Map of Transoxania (Source: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: Arabic language learning is experiencing a revival in many parts of the world, such as China, where it may be a source of empowerment for impoverished Muslim women. This post by Mehrinigor Akhmedova (Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan) and Rizwan Ahmad (Qatar University, Qatar) takes us to Uzbekistan, a part of the post-Soviet world, where some aspects of Transoxania’s multilingual past are being revived for religious and economic reasons.

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Mehrinigor Akhmedova, Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan
Rizwan Ahmad, Qatar University, Qatar
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Recently, interest in the learning of Arabic language and script among the young generation of Uzbeks has been rising. Young Uzbeks are learning Arabic not simply because of their faith, Islam, but also because it is desirable in the domestic job market and opens a window of opportunities in the Arabic-speaking Gulf states.

In September 2023, the Department of Islamic History Source Studies, Philosophy at Bukhara State University invited a professor from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University to teach courses in Arabic. This is a significant change in the history of Arabic and Islamic learning in Uzbekistan. During the Soviet rule and early years of independence in 1991, Uzbekistan witnessed many ups and down regarding the place of Islam in the constitutionally secular Uzbek society. In 1998, fearing radical Islamic ideologies, the government closed many madrasas, traditional schools of learning, established soon after the independence.

Liquidation of Madrasas and Teaching of Arabic in Uzbekistan

Although the repression of Islam in the former Soviet republics, including modern-day Uzbekistan, began during the Tsarist regime, it reached its climax during the Soviet rule following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The state repression of Islam took many forms, including the persecution and killing of mudarris and ulama, teachers and scholars of Islam, nationalization of vaqf properties, Islam endowments, and forceful removal of veils from Muslim women, known as the hujum campaign.

Dome of the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa (Image credit: Wikipedia)

On the educational and sociolinguistic fronts, the repression led to the dismantling of the centuries old traditional Islamic educational system of maktabs and madrasas where students learned to read and recite the Qur’an in Arabic. In 1928, the Fourth Meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic issued an order on the liquidation of all old method schools and madrasas. According to Ashirbek Muminov and Rinat Shigabdinov, before the 1928 decree, there were 1,362 madrasas in Uzbekistan with 21,183 students enrolled in them.

Another measure that damaged Arabic teaching and learning was the decision to replace the traditional Arabic script of Uzbek with a Latin-based writing system in 1927. Ten years later in 1937, as a measure of Russification, the Cyrillic script replaced the Latin script. These measures dealt a death blow to the teaching of Islam and Arabic language and script in Uzbekistan. In 1945, as a token of acceptance of religious institutions, Stalin allowed Mir-e-Arab madrasa, established in the 16th century, in Bukhara, to reopen with a limited number of students. Subsequently, two more institutions of Islamic learning were established; namely, madrasa Baraq Khan in 1956 and Tashkent Islamic Institute of Imam al-Bukhari in 1971.

Arabic within Multilingual Transoxiana

Present-day Uzbekistan, which in pre-modern times, was part of the larger Transoxiana region in Central Asia, was a thriving center of Arabic language and literature. The Persian-speaking Samanids (819-999 AD), who ruled Central Asia from their capital in Bukhara under the suzerainty of the Arabic-speaking Abbasids, maintained Arabic as the language of administration, Islamic learning, and sciences. The Samanids simultaneously encouraged use of Persian in the court. Under their patronage, many Arabic texts were translated into Persian, including the Quranic tafsir, exegesis, of Al-Tabari (d. 923 AD) and the Kalila wa Dimnah, a collection of fables, originally written in Sanskrit.

1958 Soviet stamp celebrating the 1100th birthday of Rudaki (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Rudaki (858-940), born and raised in Bukhara and regarded as the founder of New Persian Poetry, was granted the esteemed position of the court poet of the Samanids.

In this multilingual linguistic and intellectual environment, there emerged in Bukhara two towering figures among the scholars of Hadith, the most foundational Islamic text after the Quran, namely Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari aka Imam Bukhari (810-870 AD) and Muhammad ibn Isa known as Al-Tirmidhi (824-892). Both were born in the Bukhara region of what is today Uzbekistan. In pursuit of the compilation of the Hadith, the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, they travelled widely to different parts of the Muslim world. They wrote their collections of hadith in Arabic, known as Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sunan Al-Tirmidhi respectively.

To the illustrious history of Bukhara as a center of Arabic can be added the polymath and physician Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in Latin Western sources. He is considered to be the father of early modern medicine. Born in Afshona in Bukhara, Ibn Sina, had memorized the whole of the Quran before the age of ten. Later he turned his attention to the study of medicine. He authored many books in Arabic on philosophy, mathematics and other branches of knowledge. In medicine, his famous work is Al-Qanoon fi Al-Tib, “The Canon of Medicine.” This work consists of five volumes with over 1 million words. He was the physician of the Samanid ruler Nuh II (976-997).

In September 2023, in a speech delivered in the UN, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the president of Uzbekistan, named Imam Bukhari and Ibn Sina, among others, as scholars who richly contributed to science and showed that Islam was a religion of knowledge and peace.

Rise of Interest in Arabic in contemporary Bukhara

After the repression of Arabic and Islamic teaching during Soviet rule, there are signs of change in today’s Uzbekistan. In addition to official institutions such as Bukhara University encouraging the teaching of Arabic, many private language centers have also recently emerged in the city of Bukhara. There are over 50 private language centers in Bukhara, including popular ones like Takallum, An-Nisa, and Naqshbandi School.

Drawing of viscera from Ibn Sina’s “Canon of Medicine” (Source: Wellcome Collection)

On their Facebook page, Takallum invites students as follows, “…reciting the Qur’an with Tajweed is our obligatory deed and our deed will lead us to Paradise! Lead your friends to paradise, help them read the Quran, be a true friend for them”. Evidently, for Takallum the learning of Arabic is coupled with Islamic beliefs and practices.

Based on a pilot study conducted in September-October 2023, we found that there are clear signs of the rise in the interest in Arabic learning. First, we discuss a survey that was given online to an active Telegram group called NIسA_School, Ayollar Maktabi, with over 14,000 women members. The use of the Arabic letter س in the first word of the group is indexical of the fact that it brings back the Arabic language and its history in Uzbekistan.

Next, we discuss statistics of students who received Arabic language proficiency certificates from Davlat Test Markazi Buxoro Viloyat Bo’limi, National Test Center, Bukhara Region.

In response to the survey question ‘what was your goal of learning Arabic?’, an overwhelming 82% of the participants (N=347) answered that they considered learning Arabic as most important knowledge for their self-development. Related to this personal/spiritual goal of learning Arabic was the response from 14% of the participants who learned Arabic in order to teach it to others.

It is important to mention here that Muslims believe that God rewards those who read the Qur’an in the original Arabic, even if they do not understand its message. This means that the original Arabic text has spiritual value that cannot be gained by reading it in translation.

The remaining 4% learned Arabic because they wanted to live and work in an Arabic-speaking country.

Another indicator of the rising interest in Arabic comes from the data of students who have received a proficiency certificate in Arabic based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In 2022, Uzbekistan started to use the six-point CEFR proficiency levels from A1-A2, basic user, through B1-B2, independent user, to C1-C2, proficient user. Since the implementation of CEFR in 2022, the total number of students receiving CEFR enrolled in different Arabic language teaching centers in the Bukhara region alone was 3,079. The vast majority of them (92%) received B1 and B2 and the remaining 8% received the higher proficiency level C1. No Uzbek students attained C2, the highest-level proficiency.

Post-Soviet transformations

Bukhara, Old City (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Another important factor propelling people’s interest in Arabic learning is that the Government of Uzbekistan encourages learning of foreign languages and rewards those who earn high-level proficiency certificates in them. According to a presidential decree of 2021, teachers of Arabic and other foreign languages with a C1 certificate will be paid an additional bonus of 50% of their basic salary. Similarly, employees in any government agency possessing any national or international certificate in a foreign language will receive an extra bonus of 20% on their basic salary. Furthermore, students applying for admission into master’s and Ph.D. in the philological studies must show a C1 level proficiency in a foreign language and those in non-philological fields must have a B2 level proficiency.

The discussion above clearly suggests that the changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union have transformed the linguistic and educational fields. Uzbekistan, one of the great centers of Arabic language during the medieval era is witnessing a renaissance in the learning of Arabic after a long period of state suppression. Many young Uzbeks are rediscovering their history by learning the Arabic language and its script. The government’s incentives of learning a foreign language make Arabic learning even more attractive.

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Akhmedova Mehrinigor Bahodirovna is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Literature & Translation Studies at Bukhara State University. Her research covers issues related to translation, literature, spirituality and sociolinguistics.

Enjoy this latest episode of Chats in Linguistic Diversity! The conversation is a sequel to our previous conversation about whether we can ever unthink linguistic nationalism.

Edited transcript below

Can you tell us about the story behind Multilingualism and history?

I have a very short answer and a somewhat longer answer to your question.

The short answer: this is the book I always wanted to read. And I was hoping that somebody else would write it or edit it. That never happened.

The longer answer is that it’s a very natural outcome of the way I see my scholarly trajectory.

If you remember when we were junior scholars, our main preoccupations were, “I want to be heard, I desperately want to be published.” And then you go along and then you start thinking, “What are the conversations going on? How can I contribute to these conversations?”

And then you go along and you start thinking, “What conversations are not happening? How can we start them?”

And you and I have both been very successful starting some conversations about gender, identity, emotions. I’ve also been very lucky to start conversations about forensic linguistics.

And so it seemed like the path is very clear. You put together an invited colloquium, maybe a workshop, you put together a special issue. An edited volume. And you are building a network of people, and you get people interested, and you get people excited, and I’ve always believed that history was another missing piece.

But nothing was ever easy with history and multilingualism. Because when people heard about gender and emotions and identity, it made sense to them. It was relevant. It was relevant to the present moment. But history seemed utterly irrelevant to multilingualism in the digital age.

And so the long answer is the purpose of this edited volume. It’s to make historic research relevant to sociolinguists in a very pointed way because this research undermines the foundational myth of our field which is that we live in a world that’s more multilingual than ever before. When in reality we live in a world that’s less multilingual than ever before.

And the historians know this.

How is Multilingualism and History structured? What topics are being addressed and who are the contributors?

The choices I made was not to be comprehensive, but to highlight what is novel and interesting. So, for example, the pivotal chapter by Ben Fortna shows the transformation of a very multilingual Ottoman Empire into a very monolingual nation state of Turkey. It follows the transformation in a way that for me is emblematic of the main point made in the book.

Susan Gal talks about language ideologies that shape the ways linguists themselves work, and see multilingualism, which is also very relevant.

Or I invited Roland Willemyns to contribute a chapter on why Dutch failed as a lingua franca. Because we love talking about Latin and English and other Lingua Francas, but we never think about languages that were poised to become a lingua franca but never became one. Why is that?

So for me, each chapter highlights a novel dimension in relationships with language in ways that we often don’t talk about.

Ads in Polish and Yiddish for Halpern’s fabric store and warehouse, Skład towarów bławatnych, on Nalyvaiko street, 13 (at the turn of the 20th century the street – then known as Rzeżnicka – was inhabited primarily by Jews). Lviv, September 2019. Photo by A. Pavlenko

The progression in the book is chronological from ancient Egypt to modern day.

The aim of this volume was never to be comprehensive and to only show that multilingualism was here. Multilingualism was there. Because if that’s what I wanted, I would have edited a very different book. The challenge for me is not in the many contexts where we can find multilingualism. But in the story that we have been telling ourselves. And the story we’ve been telling ourselves is a very European, Western story. And we got it wrong.

How did we get the history of multilingualism wrong?

There was a lot of forgetting that happened in the early part and the middle of the twentieth century. And a lot of lack of intergenerational transmission.

It also has to do with the incredible dominance of English as an academic language that emerged in the second part of the twentieth century. That led to the loss of multilingual knowledge that no longer made it into the sociolinguistic mainstream. And that unfortunately also extends to historians.

In my introduction to the volume, I cite one very bitter German historian who says that American historians write the history of the colonial United States without looking at documents in European languages like Dutch and French and Swedish. Not to mention Native American languages.

It has become acceptable to be a scholar of multilingualism while not knowing more than one language. It has become acceptable to be historian while being monolingual. And that is part of forgetting.

To an English speaker, multilingualism is an unusual phenomenon worthy of study. For me, it’s a rediscovery of the wheel. It’s the process of historical amnesia.

Let’s talk a bit more about amnesia and ignorance pacts.

The term “ignorance pacts” is from Joshua Fishman, who talked about the reciprocal ignorance pacts between sociolinguists and sociologists, which made sociolinguistics a very provincial, parochial discipline.

Café Sztuka, with restored Polish and Yiddish ads for groceries and haberdashery. Kotlyarska street 8. Lviv, September 2019. Photo by A. Pavlenko.

And of course, Fishman is still that generation of scholars who are trained in a much broader tradition than we’re currently trained. And so when you spend a lot of time in the field, as you and I did, what becomes apparent?

When we started out in the 1990s, there were 3 journals focusing on bilingualism. It was hard to get a publication in, but everybody was reading everybody else, everybody knew everybody else. Since then, our own field, just like other fields, has experienced a tremendous growth. And the growth came with many positives but also with many negatives such as the fragmentation of the field.

And this split into academic tribes with their own little conventions. Their own publications, their own conferences. Bilingualism people for some reason meet separately from the multilingualism people. And the sociolinguists of multilingualism, bilingualism, live in a very different world from the psycholinguists.

Where do data about past multilingualism come from and what methods do we use in the study of historical multilingualism?

By definition, the spoken word is fleeting and so everything that we have pretty much is written records and that, of course, has limits.

The challenges are also advantages because when you look at multilingualism in the past the degree to which we privilege the spoken word becomes very obvious.

In reality, the data is plentiful for many contexts. As of today, there’s still many little clay tablets and many papyruses sitting there unread, containing precious information: administrative records, bureaucratic records, receipts, letters. There is a ton of information to be gained about all aspects of history, economics, politics, and also multilingualism from such trivial things, such as bureaucratic receipts, court records, administrative correspondence.

Moreover, when we look at evidence such as, for example, travel accounts by pilgrims. They also pick up on oral language practices. The eyewitness accounts of these people bring very precious information about what we would call oral practices. And the same goes for court records.

Bilingualism was foundational to the development of literacy. And that is not something we talk about. We kind of imagine the trajectory being the other way around. But people go on and appropriate scripts from other languages and make them their own.

What do ghost signs tell us about past multilingualism?

Ghost signs are very commonly painted, sometimes faded ads. That have lost their functional significance. The business they’re advertising, for example, is no longer there. The store is no longer there. But the sign is still there. And people love them just for the aesthetics for an immediate connection to the past.

Nevsky Prospect 20, St Petersburg, with Russian signs, German signs for St Petersburger Zeitung, the German bookstore and library of Andreas Isler, and a French sign for the Grand Magasin de Paris (ca. 1900)

The capital of ghost signs is the Ukrainian city of Lviv, which before World War 2 was the Polish city of Lwów and before that was the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg.

And so the signs in Lviv are in German and Polish and Yiddish; three languages that are no longer spoken on its streets.

And when you start seeing those signs, some of them very nicely repainted and spruced up, you start asking yourself, well, what is the function of the signs? If they are not really about Ukrainian history, what are they doing on the streets of a modern Ukrainian city?

They tell a story of how multinational the city of Lviv has always been, and an example of the tolerant coexistence between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. And that is a kind of statement that doesn’t make sense on many different levels.

First of all, because the Ukrainian language is missing from the signs. It was not very much in use in signage before World War II in a Polish city.

Secondly, we all know of the historic antagonism between the three main populations, so the coexistence was by no means very tolerant.

