LANGUAGE

Peter Burke

If social history is defined to include the history of everyday practices as well as social structures, the history of language is necessarily an important part of the enterprise. It is no accident that the shift toward the history of the everyday and the history of practices in the 1970s and 1980s—not to mention the so-called linguistic turn—was accompanied by a growing interest in what some of its practitioners described as the "social history of language." Such topics as gossip, proverbs, conversation, and public speaking, once considered peripheral to social history if not impervious to change, began to attract the attention of historians. Some scholars analyzed the uses of language in the shaping of political movements such as the French Revolution and English Chartism, emphasizing the connections between the invention of a new vocabulary or a new type of discourse and a new political culture, a new political consciousness, or a more acute awareness of possible alternatives to old regimes.

In their pursuit of a social history of language, some historians turned to the linguists, especially the sociolinguists, for assistance, often adopting their vocabulary ("speech community," "speech domain," "code-switching," and so on), and sometimes collaborating with them, as in the case of Geraint Jenkins's Social History of Welsh. Linguists had of course long been interested in history—indeed, an international conference on historical linguistics took place in 1973—but not so much in social history, preferring to produce either an extremely precise and self-contained account of linguistic changes over time or an extremely general discussion of the relation between language and national history. As for the sociolinguists, for whom the relation between language and society was of paramount importance, with few exceptions (Dell Hymes, for instance), they focused on the present and neglected history. A few historians of earlier generations, among them Lucien Febvre, had taken more than a passing interest in linguistic forms, writing essays on language and nationality in eighteenth-century France, for example, or the language of the law in England, or the language of diplomacy in Sweden. However, the new social history of language differs from the scattered studies that preceded it by being more systematic, more self-conscious, and concerned with "society" in a more precise sense of that ambiguous term.

One obvious focus for the new interest was the language of class, or more generally the ways in which differences in social status were expressed or constructed in everyday language. Another was the slang, jargon, or semiprivate languages of particular social groups, from beggars to bureaucrats. A third was the study of the forms of language considered appropriate for particular social situations or contexts, the language of insult, the language of compliment, and so on. A fourth was the study of changes in language over the long term considered in relation to changes in a given society—nation-building, the spread of literacy, and so on. These four themes will be considered in order in the following pages, in which it should become clear how much linguistic territory still awaits exploration by historians.

LANGUAGE AND STATUS

Throughout the history of postmedieval Europe, if not before, differences in language at the level of grammar, vocabulary, or accent have been associated with differences in social status. Some scholars in sixteenth-century Italy were already aware of this point and drew attention, for instance, to the archaic language of the peasants of Tuscany. These linguistic differences are sometimes unconscious, but they have often served as a means for certain individuals and groups to distinguish themselves from others. In some parts of Europe, the upper classes or status groups have literally spoken a different language from their social inferiors. Thanks to Tolstoy's War and Peace, it is easy to remember that Russian nobles of the early nineteenth century often spoke to one another in French. So did the upper classes in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century and in parts of the German-speaking world in the eighteenth, while the Danes of the period used German as a status symbol and the Norwegians used Danish. French in Languedoc, Provence, and Brittany, like English in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and Castilian in Catalonia, served a similar function.

More common as a means of distinction was the adoption by the upper classes of what they considered to be a "purer" or more rational form of speech, a form closer to the written language. They showed their civilization and their connections with the wider world by abandoning the local dialect, or patois, a symbol of the popular culture from which they were gradually distancing themselves (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in western Europe, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries farther east). In similar fashion, the habit of speaking in proverbs was gradually abandoned by the upper classes at this time. Proverbs became associated with the archaic world of the peasantry, while the employment of a pure form of language was taken as a sign that the speaker too was refined and rational. In 1690 the dictionary-maker Antoine Furetière defined patois as "corrupt and crude language, such as that of the lower orders" (langage corrompu et grossier, tel que celui du menu peuple). In the mid-eighteenth century, the Encyclopédie offered a similar definition, "a corrupted language which is spoken in almost all the provinces."

