The Economist’s “Johnson” column (see this 2010 post, in which I greeted its revival) is once again both intriguing and linguistically well-informed to a degree astonishing for a popular periodical in Young Americans are losing the southern accent:
Is the southern accent in decline? A recent study by four researchers from three universities, widely covered in the press, indicates that a prized and unique part of America’s linguistic culture may be under threat. As the Washington Post put it, “The Georgia drawl is fading, y’all.”
Accent shifts often accompany demographic ones. Americans began moving south in larger numbers in the 1960s. Southern cities boomed as a result. Naturally, people took their children along (including a young Johnson, who moved from Nebraska to Atlanta with his Georgian father and Wisconsin-born mother).
The study found that the southern accent is most common among baby-boomers, born from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, before the influx of migrants to the South ramped up. Among Generation X—people born from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s—the prevalence of southern sounds declines, as Georgia-born children socialised with transplants from northern cities like Boston and Chicago. The youngest Georgians, millennials and Generation Z, sound the least southern of all.
There is not a single southern sound. Linguists broadly distinguish “inland” and “lowland” accents—inland speakers are more likely to say raht for right, for example—and note local particularities. These are the accents of southern whites, which the study focuses on, even though southern white and black English dialects share many features, from vocabulary (“y’all” for the second-person plural, most famously) to grammar (eg, double negation: “I ain’t got none”).
The famous drawl is largely a matter of the “southern vowel shift”. Linguists classify vowels primarily by where the tongue is in the mouth when they are pronounced: the tongue can be low or high, and forward or back. (The rounding of the lips changes the sound, too.) In the southern shift, the vowel in kit, elsewhere pronounced with the tongue slightly raised, becomes higher. It also becomes a “diphthong”, or two vowels rapidly sliding one to the other: kee-it. And a vowel shift like the southern one tends to affect several vowels, because a change in one may risk confusion if another, similar vowel does not change too. So southern-shifted dress sounds a bit more like driss, and so on, with many vowels becoming “higher”.
But the researchers found that younger Georgians’ vowels are heading in the other direction, taking part in a wider vowel change occurring in America. Speakers who reflect this shift tend to pronounce cot and caught as homophones, and so another chain reaction takes place, and the vowels in kit, dress and trap are lowered (towards ket, drass and trop, though not all the way there).
The southern drawl is the most emblematic American voice: many people imitating a stereotypical American will adopt a twangy southern accent, though it is far from America’s most common. Nor is it ancient. The researchers found that speakers born around 1900 almost entirely lack the southern shift, which peaked two generations later. If you listen to a speaker born in 1894 (recorded for the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States and available online) you will hear a distinctive sound: certainly southern, but quite unlike the tones of a 70-year-old Georgian today. […]
Paul Reed, a linguist at the University of Alabama, notes that other research finds the accent more robust in rural areas. Metro Atlanta is not all of Georgia (though its boom and sprawl continues, and sometimes seems to threaten to consume the whole state). If some features of “Georgianness” decline from the accent, he says, it is entirely possible others will arise to replace them. […]
Thoughtful, balanced, lacking even a hint of apocalypse… what’s not to like? Thanks, cuchuflete! (The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States is online here, but I don’t know how to use their interface and find the speaker born in 1894.)
The Economist (to which I subscribe) is a bright light in a naughty world.
It had a nice article on Karl Marx’s abiding contributions to economics not long ago, and once featured the nice parenthetical explanation for non-Brit readers “,,, Nadine Dorries, a cabinet toady …”
I also fondly recall that in the week when lesser publications were all running obits of Steve Jobs, the Economist had a joint obit of Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist)
The WaPo article (María Luisa Paúl, “From Paula Deen to Julia Roberts, the Georgia drawl is fading, y’all).
The paper (Margaret Renwick et al., “Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English.” Open Access!)
BTW I have heard lowered DRESS without a lowered TRAP, getting close to a merger (but not quite).
That the vast majority of their speakers were from the metro Atlanta area (as seems clear from the “data” section) in the link Y thoughtfully provided), including some from a location that 100 years ago seemed quite distinct from the big city but then got consumed by suburban sprawl,* makes this of … somewhat limited interest. It is fairly obvious that the percentage of white Atlanta-metro residents whose parents/grandparents are not from anywhere where the Southern accent prevailed is quite high (including one of my first cousins, born near Pittsburgh, and her husband, born on Long Island). If you could document the same sort of shift (which perhaps you could, for all I know) out in more rural counties where there has been less inmigration, that would be more interesting.
*They say “exurb,” but it’s less than 15 miles from the present city limits.
Actually on closer rereading it sounds like the one set of speakers they had that may have had the most substantial representation of Georgians outside the metro Atlanta area was also by unhappy coincidence … the oldest set of recordings, with speakers with the earliest years of birth. Which they are comparing to younger cohorts that are also more Atlanta-heavy. Doesn’t sound like a good combination, although maybe there’s statistical mumbo-jumbo that could be done to try to account for the distortion you would expect from that …
Ouch. You’re right, that doesn’t sound like a good basis for their sweeping conclusions.
As A Southerner, I’m immediately skeptical of any supposed dialect analysis that uses the word “drawl.” To me it’s one of those words like “guttural.”
I know the language science is solid and the reportage seems to mostly be free of both-sidesism and Cletis Safaris, but I still wonder how much it is possible to separate this from the current battle for the soul of Georgia between ahistorical visions of a white utopia in the 1950s and a multi-cultural urban reality.
