This post was originally published by the Institute of Art and Ideas and is republished here with permission as part of the Blog of APA’s partnership with the Institute.
The idea of linguistic purism, or of resisting the excessive encroachment of foreign words in local languages, is often immediately disparaged as ignorant nationalism and stultifying to change. Yet in this piece, Welsh Philosopher and Lecturer Rhianwen Daniel defends the concept as being intrinsically misunderstood. Linguistic purism actually helps cultures preserve themselves against colonialism and speakers feel more at home in their language, among other benefits described here.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Grimm Brothers began assembling the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary of the German language, eventually spanning thirty-two volumes. So forensic was the brothers’ tracing of word etymology, history, and usage, that they died before its completion.
Even more painstaking, however, was their austere purging of French loan words, which they believed to be tainting the purity of the German language. This process of elimination may in fact have taken more time and effort than compiling the lexicon itself. Together with their Household Tales, whose folktales also underwent extensive puristic rearrangement, the Wörterbuch helped fashion a more unified German cultural-linguistic identity, thereby paving the way for the dissemination of the Volksgeist (or national spirit) in the subsequent political manifestations of nationalism.
This tendency to resist excessive translingual borrowing, particularly loan words and loan translations, is known in contemporary linguistics as “linguistic purism”. In practical terms, purism involves grassroots campaigns to remove foreign loanwords from everyday speech, or centralized direction from lexicographers and language academies such as L’Académie Française, where new and emerging concepts are coined, monitored, and regulated according to established linguistic standards. Nonetheless, purism continues to be caricatured and dismissed by a majority of sociolinguists as irrational and reactionary. This brief piece, in contrast, will defend a purist approach to language against several objections.
The objections
While parts of the Grimm brothers’ legacy may all too easily be associated in hindsight with the atrocities of the Third Reich, it would be a mistake to conclude that there is any inevitable connection between linguistic purism and national chauvinism. To the contrary: purism is most commonly found among cultural-linguistic populations facing endangerment or imperial threat, where national chauvinism is actually being resisted rather than perpetuated. This protective function is particularly urgent today, as more languages than ever face extinction.
So why, given its anticolonial functions, has linguistic purism acquired such an unfavorable reputation? One commonly-cited objection is that linguistic purism is stultifying to language’s growth, preventing it from moving with the times and meeting present needs. To this end, even L’Académie Française is viewed by many as “trying officiously and pointlessly to hold back the inescapable evolution of the French language.”
But this objection fails to distinguish between necessary neologisms and lexical borrowings, and the indiscriminate adoption of endless loan transfers, regardless of whether they serve any additional use or enhance value. It is only the latter approach to translingual borrowing that is opposed by purists; as such, it does not follow that their desired effect on language is stultifying.
The objection that purism stultifies language’s growth also implies that purism demands a near-literal freezing of language, preventing any loan transfers from entering an otherwise pure vernacular. But such absolute purity has never been postulated, since it is common knowledge that every known language has undergone significant historical change via contact with other languages.
Indeed, language contact and change are precisely what gave rise to distinct languages in the first place. Consider Medieval Norwegian’s bifurcation into Icelandic and Modern Norwegian due to the latter’s sustained contact with Low German, or Hindustani’s division into Hindi and Urdu according to the respective Sanskritization and Perso-Arabization of their vocabularies. Purism, rather, concerns the optimal rate of change, rather than resisting it altogether and thereby stultifying language’s growth.
A further objection is that purism constitutes exclusionary nationalism: by gatekeeping against the importation of foreign elements, and by prioritizing the host language’s own resources in the coining of new words using indigenous roots, a type of nationalistic protectionism is sustained.
But this characterization is incomplete, at the very least. For, as previously emphasized, purism is usually a medium for resisting rather than advancing exclusionary nationalism: it is a vital tactic for preventing language endangerment and extinction. Indeed, this explains why purism usually only targets the loanwords of colonial or neighboring dominant languages, given its primary function of resisting assimilation via an incoming tsunami of lexical incursions.
