Prepared for a meeting on ‘The Need for New Terminology to deal with “Mother Tongues”’, held at the Central Institute of Indian Languages. The lecture was given to honor Prof. D.P. Pattanayak Mysore, India, 1978
Language has become expensive. As language teaching has become a job, a lot of money is spent on the task. Words are one of the two largest categories of marketed values that make up the GNP. Money is spent to decide what shall be said, who shall say it, how, and when, and what kind of people should be reached by the utterance. The higher the cost of each uttered word, the more effort has gone into making it echo. In schools people learn to speak as they should. Money is spent to make the poor speak more like the wealthy, the sick more like the healthy, and the black more like the white. We spend money to improve, correct, enrich, and update the language of kids and that of their teachers. We spend more on the professional jargons that are taught in college, and still more in high schools to give each teenager a smattering of these languages: just enough to make them feel dependent on the psychologist, druggist, or librarian who is fluent in some special kind of English. We first spend money to make people as exclusively monolingual in standard, educated colloquial, and then — usually with little success — we try to teach them a minority dialect or a foreign tongue. Most of what goes on in the name of education is really language instruction, but education is by no means the sole public enterprise in which the ear and the tongue are groomed: administrators and entertainers, admen and newsmen form large interest groups, each fighting for their slice of the language pie. I do not really know how much is spent in the United States to make words.
Energy accounting was almost unthinkable only ten years ago. It has now become an established practice. Today — but really only since a couple of years ago — you can easily look up how many BTUs or other energy units have gone into growing, harvesting, packaging, transporting, and merchandising one edible calorie of bread. The difference is enormous between the bread that is grown and eaten in a village of Greece and the bread sold by the A&P; about 40 times more energy goes into the latter. About 500 times more energy units went into building one cubic foot of St Catherine’s College in Oxford in the sixties than was needed to build one cubic foot of the Bodleian Library which stands next door, and which I like much more. Information of this kind was available ten years ago, but nobody felt like tabulating it, and it made only a few people think. Today it is available, and very soon will change people’s outlook on the need for fuels. It would now be interesting to know what language accounting would look like. The linguistic analysis of contemporary language is certainly not complete unless, for each group of speakers, we know the amount of money that was spent on the speech of each person. Just as social energy accounts are only approximate and permit — at best — identifying the orders of magnitude within which the relative values are to be found, so language accounting would provide us with data on the relative prevalence of taught language in a population — which would be sufficient for the argument that I would like to make.
The mere per capita expenditure on the language of a group of speakers would, of course, not tell us enough. Taught language comes in a vast range of qualities. The poor, for instance, are much more blared at than the rich, who can buy tutoring and, what is more precious, silence. Each paid word that is addressed to the rich costs, per capita, much more than each word addressed to the poor. Watts are more democratic than words. Yet, even without the more detailed language-economics on which I would like to draw, I can estimate that the dollars spent for fuel imports to the United States pale before those that are now expended on American speech. The language of rich nations is incredibly spongy and absorbs huge investments. Rising expenditures for tax collection, administration, theater, and other forms of costly language have always been a mark of high civilization, especially in urban life. But these fluctuations in expenditures for language (or fuel) were traditionally of a different kind, incomparable with the capitalization of language today. Even today, in poor countries, people still speak to each other, though their language has never been capitalized except, perhaps, among a tiny élite. What is the difference between the everyday speech groups whose language has received — absorbed? resisted? reacted to? suffered? enjoyed? — huge investments and the speech of people whose language has remained outside the market? I want to compare these two worlds of language, but focus my curiosity on just one issue that arises in this context: does the structure of the language itself change with the rate of investment? If so, are these changes such that all languages that absorb funds would show changes that go in the same direction? In my introductory discussion of the subject I may not be able to give you enough arguments to make both claims appear very probable and to convince you that structurally oriented language economics are worth exploring.
Taught everyday language is without precedent in pre-industrial cultures. The current dependence on paid teachers and on models of ordinary speech is just as much a unique characteristic of industrial economies as is our dependence on fossil fuels. Both language and energy have only in our generation been recognized as worldwide needs that — for all people — must be satisfied by planned, programmed intervention. Traditional cultures subsisted on sunshine that was captured mostly through agriculture: the hoe, the ditch, the yoke were common; large sails or waterwheels were known but rare. Cultures that lived mostly on the sun subsisted basically on vernacular language that was absorbed by each group through its own roots. Just as power was drawn from nature mostly by tools that increased the skill of fingers and the power of arms and legs, so language was drawn from the cultural environment through the encounter with people, each of whom one could smell and touch, love and hate. Taught tongues were rare, like sails and mills. In most cultures we know, speech overcame man.
