SIL Electronic Book Reviews 2010-016

Introduction

This book, based on the 2002 Wiles Lectures given at the Queen’s University in Belfast, is a “series of linked essays” (p. 1) on languages and communities. A cultural historian, Burke explores the social and cultural history of European languages during the period of time from around 1450, marking the end of the Middle Ages and the advent of the printing press, to the French Revolution in 1789. Employing a historical comparative approach, Burke considers a broad range of languages and countries while noting that in the early modern times language identity was not clear-cut and as closely aligned to nationalism as it is now. Of special interest are the many interesting and often pungent quotes reflecting language attitudes. The story line begins with the use of Latin by various communities (chapter two), continues with the ‘rise of the vernaculars’ (chapter three), and then, in the final three chapters, addresses the topics of standardizing, mixing, and purifying languages.

Chapter summaries

Chapter one, “‘Speak, that I may see thee’: the discovery of language in early modern Europe,” begins by noting that a measure of interest in languages existed in the Middle Ages. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century), for example, reveals pilgrims’ social positions through their language. Fear of language death was also present, as Edward I of England feared that the King of France wanted to invade England and “wipe out the English language” (p. 16). A greater interest in languages and language diversity, however, developed from the mid-fifteenth century on, particularly with regards to a language’s riches or ‘deficit’ of vocabulary. Debate on language purity and mixture also arose, a topic explored later in the volume.

The question of whether language change is an improvement or corruption was a major feature of early modern scholarship. A pristine view saw peasants’ speech as rustic and pure, uncorrupted from intermingling with foreigners and preserving archaic forms, as found in Iceland’s isolation. Others expressed contempt, such as the playwrights who ridiculed provincial speech in their plays. Interest in linguistic diversity grew as explorers in the Age of Exploration encountered remote cultures and collected wordlists, and in Russia, Catherine the Great commissioned a dictionary of all the languages of the world. Awareness of diversity was accompanied by both debates about standardization and a fascination with the exotic.

Ridicule of the affected speech of the socially ambitious is one example of a negative language attitude. Religious groups such as the Quakers and Puritans in England were recognized as having distinctive speech forms, and gender differences were mostly noted by men criticizing women’s errors and pronunciation. Accent, particularly among the English, became a way to determine status.

Chapter two, “Latin: a language in search of a community,” notes that by the ninth century, Latin had no native speakers. While it has been typical to call Latin a language “without a speech community,” Burke (chapter two) prefers to call it “a language in search of a community” (pp. 43-44). In this it did succeed in two arenas: the Catholic Church, where it served as the liturgical language for 1,600 years, and in the international community as a lingua franca for lawyers, officials, diplomats, and travelers. While the Protestant Reformation diminished the expanse of Latin, the language did continue to expand eastward and to the New World. Even while vernacular use rose, Latin was still used for its geographic breadth. It also “offers a classic example of ‘diglossia’ . . . in the sense that it was considered appropriate to use . . . in some situations and domains” (p. 43). While the Reformation reduced its ecclesiastical use, Luther advocated a middle position which would retain a Latin liturgy “for its educational value” (p. 51) and develop a vernacular liturgy for those not literate in Latin. Latin’s history can be summarized as the language of the state (Roman Empire), then the Church, and then of high culture, before its position began to decline in the mid-seventeenth century.

Chapter three, “Vernaculars in competition,” challenges the traditional interpretation of the triumph of languages such as French and English over Latin during the Renaissance and Reformation, an interpretation comparable to the traditional but criticized explanation of the rise of the middle class. This view, with its use of combative terms such as ‘revolt’, ‘victory’, and ‘emancipation’, has some validity, particularly due to the rise of the printed vernacular. However, it neglects facts such as the continued persistence and spread of Latin and widespread language plurality, as evidenced by the example of a sixteenth-century Swiss family which wrote letters in five languages. ‘Rise’ itself is an ambiguous term: is this a rise in number of speakers, prestige, or function?

As an alternative, Burke offers a comparative approach, noting particularly vocabulary enlargement. 38,000 new words were introduced to English between 1450 and 1750. Shakespeare alone contributed 1,700 neologisms; of these, two-thirds were accepted into the English language. Burke lists 12 printed defenses of the vernacular produced 1529-1663. “The main point of all these orations or treatises was to stress the riches, abundance, or copiousness of one language and the poverty of its rivals” (p. 66). Colorful, emotive descriptions, both extolling and deriding languages, abounded.

Rather than the language of ‘triumph’, Burke prefers to compare the histories of different languages and note their usages in different domains. As the use of 40 to 70 vernaculars arose in early modern Europe, some had to be losers. Among these were Gothic, Couronion, Old Prussian, Polabian, and Cornish. More common than extinction was reduced usage in diminished domains, either due to external political pressure or internal usage decline in public domains. Chapter three closes with a variety of examples demonstrating how French made the strongest showing as a lingua franca in that era.

Chapter four, “Standardizing languages”, discusses how the expansion of a vernacular’s domain required its standardization, which facilitated “communications between regions” (p. 89) and granted prestige and dignity. A language without a standard was considered ‘barbarous’. Prestige required stability over time, a‘fixity’ which fostered the founding of academies which produced dictionaries. Numerous grammars were published as well.

