The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  While Grose the antiquarian was sniffing out such details, his son (also Francis) was serving in the American War of Independence. In 1791 the younger Grose travelled to Australia to be the Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales. He soon replaced his ailing superior, Arthur Phillip, who had founded the convict settlement at Sydney; at the point where he took over, there were 4,221 Europeans in New South Wales, and 3,099 of these were convicts. The contrasting lives of father and son evoke the broadening horizons of English. The elder Francis Grose noted the prevalence among thieves of the word bloody; half a century later Alexander Marjoribanks, depicting life in New South Wales, identified it as one of the leading British exports. Marjoribanks was moved by the experience of hearing a bullock driver utter the word bloody twenty-five times in a quarter of an hour to reflect that the man, with ‘ten hours for conversation’ each day, would in fifty years use it more than 18 million times.19

  The work done by Murray and the elder Grose suggests two very different approaches to language that would occupy arbiters of English usage in the century that followed: a determination to issue conservative and moralistic prescriptions, and an appetite for describing the language in all its hues. The experiences of the younger Grose and of Alexander Marjoribanks offer an alternative vista: towards the development of English on continents where it had previously been unknown, and its role in forming the identities of new communities.

  In addition, Marjoribanks’s little calculation was a step towards the word bloody being consecrated as an Australian national treasure. When in 1898 Edward Ellis Morris received an honorary doctorate from the University of Melbourne in recognition of his recent Austral English: A Dictionary of Australian Words, Phrases and Usages, students at the university were so piqued by the absence from this volume of bloody that they staged a mock degree ceremony in which a gowned figure appeared lugging a tome labelled ‘The Great Australian Adjective’.20

  11

  The pedigree of nations

  Language, identity and conflict

  Lindley Murray was one of life’s anthologists, content to pick other men’s flowers. Yet at the same time as he was doing this, original theories of English and its uses were burgeoning. Arguments about the language were becoming, to a striking degree, explicitly political. The appetite for a standard of English usage, which we might reasonably associate with a desire for political stability, was in some quarters a vestige of radicalism.

  Concern for the state of the language is, as I have suggested, always bound up not just with practical missions, but also with social or political agendas. In the 1790s it became normal to think that a challenge to the existing structures of power could be achieved through literary and linguistic endeavours. The period was marked by a special awareness of the relationship between language and nation. This was shaped to a significant degree by the revolutions in America and France. Amid the rise of nationalist feeling in Europe, the idea of language as a badge of identity – not just our togetherness, but their lack of it – became customary. This was not a new idea, but the conscious attention it received was a fresh development.

  One agitator who combined political iconoclasm with philological investigations was John Horne Tooke. His anti-authoritarianism took many forms, but included campaigning for parliamentary reform, distributing copies of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, and advertising to raise money for the widows of American soldiers killed by British troops. Most important, though, was Tooke’s attempt to set language on a more democratic footing. He rejected conventional grammar. His book The Diversions of Purley – the first part of which was published in 1786, though the work was not completed till 1805 – used etymology in an attempt to demystify the often abstract language of politics. It scraped away the extraneous matter with which important words had over time become coated.

  Tooke’s radical thesis was that all language can be traced back to nouns and verbs. Whereas Johnson, Lowth and Lindley Murray referred to nine distinct parts of speech, Tooke stripped grammar down, in the belief that language begins in the material world and in actions. ‘The first aim of Language,’ he writes, ‘was to communicate our thoughts: the second, to do it with dispatch.’1 Perhaps he recalled the characters in Gulliver’s Travels whose mission it was to eliminate from language all parts of speech except nouns. In his personal life Tooke appreciated quick communication of feelings, even wishing that when women were pleased with what he said they would simply purr.2 The brevity he favoured had practical benefits, and the idea that words were fundamentally the names of sensations earned him many disciples.

  There were strong links between Tooke’s studies in etymology and his politics. He prepared a second edition of the first part of his work while in prison on a charge of high treason; his crime had been to argue the need for constitutional change, and in his work on language he analysed the vocabulary of political authority. His first-hand experience of legal process had sharpened his sense of the relationship between injustice and the professional cant of lawyers. He belongs to a tradition of thinkers, including John Locke and Jeremy Bentham, who have posited that there can be no liberty without an intelligible language of law and politics. Intelligible legal and political language creates accountability; the people who are affected by legislation can understand it and engage with it. Tooke was a key mover in the Society for Constitutional Information, which sought to bring about parliamentary reform.3

  Tooke’s main achievement lay in marrying philology and philosophy. His ideas were interesting, but his blunders numerous, and his influence retarded the development of English philology, insulating it from the new Continental scholarship of (among others) Jacob Grimm. In the early part of the nineteenth century, philology enjoyed a vogue among creative writers; Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt were among those enthusiastic about Tooke, believing he had penetrated the clutter of polite refinement and seen language in its primitive state. Hazlitt on the title page of his 1810 grammar book ‘for the use of schools’ indicated that ‘the Discoveries of Mr Horne Tooke … are for the first time incorporated’. This particular enthusiasm did not last long, but there was a general excitement about all that English seemed to make possible: the traffic of goods and ideas between Britain and its far-flung dominions, the cementing of a national consciousness, and the scope for creating the sort of ideal, civil, standard language that Germans call a Hochsprache. It also represented the exchange of radical ideas through private correspondence, the reconstitution of literary genres, the magic of impure speech and dialect, and the liberty – intellectual, political, imaginative – of an unfettered vernacular.