The majority in poor countries, even today, learn to speak without any paid tutorship; and they learn to speak in a way that in no way compares with the self-conscious, self-important, colorless mumbling that, after a long stay in villages of South America and Southeast Asia, surprised me again during my last visit to American campuses. For people who cannot hear the difference, I feel only contempt that I try hard to transform into sorrow for their tone-deafness. But what else shall I expect from people who are not brought up on mother’s breast but on formulas: Nestlé if they are from poor families, and a formula prepared under the nose of Ralph Nader if they are born among the enlightened rich, or if they are foundlings whom the élite tutor in its institutions. For people trained to choose among packaged formulas, mother’s breast appears as one more option. In the same way, for people who learned every language they know from somebody they believe to be their teacher, untutored vernacular seems just like another less-developed model among many.
But this is simply not so: language that is exempt from rational tutorship is a different kind of social phenomenon than language that is taught. Where untutored language is the predominant marker of a shared world, a sense of shared power within the group exists that cannot be duplicated by language that is delivered. One of the first ways this difference shows is in a sense of power over language itself — over its acquisition. The poor in non-industrial countries all over the world, even today, are polyglot. My friend the goldsmith of Timbuktu speaks Songhay at home, listens to Banbara on the radio, devotedly and with some understanding says his prayers five times a day in Arabic, gets along in two trade languages on the souk, converses in passable French that he has picked up in the army — and none of those languages was formally taught him. Communities in which monolingual people prevail are rare except in three kinds of settings: in tribal communities that have not really experienced the late neolithic period, in communities that have experienced certain intense forms of discrimination, and among the citizens of nation-states that for several generations have enjoyed the benefits of compulsory schooling. To take it for granted that most people are monolingual is typical of the members of the middle class. Admiration for the polyglot unfailingly exposes the social climber.
Throughout history, untutored language was prevalent, but it was hardly ever the only kind of language known. Just as, in traditional cultures, some energy was captured through windmills and canals, and those who had large boats or those who had cornered the right spot on the brook could use their tool for a net transfer of power to their own advantage, so some people have always used a taught language to corner some privilege. But such additional codes remained either rare and special, or served very narrow purposes. The ordinary language, the vernacular, but also the trade idiom, the language of prayer, the craft jargon, and the language of basic accounts, was learned on the side, as part of everyday life. Of course, Latin or Sanskrit were sometimes formally taught to the priest; a court language, such as Frankish, Persian, or Turkish, was taught to him who wanted to become a scribe; neophites were formally initiated into the language of astronomy, alchemy, or late masonry. And, of course, the knowledge of such formally taught language raised a man above others, like the saddle of a horse. Quite frequently, in fact, the process of formal initiation did not teach a new language skill, but exempted the initiate from the taboo that forbade others to use certain words. Male initiation into the languages of the hunt and of ritual intercourse is probably the most widespread example of such a ritual of selective language ‘de-tabooing.’ But, no matter how much or how little language was taught, the taught language rarely rubbed off on vernacular speech. Neither the existence of some language teaching at all times nor the spread of some language through professional preachers or comedians weakens my key point: outside of those societies that we now call ‘modern European,’ no attempt was made to impose on entire populations an everyday language that would be subject to the control of paid teachers or announcers. Everyday language, until recently, was nowhere the product of design, it was nowhere paid for and delivered like a commodity. And while every historian who deals with the origin of nation-states pays attention to commodities, economists generally overlook language.
I want to contrast taught colloquial and vernacular speech, costly language and that which comes at no cost. I call the first ‘taught colloquial’ because, as we shall see, ‘mother tongue’ is fraught with tricky implications. ‘Everyday language’ might do, but is less precise, and most other terms that I shall occasionally use caricature one of the aspects of tutored language. For the opposite, I use the term ‘vernacular’ because I have nothing better. Vernacular comes from an Indo-Germanic root that implies ‘rootedness’ or ‘abode.’ It is a Latin word used in classical times for whatever was homebred, homespun, homegrown, homemade — be it a slave or a child, food or dress, animal, opinion, or a joke. The term was picked up by Varro to designate a distinction in language. Varro picked ‘vernacular’ to designate language that is grown on the speaker’s own grounds as opposed to that which is planted there by others. Varro was a learned man, the most learned Roman according to the great teacher Quintillian, librarian to Caesar and then to Augustus, with considerable influence on the Middle Ages. So ‘vernacular’ came into English in just that one, restricted sense in which Varro had adopted it. I would now like to resuscitate some of its old breath. Just now we need a simple, straightforward word to designate the fruit of activities in which people engage when they are not motivated by considerations of exchange, a word that would designate non-market-related activities by which people do things and make do — wants to which, in the process of satisfying them, they also give concrete shape. ‘Vernacular’ seems a good old word that might be acceptable to many contemporaries for this usage. I know that there are technical words available to designate the satisfaction of those needs that economists do not or cannot measure: ‘social production’ as opposed to ‘economic production’; the generation of ‘use values’ or ‘mere use values,’ as opposed to the production of ‘commodities’; ‘household economics’ as opposed to the economics of the ‘market.’ But these terms are all specialized, tainted with some ideological prejudice, and they often limp. We need a simple adjective to designate those values that we want to defend from measurement and manipulation by Chicago boys or socialist commissars, and that adjective ought to be broad enough to fit food and language, childbirth and infant-rearing, without implying a ‘private’ activity or a backward procedure. By speaking about vernacular language I am trying to bring into discussion the existence of a vernacular mode of being and doing that extends to all aspects of life.
