Via a Facebook post by our old pal Slavomír Čéplö a/k/a bulbul, the Arabic Discovery Catalog:
OCLC has introduced the Arabic Discovery Catalog, a new initiative that brings together bibliographic records from libraries located in Arab countries into one catalog to enhance the discoverability and visibility of these collections for international research.
The Arabic Discovery Catalog currently includes records of more than 3.8 million Arabic resources and continues to grow, making it one of the most comprehensive bibliographic resources of Arabic culture.
OCLC staff have indexed records in Arabic and taken steps to ensure that sorting and searching of results are accurately displayed to deliver an intuitive and seamless discovery experience using Arabic script. The Arabic Discovery Catalog is built on the WorldCat Discovery platform, the discovery solution developed by OCLC that makes it possible for people easily find and get resources available in libraries worldwide through a single search.
Also, “Happy Birthday” to the Linguistic Society of America (it turns 100 in January), and — just for the hell of it — Wikipedia’s list of bodies that consider themselves to be authorities on standard languages, often called language academies (note the pungent parenthetical on Yiddish: “YIVO does not regulate or hold any sway over the Yiddish used in Ultra-Orthodox circles where the Yiddish language is most used in current times”).
Wikipedia’s list of bodies that consider themselves to be authorities on standard languages, often called language academies
The Norwegian entries — Det norske akademi for “Riksmål/Bokmål”, and Norsk språkråd for Bokmål and Nynorsk are very different in both status and purpose.
Det norske akademi has no official status. Its members are appointed by Riksmålsforbundet, an organization whose traditional ano-Norwegian.safeguard and promote a written standard based on the polite speech of educated speakers, I.e. conservative, historically Dano-Norwegian.
Norsk språkråd is an officially appointed committee charged with i.a. observing the development of the language and maintaining the official dictionaries of Bokmål and Nynorsk. Its members represent universities, professional organizations for authors, translators, journalists, etc., different organized factions in the Norwegian language debate (also Riksmålsforbundet), and even a couple of politicians from across the political spectrum.
Thanks for explaining the distinction; do you think either of them has much effect on the language (aside from the production of official dictionaries)?
…please try again…?
Is an anal Norwegian not simply a Swede?
Me: Riksmålsforbundet, an organization whose traditional ano-Norwegian.safeguard and promote a written standard based on the polite speech of educated speakers, I.e. conservative, historically Dano-Norwegian.
Weird. I think I wrote “… whose traditional purpose is to safeguard …”. I don’t know what happened, but I was on my phone, and weird things happen.
Hat: Thanks for explaining the distinction; do you think either of them has much effect on the language (aside from the production of official dictionaries)?
Less and less, I guess. They both carry baggage from the era when official language policy sought to bring the two official norms closer together and closer to the grammar of the spoken language. Norsk språkråd is the successor of the institutions charged with that task, but its mandate today is to keep the norms in line with the development of actual written language — which means a slow consolidation of Bokmål around its conservative wing and a gradual drift of Nynorsk towards Bokmål. Riksmålsforbundet (and thereby Det norske akademi) was formed by those who saw the written expression of diphtongs and unlenited consonants as the end of civilization as we know it. It ran a really powerful campaign in the fifties and sixties that helped change public opinion permanently, away from both increasing use of Nynorsk and a growing preference for the grammar of the spoken language in Bokmål. Nowadays it’s silent, or trying to redefine its purpose into defending Norwegian language against losing domains to English.
Takk!
… but sorry for hijacking the tread. The Arabic Discovery Catalog is worth attention. I just don’t have much intelligent to say.
No, no, I didn’t expect people to have much to say about the Arabic Discovery Catalog, so I added the other stuff as bait for comments. Thanks for taking the bait!
For what it’s worth, when I saw the title I thought it would be about medieval Arabic discoveries (e.g. of Biruni and Ibn Sina) – also, I gather, a topic that’s quite badly covered by European science, though probably not as much as the modern stuff because at least most people know it’s a thing.
Yeah, me too. Maybe a recently discovered medieval catalog of discoveries by Arabian travelers. But then I remembered the difference between Arabic and Arabian.
Test comment (my comments aren’t showing up in the latest thread).
Many language academies are private institutions, although some are governmental bodies in different states, or enjoy some form of government-sanctioned status in one or more countries.
In other countries, such an institution—one that collects and publishes information about current usage and dialectal variation and promotes a standard orthography and grammar so that the language can be used in all spheres of modern life—may be considered a subversive organization by the state:
From one of the links at the end of the article: “The Kurdish Institute of Istanbul was founded 28 years ago to promote the Kurdish language and culture. Already on the day of the opening the first raid took place.”
“The Kurdish Institute of Istanbul was founded 28 years ago to promote the Kurdish language and culture. Already on the day of the opening the first raid took place.”
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The situation is even worse:
“The institute was again closed down and sealed on the morning of 31 December 2016, per a declaration issued under Article 11 of the Turkish State of Emergency (OHAL).[6][7]” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdish_Institute_of_Istanbul).
@xerib
I do not think that an independent organisation’s publishing or disseminating information is the principal concern of the authoritarian government, although this activity raises a red flag, even when the organisation complies with rules concerning censorship, e.g., submitting drafts to a censor before publication. The government may feel that any organisation not controlled and supervised by the government is subversive, unless the government can be convinced that the activity of the organisation can be used to keep people usefully occupied and permit a “safe” expression of popular frustration and dissatisfaction. More specifically for Kurdish (or Armenian) cultural organisations, the Turkish government seems to be extremely sensitive to (potential) “splittist” or irredentist claims. I would suppose that an organisation dedicated only to the promotion of Kurdish folk-dance would have the same problems.
@PP I don’t know how they feel about the matter now, but their traditional view of the role of language is somewhat unusual. The infamous law 2932 from 1983 (canceled in 1991) is described in Western press as a law banning speaking Kurdish in public. I don’t know if if this is how it was actually interepreted and implemented (perhaps Xerîb can clarify) – it does not seem to say exactly this, but the definition yasaklanan diller (“forbidden languages”?) is surprising even if for governments we count as “evil”. (Again, perpaps I misunderstand something and yasaklanan diller sounds softer?). And in 90s the government still determined which foreign langauges can be taught. I know, the present situation is different, just an illustration.
Law 2932 expressly stated, in Article 3, that ‘Turkish is the mother tongue of Turkish citizens’.
Well, yes.
