« previous post | next post »

From yesterday's mail:

An idle question from a big Language Log fan: Do you have any idea if the nice folks in, say Germany or Italy or Spain, go as nuts as Americans seem to when native speakers make "fundamental" grammar errors?

It appears that the strong form of "going nuts" that we've called word rage is mainly an Anglophone phenomenon, with the British as the originators and still the champions. But the sociolinguistic settings in Germany, Italy, and Spain are very different from the situation in the U.S. — and as a result, they have their own kinds of language wars over there.

The most obvious difference is the role of traditional local language varieties. Each of the European standard languages developed in the midst of a complex dialect continuum, where differences increase with geographical and social distance, and enough distance creates differences like those between German and Dutch, or French and Italian. As a result, many if not most Europeans speak a local "dialect" that is very different in morphology, pronunciation, and word stock from the standard national language that they also control to one extent or another; and in practice, the local and standard varieties are often mixed to a variable degree depending on circumstances.

Something of the same kind is also true in the U.S., but the differences are generally not as great.

Do our European friends comment among themselves as often as Americans seem to about their neighbor's grammar?

I don't know the facts about the conversational density of metalinguistic commentary, and I don't think that anyone has ever studied this empirically. But in Europe, there's more to talk about, since geographical and social differences among language varieties are bigger and more complicated.

Do Germans hotly chastise newspaper editors for an occasional faulty case? Do the Spanish roll their eyes when a writer fails to employ the subjunctive? Do Italians suspect the imminent demise of civilization if a subject and verb fail to agree?

There's apparently quite a bit of concern in Germany about the fate of the dative case, with journalists very much under the gun on this question. I'm not sure about the ideology of mood in Spanish, but there was a fair amount of discussion a few years ago about whether a Francophone mass murderer used the subjunctive appropriately.

Those are both instances of concern about the evolution of the standard national language, and there are plenty of those around. But most European countries have one or more governmental institutions charged with establishing and maintaining language standards — the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, the Académie française, etc.– and perhaps this makes the citizenry less prone to take up pitchforks and torches on their own initiative.

A different sort of struggle is described by Jillian Cavanaugh in "Remembering and Forgetting: Ideologies of Language Loss in a Northern Italian Town" (Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14(1), 2008):

One wintry afternoon in the northern Italian town of Bergamo, I had coffee with Giani, a retired engineer in his mid-sixties, and talked about the impending loss of his dialetto (‘dialect’), Bergamasco. Giani, speaking Italian with a strong Bergamasco accent, told me a story about the punishment children endured for speaking Bergamasco when he attended elementary school. Every morning, the first time the schoolteacher heard a child say something in Bergamasco, he or she would hand that child a wooden baton, which the children cheekily called—in Bergamasco—a bastù. This child held the baton until they heard another child speak Bergamasco, and then passed it on; this continued throughout the day. At the end of the school day, the teacher called the last unlucky child to the front of the class and made them tell who had passed them the baton. That child was then called up to the front to tell who had given it to them, and so on back to the original offender. The entire chain of Bergamasco-speaking children was then punished in front of everyone else (often with a strap). The next day, the gruesome relay began again. Giani laughed as he told me that on some days, practically the whole class would end up in the front of the room. “Everyone was poor and spoke Bergamasco,” he said, “and though we suffered for it, we all got through it.”

In most European countries, I believe that struggles of this kind remain very much alive. In some cases, the result is the loss of the local variety; in other cases — for example Catalan — the local variety has become established as a standard in its own right. In either case, the struggle seems to leave less ideological energy to spare for questions like whether a change in word sense threatens the foundations of civilization.

Permalink