Before I can go on in my argument, I will have to clarify one more distinction. When I oppose taught language to the vernacular, I draw a line of demarcation somewhere else than linguists do when they distinguish between the high language of an élite and the dialect spoken in lower classes; somewhere else than that other frontier that allows us to distinguish between regional and supra-regional language; and, again, somewhere else than the demarcation line between the language of the illiterate and that of the literate. No matter how restricted within geographic boundaries, no matter how distinctive for a social level, no matter how specialized for one sex role or one caste, language can be either ‘vernacular’ (in the sense in which I use the term) or ‘taught.’ Elite language, second language, trade language, and local language are nothing new, but for each the taught variety that comes as a commodity is entirely new. I am not speaking now in detail about varieties of taught language, but I am focusing on taught everyday language, taught colloquial — which usually is taught standard colloquial. In all of recorded history, one among several mutually understandable dialects has tended towards predominance in a given region. This kind of predominant dialect was often accepted as the standard form, that form which was written — and that form which, earlier than others, was taught. This dialect generally predominated because of the prestige of its speakers. Most of the time it did not spread because it was taught; it diffused by a much more complex and subtle process. Midland English became the second, common style in which people born into any English dialect could also speak their own language, just as Bahasa Malayu became the national tongue of Indonesia. Since both those language-diffusions took place in rather modern times, we might suspect that intentional teaching had something to do with the process. For Urdu, which the Moghul soldiery spread over the Indian subcontinent, teaching has hardly anything to do with the sudden spread.
No doubt, the dominant position of élite or standard language varieties everywhere was bolstered by writing, and even more by printing. Printing enormously enhanced the colonizing power of élite language. But to say that because printing has been invented, élite language is destined to supplant all vernacular varieties is to put the cart before the horse; it’s like saying that after the invention of the atom bomb, only superpowers shall be sovereign. In fact, the editing, printing, publishing, and distribution of printed matter incorporated increasingly those technical procedures that favor centralization and the colonization of vernacular forms by the printed standard. But this monopoly of centralized procedures over technical innovations is no argument that printing technique could not increasingly be used to give written expression a new vitality and new literary opportunities to thousands of vernacular forms. The fact that printing was used for the imposition of standard colloquials does not mean that written language will always be a taught form.
Vernacular spreads by practical use; it is learned from people who mean what they say and who say what they mean to the person for whom what they say is meant. This is not so in taught language. In the case of taught language, the key model is not a person that I care for or dislike, but a professional speaker. Taught colloquial is modeled by somebody who does not say what he means, but who recites what others have contrived. Taught colloquial is the language of the announcer who follows the script that an editor was told by a publicist that a committee had decided should be said. Taught language is the dead, impersonal rhetoric of people paid to declaim with phony conviction texts composed by others. People who speak taught language imitate the announcer of news, the actor of gags, the instructor who follows the textbooks, the songster of engineered rhymes, or the ghost-written president. This language is not meant to be used when I say something to your face. The language of the media always seeks the appropriate audience-profile that has been chosen by the boss of the program. While the vernacular is engendered in the learner by his presence at the intercourse between people who say something to each other face to face, taught language is learned from speakers whose assigned job is gab.
Of course, language would be totally inhuman if it were totally taught. That is what Humboldt meant when he said that real language is that speech which can only be fostered, never taught like mathematics. Only machines can communicate without any reference to vernacular roots. Their chatter in New York now takes up almost three quarters of the lines that the telephone company operates under a franchise that guarantees free intercourse to people. This is an obvious perversion of a public channel. But even more embarrassing than this abuse of a forum of free speech by robots is the incidence of robot-like stock phrases in the remaining part in which people address each other. A growing percentage of personal utterances has become predictable, not only in content but also in style. Language is degraded to ‘communication’ as if it were nothing but the human variety of an exchange that also goes on between bees, whales and computers. No doubt, a vernacular component always survives; all I say is that it withers. The American colloquial has become a composite made up of two kinds of language: a commodity-like, taught uniquack, and an impoverished vernacular that tries to survive. Modern French and German have gone the same way, though with one difference: they have absorbed English terms to the point that certain standard exchanges in French or German that I have overheard in European drugstores and offices have all the formal characteristics of pidgin.
