1
Like somebody collecting shells and stones on a beach, linguists constantly look out for features that set apart one way of talking from another.
The other day, as I was sitting in our university library, I got a message from Jacques, a Swiss friend of mine. This is the exchange:
J: Falls hüt spöter no en Kafi möchtsch nä chasch mer spontan schrybe. Lg
S: Ja cool wenn so? Am füfi villecht?
J: Ja, wieso nöd? Wo ide Soas oder susch neumed?ⁱ
The above is clearly different from the German language in textbooks. However, children in German-speaking countries grow up learning that there is one language called German – High German (‘Hochdeutsch’) in technical terms – that everybody speaks in this language area. Although Germany, Austria and Switzerland all have their own standardised versions of German, people in these countries are used to thinking that they speak the same language, and anything different from this form of language is called a regional dialect.
Many Germans emigrate to Switzerland, expecting their every-day language to be only marginally different from what they’ve grown up with in Germany, but soon find out that the language used in official situations and the one spoken in more informal contexts are radically different from each other, making every-day conversations difficult to follow. Sessions in the Swiss National Assembly or lessons at school in German-speaking areas are in High German, but more informal conversations such as entertainment programmes in mass media use ‘Swiss German’.
In German philology, what is called ‘Swiss German’ is part of a continuum of ‘Alemannic’ dialects that are spoken in South-Western Germany and Northern Switzerland. The forms of Swiss German differ quite radically, to the extent that somebody from Basel might have trouble understanding someone from an alpine valley in the Valais. I usually speak Bernese Alemannic to Jacques, whereas he replies to me in Alemannic spoken in and around Zurich. People from Bern and people from Zurich differ not only in terms of their pronunciation – just as younger people from Liverpool, London or Bangor would – but also in numerous other aspects such as the usage of specific words or even the conjugation of verbs. To give an example, in Bernese Alemannic one uses the second person plural (‘you all’) to indicate politeness in verb forms — just as in French — but in Zurich, you would use the third person plural (‘they’) to indicate politeness, which brings it closer to German. Verbs are also conjugated in a different way, which is why in Zurich people say ‘si händ’ (‘they go’), and in Bern one says ‘si hei’.
Obviously, more than differences between types of Swiss German, the distance between the German spoken in Germany and Swiss German spoken in Switzerland is demonstrably bigger. There are obvious and substantial differences between the every-day language spoken by younger people in Germany and in ‘German-speaking’ Switzerland, yet the latter is nevertheless referred to as ‘Swiss German’ and conceptualised as a dialect of the German language.
As a linguist I am trained in analysing the grammatical system of a language, and after years spent in academia, this has become an unconscious habit. When I learned Bernese Alemannic and got used to speaking it with my Swiss friends – a truly geeky thing that only a linguist would want to do – I ended up asking myself why the everyday speech of Germany and Switzerland are tightly bound under the roof of one and the same language. Clearly, thought plays an important role here.
2
To add a pensive note. I remember a lecture where the teacher, after reading a baffling passage in Old English, asked, ‘Can anyone of you tell me what “English” is?’ Along the same lines, one could follow that up with, ‘What is the language that you actually speak?’
The question seems much simpler than it actually is. Between English, Spanish and Japanese, people will not have much trouble distinguishing these idioms without a doubt. But we might consider that Old English had a different sound system with vowels [y] and [ø], different sentence structure, and a complex system of four different cases on articles, nouns and adjectives, all of which distinguish it from Modern English. Even if we emphasise the commonalities between Modern and Old English, what is common between these two idioms can be equally found between a number of Germanic languages that are spoken now; for example, similarities in vocabulary, as well grammatical features such as the usage vowel of changes to indicate different tenses in verbs (sing, sang, sung), can be found in German, Dutch, Frisian, Danish and English.
Stating that Old English is only an older form of Modern English, and thinking about where English begins, tells us a lot about how we think about the world in general — and affects our everyday lives more than we might be able to admit.
3
‘A language’ is, somewhat ironically, recognised to be a highly problematic term in linguistics, with sociolinguists such as Einar Haugen denying its usefulness altogether. Can we rely on linguistic evidence when showing that something is language A and another is language B? For Japanese or Finnish this should not be too difficult. However, if we move to the West of Germany, it becomes much more difficult to draw clear language boundaries: Along the Dutch border of Germany, ‘dialects’ have features from German and Dutch, and it is difficult to say that these dialects are ‘more Dutch’, or ‘more German’.
In the case of the Dutch-German border, even mutual intelligibility is very difficult to determine. From a logical viewpoint, what if there are three languages A, B and C, where speakers of A and C cannot understand each other, but speakers of B can understand speakers of both A and C? It would be contradictory if we said that based on mutual intelligibility between speakers, A and C were distinct languages, but B was a dialect. And to push it even further: a dialect of what?