Print and the mass production of texts obviously played a large role in language standardization with “the need to sell identical texts to the maximum number of readers” (p. 92). Burke notes, however, that standardization was occurring before the printing press, and that print could also “promote rival standards” (p. 93). Whether standardization came due to the influence of the print itself, or that of the writers and printers controlling the text, is another factor to consider.

As opposed to one dialect’s ‘triumph’, a ‘koine’ combining different dialects was successful in German, Swedish, Dutch, and Finnish. Luther had no standard to follow but used the spoken variety of his local Saxon chancery. Throughout Europe, the Bible played a central role in creating vernacular standards. The chapter’s last two sections discuss how reading aloud contributed to standardized spoken language and how centripetal forces of conflict and rivalry and centrifugal, unifying forces of print, courts, and cities affected standardization.

Chapter five, “Mixing languages,” describes how cultural and linguistic encounters in Europe counterbalanced the decline of Latin and led to the rise of pidgins, creoles, and other mixed languages. The teaching of European languages gradually rose in the early modern period and “infiltrated the universities” (p. 115). Interestingly, English did not have prominence on continental Europe until the late seventeenth century.

Frontier zones and polyglot cities were two main areas of significant linguistic encounter. A negative effect occurred when no one language was spoken well. Examples of flourishing multilingualism include a possibly apocryphal story about a Cardinal who dictated to six secretaries in as many languages. Polyglot cities were mostly ports such as Venice, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, cities which became multilingual publishing centers. The British Isles, in addition to English, hosted five Celtic languages and a “pocket of Flemish” (p. 119).

Mixing and borrowings were often described negatively in that era, through the use of terms such as “robbing”, “pilfering”, and “mingle-mangle” (p. 120). Global contributions came from words for tropical weather, and terms for flora, fauna, and food, such as ‘chocolate’, ‘avocado’, and ‘jaguar’. Material objects (‘canoe’) and social terms (‘sultan’) were also introduced (pp. 122-123). Burke particularly describes Portuguese’s influence on Amerindian, Asian, and African languages as well as their influence on Portuguese.

Within Europe, some languages dominated certain domains, such as Italian in commerce and the arts. Armies also influenced languages due to their international composition, mobility, and size. Mixing could be both pragmatic and playful. German writers such as Luther and Leibniz commonly used Latin phrases, particularly for abstractions. The playful use of mixing, called ‘macaronics’, referred generally to code switching in a literacy text and more specifically to a ‘macaronic’ Latin developed in the fifteenth century which mixed vernacular vocabulary with Latin syntax. The mixing of vernaculars was employed, often for comic effect, in various works such as satire, plays, verses, and operas. The peak of borrowing, or ‘inter-animation’, occurred in the sixteenth century.

A natural reaction to mixing languages was “Purifying languages” (chapter six). Three kinds of language purity are moral, social, and ethnic; Burke focuses on the last one. He also discusses the concept of early modern Europe purity in the domains of religion, society, politics, and hygiene, particularly the plague. Purification could ‘transform’ a language, and it could also foster a ‘defensive’ purism. Language standardizers often saw their task as one of purification, and examples are provided from Italy, France, and England. The Académie Franaise saw its purpose as “to clean the tongue from dirt” (p. 146).

An ‘anxiety of contamination’ was “the complementary opposite to the ‘anxiety of deficit’,” with reactions strong enough to be described as “moral panic” (p. 147). Examples of heated debates concerning language corruption versus enrichment are given from Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, Russia, and elsewhere. England also had purists, but “not many” (p. 149). In Germany, a poet criticized a “German larded with Italian” (p. 150), and a historian complained about the entry of “a horde of foreign and barbarous words” (p. 151). Examples of purism being mocked by scholars and writers are also provided, and, finally, the role of purism as a community response to perceived language endangerment is discussed, noting that a “good deal of evidence” exists “for what might be called linguistic xenophobia” (p. 159).

Burke (“Epilogue: languages and nations”) states that the French Revolution marks the time when languages became more consciously associated with governments and vice versa. Nationalism created ‘imagined communities’ through armies, education, centralized governments, and communications media such as the railway and newspaper (and later the radio, cinema, and television) (p. 166). Nationalistic struggles related to language occurred in places such as Prussia, Finland, Greece, Bulgaria, and Germany.

While the regulation of language, if it happened at all, used to occur in academies of writers and scholars, in modern times governments have intervened and scholars and writers have turned to writing histories about “their national languages” (p. 172). In the volume’s final sentence, Burke emphatically states that “this is precisely the kind of national, or even nationalist, history that this book—together with other studies in the social history of language, with their stress on multiple communities and identities—has been trying to undermine” (p. 172).

Evaluation

This is an informative, interesting, and entertaining volume. Burke works with established theory and thought while also providing original interpretation to events and trends. Of special appeal is the timelessness of the topic. Those interested in current language changes and trends can find numerous precedents here, and anyone working in the arena of language development will be reminded of the complexity of the topic. The six chapters are full of colorful examples from a wide range of period scholars, literature, languages, and countries. Especially noteworthy are the wealth of quotes revealing emotive language attitudes. While this fascinating story of languages holds one’s attention, the density of information and examples can also be overwhelming.

A colleague of mine once observed that working with languages is always interesting because languages are intrinsically connected to people. Perhaps that best explains why this book succeeds, as it describes how languages have been used, developed, changed, maligned, and extolled in the context of human community.