Is language political? Wikitongues responds
What defines a language? What’s authentic speech? Is the love of languages political? Let’s discuss.
If this is your first time engaging with Wikitongues, welcome! Offline, we’re a global network of grassroots linguists expanding access to language revitalization. Online, we publish new language videos on YouTube every week — and we’d like to try using the comments on our videos as starting points for conversations about language, linguistics, history, and culture. This essay will unpack three recurring debate topics in our comments: how languages are classified, what constitutes linguistic “authenticity”, and whether language is political.
“When did Wikitongues become political?”
On June 2nd, Wikitongues joined #BlackoutTuesday, an online effort to clear digital space and acknowledge a global groundswell of protests against racial inequity in policing. While the U.S.-based protests are perhaps the most widely covered, concerned citizens have taken to the streets from Australia to South Africa to Ireland; and many of our own contributors were participating in #BlackoutTuesday, whether from Namibia, Sudan, or Switzerland. So, instead of posting a language video, we left a message on our community feed, encouraging people to be kind to one another, help their communities, and vote more. For our US-based followers who want to put their money where their social media is, we included a list of Black-owned bookstores to support. We asked our followers outside the US what their countries need:
Today is for reflection and commitment to meaningful change — in the US and around the world. If the people in your life need you, ask how you can help. If your community needs you, do what needs to be done. If you can vote, learn about the barriers to justice and vote to tear them down. Wherever you are, keep on using language to affirm the humanity of others. Black lives matter.
To our friends in the US: here’s a list of Black-owned bookstores that you can support as you engage with the written word: […]
To our friends outside the US: what can others do to amplify movements for justice in your country?
Thank you to Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang for conceiving of and organizing #blackouttuesday. This will be our only post today. For BLM, go straight to the source: blacklivesmatter.com.
Some of our subscribers interpreted this as open support for anarchism, terrorism, and murder:
However, not all of our critics were so incendiary. Gage Brewer said:
The last time we posted something explicitly “political” was 2017, when the Women’s March was as global as the protests today. There were Women’s Marches in hundreds of cities on every continent, literally—even Antarctica. It had to do with so much more than politics in the United States and the then-recent election of U.S. President Donald Trump, so on Instagram and Facebook, we posted a picture that I had taken in Washington, D.C., of a banner with the word sisters translated into a few dozen languages. And as with our #BlackoutTuesday post, some of our followers found the foray into politics inappropriate. David Bernard Bujold responded:
Well, the answer is simple. We’ve always been political. Wikitongues is inherently political because language is political. It’s how people express themselves as individuals and collectives; and it’s hard, if not impossible, to celebrate and explore the differences, similarities, and histories of humanity’s 7,000 languages without talking about politics. Take one of my ancestral languages, for example: Yiddish. At the turn of the 20th century, Yiddish was the predominant mother tongue of Ashkenazi Jews. Even Einstein spoke Yiddish. But today, nine times out of ten, when you meet an Ashkenazi Jewish person, chances are they never learned Yiddish — or, as in my case, they only know a handful of words and phrases. Why? Because six million of us were murdered during the Holocaust and, in the aftermath of genocide, millions more were sent into permanent exile, the majority of us to Canada and the United States, where we assimilated, or Israel, where we shifted to Hebrew.
For the uninitiated, Hebrew is the common ancestral language of all Jewish people. It was our predominant mother tongue until the 2nd century, when the Roman annexation of the Levant put a strain on local communities and provoked mass Jewish emigration, creating the Jewish diaspora. In the diaspora, Hebrew often merged with local languages to create new ones, which is why there’s such a thing as Judeo-Portuguese, Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Amharic, Judeo-Malayalam, and Yiddish, which you could describe as a “creolization” of Hebrew, Middle High German, and Slavic languages. (Despite its origins, Yiddish is often overlooked in creole linguistics, a field with deep roots in the history of transatlantic racism.) Now, Hebrew actually went dormant in the 2nd century, as Roman repression of Jewish culture intensified. (If you’re not yet familiar with the term, in linguistics, “dormant” is a politically correct way of saying “extinct”.) But today, Hebrew is no longer dormant. It’s the mother tongue of 5 million Jews, because in the 19th century, in response to rising anti-Jewish violence in Europe and the Middle East, Jewish cultural activists mounted what is arguably history’s most successful example of language revitalization.
