“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.”
“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).”
–Wikipedia: “African American Vernacular English: Social Context”
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“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.”
“Beginning with the Indian Civilization Act Fund of March 3, 1819 and the Peace Policy of 1869 the United States, in concert with and at the urging of several denominations of the Christian Church, adopted an Indian Boarding School Policy expressly intended to implement cultural genocide through the removal and reprogramming of American Indian and Alaska Native children to accomplish the systematic destruction of Native cultures and communities. The stated purpose of this policy was to ‘Kill the Indian, Save the Man.’
Between 1869 and the 1960s, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. Though we don’t know how many children were taken in total, by 1900 there were 20,000 children in Indian boarding schools, and by 1925 that number had more than tripled. The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture. They suffered physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse and neglect, and experienced treatment that in many cases constituted torture for speaking their Native languages. Many children never returned home and their fates have yet to be accounted for by the U.S. government.”
–National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition: “Intro to Boarding School History”
an addition:
in portuguese, the word boçal generally means uncouth, backwards, or unsophisticated. generally it’s a pejorative used to denote someone whose violent passions get a hold of them more than reason does. (which is why, for example, it’s one of the many, many words used to describe bolsonaro.)
what most people (and brazilians) don’t know is that boçal gained widespread usage in brazil to separate enslaved africans that didn’t speak portuguese and were not baptized from the ones that did speak the language and (externally, at least) practiced catholicism. the former were boçais and the latter, ladinos. this last term in itself comes from latim, latin, and was generally used in romance-speaking areas of europe to identify the language spoke (after all, for a long time, it was all some form of vulgar latin; a modern example of this is judeo-spanish, or ladino). the division between boçal and ladino is analogue to the division between pretos, those born in africa, and crioulos, enslaved people born in brazil and that generally were seen to be less prone to revolt. after the 1840 malê revolt – brazil’s largest urban slave revolt in salvador –, one of the repressive measures was to aggressively surveil african-born slaves.
interesting, though, that these divisions in some way always go back to language, language as a sign of humanity or the lack of it (until the late 19th century europeans genuinely believed african languages did not possess grammar).
“Anoher crucial characteristic of Hebrew slang is that most expressions came from other languages. The largest group came from Arabic, followed by Yiddish, German, and Russian, and to a lesser extent English and Spanish [via Ladino]. This pattern is evident even before 1948 and hardly surprising…
Ironically, the official suppression of foreign languages has led to a fascinating linguistic return of the repressed; languages mostly used by the Zionist militias before 1948—Yiddish, Russian, Arabic, and English—have all re-emerged in slang. It was easier to adopt and adapt words from such languages than wait for the august committee to add urgently needed words. [..] Ben-Gurion’s own moniker became Bee-Gee.
Terms for swearing, sexual functions, or private parts were adopted from Russian, Arabic, or Yiddish [..]. [They] have survived seventy years of Israeli Zionism and are used daily by millions. Ella Shohat tells us in a memoir: 'Arabic was also the language in which I learnt to curse so well, much to the chagrin of the adults around me.’ This gives us an important clue as to the function of slang in Israel. The vigorous development of slang in the context of the toxic and aggressive campaign against Diasporic languages and for exclusive use of Hebrew, led by Ben-Gurion, was nastiest against Yiddish and Arabic, the two languages spoken by most immigrants. By taking over Hebrew slang, the repressed languages proved their richness and vivacity, contrasting with the aridity and sterility of most invented Hebrew.
The most vulnerable sectors of the Jewish population of Israel [are] Holocaust survivors and Arab Jews, two groups that have suffered a combination of dismissive neglect and active disdain from the ruling elite.
Both groups faced official shunning of their languages, Yiddish and Arabic… In the case of Yiddish, a special, unique tax was forced on newsprint in this language to deter readers of the popular Yiddish daily Lezte Nies (Latest News), venomously hated by Ben-Gurion. He insisted that Yiddish was not a 'proper’ language and never mentioned it by name, calling it jargon instead.” –Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, “An Army Like No Other: How the Isreal Defense Forces Made a Nation” (2020)
“Bahru Zewde traces the development of the Ethiopian State through history, starting with the battle of Adwa in the late 1800s that cemented emperor Menelik’s rule over Ethiopia after driving out the Italian colonizers. At this point, Menelik’s primacy was secured, but his rule was still somewhat decentralized. Ethiopia’s size and terrain made having greater control in that time period basically impossible. It wasn’t until Haile Selassie’s rule and the emergence of some form of modernity that it became more reasonable to seek greater levels of centralization, but it is important to note here that it was Menelik’s consolidation of power that set the internal colonial relations that would later come to be a dominant issue.
The two most important vehicles of this were obviously the military and the school system. The military crushed the local peasant uprisings over land and taxes, as well as upstart local rulers and nascent ethic-nationalist uprisings, while the school system’s primary job was working toward the absolute assimilation of peoples such as the Oromo, Afar, and others. This was achieved through the establishment of Amharic as Ethiopia’s national language in 1963 and the propagation of Ethiopian nationalism throughout.
[..] Eritreans were widely resented for essentially refusing to fold quietly into the ongoing centralization process and refusing to be literally colonized by Ethiopia. They were accused of ‘narrow nationalism, undermining Ethiopian unity’, and being ‘puppets of Arab States.’ [..] Radical students lamented the Eritrean uprising for failing to acknowledge the ‘primacy of class struggle’, although there were populist-left forces within the Eritrean revolution alongside others.
It wasn’t until the conquests of Menelik II in the late 1800s That an Ethiopian State began to appear. The relation of other Ethiopian peoples [..] to the newly created State was a colonial one. [..] Beyond mere restrictions on language and Amhara hegemony, Adis Ababa was built on stolen Oromo lands, a common occurrence due to land alienation campaigns carried out by Halie Selassie in 1943 and Menelik in the 1800s. The Afar, a nomadic people, saw their ability to travel freely damaged by the machinations and development of the Ethiopian State. In 1974 they saw their lands destroyed by the redirection of the Awash river to the Dubti valley in order to provide water for cotton crops. Villagers were not informed beforehand. Three thousand lost their homes while around a hundred were dead or missing. [..] [M]any of the famines that rocked the various regions [..] were the direct result colonial land use and agricultural practices. As a result I think it is fair historical fact to describe Ethiopia’s State relationship to various people forced to participate a colonial one.“ –Anansi’s Library, “The Ethiopian Revolution” (2023)