I know the language science is solid and the reportage seems to mostly be free of both-sidesism and Cletis Safaris,
Going a long way off topic, the above had me hunting for a definition of Cletis Safaris. Leading search engines were of little help. Finally, I found the following-
“This was the year the political media couldn’t stop reminding us of the forgotten Americans. All year long, outlets parachuted reporters into “Trump Country” to observe his voters in their habitat — “Cletus safari” is the derisive term of art — and the reporters returned with tenderly crafted soft-focus portrait after tenderly crafted soft-focus portrait of people aching to say the n-word.”
source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/media-trump-country_n_5a449e8ae4b025f99e199ef8
I know, it’s redundant to call any honest description of Trump supporters “derisive”, but there you have it.
And now, back to our program…
ETA-for an arguably less charitable description of Cletus et alia, have a look here:
https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2019/04/05/we-need-democratic-primary-cletus-safaris/
Hat, J. W. Brewer: A…a media outlet not specializing in linguistics coming to…to incorrect/baseless conclusions regarding some language matter?! I…I am shocked, shocked I tell you! Round up the usual suspects! By the way, where are my winnings?
Okay, on a more serious note:
Beyond the fact that the speaker sample is utterly unrepresentative, I think there is an ideological factor to consider: THE ECONOMIST is committed to the belief that less government is good for all: it will generate innovation, entrepreneurship, social mobility, make everyone richer…
In other words, in the world according to THE ECONOMIST, linguistic differences associated with such things as race and class are bound to disappear or at least become attenuated thanks to the benign intervention of Big Broth –err, I mean, the Communist Part –err, no, I mean, the infallible MARKET (Sorry, I occasionally have trouble keeping different totalitarian brands of lunacy apart).
So: Just how surprising is it that we find in its pages a claim that a distinctive albeit stigmatized linguistic feature (The “drawl”) is losing ground? Despite said claim being backed by “evidence” that is utterly unrepresentative?
Which leads me to make a prediction: As I have already mentioned at least once (Thirteen years ago! TEMPUS FUGIT…) here at Casa Hat, Labov in the late eighties made a case that black and white spoken English in Philadelphia were DIVERGING: Young speakers of White and Black English were linguistically further apart from one another than their grandparents were. And this was because of DE FACTO greater geographical segregation today (with the economic consequences this entails) between Blacks and Whites in the eighties than two generations earlier.
So, my prediction: if serious linguistic work were ever to show that such divergence was on the rise in either Britain or the United States, as a direct result of loss/reduction of geographical and/or social mobility, the writers of the “Johnson” column will quite assiduously do their utmost to ignore it.
P.S. Having once taught in the Canadian Prairies, at a post-secondary institution which attracted a fair number of indigenous (or, as we say in Canada, First Nations) students, I definitely sensed that their in-group English was more divergent from more mainstream/standard varieties than their parents’ or grandparents’. And unfortunately, inasmuch as the DE FACTO indigenous-white apartheid (There is no better word) in the Canadian prairies shows no sign of ending (Indigenous life expectancy in Alberta dropped by seven years since 2020), I suspect this divergence, if it is indeed real, will accelerate.
Cletus (Anacletus) was the third pope, after Peter and Linus. His name hasn’t caught on quite as well as theirs.
@Etienne, Afrikaans (and many other languages) appeared because inequality can lead to convergence (and perhaps different modes of it may encourage divergence).
Speaking of, are there any black communities where Afrikaans is the majority first language?
It’s a few years since I was a regular reader of The Economist, but I didn’t find its libertarian bias too heavy handed. FWIW it has often endorsed centrist electoral candidates over rightists.
Rodger: to be fair, the original paper speaks of the Southern Vowel Shift, not of “drawl”.
Etienne: As much as I dislike rich people telling the poor why the free-market economy is wonderful, I don’t see any connection between The Economist’s economic outlook and this article. Johnson, as Hat says in the linked post, writes popular articles about various language topics, and well at that. The plutes who presumably read and edit the magazine don’t know enough to associate sociolinguistics with economics, even if they were inclined to pull strings.
As one who finds the New Statesman annoyingly right-wing*, and is probably hypersensitive to plutocrat-toadying bias in the media, I think I can say that the Economist is admirably even-handed in general, and it often explicitly tells you that it is adopting a particular economic view when it does so.
It is also much more interested in and informed about world affairs outside the US and Europe than most newspapers.
They also remind me of a lost age when Republicans were not all closet Fascists and Conservatives did not regard race-baiting as acceptable electioneering behaviour. Once there were decent right-wingers: may their time come again soon!
* Also, smug and boring. But I’m bitter because I forgot to cancel my annual subscription in time.
I agree with mollymooly, Y, and DE re the Economist.
A reference in the article got me to Joey Stanley’s dissertation on vowel shifts in the Pacific Northwest. Apart from finding the subject matter interesting (analysis of vowel trajectories), I am pleased that the U. of Georgia accepts dissertations with such nice typography (even margin notes and hanging punctuation), instead of the usual dreary double-spaced Times New Roman.
The plutes who presumably read … the magazine
Sadly, I don’t seem to get invited to parties by the other plutes. I mean, I’d turn down the invitation, of course, but it would be nice to be asked.
@Y, “Coloureds” of Karoo are basically Hottentots. Malays are “Coloureds” too.
If you don’t include Hottentots, then I’m not surprised if there are other African communities counted as “Coloured”.
DE, you reminded me my freind’s complaint at a friend of our friends. The first thing I ever heard from that girl was that she just tried lesbian sex.
