Being Persian.

Mana Kia has an Aeon piece called “Being Persian” that describes a premodern situation that has long been attractive to me. It begins:

At the end of the 19th century, under the looming shadow of European colonial encroachment, political and intellectual elites in Iran began to draw on nationalist forms of belonging as a way to unify the various ethnic and religious groups that lived within its territory. The nation was gaining ground at this time as the acceptable and legible idiom of collective political demands. As in most of Africa and Asia, nationalism was anticolonial, understood as a liberatory basis of solidarity to gain independence (or protect) from European colonial rule. Among its distinctive features is a conflation between land, a national(ised) language, and a people. But nationalism also sought to produce cultural homogeneity, and so fostered ugly forms of subordination and violence against peoples who, amid new ideals of the nation, suddenly became linguistic and religious minorities. In the case of Iran, nationalists seized upon the Persian language as a crucial basis of national identity, one that could be shared across religious and sectarian lines. But at the turn of the 20th century, fewer than half of the population of Iran spoke Persian as a first language (or at all).

Bound up in the spread of nationalism was not just repression of ethnic minorities (linguistic, as with Azeris, but also tied to other affiliations, as with the Sunni Kurds) and the repurposing of language as a basis of this necessary homogeneity, but a whole transformation of how it was possible to know oneself, one’s collective, and one’s relationship to other selves and collectives through the modern conceptual systems that came with a nationalist frame. In order for Iran to repurpose Persian as the national language of its people, it had to efface a number of significant aspects of its history and traditions shared with other countries. In the process, what it meant to be Persian changed profoundly.

Before modern nationalism, which led to today’s Iran (before 1934, the country was called Persia in European languages), Persians had an entirely different relation to land, origin and belonging. Prenationalist Persians (possessors of the Persian language) belonged to many lands, religions, kingdoms, regions, in what is now Iran and far beyond it. This earlier form of belonging allowed for a kind of pluralism, one in which Persians spoke other languages, observed different religions, and were part of various states or empires. Indeed, they accepted and even celebrated such overlapping multiplicity in language, religious affiliation and regional identification, which in more recent times has been the basis of so much conflict.

Previously, Persian had been a transregional lingua franca that co-existed with other languages across a shifting constellation of multilingual and multiconfessional empires and regional polities that characterised the eastern Islamic world. This older Persian signified no specific place or ethnicity. New Persian, the language’s technical term, grew out of the interaction of the Arabic language with Middle Persian, following the Arab Islamic conquests of the Sassanian Empire in the 7th century. […]

A constant circulation of people and knowledge sustained this shared culture, a set of sensibilities most easily understood through its adab, or its proper aesthetic and ethical forms. Learned not born, being Persian marked someone who had received a particular basic education that imparted Persianate sensibilities, through which they understood and engaged with the world. Adab was the proper form by which something had meaning in the world, though what was proper to one context was relational and could be inappropriate to another. Adab was central to the ontological being of any substance, whether as morals or meaning more generally. Its forms shaped practices of governance, social ethics and economic exchange. […]

If being Persian was not about origin in a particular place, neither was it about ‘ethnicity’. Origin was important, though it was differently comprised from our own, which is largely articulated through the Christian-specific idiom of blood, now universalised as modern. For premodern Persians, origin was part of a broader understanding of a person’s moral substance and ethical embodiment. A set of lineages comprised origin, establishing affiliations beyond those inherited with birth that seem illusory to us (not ‘real’ kinship), but were quite meaningful for Persians and significantly constitutive of understandings of self, family and broader social collectives. They included natal lineages, but also those of learning, service, aesthetics, occupation and devotion, which articulated the basis of possible affiliations (or their lack) to social collectives. These genealogies laid the basis for kinships that brought people together in ways that modern parochial categories of family, nation, ethnicity, gender and even religion do not accurately explain. Place was almost always part of origin, inflecting its more significant lineages, but did not give meaning to origin alone. There were many ways to be Persian, and one need not be Muslim or born in an Iranian city to be a master of its adab and all that it implied morally, though one had to be able to inhabit its forms.

It includes a lot of history and anecdotes, and ends:

Colonial modernity and its nationalist responses did not completely change the terrain of place and origin. New logics organised belonging, but old meanings and their multiple possibilities remained. In 2008, an old man who welcomed me in the Yazd bazaar called Yazd a mamlakat, a relational use of the word for a region or domain. I had come from Tehran and, in his usage, Tehran and Yazd were both regions in their own right, as part of the larger domain (mamlakat) of Iran. I wondered how the aporetic ease with which the two levels of mamlakat existed might serve as a foundation for a sense of belonging that could accommodate differences such as regional affiliations in ways non-threatening to the Iranian state (or, most pressingly, to states in the subcontinent). Perhaps the continued existence of aporetic Persianate forms is a hopeful perspective from which we might see possible futures anew.

Try not to be put off by academicisms like “aporetic”; it’s a look at a non-nationalist world view we could use more of. I should really read Kia’s book Persianate Selves. (Persianate India at LH.)

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    Christian-specific idiom of blood

    “Christian-specific”? Hardly – neither in the sense that Christian states necessarily had this viewpoint (cf Austria-Hungary), nor in the sense that it is confined to Christian states (cf Japan.)

    Certainly it’s tied up with the disastrous modern concept of the “nation-state”, which arose in “Christian” Europe (and was then adopted by the victims of European aggression, as the piece describes); though that is actually surely connected withe a conscious repudiation of the idea of “Christendom”, and with secularisation in general.

    It’s “Christian” only in the polemical Muslim sense of “European, in a bad way”; the same mindset as leads to calling modern commercially-driven colonial adventures “crusades.”

  2. Yeah, that’s sloppy phrasing, but I think it’s the link with “Christian” Europe she has in mind.

  3. The concept of nation-state has nothing to do with the Christianity if Europe. Europe was Christian for a looooong time before nation-states.

    It’s a legacy of 19th century nation building and the French revolution. It’s a consequence of secularism and ‘modernity’.

    If anything, the Christian institutions were supranational and universal.

  4. She is being Persian:)

  5. The comment above is likely to be misunderstood. What I mean is that her own model of what is Christian and why blood is important and for whom is likely based on her personal experience. I constantly contrast Russian culture to all others I am familiar with, but the result is quite different from stereotypes (not in that it contradicts them). But I simply do not understand what she means here:(

  6. I pulled up at exactly the same place (Christian-specific idiom of blood).

    The nation-state has a lot to answer for, with its insistence on organising human beings into homogenous blocks. Still, I’m sure that pre-Westphalian humanity found plenty of other ways to organise, homogenise, other, discriminate, and persecute.