One could have thought that France gave us the most refined example of linguistic nationalism. One would be wrong.
the turkish case is not unusual in any way; i’m not even sure it’s unusually explicit. (and, of course, it affects every language in anatolia aside from atatürk’s engineered turkish – it’s just that more than a century of genocide and mass expulsion have left kurmanji and zaza as the only two with populations too large to ignore or easily suppress.)
controlling what languages have a public presence is a central concern of many states, and has been for at least 500 years. by me, ivan illich’s analysis of the central role of language standardization in the transformation(s) of the state in the early modern period is an excellent window into the early history and its whys and wherefores.
a few examples: the russian empire banned yiddish from spaces of public performance (and i assume did parallel things to other languages). the destruction of indigenous languages was one of the core elements of u.s. and canadian assimilation-as-genocide (“kill the indian; save the man”) policy for the entire period between the end of officially implemented massacres and the current co-optation model. enforced hebraization by the israeli state is responsible for endangering or eliminating more diasporic jewish languages than any other factor in history. i could go on.
I agree that (a) it’s not the worst example (b) it’s difficult to tell most what it is.
But it is striking.
It would be interesting to imagine (echoing/reacting to several hatters’ comments) what kind of state would not only preserve but indeed actively promote ethnolinguistic diversity. And by “actively promote” I mean assist not only in maintaining its “inherited” ethnolinguistic diversity but also in grassroots projects aiming at resurrecting extinct languages (à la Israeli Hebrew) or scripts, or indeed creating new ones.
I could see an imperial-type structure doing so simply in order to prevent a bulk of its subjects from developing a common identity which might endanger the imperial overseers’ power (whether said Imperial overseers are a separate ethnic group or social class/caste or the like is immaterial): not so much “Divide and conquer” as “Keep creating divisions to make the status quo impregnable”. It could even meet with the enthusiastic backing and approval of many if not most of the imperial overseers’ subjects, if said imperial overseers played their cards right.
Imagine, for example, a global maritime trading empire (GMTE) with total control of the seas and which purchases land from various states worldwide to build seaports. In order to obtain a workforce within each seaport, a very easy way to obtain a VERY loyal workforce would be to offer ethnolinguistic minority members from the nearest states the opportunity to settle in such seaports, with the respective minority language being given sole official status and total freedom of expression and worship guaranteed to all.
No matter how egregiously exploitative, corrupt, unjust, inefficient (or all of the above) the GMTE might be, for the seaport-dwelling members of all too many non-national ethnolinguistic groups life as GMTE subjects would be such a massive improvement over life within the nation-state they had once lived in that their loyalty to the GMTE could easily be counted on for a few generations.
Or imagine that such seaports served as refugia for individuals from multiple ethnolinguistic groups and that, instead of imposing some common language, the GMTE pragmatically examines how the various groups communicate (members of the younger generation, especially) with one another: if it is by means of some locally created pidgin, for example, you encourage and promote its use, and any grassroots writing system which meets with broad approval (especially among the young) likewise is encouraged and promoted, and once both have become widespread enough you make them both official.
One thing the GMTE would heavily promote would be stories (in print, over the radio…) relating to how horrible life was for members of the ethnolinguistic groups in question before settling into their respective seaport (unfortunately, as a rule it would not prove necessary to make anything up: the truth is all too often repulsive enough).
I freely grant that some kind of lingua franca(s) would probably need to be used within the GMTE, but this needn’t in any way endanger any of the many local languages within the GMTE. Especially since it would not be necessary for knowledge of such a lingua franca to be widespread.
Thoughts?
It would be interesting to imagine (echoing/reacting to several hatters’ comments) what kind of state would not only preserve but indeed actively promote ethnolinguistic diversity.
The Soviet Union did this.
And by “actively promote” I mean assist not only in maintaining its “inherited” ethnolinguistic diversity but also in grassroots projects aiming at resurrecting extinct languages (à la Israeli Hebrew) or scripts, or indeed creating new ones.
This is just silly: “resurrecting extinct languages”? What? That is not a state project, and why would it be?
resurrecting extinct languages
In order to communicate with those who have died before us, because they must be resurrected. There will then be so many people on the earth that a great number will have to be moved to other planets. [see Nikolai Fyodorovitch Fyodorov, Russian cosmism and the rest of it.]
It will be a state project because it is an obshii delo.
I brought this up here at least 10 years ago.
The whole business is so funky that I would not be surprised to learn that rozele knows about it.
I think that should be obshee delo.
It should (well, technically obshchee). And of course you’re quite right: a Fyodorov-inspired state would make that a priority.
1-Hat: In answer to your question: (“This is just silly: “resurrecting extinct languages”? What? That is not a state project, and why would it be?”), please re-read what I wrote: “And by “actively promote” I mean assist not only in maintaining its “inherited” ethnolinguistic diversity but also in grassroots projects aiming at resurrecting extinct languages (à la Israeli Hebrew) or scripts, or indeed creating new ones”.
So the state project would not be to actively create languages or resurrect extinct ones, but to actively aid and support whatever groups are engaged in doing such things. And while resurrecting a language is a tall order, resurrecting an extinct script, or inventing one, in order to represent a minority language or deviant dialect, could certainly be justified as a state project if mass literacy was deemed desirable. Indeed, if the goal is to cause mass literacy to arise and be maintained… among illiterate speakers of a language where the written standard is maximally unlike the spoken language, a new standard, using a different writing system and a close approximation to the spoken language, could easily be justified on utilitarian/pragmatic grounds.
2-The Soviet Union did indeed promote ethnolinguistic diversity, but only for a brief period of its early history: most of Soviet history involved Russification, using methods (compulsory military service, schooling, mixing of ethnic groups, the mass media…) remarkably similar to the ones states at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum used. What I had in mind was a polity of some kind dedicated to such a project over centuries.
3-Stu’s comment made me think of what the ideological foundations of such active preservation of ethnolinguistic diversity, or of its re-creation, might be, and a “restorative” ideology might do it, perhaps one extending beyond ethnolinguistic diversity: Seeking to preserve and restore ecosystems and preserve marginalized ethnolinguistic groups, or, in the case of extinct languages, actively aiding any and all groups seeking to resurrecting any.
Think of Schumacher’s “Small is beautiful”, applied to spheres other than economics, as a basic ideological guide for this polity.
4-Now, the fact that the “Aid in resurrecting extinct languages” policy would mean that this polity (assuming it ever sees the light of day) would be hiring a lot of historical linguists is, it should go without saying, utterly unrelated to my speculations/daydreaming/call it what you will 😉
Hat, I had forgotten that you posted on Fyodorov back in 2007. I think I initially learned about him from a book by Boris Groys et al.
The Soviet Union did indeed promote ethnolinguistic diversity, but only for a brief period of its early history: most of Soviet history involved Russification
Not so; it promoted ethnolinguistic diversity throughout its existence, but that aspect of its ideological mandate was progressively watered down by an emphasis on Russian as the big-brother language. At no time was there any attempt to make speakers of Lithuanian, Georgian, etc., give up their own languages for Russian, and there was always state support for the “national” languages. These things are not simple; there is no on/off switch.
what kind of state would not only preserve but indeed actively promote ethnolinguistic diversity
Wales, of course, actively promotes a minority language, though I”m glad to say it’s by no means dead. Ireland, even minoritier.
The EU (if you call it a “state”) is officially committed to this, at least in principle. (Wella Brown’s Modern Cornish grammar was produced thanks to an EU subsidy, for example, in the days before the UKanians were seduced by the Brexit bastards.* It was the racism wot won the referendum, even if many individual dupes had better motives. )
* No apologies for the term: I owe its use in this precise context to the last Conservative Prime Minister who could reasonably be described as basically a decent human being. The Bastards have now taken over the asylum (Conservative Party.)
@LH, yes.
My own opinion: people too often focus on praising or criticising.
I’m Soviet, I have exactly one word for USSR as a place to live: inacceptable. No need to attack it, no need to defend it.
Were there deliberate attempts to decreace the number of L1 speakers of some language motivated by hostility to it or something else? Possibly (I can’t name an example). Were there attempts to promote Russian or Uzbek or whatever with understanding that it will lead to this? I think yes.
But what is practically more important for us is:
(1) failed attempts at language development
(2) actions with an entirely different goal (unrelated to language) that led to language shift
(Your examples are of course the strongest langauges of USSR. Contrast them to Persian in Bukhara).
___
“Hebraisation” (mentioned by rozele) and other …isations.
People often have seemingly good arguments for why everyone should [learn local lingua franca, get schooled, ….] and don’t think that what they propose will result in full assimilation.
Though one important factor in USSR is urbanisation of course.
what kind of state would not only preserve but indeed actively promote ethnolinguistic diversity
New Zealand makng Te Reo Māori co-equal official language, and including parallel National Anthem verses to be sung at all official occasions — and more important, at all International Rugby matches — amongst many examples. Contrast that in the 1950’s kids were beaten for speaking te Reo in school. (I’m not claiming NZ is particularly unusual.)
The Bastards have now taken over the asylum (The newly-elected National party government in our case, headed by a fuck-you rich bastard, supported by a couple of ‘populist’ minor parties who explicitly appealed to the white nationalist rump.)
Amongst their first acts? To withdraw the previously co-equal te Reo names of government departments, costing a fortune in signage and letterheads (when we’re supposed to be suffering austerity) and benefitting no actual taxpayers.
Below that level, however, there were exceptions, such as 1, 2, 3 (the same example again but followed by some discussion, which, however, drifts off into post-Soviet situations), 4 (more discussion with more examples).
@DM, absolutely.
Languages of republics and other languages are two different stories.
I can speak about situations “republican language vs. some other language” and “Russian vs. republican language”. Others speak about situations “Russian vs. some other langauge” and “Russian vs. republican language”.
I think many explain this difference by ideology (they are attacking Kremlin and I am… attacking Tashkent, Kiev, Minsk, etc.?). But I simply know more about languages outside of RSFSR and RSFSR is huge, there is over a hundred languages. There are also more administrative units (both in otrher republics and RSFSR), say “national” autonomous regions – perhaps LH refers to those (or not) when saying “national”. I’m simply not knowlegeable enough.
_____
So as I said: Persian in Samarkand and Bukhara. Eveyrone (when not in immediate contact with speakers) behaved in USSR and behaves in independent Uzbekistan as if everyone speaks Uzbek. Try to find any studies (by linguists) what to say about schools! Meanwhile those cities were Persian-speaking at first.
I heard that situation is changing with the new president (a Tajik my Tajik informant said, “unconfirmed claims that he was allegedly a Tajik” says WP, adding that it “was revealed” – by journalist – that he is an Uzbek) – I don’t know whether anything has changed.
Contrast it to 20s, when “Persian” of Shia slaves and “Tajik” of Sunni locals were distinguished (if it is not clear, I call “Persian” everthing that recites Hafez and not only) and the former enjoyed some langauge development: a theater and newspaper.
Actually, people:
it is difficult to speak of this all, when we don’t have a good model for how it can be done right…
Or when our model is simply “everyone shifts to the majority langauge (Russian here, English or French elsewhere), but everyone shifts to it naturally, democratically and within market economy”.
Of course it does matter what a party officials thinks about a small langauge. Does she think it is a good thing or bad thing.
But you are at risk of saying that when a Soviet university speaks Russian and Soviet industry speaks Russian it is bad (because Russification) and when a Dutch university speaks English it is natural (because democracy) and when business speaks Russian it is natural becuase it happens without intervention.
Meanwhile:
– how nice is either system to local communities and their (cultural, economic and linguistical) systems? Does it destroy them?
– are we going to have higher education and modern business in all languages?
– can we create a situation when (Russian, English…) business and higher education co-exist with smaller local structures in a small language community without causing shift? Language development efforts often have exactly this aim, but they fail.
Etienne,
I’m not sure what’s the plan wrt the “young people’s pidgin”.
Are you expecting it to supplant smaller languages spoken in that port? If you simply impose it on everyone in the port, you basically are turning this port into some sort of Uzbek SSR.
If you expect it to happen on its own, then it is still similar (“one port one language”) even though your empire may have something to offer to speakers of smaller languages.
Say, support for literary Arabic courses in Europe (for those immigrants who want that) without an actual intent to have an Arabic-speaking quarter or city in your country.
V: Fyodorov is a popular personage in SF circles, and he inspired Tsiolkovsky among others. Theosophists also. Fyodorov himself was inspired by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
You must be thinking of somebody else — Teilhard de Chardin’s dates were 1881–1955, and he didn’t publish anything until long after Fyodorov’s death in 1903.
I must be confusing who inflenced the other one. Sorry for deleting the previsous comment after you had already replied. It was about Fyodorov and de Chardin. Can you restore it?
1-On the Soviet Union and its support for linguistic diversity: since the official language of one of the former Soviet Republics has now become a minority language, with Russian as the majority language, via a process which began in Soviet times (see : “Russian-belarusian-variable-and-fabricated”, here at the Hattery), I cannot see the Soviet Union as having been that unlike other major modern imperial powers in terms of its DE FACTO language policy: it may never have openly proclaimed that its goal was to Russify the entire country, but the end results are suspiciously close to what they would have looked like had that in fact been their policy.
2-This is not very different from the official words of support in favor of Welsh in Wales or Maori in New Zealand (or indeed in scores of other jurisdictions): In neither instance has the decline of the minority language ceased, or indeed even tangibly slowed down. The same could be said of the decline of Irish Gaelic in Ireland, despite the Irish state having put a great deal more of an effort into the promotion of Irish Gaelic than most countries do in the promotion of any local minority language.
3-Drasvi: My thinking was that each GMTE seaport would have its own dominant language, and in instances where linguistic diversity in a given seaport is such that a pidgin arises, better that it be officialized/used in writing than banned (A generation later this would mean that the pidgin would become a creole if it becomes the home language of a substantial number of people, of course).
Again, whatever the ideology of the GMTE, such a policy could be justified on pragmatic + utilitarian grounds.
Which do you think would be the better way to make a generation literate: by making full use in the classroom of the pidgin children are using on the playgrounds to bridge the language barrier, or by stigmatizing + banning said pidgin and introducing some alien language of officialdom in the school, doubly alienating the children for whose future schooling was allegedly set up in the first place?
As we say back home, “Poser la question, c’est y répondre”. And if instead of a pidgin we are talking about the pupil’s L1, the answer is even more blatant.
4-Of course, such a policy would increase linguistic diversity even more: if speakers of a language A are scattered and make up a minority in seaports Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, each of which has a distinct local lingua franca, Language A will diversify and become three dialects and (if the GMTE lasts long enough) three languages, on account of speakers of A being isolated from one another in each seaport and undergoing the influence of a different lingua franca.
5-I referred upthread to promoting grassroots-created scripts or spelling proposals: cases such as the Naasioi Otomaung alphabet of Bougainville, discussed by Piers Kelly, were what I had in mind: if a writing system enjoys popularity, better it should be promoted by educational authorities than banned. I also had in mind the history of Cree syllabics in Canada or of the Cherokee script in the United States: in both instances a newly-invented script spread like wildfire, but in both instances the language and script remained excluded from use in local administration or schooling or the like, and as a result Cree and Cherokee did not remain long the usual languages of initial literacy to their speakers.
N.B. Links removed to ease posting. Apparently the system dislikes more than one link.
@Etienne, yes, I frequently compare Ireland and Belarus.
They eat potatos…I cannot see the Soviet Union as having been that unlike other major modern imperial powers in terms of its DE FACTO language policy: it may never have openly proclaimed that its goal was to Russify the entire country, but the end results are suspiciously close to what they would have looked like had that in fact been their policy.
You are operating in terms of what you want to see (your priors, as they say) rather than in terms of what actually is there. If their goal was to Russify the entire country, they would have done so with no shilly-shallying. (Compare how they dealt with kulaks.) You might want to read Lenin on the National Question in order to find the Bolsheviks’ priors. Or perhaps you think their devotion to Lenin was just a smokescreen to hide their true beliefs?
o nikolai fyodorovitch! what a wonderful weirdo!
(i live in hope of a renewed polemic between his two descendant tendencies, Posadists and [neo]Universalists°)
what kind of state would not only preserve but indeed actively promote ethnolinguistic diversity
i tend to think it’s a project incompatible with state-ness.
the u.s.s.r. is a great lens on that: the period of active promotion of linguistic diversity is basically identical to the period when the bolsheviks’ self-conception was as the vanguard of a steadily progressing global revolution, rather than the ruling party of a state*. once they admited to themselves that what they were doing was being a state, they shifted (unevenly & at a variety of speeds, but very steadily) to what one could call federative homogeneity: promoting a single, newly (and often rather forcibly) standardized “national language” in each state subunit (with russian as primus inter pares), and dismantling supports for other languages, whose use was discouraged in a range of ways (yiddish**, hutsul, and crimean tatar come to mind, alongside the central asian persian(s) that drasvi mentioned).
staatsräson of course can temporarily trump the general principle, in various ways. to stick to soviet yiddish examples: one mode is the 1941-45 instrumentalization of yiddish for the war effort, and to cultivate international support in particular (through the Jewish Antifascist Committee’s publications); another is the 1970s renewal of substantial yiddish publication*** as a belated counterstrategy to having pushed soviet jews into the arms of zionism and/or internal dissent by defining jewish cultural activity as inherently zionist (a temporary measure for social pacificiation not unlike the turkish relaxation of attacks on kurmanji and zaza in the early 00s, and the opening to te reo maori by the settler state in aotearoa****).
i think the actual history of global maritime trading empires – a/k/a colonialism – is sufficient rebuttal to fantasies about them being in some way an exception to how states operate on this terrain.
and i’m sure my various rants on how zionist hebraism is just not a “revival” or “resurrection” project are findable on here, so i won’t repeat them. i remain a zuckermannist.
.
° speaking of national designations in the first sentences of wikipedia articles, abba gordin’s calls him “an Israeli anarchist” – assigning him to a place he lived for 7 of his 77 years (compared to 30 in the u.s. and 40 in the russian empire and the u.s.s.r.), presumably to imply that all jews are or should be zionists and preferably israelis.
* a less generous interpretation would highlight the fact that this was also the period where the survival of the bolshevik regime, and the maximization of territory under its control, depended on support from “national minorities” who were already building their own linguistic institutions without permission or oversight, especially in territories not under bolshevik control. the (re)consolidation of a conventionally hierarchical military under central control essentially eliminated that dependence; the suppression of the kronstadt commune marks a turning point in that process.
** which is itself a microcosm of the whole dynamic: generally discouraged, but encouraged/mandated in birobidjan, the designated “national territory”.
*** the gorgeous pocket-sized editions from this period are a highlight of late-20thC yiddish book design.
**** to be clear, i think these have been good shifts. i just think they’re pretty much inherently insincere and temporary, as the soviet and turkish examples illustrate.
As usual, rozele is eloquent and sensible.
Hat: Looking at the state of the Soviet Union at the time of its fall, its basic linguistic make-up (A Russian monolingual core, with bilingualism involving Russian as a second language growing -at different rates, according to local conditions- among all non-Russian speakers; with Russian L1 speakers more likely to master some foreign language than any language of the Soviet Union; with language shift to Russian highly advanced among scores of smaller nationalities, and with Russian monolingualism so deeply entrenched that for non-Russian speakers the relationship with Russian was typically more akin to diglossia than to bilingualism) is certainly not all that different-looking from the linguistic consequences of the existence of other modern imperial polities (Indeed, back in my grad student days, I once had the remarkable experience of hearing, on the very same day, an Algerian engineer telling me how ugly and useless Algerian Arabic (his L1) is compared to French, and an elderly Kazakh lady describing her L1 (Kazakh) and its relationship to Russian in almost identical terms. I have also heard, since then, various South Asians describe their perception of the relationship of their various L1’s to English in depressingly similar terms).
I agree that rozele is eloquent and sensible, but I would venture to disagree on one point: I would say that linguistic preservation is incompatible with “nation-state-ness”, not “state-ness”: plenty of pre-modern states preserved linguistic diversity (through neglect/lack of interest: but benign neglect, in pre-revolutionary France or Tsarist Russia or the Ottoman Empire, implies -by and large- preservation of the existing linguistic landscape, whereas in a nation-state benign neglect implies large-scale loss of linguistic diversity).
I heard that situation is changing with the new president (a Tajik my Tajik informant said, “unconfirmed claims that he was allegedly a Tajik” says WP, adding that it “was revealed” – by journalist – that he is an Uzbek) – I don’t know whether anything has changed.
Back when I lived in Uzbekistan in the late 90s and early 2000s, the Farsi / Tajik speakers in Samarkand and Bukhara identified as Uzbeks. Tajik was a designation used only for immigrants from Tajikistan. I don’t know whether that has changed by now; back then, it would have been strange to refer to Mirziyoyev as Tajik, no matter what language he speaks at home.
@rozele: i remain a zuckermannist
So I find a Moshe Zuckermann, and a book by him whose very title says what I’ve felt for a long time: Antisemit!: Ein Vorwurf als Herrschaftsinstrument. Well, apart from the fact that “Herrschaftsinstrument” is an expression worn down to a nub by overuse. Might as well say “boss kazoo”. I try to say what I mean without pushing red buttons not of my own making.
Even after reading what I’ve just ordered, I feel that here be dragons, so I’d best hold my trap.
rozele meant Ghil’ad Zuckermann (I myself am definitely not an -ist thereof.)
No harm done. Nothing ventured, nothing screwed up.
I can only confirm what Etienne said concerning Kazakh. While there were Kazakh schools and a Kazakh academia in the Kazakh SSSR, this was a small, cliquish world that didn’t offer career chances to a lot of people. The Kazakh language schools were only good in preparing for that small world; if you wanted your children to have a career or just good job prospects in about 90% of the economy, you enrolled them in Russian-language schools and taught them Russian from an early age. The situation that Kazakh language schools teach on a much lower academic level than the Russian-language ones hasn’t changed even now, after 30 years of independence, and while there has been much official support for the Kazakh language, Russian still dominates in business and academia, and there is huge resentment among well-educated Russian speaking Kazakhs against the mambety who are getting government jobs with their only qualification being that they speak Kazakh.
“nation-state-ness”, not “state-ness”
nope. this is a place where illich comes in handy: his analysis is built on looking at spain under the dynamic duo, who commissioned the first grammar of a european vernacular language the same year as they expelled the jewish population of their territories and launched the colonization that gave them a transatlantic empire. the point of cultivating castillian and giving it the kind of formalization previously reserved for High Classical lects was to place it above – and displace – the other languages spoken in their territory, in the new world columbus banged into just as at home in iberia. imperial expansion went along with linguistic homogenization. and, similarly, while imperial rome certainly incorporated speakers of many languages, if you wanted to be taken seriously as a roman, you’d better have been speaking the empire’s language.
what changes – roughly in parallel with the rise of the modern idea of the nation, but not because of states’ embrace of it – is the state’s capacity for control, including its capacity to enforce linguistic homogeneity. not being practically able to carry out a desired program isn’t “benign neglect”, or any kind of neglect; it’s just harder to do some things as an empire.
(and yes, i meant ghil’ad! @Y: feel free to call me an -ite or -oid, if you’d prefer.)
I think Ghil’ad (anybody knows what an apostrophe is doing here?) is not going far enough. Israeli (Hebrew) is anti-Babylonian language, the one to which all languages unite!
@LH, there is a difference between needs of people and the preferred situation once communism is reached.
Diversity is not something many people speak about.
So when you ensure that every language is represented in a certain domain, you are not necessarily doing so because you want the communist society to be diverse and don’t want speakers to shift to something.
@Etienne, @Hans,
LH earlier named Georgian which is among the strongest languages of Soveit republics (and stronger than various smaller langauges). Belarusian in turn is the weakest (and for a reason).
Ukrainian and Kazakh come next.
The situation with Kazakh is massively different form the situation with Uzbek.
We are speaking of people who were a minority in their republic (40% in 1990, less than 30% a couple of decades before).
Re “taken seriously as a Roman,” of course many empires including the Spanish one did not particularly encourage their colonial subjects to seek to be taken seriously as participants in the imperial polity, which limited the motivation to make them all good Hispanophones. According to Ostler (I haven’t read very much from others on this topic), the major local alternatives to Spanish in the New World only started to become seriously endangered in the 19th century after the colonies became independent and their new rulers as good Enlightenment liberals or Freemasons or what have you thought that Hispanophone monolingualism was the royal road to democratic participation. The linguistic agenda may have worked out better for many of the subsequent decades than the democratic-participation agenda, but that’s a separate issue …
He does say that the period of Spanish imperial rule led to some indigenous languages (e.g. Nahuatl in Mexico) flourishing as regional lingua francas at the expense of smaller and more particularistic languages. Maybe there’s a Soviet parallel there?
Ghil’ad (anybody knows what an apostrophe is doing here?)
Most Israelis named גִּלְעָד /gilˈʔad/ transliterate their name as Gilad, assuming Latin-ish conventions. I am guessing GZ justifiably assumed his name would mostly be read by anglophones, and didn’t want it mispronounced as /ˈʤailǝd/ or /ʤɪˈlæd/ or such.
The situation with Kazakh is massively different form the situation with Uzbek.
We are speaking of people who were a minority in their republic (40% in 1990, less than 30% a couple of decades before
I agree on both points.
He does say that the period of Spanish imperial rule led to some indigenous languages (e.g. Nahuatl in Mexico) flourishing as regional lingua francas at the expense of smaller and more particularistic languages. Maybe there’s a Soviet parallel there?
In support of that, I remember reading that during Soviet times Tajik spread in Tajikistan at the expense of the smaller languages in the Pamir.
So when you ensure that every language is represented in a certain domain, you are not necessarily doing so because you want the communist society to be diverse and don’t want speakers to shift to something.
You know, this is not some sort of mystery; we are not trying to decipher Linear A or alien glyphs. Lenin and the other Bolsheviks wrote about all these things at tedious length.
@LH, I know. Now, are you aware of a work where they express an opinion on diversity as such?
Not just about the right of a speaker to get schooled in her langauge, to use it, and not to have Russian imposed on her?
(which already contradicts to the Soviet approach and I remind that “smokescreen” is exactly what many Soviet people would have said of Soviet officials and what many believers would say about church officials. Though I agree that “just a smokescreen” is too simplistic a description, and I agree with your objection to Etienne. Same would be true for the christian church and other religions – it does often look like people ignore the original teachings of that relgion, but it is not true that those just don’t matter…)
Because you know, vast majority of Irish people have this for their native English language. WE are disappointed by this, but I’m not aware of a text where they say that such language shift is undesirable.
which already contradicts to the Soviet approach
The Soviet approach had changed on this over time; in the 1920s and (especially) early 1930s, the policy of korenizatsiya had provided (among other things) essentially exactly what you were describing, namely the right of a speaker to get schooled in their language and not have Russian imposed on them. [Though in some cases they apparently had Ukrainian or Kazakh imposed on them instead.]
This policy, however, was significantly dialed down after 1933, mostly cancelled by 1938, and almost entirely abandoned by the 1940s, with Russian being instituted everywhere during and after the war.
There was apparently a brief revival under Beria in 1953, but the circumstances of that probably made sure that it would not be repeated later.
So in the period you were (most likely) familiar with – presumably well after 1953 – this had indeed contradicted the Soviet approach.
It is not trivial.
Undesirability of langauge shift does not follow from language rights.
We need speakers not to shift. This already sounds like we’re imposing something on them. Let’s try to do without it. What do we need?
We need to know in what circumstances the number of L1 speakers won’t drop below a threshold. (but we don’t)
Then – assuming that many speakers will like the idea (what if not many?) – we need to tell them what to do (but we don’t know what to do).
It appears that the “right” a speaker has with respect to this all is: (a) the right for serious scientific research of the question (b) and the right for implementation of some plan… for those who want it and once we have a plan.
____
A passage I recently read (when trying to understand the role fo French in Burkina Faso):
(I don’t understand why L1 “transmits” Western values and what is “gendered” owner and I don’t know if attitudes of locals are described here correctly)
Undesirability of langauge shift does not follow from language rights.
And it probably doesn’t help that language rights require figuring out what the language even is. Apparently under Soviet policy the Svans and Mingrelians counted as Georgian, and (almost) certainly no one was going to give the remaining North Slavic speakers in (what is now) Pskov Oblast any rights to study North Slavic in school instead of Russian.
(The German invasion absolutely steamrolling over the region had essentially got rid of the North Slavic remnants, though there were other less-but-still-significantly divergent variants of “Russian” surviving elsewhere in the country.)
@Etienne, not only imperial.
Can you name a small langauge whose speakers don’t feel so either because (1) they have access to everything modernity can offer in their small langauge (2) they don’t but they still don’t feel so?
USSR compeletely destroyed traditional cultures, communites, economies, and so on.
By the time of break up of USSR Russian villages in central Russia – at least as they appear to people in the cities – ceased to be a depressed place from where all young people want to move to the city and become wasteland from where all young people have already moved to the city.
The horror of seeing modern Russian village was a popular topic in 90s.
It applies not only to Russians, but it is not a matter of language.
Same in North Africa. It is a shithole. NO, it is not what it appears to ME. As for me, it is beautiful (and they have the sea which we Russian want ot have and they have sun and everything). But young people there are frustrated.
(An Algerian once asked: “is Russian useful? For example, Arabic is useless”.)
Frustrated:
Lack of job, lack of opportunities and frustrated with their personal (romantic) life.
As for the latter, I see this from complaints, but I also see that the combitation of “traditional” and “modern” arrangements has led to something quite uncomfortable. It is a rare situation where I can simply say that Russians are happier when it comes to relations of sexes. And it is not because we are Western (we aren’t) and not because they are Oriental (they are not, and this arrangement is totally new).
You will say this has nothing to do with what we are discussing, but actually it does: their modernity arose from contact with European modernity which in turn involved colonisation and then ultra-fast modernisation by nationalist governments who follow the French model.
Russians are happier when it comes to relations of sexes.
Russian men, you mean.
Young men and women.
I was thinking of them.
You’re right, when it comes to women with children, Russian arrangement can easily be worse.
(something makes me think that you’re not referring to the obvious fact that north african men experience some pressures that local women and russian men do not experience…)
I’m referring to the fact that Russian women are treated like shit by Russian men, by and large. There are, as always, exceptions.
how ugly and useless Algerian Arabic (his L1) is compared to French
Can you name a small langauge whose speakers don’t feel so either because (1) they have access to everything modernity can offer in their small langauge (2) they don’t but they still don’t feel so?
Kusaal for (2), or at least that’s the impression I have from David Eddyshaw’s comments, such as
Do I understand that correctly, as an answer to the question?
a small language whose speakers don’t feel so
where i’ve seen this – pretty consistently – is in the (sadly, increasingly few) situations where people’s daily lives take place in a context of traditional multilingualism. which is to say, in a space where everyone (or a reasonable plurality) operates in more than one language, with local ettiquette (and varying levels of fluency) determining who stays in their cradle-tongue in what ways, who shifts towards who, and when an ‘outside’ lingua franca comes into play. mid-00s ohrid is my favorite example (and one i’m sure i’ve mentioned here before), with albanian, macedonian, and balkan turkish active on the street, plus english and german as outside languages with a noticeable presence. DE’s accounts of kusaal seem to me to match that pattern, as does what i’ve read describing non-state spaces in north america (including some that colonizers interpreted as states [when all you are is a hammer…], like the haudenosaunee confederacy).
@LH, it’s an insult.
Insult Russian men as you please (seriously), but it is not informative.
I spoke about happiness associated with romantic relationships.
Young people from North Africa complain or are known to be unhappy more often.
@ktschwarz, you do! Despite my wording, I did not mean that such languages don’t exist, rather it would be interesting to look at them.
I think that to understand the situation we need not only the system “a small language / colonial langauge”, but also the social system (modernity / traditional society first and the role of languages in their relationship next). France brough major social (cultural, economic…) change to the colonies. USSR did more.
We emigrate to Moscow (did so before 2022, now Yerevan looks more attractive), they move to EU.
This is not how DE explains it, though: he speaks about the difference in attitudes. Maybe he is right.
@LH, it’s an insult.
No, it’s a statement of fact. Talk to some Russian women (other than your friends), or read accounts by women of how they are treated. I’m frankly surprised you take offense at that, considering your oft-repeated statements of your respect for women. Can you possibly live in such a bubble you think women are generally treated well by Russian men?
🙂
…Russia itself, the state: domestic violence was decriminalized a few years ago.
@LH, sorry, you misunderstood me.
I am a nerd and I was quite literal here. If I responded so when you said that I’m seeing an anti-male conspiracy, that would indeed mean I’m offended.
But “x is treating y like shit” is I think insult on the surface level. Just some bad words about x. They can make sense when x knows what action you’re describing so.
But they contain no information about what are those actions! No, I did not take offence (as I said: “insult […] as you please (seriously)”, and I was serious).
As a contrast to the Algerian and Kazakh examples I mentioned upthread I could mention a Swiss exchange student I consulted about a decade ago to make sense of some Swiss dialect poetry: she was no linguist, and she was surprised and VERY amused to see Swiss dialect in writing.