Some speakers went still farther in this direction and adopted a vocabulary so refined that it was scarcely intelligible outside their own circle, like the seventeenth-century French bluestockings, or précieuses, ridiculed in the plays of Molière, who distanced themselves from ordinary language by employing euphemisms and other circumlocutions such as un nécessaire for a servant. The language of the précieuses was an aspect of the culture of the salons in which women led the way in polishing the language of upper-class males, while the Académie Française, with its famous dictionary, continued and institutionalized the process. In Italy the Florentine Accademia della Crusca had a similar function, compiling a dictionary of acceptable words as a way of sorting the wheat from the "chaff" (crusca). In Spain the motto of the eighteenth-century Royal Academy, which had a similar function, was "it purifies, it fixes, and it dignifies" (limpia, fija y da esplendor). Generally speaking, the criterion of acceptability was that words or phrases should not be associated with the common people, with the provinces, or with particular occupations. The rejection of technical terms is a reminder that the upper classes defined themselves as ladies and gentlemen of leisure.

In England in the late seventeenth century, where there was no academy, a sense of distance from common speech was produced in fashionable circles by introducing French phrases into ordinary conversation. John Dryden's Marriage à la Mode (1673) mocked fashionable people who peppered their English with French terms such as grande monde, risque, épuisée, or à la mode itself. In similar fashion, Germans with social pretensions introduced such words as galanterie, goût, and politesse into their everyday speech.

Accent too carried a social message. In the Jesuit college of Milan, teachers were already trying in the 1590s to eliminate provincial accents from the language of their pupils. In France in the early eighteenth century, a duke criticized a duchess for speaking with the accent (ton) as well the vocabulary of the common people. In England the accent of the southeast was becoming associated with the court in the time of Queen Elizabeth, although Sir Walter Raleigh apparently never lost his West Country accent. The painter Sir Joshua Reynolds also spoke with a Devonshire accent, although it had become more of an embarrassment by his time, when a "Yorkshire tone," for example, was condemned in handbooks on good English. The rise of what would be known as "received pronunciation," and the habit of using accent to place acquaintances socially was already noticeable at that time. By the nineteenth century, schools in England, France, and elsewhere were inculcating standard forms of speech as well as writing and stigmatizing dialect as an inferior form of language.

As some of these examples suggest, the concern with the linguistic signs of social class is not—as it is often thought to be—a peculiarly English obsession. All the same, England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries does offer a particularly rich field of observation in this respect. The English novel of the period is also a wonderful source, provided that representations of speech in novels are used with caution, in other words, that novels are not assumed to be a simple reflection of linguistic practice but are read with awareness of the process of literary stylization. Like the guides used to correct language, they illustrate contemporary concern with avoiding a provincial accent, as well as vulgarisms such as "I had no call" or "I'll tell you for why," the use of proverbs, and above all, "dropping one's Hs" and speaking of "ouse," "appen," and so on.

Certain forms of language were also associated with gender. "Talking like a lady," as the nineteenth-century phrase went, meant distinguishing oneself at once from men and from "common" women, who were supposed to speak and especially to swear like men. Talking like a lady meant using a particular vocabulary, including modes of address such as "Papa" and, in the mid-nineteenth century, euphemisms such as "bosom" for breast and "limbs" for legs. These turns of speech are so often described as Victorian that it may be worth emphasizing that they had their equivalents in other European languages, as the example of the précieuses has already suggested.

JARGONS

The language of the précieuses might be described as a kind of jargon, a pejorative term rescued by linguists and used to refer to a virtually private language used by a particular social group. The classic case of jargon in modern Europe is the language of beggars and thieves, whether it was adopted as a way of keeping their affairs hidden from prying outsiders, as a way of creating solidarity, or both. This language was not exactly international, but there were significant features in common between the German Rotwelsch, as it was called, the French argot, the Italian gergo or furbesco, the Spanish gringo, and the English cant. These secret languages became much better known from the sixteenth century onward because they attracted the attention of both magistrates and professional writers, and dictionaries of various jargons became available in print. Less well known, but equally widespread, were the technical or semiprivate languages of other occupational groups such as students, soldiers, and masons—itinerant occupations all three, giving their jargons an international flavor.

