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“The word ‘barbarian’ originated in ancient Greece, and was initially used to describe all non-Greek-speaking peoples, including Persians, Egyptians, Medes and Phoenicians. The ancient Greek word 'bárbaros,’ from which it derives, meant 'babbler,’ and was onomatopoeic: In the Greek ear, speakers of a foreign tongue made unintelligible sounds ('bar bar bar’). Similar words exist in other Indo-European languages, including the Sanskrit 'barbara,’ which means 'stammering.’
It was the ancient Romans, who by the original definition were barbarians themselves, who first transformed the use of the term. Late in the Roman Empire, the word 'barbarian’ came to refer to all foreigners who lacked Greek and Roman traditions, especially the various tribes and armies putting pressure on Rome’s borders. There was never a single united barbarian group, and many of the different tribes–including Goths, Vandals, Saxons, Huns, Picts and many more–shifted alliances over the years or fought alongside Roman forces against other barbarian armies. Later scholars would expand on this use of the word when writing about attacks on cultures considered 'civilizations’ (be it ancient China or ancient Rome) by external enemies who don’t share that civilization’s traditions or structure.”
–Sarah Pruitt, “Where Did the Word 'Barbarian’ Come From?” (2016, 2018)
“Jabber, gibber and gibberish are words I always treat with suspicion. They come with a history — a racist history. For centuries, these words have targeted the speakers of a language that happens to be unknown to the person levelling the charge. Consider these examples from the Oxford English Dictionary: 'He repeated some gibberish, which by the sound seemed to be Irish’ (1748). 'We have got two Flemish servants, and you should hear them jabbering’ (1866). 'The aborigines speak an unintelligible gibberish’ (1884). Birds and animals are said to jabber; so are speakers of a foreign tongue. Sometimes the underlying implication is that only people who talk English are fully human.”
–Mark Abley, “Watchwords: Calling New Rihanna Song 'Gibberish’ Uses a Word With a Racist History” (2016)
“The French nation-state, which appeared after the 1789 French Revolution and Napoleon’s empire, unified the French people in particular through the consolidation of the use of the French language. Hence, according to historian Eric Hobsbawm, "the French language has been essential to the concept of ‘France’, although in 1789 50% of the French people did not speak it at all, and only 12 to 13% spoke it ‘fairly’ – in fact, even in oïl language zones, out of a central region, it was not usually spoken except in cities, and, even there, not always in the faubourgs [approximatively translatable to ‘suburbs’]. In the North as in the South of France, almost nobody spoke French.”* Hobsbawm highlighted the role of conscription, invented by Napoleon, and of the 1880s public instruction laws, which allowed to mix the various groups of France into a nationalist mold which created the French citizen and his consciousness of membership to a common nation, while the various ‘patois’ were progressively eradicated.“
*Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990; ISBN 0-521-43961-2) chapter II "The popular protonationalism”, pp. 80–81 French edition (Gallimard, 1992). According to Hobsbawm, the main source for this subject is Ferdinand Brunot (ed.), Histoire de la langue française, Paris, 1927–1943, 13 volumes, in particular volume IX. He also refers to Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, Judith Revel, Une politique de la langue: la Révolution française et les patois: l'enquête de l'abbé Grégoire, Paris, 1975. For the problem of the transformation of a minority official language into a widespread national language during and after the French Revolution, see Renée Balibar, L'Institution du français: essai sur le co-linguisme des Carolingiens à la République, Paris, 1985 (also Le co-linguisme, PUF, Que sais-je?, 1994, but out of print) (“The Institution of the French language: essay on colinguism from the Carolingian to the Republic. Finally, Hobsbawm refers to Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte, Le Français national: politique et pratique de la langue nationale sous la Révolution, Paris, 1974.
–Wikipedia, "History of French: Modern French”
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“Firstly, for centuries up until the Unification of Italy in 1861, the country was divided into a number of different states, which were usually under foreign rule. When Italy was united in 1861 the decision was taken to make Tuscan the official language of the country.
[..] As a result, dialects were used as the everyday language for centuries, and anyone who was able to express themselves and communicate in Italian did so using grammatical, lexical and phonetical aspects influenced by regional and local dialects.
[..] In 1950, just as the country was going through a time of complete infrastructural, economic, social and politic reconstruction, less than 20% of the Italian population spoke Italian fluently in their day to day to life.
TV programs began to be broadcast by RAI, the state broadcaster, in 1954 on just one channel. In the years that followed, up until the economic boom between 1958 and 1962, television did not just become a way to bring people together (as very few people actually had a TV set), but also a way to broadcast cultural programs and linguistic models.
In fact, between 1960 and 1968 RAI broadcast a show in the late afternoon which was called Non è mai troppo tardi, or ‘It’s never too late,’ which was presented by the teacher Alberto Manzi. As a result of this show, many illiterate people learnt to read and write, and it is estimated that in this period around one and a half million Italians managed to get their certificate of primary education.
And so, the spreading of a standardised Italian language was aided by economic growth, a better quality of life, the gradual spread of education and linguistic programmes shown on TV.”
–Europass: History of the Italian Language
“Misconceptions about AAVE are, and have long been, common, and have stigmatized its use. One myth is that AAVE is grammatically ‘simple’ or ‘sloppy’. However, like all dialects, AAVE shows consistent internal logic and grammatical complexity, and is used naturally by a group of people to express thoughts and ideas. Prescriptively, attitudes about AAVE are often less positive; since AAVE deviates from the standard, its use is commonly misinterpreted as a sign of ignorance, laziness, or both. Perhaps because of this attitude (as well as similar attitudes among other Americans), most speakers of AAVE are bidialectal, being able to speak with more standard English features, and perhaps even a General American accent, as well as AAVE. Such linguistic adaptation in different environments is called code-switching—though Linnes (1998) argues that the situation is actually one of diglossia: each dialect, or code, is applied in different settings. Generally speaking, the degree of exclusive use of AAVE decreases with increasing socioeconomic status (although AAVE is still used by even well-educated African Americans).”
“In the United States, there is a general negative stigma surrounding the Southern dialect. Non-Southern Americans tend to associate a Southern accent with cognitive and verbal slowness, lack of education, ignorance, bigotry, or religious and political conservatism, using common labels like ‘hick’, ‘hillbilly’, or ‘redneck’ accent. The accent is also associated nationwide with the military, NASCAR, and country music; in fact, even non-Southern American country singers typically imitate a Southern accent in their music. Meanwhile, Southerners themselves tend to have mixed judgments of their own accent, some similarly negative but others positively associating it with a laid-back, plain, or humble attitude. The sum negative associations nationwide, however, are the main presumable cause of a gradual decline of Southern accent features, since the middle of the 20th century onwards, among younger and more urban residents of the South.”
