Languages In the World (14 page)
Read Languages In the World Online
Authors: Julie Tetel Andresen,Phillip M. Carter
The question can now be asked: What were the contingencies that made the ideology of the linguistically homogeneous nation possible and, with it, the creation of nation-states with clearly defined borders?
The creation of national consciousness in Western Europe was the product of a long process that began with the Renaissance. It gained momentum throughout the course of the eighteenth century as prior religious and dynastic frameworks lost favor in Europe. In the seventeenth century, Louis XIV could confidently declare:
L'état c'est moi
(âI am the state').
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In the eighteenth century, with Enlightenment rationalism and the political conception of language, a new conception of the state came into being, and with it came a new formulation:
une langue, une nation
(âone language, one nation'), first coined by the French grammarian Nicolas Beauzée.
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The heretofore separate realms of language and political entity are now clearly harnessed.
It is relatively easy for Americans to understand Enlightenment epistemology, because the United States itself is a partial by-product of eighteenth-century French political thought. The idea that the future will be better is in the rhetoric of all American presidents up through Obama, who still encourages Americans to strive for “a more perfect union.” Thomas Jefferson, well versed in Enlightenment thought, was deeply invested in matters of language. He devoted some of his wide-ranging interests to the recording of Native American languages, particularly those in Virginia, such as Powhatan (Algonquin) and Cherokee (Iroquois).
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He was also a linguistic liberal, arguing successfully against naming English, or any other language, as the official language of the United States.
North and South American colonists were among the first to assert their nationhoods, well before most of Europe. The United States was founded in 1776, Haiti in 1804, Paraguay in 1811, and Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela in 1821. The colonial revolutionaries were the cultural elites and shared the language of the ruling classes of the governments they were separating from. On equal linguistic ground with their sovereigns, they were determined to establish equal and necessarily independent political ground. About that (literal) ground, the consciousness of their place in the world â their physical space â was high. To become President of the United States, one must be born in the United States or a place outside the United States considered American soil, such as an army base or an embassy. In a monarchic or a dynastic state, the place
of birth of the ruler is irrelevant, and so is his or her so-called national background, as the succession of non-English monarchs on Britain's throne for the last thousand years attests.
The political achievements of the colonial revolutionaries certainly caught the interests of political thinkers and political activists in Europe. Now we can identify three intertwined strands â an historical event, an intellectual movement, and an economic development â that, when woven together, solidified the one nation, one language ideology begun in pre-Revolutionary France and made it exportable to the rest of the world.
In Europe, the French Revolution, whose symbolic beginning is July 14, 1789, was a galvanizing event in the development of nationalisms. With the abolition of the French monarchy, the new Republic was organized around the democratic principles of
liberté
,
égalité
, and
fraternité.
Of these, the emphasis on
égalité
(âequality') is especially noteworthy for the present discussion, because the revolutionaries determined that one of the first inequalities was language. Before the Revolution and even well into the nineteenth century, no more than 10% of the population spoke what we would think of today as French. Rather, people living in what is now present-day France spoke languages such as: Breton, a Celtic language; Alsatian and Flemish, both Germanic languages; Catalan, Corsican, and Occitan, all three Romance langugages; as well as Basque. In addition, innumerable, often mutually unintelligible varieties of a loosely defined French were spoken. Although these languages are still spoken in France today, they have all experienced significant decline since the Revolution.
The Revolution had a profound impact on language in France for at least two reasons. First, the revolutionaries believed that linguistic difference was a potential cause of inequality, which would violate the revolutionary principle
égalité
and undermine the success of the new Republic. Thus, Standard French was promoted as one of the foundations of the nation-state. An important figure in universalizing Standard French was Abbé Grégoire. In 1794, he presented his
Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalize the use of the French language
(Abbé Grégoire, 1794) to the National Convention. It is of note that today Abbé Grégoire is called a man ahead of his time for the stance he took against racism and slavery, and for his support for universal suffrage. His stance on abolishing dialects goes unnoticed and is less admirable than the stance he took on abolishing slavery. Such are the workings of language ideology: they work best when they are invisible.
Second, as a part of the effort to centralize the state through the French language, a strong national education system was developed, and the education system moved French further and further into the non-French-speaking regions. The so-called grammarian patriot, Urbain Domergue, had begun publishing a biweekly publication,
Journal de la langue françoise
before the Revolution, and so after the Revolution, his journal disseminated the linguistic norms to be taught in what would be known as
normal schools
. The norms, or standards, taught in these schools were based on a variety of French spoken in Paris, known as
Ãle de la Cité
French, after the name of an island in
the Seine, considered the very center of the capital. This variety was promoted as the perfect language and was selected as the language of the state and the language of the new, central education system. The selection of Parisian French, actually the French of the court, as the national standard was understood as an egalitarian move in keeping with the priorities of the Republic, making what was once the province of the elite, the shared patrimony of all the citizens.
Thus perhaps for the first time in history was language recruited alongside other symbolic resources to help
construct
the identity of a nation-state through emblematic associations. Standard French was understood in pragmatic terms and as the answer to the question: Which language variety would be used in national institutions? However, it was also understood in symbolic terms, as language standing for and representing the state. In the long term, however, the imposition of Standard French created rather than eradicated inequality, in the sense that it sparked the association of nonstandard varieties of French and regional non-French languages with feudalism and the lower classes. The French Revolution marked perhaps the first occassion in which the
symbolic value
of language was so profound that people could experience personal shame for the way they spoke. The Occitans in the south of France call this experience
la vergonha
. If shame is the fear of not being worthy of connection,
vergonha
is the fear you feel when you perceive a need or pressure to disconnect from your mother tongue.