Awareness of these jargons encouraged some men of letters to stigmatize the language of professors, lawyers, physicians, and officials in similar terms. In England from the late seventeenth century, for instance, the phrase "the jargon of the schools" came into use to refer to academic language, which was still laced with technical terms of medieval Scholastic philosophy such as "quiddity" and "entity." In France, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere there was a similar rejection of pedantic language, which was increasingly considered to be out of place in polite discourse, a speech genre that the writers of the many books on "the art of conversation" (especially common in France and England in the eighteenth century) attempted to regulate.

A similar point might be made about the "lawyer's dialect" or "court gibberish," as nonlawyers called it. Doctors too liked to blind their clients with science or at least with "hard words," whether in Latin or the vernacular. We should not forget the language of bureaucracy, a jargon that appears to have been particularly elaborate and formidable in Vienna and Berlin from the eighteenth century. The jargon of the clergy should not be forgotten either. Still more striking, however, is the special language of religious movements or sects, including German and Scandinavian Pietists, English Quakers, and French Jansenists. The Society of Friends, for example, expressed their spiritual egalitarianism by their rejection of deferential forms of speech, replacing them with what they called the "plain" language of "Thee," "Thou," "Friend," and so on. They were also distinctive in their rejection of oaths in their vocabulary (in which "church," for example, was replaced by "steeple-house"), and in their emphasis on the religious value of silence.

The particular speech forms of religious groups should not be confused with religion as a special domain in which ordinary speakers of ordinary language "switch codes," as the linguists say, to a higher or more formal variety of speech, the linguistic equivalent of wearing their Sunday best to church.

SPEECH DOMAINS

After they had distanced themselves from ordinary people in the ways described above, the upper classes in Italy, France, and elsewhere continued to use dialect in certain situations, or "domains." That they needed to do so in order to speak to their servants or their tenants will be obvious enough. More significant culturally, because it is less utilitarian in motive, is the upper-class use of dialect on festive occasions as a symbol or marker of relaxation. They did this at Carnival, for example (a practice that continues in Switzerland to this day), or during the proceedings of festive societies such as the Accademia della Valle di Bregno in sixteenth-century Milan, a group of townspeople who imitated the language of the local peasants for fun. In similar fashion, or perhaps to distance himself from what he was saying, the poet Alfred Tennyson adopted a rustic Lincolnshire accent whenever he told bawdy stories. Conversely, a peasant in nineteenth-century France might use standard language as a sign of formality or emphasis, to invite a girl to dance, to talk about national politics, or even to swear.

These examples illustrate the way in which the same people often use different varieties of language—and sometimes completely different languages—according to the situation they find themselves in. The use of Latin in the Catholic liturgy before Vatican II is an obvious example, while the use of German on the Stock Exchange at St. Petersburg until the end of the nineteenth century is a striking one.

In the sixteenth century, King John III of Sweden is said to have rebuked a fellow ruler who had written to him in French by replying in Finnish. However, French gradually became established as the language of diplomacy in the course of the eighteenth century, replacing Latin, Italian, and German (although the chancery of the Holy Roman Empire insisted on Latin until the early 1700s). Frederick the Great was supposed to have spoken French everywhere except in the stables, a story that surely refers to the celebrated if apocryphal saying of the polyglot emperor Charles V that one should speak French to ladies, German to horses, and Spanish to God. In contrast, the French Renaissance princess Margaret of Navarre considered Spanish the language of love.

One of the most distinctive linguistic domains all over Europe was that of the law. What was sometimes described by contemporaries as the jargon of lawyers might be more objectively described as the language of the law courts, full of Latinisms, pleonasms, and technical terms. In England the lawyers quite literally spoke and wrote a different language, "law French." Archbishop Thomas Cranmer remarked that he had "heard suitors murmur at the bar because their attornies pleaded their causes in the French tongue, which they understood not." The standard work on landholding was known as Les tenures de Monsieur Littleton, written, according to the title page of a seventeenth-century edition, "al request des Gentilhommes, Students en la ley Dangleterre." Not until the eighteenth century did the vernacular become the exclusive language of the English law. Even when lawyers spoke English, contemporary critics suggested that the function of their jargon was to exclude the client and thus make them more dependent on professionals.