    I find it interesting that Europeans (and Americans, etc.) are often so eager to come out and declare that Chinese “dialects” are really separate languages in the same way as European languages like French, Spanish, Italian, German, English (etc). But these languages also came about in exactly the same way, as central languages of kingdoms like France, Spain, etc. Exceptions are German and Italian, but in each of these areas there was a tendency to linguistic homogenisation by choosing one variety as standard. China never followed that route, so is it really fair to make that kind of comparison? In fact, the decision to thoroughly Mandarinise all of China is a modern one undertaken on the European model.

  7. (Continued)

    The Sinosphere actually came about as a large cultural area speaking different languages where written Chinese (Literary Chinese) was the accepted written language of the bureaucracy and the cultured and intellectual classes. This has all been blown asunder by the decision by those countries to develop their own “national standards” (Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and, of course, Mandarin).

    Is this better or worse?

  8. It has nothing to do with better or worse, and it has nothing to do with history. The fact is that at present they are separate languages, and a failure to admit that is on a par with belief in a flat earth, I don’t care what the cultural/historical/nationalistic reasons are.

  9. David Eddyshaw says

    Worse. The UK nation-state made a deliberate and very effective effort to eradicate my language. This is Not Good. Next question?

    The fact (which it is) that China, in attempting to eradicate local languages and cultures, is simply repeating what France (say) has been doing since the Revolution and only officially gave up on quite recently, doesn’t make it good, any more than Japanese empire-building in the first half of the 20th century was justified by the fact that the Europeans had invented the practice of invading other countries “for their own good” somewhat earlier. Understandable, possibly. Justified – not a bit.

  10. Carthaginem…

  11. it has nothing to do with history

    You are perfectly entitled to disagree with me but I’m amazed that you would say that it has nothing to do with history. It has everything to do with history. And if someone (e.g., Xi Jinping) decides today that “separate languages” must disappear, then unless something intervenes to stop it, they are probably doomed in the long run. That will be part of history, too. Failure to admit their non-existence at such a time would similarly be on a par with belief in a flat earth.

    I find DE’s remark more to the point.

  12. “The UK nation-state made a deliberate and very effective effort to eradicate my language. This is Not Good. ”

    Honestly when I read something like this (p.36) – which is the very same method that was practiced in France (Breton, with a shoe rather than nail) – I do feel anger. But I do not give a shit about Kabyle and Arabic and Breton and French and colonialism and anti-colonialism, I am angered as an occasional teacher and former student.

  13. I am angered as an occasional teacher and former student

    That leaves you open to the charge (often made against linguists) that they care more about language than they do about people.

  14. China never followed that route, so is it really fair to make that kind of comparison?

    I was puzzled by your vehement reaction but I can now see where you are coming from.

    I am not denying that the “dialects” of Chinese are so different that they could be characterised as separate “languages”. What I am questioning is the interpretation of this difference in a European way, as separate languages. The pre-modern situation appears to have been that they were regarded as a kind of undifferentiated “local speech” or “patois”, as against the literate (written) language of the educated classes. On the spoken level, the bureaucrats appear to have been united by their mastery of Mandarin as a kind of “class language”. In the villages there were literate people who made a living out of writing letters or petitions, etc. in the correct written form when they were needed. Speaking a local patois and belonging to the Chinese-speaking world weren’t mutually incompatible propositions.

    The Chinese were happy enough with this situation until they encountered the Western powers, which had their own “national languages”. They have been trying to emulate the West for the past century, and Xi Jinping looks on the verge of bringing this to fruition.

    The drifting apart of the Sinosphere is similarly attributable to the desire to have modern, standardised, national languages, which means repudiating Classical Chinese as a unified written language.

    While I admire your very broad-minded approach to language, I suspect that most people in the West are primarily (one might say only) interested in powerful national languages like English, French, German, Polish, etc. A world like pre-modern Persian, or even pre-modern Chinese, is probably well-nigh unthinkable to most modern monolinguals. And that’s because the only world they know is one where “standard national languages” are taken for granted and anything else does not have great value. (Exaggerating a bit, but in my opinion that’s a rough picture of how things are.)

  15. I think I am right in saying that speakers of many “dialects” in China are not aware what “language” they are speaking.

    For example, a speaker of the Suzhou dialect would (I am fairly sure) say they spoke Suzhou-hua (or whatever that is in their local speech). They might recognise that their speech is somewhat similar to Shanghainese or Wuxi dialect, but they would not identify themselves as speaking the “Wu language”, which is a linguist’s concept that they probably would not even understand.

    So even if people are aware that they are not speaking putonghua, they do not necessarily have a consciousness that they speak “such-and-such a language” on the (supposed) European model. As I said, identifying with the speech of a certain place (the Suzhou topolect) does not translate to seeing themselves as speaking a certain language (the “Wu language”). If the all-important identification of a particular geographical group of dialects as a single “language” is missing, how can the European concept of speaking “such-and-such a language” be valid? That is the point I was trying to make. I hope I am making sense here.

  16. It has everything to do with history.

    You misunderstand me. Of course everything has to do with history in your sense; the past shapes all things human. But that’s not what I’m talking about — I’m saying that the issue of whether two forms of speech are separate languages has nothing to do with history, any more than the question of whether two people are descended from the same parents. Those questions are decided by science; someone may be shocked to discover that the guy they assumed was their brother turns out, according to DNA analysis, not to be, but their shock does not change the situation.

    Your talk about “a European way” and “broad-minded approach to language” suggests that you still do not actually accept linguistics as a science and think it’s all a matter of how you look at it. But it’s not. I don’t give a good goddam what Chinese rulers or peasants think; Mandarin and Cantonese are separate languages, end of story, and anyone who denies it is equivalent to a flat-earther.

  17. You either haven’t read what I said or you haven’t understood it.

    You say that Mandarin and Cantonese are separate languages. For sure, Cantonese is one of the clearest cases because it is perceived by its speakers as a “language” and has a widely-recognised name — several, in fact. I gave the example of “Wu”, which is not and does not. What I did not say, though, is that Suzhou-hua and Mandarin are the same language. If you think I did, then your high dudgeon appears to have affected your reading ability.

