The Politics of Language
My attention was riveted by a story in The Jerusalem Report of September 10, 2012, because it dealt with a topic that has fascinated me since my childhood (for a reason I will briefly mention momentarily). The story reports on a move to revive the Aramaic language in a Christian Arab village in Israel. Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, has a very long history, during which it was for a while the official language of the Persian empire and then the spoken vernacular throughout much of the Middle East, also by most Jews after Hebrew had become a “dead language” used only for religious purposes. It was of course the language of Jesus. Aramaic itself became mainly a “dead language” after the Muslim conquest of the Middle East, spoken by a few scattered minorities but, like Hebrew for Jews, continuing as the language of worship for Orthodox Christian churches in the region.The Jerusalem Report story occurred in the village of Jish in the Galilee, sixty-five percent of whose inhabitants are Maronites (Orthodox in communion with Rome), the rest mostly Melkites (Orthodox in communion with Constantinople), with a sprinkling of Muslims. Both Maronites and Melkites speak Arabic in their daily lives, but use Syriac, a version of Aramaic, in worship. The leader of the Aramaic movement in the village is a young man, Shadi Khalloul, who has been pushing for the teaching of spoken Aramaic in the village school. His advocacy finally succeeded after it was supported by a new principal, who is himself a Muslim. The Aramaic instruction has now been approved by the Israeli ministry of education. The story in an Israeli publication naturally emphasized the similarity with the rebirth of Biblical Hebrew by modern Zionism. Khalloul only speaks Aramaic with his two-year old son—just as Eliezer Ben Yehudah, who led the Hebrew revival in the late 1800s, only spoke Hebrew with his son. There is a story about an elderly Hebraist who came from Europe to the then brand-new town of Tel Aviv. He was jostled and obscenely insulted by a young boy, and afterward turned to his companion with sheer delight—“how wonderful – he can swear in Hebrew!”
Khalloul has an openly stated political purpose in mind: to unite all the Christians in the Middle East as “one strong nation”. A nation, it is supposed, needs a unifying language. Aramaic is a plausible candidate. This is understandable in the contemporary context—Christians threatened by militant Islam in all the Middle East, and as a double minority in Israel, Christians among the Muslims and non-Jews in the Jewish state. But the politics of language has a very old history all over the world, though it flared up virulently with the emergence of modern nationalism. Very often conflicts over language have had a religious dimension.
My own fascination with the topic comes from the fact that I grew up bilingually. Every summer as a child my mother took me from Vienna to visit her family in Italy. The seasons meant an alternation between German and Italian, and I was aware from early on that reality looks very different as filtered through the two languages. I also became aware of the political dimension. The Italy of my childhood was ruled by Mussolini. We went on vacation either to the seashore or the mountains, the latter in the South Tirol that had been annexed by Italy after World War I. The Fascist regime imposed a policy of coercive “Italianization” on the German-speaking population. I remember one summer, we rented a house from a Tirolean farmer. As an only child I was impressed by the large number of children in our landlord’s family. They all had common Austrian names, like Alois or Franz or Johanna—until the last one, a boy who had just been born. He was named Italo. His father had given in.
Language has always been linked to power, from Mandarin in China to Greek and Latin in classical antiquity. But through much of history official languages co-existed with numerous dialects which marked people’s personal identities. The aim to make language the principal unifying factor for national identity is largely a modern phenomenon, perhaps dramatized when Napoleon crowned himself, not as “emperor of France”, but as “emperor of the French”. I seem to remember a nineteenth-century British wit who defined a nation as “a language with an army”, but I surfed the Internet unsuccessfully for the reference. Instead I discovered that a phrase much like it is often attributed to Max Weinreich, a linguist of modern Yiddish, which had to struggle for recognition as a language rather than a low-status dialect. In a lecture in 1945, at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in New York, Weinreich said that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. Yiddish, alas, never had either. It is only natural that Israel, once it has both army and navy, discarded Yiddish for renascent Hebrew.
The Austro-Hungarian empire (described by the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus as a “dress rehearsal for the apocalypse”) pioneered the language wars of recent history. At least the Austrian half made serious efforts to institute a multilingual modern state (Hungary pursued a policy of Magyarization). The enterprise, as did the empire, came to a violent end in 1918. The successor states struggled with the same issue, and Yugoslavia collapsed in a series of bloody civil wars. The linguistic aspect of this is clear: The largest group of people in multilingual Yugoslavia spoke a language known as “Serbo-Croat”; they now speak Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak. The religious aspect is also clear: Serbian-speakers are Orthodox, Croatian-speakers Catholic, Bosniak-speakers Muslim. The most visible European case of a successful multilingual state is Switzerland, with its four official languages: German, French and Italian, with Romansch as a quaint fourth language spoken by a handful of people in Alpine cantons. Some might argue that there is actually a fifth language, Swiss-German, or Schwytzerdytsch, which is the vernacular for most people who use High German for public purposes. Swiss-German hovers somewhat awkwardly between being an official language and a dialect, its feisty gutturality (hostile outsiders have called it a throat disease) a marker of genuine Swiss identity.
