Linguistic purism
Linguistic purism (or linguistic protectionism) is the definition of one language variety as purer than other varieties, often in reference to a perceived decline from an ideal past or an unwanted similarity with other languages, but sometimes simply to an abstract ideal. The decline may take the form of change of vocabulary, syncretism of grammatical elements, or loanwords. The unwanted similarity is often with a neighboring language whose speakers are culturally or politically dominant. The abstract ideal may invoke logic or the grammar of "classic" languages.
Linguistic purism is often presented as conservative, as a "protection" of a language from the "aggression" of other languages or of "conservation" of the national Volkgeist, but is often innovative in defining a new standard.
Linguistic purism is sometimes part of governmental language policy which is enforced in various ways.
Cognate languages
In one common case, two closely-related languages or language varieties are in competition, one weaker, the other stronger. Speakers of the stronger language may characterize the weaker language as a "dialect" of the strong language, with the implication that it has no independent existence. In response, defenders of the "weaker" language go to great lengths to prove that their language is equally autonomous.
In this context, Yiddish and Dutch have in the past sometimes been considered dialects of German. In the case of Low German the debate is still current. Since linguistic science offers no scholarly definition of a dialect, and linguists regard the distinction with scepticism (cf. A language is a dialect with an army and navy), the argument is really about subjective questions of identity politics, and at times it can be conducted in a very emotional tone.
Writing systems
Closely related languages often tend to mix. One way of preventing this is using different writing systems or different spelling systems.
The extreme case was with Moldovan and Romanian languages, which are virtually identical in all respects, except that Moldovan used Cyrillic script, and Romanian used Latin script.
Another example is Yiddish, which is very close to German, but uses the Hebrew alphabet instead of the Latin alphabet, and so keeps its separateness. This results in the situation where, for example, an Israeli could read out loud a Yiddish text to a German (who could not read Hebrew), who could understand it, while the Israeli could not.
The next example is Hindi and Urdu, which are kept traditionally separated by using Devanagari and Arabic script, respectively. This is a well-known example often cited in linguistic texts; however, in recent decades, it has been observed that the languages are tending to drift much further apart, due to the corresponding Sanskritisation and Arabisation of the two languages.
Serbian and Croatian languages also differ mainly in using Cyrillic and Latin scripts, respectively (and formerly they were considered to be just variants of one language, Serbo-Croatian). After the breakup of former Yugoslavia, a third "language" was created mainly for political reasons, the Bosniak language, which uses Latin script but does not differ from the standard štokavian basis of Serbian/Croatian. The last step in the split of the former "Serbo-Croatian" language is taking place nowadays, as its fourth "copy" is being created, the "Montenegrin language". The "Montenegrin language" for now exists only in name but is likely to be politically instituted by the pro-independentist authorities in Montenegro in near future (whose citizens voted for independence on May 21, 2006).
Unrelated or distantly related languages
Often one language has a higher social status, or has an established tradition from the time it had a higher social status. However, it may be a minority language and actively threatened by the majority language. An example is Swedish in Finland: the educated upper class was Swedish-speaking prior to the 20th century, and the rules and regulations protecting the Swedish language remain in force. Although the Swedish-speakers represent a 5% minority in a country where 93% speak Finnish, Swedish is a national language and a test in Swedish is required for all public servants.
Forms of purism
Based on the approach
- Ethnographic purism: This form is based on an idealization of the countryside, folk stories and dialects. Examples: Nynorsk (New Norwegian), some versions of Demotic Greek.
- Élitist purism: Associated with the language spoken at the court.
- Playful purism: This form existed early in the 20th century and is aimed at making a mockery of purism or merely for the sake of amusement or literary aesthetism.
- Xenophobic or patriotic purism: involves the elimination or exclusion of foreign elements. An extreme case is High Norwegian, but it is common worldwide. Many English writers of the 19th and 20th centuries extolled the virtues of 'strong' Anglo-Saxon words such as 'foreword', which was coined to replace the 'weak' Romance word 'preface'. France is known for its preference for coining words to borrowing English words. German and Greek often prefer to coin calques to avoid using foreign words, although Germany was unable to prevent a major influx of informal English vocabulary in recent years.
This classification of puristic orientations made by George Thomas represents ideal-forms. In practice, though, these orientations are often combined. We may also add other approaches, such as:
- Democratic oriented purism: This is aimed at replacing linguistic items associated with an elite norm with linguistic items regarded as more representative of the language society as a whole.
- Anti-purism: A puristic reaction to a manifestation of purism, directed at the removal of neologisms originating from a puristic intervention.
Based on the goals
- Unificatory purism: Tries to satisfy the solidarity criterion of standard languages.
- Prestige purism: Tries to satisfy the prestige function.
- Defensive purism: Tries to deal with the concerns about the threat a language faces.
- Delimiting purism: Tries to satisfy the separating function
Based on the intensity
- Marginal purism: In this pattern purism never becomes at any stage a value-feature of the speech community. On the contrary, there is a certain openness to all sources of enrichment, at the same time characterized by a lack among the language elite of intellectual digestion of foreign influxes, or by a lack of such an elite as a whole. Examples: English, Russian, Polish, Japanese.
- Moderate, discontinuous purism: In this pattern, a moderate attitude is discernible over a long period of time. Examples: Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian.
- Trimming purism. A reactive correction to a potentially dangerous trend in the development of a standard language. Examples: Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Slovak.
- Evolutionary purism: In this pattern purism is seen early in the development of a written language. There are no radical changes or orientation. During the standardisation process, the purism gains momentum after which it slows down. Examples: Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Hebrew, Croatian and Slovene.
- Oscillatory purism: Involves repeated swings between intense purism and a more tolerant attitude. Examples: German, Czech and Yiddish.
- Stable, consistent purism: In this pattern no interruption or fluctuation in intensity is seen. Purism is a constant value-feature of the speech community. Examples: Arabic, Tamil and Icelandic.
- Revolutionary purism: An abrupt and violent change from the previously mentioned patterns to another. Examples: Turkish.
Based on linguistic level
- Lexical purism: directed at the lexicon, first of all against direct lexical loans, often combined with the development of loan translations (such as in Norwegian hand out > støtteark, snowboard > snøbrett).
- Orthographic purism: directed against foreign orthographic elements (such as in Norwegian: genre > sjanger, in Czech: obauwat > obouvat).
- Morphological purism: directed against foreign inflection and declension (such as the resistance to plural -s in noun endings in Scandinavian languages).
- Syntactic purism: directed at syntactic features from other languages (such as the stylistic resistance in Nynorsk against some passive constructions and some constructions with the genitive).
- Phonetic purism: directed at foreign phonemes and phonematical combinations.
Other forms
- Regressive purism. The eradication of very old loan-words. It is one of the main features of ultrapurism.
- Ultrapurism: The extreme upper limit of purism. In this pattern, everything expressed by human speech can become a target for puristic intervention, even geographical names, proper names, and names of physical elements, chemicals, etc. The only two recorded examples of this are High Icelandic (Háfrónska), and the usage of the German renaissance humanist Johann Georg ''Turmair'' who even translated the name of the ancient Roman general Fabius Cunctator into „Zauderer Bohnenmaier“ (i. e. literally “Laggard Bean-Mayor”).
Bibliography
- George Thomas, Linguistic Purism (Studies in Language and Linguistics), Longman, 1991, ISBN 0-582-03742-5.
- Endre Brunstad, Standard language and linguistic purism. In Sociolinguistica 17/2003, 52–70.
- Nancy Dorian, Purism vs. Compromise in Language Revitalization and Language Revival. In Language in Society 23, 479-494.
See also