    I don’t know where you’ve been when discussions have taken place over the criteria for recognition of separate languages but it’s not as simple as you make out. Some people swear by “mutual intelligibility”; that doesn’t always work. There are other criteria, often politically based (e.g., the old chestnut of a “dialect with an army and a navy”). Perceptions and familiarity are often crucial.

    But it’s ridiculous to go to town over that hackneyed old question of whether Mandarin and Cantonese are separate languages, because that’s not what I was talking about. I was talking about the different ways in which social and political realities impact on perceptions and realities of language use. The kind of wrenching of social and political realities that resulted in the complete realignment of the Persian linguistic situation. The kind of wrenching of social and political realities that has consigned the term “Serbo-Croatian” to the dustbin of history — no matter how you feel about it. The kind of wrenching of social and political realities that gave rise to modern Japanese as a newly standardised language, consigning much of its Chinese-language (kanbun) past to a mere school subject.

    If you feel that this is controversial, then I’m sorry. I don’t find it controversial at all. It’s history.

    (BTW, if linguistics can only call itself a science by cutting sociolinguistics adrift, then you’re right, I reject linguistics as a science.)

  18. I don’t know where you’ve been when discussions have taken place over the criteria for recognition of separate languages but it’s not as simple as you make out.

    I’ve been right here, and I’ve read those discussions. I’m not making it out to be “simple”; DNA analysis sometimes isn’t simple either. I’m saying the existence of edge cases doesn’t throw everything into chaos and make it impossible to say anything for sure. If you accept Cantonese and Mandarin as separate languages, great, you’re not a flat-earther. Most Mandarin-speakers would disagree with you.

    The kind of wrenching of social and political realities that has consigned the term “Serbo-Croatian” to the dustbin of history — no matter how you feel about it.

    Again, it’s not about the term, it’s about the linguistic situation. Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are dialects of a single language, no matter what term you use or how you or the speakers feel about it.

  19. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    @Bathrobe: Possibly because of my ignorance of linguistics, I’m failing to understand what distinction between Europe and the Sinosphere you’re trying to highlight. What you’re saying seems to apply identically to Italy as to China.

    A speaker of the Legnano dialect would (I am fairly sure) say they spoke “dialect” tout court, or Legnanese. They would certainly recognize that their speech is similar to Milanese and to the Varese dialect, but they would likely not identify themselves as speaking Lombard, and definitely not as speaking the “Gallo-Italic language,” which is a linguist’s concept that they probably would not even understand.

    I read you as highlighting that our diglossic speakers think of their formal language as putonghua or Italian, and are probably unaware of their own regionalisms; while they think of their informal dialect as Suzhounese or Legnanese, and have probably never asked themselves what language it is a dialect of: Lombard or Gallo-Italic? Northern Wu or Wu? They might even assume unthinkingly and unscientifically that theirs is not only a Chinese or Italian dialect, but also a dialect of Chinese or Italian.

    I don’t doubt all this is both true and socio-linguistically significant. But how is it truer or more significant in East Asia than in Western Europe?

    I suspect a decent argument could even be made that Western Europe came about as a large cultural area speaking different languages where Latin was the accepted written language of the bureaucracy and the cultured and intellectual classes.

    E.g., 70% of incunabula across Europe were printed in Latin. In my own Italian hometown of Turin, the bureaucracy switched from Latin to Italian (not the local speech then, nor for many centuries thereafter) by royal edict in 1561-62.

  20. David Eddyshaw says

    What scanty data there are for the Nabit language of northern Ghana suggest that it is extremely similar to Toende Kusaal; indeed, more so than Toende Kusaal is to Agolle Kusaal. I would not be at all astonished if the degree of mutual comprehension between Toende Kusaal and Nabit is higher than than between Burkina Faso Toende Kusaal and Ghanaian Agolle Kusaal (Ghanaian Toende Kusaal speakers understand Agolle Kusaal better, on account of much greater exposure to it than the Burkinabe speakers have.)

    However, according to local traditional language ideology, Toende Kusaal speakers are Kusaasi, and therefore speak the same language as Agolle Kusaasi, whereas Nabit speakers are Nabdema, and thus (obviously) speak a different language from (all) the Kusaasi.

    However (to come to the point), having said that, I may well be misinterpreting the situation in describing this as “speaking the same/a different language.” The names of languages in Kusaal are nearly always used adverbially:

    O pian’ad nɛ Kʋsaal. “She is speaking Kusaal.”

    could perfectly well be parsed “speaking Kusaasi-fashion.” I’m not convinced that the traditional understanding of languages reified languages in the way that we take for granted: a language was not so much a thing as a way of behaving. This would mean that to say that Atiga is speaking Nabdema-fashion and Awini is speaking Kusaasi-fashion does not in any way imply that they can’t understand each other; that’s quite another question.

    The ki of Swahili language names, like “Kiswahili”, is also used adverbially: mtoto “child”, kitoto “like a child.” It seems extremely probable that this is the origin of its use to make language names.

    The indigenous names of the various Eskimo languages/dialects are equative-case forms of ethnonyms: for example, Kalaallisut “Greenlandic” is transparently simply “like a Greenlander” in Greenlandic.

  21. @ Giacomo Ponzetto

    What you’re saying seems to apply identically to Italy as to China.

    Thank you for your comment. Perhaps there is not such a big difference as I thought.

    In Chinese, as Hat pointed out, there is a belief among native speakers of so-called “dialects” that, despite the fact that their “dialect” might be so radically different as to be completely unintelligible to speakers of other “dialects”, let alone speakers of the standard language (Mandarin), they are still speaking a variety of “Chinese”. Looking at this situation, the linguist would consider these “dialects” too different from Mandarin to be objectively considered a “dialect” of it, and would take the view that they should objectively speaking be regarded as separate languages.

    My point there was that in some cases speakers of such “separate languages” do not, in fact, have any conception what “language” they are speaking. There is no consciousness of speaking anything other than their local speech variety. As Hat pointed out, this should not pose an obstacle to the linguist making an objective decision as to what local varieties should be lumped together under the umbrella of a single language, such as Wu. But it seems to me that it does, in fact, pose an obstacle.

    In Europe the existence of nation-states which have adopted their own standard languages also introduces a bias into the classification of “language” and “dialect”. For example, would a linguist who adopted purely objective criteria divide Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish into three separate languages, or would they describe them as a single language with three or four somewhat different written forms? It is the nation-state and the established standard languages of the nation-state that distort the classification of languages in Europe. In China, on the other hand, where there is no strong tradition of individual nation-states, a LACK of such standardised languages (in cases like Wu) makes the classification of “language” and “dialect” into an arguably arbitrary exercise. (Cantonese is somewhat different because it is regarded by speakers as a specific variety, with a standard language centred on Guangzhou city, and thus has its own clear identity.)

