Sanctifying languages: dictionaries and linguistic nationalism
This academic year, I have been supervising on a course that takes a closer look at the question of the perceived neutrality of dictionaries. The common perception on dictionaries might be that dictionaries are apolitical reference works, the primary purpose of which is to help their readers understand the meanings of words they are not familiar with. The story of dictionaries is, however, not as one-dimensional as it may seem. Dictionaries have been part of nation-building projects, especially in the nineteenth century when post-enlightenment nationalism was at its peak. A closely related but seldom discussed phenomenon is the sanctification of language, which is intertwined with linguistic nationalism. This piece addresses this phenomenon.
The dictionaries discussed in the course I am associated with focus on the German lexicographical tradition, and include two major German-language reference works: the ‘Deutsches Wörterbuch’ by the Brothers Grimm, and Duden’s dictionary by Konrad Duden. Of these, the dictionary by the Brothers Grimm has a greater nationalistic underpinning. Although the Brothers Grimm are more famous for their collection of German folktales, this collection too had a nationalistic outlook. Robert Henry Robins (1997) notes in his ‘A Short History of Linguistics’ that these folktales – along with Jacob Grimm’s language studies – belong to the ‘general upsurge of national pride in the German language that began in the early eighteenth century’.
The nationalistic ambitions of the dictionary by the Brothers Grimm especially come to the fore in its preface, in which the Brothers Grimm proclaim: ‘Beloved German compatriots, no matter which state you are from and which religion you follow, enter the hall of your ancestral and ancient language, which has been opened to all of you. Learn and sanctify it. Hold on to it, [for] your national strength and endurance are attached to it’. In addition to the nationalistic rhetoric, the preface also urges its readers to sanctify the German language. In the same piece, the Brothers Grimm pose the question ‘what is the purpose of a dictionary?’. The answer offered by them is that a dictionary should establish a shrine of the language.
These programmatic sentences make it clear that the Brothers Grimm wanted the German language to be treated as holy. The phenomenon of sanctification of languages is not exclusive to nineteenth-century German nationalism. It can be found in different cultural and socio-political contexts: The common ground to all these cases is that sanctification is somehow intertwined with nationalism. Sumati Ramaswamy, a historian at the Duke University, has documented Tamil linguistic nationalism in her book ‘Passions of the Tongue’ and used a devotional framework to explain the roots of linguistic nationalism in Tamil Nadu. The current policy of official multilingualism in India is a result of the protests led by Tamil speakers in 1960s against the proposal to make Hindi the only official language of India.
An interesting feature of these protests is that even farmers and daily labourers took part in them, and many committed suicide in the name of protecting Tamil. Such extreme steps by people that were not directly involved in language policy decisions could not have been possible without the devotional element that was attested to Tamil. Such unfortunate incidents in which people took their lives in order to protect a language were not limited to Tamil language movement. Even Telugu movement witnessed such cases. Potti Srimalulu, an activist who demanded the creation of a separate state for Telugu speakers, died after being on hunger strike for 58 days. Lisa Mitchell comments on this case in her work ‘Language, Emotions and Politics in South India’ and asks ‘what conditions must exist in order for someone to be willing to die, not for a nation, but for a language?’.
In both these cases, the sanctification of the language was not merely confined to rhetoric. The activists built statues for these languages and worshipped them as ‘Tamil Thai’ (Mother Tamil) and ‘Telugu Talli’ (Mother Telugu). If we examine the impact of dictionaries in linguistic nationalism, the sanctification of German proposed by the Brothers Grimm did not lead to any statues for the German language, but it did contribute to the ideological framework of the nation-building (or rather nationalistic) project that resulted in the creation of Imperial Germany in 1871. However, what is equally important is the fact that the ideological programme of the Brothers Grimm ran counter to Kant’s enlightenment ideals. Whilst the secularism propagated by enlightenment argued for separation of religious and political affairs, the Brothers Grimm aimed to reverse this progress through their nationalistic-sacral approach to language.
Abhimanyu Sharma, PhD
Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
University of Cambridge
How to cite this article:
Sharma, Abhimanyu. 2019. Sanctifying Languages: Dictionaries and Linguistic Nationalism, URL: < https://sharmaabhi1.wixsite.com/mysite/post/sanctifying-languages-dictionaries-and-linguistic-nationalism > [accessed on DD/MM/YYYY]