Linked to the language of the courts, but increasingly distinct from it, was the language of public administration in chanceries and elsewhere. In the case of German, for example, a distinctive "chancery language" (Kanzleisprache) developed relatively early, in the later Middle Ages, in order to make imperial decrees intelligible to the laity all over the empire, whatever dialect they spoke. This administrative language, or Curialstyl, developed characteristics of its own. It was pompous, probably deliberately so, and drew on Latin and on the languages of the law and sometimes of finance for terms that were lacking in everyday forms of the vernacular. Sometimes assumed to be a German peculiarity, this "bureaucratese" had its equivalents in other parts of Europe: in Italy (where Spanish rule encouraged the adoption of Hispanisms), in the Swedish empire (where Germanisms as well as Latinisms are noticeable), and in Russia, where it was known as prikazni jazyk ("departmental language"). Common characteristics of these official languages are circumlocutions and euphemisms, for example, the notorious euphemism of the Third Reich "special handling" (Sonderbehandlung) as a way of describing official violence.

One speech domain that has attracted a good deal of interest from social historians in the last few years is that of insult. There are several reasons for this interest. Judicial records offer rich sources, while the confrontations leading to insult make latent tensions manifest and reveal something of the attitudes and prejudices of ordinary people whom other sources do not reach. For example, insult is gendered. Women are most often attacked through their supposed sexual behavior and described as whores, while insults to males are more various, ranging from "spy" through "cuckold" to "idler" or "bankrupt." Forms of politeness, on the other hand, have attracted less attention and are sometimes thought to be essentially unchanging. However, recent work on Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasizes changing ideas of politeness, or "civility," linking them to political and social changes such as the rise of the middle classes or the reaction against the bitterness of the conflicts between the Whig and Tory parties.

Writing is a domain of its own, and in many cultures there is a difference, lesser or greater, between spoken and written forms of language. However, the written language like the spoken may be subdivided into smaller domains in some of which a foreign language might be thought appropriate for a variety of reasons. In nineteenth-century Finland, for example, the language of bookkeeping was German, probably because German had long been in use as a commercial lingua franca in the multilingual Baltic region in which the German merchants of the Hanse played an important role. In eighteenth-century Germany, some of the bourgeoisie (including the fiancée of the writer Johann Christoph Gottsched) thought it "plebeian" to write letters in German, preferring to use French for the purpose. For the last five hundred years or so, however, this linguistic separation of spheres has been gradually but steadily undermined by the rise of many vernaculars, a process closely linked to the processes of state- and nation-building.

LANGUAGES, STATES, AND NATIONS

One of the major long-term trends in the history of the languages of Europe since the end of the Middle Ages is the decline of Latin, particularly as a written language, and its replacement by vernaculars. The decline of Latin must not be dated too early. Translations from vernacular into Latin were common, and they reached their peak in the first half of the seventeenth century. All the same, the increasing importance of written Italian, French, Spanish, English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian is particularly obvious by the sixteenth century, and it was accompanied by statements of the "dignity" of those vernaculars as well as by decrees like that of 1539 in which the king of France ordered legal documents to be drawn up in French. The increasing employment of vernacular for literary purposes was accompanied by their standardization and codification, making them distinct from spoken languages as well as from Latin. The trend to standardization was assisted by the spread of printing, especially when the new medium was consciously exploited for this purpose, as it was, for example, by Martin Luther.

Luther's problem was he wanted to appeal to ordinary people as well as scholars, so that he could not confine himself to Latin. For the same reason, both in his own writings and in his translation of the Bible, he needed to employ a form of German that would be intelligible from Alsace to Saxony. Luther based his German to some extent on the chancery language that, as we have seen, was already current throughout the empire, but in order to reach as many people as possible, he simplified it. In turn, Luther's Bible helped create literary German, just as the Kralice Bible (1579–1594) contributed to the development of literary Czech and the Authorized Version of 1611 contributed to the development of literary English.