    In other words, I was continuing the line of thought in the article that the existence (or non-existence) of nation-states has had a distorting effect on language in general. In the case of Persian, the nation-state has converted what was a non-localised cultural language existing across different states into the standard language of a nation-state, with a very large and obvious impact. (The creation of new standardised written languages for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese and the abandonment of Literary Chinese as a common written standard was my other example of how the nation-state has reworked the entire linguistic situation in a particular way.)

    I am not sure what relevance this might have for Italian “dialects”. Do linguists advocate splitting Italian into a number of separate “languages” in the way that they do for China? Or perhaps they should be doing so….

  22. DE, Russian does that too. Speak X (X = Russian, English, Chinese etc.) is “говорить по-X” that is “in the manner of X”. But. It is nigh impossible to say говорить по-аргентински (speak Argentinian), the constuction was completely conventionalised (google finds like 5 websites with the phrase, at least 2 of them porn). Make coffee по-аргентински is very much a possibility.

  23. David Eddyshaw says

    Although “Hausa” is now generally thought of as an ethnonym (including by Hausas), historically it’s the name of a language, not of an ethnic group, and you’re basically “a Hausa” if you speak Hausa. (In other words, it works pretty much the opposite way round from Kusaasi language-naming practices,)

    Most Hausa names for languages are derived with the suffix -nci, which denotes “behavioural characteristics” (birni “city”, birnanci “slick behaviour”; Buzu “Tuareg person”, Buzanci “Tuareg language”), but Hausa itself is a major exception (along with Ingilishi.)

  24. Like David Eddyshaw I am very puzzled by the phrase “Christian-specific idiom of blood” (Many Christian States/Empires made no reference to “race/blood”, and conversely some non-Christian States/Empires did), and even more puzzled by the addition of the phrase “now universalised as modern”: plenty of modern states make no reference “to race/blood”, even if their pre-modern predecessors sometimes did (I have the impression -nothing more-that Mana Kia encountered the medieval Spanish phrase/concept “limpieza de sangre” somewhere and assumed that it was a pan-Christian phenomenon).

    (I suppose I am expected to express shock, disappointment and dismay that an Ivy league professor could be this ignorant, but I am afraid such ignorance is so typical among academics that doing so consistently would be an exhausting and time-wasting endeavor, so I will of course do no such thing).

    And more broadly, I find her opposition of “(Diverse) Persian cosmopolis” and “(Homogeneous) modern nation-state” silly. Long before the rise of the nation-state (in theory or in practice) Persian had spread over a huge area *as an L1*, through a depressingly familiar mechanism of language spread: Military conquest associated with the spread of a religion (Islam, in this instance): in Central Asia, Afghanistan and South Asia in this particular case.

    Was this conquest and accompanying linguistic imposition somehow more acceptable because it was not done in the name of a nation-state? I suppose one might argue that this conquest was the price to pay to bring together such a diverse group of people under the roof of a common language. But unfortunately for such an argument Persian expansion outside Iran was (inter alia) at the expense of two languages which had themselves been supra-regional: Sogdian in Central Asia, and Sanskrit (I think some reference has been made here at the Hattery to Sheldon Pollock’s work on the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis”) in what (as a result of the Muslim conquest) became Muslim South Asia.

    Another blow to such an argument is the fact that the spread of some supra-regional lingua francas took place via more peaceful means: the spread of Latin as a written language outside the borders of the Roman Empire (Ireland, Poland, Scandinavia, the Baltic lands…) was not caused by military conquest but by missionary activity. Of course, using the pre-modern “Latin cosmopolis” as an example of a non-nation-state-bound world view would be awkward, since European=bad is as undeniable, to most mainstream academics today, as “big brother is good” to an inhabitant of George Orwell’s Oceania (Has anyone told our political and cultural elites that “1984” is a cautionary tale, and not an operating manual, by the way?)

    And more broadly, annihilation of linguistic diversity is something that does not require a nation-state: the diversity of Chinese varieties today cannot make us forget that all varieties of Chinese have a common ancestor whose spread was a direct result of the unification of China and which must have caused the extinction of a great many languages, indeed perhaps even of entire language families. The same is true for the spread of Latin and Greek.

  25. Addenda: My last sentence should have been expanded to “…the spread of Latin and Greek within the Roman Empire”. The later expansion of Greek as a prestige language outside the confines of the Roman Empire via missionary activity is, naturally, quite similar to the case of Latin I gave above.

  26. the constuction was completely conventionalised

    D.O., I am not sure if a speaker from a village X will describe a person who speaks in a manner of people of a village Y as “he speaks по-игрецки” or not.

    She will do that when discussing how they dance or cook or whatever, and what prevents me from applying that to manners of speaking is that I am too accustomed to “Spanish”, “Russian”, “Arabic” and so on. I am afraid of confusion (that my wording will be understood as “Argentian if one-of-languages-studied-in-school”). Also I am accustomed to vasious phrases used to circumvent the problem.
    But po—- scheme is productive: говорить по-аргентински does not sound wrong.

    Moreover, when dealing with somethign that you do not learn in school I can say it. I can say по-тюркски, по-огузски, по-берберски, по-кабильски (…speaks Turkic, Oghuz, Berber, Kabyle) in context of old – or maybe even modern Turkic (still not school langauges in Russia: languages you hear on Moscow streets) and any Berber. I can even put a Moroccan city in this scheme, though I will say it a bit humorously.

    I am not sure if what prevents me from saying “говорит по-московски*”, will also stop a villager who does not speak or hear about Spanish and French often (that is: not a book worm).

    Говорить по-простому “to speak simply” (the construction used by some to refer to the langauge they speak at home, as opposed to say Lithuanian) is a similar construction.

    —————–
    *Yandex: Даль “по-московски”

    “По-московски говорили даже в санкт-петербургских театрах, утверждает Людмила Баш.” (76 языковых различий “высокого петербургского стиля” и “живой московской речи” and the article does not even mention Даль)

    Now Google, the same:
    “Надеюсь, Вы поможете мне разрешить вопрос, который мучает меня со времени поездки в Петербург. Дело в том, что я и раньше замечала, что в это городе говорят как-то не по-нашему, не “по-московски”.” (gramota.ru).