Given my obsession with language, I have played with the idea of writing a historical treatise on the interplay of language, politics and religion. This is not the place for it. I can only give a few examples of the diversity and the curiosities of the phenomenon in our own time. Papua New Guinea is the country with the largest number of languages in the world (I have heard an anthropologist give the figure of 800, which seems a little improbable); every year some of them die out, yielding to the dominance of official English and vernacular Pidgin. The most famous case of successful resurrection of a “dead language” is of course modern Hebrew. Ireland has not been quite as successful with Gaelic. Modern Greek was deliberately concocted by nationalist intellectuals in the nineteenth century, who “purified” the spoken dialects of its foreign (especially Turkish) elements, so as to create a national language as close as possible to the glory of classical Greek. Politically or culturally repressed languages, like Catalan or Slovak, have been mobilized for the purpose of nation-building. Regional dialects become the official language for an entire country; much earlier in history the dialect of the Ile de France became modern French, a feat facilitated by the brutal repression of the Langue d’Oc in what is now southern France (more or less the same language now resurrected as Catalan). A very successful twentieth-century case is Bahasa Indonesia, which after that country became independent was made the official language, but now has become the vernacular for many people who could not communicate in their native languages. Whether this happened by chance or by deliberate planning, Bahasa was the dialect of a politically unimportant region of Sumatra—not of Java, the center of political power—and this fact made Bahasa acceptable over the vast territory of the Indonesian archipelago. Other newly independent countries tried to nationalize the language spoken at the political center, only to meet up with successful resistance in other regions. Thus Hindi, the language of the north, was resisted in the south of India, and Tagalog, originally spoken around the capital Manila, was not successfully nationalized in other parts of the Philippines. Language politics has been a major factor in Indian politics since independence. It also has a religious dimension: Urdu is the language associated with Islam in India (the fact that it has also become the national language of Pakistan has not enhanced its popularity in the other part of the subcontinent).
Language has often been a symbol of resistance of repressed populations, such as Czech against Habsburg Austria or Polish against imperial Russia. In the latter case, not in the former, there was a religious element: Poland is Catholic, Russia is Orthodox. Closer to home, Quebec has gone to much trouble to preserve itself as an island of French in the ocean of English-speaking North America (its language laws had the unintended consequence of driving out many anglophone businesses from Montreal to Toronto). Language continues to be a political issue in the United States, mainly as a defense against the perceived challenge from Spanish. Belgium is in danger of splitting apart in the battle between French and Flemish (ironically Brussels, a hotpoint of this battle is the capital of the multilingual European Union, whose transactions are laboriously translated, at enormous expense, into all its twenty-some languages). There are semi-political movements to enhance the status of indigenous languages, such as Quechua in Peru, or to prevent their extinction, as with Hawaiian and Welsh.
Yiddish is a very interesting case of the overlap of religion and politics. For most of its history, Yiddish was the profane language representing Judaism, while Biblical Hebrew was the latter’s sacred language. There was an interesting case in Austria-Hungary in the early years of the twentieth century. Bukowina, a multilingual and multireligious province of the Austrian part of the dual monarchy, was a showcase of enlightened language policy. If I remember correctly, the official languages were, in addition to German: Polish, Ukrainian and Romanian. There was a large Yiddish-speaking Jewish population, whose religion was protected by law. A Jewish group demanded that Yiddish be added to the list of official languages. The demand was rejected by an administrative court, on the ground that it would violate the religious freedom of Jews by forcing an ethnic (or, in the term used then, a national) designation on them. In a curious way this Habsburg court anticipated and rejected the Nazi policy of forcing Jews into the designation of a race rather than a religion. When the Zionist movement transformed Hebrew from a sacred to a profane language, it concomitantly secularized it. Yiddish was widely looked down upon. Significant numbers of Orthodox Jews continue to resent this, in Israel and in the diaspora. This fact is beautifully and economically reflected in an Israeli joke: A woman on a bus in Tel Aviv is speaking to her son in Yiddish. A fellow passenger, a staunch Zionist, rebukes her: “You should speak to your son in Hebrew. Why do you speak to him in Yiddish?” She replies: “Because I don’t want him to forget that he is a Jew”.