The multilingualism was real, it was there, but it was hierarchical. If you were Polish, you may learn German, but you’re not going to learn Ukrainian or Yiddish, but if you were Jewish you would have to learn everybody else’s language, in addition to Yiddish and Hebrew.

Even more importantly, the signs that make this very smooth artificial transition from a Polish to a Ukrainian city obfuscate the amount of violence that took place in the city during and after World War 2, that transformed a historically Polish city into a Ukrainian city through the genocide of its Jewish population, and ethnic cleansing and deportation of its Polish population.

We don’t just innocently reimagine history. We reshape people’s perceptions of what happened in the past. And that is what the ghost signs are very successfully doing. They’re creating someone else’s history. In this case, the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was cosmopolitan, the history of multilingual Poland – to give a very respectable aura of cosmopolitanism to a modern Ukrainian city, that is by no means very tolerant. In my fieldwork I found not a single sign in the language of the largest linguistic minority of the city of Lviv, which is Russian.

How is the past entangled in the present and the future?

It breaks my heart to see war in my homeland of Ukraine. It broke my heart to see Russia invade Ukraine, cruelly, with no justification. Nobody can justify that.

But it also breaks my heart to see the Ukrainian government using the very same invasion to push forth language policies that have been unpopular before and making them popular. Taking down every monument in a Russian writer, reducing the uses of the Russian language further because it’s presumably the language of the enemy and not the language of the population.

And that is something that no sociolinguist comments on because presumably that is okay. We are okay with linguistic nationalism in certain forms. That to me is hypocritical.

We start from the question whether the world today is more multilingual than it was every before. Spoiler alert: we quickly conclude that no, it is not.

Aneta takes us to one of her favorite multilingual polities, Medieval Palermo. The Normans who conquered Palermo in 1072 ruled trilingually – through Arabic, Greek, and Latin. However, we would be wrong to conclude from this multilingual regime that Norman Palermo was a tolerant and liberal place. Both monolingual and multilingual regimes operate in the service of the state, as evidence from laws, trial proceedings, monuments, or even currency shows throughout the ages.

Petrus de Ebulo, Trilingual scribes in the Kingdom of Sicily (1196)

One of the reasons why the world may seem more multilingual today than in the past lies in the European nationalist project, which culminated in the “population exchanges” of the 20^th century – the great “unmixing of peoples”, as Lord Curzon called it.

As a result, languages became associated with nations and this linguistic nationalism continues to guide views of language today. Can linguistic nationalism ever be unthought?

Maybe because languages are now so deeply intertwined with nationalist projects, we have become much more emotional about language and languages than people may have been in the past. This is true even of academic research, where there can be significant pressure to bring our emotions into our research, too.

How to deal with such pressures is another thread that runs through our conversation. We reflect on our own academic careers and what lessons they may or may not hold for early career researchers today.

Further resources

Our conversation accompanies Aneta’s 2021 Einar Hauge Lecture “Does multilingualism need a history?” and the introductory chapter “Multilingualism and history” to her upcoming book devoted to the same topic.

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Alexander von Humboldt at Uluru (Collage by Language on the Move based on previous collage by Raufeld Medien based on painting by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

This evening I have ventured beyond the Americas which had such an impact on me in my younger years to come Down Under. I always wanted to visit to Australia with its rich diversity of landscapes, climates, flora and fauna, your Schnabeltier (platypus) and all the marsupials – regrettably, I did not make it in my first 250 years. I have been encouraged to come this evening in light of the celebrations that you had last year to mark my 250th birthday, including the fabulous symposium devoted to “Sharing Knowledge in the Spirit of Humboldt” at Macquarie University.

From a young age, I wanted to explore foreign lands. I developed a particular interest in Australia in the late 1780s as a student at the University of Göttingen. There I met Georg Forster (1754-1794), who had accompanied Captain Cook (1728-1779) on his second voyage to the Pacific. During my youth, I had read and been captivated by Cook’s journals. My lively conversations with Forster intensified my travel bug. Well-known not only as a scientific traveller but also a personage in the Enlightenment movement, Forster influenced me both in terms of pursuing my future explorations and of acquiring more progressive views.

After two semesters in Göttingen, Forster and I spent four months trekking through the Netherlands, England and France. While in England, Forster introduced me to Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), President of the Royal Society. Banks had been the botanist on Cook’s first voyage, which took him to Australia. That introduction was the origin of my valued scientific friendship with Banks who offered me first-hand knowledge of Australia.

I would have particularly liked to come here in the middle of the 19th century but I was too old by then. A number of young Germans arrived in the colonies at that time, seeking to emulate across the seventh continent my scientific travels in the Americas. Take, for example, the Australian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt (1813-ca. 1848). He wrote that I was one “of those men … whose deeds sounded like legends to the boy, filled the youth with rapture and finally drew him to follow a similar direction”.[1] How sad that Leichhardt disappeared without trace on his second major expedition and what a loss to Australian scientific exploration!

Then there was the first Victorian Government Botanist and Director of the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, Dr Ferdinand Mueller (1825-1896). He said that my “works … inspired [him] to contribute to investigations of the realms of nature, drove [him] … with endless longing, to distant places in order to give the great master [that’s me] a few, potentially valuable stones for the construction of the palace of science”.[2] He was quite a character! He made a prodigious contribution to Australian botany, undertook journeys of exploration and gained such high offices as President of the Royal Society of Victoria. His international scientific recognition was marked by innumerable honours, including being made an hereditary baron by the King of Württemberg.

For a third example of these young scientific adventurers, I turn to Professor Georg Neumayer (1826-1909), Founder of the Melbourne’s Flagstaff Observatory, Government Meteorologist in Victoria and Director of the Magnetic Survey. Neumayer idolised me – it is said that, on his treks across Victoria, he discussed my “theorems with those he met and carr[ied] a well read copy of [my] Cosmos”.[3] I had been introduced to Neumayer between his two sojourns in Australia and backed the magnetic survey that he planned to conduct upon his return to Melbourne in 1857. Significantly, Neumayer was “the first professionally trained physicist to work in Australia”. He brought to his endeavours in the Colony “new standards of precision and sophistication in physical inquiry” while reinforcing my integrative so-called Humboldtian orientation in his work. With his “field-based, observational and world-encompassing style”, he was entirely in my own mould.[4]

Through German Australians such as these I was well-known Down Under in the 19th century. Like others of German background, I faded from the limelight as the German States became a colonial power in your region, and conflicts like the Boer War and World Wars I and II, put us on opposite sides.

However, two contemporary factors have seen me returning to public interest. In 2019, I celebrated my 250th birthday, as you know – such a momentous milestone saw work done all around the globe, including in Australia, re-assessing the significance and impact of my work.

The second factor leading to my ‘renaissance’ relates to one particular aspect of my work – let me remind you that, already in 1800, I contributed the first-recorded description of human-induced climate change. In South America, I saw the impacts of colonisation ― deforestation, the introduction of plantation agriculture, consequent soil erosion and ultimately altered climate patterns. Linking social and economic factors with environmental issues, I highlighted the importance of forests to the ecosystem. Over the years I not only spoke out against environmental destruction but also slavery, colonialism, and showed them all to be connected. I wanted a more democratic society than the repressive Prussian state. My country and yours now have that but, in other aspects, you have not heeded some of the understandings that I won over two centuries ago, when I was very much younger.

Let us consider your contemporary Australian challenges of severe droughts, unprecedented bush fires and increasingly alarming climate change. I look back over the years on interventions which have devastated parts of this ‘lucky’ country and continue to do so – the ravaging of native forests, uncontrolled proliferation of feral animals, severe soil erosion and clogging of some of the magnificent river systems about which young German and other explorers wrote home to us in Europe.

You seem to have forgotten some of the learnings that I sought to promote – the interconnection of the sciences, an integrated view of the natural world, the “unity of nature”, as I have called it. You have also ignored what the First Peoples of Australia would have been able to teach you about caring for and nurturing this country.

In many ways I like your global age, the ease of modern travel and the speed of social communications – how easily I could have conducted my scientific journeys and communicated my findings, if I had been active in the twenty-first century. However, globalisation has brought its own challenges. Seeing we are in 2020, I will highlight the COVID-19 pandemic. How rapidly and widely it has spread with what was your ‘normal’ lifestyle. Many of the countries which have suffered most are those with great deprivation of their people and devastation of their environment.

It is timely that I am with you this evening to highlight again the critical importance of the “unity of nature”. My integrated view of the natural world underpinned so much of what I achieved. Take it to heart as Australia seeks to address its contemporary challenges and contribute on the global stage. From my insights into the inter-connectedness of the sciences, it is clear that, like never before, we need communication and collaboration across disciplines to address the contemporary issues of climate change, sustainability and the pandemic.

I was always a great networker so it has been a delight this evening to widen my circle to include Australia. You will know how I relished receiving all those awards and honours in yesteryear. I am really touched that you still recognise my significance by celebrating my birthday each September. I am wondering what changes I might find in your fair land if I come Down Under again to join one of my birthday dinners in 10, 20 or 50 years time …

May the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows long keep my name and contributions alive in Australia – enjoy your evening together. Auf Wiedersehen!

Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows

Humboldt Fellows have all undertaken periods of research in Germany funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This year the Melbourne gathering had to go online due to the COVID-19 lock-down.  That enabled interstate colleagues to join the celebration as well as two members of the Foundation to link in from Bonn, Germany. The speaker on the occasion was current President of the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows, Professor Gabrielle McMullen AM FRACI BSc(Hons) PhD (Monash).

To learn more about the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows visit their website. A report about their most recent biennial meeting, the symposium “Sharing Knowledge in the Spirit of Humboldt” at Macquarie University in 2019, is available here. The proceedings of the symposium have been published by the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of NSW and are available open access.

Want to learn more about becoming a Humboldt Fellow? Visit the website of the Humboldt Foundation.

To learn more about Alexander von Humboldt head over to this ABC Late Night Live podcast where Phillip Adams and Ingrid Piller discuss his legacy.

References

[1]     H Fiedler (2007) ‘Ludwig Leichhardt and Alexander von Humboldt’, Alexander von Humboldt im Netz (HiN), VIII (15), 1–7, see p. 2.

[2]     Melbourner Deutsche Zeitung, 7 (21 October 1859), 42.

[3]     C Heathcote (2001) ‘When Science Meets Art: Humboldt, von Guérard and the Australian Wilderness’, Art Monthly Australia, 145, 27–31, see p. 31.

[4]     RW Home (1991) ‘Georg von Neumayer and the Flagstaff Observatory, Melbourne’ in D Walker and J Tampke (eds.), From Berlin to the Burdekin: The German Contribution to the Development of Australian Science, Exploration and the Arts, Sydney: New South Wales University Press, pp. 40–53, see p. 51.

One of countless internet memes about crazy English spelling (Source: angmohdan.com)

During a dreary German winter in the 1980s, I would get up early each Friday morning, wrap myself up against the cold, and ride my bike in the morning darkness up “Gallows Hill Street”, where for many centuries the city’s court of justice had been located. My destination was a windowless underground classroom in a 1960s concrete building, where an “Advanced Dictation” class was taking place that was compulsory for all undergraduate students of English.

For 90 minutes each week, we would take dictation of some text, then swap the result of our labors with our neighbor, whose job it was to mark up the errors and tally them while the teacher wrote out the difficult words on the blackboard. Each week, this was an exercise in guessing and humiliation: for instance, how do you spell /ɪndaɪt/ when you hear it for the first time and have only the vaguest idea what it means? Most likely “indite”? Or is it spelled like “night” and “right” and hence “indight”? Or how about /teknɪklɪ/? To spell “technicly” seems obvious enough but wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

There are hundreds if not thousands such words in the English language that you need to know before you can spell them. Understanding the logic of the alphabet and the main sound-letter correspondences still leaves you with a long way to go when it comes to being able to read and write in English.

Most students in the class struggled and we all dreaded the final exam (I passed with a credit, which, by my standards, was disappointingly low).

A student in the class had dug up a quip by the Austrian linguist Mario Wandruszka, who had opined that “English spelling is an insult to the human intelligence.” Being teenagers, we all agreed with the statement and – in a classic case of sour grapes – consoled ourselves with the idea that not doing well in English dictation was in fact a badge of honor that demonstrated our superior intelligence.

Pope Gregory sending St Augustine to convert the people of England to Christianity in 597 (11th c manuscript, British Library)

In the years since, maybe in a case of Stockholm syndrome, I’ve come to adore English orthography. Today, I see it as an intricate system that contains within it the sediments of the innumerous contacts between different languages and cultures that make English such a fascinating language.

Adopting the Latin script

English writing had a design flaw from Day One: adopting the Latin alphabet, which is designed for the sound system of another language, Latin, to English was always going to be a problem – as has been proven innumerable times since the Latin alphabet has been adopted to more languages than any other script (as I explain in this lecture).

When the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain (ca. 400-700 CE), they brought with them not only their Germanic dialects but also their runic alphabet, which had been designed for the phonology of Germanic languages.

During Christianization the runic alphabet became associated with heathendom, and the Latin alphabet with Christianity. From 597 – the date of Augustine’s mission to Kent – Latin became the language of the new faith and, gradually, the alphabet of the Latin language began to be used to also write English.

Old English was a very different language from what it is today, and with the addition of a few letters, the match between sounds and letters was not too bad in those days, even if the problem of fewer letters than sounds has been a problem of English spelling since the beginning. The classical Latin alphabet had 23 letters, and three were added. These 26 letters now have to cover the 43 phonemes (19 vowels and 24 consonants) of modern English.

The last English king, King Harold, is killed during the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (Bayeux Tapestry)

So, the first story of language and culture contact encoded in English spelling is that of the contact between spoken Germanic dialects and the sophisticated literate world of Latin. It is also the story of adopting a new faith and the fundamental transformation of a culture this results in.

Mixing in French

Old English died in 1066. Although the name “English” suggests continuity, Old English is as different from English as we know it as, say, German or Norwegian.

This is because the Norman Conquest of 1066 brought Old English into intense contact with French. For centuries, a social divide separated English (the spoken peasant dialects) and French (the language of the upper classes, and the language of almost all writing in England during the period).

This medieval social-cum-linguistic divide is still vividly illustrated by Anglo-Saxon-origin terms for animals (e.g., pig, cow, sheep, deer) existing side-by-side with French-origin terms for the meat of those animals (e.g., pork, beef, mutton, venison). That the medieval division of labor was also an ethnolinguistic divide could not be clearer.

By the time “English” started to be used again in writing it was a fundamentally changed mixed language, and spelling conventions that made sense in a Germanic language co-existed, not always easily, with spelling conventions that made sense in French.

The printing press fossilizes spelling

As if all that language mixing was not enough to confuse English writing, the printing press, which was introduced to Britain by William Caxton in 1476, altered the relationship between speech and writing forever.

Caxton’s rant about linguistic diversity (from the Preface to his print of Eneydos)

The idea of orthography – that there is only one correct way to spell – was alien to the medieval mind. Spelling mirrored pronunciation closely and different scribes in different dialect areas spelled differently. Spelling was ultimately a matter of individual preference.

Printing changed that – not only because a standard was more convenient for printers but also because a uniform linguistic product could reach a larger market. Not surprisingly Caxton was one of the first to rail against linguistic diversity when he famously complained that “eggs” were called “egges” in some parts of England but “eyren” in others.

Standardization was born.

Initially, the idea of a standard language only applied to writing, and spoken English continued to be highly diverse.

What happens when spoken language continues to change but writing does not? They drift apart … and you end up with a spelling system that is more in tune with the pronunciation of 500 years ago than contemporary pronunciation. This is particularly true of English vowels whose pronunciation changed considerably between the 15^th and 18^th centuries in a process called the “Great Vowel Shift.”