In Catholic countries in particular, an alternative to the Bible as a means of linguistic codification was the academy. Academies were discussion groups of men of letters, some of which acquired official status and prepared dictionaries from which inappropriate words were carefully excluded, whether the selection was made on moral or social grounds. The Florentines had their Accademia della Crusca, the French their Académie Française, which had the task of cleaning up the language (nettoyer la langue des ordures), and the Spaniards their Real Academia Española. In Russia the first important linguistic reformer was the polymath academician Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), whose Russian grammar played an important role in the secularization of Russian culture, helping to create a new written language that could compete with the traditional one, church Slavonic, the function of which in the Eastern or Orthodox Church had been comparable to that of Latin in the West.

Language and politics. Governments not infrequently lent their support to these enterprises. In the sixteenth century the grand duke of Tuscany, Cosimo de' Medici, tried to turn Florentine cultural capital into political capital by associating himself with dictionary-making and the Accademia Fiorentina. In the seventeenth century Cardinal Richelieu was involved in the foundation of the Académie Française. There were good pragmatic reasons for statesmen to concern themselves with language. The political theorist Giovanni Botero noted in his Reason of State (1589) that conquerors "will do well to introduce their own tongue into the countries they have conquered." As if following his advice, the emperor Ferdinand II made German the official language of Bohemia at the expense of Czech in 1627, six years after his victory at the Battle of White Mountain. Continuing this policy of linguistic centralization, the emperor Joseph II attempted to replace Latin with German in the Hungarian Diet (1784) and made German obligatory in the schools of the empire in 1790. In the Swedish empire, the government encouraged the spread of the Swedish language at the expense of Finnish.

For a dramatic and well-documented case study of the relation between language and politics, we may turn to the French Revolution. The revolutionaries faced a problem not unlike that of Martin Luther in the early years of the Reformation. They needed to broadcast their message as widely as possible in a country in which the majority of the population did not speak standard French, while minorities—Occitan, Breton, German, Flemish, and Basque—did not speak French at all. An early solution to the problem, reached in 1790, was to translate government decrees into patois. However, it was argued that French was the language of the revolution and that speakers of patois, let alone speakers of other languages, were at best unenlightened and at worst counterrevolutionary. The revolution's specialist on language, the abbé Henri Grégoire, claimed that it was necessary "to destroy patois" (anéantir les patois) and make French universal (universaliser l'usage de la langue française). The language policy followed by the French government from 1794 onward thus resembled that of Joseph II discussed above. The Third Republic took that policy a stage further, through the educational reforms of 1880 and the prohibition of Breton in the religious domain (sermons and catechism classes) in 1902.

Linguistic revivals. Competition between languages ensured that the emergence of the vernacular languages of Europe was no simple success story. We should not forget the losers, especially in the domain of writing. The decline of written Czech after the Battle of White Mountain is one well-known example, a decline lamented later in the century in a treatise by the Jesuit Bohuslav Balbín. Literary Catalan was declining at much the same time, as Madrid tightened its grasp on the rest of Spain. In the British Isles, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh were all retreating as English was advancing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first as a written language and later as a spoken one. In France, Occitan and Breton were in retreat. No wonder that in the eighteenth century the less literate half of the hexagon (southwest of an imaginary diagonal line from Saint-Malo to Geneva) included not only the poorer part of the country but also the principal regions (Brittany, Languedoc, and Provence) in which French was not the mother tongue. The competition between dominant and dominated languages is not a new phenomenon.

In all these regions, the choice whether to speak the local or the metropolitan language both expressed and contributed to the increasing cultural distance between different social groups. In Scotland, Gaelic became, in the words of the eighteenth-entury social theorist Adam Ferguson, "a language spoken in the cottage, but not in the parlour." In Wales the gentry of Glamorgan switched to English in their everyday speech in the eighteenth century, thus expressing their identification with the values of the metropolis and their withdrawal from local popular culture. By the nineteenth century, Scottish, Irish and Welsh parents who wanted their children to rise socially were encouraging them to express themselves in English, while Breton parents were taking a similar attitude toward French. In the nineteenth century, the great agent of linguistic acculturation was the school. In late nineteenth century France, for example, it was forbidden to speak Breton in the schools of the region, although the teachers themselves often spoke Breton at home. Whether the teachers were aware of this or not, a major function of the school at this time was to undermine dominated languages and replace them with dominant ones.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the decline and even extinction of the minority languages already appeared virtually inevitable. All the same, the nineteenth century was to be an age not only of the spread of dominant languages in official domains but also of revivals of dominated languages in unofficial or informal settings. In the Austrian Empire, for instance, as if in reaction against the germanization favored by Joseph II, four Slav languages were revived from the late eighteenth century onward, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovene. In the case of Czech, there was a conscious return to the usage of the sixteenth-century "golden age," while in the other cases a new written language was shaped by standardizing spoken forms. In all these cases, a linguistic movement, complete with societies, journals, meetings, and so on became associated with a movement for political autonomy. Modern Greek developed in a similar way at the time of the independence movement of the early nineteenth century. In similar fashion in Provence, the poet Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914) was one of the leaders of the Félibrige, a movement founded in 1854 to revive literary Occitan. There was a similar movement in Catalonia at about the same time. The two groups were in contact, and both revived the medieval poetry competitions known as the floral games (jocs florals).

