments. As Su (1993, 42) has metaphorically said, “the bud of 1935 bloomed in 1956.” In our judgment, the success of the First Scheme might be rated 8 out of 10 in technical terms, 2–3 out of 10 in immediate political impact, but 6 out of 10 for its longer-term political impact on the 1956 Table of Simplified Characters.

The 1956 Table of Simplified Characters: Illiteracy Elimination for Nation Building There was a strong belief that a simple cause-effect relationship existed in both the official ideology and public mind-sets about economic development and a complex writing system; that is, a complex writing system leads to a lower literacy rate, and that leads to lower productive power. Thanks to a high level of political support, the simplification of traditional character script was put on the agenda as one of the major cultural infrastructure construction projects undertaken by political leaders in the years following the establishment of the Peoples’ Republic

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of China in October 1949. The Table of Simplified Characters was officially issued by the State Council (Chinese Cabinet) in 1956. The Table was formulated over a relatively short period because of the enthusiasm of building a strong and modern socialist nation. This Table, which was formally promulgated in 1964, was in effect initially seen as a transitional measure, pending more radical reform toward orthographic alphabetization and phonecticization (DeFrancis 2006). In comparison with the 1935 Scheme, which took over two decades to prepare and produced 324 characters, it comes as no surprise that the 1956 attempt was widely criticized both by overseas scholars (e.g., Wang 1974) and internal scholars (e.g., Su 2003) as being too hastily implemented (over 2,000 characters were compiled in just a few years). This is the major reason that an extension Table was pursued following its initial promulgation in 1956, and the Table has seen several revisions (e.g. 1964, 1986, etc.) including the recent Comprehensive Table of Standardized Characters (see subsequent discussion). These continuing changes also contrast with the Hanyu Pinyin Fang’an (the Chinese Phonetics System), another language modernization endeavor created parallel to character simplification in the 1950s. The latter was promulgated by a higher authority (National People’s Congress or Chinese Parliament) and it has remained unchanged after more than half a century. By way of contrast, empirical studies (e.g., Bokset 2006; Zhao and Baldauf 2008) show that the success of the 1950s reform was compromised by the continued use of variants that were seen as non-standard characters. Although this has at times been lamented, it also has meant that “[s]uccess turned out to be moderate” (Bokset 2006, 1). The apparent rationale for simplification was to wipe out mass adult illiteracy, which was believed to be as high as 80 percent of the total population when the simplification was initiated during the beginning of the 1950s. However, some researchers argue that the biggest accomplishment was the radical reduction of stroke numbers. It is calculated that for the 2,235 simplied characters, on average, stroke numbers were reduced from 16 strokes to 10.3 strokes. This implies that for every 2,000 characters, 10,000 strokes can be saved in actual writing, equating to nearly 1,000 characters (Su 2001, 117). To some extent, this rings true. However, its effectiveness in illiteracy elimination has been controversial. Zhao and Baldauf (2008), for instance, argue that from an international comparative perspective, there is no confirmed link between hanzi’s physical complexity and the literacy rate, just as there is no correlation between script choice and national development. For the former, the highly literate Taiwan and Hong Kong, where traditional characters are still the universal norm, serve as evidence; the latter can be best exemplified by the experience of North and South Korea: the former abolished Chinese characters after World War II, while the latter did not. The arrival of the computer and the opening up of the economy had an impact on the success of the simplification efforts. Simplification was blamed for causing difficulties in written communication between returning overseas Chinese and mainlanders when China was first opened up to attract international investment in the 1980s. Further suspicions about simplification’s effectiveness were raised when computers eventually became part of ordinary life in urban areas. Their introduction has meant that stroke number is not the main issue, as the computer

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makes writing a less daunting task than it used to be (e.g., Chen 1999). Furthermore, simplification has two negative effects for computing. First, simplified characters are considered to be more physically ambiguous than their traditional counterparts in reading; second, the systematic consistency of hanzi was sacrificed by blithe simplification. The working principles and quality of logography-based (or stroke-based) input programs depends on the hanzi’s internal consistence to a great extent, meaning that the adulterated physical configuration of a significant number of the most used characters causes trouble for both input software developers and computer users. Such a controversial evaluation of the Table of Simplified Characters raises the issue of how to treat long-term accomplishments and short-term successes in language planning. While concurring with Ferguson (1996, 283) on his observation that “the measurement of efficiency [of language modernization] must always be in terms of particular goals,” Zhao and Baldauf (2008) argue that it is more constructive to examine failure and success on the basis of respective historical conditions and expectations. Thus, to analyze success or failure of the Table of Simplified Characters, one must put them in the context of historical conditions and expectations. In this regard, the achievements during the Mao period (1949–1977) had an inward focus and manifested themselves in economic interests and political gains where simplification was substantially an internal matter. This policy may even have been deliberately pursued to block the people from communicating with the outside world. However, during the Deng Era (the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s), simplification caused a break between the writing system used on the mainland and that of overseas Chinese communities, and thus may be evaluated less positively. When one examines the information technology era in the period after the mid-1990s in China, systematic rationalization (internal consistence) became more important than the pure quantitative reduction of stroke complexity. Therefore, under the tenet of “the simpler, the more efficient” prevalent during the simplification period, a number of atypical characters and components that were inconsistent with the writing rules and conventions of the hanzi system were created, resulting in hanzi that were “simplified individually, but complicated systematically,” that is, simple in form with fewer strokes, but not necessarily easier to write, recognize, and memorize. These irregular and unpredictable elements have created enormous inconvenience for hanzi computerization, including logography-based text-typing, hanzi information processing (auto retrieval and index systems), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and auto conversion between the simple and traditional systems. Simplified characters have been in official use for half a century, and judgment of their success varies over that period depending on the context. Thus, the success of the Table of Simplified Characters might be rated 6 out of 10 in technical terms (if the dysfunctionality of the auto convertion between the simplified and traditional systems is counted), 10 out of 10 in immediate political impact, but 7 out of 10 for the longer-term problems stemming from their oversimplification, the lack of foresight in hanzi’s internationality, and from technological developments. These problems have lead to heated disputes about hanzi’s future development, a matter discussed subsequently.

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The 1977 Second Simplification Scheme: Political Participation The Second Simplification Scheme, which was made official before the end of 1977, was actually begun in the 1960s right after the Table of Simplified Characters was formally implemented in 1964, but was radically expanded and hurriedly publicized during the turbulent 1970s without going through a proper accreditation processes (Zhao 2005). The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966– 1976 brought language planning in China, like other economic and cultural activities, to a virtual halt for nearly a decade, so perhaps it is little wonder that both the Second Scheme’s formulation and promulgation are the result of heavy-handed political manipulation (Rohsenow 1986). The major work of the Scheme was drafted during the Cultural Revolution and was formally decreed by the Committee of Script Reform, then the state language authority, on December 20, 1977. The characters forming the core part of the Scheme, that is, about one hundred short forms collected from mass use before the 1970s, can be justified by their deep roots in the public’s daily writing. But the majority of the characters making up the scheme, totaling 853 simplified characters and 61 simplified radicals, together with 263 forms that were discarded in favor of homophonic substitution, were the result of revolutionary fever that gripped every aspect of state life. The scheme stipulated that the first stage would consist of the experimental implementation of only 248 characters to be used in some areas of the print media. Nevertheless, the release of the scheme caused immediate graphic chaos among the public and loud outcry from some well-known scholars both within and outside of linguistic circles. Social resistance grew so strong that its trial was quietly stopped by the major national newspapers and the Ministry of Education in July 1978, although the formal official repeal was not declared until 1986. Various reasons have been suggested to account for the dramatic implementation and demise of the ephemeral Second Simplification Scheme (e.g., Cheng 1979; Zhao 2005). First, from a technical perspective, the changes had an overwhelming impact on users in terms of the number of hanzi affected. This radical altering of the physical makeup of characters was too much to absorb given the previous changes. Second, there was a departure from normal language-planning procedures, leading to charges of malpractice in their formulation and a lack of legitimacy in their implementation. Finally, the implementation process was ill-timed, coming as it did at the end of a period of sociopolitical turmoil when people longed for normalcy and stability. However, a lack of historical data related to this period has limited what can be authoratitively said about the circumatances of their implementation (DeFrancis 1984). Zhao and Baldauf (2008) have investigated the reasons for the Scheme’s sudden publication, and have found a further important factor that previously had been missed—the struggle between conservatives and radical reformers, or in Cooper’s (1989) terms, between former elites and counter-elites. The simplification proponents, including those involved in alphabetization and phoneticization, active in the 1950s–1960s (for the most part, linguists and officially appointed scholars), were by the 1970s conservative when compared

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with the more revolutionary ultra-leftists who had ascended to the political arena during the Cultural Revolution. According to Mao’s historical materialism and the “two line struggle” theories, the masses, rather than a minority of “heroes,” which can be read as “experts and scholars,” are the makers of history. The main target of the Cultural Revolution was those reactionary authorities with both political and academic power. Therefore, under the banner of a proletarian revolution and a guiding ideology of “mass-line” principles, most experienced language-planning practitioners and senior officials were expelled from the Committee of Script Reform, and the experts and academics in language planning areas were replaced by “the masses,” that is, working-class people such as plant workers, peasants, and soldiers. It was reported that, at one time or another, all the former personnel in the Committee of Script Reform were forced to engage in manual labor in farming or industry, and played no active role during the last stage of the Scheme’s formulation and promulgation. In 1978, when “the political pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction, and more pragmatic and powerful leaders began eventually to regain positions of power, it was becoming clearer that it was only a matter of time before the chilling influence of the Leftist faction would fade from educational and cultural affairs” (Zhao 2005, 335). In the spring of 1980, after a hiatus of over a decade, China’s language-planning agency officially resumed normal work. One urgent problem that topped the committee’s working agenda was to review the controversial Second Simplification Scheme. Unfortunately for historians of language planning, there are no references available as to how this revision proceeded, or to reveal the agreements and disagreements that contributed to the final decision. What can be ascertained is that in the reorganized top language administration, all members were renowned scholars in linguistics and in other relevant areas, and obviously they constituted a powerful force objecting to the Second Simplification Scheme. But rejection was not straightforward, as there was disagreement about what to do with approximately 100 characters that had been in circulation before the Second Scheme took shape. The dispute continued up until the National Conference on Language and Script Work was convened in 1986. However, after long internal deliberation, the Conference members decided to terminate the Second Scheme as of 1986. Thus, the success of the Second Simplification Scheme might be rated 6 out of 10 for the 100 short forms, but 1 out of 10 for the other forms in technical terms, and 9 out of 10 in political impact, although this strong impact was almost entirely negative. The previous discussion has emphasized that the underlying reasons leading to the failure of the Second Scheme may be multiple. What is important to emphasize is that internal conflict between language planners with different interests and ideologies is a phenomenon that has not been studied. Language planning agencies are intensely political and factionridden. The examination of the recurrence of internal conflict—as a significant variable in the entire language planning context—adds an angle to the better understanding of complexities and limitations of language planning, and should be seen as an important phenomenon worthy of serious study. In what follows we will see again the effects of factionalism on language planning.

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Setback in the 1980s–1990s: New Agenda and New Debate The simplification movement suffered a setback during the 1980s–1990s for three reasons: First, further simplification, along with alphabetization, was officially phased out of the national language-planning agenda during the 1986 national language conference. Second, the public use of hanzi witnessed an ever-increasing chaotic period as Second Simplification Scheme characters and traditional characters became more ubiquitous in both public places and private writings. Third, because of the lack of advocacy or support for language modernization in the 1986 Conference agenda, an opportunity was provided to launch an aggressive attack on previous prosimplification efforts leading to calls for wider use of traditional characters. The phenomenal change that occurred during the mid-1980s has defined script reform ever since. The turnaround was marked by the hallmark conference on national language life held in the beginning of 1986. The conference brought together not only linguists and language-planning researchers, but also top national officials on ideology affairs and language-planning practitioners from across the country. Out of the series of major decisions made about language planning in the official conference declaration, the one that concerns script reform led to the formal abandonment of any move to phonetization and to a reorientation of the nature of script reform. While formally rescinding the 1977 Second Simplification Scheme, it was made clear that the major concern of script reform would switch to maintaining the status quo in order to refocus efforts on serving the information technology industry. Thus hanzi use standardization was singled out as the focus for language planning in the new era. Politically, the end of the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s made people reflect on the past. With respect to language modernization, the environment was ameliorated by the Party’s loosened control on cultural and educational matters. Under the influence of suspicion of everything done in the past, not only the traditional opponents of simplification, but official scholars, including simplified character protagonists, felt the necessity to review some of the specific aspects of the 1950s simplification movement (e.g., Su 2003). In the mid-1980s a faction of what Guo (2004) has dubbed as cultural neo-conservatives emerged. A heated debate then broke out, bypassing the simplification proponents, who formed a small minority, among the other two camps—those favoring the status quo, and the traditional character camp, or hanzi culture fraction. The debate revolved around the current status of the simplified characters and the future direction of the writing system, namely, to further simplify, to maintain the state quo, or to roll back to the traditional system, partially or completely. The hanzi culture fraction argued that hanzi’s qualities should be examined from the perspective of cultural value as a counterweight to the undesired impact of Western influence and to boost emerging nationalist sentiment. As Barme (1999, 256) has observed, “the rapid decay of Maoist ideological beliefs and the need for continued stability in the Chinese Communist Party led to an increased reliance on nationalism as a unifying ideology.” The hanzi cultural fraction argued that hanzi had previously been simplified on the basis of its dysfunction as a

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communication means, but now this disadvantage was compensated by its successful computerization in the information era. They also argued that hanzi’s other two qualities, its aesthetic value (e.g., as an art form, calligraphy) and as carrier of cultural heritage were more important. In other words, since hanzi is a script system that is highly culturally charged, it should be considered as a kind of culture per se. In advocating hanzi culture, they named their academic journal, the Journal of Hanzi Culture, and their research institute, the International Institute of Hanzi Culture Studies. Most key members of the hanzi culture camp, led by Madame Yuan Xiaoyuan, a rich returned overseas Chinese with Taiwanese background, were prestigious people or notable public figures with political connections but with little linguistic background. In the 1950s, the focus of the debate had been on hanzi’s transferability and permanent comprehensibility across dialects and languages. This referred to hanzi’s ability to transcend chronological and geographical limitations so that speakers from different dialectal areas could communicate in writing. The hanzi culture campaigners, however, either targeted technology applications or aligned their arguments to the Party’s updated propaganda ideology. For instance, hanzi was launched as a pro-IT script because it contains more information than its phonetic counterparts, and this makes Chinese the clearest and the most concise language in the world. Claims such as Hanzi’s transferability, or the universality myth, are particularly attractive to politicians given their eagerness to promote Chinese language in the world to match the country’s economic success. The logical extension of these beliefs is that the ideographic symbols convey their message directly to our minds; therefore, hanzi, as a self-evident script, is intelligible to speakers of all languages. To build this discourse of hanzi culture, these newly discovered characteristics of hanzi’s superiority were promoted through “using rhetorical language and a journalistic style of writing replete with turgidity” (Zhao 2005: 350). The debate, which lasted from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, was brought to an end politically when it developed to the point of threatening the foundation of national language policy. Hanzi simplification has been regarded as the cornerstone of national language planning. What is intriguing about this episode is why, in a normally tightly controlled society, an event that almost reversed the government’s longguarded language policy was allowed to occur. Scholars within China have done little to explore the reasons behind this superficial academic debate, perhaps because it was more a political exercise than a purely linguistic issue. One implication that can be drawn from the event might be that it provides a warning of how fragile language-planning programs can be. Hard-won language-planning accomplishments can be put under a serious threat in an unfavorable political environment.

Reorientation in the New Millennium: Optimization and Standardization Progress during the 1990s, as defined by the agenda set by the language congress in 1986, was characterized by the so-called “Four Standardizations”; namely, to fix the four unstable hanzi attributes needed for facilitating hanzi computerization and

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Chinese information processing. The Chinese hanzi was notorious for its instability in shape, pronunciation, ordering (including frequency order and stroke writing order), and total number of characters. Since the new millennium, a host of standards on various aspects of hanzi have been formulated and issued with the aim of facilitating hanzi computerization. The greatest standardization effort is the combination and rectification of the published standards called the Comprehensive Table of Standardized Characters (draft), which is not only considered one of the major language-planning undertakings since the 1950s, but also as cultural infrastructure at the national level. This Table was first initiated by Zhou Youguang, a leading figure in the witing reform movement in 1950s (Su 2001), and was established as a national research program on three occasions. The current one was launched in April 2001 with the aim of comprehensively overhauling all hanzi characters in active use. After eight years of hard work, the Table, which is based on more than ninety modifications resulting from formal discussions at over eighty conferences and seminars, was finally shown to the public with the call for open discussion and critique on August 12, 2009. The Table is inevitably seen to be an authoritative answer to a number of paramount concerns among language planning observers. Beyond prescribing the total numbers of modern characters covering three areas, it is noted that out of a total 8,300 characters included in the Table, 57 canceled traditional characters and variant forms (6+51) were reinstalled, signifying at least that partial amendments were pursued. What is more significant is that the sub-table lists the traditional characters in parallel with their simplified counterparts for comparison purposes. The unexpected reappearance of the traditional and variant forms of characters in the Table appears to suggest that the resumption of the traditional system is not being ruled out, which is bound to add fuel to speculation and to renew debate about the reversal of what has been accomplished so far in simplifying Chinese characters. Although the Table is a relatively conservative document that is less ambitious than might have been expected in both its scale and magnitude, if formally promulgated, it will be the the biggest officially sanctioned change made to hanzi’s physical configuration since the 1950s. It was also surprising that the authorities openly solicited opinions (August 12–31, 2009) via public media on these proposed changes. According to the newly launched journal by the Department of Language Information Management under the Ministry of Education, China Language Situation (Zhongguo Yuqing, Vol. 2, 2009), by August 24, 90.6 percent, 87.6 percent, and 98.6 percent of 5 million online respondents from the country’s three major Internet portals had voted against the revisions proposed to be made to 44 characters in the Table. This unexpected overwhelming opposition from the public poses a dilemma for the authorities—they have invested significant time and resources in this project, but the outcomes have been publicly rejected, placing the project in grave danger of being derailed.

Conclusion: Future Perspective The need for reform built over the first half of the twentieth century and was consummated by the Chinese Communist revolution and its drive for universal

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literacy. However, as literacy became increasingly commonplace, and with the interruption created by the Cultural Revolution, character simplification has been seemingly becoming less urgent. There are a number of important reasons that underscore the difficulty, if not impossibility, of further hanzi reform. First, economically, the improvement in living standard has enabled the citizenry to invest more leisure time on educational and cultural activities. Second, technologically, the advent of computer technology makes writing hanzi a less daunting task than it was prior to the personal computer era, at least among the urban population. Third, linguistically, because of what Geerts et al. (1977, 230–231) terms the “possession-instinct,” people who were educated under the 1950s simplification scheme are reluctant to learn the new reformed characters. Most importantly, politically, because traditional things have been favored by Party propaganda as a strategy to increase ruling legitimacy and gain support, indigenous culture and knowledge have seen a strong comeback over the last two decades. This renewed interest in rejuvenating tradition serves as a significant boost for traditional characters. Not only are traditional hanzi the emblem of the Chinese culture per se, but also classical knowledge is wrapped in traditional hanzi. What is ironic is that, ideologically, the ruling party has become increasingly elite oriented, and as a result, it is more concerned with the interests of the literate middle class than with lower class illiterates. Therefore, in spite of a century of attempts to simplify the hanzi, especially through the socialist goal of literacy for the masses, with the focus of language planning reoriented toward computerization through standardization, the planning target of hanzi reform returns to a relatively few (urban elites) in the information age. As Cooper (1989) has said, to plan language is to plan society. The long and complex path of reforming the Chinese script system shows that language planning is intricately interwoven with sociopolitical contexts. As Cohen and Kraak (cited in Geerts et al. 1977, 202) have said, “the problem of so-called spelling simplification can hardly be called simple.” Paulston (1992) argues there are few methodological criteria upon which to base any firm statements about the effectiveness of any particular planning products, and Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) point out that it is difficult to evaluate the degree to which goals have been fulfilled or the relative contribution of various factors to the outcome, since the ultimate effect can only be shown by social use over a long period of time. Now, with the new release of the long-awaited Comprehensive Table of Standardized Characters, a new window for understanding the various issues related to the official discourse on direction of hanzi planning is available. The struggle to make the Chinese script system more accessible to the masses, as well as machine friendly, will continue to play out in a rapidly changing sociopolitical context. Thus, judging success or failure of simplification reform is far from a simple matter, but in aggregate, the success of the three simplication accomplishments might be rated 7 out of 10, depending on the historical perspective one chooses to take and one’s distance from the events. Modern history shows that the vicissitude of hanzi’s physical changes has been highly correlated with political developments, and thus are as unpredictable as politics is. However, after saying this, there are some interesting developments that can be observed since the mid-1990s, when the hanzi culture debate was

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brought to an end by political intervention. First, the Journal of Hanzi Culture, the mouthpiece of the hanzi culture fraction, continues to exist and has firmly established itself as a national core academic journal in linguistics. Second, traditional characters’ long-attested prestige has picked up new momentum due to emerging nationalism sentiments supported by the authorities. Third, renewed interest in traditional characters has gained increasing currency, with a number of high-profile individuals advocating the resumption of traditional characters. This has included a submission by a political advisor from north China’s Tianjin Municipality to the annual session of China’s top political advisory body in March 2009, a submission by a host of social celebrities to the same annual political congress in 2008, criticism of simplified characters’ evil role in breaking up traditional culture by a paramount official scholar (Prof. Ji Xianlin from Beijing University) before his passing away at the age of ninety-eight in July 2009, and in same month Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou’s call for script unification across the Taiwan Strait. In short, out of the three possible scenarios relating hanzi reform to the simplified form versus traditional character forms, in all of which the government will play a major role, wholesale re-introduction of the traditional system is apparently the least likely. Maintaining the status quo also seems unlikely, as proposals to loosen the use of traditional characters, which were out of the question just a few years ago, have become an increasingly viable scenario. Traditional forms could reappear on the mainland in either of two ways: first through the adoption of a “biliteracy” hanzi policy epitomized in “writing simplified form, recognizing traditional form”—advocated by the hanzi cultural fraction in the 1980s and raised again by Ma Ying-jiou just recently; or, second, the opening of more areas for traditional characters to be used. According to the Language and Script Law of P.R. China enacted in October 2000, traditional characters are allowed to be used in only five areas. The latest developments mean that the authorities are faced with increasing pressure to adopt this policy in the educational system to enable students to be literate in both the simplified and the traditional system. Here we see language planning as a matter of political reality rather than academic contemplation. Given the pragmatism that has been prevalent so strongly in recent Chinese political and economic discourse, there is a high possibility of this being extended into language and script work. If the biliteracy hanzi policy were given official active support, it is bound to change Chinese graphic life in a significant way.

References Barme, Geremie R. (1999). In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Barnes, Dayle (1988). A continuity or constraints on orthographic change: Chen Guangyao and character simplification. Journal of Oriental

Studies (Monumenta Serica, 1988–1989), 35: 135–166. Bokset, Roar (2006). Long story of short forms: The evolution of simplified Chinese characters. PhD dissertation, Department of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University.

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Chen, Ping (1999). Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cheng, Chin Chuan (1979). Language reform in China in the seventies. Word 30(1–2): 45–57. Cooper, Robert L. (1989). Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Facts and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. DeFrancis, John (2006). The prospects for Chinese writing reform. Sino-Platonic Papers 171: 1–29. Ferguson, Charles Albert (1996). Sociolinguistic Perspectives: Papers on Language in Society. 1959–1994. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geerts, Guido, Jef van den Broeck, and Albert Verdootdt (1977). Successes and failures in the Dutch spelling reform. In Advances in the Creation and Revision of Writing System, Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), 179–246. Paris/The Hague: Mouton. Guo, Yingjie (2004). Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China: The Search for National Identity under Reform. London and New York: Routledge Curzon. Kaplan, Robert B., and Richard B. Baldauf, Jr. (1997). Language Planning: From Practice to Theory. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

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Paulston, Christina Bratt (1992). Linguistic minorities and language policies: Four case studies. In Maintenance and Loss of Minority Language, Willem Fase, Koen Jaspaert, and Kjaak Kroon (eds.), 55–79. Amsterdam: John Benjamines. Rohsenow, John S. (1986). The second Chinese character simplification scheme. International Journal of Sociology of Language 59: 73–85. Su, Peicheng (1993). “Di Yi Pi Jianti Zi Biao” du hou [After reading the first table of simplified characters]. Chinese Language Review 41: 39–42. Su, Peicheng (2001). Xiandai Hanzi Xue Gangyao [The outline of modern hanzi study]. Beijing: Beijing Daxue Chubanshe. Su, Peicheng (2003). Chongxin shenshi jianhua zi [Rethinking the simplified Chinese character]. Beijing Daxue Xuebao [Journal of Beijing University], 40(1): 121–128. Wang, Xuewen (1974). Gongfei Wenzi Gaige Zong Pipan [Comprehensive critique of the communist bandits’ simplified characters]. Taipei: Zhonghua Minguo Guoji Guanxi Yanjiusuo. Zhao, Shouhui (2005). Chinese character modernization in the digital era: A historical perspective. Current Issues in Language Planning 6(3): 315–378. Zhao, Shouhui, and Richard B. Baldauf, Jr. (2008). Planning Chinese Characters: Evolution, Revolution or Reaction. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Publishers.

15 Problems in Orthography Development for the Yi in China DAVID BRADLEY

Introduction The Yi are an officially recognized national minority of nearly 8 million people in southwestern China. Like many other minorities in China, the category Yi includes distinct groups who speak a very wide range of related languages. In the case of the Yi, these sixty or more languages are all in the Ngwi (formerly known as Loloish) branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family. For maps and population details, see Bradley (2007); concerning their historical position within the Tibeto-Burman family, see Bradley (1979). Four of these languages of the Yi nationality have distinct writing systems: Nosu, Nasu, Nisu, and Sani. All four use the same logographic principle as Chinese writing and a few Chinese characters. Otherwise, these writing systems are very different from Chinese and to a lesser degree from each other. For an overview of the Yi scripts, see Bradley (2001). The term Yi was introduced in the early 1950s to replace the earlier Chinese term Lolo, now regarded as pejorative. It is said that Chairman Mao himself selected the character now used in Chinese for the Yi nationality. The nationalities classification was carried out very quickly in the mid-1950s, following the established Chinese practice of amalgamating distinct groups with different but usually related languages into large nationalities. Table 15.1 shows the distribution of the Yi in China. There are also about 9,000 people in Vietnam and 1,000 in Laos classified as Lolo, and about 3,300 people in Vietnam classified as Phula; these groups are included in the Yi in China. Since the 1950s, China has made major changes to many writing systems, starting with Chinese, whose character system was greatly simplified; a standard Romanization called pinyin (“phonetic writing”) was also created, and is used to teach standard Mandarin Chinese and as a basis for new Romanized scripts for

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Table 15.1 Distribution of the Yi in China (2000 census) Province Yunnan Sichuan Guizhou Guangxi Other China total

Yi population % of

Total population

% of total in area

% of all Yi

4,705,658 2,122,389 843,554 9,712 80,959 7,762,272

42,360,089 82,348,296 35,247,695 43,854,538 1,038,789,608 1,242,600,226

11.1 2.6 2.4 0.02 0.01 0.6

60.6 27.3 10.9 0.1 1.0 100

various national minorities; for details, see Bradley (1991). From 1973 on, orthographic reforms for the Yi writing systems also took place separately in the three main provinces where the Yi languages are spoken: Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou. The process has been top-down language planning, run by leaders and language workers from the Yi communities of each province. In addition, all four traditional Yi scripts continue in use, mainly by traditional male religious practitioners (hereafter “shamans”) and for scholarly purposes, though their use is declining. This chapter shows how and why the process of reform that created three modern orthographies alongside the four traditional ones has been a success in one case, a partial success in another, and a near-total failure in the third.

How Did the Yi Write before 1950? Nosu, Nasu, Nisu, and Sani are four very distinct but related languages. Like Chinese characters, the original basis of their scripts was pictographic, but they subsequently developed into logographic systems by the use of pictographic characters in their phonetic value for homophones, often with modifications to distinguish these characters from the original pictographs. However, the process of modification to distinguish homophones is much less extensive and systematic in these four scripts than in Chinese. Like Chinese, these languages do not have affixal morphology, and each character represents a syllable which is also a word with a meaning. The main users of the Yi scripts were shamans, chanting ritual texts at life-cycle ceremonies, exorcisms for the sick, fortune-telling, and writing family genealogies to help remember them. Traditionally, each shaman would train a son or nephew to succeed him, and the successor would recopy all of the books of his mentor, and as many other books as he could find. All shamans are men; female healing practitioners do not use writing. Of the Yi groups with distinct traditional writing systems, the Nosu are Northern Yi, the Nasu are Eastern Yi, the Nisu are Southern Yi, and the Sani are Southeastern Yi. There are many other languages without scripts classified in one or other of these four clusters. Some other groups within the Yi nationality have used Nasu or Nisu script to represent their own languages.

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The Nosu number over 2.3 million people, mostly in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture of southwestern Sichuan, but also in northwestern Yunnan. The Nosu are by far the largest group within the Yi nationality; their language is very well maintained among the population, and Nosu leaders have frequently proposed that their language should be the standard for all Yi in all provinces of China. This was agreed at a conference of Yi Studies held in Sichuan in 1999, but has not been implemented. Nosu has an extremely wide range of published materials, including several dictionaries, numerous grammatical studies, and extensive educational and literary outputs. Nearly all use the new syllabic writing system (see below), not the older traditional script. Most published traditional texts have been edited to remove graphic variation as found in real traditional texts, usually to conform exactly to the new syllabic standard discussed below. However, there are still many Nosu shamans who use traditional writing, including young ones in some areas. The Nasu are widely scattered across northeastern Yunnan and northwestern Guizhou; there are about one million speakers and many ethnic group members who do not speak the language. Two Nasu subgroups have parallel literary traditions; one is in north central Yunnan just north of Kunming city, the capital; the other is in northwestern Guizhou. Many edited traditional Nasu texts with Chinese translation have been published in China in the last thirty years, especially material from Guizhou but also from Yunnan. However, the number of fully literate Nasu shamans who can read traditional materials is small and rapidly decreasing, and there are few scholars working on Nasu. Several dictionaries have also been published in Nasu. Apart from the literary varieties of Nasu, there are many other related languages classified within Eastern Yi by Chinese linguists. Nisu, or Southern Yi, is also diverse; there are about 800,000 speakers and many nonspeaker members of the group, and various subdialects within the main Northern and Southern dialects. The Northern dialect has two subdialects. One is the northernmost; they call themselves Nasu and live just south of Kunming, but should not be confused with the Nasu just discussed above; the other is the much larger Nisu subdialect, covering much of south central Yunnan. The Southern dialect, whose speakers call themselves Niesu, is spoken in various counties of southern Yunnan and in Vietnam. Traditional literate shamans are found in some areas, but their numbers are declining, and few young shamans are being trained. There are also a few Nisu scholars and intellectuals who know the traditional Nisu script. There are excellent and very comprehensive Nisu dictionaries, giving pronunciation based on Northern Nisu. One makes a systematic attempt to list all alternative forms of characters. There has also been some publication of traditional Nisu texts. Azhe is a Southeastern Yi language spoken in northwestern Mile County by about 60,000 people. Its orthography appears to have been adopted from Nisu to write Azhe. There are few manuscripts and even fewer proficient Azhe shamans. Similarly, a few Phula and Muji shamans speaking other Southeastern Yi languages, and bilingual in Nisu, also use Nisu script. Sani is the main language of the Yi nationality in Shilin “stone forest” County, southeast of Kunming. The autonym of this group is Ni; Sani is a Chinese exonym

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containing the first syllable sa, which is very widespread in Chinese names for Yi groups around Kunming. Sani is also spoken in a number of surrounding counties by a total of about 120,000 people. The Shilin County government promotes the use of traditional Sani logographic characters and research on Sani topics, notably the story of Ashima, a Sani princess who wanted to marry a commoner. There are two dictionaries, one by a French Catholic missionary, Vial (1909), using a font restricted to 450 characters for cost reasons, and Jin (1984), representing a different dialect with over 1,300 handwritten head entry characters and some alternative forms.

Yi Writing Systems Figure 15.1 illustrates the forms of various characters in all of the main traditional and reformed orthographies. The first column after the Chinese is in the new Sichuan standard syllabary, representing Shengza Nosu. The second column is one example of a traditional Nosu script, in this case the Yinuo dialect. The third column represents traditional northern Yunnan Nasu, and the fourth is the new Guizhou standardized Nasu characters. The fifth column shows traditional Nisu characters, the sixth is traditional Sani characters, and the last is Yunnan Reformed Yi, the new composite character system. The representation of one syllable or word by a single form of a character is an outcome of the standardization process; in traditional materials, many variants can be found for the characters representing frequently occurring words. The most extreme example is the character meaning “not” in Nisu, for which the best dictionary lists 103 alternative forms. Jin (1984, 35) gives seven alternative forms for the corresponding character in Sani. One Nasu dictionary shows four alternative Nasu forms, but there are many more. A typical published traditional Yino Nosu text uses twenty-two distinct forms for this word. The same frequent word in adjacent lines of a text is often written with a different character, as a stylistic flourish and as a means of disguise. For this character meaning “not,” a form similar to the selected standard form in Guizhou Nasu and Yunnan Reformed Yi is also among the alternatives found in traditional Nisu and Nosu, though it is not the most frequent form and was not chosen as the standard syllabic Nosu form. The Nosu are recent arrivals in Sichuan; they came from the east, across the upper Yangtse River from the adjacent Nasu area of northeastern Yunnan, a few hundred years ago. At some point, the Nosu turned their texts 90 degrees clockwise, and now read them from left to right starting at the top, instead of top to bottom starting from the right as in Nasu and traditional Chinese, or starting from the top left as in Nisu and Sani. Thus, Nosu characters are rotated 90 degrees clockwise compared to the characters of the other three Yi scripts. In northern Yunnan, there are old Nasu inscriptions on stone or on bronze bells, of debated dates but probably less than 600 years old. Some Yi scholars claim a 6,000-year history for Yi writing, antedating Chinese, but this is extremely

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implausible. The principle of logographic writing and (as seen in figure 15.1) some Yi characters derive from Chinese. The Chinese have been a major force in the Yunnan area for over two millennia, long before any surviving Yi inscriptions. It seems most likely that the creation of Yi writing started during the Cuan dynasty, the Yi rulers of the area around Kunming, about 1,500 years ago. Due to the mode of transmission, the forms of the characters within each major tradition show substantial internal differences. Unlike Chinese, there has never been an education system spreading and standardizing these scripts. Also, as the shamans made much of their living by chanting texts, there was considerable motivation to keep the texts opaque. As the texts have been transmitted for many generations by recopying, differences have developed. Often, while most of a text is clearly understood, parts are ambiguous or impossible to understand, though they can be read phonetically.

Figure 15.1 Examples of Yi Characters

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Standardization of Yi Scripts Language policy for minority languages in China follows the usual Stalinist model: each nationality in principle has one language, and one standard dialect—a central dialect intelligible to speakers of other dialects with a large number of speakers who are socially advanced within the group—should be chosen. This one dialect should become the standard for the development or reform of writing, for educational implementation, and for wider societal use. As for other areas of policy in China, the planning and details of script reform have been done by experts, agreed upon by leaders, and then implemented, sometimes with good outcomes and sometimes with less success. In a few cases, unsuccessful attempts have been abandoned or modified. As the Yi are numerous in three different provinces, there have been three distinct script reform processes, with little or no interaction across provinces at the design phase. Since 1999, some attempts have been made to link and unify the Yi scripts, mainly based on political rather than linguistic principles: that the Yi are one nationality and should have a single script, not three or more. During the 1950s, there were several attempts to implement Romanizations to replace the Yi orthographic traditions, most notably for the Nosu in Sichuan (Pu 2004). None was ever accepted by any Yi group. It is interesting that indigenous literary traditions known almost exclusively by shamans nevertheless were central enough to group identity that the Yi simply refused to accept any Romanization, though there is one associated with the Nosu syllabary. After the end of the Cultural Revolution and the fall of the Gang of Four in the mid-1970s, there was an explosion of work on minority languages. First, a massive quantity of ethnographic and linguistic materials collected in the late 1950s was finally published. Second, the shamans who had managed to save their books from the Red Guards brought them out from hiding and started to perform traditional rituals again. Third, a new generation of young scholars and shamans could be trained. Finally, the new 1982 constitution proclaimed the right of each nationality to maintain and develop its language and culture. Many local governments in minority autonomous areas all over China took full advantage of this liberalization, but recently this push has slowed greatly. The imposition of a single standard variety for an entire nationality has not been attempted for the Yi; each province with a substantial Yi population has followed a different path. It is only in declarations of principle since 1999 that any desire for full orthographic unification has surfaced.

The Nosu Syllabary The first and most successful reformed writing system for a Yi language was the Nosu syllabary. This syllabary was devised starting in 1974 and was fully approved by the central government on December 17, 1980. It selects one of the alternative variant characters for each of the 819 syllables which occur in the speech of the Central (also known as Shengza, its subgroup autonym) variety of Nosu as spoken

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in Xide County, and uses only that character, rather than different logographic or variant forms, for every other homophone, regardless of meaning. It also adds a diacritic, a semicircle above the mid-tone form, to indicate the lower-high sandhi tone found in that local dialect but not previously distinguished in the orthography. Not surprisingly, this syllabary is written from left to right starting at the top, like traditional Nosu script and like modern Chinese. The orthography is a phonetic syllabary based on one dialect, not a logographic system neutral between dialects. Therefore, speakers of other varieties of Nosu, including Northern Yino and Lindimu and Southern Sondi and Adur, must learn the Central Shengza dialect in order to become literate. As these other Nosu speech varieties, including the Southern ones not mutually intelligible with Shengza Nosu, have different tone sandhi patterns, other phonological differences, major lexical and some syntactic differences, becoming literate is much easier for the half of the Nosu who speak a Central Nosu dialect, including all those in northwestern Yunnan. Training for teachers of Nosu has long been carried out in the Nosu area at Liangshan University in Xichang and Zhaojue Normal Institute in Zhaojue, and elsewhere at the Southwest Nationalities University in Chengdu and at the Central University of Nationalities in Beijing. In the early 1980s, the Yunnan Institute of Nationalities brought teachers from Sichuan to teach Nosu to students from northwestern Yunnan, but since the mid-1980s, Nosu students from Ninglang County have been sent to Sichuan to study Nosu instead. A huge number of monolingual books in Nosu, including textbooks at all levels up to university, original research on Nosu language and society, traditional and modern literature, health, agricultural, political, and other materials translated into Nosu from Chinese, magazines, scholarly journals, and many other things have been published, starting in draft versions in the late 1970s and since 1980 in really amazing quantity and quality, mostly through the Sichuan Nationalities Press. There is also a newspaper in Nosu, The Liangshan Daily, which started in January 1978 with three issues a month and has been a daily for many years. Initially all Nosu materials were typeset and printed at a plant in Xichang, but now everything is computergenerated and there is a Unicode standard. Claims of literacy achieved in this Nosu syllabary range up to nearly 100 percent in the core Shengza areas where it is the local speech, and nearly as high in other Shengza areas with some dialect differences. Signs in public places such as train stations, roads, signboards, and notice boards throughout Liangshan are bilingual. Many members of other nationalities in Liangshan are also able to speak Nosu, and children of all nationalities in Nosu-majority areas learn the syllabary in school. There are some Han Chinese and a few foreigners who have learned Nosu and its syllabary. Overall, the Nosu syllabary is a big success, despite its top-down origins. This may be because the script is relatively simple, the variety chosen is very widespread and vigorously spoken, is used as a lingua franca, and because many children arrive in school monolingual in Nosu. Also, an enormous effort was put into a well-designed and successful literacy campaign, including full educational implementation and wide use in many public written domains.

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The Nasu Characters In Guizhou starting in the early 1980s, the traditional Nasu logographic script was standardized and brought back into use, starting with draft literacy primers and textbooks from 1982 to 1984 and later in near-identical definitive versions, and subsequently with a great deal of traditional text material published by the Guizhou Nationalities Press and by the Sichuan Nationalities Press. People were intended to use their own local pronunciation, and a single standardized set of logographic characters without graphic variation. That is, unlike Sichuan, no Nasu in Guizhou were expected to learn to use another dialect in order to write; they only had to learn a single set of standard characters. This is analogous to the pre-1911 Chinese situation, in which people used local pronunciation when reading, unlike the modern Chinese situation in which more or less standard Putonghua (“‘common speech,” i.e., standard Mandarin) pronunciation is normatively used for reading throughout China. The dialect differences within Nasu in Guizhou are not very great. Modern Nasu in Guizhou is written from left to right starting at the top left, as is modern Chinese, unlike traditional Nasu; even published versions of traditional Nasu books are printed this way. The dissemination of this Nasu script has been led by the Guizhou Institute of Nationalities, training teachers, scholars, and administrators in Nasu from the late 1970s. There is also an institute for Nasu writing at Bijie, which carries out research work. As about half of the Yi nationality in Guizhou, especially younger people, do not speak Nasu or any other kind of Yi, chances for long-term success with this script are lower than in Sichuan. For more details on its implementation, see Pu (2004, 269). Overall, the standardized Guizhou Nasu script has been fairly successful. This may be because it is standardized, has no graphic variation, and allows people to use their own local pronunciation. It uses a larger inventory of characters than Nosu, as homophones are written differently according to their meaning, and so requires more effort to learn. It also does not lead to the kind of unification and spreading of a standard seen among the Nosu in Sichuan, and it is not preventing, let alone reversing, the erosion of knowledge of Nasu among younger Yi in Guizhou.

Yunnan Reformed Yi As we have seen, all four of the traditional Yi writing systems are found in Yunnan. Thus, no one system could be implemented province-wide, unlike Sichuan and Guizhou where the internal linguistic differences between the languages included in the Yi nationality are much less substantial, and only one traditional Yi orthography was present. In response to this, the Yunnan Nationalities Commission directed its Nationalities Language Commission to create a new composite logographic system. A work group representing the four literary varieties of Yi was set up, and worked from September 1983 to late 1985 creating a completely new composite logographic orthography of 1,675 characters, with some of its characters derived from

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each of the four established scripts. The Nosu work group member left after one year, and the Nosu component is small. Like modern Nosu and Nasu, Yunnan Reformed Yi is written from left to right starting at the top; unlike Nosu, none of the characters is turned on its side. A conference to report on and discuss this work was held in Kunming in March 1986. The intention in this process of Einbau (Fishman 2006) was to have majority rule: if a single character was used in three of the four scripts, or two out of four with the other two different from each other, then the majority character was meant to be chosen. Given that Nosu, Nasu, and Nisu orthographies are closer to each other, and Sani is more distinct, this would have meant that relatively few uniquely Sani characters would have been chosen, so the work group attempted to give Sani characters somewhat greater representation than would have resulted from the majority principle. This means that the Yunnan Reformed Yi characters are purely logographic; in principle they cannot be used with a phonetic value, as they have no inherent phonetic value. Everything is meant to be pronounced according to local speech; thus it is also suitable for Yi areas where there was no traditional script, such as in western Yunnan among the Lolo and Lalo, or where there are speakers of more than one type of Yi; or where children do not speak Yi, and can be taught some appropriate variety using the materials provided. The first stage was approved for implementation at the province level in February 1987. Over a further two years, the work group devised an additional 580 logographic characters and 350 characters to be used for Chinese loanwords for which there is no logographic Yi character available; a supplementary Romanization had been intended for Chinese loans in the originally approved system, but this was never implemented. Initially, provincial Nationality Affairs Commission subsidies were available to teach the system in schools, and various textbooks were prepared. A literacy volume had the largest print run, with 6,000 copies printed in 1991 from handwritten characters; then a revised edition of 5,000 copies using a computer font for both Yi and Chinese came out in 1997 and an expanded edition in 2000 in a print run of 10,000. The total printing of 21,000 copies over ten years for a group with nearly five million people in the province shows how limited the actual implementation has been; if anything, the print runs exaggerate the extent of use, as in each case the new printing was made to improve the earlier edition, before it was sold out. There was a serious attempt by one professor of the Yunnan Institute of Nationalities to disseminate this script. He led and taught a two-year program for fifty Yi cadres from all over Yunnan, with a few from other provinces, to learn it; this included participants from groups with and without traditional writing, and also trained participants in the new Nosu script from Sichuan. Over a number of years, he also taught Yunnan Reformed Yi to all students of the Yi language class in the institute, using his own Nasu as the model pronunciation; students were also trained in phonetics so that they could represent their own speech and relate it to the characters. Since he retired at the end of 2001, this training has stopped. Another center for learning this script was in Chuxiong, the capital of the only Yi autonomous prefecture in Yunnan, at the Chuxiong Normal Institute; this claims to have produced 340 qualified teachers since 1987. Since most Yi in Chuxiong

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either have no tradition of literacy or are Nasu and prefer traditional Nasu script, teaching has not been well-received. In the Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southern Yunnan, a six-month class for teaching this script was held in 1989 with 36 of 74 participants passing, and six teacher training classes were run between 1991 and 1998 with 208 teachers trained. Despite the substantial number of teachers trained, the Yunnan Reformed Yi writing system has encountered very serious problems. It was taught in some schools in various areas during the 1990s, including in some areas where the local Yi language was endangered and not spoken at all by children (Bradley 2002, 2005). A few Yi in Yunnan, especially in areas with languages without orthographic traditions, have used the Yunnan Reformed Yi script for symbolic purposes such as public signs, banners, letterheads, and tourist-oriented materials, but its educational implementation has stalled, and authorities in Nisu, Sani, and Nasu areas have strong reservations about its use, all preferring their own traditional scripts. Nosu in northwestern Yunnan have never switched to it, but continued to use the Sichuan Nosu syllabary and materials from Sichuan. The Yunnan Nationalities Press continues to publish materials in Yunnan Reformed Yi, including new primary school textbooks in a province-wide series for all nationalities that have an established orthography, but these Yi textbooks are hardly used. Thus, the Yunnan reformed Yi script can now be regarded as a clear failure of top-down script reform policy. This is because it was nobody’s own script and had no natural constituency, least of all among those already literate in any of the four existing scripts. It also was difficult to teach, especially to those children who do not speak any Yi language, and served no obvious purpose other than very limited symbolic use.

Continuing Use of Traditional Yi Scripts In Yunnan, local authorities in the Nisu, Nasu, and Sani areas have attempted to document their traditional orthographies and publish materials in traditional characters, usually through the Yunnan Nationalities Press. There is even more material internally published by various universities, research institutes, and local government offices, some of which later appears in published editions. The most extensive efforts to teach a traditional system to new shamans have been in the Honghe Yi and Hani Autonomous Prefecture in southern Yunnan. There, many Nisu shamans have taught informal classes since the early 1980s; a more formal program was run in primary schools of one village in Xinping County of Yuxi Prefecture in the mid-1990s, but stopped after funding from the Ford Foundation ran out. Many Nosu shamans in Sichuan also run informal classes, mainly for their male relatives. In addition, extensive study of traditional Nosu, Nasu, Nisu, and Sani written materials is carried out by scholars at what are now the Central University of Nationalities, the Southwest Nationalities University, the Yunnan Nationalities University, and the Guizhou Institute of Nationalities; all of these institutions have also trained many students in traditional scripts.

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Conclusion In all three cases, the development of reformed orthographies for the Yi in China has been a top-down process. The newly developed syllabic orthography for Nosu in Sichuan has been very successful and is very widely used and we would rate it as 9 on a 1–10 failure-success scale. The standardized logographic orthography for Nasu in Guizhou has been fairly successful but is less widely used. Thus, we would place it at 5 on the scale. The composite logographic Yunnan Reformed Yi has been rather unsuccessful and is now hardly used, though it has served a symbolic role in some communities. This could be rated as 2 on the scale. At the same time, efforts are being made to document and preserve the four traditional logographic systems and the materials written in them, and in some areas to continue to train traditional shamans. Overall, the situation remains fluid, with use of new materials in some areas, pressure from the Yi in Sichuan to spread the use of their orthography more widely, unimplemented plans to prepare materials for yet another composite orthography, this time for Yi in all provinces, and ongoing use of traditional scripts by shamans and scholars, resisting all the various top-down processes. The Yi provide just one example of a widespread script reform process in China since 1950. Some groups like the Zhuang, Dong, and some Miao have accepted alphabetic scripts devised in the 1950s and based on the principles of Chinese pinyin, while other such scripts have seen only limited use, as among the Bai and Naxi. Some groups eventually rejected such scripts in the 1980s and returned to earlier scripts, such as the Lisu, some Miao, and many of the Muslim minorities in western China. Minor reforms in traditional scripts, like Tibetan and two Dai scripts, have mostly been well-accepted and successful. The reforms in the various Yi scripts have been more far-reaching than any others, including Chinese. The most radically reformed Yi script has also been the most successful of the three. References Bradley, David (1979). Proto-Loloish. Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series, No. 39. London and Malmö: Curzon Press. Bradley, David (1991). Chinese as a pluricentric language. In Pluricentric Languages, Michael G. Clyne (ed.), 305–324. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bradley, David (2001). Language policy for the Yi. In Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China, Stevan Harrell (ed.), 195–213. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Bradley, David (2002). Language policy and language maintenance: Yi in China. In Language Endangerment

and Language Maintenance, David Bradley and Maya Bradley (eds), 77–97. London: Routledge Curzon. Bradley, David (2005). Sanie and language loss in China. Language endangerment in the sinosphere. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 173: 161–178. Bradley, David (2007). East and Southeast Asia. In Atlas of the World’s Languages, 2nd ed., Ronald E. Asher and Christopher J. Moseley (eds.), 159–208. London: Routledge. Fishman, Joshua A. (2006). Do Not Leave your Language Alone. Mahwah

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and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Jin Guoku et al. (1984). Concise Yi-Chinese Dictionary [in Sani and Chinese]. Kunming: Yunnan Nationalities Press. Pu Zhongliang. (2004). Policies on the planning and use of the Yi language and writing systems. In Language

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Policy in the People’s Republic of China: Theory and Practice since 1949, Minglang Zhou and Hongkai Sun (eds.), 257–275. Boston, Dordrecht, New York, and London: Kluwer. Vial, Paul. (1909). Dictionnaire Françaislolo, Dialecte gni [in French and Sani]. Hong Kong: Presses des Missions Ètrangères de Paris.

16 Planning for Failure: English and Language Policy and Planning in Bangladesh M. OBAIDUL HAMID

Introduction Language is not an essential marker of national or ethnic identity; nevertheless language plays a crucial role in the formation of such group identity. Bangladesh, the South Asian nation of 160 million Muslim-majority people, provides a good example: language was at the heart of the emergent nationalism that led the nation to separation and independence from Pakistan in 1971. Bangla, the national language, is spoken by 98 percent of the total population. Dominant discourses in Bangladesh portray the nationalism as entirely language-based, to the extent that the Bangla-based identity (Bangali) is promoted, although controversially, at the expense of the political national identity (Bangladeshi). Naturally, Bangla constitutes one of the most sensitive issues in the social, cultural, and political life of the nation. English came to Bangladesh in the wake of British colonial rule in the eighteenth century, and has become entrenched in the society since then. At present, English is an essential component of the national curriculum for grades one through twelve. Children start receiving instruction in English on the first day at school and continue learning English throughout their school careers and also at the tertiary level. English is highly regarded in the society for its power, prestige, and instrumentality. Set against this linguistic background, the discussion in this chapter pursues four aims. First, it shows how macro-level language policies have accommodated English, the language of colonization, to the sensitive language dynamics in the polity. Second, it discusses how state policies have managed the acquisition/ learning of English by its citizens over the decades. Third, it evaluates language

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policy and planning initiatives since the nation’s independence until now, and identifies reasons for the poor outcomes of state management of English language teaching (ELT). Finally, the chapter highlights major social consequences of ELT policies and their implementation over the years. The discussion of these key issues leads to the conclusion that the state commitment to English has largely failed to deliver expected results due to resource constraints on the one hand and contradictions and lack of pragmatic directions in policy on the other. Poor language acquisition management in the public sector has made English learning contingent on private investment, which in turn has exacerbated the social divide between those who can afford to buy English instruction and those who cannot.

National Language and Language-Based Nationalism Although Bangla has been the dominant language in the current territory of Bangladesh for centuries, the nationalism centering on Bangla came to the fore only half a century ago in the context of economic and political discrimination in general and linguistic discrimination in particular. The end of British colonial rule saw the Indian subcontinent divided into two independent countries: India and Pakistan on the basis of religion (Hinduism and Islam, respectively). Being Muslimdominated, the current territory of Bangladesh constituted one wing of Pakistan and was known as East Pakistan. East Pakistan was distinct from West Pakistan (which itself was divided into several provinces) in terms of language, culture, and 1,000 miles of hostile Indian territory. The only element that glued the two distinct lands, cultures, and peoples was religion, that is, Islam. The first test for the future of the geographically nonadjacent federation was language-focused. Based on the European one-language-one-nation model, the early rulers of Pakistan wanted to promote Urdu, a minority language, as the state language of the country. They wanted to add language, a crucial nation-building element, to religion, in order to forge the unity of Pakistan. Although the rulers realized the importance of language, in this case Urdu, in maintaining the unity of Pakistan, they could not imagine the potential of language, in this case Bangla, to unite its speakers in search of a separate national and political identity when their language rights were denied. Predictably, Urdu as the sole state language of Pakistan was unacceptable to East Pakistan, where the vast majority of the people spoke Bangla. The Urdu-only agenda denied not only their distinctive identity based on language, but also their hopes and aspirations in a newly independent country at the end of British colonial rule. East Pakistan offered two feasible solutions to the problem of a state language for Pakistan. The first was retaining English as the official language, a solution that was adopted by India. But this was unacceptable to the Pakistani power elite because English was not compatible with the Islamic identity of the new state. The second solution was a two-language formula—making Bangla as well as Urdu state languages of Pakistan. This was not acceptable to the rulers either because they could not conceive of two languages in one nation. As Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, declared in a public meeting in Dhaka in 1948:

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But let me make it clear to you that the State language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State language no Nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. (quoted in Oldenburg 1985, 716)

The rulers’ insistence on Urdu was responsible for the language movement in East Pakistan. East Pakistanis protested at the imposition of Urdu in the streets of Dhaka on February 21, 1952. The police opened fire on the mass procession and killed four students from the University of Dhaka. The movement then spread throughout the country and it did not stop until Bangla was made a state language of Pakistan along with Urdu in 1954. The language movement of 1952, which called for the sacrifice of lives for the “mother tongue,” was an occasion of disillusionment, first and foremost, for East Pakistani Bengalis. It brought them to the realization that the end of British colonial rule did not put an end to their subordination and exploitation; they were now under Pakistani colonial rule. Linguistic discrimination was accompanied by economic and political exploitation (see Islam 1981; Oldenburg 1985). This exploitative rule led East Pakistanis to search for a separate national and political identity, which they finally achieved through a nine-month-long war in 1971.

Language Issues in Post-Independence Bangladesh The journey of the new nation called for a national pledge to hold Bangla high in its national life and to remember the tragic history of the language movement of 1952. The new nation made it a duty for its citizens to show their love, respect, and allegiance to their language. Bangla was made the state language; it was given constitutional recognition. The 21st of February was made National Martyrs’ Day, a public holiday, to commemorate the sacrifice of the language heroes and is still observed with due solemnity throughout the country. Language policy at the dawn of independence was characterized by single-minded promotion of Bangla for national identity. This policy denied the existence of other languages1 and the ethnic identities of a few dozen ethnic communities in the country. To a great extent, the promotion of Bangla and Bengali identity created a national identity crisis for these ethnic minorities who did not speak Bangla as their first language. The policy aggrieved these communities, many of whom are still fighting for the recognition of their linguistic and cultural distinctiveness (Mohsin 2003). It is ironic that the nation which was subject to Pakistani linguistic discrimination would subject their fellow citizens to similar linguistic discrimination in a matter of a few years. Not recognizing the ethnic languages in order to present Bangladesh as a Bangla-speaking monolingual country marks failures in state policy, which can be subjectively rated 4 on a 1–10 failuresuccess continuum. Policy emphasis on Bangla had implications for English and its status and functions in society. The importance of English and its teaching and learning were recognized by the 1972 national constitution for “historical reasons.” In reality, however, English lost its previous status as a second language. Moreover, many of

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its functions were to be taken over by Bangla. Bangla was to be the medium of instruction at all levels of education. It was to be the language of government administration and the judicial system. In short, it was to be used in all walks of national life. It is often argued that Bangla in post-independence Bangladesh was not in a position to take over the functions and the domains previously assigned to English. For instance, the national language could not be the medium of instruction for higher education because textbooks were written mostly in English, which could not be translated into Bangla within a short time (Choudhury 2001). Therefore, English continued to dominate higher education. Thus, there was a gap between what Bangla was projected to be in policy and what language use was in reality. Nonetheless, the policy discourse affected the role of English in the society and its teaching and learning. The populace received the message that learning English was less important in the newly independent nation, which would function mainly in Bangla. Indeed, studies showed that there was a drastic decline in national proficiency levels of English in the decade following independence (BEERI 1976). Moreover, despite the recognition of the importance of English, postindependence language policies placed Bangla and English in a conflicting equation in which the promotion of one language was believed to be the demotion of the other. Since the popular sentiments about the national language must be upheld, at least in policy discourses, the planning of the two became “a balancing act” (see Rappa and Wee 2006). For example, assigning a greater curricular share to English or the allocation of increased resources to its teaching and learning was balanced by a heighted commitment to Bangla, Bengali identity, and the language movement. The balance between Bangla and English was not simply rhetorical. For instance, when the University of Dhaka, the premier university in Bangladesh, introduced an English foundation course for first-year undergraduate students in 1999, it also introduced a similar course in Bangla for the same students, mainly to balance the curricular space given to English (Hamid 2000). Beyond official discourses, however, the management of English does not constitute a language-planning balancing act. Maintaining a balance between Bangla and English has been restricted to the public sector; the private sector has been left outside of the policy purview. Although there has not been research on the use of languages in the private sector, it can be argued that this sector is guided by market forces in an open-market economy. No public institution can promote English without also promoting Bangla. However, the same rule does not apply to private institutions, which are considered private enterprises. The distinction created the scope for establishing private English-medium schools in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the national levels of English began to deteriorate as a consequence of Bangla promotion policies. English-medium schools have now spread to all major cities in the country and are widely popular among the wealthier class. The increasing popularity of English education can be attributed to the growing importance of English in a globalizing world on the one hand and the depressing state of English teaching and learning in the national curriculum on the other. Englishmedium schools teach the curriculum for “O” and “A” levels with minimal or no

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inclusion of the national language or its history and culture. The curricular impact of these schools is yet to be investigated. However, there are perceptions that English-medium education sits on the social divide between the rich and the poor and between the English-competent and the English-incompetent: The acquisition of English happens to be an instrument for gaining both power and prestige and to limit its knowledge to a section of society would be to deprive others of a right. The basic fact here, as in many other areas, is that the state must address itself to the question [of] whether it wants to have a more egalitarian society or to widen the social gulf further, with the knowledge of English acting as a divisive factor. (Choudhury 2001, 16)

The operation of English-medium schools contradicts post-independence policies, which were aimed at promoting Bangla in all walks of national life including education, because English-medium education, as it is currently formulated, actually means education without Bangla. The trend set up by English-medium schools has been followed by private universities that run entirely in the medium of English. Private universities are also private enterprises; there is no requirement for these universities to use Bangla as the medium of instruction or in their academic programs. Consequently, none of the fifty-six universities established since the enactment of the Private University Act in 1992 offer any courses in Bangla. The use of Bangla is restricted to informal conversations between students and university staff. While allowing the operation of the elitist English-medium schools may have created language policies characterized as inegalitarian, egalitarian principles have been the cornerstone of ELT policies in the public sector. From the beginning, English was made a compulsory subject for students across the country, irrespective of geographic location and social class. Apparently, the principle of social justice and equality of opportunity guided this policy: if English was a language of opportunity and upward mobility, it should be made accessible to all students so that they could take advantage of the language for their social and material well-being (Hamid 2009). However, the evidence shows that the principle of social equity and justice is only rhetorical. First, the compulsory study of English for all does not exemplify social justice in a society where more than 50 percent of the total population do not have formal literacy in Bangla, let alone English. In other words, the question of social justice with regard to English applies to a minority of the population that is able to go to school and receive formal instruction in the language. Does making English compulsory for school learners guarantee equal opportunity of learning the language and taking its benefits? The discussion in the following section examines this question.