The Great Vowel Shift and the stubborn conservatism of printing have created a rift between spoken and written English (Image credit: Wikipedia)

As a result, written and spoken English are today quite different beasts.

Is learning how to spell in English worth it?

Untold numbers of English language learners have, like myself, sweated to learn how to spell in English.

This task has been unnecessarily complicated by the false belief that we were learning an alphabetic script. Systematic letter-sound relationships are the foundation of English spelling but they are complemented by a significant logographic element, where letter combinations are systematically related to morphemes. The triple baggage of adopting an ill-suited alphabet, of mixing two languages and their internal logics, and of separating written from spoken language, has inserted a considerable logographic element (I explain this is in greater detail with the example of <s> as plural marker and <ce> as marker of word-final voiceless /s/ in non-inflected words in this lecture).

Logograms can only be acquired through patient practice, as any Chinese teacher will tell you. However, a knowledge of language history can help make sense of the logographic element. And it is certainly more motivating to understand English spelling in its socio-historical context instead of considering it “an insult to human intelligence.” The reward of learning how to spell is the kind of reading automaticity and speed that characterizes the proficient reader and that is the ultimate point of literacy.

What is your experience with learning or teaching English spelling? And how do you think digital technologies will change English spelling?

To explore further, view the lecture about the spread of the Latin alphabet that goes with this blog post:

Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not … they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb – that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail – the bravery, even, of the lions.

Achebe’s story illustrates that reading is a powerful mind-altering technology: at its best, reading allows us to leave our own selves behind and see the world through someone else’s eyes. For example, reading Achebe’s novel Things fall apart enabled me to experience the world through the perspective of a 19th century Igbo tribesman. Stepping out from our own identity and into someone else’s place in this way extends us in multiple ways. It increases our capacity for empathy and our understanding of the breadth and diversity of human experience.

However, as Achebe points out, there is a dark side to reading as a shaper of minds and identities: stories that never feature people like ourselves or only depict them as negative stereotypes – as “stupid and ugly” – are deeply alienating.

People who have learned to see themselves exclusively through the eyes of others are easily controlled. All regimes of domination make use of these forms of mind control by restricting the circulation of stories.

The annals of colonialism are full of these attempts at mind control via control over literacy. Some are of breathtaking barbarity, such as the burning of the Mayan books by the Spanish conquerors. The destruction of the flourishing and advanced Mesoamerican civilizations was so complete that today few people even know that the precolonial Mayans had developed a writing system and were recording their scientific knowledge, particularly of astronomy, in books.

Destroying the books of the Mayans – and thus consigning their writing system and their knowledge to oblivion – paved the way for the colonizers to re-invent the colonized as an abject people without history and independent identity whose “agony, travail and bravery” remains untold, unnoticed, even unimaginable.

Excerpt from the Dresden Codex, one of only 4 surviving Mayan books (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The technologies of the 16^th century made the destruction of the Mayan codices a relatively straightforward undertaking. As Bishop de Landa states, “we burned them all.” And when he says “all”, he literally meant “all”. Today, only four Mayan codices are known to survive. To add insult to injury, none of these are (easily) accessible to the descendants of the Mayas. Three are located in European libraries in Dresden, Madrid, and Paris, and the fourth in the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City.

Burning books has always been a crude way to control minds. Keeping the stories of the lions out of circulation has always been a more efficient and subtle strategy.

For a long time, the possibility of resistance to mind control via keeping stories out of circulation was severely curtailed by technology. Even when Achebe decided that he would become a writer to tell the story of colonized Nigerians in the middle of the 20^th century, getting his stories published was incredibly difficult. There was no African publishing house and, in fact, not even a typing service. He had to entrust the hand-written copy of his first novel – and the only copy in existence – to international mail and send it all the way to London so that it could be typed up for manuscript submission to a publishing house.

We have come a long way since then. Postcolonial literatures have established themselves, women writers have entered the canons, and, in many contexts, the dominated have found ways to not only tell their own stories in their own words but also to get them published. New technologies are lowering the barriers to circulating the stories of the lions to ever larger audiences.

Do you find yourself in the books you read? And do you make an effort to seek out the stories of those who are different from you?

References

Achebe, C. (1958). Things fall apart. London: Heinemann.
Brooks, J. (1994). Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction No. 139. Paris Review. Retrieved from https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1720/chinua-achebe-the-art-of-fiction-no-139-chinua-achebe
Landa, D. (ca. 1566) Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. Retrieved from https://www.wayeb.org/download/resources/landa.pdf

Native and non-native teachers at Lord Harris’ School, Royapett, Madras, 1865 (Source: British Library)

For some time now, a debate has been raging in TESOL about the relative merits of native and non-native speakers as English language teachers. While many people in the field are critical of the continued dominance of native speakers as “ideal” teachers, proposals for change have largely been ineffectual.

True, job ads asking for “native speakers” are now widely considered discriminatory and the relative strengths of both groups are spruiked at conferences. However, none of this has much changed the fact that institutions, students and parents, by and large, continue to prefer TESOL teachers who they consider to be native speakers; that such teachers are oftentimes paid more and hired into more secure employment; and that teachers considered non-native are regularly subject to micro-aggressions such as having their expertise called into question.

Is there a more effective way to overcome native speaker hegemony other than to educate people about the native speaker fallacy?

Absolutely. It has been done before. The following object lesson of native speaker subordination comes from an unlikely source, namely the British Empire and specifically the East India Company.

Persian – India’s power code

To understand this case study, a bit of historical context is required: when the British brought the Indian subcontinent under colonial control, they displaced an existing state, the Mughal Empire. The Mughals’ state language was Persian. In the 18^th century, when the British rapidly expanded and consolidated their possessions on the subcontinent, Persian had been India’s written language, its power code and its lingua franca for over three centuries. In other words, Persian was the Moghuls’ “technology of governance” (Fisher, 2012, pp. 328f.).

Officer of the East India Company being coached in Persian by a private tutor (Source: Massey & Massey, 1968, p. 473)

In order to rule India, it was therefore essential to know Persian. And Indians knew Persian. Britons did not.

As the East India Company tightened its grip on India, it approached this problem gradually by first replacing Indian speakers of Persian with British speakers of Persian and, further down the track, replacing Persian with English as the language of the state. It is the first step in this process that concerns us here: how did the East India Company go about replacing Indians with Britons as privileged knowers of Persian?

Establishing a Persian language teaching industry

Initially, British colonial officials who wanted to learn Persian (or any other Indian language) were largely left to their own devices and such language study was a matter of private enterprise. Many hired Indian language teachers as private tutors.

Gradually, Persian language learning became more formalized and dedicated language training institutes were established. The most important of these were Fort William College in Calcutta, and, back home in Britain, Haileybury Imperial Service College and Addiscombe Military Seminary. These institutes all opened in the first decade of the 19^th century.

Since the 18^th century, Persian-speaking Indian elites had increasingly shifted from working for the Mughal Empire and its ever smaller and more fragmented successor states to accepting employment from the British. For many of them this meant becoming language teachers.

In India, teaching was a highly respected profession and Indian teachers of Persian initially assumed a high-status position vis-à-vis their British students. They were in a bull market, or so it must have seemed: Persian language teaching became ever more widespread and profitable, not only in the colony, but also in Britain, where middle-class families clamoured for an education that would ensure their sons’ future in lucrative colonial positions. Just how profitable the teaching of Indian languages was can be seen from the autobiography of one such language teacher, Lutfullah:

I regularly held the profession of a teacher of the Persian, Hindustani, Arabic, and Marathi languages to the new comers from England, from time to time, and place to place, as their duty obliged and caprice induced them to go. Upwards of one hundred pupils studied with me during the above period, and none of my scholars returned unlaureled from the Government examination committees. I have a book of most flattering certificates in my possession, and I may say that I was better off than many by following this profession. (Lutfullah, 1858, p. 139)

Haileybury College (Source: Wikipedia)

In the colonial logic of the assumed inferiority of the colonized, high-status Indian language teachers with a good income soon became the targets of envy and efforts to undermine them got underway. Returned colonial officials, in particular, wanted teaching positions for themselves rather than see them occupied by Indians. Given their clout and connections, many of them managed to be recruited into Persian language teaching positions in the new imperial training institutes. That their language competence was sometimes almost non-existent did not matter.

The Professor of Oriental Literature at Addiscombe, for instance, was one John Shakespear, who not only drew a professorial salary but supplemented his income by publishing numerous textbooks and teaching aids. His most successful textbook was one of the earliest grammars of Urdu, A Grammar of the Hindustani Language. First published in 1813, it was reprinted and re-issued in new editions for almost half a century. The above-mentioned Lutfullah met Shakespear during his visit to England in 1844 and describes his encounter as follows:

[I] had the honour of being introduced to three men of learning, viz., John Shakespear, the author of the Hindustani Dictionary […]. Knowing the first-named gentleman to be the author of a book in our language, I addressed to him a very complimentary long sentence in my own language. But, alas! I found that he could not understand me, nor could he utter a word in that language in which he had composed several very useful books. (Lutfullah, 1858, p. 389)

Subordinating native speakers

The above example can leave no doubt that the linguistic qualifications of Indians were superior to those of British language teachers. Even so, the former were excluded almost entirely from the enterprise of Persian language teaching, well before that enterprise was abandoned entirely in favour of making Indians learn English.

Addiscombe Military Seminary, c. 1859 (Source: Wikipedia)

The subordination of native speaker teachers was achieved in two ways, namely through arguments related to teacher identity and through a reorganization of language teaching.

The arguments related to teacher identity basically stated that Muslim men were unfit to teach Christian boys and young men. The board of Haileybury College, for instance, decided in 1816 that “the linguistic advantages of having a ‘native speaker’ teach British students was outweighed by the alleged disruption these Muslim Indian men had on the students’ moral education” (Fisher, 2012, p. 344). As in other language training institutions, Indian teachers were replaced with British teachers.

Reorganization of language teaching meant that Indian ways of language teaching (through the study of literature) were devalued in favour of British ways of language teaching (through the study of grammars and dictionaries). While the former approach requires a high level of language competence of the teacher, the latter does not.

Furthermore, Indian teachers were reframed as specialists in pronunciation, and pronunciation as a language skill was marginalized. Instead of hiring them into teacher roles, Indian teachers were offered positions as drill masters and teaching assistants of British teachers. The latter were fashioned as experts both in methods of language teaching and in the grammar skills that were now considered the essential test of language competence.

By the 1840s, all Indian language teachers had been removed from imperial language training institutes and the newly established university chairs in Persian, Arabic and other oriental languages all went to Britons. Any Indian language teachers who remained in Britain were relegated to the private tutoring market, which was shrinking, too, as a knowledge of Persian and other Indian languages became increasingly irrelevant to pursuing a career in the colonies.

Fort William College (Source: Navrang India)

Who is to be master?

As is obvious from this brief account, the battle between Indians and Britons over who was a better teacher of Indian languages was fought on linguistic terrain only on the surface. Some of the British 19^th century superstars of oriental language teaching such as John Shakespear obviously had serious linguistic deficits. That did not keep them from becoming privileged knowers of colonial languages. A holistic knowledge of the language, cultural competence and conversational fluency were all devalued in favour of a focus on methods and a narrow understanding of language proficiency as grammatical mastery.

Ironically, once Persian was out of the way as the power code of India and the global English language teaching enterprise got underway, the rules of the game were re-written yet again. What we consider desirable linguistic competence today is to a significant degree shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of the new privileged language knowers, native speakers of English.

References

Eastwick, E. B. (Ed.) (1858). Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohamedan Gentleman; and the transactions with his fellow-creatures; interspersed with remarks on the habits, customs, and character of the people with whom he had to deal. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Fisher, M. H. (2012). Teaching Persian as an Imperial Language in India and in England during the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries. In B. Spooner & W. L. Hanaway (Eds.), Literacy in the Persianate world : writing and the social order (pp. 328-358). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Massey, R., & Massey, J. (1968). Lutfullah in London, 1844. History Today, 18(7), 473-479.

The theme of #LIW2018 is “Find yourself in a Library”. The book I read in the category “a memoir of an adult migrant and language learner” describes exactly that: a refugee in search of his past and his future. The public library is one place where this refugee finds solace:

It has become my habit to gather together a small store of provisions, some biscuits, chocolate, an apple or two, and repair each morning to the reading room of the Public Library. There I lose myself in long dead time and not rouse until the shrill, too early summons of the closing bell. This way of living is extremely economical. […] I have discovered that a moderate hunger increases both sensibility and concentration. It is not a new idea. Since the times of the monkish visionaries fasting has been the essential preliminary to revelation. The library is my monastery. (Natonek, 1943, p. 124)

The author, Hans Natonek (1892-1963), was a refugee from the Nazis and the public library he refers to is in Manhattan. Hans Natonek arrived in New York in 1941 after having been on the run for almost a decade. One of the foremost literary critics of Weimar Germany and a well-known social critic and author, Natonek had fled Germany for his native Prague in 1934. As the Nazis conquered more and more of Europe, he had to flee again; first to Paris, then Marseille, which became a trap for many refugees as the Vichy regime handed them back to the Nazis. Natonek escaped and managed to cross the Pyrenees into Spain and was finally granted a US visa in Lisbon.

Hans Natonek and Anne Grünwald in Arizona, 1950s (Source: Arts in exile)

By the time Natonek arrived in New York shortly before his 50^th birthday, the loss of his previous existence and the long years of constant danger and insecurity had taken their toll: “Flight softens the morale. To escape is to arrive nowhere. Escape is a negative, a fallacious rescue. Every fighter knows that. We are all fighters.” (p. 68)

In his memoir In search of myself published in 1943, Natonek asks what his refugee status means for his identity: he considers himself cut off both from his past and his future. His former language and identity have become meaningless and he feels disconnected from the language and identity options valued in his new environment.

For a writer, professional identity and language are inextricably linked and both have been taken from him: “A writer! Am I still one in point of actual fact? Tell me, then. What is a writer without a language and without a past? He is a mechanical absurdity, a piano without strings.” (p. 17)

Natonek tries hard to reinvent himself in English, even as he bemoans the difficulty of doing so at the age of 50.

I love my own mother tongue, but I recognize with sadness that separated from the soil in which it roots it must wither. It cannot be artificially maintained. The mother language does not transport nor grow nor bloom under alien skies. It is, at best, no more than a memory to be used on occasion to recall a friendship or another life. (p. 158)

Unfortunately, Natonek discovers that the growth of his English is in no way proportionate to the withering away of his native German and his beloved French. In fact, despite all his strenuous efforts to improve his English, he had to write In search of myself in German and leave the translation to his publisher.

It is not only the loss of German that throws Natonek out of balance. It is also the loss of prestige and professional standing. In America Natonek discovers a thoroughly materialistic culture that has no patience for intellectual pursuits. While he tries hard to adapt, he cannot get himself to accept the prevailing “jobism” as he calls it. He feels that everyone expects him to move on, find a job, make money and be happy; but Natonek insists on his right to grieve for his lost life and for his home engulfed by disaster.

They are unanimous in exhorting us to bend every effort toward the rapid adaptation of the American point of view. Waste no time in dalliance, they advise. Get busy. Forget the past. Embrace the new. It is the only way to demonstrate a decent gratitude. I am not exactly clear why I so stubbornly oppose this theory of rapid adaptation linked to the theme of gratitude for rescue and asylum. My soul rebels against it as a child rebels against forced feeding. An approach to living, a point of view on life, cannot be changed as abruptly as a lantern slide. I am not one of those worms which may be cut in two and go on living. Life flows like a blood stream from the past, through the present, into the future, and what a man is, is the result of what he has been. (p. 95)

In America, Natonek finds, work that is not profitable counts for nothing. While he is refused a small loan that would enable him to concentrate on finishing his book manuscript, he is offered a loan to start a small business. Bitterly, he scoffs: “Apparently there were too few beauty parlors, too many books.” (p. 157)

Some healing ultimately comes from books and he rediscovers a part of himself when he finds that the New York Public Library actually holds copies of the books he had published before having had to flee Germany. Even more astonishing to him, the library also holds a copy of a book written by his grandfather:

Beyond the handful of my own poor records I saw a single card. It bore my grandfather’s name. It was as though he spoke to me in love and confidence from out the past. (pp. 125f)

In search of myself is a moving account of the refugee experience. Its poignant message of loss and destruction but also the healing power of ideas is as important today as it was in 1943.

Given how topical the search for language and identity is in our time, I would wish the book a new generation of readers. Unfortunately, the book has been out of print for a long time. No copy is held in any Australian library and none seems to be on sale even in the vast world of e-commerce.

I had resigned myself to not being able to get my hands on the book when I discovered that Google had apparently digitized the book in 2007. So, I asked Macquarie University Library to trace the digital version for me. Amazingly, they got me an actual copy through interlibrary loan instead.

Being able to hold this wartime copy (“There are many more words on each page than would be desirable in normal times; margins have been reduced and no space has been wasted between chapters.”) in my hands has been a privilege I am grateful for. And that is another reason why #LIW2018 matters and why we all need to appreciate and support our libraries – for ourselves and all the other seekers who find solace there. #findyourself

Further reading

Reading challenge

• In search of a language and an identity
• One orientalism or many orientalisms?
• Why are you not citing any African female expert?
• The devil’s handwriting
• Globalization between crime and piety
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

Libraries

• Getting published while foreign
• Are we killing the joy of reading?
• Serendipity, Cyberspace, and the Tactility of Documents
• Bitter gifts: migrants’ exclusive inclusion
• Multiculturalism alive and well in Austria
• Herder: an explainer for linguists
• Barbarous multilingual devil worshippers

Ethnography as the “devil’s handwriting”

The Devil’s Handwriting takes its title from the memoir of Paul Rohrbach (1869-1956), a German travel writer and colonial official. The memoir, published in 1953, when the Third Reich provided an ineluctable prism on the German colonial empire (1884-1918), advances the idea of a satanic mode of writing: travel writing such as that produced by the young Rohrbach about Africa and China had laid the basis for the evil of colonialism. Steinmetz makes this idea the central hypothesis of his fascinating inquiry and finds a close relationship between ethnographic representations and colonial policies. This may seem unsurprising and harks back to Edward Said’s dictum “from travelers’ tales […] colonies were created” (Orientalism, p. 117).

What is surprising is the many different forms of colonial policy and practice that The Devil’s Handwriting reveals. Even in the relatively short-lived and comparatively small German colonial empire, colonial governance was highly variable. That variation cannot be explained by socioeconomic or materialist theories, as Steinmetz shows with reference to three specific colonies: Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), Samoa and Qingdao (in Shandong province). Each of these held a distinct and very different place in the European imagination prior to colonization.

Abject and devious savages

Ovaherero in chains, 1904 (Source: Der Spiegel)

Precolonial accounts of the people of Southwest Africa were extremely negative and represented them as sub-human savages. One 19^th century German explorer, for instance, described the Khoikhoi as “bizarre red people” of “pronounced ugliness” with an “animal-like clicking language” (p. 154). The Germans did not invent these tropes of African abject savagery but fell back on the accounts of earlier European travelers. Already in 1612, for instance, a British official had described the Khoikhoi as “brute and savage, without religion, without language, without laws or government, without manners or humanity, and last of all without apparel” (p. 81; spelling adapted to modern English).

By the time the German colonial state arrived in Southwest Africa in the late 19^th century, these negative representations of Africans as abject savages had become entrenched in the minds of Europeans. Additionally, these previous encounters added another dimension, namely that of deviousness, shiftiness and insincere cunning. The Cape Colony, which had been under European (first Dutch, then British) rule since the late 17^th century, had brought numerous Europeans – traders, settlers, explorers, soldiers and missionaries – to Southern Africa. 19^th century German arrivals felt that contact with these earlier Europeans had served to corrupt the locals even further. One travel writer opined that “contact with civilization seems to make the savage more savage” (p. 156).

The military leadership of Southwest Africa, 1905 (Source: Der Spiegel)

In this perverted logic, conversion to Christianity was seen to make the natives “worse” rather than “better”. One missionary, for instance, wrote in a letter: “According to many whites it is much easier to interact with a pagan who has had no contact, or very little, with the mission than with the baptized ones. […] In many cases this is sadly often true” (p. 121, fn. 195)

These entrenched negative perceptions of Africans – as abject savages who had been further degraded through contact with Europeans – largely precluded any kind of engagement with them, as is particularly obvious from the fact that Europeans rarely attempted to learn local languages. In fact, many considered African languages unlearnable. The Khoikhoi language was variously described as similar to the “clucking of turkeys”, the “screaming of cocks” or to the sound of farting. This “apishly [rather] than articulately sounded” “incomprehensible” language kept frustrating Europeans:

But while Europeans expressed frustration at being unable to learn the local tongue, Khoikhoi picked up English or Dutch very quickly. Europeans seemed incapable of reaching the obvious conclusion that the locals had more linguistic talent than their foreign visitors. (p. 82)

The Europeans’ staunch belief in their own superiority meant that they wanted to transform Africans. Their assumption that communication and meaningful interaction were difficult, if not impossible, meant that they considered force and violence the preferred mode of engagement. Consequently, colonial policy aimed to seize the land and livestock of local populations in order to turn them into a “deracinated, atomized proletariat” (p. 203). Where locals resisted, extreme violence was readily used, as in the 1904 “Annihilation Order”, which ushered in the 20^th century’s first genocide, of the Ovaherero.

2014 exhibition of (pre)colonial South Pacific photos at the Hamburg Museum of Anthropology entitled “A view of paradise”

Noble savages

In hindsight, the Ovaherero Genocide is often read as a precursor to the Holocaust and an indicator that German colonialism was exceptionally brutal and destructive. Steinmetz, however, contends that this argument suffers from a methodological error, namely the lack of comparison with other national cases. It is not his aim to compare German colonialism with the colonialism of other European nations although he does point out in passing similarities of the Ovaherero Genocide with the extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines and the Queensland Frontier Wars between 1840 and 1897. Steinmetz advances the comparative case “intranationally” with reference to two other German colonies, Samoa and Qingdao. Although these were part of the German colonial empire at the same time as Southwest Africa, colonialism played out quite differently there.

European ideas about Samoa, as of the South Pacific generally, were rather different to those they had of African. Like Africans, Samoans were portrayed as inferior savages. However, in contrast to Africans, Samoans were considered beautiful, noble and virtuous and were thought to live in paradise in harmony with nature.

German enthrallment with Samoans coupled with their belief in racial hierarchies produced some absurd ideological maneuvers. For instance, when German settlers in 1934 (by which time Samoa was a colony of New Zealand) formed a chapter of the Nazi party, they duly made a case that Samoas were “Aryans”. Crazy as that may seem, Samoans were not the only ones whose “race” kept changing in European eyes:

One of the most absurd aspects of European discussions of “race” during the nineteenth century is the way in which certain populations “changed color” as their relative standing within comparative ethnographic discourse shifted. Thus, the Witbooi changed from black to yellow after 1894 […] and the Chinese changed from white to yellow over the course of the nineteenth century. Samoans underwent a process of racial lightening, becoming more like the early image of Tahitians – who themselves began to seem swarthier to Europeans as they lost their charm.” (p. 302)

“Looking into paradise” was not innocent: “scientific” photography in physical anthropology, Samoa, ca. 1875 (held in the collection of the Hamburg Anthropology Museum)

In short, by the late 19^th century, Samoa had become paradise in the European imagination. Therefore, the aim of colonial policy was not to change Samoans but – to the contrary – to keep them in their supposed paradisiacal state. To achieve that the use of explicit force was rarely considered and the idea was that the colonial state would offer a firm paternal hand. In contrast to Southwest Africa, where the possibility of learning local languages did not seem to enter the minds of Europeans, it did in Samoa. The colony was governed through the medium of Samoan and, to a lesser degree, English. Colonial officials periodically responded to reprimands from Berlin and pointed out that the use of German in the South Pacific was not practical. The two German colonial governors (Samoa was a German colony for only 14 years) both became proficient Samoan speakers, adopted Samoan titles and styled themselves as traditional Samoan chiefs. Their identification with the colony was such that one of them declared himself to be Polynesian when he was no longer in office.

An advanced civilization

Just to be clear, it is not Steinmetz’ intention to argue that Samoan colonialism was “good”. All colonialism involves subjugation and exploitation, and Samoa was no exception. In fact, he trains his eye not on the colonized but the colonizers and his argument revolves around one of the perennial problems of intercultural communication: the ways in which stereotypes inform action. While European stereotypes about Africans and Samoans were relatively consistent, this was not the case with China.

China had been known to Europeans since the Middle Ages and hence there was significant variability in the ways it was represented in ethnographic writing. From early vague views of a fabled land emerged a highly positive representation starting with the 16^th century Jesuits of China as a well-ordered advanced society that was superior to Europe. These discourses of Sinophilia were in the 19^th century complemented with yet another, now negative, strand of representations of Chinese as members of an inferior race. While negative views started to gain currency, the earlier positive representations never died out entirely and so discourses about China were always much more poly-vocal than was the case with Africa and the South Pacific.

The transformation of Sinophilia into Sinophobia was, of course, tied to colonial expansion at the time and another emerging idea was “that China was ‘crying aloud for foreign conquest’” (p. 389). The Germans particularly coveted a colonial port similar to what the British had with Hong Kong and so they annexed Qingdao on the east coast in 1897. The first couple of years of colonial rule saw a focus on aggressive segregation between the colonizers and the colonized. However, this hostile approach did not last long, not least because colonial officials from the military were increasingly replaced with administrators who had a background in Chinese studies or had previously worked as translators and interpreters.

Many of the Qingdao colonial officials were graduates of the Oriental Languages Department at the University of Berlin, a language-training institute with the mission to prepare graduates for the foreign service. Graduates achieved high levels of proficiency in Chinese and imbibed a spirit of Sinophilia. Putting these men in charge of colonial policy resulted in “a program of rapprochement, syncretism, and exchange between two civilizations conceptualized as different but relatively equal in value” (p. 470).

Another legacy of German colonialism: Tsingtao Beer. The brewery, which was founded in 1903, is today a major tourist attraction (Source: Wikipedia)

A bilingual high school and college were founded with the aim to orient Chinese elites towards Germany. The high school employed Chinese teachers to teach Chinese, math, physics and chemistry, and German teachers to teach German and history. In contrast to colonial schools elsewhere, there was no religious instruction and Christian holidays were not observed. The college similarly aimed at an equilibrium between German and Chinese elements and offered a mixed curriculum. Institutions such as these and the colonial policies they were based on “took for granted that China was an advanced civilization on a level equal to that of Europe. Opening these floodgates within a colonial context pointed beyond European claims to sovereignty and supremacy, beyond colonialism” (p. 534).

Beyond colonialism?

German colonialism ended with Germany’s defeat in World War I and its unconditional surrender. This did not mean independence for its colonies but a change in occupying power. Southwest Africa was assigned to South Africa, Samoa to New Zealand and Qingdao came under Japanese occupation.

The afterlife of German colonialism is highly variable, too. Discussions with Namibia over reparations and a formal apology are ongoing although, as Steinmetz points out, the economic structures created by colonialism remain in place, with 30% of all Namibian farms owned by Germans or their descendants. In Samoa, German colonialism seems largely forgotten or, at least, not a matter of public debate; and Qingdao is capitalizing on its German heritage by having it turned into a tourist attraction.

Overall, The Devil’s Handwriting is a brilliant historical study of a key question in intercultural communication: how are discourses of culture related to practices in intercultural engagement? My brief overview here cannot do justice to the wealth of detail it offers but anyone interested in history, colonialism and intercultural communication will enjoy this book. Another highly recommended!

Happy reading! And don’t forget to share your progress. If you tweet about it and mention @lg_on_the_move, you’ll be in the running for our monthly draw of a copy of Intercultural Communication. The March winner has been announced on Twitter:

Each month we celebrate the #Language-on-the-Move community by gifting a copy of Ingrid Piller's "Intercultural Communication" @EdinburghUP to one of our interactive followers. The March winner is @KhawlaBadwan. Who will get lucky in April? pic.twitter.com/0liU8J2EyD

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 1, 2018

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Heinrich Zille, “Die Original Australier” auf dem Rummel, ca. 1900

One of the central arguments of my book Intercultural Communication is that, even today, much intercultural communication is approached from an orientalist perspective, i.e. a Eurocentric and colonial way of seeing people from other countries as stereotypes. Orientalism finds expression in a myriad of discourses and one way in which it is reproduced is through presenting “foreigners” as weird spectacles.

During the ages of European exploration and colonial expansion, the west delighted in viewing the wonders of the “new” world by collecting specimens of exotic animals, plants and cultural artefacts for display in zoos, botanical gardens and museums. The desire to collect and display “the exotic” did not stop at humans, either. For instance, in the 1830s a French merchant snatched the body of a young African man and stuffed it in the way animals are sometimes stuffed and prepared for display. The body was then shipped to Europe and displayed for almost two centuries in various museums. The body was removed from public display only in 2000, when the remains were repatriated to Botswana. If you are interested in learning more about the man behind the body, you will find this BBC article about “the man stuffed and displayed like a wild animal” as informative as it is disturbing.

Heinrich Zille, Sioux-Indianer auf dem Rummel, ca. 1900

Another way to turn foreign people into spectacles for the western gaze was to put actual people on display. For instance, in the collections of Heinrich Zille, an illustrator and photographer who documented the lives of Berlin’s poor in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, there is a series of photographs of an amusement park festival, a “Rummel.” The photographs are ethnographic in the sense that Zille’s aim was to capture the perspectives of the common people who attended the festival. Many of the spectacles on display for the amusement of Berlin’s poor relate to “fremde Völker” (“foreign peoples”). Browsing through the photos, one notices an “Indian Pavilion”, one that displays “Roses from the South” (women in costumes), or another one that features “Sioux-Indians from the Island of [illegible].” In the displays, anthropological accuracy is obviously completely beside the point. While the name of the island, where the Sioux on display are supposed to come from, is illegible in the image, it obviously does not matter because the basic mistake is the claim to island residence. Furthermore, the painted image of a “Sioux” on the front of the tent is of a black person.

The image I find most haunting in the collection is of a tent displaying “Die Original Australier” (“the original Australians”). In front of the tent, three Aboriginal (or South Pacific?) men stand on display. They are wearing long white robes in the manner of Christian monks or possibly traditional Arabs. The headdress of two of them includes some feathers and the third wears a headdress that includes the horns of cattle. Again, accuracy is completely beside the point – do I even need to point out that cattle are not native to Australia and so could not have been part of traditional dress? One cannot but wonder what the three costumed men who are being gawked at make of their position. Their facial expressions seem withdrawn. How did these men from the Southern Hemisphere end up as display objects in a Berlin amusement park in 1900? What did they make of life in Wilhelmine Germany? Where did they die?

In addition to displaying real bodies and people as specimens of the “weird” Other, books, newspaper and paintings equally contributed to the exoticization of non-Europeans. The stalls photographed by Zille all also display painted images of and short slogans about the featured group. A vivid example of “textual display” comes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection of children’s verses “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” First published in 1885, the collection continues to be in circulation today. Wikipedia informs us that the collection “contains about 65 poems including the cherished classics ‘Foreign Children,’ ‘The Lamplighter,’ ‘The Land of Counterpane,’ ‘Bed in Summer,’ ‘My Shadow’ and ‘The Swing.’”