Gaelic too enjoyed a revival. Welsh, which had declined least, was also the first to be revived. The Eisteddfod, a poetry competition associated with the days of the Druids, increased in popularity during the late eighteenth century and was held on a national basis from 1858 onward. Dictionaries of Welsh were compiled and an attempt was made (as was the case with Czech) to return to a sixteenth-century golden age. In Ireland, on the other hand, it was only in 1876 that the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language was founded, followed in 1893 by the Gaelic League. Children were taught Irish in school from 1878 in small doses and from 1922 onward in larger ones. A demand for the preservation of the Breton language was demanded by one wing of the Breton national movement.

In England and Italy, by contrast, there was competition not between languages but between varieties, between the standard form of the language and dialects. In Italy the dialect tradition was of course much stronger; it has been calculated that only 2.5 percent of the population spoke Italian at the time of the unification of Italy in 1861. However, urbanization and emigration weakened the hold of dialect, and the rise of Italian in the twentieth century, like that of other standard national languages, was assisted by a variety of institutions, notably the school, newspapers, the cinema, radio, television, and (thanks to compulsory military service) the army. In England this process of linguistic unification took place much earlier. Even in England, however, it is possible to discern a revival of dialect in the nineteenth century, notably the rise of printed poetry in the Yorkshire and Lancashire dialects from the 1840s onward. Once the agent of linguistic standardization, by the nineteenth century the printing press was also serving the causes of regional resistance and revival.

Linguistic purification. Dominant and dominated languages alike were subjected to purification from foreign words, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In France postwar governments struggled against franglais, the contamination of the French language by contact with English, especially American English. In Greece and Germany, purification also became a political issue. In Greece the movement for pure speech (katharevousa) aimed at deleting foreign words and restoring classical elements to the Greek language. The reformer Adamantios Koraïs, for example, denounced "borrowing from strangers . . . words and phrases amply available in one's own language." In place of the foreign, the reformers suggested learned, archaic, and pseudo-archaic words. Thus the potato, traditionally patata, became gêomêlon, a rendering into classical Greek of pomme de terre. The new Greek state founded in 1830 officially adopted katharevousa. In the late nineteenth century, however, there was what might be called an antipurist campaign in favor of the language of the people, demotic Greek (demotike). In the twentieth century the Left has championed demotike, while right-wing governments in 1921–1923, 1935–1936, and 1967–1974 all restored katharevousa.

In Germany following unification, there was a movement to remove French, English, and other alien terms from the language, a movement linked to the return to the Gothic script, another symbol of national identity, and institutionalized in the form of a society, the Allgemein Deutsche Sprachverein (founded in 1885), and a journal, Muttersprache. The 1930s were the high point of the society's attempts to hunt down and replace foreign words, the so-called Fremdwortjagd. Thus Universität became "Althochschule," Student "Hochschuler," Rationalismus "Vernunftum," and so on. The Nazis supported the movement at first but put an official end to the hunt in 1940 after Hitler's speeches were criticized by purists.

The links between linguistic revivals and politics are well known, particularly for their place in a more general reaction against centralization. On the other hand, the social composition of these movements remains to be studied. In the precise sense of the term "social," the social history of linguistic nationalism remains largely unexplored territory. Much work also remains to be done on the place of language in the construction or presentation of the self and of the emotions in letters and other personal documents in different places, periods, and social groups.

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