English, National Curriculum, and English Proficiency The decline in national proficiency levels of English, as previously mentioned, affected not only the standards of education but also the functioning of government bureaucracy. Therefore, the government realized it needed to revitalize the teaching

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and learning of English. While the balance between English and Bangla was not discarded, there were significant changes in policy in the 1990s. First, English was made a compulsory subject from the first grade, whereas it had previously begun in the third grade. English was also introduced as a compulsory course in most public universities and tertiary colleges across the country. This was on top of the compulsory study of English for twelve years in high school. Then, in terms of pedagogical innovation, communicative language teaching (CLT) was introduced to replace the existing literature- and grammar-based English curriculum at the secondary and higher secondary levels. With direct assistance from the Department for International Development of the British government, the Bangladesh government launched the English Language Teaching Improvement Project in the late 1990s. The project aimed at implementing CLT in two important ways: by providing CLT training to secondary school English teachers; and by writing new English textbooks in light of the adoption of CLT methodology. This substantial reshuffle of English acquisition planning within the national curriculum was believed to improve the falling standards of English on the one hand and to contribute to the development of human capital as required in a globalizing world on the other (Hamid and Baldauf 2008). Nearly a decade has passed since these major curricular reforms in ELT were implemented. Has the country started to crop the benefits of these reforms? Farooqui (2008), Hamid (2009), and Hamid and Baldauf (2008) show that, despite the innovations, English teaching practice has not been informed by CLT principles to any substantial degree because English teachers do not have adequate knowledge of and expertise in CLT. The English Language Teaching Improvement Project trained a large number of English schoolteachers, but the thirteen-day training was inadequate in developing their knowledge of CLT. Moreover, the majority of English teachers have yet to be trained. Thus, post-CLT pedagogy was a virtual continuation of the pre-CLT practice. Examining the outcomes of English teaching and learning over the last decade further substantiates the negligible impact of CLT on student proficiency. If student performance on national school-leaving examinations is any indicator, this has not changed much: the highest number of students still fail in English, just as they did in the past. Moreover, many of those who are successful under the current examination system achieve only minimal functional competence (Hamid and Baldauf 2008).

National Failure in English Learning and Social Consequences What are the reasons for poor English achievement among Bangladeshi learners within the national curriculum? Why does the study of English for twelve years fail to produce substantial positive outcomes? Are there any deep-seated sociocultural issues that lead people to resist the learning of English? Although the largely monolingual character of the nation does not require people to use English for internal or interethnic communication, the instrumental value of English and its

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power and prestige are widely recognized. Despite the emphasis on Bangla-based identity in mainstream discourses, Bangladeshis do not encounter potential sociocultural inhibitions about learning English, as do, for example, Puerto Ricans (see Resnick 1993). In other words, the concept of motivated failure—the bottom-up social pressure to maintain Spanish monolingualism in the face of policy efforts at bilingualization (Spanish plus English), which applies to Puerto Rico—does not hold true in Bangladesh. Hamid (2009) documents the internalization of the value of English and the social motivation to learn it even among students in rural, peripheral Bangladesh, although many of these students and their parents have to worry about how to arrange three daily meals for their families. The principal causes of failure of Bangladeshi ELT can be located in state policy and planning. While policies in the 1970s constrained the growth of English by overemphasising Bangla, those in the 1990s committed to the language more than its national resources permitted. In other words, the policy of expanding English (i.e., introducing English at the earliest grade) in the national curriculum cannot be justified from a resource point of view. State inability to implement ambitious language policies is ultimately a loss of a) national resources which are already spent on the teaching and learning of English, and b) the limited space in the curriculum which could have been given to another subject/discipline if not to English. It is rightly argued that “[t]he present state of English language in Bangladesh represents a significant misapplication of human resources and money” (Allen 1994, cited in Rahman 2007, 83). The importance of resources for optimal teaching and learning of English hardly needs emphasizing. The amount of public investment in school education in Bangladesh is one of the lowest in the world. Education Watch 2006 (CAMPE 2007) shows that government investment in non-nationalized secondary schools is US$2.90 per student per month. This extremely low level of investment means that the quality of education in general and the teaching and learning of English in particular cannot be ensured in secondary schools. This is particularly the case in non-government secondary schools in rural Bangladesh, which cater to over half of the secondary school population (over 8 million) in the country. Haq (2004) pictures the depressing condition of these schools, which lack infrastructure, educational equipment, and other basic requirements for carrying out teaching and learning activities. Similarly, Hossain (2009) depicts a compelling picture of the inadequacy of infrastructure in rural schools, which affects the teaching and learning of the language. If adequate resources cannot be allocated for optimum teaching and learning of the English curriculum, then the state commitment to more English can be seen as political eye-wash in a society where the importance of teaching and learning English is popularly recognized. Inadequate public investment and, consequently, the poor quality of education in schools mean that private (family) investment plays a crucial role in students’ academic achievement. Government contribution to secondary education constitutes about 29 percent of the total education cost at this level. The other 71 percent of the total cost must be borne by parents from their family resources. Thus, ensuring children’s quality education and academic achievement depends on the extent to which families invest, or are able to invest, in their children in various

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forms—from provision of food, clothing and shelter to books and other educational supplies and after-school private tutoring. Hamid, Sussex, and Khan (2009) show that over 75 percent of the students in a sample of 228 in a rural subdistrict participated in private tutoring in English. According to Education Watch 2006 (CAMPE 2007), the cost of private tutoring constitutes a significant proportion (42 percent in government schools; 29 percent in non-government schools) of the total education cost borne by families. Analysis of student views and perceptions in Hamid et al. (2009) shows that private tutoring is more desirable than formal schooling itself. Worryingly, the value of private tutoring has become a social belief, and students irrespective of social class and gender strongly believe that schooling is not enough; they require private lessons to ensure their learning success and achievement. The social consequences of the practice of private tutoring are predictable: students from well-off families are taking advantage of private lessons to ensure their success, which is denied to students from low-income families. A mother from a disadvantaged family was quoted in Hamid et al. (2009, 297) as saying: “If I had some poultry, I could sell eggs and give her [her daughter] some money. She could then pay an English teacher and get some private lessons.” Thus, private tutoring divides the student population in terms of socioeconomic backgrounds, and academic achievement becomes a matter of family investment, which renders the meritocratic and egalitarian principles underlying English language policies meaningless. Socioeconomic divides underlying English learning opportunities can also be illustrated as urban-rural divides. The rural areas in Bangladesh have been the abode of poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment for decades. The socioeconomic and infrastructural divides between urban and rural areas have resulted in commensurate divides in educational opportunity and students’ academic achievement. For example, the results of national school-leaving examinations over the last several decades have shown wide differences between the educational achievement of urban and rural students (Hamid 2009). The differences stand out particularly in English, as statistics show that those who fail in school-leaving examinations usually do so in English, and they are usually from schools in rural areas. Hamid’s (2009) fieldwork with secondary schools in northern Bangladesh provides English achievement data that allow the comparison of students from two schools situated in different socioeconomic and geographic contexts. The urban school is located in the center of a well-known regional city in the north, while the rural school is located in a rural subdistrict town. Two samples of students from these two schools were given a 60-point English test (BEERI 1976). The students’ grades in English in the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examination in 2007 were also collected from the schools. The data show that while the mean score of the urban students on the proficiency test was 40, it was 27.6 for the students from the rural school, with the mean difference being significant at the p < .0001 level. Similarly, the students’ grades in English in the SSC examination showed substantial differences as can be seen from table 16.1. While over 80 percent of the urban students obtained A+, A, or A- in English, the corresponding figure for the rural students was only 11 percent. The lowest grade for the urban students was B, which was obtained by only 9 percent of the students. On the other hand, 47

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percent of the rural students obtained C and D, the lowest grades. Finally, 32 percent of the students from the rural school failed in English, compared to a zero failure rate in English from the urban school in the high-stakes examination. The students’ English achievement differences can be attributed to many factors, including their social backgrounds (family economic, social, and cultural capital, for example) as well as the teaching quality and geographic locations of the two schools. Whatever the actual causes, what is important to note is that no matter which schools students attend and what sort of social backgrounds they come from, they have to study the same curriculum and take the same schoolleaving examination. Their grades on the examination are part of the processes that determine their future education and career trajectories in a society where both domains are highly competitive. If differential English achievement suggests bleak life chances for the vast majority of students from rural schools, then state policies that manage language acquisition without considering the varying circumstances under which different groups of students learn English must be held responsible to a considerable extent. The socioeconomics of ELT as discussed in this section raises two questions. First, is the relationship between resource investment and English achievement supported by evidence from other countries? Examining this question is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, as McKay (2002) argues, although English is a required subject of study in the South American countries of Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras, only Costa Rica has experienced some growth in learning English, which is attributable to higher budgetary allocation (33.3 percent) compared to Guatemala (1.7 percent) or Honduras (3.5 percent). The second question is: Did Bangladesh receive ELT aid to meet the socioeconomic demands of English teaching? The answer is yes, as previously mentioned.2 However, such aid is yet to produce significant ELT outcomes in Bangladesh (Hamid and Baldauf 2008).

English and Questions of Identity As previously noted, national identity in Bangladesh is principally constituted by the national language, Bangla. English has no role in this identity formation.

Table 16.1 Comparison of English Achievement Data between the Rural and the Urban School Grades in English A+ A A− B C D F (fail)

Urban school

Rural school

(n = 43) (%) 25.9 46.5 18.6 9.3 Nil Nil Nil

(n = 62) (%) Nil 9.7 1.6 9.7 30.6 16.3 32.3

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English is mainly related to instrumental functions. The language is required for tertiary education. It is also required for employment in the public as well as the private sectors. Because of its crucial role in education and employment, English is a significant factor in material achievement and social mobility. In reality, however, English remains a tool for maintaining status quo. Proficiency achievement in the language, as follows from the previous discussion, is largely confined to the middle and upper classes. This is apparently paradoxical in a society where primary education is universal and where English is taught from the first grade in school. However, those who graduate from primary schools after studying English for five years actually end up with almost no functional competence in English, particularly in rural areas. A large majority of students do not join secondary schools after graduating from primary schools for socioeconomic reasons and a lack of parental education and awareness. So the minimal knowledge of English that they might have learned in primary schools ends with the termination of their school careers. Students who can enter the secondary system still have another five years to further develop their competence in English. However, as previously discussed, school English teaching is not effective enough to equip most of these students with the language competence that they need for further education and employment. Despite the fact that English occupies a significant place in the national curriculum, English proficiency achievement remains a matter of family investment and effort. Those who bypass the national curriculum and attend English-medium schools can receive effective instruction for developing English proficiency. The home environment of these students is also supportive of their acquisition of English because of family capital and habitus. In the end, then, although English does not mark national or ethnic identity, it does constitute social class identity. English is associated with wealth, power, education, and progressive views. English is popular in Bangladeshi society; even lower-class and uneducated people are aware of its value. However, English cannot be the means of their social mobility since they cannot take advantage of the language. They cannot learn it adequately, despite their sincere wishes, because they do not possess the required resources (see Hamid 2009). Thus, language policy in Bangladesh, despite its pretense of social equity and attempts to use modern CLT methodology, has failed to deliver the outcomes needed for a just society.

Conclusion English in Bangladesh is embedded in complex linguistic, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical dynamics. Earlier policies placed Bangla high in the national life, which restricted the status and functions of English. More recent policies have recognized the importance of English, particularly in the context of its declining standards on the one hand and the demand of globalization on the other. Previous policies were therefore revised to expand English in the national curriculum and to adopt state-of-the-art approaches to ELT. However, the poor state of the national economy has not permitted mobilizing sufficient resources for effective teaching

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and learning of English. As a consequence, although English was made compulsory for students all over the country, learning opportunities have been restricted to those who can invest in it from family resources. Wealthier families have ensured the English achievement of their children by bypassing the national curriculum and sending their children to private English-medium schools. English and English proficiency achievement is thus related to social class and socioeconomic factors in the polity. The chapter has argued that the dynamics of English, ELT, and English proficiency are mainly related to state language policy and planning. Although the gap between policy and practice is undeniable, language-planning efforts have largely failed to produce desirable outcomes in the teaching and learning of English. On the positive side, making English compulsory has made students aware of its value and has enhanced their motivation to learn English. However, real achievement, as measured by examination results and/or proficiency test scores, has been restricted to the wealthier minority. Overall, the performance of language policy and planning in terms of English language acquisition management may not rate a score over 5 on a subjective 1–10 scale. Despite the recent curricular reforms and pedagogic overhaul, there is nothing to indicate that this performance rating will change dramatically in the near future in Bangladesh. Acknowledgments The author would like to acknowledge comments and feedback received from Richard Baldauf, Nanette Gottlieb, and the editors of the volume. Notes 1. These include Chakma, Saontal, Rakhaine, Khasia, Manipuri, and many other languages spoken by the ethnic communities. These languages belong to Austro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Dravidian, as well as Indo-European language families. Different estimates present different numbers of these languages. See Mohsin (2003) for details. 2. Bangladesh has received substantial ELT aid from the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries. Two major UK-funded projects in Bangladesh are the English Language Teaching Improvement Project (completed) and English in Action. The $100 million English in Action is currently being implemented (see Banks 2008 for details).

References Bangladesh Education Extension and Research Institute [BEERI]. (1976). Report of the English Teaching Task Force. Dhaka, Bangladesh: BEERI. Banks, Frank (2008). Technology and English: A new paradigm for technology education? PATT 20: Pupils’ attitude towards technology: International conference on design and technology educational research;

Critical issues in technology education, November 3–6, 2008, Tel-Aviv, Israel. Retrieved from http:// c3.ort.org.il/Apps/WW/Page. aspx?ws=f54a572e-bc70-4d9c-abdf3f289bdeeaa2&page=f4a280db-b932435d-a6b8-cb9cc11be9f8. Campaign for Popular Education [CAMPE] (2007). Education Watch 2006: Financing Primary and

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Secondary Education in Bangladesh. Dhaka: CAMPE. Choudhury, Serajul I. (2001). Rethinking the two Englishes. In Revisioning English in Bangladesh, Fakrul Alam, Niaz Zaman, and Tahmina Ahmed (eds.), 15–25. Dhaka: University Press Limited. Farooqui, Sabrin (2008). Teachers’ perceptions of textbooks and teacher’s guide: A study in secondary education in Bangladesh. The Journal of Asia TEFL 5(4):191–210. Hamid, M. Obaidul (2000). A proposed content-based English for Academic Purposes syllabus for the Foundation Course-2 at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Unpublished MA thesis, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia. Hamid, M. Obaidul. (2009). Sociology of language learning: Social biographies and school English achievement in rural Bangladesh. Unpublished PhD dissertation, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Hamid, M. Obaidul, and Richard B. Baldauf, Jr. (2008). Will CLT bail out the bogged down ELT in Bangladesh? English Today 24(3): 16–24. Hamid, M. Obaidul, Roland Sussex, and Asaduzzaman Khan (2009). Private tutoring in English for secondary school students in Bangladesh. TESOL Quarterly 43(2): 281–308. Haq, M. Nazmul (2004). A baseline survey of rural secondary schools: A quest for teaching-learning quality. Bangladesh Education Journal 3(2): 31–54.

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Hossain, Tania (2009). Inequalities in English language education in Bangladesh: Observations and policy options from rural and urban schools. Asian Cultural Studies 35: 283-297. Islam, Nasir (1981). Islam and national identity: The case of Pakistan and Bangladesh. International Journal of Middle East Studies 13(1): 55–72. McKay, Sandra L. (2002). Teaching English as an International Language: Rethinking Goals and Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mohsin, Amena (2003). Language, identity, and the state in Bangladesh. In Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia, Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly (eds.), 81–103. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oldenburg, Philip (1985). “A place insufficiently imagined”: Language, belief, and the Pakistan crisis of 1971. The Journal of Asian Studies 44(4): 711–733. Rahman, Arifa. (2007). The history and policy of English education in Bangladesh. In English Education in Asia: History and Policies, Yeon Hee Choi and Bernard Spolsky (eds.), 67–93. Seoul: Asia TEFL Rappa, Antonio L., and Lionel Wee (2006). Language Policy and Modernity in Southeast Asia: Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. New York: Springer. Resnick, Melvin C. (1993). ESL and language planning in Puerto Rican education. TESOL Quarterly 27(2): 259–275.

17 The Emergence, Role, and Future of the National Language in Singapore PHYLLIS GHIM-LIAN CHEW

Introduction Singapore is quite unique, being a tiny city-state of 272 square miles with a peaceful, dynamic, and prosperous multiethnic, multireligious, multiracial, and multilingual population of almost 5 million. This great heterogeneity is a result of its recent history. Historically a nondescript Malay fishing village, it was catapulted onto the world stage when it became a part of the British Empire in 1819. As a strategic British commercial and military base, its population was enlarged though an influx of migrants from, for example, China, India, and the Riau Archipelago. On the eve of Singapore’s independence in 1959, the population was 77 percent Chinese, 15 percent Malay, 6 percent Indian, and 2 percent other ethnic definitions (Census 1957). The Census also identified 3 lingua francas—Bazaar Malay, Hokien, and English—as well as thirty-three mother tongue groups with their own parallel supporting institutions such as schools, religion, and economic socialization. A full sociolinguistic understanding of Singapore must also take into account the role of the state. Its policies and actions enable us to understand the rise and fall of its multifarious languages. The first local government that came to power was the Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) led by Lee Kuan Yew in 1959. Lee may be called the founding father of modern Singapore, having served continuously as prime minister, senior minister, and currently, minister mentor. Hence, both “Singapore” and the “PAP” are synonymous; and ideas and speeches by the PAP, and especially by Lee himself, will play a necessary part in our story. After its victory in 1959, the PAP installed the four language streams of education (Chinese,

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Tamil, Mandarin, and English) and elevated Malay to national language status— clearly a multilingual policy well suited for its multiracial population. These were official languages and could be used legitimately in the courts, schools, and government offices, and could be voiced freely in the press, radio, television, and movies. However, it must be noted from the onset that these four official languages are not necessarily mother tongues, but rather the “symbolic” designated languages of the different races. The Chinese do not typically speak Mandarin, the Indians do not normally speak Tamil, and the Malays do not necessarily speak Malay—they might instead be more likely to speak Hokien, Telegu, and Boyanese, respectively. A typical Singaporean student speaks a home language (probably Hokien for a Chinese, Telegu for an Indian, or Boyanese for a Malay); he then also learns either English, Tamil, Mandarin, or Malay as a “first” language depending on which language-medium school he is enrolled in, and he also has to pick a “second” language from among the four official languages. Last but not least, he has to attend Malay lessons, since that is Singapore’s designated “national language.” Table 17.1 depicts the verbal repertoire of typical Singaporeans in the 1960s and 1970s (cf. Platt 1980, Bell 1972). Today, in 2009, most Chinese, Indian, and Malay dialects are in various stages of extinction in Singapore (Waas, 2002). However, to categorically state that even officially designated languages such as Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin have “failed”—an emotionally strong word—is to court controversy, for this is not quite politically correct. Nevertheless, in our efforts to understand language shift against an imaginary success-failure continuum, we may conclude that all three languages relative to English have not succeeded as much as they were supposed to. My study will focus only on Malay, Singapore’s national language. A national language represents the political, cultural and social unit of the political state (Holmes 2001, 97). While it is the first among equals of Singapore’s languages, it is surprising to find that the percentage of users of Malay in Singapore has actually declined rather than increased. Indeed, by 1990, all ethnic groups have increased their use not of Malay but of English (Census 1991). This trend continued into the next decade. For example, in the decade 1990 and 2000, the proportion of Singaporeans speaking English most frequently at home increased from 19 percent

Table 17.1 Verbal Repertoire of Singaporean in the 1960’s-1970’s It usually includes:

It may include the following lingua franca:

• The mother tongue (usually one of the dialects) • The dominant Chinese/Malay/ Indian dialect depending on which race the subject belongs to • Bazaar Malay

• English • Mandarin • Tamil

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to 24 percent among the Chinese, from 6.1 percent to 7.9 percent among the Malays; and from 32 percent to 36 percent among the Indians (Census 2001, 4). Across all age groups in the Chinese, Indian, and Malay communities, the younger the child, the more likely the child is speaking English rather than Malay (Census 2000, 5). Therefore, although a national language should not “fail,” its use has decreased and even among the Malays, evidence of an inevitable language shift is apparent.

Rise of Malay as the National Language of Singapore Before we analyze the paradoxical position of the national language in Singapore, it may be helpful to first recall the political, geographical, historical, and social motivations behind its earlier meteoric rise. The choice of Malay as national language was first and foremost a politically calculated move. Singapore saw political-economic advantages in merging itself to the larger Malay hinterland due to the advantages afforded to its manufacturing sector by economies of scale. The Malay language was also seen as the metaphorical “bridge” to cross the Straits of Johore into peninsular Malaya. Already in 1956, the Razak Education Commission had decreed that a “new” Malay would be codified, elaborated, standardized, and implemented. The education ordinance of 1957, as well as the Education Act of 1961, had also spelled out the impending demise of English-medium schools and the corresponding rise of Malay-medium schools. This objective of political merger, which Singapore desired, came to fruition in 1963 when it successfully merged with Malaya, Sabah, and Sarawak to form Malaysia. The end of the Japanese occupation of Singapore also saw a rising Malay political consciousness among Malays, who became more aware of their heritage and rights (Lee 2008). The Malays comprised 15 percent of the population, and it was evident to all that they were afraid of being overwhelmed by the majority Chinese in economic, social, and cultural fields of human endeavor. Fearing the potential fragmentation of society through religious, ethnic and linguistic rivalries, the newly elected PAP government decided that the elevation of Malay would defuse a potentially unstable situation (Gopinathan et al. 2004). Thus, although three-quarters of Singapore’s population were ethnic Chinese and a majority (59.2 percent) of the school-going population was then in Chinese medium schools (Wong 2002: 5); the People’s Action Party (PAP) spoke out against a Chinese linguistic center stage: the idea that Malay should be the national language, occupying a more important place than Chinese is difficult for some to accept. And worse, any attempt to teach Malay in a way so as to make it the national language is resisted. This must be resolved. We cannot afford the luxury of blind Chinese chauvinism.” (PAP 1958, 6) Instead, the PAP were eager to solve “the Malay dilemma” (Mahathir 1992)—a dilemma which they believed would be worsened by elevating a Chinese language

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since such a move, however justifiable it might be in view of population demographics, would almost certainly alienate the minority Malays and give rise to a potentially unstable political situation. The choice of Malay is also intimately linked with the geography of Singapore. Singapore is situated in the heart of a Malay-speaking region and its fortunes irretrievably linked with those of its neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia. Malay as a national language would enable Singapore to merge naturally and linguistically with its geography. It would also reassure its watchful neighbors that its citizenry were not “Chinese fishes in a Malayan sea” (Murray 1971,5) but rather assimilated and peaceful citizens of the Malayan landscape. Hence, in the 1950s PAP election manifesto, Malay, not English became “the obvious choice”: a lingua franca is necessary, and moral, political and practical considerations make Malay, rather than English, the obvious choice . . . The Malay language in Indonesia freed from the Dutch colonial restraints, is rapidly becoming a comprehensive means of expression and communication in science and technology, commerce and industry and the humanities. (PAP 1964, 286) The existence of various forms of pidgin Malay in Malaysia today is also an attestation to the great volume of intergroup communication carried out in the language. The 1957 census (Census 1957, 76) found that in the age group 15–54, as many as “two-thirds declared that they could speak Malay” and only 31 percent were able to speak English. Overall, 48 percent of the population aged 15 and above could speak Malay, and this included 88.3 percent of Indians and 32.5 percent of Chinese. Where the Indians were concerned, there were, for example, more Indians who could understand Malay than there were Indians who could understand Tamil, although Tamil was decreed officially as the “mother tongue” of the Indians in Singapore (Kuo 1976). It was by all arguments the “natural vernacular” of the Straits Settlements (Omar 1993, Newman 1986) and colonizers, including the Portuguese, Dutch, and English, had perpetuated its use as a lingua franca. Malay’s elevation to national status saw it instituted as a compulsory subject for all students in the four types of language-medium schools. A pass in Standard 2 Malay became compulsory for the confirmation of appointment in the Civil Service. Proficiency in Malay was also a requirement in obtaining citizenship (Kamsiah and Bibijan 1998). Bonuses were also paid to all educational officers (teachers) who had successfully completed a national language course (Bell 1972). The establishment in 1961 of a Malay secondary school, Sekolah Menengah Sang Nila Utama, where there was none before, testified to the bright future of the Malay language. The media also played their part, in broadcasting Malay lessons daily for the general public (Ibid.,181). The Adult Education Board reported a significant increase in the enrollment of Malay language and the Straits Times, the daily with the largest circulation in Southeast Asia, began to carry regular lessons in the national language (MOE 1961, 12). Despite such initiatives, it may be startling to discover that the percentages of speeches made in Malay in Parliament has declined, and the language is hardly used in Parliament today. In 2005, Kishore Mabhubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan

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Yew School of Public Policy, observed: “Many Singaporeans know no Malay even though they are surrounded by more than 200 million speakers of the language. It’s like going to live in Latin America and you don’t speak a word of Spanish” (Sunday Times, Feb. 20, 2005, H2). Perhaps political, geographical, and educational reasons will once again enlighten us as to the irregular fortunes of the national language.

Reasons for the Decline in the Use of the National Language While the urge to join Malaysia had led to the rise in public interest to use Malay, the unexpected political split from the Federation two years later, in 1965, led to a reverse, that is, a decline in the learning of Malay.1 For one, it was no longer necessary to be proficient in Malay in order to be promoted in the civil service. For another, the Malay language requirement for the educational service was abolished in 1966. Another key reason for its demise resides in the educational sector. While multilingualism was chosen as the most equitable policy, it also had led, inadvertently, to a high educational failure rate in the years following (Schiffmann 2007). For example, Ahmad (1976, 46–47) selected the year 1968 arbitrarily to show the achievement results of primary and secondary school students. Table 17.2 shows a high failure rate, especially at the primary school level. This unacceptable performance may be attributable to the fact that most students were beginning elementary school at age seven in two foreign languages— and understandably, felt alienated and could not cope linguistically.2 We have already recalled that in the 1960s and 1970s, most students did not speak the official languages taught in school. Indeed, most of them were native speakers of dialects or of a street lingua franca such as Hokien or Bazaar Malay. In some cases, children may even be speaking two mutually unintelligible mother tongues because their ethnically similar parents were from different Malay or Indian dialect groups (Le Page 1964, 1997). It was rare that the mother tongue or lingua franca of the street corresponded with the school languages of English, Malay, Tamil and Mandarin (Chua 2004). A later ministerial report was to confirm this observation: The majority of the pupils are taught in two languages, English and Mandarin. About 85% of these pupils do not speak these languages at home. When they

Table 17.2 Achievement Results of Primary and Secondary School students in 1968 Language English Chinese Malay Tamil

Primary % pass

Secondary % pass

25.9 59.9% 33.3% 44.8%

52.65 58.6% 43.4% 54.0%

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are at home, they speak dialects. As a result, most of what they have learnt in schools were not reinforced. (Goh et al 1979, 44). To tackle the problem of non-achievement, a “bilingual” rather than multilingual policy was implemented. This meant that students who attended Englishstream schools had to take Malay, Chinese, or Tamil as their second languages. Those who went to one of the other three streams—Malay, Chinese, or Tamilstream—were required to take English as a second language. For our purposes, this had the indirect effect of promoting English rather than Malay, since the bilingualism in practice was not just simply any two of the four official languages, but rather English and one mother tongue (Pakir 1993). Bearing in mind that language shift is a gradual process in which a speech community gives up one language and adopts a new one, such a policy would mean that English would tacitly replace Malay as lingua franca. Fishman (1991, 1) defines language shift as “speech communities whose native languages are threatened because their intergenerational continuity is proceeding negatively with fewer and fewer users or uses every generation.” According to Romaine (1995), the starting point of language shift is bilingualism—often accompanied by diglossia— as a stage on the way to monolingualism in a new language. Romaine notes that “typically a community which was once monolingual becomes bilingual as a result of contact with another (usually socially and economically more powerful) group and become[s] transitionally bilingual in the new language until their own language is given up altogether” (1995, 50) The market economy became increasingly associated with English and so were prestigious scholarships. Not surprisingly, with each passing year, enrollments in the English-medium streams increased disproportionately to all the other language streams (MOE 1966–1999). Surprisingly, the Malays themselves did not support their own Malay-medium schools, being more drawn to the English-medium ones. One reason was the relative lack of Malay books to teach the various school subjects at the secondary or tertiary level. The 1960s were early days for the Romanization of Malay, and efforts were only just beginning to find a standardized set of terminology in the various academic and professional sections. Another reason could be that the Malays themselves looked down on their own language and were concerned that they may be viewed as backward if they were to use it in public personal communication. Most Malay children also came from homes where parents did not normally use the elaborated code when speaking to their children. Many parents spoke Bazaar Malay, an easy-going informal style that sometimes lacked accuracy and grammatical order. While such informality is the norm in intimate relationships, it will undoubtedly not be advantageous for younger members of the family who have to write and speak Standard Malay in school (cf. Heath and Langman 1994). Last but not least, and ironically, the adoption of Romanization for written Malay (to replace the traditional Jawi in which it was originally written) had also made the learning of English easier. Singaporeans are aware of the high correlation between income levels and the use of English (Census 1991). Families with a higher income use English as a

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predominant home language; while among families with a lower income, the languages at home were Mandarin, Malay, Indian, and Chinese dialects (Straits Times, May 1, 1993). This early realization of language as “linguistic capital” rather than “cultural capital” may be attributed to the fact that the majority of Singapore’s populations are people who have been historically wrenched from extremely deep roots and plagued by insecurities (Tan and Chiew 1995). This pragmatism is also obvious in the Malay community, as evidenced by the fact that some Malay (and Indian parents) have asked the government for greater “flexibility” in the state’s bilingual policy—not because they want to promote their own languages and cultures, but rather because they want their children to be allowed to learn Mandarin as a third language (in addition to English and the mother tongue), or because they want their children to pick up Chinese as a second language.3 Not being able to find suitable employment in the marketplace, unlike their Chinese-medium counterparts who are able to find support from Chinese small businesses for their skills, Malays departed in droves from Malay-medium schools. Hence, the 1970s onward saw the closure of Malay medium schools—first primary, then secondary, and later pre-university and junior colleges (Kamsiah and Bibijan 1998). As Schiffman (2007) notes, the cultural capital available to English-knowing elites has become too much of a temptation.

The Rise of English Unlike half a century ago, when Singapore saw itself singularly as a new “nation,” Singapore views itself today not so singularly but as a mosaic of an unchanging, invasive, and irreversible globalization (Wee 2008). It has actively embraced “the new world order,” as seen by in its rating by A. T. Kearney as “the world’s most globalized country.”4 Its citizens have been urged to be more “creative” than “conformist.” The Republic today offers greater governmental transparency, and islandwide broadband access with financial and legal institutions complementary to global operations in London and New York. Foreigners make up over 30 percent of Singapore’s workforce.5 In 2007, 40 percent of Singaporeans were found to have opted for marriage with either a permanent resident or foreigner (Department of Statistics 2009). An allegiance to the global order has naturally led to a wholesale adoption of English—the indisputably international language of the world (Graddol 2006). Vaish (2007) shows that the number of children entering the first grade6 who spoke predominantly English language has risen from 36 percent in 1994 to 50 percent in 2004. For such a short period, the increase has been dramatic, and Liu et al. (2007) have predicted that while the last school-going generation has seen the shift from Chinese dialects to Mandarin, the next generation may see the shift from Mandarin to English. Teachers have complained of difficulties in motivating pupils to study Malay, even though the Ministry of Education has recently introduced Malay language programs and an incentive points system for entry into junior college and local universities (personal communication).

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A decade after the installation of Malay as national language, Lee (1971) has admitted that the centrality of English could no longer be suppressed: Suppression of the English language, which gives access to the superior technology of the West, will be damaging to the developing countries. Not only will it blindfold the next generation to the knowledge of the advanced nation, it will cause a brain drain. But so many new countries have stifled the foreign language they have inherited. Sometimes this is done, not so much to elevate the status of the indigenous language, as to take away an advantage a minority ethnic group has by having greater competence in the former colonial language. This has been damaging. It blindfolds the next generation to the knowledge of the advanced countries. Worse, it leads to an exodus of the professionally trained. They can immigrate to the advanced countries, and do because they do not intend to allow their children to be crippled by language linkers. To get access to new knowledge, the best course would be to continue using the language of the former metropolitan power, particularly where this happens to be English.

The Future of Malay as National Language Even if the national language is no longer heard on the main streets of Singapore, Malay will continue to be written and spoken for obvious reasons. For one, it is the national language of Indonesia and Malaysia—together possessing a combined population of almost 300 million native speakers. Second, Malays have largely become more consciously Muslim since the onset of independence and more so since the terrorist attack on the United States in September 2001. Many more are making pilgrimages to Mecca, are fasting during the month of Ramadan and are, for example, praying five times a day. Religion has become more than ever an integral part of their ethnic and national identity, and to a large degree, religious instruction helps to perpetuate the use of the Malay language (Kassim 2008). In comparison with the Indian and Chinese community, where language shift has been much more rampant (cf. Saravanan 2001, Goh 2001), Malay remains a cultural tool for maintaining family values in the Malay community. In the 1980 census, 96.7 percent of Malay households used Malay, but in the 1990 census, the figure dropped to 94.3 percent. Correspondingly, the use of English in Malay homes increased from 2.3 percent in 1980 to 5.5.percent in 1990 (Census 1981, 1991). In table 17.3, as one compares 1990 and 2000 census figures, the Malay community has done significantly better than the Chinese community and slightly better than the Indian community in preserving their mother tongue. We may conclude that, Malay, which once used to be the lingua franca of Singapore, has managed to keep its place in the Malay home despite a slight percentage decline from 1990 to 2000. Malay parents do speak Malay to their children, even if it may not be Standard Malay or even if code-mixed significantly with English.

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Table 17.3 Languages most spoken at home 1990 vs 2000 *Language most frequently spoken at home

English Mandarin Chinese dialects Malay Tamil

Chinese

Malays

Indians

1990

2000

1990

2000

1990

2000

19.3 30.1 50.3 0.3 –

23.9 45.1 30.7 0.2 –

6.1 – – 93.7 –

7.9 0.1 0.1 91.6 0.1

32.3 0.1 0.1 14.5 43.2

3.6 0.1 0.1 11.6 42.9

Adapted from Census of Population (1991, 2001)

As a national language, Malay continues to receive institutional support from the state. The government has for example, continually urged non-Malays to learn Malay, on the grounds that it can be an effective tool to facilitate business and would help the learner appreciate the culture and thinking of Singapore’s Malaysian and Indonesian neighbors (Koh 2006). In 2008, for the first time, a doctoral program in the Malay language, with faculty drawn from Malaysia and Indonesia, has been offered by SIM University, Singapore’s first and only privately funded university. This is not just an attempt to raise the profile and prestige of Malay, but more practically, to help Malay language teachers and professional interpreter and translators improve their practice. In the short term, the Malay language is well maintained. However, in the long term, it will face challenges that are more serious. Its survival will depend on the response of the Malay community to counter influences from English through advances in information and communications technology. Already religious teaching is beginning to be taught more and more in the English language. English is also being used during Friday prayers at the mosque, although not frequently. Even Malays do not have high expectations to speak Malay well. Indeed, if one asked a four-year-old a question in Malay, the chances are that he will reply in English (Sapawi 1999). Four-year-old Malays are more at home in English than Malay since they watch English-language cartoons, sitcoms, and movies. They are more adept at using children’s programmes XXX on the computer, thanks to the English instructions. The only time they are likely to use Malay is when they are with an Indonesian maid or with their grandparents (Sawapi 1999). These two trends in religion and the home indicate that the link between language and culture in the Malay community is weakening and that a language shift will soon become more pronounced. The history of European colonization has also, unfortunately, made Malay a relatively low-status language and one that does not command as much respect as it did before. Already, teachers are finding it difficult to motivate not just non-Malay but Malay pupils to study Malay, even though the Ministry has introduced Malay language programs and a merit points system for entry into junior college and local universities (Koh 2006).

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Conclusion The maintenance of a minority language is not necessarily based on whether it is given national status but rather on two conditions: (1) the strict compartmentalization of the dominant and subordinate languages; and (2) the preservation of the patterns of intergenerational transmission of the minority language (Fishman 1991). Where the Malay community is concerned, the first has already been violated. There exists no rigid segregation between the use of dominant and subordinate language, and hence it is likely that with time, the latter will be subjugated. The second condition is still intact but is threatened because English has already begun inroads into Malay home domains, and as its influence grows the traditional patterns of intergenerational transmission of Malay will be under stress. As young Malay parents choose to live in nuclei homes, such transmission is also poised to decrease (Public Education Committee 2002). Overall, the trend toward the wider use of English in the Malay community may lead to the eventual loss of Malay in the same way that the Malay-medium schools were closed down previously because Malay parents chose not to send their children to these schools. Although Singapore is veering toward monolingualism (English/Singlish) in practice (Chew 2009), bilingualism remains the official cornerstone of language policy in Singapore schools, as reiterated by Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, careful not to alarm a population who are already on the verge of losing their mother tongues: Let me reiterate that despite the recent changes made by the Ministry of Education, the government has not changed its longstanding bilingual policy or shifted its position on the mother tongue. Bilingualism and learning the mother tongue will remain the cornerstone of our education policy. (Goh 2004, H2) While the government has gone to lengths to emphasize that the bilingual policy is fundamental to the Singaporean educational system, it is becoming increasingly obvious that such assertion may often be more symbolic than real (Chua 2004). This is a familiar ploy much like what was done before with the raising of Malay as the national language of Singapore in 1959. In other words, while Malay remains the national language of the Republic resplendent in the state crest, currency notes, national anthem, and army commands, in reality it is hardly used in the working lives of Singaporeans, much less as a lingua franca of the streets than it previously was, before it was raised, ironically, to national language status. In the short term, the Malay language is well maintained due to the institutional support that it continues to enjoy from the government, the numerical strength of Malay speakers, the geographical proximity of Indonesia and Malaysia, and a dynamic population growth. In the long run however, the Malay language will face greater and more serious challenges. I would place Malay in Singapore as 6 on an imaginary failure-success continuum of 1–10 primarily because a diglossic arrangement in which minority languages are encouraged in the private sphere but not employed in the public is likely to lead to language shift in the long run (Wright 2000).

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Nevertheless, I would like to assume that the national language has not failed— indeed, it has greatly succeeded as a keeper of civic peace and as a symbol of geographical identity. It has only failed in increasing its percentage of speakers in Singapore. It is still ardently sung each morning before the raising of the national flag, even if the majority of singers do not understand the words (cf. Hong and Hung 2008). De jure in status, elegant and grand ceremonially, its communicative functions subcontracted to English, the national language appears aloft, distant yet calm amidst the winds of impending change. Notes 1. Singapore’s model of a “Malaysian-Malaysia,” modeled on multiculturalism, clashed with the Malaysian government’s desire for a “Malay Malaysia.” 2. Bilingualism: Many are masters of none, Straits Times, August 12, 2007, H14. 3. The government was reluctant to allow this because they wanted to maintain the viability of four official languages. What they did instead was to play up the economic value of Malay so that it might be considered as attractive as Mandarin. 4. Singapore has been rated “most globalized country” for several years running. See http://www.atkearney.com/main.taf?p=5,3,1,143,3. 5. New citizens make up half of our Olympic team, Straits Times, August 18, 2008, A7. 6. SIM University received 168 applications for the first intake, consisting mostly of teachers and professionals. Classes commenced in January 2009 with a cohort of 48 students. SIM University has increased the intake to 100 for the July 2009 cohort.

References Ahmad, Zahoor (1976). Analysis of the effects of changes in administrative policies of the Singapore Ministry of Education on the operation of the Singapore School system 1960–1972. PhD dissertation, University of Kansas. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms. Kamsiah, Abdullah, and Ayyub Bibijan. (1998). Malay language: Issues and trends community. In Language, Society and Education in Singapore: Issues and Trends, 2nd ed., Saravanan Gopinathan (ed.), 179–190. Singapore: Times Academic Press. Bell, David Scott (1972). Unity in Diversity: Education and Political Integration in an Ethnically Pluralistic Society. PhD dissertation, Indiana University. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms. Census of population 1957 (1957). Report on the Census of Population

1957 by S. C. Chua. Singapore: Government Printing Press. Census of population 1980 (1981). Report on the Census of Population by Khoo Chian Kim. Singapore: Department of Statistics. 9 volumes. Census of population 1990 (1991). Advance Data Release. Singapore: Department of Statistics. Census of Population 2000 (2001). Advance Data Release. Singapore: Department of Statistics. Chew, Phyllis Ghim Lian (2009). Emergent Lingua Francas and World Orders: The Politics and Place of English as a World Language. New York: Routledge. Chua, Catherine Siew Kheng (2004). Singapore’s literacy policy and its conflicting ideologies. Current Issues in Language Planning 5(1): 64–76. Department of Statistics. (2009). Statistics on Marriages and Divorce

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2008. Singapore: Department of Statistics. Fishman, Joshua. A. (1991). Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Goh, Chok Tong (2004). Refinements to mother-tongue language policy. Speech given at the Chinese High School 85th Anniversary held at the Chinese High School, March 21, 2004. Retrieved from http://www. moe.gov.sg/media/speeches/2004/ sp20040321.htm. Goh, Keng Swee, and Education Study Team (1979). Report on the Ministry of Education 1978. Singapore: Singapore National Printers. Goh, Yeng Seng (2001). A sociolinguistic profile of Chinese language student teachers in Singapore. In Challenges Facing the Singapore Education Systems Today, Jason Tan, Saravanan Gopinathan, and Wah Kam Ho (eds.), 227–246. Singapore: Prentice Hall. Gopinathan, Saravanan, Wah Kam Ho, and Vanithamani Saravanan (2004). Ethnicity management and language: Towards a modified model of language education in Singapore schools. In Beyond Rituals and Riots: Ethnic Pluralism and Social Cohesion in Singapore, Ah Eng Lai (ed.), 228–257. Singapore: Eastern University Press. Graddol, David (2006). English Next: Why Global English May Mean the End of “English as a Foreign Language.” London: British Council. Heath, Shirley B., and Juliet Langman (1994). Shared thinking and the register of coaching. In Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register, Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan (eds.), 82–105. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmes, Janet (2001). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. 2nd ed. London: Longman.

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Mahathir, bin Mohamad (1992). The Malay Dilemma. Singapore: Times Book International. Murray, Douglas P. (1971). Multilanguage Education and Bilingualism: The Formation of Social Brokers in Singapore. London: University of Microfilms International. MOE (Ministry of Education) (1961). Annual Report. Singapore: Government Printing Press. MOE (Ministry of Education) (1966– 1999). Education Statistics Digest. Singapore: Ministry of Education. Retrieved from http://www.moe.gov. sg/education/education-statisticsdigest/online-interactive/ Newman, John (1986). Singapore’s speak Mandarin campaign: The educational argument. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 14(2): 52–67. Omar, Asmah Haji (1993). The first congress for Malay. In The Earliest Stage of Language Planning: The “First Congress” Phenomenon, Joshua Fishman (ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pakir, Anne (1993). Two tongue tied: bilingualism in Singapore. In Bilingualism and National Development, Gary M. Jones, Andrew Conrad, and K. Ozog (eds.), 73–90. Clevedon, Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters. Platt, John (1980). English in Singapore and Malaysia: Status, Features, Functions. New York: Oxford University Press. PAP (People’s Action Party) Central Executive Committee (1958). The New Phase after Merdeka: Our Tasks and Policy. Singapore: People’s Action Party. PAP (People’s Action Party) (1964). Manifesto: Our First 10 years. Singapore: The Star Press. Public Education Committee on Family (2002). Family Matters: Report of the

Public Education Family. Singapore: Public Education Committee on Family. Romaine, Suzanne (1995). Bilingualism. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Sapawi, Tuminah (1999). Is Malay language holding its own? Straits Times, July 24, 1999, 2. Saravanan, V. (2001). The significance of bilingual Chinese, Malay and Tamil children’s English network patterns on community language use patterns. Early Child Development and Care 166: 81–91. Schiffman, Harold (2007). Tamil language policy in Singapore. The role of implementation. In Language, Capital, Culture. Critical Studies of Language and Education in Singapore, Viniti Vaish, Saravanan Gopinathan and Yong Bing Liu (eds.), 209–227. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publications. Straits Times (1993). May 1, 1993, page A4. Straits Times (2008). New citizens make up half of our Olympic team. August 18, 2008, A7. Sunday Times (2005). Bahasa: Young can take initiative. February 20, 2005. Tan, Paul (2007). Conserve linguistic heritage of Singapore. Straits Times 18(8): 28.12 Tan, Ern Ser, and Seen Kong Chiew (1995). Emigration orientation and propensity: The Singapore case. In Crossing Borders. Transmigration in Asia Pacific, Jin Hui Ong, Kwok Bun Chan, and Soon Beng Chew (eds.), 239–258. Singapore: Prentice Hall International. Vaish, Vintii. (2007). Globalization of language and culture in Singapore. International Journal of Multilingualism 4(3): 217–233. Waas, Margit. (2002). Language reclamation: Kristang. In

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Globalization, Phyllis Chew, Ghim Lian, and Ser Hwee Quek (eds.), 103–112. Singapore: National University of Singapore Alumni. Wee, Wan Ling (2008). The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development. Singapore. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

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18 Efforts to Vernacularize Sanskrit: Degree of Success and Failure MADHAV M. DESHPANDE

Introduction Historically, originating as a sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian branch of the IndoEuropean language family, Sanskrit stands at the intersection of the genetic inheritance from Indo-European and the areal features it shares with languages of other families like Dravidian in the Indian subcontinent (cf. Emeneau 1954). From the early manifestation of Sanskrit in the Vedic texts, the earliest of which probably go back to the middle of the second millennium BCE, Sanskrit appears in more or less changing forms in middle and late Vedic texts. By the time we come to the middle of the first millennium BCE, there is clear evidence of the presence of the linguistic material from the Vedic texts that is orally preserved and used in ritual, alongside the presence of a more or less colloquially spoken form of Sanskrit that is recorded by the grammarian Panini around 400–500 BCE. When one thinks of the notion of “vernacular” in relation to Sanskrit, one must note that the name comes from the Sanskrit word samskṛta, which refers to a variety that is cultured or sophisticated, in comparison with the vernacular languages of ancient India that were called Prakrits. This label comes form the Sanskrit word prākṛta, which refers to a more natural, uncultivated state of language. So, Sanskrit was indeed perceived to be a more cultured or cultivated variety of the ancient Indo-Aryan linguistic spectrum, while the Prakrit languages were considered to be the true vernaculars. With this terminological distinction in mind, scholars have discussed issues like Prakritization of Sanskrit and Sanskritization of Prakrits in the various historical periods and regions of India (Deshpande 1979, 1993). On the other hand, there is an important question relating to the usage of Sanskrit itself. Was Vedic Sanskrit the mother tongue of the poets who produced

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the hymns of the Vedas? Did they speak at home the same form of language as is seen in the hymns? Did the women and children speak this form of language? Did members of the non-priestly classes speak this form of language? These are important questions for the Vedic period. Within the language of the Veda, there are Prakritisms, indicating that there were other, probably more vernacular varieties of Indo-Aryan spoken by members of the Vedic communities and their neighbors. There are occasional indications that the Sanskrit language spoken by the queens during the Vedic royal horse sacrifice, Aśvamedha, while dancing around the recently sacrificed horse, looks like a distinct dialect. The home language of the Vedic poets was in all probability somewhat different from the literary and ritual language seen in the Vedic hymns and ritual texts. Sanskrit, even in its earliest known period, existed in a somewhat stratified form consisting of a variety of related dialects, alongside the more vernacular precursors of languages known as Prakrits in later times. To this one must add the not-so-clearly-known non-IndoAryan languages of the ancient north India. We have a picture of Sanskrit embedded in a social context where it is a language of high prestige, but a language that must coexist and compete with other Indo-Aryan and non-Indo-Aryan languages. M. B. Emeneau remarks (Deshpande 1979, Foreword by Emeneau, 1) that In the earliest period speakers of Indo-Aryan—Vedic and living Sanskrit— were concerned with neighboring languages, whether they were other varieties of Indo-Aryan or were non-Indo-Aryan; the historical dimension had hardly yet come into play. Thereafter, when Sanskrit was no longer a living language but was a language of high prestige that had ceased to be anyone’s first language, the concern was essentially an evaluation of various vernaculars as against the classical language. The situation was complicated by the circumstance that some “protestant” communities combined an adversary position on the language with an adversary stance against the religious and social doctrines and practices of Hinduism. While Emeneau’s characterization is quite convincing, it raises some important issues. What is a living language? Must a living language be a first language of its speaker? Can a second language be also a living language, without being anyone’s first language? These questions are relevant not only to evaluating the status of Sanskrit during the ancient and medieval periods, but they are also relevant to its status in modern times.

Ancient and Medieval Times Before discussing modern efforts to revive the Sanskrit language, it necessary to first understand something about its condition in ancient and medieval times. Panini’s grammar of Sanskrit composed around the middle of the first millennium BCE presents to us a language that has two distinct domains, namely the language as seen in the inherited scriptural texts of the Vedas, and the domain of contemporary colloquial usage referred to simply as speech (bhāṣā). Beyond noting this

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major distinction within the total domain of the usage of Sanskrit, Panini notes divergences of its usage in different geographical regions and in different scholastic traditions, with some usages being more preferred than others (cf. Kiparsky 1979). Panini’s grammar seems to be mainly a description of a variety of Sanskrit spoken by educated Brahmin males. There are references in his grammar to how Brahmin males should speak to women and members of lower castes, but no clear indication that women or members of lower castes spoke this variety of Sanskrit. This does not mean that Sanskrit was restricted to an academic or ritual domain. There is an interesting rule [Panini 8.4.48] that says that a man cursing a woman can use the expression putrādinī (“son-eater”), without the doubling of t, but he should use the expression puttrādinī (“son-eater”), with a geminate tt, if this is a factual description. This clearly refers to a colloquial, non-ritual and non-academic, domain of usage. Similarly, the verb-root pard (to fart”) listed by Panini is not recorded in literary Sanskrit, but is found in the later vernaculars (Deshpande 1992). From this description, one might get a sense that women and members of lower castes did not speak Sanskrit, or at least what the high-brow Sanskrit grammarians would recognize as forms of Sanskrit. Did they speak any forms of Sanskrit, perhaps not acceptable to Sanskrit grammarians, and yet forms closer to Sanskrit than to Prakrits? The first commentator on Panini’s grammar, Katyayana (about 200 BCE) suggests that only the usage of correct Sanskrit produces religious merit. Inability is suggested as one of the reasons why certain people speak deformed speech, a reference to vernacular forms. What does this inability produce? Only the nonSanskrit languages? Or also what we might call non-standard forms of Sanskrit? The examples given by Patanjali (about 150 BCE) suggest both. Patanjali says that while most women did not speak standard Sanskrit, as defined by Panini’s grammar, a few exceptional women became scholars of great repute. What did most other women speak? Patanjali reports that a Brahmin girl says: “My eyes are beautiful and my feet are delicate” (akṣīṇi me darśanīyāni, pādā me sukumārāḥ). Here, what the Brahmin girl says fits the standard Sanskrit morphology and phonology, but not its syntax. To refer to her two eyes and two feet, the Brahmin girl is using plural, rather than the required dual, forms. This obviously produces a comic result. The syntax matches that of the Prakrit languages, where the category of dual is lost. So, what language is the Brahmin girl speaking? While the Sanskrit grammarians will not accept it as standard Sanskrit, its morphology and phonology matches that of Sanskrit, and hence the result is some sort of non-standard Sanskrit, which has some Sanskrit-like features, and some Prakrit-like features. But the very presence of such usage is significant. Patanjali says that the requirement that one speak standard/proper Sanskrit applied only to the domain of Vedic ritual. Within this domain, one must not speak non-standard forms. The sages called Yarvanastarvana used to speak the proper Sanskrit expressions yad vā naḥ and tad vā naḥ during the course of the ritual, but outside the domain of the ritual, they used the non-standard forms yarvāṇa and tarvāṇa. Patanjali says that demons used non-standard forms during the ritual and hence they lost to the gods. Patanjali says that there are some exceptional people who spoke proper Sanskrit, as described by Panini, without ever

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learning it from a grammar-book, and it was their usage of the language that the grammarians look up to, in order to revise their grammars. But there is no suggestion that these exceptional people were monolingual Sanskrit speakers. In all likelihood, they were bilinguals like the great sages referred to above. This gives us a remarkable situation of the usage of Sanskrit. Certainly, by Patanjali’s time, there were hardly any monolingual Sanskrit speakers. They were all bilingual, with some vernacular language as their first language, their mothers generally speaking some vernacular languages, and their fathers using Sanskrit only in certain domains. So, we are able to say that Sanskrit as described by Patanjali was by and large a living second language, with very little first-language use. But it was by no means a dead language (Deshpande 1993, 17–32). Second, there were varieties of Sanskrit, some closer to the Paninian standard, and others closer to the Prakrit languages spoken by the masses. It is such more or less hybrid forms of Sanskrit that are found in the Buddhist and Jain literature and in inscriptions, alongside the more impeccable Paninian forms of Sanskrit. The struggle for prominence between Sanskrit and the Prakrit languages is played out on the background of emergence of monarchies like the Mauryan dynasty (3rd century BCE) as well as the emergence of the protestant religious traditions like Jainism and Buddhism (5th century BCE). At least initially, all these factors were arrayed against the prominence of Sanskrit as well as the prominence of the Brahmin class. The need for mass communication seems to have provided additional pressure. The inscriptions of the king Ashoka (3rd century BCE), the first readable inscriptions in ancient India carved on rocks and pillars, are mostly in regional Prakrit varieties (with a few in Greek and Aramaic), but none in Sanskrit. The early Jain and Buddhist literature is entirely in Prakrits, and not in Sanskrit. As contrasted with this essentially eastern Indian region of Magadha becoming the focus of a Prakrit-dominant sociolinguistic entity, there is some evidence that the westerly region of Mathura was the focus of a relatively Sanskrit-dominant sociolinguistic entity. Inscriptions in this region began to show a greater degree of Sanskritization, and the eventual turn of the Jain and the Buddhist traditions toward accepting Sanskrit as a medium for their religious traditions may well have begun in this westerly region. Gradually, Sanskrit appears in a more prominent role in inscriptions as well as in literature of all sorts of subjects. The shift in inscriptions to Sanskrit presumably correlates with the emergence of originally non-Indian dynasties like the Shakas coming to prominence and looking to Brahmins and Sanskrit for legitimization. But even in inscriptions, often the frame is in Sanskrit, while the details of the land grant, and so on, are given in the vernacular. Thus the expansion of Sanskrit at these elite levels came to coexist with Prakrit and other languages. An idealized picture of this complex and yet hierarchical sociolinguistic situation is seen in the use of Sanskrit and Prakrits in Sanskrit dramas. In these dramas, the upper-class male characters like kings and the Brahmin ministers speak Sanskrit throughout. The upper-class female characters like the queens generally use the Maharashtri Prakrit of high prestige for poetry and the normal Shauraseni Prakrit for conversation. The Magadhi Prakrit is reserved either for low characters like thieves or for comic effect. While the usage of these linguistic

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varieties in Sanskrit dramas is highly conventional, it is based on certain important assumptions. One of these assumptions is that all these varieties, spoken by different characters generally in a monolingual mode, are mutually comprehensible, and that they do partake in an interactive universe of discourse. The assumption that most of these characters are monolingual is in all likelihood not quite true to facts. Like the sages Yarvanastarvana, described by Patanjali, the upper-class characters, if they did speak Sanskrit, spoke it as an acquired language of high culture in some environments, but were not truly monolingual speakers of Sanskrit. The Sanskrit drama seems to follow the moral exhortations of Sanskrit grammarians that one should speak proper Sanskrit at all times, and at least during ritual. But such exhortations aside, Sanskrit speakers were almost always bilingual, though they may indeed have been fluent in the use of Sanskrit that was generally restricted to some registers. The other important assumption is that these multilingual dramas were comprehensible to the audience, which may or may not have had active competence in Sanskrit. This picture allows us to understand not only the place of Sanskrit within a multilingual spectrum; it also gives us some insight into the role of Sanskrit in regional and trans-regional geographies. While Sanskrit stood at the elite end of the social spectrum in most regions of Hindu India, it had a distinct advantage over the vernacular Prakrits and regional languages like the Dravidian languages. While the regional languages could not be used for communication outside their region, Sanskrit connected the Hindu elites throughout the subcontinent in networks of ritual and scholarly communication. Brahmins from Tamilnadu and Kashmir could meet in Banaras and discuss philosophical issues with each other or enjoy each other’s literary creations using Sanskrit as a medium of communication. Thus, speaking and writing Sanskrit had a distinct place in the elite world of ancient and medieval India. Here, there was a clear recognition of regional differences in the pronunciation of Sanskrit (as seen in Rajashekhara’s Kāvyamīmāṃsā, ninth century CE, Deshpande 1993), and yet there was a clear sense of the pan-Indic accessibility achieved through Sanskrit. By now we have explicit indications of the usage of Sanskrit by the elites across the Indian subcontinent (cf. Hock and Pandharipande 1976, Deshpande 1979, and Pollock 2006). What are the domains of the usage of Sanskrit during this medieval and early modern period? Sanskrit was widely used in spoken and written forms by the learned Brahmins across the subcontinent to communicate with each other on ritual, philosophical, and literary matters. This is a thin layer of the Indian society, and yet it covers a wide geography. Within this scholar-to-scholar communication, we notice a fairly conservative maintenance of the high classical Sanskrit. In centers like Banaras, Paithan, Pune, and Kanchipuram, we know of a strong presence of Sanskrit teaching and debating institutions, and how these magnet centers interacted with regions across India. The Sanskrit schools in such centers often outnumbered vernacular schools and received patronage from local rulers and wealthy classes. It is in such circles that Sanskrit philosophical and literary production and discourse continued until the arrival of the British colonial rule. Then there are more popular domains where Sanskrit circulated in various ways. There is evidence from different regions that the learned Pandits often produced a form of vernacularized Sanskrit to communicate with the wider audiences.

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This form of Sanskrit is seen in works like the Bharaṭakadvātriṃ śikā, a collection of stories produced by Jain monks to poke fun at the monks of the Shaivite orders. Here one sees an effort to bring Sanskrit closer to the vernaculars of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Medieval attempts to teach spoken Sanskrit to beginners are seen in works like the Uktivyaktiprakaraṇa, the Gīrvāṇapadaman̄jarī, and the Gīrvāṇavāṅman̄jarī (cf. Deshpande 1993). Here, the assumption seems to be that the learner is first of all a speaker of a local vernacular like Hindi or Marathi, and that the initial Sanskrit produced is a gradual transformation of this vernacular into a more or less Sanskritized appearance. These works give us a sense of how spoken colloquial Sanskrit was taught in the elementary stages. Then there is a domain of the Hindu priests interacting with their communities. The ritual texts in Sanskrit often represented a mixture of multiple forms of Sanskrit. They contained Vedic mantras that are meant to be recited during rituals of different kinds. The priests generally knew only how to recite these mantras, and had only a vague idea of what they meant. There are also verses and passages from the Sanskrit epics and mythological narratives that are in a form of Sanskrit that was more accessible to the priests. The instructions to carry out the ritual are in formulaic Sanskrit that the priest understood contextually, but not necessarily grammatically. For example, a priest may comfortably utter a Sanskrit formula, memorized by heart, such as: “I am performing the wedding of X’s son to Y’s daughter.” However, if the actual situation is complex, and the priest is required to say something like “I am performing the wedding of your sister’s son to his nephew’s daughter,” we are likely to see appearance of some ad-hoc vernacularized Sanskrit forms. In some cases, a semblance of spoken Sanskrit is produced through repetitive utterances of formulaic phrases. For instance, while offering worship to a certain divinity, the priest may ask his hosts to say the word namaḥ (“salutation”) each time he recites an epithet of that divinity. Such occasions produce a form of spoken Sanskrit on a wider scale by being formulaic and repetitious, and by being just one step removed from the vernaculars of the speakers (Deshpande 1996).