Language is political. The “love of languages” is inseparable from the knowledge that half the world’s languages are at risk of disappearing. And half the world’s languages are at risk of disappearing because of politics. For example, Occitan’s decline in France was the intended result of French government policy. In 1972, French President Georges Pompidou said that there could be “no place for minority languages in a France destined to make its mark on Europe.” It’s hard to talk about the state of Occitan today without acknowledging that France never ratified the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. The decline of the Gullah-Geechee language, predominantly spoken by African Americans in South Carolina and Georgia, is tied to its systemic exclusion from public schools, the result of social stigmas born in anti-Black racism. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a native Gullah speaker, has described his relative silence on the bench as the result of lingering trauma: “They used to make fun of us back then. It’s not standard English… So I learned that — I just started developing the habit of listening.” Throughout the United States, 140 Indigenous languages are endangered because, until 1978, federal law forced Indigenous children into boarding schools where they were given English names and punished, often violently, for speaking their languages. Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army General and architect of the Indian Residential School system, infamously said that his mission was “to kill the Indian” in order to “save the Man.” In Canada and Finland, similar assimilation programs ran well into the 1980s. In Mexico, linguistic discrimination against Indigenous children was legal until 2003. This isn’t ancient history. Our videos of the Rohingya language, recorded just last year, were recorded in a refugee camp because, in 2020, upwards of half of all Rohingya speakers are living in exile as refugees and survivors of ethnic cleansing. So, while Wikitongues will never be a place for partisan crossfire, we will, from time to time, talk about social injustice. It’s hard to talk about every language in the world without ever talking politics.
And yet. To be fair, it is possible to explore language diversity in a strictly descriptive way, talking about phonemes, syntax, and other linguistic building blocks. But without social and historical context — without sociolinguistics — you’re only telling half the story. Take English, for example, which emerged from the “creolization” of Anglic languages, which were Germanic, and Old Norman, a Latin language from Northern France. In the centuries that followed the Norman conquest of England, Latin vocabulary from Norman entered local Anglic languages, creating a new language with Germanic grammar and largely Latin vocabulary. But not all Germanic words were lost. Look at livestock. Cow, chicken, and pig are all Germanic words. However, the words for the meat of those animals — beef, poultry, and pork — come from Norman. Why? Because wealthy people who spoke Norman were more likely to be eating meat, while poor people who spoke Germanic languages were more likely to be raising livestock. In other words, English didn’t emerge in a sociological vacuum. It developed politically, in the aftermath of conquest, along the lines of ethnicity, regionality, and class. Today, as the existence of Appalachian English, African American Vernacular English, or Singapore English teaches us, the English language continues to develop politically; not in the aftermath of the Norman conquest of England, but in the aftermath of the more recent British conquest of the world.
In the spirit of rigor, Singapore English or Singlish, as native speakers call it, may in fact be a language in its own right rather than a variety of English… which brings us to one of the most political subjects in linguistics, as well as one of the most wrought debates in our comments section: how languages and dialects are classified. If there is an easy answer, it lies in the axiom of the late Yiddish-speaking linguist, Max Weinreich: “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
“Why is this considered a separate language?”
On May 14th, we posted a video of Tourangeau, a language from Northern France which, a lot of people pointed out, sounds a lot like French. Some, like Alberto Crescini, found the similarity charming:
However, others found the similarity disturbing. According to Rüçhan Özcüler:
In short, Rüçhan’s argument is: Tourangeau is similar to French, so it’s wrong to consider it a separate language. People make versions of this argument on our videos all the time. On one of our videos of Mirandese, a language close to Portuguese, Carl Tomacruz asked:
On one of our videos of Jamaican Creole, also known as Patwa, Hispaniolan 93 said:
On a video of Extremaduran, an Astur-Leonese language related to Spanish and Portuguese, Ernesto Ghinaglia had this to say:
In a sense, Ernesto is right. Local accents and differences in pronunciation don’t define a language. So, using the example of Tourangeau, let’s talk about what does.
Formally, Tourangeau is part of the langues d’oïl, a group of Romance varieties that includes French and several others; languages like Walloon, Picard, and Norman. As we have already examined, Norman, which today is also known as Dgèrnésiais, Jèrriais, Auregnais, and Sercquiais, is actually the language from which Germanic English derives most of its Latin vocabulary. Tangentially, they also have dank memes.