The argument of A, B and C does not hold with historical relations between states of languages: otherwise ‘Old English’ would not be the same language as ‘Modern English’, since clearly speakers nowadays are hardly able to understand documents written in Old English.
Therefore, although as a linguist I would say it is impossible to define the notion of a ‘language’ in a consistent and sound way, as a member of society I know we need to use labels to name languages. However, our way of interpreting and reflecting on language use goes much further than observations of accentual differences and imitations of funny accents.
4
Consider Japan. In The Making of Monolingual Japan , Patrick Heinrich has shown how what we call ‘Japanese’ – in Japan often just called gokugo , ‘national language’ – did not exist before the concept of a single, unified Japanese nation emerged during the late nineteenth-century Meiji era. People’s speech in pre-modern Japan differed drastically from region to region, and for inter-regional, written communication, people resorted to Classical Chinese, similarly to old European scholars using Latin as the medium of communication.
When autonomous, local dominions merged to form Japan, language was seen as a powerful medium that symbolised the unity of a people, and was identified as a necessity for successful communication between people of different regions. The speech in what’s now called Tokyo became the standardised, official Japanese, and anything that was spoken by people of a certain region of the new state of Japan was called a regional dialect. Therefore, this artificially created language eventually became the only accepted speech form used for official, institutional purposes. Nobody’s mother tongue at the beginning of its creation, after a couple of decades Japanese became the only language people spoke.
What were classified as regional dialects of Japanese are nowadays considered to be a number of related languages, of which only Japanese is thriving. All the others are at the verge of extinction. The UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger lists seven of those languages, almost all of which are spoken on the islands of the Ryukyuan archipelago to the South of the Japanese Isles. More importantly, as a devastating result of standardisation, intergenerational transmission of these languages has been disrupted. Once a language is not passed on to younger generations, it is not only associated with a particular age group, but also perceived as a remnant of ancient times. Locals refer to these idioms as dialects of Japanese, despite the differences between them being similar in scale to those between French and Spanish.
A connection of ideas of a unified people and nation with ideas of a unified language, as Heinrich describes in relation to Japanese, is a classic example of language ideology that influences people’s behaviour. Entire languages cease to be used within the course of one generation. Naming something that people speak and localising it as a language or a dialect is always dependent on the ideology that stands behind it as a system of justifications. This language ideology is a vehicle through which power is established in society. As Max Weinreich allegedly said, ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’.
However, language ideologies are also part of our ‘common-sense’ knowledge about the world, rarely brought to our attention or questioned for their internal consistency. We normally accept Swiss German as a dialect of High German, or Old English as a historical form of Modern English.
5
If it is nearly impossible to ‘measure’ speech with respect to whether it is a language or a dialect, why should linguists, or those who are not interested in language, bother? Why can’t we accept ‘Swiss German’ as a distinction from High German? Although ‘Swiss German’ is in fact a label for a particular speech form, this name is assigned by somebody or a group of people. In this sense, naming is a social practice that may be the result of a much bigger social process. As the name for something that people speak becomes conventionalised, those who assign the name to a speech form have to have the authority to do so. More importantly, one does not only name a language or a dialect, but the name itself becomes emblematic of the people who speak it.
As power is an inevitable element of social organisation, linguistic behaviour and our reflections on language use are deeply infused with power relations. Calling something the ‘Okinawan dialect of Japanese’, ‘Swiss German’, or ‘Lombardian dialect of Italian’ is a social practice that operates against the backdrop of an ideology that tries to sustain the contiguity of an imagined community (as coined by Benedict Anderson) such as a nation or an ethnic group. Incorporating a linguistically different speech form into the roof of one language must involve the act of subordinating one idiom (at least from a scientific perspective) under another. Similarly, by claiming that something is a dialect of a language spoken by a more powerful group, one takes the speakers of this dialect into one’s own sphere of power.
6
I am currently doing field research on the beautiful, volcanic Jeju Island in South Korea.
Among other things that distinguish the island province from the South Korean mainland, its language is said to be difficult to understand by other South Koreans. Jeju had long been classified as a dialect of Korean, although there are numerous linguistic differences between Standard Korean and the speech of Jeju Island.