The first thing my friend heard from her (when they entered a lift) was “I recently tried lesbian sex. I considered you, but then I changed my mind.”
(she a children psychologist, by the way).
(I’m male, my freind is female and heterosexual, the girl is also female)
So what my friend felt was “I never was attracted to women, but starting a conversation with ‘I don’t want you’, is not it a bit discouraging?”
As to The Economist and its readership, as a general matter nothing more need be said than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KJSnd8VzQw Because of the Economist’s cultish hostility to bylines, I’m not 100% sure if the Johnson column is still the output of Robert Lane Greene, but I have a generally positive impression of him based on internet comments published under his own name on linguistics blogs and the one time I saw him speak at a public event.
Turning to the underlying paper, I think it’s entirely reasonable for the researchers to try to remove race as a variable in a given analysis, since at least in the U.S. race does correlate (on average, not in 100% of individuals) with variations in accent and other ideolect features, and it can be useful to try to do a study with fewer variables rather than more variables, ideally under circumstances where it’s reasonable to suppose that other researchers will be looking at the speech of those you are deliberately excluding from your study to keep the focus narrow. As to their overall methodology, when I read the relevant section again I find myself even more confused about how they did and didn’t analyze: out of the 242 Georgians in the LAGS study, did they only look at the 19 who were long-term residents of Roswell, or did they also look at others who lived at a greater distance from Atlanta? It’s possible depending on the answer to that that some of my upthread critique was unjustified, but in that case poor marks for explaining clearly what you were doing.
In prior times, even though the South was known to be Extremely Wicked in racial matters (as those of us who grew up white in the North were taught from infancy) black and white language varieties were much more similar in the South than in the North — because most Northern blacks were recent-ish immigrants from the South or the children of the same who due to various factors, including social barriers in the North, had not assimilated to the local language variety the way that the children of Southern internal migrants tended to. If that pattern has shifted (because Southern white speech is less distinct from Northern white speech while black speech remains as distinct as ever) that would be INTERESTING, regardless of what social/political/etc. story you might tell about it. Is that in fact the case? I dunno, more research needed.
DE, I should have written, “those plutes who presumably read…” I blame articles and their relative clause sympathizers.
Sadly, I don’t seem to get invited to parties by the other plutes.
We may well think you are not a plutocrat, but it is safe to suppose that you are a plutonist.
Is that in fact the case?
The WP article “Southern American English”, says: “The [2006] Atlas of North American English identified Atlanta, Georgia, as a dialectal ‘island of non-Southern speech’ […] best described today as sporadic from speaker to speaker, with such variation increased due to a huge movement of non-Southerners into the area during the 1990s.” So yes.
(Charleston and Savannah are also islands within the Southern dialect continuum, which otherwise stretches from all-but-westernmost Texas eastward across southern Oklahoma, southern Missouri, then following the Ohio River, then across northern West Virginia through southern Maryland, then southward as far as northern Florida.)
it is safe to suppose that you are a plutonist
Are you implying that I come from Yuggoth?
It sounds like my Security Head could do with a new brain. The current one has failed me for the last time.
No, merely that you believe in the origin of at least some rocks from volcanic eruptions, as opposed to neptunists who believe that all oceanic rocks are sedimentary. There are probably no neptunists left. (In actual fact I just looked for words with plut-.)
OK.
You’re not just saying that out of fear? (It seems a bit thin …)
By the way, if you don’t really need your brain at present, We do have some unique opportunities available. Travel, meet interesting beings. People. Interesting people. Yes.
Checked the first appearance of “mumbo-jumbo”:
___________________________________
(1730)
{Language} – THE most general Language is Mundingoe, by which Name the Country and People are call’d : If you can speak that Language, you may travel from the River’s Mouth up to the Country of Joncoes (alias Merchants 😉 so call’d from their buying every year a vast Number of Slaves there, and bringing them down to the lower Parts of this River to sell to the White People: Which Country, I believe, cannot by all Reports be less than 6 Weeks Journey from James Fort.
THE next Language moftly us’d here is call’d Creole Portuguese, a bastard Sort of Portuguese, scarce understood in Lisbon; but it is sooner learnt by Englishmen than any other Language in this River, and is always spoken by the Linguists, which serve both the separate Traders and the Company. The two foregoing Languages I learnt whilst in the River.
{Author learns it.} – THE Arabick is spoken by the Pholeys, and by most of the Mahometans in the River, tho’ Mundingoes; but those who can write Arabick, are very strict at their
{Sobriety.} Devotions 3 or 4 Times a Day, and are very sober and abstemious in their way of Living,chusing rather to dye than drink strong Liquors, and rather fast than eat any Thing which is not kill’d by one of their own Way of
{Superftition.} Thinking. They have a great Veneration paid them by all the Mundingoes ; insomuch that if any of them are ill, they apply to a Mahometan for Cure ; but not by inward Potions, as any one would reasonably imagine, but they put so much Faith in them, that they desire them only to write a sort of a Note on a small piece of Paper, for them to wear about them, imagining that as they have a Paper about them written by a Holy Man, no Ill can happen to them, or continue long with them : But the worst of it is, that they pay a great Price for these Papers ; by which
{Busherines.} – means the Mahometans, commonly call’d Busherines, are generally richer, and have greater Plenty of Things about them, than the Generality of the Mundingoes
AMONGST the Mundingoes there is a Cant Language, entirely unknown to the Women, being only spoken by the Men, and is seldom us’d by them in any other Discourfe than concerning a dreadful Bug-
{Mumbo-Jumbo.} – bear to the Women, call’d Mumbo-Jumbo, which is what keeps the Women in Awe: And tho’ they should chance to understand this Language, yet were theMen to know it, they would certainly murder them.