Broadly, the langues d’oïl are under-researched and widely under-resourced, so there isn’t a linguistic consensus around the classification of Tourangeau. In fact, Tourangeau has no ISO code or Glottocode, excluding it from linguistics databases. The French government doesn’t recognize it. It has no institutional support “as a language”. However, we do know that Tourangeau isn’t a dialect of French, because it didn’t develop from French. French, Tourangeau, and the other langues d’oïl varieties — Norman, Picard, Walloon, and so on — each developed independently and simultaneously from Latin. You could make the case that Tourangeau and French are dialects of the same langue d’oïl, but calling Tourangeau a French dialect has political, not scientific, connotations.
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is not the defining metric for classifying one language from another (see Norwegian and Swedish, Hindi and Urdu, Galician and Portuguese, and more). In fact, classifying one language from another is nowhere near as objective as, say, classifying one species from another, because language is the expression of culture. It embodies human subjectivity. So, when linguists classify a language, they consider several factors, including: vocabulary, grammar (syntax, phonology, morphology, and so on), genealogy (how languages evolve), and the cultural identity of the speakers. This process often leads to languages with high degrees of mutual intelligibility being classified as separate. And that’s ok!
When researchers recognize a language, it becomes possible for that community to secure a three-letter ISO language code, which makes it possible for Internet browsers to recognize their language. Browser recognition opens the door to machine translation and predictive text or autocorrect, so people use their own language to interact with modern devices. Moreover, as the experience of the Jeju language in Korea teaches us, an ISO code can also fast-track political recognition for a language and, by extension, the ability to learn it in schools. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether Tourangeau and French are two varieties of the same language. What does matter is that Tourangeau and French both can continue to exist. The same is true for English and Jamaican Creole, Spanish and Extremaduran, and so on.
“This speaker isn’t authentic!”
While we’re on the topic of Frankish tongues, back in 2014, Freddie and I recorded our friend Sam, from New Orleans, speaking Louisiana French. In March of this year, Sam’s video mysteriously went viral. (One of the more than 3,000 commenters suggested it’s because Sam looks like Post Malone.) For a lot of people, this was their first time hearing Louisiana French spoken. Predictably, not everyone liked it. Some, like Suu Minazaki, suggested fraud:
Mauritio Adr echoed Suu’s sentiments, when he said:
In fact, Moroccan French is a documented dialect of French, so it would be linguistically correct to describe Mauritio’s uncle as a Moroccan French speaker, but the intent of this analogy seems to imply that Louisiana French doesn’t exist at all. Sofia C.M. said this explicitly:
Unequivocally, Louisiana French exists. Not to be confused with Louisiana Creole French, which is a language in its own right and more closely related to Haitian Creole (natively, Kreyòl), Louisiana French is a broad term for the French varieties spoken in Louisiana, primarily by ethnic Creoles and Cajuns, certain Indigenous communities, and students of French immersion schools. Some critics, like Mr Random, seemed to acknowledge this, but still questioned Sam’s authenticity as a speaker:
As with Moroccan French, if there were an historically English-speaking community in Marseille, ‘Marseillais English’ would be a fine term for English spoken there; but there isn’t such a community, so Mr Random’s analogy falls flat. Interestingly, the hundreds of comments criticizing this video made the same accusation: this is “just” American French.
Guilty as charged! This is American French. Louisiana French is a French variety specific to North America. Of course, in the context of these comments, that description is intended dismissively. However, what they really mean to say is that this is Anglicized French or, in other words, that Louisiana French — at the very least, as spoken by Sam — is heavily influenced by English. But as the existence of Louisiana French, Cherokee, Choctaw, and over a hundred more Indigenous languages shows us, “English” and “America” are not equivalent. And, in any case, Louisiana French as spoken by Sam isn’t especially anglicized, as others pointed out.