British Colonial Rule With the coming of the British colonial rule in the eighteenth century, we see different factors coming into play. During the early period of the rule of the British East India Company, we see the British promoting “Oriental” learning through support for Hindu and Muslim traditional institutions. Such British-supported Sanskrit schools emerged in places like Calcutta, Banaras, and Pune. Here, an attempt was made to maintain the old Sanskrit traditional learning, while encouraging the tilt to more “useful” branches of Sanskrit learning like law and medicine, and de-emphasizing branches like the study of the Vedas. During this period, these Sanskrit institutions began to compete with the emergence of vernacular and English education, which were expanding at a faster rate. As the history of Pune shows, the early British support for traditional Sanskrit learning gradually gave way to transforming the old Poona Sanskrit College into the more modern Deccan

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College in 1860. In the old Poona Sanskrit College, only Brahmin students were taught various branches of Sanskrit learning by Brahmin teachers in traditional ways. But the Deccan College opened up education to people of all castes and religious backgrounds in a wider range of subjects using the medium of English. The Deccan College also offered education in Sanskrit, but here the medium of instruction was English, and often the teachers included Europeans, who brought new historical and analytical perspectives to the attention of the Indian students of Sanskrit (Deshpande 2001). This situation gradually resulted in the emergence of alternative ways of learning and teaching Sanskrit in India. Traditional supporters of Sanskrit continued on the traditional path and either maintained or opened up new Sanskrit schools (Pathashalas) along traditional lines. For example, in the city of Pune, in 1880s, we see the study of Sanskrit in newer institutions like the Deccan College and the Ferguson College generally on Western lines, using the medium of English. But in the same period, we see the emergence of institutions like the Vedashastrottejaka Sabha (Forum for the promotion of the Vedas and the Shastras) and a Sanskrit Pathashala (a traditional Sanskrit school). Here, the teaching and learning of Sanskrit continued on the traditional path. The new educational institutions like elementary and secondary schools and colleges included Sanskrit as one of the subject areas, and this finally became part of the Indian universities that opened in cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Allahabad. While the “modern” institutions promoted a more historical and analytical study of Sanskrit, the traditional institutions continued to teach Sanskrit in old ways, promoting the ability of their students to speak and write Sanskrit. With the spread of vernacular and English education in these institutions, Sanskrit emerged as one of the necessary subjects for most students. This meant that a very large number of students began to learn Sanskrit. The need to provide teachers for these students produced a high demand for Sanskrit teachers, and the emergence of new Sanskrit textbooks, like the famous books to teach Sanskrit in a new way produced by R. G. Bhandarkar. The numbers of students learning Sanskrit through these new institutions were so high during the early 1900s that N. C. Kelkar (1915) called it the renaissance of Sanskrit learning under the British rule.

Modern Times When I was in high school in Pune in the 1950s, there were multiple avenues of learning Sanskrit. In my New English School, Sanskrit as a subject was introduced in the eighth grade. It was one of the four languages each student had to learn, others being Marathi, Hindi, and English, besides subjects like science, mathematics, and history. The medium of instruction for Sanskrit in this school was Marathi. But besides such “modern” schools, there was the old Sanskrit Pathashala and the Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapitha, institutions that were focused on teaching Sanskrit in relatively old ways. These institutions, by this time, were inviting high-school students to come and learn Sanskrit, in addition to their Sanskrit classes at the high school, so that these students could score higher marks in

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Sanskrit in their high school matriculation examinations. In the Sanskrit Pathashala and in the Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapitha, modernity had made its way to the extent that students of non-Brahmin castes, as well as girls, were admitted and encouraged to learn Sanskrit. While the medium of instruction for the initial stages was Marathi, after the first few years the medium of instruction switched to Sanskrit, and the students were expected to read, write, and speak Sanskrit. There was all-round encouragement given at these institutions to writing and speaking Sanskrit. At the annual Vyasa-festival, the Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapitha conducted competitions that included Sanskrit story telling, drama reading, and Sanskrit debates on various topics. A reasonably large number of students used to take part in these competitions, and as a result gained a more active control over the use of Sanskrit. While I was taking part in these competitions as a high-school student, I remember that there were some very young children, students of an experimental Sanskrit-medium kindergarten school run in Bombay by Mr. Chakradeva, who also participated in these events, and they were even bolder in their use of Sanskrit, not being afraid to make mistakes as I was. There were other forums in Pune to promote the active use of Sanskrit. The Anandashram in Pune used to conduct a weekly gathering of Sanskrit-conversation called Girvanavagvardhini Sabha. There were periodic poetry-reading sessions in Sanskrit, where various people read their new poetic compositions in Sanskrit. There were stage-presentations of Sanskrit dramas, both old classical dramas and newly written Sanskrit dramas, in cities like Pune, Mumbai, Ujjain, and Madras. There were inter-university Sanskrit debate competitions held at places like Guruvayur, Ujjain and Udaipur. There were also occasional Sanskrit debates involving different traditional disciplines, Shastras, for which students had to prepare and where they were tested by the gathered Sanskrit pandits. There were Sanskrit magazines like the Sharada and the Bharatavani in Pune, which published Sanskrit stories, poems, advertisements from local businesses, and articles on various contemporary subjects like the American astronauts reaching the moon. This environment, found in various cities in India, encouraged the emergence of a reasonably large amount of modern Sanskrit literature, described in great detail by Warnekar (1963) and others. The literary status of Sanskrit in modern times is also officially accepted in India by institutions like the Sahitya Akademi (Literature Academy), which awards annual prizes for best literary creations in Indian languages, including Sanskrit. A detailed account of the condition of Sanskrit and Sanskrit study in India is found in the Report of the Sanskrit Commission published by the Government of India in 1958. Also see Rao (1980) for the statistics of students enrolled in the traditional Sanskrit schools, the Pathashalas. During the more recent modern phase, the fate of Sanskrit is linked to various social, religious, and political factors. During my high-school days, each student had to learn four languages, but this policy was later changed by the central government in India to three required languages: Hindi, English, and the regional language. This change of policy resulted in the near elimination of Sanskrit at the high-school level in those states where the regional language was other than Hindi. In these states, Sanskrit suddenly became an optional subject, and this led to a steep decline in the numbers of students studying Sanskrit in such regions. On the

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other hand, in those regions of India where Hindi is the regional language, Sanskrit found a place in the three-language formula, and at least in terms of numbers, it continues to be studied on a large scale (cf. Bhate 1996). On the political front, Sanskrit has generally received strong support from the central government in India, while the regional support for Sanskrit varies from state to state, depending upon the local politics. Sanskrit is often perceived as the language of the Brahmins, and its fate is often linked to the political and socioeconomic fate of the Brahmins in various regions. Within the larger political spectrum in India, the Hindu Nationalist parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party have supported the cause of Sanskrit with greater vigor, though support for Sanskrit at the central government level was not lacking, even under the rule of the Indian National Congress. The central government in India, under changing political parties, has uniformly supported the formation of the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan “National Sanskrit Institute” within the Ministry of Human Resource Development, and has given substantial financial support for its activities. The Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, now deemed a university, runs more than a dozen Sanskrit universities in various states in India, where instruction is supposed to be given using Sanskrit as the medium of instruction. At such institutions, not only traditional subjects but even modern subjects, such as historical and comparative Indo-European linguistics, are taught using the medium of Sanskrit. Several hundred PhD dissertations at these institutions are written in Sanskrit on various subjects, and the Sansthan promotes the active use of Sanskrit through its programs (cf. URL of the Sansthan: http://www.sanskrit.nic.in.) This is in addition to the fact that every Indian university has a department of Sanskrit. The most important organization to emerge in recent times to promote the active use of modern Sanskrit in India is the Samskrita Bharati, based in Bangalore and Delhi, but active in many centers in India, with branches extending into the Hindu communities abroad. Led by Pandit Chamu Krishna Shastry, the Samskrita1 Bharati runs courses of different duration to teach modern spoken Sanskrit. (For details of the activities of this organization, consult the URL: http://www.samskritabharati.org/sb/.) The kind of Sanskrit that is taught through these courses is a simplified form of Sanskrit, which, for instance, avoids the use of past perfect and past aorist, and even the past imperfect forms,2 preferring to use past participles to express the past tense. It tends to be “modern” in its vocabulary, largely by reborrowing Sanskritized Hindi expressions that developed in modern times to replace English words, so that a speaker of this modern Sanskrit can talk about trains, planes, universities, politics, and computers. The Sanskrit taught in these courses is partly formulaic, but that seems to ease the fear of the complexities of Sanskrit grammar on the part of the users. The users of such modern Sanskrit are on the one hand ideologically committed to Sanskrit, and prone to declaring Sanskrit as their first language for the census-takers, but are in all cases fluent bilinguals, and in a large number of cases are engaged in modern professions like engineering and information technology. For such users/speakers of modern Sanskrit, Sanskrit becomes an important tie to the inherited Indian tradition, without yanking them from their essential modernity. Linguistic studies of this modern Sanskrit (Nakamura 1973; Hock 1983, 1988, and 1992; Aralikatti 1989;

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Hastings 2008) show how closely this Sanskrit is related to the vernaculars of the speakers as well as to English, since it is these languages that tend to be more primary than the resulting Sanskrit, which tends to recreate the semantic and often the syntactic structures of these languages and their word orders into a Sanskrit surface. The users of this Sanskrit are often not explicitly aware of when they are transporting an expression from their vernaculars or English into Sanskrit. I heard a friend of mine, a member of the Samskrita Bharati, tell someone: saḥ parasparam gatavān (“he went directly [without stopping here]”). While the expression paraspar has the sense of “directly” in Marathi, it does not have this meaning in the classical usage of Sanskrit, and yet this speaker of modern Sanskrit was using this expression in its Marathi meaning. I also remember a lecture in Pune in modern Sanskrit on neharūṇāṃ vyaktitvam (“On the Personality of Nehru”). Here again, the word vyakti is used in its Marathi meaning of a person, a meaning not found in the classical usage of Sanskrit. Thus, the immediate context for the use and comprehension of modern Sanskrit is the world of the vernacular and English, rather than the classical usage of Sanskrit (Samskṛta-Vyavahāra-Sāhasrī, “A Thousand Sanskrit Usages”), and yet this modern Sanskrit psychologically and emotionally links its speaker to the classical heritage, without disconnecting him or her from the modern world.

Conclusion The modern efforts to bring Sanskrit back to life have led to producing Sanskrit movies like the film on the life of Shankaracharya, the daily broadcast of news in Sanskrit on All India Radio, Internet-based Sanskrit chat-groups, and so on. Generally, the Western scholarship on Sanskrit is focused on the Vedic and classical Sanskrit, and this has led scholars (Pollock 2001) to declare “the Death of Sanskrit.” While such an expression is probably accurate in describing the decline of the classical mode of Sanskrit productions in India, it is too soon to declare that Sanskrit as such is dead. On the other hand, one needs to recognize that the modern Sanskrit that is meant to keep Sanskrit alive is in effect a trade-off of a partly re-lexified, morphologically and syntactically simplified and in effect truncated variety of the fullness of the classical language; yet it keeps the language in circulation, indeed not as a mother tongue, but as a reasonably functional second language, usable in some contexts. This is the case of the so-called Sanskritspeaking village of Mattur in the state of Karnataka (David 1997 and Hastings 2004). In spite of the publicity to the contrary, the Sanskrit speakers in this village are not speaking Sanskrit as their mother tongue. They are indeed not monolingual speakers of Sanskrit. Mostly with the Brahmanical social background and fired by the Hindu Nationalist ideology of reviving the classical heritage of Sanskrit, and encouraged by the local religious establishments, the residents of Mattur have joined the efforts of the Samskrita Bharati, which has an active training center in this village. The spoken Sanskrit of Mattur (as initially reported by David 1997), like the spoken Sanskrit promoted by the Samskrita Bharati, is a functional second language, like the English language acquired by many Indians.3

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However, unlike English, this modern Sanskrit provides for the residents of Mattur, and other practitioners of modern Sanskrit, a cultural link to the classical heritage of India (cf. Ramaswamy 1999), and, in this role, Sanskrit is destined to survive in the future. A rating of 5 on the failure-success scale of 1 to 10 would be fit for Sanskrit. The efforts to keep spoken Sanskrit alive vary in their intensity, scope, and popularity. While small committed groups have successfully kept spoken Sanskrit alive over the centuries, and are keeping it alive today, given the sociopolitical situation in India, making Sanskrit into a truly national language like Hebrew in Israel is nothing more than a dream of a very small number of lovers of Sanskrit. Bringing Sanskrit to equivalence with either the regional languages or with English is equally impossible. While living Sanskrit is possible and available within small motivated groups, it is of little use for communication outside these groups, and has almost no economic value, unlike English in the Indian job market. However, the government of India has committed abundant resources to keep Sanskrit alive as a matter of national pride, and there is no reason to believe that Sanskrit is in any danger of becoming a truly dead language. Notes 1. The movement prefers a more Sanskritic form “Samskrita” to using the Westernized name Sanskrit. 2. Sanskrit has three past tenses. In the pre-classical language, the past perfect forms were used to refer to remote unseen past events. The past aorist forms were used for very recent past events, something like the present perfect in English. The remaining domain of past was indicated by the past imperfect forms. In the classical usage, the forms survived, while the semantic distinctions disappeared. 3. There are no detailed studies of the spoken Sanskrit at Mattur, beyond the popular reports like David (1997), which are repeated on numerous web sites and in newspapers. Hastings (2004) and (2008) are the only detailed linguistic and sociological studies of the Sanskrit promoted by the Samskrita Bharati and practiced by a few committed families, mostly in the city of Bangalore. Also see Hock (1988) for a sociological study of the spoken Sanskrit in Uttar Pradesh.

References Aralikatti, Ramchandra N. (1989). Spoken Sanskrit in India: A Study of Sentence Patterns. Tirupati: Kendriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha. Bhate, Saroja (1996). Position of Sanskrit in public education and scientific research in India. In Ideology and Status of Sanskrit, Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, Jan Houben (ed.), 383–400. Leiden: E. J. Brill. David, Stephen (1997). The living word. Who said Sanskrit is a dead

language? Not the people of this Karnataka village. India Today, 7. Deshpande, Madhav M. (1979). Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: An Historical Reconstruction. Linguistica extranea, studia 5. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers. Deshpande, Madhav (1992). Sociolinguistic parameters of Pānini’s Sanskrit. In Vidya-Vratin: Professor A. M. Ghatage Felicitation Volume, V. N. Jha (ed.), 111–130. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications.

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Deshpande, Madhav (1993). Sanskrit and Prakrit: Sociolinguistic Issues. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Deshpande, Madhav (1996). Contextualizing the eternal language: Features of priestly Sanskrit. In Ideology and Status of Sanskrit, Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, Jan Houben (ed.), 401–436. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Deshpande, Madhav (2001). Pandits and professors: Transformations in the nineteenth-century Maharashtra. In The Pandit: Traditional Scholarship in India, Axel Michael (ed.), 119–153. Delhi: Manohar. Emeneau, Murray Barnson (1954). Linguistic prehistory of India. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98(4): 282–292. Hastings, Adi (2004). Past Perfect, Future Perfect: Sanskrit Revival and the Hindu Nation in Contemporary India. PhD dissertation in anthropology and linguistics, University of Chicago. Hastings, Adi (2008). Licked by the mother tongue: Imagining everyday Sanskrit at home and in the world. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18(1): 24–45. Hock, Hans Henrich and Rajeshwari Pandharipande (1976). The sociolinguistic position of Sanskrit in Pre-Muslim India. Studies in Language Learning 11: 105–138. Hock, Hans Henrich (1983). Languagedeath phenomena in Sanskrit: Grammatical evidence for attrition in contemporary spoken Sanskrit. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 13(2): 21–35. Hock, Hans Henrich (1988). Spoken Sanskrit in Utar Pradesh: A

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sociolinguistic profile. Lokaprajñā: Journal of Orientology 2: 1–24. Hock, Hans Henrich (1992). A note on English and modern Sanskrit. World Englishes 11(2–3): 163–171. Kelkar, Narasimha Chintaman (1915). Keḷakar kṛt lekh-saṃgrah [In Marathi: Collected Articles of Kelkar]. Pune: Chitrashala Press. Kiparsky, Paul (1979). Pāṇini as a Variationist. Cambridge, MA, and Poona: MIT Press and Poona University Press. Nakamura, Hajime (1973). A Companion to Contemporary Sanskrit. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Pollock, Sheldon (2001). The death of Sanskrit. Comparative Study of Society and History 43(2): 392–426. Pollock, Sheldon (2006). The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ramaswamy, Sumathi (1999). Sanskrit for the nation. Modern Asian Studies 33(2): 339–381. Rao, K. N. (1980). Third all-India Educational Survey: Sanskrit Pathshalas and Madrasas. Delhi: National Council of Educational Research and Training. Report of the Sanskrit Commission 1956–1957. (1958). Delhi: Government of India Press. Samskṛta-Vyavahāra-Sāhasr ī [A Thousand Sanskrit Usages]. (no date on the publication). Bangalore: Pallava Prakashanam. Warnekar, Shridhar Bhaskar (1963). Arvācīn Saṃskṛta Sāhitya [in Marathi: Modern Sanskrit Literature]. Nagpur: Modern Book Stores.

19 The Political Rise of Tamil in the Dravidian Movement in South India E. ANNAMALAI

Background The Dravidian movement is a political movement that started in colonial India in 1916, in the Madras Presidency. The Dravidians demanded higher representation in government employment and modern education for non-Brahmins, who formed the majority of more than 90 percent in the Presidency. It was spearheaded by the elite non-Brahmins from the four linguistic regions of south India, who spoke the four literary Dravidian languages: Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. These non-Brahmin leaders had the benefit of colonial education in English and found the Brahmins, who had the exclusive tradition of Vedic learning for centuries, occupying positions in the government and in professions and seats in educational institutions hugely disproportionate to their number in the population (Irschick 1969, 12–19; Nambi Arooran 1980, 38). These leaders also realized that the Brahmins would be the political leaders in independent India for which the Congress Party was fighting, whose leaders were Brahmins or those who subscribed to the superiority of Brahmanic culture and equated it with Indian culture. The reality of the traditional sacred power of the Brahmins converging with the modern temporal economic and political power in colonial and independent India was threatening to non-Brahmins. The terms “non-Brahmin” and “Dravidian” were interchangeable in the political discourse of the time, and so were the identities expressed by the terms, although they were logically different from each other. The Brahmins in South India spoke the Dravidian languages as their first language. The above terms signified the “other” of the Brahmin and Aryan identities, which were also interchangeably used terms. This opposition was constructed on the theory that Brahmins migrating

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from northern India brought the Vedic rituals to sanction the sacredness and legitimacy of the rule of southern kings. However, as the medium of the rituals was Sanskrit, Brahmins had a special affinity to the language, which they (exclusively, men) learned as a second language. Identification of language with Brahmins and non-Brahmins was based not on mother tongue per se, but on attitudes toward a second language versus the mother tongue. This added to the opposition between the Dravidian languages, notably Tamil, and Sanskrit, a Brahmin/non-Brahmin opposition based on caste and “race.” This was the point of entry for language in the political movement, in which the Dravidian languages came to be identified with non-Brahmins.

Superior status of Brahmins Being a political movement, the Non-Brahmin movement—which later came to be increasingly referred to as the Dravidian movement—fought for equalizing access to education and employment for non-Brahmins. As mentioned above, their particular focus was English education and government jobs for non-Brahmins. This political agenda also had the social component of equalizing the social status enjoyed by all Indians, who had traditionally lived in a social hierarchy defined by caste. The political strategy was to achieve these goals through the institutions of the colonial government, which was also eager to have a check on the ascendance of Brahmins in the political sphere and on the increasing participation of the wider society in the freedom movement under the leadership of M. K. Gandhi (1869–1948), who entered the political scene in India in 1915. The liberal elements in the colonial government and in the larger British society were also in support of the aspirations of the lower castes, as were the evangelists, whose religious agenda drew them to the cause of lower castes. The colonial period opened up new public spheres for people to engage in discursive politics. Many associations of people who shared common interests and goals were formed; in these settings, issues were formulated, debated, and taken forward for action. In 1916, two prominent non-Brahmins called a conference of non-Brahmins in the city of Madras. At this conference, the political association named the South Indian Liberal Federation was formed by merging some existing non-Brahmin associations. This association later came to be known as the Justice Party, after the title of its newspaper. The party issued a political declaration, called “The Non-Brahmin Manifesto,” a month after its founding. The manifesto, after describing the unequal access to government employment and public education for non-Brahmins, and the disproportionate presence in the same among Brahmins, ends by claiming that social restructuring must precede political independence (Irschick 1969, Appendix 1, 358–367; Pandian 2007, 167–168). Because the Brahmins, who argued that their superior intellect, moral character, and authenticity entitled them to represent all Indians, would be at the helm of the free country’s political system, it was argued that the only way for non-Brahmins to make political progress would be through social restructuring.

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Non-Brahmin as Dravidian Non-Brahmins were equated politically with the Dravidians from the beginning of the Dravidian movement. Though the non-Brahmin manifesto did not use the term “Dravidian,” the party’s Tamil newspaper was called Dravidan, or “people of Dravidian origin.” The term “Dravidian” has historically been used at times to refer either to a region in the southern part of India, a language family, or a “racial” group, often conflating the three. It came to refer to a political group or constituency for the first time through equating it with the term “non-Brahmin.”

Seeking Political Equality The Justice Party sought social, economic, and political justice, but its focus was on obtaining the political power needed to achieve equality in all domains. In 1921, during the first free elections in India because of the constitutional reforms instituted by the colonial government, the Justice Party contested in the Madras Presidency; they won the majority of the seats allocated for the natives and became part of the government. The most politically significant act of government issued under their rule was the earmarking of government jobs for specific groups other than Brahmins so that non-Brahmin candidates would be ensured a specified percentage of all civil service jobs. Another act that checked the source of Brahmin power in the cultural domain was establishing the governmental administrative superintendence of Hindu temples and the use of the surplus funds from these temples for civic facilities like schools, sanitation, and drinking water (Pandian 2007, 151). The government supervisors of temples were drawn from all castes, and a Dalit “a person of the untouchable caste,” was placed in charge of the ministry administering the temples. Such political acts for social justice extended to language. Promotion of Sanskrit by Brahmins, the language that gave them their sacred power by the rituals codified and performed in it, was countered by non-Brahmins claiming the equal status of Dravidian languages, particularly Tamil, in domains that extended from higher education to the recitation of hymns in temples. For example, prior to the Dravidian movement, Tamil had never been taught as a language in higher education at the University of Madras, whereas Sanskrit, as a classical language, had enjoyed a high status in this institution for years. After much resistance, the demand for the inclusion of Tamil was conceded in the early 1930s (Nambi Arooran 1980).

Language in Political Imagining Language figured importantly in imagining India in the colonial period. Those who were engaged in “imagining India” in a particular way were called Orientalists, and they were mostly European scholars, colonial administrators, and Christian missionaries. The Oriental knowledge of India constructed in Calcutta, the seat of

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colonial government power, is garnered primarily from texts in Sanskrit that celebrated the classical Aryan culture and society as representing the Indian culture and society. Sanskrit came to be viewed as the icon of India. Orientalists of this school of thought believed that no language of India was independent of Sanskrit and that all were derived from it historically. There was another school of Orientalist thought in Madras in southern India which questioned the omnipresence and superiority of Sanskrit and showed that there was another strand of culture and literature in southern India, whose languages are not derived from Sanskrit, though they have heavily borrowed from it (Trautmann 2006). A missionary named Robert Caldwell (1814–1891) published A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages in 1856, which firmly established the existence of a different family of languages genetically unconnected to Sanskrit; he called this family of languages Dravidian, the oldest literary language of which was Tamil. He and other European missionaries praised the rich vocabulary of Tamil and compared it favorably with the vocabulary of Sanskrit, and also to that of Latin and Greek. Tamil was projected to represent the Dravidian languages because of its literary antiquity and relative insularity from the influence of Sanskrit on its early literature and language. Some of its native scholars claimed Tamil as the mother of all the Dravidian languages, just as Sanskrit spawned the modern Indo-Aryan languages. Tamil was the iconic language of Dravidian India. The glory of Tamil was tied to its literary antiquity and distinctiveness, and the notion of its “purity” from the “pollution” of Sanskrit was created and supported by the discovery of its original ancient literature and its conversion from palm leaves to paper (Nambi Arooran 1980, Irschick 1986). This conversion gave the literary works permanence and extended their reach beyond the religious abodes and the scholars and poets patronized by them, and allowed the public to claim the written Tamil literature. The literary evidence for the glory of Tamil was further supported by the archeological discovery of inscriptions in caves and temples, and the excavation of artifacts from sites in Tamil Nadu. The earliest grammar of Tamil, Tolkappiyam, written a few centuries after Panini’s Sanskrit grammar, was published on paper from palm leaf manuscripts in 1868 by C. V. Damotharam Pillai (1832–1901), a non-Brahmin civil servant. This was followed by the printing of many more newly discovered literary and grammatical texts of the ancient and medieval periods, many of which were made by U. V. Swaminatha Aiyer (1855– 1942), a Brahmin teacher of Tamil. These printed texts entered the public space and consciousness.

Dravidian Distinctiveness The ancient Tamil texts were found to represent an independent literary and grammatical tradition that, among the Dravidian languages, proved to be least influenced by the Sanskritic tradition. Thus, they gave authenticity to a distinctive, literate Dravidian past that paralleled the Aryan literary tradition. This tradition was argued to be free from the Brahmanic ideas of hierarchical social organization and exclusionary cultural practices. It provided a historical rationale

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for the different social order in independent India sought by the Dravidian movement. Modern science and technology, philology, archaeology, and printing all helped to provide objective proof of Tamil’s means to occupy the public sphere in India, assisted by the construction and promotion of a Dravidian identity. The scientific discoveries helped make culture, including linguistic culture, a central piece of Dravidian identity. An influential figure in the movement to denounce the superiority of the Aryan culture was Maraimalai Adigal (1876–1950) (Pandian 2007, 120–143). Adigal, a teacher of Tamil and a preacher, constructed a Tamil religion from a branch of Saivism and claimed that because Saivism and the Tamil language were independent in origin and dvelopment, they were superior to Brahmanic Hinduism and Sanskrit. The purification of the Tamil religion and Tamil language from the “corrupt” influences of Sanskrit and Brahmanic Hinduism was a crucial component in Adigal’s cultural agenda and that of his followers. The language side of this cultural movement, called the Pure Tamil movement, was launched in 1916 and gave rise to pure Tamil cleansed of Sanskrit loans. The cultural agenda was to reclaim Tamil from Aryan and Brahmin influences and to restore it to its ancient glory.

Culture in Politics Language was the bridge that linked culture with politics. Because of the elitist nature of the religious distinctiveness constructed and promoted by Adigal and its identification with one higher non-Brahmin caste, it did not become an integral part of the non-Brahmin or Dravidian political movement, but the distinctiveness of the Tamil language did. In fact, the movement’s leaders were divided on the separateness of the Tamil religion and Brahmanic Hinduism (albeit without the exclusive social privilege of Brahmins), which was the traditional religion that many of these leaders accepted as their own. Politically, the Aryan-Dravidian cultural separateness increasingly came to be expressed in terms of the temporal and aesthetic aspects of Tamil literature (as opposed to the Aryan mythology) and of linguistic culture (which encompasses attitudes toward Tamil, Sanskrit, and, later, Hindi) and language use with regard to the lexicon and the formal variety of diglossic Tamil.

Defeat of the Non-Brahmin Party The Justice Party lost the election to Congress in 1926 and, consequently, lost its political leverage. Reasons for the loss are multiple. One was the party leaders’ organizational failure to mobilize the public at large to its cause, partly due to the fact that the leaders were from the English-educated elites. Language was not pivotal in their strategies for political mobilization. There was also dissention within the party with regard to the inclusion of religion in their politics. Further, PanIndian nationalism under Gandhi was surging in the early 1920s in response to his

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political actions in support of farmers and mill workers and political calls for eschewing colonial goods and withdrawing cooperation with the colonial government. Some leaders in the Justice Party came to hold the view that nationalism and social justice through equalized opportunities were not incompatible with appropriate political strategies. In 1917, the Congress Party allowed party members to form caucuses on the basis of linguistic regions; the first one was of the Telugu-speaking region of Andhra. This congressional decision reflects the perception at the national level that group interests were decided in terms of linguistic regions and communities rather than on the basis of caste groups. Language became an additional variable to caste for group identity at the regional level, and it eventually became the exclusive one. Another reason was that the Dravidian identity in south India was becoming narrowly defined as Tamil identity, as mentioned earlier, causing loss of appeal in the broader region of Madras Presidency.

Seeking Social Dignity The Justice Party transformed itself through inducting as its president E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973), a non-Brahmin from a business family. He came to be called Periyar, or “‘great man,” which is close to Mahatma in meaning, although without its spiritual connotations. Periyar, who was president of the Tamil Nadu unit of the Congress Party for some time, quit this post in 1925 in protest of the party’s rejection of caste-wise representation in government jobs, in addition to the denial of representation to non-Brahmins in party offices. In 1926, he started a social organization called the Self-Respect League. It was a forum to critique the caste, religion, and nationalism that represented Brahmanic values (Saraswathi 1994). It enjoined non-Brahmins to claim their dignity by socially and culturally rejecting their subordination to Brahmins. Strategically, participation in electoral politics and nation building were subordinated to gaining this non-Brahmin dignity. Periyar argued that self-respect must precede self-rule (Diehl 1977, 17). He appealed to the subaltern public and attracted them to the ideology of nonBrahmin equality with Brahmins, and Dravidian identity separate from the Aryan. He used colloquial Tamil instead of formal Tamil in his speeches, thus breaking the convention of this diglossic language. He used the traditional technique of telling stories from Hindu mythology, but transformed these tales with his iconoclastic and rationalistic interpretations of them in the language of the people. This allowed him to dispel blind beliefs in them and to highlight the disgraces that Dravidians—who are depicted as demons in these myths—had suffered at the hands of Aryans, who are depicted as divine. His ideology of a casteless society had a central place in his negation of religion (Hinduism, in particular). He argued that Hinduism legitimizes varna and, consequently, also accepts the caste hierarchy; he thought that without breaking with Hinduism, neither the castes nor the dominance of the Brahmins could be eradicated. Instead, he propagated atheism. Evoking the Enlightenment ideas of progress, he predicted a future golden age of social justice and economic liberation for the marginalized, including Dalits and

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women. He had no use for the past, which he saw as hierarchical and unjust, even though the cultural reconstructionists in the Dravidian movement imagined it much differently. He gave primacy to the social dimension in relation to the electoral political dimension in the ideology and agenda of his Self-Respect movement. Social retooling was the foundation for equitable political power and justifiable cultural pride. Periyar was thus trying to construct a new Dravidian identity of modernism that would move non-Brahmins out of the historical reality of social deprivation and away from the Brahmins’ claimed cultural superiority. He effectively used the political strategy of direct action he had learned as a Congress leader through his participation in campaigns for the prohibition of alcohol, temple entry for Dalits, and other such Gandhian political actions. To further the goals of social reform through his Self-Respect movement, he engaged the common people in his iconoclastic campaigns by breaking religious idols in public, erasing Hindi from signboards in Tamil Nadu, and burning the Indian constitution.

Reaching the Subaltern Periyar had little use for the glorification of Tamil and the culture it represented. Thus, by using language as a symbol of sociopolitical rather than cultural identity, he was politically successful in mobilizing the public. His anti-Hindi agitations drew more people to his movement than his anti-religion agitations. The latter brought marginal changes in cultural practices, such as not inviting a Brahmin priest to officiate at marriage ceremonies, or in social customs like marrying outside one’s caste. The former, on the other hand, reached every caste across Tamil society and came to define Tamilness in terms of opposition to Hindi, which was a transplant of opposition to Sanskrit and, by implication, Aryan and Brahmin. Hindi was the “other” of Tamil, and Brahmin was the “other” of Tamilian. Hindi (or Hindustani, depending on one’s linguistic and political ideology) was promoted by the Congress Party, and thus by the nationalist movement, as the symbol of national identity, a means of wider communication, and as the instrument of government in free India. Tamil (by extension, Dravidian) identity was in opposition to the national identity, which was equated with the Aryan identity. Under the auspices of the Justice Party, Hindi was first introduced in schools in 1926 in the Madras Presidency as an optional subject of study and as a skill useful for non-Brahmin students to improve their pan-Indian economic opportunities (Irschik 1986, 213–214). When the Congress Party, headed by C. Rajagapalachari (1878–1972), took control of the Madras Presidency government in 1938, Hindi was made a mandatory subject of study in schools after the full transfer of legislative powers in the provinces to Indians. Periyar, who was then leading the Self-Respect movement, saw an opportunity to mobilize non-Brahmins against Hindi, which in his mind was the symbol that stood for the dominance of Aryans in the Indian nation. When Periyar was in prison for his part in the anti-Hindi agitation, the Justice Party made him its president in 1938. Periyar transformed the party into a

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subaltern party, involved in social transformation and withdrawn from direct participation in electoral politics. Though the agenda of the Party changed focus, it had the political goal of establishing a separate Dravidian nation known as Dravida Nadu, or “land of Dravidians,” and used as its slogan the words “Dravida Nadu for Dravidians,” meaning that the Dravidian nation cannot be shared with Aryans. He renamed the party Dravidar Kazhgam (Assembly of Dravidians) in 1944, by which time the term Dravidian had come, for all practical purposes, to refer to the Tamilspeaking non-Brahmin. In 1956, he gave up the demand for Dravida Nadu (it was originally to be a separate country under the British empire and in 1940 was changed to be a demand for an independent country) as the idea had lost political traction. That same year, he changed the Party’s rallying cry to “Tamil Nadu for the Tamils,” which, in practical terms, symbolized his demand that Tamil Nadu be ruled by non-Brahmin leaders, irrespective of political party affiliation. The identities of Tamils and non-Brahmins were interchangeable for him, suggesting that the Tamil identity was derived both from language and caste.

Return to Political Equality Periyar’s associate C. N. Annadurai (1909–1969), thirty years younger in age, had political aspirations and wanted to go the political route followed by the Justice Party. Periyar and Annadurai saw the relationship between social change and political power differently. Periyar called for Independence Day (August 15, 1947) to be observed as a day of mourning by Tamils on the argument that it was a day on which Tamils changed their yoke from rule by the modern British to rule by the conservative Aryans and Brahmins. Annadurai did not subscribe to this position. Due to this difference in political perception about Dravidians in independent India and some reasons that related to Periyar’s personal style and decisions, Annadurai, along with the younger followers of Periyar, founded a new political party, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Progressive Party, known as DMK) in 1949. The political agenda for a sovereign state for Dravidians was continued by DMK. The idea was to build an independent nation on Periyar’s social agenda and Adigal’s cultural agenda without religion. To restore the imagined casteless society and cultural distinctiveness of the ancient Tamils was to be the project of this nation, which would also confer on it economic independence from the Aryan North. The economic freedom meant in practical terms preserving and building on the economic advantage that Tamil Nadu had achieved as part of a colonial presidency rather than being in the hinterland. Opposition to the cultural domination of Aryans came to be identified more closely with the linguistic culture. Tamil language came to occupy an even more central place in the new party’s politics of cultural nationalism (Barnett 1976, 27). The party desired to rebuild the non-hierarchical society and glorious culture that existed before the corrupting influences of Aryans, as represented or interpreted in the ancient literature codified in the Tamil language. By claiming that Tamil must be protected from perceived threats, specifically from Hindi—which, along with English, had become the official language of the Indian Union—Tamil

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became a powerful symbol for political mobilization and a tool to legitimize political power. Protection of Tamil from the threat of English, however, remained notional because of the perceived advantages granted to the people of Tamil Nadu who had received English education during colonial times. English would give them the power to stalemate Hindi in the fight against its dominance (Annamalai 2010). The fight against the dominance of Brahmins in politics started by the Justice Party had been won in Tamil Nadu. Non-Brahmins were taking over leadership positions in the Tamil Nadu unit of the Congress Party. The political fight was turning into one between political parties, all of which were led by non-Brahmins; this neutralized the question of caste. Therefore, the regional DMK Party had the necessity to differentiate itself on linguistic cultural issues from the national Congress Party.

Shift of Identity from Caste to Language Participation in electoral politics forced the DMK Party to make compromises or work out expedient strategies to further its political ends. Its political platform changed from a concrete to an abstract anti-Brahmin campaign, and from iconoclastic atheism to amiable monotheism. The former aided in decoupling caste from language as the omnipresent marker of identity of all speakers of Tamil. Separatism demand itself was given up in 1963 by DMK. There are many reasons for this radical shift in the policy besides the compulsions of electoral politics. The immediate cause was the proposed Sixteenth Amendment to the Indian Constitution, which would make any claim for secession an act of sedition. This made contradictory the party’s political ideology of separation and its representation in national and provincial legislatures by swearing allegiance to the Constitution. The DMK Party was not prepared to fight for separation through extra-constitutional means. It was not willing to do this because support for Dravida Nadu was weak among the Tamil people, let alone the other Dravidian language-speakers, and some of the leaders of the DMK Party expressed their misgivings about its feasibility. Chinese aggression on Indian soil in 1962 gave an opportunity for the DMK Party to express solidarity with the Indian nation. Violent agitation throughout the 1950s for states with one language as the majority language led to the reorganization of the administrative boundaries of Indian states to coincide with the boundaries of contiguous linguistic communities; the first such state was the Telugu-speaking Andhra, carved out of Madras and other states in 1956 (Annamalai, in press); these concessions took the wind out of the sails for separatist demands. The people of Tamil Nadu also came to see the advantages of settling for a separate state for Tamils within India with an emerging common market, in place of a sovereign independent nation. The DMK Party replaced its political goal of an independent homeland with the goal of obtaining fiscal and political autonomy for the state within an Indian Union made of many linguistic states.

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Rise in the Role of Language This political goal shift intensified the role of language in politics as a way for the DMK Party to create a unifying identity surpassing caste divisions for all Tamilspeaking people. The political and economic interests of the state were commonly presented as means of safeguarding the Tamil language. Hindi was the nemesis of Tamil in political discourse. Organized anti-Hindi agitations began in 1938, culminating in the sustained agitation from 1963 to 1967 when the constitutional mandate to retain Hindi and drop English as the sole official language of the Union became a political issue. This violent agitation by students was an important factor in the DMK Party winning the majority of congressional seats in the elections of 1967, defeating the Congress Party. Some of the acts passed by the DMK government were rich in political symbolism, such as changing the name of the state from Madras to Tamil Nadu—“land of Tamils”—in 1968, getting the status of a classical language for Tamil from the federal government in 2004, sponsoring the International Conference of Tamil Studies in Madras in 1968, honoring Tamil poets and scholars with statues, and publicly honoring people who had fought against Hindi and had made sacrifices for this cause, such as going to prison, equating them with fighters for India’s freedom through awards, pensions, and other benefits. The social and political consequences of the decisions of the DMK government—besides governmental support for some of Periyar’s social action plans, like legalizing marriages not sanctified by Brahmanic rituals and Brahmin priests, incentives to couples of inter-caste marriages—may be seen in the implementation of a dual language policy in school education. Under this policy, Tamil and English were the only languages taught, contravening the national three-language policy that included Hindi. Banishing Hindi from schools was an act of achievement of the Dravidian movement’s goal of safegurading the interests of the Tamil language and the Tamil people..

Questioning Common Caste Identity from Below After five years in government, the DMK Party saw the creation of many splinter parties,1 all claiming to be successors to the Dravidian heritage and followers of Periyar and Annadurai. The explicit causes for the splits are personal feuds and rivalry between the leaders, but they by and large came to represent the interests of specific castes or caste groups within non-Brahmins as a political constituency. They also represent to some extent the resentment of lower castes among nonBrahmins at not receiving the economic benefits and social justice promised by Dravidian politicians; they noticed that seats in government employment and in higher education, especially professional education, were earmarked for the upper-caste non-Brahmins. The authentic non-Brahmin identity, and transitively the Dravidian identity, is claimed by the lower castes. However, the continuity of political power acquired by non-Brahmins by sustaining their composite, or Einbau, identity for more than four decades speaks to the political success of the Dravidian movement.

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The acute challenge to the equation of all non-Brahmins with Dravidians comes from Dalits, who earlier called themselves adi diravidars (“the original Dravidians.”) While Dravidian was an overarching “racial” identity of all non-Brahmins (including non-Hindus), non-Brahmin was an identity of a cluster of castes defined by its being the “other” of Brahmins, though both were conflated as described above. The Dalit challenge to this is that the upper-caste non-Brahmins are the “other” of Dalits, in much the same way that Brahmins, who claim exclusivity and supremacy over Dalits, are. Dalits also claim that the ancient greatness of Tamils, as represented in the ancient Tamil literature that really belongs to them, has been appropriated by the upper-caste non-Brahmins who led the non-Brahmin movement (Pandian 2007, 240–244; Gauthaman 1996). While the composite identity of non-Brahmins unifying all groups other than Brahmins has come to be challenged, the Tamil language is the marker of identity of all Tamil speakers for different castes, including Brahmins. Politically, all caste groups subsume their caste identity to the language-based Tamil identity at the national level. The equation of Tamil with Dravidian in identity politics has lost relevance. Language-specific identities like Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam have emerged, contesting Tamil identity at the national level and obliterating the usefulness of a unitary identity based on Dravidian culture. Dravidian and Non-Brahmin are constructed political identities. They were constructed in response to a specific social, economic, and political situation (Pandian 2007, 1–3). They lost their political value when the political situation changed on the eve of India’s independence. However, the primordial language identity, though it was arrived at by transitive shifts from these constructed political identities, is politically virile.

Conclusion From the point of evaluating the nature and role of identity in a political movement like the Dravidian movement, the shift from social to linguistic, and from caste to language, is a gain for language in politics. Later in its evolution, this movement added the safeguarding of Tamil to its goals of political power and social justice. Measurement of success of this movement as one founded on a primordial identity, then, has to be based on the role of language within the movement. The language goal of the movement is twofold. One goal is to place political power and social justice into the hands of the marginalized majority of non-Brahmins upon whose composite identity the movement was based. This portion of the movement is highly successful with regard to the establishment of the linguistic state of Tamil Nadu and consolidation of its political control in the hands of non-Brahmins; thus, it can be rated as 10 on a success scale from 1 to 10. It obtained this position by bringing language to the center stage to achieve its political goal of empowering non-Brahmins. The second goal is to empower the language itself, which in this case is Tamil. This goal was achieved, and Tamil now reigns in a political territory; it is the official language of this territory, which is a state within the Indian Union with some autonomy, and has access to the resources of the state for its development; and it excites people to be drawn into direct political action. However, this

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achievement has not affected the actual language behavior of people in their private domain, who view it as a liability for their children’s material progress and subordinate it to English when making choices in life like the language of education and employment. They also view Tamil as representing traditional values and not imparting modern skills and knowledge for material success in life. Thus, there is a dissonance between the place of Tamil in the public domain, where it can receive a score of 10, and in the private domain, where it is closer to a 5. The reason is that, while Tamil attained symbolic political power by its place in the Dravidian movement and its role in the electoral victories of the Dravidian parties, it did not gain substantive economic power to provide material benefits to its speakers, yielding it to English. This reflects the origin of the movement that set the goal of English education to non-Brahmins for their economic progress. The success is split when it refers to empowering Tamil.2 Notes 1. A major split in 1972 was led by film star-turned-politician M. G. Ramachandran. This party is currently headed by a Brahmin woman. The first split was led in 1962 by Periyar’s nephew, E. V. K. Sampath, who tried to locate Tamil nationalism within Indian nationalism. 2. This paper heavily draws from my earlier extensive paper Transformations of the Dravidian identity, which appeared in the journal Indian Linguistics Vol. 69 (2008).

References Annamalai, E. (2010). Politics of language in India. In Handbook of South Asian Politics, Paul Brass (ed.). New York: Routledge. Barnett, Marguerite R. (1976). The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Diehl, Anita. (1977). E. V. Ramasamy Naiker-Periyar. Sweden: Scandinavian University Books. Gauthman, Raj. (2006). Remains of tribal ethos in Purananuru: A contemporary reading of the Sangam anthology. In Negotiations with the Past: Classical Tamil in Contemporary Tamil, M. Kannan and Carlos Mena (eds.), 189–211. Pondicherry: Institut Francais de Pondicherry. Geetha, V., and S. V. Rajadurai. (1998). Towards a non-Brahmin Millennium. Calcutta: Samya.

Irschick, Eugene F. (1969). Politics and Social Conflicts in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929. Berkeley: University of California Press. Irschick, Eugene F. (1986). Tamil Revivalism in the 1930s. Madras: Cre-A. Nambi Arooran, K. (1980). Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism: 1905–1944. Madurai: Koodal Publishers. Pandian, M. S. S. (2007). Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present. Delhi: Permanent Black. Saraswathi, S. (1994). Towards SelfRespect: Periyar EVR on a New World. Madras: Institute of South Indian Studies. Trautmann, Thomas R. (2006). Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras. Berkeley: University of California Press.

20 The Politics of Language and Dialect in Colonial India: The Case of Asamiya SIPRA MUKHERJEE

Introduction This chapter will examine the case of the Asamiya tongue, one of the many languages of modern India that made the journey from classification as a dialect to recognition as a language in colonial India. This journey of success, however, meant the failure of the other language, Bengali, to establish itself as the language of eastern India. Strikingly similar to Asamiya in syntax and script, Bengali was the mother tongue of Bengal, the neighboring province of Assam, and economically and politically a language then more powerful than Asamiya. With the British colonization of Assam, Bengali was accepted as the language of both these states, and Asamiya was declared to be one of the many dialects of this language. Under the colonizers, this area in eastern India, comprising Bengal, Assam, and a few other states, came to be referred to as Greater Bengal, and the Bengali language was, sometimes tacitly and sometimes officially, enforced upon this area as the accepted language. Following numerous petitions, processions, demonstrations, and campaigning, however, Asamiya went on to be recognized as the language of the people of Assam in 1872. With the struggle for the official acceptance of Asamiya being intimately connected with what was viewed as the struggle for Assamese identity,1 it today appears absolutely incorrect to posit the possibility that Bengali could have survived as a language of pan-eastern India. The recognition in 1872 of Asamiya as a language, not a dialect of Bengali, is today viewed as the only acceptable culmination of the long struggle of the people of Assam against the imposition of Bengali, a language that was regarded as foreign. The feeling of righteousness associated

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with this event is seen to be vindicated by history itself, with Asamiya achieving the status of a language. But history is contingent upon facts that may not have come together in exactly the same manner as they did. Since India is a multilingual nation, the issue of language-or-dialect has remained. The many social, economic, and political factors that played a role, first in the assertion of Bengali as the true language of Assam, and then in its subsequent failure, points us to the fact that the success or failure of a language derives more from non-linguistic processes than from linguistic ones.

Insularity of Assam and Its Relation with Colonial Bengal Subsequent to the colonization of the state of Assam in 1826, Assam became a part of British India. The Indian subcontinent, which today comprises the three independent nations of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, had in the pre-colonial era included many independent smaller states, most of which were colonized by the British during the nineteenth century. By the time the British colonized Assam, a state on the northeastern margin of India, they were the dominant colonizing power on the subcontinent. The annexation of Assam to India brought the state into very close association with the neighboring state of Bengal, a state that was already well established within British India. Being the first Indian kingdom to come into contact with Britain’s East India Company, Bengal had, by 1826, consolidated its situation in the British colony. As the seat of the British colonial power, this state occupied a position of greater bargaining power than all the other Indian states of the subcontinent. Assam, on the other hand, was not only a new entrant into colonized India, it was also a state that had been largely isolated from the rest of the subcontinent. This was despite the fact that pre-colonial Assam has been described as having “all the features of a frontier region,” with its borders touching the countries of China, Tibet, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Nepal, and therefore being “the meeting place of two great civilizations—Indian and Chinese” (Hussain 1993, 26). Its geographical position and its terrain had together contributed to discouraging all but the very adventurous travelers and traders from the areas that surround it. Assam is encircled by mountains and dense forests on all sides except its western frontier. The western border of Assam, through which access is relatively easier, is the side on which Bengal lies. But this approach too is made difficult by the mighty Brahmaputra River, which on its way down from the Himalayas is fed by numerous tributaries that flood their banks or change course during the monsoons, causing immense destruction. The dense forests with a sub-tropical climate, the mountainous terrain, and the hill tribes who inhabited the mountains acted as deterrents to outsiders, and kept the invading armies at bay. Assam therefore remained a self-sufficient economy and society, relatively out of touch with the changing realities of the subcontinent. The Mughal invasion that took a large part of the Indian subcontinent by storm affected only a part of Assam, and the later British, French, Danish, and Portuguese entry into Bengal remained distant to this state. Its border with the neighboring state of Bengal was viewed by most of the Assamese more as the boundary of their world, than as the frontier to

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the one outside. Centuries of isolation inculcated in the Assamese society insularity and a suspicion of foreigners. The Asamiya word bongal came to denote foreigners, since outsiders who entered Assam usually used the approach through Bengal. Over the years of seclusion, bongal became a term of suspicion, reproach and contempt (Nag 1990, 26). It must be noted however, that though the hated word bongal was derived from the Asamiya word for Bengali, it denoted the “foreigner” and not the Bengali. This was because the few Bengalis who came to Assam in the pre-colonial period were usually highly respected Hindu Brahmins who had been invited by Assam’s Ahom kings to serve as priests in the Hindu temples, or artisans, scholars, and musicians whom the kings patronized. These Bengalis settled in Assam, gave up their “ ‘foreign-ness,” and were completely assimilated into Assamese culture and society. In fact, it was so unlikely for people who entered Assam to return from there that there are records of the many myths that sprung up about the black magic and sorcery of the people of Assam: “no one who entered this country, like visitors to the realm of Death, ever returned.”2 But the colonization by Britain ushered Assam into the outside world. For the first half century after colonization, from 1826 to 1874, the state was ruled as a part of neighboring Bengal. The consequences of being administered jointly with a state that had been colonized much earlier were dramatic. Assam was, with tremendous rapidity, catapulted from its feudal social structure and independent nation statehood into the radically different economic world of capitalism and colonization. The Assamese economy was pushed to its extremes to receive its changed status as a source of raw material. At this time, Britain’s domination and colonization of the Indian states was being done through the East India Company. In these years, consequently, the British administrative policies in Assam were dictated entirely by fiscal interests. The official transfer of the Indian colony to the crown came three decades later in 1857. While many of the Company’s policies were touted as pursuing useful knowledge that could be beneficial to the natives, the economic factor far outweighed any other. As Arnold (2000, 21) points out, in the case of the British commercialization of Assam tea, “self-interest and scholarship often coincided, but whereas the former was frequently in evidence, the latter received only erratic support.” Thus, when Assam was annexed by the British, it made perfect economic sense to rule it as part of its neighbor, the Bengal province, where the colonizers had already invested in and established the administrative machinery. Assam was therefore yoked to the province of Bengal.

Assamese Response to the Bengali Language: A Confusion of Welcome and Rejection The decision on language was made in 1836. By the time the East India Company had taken over Assam, they had already been masters of Bengal for about sixty years, and had invested considerable time and money in learning the Bengali language. British domination of Bengal in fact coincides almost exactly with the

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decade of 1770 that marks the beginning of the British program of “appropriating Indian languages to serve as a crucial component in their construction of the system of rule”(Cohn 1996, 20). Howell, Halhed, Foster, Gilchrist, and other Orientalists who studied Bengali or other Indian languages from the 1770s to the 1820s had created a body of texts that included dictionaries, translations, treatises, and grammars. These texts satisfied the imperialists’ need of a language to control the natives through commands and collection of information. As Halhed (1778, i–ii) writes, “the English masters of Bengal” needed to cultivate the language that would be “the medium of intercourse between the government and its subjects, between the natives of Europe to rule and the inhabitants of India who are to obey.” Bengali was consequently a language they were reasonably comfortable with. But in Assam, where the colonizers were just beginning their rule, the British were ill-equipped to deal with the new language. So when various European and Bengali scholars revealed the similarities of script and terminology between the two languages, it appeared possible, and astute, to solve this chaos of linguistic heterogeneity by imposing Bengali on Assam as its “original” and, hence, true language. This decision, however, had unfortunate though expected consequences. With Bengali becoming the language of the courts and the medium of instruction in schools, nearly all employment in the colonial administration and any job that required connection with the government were monopolized by the Bengali who migrated to Assam. Only a handful of Assamese who had earlier worked for Assam’s kings in maintaining diplomatic connections with the other northeastern states (Cachar, Tripura, and Darrang) knew the Bengali language. Bengali was a foreign language to all other Assamese. The common man of Assam, lacking knowledge of both Bengali and English, was unqualified for the new employment opportunities under the British. The Bengalis who took up jobs in Assam were privileged in two ways. Not only were they conversant with Bengali, but they also had a fairly good knowledge of English, since Western education had been introduced in Bengal years ago. The colonizers were thus spared the need to invest in Western education in Assam, and benefited from the investment that they had already made in Bengal by using the services of the “surplus” among the educated Bengali youth (Guha 1977, 58). Thus employment in the departments of law, railways, post, administration, tax collection, and education was for all practical purposes blocked to the Assamese. As the Bengali and the Assamese jostled for the small number of employment opportunities that existed in the colonial world, speculation was rife that it was the Bengali who had persuaded the British to suppress the Asamiya language. Looking back today, it seems unlikely that the colonial administrators were swayed by the Bengali. However, it does appear possible that Bengali officials helped Henry Hopkins, the commissioner of Assam, argue that Asamiya was a variant of Bengali. This “conspiracy theory” resulted in intense hostility between the communities, with the Assamese resenting the fact that their language was believed to be a corrupt and vulgar dialect of Bengali. There was, however, another angle to the situation, which complicated matters. Bengal and the Bengali were respected and admired by most of the Assamese

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because Bengal had come to occupy a position of leadership in colonial India through its dynamic social and cultural progress in the mid-nineteenth century. This was the period of the Bengal Renaissance, which saw the emergence of intellectuals, philosophers, and social reformers who radically transformed the social and religious landscape, marking the transition from the medieval to the modern. This era witnessed the newly formed Bengali middle class pushing the frontiers of knowledge and experience. The new knowledge brought in through Western education created a generation of firebrand youths who debated and questioned age-old traditions and beliefs, forcing to a head issues of social and religious reform. Bengal’s role in the awakening of India to modernity has been compared to the “position occupied by Italy in the story of the European Renaissance” (Sarkar 2002, 11). It was, therefore, impossible for the Assamese, or any other Indian, to remain indifferent to Bengal and to its metropolis, Calcutta. Bengali journals and newspapers found subscribers all over eastern India, and Bengali publications in English were read all over India. Assam too came under Bengal’s overwhelming influence and records show subscriptions to the Bengali Samachar Darpan, Samachar Chandrika, and Masik Patrika. As early as 1831, we find the Bengali newspaper from Calcutta, Samachar Darpan (July 30), reporting: The distinguished persons of Assam maintain contact with every affair in and about Bengal through the newspapers of this Province. In no district of Bengal are found so many subscribers to our newspapers as are found amongst the people of Assam . . . Possibly because Bengal and the Bengali culture were held in such high regard, the proclamation of Bengali as the official language of Assam did not immediately spark off protests. On the contrary, the educated elite of Assam modeled themselves on the Bengali upper-caste urban intellectual. Bengal, Calcutta, and the Bengalis embodied much that was appreciated and admired by the Assamese elite. With all the institutions of higher education being located in Calcutta, the city exercised a tremendous influence on the minds of this group, many of whom spent their impressionable years there. Those Assamese who aimed to climb the emerging social hierarchy in colonial Assam imitated Bengali food habits, customs, dress, and manners. They spoke the Bengali language proudly, read the Bengali papers and literature, and even published their own writings in Bengali (Hussain 1993, 231). Most of the Assamese pioneers of education and modernity were actively involved with the reformist movements in Calcutta and many of them published their first writings, not in Asamiya, but in Bengali. In fact, the first printed history of Assam, Asam-Buranji, was in the Bengali language. Such a history of close association with, and love for, the Bengali culture and language may be traced in the lives of most of Assam’s early leaders. Their contributions to the Asamiya journals like Mou and Asam Bandhu also bear witness to their urging the Assamese to emulate what they viewed as the Bengalis’ admirable pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment. With the social elite accepting the Bengali language and culture, many of the educated among the Assamese Hindus began to identify with Bengali culture (Baruah 2001).

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Increasing Bitterness over the Bengali Language To Bengalis in Assam, the situation was one that suited them in every way. The new state that was annexed was a part of the Bengal province and they were qualified for the jobs which were offered here. Moreover, the question of Asamiya being a language or a dialect appeared superfluous to them for two reasons. First, Assam was ruled as a part of Bengal where the majority of the population spoke Bengali,3 and second, Bengal’s culture and language were regarded as far richer than most others on the entire subcontinent. Most Bengalis therefore believed that the imposition of the Bengali language on Assam would be beneficial to the Assamese. This belief in the superiority of their language and culture had its predictable effect on the behavior of the Bengali. Empowered by the state, and as the representatives of colonial power, they behaved as quasi-colonizers, arrogant and supercilious in their conduct. With the crumbling of the Assamese aristocracy, and in the absence of an Assamese middle class, it was the Bengali who became the embodiment not only of progress, education, and culture, but also of power and prosperity. Gunaviram Barua writes that the social status of the Bengali “was next to the British in Assam” (Raatan 2008, 50) and the Bengali was well aware of it. Within years, the situation grew embittered. Pushed against the wall because of their economic and social helplessness, the Assamese grew disillusioned with the Bengali. This was reflected in a duality in the Assamese attitude toward the Bengali, which began to be revealed in the periodicals of the early 1850s. Bengali culture and literature was held up simultaneously as a fit model for emulation and for vehement disparagement. While earlier protests against Bengali had questioned the imposition of the language, the later protests coalesced around a bitter criticism of the language itself, and the language was condemned as weak and feminine. Anandaram Dhekiyal Phukan created an imaginary conversation between the two languages, Asamiya and Bengali, visualizing them as two mothers, the first clothed in rags, and the other richly attired. The poverty and humiliation of the Assamese mother is ascribed to the neglect meted out to their mother-tongue by the Assamese people, who flee from her and adopt the Bengali language (Neog 1983 [1854], 168). Gradually the Bengali begins to be seen as more of a tangible threat to the Assamese culture than the English, and thus the “other” always refers to the highcaste, educated Bengali visible in colonial Assam. The mixture of scorn and admiration for the Bengali is echoed in the portrayals of the Bengali-inclined Assamese. Criticism of natives who flaunted an inadequate knowledge of Assamese, concealed their Assamese roots, and had imbibed the “foreign” Bengali culture became more and more frequent in journals. Thus one writer comments: “Alas . . . If I had spoken of the Bengali language instead of the Asamiya, or asked the youth to . . . behave as the Bengalis . . . then my words would have seen results” (Neog 1981, 155. Translated from Asamiya). In reaction to Bengali chauvinism, there gradually developed a sense of Assamese ethno-nationalist feeling. Built around the Asamiya language, the most visible issue of the times, linguistic identity became the central core of the Assamese identity that was shaped during this period. There had been no

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perceptible reaction from the Assamese against the decision to declare Asamiya a dialect from 1836, when Bengali was introduced, to 1853. But the protests began loud and clear in 1853 when A. J. M. Mills, the judge of the Sadar Dewani Adalat, visited Assam on an official inspection tour. Was it then the protests of the Assamese that led to the acceptance of Asamiya as a language? One cannot be certain of such a conclusion since the decision to revoke Bengali came about twenty years later, in 1873. If there is one incident that may be seen as having acted as the final trigger in the Asamiya-Bengali conflict, it is a memorandum placed before the British government in 1872 by a missionary called Miles Bronson. This was a petition entitled “The Humble Memorial of the Assamese Community at Nowgong, Assam,” bearing the signatures of 216 Assamese and the president of the committee, Bronson. This brings us to the next and perhaps most important group of players in the language-dialect debate of Assam: the American Baptist missionaries.