  In the 1790s William Wordsworth was one of those who, like Tooke, saw in the French Revolution a portent of radical change in Britain. When he visited Paris in 1791, he pocketed a little piece of the ruined Bastille – a souvenir of his visit and a symbol of French radicalism. Through his friend Samuel Nicholson, a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, he was exposed to the thinking of some of Britain’s most passionate agitators for political reform. Later he would reassess his attitude to the French Revolution, but early in his career events in France convinced him of the need to construct a new literary language, which would be a means of nationalizing poetry.

  Wordsworth’s manifesto was the preface to Lyrical Ballads, the collection he and Coleridge published in 1798. There he made it clear that he was breaking with the aristocratic tradition in English poetry. In the preface to the second edition, two years later, he declared that he was providing readers with ‘a selection of language really used by men’. Arguing that a poet must be ‘a man speaking to men’, he suggested the power of poetry to improve social conditions and reverse the general degradation of public taste. ‘The primary laws of our nature’ are discernible in ‘low and rustic life’, and in taking as his subject this neglected area of existence he believed he had found the source of ‘philosophical language’.

  The language of the poems in Lyrical Ballads does not fulfil the
promises of the preface. But Wordsworth and his contemporaries did create a new literary language. In the Romantic period English literature stopped trying to copy the literature of Latin and Greek, and asserted its independence. However, as this happened, literary language no longer seemed able to represent the language of the nation.4 Instead of something solid and accessible, there were new and confusing enthusiasms for the vibrancy of dialect, obsolete words, archaism, lushness, haphazard borrowing from other languages, casually bad grammar and bursts of emotion. In Wordsworth’s work, there is everywhere the looseness of improvisation and invention. The emergence of Romantic poetry was the moment when novels ceased to be an upstart form, becoming instead the everyday furniture of the national literature. Meanwhile poetry was increasingly treated not as a staple of the public conversation about culture, as it had been for most of the eighteenth century, but as an enigma. Wordsworth preached community without achieving it. But his idea that refashioning literary language was a means of redistributing property suggests the spirit of the times: the old authorities, in matters of both language and law, were deemed obscure; the invention of a new common language could liberate the people; and the true genius of the nation lay in its everyday, untutored eloquence.

  If we look at the history of the word nation, we find that it was first used to signify an ethnic group, not a political one. Its Latin root conveyed ideas of birth, descent and race – issues of breeding, not of conviction. But since the seventeenth century the noun nation and its kindred adjective national have been employed as emotive, unifying terms. A nation is, in Benedict Anderson’s crisp definition, ‘an imagined political community’, and it is ‘imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’. Why ‘imagined’? ‘Because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’5

  To feel that one is part of a certain nation is to subscribe to an invention. The invention is not a lie, yet it is, as Anderson emphasizes, an imagining – a function of an aspiration, psychological rather than material. This is not to say that it is something small; often the national attachments that people feel have a religious quality, and it is no coincidence that the rise of nationalism in Europe in the eighteenth century coincided with a decline in religion. Nationalism was not a direct replacement for religion, but was the product of other changes that had slowly been eating away at the old certainties. For instance, the rise of printing and of printed reading matter had facilitated the spread of religious propaganda, which had destabilized religious communities, and it had also established different (and secular) communities – of readers.

  It is easy to say that this kind of national sentiment is now the stuff of nightmares, where once it was a dream. But really it is double-sided: it binds peoples together, hoisting them out of little local allegiances and creating the fertile possibilities of a shared public life, yet it also encourages a collective antipathy to other peoples. There is no sense of nationality without a sense also of rivalry. It may with some justice be argued that promoting the idea of a nation’s unity has the ironic effect of emphasizing the divisions that fester among its inhabitants. Leaving this aside, though, it is clear that the pleasures and rewards of national feeling are inseparable from a capacity for hostility and violence. A society that maintains an army does so in the belief that there are some things more precious than life itself.6 Those ‘things’ are the principles of one’s nationhood – for which, in the twentieth century especially, millions have been prepared to die, or have been forced to. Such principles are every day flagged all around us. Part of this is literal: national flags are displayed. But we are surrounded also by badges of national identity – to many of us unobtrusive, familiar and reassuring. A lot of these are what the social scientist Michael Billig calls ‘invented permanencies’. These are notions that feel as though they have always existed but have in fact been created far more recently than we imagine.