This blog is supposed to deal with religion and other curiosities. A very curious case of the politics of language (religion was not involved) occurred in South Africa soon after the establishment of post-apartheid democracy. Every modern nation is supposed to have a flag, an anthem, and a coat of arms preferably inscribed in the national language. A new flag was designed very creatively and has been generally welcomed. The anthem issue was avoided by adopting two anthems, the old Afrikaans one and in addition the hymn “God bless Africa” of the anti-apartheid movement. The coat of arms presented a more difficult problem. The old official languages were English and Afrikaans, and the inscription on the coat of arms was in Latin – “Ex Unitate Vires” (“Strength from Unity “). This clearly would not do. The New South Africa now has 11 official languages: the old two, plus nine African ones. (This means that English is actually the national language—as, incidentally, it is in India.) They could not be squeezed onto the new coat of arms (which displays a diversity of pictorial symbols). It was decided that none of the official languages were to be used. Instead the coat of arms now sports an indigenous language that is virtually extinct in South Africa (it survives, precariously, in Botswana): Koisan, the language of the Koi, the so-called Bushmen who inhabited this part of the continent before the invasion by Bantu-speaking Africans. It is full of click sounds and glottal stops almost impossible for an outsider to pronounce (The Star, Johannesburg’s major newspaper, published a pronunciation guide, which I, for one, could not understand let alone follow). It appears on the coat of arms as follows: !KE E:/XARRA//KE. Thabo Mbeki, the successor of Nelson Mandela as president, explained that the motto means “Let diverse people unite”. As I recall, there were two linguistic experts on Koisan in South Africa. One had advised the government on the new motto. The other stated publicly that this was a mistranslation. The correct translation should say “Let us urinate together”. I don’t suppose that this rendering would negate the intended noble purpose. I don’t know whether there was a genuine scientific disagreement between the two linguists, or whether number two was a politically subversive jokester.
How one views these very different cases will obviously depend on one’s own political positions. (And I have not even mentioned the language rules propagated by feminists in both politics and religion.) But I think I can say one thing quite beyond any particular partisanship: Every language opens up a distinctive window on the world. It is a distinctive world. The loss of a language means the loss of a world. Perhaps some worlds deserve extinction. Most do not. Their extinction is an impoverishment in our capacity to appreciate and to wonder at the many different human attempts to come to terms with reality. Of course the study of a “dead language” can mediate this wonder (which is why the study of Latin and Greek was for a long time an integral part of school curricula). But there is nothing like hearing contemporary people actually speaking a language. This is why keeping a language alive, or restoring it to living speech, is a truly humane value of civilization.
10 Responses to The Politics of Language
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/berger/2012/09/12/the-politics-of-language/
Secondly, Professor Berger reflects at some length on Yiddish, but he neglects to mention Ladino which in fact has a far richer linguistic heritage than even Yiddish does. While Ladino was based on Spanish (much as Yiddish was based on German) it was also heavily influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Turkish and even Greek. Almost 100,000 people in Israel (virtually all of them of Separdic decent) consider it their native language. Ladino is still spoken in Spain, Turkey and the United States and ad with Yiddish, there have been recent attempts to revive the language.
Than you for very interesting post. I happen to be from Bukowina’s capital Chernotsy (now Chernivtsi or Chernivci, between WWI and WWII: Chernauti, and before Chernowitz). Unfortunately, during the soviet time the multilingual culture disappeared. I knew though uneducated people who did speak 5 or 6 languages.
Recently I’ve heard someone calling pre-soviet Chernovtsy a fish that spoke 5 languages. So yea, you are correct.
Thanks again!
Uzh
For a quick taste of what Ladino music sounds like, try this link,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sKXXPzYbH0
Pinker’s book expounds on Noam Chomsky’s theory about “universal grammar.” To be fair, at this point to call Chomsky’s thesis a theory doesn’t do it justice; it’s more like Darwin’s theory of evolution-that is to say an accepted fact by anyone other than the preternaturally dimwitted. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Chomsky’s thesis suggests that the ability to learn grammar (which is the building block of all language) is hard-wired into the human brain which is evident from the fact that children learn to speak without being taught. Chomsky started a whole generation of linguists on the search for the universal properties that all human languages share. To the extent that Pinker disagrees with Chomsky at all, Pinker believes even more doggedly than Chomsky does about the biological imperative when it comes to language. Since Chomsky developed his thesis and Pinker wrote his book, the genomics revolution has validated a number of points that they made. Several human genes associated with language have been identified and disorders in speech development in children have now been associated with a number of these genetic variants. For those who are interested, the most important gene regulating human language development is called “FOXP2.”
Given that there is nothing that unites the human species more than the fact that we, alone amongst the species inhabiting the earth, possess the language instinct (Pinker’s book demolishes the idea that animals such as birds, dolphins or non-human primates have real language) it is somewhat surprising that differences over language have proven so divisive.
Perhaps the only thing that has excited more rancor throughout human history than language is religion. This fact puts me in mind of an explanation I once heard during an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez where the great author was asked how he explained why the animosity between co-religionists like Roman Catholics and Protestants or Shia and Sunni was more likely to lead to violence than animosity between members of different religions (e.g. Hindu and Christian). Garcia-Marquez’s explanation was as elegant as it was simple; the problem he said was that they all read from the “same book.” Religious people who take their cues from different books have much less to fight about.
All of this brings me back to Professor Berger’s remark about the Anglophones in Quebec. I don’t think that there is any question that the purpose of the Quebec language laws was to ethnically cleanse Anglophone speakers from the Province. The French majority in the Province, which overwhelmingly supported the legislation, wanted what all linguistic chauvinists want; they wanted their Anglophone neighbors to “convert” and speak French or to leave. Like the conversos in Spain, many Anglophones chose to conduct their business in French while furtively speaking English at home; many left the Province for good. Either way, the French chauvinists got what they wanted, but only partially.
After achieving their linguistic hegemony in the Province, the next goal of the many Québécois was independence from Canada. For a time, it seemed that the political party enfranchised to accomplish this goal, the Parti Québécois (PQ), might achieve independence. Ironically, once the English language was practically banished from Quebec, this caused the nationalist fervor amongst the Province’s French speaking citizens to abate. Previous referendums on the issue all failed and for the past 15 years the PQ was out of power in Quebec. Just a few weeks ago, the PQ was voted back into power but without any mandate to seek independence from Canada. Once the French in Quebec could bully others into speaking their language, their zest for political independence dissipated.
Of course, the French are not the only linguistic chauvinists in the world. The Turks don’t much like the Kurds speaking their native tongue; the fact that Turks and Kurds are both mostly Sunni Muslims hasn’t lessened the distaste that both populations have for each other, largely over the issue of language. In Japan, during the 1970s when the Japanese economy was ascendant, it was not uncommon to hear Japanese intellectuals and businessmen attribute their superior economic performance to the supposedly unique way in which the Japanese language shaped the Japanese intellect. Of course, now that Japan has become an economic laggard for the past 20 years, we never hear Japanese attribute their economic failings to the inadequacies of their language.
Still, there does seem to be something unique about the French; in a world full of linguistic chauvinists they always seem to ascend to the top of the pyramid. In fact, the political unification of France was very much about the French language crowding out and then destroying local languages and dialects spoken in what were to become parts of the French periphery. A wonderful book that describes this history in some detail is Graham Robb’s, “The Discovery of France.” At $9.99 on the Kindle, it is also a steal and well worth a look,
http://www.amazon.com/The-Discovery-France-Historical-Geography/dp/0393333647
In other words, translated from Yiddish to English, the punch line is that she is speaking to her son in Jewish so that he won’t forget he’s a Jew.
Berger describes the stated purpose is to unite all Middle East Christians in “one strong nation.” Cognitively besieged by Arabic and Hebrew languages as what might be called “hegemonic languages,” this Christian minority wants to re-institute Aramaic as a way to re-create what Berger would call a “Christian plausibility structure.”
This is ironic in that the New Testament world and language was Greek.
In Jerry Dell Ehrlich’s book “Plato’s Gift to Christianity: The Gentile Preparation for and the Making of the Christian Faith” (2001) the author asks:
“Why, if Jesus and all the disciples were Jewish, is the entire New Testament written in Greek?”
“Why within 100 years of Jesus’ reported religious ministry were all the leaders of the Christian Church Greek speaking?”
Ehrlich makes a case that Jesus was a “Hellenized” or Greek Jew, not a Palestinian Jew. Ancient Palestine was a Greek state or occupied territory. The names of Jesus’ family and his Disciples are mostly Greek. The Herodian dynasty ruled Palestine from 37 BC to AD 70, with the life pf Jesus exactly at the peak of this 107-year dynasty. The lineage of Herod the Great had mainly Greek names. His wives had Greek names. Herod’s grandfather was a Greek army general or “Strategos.” A large proportion of the names in the Christian New Testament are Greek, not Jewish or Palestinian. Ehrlich writes that the name “Jesus” is of Greek origin.
According to Ehrlich, the occupation of Jesus as a reported carpenter or stone mason could not have occurred in Galilee, but in the City of Sepphoris, built during the years of Jesus’ life by Herod Antipas, the Greek son of Herod the Great. In Sepphoris, a 4,000 seat theater was built in which Greek plays were performed and Greek philosophy was taught. This theater was the largest public works project of its time and locale. As a builder, Jesus may even have worked on this nearly project. Thus, Jesus may have come into daily conversation with Greeks.
An Ehrlich point out the very word “synagogue” is a Greek word. And since Jesus is reported on nine occasions by his Disciples to have read from the Jewish scriptures in the synagogue, and the Jews in Palestine mostly used Septuagint Greek, Ehrlich believes he must have known Greek.
Jesus is referred to as a “teacher” over 50 times in the Christian Gospels. But in the entire New Testament only three Aramaic expressions are attributed to him and everything else is in Greek.
The Letters of Paul the Apostle were written before the Christian Gospels. And the Pauline birthplace of Christianity was the City of Antioch, not Jerusalem.
That the modern Greek state is now bankrupt and a dependent ward of the European Union may be why a Christian enclave in the Arab section of Israel may desire to revive Aramaic rather than Greek for its community language.
Corrections to the above comment:
“As a builder, Jesus may have worked on this NEARBY project.”
“AS Ehrlich POINTS out the very word “synagogue” is a Greek word.”
Radical sociolinguistic constructionism, which holds that there is no mind-independent reality, is obviously not interested in listening for signals of transcendence from what Nietzsche dismissed as worlds behind the scene. For constructionists, the point is to engineer a better world through language-police enforcement of politically correct language. (I recall a sociology textbook which denounced the military’s attempt to normalize war with terms like collateral damage and neutralization of enemy assets. Having finished the topic of linguistic spin, the text took up the topic of abortion and noted the case of a woman who experienced unnecessary guilt because she believed she had killed her baby—rather than removed unwanted “products of conception”!)
Cognitive scientists like Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate) have properly ridiculed standard sociological nonsense about Eskimos constructing snow with words. But, refreshing as it is to have fellow-traveling scientists debunking the idea that humans and the whole world are blank slates, theists can travel only so far with those who ignore philosophical anthropology and view language simply as a collection of modules in the “adapted mind.” The language “instinct” cannot explain a God who speaks or the responses of creatures made in the image of God. Language, like consciousness, remains a miracle, despite the claims of cognitive scientists to have “explained” both.
Berger’s inclination to support a multiplicity of distinctive language windows is sound. If language does not actually construct reality, there is not much danger of getting stuck in the “wrong” language. As Archie Bunker famously put it, God speaks all five languages. And, of course, language differences are not just between languages but within them. Chaucer’s English is not ours. Language change never stops.
But if laissez faire is the best language policy, it is not only unwise to police language but perhaps also to artificially preserve it. Spoken language windows are more life-enhancing than dead language windows—or dying language windows. As a current resident of Oklahoma, I frequently encounter efforts to preserve Indian languages that have dwindling numbers of speakers. The multicultural presupposition seems to be that if culture constructs selves and language constructs culture, then letting a language die out is tantamount to genocide. But if a language is dying not because of language suppression and the associated hostility to its speakers, it may be possible for values acquired in one language to receive expression in another. If I may be permitted to expand the discussion to include the “language” of ballet, I would note the disproportionate number of world class Indian ballerinas from Oklahoma. I recently attended a memorial tribute for one of them, Moscelyne Larkin, daughter of a Russian mother and Indian father. As a child she hated ballet lessons—“Indian children like to run free, not be stuck doing barre exercises.” But then she discovered that all that discipline vastly enhanced her capacity for self-expression– including her Indian self. Linguists speak of “subtractive bilingualism” when oppressed people are forced to speak the oppressor’s language (and their own on the sly). The additional language diminishes their selfhood. I think it is safe to say that the Indian ballerinas experienced no subtractive bilingualism when they danced Swan Lake. The point is that the larger world was receptive to their contributions. They did not have to choose between being Indians and being ballerinas. Dancing Swan Lake was one way of being Indian.
So, in accordance with laissez faire language policy, I would not oppose efforts to revive Aramaic or preserve Chickasaw or hold a war dance festival. But linguistic ethnocentrism is not our greatest human failing. Ranking higher is our reluctance to say what needs to be said in any language.
I would like to offer a clarification: The Maronite Catholic Church is not ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome.” It never entered into schism. Also, Melkites as they are referred to in the piece can only be Catholic, as their Church of the see of Antioch came into communion with Rome in the 18th century, after a split with the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch.
Both are referred to as Eastern Churches.