The Potential Role of the Missionary: Educating, Taming, and Converting the Tribal Within two years of their occupation of Assam, the British were facing revolts. Though the disaffected nobility was the first to rebel, the more sustained and trying resistance was put up by the hill tribes. The Khasis fought the British from 1829 to 1833, and the Singphos put up a formidable resistance to the British. It was around this time, when the British were struggling to tame the Khamtis of Sadiya, that the decision to invite the missionaries into Assam was made. Francis Jenkins, who arrived as commissioner in 1834, asked the missionaries of Bengal stationed at Serampore, who in turn asked the American Baptists, to set up a school in the area. This invitation brought the Baptists into Assam with the purpose of spreading education. The decision by the British was possibly based on the hope that formal education would make these hill tribes tamer and hence more malleable to colonial governance. This corresponded with the economic plans of the British. Since the early 1830s, the British had been trying to set up tea plantations in the Sadiya district of Assam. This was imperative to the economic interests of the Company since the tea situation had changed dramatically around 1830. New tensions in Anglo-Chinese relations led to a growing distance between China and Britain. This “dragged the British tea quest to the centre stage of metropolitan concern. With Chinese threats to terminate the treaty port system ringing in their ears, British public opinion urged the powers-that-be to consider” the scope of tea in Assam (Sharma 2006, 433). One anonymous writer in The Asiatic Journal advised that, if but a portion of the capital, which is now jeopardized in China, be carried to the British provinces in Assam, the transfer will give an impulse to agriculture in those provinces, which will develope [sic] many of its other resources, and at the same time, do more to teach the Chinese sounder notions of political economy than even the cannon of a British man-of-war. (Sharma 2006, 433)

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Consequently in 1834, the Indian Tea Committee set up by the governor-general of Bengal proclaimed that the tea plant was indigenous to Assam. In the contemporary threatening scenario of losing out on a huge share of the world’s tea market, the discovery was hailed as one which was “by far the most important and valuable that has ever been made on matters connected with the agricultural or commercial resources of this empire” (Parliamentary Papers 1839, Paper 63). The proposed tea plantations of Assam could therefore be profitable business ventures for the British but “few speculators ventured to take risks in a region of lawlessness” (Barpujari 1963, 248). It was probably hoped that education and possible conversion to Christianity might “discipline” the fiercely independent tribes and diffuse the potential threat of political instability in the area. Plans of setting up Sadiya as a central market for China and Burma were also discussed. This was surprisingly the future plan of the Baptists, too, who, viewing Assam as the gateway to China, called the Assamese mission the Mission to the Shans. One of the papers presented at the 1886 Conference of the American Baptists held in Assam states clearly: “The fact of Assam’s location as a highway to Tibet and Western China enhances its value from a missionary, as well as from a Political and Commercial point of view” (Chaudhury 1990, 25). An entry into Assam was looked upon as the beginning to a greater mission. But it would be incorrect to assume that the American Baptists enthusiastically acquiesced to the British plans of domination through missionary endeavor. That the Baptists were aware of this manipulative use of the missionaries for purely imperialistic and commercial purposes is revealed in their journals, as is their natural resentment at being put to such use. Bronson writes: “For more political ends, where missionaries serve as an entering wedge among barbarous tribes as Civilizers and Educators and as Informers, missionaries may receive countenance, but for no higher motive” (Barpujari 1986, 94).

The Missionaries’ View of the Language Debate On beginning their work in Assam however, the missionaries found their endeavors seriously hindered by the lack of support offered to the vernacular Asamiya by the administrative authorities. The missionaries had trained themselves in Asamiya and begun to translate the Christian books and hymns into this native language, a practice they followed in every area they worked in. Arriving around the time when Bengali was imposed as the official language in Assam, the missionaries realized the difficulty of preaching the Bible to a people who were illiterate both in English and in their own vernacular. It must be remembered that the people whom the missionaries addressed were seldom those who belonged to the Assamese elite, that is, to either the higher castes or the more privileged classes. These poorer people spoke only Asamiya, but since this was no longer taught in schools, they were often not literate in the vernacular Asamiya. With the relevance of Asamiya decreasing, it became more and more difficult for the missionaries to communicate with the Assamese or to get them to read the religious tracts. Yet it was necessary to educate them in order to enlighten them: “How can we enlighten

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these without first teaching them to read?” (Barpujari 1986, 108) Keeping the vernacular alive was of prime importance to the missionaries in a field where the people were unacquainted with the other possible languages. To counter this threat to Asamiya, the missionaries set up about six Asamiya-medium schools (Neog 1981) around Sibsagar. By 1846, the number of such schools had risen to fourteen. Reverend Nathan Brown began the first Asamiya journal, Orunodoi, and Miles Bronson, the missionary who spent about forty years of his life in this northeastern state, began the mammoth task of authoring the first Asamiya dictionary. Realizing the futility of the Shan mission that they had earlier planned from Sadiya, the missionaries “turned their eyes upon the peaceful fertile valley of Brahmapuutra, where people spoke only one language, Assamese, unlike the many splintered groups on the hills” (Neog 1981, 60). Arriving at Sibsagar, a more centrally located area than that of Sadiya, the missionary Nathan Brown’s journal reads: I have decided to remain at this place. The press, we trust, will ultimately be located here, it being altogether the most central and important station in Assam Proper—that is, Assam above Gowahati. The district between Gowahati and Goalpara, though reckoned as part of Assam, has no connection with it in a missionary point of view, as the people do not speak the Assamese language. (Baptist Missionary Magazine, September 1842, 243) The Baptists realized the urgent need to get Asamiya back into schools because this was the only vernacular familiar to the Assamese among whom they worked. Their determined efforts to use Asamiya at baptism and prayers are revealed in a journal entry of 1842: On the 12th, Montan, the lad mentioned . . . was baptized by Br. Brown in the large and beautiful tank at Sibsagor. Most of the European residents at the station, and several natives, were present during the services. Br. Brown delivered an address, and prayed in Assamese; and a hymn composed by him in the same language, for the occasion, was sung to the tune of Suffolk. (Baptist Missionary Magazine, March 1842, 244) The Baptist Mission Press was set up at Sibsagor, and it was from here that the missionaries published their dictionaries, grammars, and primers of the Asamiya language. The choice of Sibsagor as the Mission center had a significant influence on the language that finally came to be standardized throughout Assam. The dialect prevalent in this eastern area of Sibsagor, used in the printed literature by the Press, became the Asamiya language that gradually gained acceptance as the language for all Assamese (Kakati 1941). The missionaries used all their social power and proximity to the colonizers to push the language issue to the forefront. It is believed that if it had not been for the active cooperation of the missionaries, “the Assamese language, thanks to the mercies of the English and their Bengali employees, would have been buried forever” (Saikia 1993, 83). By the early 1850s, when the awe in which the Bengalis were held had begun to wear off, the Assamese elite joined hands with the missionaries in establishing Asamiya as a language. The texts that the missionaries authored fulfilled a dual role: legitimizing the Assamese language, and giving the

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colonial rulers a rudimentary introduction to this language. The process of state building, which induced a need to cultivate the local languages, was met, to a large extent, by the publications of the Baptist Mission Press. The dictionaries and grammar texts, written in English and interpreting the Asamiya language in English, would have been of undeniable value to the imperialists both for administration and for commerce. This is revealed in Miles Bronson’s words, “and the English wrote to me asking for an English and Assamese dictionary, but my dictionary has not yet been published to give to them . . .” (Saikia 2002, 146). The Company’s servants were therefore in need of the missionaries’ help as far as books and knowledge on the natives was concerned. By the 1860s, British documents began to acknowledge that the very large Bengal province was getting too unwieldy to administer. Also, equipped with grammars and dictionaries, the language of Assam no longer appeared to present difficulties as insurmountable as they had fifty years ago. After repeated petitions from the Assamese and the Baptist missionaries, the government finally took the long-awaited resolution in 1873 of declaring Asamiya a language in its own right. The following year Assam was separated from Bengal and its territories were redrawn to create a new state. While this did not entirely solve all the problems spawned by the five-decades-long language-dialect conflict, it was a decisive victory for the Assamese. It acknowledged the Assamese identity as distinct with a history and culture of its own. Subject to a situation that rendered them weak and inferior to another colonized community, the Assamese had grown into the habit of measuring their literary or cultural achievements in Assam against happenings in Bengal. Though Bengali continued to remain a touchstone of the progress of Assamese culture for a long time, other developments on the subcontinent at this time helped to merge Assam’s sympathies with the rest of the Indian subcontinent. As the winds of nationalism and anti-colonialism began to spread over India, with Bengal taking a leading role in the nationalistic movement against the British, Assam too gradually began to move out of its ethno-nationalism and toward the larger nationalism that united the Indian subcontinent.

Current Relations between the Bengalis and the Assamese The hostility between the Assamese and the Bengalis has, however, continued into the present times. While many of the Bengalis still living in Assam have assimilated themselves into the Assamese culture, areas where Bengalis predominated since colonial times have retained their Bengaliness. The drawing and redrawing of Assam’s boundaries have now caused a large area, Cachar, geographically and culturally closer to Bengal, to be a part of the present Assam. This has resulted in Bengali remaining the vernacular of a substantial percentage of the people who live in Assam. The effects of the large-scale migration of Bengalis into Assam proper during colonial times cannot be wished away, and it was only in the late twentieth century that Asamiya could be introduced as the language in institutes of higher education like the colleges and universities. Language riots have continued, and it was “entirely consistent with its recent history that during the

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language riots of 1960-61, a non-official commission, constituted by Bengali organizations in Cachar to inquire into a police firing on Bengalis . . . consisted entirely of legal figures from West Bengal” (Baruah 2001, 103).

Conclusion The success of the Assamese in establishing the Asamiya language within Assam may today, perhaps, be rated at a point of 8 on a 10-point scale, where 1 stands for least successful and 10 for most. Schwartzberg (1985, 177) writes that: the changes that India has made to date in its political map have preserved the essential unity of the nation, rather than contributing, as many predicted, to a process of balkanization. In creating a system of essentially linguistic states, India has provided a local milieu that is conducive to the flowering of many linguistically-rooted cultures and thereby evolved a system which greatly enriches the cultural life of the nation as a whole. Assam, however, is a significant exception to this generalization (Baruah 2001). It may not be irrelevant at the end of the chapter to take a look at the relationship, if any, that exists between the two languages, Asamiya and Bengali, from a linguistic point of view. The Charyapada collection of poetry and songs, believed to be composed in eastern India between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, is claimed by both the Assamese and Bengali as belonging to their language. The spoken languages/dialects of North Bengal and that of Western Assam today are substantially the same, as they seem to form one dialect group. The Rajbongsi dialect that is spoken in the northern areas of West Bengal is very similar to the Kamrupi of Assam. It is not easy to decide whether these dialects should be categorized as dialects of Assamese or of Bengali. Linguists believe that these “dialects are independent of literary speech, and as such, East Bengali dialects, North Bengali dialects, (with which Assamese is said to be associated) and West Bengali dialects are not only independent of one another, but also they are not, as is popularly believed, derived from literary Bengali” (Chatterji 1970, 108). The processes through which a language or a dialect is pronounced as such are, therefore, more connected with the processes through which they have found their way into people’s minds and voices, than with linguistic reasons. Notes 1. I have followed the usual convention in English of referring to the people of Assam as the Assamese and to the language of Assam as Asamiya, though in the Indian vernaculars both would be referred to by the term Asamiya. 2. Talish Shihabuddin, War against the Assamese: Fatbiyab-i-Ibriyahi, quoted in S. K. Bhuyan. Annals of the Delhi Badshahate: Being a Translation of the Old Assamese Chronicle Padshah-Buranji (1947). Gauhati: Government of Assam, Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, 13. 3. In fact, the Assamese remained a minority in their own state even after Assam was separated from Bengal in 1874. This was because large areas of East Bengal were

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added to Assam, creating a state that was “an amalgam of Asamiya speaking, Bengali speaking and myriad tongued hills and tribal areas in which Asamiya was the claimed mother tongue of less than a quarter and Bengali more than 40 per cent of the population” (Amalendu Guha 1980).

References Arnold, David (2000). Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India: The New Cambridge History of India, III.5, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baptist Missionary Magazine. March 1842, No. 3, Vol. XXII. Boston: Press of John Putnam. Baptist Missionary Magazine. Sept. 1842, No. 9, Vol. XXII. Boston: Press of John Putnam. Barpujari, Heramba Kanta. (1963). Assam in the days of the company: 1826–1858. Guwahati: Lawyers’ Book Stall. Barpujari, Heramba Kanta. (1986). The American Missionaries and North-east India, 1836–1900 A. D. Guwahati: Spectrum Publications. Bez Baruah, Sanjib (2001). India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Identity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Barua, Lakshmikanta (1968). Prabandha Bachhani. Jorhat: Assam Sahitya Sabha. Chaudhury, Prosenjit (1990). The Assam mission of the American Baptist missionary union: Papers and discussions of the jubilee conference held in Nowgong, December 1886. Ateet Anushandhan. Guwahati: Asam Sahitya Sabha. Chatterji, Suniti Kumar (1970). The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language,Vol. 1. London: George Allen & Unwin. Cohn, Bernard. (1996). Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Guha, Amalendu (1977). Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom, Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam,

1826–1947. New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research. Halhed, Nathaniel (1778). A Grammar of the Bengali Language. Hooghly. (Fascimile Reprint, 1969). Hussain, Monirul (1993). The Assam Movement: Class, Ideology and Identity. Delhi: Manak Publications. Kakati, Bani Kanta (1941). Assamese, its Formation and Development. Guwahati: LBS Publications. Nag, Sajal (1990). Roots of Ethnic Conflict. New Delhi: Manohar. Neog, Maheswar (ed). (1983 [1854]). Orunodoi 1846–1854. Guwahati: Asom Prakashan Parishad. Parliamentary Papers (1839). Paper 63: Extract India revenue consultations, 7 Jan. 1835. From tea committee to revenue dept., 24 Dec. 1834. Raatan, T. (2008). Encyclopaedia of North-East India, Vol. 1. Delhi: Isha Books. Saikia, Arupjyoti (ed). (2002).Orunodoi 1855–1868. Nowgong: Krantikaal Prakashan. Saikia, Nagen (1993). Aitihya Aru Anyanya Rachana. Guwahati: Banalata. Schwartzberg, Joseph (1985). Factors in the linguistic reorganization of states. In Region and Nation in India, Paul Wallace (ed.), 177. New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies. Sarkar, Susobhan (2002). On the Bengal Renaissance. Calcutta: Papyrus. Sharma, Jayeeta (2006). British science, Chinese skill and Assam tea: Making empire’s garden. Indian Economic Social History Review. 43: 429–455. Sharma, Manorama (1990). Social and Economic Change in Assam: Middle Class Hegemony. Delhi: Ajanta Publications.

21 Plights of Persian in the Modernization Era MARYAM BORJIAN HABIB BORJIAN

Background: A History of Persian The oldest monument of the Persian language is the Bisotun inscription, carved in cuneiform on a high cliff in western Iran. Written in 520 BCE, it relates the military campaigns of the Achaemenian king Darius I in the first year of his reign. Alongside the Persian text, there are translations in Babylonian and Elamite, two among many languages of the Persian Empire, which then extended far and wide from Central Asia to Egypt and from the Indus River to western Anatolia. The Persian language of Achaemenian inscriptions, properly called Old Persian, was spoken in Persis, a super-province on southern Iranian Plateau and the home of the Achaemenian dynasty (550–330 BCE). The other two super-provinces of the Iranian Plateau were Media (northwest) and Parthia (northeast), each having an Iranian language akin to Persian.1 Aside from Persian, Median, and Parthian, there were several other Old Iranian languages, spoken in Afghanistan and Central Asia. A historically important one is Avestan, the language of the Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic faith practiced by Iranian peoples before the advent of Islam. Avestan is generally more archaic than Old Persian, but both share an elaborate inflectional nominal and verb system, quite similar to their sister language Sanskrit and to the closely related Old Greek and Latin, the other major ancient languages of the IndoEuropean family. Contrary to Avestan, Old Persian was destined to survive, but not without going through a major restructuring. In a relatively brief period after the Achaemenians, its grammatical gender, case, and number inflections were reduced to far simpler forms (essentially survived to this date), a profound 254

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transformation comparable to that of Old to New English. By circa 200 BCE, not only Persian but other Iranian languages as well had entered the Middle phase of language development. The linguistic metamorphism was concurrent with a parallel transformation in history. Alexander’s invasion of the Persian Empire in 330 BCE brought his generals to power, who reigned for a century as the Seleucids. Their Hellenistic legacy was challenged by the Arsacids (247 BCE–224 CE), a Parthian ruling dynasty that was successful in reclaiming the Iranian national traditions and replacing Greek with Parthian as the state language. It was sometime within the Arsacids’ long rule that the Iranians were developed from a people into a nation who lived in “Iran” (< Aryân < Old Iranian Aryânâm “of or related to the Aryans”).2 However, the Iranian national character—in late antiquity terms—was to develop under the Sasanians (224–651 CE) in earnest. The state language, now Middle Persian, played little role in the national unification; it was rather the Zoroastrian faith, sanctioned by the court, that primarily stood for the sense of nationhood and unification. The bulk of the surviving Middle Persian texts are religious texts that continued to be compiled up into the tenth century, when most Iranians had already converted to Islam. Following the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, it took Persians some two centuries to recover from their humiliating defeat, a defeat which entailed not only the collapse of their political order but also the imposition of the new religion and language on them. Local Persian dynasties who claimed independence from the caliphs of Baghdad adopted New Persian, a colloquial form of Middle Persian written in the Arabic alphabet, as their court language. It was not long until Persian was standardized, gained literary status, and overlaid the East Iranian vernaculars Parthian, Choresmian, Bactrian, and Sogdian, and replaced Sogdian as the lingua franca of the Silk Road, which connected China to Central Asia. By the tenth century, Persian was providing the umbrella under which the Iranian-speaking peoples were unified once again after the collapse of Zoroastrianism. Thus language replaced religion as the principal unifying force among Iranians (cf. Meskoob 1992). The recovery of Persian was concomitant with the revival of Iranian national identity. A crucial venture was the recollection and translation into New Persian of the Sasanian Khwadây-nâmag (Book of Lords), an extensive mytho-historical collection rooted in the Avestan tradition. After several attempts by a number of writers and poets, the versified rendition of Ferdowsi, known as the Shâh-nâma (Book of Kings), in some 50,000 couplets, proved conclusive (ca. 1010 CE). It ranks with the Indian Mahabharata, the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, and the Germanic Nibelungen Saga as one of the great epics of the world. The Shah-nama not only revitalized the national history with its strongest affirmation and support, it also provided evidence that the Persian language had risen from the ashes of defeat with greater brilliance and richness as a potent symbol of Persian cultural identity. This manner of revival and reconstruction was unparalleled among the other ancient cultural areas that were incorporated into the Islamic world; while Mesopotamia (Iraq), Syria, and Egypt lost their languages under the hegemony of Arabic, Persia survived as the main cultural area that maintained its distinct linguistic and cultural identity within the emerging Islamic empire.

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Persian classical literature continued to thrive for five golden centuries after Ferdowsi, and such great men of letters as Sa’di, Hafez, Nezami, Rumi, and Omar Khayyam, among many others, wrote the masterpieces of the language, mostly in poetry. Written in a wide range of genres, Persian classics offer an all-inclusive set of human experience, from love of beauty to mystical spirituality, musings about life and the universe, moralizing and didactic counsels, and humor and social satire. There exists also a large number of medieval Persian manuscripts on history, sciences, philosophy, and religion, but it is Persian literature that is considered the single most important accomplishment of the Iranian experience (Yarshater 1970). Having been espoused by the Iranian-speaking peoples of the Iranian Plateau and Central Asia as their literary language, the cultural field of Persian began in the thirteenth century to expand into the neighboring lands, to cover the entire northern and eastern Islamic territories, from the western shores of Asia Minor to the eastern plains of Bengal. As the official language, it was adopted by the Turkic dynasties in Transoxiana, the Ottomans in Anatolia (later, along with Turkish), and the great Mughals in India. Worth mentioning is Akbar (r. 1556– 1605), the greatest of the Mughal emperors, who made an attempt to unify the religiously divided India by devising the Divine Religion (Din-i ilâhi) with Persian as the religiously neutral lingua franca. In India both Muslims and Hindus took a great interest in Persian, and produced a corpus of manuscripts that far outnumber those written in Persia proper. A significant heritage of Persian in India is the compilation of dozens of monolingual and bilingual Persian dictionaries and grammars within the millennia-old traditions of Indian linguistics. A comparable number of Persian reference works were written in the Ottoman Empire, within which the lands as far as Bosnia contributed to the Persian literature. Along with the decline of the south and west Asian civilizations, represented by the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, and contemporaneous with the rise of the West as the world hegemonist, the status of Persian weakened in the Persianate world. Persian was officially replaced with English in British India (1834) and by Uzbek, following the collapse of the Emirate of Bukhara by the Soviet army (1921). It survives as an official language only in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. Persian’s legacy in the lost territories can readily be found in the extensive vocabulary, idioms, and expressions it left in Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai (Uzbek), and Urdu-Hindi, the literary languages that emerged under a profound influence of Persian. The language of prestige is still echoed in a typical Indian restaurant menu.

Modernism and Persian Iran entered modern times facing many challenges, but not the two fundamental challenges that many other nations had to deal with: There was no dispute as to what the national language ought to be, or what would make up the national identity. Persian3 continued its role as the language of the state, education,

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literature, and media, without facing any rival, just as English did in England and the United States. Neither was there any serious challenge as to what would constitute the Persian nationality. Iran was among the few nations that entered the age of nation-building and nationalism of the nineteenth century with the legacy of a long-standing historical awareness and cultural consciousness of its identity. Long before the invention of the modern version of nationalism in eighteenth-century Europe, a pre-modern ethno-national identity existed in Iran, an identity formed by a common historical experience and the sharing of a common cultural and literary medium (Ashraf 2006). Persian had a pivotal role in shaping the modern national identity of Iranians. It was not, however, every form of Persian, such as various colloquial variations or the Arabicate style that occurred in the pseudo-chancellery verbiage of preceding centuries. “Good Persian” was perceived—as it still is—as the language employed in the classical Persian literature of the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Traditional schooling—current as late as the early twentieth century—would begin with the thirteenth-century Sa’di’s Golestân (Rose Garden) immediately after introductory lessons on the alphabet and syllabics of the language. As the spoken language had changed considerably since the classical era in both vocabulary and grammar, the school children had to memorize the text with little understanding of its contents (see Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Education”). This same method was universally— and voluntarily—practiced throughout the country, irrespective of the child’s mother tongue, even in northwestern Iran where the vernacular had gradually become Turkish for some half a millennium. Classical Persian has thus been perceived as the “ideal” language and as constituting a big—if not the biggest—chunk of Iranian national identity. This notion of loyalty to the classics is particularly significant in making sense of why the extremist efforts failed in the language reforms of the twentieth century. But before moving on to the discussion of reforms—first spontaneous, then planned—let us consider the circumstances which led to the idea of language reform. Having begun its acquaintance with the West under the Safavid dynasty in the seventeenth century, Iran accelerated its engagement with modern civilization under the Qajars (1794–1925). Modernization of Iran began in earnest under Reza Shah Pahlavi (1921–1941) and continued under the reign of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah (1941–1979). The nation was meeting for the first time Western culture, the strength of which contrasted sharply with the declining fortunes and cultural decline of Asia. It coincided with the period when Persian culture, after having its culmination in the late antiquity and earlier medieval periods, had finally entered a period of decline. The modern West made Iran aware that it was seriously in need of a thorough adjustment through adopting Western methods, techniques, and sciences—an invariable principle from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 until the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (see CHI VII). Adaptation to Western material life, under the late Qajars and the Pahlavis alike, was compounded with another principle: preservation of the national character. The linguistic implication of these principles was to bring Persian in concordance with Western European languages while remaining loyal to the language of

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Persian classics. This objective, somewhat contradictory in itself, underlies the subsequent debates and exploits in language reform in Iran. In the process of reforming written Persian, two aspects can be distinguished: (1) simplification of the language through replacing the empty, ceremonial wordiness and the overformal prose of previous centuries with a readily intelligible, balanced and pleasing manner of writing; (2) expanding its vocabulary to cope with the new concepts of modern times. Simplification of Persian began in the early Qajar era with a movement called bâzgasht (“the literary return”), in which the poets attempted to do away with the excessive subtlety and elaborate artificiality of the “Indian style”—the legacy of the Mughal period, when India was the center of Persian literary production—and return to the lucidity and the elegance of the classical poets. A similar movement for simplifying Persian prose, ridding it of its excessive features and making it more economical, began in the same period, partially as a result of increasing familiarity with the Western style of writing. The turning point came about with the introduction of print technology, which suddenly expanded readership domain to include literate masses and as a result mandated much simpler language. Journalism too contributed profoundly to the simplification process and helped lead a gradual shift from poetry to prose as the main vehicle of social expression (Tavakoli-Targhi 1990). The bigger challenge, however, was how to deal with the new concepts. Throughout the nineteenth century, Iran’s expanding contacts with Europe led to an influx of technological, institutional, and other new concepts for which there were no Persian equivalents. Many of them, such as “bank,” “post,” “machine,” “train,” “telegraph,” “parliament,” and “cabinet,” were simply adopted into Persian directly from French, and there were many other borrowings from Russian and Turkish (Sadeghi 2001). It was not until the early twentieth century, however, that literary societies arose in Tehran and the provinces with the purpose of promoting modern ideas and coining Persian words to express them. The first attempt at an organized approach to coin words was made by a monthly session called the Academic Assembly (Majles-e âkâdemi) in 1903. A successful coinage of this short-lived venture was râh-âhan, a calque on the French chemin de fer “railroad” (Jazayery 2009). Notwithstanding these pragmatic solutions, the debate over modernization of Persian was becoming politicized concomitant with the rise of nationalism in Iran. The West was a source of inspiration and praise as well as fear and contempt for many Iranians in the nineteenth century. Iran’s humiliating territorial loss of the Caucasus and parts of Central Asia to Russia and some eastern areas to the British India, coupled with the intervention of these two imperial powers in the country’s internal affairs, had left a deep scar on the memory of Iranians in general, and the intellectuals, in particular. There were many Iranian students who were sent to Europe either by their parents or on state scholarship to acquire a modern education. Upon their return, they would bring back not only many progressive ideas from the West but also the reverberation of the contempt and ridicule set in the question “How can anyone be a Persian?” posed by Montesquieu in his Persian Letters (1721). Many of those acquainted with European culture and

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alienated in their own country employed many French words in their everyday speech and writing, as if there were emerging a new generation of mixed PersianEuropean speakers vis-à-vis the mullahs and medieval-oriented scribes who would boast about their knowledge of Arabic. The phenomenon is symbolized in the first modern fiction written in Persian. Modern Persian fiction genre began with Mohammad-Ali Jamalzada (1892–1997), a Persian expatriate in Western Europe, whose pioneer collection of short stories, Once upon the Time, published in 1921 in Berlin, introduced for the first time a simple but colorful prose based on everyday speech. Dealing with the social and political conditions in contemporary Iran, a subject that had hitherto been outside the purview of writers and poets in general, its first story, Fârsi shakar ast (Persian is sugar), is about the question of language. Its three diverse actors, who could only meet up in a detention cell, are a Europeanized intellectual, a mullah, and a simple young man. The intellectual, “who would remain Iran’s symbol of insipidness, foolishness, and lack of education for generations to come,” embellishes his speech with French words such as despotisme, illegalité, and constitutionnel, as well as calque translations like “to count on somebody” and “to scratch one’s head,” all unintelligible to his inmates. Equally bizarre is the speech of the mullah, characterized by heavily Arabicized syntax and frequent Quranic quotations, though often inaccurate, and in any case alien to the ear of the illiterate fellow, who understands no language other than simple Persian. The fiction best symbolizes the complexities in Persian sociolinguistics and calls for language reform to save Persian as a social medium of a modern nation emerging from its medieval past. It was perhaps just a bit too early for Jamalzada to add yet a third unintelligible character to his satire: a xenophobic who would try to avoid Arabic (and French) loans by making up “pure” Persian synonyms, to the degree that his speech became incomprehensive to his audience. The purification idea was yet to gain state support under the nationalist administration formed by Reza Shah Pahlavi, who seized power in the same year that Jamalzada published his pioneer work. Already in the nineteenth century, however, the nationalist sentiments had taken a central role in the nation’s political discourse, targeting not only Russian and British imperial domination, but also the Islamic past as a cause of the ignorance of the masses and the backwardness of the nation. Many progressives would see religion as an impediment to establishing a secular, civil society necessitated by modern civilization. The Islamic culture, in the nationalists’ opinion, was to be replaced by the notions and symbols drawn from the long pre-Islamic history, magnificently preserved in Ferdowsi’s great epic, Shah-nama, which was not only widely read and memorized by the literati but also transmitted orally through minstrels who would read its exalted patriotic verses in the traditional cafes (tea-houses) and sports clubs (power-houses) across the nation. Moreover, the Persian classical literature draws many of its heroes, often subjectively, from the ancient past, side by side with Quranic figures, such as Noah, Abraham, and Joseph. Contrary to the notion of the New Year in Western cultures, the Persian Nowruz, held at the spring equinox, has remained outside the domain of religion to this date. Thus, the pre-Islamic past was not regarded by Persians as “pagan,” as

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pre-Christian past is to many European cultures. This continuity assisted the rise of the Persian nationalism, which aimed at circumventing the Islamic past by relying on the ancient heritage. Its language implication was the notion of ridding Persian of Arabic elements. Reviving the ancient past was even more appealing because it would be seen by many Persians, ironically as it was, compatible with a modernization era. Persians would see something “European” in their antiquity and Indo-European language, contrasting their Islamic experience, which had put them at odds with the Christian West. The Orientalist literature, then in its heyday, would help cultivate this outlook. As much as the Europeans looked down on contemporary Iran for its backwardness, they praised ancient Persia for its prosperity and splendor. Indo-Europeanists held the Iranian Plateau in high esteem, since they thought it to be the original homeland of the proto-Indo-Europeans. The antiSemitic European followers of the Aryan myth would see the Iranian prophet Zoroaster as one of the greatest thinkers of all pre-historic “Aryans,” Europeans included; he was fictionalized as a protagonist by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) to present ideas that fundamentally oppose Judeo-Christian morality and tradition. The linguistic scholarship of the Avestan and Old and Middle Persian by Orientalists encouraged Persians to nurture the possibility of coining Persian words based on the roots drawn from the extinct Iranian languages, much the same way as Greek and Latin roots are incorporated into modern European languages; thereby, Persian would homogenize its pan-Iranian vocabulary with little need for either current Semitic-Arabic or future European borrowings (Kia 1998, Tavakoli-Targhi 1990). This formed the basis for language reform—by the state and individuals alike— under the Pahlavi dynastic rule.

Language Reform under the Pahlavis In 1921, a military coup brought Reza Khan to power. He had been the war minister of the crumbling Qajar kingdom. Four years later, he crowned himself as the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty and reigned for sixteen fruitful years, before he was forced to abdicate by the Allies in 1941 because of his alleged German inclination. Reza Shah Pahlavi successfully mobilized the nation under the banner of an intense modernization program, and in his reign Iran saw the development of a modern nation-state, rapid urbanization and growth of population, establishment of a modern system of national education, and the economic integration of the country. These were contemporaneous with, and affected by, the intensive social changes in many other countries, including Germany, the Soviet Union, and Turkey (Wilber 1975). As in the case of social and political reforms, the impetus for a concerted government action in the field of language came initially from the military. The armed forces were to modernize their hardware, tactics, transportation and administration, which called for coining new terminology and a simplified language for the manuals. A joint committee of officers and officials from the

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ministries of war and education met in weekly sessions beginning in 1924 and was responsible for some 300 neologisms, such as havâpeymâ (“aircraft”), khalabân (“pilot”), and forudgâh (“airport”), which eventually gained ground over the former Turkish, Arabic, and French loanwords. The new military terms, publicized through the press, caught on rapidly and usually became permanent. It is important to note that Reza Shah instigated and encouraged this, and later he continued to support coining words of pure Persian origin (Perry 1985). Another successful organization was initiated in 1932 by Isa Sadiq, dean of the Teacher Training College, who organized the student-based Society for Coining Scientific Words and Terminology. Divided into the natural sciences, physics and chemistry, philosophy and literature, and mathematics, formal procedures were established for collecting data and registering suggested terms, and students from the provinces were encouraged to collect and submit words used in their local dialects. A French-Persian glossary was compiled, containing data on specific terms from sources in various languages, to be used by the students in coining words. It adopted and classified some 3,000 terms in all, of which about 400 became permanent. This body continued to function until 1941, overlapping with the Persian Academy (see below) and submitting its recommendations to the latter. Several other organizations, generally short-lived, appeared by the mid-1930s (Jazayery 2009, Perry 1985). Along with these organized efforts, the movement for purification of Persian from foreign words, mostly Arabic, was gathering pace. Younger employees of various governmental institutions began enthusiastically to coin their own, often mutually incomprehensible, neologisms to replace Arabic loans. Archaic Persian words were used arbitrarily, even in official government correspondence, causing confusion among recipients, who often did not know what the neologisms meant. This led to chaos and intensified the argument against the purification of the Persian language, as witnessed in the exchanges between the moderates and purists in the newspapers and magazines of the 1930s. The purists maintained that Persian had no need for foreign words in general and Arabic in particular, and the public media should strive to use language that was readily comprehensible to the masses and should draw their vocabulary particularly from the language of the Shah-nama. The moderates would respond that these qualities were patently incompatible and that the many assimilated Arabic loanwords in current Persian were more familiar to the masses than the revived or invented Persian advocated by the purists; moreover, there were many Arabic lexical items that were Persianized and often took a different meaning and usage from the Arabic original. There were also conservatives who opposed the very notion of neologisms on the ground that the homogeneity of the language would be at stake (Kia 1998). Much of the language purification in Iran was influenced by a similar campaign in neighboring Turkey to purify the Turkish language from “foreign” terms. Following the founding of the Turkish Republic (1923) and the script reform (1928), the Turkish Language Association was established in 1932 under the patronage of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, with the main task of replacing loanwords of

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Persian and Arabic origin with pure Turkish coinages. By pursuing a carefully planned campaign of publicizing the neologisms, the association was largely successful in its language reform (Perry 1985). In 1934, when the language debate was at its peak, Reza Shah paid a historic visit to Turkey, then Iran’s role model in developmental achievements. Among many other aspects, the king was impressed by Turkey’s accomplishment in language planning—with purification as the chief goal. After his return to Tehran, he appointed his prime minister, Mohammad-Ali Forughi, to unify the scattered language societies into a single authoritative language-planning organization. Soon after, a royal order mandated the formation of the Persian Academy—a body of scholars in coordination with the education ministry to oversee the whole realm of language reform and put an end to sporadic and ill-informed experimentation. The Academy, called Farhangestan in Persian, was formally inaugurated in May 1935 (Jazayery 2009). The Persian Academy, organized on the lines of the French Academy, was quite productive in its initial years, but it also saw much fluctuation in terms of scope and goals. The academy’s membership was broad based, consisting of scholars of different tastes and backgrounds. Its overall production, however, was anything but fulfilling the aspirations of the shah, who expected an achievement comparable to that of the Turkish Language Academy. Frustrated with its lack of progress in the purification of Persian, he replaced the Academy’s director three times and even temporarily dissolved it in April 1938. None of these measures was effective in materializing the ideals of the shah, who had the leading role in the purist movement throughout his reign. Following Reza Shah’s abdication, the Academy’s activities slowed down considerably and gradually diminished in the politically troubled years during and after World War II. During its prolific years, the Academy coined some 2,000 words. Many of them were adopted, particularly in administrative and scientific fields, for example, shahr-dâri (lit. city-holding; “municipality”), dâd-gostari (lit. justicespreading; “law court”), do-zist (lit. two-life; “amphibian”), feshâr-sanj (lit. pressure-measuring; “manometer”), govâhi-nâma (lit. behold-book; “certificate”), mardom-shenâsi (lit. people-knowing; “anthropology”) (for a list, see Sadeghi 2001). However, many coinages were eventually abandoned in the less autocratic period after Reza Shah. For instance, the education ministry removed from textbooks the geometrical terminology such as hich-ak (lit. nothing + diminutive suffix -ak; “point”), sikh-ak (stick + -ak; “line”), and gerd-ak (“roundy, i.e., circle”), as they sounded somewhat naive in practical usage: instead of “drawing the tangent to a circle circumscribed by a rectangle,” one would have to say “making the stick touch a roundy stuffed into a four-sided-stuff.” Nonetheless, some of the mathematical terms lasted, for example, for “parallelogram,” hamrow-bar (“together-going-side[s]”) still competes with the Arabic motavâzi-alazlâ` (“parallel-edges”). In general, the state-sponsored language program had little practical results in Iran when compared to Turkey. Several reasons explain this difference. The first and foremost cause lies in the literary heritage of each country. Contrasting with Turkey, where “the classical literature was heavily derivative and readily seen as

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itself the corrupter, not the savior, of the national language” (Perry 1985, 300), Persian had an unbroken linguistic and literary continuity, and the golden age of medieval literature provided models of “good Persian” for both purists and moderates. Another difference between the two nations lies in the personalities and attitudes of the participants in the respective language reform process. The Turkish language policy was a by-product of the general reformist movement carefully engineered by astute policymakers, whereas the members of the Persian Academy were by and large men of letters who could not intrinsically concede to the fanciful ambitions of the king and his generals. Moreover, Turkey’s language reform, like its other reformist programs, was focused and persistent, compared with the diffuse and vacillating policies in Iran: All this points to one general difference between the respective modernization programs of Turkey and Iran. Turkey’s problems were, or were seen to be, simple. There was one villain—the Islamic Ottoman past; one goal— independent westernization; and one method—to persuade the masses to see things just as simply. Neither Reza Shah nor the Iranian intellectuals managed to simplify Iran’s problems like this, either for themselves or for the masses. The catalog of villains included Britain and Russia as well as traditional Islam, but none of them could be antagonized outright; the goals of national independence, westernization, and modernization were in practice incompatible; and the various methods tried largely ignored or misjudged the masses. (Perry 1985, 309) For three long decades after Reza Shah, Iran saw little state interference in language reform. The gradual improvements were often fostered by individual scholars, writers, and journalists who led Persian toward increased transparency of the lexicon and grammar. Particularly successful in language reform were also the non-governmental institutions such as the Institute for Translation and Distribution of Books, the Franklin Institute, the Persian Encyclopedia (based on the American Columbia-Viking Encyclopedia), and the Iran Cultural Foundation, each of which made a substantial contribution in answering the ever-increasing scientific and technical needs of Persian. Besides these noiseless efforts, the language issue, including the Romanization of Persian alphabet, would be raised periodically in social discourse. It was probably in response to these debates that a royal decree was issued for revitalizing the Persian Academy. When the Persian Academy was re-inaugurated in 1970 it had a long list of objectives, such as a detailed study of the extinct languages and living dialects and compilation of various dictionaries and reference books—none ever accomplished. In coining words—the main objective—the second Academy was far more prolific than the first one, with tens of thousand of new coinages, though with little success in implementing them. Notwithstanding the Academy’s declared intention of responding to immediate needs of the national language, purification of Persian can be inferred from many of its proposed lexemes (for a list, see Sadeghi 2001); for example, far-neshin for Arabic ra’is (“chairperson”) and âmuz-gâh for French classe (“classroom”) never gained ground. Although no detailed study has been published on the second

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Academy, its failure can be attributed to the narrow outlook of its members, including its xenophobic director Sadeq Kia.

The Islamic Republic The establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979 is generally understood as a historical reverse to the intensive modernist direction the country had taken since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. Particularly in its first decade, the Islamic regime sought to forge a new cultural identity for Iranians as an Islamic nation by replacing every national symbol promoted by the Pahlavis with anything that would champion the cause of Islamic universalism. Persian classics were thus despised by Iran’s new clerical leaders and the Shah-nama verses were removed from school textbooks under the pretext that the ancient mythology would propagate superstition. Every possible effort was made to promote Arabic, which was declared as the “second” national language by the new constitution. The long-term linguistic strategy of the Islamic Republic was once stipulated by Ali-Akbar Rafsanjani in 1981: We accept that Arabic is the language of Islam, and . . . the world’s holiest language . . . We believe that in the future Arabic, not Persian, will be the international language of Islam. We believe that, on the day the united Islamic government is established, certainly its language cannot be anything but Arabic. (cited in Paul 1999, 210) The turning point in the language question was reached in 1988, when Ali Khamenei, the president and the future supreme leader of the theocracy, spoke of the “greatness” and “holiness” of the national language and the “revolutionary duty” to guard and promote Persian (ibid.), a viewpoint unseen from Shiite religious leaders, who had generally expressed little interest in the royally supported, religiously neutral Persian (Meskoob 1992). A consequence of the change in the languages policy was the establishment of the third Persian Academy, with members appointed by the supreme leader: a mix of language experts and revolutionary pundits. As one may expect, the new Academy stood indifferent toward the Arabic elements in Persian while waging a war against the borrowings from French and English, leading to a new purification campaign against “Westoxification” of Persian. The Academy initiated a law preventing foreign names for newborns and removal of Western names from titles of businesses. Neologisms were coined for many familiar Western words known in Persian for decades; for instance, the third Academy re-instated râyâna (“computer”), a failed coinage of the second Academy, which is often confused, even by high officials, with yârâna, a new coinage for the century-old loan subsid (“subsidy”). The native term for “fax” has been issued by the third Academy at least thrice, and the one for “pizza,” kesh-loqma (“stretch-morsel”), has understandably gained no popularity.

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While the thousands of words proposed by the third Academy have left no dramatic impact on the everyday language, there is another aspect of language change worth mentioning in the last thirty years: The concession made to the language of the commoners. The insecurity on the part of administrators, lawmakers, jurists, journalists, and educators—often appointed and promoted by their ideological inclination rather than knowledge and competence—has resulted in a vulgarized form of speech promoted by the mass media. The Persian language of broadcasts and periodicals has increasingly become not only turgid, but also lacking in clarity and sometimes even soundness. It appears to be the beginning of a permanent drift from the millennium-old loyalty to classical Persian.

Conclusion When Persian engaged with the modern world in the early nineteenth century, it faced the dilemma of preserving its millennium-old continuity amid the profound evolution that was underway. Aside from stylistic simplification—a relatively smooth process over the past two centuries—the main reformist concern for Persian has been lexical innovation. The initial goal was coining words for those Western glosses which Persian lacked, but soon the scope was extended into purging Arabic loans from Persian. The purist movement—much influenced by a similar trend in Turkey—culminated in the 1930s under Reza Shah Pahlavi, who established the Persian Academy to regulate the language reform. To the royal dissatisfaction, however, the Academy’s undertakings were more in the direction of curbing the purification tendencies than promoting them. The paradox lied in the two societal groups involved in the process. On the one hand, there were purists— mostly the younger generation and military officers, led by the shah—who were persuaded by the global conviction of their times that nations were reshapable, materially and spiritually, at all costs. On the other hand, the scholars, educators, and educated public at large aspired to improve Persian to meet the educational, technical, and administrative needs of a modern society while preserving their uninterrupted literary traditions. If the assessment is to be based on the latter objectives, then the degree of success in the language reform of those years—be it carried out by the Academy or other intuitions—should be regarded as high, deserving a score of 7 or even 8 out of 10, not only for salvaging Persian under extreme circumstances and for coining hundreds of lasting terms, but also for the inspiring legacy of studying and improving Persian that this generation left for those to come. In the period of 1940s–1970s, the driving force behind language reform was chiefly individuals and independent institutions. Their substantial contribution—unmatched by any state-sponsored organization—has remained largely unnoticed because it ran gradually and quietly, avoiding propaganda or ideological sentiments. The last decade of this period saw the formation of the second Persian Academy, whose coinages score no more than 3 when judged by their circulation.

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As Iranian history was violently interrupted by the Islamic Revolution of 1979—the subject of numerous scholarly works but beyond the scope this paper—so were the fortunes of the Persian language. The romantic (and bloody) post-revolutionary decade, which focused on a return to the time—and language— of Prophet Muhammad, eventually passed into a more pragmatic period. The third Persian Academy thus came into existence with an ambitious scholarly agenda. It has been in charge of coining new words, and in propagating them the Academy has enjoyed the support of the state-run mass media. It is hard to assess the improvements made by the current Academy; the most obvious fact is its preoccupation with the existing Western loans in Persian, and the reality that the Academy definitely missed the opportunity to prove its usefulness in the new era of the Internet. Overall, the third Academy hardly scores any better than its immediate predecessor. How do we put all this into a general perspective? The original goal of language reform to meet the needs of modern times seems to have often been forgotten amid the political upheavals and the contradictory ideological directions that the country has experienced, and the question remains whether to engage or disengage with the world. Governmental organizations and individual efforts have not been decisive in compiling comprehensive dictionaries based on the current usage, reliable thesauri and grammars, and other language tools, and Persian has not become capable of handling science and technology beyond high-school level. There remains the question of what degree of freedom the current language should enjoy with respect to its classical heritage. Reconciliation between the past and present will continue to be a challenge for future generations. Notes 1. For various aspects of the Persian history and culture, consult Encyclopaedia Iranica (hereafter EIr.; see References), the fifteen published volumes of which cover the entries up to the letter “K,” and even more articles are available in its online edition, which is accessible free of charge. This far-reaching, monumental work of scholarship covers the entire Persianate cultural region in addition to the Iranian-speaking lands. Another comprehensive reference to look into is the seven-volume Cambridge History of Iran (henceforth CHI; see References). Moreover, A History of Persian Literature (gen. ed. Ehsan Yarshater), projected to be eighteen volumes, is under publication by I. B. Tauris, London. 2. “Iran” and “Persia” are synonymous. The former has always been used by Iranianspeaking peoples themselves, while the latter has served as the international name of the country in various languages, ever since it was introduced by the Greeks some twenty-five centuries ago. In 1935, however, the nationalist administration under Reza Shah Pahlavi (see below) made a successful effort to replace “Persia” with “Iran,” apparently to underline the nation’s “Aryan” pedigree to the international community. The latter term used to signify all branches of the Indo-European language family (and even the “race” of their speakers), but was practically abandoned after World War II. In scholarly usage, “Aryan” is occasionally used as a synonym of “Indo-Iranian” in the linguistic sense. 3. The self-designating name of the language is Fârsi, and this name is sometimes used also in the English language.

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References Ashraf, Ahmad (2006). Iranian identity. In Encyclopaedia Iranica, Ehsan Yarshater (ed.). New York: Encyclopedia Iranica Foundation. Cambridge History of Iran (CHI). 7 vols. (1968–1990). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jazayery, Mohammad Ali (2009). Farhangestān. In Encyclopaedia Iranica, Ehsan Yarshater (ed.). New York: Encyclopedia Iranica Foundation. Retrieved from www. iranica.com. Kia, Mehrdad (1998). Persian nationalism and the campaign for language purification. Middle Eastern Studies 34 (2): 9–36. Meskoob, Shahrokh (1992). Iranian Nationality and the Persian Language 900–1900: The Role of Court, Religion, and Sufism in Persian Prose Writing (tr. Michael Hillmann). Washington, DC: Mage Publishers. Nietzsche, Freidrich Wilhelm. (1885). Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen [Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None]. Germany, Chemintz: Ernst Schmeitzne. Paul, Ludwig (1999). Iranian nation and Iranian-Islamic revolutionary

ideology. Die Welt des Islams 39 (2): 183–217. Perry, John R. (1985). Language reform in Iran and Turkey. International Journal of Middle East Studies 17 (3): 295–311. Sadeghi, Ali Ashraf (2001). Language planning in modern Iran: A historical overview. International Journal of Sociology of Language 148: 19–30. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohammad (1990). Refashioning Iran: Language and culture during the constitutional revolution. Iranian Studies 23: 77–101. Wilber, Donald N. (1975). Riza Shah Pahlavi: The Resurrection and Reconstitution of Iran. Hicksville, New York: Exposition Press. Yarshater, Ehsan (1970). Persian literature. In The Cambridge History of Islam 2B. Islamic Society and Civilization, P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis (eds), 671–682. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yarshater, Ehsan (1982–) (ed.) Encyclopaedia Iranica. New York: Encyclopedia Iranica Foundation. Online edition at www.iranic aonline.org.

22 A Pan-Turkic Dream: Language Unification of Turks JALA GARIBOVA

Introduction This chapter deals with the historical context in which the idea of a common Turkic language was developed. First of all, distinction should be made between the terms “Turkic” and “Turkish.” “Turkish” implies the Turks of Turkey and the language spoken in Turkey. “Turkic” is a broader term that refers to all ethnic groups of Turkic origin (including the Turks of Turkey), and their languages. Both “Turkish” and “Turkic” are represented by the single word “Türk” in Turkic languages. Approximately 200 million people, in a vast area stretching from western China to the Mediterranean, and from the Arctic Sea to central Iran and Afghanistan, speak nearly 40 Turkic languages and dialects. Turkey is the largest Turkic state, with about 60 million ethnic Turks living in its territories. The other contemporary Turkic states in which a Turkic language is titular are: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, all of which had previously existed as sovereign Soviet Republics. Turkic languages are also spoken as non-titular languages in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, China, Greece, and the Balkans, as well as in some other states where Turks live as immigrants. It is commonly accepted that Turkic languages are in the broader Altaic language family. It is also believed that Turks originated in inner Eurasia (mainly Russian Siberia) from where, beginning from the third and fourth centuries BCE, they started migrating in various directions. These migrations led to greater 268

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dialectal divergence among Turkic languages. Although the classification of modern Turkic languages has not been resolved, the scheme proposed by Johanson appears to be the most adequate from the point of view of combining genetic and geographic criteria. Johanson (1998) identifies twenty-four modern written Turkic languages: Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, and Gagauz in the Southwestern (Oghuz) group; Tatar, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Bashkir, Kumyk, Karaim, Nogay, Balkar, Crimean Tatar, Karachay, and Karakalpak in the Northwestern group (Kypchak); Uyghur and Uzbek in the Southeastern (Uyghur) group; Yakut, Altay, Khakas, Tuvan, Shor, and Tofa in the Northeastern (Siberian) group; and Chuvash. The origin of Turkic writing goes back to eighth-century Runic stone inscriptions found in Mongolia and Russian Siberia. After the spread of Islam, many Muslim Turks developed writing traditions in the Arabic script. Today, Uyghurs in China and Azerbaijanis in Iran are still using the Arabic script as their official alphabet; in Turkey, however, the Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic script in 1928. This orthographic change also occurred for all Soviet Turks under the Soviet language policy in 1920s, but between 1939 and 1940, Cyrillic replaced Latin as the alphabet used in written Turkic languages throughout the Soviet territory. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan have shifted to the Latin alphabet. In Uzbekistan, in spite of official declaration, shift to Latin has only partially been implemented in public domain. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan continue to use the Cyrillic alphabet; in Kazakhstan, however, shit to Latin has been promoted by prominent political leaders and scholar. While certain initiatives toward Latinization have also been undertaken by other post-Soviet Turks living as non-titular nations within Russia (e.g., Tatars, Bashkirs, etc.), these initiatives have been halted by a recent Russian law endorsing the Cyrillic alphabet as the only script for all ethnicities living in Russia. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between some Turkic languages, especially those within the same group (for example, between Azerbaijani and Turkish, or between Kyrgyz and Kazakh). However, in general, all Turkic languages show close similarities in phonology, lexical stock, and structure. As Soucek (2000, 30) states, when referring to the intrinsic kinship of the Turkic languages: a native speaker of any of them [Turkic languages], when exposed to any of the others, is likely to become used to the differences, and will up to a point be able to function in such a new milieu; and the fundamentally identical grammatical structure and lexical content of all of them make it feasible for him to learn the kindred idiom—if he makes the effort—better and faster than a member of an alien linguistic family could.

Genesis It is commonly acknowledged that pan-Turkism, the movement aiming at the political and/or cultural unification of all Turkic peoples, emerged among Turkic intellectuals of Russia as a liberal-cultural movement in the 1880s. In fact, panTurkism was the result of flourishing nationalist feelings among Turks against the

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Tsarist policies of Russification in the nineteenth century. Yet, the Russian conquest of Turkic peoples had started even before. Russia’s conquest and forceful assimilation of the Siberia Turks and the Volga-Ural Turks (including the Kazan Tatars) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked the beginning of a broad-scale Russian colonization of Turkic lands. In the eighteenth century, the Crimea was conquered and annexed to Russia as a result of Russia’s expansion toward the Black Sea. The occupation was then followed by massive settlements of Russians on the lands taken from the Crimean bourgeois (McCarthy 1995). Between 1813 and 1828, the northern part of Azerbaijan was annexed to Russia as a result of Russia’s victory over Iran. With the 1860s invasion of Western Turkestan (present-day Central Asia), the Russian conquest of Turkic lands was complete. This expansionist policy significantly changed the demographic landscape of Russia. Tsarism now had to deal with a large new segment of its population— almost 11 percent in 1897 (Landau 1995)—with different linguistic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. The Russian authorities feared the eventual unification of its Muslim Turks; to prevent any sort of national awakening among them, Tsarist officials resorted to a policy of Russification and Christianization. Enlightenment initiatives of Turkic intellectuals were suppressed. Decaying Muslim education was not reformed, and instead Russian schools were opened to prepare local and loyal representatives within remote communities. Muslims were not taken into military service, or involved in the administrative bureaucracy, with the exception of those few who were trained through the Russian educational network. The repression of local languages and cultures mobilized the intellectuals. In 1875, the first Turkic-language newspaper Əkinçi (Ekinchi) appeared in Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani intellectuals promoted the reform, and further replacement, of the Arabic script which, being inconsistent with the Turkic phonetic system, created problems for mass literacy. Enlightenment activities among Tatars in the nineteenth century gave a strong boost to the secularization and modernization of the education system in the Turko-Tatar society (Hostler 1957, 1993). According to Landau (1995 7), virtually all Turkic groups in Russia during that period were Muslims. Since the problems were common for all Muslim Turks of Russia, the Turkic and Muslim commonalities between these diverse peoples became platforms of action for many reformists. Reliance on Islam as a strong unifying framework was also justified by the geographical isolation of the Turkic peoples from one another within the Russian Empire. Therefore, pan-Turkism in Russia was often blended with Islamism, and the terms pan-Turkism and panIslamism were often used interchangeably. The idea of Turkic commonality emerged in Azerbaijan, Crimea, and Kazan earlier than elsewhere in Russia. It was due to the proximity of these regions to the Ottoman Empire, where the state-initiated Tanzimat1 reforms had given way to the process of national identity reconstruction in the middle of the 19th century (Atabaki 2000, Finkel 2006, Kinross 1979, Landau 1995, Tanpınar 2006). The lively debates over the language, which many Azerbaijani and Tatar intellectuals witnessed in Istanbul during the Tanzimat period, had a significant impact on the fate of the Turkic languages in Russia (Akçura 2006, Hostler 1957, Saray 2003). Interestingly, the Russian-born linguistic pan-Turkism, which was encouraged by

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the Turkish experience at its inception, was eventually exported back to Turkey, in a politicized form, to play a significant role in the formation of Turkish nationalism.

Linguistic Pan-Turkism of the Pre-Soviet Period Philosophy The campaign to linguistically unify Turkish was launched in the 1880s by Ismail Gasprinski (1851–1914), a Crimean-Muslim reformer. Later, beginning in the early 1900s, the issue was also taken up by Azerbaijani and Tatar intellectuals, in particular, Ali Bey Huseynzade, Hasan Sabri Ayvazi, and Ahmet Kamal. These were slightly different but hardly rival contexts within which linguistic panTurkism was promoted in a span of almost 30 years. For both camps, the base for unification was to be the existing Ottoman standard. However, while Gasprinski viewed linguistic unification as the adaptation of Turkic languages (or dialects, as he identified them) to the simplified Ottoman standard, the others promoted Ottoman Turkish, without simplification and purification, for all Turks. Proponents of Ottoman Turkish are often identified in scholarly literature as Fuyuzatists in reference to the magazine Füyuzat (Fuyuzat), which was their basic mouthpiece; the Ottoman standard was also promoted in the newspaper Həyat (Hayat). For both Gasprinski and the Fuyuzatists, the idea of a common Turkic language was closely connected with the establishment of a Turkic literary standard. In both contexts, the issue was mostly the domain of media disputes since what was mainly debated was the question “in which language should the press appear?” Both expressed concern about the existing language chaos in the press, which was paralyzing literacy. Further, as stated above, since all of the Russian Turks shared the same problem, whatever literary standard was to emerge was to be their common language of school instruction and media. Pan-Turkism was often promoted jointly with the reform of Islam and Westernization or modernization. Unlike other reformists, neither Gasprinski nor the Fuyuzatists viewed Islam and Westernization as incompatible phenomena. For them, Islam was instead a strong unifying framework, and in the hands of reformers it was not a threat to enlightenment. The two trends—that espoused by Gasprinski and the one supported by the Fuyuzatists—were different in terms of their social and political scope. For Gasprinski, who saw Turks as a community within Russia, the problem was of a social nature. Simplification of an existing standard (in his case, Ottoman Turkish) was important to solve many problems, above all, the problem of illiteracy. Therefore, Gasprinski took practical actions by modernizing the schooling system (in particular, by developing a phonetic-based reading system), thus setting ground for cultivating his common language idea. The view of the anti-Russian Fuyuzatists projected political integration of Turks around Ottoman Turkey. Many of the Fuyuzatists had imported pan-Turkism to the Ottoman Empire by involving themselves in the establishment of Turkist

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organizations in Istanbul. Therefore, they focused their efforts on the promotion of Ottoman Turkish in the political-cultural context.