BESIDES the foregoing Languages there are alfo others which every Kingdom has peculiar to itself; such is that of the Floops, Banyoons, Jolloiffs and Bumbrongs; the latter of which are very distant from the River; in the Merchants Country.
________________
And also a proper description of M-J.
A very early use of the winking emoji.
I forgot to add
@John Cowan: Plutonic rock is actually not volcanic. It is the other type of igneous rock formation, created when material from the mantle solidifies first and then is uplifted through the crust to the (near) surface. Essentially, of the two types of igneous rocks, volcanic rock is solidified lava, while plutonic rock is solidified magma. (I first learned this distinction from a movie we watched in seventh grade Earth Science class. I was surprised that the brought up this rather obscure distinction in what was otherwise a very basic presentation about rock types.)
Is it more accurate to say (at least when it comes to mainstream currently-living geologists) that everyone is now a Plutonist (making the point somewhat trivial) or that no one is a Plutonist? It may potentially be akin to whether modern astronomers are or aren’t “Copernican” – they all agree with Copernicus on the big-picture issue that distinguished him from many/most prior astronomers, but none of them accept all the details of his then-novel account.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/15/are-we-reyt-the-course-that-aims-to-revive-the-yorkshire-dialect
I would say that when a speech form becomes the object of middle-class hobbyist classes, its doom is inevitable: this criterion is, however, unaccountably missing from
https://ich.unesco.org/doc/src/00120-EN.pdf
(Unfortunately, in some respects this is somewhat near to the bone with regard to Welsh: there is a definite bourgeois cast to many efforts to preserve the language.)
Dimbleby himself seems to be a pretty sophisticated type as far as the linguistics goes, though (as far as one can tell through the miasma of journalistic silliness,)
I grew up on Lassie Come-Home and The Flying Yorkshireman. Granted, Eric Knight is no Walter Scott or RLS, but he’s extremely readable. For the most part the dialogue is in dialect but the narration is not.
“Chusing rather to dye than drink strong Liquors” – one wonders if this dreadful choice was something often faced by those living along the Gambia? Maybe it was rare enough for having greater Plenty of Things about them while alive to make up for it?
I interpreted that as rhetorical (people staunchly saying “I would rather die than…”) as opposed to a report on actual fatalities.
I gather that there have been juridical opinions among West African Muslims that traditional millet beer does not count when it comes to the prohibition on alcohol: this may be at the back of “strong Liquors.” So, not so bad …
I suspect that with the ongoing homogenisation of the world these things may have been brought into line with Muslim practice elsewhere nowadays, though.
There are anecdotes (I have not investigated the scholarly literature or archival documentation) that when the U.S. imprudently decided to experiment with the national prohibition of “intoxicating liquors” a bit over a century ago, many supporters of the ban assumed it would not be applied to beer. But once the constitutional amendment was adopted, the implementing legislation was then controlled by the more fanatical subset of the winning political coalition. And to be fair there’s the practical problem that even though it’s more time-consuming and bladder-burdening to get extremely intoxicated with beer than with whiskey, some folks who are deprived of access to whiskey will make do with what they can get.
>“Chusing rather to dye than drink strong Liquors”
I chose to interpret it along the lines of the goof on “eat shit and die” — eat dye and shit funny colors.
Not really, but it was an odd enough build-up, coming before the much milder “and rather fast than eat”, that my mind did search for alternatives.
the ongoing homogenisation of the world
And the ongoing stringency crisis in the orthopraxis of whatever religion.
Which is interesting itself. Why have religions that were loosey-goosey in the 19th century gotten all harsh and prescriptive? It’s almost as if the Whig interpretation of history is false!
Why have religions that were loosey-goosey in the 19th century gotten all harsh and prescriptive?
Perhaps because in the 19th century (or indeed up through the 1950s), church attendance was socially expected. When people could just leave, the churches had to start preaching something other than dressed-up secular liberalism.
For Pete’s sake, “dressed-up secular liberalism” has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. I was thinking specifically of Islam and Hinduism, both of which used to tolerate wide varieties of both belief and practice, but not either secularism or liberalism (in the sense you probably intend). I was certainly not thinking of Christianity, which was not notably loosey-goosey in the 19th century.
There are two competing narratives:
1. Religions in general have gotten more loosey-goosey, except for those which haven’t.
versus
2. Religions in general have gotten more strict and doctrinaire, except for those which haven’t.
Before modern communications and transportation etc., many believers were probably blissfully unaware as to how deviant their nominal co-believers in other parts of the world were from the locally normative belief and practice, which could naively be assumed to be universal. The loss of that blissful ignorance is probably one driver toward greater uniformity, although the shape that uniformity will then take is determined by other factors, one of which is that the more loosey-goosey types are often less likely to put as much energy and passion into the relevant fights as their more hardline (or whatever you want to call it) opponents. Unless of course there are powerful secular forces also involved, such as perhaps Ataturk deciding for his own reasons that the imams really needed to tone down the “no one should be drinking booze” messaging and being able within his domains to have his will effectuated. The extent to which clergy-or-equivalents are more geographically mobile than they used to be and are more likely to have been trained/socialized in larger institutions which attuned them to the current wave of doctrinal fashion (which might be hardline as easily as it might be loosey-goosey) rather than staying socialized to the norms of their childhood village is probably also a factor.