In particular, commenters from North America, the Caribbean, French Polynesia, and even parts of rural France were excited to hear that Sam’s French resembled their own. Elodie Padou, for example, said:
Hina B. echoed this observation:
Asia Lee replied with the same observation, but from the opposite culture direction:
In Canada, a lot of people saw similarities, too. Nachinachi, for example, said:
Matt Roy said,
From just south of the US-Canadian border, SteaminDemon said,
Valley French is a variety of New England French, itself a variety of Acadian. (If you’d like to listen to a similar dialect from New Hampshire, check out our video of Christian speaking New England French.) I think by “actual” French, SteaminDemon means Metropolitan (read: Parisian) French, and, as an aside, this is an example of how just how thoroughly disparaging attitudes toward non-standardized dialects permeate the way we talk about language, even when we don’t mean to disparage.
So, ok. New Englanders, Canadians, Cajuns, and Polynesians seem to agree that Sam’s Louisiana French is familiar. But why? Maeva Demol and Anthony Matumbu pointed specifically to pronunciation:
A lot of people pointed to the way Sam pronounces the letter R. Nico, for example, said,
Strikingly, even people from rural France agreed. JP C said:
The rolled “r” in question is part of a family of consonants that linguists call dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trill. It’s the “rrr” sound that you frequently hear in Romance languages like Spanish, Catalan, or Italian. In fact, French or, more precisely, Metropolitan French, is one of the few Romance languages that doesn’t commonly use trills. However, as evidenced by the presence of trills in Polynesian, Caribbean and North American French varieties, the French phonological transition to a guttural R — from fɾɑ̃sɛ to fʁɑ̃sɛ (see: IPA) — is historically recent. Just look at JP C. His grandparents rolled their R’s well into the 1900s; and he wasn’t the only one to hear the recent past in the way Sam rolls his R’s. Guillame D. said,
DéhLyla said,
So, in other words, when Charles Dickens said…
…he was a little off the mark. Sam’s French isn’t like an Italian speaking French. It’s like an early 20th-century French person speaking French, as K. V. explained:
The resemblance here isn’t restricted to phonology. There’s a reason that Elodie Padou pointed out that, in addition to pronunciation resembling Reunion Island French, she said that she found expressions from Caribbean Creole languages, which emerged from the confluence of diverse West African languages and 18th-century varieties of French. In a rebuttal to Mr Random’s assertion that Sam makes “basic grammar mistakes”, Francés con Roro assured that Sam’s speech was authentic by pointing to grammatical constructions that resemble Antillean Creole French:
In addition to grammar, many commenters highlighted vocabulary; in particular, several swooned over Sam’s use of the word icitte, which is an antiquated form of the Metropolitan French word ici, which means ‘here’ in English. L’Eau Reine said:
TchaïLatté & VideoGames said,
PotatoPoison11 pointed to additional “older” words apparent in Sam’s French:
It’s important to note that this “antiquated” vocabulary doesn’t just remain in non-standardized varieties of French. They also show up in the other langues d’oïl varieties in France. Back in the comments on our Tourangeau video, Julian Rachele said,
And, if you listen carefully, Tourangeau has the trilled R, too. In fact, Pjanos said just that:
And that brings us full circle. North American, Caribbean, and Polynesian French varieties more closely approximate 18th-century French because the French Empire conquered these places in the 18th century. As many commenters pointed out, Louisiana French can actually be traced back to the British Conquest of Acadia in the 1700s:
In fact, the word ‘Cajun’, so commonly associated with Louisiana French, is an anglicized version of the Louisiana French word cadien, a shortened form of acadien, which means someone from Acadia. So, in conclusion, Louisiana French is, for the most part, “old” French. Now, it’s worth noting that Louisiana French varieties have been influenced by English, as well as Spanish, Choctaw, and diverse West African languages, the natural result of Louisiana’s multicultural and political history. But there’s nothing especially anglicized about the way Sam speaks Louisiana French, at least not compared to other speakers of the language. However, even if his French did have an English-influenced accent, that would also be ok.