A resistance that sometimes becomes as strong as a sacred taboo guards the recognition of the difference with which we are dealing here: the difference between capitalized language and vernaculars that come at no economically measurable cost. It is the same kind of inhibition that makes it difficult for those who are brought up within the industrial system to sense the fundamental distinction between nurturing at the breast and feeding by bottle; or the difference between the pupil and the autodidact; or the difference between a mile moved on my own and a passenger mile; or the difference between housing as an activity and housing as a commodity — all things about which I have spoken in the past. While anyone would probably admit that there is a huge difference in taste, meaning, and value between a homecooked meal and a TV dinner, the discussion of this difference among people like us can be easily blocked. The people present at a meeting like this are all people who are committed to equal rights, equity, the service of the poor. They know how many mothers have no milk in their breasts, how many children in the South Bronx suffer protein deficiencies, how many Mexicans are crippled by lack of basic foods. As soon as I raise the distinction between vernacular values and those that can be economically measured and therefore administered, some protector of the poor will jump up and tell me that I am avoiding the critical issue by giving importance to niceties. I distinguish between transportation and transit by metabolic power, between vernacular and taught colloquial, between homemade food and packaged nutrition. Now, are not the distances covered on foot and by wheel, the terms used in learned and in taught language, and the calories ingested in the two kinds of food the same? No doubt they are, but this makes each of the two activities comparable only in a narrow, non-social sense. The difference between the vernacular movement, word or food and that which is overwhelmingly a commodity goes much deeper: the value of the vernacular is to a large measure determined by him who engenders it; the need for the commodity is determined and shaped for the consumer by the producer who defines its value. What makes the world modern is a replacement of vernacular values by commodities, which — to be attractive — must deny the essential value of the aspect that, in this process, is lost.
People who feel like modern men experience basic needs that correlate to commodities rather than to vernacular activities. Technologies that fit into this kind of world are those that apply scientific progress to commodity production rather than to the enlargement of vernacular competence. The use of writing and printing at the service of the standard colloquial in preference to its use for the expansion of the vernacular reflects this deeply ingrained prejudice. What makes the work process modern is the increased intensity with which human activity is managed and planned, and the decreased significance that those activities can claim for themselves, rather than for exchange on the market. In his essay ‘The Limits to Satisfaction,’ William Leiss argues this point. I will incorporate here some of his argument, because later I would like to show how the process he describes has affected language since the rise of Europe as an ideal. Leiss argues that the radical transformation of individual wants in the process of industrialization is the hidden complement of the attempt to dominate nature. This attempt to dominate nature has, since the seventeenth century, progressively shaped and branded every aspect of public pursuits in Western societies. Nature was increasingly interpreted as the source from which a social production process is fed: an enterprise that is undertaken for people rather than by them. ‘Needs’ designated, increasingly, rights to the output of this process rather than claims for the freedom and competence to survive. As the environment (which formerly was called ‘nature’) became ruthlessly exploited as a resource and as a trash can for those commodities that were being produced for the purpose of satisfying needs, human nature (which today is called human psychology) avenged itself. Man became needy. Today, the individual’s feelings about his own needs are first associated with an increasing feeling of impotence: in a commodity-dominated environment, needs can no longer be satisfied without recourse to a store, a market. Each satisfaction that commodity-determined man experiences implies a component of frustrated self-reliance. It also implies an experience of isolation and a sense of disappointment about the persons that are close. The person that I can touch and cherish cannot give me what I need, cannot teach me how to make it, cannot show me how to do without it. Every satisfaction of a commodity-shaped need thus undermines further the experiences of self-reliance and of trust in others that are the warp and woof of any traditional culture. Leiss analyzes what happens when the number and the variety of goods and services grow, each of which is offered to the individual, each interpreted as a need, and each symbolically constituting a utility. The individual is forced to relearn how to need. His wants crumble into progressively smaller components. His wants lose their subjective coherence. The individual loses the ability to fit his need-fragments into a whole that would be meaningful to him. Needs are transformed from drives that orient creative action into disorienting lacks that call for professional service to synthesize demand. In this high-commodity setting, the adequate response to any commodity-determined need ceases to imply the satisfaction of the person. The person is understood as forever ‘in need’ of something. As needs become limitless, people become increasingly needy. Paradoxically, the more time and resources are expended on generating commodities for the supposed satisfaction of needs, the more shallow becomes each individual want, and the more indifferent to the specific form in which it shall be met. Beyond a very low threshold, through the replacement of vernacular forms of subsistence by commodity-shaped needs and the goods or services that fit them, the person becomes increasingly needy, teachable, and frustrated.