Around the time of the French Revolution, German romantic philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humbolt, in an era of monarchies and dynasties, began to theorize the nation as a revolutionary concept. Herder was especially influential in this regard, and his ideas were influential in the development of nationalisms across Europe. His thinking on nationalism focused on the concept of
das Volk
, those masses understood to be the core of the nation. He articulated a view of national patriotism rooted in folk practices, including folk tales.
The Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, mentioned in Chapter 3, used Herder's work as their inspiration to collect and record German-language folk tales, which were understood to reflect the true German character. Herder believed these cultural traditions were the basis for national character,
Volkgeist
, and were crucial for nation-building efforts. Language, above all other cultural resources, was understood as the direct manifestation of an identity that was not merely cultural, but also national in nature. In other words, language was the precise distillation of all culture, which stood as the symbolic center of the nation. Herder's view on language and national identity is summarized in his phrase:
Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National-Bildung wie seine Sprache
(âSince every people is a People, it has its own national culture through its own language.') In Herder's philosophy, the German concept of
Bildung
, or self-growth, is extrapolated to the level of the nation, where it literally comes to mean ânation building,' in the sense of creating a national identity.
The nationalism and state formation based on the political and conceptual groundwork laid by late-eighteenth-century political thinkers expanded rapidly in the
nineteenth century. Herder in Germany and the revolutionaries in France set the terms of the debate. Their theories of language differed: the French held a mechanical conception of language, while the Germans held an organic conception of language; the French thought language was a tool that could be tinkered with and improved; the Germans took a hands-off policy toward language change. The French and the Germans nevertheless coincided in their belief in the relationship between nation and language: they converged on the ideology of the monolingual nation-state.
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In his landmark book
Imagined Communities
, Benedict Anderson theorizes the
nation
as a new kind of community, and he attributes the new-found ability of people to imagine such a political entity to two forms of writing that flowered in the eighteenth century: novels and newspapers (Anderson [1983] 2006:24â25).
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Readers of novels and newspapers receive a sense of historical, clocked time in which characters who might not know one another and events that might seem otherwise unrelated are gathered in one space to create a sense of an interacting world that is beyond the reader's experience but fully within the grasp of her imagination. In order to have a consciousness of a nation, one must be able to imagine one's fellow Americans, Haitians, Mexicans, Paraguayans, Peruvians, or Venezuelans â the vast majority of whom one will never meet â linked in real space and time. One must have a sense that the group of one's fellows is acting together with unknown effects on one another like characters in a novel, and that these actions occur simultaneously, such as events reported upon each day in the newspaper. This consciousness is different than a person imagining himself to be a subject of, or a believer in, a higher power, such King George III or Mohammad. A national consciousness has horizontal range linking fellows with no higher authority and comes with rights and responsibilities.
Jefferson recognized the preeminent importance of newspapers when he said, “If I had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, I would not hesitate to choose the latter.” He was stressing the importance of an informed populace, for only an informed populace can make good choices concerning their governance. However, in an Anderson-style argument, Jefferson's quotation serves to suggest that a newspaper-reading public, one that shares the common knowledge of what is going on around them, becomes a community, the community of newspaper-readers. This community is imagined, but not imaginary.
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The nation's reality is insured by the operation of the
state
â the particular set of bureaucracies, laws, police, military, educational system, etc. Any group making a claim to being a nation can now also make a claim to deserving a state. The identification of the Palestinian nation brings with it the possibility of a two-state solution with Israel.
One of the Founding Fathers of the United States was a printer: Benjamin Franklin. Printers get to print what they want, and they stay in business as long as they sell what they print. It is perhaps unfortunate for Franklin's printing legacy that he was not the printer in January, 1776 of Thomas Paine's
Common Sense
(Paine 1776), the American bestseller of all times in terms of sales in proportion to the size of the population.
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This pamphlet created an immediate sensation in the colonies, and
George Washington made sure it was read to all his troops as they surrounded the British in Boston. This work was furthermore translated into French, and Paine was received as a political Prometheus when he arrived in Paris in 1787.
Beyond the novel, the newspaper, and the rabble-rousing pamphlet, print capitalism was a driver in the rise of national consciousness in three ways. First, it democratized reading, since the public was interested in reading materials printed not in Latin, the literary language of the educated elite, but in languages they could understand. A language leveled of strong vernacular features made it possible for speakers of the many disparate and sometimes unintelligible varieties of French or Spanish, for example, to understand one another through the written word. Second, the printed word provided the illusion of the permanence of language, which gave speakers who had not previously imagined being related to other speakers beyond their families or villages a sense of material connection to a broader community. Finally, and most importantly, print capitalism elevated certain languages to positions of power at the same time as other languages and language varieties were demoted.
Print capitalism also made possible the publication of monolingual dictionaries, which were ideologically congruent with the idea that languages were contained by national borders. That is, it was now possible to imagine not only that each state could have its own language, neatly contained within its own borders, but also that all the words of that language could be neatly contained within one book. In addition, dictionaries are crucial in establishing literary varieties, rather than colloquial ones, as the national standards. The dictionary that attended the rise of monolingual nation-states reinforced the idea that words could be literally separated from their usage in context, an idea that has increased in currency until today. We can thus conclude that the standard language ideology still operating in much of the West is a consequence of the epistemology of monolingual national standards developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, of which the dictionary is an important symbol. It remains an emblem of authority today.
In sum, the rise of nationalisms across Europe, spurred by and through the rise of print capitalism, created the fuel for the ideological development of the monolingual nation-state.