We have created Italy. Now we have to create Italians.
—MASSIMO D’AZEGLIO (Italian statesman, 1798–1866)
If you could go back in time to the shores of Iberia in about A.D. 1200, you would encounter (provided you didn’t land in the parts of the south still ruled by Arabic-speaking Muslims) people who spoke a Romance language related to vulgar Latin. If you had studied, say, the Latin Bible translation of Saint Jerome from the early fifth century, you might be able to make out a good number of words people were using.
Pretend that you have learned the local language fairly well. If you then moved inland and observed the inhabitants of the next town, you’d find nearly the same language. But you’d also notice a few differences. Maybe all the words that contained a sound like th now had an s sound where th had been or used ei where the previous town had used eh. From town to town you’d see more changes along those same lines.
People from regions near one another would understand one another, but people from two towns far enough apart wouldn’t. At one point on your journey, you might see people speaking a language recognizably related to Old Spanish. Farther on, you might see something like Old French. You could continue in much the same way down into Italy and across to Sicily, never encountering a sharp language break. At most, at a river crossing or mountain pass, you might find the differences slightly more abrupt.
The point is that at that time in history, it was almost never obvious what was a local pronunciation, what was a dialect, and what was a language. There were no neat border crossings, with flags and uniformed customs officers, telling you when Spanish ended and French began. People just spoke as they spoke, usually sounding something like the people near them. Modern-day maps like to show where speakers of this or that language live, perhaps with French-speakers colored red or German-speakers blue. But a map of medieval Europe with a dot for each speaker would show a mess, with a great deal of overlap. There would be no “red,” just reddish hues from brownish red to orange-red to hot pink, representing the different Romance dialects spoken in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France. Our Germanic “blue” might be greenish in the area that became the Netherlands and purplish in the area that became Bavaria. Linguists speak of a “Romance continuum” or a “Slavic continuum” to describe this primordial state of affairs. There were no “languages” as we think of them today, codified in dictionaries and grammar books. Everything was dialect.
How did we get from muddy continua to crisp borders? How did the hazy and shifting mess of dots get sorted into rigid containers, all the red dots in this one, all the blue dots in that one? What happened to change our thinking from “Everything is a dialect” to “There is one proper French (or English or German)”?
In short, the nation-state happened. Or more specifically, waves of nation-state building happened. The varying attitudes we see today toward language can, to a surprising extent, be traced to how and when a nation-state was built.
Americans tend to use “nation” as a synonym for “country.” But political scientists and historians, as well as many Europeans, tend to use the term for a much more specific phenomenon: a group of people who feel they belong together, whether they have a country of their own or not. Nations tend to share several things: a sense of common history, a religion, cultural customs, some geographic continuity, and, of course, a language. And though all of these can be powerful, the two most powerful of all tend to be religion and language. Where people share the same faith and the same speech, they tend to consider themselves a nation.
“Nationalism” is the political ideal that emerged as the nations of Europe became self-aware. In short, it is the idea that every nation should have a state and every state, just one nation. As nationalist thinking grew, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the old blurry linguistic borders became inconvenient for nationalists. To build nations strong enough to win themselves a state, the people of a would-be nation needed to be welded together with a clear sense of community. Speaking a minority dialect or refusing to assimilate to a standard wouldn’t do.
The first great nation-states of Europe didn’t emerge from bottom-up nationalism. They were built through the conquest of large territories by feudal kings and lords. Feudalism was a pyramidal system in which (to simplify quite a bit) the king stood above lords, lords stood above local minilords, and minilords owned the land on which peasants worked. Serfs rendered labor to their lords and were protected. Vassals—those lower in the pyramid—rendered military service and taxes to the lords above them in exchange for their land. Lords raised forces for their king when a major war had to be fought. Everyone had a place, and those on top didn’t much care whether those below them all spoke the same way, so long as the bills were paid in money, goods, or military service.
Of this era, three great states emerged, each in its own way: England, Spain, and France. England was a Germanic Anglo-Saxon-speaking land repeatedly invaded by Vikings, who left settlers (and linguistic heritage) in the north of the country. Then came the invasion that made the modern country: the Norman Conquest of 1066. England was, for several centuries, a Germanic-speaking country ruled by French-speaking foreigners. Early Norman kings spoke no English, and it would be about three centuries before English triumphed at the highest level and English kings spoke their subjects’ language as their own. By that time, of course, English had been heavily influenced by French.
Spain was almost entirely conquered by the Moors in an invasion beginning in A.D. 711. Of the modern territory of Spain, only the northern fringes remained in Christian hands. But a slow reconquest by Christian forces gradually pushed the Moorish tide back, over centuries, until the reconquest was completed with the 1492 fall of Granada. The heart of the new Spain was Castile, which had been the biggest of the Spanish kingdoms, united with Aragon, another kingdom, through the marriage of the storied “Catholic monarchs,” Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. From the last years of Islamic Iberia through the rise of unified Spain, the Castilian Romance dialect gradually became “Spanish.”
The territory and language of France, similarly, radiated out from a core: the Île-de-France, or Island of France, the territory around Paris. The kings in Paris controlled some lands directly and others through dukes, counts, and other assorted nobles. Gradually, though, the latter were folded directly into the French state through war or inheritance. The French we know today was but one of many Romance dialects in the territory of France. It just happened to be that of the capital region.
All of this state building required armies, and armies required taxation. Taxation required records, of land and population, and so records were kept—in the language of the capital. “Chancery English,” the emerging standard of record keeping in London, is partially synonymous with Late Middle English. Many Spanish-speakers today still call their language castellano, “Castilian,” and not español, a reminder that “Spanish” is one of many older Spanishes. And “Francien,” the dialect of the Île-de-France, was little more than the first among equals for centuries. It competed with other “langue d’oïl” languages in the north (so called for oïl, their word for “yes”). The langue d’oïl faced robust competition from the “langue d’oc” region in the south, where medieval troubadors worked in Provençal (also called Occitan, which used oc for yes).
It would take centuries—essentially an internal cultural conquest—for these languages to dominate their own countries. Spain was politically unified after 1492 but remained linguistically heterodox. King Charles I, who was also Charles V of the far-flung Holy Roman empire, was said to boast, perhaps apocryphally, “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.” This was hardly surprising, though, as his territory included parts of the modern Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria, and others. In Iberia itself, linguistically distinct Portugal broke away after a short-lived union. Empire, not nation-state, was the order of the day. Even within Spain, most regions were unified around Castilian over the ensuing centuries, but Galicia, Catalonia, and the Basque Country continued to hold on to Galician, Catalan, and Basque.
Paris-based kings also took centuries to complete their hold over modern France. Even so, by the time of the 1789 French Revolution a census showed that just a fraction of the people spoke standard French. Provençal/Occitan, Basque, and Catalan persisted in the south, Alsatian in the east, Picard in the North, and the Celtic language of Breton in the west—a situation considered intolerable to the revolutionaries. Henri Grégoire, an unusual Catholic bishop who enthusiastically supported the Revolution, was dismayed to find how many Frenchmen spoke “degenerate” languages, or “patois,” as he called them. “These crude idioms perpetuate the childhood of the reason and the old age of prejudices,” he wrote in his “Report on the necessity and the means to annihilate the patois and universalize the use of the French language.”
And though the modern United Kingdom took its form with the 1707 Act of Union bringing England and Scotland together, languages other than standard English carried on a vibrant life. A distinctly Scottish English, Scots (of Burns’s “gang aft a’gley”), dominated Scotland. Gaelic, related to Irish, Breton, Manx, and Cornish, persisted in the highlands and Scottish Islands: in 1755, the British census showed 300,000 people—a quarter of Scotland’s population—to be monolingual in Gaelic. In Ireland, English became the majority language only in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Irish-speaking population was devastated by the potato famine and emigration: the 1841 census showed 4 million Irish-speakers in a total Irish population of 8 million. And finally, Welsh persisted in Wales, though that country had been unified with England since the English king crowned his son “Prince of Wales” in 1301. The Welsh language was particularly strong in the mountains and the coastal regions distant from England’s heart; as so often elsewhere, forbidding geography was the best friend of a small language.
So by the dawn of the modern age, only one of two pieces was in place for modern linguistic nationalism. No great European state was homogeneous—the idea would have seemed odd to the rulers themselves. But standard languages had emerged, even if they were largely limited to elites in capitals. English, French, and Spanish shared crucial assets. One was a literature, which was the vehicle of linguistic prestige: the Cervanteses, Racines, and Miltons did much to make Spanish Spanish, French French, and English English. The second asset was some form of linguistic custodian. Spain and France went the route of the official language academy: the French Academy, founded in 1635, and the Royal Spanish Academy, founded in 1713. The guardians of English would be informal—lexicographers like Samuel Johnson and grammarians like Robert Lowth.
Perhaps most crucially, these states were powerful. Spain had conquered huge chunks of two continents in the sixteenth century. France emerged as the dominant continental power in the seventeenth, particularly after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which devastated rivals to the east. And Britain’s spectacular rise began in the eighteenth, as its colonists, merchants, and sailors built an empire on which the sun never set.
Spain, France, and Britain were not the only European countries with great languages and civilizations. But they were the only ones that combined them with heavy-duty, enduring political states. Russia was on the rise in the east but punched below its weight. Sweden declined after the Thirty Years’ War. The Netherlands flourished briefly, gathering imperial possessions around the world, but lacked the economic and military power to keep them in the long term. Much the same could be said of Portugal.
What brought Europe from the age of great but mixed states—essentially internal empires—to monolingual nation-states? Ernest Gellner, an eminent philosopher and social anthropologist, offered a theory of nationalism with one word at its core: industrialization. He wrote in 1983 that
The proportion of people at the coal face of nature, directly applying human physical force to natural objects, is constantly diminishing. Most jobs, if not actually involving work “with people,” involve the control of buttons or switches or levers which need to be understood, and are explicable, once again, in some standard idiom intelligible to all comers.
In agrarian society, only a few elite groups truly needed a standard language: military leaders, bureaucracies, and clergy. Their mastery of a high idiom (say, Latin or classical Arabic)—learned among the religious, courtly, or military elites—put them at a comfortable, usually hereditary distance from the masses. But there was not yet an “education system” available to all. The masses themselves lived on the land, geographically separated from one another and speaking unwritten languages. Most people learned their trade—almost always farming—from their parents or village communities.
Industrialization changed all that. People had to be able to learn to pick up new skills faster, since the economy had not only to produce but to continually grow and become more sophisticated technologically. Learning one trade over many years would not do. People needed generic skills, to which only a small amount of extra training would allow them to move around the economy, taking new jobs and responding to innovation. This demand for generic skills created the need for the modern, standardized, centralized educational system to be extended to the masses. Gellner pointed out that such education is useful, not just good. This is why, though modern peoples have both a “right” to free speech and a “right” to education (through the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among other things), dictatorships usually respect one and not the other. Even tyrannies educate their people, because it is economically necessary to do so.
Gellner’s theory that industrialization made nationalism necessary may be too neat. It ignores, among other things, how readily and happily common folk joined the nationalist wave. But there is no doubt that, once the nationalist spirit was loosed, industrialization and technology combined explosively with those emerging national identities. Britain, home of the Industrial Revolution, both Anglicized its islands and spread its culture to lands as far-flung as America and India with spectacular success. France’s revolution released disciplined armies with universalist ideas upon Europe, spreading the notion that rationalism, nationalism, and progress could free and unify dormant “nations” stymied by tyranny. Spain, meanwhile, underwent a relative decline. (Still, Castilian Spanish continued to dominate not only Spain but most of South and Central America and much of North America, while Spain’s regional languages languished, spoken but not fostered by the state, on the periphery. The growing Spanish insistence on Castilian only has caused conflicts that still boil today, as we will see.)
Meanwhile, two great European cultures still had no single state by the nineteenth century: the Germans and Italians. Germans were spread among dozens of states. The rickety Holy Roman Empire, created by the pope for Charlemagne in A.D. 800, was finally shoved into its grave by Napoleon in 1806. In the west, its successor states were multifarious free cities, duchies, and just two kingdoms of note, Bavaria and Prussia. In the east, the empire based in Vienna was hugely multilingual. Though dominated by Germans, it included Italians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, various southern Slavs, Ukrainians, and Jews.
The lack of a single German state offended the “one people, one state” principle. Germans, in fact, spoke many local varieties of “German” that were only partly mutually intelligible. But they shared a literary language that depended heavily on the “High German” that had coalesced after Martin Luther’s beloved 1534 translation of the Bible. In the true Protestant spirit, Luther had sought the people’s language, trying to make his translation as close to the language he heard around him as he could. When his translation appeared, a contemporary opponent, Johann Cochlaeus (a Catholic), complained that
even tailors and shoe-makers—nay, even women and ignorant persons, who could read but little—studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of truth. Some committed it to memory and carried it about in their bosoms. Within a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about the faith and the Gospel, not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and Doctors of Divinity.
Though considerably older than the King James Bible of 1611, Luther’s translation is easier for modern Germans to read than the King James is for the modern English-speaker. Luther’s home region of eastern-central Germany, with its influence on his language, would contribute more than its fair share to what would eventually become the standard language we now call German. In contrast to the state-led creation of English, French, and Spanish, German’s center of gravity would not be Germany’s eventual capital, Berlin. The unified “high” language preceded the state.
The German that Luther helped form was crucial to a sense of Germanness that bound even Catholics and Protestants together with the sense of being a single people. This linguistic unity was crucial during centuries of political division among dozens of states, and left Germans ready for nationalism when it came—on the back of an invasion from the west.
After the French Revolution of 1789, Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies repeatedly marched into German lands. Even though the French invaders were defeated, they left behind the quintessential concept of their revolution: that of the modern nation-state, all people of a nation bound together in a single polity. This idea percolated for half a century, more decades of division and weakness, punctuated by a series of failed antimonarchical, nationalist revolutions in 1848.
In the end, Germans would not be unified by republican sentiments rising from below. Instead, the wily chancellor of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, would provoke a series of wars (with Denmark, Austria, and France) that would unite most Germans from above. Under Prussian leadership, most of the German states (barring Austria) were united for the first time in a state called Germany: the “second empire” established in 1871. The king of Prussia was now the emperor of Germany. The new state quickly sought to catch up on building an overseas empire, seeking its proper “place in the sun” by racing France and Britain into Africa and elsewhere.
Italy underwent a similar crash nationalization. Italy, like Germany, was a patchwork of states in the wake of Napoleon’s 1815 defeat. Despite that, like the Germans, Italians shared linguistic unity at least at an elite level. The writings of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, all Florentines, had led to a de facto literary standard. The linguistic scholarship of the Accademia della Crusca, which preceded even the French Academy by fifty years, helped too. Italy’s “Prussians” were enlightened Piedmontese, northern Italians who gradually conquered the various states and annexed them to Italy. And Italy, unlike Germany, had no significant Catholic-Protestant divide.
But Italy was more geographically diverse, more rural, and poorer than the German lands, which had over the previous centuries produced many of Europe’s finest thinkers and writers. Italy’s sense of itself as a nation had further to go. Education had done less to spread the standard language to the people. I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), an early-nineteenth-century nationalist novel, was written in a Florentine Italian that was a deliberate attempt by its author, Alessandro Manzoni, to standardize Italy’s language. By one estimate, just 2 or 3 percent of newly minted “Italians” spoke Italian at home when Italy was unified in the 1860s. Some Italian dialects were as different from one another as modern Italian is from modern Spanish. No wonder the pro-unification statesman Massimo d’Azeglio felt compelled to sigh, in the quotation that begins this chapter, that Italy was a state without a proper people.*
The creation of two big new countries on the European map gave other nations ideas. Success of the French nationalist citizen army and the German state kicked off the stage of so-called “late nationalisms.” The many non-German peoples of the Austrian Empire began to clamor: Hungarians, whose language, from the Finno-Ugric family, shares nothing with its neighbors; Czechs, who, despite historical Catholic-Protestant divides, considered themselves a nation united by language; Poles, whose great state had been gradually partitioned among Prussia, Russia, and Austria until the Poles were stateless; south Slavs, who developed a distinct identity between the hammer of Austria to the north and the anvil of Turkey to the south (despite their own tripartite Catholic-Orthodox-Muslim divisions); and so on. The territory of Western Europe had already mostly been filled by stable states. But Eastern Europe’s borders began to change rapidly, as old empires frayed, and newly self-conscious nations began to seek states of their own. Most of those nations identified themselves mainly by their language.
This despite the fact that “language,” in the case of the new nationalisms, was a touchy subject. Many languages of Eastern Europe had not been extensively written down. Unlike the Western Europeans, who had the benefit of strong states that had boosted standard languages for centuries, the Easterners had to create standard languages on the fly, with scattered raw materials. Linguistic nationalists collected folk tales, spawned language societies, and debated late into the night. Which regional pronunciation would be the standard? Which words were “foreign” and hence to be shunned? Should technical vocabulary be borrowed from English, French, or German or minted locally?
These efforts were sometimes farcical, as intentional language planning can be. Johannes Aavik (1880–1973), the father of modern Estonian, created nonsense words out of thin air for Estonian, of which forty survive in use today. Another purist, an overzealous Czech, coined a replacement for kren, “horseradish,” because he thought it had been borrowed from German Chren. He didn’t realize that Chren had earlier been borrowed from Czech. (His coinage, morska retkev, was, ironically, a part-for-part translation of the German Meerrettich, “sea radish.” It didn’t survive.) In both cases, the motive was to make the language distinct from that of the neighbors—to make a language worthy of a nation, so that the nation itself would be taken more seriously.
All of this linguistic nationalism is at least deserving of sympathy from our modern point of view. If nations have an understandable desire for a prestigious language, for small nations that urge was given a boost by centuries of being repressed. These many long-ignored nations of Europe were merely clamoring to join their bigger, more established neighbors at the table. But the orgy of nationalism that began with the French Revolution, gained strength with the creation of Germany and Italy, and sparked the awakenings in the east would ultimately lead to a century that would include the greatest bloodshed the world had ever seen.
It was a south Slavic nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Austria’s archduke, Franz Ferdinand, in June 1914. Princip and his associates wanted a south-Slavic federation led by Serbia and free from control by Vienna. Germany, eager to flex its muscles, backed its ally Austria against Serbia. Russia came to fellow Slavic Serbia’s side and France to its ally Russia’s. Britain had allied itself to France too, and quickly, nearly all Europe was at war—the bloodiest war in centuries and the first truly mechanized war in history, killing millions of Europe’s most promising young men. The United States, the Ottoman Empire, and others were also dragged into the fight.
Germany’s defeat in that war planted the seeds of the next one. The former rising power lost big chunks of land to the east and west in the postwar Treaty of Versailles. Many Germans were now stranded outside Germany’s newly shrunken borders. This humiliation, among the others that weakened the postwar Weimar Republic, eased the way for Hitler’s rise in 1933. The two major steps toward that war—Hitler’s Anschluss fusing Austria and Germany, and the annexation of the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechslovakia—were the logical extension of the nation-state idea: that all Germans should live in one country. “National self-determination” had, after all, been one of Woodrow Wilson’s celebrated liberal Fourteen Points at the end of the first war.
Irredenta elsewhere gave far too many other Europeans cause for complaint, ultimately pushing Europeans to war again just twenty-one years after the first Great War had ended. Slovaks and Croats, resenting their subordinate status, split away from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (respectively) in the Second World War and joined the Fascist cause. So did Hungary: split from Austria-Hungary and shrunk by two-thirds after the First World War, it had lost millions of Hungarian-speakers to other countries. Many of the new Soviet Union’s restive western minorities eagerly joined the Fascists as well. The “war to end all wars,” the First World War, had done no such thing; it had merely primed the Europeans to try their hand at settling nationalist scores again. Two corporals wounded in the first, indecisive war—Hitler and Mussolini—became the instigators of the next.
It would be too glib to say that language purism and language identities caused the world wars. But the forces of modern nationalism unleashed them. And language was at the heart of those nationalisms more than any other single factor. In the high nationalist period that led to and included both world wars, religion was no good predictor of who would fight whom. Catholic and Protestant countries fought on both sides in both wars. (And some highly distinct peoples—the Hungarians, the Czechs, and the Germans themselves—were divided between the two confessions.) Instead, the new nations saw their conationals as those who spoke the most like they did. And those who felt that their nations were repressed, divided, or humiliated by others and not given a big enough piece of territory on Europe’s crowded map wreaked bloody hell on one another for half a century, in service of the idea that the best possible state was one including all of one’s conationals and no one else.
It is one of the ironies of history that, as Europe was learning the painful lessons of nationalism, one of the peoples most oppressed by Europeans was taking the opposite lesson: that the ethno-nationalist state was the peak of human accomplishment, to be attained no matter the cost. There are few more painfully ironic examples of the triumph, and the pain, of nationalism than the creation of modern Israel in 1948, achieved with the help of the extraordinary resuscitation of Hebrew.
The Jews, dispersed throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe after the destruction of Jerusalem and the second temple by the Romans, were one of the world’s most storied nations without a state. Those in the Middle East—ironically, in the light of modern times—got along as second-class, but reasonably tolerated, subjects in largely Muslim states. But those in Europe suffered heavily. The oldest form of anti-Semitism was based upon the notion of Jews as the murderers of Christ. Jews were banned from professions, landholding, and simple rights granted ordinary Christian citizens.
But in the age of nationalism, the Jews became not mainly Christ-killers but an unloved ethnic minority. The Central European states had flourishing Jewish populations that had contributed hugely to European culture, through music, science, philosophy and other areas of learning, assimilating linguistically and nationally. Many Jews had abandoned Yiddish and tried to be good citizens of their countries. But they were still objects of suspicion and scorn. And in the eastern reaches of Jewish settlement, especially in Russia, a virulent anti-Semitism led to bloody pogroms against already impoverished, isolated, and unassimilated Jewish communities.
Near the end of the nineteenth century, Theodor Herzl, an Austrian, thought he had found the answer. In his pamphlet “Der Judenstaat,” (“The Jewish State”), he proposed a solution for his stateless people: “Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.”
A minority taste at first, Zionism caught on gradually among a certain slice of Europe’s Jews. The World Zionist Organization—which met for the first time in Basel in 1897—discussed where a Jewish state might be established, briefly considering even a home in British East Africa. But the focus of Zionist longing was the ancestral homeland itself: Palestine, then a backward and, as they saw it, sparsely populated province of the Ottoman Empire. Zionists began raising money through the Jewish National Fund and lobbying the Ottoman authorities to allow land purchases in Palestine. European Jews were encouraged to emigrate there to join a small community, the “old yishuv,” of Jews who had never left.
At the same time, an astonishing cultural project began: the reconstruction of Hebrew as a living language. Hebrew had not disappeared. It was nobody’s native language, but Jews in the diaspora still used it for serious writing. Several literary works had been composed in Hebrew: plays, essays, and a nineteenth-century novel. But no one spoke it spontaneously.
Some of those who wanted to revive Hebrew were maskilim, those who had assimilated into Europe’s societies. For them, Hebrew meant scholarship and prestige, as compared to the isolation and provincialism of Yiddish. But another stream of interest in Hebrew ran in the opposite direction, feeding not integration but Jewish nationalism. One of those who caught the fever was a young Jew in the western Russian Empire, Eliezer Perlman, who gave himself an unprecedented task: to make an ancient language serve a modern nationalism.
Perlman fell in love with his people’s sacred tongue not through religion—he was only briefly devout as a teenager. He instead was tickled by a Hebrew translation of a secular work, Robinson Crusoe, that the head of his yeshiva had shown him. Perlman wanted to see more Hebrew like that and became fixated upon reviving the language so it could live not only in the yeshiva but also in the kitchen, the market, and the street; it should be not only for studying and praying but for loving and fighting.
He was inspired by European nationalism. In his autobiography, he describes his growing fascination with the Bulgarians’ struggle for liberation from the Ottoman Empire:
Then late one night, after some hours of reading the papers and thinking about the Bulgarians and their future liberation, a flash of lightning seemed to pass before my eyes and my thoughts flew from the Shipka Pass in the Balkans to the fords of the Jordan in Eretz Israel. With astonishment I heard a voice within me calling out: The restoration of Israel and its language on the soil of its ancestors!
Perlman’s passion for the language was so intense that it isn’t clear which way his Zionism ran: he wanted a state for the sake of Hebrew itself, it seemed, nearly as much as he wanted a language to serve the Jewish state. Perlman would take the name Eliezer Ben Yehuda, converting his father’s name (Yehuda) into his surname (“son of Yehuda”) in the traditional Jewish way upon emigrating to Palestine in 1881, well before the formal Zionist movement began with the 1897 Basel conference.
Reviving Hebrew was far from uncontroversial, though. Herzl never mentioned Hebrew in “The Jewish State” and in fact seemed to think that German might be the language of the future Zionist state. “Who among us has sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language?” he asked, practically enough. Yiddish, a German dialect that had spread from medieval Jewish settlements near the Rhine to Eastern Europe, was the language spoken by a majority of the world’s Jews. Within the Zionist movement, it had its fervent partisans.
Moreover, many Orthodox Jews found Ben Yehuda’s plans for Hebrew downright blasphemous. Hebrew was holy, not to be profaned by use for haggling in the marketplace. That was the job of Yiddish, Arabic, or German—anything but the language in which God had handed down the Torah.
But he would not be deterred. He isolated his first son, Itamar, from contact with any other language, refusing his frail first wife, Devora, a servant so that the child would hear only Hebrew. Itamar recalled Ben Yehuda flying into a rage upon coming home once and finding Devora (whose Hebrew was poor) singing a Russian lullaby to him. Itamar himself was once beaten up in downtown Jerusalem for speaking to his dog in Hebrew, the only language he knew. (Itamar’s siblings would later master the language without being so harshly cut off.) Ben Yehuda’s efforts to restore the language so angered the traditional authorities in Israel that when Devora died, they refused her burial in a Jewish cemetery: his family was seen as insufficiently Jewish. Ben Yehuda himself was excommunicated. But he carried on, marrying Devora’s sister, becoming a teacher, and lobbying his fellow teachers to teach only in Hebrew in the schools they had begun establishing in Palestine.
The task was huge. Only 8,000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs and knows in most languages. There was obviously no word for Herzl’s “railway ticket” or many of the other words needed for a modern state. Ben Yehuda labored to fill the gaps, writing a dictionary of modern terms coined from traditional Hebrew roots.
Meanwhile, Ben Yehuda’s fellow Hebraist teachers contributed what they could, each becoming a one-man font of new words. They also worked to market the language, convincing incoming Zionists to abandon Yiddish—symbolizing weakness and disapora—for Hebrew. Obviously, the political motivation behind Zionism was an important reason Jews in Palestine worked to learn and use Hebrew. But the language was helped by the fact that many of those making the move from Europe didn’t share a first language, and Hebrew became their lingua franca. The younger generation was particularly important. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the first children to learn not just Hebrew, but in Hebrew, began graduating from schools, marrying, and having children of their own. Those children became the vanguard, learning the ancient language from the cradle, and using it all the time. By 1922, just four decades after Ben Yehuda’s arrival, Britain recognized Hebrew as the official language of Palestine’s Jews.
That the creation of Israel was a nationalist project in the secular European mold, not a religious, messianic dream, can be seen in the stories of the early Zionists. Ben Yehuda classified himself, in his official registration in Palestine, as a “national Jew” but “without religion.” The remaining bulk of the early Zionists was inspired by socialism, not the patriarchs and prophets. The Jews shared, by definition, a religion. But obviously this was not enough. Ben Yehuda’s efforts, Herzl’s eventual support, and the success of the project showed that a nation isn’t a nation even if its people share a religion, history, and traditions. They needed a single common language.
Outside the ranks of the ultra-Orthodox, Yiddish would shrivel in Israel. A group of Zionists from the dominant Labor Party in the Jewish community in Palestine initially wanted to produce a Yiddish edition of their periodical but were attacked by the Hebrew-only faction and voted down, and Hebrew was made the party’s sole language from 1907. The proportion of Yiddish-speakers in pre-1948 Palestine steadily declined, even with the influx of Yiddish-speakers coming from Europe after 1945. Hitler killed most of the world’s Yiddish-speakers. The choice of Hebrew for Israel a century ago, and its stunning success since, is near to putting Yiddish itself into the grave.
Hebrew has expanded to all reaches of life. One need barely guess what the anti-Hebrew ultra-Orthodox think of Ben Yehuda’s successful coinage of dagdegan, “clitoris” (from a root meaning “tickle”). And modern Hebrew has become far more than the creation of Ben Yehuda alone. Though he gets most of the credit, many of the words in his masterpiece dictionary are not in modern use. Instead, as it has grown, Hebrew has done what normal languages do: it has both settled and changed through daily use by millions. Beginning with no native speakers, it now has a distinctive accent, which some trace to the Russian of many early settlers. The European backgrounds of early Israelis moved Hebrew grammar away from Semitic forms toward more European ones. Hebrew has also borrowed words from abroad, with telefon replacing Ben Yehuda’s sach-rachok, for instance. Israelis coin mongrel words, such as the English word and Russian suffix brought together to form jobnik, a soldier who has a duty resembling a normal civilian job. Hebrew even has—and this should not surprise readers of this book so far—declinist sticklers. “Ben Yehuda would be dismayed by the demotic Hebrew spoken today,” said the Israeli author and journalist Hillel Halkin. Another Semiticist scholar, Edward Ullendorff, scoffs:
Modern oddities like the grammatically impossible mekir instead of the makkir and similar monstrosities had not arisen in Ben Yehuda’s Hebrew and I am glad it is left to those who nowadays watch over the health of contemporary Hebrew either to come to terms with such horrors or to endeavour to discard them.
Just a hundred years old, and already being ruined by the kids. A normal language indeed.
To say that the creation of Israel was not without controversy would be an understatement. No other people on earth suffered as mightily as the Jews in the first half of the twentieth century. But just as the Second World War was teaching much of the world the perils of nationalism, the Jews decided that they couldn’t survive without it. Israel now had many of the trappings of a nationalist state, just like the nation-states it had imitated. It had a quasi-official religion—though Judaism isn’t singled out in the constitution, any Jew worldwide may come to Israel with the promise of automatic citizenship. It had a sanctified semiofficial history—of dispersion, persecution, survival, and revival over incredible odds. (It would be decades before prominent Israeli historians critically reappraised Israel’s creation and its catastrophic cost to Palestine’s pre-1948 Arab majority.) And it had a thriving, robust single language for its Jewish population. The new state’s third prime minister, Levi Eshkol (1963–1969), was one of the last prominent Israelis known for speaking what had been, a century earlier, the dominant language of Jewish life, Yiddish. Hebrew had triumphed.
Though other languages have been kept on life support as liturgical languages and small-scale revivals have succeeded in keeping (for example) Welsh and Irish alive, there is no parallel in history to the re-creation of Hebrew. Those who revel in linguistic diversity should take heart at the story. And those who argue—as I will in the next chapter—that official language planning by meddlesome experts is usually a bad idea must acknowledge this compelling success. Though Hebrew wasn’t imposed, and hasn’t been controlled, by strong-armed government pressure, its revival and flourishing certainly began with committed elites before spreading to the masses.
But one language and one religion for one people in one land have not brought Israel’s Jews peace and security after decades of suffering; they have brought more insecurity and frustration. Even the admirers of Hebrew can see this as evidence for the perils, not the wisdom, of cultural planning wedded to muscular nationalism.
At least Israel avoided one of the commonest, and stupidest, mistakes of linguistic nationalism. Hebrew is not the sole official language of Israel; Arabic shares that status, and the roughly 20 percent of the population that is of Palestinian Arabic origin learns in Arabic in schools, with Hebrew taught as well. Israel does push a symbolically Jewish-centered agenda by, for example, calling Jerusalem “Urshalim” even in Arabic script on signs. (The Arabic name is Al-Quds. I have seen Arabic-script “Urshalim” destroyed on Jerusalem signs. Sign defacing is a favorite outburst of linguistic discontent the world round and one inflicted by Israeli Jews on Arabic signs, too.)
But by and large, Israel has come to a pragmatic accommodation of its Arabic-speakers. Arabs campaign for seats in parliament in Arabic and debate in the Knesset in their language. A bill in 2008 proposed demoting Arabic to a “secondary language,” putting it on par with English (widely used) and Russian (increasingly important since the influx of Soviet Jews after 1991). But the bill failed to pass, and Arabic remains in the top legal tier with Hebrew. Though most Israeli Jews do not make it far in learning Arabic, the basics are still theoretically required in high school.
Unfortunately, not all nationalists have had the pragmatism Israel has shown with Arabic. The true chauvinist must not only push his own language but suppress others. Modern history is, unfortunately, too full of examples. If Charles V boasted of speaking Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to his horse, his successor, Francisco Franco, might have said, “I speak Spanish to God, Spanish to women, Spanish to men, and Spanish to my horse.” Franco, who took power after a traumatic civil war in Spain (1936–1939), sought to erase Spain’s long history of multilingualism.
Ironically, Franco himself came from Galicia, in northwestern Spain. Galician, or galego, is closely related to Portuguese. Speakers of the two can easily understand each other, but a Spanish-speaker will struggle with either. Franco spoke Galician, though he considered it Portuguese and never used it in public. He was like the Corsican Napoleon and the Georgian Stalin—a dictator from a minority background who persecuted minorities once he reached the top.
Galicia is the least nationalist of Spain’s three major minority regions. In the east, the Catalans have long sought more autonomy or even independence from Spain. Catalonia was once a powerful political unit of its own, a principality tied to the kingdom of Aragon. The Catalan language was a vehicle for prestigious literature, and Aragon-Catalonia spread the language to the Balearic Islands, parts of Sardinia and mainland Italy, and even as far as Greece. After backing the wrong side in the eighteenth-century War of the Spanish Succession, Catalonia’s language went into decline, banned from governmental use by the crown in Madrid. A nineteenth-century renaixença (“renaissance”) saw dormant Catalan nationalism begin to rise again. It was aided—as nationalism often is—by economic considerations: Catalonia has traditionally been richer and more industrialized than Spain’s Castilian heartland.
The third group to stick out from united Spain has been, from the Spanish nationalist’s point of view, the most troublesome of all. The Basques speak a language unrelated to any other known on Earth. This is rare globally and unique in Europe. (Though Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are not related to their neighbors’ languages, for example, they are related to one another.) Basque’s distance from its neighbors can be seen in almost any common phrase: dos cervezas (two beers) in Spanish is duas cervexas in Galician, dues cerveses in Catalan, but bi garagardo in Basque. Basques proudly claim to be those who resisted the Islamic invasion of the eighth century most successfully, holding out in the mountains of northern Spain. In modern Spain, too, the Basques have reason to feel proud and unique: like Catalonia, the Basque autonomous region (which naturally doesn’t include Basques across the border in France) is richer than the rest of Spain.
The only thing worse than uppity minorities are successful uppity minorities, from the centralizer’s point of view. And Franco was a centralizer. Inspired and aided by nationalist Fascists in Italy and Germany, he sought strength through Spanish “unity.” To this end, especially in early years, he cracked down on the minority languages. Official use of any language but Castilian Spanish was banned, as was the teaching of any other language in public schools. Films in minority languages were banned too, and parents couldn’t register their children with regional names like Jordi (Catalan)—they had to be given Castilian equivalents (Jorge). Shop signs in the minority languages would incur heavy fines. Basques, Catalans, and Galicians were told to “speak Christian”—that is, Castilian. Bars and other establishments were made to feature signs reading “The language of the Empire is spoken here.” A typical Francoist slogan was Una bandera, una patria, una lengua: “One flag, one homeland, one language.” The similarity to Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer is no coincidence.
Franco’s militaristic unity policy kept the minority nationalists on the back foot, to be sure. Catalonia’s leaders fled abroad, declaring government in exile from other corners of Europe, and many nationalist Basques headed to the United States. But those who stayed sought to fight back: ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or “Basque Homeland and Freedom”), the Basque terrorist group committed to independence for the Basque country (including Basque parts of France), was founded in 1959, sixteen years before Franco’s death. The Francoist regime gradually loosened its strictest controls on language, allowing books of poetry and plays, or limited radio broadcasts, on the assumption that they would reach mainly a few harmless cultural nationalists. But the minorities were unsatisfied, and ETA, in particular, stepped up a campaign of assassinations of police and officials representing the regime. Like Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Franco not only failed to eliminate the hated minority languages, he gave their speakers an enduring grievance, the perfect symbolic issue to rally around. His death in 1975 was greeted with public jubilation in the Basque lands and Catalonia.
Spain’s democracy was delicately restored after Franco. Galicia, Catalonia, and the Basque part of Spain won “asymmetrical” autonomy in the constitution, meaning that they were granted local privileges not given to other parts of the country such as Andalucía and Extremadura. The local languages were legalized and declared objects of national protection, supported for certain local uses including education. This accompanied a good bit of economic decentralization: the Basques, Catalans, and Galicians have more power to make their own economic policy than other parts of Spain do.
But independence movements continue to flourish. Galicia is largely happy with its semiautonomy within Spain. But the Catalans and the Basques continue to struggle, divided not between loyalty to Spain and independence but between far greater autonomy within Spain and independence. The Basques have sought to declare themselves a state “freely associated” with Spain, with diplomatic representation abroad. The Catalans, meanwhile, have used their minority position somewhat more cunningly: the small Catalan party in Madrid’s parliament has often been a kingmaker, joining coalitions with the bigger, all-Spanish right- and left-wing parties to give them a majority. This status has been used to wring ever more cultural and economic concessions for Catalonia. Madrid, for its part, continues to insist on all the regions’ integral status within a unified Spain. The country’s territorial integrity was declared inviolable in the 1978 constitution, though this constitution did not pass majority votes in Catalonia and the Basque provinces, rendering those regions’ national aspirations unconstitutional without their say-so.
On the linguistic level, a tense stability prevails. Catalan is seen everywhere in Barcelona—virtually every sign, even in this tourist paradise, is in that language, not the more widely spoken Spanish (which is sometimes but not always included underneath). But open your ears and close your eyes, and the impression is reversed: much more Spanish than Catalan can be heard in central districts. This is a direct legacy of Francoism: two generations were denied education in Catalan, which made it the language of homes and other private domains, not business in the streets. But Spanish prevails in Catalonia’s heart also because wealthy Barcelona has attracted “internal immigrants” from other parts of Spain. They don’t speak Catalan when they arrive. Their children, however, are immersed in Catalan at school, though Spanish is also taught. This has led to an ironic reversal of the old roles: Spanish-speakers claiming “intolerance” by the Catalans.
Joan Martí i Castell, the head of the Philological Department of the Institute of Catalan Studies in Barcelona, is a tanned, gray-templed gentleman who turns an appointed half hour into an hour to talk to me about the past, present, and future of Catalan. Though he is calm and kind, he is one of those Catalans who tenses up when he hears the Castilians talk about “tolerance.” Noting that it is perfectly possible to live in Barcelona without speaking any Catalan, he says that it would be impossible to live there speaking only Catalan. True, you have a right to demand that a waiter speak to you in Catalan, but who wants to ruin dinner by insisting on a political point? And yes, you can insist that your passport renewal interview be conducted in Catalan, but who wants to annoy a civil servant in a position to make your life difficult? He goes on to argue why requiring schooling in Catalan is “fundamental”:
When a language isn’t necessary—it isn’t indispensible—it is destined to disappear. As long as it’s only permitted, but it isn’t indispensible for daily life, that’s a language that is destined to disappear. Because anything that isn’t indispensible is dispensible.
For him, Catalan in Catalonia must be like “Italian in Italy, French in France, English in the United Kingdom, German in Germany.” The unspoken alternative is Welsh in Wales or Irish in Ireland: an accessory, not a necessity, consigned to an ever-smaller corner of life.
I ask whether Catalonia’s independence is looking more or less likely as time goes on. Though I have always heard—from Castilians—that the Catalans get everything they want, Martí i Castell’s face darkens. People in Catalonia are getting more and more frustrated. Besides “internal immigration,” foreigners are coming from North Africa and naturally prefer to learn Spanish over Catalan. Latin Americans are also coming and continue to speak their native Spanish without learning the regional language. This has put Catalan nationalism back on the boil.
Franco’s legacy was not a united Spain, una patria with una lengua. Rather, after three decades of democracy, ETA is still active, a majority of Basque-speakers still support independence, and even the wealthy and relatively comfortable Catalans are looking the same way. Spain still has found neither unity nor comfort in diversity, thirty-five years after the old dictator’s death.
Linguistic nationalism left enduring, perhaps unsolvable conflicts in Spain. Elsewhere, it may have even toppled at least one regime.
South Africa’s Constitutional Court, in Pretoria, abounds in symbolism. In an unhappier, earlier era, it was a detention facility. It has the distinction of holding, at different times, two of the world’s most famously righteous freedom fighters: Mahatma Gandhi was held there by British authorities in the early twentieth century, and Nelson Mandela would be locked up there half a century later.
Today, South Africa’s Constitutional Court is a symbol of reconciliation and justice. Some of the old brickwork has been kept as a reminder of what the building once was. But the rest is new. The ceiling is designed to evoke an outdoor setting beneath trees, making semiliteral a traditional African concept: “justice under the tree” is dispensed by elders in traditional communal gatherings. Huge windows both offer transparency to the outsider and remind the judges and lawyers inside, during their legal disputations, of the real world they serve outside. And on the face of the building, in a font designed especially for the purpose, are the words “Constitutional Court” in eleven languages.
Officially, all eleven languages are equal. Oral arguments and written submissions may be made in any of them and translated into any other; a glass booth for simultaneous interpretation overlooks the room, much as at the United Nations. But South Africa is no monodecilingual paradise. One language, spoken by less than a tenth of the country’s population at home, is distinctly more equal than others.
Mandela was released from prison in 1990, after twenty-seven years. Four years later, he became president in South Africa’s first democratic election. In 1996, a new Constitution, the product of years of negotiation between the apartheid regime and the African National Congress, promised a host of rights: not just the traditional ones of freedom of speech and assembly but socioeconomic rights such as housing and health care. Discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual preference, disability, religion, culture, age, pregnancy, and other categories is expressly forbidden in the constitution’s Article 9, a far more expansive list of protections than in most democracies’ constitutions.
Among those promises, the constitution required that the new South African state promote eleven newly declared official languages. Nine were African: Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Tswana, Swazi, Sotho, Venda, Tsonga, and Pedi. The other two were European. The first, Afrikaans, is a distinct language, descended from the language of the Dutch who first landed in South Africa in 1652. The Dutch were the dominant white power in the region for centuries. Today, Afrikaans and Dutch are mutually intelligible, but Afrikaners take pride in their language’s distinctiveness. At the Constitutional Court, judgments from lower courts often come in written in Afrikaans, and most judges speak it. But no case has ever been fully argued before the court in Afrikaans.
The last official language is English. The British came later to South Africa than the Dutch did but gradually supplanted them as the dominant European power there. In a series of clashes culminating in the turn-of-the-century Boer War (in which the young Winston Churchill served as a journalist), the British defeated the Afrikaners. The Boers, or “farmers,” as the Afrikaners were then frequently known, entered a half century of political submission to the British.
The Afrikaners’ political self-awareness grew over that time. Most wanted little to do with the British Empire, of which they were now a part. They opposed South Africa’s entry into the Second World War, quietly supporting the Axis. But three years after the war’s end, in 1948, an assertive Afrikaner party, the National Party, won South Africa’s elections for the first time. With this victory began the period of legally enforced “apartness” or, in Afrikaans, apartheid.
Before 1948, South Africa’s white rule was not unlike that in other European colonies in Africa, such as Algeria or Kenya. Apartheid, though, was a different beast: the most legally elaborate, and stiflingly oppressive, system of minority rule in the world. Blacks couldn’t move freely about the country, own land in the vast majority of it, work in skilled trades, join unions, have sex with or marry whites, or even, at apartheid’s peak, learn mathematics in school. What was the point, mused apartheid’s great architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, in teaching a subject they could never use? The stunted, so-called Bantu education became, by the 1970s, one of the greatest sources of black anger.
In 1976, however, the government overreached itself. Having raised Afrikaners’ income levels and established an Afrikaans-speaking elite, the formerly derided Boers began to see the country as truly theirs again. English had been the predominant language of education (with African languages used at the lower levels). Now, the government declared, half of all education must be done in Afrikaans.
This was too much for the already fuming black majority, and the country exploded in protest. Protestors carried banners reading, in English, “To hell with Afrikaans!” and “If we must do Afrikaans, Vorster [the president] must do Zulu!” In Soweto, a huge black township outside Johannesburg, a thirteen-year-old boy was killed by an Afrikaner policeman in a confrontation. The protests became violent riots.
The hundreds dead, not to mention the thousands injured and imprisoned, marked the beginning of the end of apartheid. South Africa, after booming economically in the 1960s, became a global pariah. International sanctions, from those on investment and sporting events to a boycott of South African oranges, made the country an international leper. Even conservative Western governments sympathetic to the South African government’s argument that Mandela’s African National Congress was a communist front, had to keep their distance. Ultimately, the combination of increasingly violent domestic protests and international isolation forced the apartheid leadership to negotiate with Mandela. He left jail in 1990, and the ANC became a legal political party. At that point, the end of apartheid was only a matter of time.
How did Afrikaans help spark the fire that burned apartheid to the ground? Obviously it was the symbol of the hated apartheid government. English, remember, was also a language belonging to whites who had oppressed the black majority, yet its dominance was not a source of the anger. For black South Africans, Afrikaans was worse than foreign; it was useless. Its imposition in school served only as a symbol of the Afrikaners’ attempt to dominate in every way, a humiliation with no redeeming features. Before 1976 most black students began primary school in their native languages, before moving gradually to English in upper grades. With English, they might speak to other Africans with whom they didn’t share a language or with South Africa’s large Indian population. They could read international resistance literature and get their own word out in English. Afrikaans was useful mainly in answering to the white boss.
Mandela is an extraordinary man for many reasons. One of them is that he studied the hated Afrikaans language in his decades of imprisonment, perhaps with a premonition that he would one day make peace with the Afrikaner government. His wearing of the national rugby uniform—which is associated with Afrikaners—at the 1995 world championship is a beloved memory of reconciliation. (South Africa won, too.) But Mandela also showed his feel for wounded Afrikaner pride in a quieter gesture, when he told an Afrikaner student audience, in their language, “Wat is vorby is vorby.”—what is past is past.
Just 8 percent of South Africans speak English at home. Yet arriving at Johannesburg or Cape Town’s airport, a visitor could be forgiven for thinking he was in California. Everything is written in English, with a rare few things also given in Afrikaans. Virtually nothing is written in an African language; only the title of South African Airlines’ magazine, Sawubona (“Hello” in Zulu), gives any linguistic hint that this is Africa.
Modern South Africa might be impossible without English. Afrikaans would have been, of course, unable to bind the country. But that is equally true of all the African languages. It is English that knits the nation together. The vast majority of television broadcasts are in English. Government works overwhelmingly in English. English is the preferred language of education and research, not to mention culture and the media.
The facts on the street are more complex. The roughly 9 percent of the population that South Africans call “Coloured” consists of people of mixed European, African, and Asian ancestry, and a large majority of them speak Afrikaans at home. In urban areas, blacks from different language groups often use a creole—a stable, established blend of different languages—with one another. Of the African languages themselves, the biggest is Zulu, spoken by about a quarter of the population, but the elite, including Mandela, is disproportionately Xhosa-speaking. Neither could unify South Africa; Zulu nationalists and the ANC clashed violently in the early 1990s, as apartheid was unraveling. Zulu nationalism is still a force.
The constitution requires not only equality but promotion of all the official languages. Since the equality exists only in theory, the government is making small efforts to make good on the promotion part. The Department of Education is trying to develop teaching materials—reading samples, workbooks, and the like—for higher-level education in the official African languages. But African parents, perhaps surprisingly, have pushed back. Knowing the state of their country and the world, they want their kids to learn English as soon as possible. English is the ticket to higher education, perhaps to a stable civil service job or one of the jobs reserved for blacks in the big corporations under the mantle of “Black Economic Empowerment.” Black it is, and empowering it may be, but to take advantage of it, they must learn a European language, English.
And what of Afrikaans? Jimmy Ntintili is one of Johannesburg’s best-known tour guides, who boasts of having taken Bill and Hillary Clinton on his well-known tour of Soweto. He can chat comfortably in German and can also do most of his spiel in French and Italian. His high-pitched, slightly nasal English is, of course, impeccable. His parents are a Sotho and a Swazi. He claims to speak all of South Africa’s languages. In a way, he is the perfect South African.
When he is asked what Africans think of Afrikaans today, to my surprise, he has nothing bad to say. “There’s nothing wrong with the language. A lot of the Coloured people speak Afrikaans.” But he continues, “It’s some of the Afrikaner behavior that’s the problem.” He says that the Afrikaners he is friendly with sometimes introduce him by saying “this is my kaffir friend,” using the Afrikaans word equivalent to “nigger.” But toward the language itself, Jimmy has no grudge. Time has mellowed this native Sowetan’s attitude toward the once-hated “Boertaal.” Other things in South Africa, obviously, are going to need a bit more time.
English has utterly triumphed in South Africa, but not because English speakers forced it on hapless natives or convinced them that its civilized grammar and vocabulary were superior to African languages’. Instead, English’s success there piggybacked on its success elsewhere, the success of Britain and then America. Afrikaans, meanwhile, has had its role humbled, in part because of the Afrikaners’ attempt to force it on the population. Language was of course not the only or even the main grievance of black South Africans. But it was a symbol of language getting ahead of politics. Create a state that everyone hates and then yoke it to an official language, and both the language and the state may fail. Create a society people want to join, such as the international community of English speakers or a modern, tolerant South Africa, and it is never necessary to force a language on anyone.
Language policy has contributed to communal war—whether ETA’s bombings or the Soweto uprising. But sometimes communal wars come first, driving what was once a unified language apart. Such has been the case with India and Pakistan, and with Serbia and Croatia.
India is a wildly multilingual country with fourteen officially recognized languages and one especially designated “national language,” Hindi. Pakistan has just one official language—English—and its own officially declared “national language,” Urdu. Pakistan and India represent, in a way, the opposite of the linguistic nationalist stories we have seen so far. In the prototypical, European-style nationalist scenario, a group of people realizes that they speak alike (and share other aspects such as history, religion, culture, and so forth). They then decide to create a monolingual, monoethnic nation-state by drawing borders, moving people or suppressing languages, with one language per state the ultimate goal. British India was almost the opposite. The colony known to Britain simply as “India” included today’s India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. A sense of common history, geography, and personality gave the linguistically diverse colony a sense of unity. But one major divide, religion, would destroy it.
The first half of the twentieth century saw the birth of an Indian independence movement. Its chief political vehicle, India’s equivalent of the African National Congress, was the Congress Party. (In fact, Mandela and the ANC learned from the Indian experience.) In freeing their country, India’s independence leaders knew that they would also have to hold it together.
The Congress Party’s leaders did not worry overmuch about language. They assumed that India’s biggest language, which they called “Hindustani,” would unite the free India they sought. These leaders included Mahatma Gandhi, a Gujarati-speaker who spoke Hindustani haltingly; Jawaharlal Nehru, who was descended from Kashmiris and spoke English best; and even the southern Tamil figure C.R. Rajagopalachari, who spoke no Hindustani at all. (Tamil is a Dravidian language, totally unrelated to the northern Indian languages, including Hindustani.)
“Hindustani,” though, is these days a disputed concept. The languages now called Hindi and Urdu are its squabbling children. The two languages are, in fact, so similar at the colloquial, spoken level that most linguists consider them a single language, Hindi-Urdu. But what is a language and what is a dialect depends almost entirely on subjective judgment, not some clear test. Partisans of the two “languages” stress the differences, not the similarities.
Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, characterized by the vertical line that connects the letters from above. It takes its lofty literary or religious vocabulary from Sanskrit, the language of Hinduism’s sacred texts. It is a marker of identity for millions of India’s Hindus. Urdu, however, is the name given to Hindustani written in a modified Arabic script with a special flowing style called Nastaliq. Urdu takes its higher-level words, those needed for literature, scholarship, or religion, from Persian and Arabic. It is totemic for millions of Indian and Pakistani Muslims, just as Hindi is for many Hindus.
So are they really the same language or not? Robert King, a scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, relays an anecdote from a tour through Muslim Old Delhi by a Hindu-speaking historian:
Our guide was engaged in conversation with Muslims on the street, asking directions and engaging in casual conversation. I detected no problems in his making himself understood and understanding himself what was said to him in return.
But then the group meets and begins to talk with a Muslim cleric about the history of the neighborhood:
At this level of discourse communication was just about impossible. The conversational strain was impossible to overlook, in spite of the best will in the world on both sides … the architectural terminology was altogether different between Hindi and Urdu—specialized vocabulary usually is. The conversation was such that genuine communication was scarcely possible on any but the most mundane topics.… The situation was painful to endure, for both parties to the conversation had very much hoped to make this harmless and decent little instance of Hindu-Muslim-Western friendliness succeed.
Eighty years earlier, Gandhi (who, remember, was not fluent in the language) was in denial about the divisions within “Hindustani”:
Hind[ustani] is that language which is spoken in the north by both Hindus and Muslims and which is written either in the Nagari or the Persian script. [It] is neither too Sanskritized nor too Persianized.… The distinction made between Hindus and Muslims is unreal.… The same unreality is found in the distinction between Hindi and Urdu.… There is no doubt or difficulty regarding script.
Nehru, meanwhile, thought a pragmatic technical fix was available. After sending out a family wedding invitation in Hindustani written in Roman letters, he wrote to Gandhi:
I have no doubt whatsoever that Hindustani is going to be the common language of India.… Its progress has been hampered by foolish controversies about the script. An effort must be made to discourage the extreme tendencies and develop a middle literary language, on the lines of the spoken language in common use. With mass education this will inevitably take place.
For Gandhi and Nehru, Hindustani was iconic. They thought that politics would lead and language would follow. Though only about a third of Indians spoke Hindustani, it was the biggest single language. After independence, Indians would surely rally around it.
That made sense so long as the British were still the enemy. But as independence began to come into view, the differences between Indians, rather than between them on one hand and the colonizer on the other, loomed larger and larger. The All-India Muslim League, under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, began to agitate for a separate state for India’s Muslims, called Pakistan. (The name was an acronym for the mooted country, the biggest parts of which would be Punjab, Afghanistan, and Kashmir.)
Jinnah’s wish was fulfilled. The British, who had clumsily tried to prevent independence by dividing the Indians among themselves, forced their own hands into creating two states when they granted the colony independence in 1947. In the violent mayhem that ensued, some 15 million people scrambled across the new border, Hindus fleeing Pakistan and Muslims fleeing India. Hundreds of thousands—the exact number is unknowable—died in communal bloodshed that scars both communities still.
The creation of Pakistan and India could be seen as proof that some forces—in this case, religion—can be more powerful than language. No rule applies to all cases. But the case of Pakistan does not prove it beyond a doubt. Before partition, Muslim organizations, including the powerful Jamaat-e-Islami, opposed or were ambivalent about the creation of Pakistan until the last minute. Prominent advocates for Pakistan were far from devout Muslims. Jinnah drank alcohol and wore Western dress. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a late-nineteenth-century proponent of Indian-Muslim consciousness and of Urdu, was so unorthodox that he was declared an infidel by the religious authorities.
Despite its status as Pakistan’s national language, Urdu is spoken natively by just 8 percent of Pakistan’s population today—mostly mohajirs, or emigrants from India and their descendants. The push for Pakistan’s creation was at least partly an ethnonationalist one—with the Muslims an insecure nation within India, not a religious group. Among Urdu’s biggest proponents were those whose status during the British Raj depended on mediating between the masses and the colonial power and on their linguistic skill—in Urdu. The mohajirs were a semiprivileged class who, by this explanation, created Pakistan to keep from losing their status in the Hindu-dominated India. This is one big reason Urdu is Pakistan’s national language, despite being the native language of so few people there. Many more Pakistanis speak Punjabi and the other local languages as their mother tongue.
India has, for its part, struggled to unite around Hindi. The constitution declared it to be the “national” language, and independence leaders had high hopes for “Hindustani.” However, almost as soon as India was created, regional leaders began to push for their own languages. Many demanded regional states with considerable autonomy, drawn on largely linguistic lines.
Nehru waffled. He had much more on his plate than language, including the threat of a new enemy abroad, Pakistan, and crushing rural poverty at home. But the hunger strike to death by Potti Sriramulu, a former Congress Party comrade in arms and advocate of a Telegu-speaking state in the south, forced his hand. The state of Andhra Pradesh was created for Telegu-speakers, and, unsurprisingly, this led to other demands for language-based states that couldn’t be ignored. Similar demands are a recurring feature of Indian politics to this day.
India now operates on a roughly three-language system: Hindi is encouraged and taught most everywhere, the major regional languages enjoy primacy in non-Hindi-speaking areas, and English is taught in secondary school. The constitution-writers anticipated a mere fifteen-year transition period for English after the constitution went into effect in 1950. Nehru waived its expiry, and English’s major role in the country continues. It is a pragmatic policy that gives major regional languages, one big national language, and the world’s most important international language each a place. But India is so multilingual that this isn’t enough for everyone: it is the smaller, subregional languages (not dialects but often clearly freestanding languages) that are squeezed, creating lasting complaints from their speakers (and thus feeding the demands for new language-based states).
As for “Hindustani,” its divergence into Hindi and Urdu has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nehru, a Hindu himself, complained that Hindi was being increasingly Sanskritized by Radio India. Meanwhile, increasing self-awareness among Muslims in South Asia, both in India and in Pakistan, has led to an Arabicization of their Urdu. Nehru had hoped for the opposite—a merger of the two over time into a “middle Hindustani,” a language Hindus and Muslims alike could call their own. Like the united, secular India he sought and so many other fond wishes for South Asia, it never happened.
That so much of what we say about language is really about politics is seen in the history of a country that no longer exists: Yugoslavia. In the course of that country’s disappearance from the map, something else vanished with it: a language called “Serbo-Croat” or “Serbo-Croatian” by most outsiders and various things by its speakers. The language did not die out as most languages “die,” with the death of its last speaker. It died when the political unit that supported it met its death.
In the 1800s, the southern Slavs lived under domination by other empires: the Ottoman and the Habsburg. They were divided by religion—the Croats were Catholic and the Serbs Orthodox, while some of the local Slavs had been converted to Islam by the Ottomans. But they shared many aspects of their identity, most notably their Slavic language, of which there was no single variety but rather mostly mutually intelligible dialects. Until 1850, there was no written standard either. Serbs wrote in a semiartificial, lofty version of their language mixed with elements of Old Church Slavonic, the progenitor of the modern Slavic languages that had a long second life as a liturgical language. Croats wrote in various dialects. But in 1850, the Serbs and Croats decided, in their “Literary Agreement,” to settle on one written version of their language. The agreement chose, as the basis of the dialect, forms used by most Serbs and the largest number of Croats. The Serbs would use the Cyrillic alphabet, like their coreligionist Orthodox Christians in Russia. The Catholic Croats would use the Latin alphabet.
The First World War resulted in the creation of the first Yugoslav state to support these aspirations: the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, renamed in 1929 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Its leader sought to emphasize the unity of the language. After all, most speakers of the various dialects could understand one another with few problems. What problems existed were not intercommunal: speakers of the biggest Croat and Serb dialects could understand one another easily, while there was far more variety among the Croats themselves. (They spoke three main dialects: Štokavian, Cakavian, and Kajkavian, named after što, ca, and kaj, different words for “what.”)
But the merger never quite stuck. Most people, as has usually been the case with language reforms, simply continued to speak as they spoke, rather than consciously moving in the direction of the standard. As for that standard itself, many Serbs thought that too many concessions had been made to the Croats. The Croats, for their part, saw the larger Serb nation as attempting to subsume them under the banner of a Serb-centered “Yugoslavism.” So despite the efforts of a committed band of “Yugsoslavs” who sought to minimize the old identities, many continued to think of themselves as Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Slovenes, and so forth. Given the chance to bolt the federation during the Second World War, the Croats broke away under a pro-Fascist state. During this period, nationalist linguists revived many “historical” Croat words, purging those drawn from Latinate or other Western-looking roots and Serbianisms.
Yugoslavia was restored after the war. The Yugoslavs, uniquely among those European populations invaded by Germany, largely fought themselves out of Nazi domination by popular uprisings, “partisans” led by a charismatic mixed Slovene and Croat, Josip Broz Tito. After the war, every effort was made to bury or deny the wartime split-up of the country and enforce political and linguistic unity. But neither political nor linguistic harmony ever truly triumphed. A 1954 agreement sought to reaffirm that “Serbo-Croatian” and “Croato-Serbian” were one language, spoken in eastern and western varieties, with two alphabets. (“Western” was spoken by many Serbs as well as Croats, while “eastern” was limited mainly to Serbs. The two differ largely in one pronunciation, the sounds -ije versus -e: vreme versus vrijeme for “time,” for example.)
Tito died in 1980, and though the country held together for a time, after the end of the Cold War in 1991, the bonds of Yugoslavia were only too ready to break. And in the nationalist muscle flexing that led to the Balkan wars, “Serbo-Croatian” was an early victim. Nationalist leaders such as Slobodan Miloševic (Serbia), Franjo Tudjman (Croatia), and Radovan Karadzic (representing the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzogovina) whipped up their peoples’ fears and resentments, emphasizing their differences and not their similarities. This found its way into language when, at political gatherings, nationalists began demanding a “translation” of the proceedings into Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian—despite the fact that everyone present had understood full well what had been said.
The war of words turned into a war of rifles and artillery. Slovenia escaped the union first, with only a brief civil war. The attempt by the Muslim “Bosniaks” to do the same, however, sparked Europe’s worst bloodshed since 1945, dragging in both Serbs and Croats. (Both groups live within Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as in Serbia and Croatia proper.)
The wars made the former Yugoslavs keener than ever to highlight their linguistic differences. Croatia, always wary of being treated as the little brother of Serbia, declared its national language to be “Croatian.” The Bosnians declared their own new language to be “Bosnian.” (It was indistinguishable from Serbo-Croat in most ways, save a few borrowed words or phrases from Arabic or Turkish.) The Serbs, for their part, continued to claim the heritage of pan-Yugoslavism.
The wars dragged through most of the decade, resulting in carnage televised around the world and the creation of seven new states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo (the last one not recognized by many countries, including those that sided with Serbia over its 1999 war with NATO). Besides Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians, other nationalities worked to emphasize the distinctiveness of their languages. In some cases this was more plausible than others. Slovenian had emerged in the nineteenth century as distinct, and Macedonian (which many Bulgarians still insist is a dialect of Bulgarian) had been officially recognized in Yugoslavia since 1944. But as the country began splitting, the former Yugoslavia also had the new Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian, and one more would come. Montenegro would not be left out when it declared independence in 2006. Its official language is now one that almost no one (even in Yugoslavia) had spoken of much before: Montenegrin, another bit of the mutually intelligible, formerly “Serbo-Croat” continuum that was now declared to be its own language.
With what result? Robert Greenberg, an American expert in the languages of the former Yugoslavia, visited several times for research in the 1990s. His experiences are worth quoting in some detail:
[In 1990] I was back in Zagreb [Croatia] at the Institute for Language to disseminate my questionnaire on Croatian appellative forms. I had painstakingly produced two versions of the questionnaire—one in the Eastern (Belgrade) variant of Serbo-Croatian, and one in the Western (Zagreb) variant. I did my best to adjust my speech from Belgrade to Zagreb mode. However, in a slip of the tongue, I innocently mentioned something about my plans for July. Much to my embarrassment, my interlocutors chastised me for using the Serbian form jul, “July,” rather than the Croatian form srpanj. To add insult to injury, one of the Institute’s staff then took me aside and made me repeat after her all the proper Croatian forms for all twelve months. I knew that language was a sensitive issue, but did not realize the emotional and ideological baggage each word carried. Most Croats had simply praised my excellent “Croatian,” even though I could have sworn that I had been speaking with a Belgrade accent.
Note that no one had objected until he made an unusual slip. They thought they had found a sympathizer, until an undeniable “mistake” gave him away.
After the Bosnian war, Greenberg returned to the former Yugoslavia:
Having landed at Sarajevo [Bosnia] Airport in June 1998, I struck up a conversation with one of the airport’s land crew. Her first comment was that she was impressed with my skills in the Bosnian language. Frankly, I had had no idea that I was even capable of speaking Bosnian …
The next morning I crossed the inter-entity boundary [between Bosnian-Croat and Serbian parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina] in order to catch the bus to Belgrade. In Bosnian Serb territory, I spoke the same language I had used the day before, only now I was treated as a Serb. When the Yugoslav border guards singled me out for extra questioning upon my entry into Serbia, the bus driver told them to let me through, because he considered me to be one of theirs.
Language was politics, as Greenberg experienced firsthand.
Since the dissolution of Yugoslavia, language nationalists have sought to push the languages apart. Croats, in particular, returned to the Fascist wartime practice of purging words deemed to be Serbian. A right-wing Croatian nationalist gave, with a straight face, the kind of chauvinistic justification the reader will find familiar by now: “The fundamental characteristic of native words in the authentic Croatian language is that they are for the most part semantically stable and unambiguous, i.e. they have a precisely defined meaning.… On the other hand, Serbian, like the majority of Balkan languages, is relativistic and undefined.”
Many of the words purged by the Croatian nationalists, though, weren’t even Serbian—they were the familiar Greco-Latin words present in languages across Europe. Croatian purists have sought to expunge ambasada, “embassy,” and avion, “airplane.” Books were issued telling Croatians how to replace muzika and geografija with glazba and zemljopis.
But the reengineering of “Croatian” has not entirely succeeded. A study of actual usage found language nationalism at a theoretical level—neo-Croatian coinages were seen as “more correct” than words of foreign origin—but not at the street level: a minority of people actually used many of the Croatian words, and some were barely known at all. Meanwhile, ironically, Latinate words such as avion provoked especially clear anti-foreign sentiment, while Serbian words, since they looked Slavic, seemed familiar. Many Croats did not even realize their Serbian provenance and hence carried on using them, especially casually. The neo-Croatian words are more likely to turn up in newspapers and other edited prose than in people’s daily speech and writing. Students are taught to use the neo-Croatianisms as much as possible. But the mask drops as soon as they get the chance. One student told the study’s authors, “Among us young people there are some who try to be very careful how they speak in school because they know that the teachers will correct them, but outside [of school] they speak normally.” “Normally” meant, of course, with the Serbian and other foreign words Croatians had always used.
So Serbs and Croats will probably be able to understand each other for some time yet. Not nearly enough time has passed for nationalist language fiddlers to render “Croatian,” “Bosnian,” “Serbian,” and the new “Montenegrin” pure enough that the speakers can’t rub along. It remains to be seen whether they will ever succeed. The result will depend not on real linguistic facts on the ground—remember that “Croatian” differs more internally than it does from “Serbian.” It will depend on the old Yugoslav republics’ political future, and that depends on the rest of Europe.
The European Union has twenty-three official languages. Romanian and Bulgarian became official when Romania and Bulgaria joined the Union, in line with the traditional policy that each official national language is an EU language. But the European Union has another recent addition to its official roster: Irish. First-language speakers of the Gaelic language now number in the tens of thousands, but it has coequal official status with English in the republic. There are no monolingual Irish-speakers left. But the government of Ireland recently decided to insist on its right to make Irish an EU language. Now all official documents of the EU must be published in Irish, and Irish-speakers will have the right to speak it in the European Parliament. Simultaneous translation must, by law, be provided in all of the other twenty-two languages of the EU. There are, of course, vanishingly few living experts in both Irish and Maltese or Finnish; where needed, small languages are translated twice, once into English or French and then again into the other languages. The deadening effect on debate is predictable.
The EU experiment is an unwieldy one, binding together twenty-seven countries into a union far tighter than any other of the regional groupings in the world, such as ASEAN (Southeast Asia), Mercosur (southern South America), or the African Union. Laws passed by the European Parliament are binding on all members, judiciable through the powerful European Court of Justice. Europe has a common passport, anthem, holiday, currency, and many other trappings of a modern state. It has common policies on trade, agriculture, the environment, and other key areas and shares policy making with the member states on the economy, education, culture, transport, and more. The European Union is moving toward common foreign policy and possibly even common defense. In other words, it is somewhere between a garden-variety international club and a confederal state in the making.
Still, countries are clamoring to join. Turkey is particularly eager, enough so to change its old habits of linguistic nationalism. The prospect of EU membership has resulted in greater tolerance of Kurdish—spoken widely in the southeast but long repressed by the Turkish majority. Kurdish can now be broadcast, though only with translations (only music is excepted). Kurdish can be taught in private schools, though the first few schools set up to do so failed financially and it remains illegal to teach Kurdish in public schools. The progress is real, if fitful and partial, and the EU can take much of the credit.
The pull of membership has had results in the ex-Yugoslav would-be member countries too. Croatia has arrested highlevel war-crime suspects and moved to near the top of the queue, trying to put the 1990s behind it since the death of Tudjman. Serbia, too, hopes to get in on the action. The other Yugoslavs watch, with envy, the benefits enjoyed by Slovenia, the small, Catholic, mountainous republic at the western end of Yugoslavia that escaped the worst of the wars and joined the EU in 2004. Slovenia uses the euro, and its citizens have the right to work and live freely in all other EU countries.
To get into the European Union, countries must show that they are functioning market economies and can put into effect some 80,000 pages of EU law. But they must also show that they are modern, stable democracies that respect human rights. Among those rights are language rights; trying to stamp out troublesome minority languages is an absolute nonstarter for would-be EU members. This has been one of the main levers for improving human rights in Eastern Europe and the Balkans: countries wanting to get in must be decent to their minorities. Implementation is not perfect; Slovakia is hard on its Hungarian-speakers and Latvia on its Russian-speakers. Among older members, France and Greece have often treated language minorities shabbily, and Belgium’s linguistic squabbles between French and Flemish-speakers seem interminable. But all in all, the European Union is one of the most liberal and diverse places on earth, with proud and centuries-old nation-states respecting the principle of tolerance not only within the Union but within national borders.
Will the Balkan countries and Turkey make it into Europe’s bureaucratic and boring, but also pluralistic and successful, postnationalist experiment? Or will the imperatives of nationalism—not least linguistic nationalism—continue to trap them in an atavistic zero-sum game, Turks versus Kurds, Croats versus Serbs, faith versus faith, and people versus people, fighting it out for the dream of one people, one state? The future of a large and volatile chunk of the world hangs in the balance.
* Even today, a movie in a regional dialect, such as 2008’s Gomorra about the Naples mafia, must be subtitled in standard Italian in order to be understood nationwide.