This analysis of the correlation between needs, commodities, and satisfaction provides an explanation for the limitless demand that economists and philosophers today tend to postulate, and for which empirical evidence seems not to be lacking. The social commitment to the replacement of vernacular activities by commodities is, in fact, at the core of today’s world. On this ground alone, ours is a new kind of world, incomparable to any other. But as long as this trend subsists, ours is also a world in which the increase of supply of those kinds of things that teachers or fuel lines make will correspond to increasing frustration. In a world where ‘enough’ can be said only when nature ceases to function as pit or as trash can, the human being is oriented not towards satisfaction but towards grudging acquiescence.
Where shall we look for the roots of this inversion of values, for this transformation of human psychology in the pursuit of the domination of nature? To say that the roots of this inversion lie in the ‘rise of capitalism’ would be to take the symptom for the disease. Socialism that enshrines at its core the provision of goods and services to each one according to his or her needs is just as much dependent on the belief that needs correlate to commodities as any of those doctrines that socialists call ‘capitalist.’ The root of the inversion is much deeper. It is, of course, of a symbolic, religious nature, and demands an understanding of the past and the future of ‘education,’ the issue that has brought us together. If we examine when and how ordinary everyday language became teachable, we might gain some episodic insight into this event.
Nobody has ever proposed to teach the vernacular. That is, at least as I use the term, impossible and silly. But I can follow the idea that the colloquial is somehow teachable down into Carolingian times. It was then that, for the first time in history, it was discovered that there are certain basic needs, needs that are universal to mankind and that cry out for satisfaction in a standard fashion that cannot be met in a vernacular way. The discovery might be best associated with the Church reform that took place in the eighth century and in which the Scottish monk Alcuin, living a good part of his life as court philosopher to Charlemagne, played a prominent role. Up to that time, the Church had considered its ministers primarily as priests, that is, as persons selected and invested with special powers to meet communitary, public needs. They were needed to preach and to preside at functions. They were public officials analogous to those others through whom the state provided the defense of the commonweal against enemy and famine, or the administration of justice or public order and public works.
To call public servants of this kind ‘service professionals’ would be a double mistake, a silly anachronism. But then, from the eighth century on, the precursor of the service professional began to emerge: church-ministers who catered to the personal needs of parishioners, equipped with a theology that defined and established those needs. Priests slowly turned into pastors. The institutionally defined care of individual, the family and the community acquired unprecedented prominence. Thus, the bureaucratic provision of services that are postulated as a ‘natural’ need of all members of mankind takes shape long before the industrialization of the production of goods. Thirty-five years ago Lewis Mumford tried to make this point. When I first read his statement that the monastic reform of the ninth century created some of the basic assumptions on which the industrial system is founded, I had many reasons to reject this insight. In the meantime, though, I found a host of arguments — most of which Mumford seems not even to suspect — for rooting the ideologies of the industrial age in the Carolingian Renaissance. The idea that there is no salvation without personal services from the institutional church is one of these formerly unthinkable discoveries without which, again, our own age would be unthinkable. No doubt, it took 500 years of medieval theology to elaborate on this concept. Only by the end of the Middle Ages was the pastoral self-image of the Church fully rounded. Only during Vatican Council II, within our own generation, will the same Church that served as the prime model in the evolution of secular service organizations align itself explicitly with the image of its imitators. But what counts here, the concept that the clergy can define its own services as needs of human nature and make this service commodity into a necessity that cannot be foregone by any single human being without jeopardy to eternal life. This concept is of medieval origin. It is the foundation without which the contemporary service or welfare state would be inconceivable. Surprisingly little research has been done on the religious core concepts that fundamentally distinguish the industrial age from all other societies. The decline of the vernacular conception of Christian life in favor of one organized around pastoral care is a complex and drawn-out process that I mention here only because it constitutes a necessary background for the understanding of a similar shift in the understanding of language.
Three stages can be distinguished in the evolution of the vernacular into industrial uniquack — a term that James Reston first used when Univac was the only commercial computer. The first step is the appearance of the term ‘mother tongue’ and monkish tutorship over vernacular speech. The second is the transformation of mother tongue into national language under the auspices of grammarians. The third is the replacement of schooled and educated standard language based on written texts by our contemporary, medium-fed, high-cost idiom.