I think myself that it’s a sign of weakness; a response to the threat of “liberalism” by people who, deep down, don’t really believe that they really have a proper answer, so they resort to bluster, attempted or successful coercion and (sometimes) violence.
I’m with Tiberius: deorum injuriae, dis curae. If God is great, he has no need of people going round punishing blasphemy. Therefore, to go round taking it on yourself to do so, is to doubt God’s power and providence. Perilously close to blasphemy in fact …
It’s not accidental, I think, that some of the loudest “Christian” critics of Godless Western society are such evident thumping hypocrites. It’s to be expected.
Intolerant “religion” also flourishes because it is politically useful. In democracies, it can be a useful way for the billionaires who have bought up right-wing parties to craft laws for their own benefit to stir up fear and hatred in the populace in the hope that they will vote for the shill parties against their own interests, For out-and-proud autocracies the usefulness is obvious: the dynamic is the same as encouraging xenophobic nationalism.
Pouring money into supporting a “religion” works. The Saudis have been exporting Wahhabism for years, to considerable effect in corrupting Muslims elsewhere.
On the other hand, the more repellent aspects of some strands within modern Islam are surely a response to Western colonialism and imperialism. (Another aspect of weakness.)
In the U.S. context I would slightly disagree with Rodger C’s phrasing. It’s not so much that specific churches turned away from the path of loosey-gooseyness and moved in the other direction – it’s that in a competitive marketplace, once the strong social norms that made people feel like they ought to go to some church, any church (rather than no church) faded, the more loosey-goosey churches started losing members at a disproportionate rate such that the less loosey-goosey churches which had previously seemed more marginal then increased their relative market share. Some of the more loosey-goosey churches then convinced themselves that they needed to double down on the loosey-gooseyness in order to present a more distinct brand alternative in the marketplace, but at least in raw demographic numbers (which may not be the metric the Holy Ghost is most interested in, of course) that was an unsuccessful strategy, as can be seen by looking at the trendlines in average Sunday attendance etc. for virtually all of the once-dominant “mainline” Protestant denominations in the U.S.
I don’t know the extent to which a parallel dynamic may have obtained in certain historically non-Christian parts of the world. Has the percentage of the population of a large city like Cairo or Karachi that feels a social obligation to go to some mosque, any mosque on Friday materially decreased over the last few generations? If so, how has that affected the relative market share of the more loosey-goosey mosques compared to the less loosey-goosey ones?
J.W. Brewer, thanks, that was exactly what I was trying to get at in my (all too usual) overcompressed way. And no, I wasn’t thinking on a worldwide basis, but in terms of what I’ve spent a lifetime observing in my vicinity.
As for the Big World, I suspect that as liberalism (in the economic sphere especially) turns out not to have been the panacea it was advertised as, and the “socialist” world has collapsed, a lot of people are feeling that it’s time to Get Serious about something, and are reaching toward what they were taught once upon a time.
On the other hand, the more repellent aspects of some strands within modern Islam are surely a response to Western colonialism and imperialism. (Another aspect of weakness.)
What is the weakness, repellency or imperialism ? Weakness on whose part, Islamists or Westernists ?
Fighting fire with fire is not an available option in this case, I think. Fighting colonialism and imperialism with colonial imperialism is for the big boys, not the pious.
a lot of people are feeling that it’s time to Get Serious about something, and are reaching toward what they were taught once upon a time.
That’s what I see as well – except that Getting Serious About Religion doesn’t seem to happen in Germany and many other Western European countries. The impudently 14-year-old Gretchen brought this up 200 years ago:
Nun sag’, wie hast du’s mit der Religion?
Du bist ein herzlich guter Mann,
Allein ich glaub’, du hältst nicht viel davon.
Calling all literate Germans ! Is that “wie hast du’s mit” an (the?) original wording ? I find it sometimes quoted as “wie hältst du’s mit“, which is what I would expect her to say nowadays, Cologne-bound as I am. Is this one of those annoying textual variant things ? Is there a dialectal “wie hast du’s mit” ?
Christianity […] was not notably loosey-goosey in the 19th century.
Not in the U.S., no, but things were much more variable in Europe.
The case I understand best is the Jewish one, where the stringency crisis takes the form of rivalry between the followers of different rebbes. “Our rebbe has kept kosher every day of his life, even when he was ill!” “Our rebbe not only keeps perfect kosher, he eats no meat!” “Hah! OUR rebbe, I say, is so zealous for the Law he does not eat at all!” And of course, what the leaders do, the followers do.
But there is no overall Jewish trend, which is why I didn’t mention Judaism.
There is in the U.S. at present an arguable trend of decreasing loosey-goosey market share among those identifiable as Jewish in some affirmatively religious sense, which may be sufficiently explained by a significant differential in birth rates between the less loosey-goosey demographic and the more loosey-goosey demographic. OTOH, this trend may be particularly noticeable in the NYC area where I live, so it’s possible that it doesn’t quite net out that way nationally and my perspective is distorted.
Some of the more loosey-goosey churches then convinced themselves that they needed to double down on the loosey-gooseyness in order to present a more distinct brand alternative in the marketplace
I think they didn’t understand that their real market competitors weren’t conservative churches but non-institutional spirituality, which they were becoming barely distinguishable from, except for institutionality. And therefore roof repairs, etc.
There is more than nothing to the claim that Wahhabism and Hindutva are unintended consequences of imperial colonialism. And that neocons enlisted theocons with tax avoidance (and undoing of post-war leveling in general) as the main goal.