Gasprinski’s “Unity in Language, Thought, and Deed” Gasprinski’s earlier unification views were restricted by the commonality of Tatars rather than of all Turks. Edward Lazzerini (1973, 211) argues that: Gasprinski wrote his newsletters in Crimean Tatar, his own native tongue. Since the vernacular among the Uzbeks of Central Asia differed greatly from that of the Tatars of Kazan, and the Crimean vernacular differed as much from both of these, Gasprinski could not have been thinking in terms of a common Turkic language except in the most elemental sense that each of the vernaculars was indeed Turkic. In his earlier newsletters, Gasprinski mentioned language similarities among Tatars rather than among all Turks, which was probably a tactic to circumvent Russian censorship (Akçura 2006, Saray 2003). Only later, in the newspaper Tercüman (Terjuman), which he published from 1883 to 1914 (and which outlived Gasprinski by four years), he gradually broadened the scope of his discourse to cover all Russian Turks. But even then, Gasprinski’s discourse was contradictory to what he actually promoted. On one hand, he was pointing to a common language that would be understood by all Turks from Istanbul to China (Benningsen 1993). On the other hand, his entire initiative in the newspaper Tercüman was limited to the simplified Ottoman standard, with some space given to his native Bakhchasaray dialect (Saray 2003). The Bakhchasaray dialect was very close to the Istanbul vernacular—the basis of the Ottoman standard. The genuineness of Gasprinski’s idea must have, therefore, raised doubts in his opponents since his initiative served Crimean Tatars best. Many Kazan and Central Asian intellectuals thought that Gasprinski’s proposal did not have anything in common with their vernaculars (Lazzerini 1973, Khalid 1998). Despite scepticisms, however, Gasprinski himself must have been convinced by the plausibility of such unification. First of all, adaptation of all Turkic languages to one standard did not create problems: the structure of Turkic languages facilitated mutual intelligibility due to fixed declension and conjugation rules, and words differed mainly by their phonetic representations. Besides, by adhering to Ottoman Turkish as the most developed vernacular, Gasprinski could have simply taken a practical approach. In general, Gasprinski was against shocking changes since he believed in the strength of tradition as a tool enhancing the sense of group solidarity. Although he was concerned about varying spelling norms in different newspapers, his response to the problem was a slight modification of the spelling rules rather than of the alphabet itself (Lazzerini 1973). After the 1905 Russian revolution, which guaranteed a degree of freedom to the press, Tercüman was issued under the slogan “Unity in Language, Deed, and Thought.” In 1906, the 3rd Congress of the Union of Muslims adopted a resolution that the fourth year of instruction in elementary schools be conducted in the unified language, according to Gasprinki’s proposal. The Fourth Congress of the

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Russian Muslims held in May 1917 in Moscow resolved that the common Turkic language would be an obligatory subject for secondary schools (Hablemitoğlu 1997). In post-1905 Russia, Gasprinski’s influence on the flourishing journalism was significant. In 1906, he was reporting serious progress: “For the past nine months, the newspapers using local dialects have been Turkified for ninety per cent” (Kəngərli 2004, 144). Besides, “ . . . more than 35 newspapers and reviews . . . issued in Kazan, Caucasus, Crimea and Turkestan were produced in, or close to, the language of Terjuman” (Kırımlı 1934, 74–75).

Fuyuzatists versus Gasprinski Fuyuzatists strongly opposed the simplification and purification of the Ottoman standard (Hüseynzadə 2007a). The linguistic narcissism of the Fuyuzatists could have well been rooted in their educational backgrounds. Many of them had attended the best universities in Europe and Ottoman Turkey, had become highprofile scholars and writers, and knew several European and Eastern languages. Whether or not all of them were pursuing political integration with the Ottoman Empire (and probably many of them were), Ottoman Turks were a source of inspiration for them. As the Ottoman Empire was a highly hierarchal society with its elite traditions and culture, the language of the Ottoman elites was expected to be marked as well. Their discourse over the language often revealed this tendency: “ . . . Yes, there should be simple poems written for lay people. But not always can the genius of poetry descend to the level of the uneducated” (Kamal 1907, 11). The more the Fuyuzatists followed Ottoman Turks, the more they saw themselves as setting a benchmark. For them, language unification was therefore not so much a tool for combating social problems, but rather a means of maintaining a standard. Even if, they thought, the standard was complicated to attain, those who loved their language were to make efforts to learn it. In response to demands to simplify the language of their publications, Huseynzade wrote: “Do we really need to simplify the language of our newspaper, or should people indeed master their own language?” (Hüseynzadə 2007a, 38). The Fuyuzatists also opposed the reform of spelling rules, basing their ideas of language unification on a few, specific features of Arabic script. As Arabic script did not have explicit symbols for vowels, it facilitated the unification process by neutralizing pronunciation differences among Turkic vernaculars. Even for all these differences, no serious tension existed between Gasprinski and the Fuyuzatists, except for mild disputes, explained by conflicting motives and different identities. Unlike Fuyuzatists, who felt strongly affiliated with the Ottoman empire and its culture, Gasprinski, himself a representative of the Russian bureaucracy,2 did not pursue political integration with Ottoman Turkey. Moreover, he saw Russian Turks as part of Russian society, and their enlightenment, as an asset to the development of Russia: “Give the Muslims a chance to get to know Russia . . . help them acquire knowledge . . . and you will see how fast the sleepy Muslim mass will liven up . . . and integrate itself more with Russia” (Gasprinski 1993, 46).3 Besides, Gasprinski’s opponents explained his simplification tendency

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by his own insufficient “high standard” skills and his better knowledge of Russian (Hüseynzadə 1907).

A Way Leading to Failure: Particularism Not all of the Muslim reformists were thinking in terms of language unification. Particularism, a trend focused on developing separate national languages based on spoken dialects, was simultaneously growing. This was a direct outcome of the flourishing realistic literature and journalism, whose main mission was to reach out to masses “in their own language.” This generation of enlighteners considered the Ottoman standard, whether in its pure or simplified form, to be alien to many Turks. For instance, Gasprinski called the language in which they produced their works “peasant language.” Against this criticism, an Azerbaijani writer responded: “No matter what Gasprinksi says . . . Even if my play is written in the peasant language, it is because we are writing for lay people. The educated do not need our ‘preaching’.” (Kəngərli 2004: 27). In Central Asia, too, press and literature were developing in “Turkestani Turkic.” As this vernacular was taking shape, literature influenced by Tatar or Ottoman standards was falling under criticism by the growing new generation of intelligentsia (Khalid 1998). In the wake of the enlightenment activities of Turks, the Russian bureaucracy was trying to prevent Turkish unification. Therefore, particularism soon came to be favored and supported by the Russian bureaucracy. The elementary language textbook produced by Gasprinski in common Turkic was banned outside the Crimea, and school textbooks and press were developed in local languages with the support or direct involvement of Russian missionaries. Linguistic pan-Turkism indeed suffered from insufficient cooperation among Turkic reformists. Lazzerini argues that the idea of a common Turkic language was not convincing to certain intellectuals who modernized their local languages (Lazzerini 1973). Local nationalisms were pushing pan-Turkism to the background. Already by the early 1900s, the anti-Turkist Tatar sentiment was growing in Kazan. Azerbaijani nationalism, which led to the establishment of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1918, became the ideology of those who had previously adhered to pan-Turkism (Balayev 2009).

A New Era Continuum Soviet Purge of Turkism The unification tendencies of Turks outlived the fall of the Russian Empire, but Turkey and its language were no longer seen as the center of this process. The Soviet literacy campaign had played an important role in this. In a number of areas, the Soviet Turkic Republics set examples for Turkey. Azerbaijan had started using the Latin alphabet in 1922 and had launched a large campaign of language reform under the new Alphabet and Terminology Committees. The Arabic script

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was adapted for the Tatar language by Kazan intellectuals. The Soviet Turks (Azerbaijanis, Bashkirs, Tatars, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Uzbeks, and many other minorities living in the Russian Federation) now had to find their own ways of rapprochement. As Chobanzade, a Crimean Tatar Turkologist, wrote in 1924: “As far as the hegemony of the Istanbul dialect is concerned . . . today it is an empty fantasy. At present the Turks of the Soviet Union are more advanced than Turkey both in quantity and quality of schools, press, and cultural institutions” (Çobanzadə 1924, 199). The venue of the next wide-range discussion of a common Turkic language was the First Turkological Congress held in Baku in early 1926. At the congress, the issue of linguistic unification was raised regarding four aspects of language: alphabet, orthography, literary standard, and terminology. Despite some opposition, certain achievements were attained. It was resolved, for example, that, in terminology formation, preference would be given to words shared by a group of Turkic languages. At the level of schooling, it was recommended that words from local vernaculars be included in elementary school textbooks, and, in secondary school textbooks, terms common to a particular group (e.g., Oghuz, or Kypchak) of Turkic languages were to be included. A unified New Latin alphabet was designed, and a broad-scale Latinization campaign was launched for all countries. In 1927, the newspaper Yeni Yol reported an intensive process of transition to the New Latin alphabet, emphasizing final success in Crimea, where resistance to the change had continued longer (Yeni Yol 1927). However, the Soviet-endorsed new unification attempts were indeed a paradox of the time. It was certainly a temporary mechanism to gather the Turks into a “different” camp from where it would be easier to “divide and rule” them. As Narimanoglu and Agakishiyev (2005, 6–7) have said: “the Turkological Congress became a venue where a new page of the human tragedy was being prepared in the hands of the Soviet policy-makers” (Nərimanoğlu and Ağakişiyev 2005 6–7). After the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denounced pan-Turkism as bourgeois nationalism in 1921 (Hostler 1957), the Baku Congress was initiated by Moscow to detect pan-Turkist sentiments among the Soviet Turkic intelligentsia. Already in 1926, Mir Jafar Bagirov, head of the Committee on Extraordinary Matters (later to become the First Secretary of the Central Committee of Azerbaijan’s Communist Party), warned Moscow against the tendency to create a common Turkic language, which could further lead to sentiments toward Turkey. This led to a wide-scale purge of the Baku Congress participants during the Soviet “cleansing campaigns” of 1937 and 1938. Many of them, including non-Turks and one female participant, were sentenced to death as anti-Soviet pan-Turkists. The records reveal humiliating situations where the accused were obliged, under torture, to give false evidences against each other, often looking into each other’s eyes (Babayev 2006). After the 1937–1938 purge, even the word “Turk” became forbidden. In Azerbaijan and other Turkic Republics, poets, writers, and scholars who had ever mentioned the common Turkic root, or whose language revealed influence of Turkish, were severely punished as pan-Turkists. Gasprinski’s name, as well as those of medieval Turkic poets and scholars, was taken out of textbooks. “In Soviet

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research and writing about Central Asia . . . ideologists banned the name ‘Turkestan’ from cultural or political usage soon after the dismemberment of the Turkistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1923–4” (Smith et al. 1998, 70).

Language Intervention from Two Poles Meanwhile, the Soviet language policy had started to restructure the Turkic languages in order to alienate them from one another and from the Turkish of Turkey. The “purification”—that is, the de-Arabization and de-Persification of Turkic languages—eliminated most of the shared stock from the Turkic lexicon. To further complicate unification, the Soviet language-planners had introduced different equivalents for the same concept into different Turkic languages. The purists, however, continued to work to improve the mutual intelligibility of Turkish languages. For instance, the 1932 Conference on Spelling and Terminology held in Baku recommended that no words should be taken from other Turkic languages (Əliyeva 1996). Moreover, as Fierman reports in reference to the Uzbek experience, “many of the words which they [purists] sought to remove from their language were widely used, whereas few people knew some of the “pure” terms they sought to promote.” (Fierman 1991, 149) On the other hand, vocabulary intervention of the Soviet language-planners filled the Turkic languages also with Russian words or with the words of European origin adopted via Russian, which were introduced under the name of “internationalization” (Fierman 1991). Again, it was recommended at the 1932 Baku Conference on Spelling and Terminology that the words borrowed from Arabic, Persian and Turkish be replaced by their Russian equivalents (Əliyeva 1996). Soon, variations of the unified Latin script were designed for different Turkic languages. As Turkey also transferred to Latin, the Soviet planners decided, in 1939, to introduce the Cyrillic script for the Soviet Turks. They designed the Cyrillic script specifically for each Turkic nation, and introduced the new spelling rules to make the shared words appear different from their Turkish equivalents. Simultaneously, a “language revolution,” which followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, was launched in Turkey from early 1930s (Kinross 1995). Extreme Turkish purists got rid of Arabic and Persian borrowings, seeing them as signs of Ottomanism, and replaced them with Turkish neologisms. Such neologisms were often created by reviving fossilized stock of the proto-language stratum, such as erdem, which replaced Ar. fezilet (dignity, virtue), and tükel, which replaced Pers. tam (whole, entire), etc. On the other hand, extinct, non-productive, or even non-Turkish morphological forms (suffixes, endings) were used as well to form new words. For example, the suffix –ev/-v was borrowed from the Kypchak languages to form new nouns from the existing verb stems: görev (duty) from gör- (see), sinav (examination) from sina(examine, test), söylev (speech) from söyle- (speak), and so on. (Lewis 1999). These neologisms were invented to replace, correspondingly, the Arabic words vazife (duty), imtihan (test, examination) and nutuk (speech). As Aliyeva notes, many of these borrowings, which were replaced by Turkish neologisms, were words shared by other Turks (Əliyeva 1996). Therefore, all these initiatives, in turn, contributed

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to a growing gap between Turkish and the Soviet Turkic languages. Besides, while Soviet policymakers resorted mostly to Russian as a new source of vocabulary building, Turkish reformists opted for French (besides restoring ancient Turkic elements) as a result of the increased contact with West (Levend 1952). Despite Mustafa Kemal’s 1936–1937 denunciation of extreme purification, the purification movement did not stop in Turkey. As late as 1965, some authors were complaining of the “anarchy and lack of professionalism” of a new generation of reformists, who they felt were damaging the language through education and the media (Timurtaş 1965). In the Turkic Republics of the Soviet Union, however, overwhelming purism was considered harmful in the late 1930s, and the Terminology Committee took a turn back to restore some of the earlier-denied Arabic and Persian elements, but education and the media were too centralized to take as much liberty as in Turkey.

Post-Soviet Revival The post-Soviet period has witnessed the resurgence of the language unification idea. The nation-building process in the independent post-Soviet Turkic Republics was marked by a strong emphasis on returning to roots, in particular in the framework of Turkic commonality. Linguistic unification, viewed from the perspectives of common script, vocabulary, grammar, and terminology, is discussed in various forums devoted to the cultural and linguistic issues of Turks. Although the idea has not yet reached its final implementation scheme, experts indicate three possible ways of forming a unified language: (1) selection of one of the modern Turkic languages—Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, and so on—as the unifying language; (2) unification of languages on the basis of regional groups of Turkic languages (Southwestern, Southeastern, Northwestern, and Northeastern); or (3) “engineering” of a common literary language contributed to all Turkic languages. The formation of a common alphabet became the starting point of the initiatives. The first attempt was made at the 1993 Ankara Conference: a shared script with thirty-four letters (twenty-nine of them being the letters of the Turkish alphabet) representing the specific sounds in all Turkic languages was designed jointly by experts from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan (Qurbanov 1999). Nevertheless, the follow-up was not as smooth as the authors of the project had thought. Alongside the feasibility problems, there was hesitation on the part of the Turkic republics, especially those in Central Asia, who were probably concerned with mutual intelligibility. Jafarov, however, notices that Central Asians have recently been using Turkish instead of Russian as a means of communication among themselves at international gatherings (Cəfərov 2007). At this stage, the question of a common Turkic language neither implies that Turkish would supersede local Turkic languages nor denies the simultaneous existence of individual Turkic languages. Ideally, a common Turkic language would provide one language for communication while still giving priority to the native language within a polity. While Turkish would not be given precedence in this process, its role would be similar to what Russian’s role once was, and the role that English could potentially occupy. The process is more of a merger process

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than that of Turkish squeezing out the local language. Especially in places where there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Turkish—for example, in Azerbaijan—it is the process of mutual influence of the two languages rather than the Turkish having hegemony over other Turkic languages.

Conclusion As Aviel Roshwald (2001) argues, nationalist movements take shape within multiethnic empires that share similar problems and common borders, and there are ongoing contacts and mutual influences among the leaders and ideologues of many of these movements. Certainly, pan-Turkism also drew upon from the experience of other “pan” ideas, in particular from pan-Slavism, which in a certain sense also gave a boost to the intensification of the former (Shissler 2002). Still, pan-Turkism had its own features. It was born out of, and developed alongside, genuine enlightenment initiatives. Except when the idea became a rallying point for Turkish nationalists during certain historical periods, pan-Turkism went hand in hand with the modernization of education, spread of literacy, and establishment of a literary standard for Turks worldwide. Before it saw resurgence in the contemporary period, however, its last hopes were killed at the hands of rigorous politicians. But what also affected the pan-Turkism movement was probably rooted in its very nature, shared by other “pan” ideas. Because “pan” languages are usually artificially designed rather than developed in a natural way––as was the case also with the pan-Turkic language (or with the Ottoman Turkish language on which the pan-Turkic movement was based)––they seldom have sufficient followers, especially in traditional societies where there is a symbolic link between the local culture and the language associated with this culture (Fishman 1991). To be successful, a “pan” language should be promoted from a strong ideological platform in order to trigger strong affiliation sentiments. Certainly, this was not the case with linguistic pan-Turkism. The contemporary phase of linguistic unity does not stem from trying to solve social problems. For example, language unification is not promoted as a tool facilitating reforms in education, civil society, or democratic change. Rather, these questions are tackled by individual Turkic polities at the national level; present initiatives concentrate on the problem of cultural links and identity reconstruction. It is unclear whether the initiatives of this phase will bring about linguistic unity. As during the first phase, these tendencies can be a temporary underpinning for the further development of national, rather than common-Turkic, institutions. This is somewhat more promising given the paradoxical benefit of the Soviet nationalities policy: having pushed nationalistic feelings into the traditionalcultural milieus (folklore, cuisine, public practices, etc.), the Soviet national policy produced a framework that, even though it was not always capable of securing languages, acted as an effective mechanism against cultural shift. In general, the degree to which linguistic unification of Turks will be successful should be measured with consideration of its various aspects, goals, concrete

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stages, and positive impact. Despite the fact that linguistic pan-Turkism still remains an unrealized dream of its advocates, it raised the national awakening of Turks by introducing a new framework of corporate identity for Turks, in addition to their common feeling of Islamic affiliation. The movement has also proposed ways of solving certain social problems of Turks, including literacy and language development. Finally, it has created a precedent for a national awakening on the part of post-Soviet Turks. Whether or not it will really result in a common language, it has nevertheless laid grounds for cultural rapprochement of Turkic nations in a globalizing world. Since the evaluation of linguistic pan-Turkism should take into consideration not only its actual materialization but also the produced effects and further initiatives, we rate it as an 8 on a 1–10 failure-success rating scale because of its relative success, although its ideologies and initiatives have not been consistent. Acknowledgments I want to express my deep gratitude to Professor Joshua Fishman and Professor Ofelia García for their valuable contribution as editors of this chapter. Notes 1. Tanzimat (Ar. meaning “reorganization,” “restructuring”) was the period of state reforms and modernization in the Ottoman Turkey, which continued from 1839 to the adoption of the First Constitution in 1876. 2. Gasprinski was the mayor of Bakhchasaray from 1878 to 1882 and was assigned personal nobility. 3. Gasprinski’s attitude toward Russians has received varying interpretations by different authors. Some believe that Gasprinski relied more on Russians than on other Europeans in promoting the enlightenment of Turks (Benningsen 1993). Others argue that Gasprinski was not sincere in his favoritism of Russia but had to conceal his opposition to Russia to achieve his goals. (Landa, http://www.cidct.org.ua/ru/Avdet/510(00)/65.html)

References Akçura, Yusuf. (2006). Tçükçülüyün Tarixi [History of Turkism]. (Originally Published in Cairo in 1904). Bakı: Qanun. Atabaki, Touraj (2000). Azerbaijan. Ethnicity and Struggle for Power in ıran. New York: I. B. Tauris Publishers. Babayev, Adil (2006). Türksoyun Birlik Səsi [The Voice of Unity of Turksoy]. Baku: Tahsil. Balayev, Aydin (2009) Mamed Emin Rasulzade (1884–1955). Moscow, Flinta.

Bennigsen, Alexandr A. (1993). ısmail bey Gasprinski (Gaspirali) i Proisxojdenie Jadidskogo Dvizheniya v Rossii [ısmail bey Gasrinski (Gaspirali) and the Origin of Jadidism in Russia]. In Ismail Bey Gasprinskiy. Rossiya i Vostok, 79–97. Kazan: Fond Zhien. Cəfərov, Nizami (2007). Bizim Əsas Məqsədmiz Türk Xalqlarının Vahid Dil və Əlifbsının Olmasıdır [Our Main Goal is a Unified Language and Alphabet of Turkic Peoples]. Azərbaycanda Atat Ƅ rk Mərkızinin Bülleteni 4(24): 24–27. Bakı, AzAtaM.

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Çobanzadə, Bəkir. (1924). Türk-Tatar Lisaniyyətinə Mədxəl [ıntroduction to the Turko-Tatar Linguistics], 197–200. Bakı: Azərnəşr. Fierman, William (1991). Language Planning and National Development: The Uzbek Experience. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Finkel, Caroline. (2006). Osman’s Dream. New York. Basic Books. Fishman, Joshua A. (1991). Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Gasprinski, Ismail bey (1993). Russkoe Musulmanstvo [Russian Muslims] (originally published in 1896). In Ismail Bey Gasprinskiy. Rossiya i Vostok, 17–78. Kazan: Fond Zhien. Hablemitoğlu, Necip (1997). Çarlık Rusyası’nda Türk Kongreleri (1905–1917) [Turkic Congresses in the Tsarist Russia (1905–1917)]. Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi. Hostler, Charles W. (1957). Turkism and the Soviets. London. George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Hostler, Charles W. (1993). The Turks of Central Asia. Westport. Praeger Publishers. Hüseynzadə, Əli bəy. (1907). Türk Dilinin Vəzifeyi-Mədəniyyəsi [Cultural Function of the Turkic Language]. Füyuzat No 9, 6 February: 12–14. Baku: Kaspi. Hüseynzadə, Əli bəy. (2007a). Qəzetimizin Dili haqqında Bir Neçə Söz [A Few Words about the Language of Our Newspaper]. (Originally publihsed in Həyat 1905, No. 7). In Seçilmiş Əsərləri, Əli bəy Hüseynzadə, 38–41 Bakı: Şərq-Qərb. Johanson, Lars (1998). The History of Turkic. ın The Turkic Languages, Lars Johanson and Éva Ágnes Csató (eds.), 81–125. London: Routledge. Kamal, Əhməd (1907). Müxtəsər Bir Cavab [A Brief Response]. Füyuzat No. 21, 2 July: 6–14. Bakı: Kaspi. Khalid, Adeeb (1998). The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in

Central Asia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califormia Press. Kinross, Patrick (1979). The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks. Kinross, Patrick (1995). Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation. London: Phoenix. Kəngərli, Aybəniz (2004). İsmayıl bƏy Qasprinski. Bakı: Nurlan. Kırımlı, Cafer Seydahmet (1934). Gaspıralı İsmail Bey. İstanbul: Matbaaçılık ve Neşriyat. Türk Anonim Şirketi. Landa, R. ısmail bey Gasprinski. Retrieved from http://www.cidct.org. ua/ru/Avdet/5-10(00)/65.html. Landau, Jacob, M. (1995). Pan-Turkism. From ırredentism to Cooperation. Bloomington: ındiana University Press. Levend, Agah Sırrı (1952). Dilde Özleşme Hareketinin Tarihçesi [History of the Language Purification Movement]. ın Dil Davası. Ankara: T.D.K. Lazzerini, Edward J. (1973). Ismail Bey Gasprinskiy. PhD dissertation, University of Washington. Lewis, Geofrrey (1999). The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCarthy, Justin (1995). Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922. Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press. Nərimanoğlu, Kamil Vəli; Ağakişiyev, Əliheydər (2006). 1926-cı il Bakı Türkoloji qurultayı (Stenoqram Materialları, Biblioqrafiya və Fotosənədlər) [The 1926 Baku Turkological Congress (Stenographic Materials, Bibliography and Photodocuments)]. Bakı: Çinar. Qurbanov, Afat (1999). Ortaq Türk Ədəbi Dili [A Common Turkic Language]. Bakı: Gənclik. Roshwald, Aviel (2001). Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires. New York: Routledge.

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Saray, Mehmet (2003). Gaspıralı İsmail Beyden Atatürke. Türk Dünyasında Dil ve Kültür Birliği [From Gaspirali ısmail bey to Ataturk. Language and Cultural Unity in the Turkic World]. İstanbul: Çantay Kitabevi. Shissler, Ada Holland (2002). Between Two Empires: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the New Turkey. New York: I. B. Taurus. Smith, Graham, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Anette Bohr, and Edward Allworth (1998). Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soucek, Svat (2000). A History of Inner Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi (2006). XIX Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi [History of the 19th Century Turkish Literature]. İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları. Timurtaş, Faruk K. (1965). Dil Davası ve Ziya Gökalp [Language ıssue and Ziya Gokalp]. İstanbul: Fakülteler Matbaası. Yeni Yol [New Way] (1927), 7 November. Əliyeva, Xatirə. (1996). Ortaq Türk Ədəbi Dili Problemi. (Filologiya Elmləri Namizədliyi Alimlik Dərəcəsi Almaq üçün Təqdim Edilmiɛ Dissertasiya) [The Problem of a Unified Turkic Literary Language (A Dissertation for Obtaining the Degree of Philology)]. Bakı.

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23 Luxembourgish: A Success Story? A Small National Language in a Multilingual Country SABINE EHRHART FERNAND FEHLEN

Introduction Luxembourg can be crossed by bicycle on one day in either direction: it extends 51 miles from north to south and 35 miles from east to west.1 Despite its small size of less than 1000 square miles, it shows an exceptional linguistic and cultural variety—and it is able to organize a Tour du Luxembourg, a cycling competition with different routes running through the country lasting up to five days. The two authors of the article—two researchers working at the newly created University of Luxembourg, one of whom is a “genuine” Luxembourger and the other one a German living in France—join their perspectives on the country in order to give a multidimensional view of its linguistic situation and especially the initiatives of success and failure surrounding the Luxembourgish language. Our description is based on ethnographical observation following an ecolinguistic orientation. According to Fill (1993, 133): ecolinguistics is that branch of linguistics that takes into account the aspect of interaction, whether it is between languages, between speakers, between speech communities, or between language and world, and that in order to promote diversity of phenomena and their interrelations, works in favour of the protection of the small. From an ecolinguistic point of view—and by using the Fishman RLS model, as well as the continua of literacy (Hornberger 2008) as an inspiration—the position of the Luxembourgish language on the success-failure continuum can only be 285

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described by placing it in a broader context. The answers to the questions that arise then will always be manifold.

Historical and Geographical Framework The present-day Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg with its surrounding region has a long tradition of linguistic and cultural diversity, as for centuries it has been the continuous meeting point of several cultures. It belonged until the nineteenth century to different sovereignties and overlapped the linguistic frontier that cuts Western Europe in a northern Germanic and a southern Romance area. After the Treaty of Vienna (1815), new borders were drawn in this region, not at all preordained by linguistic facts on the ground. Other possible geopolitical solutions would have been the creation of a buffer state between France and the different German microstates. As Fishman (2006, 84) has said: The Belgian Flemish, Dutch Flemish, Belgian Germans and Letzembergish speakers of Luxembourg could very well have constituted the bulk of a new pan-low-German confederation with an arguable claim to a long established written variety all its own. Perhaps such a variety would even have been extended to include Alsatian and Swiss German too in some future greater Lothringian union.2 In 1839, following the Belgian revolution with which Luxembourg was associated, the Grand-Duchy was established by the Treaty of London within the territorial limits that are recognized today. It has been said that Luxembourg was the first modern state because, for the first time, the great European powers that imposed the territorial settlement followed the linguistic border to demarcate a territorial frontier, with the exception of some small deviations for geopolitical reasons. Just as there are languages that existed before “their” state came into being, as for instance the German language, there are also states that have pre-existed “their” language. The Luxembourgish nation-building process is an ideal example of the invention of a national language, and Luxembourgish is a typical Ausbau language,a language by extension, or construction in the sense of Kloss (1967): a Germanic dialect becomes a language because it has, over time, assumed the functions of a language in a small community. After the French or Walloon territories had been lost to Belgium in 1839, the general population of Luxembourg, most of whom were peasants, spoke a dialect which belonged to the Germanic family, named West-Moselle-Franconian by dialectologists. The noblemen, the bourgeoisie, and the senior functionaries also spoke French and standard German, while German and Latin were the main languages of the Church. The different languages of the Germanic family can be best described as the colors of a rainbow with a smooth transition from one to the other, forming a progressive chain of mutual intelligibility. Luxembourg’s path “from a state to a nation” (Trausch 1992) was accompanied by the invention of its own language, Lëtzebuergesch, which became the symbol—

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and for many, even the essence—of Luxembourgish identity. This Ausbau, the “building away” was favored by the fact that the Moselle-Franconian varieties spoken in the Duchy of Luxembourg were border dialects and therefore profoundly influenced by standard French as well as by the neighboring Romance dialects. It still took many years for the linguistic variety of the new country to get a name; the designation of onst Deitsch (“our German”) could be heard until World War II. It was only during the 1930s, confronted with annexationist pan-Germanism, and during the Nazi occupation that the Luxembourgish language definitely became a rallying cause for patriots and a focal point for the resistance against the annexation by the Third Reich. In 1984 Luxembourgish became the national language by virtue of a law (Loi du 24 février 1984 sur le régime des langues) that had been pushed through by the lower middle classes and schoolteachers against the Francophile—though Luxembourgish speaking—elites of the country. That law also declared French to be the language of jurisdiction and French, German, and Luxembourgish were to be accepted as languages of the administration. It carefully avoided the use of the term “official” in its text. In 1839, Moselle-Franconian was spoken in a region that largely overlapped the borders of the Luxembourgish state and the neighboring countries of Belgium, France, and Germany. But the evolution of this variety has been divergent in the four states concerned. In the German border region, it underwent what Fishman calls Einbau, that is, building toward German, being considered by its speakers as a German dialect that was “dissolving” its typical features within a regional variety of German. In France it is today a part of the Lorraine region, which passed during the last 150 years several times from French rule to German domination and vice versa. After the German occupation of World War II, it definitively came back to France. Since then, as francique (franconian) was considered a German dialect, there has been an important language shift toward monolingualism in French, especially among the younger generations. A comparable decrease in the number of the members of the speech community can be observed in the Belgian region bordering Luxembourg. However, there is one difference to France: in the Belgian pays d’Arlon (which was part of the Grand-Duchy until 1830), the inhabitants consider their language as Luxembourgish (Fehlen 2004). In a diachronic (historical) view, the development of the Luxembourgish language in Luxembourg can be seen as a success story, with a position between 7 and 9 on the continuum scale used for this publication (this depends on which weight we give to the spoken or the written language), as it has shown a steady progression during the last two centuries. The development of similar linguistic varieties spoken in the border regions of the neighboring countries must be considered as a failure, ranking, for the German and the French region, at 2 or 3 on the continuum scale. The Belgian region is slightly better off, as a small minority claims rights for its dialect (Darquennes 2005), so it could be placed at 4 on the continuum scale. For the next sections, we will limit our observation to the territory occupied by the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg in its borders of today.3

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The Ecological Context of the Luxembourgish Language General Definitions Because of its geographical location at the crossroads of Europe, Luxembourg is synonymous with language contact and linguistic diversity. While this has always been the case in Luxembourg, the promotion of multilingualism, plurilingualism, and linguistic diversity is a relatively recent phenomenon in Europe. Plurilingualism4 and pluriculturalism are explicit goals of the European Union’s language policy. Following an official definition, plurilingual and pluricultural competence refers to “the use of languages for the purposes of communication and to take part in intercultural action, where a person, viewed as a social agent, has proficiency, of varying degrees, in several languages and experience of several cultures” (Council for Cultural Co-operation 2001). Plurilingualism as an individual competence (oral, written, active, or passive) in several linguistic varieties is usually distinguished from multilingualism, the presence of different languages spoken by more or less monolingual speakers in a given geographic area. The linguistic situation of the Luxembourgers is special, as they have developed a higher degree of plurilingualism than their European neighbors. This great number of languages is not only distributed through the country according to geographical borderlines, but the individual is the meeting-point of the different languages and cultures. Table 23.1 illustrates not only the important number of languages spoken by the Luxembourgers, but also their strong interrelation within the life of a person. Luxembourg does not have census information about the linguistic situation, so we have to rely upon sociolinguistic surveys to know what language(s) national and foreign inhabitants speak.

The 2008/2009 Survey for Luxembourg In what follows, we present some findings of the most recent sociolinguistic survey in Luxembourg which was conducted in spring 2008 among 2,795 inhabitants of the Grand-Duchy (Fehlen 2009). Table 23.1 shows the answers to a question well

Table 23.1 What is the language you speak best? Continue with the second, third, fourth and fifth best spoken language? (2795 inhabitants of the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg - spring 2008) French Luxembourgish German first second third fourth fifth total

20% 42% 28% 5% 1% 96%

Source: Fehlen 2009

57% 10% 7% 3% 1% 78%

4% 29% 29% 11% 2% 75%

English 2% 8% 10% 34% 7% 61%

Portugese Italian 11% 4% 2% 1% 2% 20%

3% 2% 3% 3% 5% 16%

other 3% 2% 4% 3% 5% 17%

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suited to Luxembourg’s plurilingualism: What is the language you speak best? Continue with the second, third, fourth, and fifth best spoken language? Only 3 percent of the resident population speak only one language; 23 percent say that they speak five languages; 57 percent indicate Luxembourgish as their best spoken language, followed by French (20 percent) and Portuguese (11 percent). These numbers correspond approximately to the different nationalities composing the population of Luxembourg (see table 23.2). At the beginning of 2009, 44 percent of the resident population were foreigners.5 Among them, the Portuguese are the largest group with 16 percent of the resident population, followed by the French with 6 percent, the Italians (4 percent), and the Belgians (3 percent). Thus, more than one-fourth of the inhabitants of Luxembourg come from countries speaking Romance languages. There are also about 10,000 Germans making up 2 percent of the resident population. Still according to the 2008 survey, 60 percent of the foreigners claim to speak Luxembourgish. The special function of the French language as the common language of communication between the different communities can be seen in the high percentage of people indicating it as their second (42 percent) or their third language (28 percent, in table 23.1). Its central position is particularly visible when we add the number of speakers of the five best spoken languages of the informants: here, French is first with 96 percent of the people surveyed indicating that they use it either as their L1, L2, L3, L4, or L5, Luxembourgish second with 78 percent, and German third with 75 percent. Not all Luxembourg nationals have Luxembourgish as their mother tongue. When asked for the language they spoke at home during the first four years of their life, 87 percent of the Luxembourgers indicated that they mainly spoke Luxembourgish; for 4 percent of them the main language was French, followed

Table 23.2 Population of the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg population censuses

total population Luxembourgers Foreigners Country of origin Portugal Italy France Belgium Germany Great Britain Netherlands Other EU Other Source: STATEC * estimation January 1st

1960

1970

1981

1991

2001

2009*

314889 86.8% 13.2%

339841 81.6% 18.4%

364602 73.7% 27.3%

384634 70.6% 29.4%

439539 63.1% 36.9%

493500 56.3% 43.6%

N/A 5.0% 1.6% 1.7% 2.5% 0.0% 0.6% 0.6% 0.2%

1.7% 6.9% 2.5% 1.9% 2.3% 0.1% 0.7% 1.0% 0.6%

8.0% 6.1% 3.3% 2.2% 2.4% 0.5% 0.8% 2.9% 1.0%

10.2% 5.1% 3.4% 2.6% 2.3% 0.8% 0.9% 1.7% 2.4%

13.4% 4.3% 4.6% 3.4% 2.3% 1.0% 0.8% 2.1% 5.1%

16.2% 3.9% 5.8% 3.4% 2.4% 1.1% 0.8% 4.0% 6.0%

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by German, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages. Twenty percent of the Luxembourgers spoke more than one language at home in their early childhood, with German, Luxembourgish, and French mentioned most frequently as a second language. For this portion of the Luxembourgish population, the definition of bilingualism in its strictest sense applies. This kind of “deep” bilingualism stemming from early childhood is located essentially in children born from “mixed couples,” or parents with different national origins living together as a family in the Luxembourgish context. According to the general census of the population from 2001, 7 percent of female Luxembourgers are married to a non-Luxembourger, and 11 percent of male Luxembourgers are married to a nonLuxembourger.

The Language Ecology of Luxembourgish in General The Luxembourgish school system uses Luxembourgish, German and French (for details, see the following section on the education system). So it is not astonishing to find out in the survey that those languages are spoken by almost all Luxembourgers. Berg (2005, 33) goes so far as to say that plurilingualism is the real mother tongue of the Luxembourgers. If we don’t stop at the fifth language, but go further with another question, the informants of the survey will tell us in addition that 80 percent of them have some knowledge of English and 32 percent of Italian. We should keep in mind that these indications are subjective representations and they do not tell us anything about the competence level. The competence in the different languages is also related to the degree of education of the individual (see also the section on the educational system). To add still more complexity to the situation, there are also the so called frontaliers, the transborder commuters. More than 40 percent of the working population live in the border regions of the three neighboring countries—France, Belgium, and Germany—and they cross the border every working day to work in Luxembourg. The majority of these transborder commuters are native speakers of French; thus the presence of French is reinforced, especially as many of them are working in shops and restaurants. The presence of immigrants and transborder commuters is not evenly spread over the whole territory: unsurprisingly, the commuters coming from Germany are overrepresented in the parts of Luxembourg situated close to the German border. This fact explains why there is a slight geographical variation in the presence of the three national languages—the eastern and northern parts of Luxembourg are said to have a small preference for the two Germanic languages (German and Luxemburgish) and the south (close to the French border) as well as the city of Luxembourg in the center of the country are considered to be closer to French. The survey, however, shows us that in Luxembourg, the different languages are not primarily distributed according to geography, but they have a dynamic coexistence within the life of each individual. Except for a very few foreign newcomers, all inhabitants are plurilingual, and different national communities are mixed up all over the country. One might call Luxembourg a multiplurilingual society.6 This

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term describes a situation where language diversity exists both at the individual and at the collective level. This combination of multilingualism and plurilingualism is quite rare in Europe, but rather common in the world. An ethnographical observation in Luxembourg would find out that the national language does not have a clear majority for communication. As the number of foreigners in the resident and working population increases quickly (see table 23.2), the question arises of whether this represents a threat to the Luxembourgish language. The future of the Luxembourgish language depends on the number of speakers and on their attitude toward the Luxembourgish language: Do they switch immediately to another language when they are in the company of a person of foreign origin, or do they strengthen the force of cohesion of their language by using it also outside their group of Luxembourgish nationals? The Luxembourgish language does not occupy the majority of the speech acts in the country. Especially in most written domains (i.e., newspapers, formal texts), it is rarely used. This has motivated the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages to classify Luxembourgish as “unsafe” corresponding to 4 on an endangerment scale ranging from safe (5) to extinct (0) (UNESCO 2009). We think, however, from our ecolinguistic standpoint and following Fehlen and Gilles (2009) that Luxembourgish is a safe language, especially as the transmission between generations is not restricted and as plurilingualism is part of the country’s tradition. Thus it works harmoniously with the other languages spoken in the country. Furthermore, it occupies some of the central domains of cohesion for society, especially the oral informal register (at least between Luxembourgers and linguistically integrated foreigners) and political debates. Furthermore, as we will see in the following section, it is making progress as written language. Nevertheless, one has to admit that the number of speakers of the Luxembourgish language is limited—there are approximately 400,000 speakers in and around Luxembourg (Fehlen 2009, 235). The rapid growth of the foreigners during the last decade is also seen as a threat by many Luxembourgers.

Domains and Registers of Use Are we looking at spoken or written language or both? What are the registers of the language we are interested in—formal or more informal or both? In order to describe the position of a particular language in a society with a variety of languages, the concept of the different domains is very useful (Spolsky 2009). One of the best-known early articles of Joshua Fishman (2000 [1965]), “Who Speaks What Language to Whom and When,” was first published in 1965 in a French journal, La Linguistique, together with a case study (Reimen 1965) answering these questions for Luxembourg. This was the first sociolinguistic study on Luxembourg. Today this domain description is of historical interest only. It has been updated by Hoffmann (1996) in the 1980s and more recently by Berg (1993) and Davis (1994). The latest review articles (Gilles and Moulin 2003, Horner and Weber 2008, Weber 2000) are unanimous in declaring that Luxembourgish is being used more and more in oral communication.

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As Weber (2000, 86) argues: “Lëtzebuergesch is the exclusive means of oral communication between native Luxembourgers in all circumstances and whatever the social standing of the interlocutors.” This applies also to integrated immigrants and especially for their children born in Luxembourg. Even in formal occasions (also in the most formal and solemn one, the oath of office of the head of state), Luxembourgish is used. But, in informal and in formal contexts, as soon as the interlocutor is identified as a non-Luxembourgophone, switching to French, German, or even English is considered an act of courtesy, especially by educated Luxembourgers proud to show their proficiency in foreign languages. In fact, many foreigners willing to learn Luxembourgish complain of not having the opportunity to practice the new language. Due to this strong mechanism of adaptation from the Luxembourgish side and the plurilingualism of the core population, immigrants, especially expatriates working in the finance sector or the European institutions, do not feel the necessity to learn Luxembourgish. Immigrants can indeed stay their whole life in the country without learning Luxembourgish, but this will prevent them from a full integration and, in particular, from participation in political debate, which is exclusively held in the national language. At the beginning of this chapter, we gave a short sketch of the development from “our German” toward an independent language in the minds of the Luxembourgish people. As this process has happened more or less unconsciously and without structured accompanying measures in language policy and language management, the consolidation of the language did not take place simultaneously in the written and in the oral domains. German is the first language of literacy at primary school, and some people use it as the written expression of Luxembourgish, especially if they did not experience the use of German as a Kultursprache at higher levels of education. Not all pupils succeed in adding a good command of French during the later years, even if this command is specified by the school programs (for more details, see the section on the educational system). Besides the very first years in the life of a pupil, Luxembourgish is not taught at school, although it is used as the spoken language of instruction and interaction in schools, especially at the primary level (see the section on language in the educational system). Despite the little attention paid to Luxembourgish in school, its written use is steadily increasing, especially with young and educated Luxembourgers. They write in Luxembourgish mostly in informal settings like the Internet and for epistolary exchanges with close friends and family. This use has recently been fostered by the creation of spellcheckers for the Luxembourgish language. People over forty say that they do not know how to write, but nevertheless, they try sometimes by imitating the younger people (the younger people sometimes do not know how to write either, but they do not care and they create their own rules). The scenario of the traditional language transmission with the older people handing over knowledge to the younger ones is inversed in this situation, which is an excellent indicator for reversing language shift. The overall position on the continuum scale given at the beginning can be refined. We now indicate 9 for the oral use of Luxembourgish, and a dynamic 3 to 4 point position for its written use, with an increasing importance, especially for people under forty years of age.

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Quite frequently, one forgets to mention the internal variation and registers of individual languages. Formal Luxembourgish, for instance, is characterized by numerous French loan words and the avoidance of a regional accent. Despite its small size, the country has local dialects and standard Luxembourgish corresponds to the variety that used to be spoken in the central region. Our studies of Luxembourgish sociolinguistics have shown us that the domains of education and work are especially central in the highly mobile and dynamic context of Luxembourg and the next two sections will be dedicated to these topics.

Languages in the Labor Market Since the 1980s, Luxembourg has experienced a long-lasting economic boom based on the development of its financial center, today the second largest investment fund center in the world, with 152 banks from 23 countries and more than 40,000 employees. Luxembourg is also one of the administrative capitals of the European Union with some 10,000 international agents and civil servants. The other sectors of the economy have also experienced an important growth, creating a higher need for a workforce than the small country could offer. Thus many jobholders living in one of the three neighboring countries cross the border everyday to come to their workplace. Of the 357,000 jobholders, 150,000 are transborder commuters.7 In order to understand the linguistic situation of the job market, we have to distinguish three cases (Fehlen 2002): (1) The many institutions of the European Union based in Luxembourg as well as the financial sector can be considered as an “exterritorial space” for the use of its languages. The access to the institutions of the European Union has strict quota for languages.8 On the other hand, the language culture in the different banks is influenced by the origin of the parent companies (roughly 30 percent of the banks stemming from Germany and 10 percent from France) English also plays a central role in this sector. It is mainly used as a working language, with linguistic variations diverging sometimes quite significantly from the use of mothertongue-speakers of this language. (2) The administration of the state and some associated sectors like the transport with the railway company, the postal administration, and the energy sector constitutes a protected national sector and uses Luxembourgish. As the freedom of movement and of the choice of the workplace among citizens of the European Union is almost unlimited nowadays, only some special functions in the national system are reserved for the national citizens. Trilingualism, and especially the command of the Luxembourgish language, has become a condition for well-paid and secure jobs. Forty percent of Luxembourgish wage-earners are active in the public sector, the postal administration, the railway system and the services for water and energy. Thus they form 83 percent

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of the workers in those sectors, while in the other sectors of the economy the relationship is almost inversed, with 20 percent Luxembourgers and 80 percent foreigners. (3) The private sector is based on competition and is situated between the two scenarios mentioned above. French is the main vehicular language for industry and construction. The service industry, whether retail or food service (in fact, any company that deals with a local clientele), is confronted with a linguistic dilemma. If Luxembourgers with a strong cultural capital and thus comfortable using foreign languages (especially French) are happy to show their linguistic competence, less-educated Luxembourgers will be ill at ease if they have to speak French to do their shopping. Not so much because they cannot express themselves or communicate with the staff, but because they may not be able to speak in what they perceive to be appropriate norms. They will thus prefer shops where they are being served in their own language. On the contrary, foreigners who settle in Luxembourg and experience multilingualism expect to be understood by administrative and retail staff when they speak French or German, even English. This explains the fast-growing— but largely unanswered—demand, on all levels, for employees who not only speak Luxembourgish, but are multilingual. The lack of a Luxembourgish-speaking working population leads to a higher evaluation of this competence. For individual people, especially people with lower qualifications, the command of Luxembourgish can then become the important factor for upward mobility. This explains the high demand for classes with Luxembourgish as a foreign language. The increasing value of the language contributes also to the development of its status and to the improvement of the Ausbau process in the domains of the written language.

Luxembourgish in the Educational System The importance and the order of introduction of the school languages (first Luxembourgish, then German, then French) correspond less and less to the demographic, economic, and cultural changes the country is experiencing, and the national education system feels the need to adapt its programs to the new situation. The educational system is a powerful device that can manage to combine plurilingualism and multilingualism peacefully in a country and thus harmonize personal and collective language ecologies. Early childhood education includes compulsory preschool (enseignement préscolaire) from the ages of four to six and nursery school (enseignement précoce) from three to four, which is optional (it was introduced during the last decade with the aim of facilitating integration for pupils with a migrant background). At this stage, the language of schooling is Luxembourgish, but there might be some additional lessons in the languages of origin of some of the pupils, especially in Portuguese, during school time or after school hours. Primary education is for

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pupils between six and twelve years; reading and writing are taught in German, and the teaching language for grades one to six is mainly German. There are also special linguistic arrangements for the great number of newly arrived pupils. For younger primary school pupils, Luxembourgish is tolerated as a supplementary oral school language, but it is supposed to disappear with time, except for one lesson on language and culture, which is not regularly held because other parts of the program are considered to be more important for achievement. It is said that children with a migrant background in a Romance language such as French, Portuguese, or Italian have more problems with access to literacy through German than the children who are more familiar with Luxembourgish, since German and Luxembourgish are both Germanic languages. German television programs are familiar to all children—regardless of their home languages—but they do not help directly to develop literacy in this language. From the second half of grade two, after Christmas, when they are eight years old, children begin to learn French. This language is considered difficult, especially for “core Luxembourgers,” and teachers think that “Romanophone” pupils should have fewer problems with French because their languages are situated within the same linguistic family. This is not automatically true, as the link between the oral French used in the migrant communities and the standard French taught at school and based on grammatical correctness of predominantly written registers do not have too many features in common. More research is needed in this field in order to see whether this is so. High school is compulsory for pupils from twelve to sixteen years of age; it can be either through technical secondary education (with more emphasis on professional training) or through classical secondary education, which lasts seven years. In the first year of the lycée classique, Luxembourgish still occupies one lesson of the curriculum, and then it disappears as a teaching subject or a teaching language, except for physical or artistic education. According to the National Curriculum, a good knowledge of German and French is required from the first year. English is taught from the second year. Subject learning is officially done through French and German, with the two exceptions for Luxembourgish mentioned above. Generally speaking, German is still stronger in grade seven to nine, and from grade ten to thirteen French is becoming the main “vehicular language.”9 In the lycée technique, the position of German is stronger and the use of Luxembourgish is frequent, especially with teachers who tend to privilege the success of the communication and not a more normative orientation of language use. To sum up, for pupils after the age of six, Lëtzebuergesch—the “national language of the Luxembourgers” according to the Loi du 24 février 1984 sur le régime des langues—is hardly used as an official language of instruction, and this does not improve for higher education: “Letzebuergesch is virtually forbidden in secondary school” (Weber 2000, 89). Even if there is no broader empirical observation available, it is generally known that Luxembourgish has entered the classrooms through the back door and against the official curricula (Fehlen 2007). We think that the official position of Luxembourgish at school is still very weak. On

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the other hand, it is used very frequently in oral communication between the students and between the teachers and their students, but this very useful plurilingual strategy, which is often based on patterns of code-switching or trans-languaging (García 2009), does not have an administrative foundation. In the past, we would have given Luxembourgish at school a score of 1 on the continuum scale, but recently, its situation has improved.

Conclusion For an observer coming from outside the country, it is puzzling to see how much variety exists on the geographical and even more on the individual level; each Luxembourger has his or her special combination of language biographies. What will be the future of the Luxembourgish language in the ecolinguistic context of globalization? As globalization weakens the national states, the expansion of English as a global language weakens the status of other world languages (i.e., French and German in the case of Luxembourg). What Trudgill (2004, 46) says about local dialects and micro-regionalism applies also to Luxembourgish as the small language of a micro-state: If the importance and thus the status of a particular national language is reduced by the expansion of English as a global language, this may leave a gap into which local dialects can step by, as it were, awarding themselves language status. Ausbau sociolinguistic micro-regionalism can then be seen not as a defensive reaction against globalisation, but as an example of micro regions taking advantage of opportunities afforded by globalisation in order to assert themselves. In this logic, the further Ausbau of Luxembourgish, especially in the written domains, seems realistic. As we have said, in the present Luxembourgish enjoys approximately a score of 9 in oral domains in a scale of 10, and a 3–4 in written domains. Thus, Luxembourgish has a future in the interstitial spaces of the world language system and might confirm its position as the dominant color in a cosmopolitan mosaic of ecolinguistic diversity.

Notes 1. The authors wish to express their gratitude to Adam Le Nevez and Julia de Bres for their critical proofreading. 2. The English name of the language of Luxembourg can be Luxembourgish, or Luxembourgian, the German name is Luxemburgisch, and the French Luxembourgeois. Luxembourgish speakers call it Lëtzebuergesch. Different spellings, inspired by the last designation, can be found as well in German as in English linguistic and sociolinguistic textbooks. The source of them can be tracked back to a text of Kloss (1952, 239) who suggests the use of “Letzeburgisch.” His argument reflects the lesser degree of Ausbau of the Luxembourgish language in the 1950s. According to this author a

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“Luxembourgish” text could also be a text written in French or German in a Luxembourgish context. 3. For more details on this chapter, see also Ehrhart (forthcoming); Ehrhart, Hélot, and Le Nevez (forthcoming); Fehlen (2004); Gilles and Moulin (2003); and Weber (2008). 4. For the different uses of the concepts of plurilingual and multilingual, see Ehrhart, Hélot, and Le Nevez (forthcoming). 5. All figures on population and employment originate from STATEC, the government agency for statistics (www.statec.lu). 6. This term was created in 2007 in a seminary on language diversity during a discussion between Sabine Ehrhart and the Luxembourgish students of the teacher education program. 7. Figures of March 31, 2009, source as note 5. 8. Luxembourgish is not yet an official language of the EU, thus showing that its Ausbau is not completed. However, the recent full recognition of the Maltese language and the semi-official status of regional languages like Catalan have encouraged voices claiming a better position of Luxembourgish in the European Institutions. 9. For a deeper discussion of the plurilingual curriculum, see also Maurer-Hetto (2009), García (2009), and Hélot and de Mejía (2008).

References Berg, Charles, and Christiane Weis (2005). Rapport national Luxembourg. Luxembourg: Editions du CESIJE. Berg, Guy (1993). “Mir wëlle bleiwe, wat mir sin,” Soziolinguistische und sprachtypologische Betrachtungen zur luxemburgischen Mehrsprachigkeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Council for Cultural Co-operation (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/ Source/Framework_EN.pdf. Darquennes, Jeroen (2005). Sprachrevitalisierung aus kontaktlinguistischer Sicht. Theorie und Praxis am Beispiel AltbelgienSüd. St. Augustin: Asgard. Davis, Kathryn A. (1994). Language Planning in Multilingual Contexts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Ehrhart, Sabine (forthcoming). Primary schools in Luxembourg: The plurilingual situation. In Trilingual

Primary Education in Europe, Sieta de Vries and Alex Riemersma (eds.). Leeuwarden: Mercator. Ehrhart, Sabine, Christine Hélot, and Adam Le Nevez (forthcoming). Teacher Education in Plurilingual Contexts: A Critical Approach. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang. Fehlen, Fernand (2002). Luxembourg, a multilingual society at the Romance/ Germanic language border. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (23): 80–98. Fehlen, Fernand (2004). Le francique dialecte, langue régionale, langue nationale? Glottopol (4): 23–46. Fehlen, Fernand (2007). Der geheime Lehrplan des Luxemburger Sprachunterrichts. Forum (264): 33–37. Fehlen, Fernand (2009). BaleineBis Une enquête sur un marché linguistique multilingue en profonde mutation/ Luxemburgs Sprachmarkt im Wandel. Luxembourg: SESOPI Centre Intercommunautaire. Fehlen, Fernand, and Peter Gilles (2009). 25 Joer nom Sproochegesetz

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ass eis Sprooch net a Gefor. Retrieved from http://engelmann.uni.lu/ wordpress/?p=57. Fill, Alwin (1993). Ökolinguistik: eine Einführung, Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Fishman, Joshua A. (2006). Do Not Leave Your Language Alone: The Hidden Status Agendas within Corpus Planning in Language Policy. Mahwah, NJ, and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fishman, Joshua A. (2000). Who speaks what language to whom and when? In The Bilingualism Reader, Li Wei (ed.), 89–106. London: Routledge. (First published in 1965). García, Ofelia (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21st century: A Global Perspective. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gilles, Peter, and Claudine Moulin (2003). Language standardization in Luxembourgish. In Germanic Standardizations: Past and Present, Ana Deumert and Wim Vandenbusche (eds.), 303–329. Amsterdam: Benjamins Publishing. Hélot, Christine, and Anne-Marie Mejía (2008). Forging Multilingual Spaces: Integrated Perspectives on Majority and Minority Bilingual Education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Hoffmann, Fernand (1996). The domains of letzebuergesch. In Luxembourg and Lëtzebuergesch, Gerald Newton (ed.), 109–122. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hornberger, Nancy (2008). Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd ed. New York: Springer. Horner, Kristine, and Jean-Jacques Weber (2008). The language situation in Luxembourg. Current Issues in Language Planning 9(1): 69–128. Kloss, Heinz (1952). Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen von 1800 bis 1950, München: Pohl.

Kloss, Heinz (1967). Abstand languages and Ausbau languages. Anthropological Linguistics (9): 29–41. Maurer-Hetto, Marie-Paule (2009). Struggling with the languages of the “legitimate market” and the “islets of liberty” (Bourdieu). A case study of pupils with immigrational background in the trilingual schoolsystem of Luxembourg. International Journal of Multilingualism 6(1): 68–84. Reimen, Jean-René (1965). Esquisse d’une situation plurilingue, le Luxembourg. La linguistique. Revue de la Société internationale de linguistique fonctionnelle (2): 89–102. Spolsky, Bernard (2009). Language Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trausch, Gilbert (1992). Histoire du Luxembourg. Paris: Hatier. Trudgill, Peter (2004). Globalisation and the Ausbau sociolinguistics of modern Europe. Polish Studies in English Language and Literature (11): 35–50. UNESCO (2009). Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Retrieved from http://www.unesco. org/culture/ich/doc/src/00120-EN. pdf. Weber, Jean-Jacques (2008). Multilingualism, Education and Change. Frankfurt: A.M.: Peter Lang. Weber, Nico (2000). Multilingualism and language policy in Luxembourg. In Multilingualism and Government: Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Kas Deprez and Theo du Plessis (eds.), 82–91. Pretoria: Schaik Publishers.

24 Bavarian: Successful Dialect or Failed Language? ANTHONY R. ROWLEY

Bavarian: Various Definitions In Germanic philology, Bavarian is the name given to the southeastern group of the High German dialects, spoken in parts of Bavaria and Austria and in adjacent regions of neighbouring countries (Wiesinger 1990). In German dialectological usage, a difference is made, not easily rendered in English, between the adjective derived from and referring to Bayern, as the Federal State of Bavaria is known in German, and written Bayerisch with -aye-, and the name of the Austro-Bavarian dialect type, written Bairisch with -ai-. On the one hand, the dialect type Bairisch is not spoken in all of present-day Bavaria, but only in Upper and Lower Bavaria (Oberbayern, Niederbayern) and the Upper Palatinate (Oberpfalz), but not (apart from small fringe areas) in Swabia (Bayerisch-Schwaben) and Franconia (Ober-, Mittel-, Unterfranken), the dialects of which, Swabian-Alemannic (SchwäbischAlemannisch) and East Franconian (Ostfränkisch), are not classed as Bavarian. On the other hand, Bavarian (Bairisch) is also spoken outside Bavaria in most regions of Austria, in the Italian South Tyrol (Südtirol), in areas of Hungary and elsewhere. In this article, Bavarian will be used to refer to the dialects of the Bavarian type (Bairisch) spoken in Bavaria itself. No Austrian would ever refer to an indigenous language of Austria as “Bavarian.” In Bavaria, the vernacular is called Boarisch south of the River Danube, and Boirisch to the north thereof. In Austria, it is called by names derived from the places and regions in which it is spoken: for instance Weanerisch as spoken in Vienna (Wean in the vernacular), Steirisch in Styria, Tirolerisch in Tyrol. The number of speakers is difficult to estimate. Wikipedia boarisch, the Bavarian-language Wikipedia, claims there are around 12 millions speakers, and

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this can be taken as a good approximation. In Bavaria itself, the population of the Bairisch-speaking area is approximately 7 million. Assuming 75 percent to speak the dialect,1 then there are around 4.9 million speakers within Bavaria. In Austria (population without Alemannic-speaking Vorarlberg around 7,900,000), a recent study (Steinegger 1998) found that 79 percent declared themselves active dialect users, giving around 6 million speakers, and very nearly 100 percent claimed to understand the dialect.

Bavarian “Endangered”? In the 2009 web-based edition of the “UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger,”2 which includes quite a number of regional varieties in its lists, “Bavarian” is listed as an endangered language of the lowest grade (“unsafe”) for parts of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic. The fear that Bavarian is endangered would seem to be widespread among native Bavarians. W. J. Bekh (1996, 226), in a passage dating back to the early 1970s, worries that Bavarian is in danger as never before; it is, he writes, no longer a matter of conservation, but of preservation. Much has been made by Bekh and other authors of the situation in the capital city of Munich, where over the past generation, vernacular Bavarian has more and more given way to standard German as the everyday colloquial language, due to the influx of Germans from outside Bavaria and to language-switching by the younger generation. In 2009, press reports on the UNESCO atlas of the world’s languages in danger highlighted Bavarian’s endangered status, illustrated by lists of dialect words no longer in common use.3 A representative of the Bavarian language and dialect support club Förderverein Bairische Sprache und Dialekte is quoted as deploring that things should have reached this stage. Speakers’ perception of the decline of “real” Bavarian is reinforced by ongoing linguistic change, in particular accommodation between local varieties and the spoken standard, inevitable in modern societies such as Germany. People especially notice the loss of traditional vocabulary items, often connected with the old agricultural way of life, and as mentioned above, such words are given a prominent role in press reports. In contrast to these widespread popular perceptions, demographic studies inquiring after competence in local varieties have always reported it stronger and more constant in Bavaria than anywhere else in Germany. In 1998, 72 percent of a representative sample of the Bavarian population declared themselves capable of speaking dialect, against 51 percent of Germans as a whole (Allensbacher Berichte 1998). Similar percentages have been reported for Bavaria since the 1960s, whereas the proportion in Germany as a whole has declined from 59 percent in 1966. In 2008, 45 percent of Bavarians claimed to use only dialect in everyday communication (Allensbacher Berichte 2008). In these same studies, moreover, Bavarian is regularly reported as being among the best-liked dialects in Germany and even by far the most “sexy sounding.” This gives Bavarian considerable prestige. Sociolinguistic studies too confirm that, of the various regional linguistic varieties

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used in Germany beside the standard language, Bavarian has the greatest vitality (Wiesinger 1997).4 All in all, then, Bavarian would seem less endangered than any of the other dialects in Germany, and the same applies to the varieties spoken in Austria and the South Tyrol (Steinegger 1998). Bavarian thus ranks as one of Central Europe’s most successful dialects.