  National identity is anchored by a sense of shared experience: we share our past, it seems, and so we share our future. (Of course, we is a vexatious pronoun – troublingly corporate, subsuming varieties of experience and imposing a collective morality. But it’s also convenient.) Languages are obvious indicators of what we share and of our difference from other peoples. The sociologist Michel Foucault observed that the modern era witnessed a change in the understanding of language: its function was no longer ‘imitation and duplication’, but instead a presentation of ‘the fundamental will’ of the person who speaks it or writes it – and indeed of the will that ‘keeps a whole people alive’.7 One idea that has been prevalent since the nineteenth century is that the speakers of a language should mark out for themselves a homeland in which that language can be supreme. Eager to stir up German resistance to Napoleon, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte argued more than two hundred years ago that wherever a separate language is found, a separate nation exists. Another German, Johann Gottfried Herder, claimed that every people was shaped by the food it ate and the soil upon which it lived; there were rivers and mountains separating different nations, yet also, he noted thankfully, distinct languages and characters.

  This kind of idyllic vision of a national language has tended to include the less picturesque business of suppressing minority languages. National languages are examples of invented permanencies. French is an interesting case in point, for until the nineteenth century people from one part of France typically had difficulty understanding those from another. At the time of the French Revolution, the country’s fringes were dominated by other languages: Breton, Basque, Flemish and Alsatian. Other languages thrived: Lyon was ‘a hive of micro-dialects’. As late as 1880, not much more than a fifth of the population professed itself comfortable speaking French.8

  In a famous lecture delivered in 1882 at the Sorbonne, the philosopher Ernest Renan asked, ‘Qu’est-ce q’une nation?’ A Breton by birth, and on his father’s side of solid Celtic stock, Renan argued that nationality was a matter of conviction more than of ethnicity. The sense of a nation is something created in the present by human will and buoyed by a shared sense of past glories. It also, said Renan, involves some forgetting. To paraphrase Benedict Anderson, no sharp change in consciousness can be achieved without a measure of amnesia. Part of the fantasy of nationhood is an incomplete, mistaken or wilfully selective impression of history. By the same token, when we speak of English, which it is both convenient and satisfying to do, we are pretending that it is something robust and long-lived, unyielding rather than porous. We think of our variety of English in this place and in the present; other times and places are ignored, and we project an illusion of English’s permanence. But our ideas of languages as formally constituted entities are not very old, and it is nationalism that has created these ideas.

  Today it is usual for a nation to be based on political rather than ethnic unity. The European Union is the most striking example of a project in which peoples who in the past have fought horrifically bloody wars have integrated into a community which is both political and economic. Euro banknotes, tellingly, do not have lots of words printed on them, the way pound and dollar notes do. As an instrument of European political and economic union, they mark a shift from statements such as ‘In God we trust’ or ‘In the monarch we trust’ to a new, implicit act of faith: ‘In money we trust’.9

  Nevertheless, within the EU there are bitter conflicts between languages. These tend to manifest themselves as arguments about the right to speak a language in a particular place. In Spain, the position of Castilian is challenged by Catalan, which is spoken not only in Catalonia, but also in the Balearic Islands and the Comunitat Valenciana. Euskara, commonly known as Basque, has official status alongside Castilian in the Basque Country around Bilbao, but for radical Basque nationalists this is not enough. In Belgium, there is a tension between Flemish and French, particularly in the contested Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde arrondissement. If
we look further afield, in recent history there have been struggles for language rights – to give but a few examples, some of them still very much live issues – by the Gagauz in Moldova, Croatians in Austria’s Burgenland, Kurds in Turkey, Maoris in New Zealand, Sámi in Norway, the Qua in Nigeria, Hungarians in Slovakia, Albanians in Macedonia, Tamils in Bangalore, and Russian-speakers in Ukraine.

  Arguing for the right to use one’s mother tongue can be a means of expressing a range of cultural and social grievances. Marc Shell, a distinguished scholar of comparative literature, observes that ‘many wars that we used to call simply “religious” or “nationalist” turn out … to have been “linguistic” as well’.10 It is worth noting that, whatever quaint ideas we may have to the contrary, most contact between speakers of different languages is discordant, not harmonious. In fact, wherever more than one language is used, conflict of some kind is inevitable. In such a society, a particular language will tend to be used by the dominant social group. Those who are outside this group can easily be identified by their use of a different language and can be discriminated against because of it. Where there is an official national language, people who have no command of it are likely to have difficulty accessing services provided by the state.11

  When there are conflicts over language, they are waged through language: as statements, threats, denials, demonstrations. This has the effect of reinforcing the two sides’ positions: the dominant group uses its own language, while the minority group, attempting to assert its case, must either use the dominant group’s language (a deeply uncomfortable manoeuvre) or use its preferred language and risk incomprehension or simply being ignored.

  Within such conflicts, people are killed for speaking the ‘wrong’ language; their linguistic preference, which is difficult to mask, prompts accusations of disloyalty, separatism and treason. It is easier to change your political allegiance than to change your language, and also easier to cover up your religious faith (or lack of it). A single word, mishandled, can betray you. The concept of a shibboleth encapsulates this. In chapter 12 of the Book of Judges in the Bible, the following verses appear: