Babel #2: Highly Political Languages

Two of the languages in Gaston Dorren’s Babel have an abnormally high political component to them.

 

The first one is Tamil (#18, 90 million speakers). While an ancient language, for a long time, he says, it has become very political. The language is considered sacred by many of its speakers. This adoration is a relatively recent phenomenon, starting off when British scholars started to study the language and old documents in the 1800’s. That showed that South India had been ruled by many mighty dynasties from the Pandyan to Cholas to Cheras. The newfound association of the language with such ancient and powerful empires triggered a surge of pride.

 

After independence, states were created on linguistic lines and multi-language Madras state got split. Tamil Nadu became the home of Tamilians only. Later day attempts to make Hindi the national language provoked outsized protests in the state and cemented the role and position of Tamil within the state.

 

And in Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict includes a language angle, though there are other much bigger elements to it.

~~

 

The other language is entirely a political construct - Turkish (#17, 90 million). When Turkey was created out of the remanent of the Ottoman empire, Kamal Ataturk didn’t just modernize the country and pivot from an Arab facing to a West facing modern country. He also decided to revamp the language itself!

 

The Perso-Arabic script of Turkish was replaced with a tailor-made version of the Latin alphabet. In July 1932, the Turkish Language Society (TDK) was established and it started its “word-collection mobilization”. The intent was to collate a list of all words used by people and from that, a new vocabulary would be created. At least that was the plan. Not surprisingly, it led to chaos. Purists wanted it to be done a certain way; but Ataturk now balked as he saw the anarchy it was creating. Pragmatically, he allowed purism in some areas, but let other areas evolve naturally.

 

But when he died, the purists came back with a vengeance. They went about it slowly, spread over 3 decades, and changed the language dramatically. The share of “authentic” Turkish words grew from 35 to 61%; while the share of Arabic, Persian and “Ottoman” words fell from 59 to 31%.

“In a mere two generations, Turkish underwent the sort of evolution that took four centuries for English. Evolution? Revolution, more like it.”

 

All this contradicts the view that languages cannot be defined by an authority. How did it happen in case of Turkish? Dorren has two reasons. First, when Turkey was being created, the enthusiasm for a new country and a new beginning spilt over in the public for a new language as well. In other words, the people were receptive to the idea. Second, Turkey was authoritarian, not democratic for decades after its formation. That, and the fact that the government controlled radio, TV and textbooks made it easy to push the new language.

 

The idea that one cannot steer a language is true most of time, but apparently it is not a universal truth.

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