    And what I was looking for, Даль:
    …Въ окончанiяхъ прилагательныхъ аго, яго, его произносятъ в вмѣсто г, но не по–московски, а съ оканьемъ; мы говоримъ: харо̀шева, ли́шнева,
    …Въ Торжкѣ бо́льшею частiю говорятъ по–московски, на а

  27. In other words, no, it seems the construction is in use:)

  28. @Bathrobe, I think I meant the opposite. Instincts and common sense prevent people from distinguishing between Russian children, Welsh children, Berber children etc. In this case I see a rather ugly punishment applied to a child (one person) and children (one group).
    What will happen to Kabyle people or langauge is not what I think about when reading this (and likely is not what I would think about when seeing it). It is just less important:)

  29. John Emerson says

    Just to keep the pot boiling, I’ll bring up something new. related to the above.

    I have been told that the languages of of the SE, especially Fujian, are the most distinct from other languages called Chinese, and that Fujian has the greatest language diversity. Fujian only started becoming Sinified in about 300 AD and is not one of the areas longest settled by Chinese, though. The Chinese heartland by the Huang He from Shenxi to the Pacific has been Chinese for more than a millenium longer, but all speak versions of Mandarin which might be called dialects. This goes against what I know of other languages,specifically English, where the area where Engllish has spoken longest (England itself) has the most diversity. (though everything is relative: English has been spoken there about as long as Chinese has been spoken in Fujian).

    The Mandarin in Manchuria and XInjiang is a different thing, since they’re recently Sinified. I don’t know about Sichuan, which is credited with a form of Mandarin but was Sinified pretty early.

    One hypothesis I have is that the North has been depopulated and repopulated because of invasions so often that all diversity was erase, whereas Fujian is farther from the steppe invaders and also less attractive to them, and also is mountainous so that each river valley could be somewhat isolated.

    Just throwing this out. I’m not sure of any of it.

    EDIT: Per Wiki, the area started being Sinified during the Han dynasty, one to several centuries before 300 BC, and retains Han distinctions.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min_Chinese

  30. David Marjanović says

    In what sense is there a Wu language…? As far as I understand, it’s a wastebasket for “everything else”, diagnosed perhaps by shared retentions, but it doesn’t seem to have any shared innovations.

    Lombard or Gallo-Italic don’t have clear-cut boundaries, do they? There don’t seem to be any in the Inland West Germanic dialect continuum; I don’t think West Germanic, Western Romance, Slavic or Sinitic languages are objectively countable.

    Do linguists advocate splitting Italian into a number of separate “languages” in the way that they do for China?

    At least some do; the outcome is in Wikipedia. Same for German, and there, too, linguists have had to come up with names that aren’t known to most speakers.

  31. David Marjanović says

    and also is mountainous so that each river valley could be somewhat isolated.

    …while the north is flat, so nothing stops innovations from spreading through the entire plain before seeping up into the valleys.

  32. drasi, yes, I was too quick. “speak in the manner of X” is in use for variants of Russian (and I guess, Ukrainian) speech, but it is not applicable to vast majority of situations with languages that are indisputably foreign. Unless there is a recognized foreign language X, “speak in the manner of X” is almost never used. говорить по-парижски, for example, has 7 pages on internet accoring to google. I do not think it would be something wrong with such an expression, but it is simply not used.

  33. True.
    I won’t say “говорит по-мароккански” to anyone who does not know anything about languages of the region. But I am absolutely aware of this as I am speaking, I am afraid of misunderstanding (namely that there is a language-taught-in-school named so) and I avoid this formulation.

    I still can say many things to a person familiar with the situation.

    I do not use говорит по-парижски (“she speaks Parisian”), but maybe in a context where we are discussing different dialects and accents I will say it (“she is speaking Parisian, not Marseillais(e)”)

  34. Actually the “beautiful” English literal translation would be:

    “…along …. way”,

    …given that English nouns (“way”) often play the same role as our morphemes.

    po is along, across the surface of something. You walk po (down) the road, a train moves po the rails, you stroke someone po her arm or also you can hit someone po (against in this case) he hand. And things can be scattered po the floor. Thus a contact with surface.

    Я говорю по-английски, I speak English – I speak along English way.
    По-моему, in my opinion – along my way
    По-простому, in a simple way – along simple way.

  35. I speak down the English way, oh.

  36. David Eddyshaw says

    Come to think of it, Latin does it too: Latine loquor “I speak Latin(ly.)”

  37. January First-of-May says

    what prevents me from saying “говорит по-московски”

    I don’t think anything prevents me; this is the perfectly natural phrasing if/when the appropriate context comes up.

    If anything it seems more weird for the more exotic languages (Oghuz and Kabyle would be in this category for me, I think; Uzbek and, say, Chechen probably wouldn’t), where the pattern по-Хски is instead replaced by на Хском.
    (And of course when the language name does not end in -ский at all, the latter is the only option, at least without using a completely different name – e.g. на иврите, на суахили, and for that matter на латыни*.)

     
    *) In my idiolect this would actually be по-латински, I think, with the form given above being the second best option. Apparently the normative form is по-латыни [sic!], which sounds absolutely impossible, especially with the hyphen. Pushkin wrote по-латынѣ

  38. David Eddyshaw says

    I’ve cheated a bit with saying that Kusaal O pian’ad nɛ Kʋsaal can be taken as “She’s speaking in the Kusaasi manner”, because there seems to be no infallible diagnostic for separating manner-adverbs from nouns in general in Kusaal; for example, you also say

    Da niŋ alaa! “Don’t do that/thus!”
    O keŋ nɔba. “He’s gone on foot.” [he go legs]

    and virtually all words which usually appear as adverbs can, at a pinch, be used as verb subjects or as noun premodifiers just like (other?) nouns (even bɔzug “because” can be a verb subject.) So there is no way of telling, just by looking at O pian’ad nɛ Kʋsaal, whether Kʋsaal is an object or an adverb.

    However, “electricity”, for example, is Nasaal bugum, where bugum is “fire”, and Nasaal is “English/French language” (depending on which side of the border you’re on.) Fʋ wʋm Nasaalɛɛ? “Do you understand English?” With Nasaal bugum, it seems much more natural to take the construction as “fire à la mode européenne” than as “English-language bugum” (which would presumably just be the English word “fire.”)