It is the “cherished classic” poem “Foreign Children” that positions the non-European Other as weird spectacles – objects of a mixture of pity and amusement:

Robert Louis Stevenson, “Foreign Children” (first published in 1885; a “cherished classic” in 2016)

Collectible card character “Lani” representing Papua New Guinea, 2016

Little Indian, Sioux, or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don’t you wish that you were me?

You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas;
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtle off their legs.

Such a life is very fine,
But it’s not so nice as mine:
You must often as you trod,
Have wearied NOT to be abroad.

You have curious things to eat,
I am fed on proper meat;
You must dwell upon the foam,
But I am safe and live at home.

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don’t you wish that you were me?

Country “fact” about Papua New Guinea on collectible card, 2016

Whether the poem presents any facts about “foreign children” is completely beside the point. That there are no lions or ostriches where the exemplars of “foreign children” in the poem live is beside the point. What the poem does – in the same way as the displays mentioned above – is to set the foreign Other up as weird spectacle. Ultimately, the point of the poem is not even about the Other but about the Self: the British child who reads the poem – or has the poem read to them – can feel reassured that they are safe, normal and proper – in contrast to all the imagined foreign weirdos out there.

The examples I have shared so far are over a century old and one might be tempted to dismiss them as the benighted ways of our forebears. We have certainly largely lost the appetite for putting real humans – whether alive or dead – on display. However, the proliferation of images of the cultural other as stereotypical spectacle continues unabated. Not only do texts such as the “Foreign children” poem continue to circulate but new texts presenting people as stereotypical representatives of a country and weird spectacle appear all the time.

For instance, the Australian supermarket chain Woolworths is currently running a marketing campaign aimed at children called “World Explorers.” The campaign is a collectibles program where shoppers can collect card sets. The front of each card is dominated by a cartoon character, who is clearly identified as a representative of a particular country. The back of each card contains two sections. One is titled “Have a go …” and consists of a one-sentence activity suggestion and the other is titled “Weird but true” and contains some random country fact. The cards can be flipped over and their insides reveals further sections, including “Did you know?”, which features another random country fact, “Food for thought”, which describes a national dish or food item, and a little section, where the character introduces him- or herself.

What is the lesson of this 2016 collectible cards wrapper? That white boys always take center stage?

The character for Papua New Guinea, for instance, is a little girl who introduces herself as follows:

Gude! I’m Lani and I’m from the town of Tari, Papua New Guinea. It’s one of the few places in my country where we still regularly wear traditional dress.

The card also features an image of two tribal men, accompanied by this “Did you know?” explanation:

The Huli Wigmen, where I live, grow their hair long to make helmet-like wigs. They often paint their faces yellow too.

The purpose of the campaign is supposedly “to educate kids about the world and different cultures,” as the campaign website states. “Education” supposedly also was the aim of the exotic people displays from an earlier period. As I showed above, this was an “education” not in facts, knowledge, understanding and empathy but an “education” into a particular way of viewing the world: one where the foreign Other is always defined by their national identity and destined to offer a stereotypical spectacle for the western viewer. This spectacle of the “weird but true” Other may cause amusement, pity or disgust in the viewer but, above all, it is designed to bring home to the viewer their own essential difference from, if not superiority to, those exotic foreigners.

References

Piller, I. (2011). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. A revised 2nd edition of the book is scheduled to appear in 2017 – watch this space!

Flügge, M. (Ed.). (1984). Heinrich Zille: Fotografien Von Berlin Um 1900. Leipzig: VEB Fotokinoverlag.

Front of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916

Remember library stacks? Browsing among books? Serendipitously finding on a nearby shelf what you didn’t know you needed? There are still stacks, though nowadays you might be crushed if someone turned the crank. Public libraries have stacks. But where do we do most of our research?

On the internet, of course. Does serendipity exist in cyberspace?

It does. At the 2016 annual Institute for Historical Study meeting, Charles Sullivan described finding a document that had seemed non-existent, simply by using the right search terms. Advised to pursue primary sources, he worried about traveling to archives hither and yon. Did he travel? Not at all: the documents had been digitized.

I am now working with primary sources in my possession: ninety-nine postcards that my mother-in-law, Matylda Sicherman, brought with her from Poland when she emigrated in 1928. Out of them, and with the aid of other primary sources, I’ve teased the stories of a mostly Hasidic community in the first quarter of the twentieth century. I’m hoping that the owners of the cards will donate them to the Center for Jewish History in New York, which is digitizing its entire archive. In the future, these cards could be read in the countries from which they were sent—Poland, Romania, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Ukraine, Russia—and by anyone anywhere with access to the internet.

But for me, physically handling these battered cards is essential to understanding them. Each one was written by a particular person in a particular place, stamped by a post office or military postal service, read by someone in a different place and circumstance. One card depicts four generals shaking hands in 1915 to signify Bulgaria’s joining the Central Powers—“der neue Waffenbruder” (“the new brother-in-arms;” in addition to German, the phrase is also given in Hungarian, Czech and Polish). The sender, Private Jacob Isak Sicherman, wrote each “brother’s” nation above his head: “BULG. TURKEI, OS-UNG [Austro-Hungary], DEUT[SCH].” He wrote on 1 June 1916 while convalescing in a Cracow military hospital. The card is stamped by the hospital and by the military postal service (there’s no postage stamp). Like most of the cards, it went to his wife, then living in a small town in Hungary because her home in Poland wasn’t yet safe. His words overflowed the space. He writes intimately, yet anyone who read his crabbed handwriting would find no secrets:

I am going to note for you who each of these high and mighty gentlemen is. You’ll also know by yourself. Let me know whether you received it. I kiss you and the dear children heartily–[also] the dear parents. Your faithful J. Isaak

Holding this card contributes an ineffable sense of connection. Years ago, in the Public Records Office in London, I pored over scraps that a colonial official had scribbled in the course of his duties. I felt his presence.

Back of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916

This tactile connection is only part of the pleasure of my often-serendipitous research preparing an edition of the postcards. Early on, an Institute member told me about a genealogy site, JewishGen.org, loaded with an astonishing wealth of ever-growing databases and a large and friendly community of scholars and translators offering their skills for free. The main translator of the German cards, Isabel Rincon, teaches German literature and languages at a Munich Gymnasium. There was more than her training in German philology that prepared her for the task. Her personal history impelled her to volunteer: her grandfather and his best friend (Jewish) had both been in love with a young Jewish woman. She left Germany in the 1930s for America. Tempted to emigrate with her but not sharing her danger, the grandfather remained regretfully in Germany. The other two emigrated and married; all three friends remained in touch throughout their lives. Isabel knew them all.

Besides Isabel, I have had many pen pals met through JewishGen online discussion groups. Valerie Schatzker, author of the monograph Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia—a wonderfully readable book—sent a source in a 1917 Austrian newspaper, explained Polish words, and offered to read the manuscript. A professional translator in Israel grappled with the intolerably messy Yiddish script. Institute member Bogna Lorance-Kot translated Polish cards. A man in Ohio eagerly offered to make a genealogical chart for the book. Rabbi Avrohom Marmorstein figured out the most likely way that Jacob Isak learned to read and write German—from his fellow pupils in one of the yeshivas that he attended. Like many Hasidim, his family ignored the imperial law that required all children to go to school. Jacob and his parents preferred that he sleep on straw and go hungry, as long as he could absorb rabbinic learning.

What has been most rewarding about this research has been the human element: coming to know the people of the cards and the people of the scholarly community–discovering and being offered knowledge that illuminates the stories of these long-gone people.

This post was first published in the Summer 2016 issue of the newsletter of the Institute for Historical Study.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)

Some contemporary sociolinguists love to hate an 18^th century educator, philosopher, theologian, translator and general polymath by the name of Herder. Hardly a week goes by with an article denouncing something “Herderian” coming across my desk. Let me start by providing a small selection of quotes related to “Herderian” as it appears in contemporary sociolinguistics (I’m not providing references because it is not my intention to single out any particular colleague):

“… the monoglot Herderian ideology …”
“… Herder’s 18^th century writings are now common terminology in reference to one-language one-nation ideologies …”
“… the classic “Herderian” triad people-language-territory …”
“… a typical Herderian cocktail of one language-one culture-one territory …”
“… the “Herderian triad:” an adult-centric, modernist notion that language is tied to identity and located in a specific (and singular) place …”
“… the Herderian triad defines a person a native of a single language …”
“ … the Herderian triad has made us obsessed with bounded communities …”
“ … the Herderian triad also leads to places being colonized for one language or another …”
“… Herder’s romantic view of the ‘Volk’ is back in force …”
“Once we leave the Orthodox and Herderian combination behind, as we do in almost all of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, we find that the combination of zealous Islam and triumphalist Westernization has often had a regional impact, much as Catholicism and the Industrial Revolution had had earlier in the West.”

I could go on. While the meaning of these quotes may not be entirely clear, the overall message is summed up easily: “Herderian” refers to an objectionable ideological mélange of retrograde thought about the relationship between language and society.

While I am pretty confident that I am not doing any of the writers I have quoted here an injustice by assuming that they have never read a single original line written by Herder in their lives, I can guess who they have read and where the current Herder-bashing in sociolinguistics comes from: a book chapter by anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs first published in 2000 and then adapted for another book chapter in 2003, where it is entitled “Language, poetry, and Volk in eighteenth-century Germany: Johann Gottfried Herder’s construction of tradition” (Bauman & Briggs, 2000, 2003).

I want to show here that their interpretation of Herder as a theorist of monolingualism, of static nationalism and of the boundedness of communities is highly questionable. I will do so by concentrating on Herder’s ideas related to multilingualism, language learning and intercultural communication but the overall thrust of my argument is similar to the one advanced by the philosopher and Herder translator Michael Forster regarding the perception of Herder in political philosophy:

Concerning international politics, Herder is often classified as a “nationalist” or (even worse) a “German nationalist,” but this is deeply misleading and unjust. On the contrary, his fundamental position in international politics is a committed cosmopolitanism, in the sense of an impartial concern for all human beings. This is a large part of the force of his ideal of “humanity.” Hence in the Letters his slogan is “No one for himself only, each for all!” and he approvingly quotes Fénelon’s remark, “I love my family more than myself; more than my family my fatherland; more than my fatherland humankind.” (Forster, 2002, p. xxxif.)

Herder as a “German” author

The Baltics in the late 18th century

Herder is a “German” author but what it meant to be “German” in the 18^th century is very different from what that means today (and has meant at various points in between). The historian Dirk Hoerder suggests that, if we wanted to use today’s terminology, it might be a good idea to describe Herder as “transnational”:

He came from an East Prussian German family, experienced the hierarchical multicultural urban life of Riga and was thus socialized during a critical period of his intellectual development in the context of the Baltic segment of the Tsarist Empire, was subject to the Russian administrative and hegemonic culture, and came into contact with French Enlightenment thought. He migrated to the multiply dynastically segmented cultures of the Lippe region in present-day North Rhine Westphalia and then moved to Weimar, the political capital of Saxony-Weimar and a center of German high culture. Referring in particular to the many Baltic and Slavic cultures ruled by distant imperial dynasties, he postulated in his Outline of a Philosophical History of Humanity (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit) the equal value of different cultures which—under God’s benevolence—develop from the spirit of common people (Volksgeist). In modern terms, Herder was transnational in spirit and practice. (Hoerder, 2008, p. 5f.)

Let me tell you a bit about Herder’s fascinating life story.

Johann Gottfried Herder was born in 1744 into a relatively poor family of the lower gentry in the town of Mohrungen, today Morąg. Morąg is located in Poland; Mohrungen in the 18^th century was mostly part of East Prussia but shifted ownership between the Prussians and the Russians during the Seven Years’ War (1755-1764). The town of some 1,800 inhabitants had a resident German majority and a Polish minority, and various troops coming and going periodically.

Broadly speaking, the area of north-east Europe where Morąg is located had been the subject of imperial expansion projects – mostly German, Russian and Swedish – and the wars this inflicted on their populations for centuries. So, one of Herder’s formative experiences was being the inhabitant of a war-torn border place fought over by different imperial dynasties. And that’s where his aversion to imperial expansion and his lifelong obsession with finding a better way for humans to organize their affairs and to live in peace started.

In Mohrungen the young Herder felt stifled by poverty, provincialism, a tyrannical master to whom he was apprenticed and a general lack of opportunity. Like many young men before him and many since, he dreamt of leaving, emigrating, seeing the big wide world.

The opportunity to make good on his dreams arose when a Russian army surgeon offered to take the 18-year-old on as a trainee. The young Herder was delighted. He accepted against the misgivings of his parents, who he would never see again, and off he went.

The offer from the Russian army surgeon confirmed his passionate admiration for all things Russian: a few months earlier his first publication had been a poem of admiration devoted to the Russian emperor. Writing in 1880 in a very different intellectual and political climate, Herder’s biographer (Haym, 1880, p. 15) diagnosed Herder with “broken patriotism” (“gebrochenem Patriotismus”) because his youthful poem was in honour not of the “native” (“angestammt”) but the “foreign” monarch.

At the age of 18, Herder arrived in what was then Königsberg, the metropolis of East Prussia, and is today Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania. The study of surgery did not work out because Herder fainted during his first practical observation.

View of Koenigsberg in the mid-19th c. (Source: Wikipedia)

Although penniless, Herder was determined not to return to Mohrungen and to try his luck in the big city instead. Armed with a reference from his despised Mohrungen master, he received a scholarship to study theology at the local college. The scholarship covered accommodation and board and in return he had to take on all kinds of jobs in the college. The college, Collegium Fridericianum, was a Latin-medium institution that attracted students from around the Baltics.

After three years in Königsberg, at the age of 20, Herder was offered his first “real” job, as a clergyman and schoolmaster in Riga. Herder was excited to leave his fatherland and his status as a Prussian subject behind; forever, as it turned out. Years later he wrote:

Als ich mein Vaterland Preußen zum ersten Mal verließ, hätte ich vor Freude an der Grenze bei Polangen auf die Erde fallen und sie wie Brutus küssen mögen. In Riga habe ich die fröhlichste Blüte meines Lebens erlebt.
When I left my fatherland Prussia for the first time, I was so happy that, like Brutus, I would have liked to fall down and kiss the earth at the border at Palanga. In Riga I experienced the happiest time of my life. (Quoted from Kantzenbach, 1970, p. 23)

The old Hanseatic city, today the capital of Latvia, had only a few decades earlier changed hands from Sweden to Russia. Like most cities of the Hanseatic League, Riga was a cosmopolitan city. Socially, the German- and Russian-speaking upper classes dominated over the subjected Latvian majority.

Herder was deeply impressed by Latvian culture such as peasant songs and dances, and his lifelong dedication to the collection and preservation of folksongs started there. He was also deeply impressed by the misery in which most of the Latvian serf population lived. His admiration for Latvian folk culture coupled with the keenness with which he felt the injustice of Latvian serfdom influenced Herder’s thinking around cultural nationalism deeply. His view was that Latvian had the potential to be a great language and culture but was kept in a state of barbarity by the exploitative conditions in which Latvians were forced to live by their various German, Swedish and Russian overlords.

Despite the fact that Herder loved Riga – for the first time in his life he felt able to overcome the social handicap of his modest provincial background – he was also very aware of the limitations of his knowledge, which he felt to be too bookish and too narrow. He longed to expand his horizons and in 1769, after almost five years in Riga, he took an extended leave of absence from his position to travel the world. Although the Riga Council kept his position open for him, he would never return to Riga, either.

Herder had huge ambitions for his travels: he wanted to further his practical education so that he would later be in a better position to serve in the education and the general betterment of the Livonian province in particular and the Russian empire in general. To achieve his ambitions he felt he needed to travel and in his diary he set out his ambitions:

[…] Frankreich, England und Italien und Deutschland in diesem Betracht durchreisen, Französische Sprache und Wohlstand, Englischen Geist der Realität und Freiheit, Italienischen Geschmack feiner Erfindungen, Deutsche Gründlichkeit und Kenntniße, und endlich, wo es nöthig ist, Holländische Gelehrsamkeit einsammlen, […] und den Geist der Gesetzgebung, des Commerzes und der Policei gewinnen, alles im Gesichtspunkt von Politik, Staat und Finanzen einzusehen wagen, Vergnügen, und Charaktere und Pflichten, und alles, was Menschen hier glücklich machen kann, sei meine erste Aussicht. […]

[…] with this aim I want to travel in France, England, Italy and Germany; I want to learn about the French language and French wealth, English spirit of realism and liberty, Italian taste for beauty, German thoroughness and knowledge, and finally, as necessary, Dutch learning […] I want to acquire an understanding of law making, of commerce and governance; I want to look at everything from the perspective of politics, the state and finance, pleasure, character and responsibilities, and everything that can contribute to making people here [=Livonia] happy, that shall be my first purpose. (Herder, 2011 [1769], Chapter 3)

Herder was on the road for almost two years, spending longer periods in Nantes, Paris, Hamburg, Eutin, Darmstadt, and Strasbourg. His eternal problem – lack of funds – meant that his travels were neither as extensive nor as systematic as he had hoped. After the initial journey, which took him to Nantes and Paris, his travel plans became contingent on those of any patrons he could attract.

During his travels, he met two people who would shape his future: in Strasbourg he met Goethe, who first became an admirer, later a good friend and, even later, an enemy.

In Darmstadt, he met Karoline Flachsland, who later became his wife. Unusually for the time, both Herder and Flachsland wanted to marry for love and they expected spouses to be friends and companions. At a time, when marriage usually was based on dynastic and economic considerations, this was an unusual position to take. Both of them were unconventional, and entered into correspondence before they were even engaged (anyone who has ever read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility will know how courageous but also injurious to female virtue this would have been at the time). Their letters show that Herder believed in female equality long before that idea started to gain any currency. In 1772 he wrote to Caroline:

Ein Mann muss sich, glaub ich, im Weibe sehen, so wie das Weib im Manne: dann sind sie beide gesund und ganz.
I believe a man has to see himself in the woman, just like the woman in the man: then both will be healthy and whole. (Quoted from Haux, 1988, p. 21)

For someone with neither position nor fortune to enter into a love marriage with a woman who had no fortune, either, was certainly a way of walking the talk. It also meant that Herder had to find a way to secure an income. When the position of superintendent of schools in Livonia, which he saw as his vocation, fell through, he reluctantly accepted in 1771 a relatively lowly position as court preacher in Bückeburg. Bückeburg is today a town in northern Germany; back then it was the capital of the Principality of Schaumburg-Lippe.

The Principality of Schaumburg-Lippe was one of numerous mini-states that dotted the landscape of most of what is today Germany. Each of these mini-states had its own absolutist ruler; some of these were more enlightened than others but most of them were exploitative tyrants, who tried to live up the highlife a là le Roi-Soleil, except with significantly fewer resources than the French monarchs. Herder detested them all; that he was dependent on them was the bitterness of his life.

Map of “Germany” in the late 18th century

Bückeburg was deeply provincial although the ruler was relatively enlightened and tried to improve the cultural life of his domain by bringing people such as Herder to the principality. He did so against the advice of his ministers who dreaded the “most outspoken freethinker” (“erklärtesten Freigeist”) and warned that with Herder’s arrival “the collapse of religion” (“der Untergang der Religion”) was inevitable (Kantzenbach, 1970, p. 61).

For a while Herder was despondent and his letters of his early time in Bückeburg show an unhappy, deeply dissatisfied whinger, whose ambitions and endeavours were frustrated at every turn. Caroline urged him to create a better world in his mind:

Ach leider! Daß unser Vaterland nur Phantom und Schatten unserer Väter ist! Zumal für Männer and für einen Mann, wie Du, o Herder, bist. Ach, dann muß man sich ein verborgenes Vaterland schaffen!
How unfortunate that our fatherland is only the ghost and shadow of our fathers! Particularly for men, and for a man like you, Herder. Oh well, then you have to create a hidden fatherland for yourself! (Quoted from Kantzenbach, 1970, p. 63)

Herder took this to heart and went back to his almost manic writing projects; taking inspiration from his voracious reading, his interactions with the students and parishioners in his care, and his love of nature, some of his most important publications were prepared during this period.

Even so, the gist of Bückeburg was: “Ich muss hier weg, das ist das Ja und Amen.” (“I need to get away from here, that is the key point.” (Quoted from Kantzenbach, 1970, p. 75)

After five years in Bückeburg, he succeeded. His friend Goethe had intervened on his behalf with Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who offered Herder the position of chief clergyman and superintendent in the grand duchy. Herder was to spend the remainder of his life, interrupted only by a yearlong trip to Italy in 1788/89, in Weimar.

Karl August, too, was a relatively enlightened monarch; even so, he was an absolutist monarch and those around him had to suck up to him, to use a contemporary term. Herder found the flattery, subservience and intrigue of court circles despicable. Two years into his appointment, he had this to say about his new country:

Es ist und bleibt doch ein elend Leben, sich früh auf die hölzerne Folterbank zu spannen und unter dem alten sächsischen Dreck zu wühlen. Dies Land war von jeher von Kindern und Schwachen beherrscht und eine erbärmliche Apanage der Reformation.
It is certainly a miserable life to put oneself early to the wooden torture rack and to dig in this old Saxon shit. This country has always been reigned by children and weaklings and is a miserable apanage of the Reformation. (Quoted from Kantzenbach, 1970, p. 79)

Obviously, Herder took a much more measured tone in his publications than in his private journals and letters. None of this would have passed the censor’s office; not to mention that it hardly would have kept him in office. In his publications, he often used historically or geographically distant societies, which he felt freer to criticize, to make his point.

Even so, he kept pushing the envelope. In the early phase of the French Revolution, which he unambiguously welcomed, he created a scandal by pointedly refusing to include the French monarch and aristocracy in Sunday prayers; not because they were French or cosmopolitan, as some English-language commentators seem to assume, but because they were tyrants.

Herder’s tombstone in Weimar

Unlike Goethe and most other German intellectuals of the time, Herder never went back on his support for the French revolutionaries. When their sovereign, Grand Duke Karl August joined the War of the First Coalition against Revolutionary France, Herder was relatively outspoken against this foreign intervention; he felt the French people had a right to give themselves a new constitution without foreign intervention. His outspokenness in this matter resulted in the break with Goethe, the Weimar court and most of his friends there. As a result, he and his family spent his final years in relative isolation.

During his years as chief clergyman and superintendent in Weimar, Herder, unlike most of his contemporaries in similar positions, worked hard on the daily grit of his job. One of his many causes was the improvement of the conditions of teachers and his steady (though not particularly successful) efforts to improve their salaries and overall condition.

Despite his dedication to his day job, he kept up his prodigious writing and was a dedicated and loving father and husband. During his second decade in Weimar his health, which had never been strong, began to fail and he died in 1803 in bitterness and, as mentioned above, relative isolation. The inscription on his tombstone reads “Licht, Liebe, Leben” (“light, love, life”) – the motto he had chosen for himself from the First Epistle of John.

Now that we have a measure of the man, let’s address his supposed advocacy for bounded monolingual nations.

Was Herder monolingual?

One of the key charges that sociolinguists currently level against Herder is that he was supposedly the purveyor of an “ideology of a monoglot and monologic standard […] demand[ing] one language, one metadiscursive order, one voice […] denying the legitimacy of multiple voices and multiple languages in public discourse” (Bauman & Briggs, 2003, p. 194).

I would argue that only a modern English-centric monolingual reading of Herder’s writing can lead to this conclusion.

To begin with, no man of Herder’s time and education was monolingual. So, of course, Herder wasn’t, either. In fact, by the paltry standards of what goes for multilingualism these days, Herder was exceptionally polyglot.

His mother tongue would have been some East Prussian form of German; already as a child in Mohrungen he studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew. By the time he started teaching in Königsberg his proficiency in these languages was such that he was given tutoring jobs in all three of them, plus French. I’m unclear where he first started to learn French but one of his timetables from Königsberg shows that he set aside two hours each day for the study of French.

In Königsberg he also became friends with another prodigious language learner, the philosopher and writer Johann Georg Hamann. Hamann’s extensive repertoire included, unusually for the time, English, which he had learnt in London a few years earlier, and Arabic, which he taught himself just because he wanted to read the Quran. Hamann taught Herder English (by reading Hamlet together – how is that for a language teaching methodology?!) and together they also devoted themselves to the study of Italian.

All these languages – Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, English, Italian – constituted some form of “learning up” if you will: these languages were considered superior to German at the time, and the hallmarks of an educated man. That Herder as an ambitious young man should devote himself to these languages is perhaps not surprising. Where his love of languages really begins to shine is with his dedication to Latvian, a language that, at the time, was considered an inferior peasant language.

Stender’s Latvian Grammar

When they met in Strasbourg, Herder recommended to Goethe a Latvian grammar he himself had used in Riga (Stender, 1761). That grammar provides some interesting evidence for ideas about language contact at the time. In the Introduction, the grammarian, Gotthard Friedrich Stender, another Baltic German Lutheran clergyman with an intense interest in the languages and cultures of the Baltics, devotes quite some detail to discussing the relationships between Latvian and other languages in the region. Stender’s assessment of the relationship between various languages is remarkably astute. In addition to the discussion of genetic relationships (for example, Latvian is not related to Estonian), he notes that Latvians and Russians learn each other’s languages easily “through interaction” (“durch den Umgang miteinander”). In contrast, he notes that this is not so with Latvian and German, which are in a hierarchical relationship:

Daß in der lettischen Sprache nunmehr so viele Wörter deutschen Ursprungs anzutreffen, das ist gar kein Wunder, weil die Letten von den Deutschen als Leibeigene beherrscht werden.
That so many words of German origin can be found in Latvian is not surprising because the Latvians are ruled as serfs by the Germans. (Stender, 1761, p. 13)

The consequence of the subjected position of Latvian means that it has not been able to develop any educated registers:

Seitdem die vormaligen Heiden in Lief- und Kurland von den Deutschen bezwungen, und zum Christenum, zugleich aber auch unter das Joch gebracht worden, ist die lettische Sprache bis auf den heutigen Tag eine gemeine Baurensprache. […] Die lettische Sprache ist eben keine reiche, dennoch aber eine deutliche, wohlklingende und zierliche Sprache […]

Since the former heathens of Livonia and Courland were subjugated by the Germans and brought to Christianity – but simultaneously under the yoke – the Latvian language has to this day remained a common peasant language. […] The Latvian language is therefore not a rich language but nonetheless a clear, pleasant-sounding and beautiful language. (Stender, 1761, p. 17)

Stender’s specific observations about Latvian were more generally developed in Herder’s language philosophy: external domination stunts the development of a language; therefore, for people to be able to develop their full potential they need to be free from domination. This can be best achieved if nations leave each other in peace and let each nation develop organically.

With Latvian, Herder first discovered his passion for folk songs and oral poetry; and initiating and inspiring their collection constitutes one of his abiding achievements. To be able to publish his collections, he had to dedicate himself not only to language learning but also to translation. One of his best-known publications, which was titled Folk Songs in the 1778/79 edition but The Voices of Peoples in Songs in the 1807 edition is testament to his achievements as a translator. The last publication he completed before his death was, incidentally, also a translation: El Cid from Spanish.

In sum, Herder was a prodigious polyglot and language lover who achieved a high level of proficiency in a number of languages and dabbled in many others.

Did Herder hold a monoglot ideal?

Of course, being multilingual himself does not mean that he must have thought multilingualism was a good idea. He could still have been opposed to language learning in the wider population; except that he wasn’t.

We know what Herder thought about multilingualism and language education from at least two of his writings: a 1764 essay entitled “Über den Fleiß in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen” (“On Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages,” an English translation is available here) and his travel diary “Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769” (“Journal of my Voyage in the Year 1769,” (Herder, 2011 [1769]), which does not seem to have been translated into English).

In “On Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages” Herder argues for the importance of studying “two or three” foreign languages in addition to the mother tongue. His arguments are both utilitarian (commerce cannot flourish without knowledge of different languages; it is inefficient for the advancement of humanity if knowledge only circulates within the boundaries of a given language and is not freely shared) and idealistic (knowledge of a language “expands [the] soul” and “raises up the mind”).

As I’ve pointed out above, studying languages was not unusual at the time and all higher learning in Europe included the study of at least Latin and Greek. Part of Herder’s originality lies in the fact that he insists on diligence in the study of both foreign languages AND the mother tongue: “Our learning must shape both kinds of languages, must tie both to each other to become the bond of knowledge” (p. 33).

In the Journal he sets out his vision how this “bond of knowledge” between mother tongue and learned languages could be achieved. He begins by denouncing the contemporary practice of Latin-medium education. He concedes that Latin grammar is superior to the grammar of all other languages but goes on to vividly describe the “torture” experienced by children for who Latin is a “dead building that tortures them without providing them with any tangible benefit, without learning a language” (“das todte Gebäude, das ihm Quaal macht; ohne Materiellen Nutzen zu haben, ohne eine Sprache zu lernen”).

Weg also das Latein! […] durch sie werden wir klug im Sprechen und schläfrig im Denken: wir reden fremder Leute Worte und entwöhnen uns eigner Gedanken.
Therefore, away with Latin! […] it makes us clever in speech but lazy in our thoughts: we speak the words of other people and become disaccustomed to thinking for ourselves. (Herder, 2011 [1769], Chapter 5)

Voices of Peoples in Songs

Therefore, the first language in the education of children has to be their mother tongue.

However, for Herder the mother tongue is never enough. In his reform plans for the school curriculum of Livonia, he proposed three years in primary devoted exclusively to education in the mother tongue. After that, an ambitious program of language learning was to start.

Another innovation is constituted by the fact that he regarded the study of living languages superior to the study of dead languages. For Herder, there can be no doubt that the first foreign language should not be Latin but French:

Nach der Muttersprache folgt die Französische: denn sie ist die allgemeinste und unentbehrlichste in Europa: sie ist nach unsrer Denkart die gebildetste: der schöne Styl und der Ausdruck des Geschmacks ist am meisten in ihr geformt, und von ihr in andre übertragen. […] Sie muß also nach unsrer Welt unmittelbar auf die Muttersprache folgen, und vor jeder andern, selbst vor der Lateinischen vorausgehen. Ich will, daß selbst der Gelehrte beßer Französisch, als Latein könne!

The mother tongue is followed by French because it is the most widely used and indispensable in Europe. We believe it to be the most educated. Beautiful style and the expression of style is most developed in French and has from there been transferred into other languages. […] In our view French therefore has to follow immediately after the mother tongue, and precede any other languages, even Latin. I want even scholars to speak better French than Latin! (Herder, 2011 [1769], Chapter 6)

The Herder Award: an award of the German Democratic Republic for exemplary teachers of Russian

Latin would be the second foreign language in Herder’s ideal curriculum. With regard to the third foreign language, students should be given the option to choose between Greek and Italian. He does not fully commit himself whether there should be a fourth foreign language in his school: if yes, it would have to be Hebrew; maybe not much – just enough to appreciate the beauty of the original of the Old Testament.