At the beginning of his video, Sam is explicit that Louisiana French was the language of his grandparents, but his parents never learned it and couldn’t teach him. Therefore, even though his ancestral language is Louisiana French, his native language is English, an experience of cultural displacement that other commenters echoed. Serendipandy said:
Similarly, Stale Water wrote:
This generational gap is so prevalent because, throughout the 1900s, government policy was specifically designed to anglicize French Louisiana. This included banning the use of French in public institutions and punishing children for speaking French in school. On another one of our videos, Louis speaking Louisiana French and English, Daniel Bergeron wrote:
By 1968, linguist Marilyn J. Conwell had observed that it was common to find “grand-parents who speak only French, parents who speak both French and English, children who speak English and understand French, and grand-children who speak and understand only English.” Back then, there were upwards of a million Louisiana French speakers. Today, there are fewer than 200,000, most of them elders, which means that if young Louisianans like Sam don’t learn the language of their grandparents — if they don’t reclaim Louisiana French — Louisiana French will disappear. If you care about linguistic diversity, you should celebrate and encourage people who are working to keep their languages alive, rather than scrutinize their accents.
In fact, from a linguistic perspective, there’s no such thing as a “correct” accent. As we’ve already explored, languages are constantly in flux. English speakers today don’t speak English the same way that English speakers did a hundred years ago and, a hundred years from now, if English is still spoken, it will be spoken differently. Language change is natural and it’s especially common when “endangered” languages are revived. That’s because language revitalization happens when members of a culture who, usually for political reasons, never learned their language, decide to learn their language as adults, in order to pass it onto their children. However, in learning their ancestral language later in life, they often speak it with a “non-native” accent.
If you care about linguistic diversity, you should celebrate and encourage people who are working to keep their languages alive, rather than scrutinize their accents.
Cornish, a Celtic language from the UK, went dormant in the late 1700s, only to be revived by Cornish people in the 1900s. However, by the 1900s, Cornish people were native English speakers, over a century severed from their ancestral Celtic language. Therefore, when they revived the Cornish language, they revived it with a pronunciation based on English rather than neighboring Celtic languages like Welsh or Breton. This phonological change doesn’t make Modern Cornish any less Cornish. It doesn’t undermine the fact that, after centuries of forced assimilation, the Cornish people were able to bring their language back and reassert their identity as a Celtic nation alongside Brittany, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were mainly native speakers of Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic, so Modern Hebrew is heavily influenced by Yiddish and Arabic. It doesn’t sound at all like ancient Hebrew, but that doesn’t make it any less authentically Hebrew. As an English-speaking diaspora Jew, I’m even farther removed. I’m now learning Hebrew as an adult and I will always speak it with an English-language accent. But it’s still my language. And I’m proud of it.
It’s not uncommon for speakers of marginalized languages to report feeling insecure about speaking, driven by the misguided idea that they don’t speak authentically enough. On the eve of the Holocaust, two years after his exile from Germany, Albert Einstein declined to speak in Yiddish at a Jewish gathering because he was embarrassed by his own lack of “fluency”; a decade later, half the world’s Yiddish speakers were wiped out. The fixation on linguistic purity — what linguists call linguistic prescriptivism — is harmful to cultural survival. It can also obstruct education and entrench cycles of poverty. In Haiti, where Kreyòl has historically been viewed as “corrupted” French, most children are still denied education in their mother tongue and, by extension, access to opportunity. However, when schools do teach in Kreyòl, children excel. When people are allowed to learn our languages, speak our languages, and dream in our languages—when we’re free to be ourselves—we excel. One day, when everyone is free, the world will excel.
Until then, to all the people who left comments of encouragement on Sam’s video and who frequently remark on the beauty of languages that you don’t understand, thank you for celebrating cultural diversity and encouraging people to keep their languages alive. One commenter, Ro Se, always has something nice to say:
So, what are your ancestral languages? Do you speak them? If not, have you ever considered learning? Because, as Smoked Pork Ribs reminds us, it’s never too late to start:
We covered a lot of ground today, so if you have questions (or disagreements) about any of the topics raised, let me know! You can write to me at daniel@wikitongues.org or on Twitter: @bogreudell. If you would like to see an entire essay on any of the topics this essay touched on, from French dialectology to the science of classifying language, let me know. In the meantime, as I would say in my anglicized, revitalized Hebrew,
תודה רבה לכם שהקשבתם, ותודה שהייתם חלק מוויקיטונגז
Todah rabah lachem shekhshaftem ve’todah shehai’tam halekh ma’Wikitongues.
Thank you so much for listening and thank you for being part of Wikitongues.
If you would like to donate to support the work of Wikitongues or if you would like to get to know our work, please visit wikitongues.org. To watch our oral histories, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit wikitongues.org to submit a video.