Bavarian as a Language? That Bavarian might indeed be a language, however, would surprise most Bavarians. Purely from a linguistic perspective, according to the Swiss linguist Robert Hinderling (1984), the specific characteristics of Bavarian in contrast to standard German are so marked that they would suffice to give it the status of a separate language (“das Eigengepräge des Bairischen gegenüber dem Schriftdeutschen so stark, dass es genügen würde, ihm den Status einer eigenen Sprache zu verleihen”). Hinderling goes on to compare the linguistic distance between various varieties and concludes that the distance between Bavarian and standard German is greater than that between Danish and Swedish or between Czech and Slovak. To name some specific phenomena typical of Bavarian and common in everyday speech (cf. Hinderling 1984 and Rowley 1990), there are vocabulary items particular to Bavarian (Kranzmayer 1960). Bavarian has its own personal pronoun (nominative) es, (accusative, dative) enk for the second person plural instead of German ihr, euch, and the verbal suffix -ts for this person is also a Bavarian speciality. Elements introducing subordinate clauses are suffixed with the endings used on verbal stems (wannst kimmst, “when you come”), creating the impression that conjunctions are subject to conjugation in the manner of verbs. Syncretism within nominal declensions gives the Bavarian case system its own quite distinct system of plural formations, a characteristic structure in which masculine nouns display morphosyntactic behavior different from that of feminine and neuter nouns, and much else. The linguistic distance to the standard would thus be sufficient to argue the case for language status for Bavarian.

Bavarian as a Dialect But the case has never been argued. When the German Federal Parliament ratified the European Charter for Minority or Regional Languages in 1998, only Low German was included in the list of regional languages, and not Bavarian. No objections were recorded from Bavaria. Nor was there more than a feeble and unsuccessful belated attempt to add Bavarian to the list.5 This is because the Bavarian public sees Bavarian as a dialect of German, and not a language in its own right. In Ludwig Zehetner’s dictionary of Bavarian regionalisms (2005, 16), for instance, the author clearly states: “Bairisch ist deutsch” [Bavarian is German]. The term Bairische Sprache (Bavarian language) used in the name of the dialect support club Förderverein Bairische Sprache und Dialekte denotes the variety of standard

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German used in Bavaria, and is synonymous with Bavarian German, as it is called by authors such as Zehetner and Wolfgang Johannes Bekh (1996). This is the common view, held not only by specialists. In the newsletter of the dialect-friendly Förderverein, correspondent Josef Scheitl (2009) disputes the necessity for a standard form of Bavarian, arguing that in Bavaria, the standard language is not Bavarian, but High (standard) German (“Bairisches Deutsch ist nicht Bairisch, es ist Hochdeutsch”)—the term Bavarian is reserved for the spoken dialect. These authors argue in favor of a pluricentric model of the German language, which accepts as equally valid not only the national standards in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but also the regional standard in Bavaria. It is this specifically Bavarian form of the standard, characterized, for instance, by the apical pronunciation of [r] instead of usual German uvular r, by use of the greetings Grüß Gott and (familiar) Servus, which for Bavarians express their ethnicity when communicating with other Germans. Particularly patriotic speakers consciously avoid specifically northern German turns of phrase—Zehetner (2005, 400–479) provides a list—and the parting greeting tschüss has become a symbol of the spread of northern expressions in Bavaria, with all who use such words being derided as Tschüssler (tschüss-people). Speakers from more northern parts of Germany, in which dialects are less current, often do not recognize that they themselves speak with regional accents, and then confuse the Bavarian spoken standard with the dialect. During the parliamentary debate on the ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 1998, after listening to speeches in Low German and in Stuttgart dialect, the president of the assembly joked that it was nice to have a change from all the Bavarian that the House was otherwise inundated with. In fact, Bavarian members of Federal parliament speak their regional standard German in debates.

Political and Linguistic History The lack of interest in a separate Bavarian language mirrors the historical development of Bavaria as an integral part of Germany. Bavaria was to the end a constituent part of the first German empire, the so-called “Holy Roman” Empire, its ruler one of the Empire’s elite Prince Electors, and it has remained a major constituent of the various German confederations that succeeded the Holy Roman Empire. Linguistically, within the bounds of the West Germanic (German, Dutch, Frisian) speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire, in the Middle Ages various regional written languages were used. Of these, the northwesternmost has survived as modern Dutch (and the English name Dutch for Nederlands itself is related to the German word deutsch for “German”). In the southeast, in Bavaria and Austria, the local written language was known as “Common German” (das Gemaine Deutsch). For the regions of present-day Germany, in the age of the printed word, there was a process of gradual linguistic accommodation between the various regional standards, given direction by the prestige of eastern central German. In Catholic Bavaria, because of confessional differences to Lutheran eastern central Germany, the traditional regional written norm persisted into the

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eighteenth century, longer than elsewhere in Germany and even than in Austria. This written standard, however, although closer to the spoken language than the modern norm, always bore the name “German.” The Bavarian government initiated a change to the more modern standard in the mid-eighteenth century (Reiffenstein 2009). While there was at first opposition to this policy, it revolved around confessional and not ethnic or national considerations, and was especially fueled by the reluctance of Catholic circles to espouse the variety of German propagated by the Lutheran church (Reiffenstein 2009). Despite the confessional differences, Bavaria remained within the first German Empire and its descendent states. Until the nineteenth century the Principality of Bavaria consisted largely of regions in which Austro-Bavarian dialect was spoken. From the nineteenth century on, as a kingdom, it also comprised Franconia and Swabia. The various kingdoms that emerged after Napoleon had split up the old empire all continued to consider themselves “German,” and from them derive the present day states of Germany and Austria. Austria though, politically outmaneuvered and isolated by plans for a new German empire under Prussian hegemony, during the course of the nineteenth century developed into the center of a separate empire, and after a period of annexation by Nazi Germany from the 1930s until the end of World War II, has developed its own Austrian identity.

Particular but Not Separate The linguistic situation in Bavaria mirrors the political situation. There is a certain element of particularism in Bavarian politics, but practically no measure of separatism at all, and no serious movement aiming to attain a Bavarian state independent of the German Federal Republic. The Bayernpartei (Bavaria Party), the one political party that does wish for Bavarian independence, has for decades gained only between 0.4 and 1.1 percent of the votes at elections, and is not represented in Bavarian parliament. So too, as far as the linguistic situation is concerned, there is plenty of emphasis on Bavarian varieties of German, with some authors (notably Bekh 1996) quite combative in propagating regionalisms. But there has never been any proposal to declare Bavarian a separate language in its own right. Even the programs of the separatist Bayernpartei only bemoan the neglect of dialects and the regional language, meaning regional standard German. There is no Bavarian form of the party’s name, and its programme is only published in German. Suggestions for the creation, from German dialects, of separate norms for standard languages have indeed arisen in countries in which Germany has been perceived as a dangerous and overbearing neighbor, as in pre-war Switzerland (Baer 1936) and, successfully, in the case of Lëtzebuergisch in Luxembourg. In Switzerland, too, Swiss German has for this reason more fully established its separate identity, especially in writing, than Bavarian has. But Bavaria itself was, as mentioned above, to the end a constituent part of the Holy Roman Empire and belonged to the various confederations which succeeded the Empire. At the time of the late-nineteenth-century attempts at German unification, the Bavarian dialect poet Franz von Kobell (1862, 209) published a poem, “So iss bei’n uns in

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Boarnland” [That’s how it is in Bavaria], which sums up the national aspirations of his compatriots: “Deutsch woll’ ma sey’, san’s allwei gwest, Aber boarisch woll’ mer aa bleibn” [We want to be German, always have been, but we also want to stay Bavarian]. This can be taken as typical of mainstream Bavarian political sentiment up to this very day, and the linguistic situation faithfully reflects this state of affairs. Thus a standardized variety of Bavarian has never arisen, and even occasional suggestions for the standardization of the orthography have met with widespread indifference. Written Bavarian generally follows German orthography as far as possible. This marks it as clearly derivative of and dependent on the German standard and fortifies the perception that it is a variety of German. Even Wikipedia boarisch, which is written in Bavarian and openly declares it a language, albeit without any serious discussion, adds that its Bavarian texts are written in the subvariety of Upper Bavarian (Der Artikl is im Dialekt Obaboarisch gschriem worn), and its written Bavarian closely follows standard German orthographical usage. The standard language was until the mid-twentieth century largely confined to the written medium, and so in Bavaria and Austria, talking standard German is called speaking “as it is written” [nach der Schrift]. And talking the vernacular in Bavaria and Austria is widely referred to as speaking “German” (daitsch, or in the South Tyrol taitsch). Bavarian has no great presence in the media and the public domain, but neither is it totally absent. There is a thriving Bavarian theatre scene, and several classics have been translated into Bavarian for the stage, including Shakespeare (Weiss 2008). There is a considerable body of literature in Bavarian reaching back to the late eighteenth century. Folk songs can be found dating back to the seventeenth century, but these are oral texts committed to writing. There is still a strong folk music tradition in Bavarian, and a thriving market for modern songs, from chançon to pop and rock. The Austrian capital of Vienna has led the way in this respect. Apart from a recent translation of the Bible (Hell 1998), few prose works are written entirely in Bavarian. Alongside lyrical and epic poetry, Bavarian is often used, in prose texts mainly written in standard German, to denote the speech of ordinary people. Some authors use a technique known as “hidden dialect,” in which Bavarian is written as if in standard German, but is meant to be read aloud in the vernacular. So too, for the current daily dialect soap Dahoam is dahoam [At home is at home] on Bavarian regional television, the script is written in standard German, and the actors act it as spoken Bavarian. On television and radio, Bavarian will typically be used in folk-music programs and in some programs of purely regional interest, but also in political cabaret. There are no serious current affairs programs broadcast in Bavarian, as there are in Low German. There is also virtually no scientific6 or official literature, and texts or notices printed in Bavarian are almost nonexistent. All official announcements and publications of local and federal authorities are in German, and only very few villages, for instance, have erected bilingual place-name signs. It is, however, occasionally used for advertising. Bavarian is not taught at school, and features only as a small element in the curriculum (mainly as part of the courses in German language) at the primary and secondary level (Kanz 2006). The aim of primary and secondary education has always been to inculcate a good command of standard

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German; while some educational specialists have seen Bavarian (and dialects in general) as an obstacle to this goal, and one that must be removed, many others have pleaded for a more tolerant approach to dialects, which they recognize as having their place in everyday communication (Hochholzer 2004). This is the view expressed in all curricula (Kanz 2006), and a Bavarian schools minister (Hohlmeier 2001) has even argued the case in an interview given and published entirely in Bavarian.7 Courses in Bavarian can occasionally be found in adult education and at universities. Philologists and linguists, too, have always treated Bavarian as a constituent of the greater German whole. Scholarly interest in Bavarian reaches back to the age before the establishment of philology as a discipline in its own right in the nineteenth century; the first dictionary of a German dialect was the Glossarium Bavaricum, published in 1689 by a mayor of the Danube city of Regensburg, Johann Ludwig Prasch. Prasch’s study was the first of a series of dictionaries predating the dialect grammar (published in 1821) and dictionary (published between 1827 and 1837) written by Johann Andreas Schmeller, with which this Munich scholar created dialectology as a discipline of philology. Prasch, in his preface, calls the Bavarians a “Germanorum natio” (1689, 15), a nation of the Germans, and Schmeller, who had fought against Napoleon in the hope of a unified German nation, expounds a domain- and class-based sociolinguistic model to come to grips with the distribution of dialect and standard varieties in the Bavaria of his time (cf. Rein 1985). A refined version of this model is still prevalent today (König and Renn 2009). Indeed, the various definitions of the term dialect in use among scholars of the German language even today are all framed in such a fashion as to comprise Bavarian among the dialects, and all make reference to dialect’s relationship with the standard language (Russ 1990, xx–xxi). For Schmeller, as for his contemporaries of the Romantic age and scholars of following generations, the various German dialects were constituents of the greater whole of the German language, the language name “German” being by no means confined to the standard variety. Schmeller and his colleagues saw the standard language and the dialects as different sides of the same coin, the difference being that the dialects were felt to have developed much more regularly than the standard language, which was considered to be the result of numerous compromises and admixtures (Rein 1985). This ideology persists among dialect speakers and dialect scholars to this day, and pervades almost every dialect description published, especially those of the traditional “Young Grammarian” school dating from the nineteenth century and still current in German dialect studies today. This traditional model postulates an unbroken linguistic continuum between the dialects and the spoken standard, with various stages of mixture in between, which are neither dialect-free standard, nor uncontaminated dialect. Between “pure” dialect and “pure” standard language, a third level, known as Umgangssprache (everyday colloquial language) is usually distinguished, which is neither dialect nor standard. Speakers are seen as being able to move along the standard-dialect continuum, thus indicating their social status and relationship to the hearer. Models of this type are important and effective instruments for the accurate study of the pragmatics of everyday vernacular speech in Bavaria.

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Suggestions for Language Status Due to the lack of perception that Bavarian could be other than a German dialect, there has been little discussion of its possible status as a language. The author knows of only two linguists who have publicly pointed out that, theoretically and purely from a linguistic point of view, Bavarian could be seen as a language. Neither publication was particularly prominent, nor was there any critical response. The first to discuss this topic was Hinderling (1984); for him, it is a result of historical chance that Dutch became a separate language, but Swiss German or Bavarian did not. Hinderling’s explanation for this is largely the same as that offered in the section on political and linguistic history above. In Rowley (1999), the author of this article explained in the newsletter of the pro-dialect Förderverein that the German Federal Parliament had included Low German in the list of regional languages safeguarded by the European Charter of Minority or Regional Languages. He also pointed out that the criteria used to prove that Low German is more than just a dialect of German would be equally valid for Bavarian, namely that it is a historic individual linguistic entity with the status of a regional language, that it is not derivable from the German standard, and that in medieval times it was used as a written language. Rowley had already pointed out in an earlier letter to the Förderverein that the Federal Parliament was going to debate the topic; his 1999 article finished with a plea that Bavarian too should be added to the list of regional languages. In June 2000, the Förderverein pledged its support, but I can find no further mention of the subject in its publications after this date, and not a single lament that an opportunity might have been missed. The Förderverein has in fact no real interest in fighting for language status for Bavarian. In 2008, non-Bavarian correspondent Alexander Dietz suggested in its newsletter that “you or another institution should create a Bavarian written language,” pointing out that in the Occitaine and in Spain, regional languages already exist. This suggestion has not been well received; indeed, correspondent Josef Scheitl in the following number of the newsletter (2009) calls it “nonsense” (unsinnig), emphasizing that this role is already filled by Bavarian standard German and that any such plan would be doomed to failure because no one local variety could ever be imposed as a standard above all others.

Attempts to Create a Bavarian Language Attempts at standardization of Bavarian have largely been confined to suggestions for the orthography, none of which has gained any great following. Schmeller, the nineteenth-century grammarian and dictionary writer, used historical spellings of the old regional literary language to transcribe dialect words, a practice followed by some later grammarians, but never used to write texts. The Bavarian grammar by Merkle (1975) is based very strongly on the dialect of the capital Munich (Minga in Bavarian), and Munich Bavarian is certainly the variety with the greatest prestige, the form most frequently heard on radio and television and recognized

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throughout Germany. But attempts to propagate Munich Bavarian beyond the confines of the conurbation have always met with resistance from local patriots who insist on speaking their own local varieties and complain about the perceived predominance of Munich speech. There is only one serious attempt to create a literary form of Bavarian. This is Bairische Buchspraach, the artificial literary form used in Hell Sepp’s 1998 Bible translation, the so-called “Sturmi-Bibel.” The published Bible itself contains no discussion of the language used, but its translator professes (Hell 2002) to modify oral Bavarian usage into a form he finds more suitable for biblical texts. For instance, he recreates the simple past tense, long lost in colloquial speech. No other author has as yet followed Hell in producing a literary text in this new written language, but his bible translation does already have a dedicated group of fans.

Conclusion Attempts to make Bavarian a language are not so much failed as non-existent. As a language, it would have to be rated right at the bottom of the success scale between 0 and 1. And yet Bavarian as a dialect of German is the most vital and successful of the regional varieties in Germany, ranking a good 8 on a scale of 10. It can even lay claim to international status, as the closely related dialects in Bavaria, Austria, and the South Tyrol are mutually comprehensible and can be used freely in the other countries. While Bavarian lacks the official recognition that Low German (Plattdeutsch) has achieved as a regional language, it enjoys considerable prestige among its speakers and is spoken by a much greater proportion of the speech community than is Low German, and has an equal, though marginal, presence in the media and in the public domain. As a variety of German, it is among Europe’s most successful dialects, and within the German speaking world, it is surpassed only by Switzerdütsch (Swiss German) and Luxembourgish. This situation has persisted for centuries, and I see few signs of any change. One point, however, is worth mentioning. For some younger Bavarian speakers, members of the first generations to have grown up in a speech community entirely fluent both in Bavarian and in spoken standard German, the standard is seen not only as complementary to spoken Bavarian, but also as a competitor, as a danger to the continued existence of Bavarian and as the main reason for its perceived decline as the common colloquial language. Such people, well represented, for instance, by Wikipedia boarisch, are more inclined to feel that Bavarian is a language, an entity separate from German. But without a political separatist movement, the author of this article doubts that such perceptions will ever become mainstream in Bavaria. Notes 1. In 1975, 81 percent of the inhabitants of the bairisch-speaking area claimed to speak the dialect (Zehetner 1985), a higher percentage than in Swabia or Franconia; in 1998, 72 percent of all Bavarians (including Swabians and Franconians) made this claim (see below).

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2. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00206. 3. For example, “Wenn’s das Dradiwaberl nicht mehr gibt” [When there are no more Dradiwaberl (local culinary speciality)]. In Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) (March 5, 2009, 50). 4. See especially the map on p. 27. 5. The author himself in 1998 and 1999 wrote articles titled “Bairisch und die Europäische Charta der Regional- und Minderheitensprachen” [Bavarian and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages] for the newsletter of the dialect support club Förderverein Bairische Sprache und Dialekte, which lead to the belated petition to add Bavarian to the list. 6. The author knows of only one abstract for a specialist publication on chemistry printed in Bavarian: Michael Hagemann, Raphael J. F. Berger et al. (2008) N, N-Dimethylaminopropylsilane: A Case Study on the Nature of Weak Intramolecular Si . . . N Interactions. In Chemistry, A European Journal 14: 11027–11038, Abstract 11028. 7. Hohlmeier (2001) stresses that pupils must also be taught proper standard German.

References Allensbacher Berichte (1998). Nr. 22 (Bayerisch hören viele gern). Ed. Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach. Allensbacher Berichte (2008). Nr. 4 (Auch außerhalb von Bayern wird Bayerisch gern gehört). Ed. Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach. Baer, Emil (1936). Alemannisch. Die Rettung der eidgenössischen Seele. Zürich: Rascher. Bekh, Wolfgang Johannes (1996). Bayerisch. Rosenheim: Rosenheimer Verlag. Dietz, Alexander (2008). Bairische Sprache/Bairisches Deutsch. In Förderverein Bairische Sprache und Dialekte. Rundbrief 67: 18–19. Hell, Sepp (1998). de Bibl auf bairisch. [Trostberg: private print]. Hell, Sepp (2002). Bairische Buchsprache und Sturmi-Bibel. In Bairisch in Bayern, Österreich, Tschechien, Alfred Wildfeuer and Ludwig Zehetner (eds.), 271–279. Regensburg: edition vulpes. Hinderling, Robert (1984). Bairisch: Sprache oder Dialekt? In Jahrbuch der Johann-Andreas-SchmellerGesellschaft 1983, Rüdiger Harnisch

(ed.), 47–64. Bayreuth: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät. Hochholzer, Rupert (2004). Konfliktfeld Dialekt. Regensburg: edition vulpes. Hohlmeier, Monika (2001). Red’n, wia da Schnabl g’wachsn is’ [talking in plain-speak]. Abendzeitung (Munich) June 28, 2001, 3. Kanz, Ulrich (2006). Dialekt und Lehrplan. Ein Überblick. In Dialekte in Bayern. Handreichung für den Unterricht, Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus (ed.), 84–88. München: Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus. Kobell, Franz (1862). Gedichte in oberbayerischer Mundart. München: Cotta. König, Werner, and Manfred Renn (2009). Kleiner bayerischer Sprachatlas. 3rd ed. München: Verlag C. H. Beck. Kranzmayer, Eberhard (1960). Die bairischen Kennwörter und ihre Geschichte. Graz, Wien, Köln: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf. Merkle, Ludwig (1975). Bairische Grammatik. München: Hugendubel.

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Prasch, Johann Ludwig (1689). Dissertatio altera, De origine Germanica Latinae Linguae . . . Accedit Glossarium Bavaricum. Regensburg: Hofmann. Reiffenstein, Ingo (2003). Sprachgeschichte seit der beginnenden Neuzeit. In Sprachgeschichte. Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung, 2nd ed., vol. 3., Werner Besch et al. (eds.), 2942–2972. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Rein, Kurt (1985). Schmeller als Soziolinguist. Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte 48: 97–113. Rowley, Anthony (1990). North Bavarian. In The Dialects of Modern German: A Linguistic Survey, Charles Russ (ed.), 417–437. London: Routledge. Rowley, Anthony (1999). Bairisch und die Europäische Charta der Regionalund Minderheitensprachen. Förderverein Bairische Sprache und Dialekte e.V., Rundbrief 29: 9–10. Russ, Charles V. (ed.) (1990). The Dialects of Modern German: A Linguistic Survey. London: Routledge. Scheitl, Josef (2009). Zum Lesebrief von Alexander Dietz. In Förderverein Bairische Sprache und Dialekte. Rundbrief 68, 31.

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Schmeller, Johann Andreas (1821). Die Mundarten Bayerns grammatisch dargestellt. München: Thienemann. Schmeller, Johann Andreas (1827–1837). Bayerisches Wörterbuch, 3 vols. Stuttgart/ Tübingen: Cotta. (2nd ed. München: Oldenbourg, 1872–1877.) Steinegger, Guido (1998). Sprachgebrauch und Sprachbeurteilung in Österreich und Südtirol. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag. Weiss, Wolfgang (2008). Shakespeare in Bayern: und auf Bairisch. Passau: Verlag Karl Stutz. Wiesinger, Peter (1990). Central and Southern Bavarian. In The Dialects of Modern German: A Linguistic Survey, Charles V. J. Russ (ed.), 438–519. London: Routledge. Wiesinger, Peter (1997). Sprachliche Varietäten: Gestern und Heute. In Varietäten des Deutschen. Regionalund Umgangssprachen, Gerhard Stickel (ed.), 9–45. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Zehetner, Ludwig (1985). Das bairische Dialektbuch. München: Verlag C. H. Beck. Zehetner, Ludwig (2005) Bairisches Deutsch. Lexikon der deutschen Sprache in Altbayern. 3rd ed. Regensburg: Edition vulpes.

25 The Regional Languages of Brittany MICHAEL HORNSBY J. SHAUN NOLAN

Introduction The two existing regional languages in Brittany—Gallo and Breton—have subsisted in a contact situation since the fifth century CE, when British immigrants fleeing Anglo-Saxon invasions of the British Isles brought a Brythonic (or P-Celtic)1 language with them (Loth 1883). Breton is therefore Brittany’s historical Celtic language. Conversely, Gallo has been described by both those who politically promote it (e.g., Simon 2003) and linguists (e.g., Abalain 1995, Walter 1999, Manzano 2002) as Brittany’s historical Romance language variety that initially evolved from Vulgar Latin and then from Romance. It is today categorized linguistically as a northern French Oïl variety, and is thus very closely related to standard French, which also originates from the Oïl varieties.2 Both Breton and Gallo appear to be faring less well than other regional languages in France. According to Ager (1999), in a survey published in 1993, 25 percent Alsatian and 10 percent of Corsican speakers were transmitting their respective languages to their children, whereas Breton had “practically disappeared among those under thirty” (Ager 1999, 36). The proximity of Alsace to Germany might account for the relative vitality of Alsatian (a Germanic variety). Corsica, as an island, is split from the mainland, its annexation is more recent, and it is there that the movement for a separate identity has been most dramatic or violent thus forcing the state into making a special case for promoting Corsican. The traditional Breton-speaking areas are located west of a linguistic frontier that extends from St. Brieuc in the north of the Armorican peninsula to the mouth of the river Vilaine on the south coast (Stephens 1993). To the east of this frontier are the traditional Gallo-speaking areas which are situated in Upper Brittany, or Haute-Bretagne in French (cf. Broudic 1997). Upper Brittany covers the

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départements (local administrative regions) of Ille-et-Villaine, Loire Atlantique, and the eastern halves of Côtes d’Armor and Morbihan. Lower Brittany (BasseBretagne in French and Breizh Izel in Breton) covers the west halves of the aforementioned départements and also Finistère (or Penn-ar-Bed in Breton), which both mean “land’s end.” The département of Loire Atlantique has not been recognized officially as part of Brittany since 1941, despite many historical and linguistic connections to the region (e.g., Nantes was the historic capital of Brittany, and both Breton and Gallo speakers were to be found in the département within living memory). The contact situation between Gallo and Breton speakers has not always proved to be harmonious and would appear to confirm Nelde’s statement that “there is—in the field of European languages—no contact situation which cannot be described as a linguistic conflict at the same time” (Nelde 2007, 64). Brittany’s cultural specificity is frequently located in its Celtic past, as expressed by Humphreys (1993, 609): “Brittany’s present distinctiveness can be attributed to British immigration originally organized as a defensive measure in a threatened Roman empire.” Gallo, as a result of its close linguistic relationship with French, is contested in popular opinion and frequently referred to as a patois or dialect of French. This contestation is further aggravated when Gallo is contrasted with Breton, which in popular consciousness is a more firmly established regional language (cf. Nolan, in press). In addition, as a result of its linguistic proximity to French, spoken vernacular French and Gallo share the same sociolinguistic landscape. According to Tréhel and Blanchet (2002), many Bretons in Upper Brittany use a mixed linguistic system, oscillating between two polarities that can be called gallo francisé (“Frenchified Gallo”) and français gallésé (“Gallicized French”), which is also called regional French when this interference is relatively stabilized. Breton, which is closely related to other P-Celtic varieties, such as Cornish and Welsh, shows less interference from French than does Gallo, but has traditionally accommodated large numbers of lexical borrowings from French over the centuries. This interference has intensified recently to include syntactic and phonological influence from French due to the large number of L1 French speakers involved in the revitalization of Breton (Jones 1998). As minor languages in France, both Breton and Gallo exist in what is probably the most highly centralized linguistic culture in the world, focused on one single language: French (Schiffman 1996, 2002). The French language not only plays an important role in the conceptualization of French identity, but it is also symbolic of the power of the centralist French Republic. Since the advanced stages of the Revolution of 1789, the regional languages have labored to find an officially recognized role in post-Revolutionary French identity. Recent debates in the Assemblée nationale over the position that regional languages should play in the life of the French Republic show that even though more prominence is beginning to be given to such languages (albeit in an amended, minor article of the French Constitution), the status quo is not really going to change (Assemblée nationale, May 7, 2008). The dominance of the French language vis-à-vis regional languages in France remains secure.

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Demographics of Brittany’s Historical Languages Systematic surveys of the number of speakers of Breton have been carried out only recently; before the 1990s, figures for the numbers of Breton speakers were based on informed estimations. The highest number of speakers recorded is in 1886, with just under two million people (or 59 percent of the total population of Brittany) able to speak Breton. In 1983, this figure had dropped to 604,000 people (or 16 percent of the population), decreasing further still in 1991 to a quarter of a million speakers (or 6.5 percent) (Observatoire de la Langue Bretonne 2002, 14). The decline of the language thus seems to be gathering pace as more and more native speakers die and their numbers are not reproduced among the younger generations. Two surveys carried out in the 1990s and the 2000s indicate a further and even more pronounced decline in the number of speakers of Breton. An investigation by Broudic (1999) indicates that in 1997, 240,000 speakers of Breton lived in Lower Brittany, of whom 125,000 were semi- or passive speakers (i.e., able to understand the language but not able to use it in an active sense). The vast majority of these speakers were in the 60–75+ age range, and only 1 percent of them were under 20 years old. Only 27.5 percent of all speakers tended to use the language on a daily basis (Broudic 1999). Broudic has recently completed an updated version of his survey and has found that the number of speakers continues to decline; according to his 2007 investigation, 172,000 people in Brittany are able to speak Breton, and 71 percent of them are over 60 years old (Broudic 2009). There has, however, been a modest increase in the number of speakers under 20. Broudic (2009) now enumerates 4 percent of the total Breton-speaking population as being in this age bracket (as opposed to under 1 percent ten years earlier). If it has proved difficult to estimate the number of Breton speakers until recently, it continues to be difficult in the case of Gallo. The first estimate on the number of Gallo speakers, which is provided by Le Boëtté (2003) at 28,300, is based on INSEE (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques) data gathered in 1999. Blanchet and Le Coq (2007) propose 40,710 speakers based on these same data, but include the Loire Atlantique in their estimate, which Le Boëtté does not. UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Moseley 2009) puts forward an estimate of 200,000 speakers. This final figure is extrapolated from the Blanchet and Le Coq (2007) report, which proposes that 5 percent to 10 percent of the Breton population (including Loire Atlantique) speak Gallo and twice as many understand it. Despite the rising estimates of Gallo speakers, like Breton, UNESCO (Moseley 2009) considers Gallo to be “severely endangered.” This is a conclusion that is confirmed in recent studies on the sharply falling intergenerational transmission of Gallo (cf. Nolan 2008, Blanchet and Le Coq 2007).

Breton Language contact in Brittany shows a distinctly hierarchical pattern, with French as the high or prestigious language, Breton as “the” regional language

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of Brittany, and Gallo as the “poor cousin” to both French (of which it is sometimes considered a dialect) and Breton. Even when commentators afford Gallo a place on Brittany’s linguistic landscape, Breton still tends to occupy the overarching position of regional language par excellence. For example, Le Coadic (2001), in a televised documentary, recognizes Gallo’s position in “une société biethnique” (a bi-ethnic society), but sees the Breton language as “un symbole auquel tous les Bretons sont attachés” (a symbol to which all Bretons are attached).

Status Planning Attempts to improve the status of the Breton language at the local level within Brittany and also within the wider context of the French state have been numerous. They date from 1870, when the French government was asked by a number of leading Breton intellectuals (among them the grand-uncle of Charles de Gaulle), to recognize the advantages that bilingualism in French and an RL (regional language) could bring to French citizens (Abalain 2004). Lack of any positive response led to further demands and eventually to the formation of the political group Breizh Atao (Brittany Forever) in 1927. It was inspired by the success of the IRA, which had managed to secure the independence of part of the island of Ireland in 1921. Several of its members were in favor of an alliance with certain German political parties (Abalain 2004). At the other end of the political spectrum, the formation of the group Ar Falz (The Sickle) in 1933, inspired by the USSR’s example of encouraging minority languages, marked a radical departure from previous demands. They wanted Breton as the language of instruction in schools in Brittany (instead of French) and the teaching of more specifically Breton history (Abalain 2004). According to Broudic (1995), this movement had little success among teachers in state schools, the target group that the movement aimed to recruit. The focus for improving the status of Breton became increasingly centered on the schools and a campaign was launched in 1934, Ar Brezoneg er Skol (Breton in Schools). It lasted for four years and was successful in attracting the support of 305 localities in Lower Brittany (Abalain 2004). However, French remained the sole medium of instruction for an entire generation of children who arrived at school monolingual in Breton. During World War II, several initiatives favoring Breton occurred in occupied France: the language could be taught for ninety minutes a week, and a weekly bilingual program was broadcast on the radio. The Vichy government created a consultative committee on Brittany in 1941 (le Comité consultatif de Bretagne). In 1943 this same body recommended making Breton (along with French) an official language of the province, the creation of a “Celtic” university, the teaching of Breton and Celtic cultures as well as literatures, histories and geographies in all schools in Brittany (Abalain 2004). Any measures taken by the Vichy government were discontinued after the war, and any association with the Breton cultural movement during this time was viewed very suspiciously by the post-occupation authorities.

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Attempts to secure a more favorable status for Breton began again not long after the end of the war, and in 1951 the Unvaniez Difennourien ar Brezoneg (Union of the Defenders of the Breton Language) succeeded in persuading the French government to pass the Deixonne Law. It allowed, but only in a very restrictive sense, the teaching of Occitan, Catalan, Basque, and Breton in regional schools (Abalain 2004). The 1950s saw an emphasis on re-Bretonnization, with more and more young people learning Breton; some movements even envisaged Upper Brittany becoming entirely Breton-speaking (Abalain 2004). By 1969, Galv (The Call) insisted on measures that would improve the teaching of Breton and the inclusion of more Breton on television and the radio, generally comparing French policies to those practiced in fascist Greece and Franquist Spain (Abalain 2004). In 1978 the French government created the Cultural Charter for Brittany (La Charte culturelle de Bretagne) which, on paper at least, guaranteed the necessary support to ensure the teaching of Breton and Gallo and to ensure their presence on the radio and on television (Evenou 2001). Monolingual road signs in French became the next target for activists, and by 1985 Stourm ar Brezhoneg (Struggle for the Breton Language) had destroyed 10,000 signs in order to make the French government aware of the support for the Breton language (Abalain 2004). Emgleo evid Lezenn ar Yezou (Movement for a Status for [Regional] Languages) launched a petition in 1987 to get Breton recognized as an official language by the French state, attracting the support of some 600 localities in Lower Brittany and 95 in Upper Brittany (Abalain 2004). The immersion-style Diwan (or Sprouting) primary schools established in the 1970s expanded rapidly in the 1980s, eventually providing teaching through the medium of Breton from kindergarten to the end of secondary school by the 1990s (Evenou 2001). This has been matched, up to a certain point, by Div Yezh (Two Languages) in state education and by Dihun (Awakening) in Catholic education. But the teaching in these schools is bilingual—that is, French is the main medium of instruction, but some subjects (e.g., history and geography) are taught through Breton. As the main vehicle for the revitalization of the Breton language, a number of schools in Brittany are thus playing a reversal role in language shift that state schools had played in the opposite direction over a hundred years before. Broudic wonders whether Breton’s present precarious state has in fact proved beneficial in attracting the support it needs from the general public: L’évolution des usages linguistiques en Basse-Bretagne était-elle donc un préalable indispensable à l’évolution du statut de la langue regionale? [Was the evolution [i.e. decline] in linguistic practices in Lower Brittany a necessary step in the evolution [i.e. improvement] of the regional language’s status?]. (Broudic 1995, 389) The most recent boost for Breton occurred in 2004 with the establishment of Ofis ar Brezhoneg (The Breton Language Office), whose mission is to “carry out and monitor both status and corpus planning for the language in the future” (Ó Néill 2005, 171).

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Corpus Planning Literary or “neo” Breton, mainly developed by Roparz Hemon (1900–1978), a Celticist whose nationalist credentials caused him to seek refuge in Ireland after the war, has often been portrayed as being a language tainted by cooperation with the Nazis. However, fascist tendencies have not been apparent in Breton nationalism since World War II, nor indeed did they appear to have been held by Hemon himself (Hincks 2000). The variety demonstrates: a bias toward léonais [north-west] pronunciation—for example, no palatalisation of velar consonants before front vowels, which is widespread in vannetais as well as certain subdialects of cornouaillais. In addition, the structural and linguistic differentiation of Breton vis-à-vis French was emphasised by . . . reformers, with the goal of achieving a purer “Celticity” in syntax and lexicon. (Timm 2001, 149) This type of Breton has been taught at the University of Rennes, in the Diwan immersion schools and in state and Catholic bilingual schools since the 1970s. As a result, it has become the principal variety of the language learned by younger people, and since Breton is being passed on in a family context in only 0.2 percent of all cases (Broudic 1999), it is this variety of Breton that is most likely to endure in the future. There appears to be a threefold distinction with regard to this situation which has been summed up by Jones (1998) using the following categories: • Dialectal Breton, showing French influence in its lexicon but not in its syntax and predominantly spoken by the working class; • Standardized literary Breton, with no particular French influence, used above all in writing but influencing the speech of educated, older speakers, for example, the clergy; • Néo-breton, showing French influence in its syntax but not in its lexicon and is predominantly spoken by the middle classes. She concludes, “although both the obsolescent and reviving varieties are termed ‘Breton’, they are not, strictly speaking, the same language” (Jones 1998, 321). The situation is further complicated by the presence of three main spelling systems to write Breton. These are: (1) University Orthography, in which local, dialectal forms are prioritized and is used, in addition to the University of Brest, in bilingual units and classes in state and Catholic primary and secondary schools; (2) Interdialectal Orthography, where the emphasis is on reproducing traditional language forms, with local pronunciation systems acting as a norm (Le Besco 1997); and (3) Zechadeg or Peurunvan (completely unified) orthography, this being the most widely used Breton spelling system in Brittany. It is the orthography of most modern Breton literature and journals and of the immersion school movement (Diwan). The writing system gained notoriety in 1941, when it was decided to represent the evolution of the historical phoneme /θ/ with a single

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grapheme. The year 1941 is not without significance; as Press (1986, 5) says, the system “is much maligned because of suspicions regarding the circumstances of its ‘creation’ during the occupation.” Ironically, where loanwords from French are well established in dialectal Breton, they have been the focus of lexical innovations by language reformers (the main three being Vallée, Mordiern, and Hemon (Morvan 2002). This is shown in Jones (1995, 429), who terms such innovations as “ ‘purification”: kaotigell instead of konfitur (“jam”); holl instead of tout (“all”); hevelep instead of memes (“same”); morse instead of james (“never”); dibab instead of choaz (“to choose”); ar galleg instead of ar français (“French”). The debate over the presence of French words in Breton stems from the eighteenth century. Originally designed to elevate the status of Breton to a written register, the insertion of French loanwords was perceived to lower the status of the language to the level of a jargon known as brezhoneg beleg (priest’s Breton) or brezhoneg bourgeois (middle-class Breton) (Hincks 2000). Hewitt (1977, 52) insists that the only hope of success for the written language is to accept “the principle of admitting French words as the spoken language does.” But as Hincks (2000) points out, this is to overlook the importance of a certain level of purism in a minority language community’s attempts at linguistic self-determination. Attempts to rid Breton of French loanwords have produced a register of language that has been described “as frequently unintelligible to many of the native Breton speakers from pre-dominantly rural communities” (Jones 1995, 428), who in turn feel stigmatized by their own varieties of Breton: “Intimidated by the intellectualization of their language, they are quick to denigrate their own variety of Breton” (Jones 1995, 430). However, this sense of intimidation works in both directions: “Criticism of the [neo-Breton] register often goes hand in hand with attacking learners . . . [who are] blamed for not keeping, in its entirety, the language which the traditional speaker has abandoned and has not passed on to his own children” (Hincks 2000, 11).

Gallo Gallo’s historically close linguistic relationship with French has placed it in a difficult middle ground between Breton and French. Many Breton activists have become more open to Gallo in recent years and indeed have been very actively supportive of the Gallo movement. However, promoters of Gallo still find that they must defend their activism for Gallo, and its quality as a language representative of Breton identity, in the face of some Breton activists who promote a monolingual and monocultural Breton identity focused on the Celtic language of Brittany. For some, Gallo has taken on the role of a conflicting “other” in the formation of Breton

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identity and possibly more gravely, it has been perceived as a “Trojan horse” for French culture in Brittany (Manzano 2002). This difficulty is compounded by the resistance of central government authorities in accepting Gallo’s status as a regional language of France that is distinct from French.

Status Planning The political assertiveness of Gallo activists in promoting it as a language with the same status as other, more established regional languages is still recent. The very first movement that was created to promote Gallo was the Compagnons de Merlin. Founded in 1939, it was part of the Fédération Régionaliste Bretonne (Breton regionalist federation, founded in 1911 after a split with the Union Régionaliste Bretonne, the Breton regionalist union). It lasted until 1944, when it was dissolved due to its association with the regime installed during the German occupation (Bertaèyn galeizz 2003). Even within the ranks of the Compagnons, there was much disagreement regarding the extent of demands that they should make in favor of the promotion of Gallo, with many choosing to promote Breton only at the expense of Gallo, for the sake of Breton unity. The present-day Gallo promotional network, which originates from the period of cultural revival of the 1970s, has gradually shown more self-assurance with regard to the Breton language promotion movement. The three main actors of this network are the activist organization Bertaèyn galeizz (Gallo Brittany),3 the linguistic association Maézoe (Henceforth) and the Gallo Teachers’ Association. Activists have dedicated much energy to the political promotion of Gallo, especially in the Breton regional and Upper Breton département councils, in the nationwide RL movement and in state-appointed bodies that enact government language policy such as in the La délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France (DGLFLF), and international bodies such as the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages (EBLUL). At the national and international level this activity is frequently carried out through the umbrella organization for all of the Oïl varieties, the Défense et promotion des langues d’oïl (DPLO). Gallo is also promoted in the local media (Radio, TV, and print media), through cultural events (e.g., les fêtes gallèses), the publication of stories and poetry in Gallo, the translation of comic strips such as Tintin and Astérix, and the release of music in Gallo. All of these efforts are not only aimed as fostering a positive reevaluation of the variety among speakers and nonspeakers, but also at providing information regarding the existence, the linguistic nature, and the continued use of Gallo for those who are unaware of it. But activists are particularly focused on the political promotion of Gallo as a bona fide language, and a language of Brittany that is not just related to a rural past, but has a role to play in contemporary Brittany. Notable results of these efforts were the mentioning of Gallo along with other Oïl varieties in the government sponsored Cerquiglini report (1999, cf. note 2), and the naming of Gallo along with Breton in the language policy of Brittany adopted in 2004 as one of the two languages of Brittany and therefore as worthy of promotion as Breton by the regional council.

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Bertaèyn galeizz organizes courses in Gallo of various kinds, such as night classes and correspondence courses, but a very important part of the Gallo movement’s promotional strategy is the inclusion of Gallo in the education system. The insertion of Gallo, along with Breton, into the 1978 Cultural Charter, albeit as a parler (i.e., local language form), was very influential in its adoption as an optional school subject since 1982 and its inclusion in the Baccalauréat school-leaving exam. It is still the only Oïl language variety that is taught at all three levels of the state education system: in primary, lower secondary (collège), and high school (lycée). In addition, it has recently been introduced into private education in the Morbihan département at all three levels. It was an optional subject for the first and second year (DEUG I and II ) at the Université Rennes 2, Haute-Bretagne, from 1996, and it was also an optional subject in the teacher training college (Institut universitaire de formation des maîtres, IUFM) from 1994. However, in a move which is indicative of the debate surrounding Gallo’s status, university and IUFM optional subject status were withdrawn in 2002. This also indicates a certain nonchalance regarding the local education authorities’ approach to Gallo, as these are the very bodies that have responsibility for the training of teachers in Brittany; from the 2002 decision, students did not have the possibility of receiving this education during their formative training. However, the 2004 language policy proposed that Gallo become an optional subject in the Université Rennes 2, with the creation of a university training course and a specific diploma for teaching Gallo open to students from both the universities of Rennes 1 and Rennes 2. This training was to be adapted to students who envisage teaching Gallo in primary and secondary schools. While the full extent of these proposals have yet to be implemented, as of September 2009 it is possible for students in Rennes 2 to take three hours of subjects related to Gallo (sociolinguistics, language learning, and Gallo culture) as an optional course in the first and second years. The numbers of pupils during the academic year 2008–2009 were the following in the state education system: 1,400 in primary school, 226 in lower secondary school, and 233 in high school. Around 30 pupils took the Gallo option in the Baccalauréat exam in the private sector.4

Corpus Planning Another important aspect of Gallo activist language policy has been the attempt at establishing an orthographic standard. This has been dogged by highly divisive debates within the Gallo movement on the merits and shortcomings of different orthographies that have been proposed. One of the main preoccupations has been the proposal of a homogenized orthography representative of the diverse variants of Gallo. The Gallo orthographic debate, much like the controversy over the various Breton spelling systems discussed above, has long existed. In 1940, some members of the Compagnons de Merlin proposed a standard orthography to facilitate written communication between the different varieties of Gallo. However, it was finally rejected by the leadership of the Compagnons based on the principle of maintaining the diversity of Gallo. This concern for the diversity of Gallo continues to be an issue today.

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Since then the situation has further evolved. While other systems have been proposed such as Aneit (“today”), it was ELG (Écrire le gallo, “Writing in Gallo,” based on another system originally proposed by Alain Raude) and Motier de gallo (“Gallo words/dictionary,” also called Chubri, proposed by Bertran Ôbrée) that became the main opposing standards during the 1990s and early 2000s. Since 2007, Motier has become Moga, an orthography which Ôbrée (2008) claims is an attempt at respecting the internal diversity of Gallo, while at the same time being adaptable to new uses. It has been reviewed and modified since 2007. For the president of the Gallo Teachers Association, André Le Coq (interview, November 25, 2003), it appears that the choice between ELG and Motier is that of a dichotomy between the ideological, or the political, and the useful. ELG is more distant from French and, according to Le Coq, is favored by those who want to emphasize the difference with French. Motier is considered easier for learners who have French as a first language or who are familiar with French, and it is favored by most teachers. However, the ideological and the political are never far from linguistic considerations, as the Gallo orthographic debates exemplify, and the orthography quarrel is ongoing. The primary factors that have been problematic for the development of the Gallo movement and the reversal of the fall in usage of the variety have been the historical hesitancy of activists to promote it as a language on a par with Breton, and the debates on an orthographic standard. The lack of will to encroach on what appears to be the perceived “natural” role of Breton as the sole language representative of Breton identity during the Compagnons de Merlin period was typical of a modernist “one language = one ethnic group/identity” ideology, and as a result, the historical linguistic diversity of the region was ignored. Arguably, this delayed the Gallo movement’s evolution and is reflected in the very tardy developments in Gallo’s recognition as a language and not just a rural patois, even if locally appreciated, which is confined to the past and is destined to disappear. It could also be argued that the development of a common Gallo written standard was also delayed as a result. The continued division in the movement between favored standards is certainly not unique in the history of any language, but in the context of contemporary France (which has a highly developed linguistic culture essentially focused on French), it is damaging for Gallo’s image that there is no commonly agreed written standard. However, the situation of Gallo has recently changed for the better. The 1970s were a time of renaissance for Gallo activism; the movement not only astutely used initiatives made in favor of Breton, especially in the educational system, for Gallo’s benefit, but built on this success to further their own agenda in favor of Gallo’s recognition as one of the historical languages of Brittany in regional politics. Tangible evidence of political success has been the elevation of Gallo’s status from that of a local language form (parler) to that of language (langue) in political discourse.

Conclusion Given the singularly hostile environment in which regional language speakers in France find themselves, progress in maintaining Breton and Gallo in Brittany has been limited. There are many groups and activists who work very hard to stem the

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tide and improve the fortunes of these languages. Breton in particular is supported by a plethora of local and Brittany-wide organizations, which have had success in attracting people to learn and adopt the language, and benefits from its association as one of the markers of Celtic Brittany. However, such efforts are almost exclusively bottom-up. Given the lack of political goodwill on the part of the French state toward regional languages, a conservative success rate of 5 out of 10 would appear to describe the one-sided approach to the maintenance of the Breton language in the twenty-first century. The sociopolitical environment in which Gallo operates is even more difficult. Neverthlesss, even though Gallo did not have a positive socially perceived value in Breton identity (in comparison with Breton) in the past, that situation has changed over the last thirty years. It can therefore be cautiously argued that the Gallo movement merits the success rate of 2 out of 10 due to the very difficult circumstances under which it has carried out its activities. Notes 1. The Celtic languages are divided into two branches: Goidelic (or Q-Celtic), which includes Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx; and Brythonic (or P-Celtic), which incorporates Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Mutual comprehension between the languages in each branch is of varying difficulty; it is practically impossible between a Q- and a P-Celtic language. 2. Bernard Cerquiglini in his report Les langues de France (1999) lists the following Oïl varieties: franc-comtois, wallon, picard, normand, gallo, poitevin-saintongeais, bourguignon-morvandiau, lorrain (Cerquiglini 1999). This report was made public in April 1999. Its aim was the establishment of a list of languages in France that would comply with the European Charter for Regional or Minority Language’s definitions of “regional or minority languages.” The report was carried out at the request of the ministries of national education, and of culture and communication. 3. Previously called Les amis du parler gallo (the Friends of Gallo, formed in 1976), which eventually became known as Bretagne gallèse (1983) and then Bertaèyn galeizz (1993). 4. Personal communication with President of Gallo teacher’s association, André Le Coq (June 12, 2009).

References Abalain, Hervé (1995). Histoire de la langue bretonne. Paris: Jean-Paul Giserot. Abalain, Hervé (2004). Pleins feux sur la langue bretonne. Spézet: Coop Breizh. Ager, Dennis (1999). Identity, Insecurity and Image. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Assemblée Nationale (May 7, 2008). Déclaration du Gouvernement sur les langues régionales et débat sur cette déclaration. Comptes rendus des

débats au cours de la XIIIe Législature (2007–2012). Retrieved from http:// www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/ cri/2007-2008/20080153. asp#P385_72702. Bertaèyn galeizz (2003) Les compagnons de Merlin. Rennes: Bertaèyn galeizz. Blanchet, Philippe, and André Le Coq (2007). Où en est le gallo: Pratiques et représentations de la langue et de la culture régionales en Haute Bretagne. Résultats d’enquêtes. In Autour du

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Gallo: Etat des Lieux, Analyses, Perspective, Jean-Pierre Angoujard and Francis Manzano (eds.), Cahiers de Sociolinguistique (12): 11–29. Broudic, Fañch (1995). La pratique du breton de l’ancien régime à nos jours. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Broudic, Fañch (1997). À la recherche de la frontière: La limite linguistique entre Haute et Basse-Bretagne aux XIXe et XX siècles. Brest: Ar Skol Vrezoneg. Broudic, Fañch (1999). Qui parle breton aujourd’hui? Qui le parlera demain? Brest: Brud Nevez. Broudic, Fañch (2009). Parler breton au XXIe siècle: Le nouveau sondage de TMO-Régions. Quimper: Emgleo Breizh. Cerquiglini, Bernard (1999). Les langues de France: Rapport au Ministre de l’Éducation Nationale, de la Recherche et de la Technologie, et à la Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication. Paris: DGLF. Evenou, Erwan (2001). Pédagogie et enseignement. In Parlons du breton!, Association Buhez (ed.), 68–76. Rennes: Editions Ouest-France. Hewitt, Steve (1977). The Degree of Acceptability of Modern Literary Breton to Native Breton Speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University diploma of linguistics thesis. Hincks, Rhisiart (2000). Yr iaith lenyddol fel bwch dihangol yng Nghymru ac yn Llydaw/The Literary Language as a Scapegoat in Wales and in Brittany. Occasional Studies Series. Aberystwyth: The Welsh Department. Humphreys, Humphrey Lloyd (1993). The Breton language: Its present position and historical background. In The Celtic Languages, Martin J. Ball and James Fife (eds.), 606–643. London: Routledge. Jones, Mari (1998). Language Obsolescence and Revitalisation: Linguistic Change in Two Sociolinguistically Contrasting

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Welsh Communities. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jones, Mari (1995). At what price language maintenance? Standardisation in modern Breton. French Studies XLIX(3): 428–436. Le Besco, Patrick (1997). Parlons breton: Langue et culture. Paris: L’Harmattan. Le Boëtté, Isabelle (2003). Langue bretonne et autres langues: Pratique et transmission. Octant (92): 18–22. Le Coadic, Ronan (2001). In Pierrick Guinard (dir.), Brezhoneg, un siècle de breton. DVD 3: chapter 6. DVD video, France 3 Ouest/13 Productions. Loth, Joseph (1883). L’émigration bretonne en Armorique. Paris: Champion. Manzano, Francis (2002). Antr’noz/ Interview. Le Liaun jaunvryaerfeyvryaer (149): 13–18. Morvan, Françoise (2002). Le monde comme si: Nationalisme et dérive identitaire en Bretagne. Arles: Actes Sud. Moseley, Christopher (ed.) (2009). Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, UNESCO. Retrieved from http://www. unesco.org/culture/ich/index. php?pg=00136. Nelde, Peter (2007). Maintaining multilingualism in Europe: Propositions for a European language policy. In Maintaining Minority Languages in Transnational Contexts, Anne Pauwels, Joanne Winter, and Joseph Lo Bianco (eds.), 59–77. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nolan, John Shaun (2008). School and extended family in the transmission and revitalisation of Gallo in UpperBrittany. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 29 (3): 216–234. Nolan, John Shaun (in press). Reassessing Gallo as a regional language in France: Language emancipation vs. monolingual language ideology. International Journal of Sociology of Language.

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Ôbrée, Bertran (2008). Lire et écrire en gallo avec le Moga, Version n° 2, Retiers: Chubris. Observatoire de la Langue Bretonne (2002). Un avenir pour la langue bretonne? Rapport sur l’état de la langue bretonne. Rennes: Office de la Langue Bretonne. Ó Néill, Diarmuid (2005). Rebuilding the Celtic Languages: Reversing Language Shift in the Celtic Countries. Talybont: Y Lolfa. Press, Ian (1986). A Grammar of Modern Breton. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Schiffman, Harold F. (2002). French language policy: Centrism, Orwellian dirigisme, or economic determinism? In Opportunities and Challenges of Bilingualism, Li Wei, Jean-Marc Dewaele, and Alex Housen (eds.), 89–104. Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter. Schiffman, Harold F. (1996). Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. London: Routledge. Simon, Crisstof (2003). ‘Le gallo, un patois ou une langue?’ Paper presented at 130e Congrès: Histoire, arts et lettres, économie, langue bretonne. Dol, Brittany.

Stephens, Janig (1993). Breton. In The Celtic languages, Martin J. Ball and James Fife (eds.), 349–409. London: Routledge. Timm, Lenora (2001). Transforming Breton: A case in multiply conflicting language ideologies. Proceedings from the Eighth Annual Symposium about Language and Society. Austin, April 20–22, 2001. Texas Linguistic Forum 44(2): 449–456. Tréhel, Natalie, and Philippe Blanchet (2002). Pratiques linguistiques régionales d’élèves du primaire et de collège en zones suburbaines de Bretagne gallo: Rapport de Recherche. L’Observatoire des Pratiques Linguistiques de la Délégation Générale à la langue Française, Ministère de la Culture. Walter, Henriette (1999). On the Trail of France’s Regional Languages. In Les langues régionales de France: un état des lieux à la veille du XXIe siècle / The Regional Languages of France: an Inventory on the Eve of the XXIst Century, Philippe Blanchet, Roland Breton, and Harold F. Schiffman, (eds.), 15–24. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters.

26 Success-Failure Continuum of Euskara in the Basque Country MARIA-JOSE AZURMENDI IÑAKI MARTINEZ DE LUNA

Introduction Nowadays, Euskal Herria (Country of Euskara), or the Basque Country, is divided between two states: (1) the Spanish one and (2) the French one. The Spanish one, or Hegoalde (Southern Basque Country), is divided into two separate Autonomous Communities: the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC), comprising the 3 provinces of Araba, Bizkaia, and Gipuzkoa; and the Charter Community of Navarre (Navarre), which is a single province. The French Basque Country, or Iparralde (Northern Basque Country), comprises the three provinces of Behe-Nafarroa, Lapurdi, and Zuberoa. Thus, the Basque Country constitutes three different administrative and juridico-political units, which are recognized this way in the European Union (EU), and which makes it easy to regard them as three different language groups (Nelde et al. 1996).

Contextualization of the Basque Case In the European Union In Spain, the signing and ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992) entails obligations for the state in the territories in which the regional languages are official. France, insofar as Euskara is concerned, signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 1999, but did not ratify it, and so is not bound to comply with it. In fact, France amended its 323

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Constitution in 1992 by inserting the following phrase: La langue de la République est le Français (“the official language of the Republic is French”); thus the Charter was declared unconstitutional in 1999. The European institutional network (mainly the Council of Europe [COE] and the European Parliament as official institutions, and the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages [EBLUL] and Euromosaic as non-governmental organizations) is contributing indirectly to efforts to revive and normalize Europe’s marginalized languages and to meet the demands of language minorities. However, no specific regulations have been developed to defend the individual and collective rights of speakers of minority languages. This responsibility has been left to the language communities themselves and to the states.

In the Spanish and French States With regard to the tolerance of the Basque language in the twentieth century, one would have to distinguish between two periods of Spanish-Basque history: one from 1900 until the end of the 1970s, and a second from the 1980s to the present. The first period was a history of linguistic exclusion and prohibition in general, and even persecution during the forty years of the Franco era; this largely explains many aspects of how the language of Euskara has evolved. Approximately 80 percent of the population in the territories of Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa (comprising the Basque Autonomous Community), were Euskaldun or Euskaraspeaking in 1900, and many of them were monolingual Euskara speaking. By the 1980s, the majority of people in the Basque Autonomous Community, about 80 percent, were monolingual Spanish-speaking, while bilinguals accounted for the other 20 percent, and monolingual Euskara-speaking had died out. There were also significant demographic changes in the twentieth century coinciding with periods of economic development. The demand for work increased considerably at the turn of the century and during the Franco era, as a result not only of emigration but also of immigration. Basque emigration was generally due to political reasons, such as voluntary or involuntary exile. There was also immigration of people of Spanish origin for both economic and political reasons during the Franco era. These immigrants had few possibilities of becoming integrated into a Basque-speaking context. Their presence aided the shift from Euskara to Spanish. In the second period (since the 1980s), which begins with the Spanish transition toward democracy through the new Constitution (1978), Spanish was regarded as the obligatory and official language of the state, and “other Spanish languages,” or “autochthonous languages,” were recognized in their respective territories (the Basque, Catalan, and Galician languages). Through the Statutes of Autonomy, Euskara was designated an official language in the Basque Autonomous Community (1979) and in Navarre (1981). Language policies designed to develop Euskara placed it in a subordinate and inferior position to Spanish, the dominant language, since the use of Euskara was considered a right, but not an obligation. Efforts to revive and normalize Euskara were conducted in very different ways in the Basque Autonomous Community and in Navarre, so the results achieved have also been

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very different. In the Basque Autonomous Community, for instance, the Ley Básica de Normalización del Uso del Euskara (Basic Law for the Normalization of Basque Use, 1982) drew up a language policy for various social spheres (e.g., education, administration, mass media, economy, health, etc.), although its implementation was very flexible. Plans for the revival of Euskara have yielded largely satisfactory results, despite the fact that the right of Euskara-speakers to use Euskara encounters serious difficulties. In Navarre, the Ley Foral del Vascuence (Charter Law on Basque, 1986) specified three sociolinguistic zones—Basque-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and bilingual Basque-Spanish-speaking (mixed)—for which very different language policies were designed. Rights to use Euskara, mainly in education and administration, are upheld in the Euskara-speaking language zone, are tolerated in the mixed zone, and are hindered in the Spanish-speaking zone. In Iparralde (the Basque territories in France), Euskara has been prohibited throughout the twentieth century, and French institutions only began to recognize Euskara in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The Euskararen Erakunde Publikoa (Public Bureau for the Basque Language) was established in Iparralde in 2004 and is offering institutional and economic help in education and culture, as well as designing language policy projects. Official institutions involved in the revival and normalization of Euskara are fairly new. In the Spanish territories, they have existed for thirty years. In the territories in France, their presence has only been felt for less than a decade, since 2000 (Azurmendi et al. 2005, 2006).