This explains why Welsh lexicographers have historically been reluctant to fill lexical gaps with English-based loanwords while tolerating Latin or Greek roots, and why German intellectuals in the Wilhelmine era deliberately purged German of French and English loanwords while similarly tolerating Latin and Greek influences. Comparably, Tibetan linguistic purism focuses exclusively on eliminating Mandarin loanwords, tolerating those derived from English, Hindi, Sanskrit, and Mongolian, while Italian suffixes are generally acceptable in Norwegian morphology while English ones are not.
It should not, however, be denied that linguistic purism has on certain historical occasions become entwined with national chauvinism. As early as the 18th century, Johann Gottfried von Herder objected to Germans learning and studying French: “the slime of the Seine” which could only “deform” the German mind. Subsequently, Johann Gottlieb Fichte denounced the invasion into German of French loan words and loan translations, which he viewed as “perversions” and “corruptions” contributing to the fragmentation and disunity of German culture.
But while such alarming instances of Francophobia may appear to suggest that purism is a slippery slope inevitably leading to xenophobia, the fact remains that it is imperialism, rather than purism, that tends to ignite such defensive backlashes. Fichte’s remarks were delivered as part of the struggle against French occupation in 1808 shortly after the Battle of Jena, while Herder’s prejudice against the French language was deeply affected by France’s cultural and linguistic domination of Europe, and the resultant subordination of the German language.
Considered within the proper historical context of French cultural, linguistic, and political imperialism, then, there is a sense in which Fichte’s and Herder’s remarks are run-of-the-mill instances of anticolonial rhetoric. Their indispensability in regenerating national consciousness, moreover, central to Germany’s unification in 1871, cannot be overstated.
For contemporary instances, take, for instance, the linguistic purism found among China’s non-Han minority ethnicities. Over half of China’s 284 living indigenous languages are currently endangered, due in part to the Chinese Communist Party’s Han-centric assimilationist state-building. While Mandarin is promoted as the sine qua non of social mobility and advancement, other languages face status relegation, declining proficiency levels, and a constant incursion of Mandarin loanwords into everyday speech.
Consequently, numerous puristic counter-movements have proliferated in an attempt to offset the resultant language shifts. Among the Mongols, for instance, “pure” Mongolian is depicted as representing an untarnished agrarian, poetic, and ancestral worldview and tradition, while “mixed” (i.e. Mandarin-infused) Mongolian is seen as a destructive and polluted medium of disordered thinking. Similar patterns are found among the Uyghurs, Yi, and Tibetans, to name a few. Purism can be part of a survival strategy for minority cultures.
Or consider the anti-Hindi purism among Bengali speakers, or the Ukrainians’ recent campaign of cultural-linguistic de-Russification, whose linguistic purism went so far as shredding the Russian literary classics of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and others, and recycling 72 tons of their books into toilet paper. In each of these cases, purism is a direct response to imperial threat or cultural-linguistic assimilation, rather than unilateral national chauvinism.
The benefits
Now that the conflation of linguistic purism with exclusionary nationalism and linguistic stultification has been disentangled, the question arises: what, more specifically, are the further advantages of purism, other than offsetting cultural-linguistic assimilation?
First, the advantages of linguistic diversity. As mentioned, purism is necessary for maintaining the integrity of endangered languages: in a hyper-globalized world where English loanwords and neologisms are continually entering everyday language via social media and smart devices, preventing the resultant language shifts requires coining and reasserting the equivalent terms in the recipient language. But why is the maintenance of linguistic diversity so important? The answer, quite simply, is that language is a repository of its speakers’ culture-specific traditions, sensibilities, and values. With nearly half of the world’s 7,164 languages currently endangered, the accumulation of culture, knowledge, and experience garnered by the affected linguistic communities risks being wiped out.
Secondly, it conveys the expressive force and cultural authenticity of a language. Since language’s figurative meanings arise from their own culture-specific contexts, these nuances are often lost in translation when a host language adopts them as translingual borrowings. When metaphors are transplanted from one cultural-linguistic context into another, it is likely that they will lose much of their relevance, expressive force, and comprehensibility. Consequently, an overreliance on translingual borrowings rather than native near-equivalents causes the host language to lose much of its natural lucidity and footing in its cultural home.