The terms and the concepts of mother tongue and mother country were both unknown until the High Middle Ages. The only classical people who conceived of their land as related to ‘mother’ were the early Cretans; memories of a matriarchal order still lingered in their culture. When Europe took shape as a political reality and as an idea, people spoke ‘people’s language,’ the sermo vulgaris. ‘Duits’ means precisely that. In patriarchally-minded Roman law, a person’s vernacular was presumed to be his or her patrius sermo — the speech of the male head of the household. Each sermo or speech was also perceived as a language. Neither the early Greeks nor people in the early Middle Ages made our distinction between mutually understandable ‘dialects’ and distinct ‘languages,’ a distinction that people on the grassroots level of India equally do not yet make. During the last three decades I have had the opportunity to observe many hundreds of highly motivated and intelligent foreign academics seeking entrance to village life in South America and then in Southeast Asia. Again and again I was struck by the difficulty these people have, even when they are trained as social scientists, in understanding the lucid simplicity with which people can identify with one — or with several — forms of vernacular in a way in which only the exceptional poet can live a taught language with every one of his fibers. The vernacular was, in this sense, unproblematic up until the eleventh century. At that moment, quite suddenly, the term ‘mother tongue’ appears. It appears in the sermons of several monks from the Abbey of Gorz and marks the first attempt to make the choice of vernacular into a moral issue. The mother Abbey of Gorz in Lorraine, not far from Verdun, had been founded in the eighth century by Benedictines, over a church dedicated to St Gorgonius. During the ninth century the monastery decayed in a scandalous way. Three generations later, by the tenth century, the Abbey became the center of Germanic monastic reform; parallel, east of the Rhine, of the Cistercian reform Abbey of Cluny. Within two generations, 160 daughter abbeys, founded (or engendered) by Gorz were scattered all through the Germanic territory of the Holy Roman Empire. Gorz itself was located near the dividing line between Romance and Frankish vernaculars, and the monks from Gorz wanted to stop the challenge or advance of the competing monks from Cluny. They made language into an issue and a tool for their claim.
The monks of Gorz launched into language politics by attaching to the term ‘language’ a curious epithet, namely, ‘mother’ — an epithet that was ideologically charged at that time in a manner that is, again, difficult for us to grasp. The symbolic maternity of the Church, the universal maternity of the Virgin Mary, was central to the experience of personal life and of cosmic reality with an intensity that you can glean only by reading the original poetry of the time or by sitting quietly in front of one after another of the great statues representing Romanesque art. By coining the term ‘mother tongue,’ the monks of Gorz elevated the unwritten vulgate, vernacular ‘Duits’ into something that could be honored, cherished, defended against defilement and otherwise treated as mother should be. Language was consecrated through its relation with maternity and, at the same time, maternity was alienated by one more step into a principle over which the male clergy could claim power. Mother was now honored and managed, cherished and used, protected in her purity and forged into a weapon, guarded against defilement and used as a shield. The professional pastorate, which today we would understand as a service profession, had made an important step in acquiring responsibilities in the performance of maternal functions.
From the Frankish of the eleventh century the term was translated into low Latin as materna lingua and thus spread throughout Europe, only to be rediscovered and retranslated into various forms of the vulgate in the early fifteenth century. With the concept of ‘mother tongue,’ of a supra-regional colloquial with highly charged emotional value and a broad audience, a condition was created that called for the invention of moveable type and print. Gutenberg made his invention when the language that he needed for its acceptance was ripe.
The next step in the mutation of the vernacular coincides with the development of a device by which the teaching of mother tongue could be taken over by men. The medieval preachers, poets, and Bible translators had only tried to consecrate, elevate, and endow with the nimbus of mystical maternity that language that they heard among the people. Now a new breed of secular clerics, formed by humanism, consciously used the vulgar as raw material for an engineering enterprise. The manual of specifications for correct sentences in the vernacular makes its appearance.
The publication of the first grammar in any modern European language was a solemn event, in late 1492. That year the Moor was driven from Granada, the Jews were expelled from Toledo, and the return of Columbus from his first voyage was expected any day. That year, Don Elio Antonio de Nebrija dedicated the first edition of his Grammatica Castellana to his Queen, Isabel la Católica. At the age of 19, Nebrija had gone to Italy, where Latin had least decayed and was best cultivated, to bring back to life in Spain the one language that as a young man he had considered worthy and that, in his opinion, had died in barbarian neglect in his home country. Hernán Núñez, a contemporary, compared him to Orpheus bringing back Euridice. For almost a generation he was in Salamanca, at the center of renewal of classical grammar and rhetoric. Now, in his fifty-second year, he finished his grammar of the spoken language and, shortly afterwards, the first dictionary that already contains a word from overseas: ‘canoa-canoe,’ which Columbus had in the meantime brought back with the first sample Indian.
As I said, Nebrija dedicated his grammar to Isabel, who was a very uncommon woman, too. In battle she dressed as a knight and at court surrounded herself with humanists who consistently treated her as an equal. Six months earlier, Nebrija had sent a draft of the book to the queen. For this draft she had expressed her gratitude and admiration for the author who had done for Castillian what, so far, had been done only for the languages of Rome and Greece. But with her appreciation she also expressed her perplexity. She was unable to understand to what use such a grammar could be put. Grammar was a teaching tool — and the vernacular was not something anybody could ever be taught. In her kingdoms, the queen insisted, every subject was destined by nature for a perfect dominion over his tongue. This royal sentence expresses a majestic principle of political linguistics. In the meantime, this sense of vernacular sovereignty has been largely administered away.
In the introduction to the first edition which was published in late 1492, Nebrija defends his undertaking by answering the queen. I have translated parts of his three-page argument, because any paraphrase would water it down:
My illustrious Queen. Whenever I ponder over the tokens of the past that writing has preserved for us, I return to the same conclusion: language has forever been the mate of empire and always shall remain its comrade. Together they start, together they grow and flower, together they decline.
Please note the shift from ‘mother’ to ‘mate’. He enunciated the new betrothal of ‘armas y letras’ — the military and the university. Please note how the ever-changing patterns of vernacular speech may now be held up against a standard language that measures their improvement and their debasement.
Castilian went through its infancy at the time of the judges … it waxed in strength under Alphonse the Wise who gathered laws and histories and who had many Arabic and Latin works translated.
Indeed, Alphonse X was the first European monarch who used his native tongue to insist that he was no longer a Latin king. His translators were mostly Jews, who preferred the vulgar tongue over the Church’s Latin. Please note Nebrija’s awareness that the standard language is strengthened as it is used for the writing of history, as a medium for translation and for the embodiment of laws.
Thus our language followed our soldiers whom we sent abroad to rule. It spread to Arragon, to Navarra, and hence even to Italy… The scattered bits and pieces of Spain were thus gathered and joined into one single kingdom.
Note the role of the soldier who forges a new world and creates a new role for the cleric, the pastor educator.
So far this language of Castile has been left by us loose and unruly and therefore, in just a few centuries, this language has changed beyond recognition. Comparing what we speak today with the language of 500 years ago, we notice a difference and diversity that could not be greater if these were two alien tongues.
Please note how in this sentence language and life are torn asunder. The language of Castile is treated as if, like Latin and Greek, it were already dead. Instead of the constantly evolving vernacular, Nebrija is referring to something totally different: timeless colloquial. He clearly reflects the split that has come into Western perception of time. The clock had come into the city, had been lifted onto a pedestal, had been made to rule the town. Real time, made up of equal pieces of equal length no matter if it was summer or winter, had first come to dictate the rhythm in the monastery and now began to order civic life. As a machine has governed time, grammar shall govern speech.
But let us go back to Nebrija:
To avoid these variegated changes I have decided to … turn the Castilian language into an artifact so that whatever shall be henceforth written in this language shall be of one standard coinage that can outlast the times. Greek and Latin have been governed by art and thus have kept their uniformity throughout the ages. Unless the like of this be done for our language, in vain your Majesty’s chroniclers … shall praise your deeds. Your labor will not outlast more than a few years and we shall continue to feed on Castilian translations of strange and foreign tales (about our own kings). Either your feats will fade with the language, or they will roam among aliens abroad, homeless without a dwelling in which they can settle.
Please note how Nebrija proposes to substitute for the vernacular a ‘device,’ an ‘artificio.’ Unruly speech shall henceforth be substituted by standard coinage. Only 200 years earlier, Dante had still assumed that any language that had been learned and that is spoken according to a grammar could never come alive. Such language, according to Dante, could not but remain the device of schoolmen, of ‘inventores grammaticae facultatis.’ Nebrija has a different perspective on power and rule. He wants to teach people the language of clerics, to tighten their speech and to subject their utterances to his rule. For Isabel the Queen, language was perceived as a domain. For her, the vernacular is the domain of the present, the utterance in which every speaker is sovereign. For Don Antonio the grammarian, language is a tool that serves, above all, the scribe. With a few words, he translates his ‘dream of reason’ into a monstrous ideology, the supposition on which, henceforth, the industrial system shall rise. Artifact shall substitute for autonomous subsistence; standard shall replace unruly variety; predictable outcomes shall remove the risk of surprise. He presses language into the service of fame — or more precisely, of a new kind of fame that is best called ‘propaganda.’
I want to lay the foundations of that dwelling in which your fame can settle. I want to do for my language what Zenodotos has done for Greek and Krates for Latin. No doubt, their betters have come after them. But to have been improved upon by their pupils does not detract from their, nay, from our, glory to be the originator of a necessary craft, just when its time had become ripe; and, may you trust me, no craft has ever come more timely than grammar for the Castilian tongue.