“On Diligence in the Study of Several Learned Languages” and “Journal of my Voyage in the Year 1769” were written relatively early in Herder’s life. While some of his positions changed, the one on the importance of learning multiple languages never did. In the 1790s he reiterated his position:

Gewöhnich denken wir nur in der Sprache, in der wir erzogen wurden, in der wir zuerst die innigsten Gefühle empfingen, in der wir liebten, in der wir schlafend und wachend träumen. Sie ist uns die Liebste; sie ist unsres Gemüthes Sprache. Und doch hindert sie nicht, daß wir nachher nicht zehn andre, alte und neue Sprachen lernen, ihre Schönheit lieben und Früchte des Geistes aus ihnen allen sammlen könnten. Ein gebildeter Mensch zu unsrer Zeit muß dies thun.
Usually, we only think in the language in which we were brought up, in which we first received the deepest feelings, in which we loved, in which we dream and day-dream. It is our favourite language, the language of our soul and mind. But it is no obstacle to later learning ten more languages, living and dead; to love their beauty and to collect fruits of the mind from them. An educated person of our time has to do that. (Suphan, 1883, p. 336f.)

In sum, Herder insists on the primacy of the mother tongue as the first perspective on the world through which thought and learning are formed and, indeed, become possible. However, it never seems to have occurred to him that anyone might think that the mother tongue might be enough and that our education should stop there.

Did Herder believe in bounded languages and communities?

The picture of Herder’s views on multilingualism and linguistic diversity I have offered here is almost diametrically opposed to the one current in sociolinguistics at the moment, where Herder is assumed to have formulated the ideology of an isomorphic relationship between language and nation. Baumann and Briggs sum this view up as follows:

The desired goal of unification rests upon discursive unity, provided by the authority of tradition and a unified adherence to the national spirit. And here too, linguistic homogeneity is a necessary condition: “One people, one fatherland, one language” (SW 18: 347). In Herder’s vision, a viable polity can only be founded on a national language resistant to the penetration of foreign tongues. (Bauman & Briggs, 2003, p. 193f.)

There are a number of severe problems with this interpretation. To begin with, Herder is no sloganeer; and the slogan “One people, one fatherland, one language” seemed to me to sound a bit too much like “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer!” to ring true to Herder. So, I looked it up …

The quote is from an appendix in the complete works for Herder, which offers a collection of “letters kept back and ‘cut off.’ Mostly unpublished. […] Older drafts and discarded pieces.” [“zurückbehaltene und ‘abgeschnittene’ Briefe. Meist ungedruckt. […] Ältere Niederschriften und ausgesonderte Stücke.” (Suphan, 1883, ToC)]. If I understand this correctly, the damning slogan that now supposedly sums up Herder can thus be found somewhere in Herder’s “discarded” private notes and was first published in 1883, exactly eighty years after his death.

Even in this minor piece, it does not appear as a slogan. The text is a short report about a conversation among friends who discuss the state of disunity among the German states whose rulers abuse and backstab each other.

Alle waren [wir] der Meinung, daß in Deutschland, wenn wir nicht ein zweites Pohlen seyn wollten, keine Mühe edler angewandt werde, als diese Dissension zu zerstören. Alle Waffen der Ueberzeugung und Ironie, des guten Herzens und des gesunden Verstandes sollte man gebrauchen, um jene Provinzialgötzen zu Dan und Bethel, den Wahn und [Selbst]Dünkel abzuthun, und in Allem das große Gefühl emporzubringen, daß wir Ein Volk seyn, Eines Vaterlandes, Einer Sprache. Daß wir uns in dieser ehren und bestreben müßen, von allen Nationen unpartheiisch zu lernen, in uns selbst aber Nation zu seyn.
We were all of the opinion that, if Germany was not to become a second Poland [in the 18^th century, Austria, Prussia and Russia divided Poland amongst themselves and Poland ceased to exist as a nation until after WWI], no endeavour would be more worthy than to destroy this disunity. All the weapons of persuasion and irony, the good heart and the good sense should be used to tear down the provincial idols of Dan and Bethel [a biblical reference to idol worship; 1 Kings 12: 25-33] and of delusion and conceit; and to raise up in everything the great feeling that we should be one people, of one fatherland, of one language. That through it we must honour ourselves and strive to learn from all nations without fear or favour but remain a nation in ourselves. (Suphan, 1883, p. 347)

In order to arrive at Bauman and Briggs’ interpretation, the context had to be removed and misread. One might be generous and accept that “One people, one fatherland, one language” is a fair translation of “[…] Ein Volk seyn, Eines Vaterlandes, Einer Sprache” although on the basis of the English I had assumed to find “Ein Volk, ein Vaterland, eine Sprache;” and although the customary square brackets to signal an omission are missing. More importantly, Bauman and Briggs’ interpretation renders as universal a statement that clearly is intended to only apply to the divided German states of Herder’s time. It is to overlook Herder’s general relativist stance and impute a universalist philosophy to him.

The claim that in Herder’s vision “a viable polity can only be founded on a national language resistant to the penetration of foreign tongues” is pure fantasy. While Herder did, thankfully, not use masculinist metaphors of interlanguage penetration, the very next sentence following “the slogan” points out the importance of learning from all nations without taking sides; in modern terms we might say, that “von allen Nationen unpartheiisch zu lernen” asks the reader to learn widely without being ethnocentric.

The exhortation to learn widely is not unique to this passage but a recurrent theme in Herder’s writing, as we also saw in the discussion of language learning above. The key claim is the belief in the organic connectedness of all humanity in every field of human endeavour. What is particularly noteworthy here is that his insistence on the necessity to learn from others is, for an 18^th century European, exceptionally “non-Eurocentric.” In his plan for the reformation of the Livonian curriculum (Journal, Chapter 4), for instance, he writes that students will always have to study French and English history. He concedes their importance but goes on to add that one cannot rest there but also needs to include the history of the Jews, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Tartars, the Indians and Persians, the Arabs, the Greeks, and “the newer peoples” (“die neuern Völker”).

While Herder insists on learning from every people, language and culture with an open mind, he does object to the mixing of peoples, languages and cultures that is the result of empire. An excerpt from the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, which were published in the 1790s, is worth quoting at some length:

But why must peoples have effect on peoples in order to disturb each other’s peace? It is said that this is for the sake of progressively growing culture; but what a completely different thing the book of history says! […] And if through the friction between peoples there perhaps spread here this art, there that convenience, do these really compensate for the evils which the pressing of the nations upon one another produced for the victor and the vanquished? Who can depict the misery that the Greek and Roman conquests brought indirectly and directly for the circle of the earth that they encompassed? Even Christianity, as soon as it had effect on foreign peoples in the form of a state machine, oppressed them terribly; in the case of several it so mutilated their own distinctive character that not even one and a half millennia have been able to set it right. Would we not wish, for example, that the spirits of the northern peoples, of the Germans, of the Gaels, the Slavs, and so forth, might have developed without disturbance and purely out of themselves?
And what good did the crusades do for the Orient? What happiness have they brought to the coasts of the Baltic Sea? The old Prussians [an extinct people indigenous to the Baltics; IP] are destroyed; Livonians, Estonians, and Latvians in the poorest condition still now curse in their hearts their subjugators, the Germans.
What, finally, is to be said of the culture that has been brought by Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, and Dutchmen to the East and West Indies, to Africa among the negroes, into the peaceful islands of the southern world? Do not all these lands, more or less, cry for revenge? All the more for revenge since they have been plunged for an incalculable time into a progressively growing corruption. All these stories lie open to view in travel descriptions; they have also in part received vocal expression in connection with the trade in negroes. About the Spanish cruelties, about the greed of the English, about the cold impudence of the Dutch – of whom in the frenzy of the madness of conquest hero poems were written – books have been written in our time which bring them so little honor that, rather, if a European collective spirit lived elsewhere than in books, we would have to be ashamed of the crime of abusing humanity before almost all peoples of the earth. Let the land be named to which Europeans have come without having sinned against defenseless, trusting humanity, perhaps for all aeons to come, through injurious acts, through unjust wars, greed, deceit, oppression, through diseases and harmful gifts! Our part of the world must be called, not the wise, but the presumptuous, pushing, tricking part of the earth; it has not cultivated but has destroyed the shoots of peoples’ own cultures wherever and however it could.
What, generally, is a foisted, foreign culture, a formation [Bildung] that does not develop out of [a people’s] own dispositions and needs? It oppresses and deforms, or else it plunges straight into the abyss. […]
One human being, goes the saying, is for the other a wolf, a god, an angel, a devil. What are the human peoples that affect each other for each other? The negro depicts the devil as white, and the Latvian does not want to enter into heaven as soon as there are Germans there. “Why are you pouring water on my head?” said that dying slave to the missionary. “So that you enter into heaven.” “I do not want to enter into any heaven where there are whites” he spoke, turned away his face, and died. Sad history of humanity! (Forster, 2002, p. 380ff.)

It should be clear that, for Herder, it is not cultural closure per se that is desirable; what he objects to is foreign intervention. It is particularly admirable that his list of foreign oppressions can in no way be constructed as ethnocentric demanding freedom only for his own group. He does not hesitate to list Germans as oppressors of Balts and Slavs and, at the height of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism, he not only denounces these injustices of foreign intervention but tries to construct his argument from the perspective of the oppressed (“the negro depicts the devil as white”).

An English-centric monolingual mindset in sociolinguistics?

This Herder biography in the Macquarie University library was donated by the Australia-German Democratic Friendship Society

I believe I have shown that the current understanding in sociolinguistics of Herder as a theorist of monolingual bounded nations is simply not borne out by the evidence. Herder was a keen language learner, who argued for the importance of cultivating the mother tongue as the basis of the equally important learning of other languages so as to be able to learn from other cultures. He insisted that multilingual and multicultural learning is beneficial for the individual, the country, and for humanity if engaged in freely. If cultural and linguistic contact, on the other hand, are forced upon a people through imperial expansion he considers them a “crime of abusing humanity.”

In writing this piece I have found myself in the odd position of defending a pale, stale male. As such, this rehabilitation may seem a relatively pointless exercise, particularly as it does not reflect well on our discipline that we should be arguing over the ideas of a man who died more than 200 years ago and whose lasting influence has been relatively moderate.

The reason I consider this exercise important is because it evidences a lack of academic rigour in the reception of material in languages other than English. The sociolinguistic reception of Herder is evidence for what I have elsewhere called “English-centric monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism.”

Textual interpretation is ultimately the setting forth of a claim. Bauman & Briggs (2000, 2003) have set forth such a claim based on their reading of Herder, and I have here set forth a counterclaim. We’ve both used accepted methods of philological argument. That is how it should be.

How it should not be is that a deeply flawed interpretation is left completely untested for 16 years and immediately accepted as gospel in the field. Why did not one of those sociolinguists who are so keen to denounce “the Herderian triad” consider themselves under an obligation to actually go back to the original and arrive at their own interpretation?

Is it because we regard a critical approach as unnecessary when it comes to texts produced in languages other than English? Is it because of a hidden language ideology that texts produced in languages other than English are only objects of analysis? That the meaning of texts produced in languages other than English is somehow more transparent and that any claims about such texts are not subject to the usual tests?

If an analysis of a text (treating Herder’s writings as “a text”) in German, a major European language – and, furthermore, a text that is fully published and by an author about whom a significant body of work exists – is so uncritically accepted, what does that mean for all those analyses we read of texts (written, spoken, online, published, unpublished) in languages even further down the global linguistic hierarchy?

References

Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. L. (2000). Language Philosophy as Language Ideology: John Locke and Johann Gottfried Herder. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (pp. 139-204). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. L. (2003). Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Forster, M. N. (Ed.). (2002). Herder: Philosophical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haux, C. (1988). “Eine Empfindsame Liebe:” Der Brautbriefwechsel zwischen Caroline Flachsland und Johann Gottfried Herder. MA thesis. Bielefeld.

Haym, R. (1880). Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken dargestellt [Herder Portrayed on the Basis of His Life and Works] (Vol. 1). Berlin: Gaertner.

Herder, J. G. (2011 [1769]). Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 [Diary of My Journey in the Year 1769]. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/journal-meiner-reise-im-jahr-1769-2011

Hoerder, D. (2008). Migration and Cultural Interaction across the Centuries: German History in a European Perspective. German Politics & Society, 87(26, 2), 1-23. doi: 10.2307/23742821

Kantzenbach, F. W. (1970). Herder. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

Piller, I. (2015). Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 1-9 DOI: 10.1080/17447143.2015.1102921

Stender, G. F. (1761). Neue Vollständige Lettische Grammatik [New Complete Latvian Grammar]. Mitau [Jelgava]: Steffenhagen.

Suphan, B. (Ed.). (1883). Herders Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 23. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.

Rashid al-Din Monument in Soltaniyeh, Iran (Source: Wikipedia)

Recently, I signed a contract for a revised second edition of my 2011 book Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction to be published in 2017. One way in which I am planning to extend the book is to have a greater focus on cultural mediators. What are the stories, experiences and practices of people who act as brokers between languages and cultures?

In some cases, people are pushed into the role of cultural mediators out of necessity, as is the case with child cultural and linguistic mediators. Others take on the roles of cultural brokers as an act of public service. In an age when most of our own political leaders seem to be more inclined towards erecting new borders, strengthening old ones and tearing down bridges, it is instructive to consider the case of two 13^th century statesmen whose friendship helped to connect east and west Asia: the Mongol Bolad and the Persian Rashid al-Din.

Rashid al-Din

Of the two, Rashid al-Din is today the better-known; as the author of the Jāme’ al-Tawārikh (“Universal History”) he is credited with having been “the first world historian” (Boyle 1971).

Rashid al-Din was born around 1250 CE into a Jewish family in Hamadān in north-west Iran. At the age of twenty-one or thirty (different accounts exist in different sources; see Kamola 2012), he converted to Islam and around the same time he entered the service of the then-ruler of Iran, the Il-Khan Abaqa (1265-81) as court physician. Under Abaqa’s grandson Il-Khan Ghazan (1295-1304) Rashid al-Din became vizier, one of the most influential roles in the state. Rashid al-Din also served Ghazan’s son and successor Öljeitü (1304-16). After Öljeitü’s death he became the victim of a court intrigue and was put to death in 1317, when he was around seventy years old.

During his long career he served his kings in many capacities: as physician, head of the royal household, military and general adviser, the mastermind of far-reaching fiscal and agricultural reforms, and, through his writing, as chief ideologue and propagandist of the Il-Khanids. In short, Rashid al-Din was a powerbroker, who did very well for himself and the realm he served:

He had become the owner of vast estates in every corner of the Il-Khan’s realm: orchards and vineyards in Azerbaijan, date-palm plantations in Southern Iraq, arable land in Western Anatolia. The administration of the state was almost a private monopoly of his family: of his fourteen sons eight were governors of provinces, including the whole of Western Iran, Georgia, Iraq and the greater part of what is now Turkey. Immense sums were at his disposal for expenditure on public and private enterprises. (Boyle 1971, p. 20)

Portrait of Kublai Khan (Source: Wikipedia)

Bolad

Thousands of miles to the east, Bolad’s career was very similar to that of Rashid al-Din: Bolad was about ten years older than Rashid al-Din and born around 1240 somewhere in Mongolia. His father was a man named Jürki, a member of the Dörben, a Mongolian tribe, who had submitted to Genghis Khan in 1204. Jürki quickly rose through the ranks of the imperial guard. In addition to his military distinction as a “Commander of a Hundred in the Personal Thousand” of Genghis Khan, he also became a ba’ruchi (“cook”) in the imperial household. While “cook” may not sound like much of a rank, in the Mongolian system this household position carried great prestige and showed close personal ties with the ruler (Allsen 1996, p. 8).