I stress the word: amused. To her it was inappropriate to actually write Swiss dialect, but the way she described Swiss German and its relationship to High German (to her eyes) was utterly unlike the Algerian and Kazakh individuals: to her Swiss German was not to be written, but she certainly never used any negative term to describe it: indeed, she agreed with me when I said that in (her part of) Switzerland (except in the presence of German-speaking outsiders) speaking High German would be just as funny as writing Swiss German. In short: each language had a clearly assigned social space, without the non-written locally dominant L1 (Swiss German) one being considered IPSO FACTO to be inherently deficient/inferior/ugly or the like.
Now, Swiss German definitely qualifies as a small language when compared to Standard German or French, to say nothing of English, but the fact that this L1 Swiss German speaker had a much more positive attitude to her L1 (despite its having far fewer native speakers than, say, Algerian Arabic or Kazakh…) is something I have a very hard time believing is unrelated to Swiss German speakers never having been colonized or indeed socially dominated by non-Swiss German speakers.
AFAIK, that’s the same in all of German-speaking Switzerland and, with slightly differently defined social spaces and other details, in German-speaking Austria other than sprawling Vienna. I don’t know if this continues a bit into Germany.
The contrast with French-speaking Switzerland is stark.
What’s the story with French-speaking Switzerland?
Apart from fascinating glimpses, the dialects (most of which aren’t even French proper, but Franco-Provençal/Arpitan) seem to be *poof* gone, and what people speak is indistinguishable from contemporary Parisian except for using septante, huitante, nonante and not being spoken quite that fast.
In other words, I don’t know if there are any differences from contemporary Belgian French…
My sample is biased toward Lausanne. (They’ve always used quatre-vingt in Geneva, supposedly.)
Hat: See the relevant comments in this thread (especially my own June 11 2:39 one):
https://languagehat.com/swiss-dialect-exhibition/
Incidentally, many of these dying/extinct “dialects” were fascinating: some of the Easternmost ones still made full use, in the twentieth century, of a…two-case declension system in nouns that grew out of an Old French- or Old Provencal-type system.
David: the fact that “quatre-vingt” is in use in Geneva, unlike in other francophone Swiss cities, may be related to the fact that dialect loss in Geneva was partly due to its position as the “Protestant Rome” and as a haven for persecuted foreign (mostly French) Protestants: as a result there was, in Geneva, a massive demographic presence of non-Swiss French speakers when shift to French took place, something quite alien to any other community in French-speaking Switzerland (whose later shift to French, not involving large numbers of non-Swiss refugees, would have been more conducive to the survival of local features in their French. I wonder whether this is demonstrably true of features other than the numeral system?).
Thanks! Needless to say, after more than a decade I’d forgotten all about that very interesting thread.
In Canton of Geneva, Arpitan now survives only in its official hymn, Cé qu’è lainô (the two renditions I like best are at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfIo2jKwj5c and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJyKe95cgvc). Searching for its name will bring up many websites about the history and language of the hymn.
The Aosta Valley and the Municipality of Evolène may now be the best places to hear Arpitan as an everyday spoken language.
“speaking High German would be just as funny as writing Swiss German”
@Etienne, are there topics to be discussed in either HG or a mixed register and are there situations where people are expected to speak it? School? University? When discussing things they learn in university?
For fus·ha vs. dialect (I’m a bit tired of “literary Arabic” and “vernacular Arabic”) a good analogy maybe is Latin vs. medieval Romance. And positions of fusha in Algeria are stronger than in most countries (at first, most countries expected the opposite from them). Of course the engineer was comparing it to French, but what I mean, it is already contrasted to fusha.
Drasvi: I am not an L1 Swiss German speaker and have never lived in Switzerland, and thus cannot answer your questions on the finer points of Swiss German diglossia (I am sure several Hatters know more on the topic and might be able to give you (partial?) answers).
The only reason I brought up Swiss German in the first place was because it seems to serve as an example of a small language whose speakers seem not to feel the crippling inferiority complex and deep shame which seems to be felt by L1 speakers of small languages which are or have recently been colonized (suggesting a causal link between said colonization and negative attitudes to one’s own L1).
Amplifying M’s point above: according to a 2014 article I recently read there may be some 15 000 -17 000 Franco-Provençal speakers in the Alpine area of Northwestern Italy: they have Italian as an H language, their local variety as an L language, with Piemontese being L compared to Italian and H compared to local Franco-Provençal. It is unclear to me whether shift to Piemontese and/or Italian among the younger generation is universal or simply widespread.
@Etienne, thank you. It is difficult to tell what of this attitude of the Algerian engineer actually reflects his views on the somewhat different matter of dialect vs. literary language. There is a tradition of marking the former as inferiour and this is why I mentioned Latin and Romance: the former was also considered superiour. This tradition was already there in Early Middle Ages, it is here now and I suspect people are taught it in school:)
The difference with Kazakh is of course that they are not shifting to French or fus·ha in Algeria.
Drasvi: I have known a lot of (educated) Algerians, and their linguistic self-hatred is quite intense, far more pronounced than is the case with your typical Tunisian or Moroccan (if my experience with individuals of all three nationalities is in any way typical/reliable).
Unlike their fellow North Africans, not only do Algerians regard Algerian Arabic as totally worthless (plus any number of other negative features), they also regard Standard Arabic as almost totally worthless too: non-Algerian North Africans, by contrast, seem to see Standard Arabic and French as being comparable H languages (in terms of prestige). My outsider’s impression is that, because the linguistic H space in Morocco and Tunisia is being shared/contested by two different languages, the prestige of the (Arabic or Berber) vernacular gains somewhat as a “default” language.
And some parts of Algeria ARE shifting to French: I mentioned here at the Hattery a few years ago that a former colleague of mine, from rural Kabylia, was quite upset on his last trip there, because he observed that many young mothers seem to speak nothing but French to their babies/young children, and Lameen made the comment that he would not be surprised if Kabylia partly shifted to French in the near future.
@Etienne, wow, thank you.
I mostly know Tunisians and Moroccans. I read some theses about code-switching by Algerian students and I discussed the proposal for dialect education with an Algerian. That’s all (if we don’t count reading Lameen’s comments here). A few other conversations were not about language (or when they were, it was phonology, grammar etc.:)).
I know of course that there is a very strong Algerian diaspora (and Kabyle diaspora in particular).
I wonder why the difference in attitudes to the koine then: apart of economy/politics etc, Algeria is a Large country (“larger than Mongolia and smaller than Kazakhstan”), and local dialect landscape is different too….
I’ll bet it has a lot to do with Algeria’s having been an integral part of France rather than a colony like the others.
Hat: Yes, that was my point exactly (On a completely unrelated topic: I hope the recent storm did not affect you and your loved ones too badly). I would love it if others with actual direct experience with the region (Lameen?) would chime in…
Yes, we need Lameen here.