The cultural and geographical distance of Jeju Island from the mainland frequently gave rise to conflicts and political turmoil, culminating in the so-called April 3 Incident that lasted from 1948 up to the 1950s, during the early years of South Korean state formation, where many of Jeju Island’s villages were destroyed and thousand killed in an uprising against the mainland police forces. Subsequent social discrimination and severe punishments for using the Jeju vernacular at school led to the inhabitants adopting Standard Korean. For decades, Jeju province was the poorest region of South Korea, and, against this socio-economic and historical background, only a handful of people over eventy can speak Jeju language now. The island has become a pertinent, tragic example of social domination followed by linguistic domination. Still, among the older generation in rural Jeju, the language lives on as their everyday medium of communication.
Such a divergent ‘dialect’ still being spoken in South Korea doesn’t square well with the grammarian Ho-Min Sohn, who states in his Korean grammar that ‘Korean is relatively homogeneous, with excellent mutual intelligibility among speakers from different areas’. In fact, both Japanese or Korean grammar books rarely reveal how different ‘regional dialects’ are from either the standard language or from each other. Heinrich, talking about the creation of the Japanese standard language, describes how often commonalities between different regional speech forms are emphasised, and differences examined only marginally. Following Judith T. Irvine and Susanne Gal, this linguistic subordination of one language to another may lead to ‘erasure’, where a certain language ideology renders sociolinguistic facts invisible. ‘[E]lements’, Irvine and Gal state, ‘that do not fit [a certain ideology‘s] interpretive structure – that cannot be seen to fit – must be either ignored or transformed’. Simply put, if a certain group’s language ideology supports the homogeneity of a language, anything that goes against this homogeneity is commonly ignored.
On Jeju Island, the opinion on the value and usefulness between Standard Korean and their local vernacular reveals a result of what Rosina Lippi-Green calls the ‘Principle of Linguistic Subordination’. According to the principle, ‘the language of socially subordinate groups will be interpreted as linguistically inadequate and deficient by comparison with the language of socially dominant groups’. Such interpretations of one’s own language structure and use can also foster attitudes that may eventually lead to the demise of a language. Usually, Jeju inhabitants say that it is not appropriate to speak the local language in situations that require the use of polite language. People I have asked sometimes go as far as suggesting that the Jeju language and its grammar do not have any means of expressing politeness.
For a linguist studying Jeju grammar, such a claim is interesting, mostly because the language possesses a genuine, complex politeness system – much more complex than the French tu-vous , or the German Du-Sie distinction. However, such beliefs exist as part of a net of ideologies to sustain and reproduce the status quo, for example the existence of a strong, centralist nation, or a federal system with a religiously oriented constitution. The longer people hold the beliefs, the more likely they will end up not using their autochtonous language, retaining a couple of regional peculiarities at best. In this way, language ideologies have the power to turn thoughts into reality, and are therefore crucial in the relationship between language, power and social inequality. However, as soon as the ideologies become the object of conscious scrutiny, they lose a lot of their power, opening up the way for possible, alternative ideologies.
With Jeju, such an alternative ideology found its way into the general discourse when the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger classified it as a ‘critically endangered’ language in 2010. The accompanying press releases called Jeju a language, which was unheard of at the time in the mainstream South Korean press. For the first time, Korean was not seen as one homogeneous language anymore. Instead, the powerful foreign voice of UNESCO had made a statement about the linguistic divergence of Jeju that ‘gave it the right’ to be called a language separate from Korean, essentially going against nationalist language ideologies. Subsequent discussions established the new name of Jejueo , ‘Jeju language’ to be used in the media, now a legitimate name alongside older names.
This change in language naming could not have happened without an alternative language ideology that supports this new practice. Given the dramatic decline of linguistic diversity in the twenty-first century, (mostly Western) linguists have become more explicit in supporting linguistic diversity as their language ideology, possibly going against existing language ideologies as happened in the Jeju case. This way, by giving Jeju more ‘linguistic weight’ through academic acknowledgement, scientists are questioning and reversing processes of past linguistic domination and subordination. It is still hard to tell which road this recent development will take.
7
Instead of giving an answer to the big questions, one can say linguistics is entrenched in domination and subordination. Language ideologies surround us everywhere and through our speech behaviour – language naming in particular – we enact and reproduce language ideologies as tools of power. Without us noticing, we may be supporting a mechanism that threatens the very existence of some languages while ensuring the position of others. The question, therefore, is not whether we should support a particular language ideology, but which language ideology might be best to make sure we live in a more just and colourful world.
i. ‘If you’d like to grab a coffee later just drop me a line. Xx’
‘Yeah cool, around what time? At around five?’
‘Yeah, why not? Where, at SOAS or somewhere else?’
Soung-U Kim is doing his PhD in Linguistics at SOAS, University of London, and has just arrived on Jeju Island, South Korea to document Jeju language for future generations. In reality, he spends most of his time fighting his urges to relax on Jeju’s beautiful beaches and peaceful mountains, with little success.