“ I was thinking specifically of Islam and Hinduism, both of which used to tolerate wide varieties of both belief and practice, but not either secularism or liberalism”
@LH, could you clarify, what do you mean by “harsh and prescriptive”?
I just don’t know what dimensions of life you classify as “this is what Islam did not tolerate”, which ones are “here Islam became more prescriptive” and which ones are “here Islam is less prescriptive”…
There is more than nothing to the claim that Wahhabism and Hindutva are unintended consequences of imperial colonialism.
Has anyone claimed that they were intended consequences ? I’m guessing you mean a claim that they arose in large part as a reaction to colonialism, instead of having just growed, like Topsy. To Wahhabism and Hindutva one could add post-colonial studies, of which Queen Victoria would have disapproved.
How curious, the innocuous comment I just posted was shunted directly into moderation. I wonder if that was triggered by the word T*o*p*s*y.
@LH, could you clarify, what do you mean by “harsh and prescriptive”?
I just don’t know what dimensions of life you classify as “this is what Islam did not tolerate”
Beheadings for apostasy are a good example. Do you really have no idea what I mean by “harsh and prescriptive”?
OTOH, this trend may be particularly noticeable in the NYC area where I live, so it’s possible that it doesn’t quite net out that way nationally and my perspective is distorted.
Perhaps., But this Jerusalem Post opinion piece suggests that the desire for stringency is increasingly common. The author is a philosopher committed to the idea that the unexamined life is not worth living; nonetheless he teaches young adults spending a year in Israel (presumably mostly from the U.S.) and discusses the dangers of mindless stringency. The punchline is: “My students, therefore, are trying to make things harder on themselves in an attempt to find a God that was pretty much absent from the last 18 years of their lives. Let’s hope they learn more productive ways of finding Him.”
as a reaction to colonialism
More than that. Not to make it either/or, but ideas like, “The House of Saud and the Great Game,” or “Was Hinduism Invented?”
Was Hinduism invented?
Huh. Inventors everywhere, but no registered patents. Collaborative inventions.
@LH, thank you!
I thought I did, but then you wrote “…but not either secularism or liberalism”, and I was confused.
I assumed that by intolerance to liberalism and secularism you exactly mean that Islam could be intolerant to some things – but not others.
My own understanding is fragmentary: I know that some modern Muslim countries are like this (e.g. Tatarstan in Russia, where wearing hijab is viewed with disapproval – or Kazakhstan) and others are like that (speaking of apostasy, e.g. recently mentioned Comoros).
I guess, many would exclude countries like Kazakhstan from the list of Muslim countries (when Tunisia allowed Muslim women marry people of other religions, al-Azhar excluded Tunisia) and you don’t mean Kazakhstan either – but there is still a deal of variation.
Similalry, I know that Mihrab is almost 19th century, and also that in Bukhara singing was banned.
Add slavery – Muslims can’t keep Muslims in slavery, so slavery aquires a religious dimension (and we then face the general problem of telling the situation with human rights in general in a society from specifically religious (in)tolerance).
But all of this is just sequence of fragments. I don’t know what Islam “in general” is, what it used to be and how it changes.
The idea that you first would think of a broad range of local religious traditions and practices as a semi-coherent whole called “Hinduism” only in reaction to coming under the rule of foreigners with a traditionally-coherently-conceptualized monotheistic religion seems plausible, but it’s less plausible to assume it only suddenly happened when the Brits arrived since the previous many centuries of conquest and rule by Muslim foreigners would, you think, have provided the same stimulus. Of course, one of the controversial-in-some-quarters things about Hindutva is that they are just as resentful of historical Moghul etc. rule as they are of the British rule that replaced it.
For Hinduism I don’t have even a fragmentary understanding.
I think under Ottoman rule supposed apostates were at least sometimes executed by hanging, although I’m not sure that I would point to the substitution of beheading for hanging as a key indicator of increasing stringency.
The idea that you first would think of a broad range of local religious traditions and practices as a semi-coherent whole called “Hinduism” only in reaction to coming under the rule of foreigners with a traditionally-coherently-conceptualized monotheistic religion seems plausible
I don’t know about Hinduism, but I think this is very true of the traditional “religious” beliefs of peoples like the Kusaasi.
The scare quotes unfortunately make it look as if I’m implying that these beliefs amount to something lesser than a “real” religion, but I really mean “other”: calling them “religion” is imposing a Western category which fits quite poorly.
(I’ve linked to Tony Naden’s relevant paper before: I don’t agree with all of it, but he makes some very good points, I reckon.)
https://www.academia.edu/52252623/Ancestor_Non_worship_in_Mampruli
I think under Ottoman rule supposed apostates were at least sometimes executed by hanging
Sure, this was always an available option — I didn’t mean to imply they were adherents of Thelema! But I think you’ll find it was accompanied by a more general tolerance of various forms of Islam that has utterly disappeared in the Wahhabi Wasteland.
“We still execute actual self-identified apostates but we have a more generous view than the Wahhabis of how many different ways of being a self-identified Muslim qualify as non-apostasy.” Obviously there was e.g. a transitional period in English history when certain Non-Conforming Protestants began to get an improved legal status still not available to Catholics and Jews etc., but we perhaps feel more positive about that in hindsight because it was a waystation to even greater tolerance, not an endpoint.
It also could and perhaps should have made it more practicable for the C of E to be less internally loosey-goosey because the opportunities to be loosey-goosey outside the C of E were greater, although it may not have actually played out that way. A situation in which everyone in the kingdom must be a nominal adherent of the One True Religion creates considerable political/social pressure for the OTR to take a pretty latitudinarian attitude toward what its minimum requirements are, so that proto-dissident groups can remain internal factions rather than external schismatics.