  39. David Marjanović: Much of Romance indeed ls a dialect continuum, but Gallo-Italian does have a clear linguistic boundary to its South: there is a major isogloss, known as the La Spezia-Rimini line, separating Gallo-Italian from Central Italian dialects: North of this line (and almost everywhere West as well, on the continent) intervocalic stops are voiced, with intervocalic geminate stops consistently degeminated. South of it voicing of intervocalic stops is not systematic (or wholly absent, if, like me, you believe that the evidence indicates that intervocalic voiced stops in Tuscan are due to forms borrowed from varieties spoken North of the La Spezia-Rimini line) and intervocalic geminate stops remain geminates.

    And I am surprised by your claim that there are no clear boundaries in continental West Germanic: I thought the isoglosses separating Low from Middle, and Middle from High German dialects were quite clear-cut over most of German-speaking Europe.

  40. Wikipedia backs me up completely on how Suzhou-hua speakers would see their language.

    Speakers of Wu varieties are mostly unaware of this term for their speech since the term “Wu” is a relatively recent classificatory imposition on what are less clearly defined and highly heterogeneous natural forms. Saying one speaks Wu is akin to saying one speaks a Romance language. It is not a particularly defined entity like Standard Mandarin or Hochdeutsch.

    Most speakers are only vaguely aware of their local variety’s affinities with other similarly classified varieties and will generally only refer to their local Wu variety rather than the dialect family. They do this by affixing ‘話’ (speech) to their location’s endonym. For example, 溫州話 (Wu Chinese: [ʔy˧꜖ tɕiɤu˧꜖ ɦo˩꜒꜔]) is used for Wenzhounese.

    Also, a bit more detail: Suzhou actually formed the basis for Shanghainese. After all, Shanghai was a nondescript fishing village until relative recently:

    The Suzhou dialect was the prestige dialect of Wu as of the 19th century and it formed the basis of Wu’s koiné dialect, Shanghainese, at the turn of the 20th century.

    At any rate, the to-and-fro between me and Hat was based on a misunderstanding. I was pointing out the distorting effects of the nation-state and “national languages” (à l’européenne), not asserting that Cantonese is a dialect of Mandarin. I’m sorry that wasn’t clear from my rather rambling initial comments.

  41. David Marjanović says

    And I am surprised by your claim that there are no clear boundaries in continental West Germanic: I thought the isoglosses separating Low from Middle, and Middle from [Upper] German dialects were quite clear-cut over most of German-speaking Europe.

    They are – but they don’t line up with much of anything else; they aren’t gaps in the dialect continuum. Using the various extents of the High German consonant shift as the defining criteria for these large-scale divisions is arbitrary, and any alternative would be arbitrary as well.

    Here is a bit of a glimpse at this. (The English article is less detailed.) Most of the isoglosses listed there do concern the HG consonant shift, but the Boppard Line only does so in a wide sense that has largely fallen out of fashion, the two southernmost ones are marked “Middle/Upper German boundary” and “Middle/Upper German boundary (obsolete)”, and the text immediately above the table says the line between Low Franconian and Westphalian is a rather noticeable morphological isogloss, the “unity plural line”, north of which there’s only a single plural verb ending without number distinctions (like in Old English) – though Switzerland also has a “unity plural”. Things like the loss of the simple past in the south, the unrounding of the rounded front vowels in most of the area or the various interactions or lack thereof of vowel quantity & quality are not mentioned.

  42. @Bathrobe, (just a suggesion) two terms seem dubious to me:

    1. “standard langauge”. In Russian we usually say “literary language” and the term is often used imprecisely. Football commenters speak “literary Russian”. Similarly, in English people usually say “standard”, but what they mean is often not the standard.

    We should be avare of this, and I am not sure if it is the standard that creates the Cantonese identity. Maybe it is, but maybe it is better when our terms allow us to formulate and answer such questions.
    People identify literary Persian as “language”, but people do not usually call it a “standard”.

    2. “national language”.

    As I understand: it is a victim of homogenization policies and practices associated with the ideology of “nation state” (nationalism?). It is about what people do to a langauge – but does it makes this language a characteristic system that can be called “a national langauge”?

    In the contexts like “The official language of Ghana is… ” or “The national language of Ghana is… ” it is fine. Like with “standard langauge”, you can’t really translate it to Russian – we call it a state language.
    But it does not mean that it is a kind of a langauge.

    – How much Russian itself would change if universities in Dagestan began to teach in Dargwa/Avar/Kumyk/Lezgian or Arabic and Persian?
    – What about Algeria whose state langauge (in Russian terms) is mostly “Arabic” (Berber is recognized too), and Arabic is a system that includes a Wenyan-like acrolect?
    – Or conversely, is not the language policy of Belarus similar to those associated with “national langauges” even though it is Belarussian nationalists who were expelled together with Belarussian?

    Of course, the concept of nation state à la française exists (outside of Switzerland…:)) and yes, for many it is tempting to say that as Morocco is a nation they all should now start learnign Moroccan.

    I am just not sure if “national langauge” is a thing.

  43. David Marjanović says

    Unity plural with a nice map, though it glosses over details that are irrelevant in this context, e.g. the 2pl ending in the Bavarian dialects isn’t /t/ but /ts/.

  44. At any rate, the to-and-fro between me and Hat was based on a misunderstanding. I was pointing out the distorting effects of the nation-state and “national languages” (à l’européenne), not asserting that Cantonese is a dialect of Mandarin. I’m sorry that wasn’t clear from my rather rambling initial comments.

    And eventually we got it all straightened out — that’s the magic of LH conversations!

  45. David Eddyshaw says

    I am just not sure if “national language” is a thing

    Depends on the “nation.”

    English is the “official” language of Ghana. But if you speak Twi/Fante, you could cope pretty well everywhere in the south of the country without being proficient in English. Southern Ghanaians have an irritating habit of supposing that all Ghanaians can understand Twi, the more irritating because most Ghanaians actually can. Unlike English, even now.

    The official language of Nigeria is, likewise, English, though where I lived in Kano (a city with a population in the millions) the great majority of people couldn’t speak English and spoke only Hausa. Again, you can do pretty much anything you like locally (including taking a university degree) if you speak only Hausa and not English.

    In a perfectly rational Vulcan universe, the best choice for a national language in Nigeria would certainly be Nigerian Pidgin (a creole, despite the name), but it’s never going to happen. Not when the usual local name for the language is “Broken.”

  46. @David Eddyshaw, I mean, I am not sure if “national langauge” makes a distinctive kind of linguistic/sociolinguistic system, that one can say: “National langauges are usually such and such”.