Social Movement in Favor of Euskara The prominence of the social organizations supporting Euskara normalization emerged mainly in Hegoalde (the Basque territories in Spain), early in the twentieth century, and have been especially strong since the 1980s. Their emergence and successes and failures need to be understood. In the decade from 1900 to 1910, two organizations emerged: Eusko Ikaskuntza (Basque Studies Society, 1917) and Euskaltzaindia (Academy of the Basque Language, 1918). Both organizations exist throughout Euskal Herria (the Country of Euskara). The second period, from 1960 to 1970, saw the emergence of the Ikastolas (Basque-medium schools), the Gau-eskolas (centers for study and literacy in Euskara for adults), the organization Euskal Herrian Euskaraz (In Basque in the Basque Country), and new Basque literature and music, magazines in Euskara, and so on. Since the 1980s, we have witnessed an explosion of social organizations in favor of Euskara: Euskararen Gizarte Erakundeen Kontseilua (The Council of Social Organizations in Favour of Basque, which brings together forty-six organizations), Udako Euskal Unibertsitatea (UEU; Summer Basque University), Soziolinguistika Klusterra (Sociolinguistics Cluster and its sociolinguistics journal in Euskara, BAT Soziolinguistika Aldizkaria, regarded as the best source of up-to-date information on the sociolinguistic situation and evolution of Euskara), and so on. It is then possible to speak of a real social movement aiming to bring about Euskara normalization, which has come

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about mainly in the Basque Autonomous Community but which targets all of Euskal Herria. Without the existence of the important social movement in favor of Euskara, the language policies of the official institutions would have been considerably less important; further, without significant institutionalization of Euskara, the social movement in favor of Euskara would have either become more radical (as in the Basque Autonomous Community, and to a lesser extent in Navarre), or weakened (as in Iparralde).

Knowledge and Use of Euskara The greatest efforts carried out to normalize Euskara have focused on increasing the number and proportion of people who master Basque. In other words, the focus has been on making people bilingual, and having them reach high levels of relative competence in Euskara (the same or higher than in the dominant languages: Spanish or French). The 4th Sociolinguistic Survey 2006 (Eusko Jaurlaritza/ Gobierno Vasco 2008) indicates that between 1991 and 2006, the proportion of bilinguals rose from 22.3 percent to 25 percent in Euskal Herria as a whole (see table 26.1). The gains and losses for Euskara vary considerably according to territory: while in the Basque Autonomy Community there was a strong increase in bilinguals (an additional 138,000), in Navarre the rise was less strong (16,200 more) and in Iparralde the number fell (17,300 fewer). But the analysis of the proportion of bilinguals by age offers a more exact idea of what is occurring in the transmission of Euskara (see table 26.2). The results demonstrated in table 26.2 are in line with the social, institutional, and legal conditions explained previously. The Basque Autonomous Community is where Euskara use is greatest, and where the greatest proportion of speakers of Euskara are young (16–24 years of age). The least use of Euskara takes place in Navarre. The greatest loss in terms of age is taking place in Iparralde. The 4th Sociolinguistic Survey of 2006 also revealed that 30.7 percent of bilinguals in all of Euskal Herria had high levels of competence in Euskara; that is, the same or better competence than in Spanish. More bilinguals in the Basque Autonomous Community (31.8 percent) showed a high level of competence in Euskara, followed by 26.2 percent in Navarre and 24.7 percent in Iparralde. The pattern among balanced bilinguals is slightly different: 30.3 percent in Euskal Table 26.1 Evolution in the Population and in Bilinguals Aged 16 and over Territory

BAC Navarre Iparralde Euskal Herria

1991

2006

Total

Bilinguals

Total

Bilinguals

1,741,500 420,700 208,900 2,371,100

419,200 40,200 69,100 528,500

1,850,500 508,900 230,200 2,589,600

557,600 56,400 51,800 665,800

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Table 26.2 Bilinguals Aged 16 and over according to Age Groups, in 2006 (%) Age groups

BAC

Navarre

Iparralde

65 and over 50–64 35–49 25–34 16–24 Total

25.0 21.3 25.7 37.3 57.5 30.1

9.1 9.0 9.7 12.5 19.1 11.1

32.4 26.8 17.5 11.6 16.1 22.5

Herria, 28.5 percent in the Basque Autonomous Community, 29.6 percent in Navarre, and 50.8 percent in Iparralde. Finally, among bilinguals with a lower competence in Euskara there are 38.9 percent in Euskal Herria, 39.7 percent in the Basque Autonomous Community, 44.2 percent in Navarre, and 24.6 percent in Iparralde. Education is the sphere that is mostly responsible for the revival of Euskara knowledge. Since the early 1980s, parents in the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre have been able to choose from among different linguistic teaching models that incorporate Euskara. The three systems are known as A (Spanish- or French-medium with Basque language as subject), B (bilingual, Euskara-medium and Spanish- or French-medium, in a fairly balanced way), and D (Euskaramedium with Spanish or French language as a subject). These options are available in all kinds of schools, both public and private (except in the Spanish-speaking zone of Navarre). However, in Iparralde, only the Ikastolas have followed the teaching model D, and only a few years ago did they start to introduce Euskara in public schools. The data shown in table 26.3 refer to secondary education, the most appropriate perhaps in terms of knowing the number of bilinguals with a high level of competence in Euskara (Azurmendi et al. 2008a). Table 26.3 Linguistic Teaching Models in the Statutory Secondary Education phase (12–16 years; 11–16 in Iparralde), 2004–2005 academic year (total and %)

Models D B A X

BAC

BAC

BAC

Euskal Herria

Araba

Bizkaia

Gipuzkoa

Navarre

Iparralde

432,729 34.1 16.9 24.1 24.9

42,894 35.1 42.5 22.4 0

157,290 38.4 18.8 41.3 0

101,338 62.0 32.0 6.1 0

81,985 17.4 0.0 11.2 71.4

49,222 3.3 4.8 8.6 83.3

Model D = Euskara-medium with Spanish or French language as a subject Model B = Bilingual, Euskara-medium and Spanish- or French- medium, in a fairly balanced way Model A = Spanish- or French-medium with Basque language as a subject Model X = exclusively Spanish- or French- medium (Foreign languages are not considered in this Table.)

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It also seems appropriate to refer to the incorporation of English- and Englishmedium teaching into the statutory education system, and at the university level as necessary in the contexts of globalization (Cenoz 2008, 2009). According to Azurmendi et al. (2008a, 44): One of the current challenges facing the Basque education system is how to guarantee a good knowledge of English in a statutory way, in addition to an intermediate level in another optional subject foreign language by the end of statutory education (at the age of 16). As far as the introduction of English is concerned, there have been a variety of experiences, the most prominent being the one conducted by the Ikastolas mainly in the Basque Autonomous Community with the introduction of English at the age of 4 in 1990. This experience of the Ikastolas has been evaluated favorably, since their students end up with a level of competence in English recognized as equivalent to the international “CAE-Cambridge Advanced English” qualification. Thus, the Ikastolas have shown that not only widespread Basquization and bilingualism are possible through Model-D schooling, but also widespread Englishization simultaneously, offering today an education model that goes beyond bilingualism, to clear multilingualism, following EU directives. The main aim behind all the efforts made to revive Euskara is to normalize its presence and use. In terms of this aim, the results achieved should be analyzed mainly in different spheres (education, work, leisure, etc.), at different levels (from the most general to the most personal), from the perspective of institutional policies and institutional and social planning, and in regard to the prestige linked to language use. Overall data indicate the situation depicted in table 26.4 (4th Sociolinguistic Survey 2006). The table reveals territorial inequalities, again. The Basque Autonomous Community is where Euskara use is greatest. The least use takes place in Navarre.

Basque Ethnolinguistic Identity In the Basque context, Basque ethnic identity is another subject that has undergone much study since the 1980s in very different ways, frequently in interdepen-

Table 26.4 Use of Euskara, in the Age Group Aged 16 and over, in 2006 (%)

Different spheres:

Eusk. > Eusk. = Eusk. < Eusk. nil

The whole Euskal Herria

BAC

Navarre

Iparralde

9.9 5.4 9.8 74.9

12.5 6.1 11.0 70.4

3.2 2.4 4.1 90.3

3.6 6.7 12.3 77.4

Different spheres: family, friends, public spheres (public spaces, health services, municipal services), private spaces (retail outlets, banking services)

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dence with Spanish or French ethnic identity. These identities are very complex because various categories understood as ethnic intervene in their configuration (cultural, linguistic, territorial, political, economical, etc.), and also because they function in a fairly versatile way (Azurmendi 2000). Ethnic identity is one of the factors explaining nearly all of the important social phenomena in the Basque context. Language is an important factor in ethnic identity. In the case of the Basque identity, many claim that language is the most important defining factor; thus, we speak of Basque ethnolinguistic identity. Baxok et al. (2006) conducted a study on Basque ethnolinguistic identity following qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The results indicate that three groups exist (Baxok et al. 2006, 106): (1) A Pro-Basque Block: They identify with the Basque Country and feel Basque, they speak Euskara well or very well, Euskara being their first language. They were born in the Basque Country as their forebears were, and consider that one important condition to regard a person as Basque is that he or she should speak Euskara. Furthermore, they mention one of the territories of the Basque Country as the adjoining territory they feel closest to. (2) Non-pro-Basque Block: They are above all citizens of Navarre and Iparralde, who feel predominantly Spanish or French. They either do not want their offspring to learn Euskara or don’t care if they do, and they associate being Basque with characteristics linked to origin, ancestors, and surnames. They identify above all with the territory in which they live (Basque Autonomous Community, Navarre, or Iparralde). (3) Mixed Block: They live mainly in the Basque Autonomous Community. They feel as much Basque as they do Spanish or as much Basque as they do French. They master little or no Euskara. Either they or their forebears were immigrants. They identify with the municipality in which they live or with Europe and the world. They consider that the most important reason for regarding a person as Basque is that he or she should live and work in the Basque Country. They mention a territory that does not belong to the Basque Country as one of the territories they feel closest to. The qualitative results of Baxox et al.’s research offer a more ambiguous finding, which Martinez de Luna (2007) calls paradoxical: the symbolic value of Euskara is greater than the pragmatic one. Those who do not master Euskara can also feel Basque. Euskara does not figure among the two most important characteristics for regarding someone as Basque (except in Iparralde). Rather, considering someone Basque has to do with that person’s wanting to be Basque and living and working in Euskal Herria. The research on identity and other issues of university students in the Basque Autonomous Community by Azurmendi et al. (2008a, b, c) revealed that there were three prototypes of Basque ethnolinguistic identity: (1) Basque, claimed by 64.3 percent of the sample of 814 university students; (2) Spanish + Basque, claimed by 30.1 percent of the sample; (3) Spanish, 5.6 percent of the sample.

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There were also negative Pearson correlations between Basque ethnolinguistic identity and Spanish + Basque or Spanish ethnolinguistic identities. This represents a possible scenario of problematic or conflictive interethnic relations. Table 26.5 shows the factors associated with the different identities (a selection are shown). These data indicate that only certain characteristics are correlated with particular identities in the Basque context. Having ancestors of one or another kind and political affiliation is a fairly strong indicator. Students with Basque ancestors tend to have a Basque ethnolinguistic identity and identify with Euskara. Students who are more leftist identify more with Basque ethnolinguistic identity and with Euskara. There is also a fairly strong correlation between the language chosen as the medium for study in college, when the option exists. Students opting to study in Euskara identify with Basque ethnolinguistic identity and with Euskara. Membership in political parties of the Basque sphere also correlates highly with Basque ethnolinguistic identity and identification with Euskara. Finally, cultural categories that were subject to choice were more important than ethnic categories which are not subject to choice. In other words, culturalism seems to predominate over ethnicism, and constructionism more over primordialism, and son on, in the Basque context.

Table 26.5 Factors of Basque and Spanish Ethnolinguistic Identity (ELI) and Identity with the Euskara and the Spanish Languages, 2004 Antecedents of Identities Spanish ancestors Female sex Euskara as acquired L1 Studying in Euskara, or in both languages, in college Studying human and social sciences, or natural and technical sciences Ideology more rightist than leftist Political membership more of parties of Spanish sphere than Basque sphere

Basque ELI

Spanish ELI

ID with Euskara

ID with Spanish

–.38** .01 .25**

.43** .10** –.41**

–.35** –.06* .39**

.37** .08* –.44**

.25**

–.54**

.48**

–.54**

.01

–.04

.03

–.03

–.19**

.34**

–.22**

.25**

–.38**

.56**

–.42**

.46**

* Significant correlations at 0.05 level ** Significant correlations at 0.01 level In bold type: the two most significant correlations in each Identity

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Final Reflections To sum up, the Euskara normalization process (not so much of Euskal Herria as a single linguistic community) has not only fallen short but is unequal in the three different administrative and legal-political units of Euskal Herria. This has to do with the contradictions not only between the Spanish and the autonomous community official institutions, but also among the autonomous community institutions themselves, and also between the official institutions and social organizations. As a result, evaluating the success or failure of the Euskara normalization process proves difficult. How is one to respond to the question of whether the situation and evolution of the Basque language, of Basque ethnolinguistic identity, and the interdependence between the Basque language and ethnolinguistic identity, is closer to success or failure? (Fishman 1999, Pütz et al. 2006).

Principal External Dynamics Globalization and the building of the European Union tend to work against minority, regional and/or minoritized languages. But, at the same time, there is a global movement in response to the linguistic genocide that is taking place on our planet. Thus, the demands in defense of the Basque language are legitimized within an international movement (Barreña et al. 2005). Whether the Basque language will emerge triumphant is unknown at this time, just as there is growing uncertainty about the future of our planet (Martinez de Luna 2007). The French and Spanish states offer different scenarios. The unitary conceptions of state that predominate in France have meant that the state has taken very few steps in language planning in Iparralde. On the Spanish side, although Spain has formally accepted the European directives aimed at protecting minority languages and cultures, in practice—on a day-to-day basis—Spanish is imposed as the only language of the state’s culture (Neff-van Aertselaer 2006).

Main Problems from an Insider Perspective The research presented above is important, but not sufficient, to explain the situation of Euskara in Euskal Herria. Figures alone do not suffice; also needed is the interpretation of insiders, and the endeavor to interrelate the quantitative aspects with the subjective and experiential ones of the Basques themselves (an idea that is repeated in Fishman 1999). We address here four of the main insiders’ concerns. First, education plays an important role in the knowledge of Euskara of young people. In the Basque Autonomous Community (which enjoys the most favorable situation out of the three administrative zones of Euskara), we have had thirty years of experience since the introduction of the three Linguistic Teaching Models A, B, and D. This experience has been studied by official institutions, social organizations, and researchers since the 1980s. We know that Model A (Spanishmedium with Basque language as a subject) does not lead to more learning of Euskara, nor of more learning of Spanish than any of the other models. We also

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know that the bilingual Model B serves to learn Euskara for academic purposes, but it is insufficient for everyday life (similar to when a second language is learned for special purposes). Finally, we know that Model D (Euskara-medium with Spanish language as a subject) is the one that most guarantees effective learning of Euskara, not only for academia but also for everyday life (at least when Euskara is used outside the educational context as well). Spanish for everyday life is learned well in the different models, although to a lesser degree in Model D. The Ikastolas (Model D) are the schools that offer better results because students achieve higher indices of trilingual competence (Euskara+Spanish+English). The success of the Ikastolas has meant that, from 2007–2009, a general debate took place with participation of educational institutions, the various associations of schools (public and private), parents and teachers, and social organizations like Kontseilua. Consensus was eventually reached, and the document produced called for considering Euskara as a priority language to be introduced from nursery school onward (from the age of two or three) as the only way of guaranteeing that relatively balanced individual bilingualism in the two languages be achieved. This meant the discontinuation of Model A. There were many reasons that this consensus was reached. First of all, there were psycholinguistic reasons, linked to early bilingualism, individual active bilinguality (non-passive), added (not subtractive), general (non-specific, or valid only for certain spheres) and balanced (non-asymmetric), making use of both languages possible. There were psychosocial reasons having to do with initiation in the minority language when it is the psychological and not the psychosocial side (perceptions, attitudes, motivations, identities, relative satisfaction, etc.) that predominates, so as to guarantee success without detriment to the dominant and majority language. There were also economic reasons having to do with facility and ease with which bilingualism was acquired, a main linguistic goal of the Autonomous Community setup. However, in July 2009 the Diario Vasco reported: The Education Department of the Basque Government (led by the Spanish Socialist Party-PSOE with the support of the Spanish People’s Party-PP since June 2009) has repealed part of the decree on Nursery Education passed by the previous executive (led by the three-party coalition of the Basque Nationalist Party, Eusko Alkartasuna and United Left) which established that Euskara should be the main language of instruction in this stage of education . . . [The new Executive] undertook to eliminate the consideration of Euskara as the main language in the school system and open a process of dialogue and negotiation with a view to exploring an agreed reform of the system of models. (July 23, 2009. 8) In other words, the situation in 2009 is one of uncertainty. Second, education is also most important for Euskara use. According to the “law of psychological economy” (Azurmendi 2008), one tends to use the language in which one has greater competence sooner and more, and from there stems the importance of the distinction between greater/equal/lesser relative competence in

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Euskara (see table 26.5). Basque ethnolinguistic identity is also very important in explaining Euskara use. The weakness in the social networks of Euskara, with speakers of Euskara immersed in the linguistic communities of Spanish and French, is yet another reason for Euskara use. Finally, speakers feel constrained in speaking Euskara when they are in the presence of those who do not speak the language. Martinez de Luna et al. (2008, 59–60) offer us a model of the principal background and situational variables that determine the varieties of language use and distinguish between three levels of factors in constant interaction: (a) Macrolevel: Social domains and social representations, visible acceptance for using language, social prestige of language (usefulness, symbolic value, etc.); (b) Microlevel: situations and social networks, identification of other speakers and relationship with them; (c) Individual level: relative language competence, motivation for use. Third, the most important factor in the use of Euskara is of a political nature, as reflected by the tug-of-war that has taken place around the linguistic teaching models in education. Basque nationalism has promoted a consistent language policy in favor of Euskara in the Basque Autonomous Community for the last three decades. However, there have been ideological discrepancies in the Basque Autonomous Community, as well as in Navarre and Iparralde. These “ideological discrepancies” are based on feelings of collective identity that are perceived, largely, as opposing ones: Spanish identity versus Basque identity. Iparralde is the exception in this regard, since Basque identity and majority French identity are completely reconciled. In the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre, there is political disagreement about the language policy and its results. It is regarded by some as excessive, and by others as insufficient. In Iparralde, although the trend that was leading Euskara to its swift demise has been turned, there is not any evidence of advances in the revival and normalization of Euskara. The main parties in the Spanish state, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and the Spanish People’s Party (PP), are political adversaries in Spain. Yet, they have become allies in the Basque Autonomous Community to prevent the Basque Nationalist Party (EAJ/PNV), the majority party in the Basque Autonomous Community, in coalition with other political parties, from continuing in the Basque government during the current legislative period that started in July 2009 and is set to last four years. Consequently, for the first time in thirty years of autonomy, neither the president of the Basque government (a member of the PSOE) nor the speaker of the Basque Parliament (a member of the PP) are bilingual, and consequently are unable to express themselves orally in Euskara, although both of them have promised to learn it so they can address Basque citizens in Euskara by the end of the four-year legislative period. How is this to be interpreted? One explanation is linked to the power of languages (Fishman 2006, Pütz et al. 2006). The question then would be how this empowerment could be effectively applied to Euskara in such a way that consensus be enjoyed.

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Fourth, the vanguard of Euskara is a decisive element that can cause not only Basque public opinion but also public administration to swing in one direction or the other. This vanguard, inconceivable only a few decades ago, is comprised of trained and specialized professional officers and volunteers. Large numbers of volunteers in support of the Basque language have provided Euskara with a very welltrained vanguard, capable of undertaking complex initiatives, be they technological, organizational, or having to do with funding, and so on, while exercising and sharing genuine leadership. Nevertheless, there is a very important shortcoming as far as this vanguard is concerned. Universities (their bodies of authority, formal structures, syllabi, and research) have experienced the emergence and consolidation of this vanguard. So, although universities (mainly in the Basque Autonomous Community) have included teaching and research in Euskara (although not on par with Spanish), syllabi and lines of research have largely ignored the needs of the community of Euskara and its vanguard. The incomprehensible schizophrenia between the social sectors working for Euskara and the priorities or orientations of university academia could turn into a serious problem in the long term. The complex social engineering involved in the revival and normalization of a language needs the drive from social scientists that constantly fosters R+D+I in an ongoing relationship with the requirements of specialized officers and of the community. How then is one to respond in a relatively reliable way to the initial question of whether the Basque case is closer to “success” or to “failure” in its efforts to revive and normalize Euskara and Basque ethno-linguistic identity? If we were to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, in which 1 = failure and 10 = success, it seems we could say that at present that the case of the Basque Autonomous Community (the best placed within Euskal Herria as a whole) would be around 6. On the other hand, the case of Navarre would be around 4, and the case of Iparralde around 3. Thus, the case of Euskal Herria as a whole would be around 5: evolving sometimes favorably, and other times negatively, insofar as reverse shifts are possible. References Azurmendi, Maria-Jose (2000). Psicosociolingüística. Bilbo: UPV/ EHU. Azurmendi, Maria-Jose (2008). Euskara erabiltzearen erraztzasuna/ zailtasunaren eragin emozionala eta horren ondorioak [The difficulty/ease of use of Basque: its influence on emotions and their consequences]. UZTARO 64: 83–97. Azurmendi, Maria-Jose, Nekane Larrañaga, and Jokin Apalategi (2008a). Bilingualism, identity and citizenship in the Basque Country. In

Bilingualism and Identity: Spanish at the Crossroads with Other Languages, Mercedes Niño-Murcia and Jason Rothman (eds.), 35–62. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Azurmendi, Maria-Jose, and Nekane Larrañaga (2008b). La inmigración emergente en la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca (CAV) desde la sociedad de acogida: la aculturación. In Método, teoría e investigación en psicología social, José Francisco Morales, Carmen Huici, Ángel Gómez, and Elena Gaviria (coords.),

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487–512. Madrid: Pearson & Prentice Hall. Azurmendi, Maria-Jose, Nekane Larrañaga, and Jokin Apalategi (2008c). Identitate etnolinguistikoa (IELa) Euskal Autonomi Erkidegoan (EAEan) [Ethnolinguistic Identity (ELI) in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC)]. BAT Soziolinguistika Aldizkaria 67: 131–150. Azurmendi, Maria-Jose, and Iñaki Martinez de Luna (issue eds.) (2005). The Case of Basque: From the Past toward the Future. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 174 (entire issue). Azurmendi, Maria-Jose, and Iñaki Martinez de Luna (eds.) (2006). The Case of Basque: Past, Present and Future. Donostia/San Sebastián: Soziolinguistika Klusterra. Barreña, Andoni, Belen Uranga, Itziar Idiazabal, Esti Izagirre, Esti Amorrortu, and Ane Ortega (2005). Europako hizkuntzak [The Languages of Europe]. Bilbo: UNESCO-Etxea. Baxok, Erramun, Pantxoa Etxegoin,Terexa Lekunberri, Iñaki Martinez de Luna, Larraitz Mendizabal, Igor Ahedo, Xabier Itzaina, and Roldan Jimeno (2006). Identidad y cultura vascas a comienzos del siglo XXI. Donostia: Eusko Ikaskuntza. Cenoz, Jasone (ed.) (2008). Teaching through Basque. Achievements and Challenges. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Cenoz, Jasone (ed.) (2009). Towards Multilingual Education. Basque Educational Research from an International Perspective. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Eusko Jaurlaritza/Gobierno Vasco (2008). IV. Inkesta Soziolinguistikoa2006/ IV Encuesta Sociolingüística2006/ IV Enquête Soziolinguistique [4th Sociolinguistic Survey 2006].

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Vitoria/Gasteiz: Eusko Jaurlaritza/ Gobierno Vasco. Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.) (1999). Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fishman, Joshua A. (2006). Sociolinguistics: More power(s) to you! (On the explicit study of power in sociolinguistic research). In ‘Along the Routes to Power’. Explorations of Empowerment through Language, Martin Pütz, Joshua A. Fishman, and JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer (eds.), 3–12. Berlin: Mouton. Martinez de Luna, Iñaki (2007). Hizkuntzen ekologia [The Ecology of Languages]. BAT Soziolinguistika Aldizkaria 65: 105–109. Martinez de Luna, Iñaki, and Pablo Suberbiola (2008). Measuring student language use in the school context. In Teaching through Basque. Achievements and Challenges, Jasone Cenoz (ed.), 59–68. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Neff-van Aertselaer, JoAnne (2006). Language policies in Spain: Accommodation or alteration? In Along the Routes to Power. Explorations of Empowerment through Language, Martin Pütz, Joshua A. Fishman, and JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer (eds.), 179–198. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Nelde, Peter, Miquel Strubell, and Glyn Williams (1996). Euromosaic. Production et réproduction des groupes linguistiques minoritaires au sein de l´Union Européenne. Luxembourg: Commission Européenne. Pütz, Martin, Joshua A. Fishman, and JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer (eds.) (2006). “Along the Routes to Power”: Explorations of Empowerment through Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

27 The Independent Standardization of Valencian: From Official Use to Underground Resistance MIQUEL ÀNGEL LLEDÓ

Introduction Valencian is a Romance variety that is the mother tongue of about two million people, and it is spoken in most of the territory of the Autonomous Community of Valéncia (Spain), where it shares the status of co-official language with Spanish. The former Statute of Autonomy (1982), which was the higher rank law of the Autonomous Community of Valéncia until the enactment of the new Statute of 2006, includes the following: The two official languages of the Autonomous Community of Valéncia are Valencian and Spanish. All have the right to know and use them. The Generalitat Valenciana (Valencian Government) will guarantee the current and official use of both languages, and will take the measures necessary to ensure its knowledge. . . . Valencian will be especially protected and respected in order to promote its recovery. The teaching of Valencian was incorporated into the school curriculum in 1982 (Strubell 1991, 96) and the Act 4/1983, November 23rd, on the Use and Teaching of Valencian was enacted in 1983, defining Valencian as the mother tongue of the Valencian Community and guaranteeing its official and public use: “Valencian is the Autonomous Community of Valéncia’s own language and, as a consequence, 336

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all citizens have the right to know it and use it, both orally and written, in private relations and in their relations with public administrations” (Diari Oficial de la Comunitat Valenciana, 1983, 1464). This same law defines two linguistic regions in the Valencian Community: one region predominantly and traditionally Valencian speaking, occupying the majority of the territory; and one region predominantly and traditionally Spanish speaking.

The Valencian Language Conflict: Valencian, an Independent Language or a Dialect? In spite of the legal definition of Valencian as the language of the Valencian Community, its linguistic category is a controversial question. Since it is similar to Catalan, linguists generally consider it a dialect of the Catalonian language. Although they are different cases, a comparison with the Serbo-Croation conflict might help to illustrate the Valencian language’s current situation. McLennan (1996, 103) writes: The general attitude of Croats is that Croatian (Štokavian - Ijekavian) and Serbian (Štokavian - Ekavian) are completely autonomous languages and as such, Croats try to emphasize the differences. Serbs however, are trying to down play those differences, taking the position that there is only one language with several variants. Regardless, Croats appear to be the most vehement in questions of language, mainly because of the perception that Serbian had been imposed upon them. In the Valencian language conflict, the residents of Catalonia maintain that Valencian and Catalan are two variants of the same language and defend the usage of a common standard with three related varieties (Catalan, Valencian and Balearic), essentially based on the Catalonian variety to which the other two options are subordinate. But this form of thinking does not concur with the vision of the great majority of speakers of the Valencian variety, who consider their language unique and independent from Catalan. However, the Valencian intellectual elite is divided into two groups: an influential majority defends subordination of Valencian to Catalan and the standard usage based on Catalan drawn up by the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC), while a minority defends the standard of the Real Acadèmia de Cultura Valenciana (RACV), an independent standard for Valencian. Neither the 1982 Statute of Autonomy nor the Act 4/1983, November 23rd, on the Use and Teaching of Valencian leave the power to codify the Valencian language in the hands of one particular institution. This legal void started a conflict between the two opposing models of standardization, a conflict that continued until 1998, when the Valencian government sanctioned the creation of a new organism, l’Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (AVL), in charge of dictating the official rules governing the use of the Valencian language. Finally, the AVL passed an official standard based on the Catalan IEC norms. It is difficult to distinguish with precision the degree of similarity between Valencian and Catalan.

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It is generally assumed that a speaker of Valencian can understand a speaker of Catalan, and vice versa. However, this alleged intelligibility only applies to some Catalonian dialects. An interesting example: in the Valencian Community the Catalonian television channel TV3 is available. It uses the Catalan dialect with the largest number of speakers, the dialect of Barcelona. But those Valencianspeaking people who have not been exposed to this variety of the language reject TV3 programs because they do not understand them. However, these same Valencian speakers are able to understand other Catalonian dialects like the dialect from the region of Lleida. In fact, some linguistic features present in the Catalonian dialects, although absent in everyday Valencian, reappear within some Valencian subdialects (Veny 1982).

Two Conceptions of Ethnic Identity: Catalonian Descent versus Isolated Valencian From a strictly linguistic point of view, a standard common to both Valencian and Catalan is feasible, but Valencian society feels close ties between language and ethnic identity, making it difficult to subordinate the Valencian language to a general Catalonian language standard. Between 1238 and 1707, Valencians possessed their own kingdom, which functioned similarly to an independent state, with its own currency and laws. This has marked the Valencian Community with the consciousness of a regional or national identity, which has also favored the birth of a feeling of possessing its own individual language. In 1238, Jaume I, king of Aragón and the Baleric Islands and count of Barcelona, founded the Kingdom of Valéncia over a territory reconquered from the Muslims. It is generally accepted that Valencian is derived from Catalan transplanted in the Kingdom of Valéncia by the Catalonian colonists after its conquest by Jaume I (Sanchis Guarner 1972). Peñarroja (1990) suggests a native origin for Valencian by demonstrating that in the Valencian territories, Latin evolved toward its own Romance language linguistically convergent with the Valencian of the 13th Century. Independent of its origin, the Kingdom of Valéncia had already begun to use Valencian since the thirteenth century as a means of expression of legal, administrative, and literary texts, and it began to replace Latin as the cultural language (Ahuir and Palazón 2002). Progressively, in the Kingdom of Valéncia, ethnic identity ceased to forge a way for itself with the Catalonian descent and began to base itself on the concept of an individual nation as a foundation of political self-government (Ferrando 1980). Soon, Valencian writers applied this concept to the linguistic realm, and after the thirteenth century there was a wealth of literary production in Valencian, which reached its peak in the fifteenth century. Its authors affirmed that they were writing in “the Valencian language.” Despite this unequivocal denomination, Valencian literature belongs to a common cultural framework with Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and to a lesser extent, with French Languedoc. In fact, there is mutual intelligibility among texts written in Catalan, Valencian, and Balearic varieties, and Valencian texts were often republished in Barcelona. In this context, the denomination “Valencian language” has been interpreted as a token of local pride, in the sense that Valencian writers like boasting of their condition as Valencians (Sanchis Guarner 1980,

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221–222). Another explanation is that the denomination “Valencian” was used to account for the differences in the language, which would hint at the development of an autonomous linguistic system that was replacing many of the archaic words shared with Occitan and Catalan (Peñarroja 1991, 65). In any case, it demonstrates the language-nation bond that had been growing since the Middle Ages. After the decline in literary production in the early decades of the sixteenth century, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century a status of diglossia with no bilingualism progressively developed in the Valencian-speaking territories. Later, in the twentieth century, it turned into a situation of diglossia plus bilingualism (Ninyoles 1995, 35), with Spanish acting as the high-level variety and Valencian as the language used for family and low-level communication. This process of diglossia was intensified by a progressive split between a literary, formal Valencian (which was becoming more and more archaic, so that it is referred to as “Lemosin”) and a popular Valencian, heavily influenced by Spanish (Ninyoles 1995, 53). As a consequence, when writers aimed at recovering the written use of the language in the nineteenth century, both language models were seen to be inadequate: the first was too archaic, whereas the second had reached a state in which it had received too much influence from Spanish. Therefore, in the early years of the twentieth century Valencian still lacked a unified spelling standard.

The Institut d’Estudis Catalans/Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC/Catalan Standard) Currently, the majority of people who write in Valencian apply the standard of Catalan from the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC). This standard, which began with Mr. Fabra’s spelling of Catalan (1913), includes some features of Valencian, but it ignores other very important features. In addition, his dictionary (1932) does not include a great amount of genuine Valencian lexicon. So the Catalan standard triumphed in Catalonia, but in Valéncia the Lo Rat Penat society, dedicated to the study of Valencian culture, rejected it and called upon Lluís Fullana to produce an independent Valencian standard. Fullana’s standard (1914) was adopted by Valencian writers, but it failed to take hold for lack of political backing. An outstanding intellectual of the time, N. Primitiu, states: “Behind the standard of Mr. Fabra there was . . . the Commonwealth of Catalonia, . . . whereas in order to enact the standard of Mr. Fullana, there was, and there is . . . nothing!” (Atienza 2003, 49). Among the Valencian intellectual elite, a conflict arose between two ways of understanding Valencian identity. Some authors, such as A. Pizcueta or Martínez Ferrando, defended a concept that they themselves call pancatalan (Recio 1996), which assimilated Valencian ethnicity with Catalonian ethnicity through the vindication of the Catalonian descent and of the linguistic unity between Valencian and Catalan. This conception clashed with the ethnic identification of the masses, who defined themselves as Valencian. The promotion of a determined ethnic identity on the part of elite can consolidate its privileged position (Safran 1999). The pancatalan intellectuals enjoyed the cultural and economic support of Catalonian

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institutions, while at the same time their minority position permitted them to distance themselves from the masses of Valencian society. A second group of intellectuals, including G. Huguet, R. Gumiel, J. Nebot, and J. M. Bayarri, supported the autonomy of Valencian from other language varieties. Finally, other intellectuals underlined the alleged common origin of Valencian, Balearic, and Catalan, believed to have originated from French Lemosin (Atienza 2002, 12). Within this group, some authors tried to make this historical unity compatible with their feeling of autonomy of the Valencian variety. That is the case of P. Boronat (1899), who claimed that: “The Valencian language, which some despise to the extent of calling it a dialect, is very similar to Catalan, but different from it . . . The unity of our Romance language is indisputable; but the variety present in the Kingdom of Valéncia is genuine, though you may call it dialectal; that is why I have said that the Valencian language is different from Catalan, even though from an strictly philological point of view it would be controversial to make such a statement.” (Atienza 2002, 22) The pancatalan ideology, although progressively extended throughout a sector of the Valencian elite, was met with fierce opposition by the Valencian masses. This is demonstrated by the fact that in the 1918 elections, the Unió Valencianista Regional Party, which called for the creation of a Valencian autonomous state, obtained 3,644 votes; a year later, when Martínez Ferrando, a nationalist intellectual, defended in his Síntesi del criteri valencianista a pancatalan position instead of an autonomous Valencianism, the popular reply was clear and simple: in the 1919 elections, Unió Valencianista plummeted to 933 votes (Atienza 2003, 11–18). In 1932, owing to the lack of a unified spelling for Valencian, a number of pancatalanist intellectuals were able to persuade the main Valencian writers and entities to adhere to the Bases d’Unificació Ortogràfica (Foundations for the unification of spelling), also known as Normes de Castelló or Normes del 32, which were an adaptation of IEC’s standard for Catalan to Valencian (Pérez 1982, 98–103). Nevertheless, the well-known Catalan origin of the Normes does not imply that all of their subscribers supported the idea that Valencian is a dialect of Catalan, since these Normes were introduced as temporary norms, which were necessary for a later creation of a unified spelling for Valencian. However, the Normes became the starting point for the replacement of genuine Valencian lexical and grammatical forms with Catalan ones, in a process of subordination to Catalan that is against Fabra’s own tenets, since he had claimed that Valéncia should establish its own standard in an autonomous way (Polanco 1983). The implantation of the Catalan standard into the Valencian Community was faced with a serious obstacle: the Valencian mind-set demanded a pluricentric codification, but allowing for a pluricentric model would have permitted the possibility of an independent Valencian standard (Polanco 1983, 123). The solution then consisted of presenting the Normes as an autonomous Valencian standard, when in reality it was a step toward the subordination of the Valencian variety to the Catalan variety.

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The interest of the pancatalan elite in establishing a monocentric standard was not a purely linguistic one. In the first place, a single language meant also a common literature, and the Catalan literature needed the support of Valencian authors since the majority of classic authors, like Joanot Martorell or Ausias March, were Valencian, not Catalonian. In the second place, the pluricentric languages need to be pluriethnic (Phillipson 1999, 102), whereas in the pancatalan conception, Valencian ethnicity is assimilated to Catalonian ethnicity. Years later, Fuster (1962) widened the breach between autonomous Valencianists and Valencian pancatalanists when he argued for the adscription of Valencian-speaking territories to the Catalan nation. Based on Marxist tenets, this theory received strong support by anti-Francoist intellectuals all over Spain, and both its internal coherence and its brilliant rhetorical argumentation were to be decisive for Fuster’s wide acceptance by Valencian intellectual elite. Nonetheless, the theory was strongly opposed by society, due to its inherent antipopular rationality, which was a full attack on the strong feeling of particularity and identity of the Valencian people (Calpe 1995, 27–35). This split between the intellectual elite and lay people was falsely settled in 1982 with the enactment of the Statute of Autonomy, which established a symbolic victory for Valencianism by the adoption of Valencian language as the only official denomination.

The Real Acadèmia de Cultura Valenciana/Royal Academy of Valencian Culture (RACV Standard) The consciousness of language unity between Valéncia and Catalonia, widespread among Valencian intellectuals, did not correspond to the linguistic consciousness of the Valencian-speaking community. Pancatalanist writers such as Revest (1930) were highly aware of this: “the denomination Valencian language or simply Valencian is the only one present throughout the territory . . . of our Kingdom, whose sons, except for a few of them, would show great surprise if told that they speak Catalan” (López V. 2001, 45). The survey carried out by Sanchis Guarner and Moll in 1935 for the Linguistic Atlas of the Iberian Peninsula (ALPI) showed that 100 percent of the speakers of Valencian answered that the name of their language was Valencian (García Perales 2001). In fact, even though the educational system of the Valencian Community has been teaching that Valencian is a dialect of Catalan since 1983, the notion of linguistic independence is widely alive in the consciousness of its speakers. The German linguist Voss (2002, 13) also attested that the speakers of Valencian claimed that they speak Valencian, not Catalan. The clash between subordination to Catalan and the Valencian autonomous sociolinguistic awareness reached its climax in the 1970s, when two of the main writers and contributors to the expansion of the Catalan standard ceased to use the Norms of 1932: Xavier Casp and Miquel Adlert. Both writers established the bases for an independent standardization of Valencian in 1977 (Adlert 1977), and these were immediately used by several publications, such as Murta review. A complete Spelling (Ortografia) treaty by the Language and Literature Section of the RACV was published in 1979. After that, Adlert and Casp adopted RACV’s standard and

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republished their previous works in an edited version. Similarly, some writers who had adhered to the Norms of 1932 also changed their mind and used RACV’s standard. The RACV standard plays an important role as a symbol of Valencian ethnic identity. The opposition between groups favors the ethnolinguistic salience of the identities threatened (Fishman 1999), and the RACV standard has become a fundamental symbol of Valencian ethnic identity in contrast with two dominant groups: Catalan and Spanish. Therefore, for twenty years the RACV standard has maintained a peculiar spelling without accents, which permitted an automatic differentiation with respect to the dominant group, Catalan. The standard of RACV became increasingly relevant, not only because it responded to the sociolinguistic consciousness of the Valencian people, but also because it was the only one that had been elaborated by a Valencian public institution. In 1982 it was established as the official standard for administrative use by the Conselleria d’Educació (Department of Education), so that all legislation issued by the autonomous government of Valéncia would be published according to this standard, including the Statute of Autonomy (1982). Three years earlier, the Decree 2003/79 on bilingualism was passed. This legal text, which regulated the integration of Valencian in the educational system, acknowledges the particularity of Valencian as the mother tongue of the Valencian people, establishes the denomination of Valencian as the only official name of the language, and accepts RACV’s spelling rules as those to be used in education. Nevertheless, this language standard was only to be applied for the academic year 1982–1983, since the new Spanish government elected in 1982 repealed the hiring of teachers of Valencian. In turn, the government determined that Valencian should be taught as a dialectal variety of Catalan in education, subordinated to the Catalan standard. In fact, that situation continues to the present. RACV’s standard language ceased being official in 1983, and from that year to 2002 it has held unofficial status, since it was not until April 4, 2002, that the regional government specified the standard to be used in public, administrative, and educational domains. Until then, the standard used officially by the administration depended on the political party that held office. Therefore, RACV’s standard was used from 1995 to 1999 by those administrative bodies controlled by Unio Valenciana, which was in a coalition with the Popular Party of the Valencian Community (PPCV). As part of the coalition, PPCV took charge of the Conselleria d’Educació and endorsed the teaching of the Catalan standard in education. Similarly, in local governments the language policy has been largely dependent on the ruling political party. The council of the capital city, Valéncia, used the RACV’s standard widely from 1991 to 1995 for a great variety of purposes, including street naming, which has been partially respected to the present. As far as the standardization process is concerned, after the publication of the Spelling, RACV has set out on a long, ambitious process of language codification, including: a grammar of the Valencian language (1980, 1982, 1987, and 1996); a Valencian-Spanish dictionary (1992, 1997, 2004, also available online), which became extremely popular when 40,000 issues were distributed by Las Provincias newspaper; a handbook on verb conjugation, with over 7,000 verbs (2006 and

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2008); an oral standard (2005); and a spellchecker for text processors (2007). An outstanding history of the Valencian literature has also been published (2002) and a dictionary, with over 75,000 words, was published in December 2010. According to Pau Giner’s survey1 (2006) on data from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, 15 percent of the books published with Valencian ISBN were written according to RACV’s standard: 858 of the total of 5,679 titles registered from 1979 to 2005. Some of the most important publishing companies in the region, such as Lo Rat Penat and L’Oronella, use the RACV standard with Valencian ISBNs.

The Acceptance of the RACV Standard The RACV standard has fared differently in different societal domains. We summarize here its position vis-à-vis the IEC-Catalan standard.

Institutional Domains: Universities, Press, Radio and TV, and the Internet Valencian universities have followed the IEC-Catalan Standard almost exclusively, both in teaching and in administrative use. The presence of RACV’s standard in higher education is almost limited to Valencianist student unions. Nevertheless, an association of professors, lecturers, and PhDs claiming the independence of the Valencian language and the use of RACV’s standard has been created recently (Colectiu Lluís Fullana). The daily papers are written in Spanish, but the RACV’s standard is used in some opinion columns in Las Provincias, whereas it appears sporadically in some Letters to the Editor in Levante-EMV. There are about ten journals and magazines that use RACV’s standard; however, with the exception of Lletraferit, their distribution is very low. The presence of Valencian according to the IEC-Catalan standard is also scarce. Valencian public TV and radio stations (Ràdio 9 and Canal 9 TV) use IEC-Catalan standard. In addition, it is possible to hear Catalan public stations in Valencian territory. The RACV standard is limited to some radio programs in private stations, such as Radio Luz, 97.7 and 93.1. On the Internet, the use of RACV’s standard is quite widespread. The RACV standard was used in the 1990s by Valéncia Club de Futbol, but today, when the club uses Valencian, it follows the IEC-Catalan standard.

Cultural and Religious Domains The RACV’s standard is widely used in Valencian festivities. Valencian is almost the only language used in the booklets of the Falles, a traditional celebration in praise of Saint Joseph. The RACV is also frequently used in other important festivals and celebrations, such as the Corpus Christi in Valéncia, and the Miracle Plays of Saint Vincent. Especially significant is the Mystery of Elig, a religious performance in Valencian that is documented to have been played since at least the fourteenth century and has been given World Heritage designation by UNESCO. There have been some unsuccessful attempts to adapt the original ancient text of

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the Mystery of Elig performance to the IEC-Catalan standard. The RACV standard has also been used in brochures and leaflets of the Palau de la Música of Valéncia. In literature, the poetry of X. Casp, written in RACV, has been translated to many languages. The RACV’s standard was used in the translation of the New Testament to Valencian, which the Spanish Episcopal Conference approved, even though the Archbishop of Valéncia did not. It was also used in the translation of Canon Law to Valencian, and in the Ordinary of the Mass, of which several thousand issues were printed. In 2008, Lo Rat Penat republished the Catholic Mass book in RACV for Valencian parish churches.

The Business Domain The RACV has been used by some businesses, such as AUMAR highways, the AirNostrum airline, and the Port of Valéncia, and it is still used in some companies.

The Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua/Valencian Academy of the Language (The AVL Standard) On June 13, 1997, around 70,000 people, according to the police, and 500,000, according to the organizers, took part in a demonstration that called for the officialization of the RACV standard. On September 17, 1997, the Valencian Parliament, with a majority of the Popular Party (PPCV), required the Valencian Council of Culture (VCC) to produce a report on the Valencian language, in order to solve the conflict from a political stance. The dictum established that the name of Valencian, endorsed by the Statute of Autonomy, is not understood to be exclusive, so that other denominations may be used. Furthermore, it declares the linguistic unity between Valencian and Catalan, avoiding the rejection of Valencian autonomic sensibility with such euphemistic words as to result in confusion. Finally, it proposes the creation of an institution in charge of fixing the Valencian official standard. Following the CVC report, the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (Valencian Academy of the Language) was established by means of Law 7/1998, issued on September 16, 1998. This law establishes the AVL as “the institution in charge of determining and elaborating, if necessary, the linguistic standard of the Valencian language, as well as watching over the Valencian language according to the lexicographical and literary tradition, the genuine linguistic reality of Valéncia.” In addition, it is also responsible for the process of standardization that has been in place since the Normes de Castelló in 1932 (I, 3). As a result, the RACV standard was excluded from the new standard. Although the progressive newspaper Levante-Emv defends the unity of Valencian and Catalan established by the CVC report, this newspaper (see May 8, 1997, 28; and July 19, 1998, 22–23) sustains that the report was the result of a pact that responded to political interests. In 1997 the Spanish government was established as a result

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of an agreement between the Popular Party of Spain and Convergència i Unió, a Catalonian nationalist party. According to the Levante-EMV, Convergència i Unió demanded that the Popular Party of Spain recognize the unity of Valencian and Catalan in the Valencian Community in exchange for its political support. In this way, the Popular Party of the Valencian Community (PPCV) would have received instructions from the Popular Party of Spain to initiate the process to begin the report. Later, the Valencian Parliament avoided the term “Catalan” in the naming of the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua and named various intellectuals linked to the Real Acadèmia de Cultura Valenciana as members of the AVL (although always a minority with respect to the defenders of the unity of Valencian and Catalan). In accordance with the Academy, the AVL standard must be based on the genuine Valencian linguistic reality. Its task, therefore, consists of a process of valencianization of the Catalan standard. Nevertheless, the Agreement 26/2002 of the AVL, on the creation of educational resources, shows no hint at this process of valencianization, since the text indicates a clear subordination of genuine Valencian forms to Catalan ones in formal registers. The introduction of Valencian genuine forms in primary and secondary schools and of Catalan forms in higher education is a pedagogical strategy to avoid the rejection of the standard by native speakers of Valencian. According to Colom’s survey (1998, 123) in the city of Valéncia, 28 percent of secondary schools rejected the teaching of Valencian for academic and ideological reasons. Similarly, Ponsoda and Segura (1996) revealed that the assimilation to the Catalan standard is more profound with speakers of Spanish than with native speakers of Valencian. Finally, even though the linguistic competence in standard Valencian has remarkably increased in the last years, its social use has not been on par. A Catalan standard that would include more Valencian forms would favor the social use of Valencian, since Valencian speakers would identify more with the standard that is taught and it would, therefore, gain more acceptance and importance for its proximity to the Valencian mother tongue (Redon 2003). In contrast, the Gramàtica (Grammar) of AVL (2006) shows a certain degree of valencianization, in accordance to the foundation basis of the institution, although it does not fulfill the autonomous language aspirations of the Valencian people.

The Status of the RACV Standard after the Creation of AVL With the appearance of AVL, the only institution attributed with language standardization according to the new Statute of Autonomy (2006), the RACV standard has shifted. Instead of being unofficial, it is now completely banned in administrative and public domains. The legal consultants of RACV may still try to appeal the creation of AVL, in the sense that the Statute of Autonomy defines Valencian as a native language, whereas AVL conceives it as a dialect, subordinated to Catalan. Nevertheless, the linguistic conflict has diminished notably in recent years and has seemed to have resolved itself with a definitive triumph of

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the Catalan rules, recognized legally by the AVL. It appears that the PPCV, which harshly criticized the pancatalanism of the Valencian Socialist Party (PSPV), especially during political campaigns, currently does not bring up the subject that often; and Unio Valenciana, whose main platform was the defense of the RACV standard, has practically disappeared from the electoral map. In a nutshell, political interest in the conflict is beginning to wane. Atienza (2005, 212–219) gives us some of the reasons for the failure of the RACV standard. On the one hand, once the Statute of Autonomy was achieved, Valencianism put all its energy into politics. The abandonment of civil disobedience as a strategy can be attributed to the lack of commitment on the part of Valencianism (Atienza 2005, 218). Even in the RACV there is a predominance of academics with excellent qualifications, but with a lack of implication in the defense of Valencian identity. In fact, since 2003 its editorial production in Valencian language has diminished considerably. And in the world of politics, autonomous Valencianism is nothing but a flop. When Unio Valenciana formed a part of the government (1995–1999), it did not change the pro-Catalan linguistic politics and it lost the support of its voters and was absorbed by the Popular Party of the Valencian Community (PPCV), which was perceived as Valencianist because of its anti-pancatalanist ideology. There is also identification between intellectual elites and pancatalanism, which has forced Valencianism to define itself as an anti-intellectual movement of popular rebellion, in such a way that when proponents of Valencianism reached political office, they were not intellectually prepared to assume power. On occasion, the defense of a language by certain groups is merely symbolic and is not linked to its functional vindication (Fishman 1999, 155). Some Spanish speakers in the Valencian Community have supported autonomous Valencianism that, as a consequence, has been labeled as reactionary, pro-francoist, and contrary to the use of Valencian. With no media or press to support Valencianism, this process of stigmatization has been highly successful; the fact that Casp and Adlert fought harshly against Franco’s censorship, and the unconditional commitment of many Valencianists to their language have not been taken into account. On the other hand, the privileged situation of the Catalan standard progressively attracts a majority of committed Valencian speakers, who feel that the only way to save the language is to adopt the Catalan standard. There has also been an internal split, caused by the introduction of accentuation in RACV spelling rules, which has caused a significant decrease of the number of publications using this standard.

Conclusion At the moment, the autonomous Valencian standard is in an agonizing situation. There has been a significant decrease in the number of publications following the RACV’s standard (75 in 1998; 15 in 2005). If we could measure its use in a scale from 0 to 10, it may be argued that it reached a value near 5 sometime during the early 1980s, whereas it would hardly reach 2 at present.

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In this context, it is necessary to reflect on the usefulness of this standard, as well as on its viability. As far as the first issue is concerned, any attempt to save the RACV’s standard will only be justified by the fact that this standard is the closest to the autonomous language of the speakers of Valencian. Therefore, being an independent standard, it would serve to contribute to the social recovery of Valencian. The struggle for the subsistence and the social extension of the RACV’s standard is undoubtedly a hard task, which would require coherent, scheduled action from all Valencianist institutions, as well as Valencians in general. Note 1. I am extremely thankful to this author, who has allowed me to use his work and data, since his La normativa propia valenciana [An own standard for Valencian] has not been published yet.

References Adlert, Miquel (1977). En defensa de la llengua valenciana. Valéncia: Del Sénia al Segura. Ahuir, Artur, and Alícia Palazón (2002). Historia de la lliteratura valenciana, I–II, Valéncia: L’Oronella. Atienza, Antoni (2002). Ciencia i Patria. La figura de Fausti Barberà i Martí. Introduction to De regionalisme i valentinicultura, 11–82. Valéncia: L’Oronella. Atienza, Antoni (2003). El valencianisme de Nicolau Primitiu. In Nicolau Primitiu i Valéncia, 11–195. Valéncia: L’Oronella. Atienza, Antoni (2005). Travessant el desert. In 25 anys de les Normes Valencianes de la RACV, dites d’El Puig, 199–230. Valéncia: L’Oronella. Calpe, Àngel V. (1995). La guerra insidiosa. Valéncia: Lo Rat Penat. Colom, Ferran (1998). El futur de la llengua entre els joves de Valéncia. Valéncia: Denes. Diari Oficial de la Comunitat Valenciana 133 (1983). Llei 4/1983, de 23 de Novembre, d’ús i ensenyament del valencià, Section 2: 1464. Ferrando, Antoni (1980). Consciència idiomática i nacional dels valencians. Valéncia: Universitat de València.

Fishman, Joshua A. (1999). Sociolinguistics. In Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, Joshua A. Fishman (ed)., 152–164. New York: Oxford University Press. Fuster, Joan (1962). Nosaltres els valencians. Barcelona: Edicions 62. García Perales, Vicent F. (2001). Atlas lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI): Edició i estudi del País Valencià. PhD dissertation, Universitat de València. López Verdejo, Voro (2001). La filosofia llingüística de Carles Salvador, Lluïs Revest i Josep Giner. Valéncia: RACV. McLennan, Sean (1996). Sociolinguistic analysis of Serbo-Croatian. Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics 18: 103–109. Niyoles, Rafael L. (1995). Conflicte llingüístic valencià. Valéncia: 3 i 4. Peñarroja, Leopoldo (1991). Sintaxis i lexic en el Tirant lo Blanch (Del valencià quatrecentiste al valencià modern). In Literatura valenciana del segle XV: Joanot Martorell i Sor Isabel de Villena, 37–66. Valéncia: Generalitat Valenciana (Consell Valencià de Cultura). Peñarroja, Leopoldo (1990). El mozárabe de Valencia. Madrid: Gredos.

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Pérez Moragon, Francesc (1982). Les normes de Castelló. Valéncia: 3 i 4. Phillpson, Robert (1999). Political science. In Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), 94–109. New York: Oxford University Press. Polanco, Lluís B. (1983). La normativa al País Valencià. Problemàtica i perspectives. In Problemàtica de la normativa del català (Actes de les primeres jornades d’estudi de la llengua normativa. Departament de Llengua Catalana), M. T. Cabré et al. (eds)., 107–146. Barcelona: PAM. Ponsoda, Joan J., and Carles Segura (1996). Una alternativa tripartida: la varietat tradicional, la varietat estàndard catalana o la varietat estàndard espanyola. Caplletra 21: 47–93. Recio, Carles (1996). Valencianisme en el temps (I). Valéncia: L’Oronella. Redon, Angels (2003). Una experiencia de billingüisme educatiu: Valéncia

1982–2002. Revista de Filologia Valenciana 10: 143–166. Safran, William (1999). Nationalism. In Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), 77–94. New York: Oxford University Press. Sanchis Guarner, Manuel (1972). La llengua dels valencians. Valéncia: Eliseu Climent. Sanchis Guarner, Manuel (1980). Aproximació a la història de la llengua catalana. Barcelona: Salvat. Strubell, Miquel, and Jude Webber (1991). The Catalan Language: Progress towards Normalisation. Sheffield: The Anglo-Catalan Society Occasional Publications. Veny, Joan (1982). Els parlars catalans. Palma de Mallorca: Moll. Voss, Antje (2002). Das Valencianische zwischen autonomie und assimilation. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

28 The Failure of “German Language Advocacy” among Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews prior to and since the Holocaust: The Major Travails and the Minor Triumphs of an Unprotected Language JOSHUA A. FISHMAN

Introduction: Genesis Scenarios Although no one doubts the early and initially close association between Yiddish and German, a lively debate is still going on as to the exact relationship between the two during the first five centuries of their pre–World War II association. The older and still better established school of thought, represented by Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language (1973 [1980, 2008]), traces the origin and eastward spread of the “Jewish ways of using Germanic speech” from eleventh-century Rhineland and its major cities of Worms, Mainz, and Spier. A newer view, represented by Paul Wexler (1991), posits the early Germanic relexification of a JudeoSorbian variety and its subsequent spread both westward and eastward with marked Slavic characteristics. The only reason for mentioning this difference in this chapter is because both scenarios involve the marked influence of major nonGermanic “components” upon Yiddish at its very genesis (Judeo-French and Judeo-Italian, both referred to as Laaz [strange, foreign] in then-contemporary lay and rabbinic works, in the Weinreich version; and Judeo-Sorbian and Judeo-Greek 349

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in the Wexler version). Of course, major Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic influences were present from the very outset too, in both versions of the genesis of Yiddish, due to the culturally normative male practice of spending every day, from age three to as late as family funds or personal ability and perseverance permitted, in the study of the classic and rabbinic Jewish texts and their memorization, explication, and phrase-by-phrase translation into local Jewish vernaculars. It is this particular cultural practice, which led to the rise of at least a dozen post-exilic vernaculars all across the diasporic Mediterranean world and even far beyond it. As a result of the above omnipresent “Judaizing” factors, plus the nonstandardized nature of all Germanic and Slavic varieties of the time, whether oral or written (even at that early time, most if not all Jewish males were nevertheless already literate, due to their prolonged textual studies, and direct citations can be marshaled, both in rabbinic and even in non-Jewish verbatim sources, from the very earliest period of Yiddish roughly a thousand years ago), it can be demonstrated that Yiddish was never exactly like “Gentile German” from the very outset. This is also reflected by the earliest extant written citation of 1272 (Kriwaczek 2005) and the earliest extant multilingual Yiddish dictionary of 1549 (Fishman 1995). The former citation would be equally non-understandable to modern German speakers and modern Yiddish speakers today, both languages having gone their own separate ways in the intervening centuries, so much so that the modern Yiddish version would clearly be considered distinctly non-German today (a git elf dem vos trogt ot dem makhzer in shil arayn/God bless whoever brings this Holiday prayer book into the synagogue). The later work includes equivalents of all Yiddish entries in several other languages, including German, that were likely to be of use to Jewish merchants and travelers. Had Yiddish been exactly or even sufficiently like German, no separate column for German would have been necessary.

Not Exactly like Gentile German Seemingly, not being exactly like German was an unstable and ambiguous state that invited resolution in either of two directions: becoming more like German, on the one hand, or becoming even less like German, on the other hand. The early intra-communal names for Yiddish reflect this ambiguity, among them being loshn-ashkenaz (either the language of Germany or the Language of Ashkenaz [= German Jewry]), yidish-daytsh (Jewish-German) or its cognate yidish-taytsh (Yiddish translaion), zhargon (jargon), and, only since the seventeenth century (and with the passage of time, exclusively) Yiddish. The fact that some German specialists continued to consider Yiddish to be a variety of German well into the 20th century is perspectivally irrelevant for almost all Yiddish speakers. It does not correspond to any intra-communal view or aspiration since the beginning of the twentieth century and must be seen as counterbalanced by another outsider designation, namely Ashkenazi German. The latter is a scholarly term (Wexler 1981) coined to designate the manner in which many Yiddish-speakers spoke German, rather than how they spoke Yiddish. Increasingly, speaking or writing Yiddish in a fashion “more like non-Jewish German” or “less like non-Jewish

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German,” became a “marker”, that is, a stylistic feature of which all (both Jews and non-Jews) were conscious and that was, therefore, as is the case with all “markers,” not only interpreted as reflecting an “unconscious agenda identity,” but one which was very often consciously utilized accordingly.