@LH, wait, then you exactly mean “tolerant to this, but not that” (and we need to define and draw the line between this and that).
And you don’t mean modern Islam, you mean militant Salafi groups…
calling them “religion” is imposing a Western category which fits quite poorly
Not exactly Western. Compare the institutionallization of “Donyi-Poloism” (‘Sun-Moonism’) in Arunachal Pradesh, with the encouragement of the authorities (e.g., and e.g.) In that case, I’m guessing, the categorization as a religion is meant to give a single point of resistance to Christian missionaries, as well as an easily digested cultural item for the tourists.
And you don’t mean modern Islam, you mean militant Salafi groups…
No, I mean the very populous countries that are enabling the militant Salafi groups and spreading intolerance to even more populous countries like Indonesia that were historically not that way at all.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (32 millions residents) or someone else?
Usually when someones says “the very populous country” I think about Egypt.
___
Anyway, yes there is such a thing as spread of intolerant ideologies.
One interesting question in the history of South Asian religion is when Sikhism (or “Sikhism,” if you prefer) became a distinct “religion” of its own that is by definition other-than-Hindu rather than just being one of many idiosyncratic groups within the broad Hindu spectrum. The timeline might be a bit different depending on whether you’re focused on the internal understanding of adherents or the perception of outsiders, I suppose. But in any event I think that may have taken a century or three from the time of the first Sikh guru to fully happen, but was still a fait accompli before the Brits were really sufficiently in power to be imposing their own classificatory schemes on others. Although the Muslim invasions had started before the time of the first guru and Muslim rulers may have had their own motives for wanting to keep track of different subgenres of non-Muslim subjects and potential subjects.
Although I suppose you could say that as with Buddhism and Jainism before it, the fact that something arising out of the “Hindu” matrix eventually became distinct enough to definitely be its own “religion” doesn’t mean that everything-else-left-behind-in-that-matrix forms a single coherent -ism of its own.
@LH, but I also know young Muslims who are at once enthusiastic about religion and are as liberal as I am.
I have Arabic speakers in mind, but I’m from USSR – a country that taught that religion is a supersition, whose population, Muslim, Christian or Jewish, was extremely curious about religion – so when people come in religion not in search of “strictness” but for something else, it is unsurpising for me.
What I want to say is that religion, when it is a source of inspiration (I’m not using it as a “good” word: I apply it to ISIS as well) and change and is associated with movements, is not always intolerant.
Yes, of course; nobody said it was. I’m talking about trends. Personal anecdotes are an entirely different matter.
@LH, and I exactly mean that it is not the only trend.
Especially it is true for Arab nationalist states that imposed secularisation (I remind that Bourguiba even tried to get rid of Ramadan): Arab spring is associated with religion, but then one girl who puts on hijab (or a boy who wears a beard) is concerned with human righs while the other would be willing to supports some other form of oppression. Both oppose the dictator.
Anyway, this picture: “modern Islam is stricter” simply does not match my subjective perception.
First, many Russians – and I mean Russians like me, not xenophobes – are islamophobic. Why?
Becuase almost all we hear about Islam in and since childhood is either the history of conquests (which Christians are about as much enthusiastic about as Muslims Arabs are about the Crusades or colonialism or fall of Granada) or the general image of an excessively strict religion.
If you think that strictness means spirituality, you may like it.
If you have more liberal preferences, then the only bright spot is 1001 nights:)
This image of strictness, it is familar from my Soviet childhood. It certainly did not refer to the Salafi.
And second what I wrote above: the Saudi version is influential, yes, but it has not “won”, and it does not exist in an universe where everyone is either “traditional” or “Salafi”, it is not the only “modern” trend. Perhaps it (alongside with more traditional communities) is just better represented in the news.
@DE The scare quotes [around “religion”] unfortunately make it look as if I’m implying that these beliefs amount to something lesser than a “real” religion, but I really mean “other”: calling them “religion” is imposing a Western category which fits quite poorly.
I’m always bemused visiting Taiwan: Taoism and Confucianism are nominally distinct religions, but indistinguishable to my eyes. Nearly every Taoist/Confucian temple has a corner which acknowledges the other, and another alcove with a few Buddhas. Every Buddhist temple has a Taoist/Confucian corner. All of them honour Mazu — who also has dedicated temples (where “dedicated” includes a corner for every of the other lot.)
Shrines/small temples in the cities are outposts of some major temple, in beautiful settings in the mountains or overlooking impressive clifftops/seascapes. On public holidays, organised bus tours go from the suburbs to those major temples for honouring some local sub-deity. But just to be on the safe side, the bus will call in at at least half a dozen other temples/beautifully-sited shrines of a variety of allegiances.
This is stark contrast to growing up in Britain, where Anglicans never went inside Catholic churches, nor v.v. (Catholics weren’t even allowed into historic Cathedrals — despite them having been Catholic originally.) My brother married into a huge Catholic family; and I was up for giving a reading; but the priest strongly vetoed Kahlil Gibran.
As @DE points out, I have no reason to think the Taoist/Confucian/Buddhist/Mazu-adherents are less than genuine in their beliefs or are somehow ‘shopping around’. Religious observance is something you *do*, not something you pontificate about.
Yes, exactly, and that’s one of the many things I loved about Taiwan — the political discourse may have been frozen into irreconcilable factions, but religion was delightfully ecumenical.
We can’t, however, expect a Calvinist to truly appreciate ecumenicalism…
Calling all literate Germans ! Is that “wie hast du’s mit” an (the?) original wording ? I find it sometimes quoted as “wie hältst du’s mit“, which is what I would expect her to say nowadays, Cologne-bound as I am. Is this one of those annoying textual variant things ? Is there a dialectal “wie hast du’s mit” ?
The text at Gutenberg has hast du’s. The Faust edition I read is at my mother’s place, so if it’s very important to check that there are no variants, I can do that about a month from now when I plan to go up North and visit. But I guess that hältst du’s is due to misremembering / correction under influence of contemporary German usage. As Tucholsky said when considering to consult Goethe on a question of wording: es ist so weit bis zu diesen Bänden, vier Meter und hundert Jahre – make that 200 years now.
A Google Books search makes it pretty clear that it’s “hast.”
The stricter denominations in the US have been shrinking pretty quickly in the last two or so decades.
Oh, is that where the American peculiarity called light beer comes from?
It seems this is one of a long list of Goethe quotes that are usually given in an updated form. Standard German has changed a lot since then; a lot of what Goethe wrote comes across as idiomatically bizarre nowadays, and a noticeable amount is even flat-out ungrammatical today.
Amerika, du hast es besser
Als unser Continent, das alte
Hast keine verfallene Schlösser
…just… no.
@David Marjanović: No, American* light beer is lower calorie, not substantially less alcoholic. The traditional term for beers with lower alcohol is small beer, but both thr name and the beverage are basically obsolete.
* British light ale might have a different meaning. I don’t know.
“Small beer” is an archaism. The relevant 20th-century American jargon was “3.2 beer,” which in some states (not including any where I personally lived at a relevant time) was in a different and less restricted legal category from 1933 until fairly recent decades. “Light beer” emerged in the Seventies (when low-calorie everything first became faddish) and typically is somewhat less alcoholic than regular (what you might call “real”) beer, but generally a bit too alcoholic to fit into the 3.2 definition. (That as I understand it was <3.2% alcohol by weight, which roughly equates to <4% alcohol by volume.)
ETA: 3.2 beer was conceptually a product of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cullen%E2%80%93Harrison_Act, enacted shortly before Prohibition had been done away with, and thus some evidence of a loophole that could have been present from the commencement of the soi-disant Noble Experiment.
Near-beer was a jocular synonym.
Standard German has changed a lot since then; a lot of what Goethe wrote comes across as idiomatically bizarre nowadays, and a noticeable amount is even flat-out ungrammatical today.
A refreshing reminder that things ain’t what they used to be.
In contrast, what Shakespeare wrote is sometimes treated in informal discussions as if it were a data point of propriety. “This word/expression appears in Shakespeare, so there’s nothing wrong with using it today.” There is a kind of coy piety that if possible avoids saying “this is flat-out ungrammatical today”, and certainly does not dwell on it.
I thought near beer was even lower in alcohol that 3.2 beer (which I have heard of but never actually encountered; I associate it mentally with early 2000s hipster culture), to the extent that in some states near beer was legally considered a non-alcoholic drink that could be purchased by teenagers. (In contrast, I remember a story about high school students in Ohio who were not allowed to buy sparkling cider without ID.)
I don’t know about near beer. There were certainly states where 3.2 beer was legal for 18-21 year olds before the national drinking age was established, and met by a certain amount of scofflawism from my peers.
One of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cases when she was with the ACLU involved 3.2 beer:
Yes, Near Beer is less than 0.5% alcohol. It might be comparable to kombucha.
This word/expression appears in Shakespeare
I at least say this to counter the Recency Illusion: if Shakespeare wrote “between you and I” (as he did), it at least disposes of the notion that it is is a new-fangled invention of Youth Today.
I probably got confused between alcohol-per-volume and alcohol-per-weight. All three of Bud Light, Miller Lite and Coors Light have 4.2% per volume, says Wikipedia; beer in Germany and Austria is mostly between 4.5% and 6%, more generally between 4.3% and 12%; Leichtbier, which has 2.0% to 3.2%, is “a niche product” with a market share of 0.7% in Germany and 0.2% in Austria (and I didn’t know it at all); the article warns that American “light beer” (market share in the US: 40%) is not identical. Beer with 0.5% or less is sold as “alcohol-free” in both countries; I’m not aware of anyone trying to sell it to children, but that would probably be legal.
IIRC, anything under 2% abv is free of age restrictions here. Controversally, anything under 16% abv is legal to sell to 15yos, and hard liquor at 18. (The controversy about the first case is whether the age limit should be higher, not about lowering the alcohol limit; the 15-17 group buys 4% alcopops anyway, or 4.6% ‘regular’ beer).
Sweden produces a horrid .5% thing they call Herrljunga Cider /si:der/ that is almost but not entirely unlike the real thing. (It tastes of apples and has bubbles). It is widely served at children’s parties.
The 16% figure is a legacy from more protectionist times where domestic apple and cherry wine were somehow positioned against (stronger) imports. Also keeping the burghers’ port and sherry in the same cheaper tax range as wine, against aquavit the workers’ public health hazard.
@Lars: 40+ years ago when underage-in-the-U.S. me spent the summer in West Germany, it was either 14 or 16 (depending on the Land) for beer/wine but 18 for “hard stuff,” but I think “hard stuff” was defined as anything over maybe 20%. Which of course created incentives for the production and sale of truly awful cheap stuff that was 19.9% and bore no resemblance to even low-end port or sherry.
Just reading this makes me want to puke.