Another kinda-stable minority language is Palestinian Arabic, as spoken in Israel. It correlates exactly with how separate Palestinian society is from the majority Jewish one. Jewish-Arab marriages are rare, but not unheard of, as before. Likewise, Palestinians speaking Hebrew better than Arabic are rare, but no longer unheard of. In contrast, diasporic Jewish languages disappear after a generation or two, even without an explicit pressure for them to do so (as happened with Yiddish). I am not sure about Russian, though.
“His mother is Jewish, his father is Arab and he lives in Moscow. Where else he can live?”
(from a birthday party)
Re the Algeria of yore, does anyone happen to know the French original of the slogan (relegated to the margins after 1962) that usually gets Englished as something like “The Mediterranean runs/flows through France just as surely as the Seine runs/flows through Paris”?
“La Méditerranée traverse la France comme la Seine traverse Paris”. Unambiguously clear and succinct, which probably made it unacceptable to any mainstream political party.
Used as the title of a novel by Mohamed Abdallah (“Ce roman suit l’évolution des relations franco-algériennes, rendant hommage à une génération d’hommes et de femmes qui, bien que nés de l’autre côté de la Méditerranée, ont fait l’Algérie d’hier et d’aujourd’hui”).
Google tells me that the slogan was “populaire dans les années cinquante.”
@Etienne “And some parts of Algeria ARE shifting to French: I mentioned here at the Hattery a few years ago that a former colleague of mine.”
For a different opinion: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/french-language-losing-ground-in-algeria/
See too https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=2023070814210465 and other websites on current trends in the use of French in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
Amazeballs.
There is no mixed register; discussing things learned in university is done by spontaneously importing the technical terms into whichever dialect it is – with a large amount of etymological nativization.
I know next to nothing about teaching in Switzerland; in Austria, teaching that is reasonably close to a prepared lecture is in Standard German, but any side comments are generally in dialect. This division of labor also holds in interviews, press conferences and the like.
DM, thank you!
interesting: if you have two sources (the language you speak and the text in another language with words like “homomorphism”) and your output is language you speak with adapted words like “homomorphism” – that is, spontaneous importing – it is mixing, just a form of it which we call “borrowing”.
The question is why in some other pairs people prefer a different strategy of mixing (a mixed register or code-switching: both times more stuff from the second source finds its way in your speech).
@M: colour me skeptical. I am familiar with this kind of political grandstanding and grandiose initiatives from Kazakhstan, whether they’re about replacing Russian with Kazakh or with English. They normally peter out for lack of qualified educators and passive resistance from an elite which doesn’t want to devalue the education they received in the existing prestige language (Russian in Kazakhstan, French in Algeria.)
No, they proclaimed triedinstvo. (Not sure if the term has an official Kazakh or English translation). “Tri-unity”, in Russian it describes the unity of the Trinity.
What is meant is unity of Kazakh, Russian and English. They once named a date when various school subjects would begin to be taught in respectively K, R or E depening on the subject…
Though Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools do seem to have something like this (with switch to English).
(in Russian “Назарбаев интеллектуальные школы” “Nazarbayev” is treated not as an adjective but as a говно-в-проруби word without markers whose function must be derived from word order (I just used говно в проруби similarly). Similar to “online” which could not enter Russian before – because it was incompatible with our syntax – and has entered it now after people internalised English syntax).
A European country having their most important colony so close probably meant that a lot of cultural influence (both ways!) was inevitable. Think of how profound British influence was in India; then imagine if India had only been as populous as Algeria and just a one or two day boat trip from Dover.
If India had been, say, Ireland…
“Nazarbayev”… word without markers whose function must be derived from word order
not unlike the maoist usage in english: “mao zedong thought”, “chairman gonzalo thought”, etc. is the syntax/phrasing also making a subtle point of political ideology?
(as best i understand it, “NAME thought”, in contrast to a construction with a name and possessive, is asserting a high level of theoretic importance, but one lower than “NAMEism”, which indicates world-historical significance – kinda parallel to the difference between beatification and sainthood)
Since you asked: attitudes towards French in Algeria are… diverse. Broadly speaking, the urban professional middle/upper classes think of it as the only serious language, and deplore all efforts to force them to work in anything else. They’re not actually a particularly numerous group, but for obvious reasons they’re notably overrepresented in the diaspora, especially in French-speaking countries. The rural lower middle classes, centred on landowners I think, have more or less the opposite attitude: it’s a scandal everything isn’t in Standard Arabic already, and reflects unpatriotic conspiracies. I was raised very much in the latter set, and it took me a while to realised just how widespread the former is. Neither group has much to say for Darja – a folkloric ornament for the former, a conspiracy against Fusha for the latter. (Edit:) However, the former often speak French even at home, while the latter almost always speak Darja at home and with their friends, despite denigrating it.
As for how this came about: yeah, suffice it to say that for a good century or so the only way to get a modern education in Algeria was through French (Ben Badis’ efforts to change this, limited as they were, were under constant pressure) and the only way to get a job suited to such an education was to become more French than the French – and, for some 90% of the Muslim population, neither path was open in the first place. That created an enormous pent-up demand.
Note also that there’s a lot a more language shift to Darja going on in Algeria than there is to French; shift to French is exclusively a rather class-bound urban phenomenon (except allegedly in parts of Kabylie?), while shift from Berber to Darja is ongoing in vast swathes of the countryside and quite a few cities as well.
I heard criticism of certain upper class people in Tunisia who love French too much and even objected to it (because snobbery is attributed to them, and though I know nothing about them and they well can be snobs, language use does not mean snobbery).
But I don’t know what they speak at home, I did not know that someone speaks French. (I generally rarely communicate with fashionable people). I wonder how their children learn dialect then.
PS. Ferguson (the classical article about diglossia) says : “Very often, educated Arabs will maintain that they never use L at all, in spite of the fact that direct observation shows that they use it constantly in all ordinary conversation. ”
I never met anyone who says exactly this. I wonder what changed…
PPS, not about Arabs specifically, but about diglossia in general (though I suspect his expereince with Arabic speakers has contributed into this generalisation):
“This attitude cannot be called a deliberate attempt to deceive the questioner, but seems almost a self-deception. When the speaker in question is replying in good faith, it is often possible to break through these attitudes by asking such questions as what kind of language he uses in speaking to his children, to servants, or to his mother. The very revealing reply is usually something like: “Oh, but they wouldn’t understand [the H form, whatever it is called].”
Of course, nowadays children and women speak fusha [not in Lebanon] and servants went out of fashion outside gulf countries….
This is like the educated Tuscan who says about the gorgia toscana “io no di[h]o”!