    For example, that national langauges are usually like Russian (the acrolect is close to the vernacular and caused extreme levelling) and not like Arabic (the acrolect is like Classical Chinese and exists in complementary distribution with vernacular – which is a group of very diverse dialects that do NOT drift toward the acrolect, but are eaten by koines).

  47. @ drasvi

    Yes, my use of “national language” and “standard language” was rather sloppy. I was trying to capture the typically European situation of the standardised language (usually focussed on the written language) of the nation-state, e.g., English, French, Dutch, etc. Needless to say this formulation will not necessarily apply outside of Western Europe, and will not even always apply in Western Europe. It’s probably best to regard it as an “ideal” of some sorts (possibly a rather nasty kind of ideal) than as a reality.

  48. @Bathrobe, it is just that the matter is really confusing, so maybe extra precision is useful.
    And yes, I cam to the same formulation (an ideal).

    I agree that some sort of “one X to rule them all, one X to find them, One X to bring them all and in the darkness bind them” logic affects people’s decisions when it comes to states, with X being a language here.

    And there is this “in Uzbekistan live Uzbeks, speak Uzbek and write Uzbek”, so we have Uzbek dialects belonging to 3 different groups of Turkic (Oghuz-Kipchak-Karluk) and invisibility of Tajiki (and not only) speakers in cities like Bukhara (initially Tajik-speaking, still to a considerable extent Tajik-speaking in 1991, but no one has stats, because Uzbekisan speaks Uzbek).

  49. And I do think that the instinctive reaction of many people (not sure about German and Italian people) will be that supplying Moroccans with a “Moroccan” langauge to be taught in school is protecting their langauge rights, supporting diversity etc.
    And maybe ltierary Arabic is seen as on oppressor.

  50. Stu Clayton says

    If I were required to use it, I sure would see literary Arabic as an oppressor.

  51. Swiss German is a step towards the Moroccan situation.

  52. Ferguson ’59, sci-hub, Arabic, Greek, Swiss German, Haitian Creole.

  53. David Eddyshaw says

    And maybe literary Arabic is seen as an oppressor

    Every time I asked about what specifically people found difficult, they would give examples of problems with case endings. It is difficult to exaggerate Egyptians’ attention to and fear of the case system. There is an ever-present and all-pervasive consciousness about them. Hence while everyone knows that the tashkiil [i.e. iʕrāb endings] are of utmost importance in reading the Qur’an, their active use in other contexts is feared and disliked, as in grammar classes or at exam and composition times. (Haeri 2003:42)

    Cited on p70 of

    https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/ws/files/3772169/8852155.pdf

  54. J.W. Brewer says

    One might note that modern Turkish nationalism of the Ataturkist variety, which has not been salubrious for non-Turks living under Turkish rule, can be plausibly explained not only as an adaptation of a 19th-century European model but as a reaction to the decline and fall of the Ottoman “cosmopolis” in which Turkish-speakers disproportionately got to boss around a wide array of other sorts of folks over a wide geographical range much of which did not have much echt-Turkish population. Even if the Persicate cosmopolis was never a single political regime and involved a certain amount of “soft power” (as conquering regimes of non-Persian origin became Persicate as a badge of sophistication etc.), there might be a parallel.

  55. Those questions are decided by science; someone may be shocked to discover that the guy they assumed was their brother turns out, according to DNA analysis, not to be, but their shock does not change the situation.
    That is an example that privileges a genetic definition of who is a brother over any other, e.g. social (we were raised by the same parents) or legal – in the eye of the law, a child your parents adopted is your brother, whatever the DNA test says. Similarly, there are definitions of language vs. dialect that are not mainly based on linguistic distance, but include cultural criteria like use of the same Dachsprache. I mean, it’s fine that talking about such distinctions on a linguistics oriented blog in English, one preferably should use the definitions applicable in contemporary English linguistics, but pointing out that there are different definitions and they are used by people in different cultures isn’t exactly being a flat-earther.

  56. That is an example that privileges a genetic definition of who is a brother over any other, e.g. social (we were raised by the same parents) or legal – in the eye of the law, a child your parents adopted is your brother, whatever the DNA test says.

    Yes, I wrote carelessly — thanks for pointing out what I should have made clear.

    pointing out that there are different definitions and they are used by people in different cultures isn’t exactly being a flat-earther.

    Sure, but what I’m talking about is flat-out denying what is true according to the definitions applicable in contemporary English linguistics. In other words, I have no problem with someone saying “According to my/our understanding of language, it is a single language,” any more than with someone saying “He may not share my DNA, but he’s still my brother.” It’s when you get angry about the DNA test and claim it’s all lies that you become a flat-earther.

  57. According to my/our understanding of language, it is a single language,

    I too have no problem with people who say “according to my/our understanding of langauge, they are different langauges”.

    I also have no problem with people who say “they are two different langauges” in order to inform me that they are not mutually intelligible (but not in order to correct me when I call them “dialects”).

    Personally I do not have a “definition”. When “language” does the job (of conveying whatever information I want to convey to my addressee) I use it. When “dialect” does the same job better I use it. And sometimes by mood where both are fine.

  58. Makes sense.

  59. @langaugehat, I think we are speaking not about a word “language” (langauge is just anything that we speak) but something like the argument of “she speaks Xish”.

    I think (or hope) we both agree that words and concepts similar to this “Xish” existed for millenia.

    Do you think that people who used them meant the same thing as what you mean by “langauge”?
    In other words, do you think that the definition you use (I assume it is “collection of mutually intelligible dialects”) does not define a new concept that overlaps with pre-existing usage well but is still distinct, but rather refines the pre-existing concept, reveals what is a langauge par excellence?

    I am asking, because when science redefines preexisting names for kinds of things (“this is not a X [stone, flower, bird], it is Y [metal, ….]!”) people sometimes agree: we called it X because it looked like X. Now when you have explained and shared what you know, with this new information we find it more convenient to call it Y.

    But when you are proposing a strict definition for a somewhat different class of things, it is maybe better to use a new word. Using a pre-existing word (especially soemthing very fundamental and important for normal communication) would be disastrous: you either have endless and pointless arguments (like what we have) or you disrupt normal communication, or you just give up.

  60. Eh, there’s always arguments on both sides of whether to make up new terms or use old ones, and in this case I don’t think it would make sense to invent a new one (hyperglossic unit? linguistic concatenation??). People just have to live with the messiness as they do in physics (force, energy, etc.).