In only a few lines, Nebrija spells out the sales talk of the expert to his government that henceforth becomes standard:
Majesty, you need the engineer, the inventor who knows how to make out of your people’s speech, out of your people’s lives, tools that befit your government and its pursuits. No doubt, believing in progress, I know that others will come who shall do better than I; others will build on the foundations that I lay. But, watch out, my lady, you cannot delay accepting my advice: ‘This is the time. Our language has indeed just now reached a height, from which we must more fear that it slide than we can hope that it ever shall rise.’
Already, the expert is in a hurry. Already, he blackmails his patron with the ‘now or never’ that leads to so many modern policy decisions. The queen, according to Nebrija, needs the grammar now, because soon Columbus shall return.
After your Majesty shall have placed her yoke unto many barbarians who speak outlandish tongues, by your victory these shall stand in new needs: in need for the laws that the victor owes to the vanquished and in need of the language that we bring. My grammar shall serve to impart to them the Castilian tongue as we have taught Latin to our young.
We know well whose concept of language won out: language became one more tool managed by the professional lackey to power. Language was seen as an instrument to make people good, to make good people. Language became one of the major ingredients put by the hermetic alchemist into the formula by which new men were made to fit a new world. Mother tongue, as taught in the church and the classroom, replaced the vernacular that mother spoke. Mother tongue became a commodity centuries earlier than mother’s milk. Men took charge of the ‘educatio prolis,’ shaping Alma Mater as their social womb and breast. In the process, the sovereign subject became a citizen client. The domination of nature and the corresponding improvement of people became central public — supposedly secular — goals. ‘Omnibus, omnia, omnino docendi ars’ — ‘to teach everybody everything totally’ — became the task of the educator, as John Amos Comenius spelled it out in the title of his book. The sovereign subject turned into a ward of the state. The doctrine about the need for primary education for the exercise of citizenship destroyed the autonomy of Isabel’s subjects: she could tax her subjects, force them to statute labor or call them into the army; she could not attain the sovereign dignity of their tongue as every school teacher does.
The third mutation in the vernacular has happened under our eyes. Most people born before World War II, rich and poor alike, learned most of their first language either from persons who spoke to them, or from others whose exchanges they overheard. Few learned it from actors, preachers or teachers, unless that was the profession of their parents. Today, the inverse is the case. Language is fed to the young through channels to which they are hooked. What they learn is no more a vernacular that, by definition, we draw into us from roots, that we send out into a context in which we are anchored. The roots that serve for this purpose have become weak, dry and loose during the age of schooling and now, in the age of life-long education, they have mostly rotted away, like the roots of plants grown in hydroponics. The young and their linguists cannot even distinguish any more between the vernacular and the high-class slang that they take to be ‘gutsy.’ Language competence now, to a large degree, depends on sufficient supply of teaching.
The lack of personal sovereignty, of autonomy, appears clearly in the way people speak about teaching. At this very moment I am talking to you and, in another four minutes, I will be speaking with you, when the time for discussion will have come; but neither now, nor then, will I be teaching. I am arguing a point, presenting to you my opinions — perhaps I am even entertaining you. But I refuse to be pressed by you into your service as a teacher. Much less am I educating you. I do not want anything to do with that task for which nature has not provided me with the necessary organs. I have told you, perhaps, about some facts that had escaped you about the Abbey of Gorz or the court of the Catholic kings; but, believe me, it was done without any intent at shaping or trapping you for the sake of education. And I hope that I have convinced you that it is more than a terminological nicety when I insist that teaching is a very peculiar, always hierarchical, form that conversation in the vernacular sometimes takes. Unfortunately, many of our contemporaries cannot grasp this any more. Language has become for them a commodity, and the task of education that of training language producers by equipping them with a language stock.
A short while ago I was back in New York in an area that two decades ago I had known quite well: the South Bronx. I was there at the request of a young college teacher who is married to a colleague. This man wanted my signature on a petition for compensatory pre-kindergarten language training for the inhabitants of a slum. To overcome my resistance against this expansion of educational services, for a whole day he took me along on visits to brown, white, black and other so-called ‘households.’ I saw dozens of children in uninhabitable high-rise slums, exposed to all-day TV and radio, equally lost in landscape and in language. My colleague tried to convince me that I should sign the petition. And I tried to argue the right of these children for protection from education. We simply did not meet. And then in the evening, at dinner in my colleague’s home, I suddenly understood why: this was no longer a man but a total teacher. In front of their own children, this couple stood ‘in loco magistri.’ Their children had to grow up without parents — because these two adults, in every word which they addressed to their two sons and one daughter, were ‘educating’ them. And since they considered themselves very radical, off and on they made attempts at ‘raising the consciousness’ of their children. Conversation has turned for them into a form of marketing — of acquisition, production and sale. They have words, ideas, sentences; but they do not speak any more.