Finally, purism facilitates the comprehensibility and competent mastery of language, which depends in part on etymological transparency. When an influx of translingual borrowings enters a language en masse, linguistic confusions emerge when the roots are largely opaque to the speakers. Although it would be misguided to suggest that understanding the roots of one’s words is necessary to understanding them at all, the fact remains that etymological opacity does, nonetheless, increase the probability of linguistic confusion.
Take the following comparison between the English and Welsh languages, for instance. Approximately three quarters of the English vocabulary has been derived from Latin, Greek, and French/Anglo-Norman, with only approximately a quarter of it being Germanic. Welsh, by contrast, evolved directly out of Britain’s native language, Brythonic. Since it is an historically continuous indigenous tongue whose vocabulary is mainly confined to its own native roots, it is arguably more semantically transparent.
Since (1) understanding a word’s root enriches one’s knowledge of its meaning, and (2) most English speakers have limited etymological knowledge unless they are proficient in Latin, it follows that many people may struggle to comprehend significant proportions of their own vocabulary.
Consider “cacophony” (kakos (bad in quality) + phone (voice/sound), Greek), for instance. How could you possibly work out its meaning unless you already had the relevant knowledge of Greek? By contrast, the Welsh equivalent drygsain (drwg (bad/evil) + sain (noise)) wears its meaning on its sleeve. Similarly, there is an indeterminate number of English words whose meanings are roughly identical but which have been derived from different languages. Among these are, for instance, brotherhood (Anglo-Saxon) and fraternity (Latin), whereas the Welsh equivalent, brawdoliaeth, has a uniform use.
This often results in a lack of consistency in the roots that are then used in semantically related words: e.g., sea/sailor (Anglo-Saxon); nautical (Latin, nauta); maritime (Latin, mare). Once again, such variability can restrict linguistic comprehension given the etymological opacity of many terms, exacerbated by the unpredictability and inconsistency in the use of the roots in conceptually related words. It can also disguise situations where one is simply repeating oneself, given the sheer abundance of available synonyms with differing etymologies.
The fact that English is permeated with lexical transplantations can also sometimes give its speakers the illusion that what they’re saying is more sophisticated than it really is. Using a loan word can appear to evoke extra-linguistic nuances when, for instance, that word has been imported from another language with which a speaker is unfamiliar. There is nothing in a loanword’s form that gives an English-speaker a clue as to what it actually means, and this can create a certain sense of mystery and/or confusion which can easily be mistaken for profundity. As Orwell puts it in Politics and the English Language:
“Scientific, political and sociological writers [in particular], are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and […] words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, […etc.] are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
Such pretentious diction can lead to political corruption by concealing disagreeable facts, such as when indiscriminate massacres of civilian populations are termed pacification, or when ethnic cleansing is termed transfer of population or dispersion. Pretension obfuscates meaning. It prevents the clarity and independence of thought which are necessary preconditions of political regeneration.”
Nearly 80 years later, Orwell’s remarks ring truer than ever. We can take a look at the present state of academia, for instance, where scandals such as the Sokal hoax and the Grievance Studies affair (where academics managed to publish in academic journals knowingly false or bogus articles that reflected academic trends of the time) illustrate just how easy it is, in certain fields, to publish nonsensical articles comprised of word salad and word association, as long as the assembled jargon is sufficiently impenetrable. Were the roots transparent, the nonsense would far more easily be shown for what it is.
It can be seen, therefore, that linguistic purism has multiple advantageous uses: reducing linguistic confusion and its resultant adverse political and scholarly effects, conserving cultural heritage and national identity, and, perhaps most importantly, offsetting cultural-linguistic decline and assimilation. If the erosion of linguistic diversity is to be contained, and the use of language as a medium of clear and inspired expression retained, linguistic purism must be duly factored into the necessary policy, planning, and standardization measures we take as a society. Languages and their associated cultures face unprecedented threats, and, as the Grimm brothers knew too well, purism can help protect them.
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