  61. I have no problem with messiness: using the old one is fine, as long as we agree that it is used in many ways.

    But if we are going to say “it is not a X, it is Y!”, or “scientifically it is X, not Y”, then I think you should use the old term if you can reasonably expect other speakers to agree with you (that it is X, not Y) after you have shared with them what you know about this object.

    Otherwise it is an argument about definitions, and it is better to use a new term. I think “scientifically, it is X” should be reserved to factual statements.

  62. David Eddyshaw says

    A lot of scientific statements are definitions. And a lot of factual statements are not scientific. So reserving “scientifically” for “factual statements, excluding definitions” is surely a non-starter.

  63. David Marjanović says

    A list of facts isn’t science, a hypothesis that explains them is…

  64. J.W. Brewer says

    Hmm, so now we can shift from “depends on what you mean by ‘language'” to “depends on what you mean by ‘science'”?

  65. David Eddyshaw says

    DM is right, of course.

    It occurs to me that there is an interesting corollary: science entails ignorance. An omniscient being (to whom all knowledge would, ex hypothesi, be immediately accessible, as a kind of infinite list of facts) would not be capable of science.

  66. Stu Clayton says

    Hmm, so now we can shift from “depends on what you mean by ‘language’” to “depends on what you mean by ‘science’”?

    Not to forget “depends on what you mean by ‘depends'”. Usually “complete dependence” is not meant, but rather something like “ignorance tempered with certainties of various kinds”.

  67. David Eddyshaw says

    Is “is” is?

  68. Stu Clayton says

    Well, “is” isses (Sein west), which is pretty close.

  69. Let’s say, I think anyone is at right to invent a definition of love. But saying “scientifically, what you call ‘love’ is not love…” is a bad idea.

  70. As I was driving home today, I was thinking about Heidegger’s sophistry about how Dasein cannot be used as the subject of ist, because Dasein is not part of das Man, and only for something from das Man can we say that such a thing “ist” something else.

  71. David Eddyshaw says

    Pah! A poor sort of language that would be. Now in Kusaal you can say:

    Ka bɔzugʋ kɛ ka fʋ tʋmim na?
    and why [linker] cause and you send.me hither
    “Why have you sent me here?” (Exodus 5:22)

    where bɔzug “why?” is the (focused) subject of “cause”: “And why has caused you to send me here?” Eat that, Heidegger!

  72. To get back to topolects. What languages are spoken in and around Wuzhou? I’ve listened to footage of the China Eastern Boeing 737 crash site, and what I hear is not like Cantonese at all. I have had a little listening practice of Cantonese, but this is unlike it at all. Is it Zhuang? It sounds more Vietnamese, which I also have a slight acquaintance with. The following link is for the Telegram channel Red News (http://t.me/+Toukke0XlHMyMDU6):

    https://t.me/c/1714863630/775

  73. @DE, have you ever heard a scientist tell to a milkmaid or economist who used the word “work” that “scientifically, it is not work. Work is ‘the energy transferred to or from an object via the application of force along a displacement’ and it is measured in joules, not hours“?

    I think no. I think it is because when scientists discuss work (mechanical) they have no reason to be manipulative.

    And they try to reduce confusion, not to add more of it.

  74. David Marjanović says

    Wikipedia on Wuzhou: “The dominant ethnic group in the prefecture-level city is Han Chinese but there are also Zhuang, Yao and others. Wuzhou traditionally belongs to the Cantonese cultural and linguistic region, so most people speak the Wuzhou dialect of Cantonese and Mandarin as a result of Central Government’s Mandarin promotion policy.”

  75. Usually when Chiense “dialects” are discussed, I think about other langauge families of China.

    As I understand it is not just Sinitic: if you speak Hani, you learn in school Hani, whether this Hani is mutually intelligible with your Hani or not.

  76. David Eddyshaw says

    And if you learn Dogon in school, you learn Toro-So, even if you actually speak Jamsay (which is not a dialect of Toro-So. Or vice versa.)

    Educational administrators like things to be tidy, even (especially?) when they’re not. Their hangups have no significance as far as the question of language vs dialect is concerned.

    [I’ve just realised that both components of the self-designation “Jamsay” are actually loanwords. It’s as bad as calling yourself “Welsh”, really.]

  77. I find her opposition of “(Diverse) Persian cosmopolis” and “(Homogeneous) modern nation-state” silly. Long before the rise of the nation-state (in theory or in practice) Persian had spread over a huge area *as an L1*, through a depressingly familiar mechanism of language spread: Military conquest associated with the spread of a religion (Islam, in this instance): in Central Asia, Afghanistan and South Asia in this particular case.

    You’ve got the *as an L1* part very specifically wrong. Nearly all of the empires that patronized and spread the Persian language, from the Ghaznavids to the Mughals to the Safavids to the Ottomans, were L2 speakers (mostly Turkic). Persian was cosmopolitan in most of those empires in that it was not the purview of any one particular ethnolinguistic group.

    Was this conquest and accompanying linguistic imposition somehow more acceptable because it was not done in the name of a nation-state?

    Unlike the totalizing scope of the modern nation-state, which often wipes out (or at least strives to wipe out) the L1 languages of its citizens, there was no such imperative in, say, Mughal India, in which the rulers themselves spoke Turkic and anyway did not care what languages were spoken on the streets in everyday life. Indeed even in Iran, 100 years ago the absolute majority of the country did not speak Persian as a L1 (probably most, who were illiterate, did not even speak it as an L2), and even today the modern nation-state of Iran is only 50% Persian-speaking. Your point that annihilation of linguistic diversity is something that does not require a nation-state is well-taken, but in Iran a millennium of being part of a Persianate cosmopolis did far less to erase linguistic diversity than a century of rule under a modern centralized nation-state has.

    Persian expansion outside Iran was (inter alia) at the expense of two languages which had themselves been supra-regional: Sogdian in Central Asia, and Sanskrit

    Sanskrit had, of course, long since ceased to be a living L1 by the time Persian came onto the scene. This replacement of Sanskrit with Persian cannot be compared to eg. the modern French state’s imposition of French at the significant expense of linguistic diversity in its territory.

    the spread of some supra-regional lingua francas took place via more peaceful means: the spread of Latin as a written language outside the borders of the Roman Empire (Ireland, Poland, Scandinavia, the Baltic lands…) was not caused by military conquest but by missionary activity.

    You might be interested to learn that much of the spread of Persian across Eurasia was similarly enabled by missionary activity.

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