German for Jewish Modernization: West and East With time, Yiddish inevitably became the vehicle of mass Jewish modernization/ secularization, first in East-Central Europe and then in Eastern Europe around the middle of the nineteenth century. In contrast to an ultra-traditionalization response (akin to what might now be termed “fundamentalism”), which some lay and rabbinic spokesman preferred in the face of unwelcome social change, a substantial group of more “enlightened” rabbinic and lay leaders advocated many and far-reaching changes, whether in religious observance, dietary and health practices, political participation, Europeanization of clothing and facial-hair styles, leisure-time activities, cross-cultural contacts with non-Jewish co-territorial neighbors, and, above all, secular education for adults and for children. Such extensive changes were propelled by attendant and constantly rising urbanization, new methods of production and distribution and, therefore, new trades and occupations (as well as unemployment and poverty related to the lesser profitability of peddling, small-shop keeping and artisanship), and closer physical and psychological proximity to the co-territorial non-Jewish populations which both the growing cities, factories, and political socialization engendered. Both the resistance to and the advocacy of modernization required and facilitated greater communication (and new media of communication, particularly via a huge expansion of inexpensive print, most of it in Yiddish) between community leaders and their constituencies, adherents or would-be adherents, and raised the question of “what kind of Yiddish to use,” orally and in print, in the variegated political-educational-productivization and mobilization efforts directed at the Jewish masses more generally, by both Jewish and non-Jewish authorities. All but a handful of the new Jewish urban elites in Eastern Europe came to realize that neither Hebrew, Russian, nor Polish could “get through” to anywhere near the numbers that they hoped to reach, influence, and lead. Yiddish was really almost the only option, whether one liked it or not (even being an option for advocating greater use and modernization of Hebrew, when that became fashionable late in the century or early in the next) (Fishman 2002). Of course, there was also the possibility of using German, particularly in Ashkenaz I (the original German heartland areas that are not within the main purview of the Eastern European focus of this article [the latter being known, following Weinreich, as Ashkenaz II]). In general, Germanization efforts amounted to an assimilatory de-ethnization movement rather than to an ethnic mobilization movement. It had been successfully deployed by corresponding Jewish modernization efforts and tendencies among German and nearby Central European Jews (Western Hungarian, Czech, Slovak) half a century or so earlier than the generally failed efforts to import it into Eastern Europe. The success of the effort to spread German among Western-Yiddish speaking Jews in the German heartland coincided

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with the so called “Western Haskala” (enlightenment) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This success was predicated both on linguistic and supra-linguistic grounds.

The Collapse of “Western Yiddish” Linguistically, Western Yiddish had remained appreciably closer to its co-territorial German origins, not having wandered as far from its area of origin and not having been exposed to Slavic (and not even to as many learned Hebraic) influences as had Eastern Yiddish. Accordingly, it was simpler to shift linguistically from Western Yiddish to German, and to accept a folk-linguistic bias shared by many Jews and co-territorial non-Jews alike, that the former was no more than an insular and nonprestigious dialect of the latter. No such bias had been impressed along linguistic grounds upon the speakers of Dutch (even though that could have been the case had it not actually become standardized before German, which was not a unified written entity until the mid-nineteenth century), although it was used against Plattdeutsch, which was even less similar to High German than was Yiddish. Supralinguistically, Western European Jews were already more Westernized in 1800 than the bulk of Eastern European Jews were even three generations later and, therefore, they were appreciably further along the road of interpreting themselves as no more than “Germans (‘Europeans’) of Moses’ persuasion.” For such Westernized or Westernizing Jews, German represented both modernity (secularization and technical superiority) and German-ness (the possibility of equal political rights and other privileges of citizenship) for Jews in the Western-“Germanosphere.” Reform Judaism accepted German as its liturgical language with few qualms, and thousands upon thousands eagerly employed Moses Mendelsohn’s (1729– 1786) German translation of the Old Testament (referred to, by part of its Hebrew name, as the biyur), initially published in Hebrew characters (1783) so as to be usable even by Jews who knew no Christian letters (galkhes, or tonsured script). The biyur (introduction, guide) quickly became the text via which German itself could most quickly be acquired by Jews in its much vaunted “pure” and nonvernacular (and, therefore, even more Yiddish-distant) form. Indeed, so successful was the Western (German) Haskala in fosterng the acquisition of German among those most directly and strongly exposed to its thinking that their own views of and use of Western Yiddish deteriorated rapidly, to the point that this much maligned variety of Yiddish (dubbed maushelen [Mosesy, i.e., spoken in an obviously Jewish way]) became increasingly impoverished and virtually extinct by World War I.

Efforts on Behalf of Repairing the Growing German-Yiddish “Gap” in Eastern Europe: Einbau Pro-German Eastern European “modernizers” also contended with linguistic and supra-linguistic factors. Eastern Yiddish extended all the way from the

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German-Slavic border on the West, to the furthermost Baltics in the northeast, up to the Greek lands in the south (i.e., well into the former Ottoman-occupied Balkan territory), and on to the outer reaches of the Ukraine in the southeast. It had become vastly more removed from Standard German by the mid-nineteenth century than Western Yiddish had ever been and had developed an intellectual Standard variety heavily impacted by learned Hebraic lexicon and grammar, on the one hand, and a folksier informal variety appreciably impacted by Slavic phonology, lexicon, and grammar, on the other hand, both of which were conspicuously absent in Western Yiddish. It had not only attained a larger repertoire of informal to formal varieties, but several of these had begun to appear in an increasingly extensive literature (secular and religious), equally accessible and popular across its own three major dialect lines (Central, North-Eastern, and South-Eastern). As time passed, the archaic and archaic-sounding Western Yiddish classics increasingly began to be replaced by Eastern Yiddish translations and adaptations (Kerler 1999), so that even a reading knowledge of Western Yiddish (and its possibly attendant utility as a bridge to German) began to atrophy and disappear. On the one hand, supra-linguistically, the combined effect of a much lower German population density than that which existed in the Western Yiddish territory, notwithstanding any possible influences from German Stammsiedlung “colonies” in Eastern Europe, such as those that existed in Galicia and in Bukowina, and on the other hand, feedback from noticeably stronger Slavic language contacts and from nationality consciousness stemming from all the indigenous non-Jewish populations upon Jewish Eastern Europe, not to mention constant urbanization and political mobilization, were ultimately much too strong for any pro-German modernizers to overcome, even given the prolonged positive reputation of all things and ideas that were considered German. Neither elitist attendance at German universities (often to escape Czarist arrest), nor attendance at annual fairs in Leipzig, Danzig/Memel by Jewish merchants and wholesalers from Eastern Europe could overcome or come even close to competing in daily usage and reward-potential with long-established man-in-the-street (not to mention women and children at home and at play) spoken, sung, and written usage, the clandestine or open workers’ organizations, political parties, schools at all levels for adults and children, and a virtually endless sea of periodicals (a thousand or more in Poland alone). This was accompanied by books, pamphlets, posters, and “fliers” that flowed forth in Yiddish. But, although in hindsight their position seems hopeless, the Germanizers in the East did not give up without a hefty struggle, the echoes of which are still recognizable, at times and among certain strata, in Yiddish in speech and in print to this very day, well over a century later. However, most of these Germanisms had been noticeably diminishing in frequency and acceptability, with only some of the most change-resistant Ultra-Orthodox press still exhibiting them aplenty by the outbreak of World War II. However, the determining factor in the defeat of Germanization efforts was the military/political expulsion of German influence after World War I, on the one hand, and the defeat of the entire German-Jewish trans-ethnization model of Jewish modernization, on the other hand. Eastern

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European Jews not only couldn’t aspire to become Germans, but they couldn’t even aspire to become Poles, Russians, and so on (for which the acquisition of German would not have been functional anyway). While German Jews had mostly opted to become modern “Germans of Moses’ persuasion,” Eastern European Jews mostly opted to become modern and to remain Jewish in a variety of secular and/ or religious political colorations. Thus the attempt to make Yiddish more like German in Eastern Europe and, thereby to attract Jews to it, failed definitively when German was no longer an open-sesame to modernization in that part of the world, a part of the world in which it had never been the language of government, trade, industry, politics, social mobility, or education outside of Austro-Hungary and in which, let it be remembered, trans-ethnification and trans-linguification more generally were both roundly rejected by all concerned, Jews and non-Jews alike.

The Conscious Attempts to Make Yiddish Less like German: Ausbau There were also anti-Yiddish sentiments (and even proclamations) in Jewish Eastern Europe, of course, but they were generally fleeting, relatively minor, and did not lead in a assimilatory direction for Jews nor in a Germanizing direction for Yiddish. For the ordinary individual (the so called “Jew of the whole year round”) supra-linguistic realities were (and ever are) determinant of linguistic ones, although among intellectual elites the contrary is often the case. There were some well-known calls on behalf of fostering a daytsh-yidishe brik (a German-Yiddish bridge), but nothing much came of them, other than attempts to get around troublesome Czarist prohibitions against licensing Yiddish publications or permitting Yiddish theaters or street demonstrations. On the other hand, opposition to “excessive” Germanisms (admittedly a perspectival judgment, and ultimately a sliding scale that had pro-Yiddish dialectal roots) started early and was fairly unrelenting, to the point that by the end of the nineteenth century even Hebraists or Russifiers attempted to write “good Yiddish” when they wanted to reach and influence the Jewish masses that were functionally illiterate in any other tongue. Mendl LefinSatenover, the first author of a free-standing monolingual Yiddish translation of a book of the Bible (in this instance Proverbs [1814], full-Bible bilingual translations into Yiddish having been available since the often reprinted Magishey-minkhe, 1725–1719) at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, stated that it was his predilection to “distance Yiddish from German and to write it as it is spoken amongst us in our Eastern Podolye” (in der mizrekh-padolye shelonu), revealing in this one brief and simple expression both his deep pro-Slavic and profound pro-Hebrew sympathies for the “authentic” stylistic development of Yiddish (Fishman 1985, 2010). His work was immediately met by both sharp criticism (even prior to publication!) as well as by support informed by the historicalphilosophical and comparative linguistics of the time. While his detractors attacked Lefin (in Hebrew) for using a “vulgar and corrupt tongue,” presumably in contrast to the sofe brure uneime praised in the daily prayerbook, his advocates

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defended him (also in Hebrew) on the ground that vernaculars all over the world were being developed by the writers and intellectuals who championed them and fashioned them into independent and elegant literary and educational vehicles. As the prime example of one such formerly lowly dialect, English was constantly mentioned (in a part of the world in which it had hitherto been totally unknown), and the insistence of English writers on not ceding priority to either German or French was emphasized to legitimize the non-German direction of Yiddish modernization in Eastern Europe.

“Good Yiddish” The concept of “good Yiddish” required at least something of an unofficial standard for its cultivation (there being no official governmental body, except in the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence, between 1925 to 1990, that could officially define and enforce it). Whereas the first Yiddish newspaper in the Czarist Empire (Kol Mevaser 1862) and those that came after it, and the burgeoning Yiddish press in the United States (from 1880 and onward to this very day, where the Yiddish Forverts has reached 110 years of age as of 2009, and the Yiddish Tsukunft more than half a dozen years more!) were all frequently, even if unconsciously Germanizing, a consensus ultimately developed about “literary Yiddish” among Yiddish linguists, lexicographers, writers, and polished spokespersons for all political and religious movements. Indeed, these proto-elites were much more united in their anti-Germanism than in most other ideological respects. The apogee of anti-Germanism was reached in the early to mid-30’s when the Yiddish Scientific Institute YIVO (in Vilne, then in Poland) and the Central Yiddish School Organization (Warsaw) and the Beys-Yakov Schools for Girls (Lodz), all in the secular capitalist world, and the Yiddish sections of the Scientific Academies of Soviet White Russia and the Ukraine in the Communist world, adopted orthographic rules and guidelines that were clearly anti-German in nature, even if they differed in some details in several other respects. This was crystal clear at all other linguistic levels in all of the YIVO publications and, above all, in Max Weinreich’s popular pamphlet Daytshmerish toyg nit (“Germanisms are No Good,” 1938), which served simultaneously as a guide for teachers, pupils, journalists, writers, and lay-adults more generally. The fact that interwar Poland, the Baltic states, Rumania, and (until the late 1930s) the Soviet Union boasted several hundred Jewish elementary, secondary, and even tertiary schools in which Yiddish was the regular language of instruction made it possible for these institutional language policies to effectively define required usage for many thousands of children in the 1930s, based entirely on an Eastern European consensus that neither Jews nor their language were to be Germanized in any way, shape, or form. The ultra-Orthodox, who also sponsored a large number of Yiddish day schools of their own after World War I (Kazhdan 1947) and who had an understandable predilection for more traditional usage in language as in most other things, accepted neither the YIVO’s nor the Soviet’s norms. They required a “traditionalist

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norm” and the one that they adopted was simultaneously both anti-German (antiMaskilic) and anti-modern (“anti-atheistic”) more generally (Birnbaum 1931, 1977). By the time World War II began, only some of the most extreme ultraOrthodox circles still reflected the re-Germanization fashion in Yiddish that had taken hold among them more than a century earlier, but theirs was substantially also a distancing effort from secular Yiddish orthographic patterns rather than an expression of a Germanizing ethnonational preference.

Yiddish and German since the Holocaust The major fact to keep in mind about the relationship between Yiddish and German after the Holocaust (even a more important fact than the understandable Jewish abhorrence of all things German) is that within a decade after World War II had ended, the bulk of the speakers of Yiddish were no longer in Europe and, therefore, further from direct German influences than ever before in the entire history of Yiddish. The major centers of Yiddish are now in the United States or Israel. In both places, ultra-Orthodox and secularist schools, periodicals, books, and textbooks continue to carry on their efforts. Judging from these sources, the avoidance of Germanisms is rarely a matter of interest or even of conscious awareness. Thus, the impact of German continues to erode, if only because there is no source from which any such influence could emanate and compete with other influences upon Yiddish usage, particularly those from English and modern Hebrew (“Israeli,” à la Zuckermann 2010). The YIVO’s “Unified Yiddish Orthography” (UYO) has slowly but surely gained adherents. It is the only orthography now followed in secularist circles and, of late, it has partially broken through even into Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox circles as well (namely Toras Harav, Agudes Yisotel, and Beys Yakov publications). Accordingly, the former impact of German on Yiddish-in-print, conscious or merely habitual, has been largely counteracted in secularist circles and is slowly weakening in Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox ones as well. Several of the latter are now published in mixed or “interstitial” orthographies and the direction of any further change that they may experience is clearly toward the UYO. This is a small but noteworthy triumph in the annals of non-governmental language planning among non-state-building languages. A smaller but still noteworthy success is continuing to unfold at the lexical level. Neologisms pertaining to the realms of science and technology, once so massively dependent on obvious New High German borrowings, are now clearly independent of that source. The elimination of German borrowings, however, still meets up with some rejection on the grounds that opposition to them is akin to “still fighting the last war,” even after that war ended more than half a century ago with the eradication of direct Yiddish-German contacts. Only a small and shrinking proportion of Yiddish speakers now have any knowledge or consciousness of “what is German” at all, and this, of course, renders any continued de-Germanization efforts more difficult (or, as its few opponents maintain, unnecessary and nonsensical). Lexical de-Germanization is currently associated largely with the publications and activities of the New York–based

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League for Yiddish, its late founder and former director Mordkhe Schaechter (1969), and with Yiddish courses at the college level, where the need for neologisms pertaining to popular fads and technological innovations is most clearly felt. Since most of the individuals who constitute the small and largely academic coterie of active “de-Germanizers” and “neologism coiners” are only in their thirties and forties (namely, their list-serve VAZMAY (Vi azoy zogt men af yidish) and have never lived in proximity to German speakers, it can be expected that their stylistic lexical efforts along these lines will continue for roughly another half a century and then may well be taken up by their own students. Some of these neologisms have been adopted by the periodical press and, in some cases, have experienced a truly remarkable diffusion in a relatively brief period. Yiddish will still remain a Germanic language, of course, and most of its neologisms continue to be derived from the Germanic component of the language, but the principle of Ausbau from New High German may well continue to be as staunchly subscribed to in the future as it is now. If so, Yiddish will not be the only Germanic language to follow this approach to “autonomy motivated distancing.” Judging by the Yiddish of the young and youngish individuals who are the mainstays of today’s best Yiddish in print, speech, song, and theater, there will be no let-up to the antiGerman tendencies and a constant buildup of anti-English ones for the foreseeable future. The absence of large-scale sociopolitical processes to support any such trends is testimony to the self-directed isolation of pro-Yiddish efforts from the major influences affecting Jewry today in any of the centers of its current concentration.

Theoretical Review Following Kloss (1932, 1967), language planning is commonly separated into corpus planning and status planning. These must be seen as two sides of the same coin, however, since there is no real corpus planning without functional status issues being uppermost in the minds of the planners. The latter must also influence the former, every bit as much as new functional statuses inevitably influence the direction of corpus planning. This relationship between status and corpus is also clear enough in Abstand languages (languages that are too different in their basic makeup to permit the weaker of the two to be considered a “mere dialect” of the other). However, it is in languages that are basically quite similar to each other that the interdependence of status and corpus comes must clearly and urgently to the fore. Under such circumstances, the basic independence of the weaker from the stronger language can be questioned, and certain newer statuses may be denied to it on the very basis of its assumed dialectal status. Under such circumstances, the adherents of new and higher statuses for the weaker language will champion further “autonomy motivated distancing” in the corpus planning realm, just as the opponents of such new and higher statuses for the weaker language will oppose such distancing (Fishman 2000). There are several different routes or “rationales” that autonomy-motivated corpus distancing may follow. One route is to emphasize a classical (usually a

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classical religious) tradition with which the weaker language is associated but with which the stronger one is not. Accordingly, Urdu corpus planning draws its inspiration from Perso-Arabic (and ultimately, Islamic) sources for its corpus planning, while Hindi remains solidly committed to the Sanskritic path of Hinduism. Via mutually incomprehensible script selection, language purification movements, and disparate classic bases for the formulation of neologisms, the two languages that are originally so similar in popular speech as to be indistinguishable, have become highly and visibly different in print. Had Yiddish followed this path, it would have cultivated corpus planning based upon its unique Hebraic religious tradition. Indeed, the traditional script difference between Yiddish and German would have lent itself to this approach, but there the similarity between the two contrasted cases ends. The Eastern European protagonists of advancing or opposing autonomy-motivated distancing between Yiddish and German rarely considered the rejection or adoption of Latin script or of Latinisms in corpus planning. This had been an ingredient of the earlier German Haskala, which bitterly opposed and ridiculed Western Yiddish. The ultimate adoption by German Jews of German script for intra-communal and even religious purposes was viewed in Eastern Europe as having led to Reform Judaism and to apostasy. Accordingly, the Eastern Haskala took pains to differentiate modernization from Christianization and the use of Latin script (or, more broadly, of Latinisms) in corpus planning. Such use was decidedly a non-starter in the East. Similarly, the adherents of distancing Yiddish from German in Eastern Europe could not achieve their goals via maximal Hebraization in matters lexical (the scripts of the languages already being virtually identical). Hebrew for secular purposes was opposed by many of the minority that knew it well in Eastern Europe, because they regarded such usage as a profanation of the sacred. On the other hand, Hebrew was insufficiently understood among the rank and file of both males and (particularly) females to depend upon it for communication with the bulk of the Jewish masses. Basically, pro-German tendencies and efforts within Yiddish in the West (when the West consisted primarily of the German lands) and antiGerman ones in the East (when the East consisted primarily of the Slavic lands) succeeded or failed not on any linguistic similarity/dissimilarity basis but on the basis of large-scale sociopolitical efforts surrounding the Jewish masses and, on a smaller scale (but, nevertheless, quite substantial), on ones emanating directly from the Jewish fold per se. This is not the place in which to review in detail the several other rationales and directions for attaining autonomy-motivated distancing that remained unutilized in the modernization of Eastern European Jewry at a time when German represented the acme of modernization. The Einbau versus Ausbau distinction seems to apply best to the facts of the Yiddish case as well as to the facts of a few other cases around the world. In Norway, also, no religious fault line fell between the adherents of Ryksmaal and Landsmaal (Haugen 1966). The former, also known as Dano-Norwegian, was considered more cultured and intellectual by most cityfolk but was regarded by “nationalists” and rural farmer and fisher folk as corrupted by foreign influences that had robbed it of any real authenticity. Indeed, the case of Norway is very much like the Yiddish one, since only one ethnoreligious

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identity is involved, but the rural and coastal Norwegian pursuit of authenticity via distancing from outside influences was, in many ways, even more difficult to attain than was the Yiddish one. Landsmal (renamed “Nynorsk” = New Norwegian) was a primarily artificial creation, assembled on the model of ancient Viking inscriptions, drawn from a variety of dialectal sources, whose major common feature was that they were judged to be “totally autochthonous” and non-Danish in influence. Distancing from Danish was the major consideration, and whenever dialectal Western Norwegian alternatives existed, the one that was furthest from Danish was the one that was preferred by Landsmaal. The result was still a Scandinavian-Germanic language but one that left no doubt as to its independence from Danish. There are still other examples of the Ausbau principle in action (outside of the additional major script issue of the Urdu-Hindi case): Frisian versus Dutch, Belarusian versus Russian, Gallego versus Portuguese, and, in earlier centuries, also Dutch versus German, and Slovak versus Czech. On the other hand, the Croatian versus Serbian case, the Rusyn versus Ukrainian case, and the Macedonian versus Bulgarian case are all more similar to the Urdu-Hindi one in that script differences ultimately tied back to different classicals are also involved. Nevertheless, in all the above cases, as well as in the Yiddish-German Ausbau one as well, the underlying causes of distancing success or failure must be sought in basic econopolitical, sociocultural, and historical factors, rather than in accompanying contemporary linguistic ones per se. Language is but one part of the total complex scene, rather than either an independent determinant or a sole consequent thereof. In the Eastern European Yiddish-German case, the major script differences between the two languages ultimately played only a minor role. Jews learned to read and write other Christian alphabets without this having any impact on the implementation or mastery of their Jewish languages or identities. Also, there was no major difference between the Westernizing penchants of the two opposed parties. Those who favored modernization via Einbau with written New High German often even accepted a diglossic model in which German and Hebrew would share H (“high” power) functions (perhaps also with Polish or Russian in the West), while Yiddish would continue to be the omnipresent informal and intimate L (“low” power) vernacular. Ironically enough, the Ausbau advocates who favored the maximal de-Germanization of Yiddish were, nevertheless, still under the strong influence of German-derived language and ethnicity ideologies. These reached back to Herder and stressed language purity (in the German case this meant the rejection of French loanwords) and the absolute necessity of an authentic and independent language in order for its speakers to successfully constitute an independent and creative nation. The modernization of Yiddish could not escape from this German-derived ideology, even though it has been amazingly effective (certainly effective given its well nigh total lack of governmental enforcement connections that related to distancing it from German) in escaping from the shadow of German in its corpus planning per se. Now that this escape has been substantially accomplished, at least by a noteworthy segment of the sadly decimated Yiddishspeaking and Yiddish-writing community, it is probably time (if not “high time” as some would claim) to give attention to the inroads of English and Hebrew and

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to the lack of inter-generational mother-tongue transition within the Yiddish secular world.

Finally: Noticing the Elephant at the Zoo Meanwhile, “back at the ranch,” much more was happening to Yiddish than its struggle with the German language that has so fascinated many linguists. The German Nazis had a much more devastating impact on Yiddish than did the Haskala at its very worst. As was the case with the Amerindians and the Aborigines and their respective languages, the speakers of Yiddish were subjected to conquest, occupation and, finally (“the final solution”) to annihilation en masse (“Holocaust”). In his famous poem, “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue), Paul Celan wrote that “Der todt ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” [Death is a Master from Germany], and certainly this applied to Yiddish as well. Having lost six million speakers, two million of them children and infants, there is most probably no chance that it will ever recover its former ubiquity among those Eastern European Jews and those of their offspring who miraculously survived the utter German-inspired carnage and disruption of World War II, or among those who were fortunate enough to migrate elsewhere before the war erupted. This irreparable loss goes far beyond the scope of any possible ameliorative attempts. Turning then to those millions of Yiddish speakers who had the good luck or the foresight to resettle outside of Eastern Europe generations ago, we encounter the negative impact of more ordinary varieties of dislocation––virtually simultaneous urbanization, secularization, migration, and globalization. Urbanization already began in the old homelands prior to World War I and it was continued and accelerated in the countries of resettlement (including the Soviet sphere). It brought Yiddish speakers into much closer residential and occupational proximity with non-Jews, necessitating a new lingua franca that inevitably turned out to be the local language of government. From this followed the loss of whatever Yiddish monolingualism there might have existed earlier (mostly among females) as Jews increasingly undertook roles in urban occupations, non-Jewish schools, political parties, and the opportunities of civic nationalism and social mobility in democratic centers of mass-immigration. These processes too had begun prior to the massmigrations out of Eastern Europe; however, in totally new and unfamiliar surroundings in which ethnoreligious nationalism was either lacking or much weaker than it had been in Eastern Europe and in which social mobility was much more widely available. As a result, their potency vis-à-vis language shift was magnified. These processes quickly led to the de-Yiddishization of most Jewish immigrants derived from Eastern Europe. In most ways, these processes also affected all nonJewish immigrants as well, and their respective languages also generally languished in the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia (all predominantly English-speaking), and even in the Soviet Union. Although the Jewish rate of reculturation and re-linguification was generally much higher among them than among other in-migrants to the Anglosphere, this was due to the impossibility of any conceivable “homeland reinforcements.”

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Two Unique Factors, One Negative and One Positive If blood-letting and assimilative globalization are widespread debilitative factors for small languages, the re-vernacularization of Hebrew, the Zionist rejection or downgrading of Yiddish as a language of detested diasporic subjugation, and the enthronement of Hebrew in the newly founded State of Israel, were, taken together, a constant-problem nexus for Yiddish quite unlike that faced by most other languages. The presence of a revernacularized Classical in the non-Jewish cases (i.e., a linguistic rival within the cultural fold) proved to be a greater stumbling block for Yiddish than it did for the varieties of vernacular Arabic (vis-à-vis Classical Arabic) or for the Hindu vernaculars (vis-à-vis Sanskrit). The other classicals have remained essentially unvernacularized and, therefore, are assigned to religious rituals or texts or other functions requiring higher literacy and formality. As a result, the classicals and the vernaculars generally avoided functional clashes in the non-Jewish cases. In the Jewish case, however, Yiddish and Hebrew underwent modernization and secularization at roughly the same time, and although Hebrew retained its ritualized and textified classical functions, it also attained modern, secular spoken ones as well. As a result, it clashed functionally with all diasporic Jewish vernaculars, Yiddish being the foremost among them and the most noteworthy one in the pre-Yishuv and early-Yishuv years (pre-Zionist years) of most of the State’s founders. In Israel this clash also had behind it the force of law, Yiddish books being specially taxed, newspapers burned in their kiosks, theaters being refused permanent venues, speakers being booed off the stage and even those speaking it informally in the street being publicly admonished not to do so (Fishman and Fishman 1978, Shohamy 2008). The modern undemocratic Eurocentric monocentric “one state-one people-one language” model of language policy remained unquestioned (at least vis-à-vis Jews) until fairly recently, when Yiddish in Israel could no longer count on many more youthful native speakers in secular circles. During the past few decades, annual prizes have been instituted there for noteworthy Yiddish authors, state stipends for a meager number of Yiddish books, broadcasts, and theater, all of which are mere window-dressing of the “too little and too late” variety that “can no longer do harm to Hebrew” and, above all, that are adopted primarily because they diffuse criticism from abroad. All in all, they are more camouflage than substance insofar as Yiddish in Israel is concerned. However, the additional dislocation to Yiddish caused by a “rival within the gates” has been somewhat ameliorated by the dawning recognition that Yiddish also possesses a special “friend at court” as well. Ultra-Orthodox Jewry has slowly recovered from the horrors of the Holocaust and has reemerged as a fully vibrant culture with a very dense population concentration, an extremely high birthrate, and a self-separating ethos vis-à-vis the State of Israel or vis-à-vis any secular state anywhere. Large segments of Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodoxy continues to be intergenerationally Yiddish-speaking and to conduct their schools (elementary, secondary, and tertiary) as well as all other communal institutions in Yiddish, whether these transpire in Israel or in the diaspora. As a “separating tongue,” Yiddish too is viewed as being “within the pale of sanctity” (Fishman 2002), while

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modern secular vernacular Hebrew is rejected as destabilizing the pre-Messianic secular versus sacred status quo. Probably as many as 10 percent of Israeli and 5 percent of World Jewry can be described as Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox and, accordingly, the future of Yiddish has begun to appear less bleak than was hitherto assumed to be the case (Fishman 2001). Ultra-Orthodoxy’s express rejection of either the American or the Israeli mainstream’s ways of life should go far to assuring that Yiddish will survive the rising tide of globalization during the twenty-first century. Thereby hangs a tale that other minority and lesser-used languages might want to consider and try on for size––social separation plus separate mobilization have considerable minority language–fostering impact.

Conclusions Yiddish has been directly exposed to both autonomy-motivated distancing from German (Ausbau) and to dependency-motivated approximation to German (Einbau) for nearly two centuries. Nevertheless, the major forces shaping its future lie (and have always lain) elsewhere. Drastically weakened by the German-inspired Holocaust during World War II, its fate today and tomorrow will be determined both by (1) the usual predators that prey upon threatened languages (primarily, the inroads of English-oriented globalization) the world over, (2) the rather atypical presence of an erstwhile Classical partner but now a rival and opponent, in the form of revernacularized and thoroughly secularized Hebrew, bolstered by the latter’s current champion (the State of Israel), and (3) the unexpected resiliency of Ultra-Orthodoxy and its capacity to regroup and to resist the pressures of the modern world. On 1–10 scales, there is good reason to rate the anti-Germanization efforts at between a 6 to 8, depending on the Orthodoxy of the context, and the total language maintenance prospects at between 4 to 8. References Birnbaum, Shlomo A. (1931). Geule fun loshn [Redemption of language]. Lodz, Beys yakev. Reprinted in Joshua A. Fishman (ed.). (1981) Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters, 181–195. The Hague: Mouton. Birnbaum, Shlomo A. (1977). Der traditsyonalistisher oysleyg fun yidish in poyln [The tradionalist spelling of Yiddish in Poland]. Dos yidishe vort. Iyar/Sivan, 31–32. Fishman, Joshua A. (1985). “Nothing new under the sun”: A case Study of alternatives in ethnocultural identity.

In The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), 77–103. Berlin: Mouton. Fishman, Joshua A. (1995). Dictionaries as culturally constructed and cultureconstructing artifacts: The reciprocity view as seen from Yiddish sources. Lexicographia, Series Maior 64: 29–34. Fishman, Joshua A. (1999). Der eynhaytlekher yidisher oysleyg: fun folk– shprakh tsu kulturshprakh (An iberblik iber der historye funem eynhaytlekhn yidishn oysleyg); Takones fun yidishn oysleyg (zekster aroyskum). [The

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unified Yiddish spelling: From a vernacular to a literary language (An overview of the history of the Unified Yiddish Spelling); Rules of Yiddish Spelling (sixth edition)]. New York: YIVO and League for Yiddish. Fishman, Joshua A. (2000). The status agenda in corpus planning. In Language Policy and Pedagogy, Richard D. Lambert and Elana Shohamy (eds.), 43–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fishman, Joshua A. (2001). A decade in the life of a two-in-one language: Yiddish in New York (secular and Ultra-orthodox). In Can Threatened Languages Be Saved?, Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), 74–100. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, Joshua A. (2002). The holiness of Yiddish: Who says Yiddish is holy and why? Language Policy 1: 123–141. Fishman, Joshua A. (2010). The Rise of European Vernacular Literacy. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, Joshua A., and David E. Fishman (1978). Yiddish in Israel: A case study of efforts to revise a monocentric language policy. In Advances in the Study of Societal Multilingualism, Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), 185–262. The Hague: Mouton. Haugen, Einar (1966). Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kazhdan, Kh. Sh. (1947). Di geshikhte fun yidishn shulvezn in umophengikn poyln [The history of Jewish school systems in independent Poland]. Mexico City: Kultur un hilf. Kerler, Dov-Ber (1999). The Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish. Oxford: Clarendon. Kloss, Heinz (1932). Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen [The development of new Germanic literary languages]. Munchen: Pohl.

Kloss, Heinz (1967). “Abstand languages” and “Ausbau languages.” Anthropological Linguistics 9 (7): 29–41. Kriwaczek, Paul (2005). Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson. Schaechter, Mordkhe (1969). The “hidden standard”: A study of competing influences in standardization. The Field of Yiddish 3: 284–304. (Reprinted in Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters, Joshua A. Fishman (ed.). (1981). 671–696). The Hague: Mouton. Shohamy, Elana (2008). At what cost? Methods of language revival and protection. Examples from Hebrew. In Sustaining Linguistic Diversity. Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties, Kendall A. King, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Lyn Fogle, Jia Jackie Lou, Barbara Soukup (eds.), 205–218. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Weinreich, Max (1938). Daytshmerish toyg nit [Germanisms are no good]. Yidish far ale X: 97–106. (Also reprinted Yidishe sprak. 34: 23–33). Weinreich, Max (1980). History of the Yiddish Language (Translated from Yiddish by Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman). Chicago: Chicago University Press. (Reprinted 2008 by Yale University Press). Wexler, Paul (1981). Askenazic German, 1760–1895. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 30: 119–132. Wexler, Paul (1991). Yiddish, the fifteenth Slavic language. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 91 (entire issue). Zuckermann, Ghil’ad (2009). Israelit Safa Yafa [Israeli, a beautiful language]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved.

29 The Illyrian Movement: A Croatian Vision of South Slavic Unity MARC L. GREENBERG

Background In the last year of his life, a poet from the province of Carniola,1 Jožef Žemlja (1805–1843), published an epic poem, Seven Sons, allegorizing the seven Slavic nations—the Russians, Poles, Bohemians, Croats, Winds, Illyrians, and Bulgarians2—as seven children condemned to death at birth by a pitiless mother. The sons are secretly spared by their father, Ban Mikić, who reunites them as adults and reveals to them their mother’s perfidy, upon which the sons forgive her. Žemlja’s contemporary, France Prešeren (1800–1849), born and raised in a neighboring Carniolan village, three years before his own death published another epic poem, Baptism by the Savica Falls. Baptism depicts the battle between pagan and christened Slovenes in the eighth century. Though the pagans are defeated, their leader declares that it is better to fight for freedom and die than to remain alive and enslaved (Hladnik 2001). The two poems stylize the conflicting perspectives of the South Slavs3 at the outset of the nineteenth century. Žemlja proposes that the cruel past be forgotten and the grand unity of the Slavs restored for the common weal. Prešeren opts to cultivate local identity. Žemlja was an Illyrian and his name is now dimly remembered. Prešeren was a Slovene and is today celebrated as the national poet of Slovenia. The Illyrian movement (1835–1848) strove to establish a broad national identity among the South Slavs, who were subjects of two empires, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, by creating a single language for the people who today identify themselves as Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Bosniacs (Muslims of Bosnia), Serbs, Montenegrins, and Macedonians. At first the apolitical movement tried to create a “spiritual brotherhood” among Slavs by developing their language and 364

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promoting literacy in it. Its main proponents were Croats, and as it developed, it moved away from broad South Slavic, focusing increasingly on Croatian political concerns, having failed to attract many followers outside of Croatia. By 1848 the movement had succeeded in creating a Croatian national identity from the provinces of Civil Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia (the Triune Kingdom), Istria, and much of the Military Frontier, but by then Slovenes and Serbs had already developed their own national identities that were incompatible with the Croatian one. Nevertheless, Croats and Serbs subsequently (1850) agreed upon a common basis for their language. Despite clearly defined national identities, reinforced by religious differences—Croats being Catholic, Serbs Eastern Orthodox—their languages were deemed to be variants of a single code, named Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Habsburg Empire, centered in Vienna, was multi-ethnic and multilingual, containing within its boundaries the majority of Slavic speakers outside of the Russian Empire, the remaining South Slavs (Bosnians, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians) being subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The internal organization of the South Slavs within Austro-Hungary was highly fragmented: the provinces of Carinthia, Carniola, Styria (now Slovenia), Istria (now divided between Slovenia and Croatia), and Dalmatia (Croatia) belonged to the Austrian part of the Empire; Civil Croatia, Slavonia (Croatia), and Vojvodina (Serbia) belonged to the Hungarian Kingdom. The Military Frontier Vienna AUSTRIA HABSBURG EMPIRE CARINTHIA

Villach

Graz

Pest

Buda

STYRIA

Maribor

Ljubljana CARNIOLA

Pecs

Zagreb

HUNGARY

CIVIL CROATIA ISTRIA

Rijeka

SLAVONIA MILITARY

Novi Sad

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VOlVODINA

Bucharest

BOSNIA

Zadar

Belgrade

Sarajevo

SERBIA

DALMATIA ADRIATIC SEA

Sofia Dubrovnik

BULGARIA

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Varna

Scutari Empires Provinces Gaj’s lyre

Figure 29.1 “Illyria”—Gaj’s lyre

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(Croatia, Serbia, and Romania), which was ethnically mixed, formed a buffer between the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires, and was controlled by Vienna (see map, figure 29.1).

Hungarian Nationalism Fosters the Illyrian Movement In the late eighteenth century, during the period of enlightened absolutism, Maria Theresa and her son, Joseph II, enacted reforms to unify the Empire. Among other things, their reforms centralized taxation and weakened regional decision-making. To effect centralization in the early 1780s, German-speaking bureaucrats were introduced into the regional administration and German was declared to be the language of administration and education, replacing Latin. In response, over the next several decades the Hungarians pushed for and attained greater autonomy and the right to use Hungarian in the administration and education in the eastern part of the Empire. In 1827 Hungarian was made compulsory in all Croatian schools. Croatian patriots used law, ideology, and language to push back against the assimilatory aims of Hungarian nationalism. On the legal front, Croatian patriots asserted their rights of inherited local autonomy (iura municipalia). PanSlavism, which was “in the air” among Slavic intellectuals, informed the Illyrian ideology and provided a framework in which to counter Hungarian nationalist challenge to Croatian identity. Because the European concept of nation was then seen primarily as a language community, it followed in the thinking of the time that the promotion of a common literary language was the central tool with which to advance Illyrian ideology. One of the responses to the assertion of German and Hungarian and the loss of neutral Latin in the Empire was the emergence of a thin layer of Slavic intellectuals promoting Pan-Slavic ideology. The Slovak pastor and Pan-Slavist Ján Kollár (1793–1852) envisioned a literary and spiritual (apolitical) brotherhood of Slavs through his concept of “reciprocity,”4 entailing the creation and promotion of Slavic literary languages, literature written in those languages, Slavic libraries and reading rooms, and the active reading of others’ literatures in their original Slavic languages. In Kollár’s vision, Slavic is a “language,” its variant forms are “dialects,” and the groups of people who speak them “tribes.” He identifies four extant “dialects” in which books are published: Russian, Illyrian, Polish, and CzechSlovak. Illyrian referred to all of the “dialects” of the South Slavic area.

The Three Vertices of the Lyre The Illyrian movement that began with Kollár’s Pan-Slavic notion was carried forth by Croatian and other South Slavic patriots. Kollár mentored the central figure of the movement, Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872) (Auty 1958, 399; Despalatović 1975, 51), who in 1835 depicted Europe allegorically as a maiden and Illyria as her lyre, the three vertices of which were formed by Lake Scutari (bordering Montenegro and Albania), Varna (on the Black Sea in Bulgaria), and Villach (in Austrian

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Carinthia); and the strings representing Carinthia, Carniola, Styria, Istria, Civil Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, Dubrovnik, Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, and lower Hungary (Vojvodina) (Despalatović 1975, 90; Stančić 1989, 139–140). But the program was not just a romantic dream aimed at a hypothetical spiritual unity; rather, it tried from the beginning to use language both to assert South Slavic unity and to achieve political autonomy from Hungary. In 1832 Gaj wrote in an essay on the Hungarian language policy that abandoning Latin directly threatened the existence of a Croatian nation. Latin was a neutral language, used throughout Central Europe without ethnic or national connotations, so it had allowed Croatian identity to remain intact. Gaj’s associate, the older and influential Croatian industrialist Count Janko Drašković (1770–1856), a member of the Croatian Sabor (Parliament), went a step further in his Dissertation or Discourse for the Benefit of the Noble Deputies (1832), urging for the autonomy from Hungary of an “Illyrian Kingdom,” consisting of Civil Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Rijeka, the Military Frontier, and Slovenia (see map, figure 29.1). The medium of Drašković’s Dissertation was in part the message: Drašković wrote his pamphlet in Croatian, not the neutral Latin, giving it a political edge.

The Language Question 1: Kajkavian First Gaj’s and Drašković’s 1832 efforts, however, were only precursors to the movement in its full form. They had hoped to promote the public use of a narrow form of the Croatian language spoken in Zagreb and other towns in Civil Croatia, called Kajkavian. Kajkavian is structurally close to Slovene and it had been written using Hungarian spelling conventions. Two years earlier, Gaj had attempted to modernize Kajkavian, but he would soon militate against it in favor of the broadly inclusive Illyrian language. Nevertheless, his Short Primer of Croatian-Slavic Orthography, published in 1830 in Buda, was iconoclastic: it broke with the tradition of employing Hungarian orthographic principles and introduced the use of diacritic marks (modifications of single letters replacing double letters).5

The First Illyrian Publications and the Attempt to Create an Illyrian Identity In 1835 the Illyrian movement began in earnest with the first issue of Gaj’s newspaper Croatian News and its literary supplement The Morning Star of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia. The names of the newspaper and its supplement indicate the received state of affairs and hint at the direction the movement would subsequently take: the term “Croatia” (Horvatzka) then referred to Kajkavian-speaking Civil Croatia around the towns of Zagreb and Varaždin, the noble and middle-class citizens of which were mostly pro-Hungarian and thus unlikely to be sympathetic to the Pan-Slavic ideals of the Illyrism. The “morning star” symbolizes national awakening, while the reference to Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia name the separate administrative and cultural entities formed in the medieval period. The first issues discussed Slavic history, language, and included mottos, poetry, and prose calling for South Slavic unity. In 1835

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and 1836 Gaj tested the waters to determine whether the call for South Slavic unity would engender a backlash from the pro-Hungarian (and Kajkavian-speaking) Croatian gentry, and so his paper was initially written in the Kajkavian standard of the time. He gradually increased the use of the name Illyrian as a cover term for “South Slavic,” until in December 1835 he announced that the newspaper would henceforth be called Illyrian National News and the supplement Illyrian Morning Star. Correspondents to the paper were identified with the formula “an Illyrian from (locality),” for example, Ljubomir Martić, an Illyrian from Bosnia. To retain anonymity, writers sometimes omitted their names and used only the second part of the formula.

The Language Question 2: The Switch from Kajkavian to Štokavian In 1836 the writers of the News and Morning Star stopped using the Kajkavian dialect and began writing in a stylized variety of the Štokavian dialect,6 called “Illyrian.” According to Drašković’s Dissertation, 65 percent of the people in Croatian territories spoke the Štokavian dialect, implying that the percentage of the Štokavian speakers—if Muslims and Serbs were included—would have been even higher. The prestige of Dubrovnik Renaissance and Baroque writing in the Štokavian dialect, moreover, had particularly inspired the Illyrians. The rapid shift from Kajkavian to Štokavian is remarkable not just because it came suddenly, but also because the majority of its early writers were Kajkavian speakers. The shift was made consciously in view of the tradition of the Štokavian writing traditions of Dalmatia, Slavonia, and Dubrovnik, as well as with a view to achieving a maximum readership throughout the South Slavic lands.

Growing Pains as the Illyrian Movement Develops from Ideology to Political Force Outwardly, Gaj and his program appeared to be in favor at the Viennese Court. In August 1839, Emperor Ferdinand awarded Gaj a diamond ring in recognition of his literary efforts, and Gaj officially proclaimed his loyalty to the Habsburgs. In the pursuit of his national program, however, Gaj was prepared not only to engage in internal politics, but also to seek assistance outside of Austro-Hungary. In pursuit of Illyrian goals, Gaj engaged in a secret agenda apart from the Illyrian Party. In just one striking example, in 1838 he appealed to the Russian tsar for financial support for his publishing venture, but later that fall he also conveyed a secret memorandum asking for Russia to aid in effecting a military coup against Vienna, liberating the South Slavs from the Habsburgs altogether and appealing in PanSlavic terms for protection of the Russian crown. The memorandum was not taken seriously by the Russian government, though official Russia had been known to take a measured interest in Pan-Slavic initiatives (Moseley 1935). By 1841 the Illyrian movement had become an organized political party, opposing the Croatian-Hungarian Party, which was run by the conservative Croatian gentry sympathetic to the Hungarian national movement. To make the

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Illyrians more acceptable to (pro-Hungarian “Magyarone”) Croatian conservatives, in 1841 Gaj formulated the motto “in the name of all true Illyrians . . . May God bless the Hungarian constitution, the Croatian Kingdom, and the Illyrian people!” (Šidak et al. 1988, 136). Nevertheless, the Hungarian government and its Magyarone sympathizers continued to view the Illyrians as hostile to them in view of their Pan-Slavic and (at least) implicitly separatist sympathies. Part of the Illyrian strategy was not just to promote a common language, but also to represent itself visually to the public. Illyrian political life now also included public demonstrations with members dressed in a special costume of a blue or red peasant-style topcoat (surka) worn over a waistcoat, and a red cap with the Illyrian coat of arms, a half-moon and the morning star, and a saber.

The Empire Strikes Back In January 1843 Emperor Ferdinand banned the use of the Illyrian name. He did not wish to curtail the right of the Croats to use their own language, but it was necessary to end political instability in the Triune Kingdom. A new Censor, hostile to the Illyrian program, made it difficult for Illyrians to publish, pushing some of their activity to move abroad. Many in the Party blamed Gaj for the change of favor and after that Gaj became less involved directly in the movement’s politics. Others carried on the work of the Illyrian Party. In response to the Emperor’s ban, the Party changed its name to the National Party, and Gaj renamed his paper from Illyrian National News to simply National News. When the Hungarians objected to the word “national,” the paper became Croatian, Slavonian, and Dalmatian News. The Vatican, too, played a hand, warning Vienna of the Illyrians’ ideological contacts and fund-raising activities with French Revolutionaries, Czech Protestants, and Russian schismatics. This did not mean the end of the Illyrian program, however, as many of the National Party members still held positions in the Sabor and were elected to the Joint Parliament. Vienna’s mistrust of Ljudevit Gaj was not misplaced. Throughout the mid1840s, Gaj traveled widely throughout Europe, secretly attempting to gather support for South Slavic autonomy. He worked through his personal contacts, rather than through Illyrian Party channels, to establish ties to the Serbian Constitutionalist Party. His goal was to set up a South Slavic state made up of Serbs and Croats and headed by the (Serbian) Karađorđević dynasty. The 1844 Draft by Ilija Garašanin (1812–1874), Minister of Internal Affairs to Serbian Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević, proceeded from Gaj’s and his representatives’ cooperation and asserted—without Illyrian Party assent (and unlikely to have gained it)— that the Illyrian movement would cooperate in a combined Serbian-Croatian state ruled from Serbia. Moreover, during 1843–1844 Gaj’s loyalties were unclear and seemingly Machiavellian in that he established ties not only with the Principality of Serbia, but also with the right wing of the Polish émigré community in Paris (which saw Croatia as the focal point of Slavic opposition to Austria), at the same time as he pushed for greater autonomy for Illyria and tried to convince the Austrian government of Illyrian loyalty to the Viennese Court.

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Nevertheless, Vienna and the National Party, along with the conservative (i.e., non-nationalist) political faction in Hungary found common cause against the Hungarian nationalists, and in 1845 the Illyrian name was again permitted by the Emperor.

Inviting the Neighbors 1: The Serbian Response Gaj and the Illyrians tried to attract followers from outside the Triune Kingdom, but had limited success. Serbs both in the Principality of Serbia and Vojvodina objected to the name Illyrian, which they felt not only referred to an ancient language,7 but also negated their own identity as Serbs. Their identity hinged on their “Serbianness” and on their Eastern Orthodox faith. Serbs viewed the Illyrian movement as Catholic and alien. Moreover, the Serbs’ own language movement had already begun with Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864), who had since 1815 advanced a standard language based on the Štokavian dialect as spoken by everyday people. This standard language was written with a straightforward letter-for-sound correspondence, based on the Cyrillic alphabet, in order to make literacy as widely accessible as possible. Karadžić’s proposed standardization broke with the Slaveno-Serbian standard language, a secularized variety of Church Slavic heavily influenced by Russian that only a small, educated elite within Serbia could understand. Karadžić also advanced his view that all speakers of the Štokavian dialect (on which Illyrian was also based) were Serbs. Not only did this view clash with the aims of the PanSlavic ideology of the Illyrian movement, but it also conflicted with the beliefs of those Illyrians who understood the movement as a primarily Croatian national endeavor. Karadžić’s view, like the Illyrian one, assumed that language defines the community, but he opposed the supranational character of the Illyrian endeavor, taking ancient dialect divisions as historical indicators of ethnicity. By this definition he expanded the notion of the Serbian to include Catholic and Muslims. The Illyrians challenged Karadžić’s definition of Serbian ethnicity by appealing to history and law. The Illyrian lexicographer Bogoslav Šulek (1816–1895), editor of the Illyrian newspaper Branislav (“Defender of Slavs”), published clandestinely in Serbia in 1844–1845, articulated Illyrian opposition to Karadžić’s view by defining the historical and legal bases of South Slavic unity and contesting Karadžić’s equation of the Štokavian dialect with Serbian ethnicity. Though circulated in various forms before, the full statement of Karadžić’s theory is found in his essay “Serbs All and Everywhere,” published in 1849.

Inviting the Neighbors 2: The Montenegrin Response Like the Serbs, the few Montenegrin literati found the Illyrian name and the Catholic-Latinate framework of the movement alien to their cultural heritage and contributed only minor writing to the Illyrian newspapers. The most prominent Montenegrin poet, Prince Petar Petrović Njegoš (1813–1851), expressed sympathy

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to the principle of South Slavic unity, but only observed the Illyrian movement from the sidelines. On the other hand, Montenegro’s legendary heroism was romanticized in one of the masterpieces of Illyrian literature, the epic poem The Death of Smail aga Čengić (1846) by the Croatian writer Ivan Mažuranić (1814–1890). Serbian and Montenegrin reluctance to join Illyrism sharpened Gaj’s conception of the relationship between Illyrism and ethnic identity. In a manifesto published in The Morning Star in 1839, Gaj recognized that “a Serb will never be a Croat or a Carniolan just as the latter two cannot ever be Serbs” (Vince 1990, 226). He went on to assert that Illyrian would not replace the ethnic designations but would simply unite them under the Illyrian name. This meant also reaffirming the religious heritage as well as the use of the Cyrillic alphabet for Orthodox (Serb, Montenegrin) traditions, alongside with and in opposition to Latin for the non-Orthodox. Despite these clarifications, the Orthodox were not drawn to the Illyrian movement, but Gaj’s shift in thinking about the ethnic problem set the stage for the later acceptance of Croatian-Serbian language unification in the aftermath of Illyrism in the second half of the eighteenth century, which will be discussed below.

Inviting the Neighbors 3: The Slovene Response A small number of clerics and intellectuals in Carinthia and Styria were interested in the Pan-Slavic ideals of the Illyrian movement. Slovenes, who were also Catholics, did not have the same objections as the Serbs. The failure of Slovenes to follow the movement in greater numbers was largely due to the fact that by the 1830s France Prešeren had established a literary standard for Slovene that the Carniolan gentry had accepted. Politically, the Slovenes stood outside of the conflict with Hungarians and thus were not a party to the antagonism between Hungarian and Croatian nationalists. On the contrary, the leading figures of the Carniolan gentry were in favor of Austro-Slavism, which viewed in positive terms the allegiance of Slavs to Vienna (see Vidmar 2006). The most notable Slovene proponent of Austro-Slavism was Jernej Kopitar (1780–1844), who was influential not only among Slovene literati but among South Slavic scholars in general. Kopitar wrote the 1808 Grammar of the Slavic Language in Carniola, Carinthia, and Styria,which was to establish the structural basis for the modern Slovene standard language. Furthermore, from 1810 Kopitar served in the influential positions of Censor for Slavic, Greek and Romanian publications and as Librarian to the Court Library of Vienna. These roles gave him an unprecedented position from which to influence the course of publication and, consequently, language planning among the South Slavs. He both socialized with and helped shape the ambitious projects of his students, who included the Slovene comparative linguist Franc Miklošič (1813–1891), who established the general outlines of the relatedness of Slavic languages (revising Dobrovský’s work), and Karadžić, who promoted his Serbian language project (see Ivić 1985). Both Styria and the eastern territory and Carinthia, north of the Alps, constituting parts of what later was to become Slovenia, might have embraced the Illyrian

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movement had they not begun their own regional language movements and proposals for literary languages. Clashing visions of language and orthography among Carniolans and Styrians in 1830–1831 became so heated that today we call them “the ABC-War.” Nevertheless, this conflict was inward-looking and not oriented toward a Pan-Slavic vision, let alone an Illyrian one. The Illyrians’ greatest hope among the Slovenes was the poet Stanko Vraz (1810–1851), a Styrian native who shared the Pan-Slavic ideals and did not feel close to the Carniolan-based standard language of Prešeren. Vraz initially admired Gaj and followed the movement with ardor, but later opposed Gaj on the grounds that the movement had narrowed its focus to Croatian interests and that Illyrian failed to allow sufficient freedom to allow elements from Styrian and other dialects. Vraz also held Kopitar’s view that Kajkavian Croatian and Slovene are the same language and, consequently, the “Slovene ethnicity” of Zagreb and its Kajkavian speakers meant that Slovenes should embrace Illyrian. Vraz’s perspective clashed with Gaj’s. Gaj rejected Kopitar’s linguistic position; on this and other points, including financial disagreements over Vraz’s publications, the two men split and never reconciled. In 1842 Vraz founded his own Illyrian newspaper, Kolo, though it had relatively few subscribers. Vraz was also able to engage some like-minded Illyrists among the Carinthians, notably Urban Jarnik (1784–1844) and Matija Majer-Ziljski (1809–1892). These Carinthian Illyrians advocated a strong sense of local identity through the preservation of their language. While Jarnik and Majer-Ziljski—both priests and ethnographers—shared Pan-Slavic ideals and declared their sympathy for the Illyrian movement, they disagreed on the use of the Illyrian language, insisting that Slovene be kept intact and that rapprochement between Slovene and Illyrian unfold as a gradual process. Perhaps there were more than ideological and linguistic reasons for the failure of the Illyrians to attract the Slovenes, who, after all, shared both Catholicism and a similar language to the Croats of Civil Croatia. A vignette raises the issue of different cultural values: Vraz traveled the Slovene provinces for the Illyrian cause and sometimes wore the Illyrian parade uniform and a beard. In Carniola and Carinthia, where most men wore western suits and were clean-shaven, he received bemused stares (Petrè 1939, 202; Zajc 2006, 212–214). Slovenes and Croats had by the first half of the nineteenth century become so different culturally that a mode of dress that was viewed as positive in one culture (i.e., the Illyrian dress in Croatia) was viewed negatively in the other.

Inviting the Neighbors 4: The Bosnian Response The Illyrian influence in Bosnia extended exclusively to the Franciscans, who were connected through their studies to Catholic centers in Rome, Vienna, Budapest, and Zagreb. Though individuals (Martin Nedić [1810–1895], Ivan Jukić [1818–1857], Grgo Martić [1822–1905]) contributed to Illyrian newspapers and attempted to gain support for the movement among their Bosnian brethren, Bosnian church officials viewed their activities with alarm and

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suppressed their efforts for fear of rebellion and, consequently, reprisals from the Ottoman authorities. The political situation was indeed sensitive: in May 1840 the governor of Bosnia, Mehmed Vedzihi Pasha, complained to the Croatian Ban of Gaj’s “political agitation” in Bosnia, which threatened relations between Turkey and Austria. Though Vienna recognized that the rumors of a Bosnian insurrection, allegedly organized by Gaj, were overblown, from this point forward Metternich through his spies monitored Gaj’s activities. Nevertheless, Gaj’s personal activism in traveling to Dalmatia and Bosnia in 1840 caused the movement to spread beyond the narrow focus of Civil Croatia and Slavonia (the parts subject to the Hungarian part of the Empire). Though short of the Illyrian goal of uniting all of the South Slavs, Gaj’s success in drawing the interest and sympathy of intellectuals in these regions marks the beginning of the modern notion of a Croatian national identity, which is arguably the most enduring by-product of the Illyrian movement.

Inviting the Neighbors 5: The Dalmatian Response and the Zadar Circle A more complex relationship arose between the language planners of Dalmatia and the Illyrian movement. In Dalmatia a long tradition of writing with the Štokavian dialect, reaching back to the Baroque, had already established a rich grammatical and lexicographical tradition. Two distinct Dalmatian traditions had coexisted here, each with its own variety of the Štokavian dialect, one in Dubrovnik using the Cyrillic alphabet, the other in central and northern Dalmatia, using Latin letters. In addition, Dalmatia differed from Civil Croatia and Slavonia in that Italian, rather than German and Hungarian, was the language of the dominant culture. Some Dalmatians, such as Božidar Petranović (1809–1874), urged cooperation with the Serbs and Karadžić’s reforms, and he himself used the new Cyrillic alphabet in his own writing. Some followed the Illyrian movement faithfully. Others went a third way. A circle of reformers working around the newspaper Dawn of Dalmatia, begun in Zadar in 1844, opposed the elements of both the Illyrian movement’s language as well as Karadžić’s Serbian literary language. The two most notable figures of this circle were Šime Starčević (1784–1859), an eminent philologist, and Ante Kuzmanić (1807–1879), a medical doctor and political journalist. Though the Zadar Circle believed generally in the Pan-Slavic ideal of reciprocity, they argued that Gaj’s Illyrian language, in attempting to integrate elements from all the South Slavic dialects, was devoid of Croatian specificity. They believed that Croatian individuality should be expressed by continuing and advancing the use of the Dalmatian literary language, though their own variety, not the one connected with the Dubrovnik tradition. Moreover, they resented the thrust of the movement, with language at its center, being run from Zagreb and Civil Croatia, which they viewed as a rustic backwater in contrast to Dalmatia, with its grand literary tradition and its “brilliant Latinate civilization” (Vince 1990, 331). They also opposed the egalitarianism of Karadžić’s language on the grounds that it elevated the speech of the uneducated, rather than aiming to raise the level of

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expression. Starčević argued further that the supranational character of the movement mooted the legal foundations of the Croatian case against Hungarian hegemony by deflecting attention from the iura municipalia.

The Illyrian Movement’s Critical Mass Lay in Croatia To convey a sense of the relative number of Illyrian activists by region, we can examine table 29.1, which shows by region and province how many individuals wrote for Illyrian newspapers. The number in the Triune Kingdom (Croatia) is somewhat greater than 150, whereas the total number in Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Slovenia is under 65.

How to Write Illyrian 1: Karadžić’s Serbian versus Illyrian At the center of the entire debate was the Illyrian language. The structure of the Illyrian language itself contrasted fundamentally with structural innovations proposed for the standard languages of the Slovenes and Serbs. The first grammarian of nineteenth-century Illyrian,8 Vjekoslav Babukić (1812–1875), distinguished its basic orthographic principle from Karadžić’s Serbian “Write as you speak, speak as you write” (a notion taken from eighteenth-century German grammarians) by stating: “Write for the eye, but speak for the ears.” What did this mean? Karadžić’s Serbian orthography aimed for one letter per sound, whereas the Illyrian rendered in letters the basic structure of the meaningful parts of words (morphemes), ignoring contextual alternations or regional variation. The point is consequential: Karadžić intended to make literacy possible for the masses by removing the arcane elements of Slaveno-Serbian; the Illyrians sought to unite heterogeneous dialects into a single, supranational literary code. Both Karadžić’s and the Illyrians’ ideas for streamlining their writing systems removed many of the arcane and provincial elements that were impediments to widespread literacy, but the Illyrian

Table 29.1 Contributors to Illyrian Newspapers Region

Province

Number of contributors

Croatia Civil Croatia Slavonia Dalmatia Bosnia Serbia Principality of Serbia Vojvodina and S. Hungary Montenegro Slovenia

ca. 50 > 50 > 50 < 15 < 20 < 15 50 > 50 < 15 < 20 < 15