As a result of his father’s position, little Bolad was assigned to the service of Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan at age eight or nine. His education included the military arts and Chinese language and civilization. Bolad, too, forged a distinguished administrative career at the Yuan court. As he grew older, his duties and assignments included formulating court ceremonies, educating young Mongolians who entered the imperial service, and organizing the “Censorate,” the investigative arm of government. He became Head of the Bureau of Agriculture, which he helped establish; took on the role of Vice-Commissioner of Military Affairs; and headed a major anti-corruption investigation. His diverse appointments close to the centre of power at Kublai Khan’s court earned him the Chinese title chengxiang, “chancellor.”

In the spring of 1283, Bolad was appointed Kublai Khan’s ambassador to the Il-Khanids. The journey from Kublai Khan’s capital Khanbaliq (Dadu; modern Beijing) to the Il-Khan’s court in Tabriz took more than one year and Bolad and his embassy arrived in late 1284. He was supposed to return to China in 1285 but hostile forces made it impossible for a man of his rank to travel. He therefore stayed in Iran for the final twenty-eight years of his life. In addition to the role of ambassador, Bolad there assumed the role of chief advisor to the Il-Khan. During Öljeitü’s reign he became third minister and was in charge of logistics during a number of military campaigns. Active until well into his seventies, Bolad died in 1313 while he was in command of the northern garrisons.

Like Rashid al-Din, Bolad was a power broker. He distinguished himself not only at one but at two courts. Like Rashid al-Din, Bolad and his family, too, acquired significant wealth in their service to the Mongolian empire.

The context: the Yuan and Il-Khanid courts

Expansion of the Mongolian Empire, 1206-1294 (Source: Wikipedia)

Rashid al-Din and Bolad obviously met and became friends at the Il-Khanid court. But what was the broader context of their encounter?

After the death of Möngke Khan, a brother of Kublai Khan’s, in 1259, the unity of the Mongolian empire Genghis Khan had forged was permanently broken and the descendants of Genghis Khan fell into various succession wars. Kublai Khan held strong in Yuan China. The Il-Khanid line in Iran, founded by his brother Hülegü, formally acknowledged Kublai Khan’s sovereignty. Between these two allies, the Genghizid lines in Central Asia and Russia established various autonomous regional khanates, including the famous Golden Horde. These were at various times allied in various ways, at war with each other in various ways, and, particularly relevant here, often at war with China and Iran.

As nomadic aristocracy ruling two realms with a settled agrarian population and ancient civilizations, the Yuan in China and the Il-Khanids in Iran faced similar sets of issues: how would nomadic warriors be able to rule these complex agrarian societies?

Kublai Khan understood early that he would need Chinese support. His own Chinese language skills were not strong and he relied on interpreters in interactions with Chinese advisors (Fuchs 1946). However, he did seek out Chinese advisors and, more importantly, initiated the bilingual and bicultural education of young Mongolian courtiers such as Bolad. Bolad developed an intercultural disposition and “his frequent and active support for the recommendations of the emperor’s Han advisers indicates that he found much to admire in Chinese civilization” (Allsen 1996, p. 9).

Map of the Il-Khanate, 1256-1353 (Source: Wikipedia)

It is unclear when and how Bolad learned Persian but on his long trip to Iran and for the first few years there, he was accompanied by an interpreter, a Syriac Christian in the employ of the Mongols, who is known in Chinese sources as Aixue (愛薛) and in Persian sources as Isa kelemchi (“Jesus the interpreter”) (Takahashi 2014, p. 43).

The actual linguistic repertoire of Aixue/Isa kelemchi is uncertain; and that is an indicator of the linguistic situation in the Il-Khanate, which was even more complex than that at the Yuan court.

The preferred languages of Il-Khan Ghazan, for instance, were Mongolian and Turkish. Additionally, he happily spoke Persian and Arabic with his courtiers. Furthermore, he reportedly understood Hindi, Kashmiri, Tibetan, Khitai, Frankish “and other languages” (Amitai-Preiss 1996, p. 27).

Rashid Al-Din wrote in Persian, Arabic and Hebrew; from his style, it can be assumed that he also had some knowledge of at least Mongolian, Turkish and Chinese (Findley 2004, p. 92).

In sum, the nomadic Mongolian conquerors, whose strengths was military, needed to integrate their culture with that of the ancient settled civilizations of China and Iran in order to maintain the empires they had gained. They did so by fostering a new class of cultural brokers. These could either be drawn from the Mongolian population and raised bilingually and biculturally, as in Bolad’s case; or recruited from the local population, as in Rashid al-Din’s case. The latter must have been far more numerous because the nomads obviously did not end up imposing their language and culture on China nor Iran.

Fusion of East and West

The World History of Rashid al-Din, Exhibition of the Edinburgh manuscript

Bolad and Rashid al-Din ended up not “only” mediating between the nomad conquerors and the settled societies they came to rule, but their friendship is an example of the deep connections between east and west Asia that were forged during that time:

Their friendship was, without question, a crucial link in the overall exchange process, for Rashid al-Din, a man of varied intellectual interests and tremendous energy, was one of the very few individuals among the Mongols’ sedentary subjects who fully appreciated and systematically exploited the cultural possibilities created by the empire. (Allsen, 1996, p. 12)

The Jāme’ al-Tawārikh presents the culmination of their interactions. These chronicles were the first-ever attempt to write a world history and include information about the Muslim dynasties, the Indians, Jews, Franks, Chinese, Turks, and Mongols. Much of what is today known about the history of Central Asia up to the 13^th century comes from the Jāme’ al-Tawārikh. This could not have been achieved without extensive collaboration, and Rashid al-Din says about Bolad that he had no rival “in knowledge of the genealogies of the Turkish tribes and the events of their history, especially that of the Mongols” (quoted from Allsen 1996, p. 13).

Inter alia, Bolad translated information from a now-lost Mongolian source, the Altan Debter (“Golden Book”). Access to the Altan Debter was forbidden to non-Mongols, and Rashid al-Din even describes how their collaboration proceeded in this case: Bolad, who, as a high-ranking Mongol, had access to the Altan Debter, would extract the desired information and then, “in the morning before taking up administrative chores,” dictate the Persian translation of the desired passages to Rashid al-Din (Allsen 1996, p. 13).

Il-Khan Hülegü and his queen, Doquz Khatun, a Syriac Christian, as depicted in a Jami’ al-Tawarikh manuscript (Source: Wikipedia)

Given the wide-ranging interests and experiences of the two men, it is not surprising that their collaboration was not restricted to history but took in many other fields, too. Principal among these is agriculture. Rashid al-Din also produced an agricultural text (Āthār va ahyā’; “Monuments and animals”), which shows considerable Chinese influence (see Allsen 1996, pp. 14ff. for details). During this time an agricultural model farm was also established in Tabriz and, on Ghazan’s orders, new strains of seeds were solicited from China and India. While the details of these cross-fertilizations have been lost in the shifting sands of time, it “can be asserted with confidence that a considerable body of information on Chinese agriculture was transmitted to Iran and that Bolad was the principal conduit” (Allsen 1996, p. 15).

The two men also collaborated in the introduction of paper money to Iran (which would have necessitated knowledge of block-printing, only available in China at the time); the translation of medicinal treatises and the implementation of aspects of Chinese medicine in the Tabriz hospital Rashid al-Din had founded; and, of course, food. Rashid al-Din, in fact, developed such a taste for the delights of Chinese cuisine that he had a Chinese chef recruited for his household.

The mountains between India and China, depicted in a Jami’ al-Tawarikh manuscript (Source: Wikipedia)

The intense friendship of Bolad and Rashid al-Din is the story of a meeting of like-minded individuals who came together across what might seem a vast chasm of cultural difference. Their wide-ranging interests and intercultural dispositions allowed them to contribute extensively – and deeply – to the fusion of Asian cultures. The results were new heights of achievement in various spheres of life, as Basil Gray, the keeper of Oriental antiquities at the British Museum between 1946 and 1969, has argued with reference to painting:

The paradox which results from a survey of the history of painting in Persia before the Mongol invasions, is that it had not yet achieved the expressive and imaginative force which was to give it its special and unique quality only after it had come in contact with Chinese drawing. This is the agent which seems to have freed the Persian genius from its subordination to the other arts of the book by a mysterious catalysis. […] The “house style” of Rashidiya [the scriptorium in Tabriz founded by Rashid al-Din] is the most thoroughgoing example of Chinese artistic penetration into Iran. In it there is not simply a question of Chinese motifs, but radical adoption of the Chinese vision. [quoted from Robinson 1980, p. 212]

That the East-West fusion enabled by the Mongolian empire was not a one-way street is best exemplified by Bolad’s name: born into a high-ranking Mongolian family, the child was given a Persian name. “Bolad” is the Mongolian version of Persian pulād (“steel”).

References

Allsen, T. T. (1996). Biography of a Cultural Broker, Bolad Ch’eng-Hsiang in China and Iran. In J. Raby & T. Fitzherbert (Eds.), The Court of the Il-Khans, 1290-1340 (pp. 7-22). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Amitai-Preiss, R. (1996). New Material from the Mamluk Sources for the Biography of Rashid Al-Din. In J. Raby & T. Fitzherbert (Eds.), The Court of the Il-Khans, 1290-1340 (pp. 23-37). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Boyle, J. (1971). Rashīd al-Dīn: The First World Historian Iran, 9, 19-26 DOI: 10.2307/4300435

Findley, C. V. (2004). The Turks in World History. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fuchs, W. (1946). Analecta: Zur mongolischen Uebersetzungsliteratur der Yuan-Zeit. Monumenta Serica, 11, 33-64.

Kamola, S. (2012). The Mongol Īlkhāns and Their Vizier Rashīd Al-Dīn. Iranian Studies, 45(5), 717-721. doi: 10.1080/00210862.2012.702557

Robinson, B. W. (1980). Rashid Al-Din’s World History: The Significance of the Miniatures. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 112(2), 212-222.

Takahashi, H. (2014). Syriac as a Vehicle for Transmission of Knowledge across Borders of Empires Horizons, 5(1), 29-52.

Barely legible today but evidence of ‘super-diversity’ in the 9th century: Runic graffiti in Hagia Sophia

On a parapet in Hagia Sophia’s gallery there is an obscure little graffiti written in Viking runes and dating back to the 9^th century. All that is legible today is ‘alftan,’ which refers to the Norse name ‘Halfdan’ and it is assumed that it was part of a formula such as ‘Halfdan carved these runes’ – the medieval equivalent of the modern graffiti formula ‘XY was here.’

How did a medieval Viking get all the way to what is today Istanbul and was back then Constantinople, the centre of the Byzantine Empire, the most powerful metropolis on earth? Maybe Halfdan was a mercenary in the Varangian Guard. Drawn from all over Northern Europe, the Varangian Guard were an elite army unit serving as personal body guards of the Byzantine Emperor. The Byzantine Emperors felt safer with foreigners as body guards who had no local loyalties. Little is known about the motivations of the young men who left Northern Europe to serve far from home in present-day Turkey but I imagine the usual mixture of lack of opportunities at home and the lure of the metropolis – a lure so powerful that medieval Constantinople drew migrants from all across the known world to this multilingual and multicultural city.

Evidence of contemporary ‘super-diversity:’ Chinese flier in Antwerp (Source: Blommaert&Rampton, 2011)

The Viking graffiti in Hagia Sophia reminded me of the Chinese flier in a contemporary Antwerp shop window that Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton recently used as example to explain the scope of linguistic research under conditions of super-diversity. Arguing that the example – an ad for a room for rent – bears traces of worldwide migration flows which make language varieties and scripts globally mobile, they outline the theoretical and methodological implications of migration and globalization for contemporary sociolinguistic research. I largely agree with their conclusions but I cannot help but wonder that two qualitatively similar examples – Viking graffiti in 9^th century Constantinople and a hand-written Chinese flier in 21^st century Antwerp – have such different effects: why has sociolinguistics been oblivious to linguistic diversity through the ages and why is the recognition that linguistic diversity is fundamental to all research in language and communication relatively recent?

Why does evidence of contemporary linguistic diversity move us to re-think sociolinguistics in a way that evidence of linguistic diversity through the ages has not? I answered that question previously with reference to the position of key linguistic thinkers in monolingual environments. However, there is another answer, too, and – like the medieval Viking graffiti – it also stares you in the face here in Istanbul. That further explanation is that multilingualism has been actively expunged from the historical record.

Ottoman Turkish inscription above the gate through which Mehmed II entered the city: its Greek name is Χαρ[ι]σίου πύλη/πόρτα (‘Gate of Char[i]sius’) and its Turkish name is Edirnekapı (‘Adrianopole Gate’)

However, the transient nature of language is only part of the story why we fail to see linguistic diversity in the historical record. The other part of the story is that evidence of linguistic diversity has been systematically erased from the historical record.

This obelisk inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs has been part of Istanbul’s linguistic landscape since the 4th century when Emperor Theodosius had it brought in from Egypt. The pedestal with its bilingual Greek and Latin inscription was added at the same time.

When Halfdan wrote his Viking graffiti and, presumably, spoke some form of Old Norse with those of his fellow Varangians who shared his dialect, the main language of Constantinople – and the lingua franca of its diverse population – was (medieval) Greek. Latin was also widely used and then there were the languages of all the city’s migrants and visitors. Christian Constantinople was a hugely multilingual place.

The city’s linguistic make-up changed on May 29, 1453 when Mehmed II took the city: not only did the Christian city become a Muslim one – and the Hagia Sophia church a mosque – the city’s dominant languages also changed from Greek and Latin to Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

What did not change was the fact of the city’s multilingualism: Arabic was the language of prayer and religion, Persian was the language of the court and Turkish was the language of the troops. Greek found itself as the language of a now down-trodden and subjected population and, as before, there were many other languages spoken by the city’s diverse inhabitants: Armenian, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Russian and Serbian would have been particularly prominent.

The Turkish that came to predominate over the centuries as Istanbul’s lingua franca was itself a highly heteroglossic language. Ottoman Turkish was inflected particularly by Arabic and Persian but also by all the other languages of this great melting-pot city.

Arabic calligraphy in Hagia Sophia: Quranic verse inscribed in the dome

The city’s multilingualism and the multilingual character of Turkish officially came to an end with the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The new Turkey wanted to sever its links with its Ottoman and ‘Eastern’ past and wanted to become modern and European. The multilingual laissez-faire of the past was now seen as decidedly ‘backward’ and ‘Eastern.’ Languages other than Turkish started to be repressed, with Kurdish as the most well-known victim of the new repression of linguistic diversity by the state. Not only was Turkey going to have only one language – Turkish – but that language was going to be ‘modernized,’ i.e. rid of the traces of other languages, particularly linguistic traces associated with ‘the East,’ i.e. Arabic and Persian.

The most well-known aspect of the Turkish language reform is the abolition of the Arabic script and its replacement with the Latin script. In one fell sweep, modern Turks lost access to their written historical record. Another target of the language reformers was Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Such words were replaced with ‘Turkish’ ones or loans from ‘modern’ European languages.

The futility of this undertaking – even if lost on everyone but the philologist – is nicely encapsulated by the word for ‘city’: Ottoman Turkish used ‘شهر‎ şehir.’ Because of its obvious association with Persian ‘شهر‎  šahr’ the language reformers saw no place for it in ‘Modern’ Turkish and cast around for a ‘pure’ Turkish word. They found it in the ancient ‘kent.’ The irony is that ‘kent’ is iself a much older loanword from Sogdian, the lingua franca of Central Asia before the Islamic Conquest.

Multilingualism has made a powerful comeback thanks to the tourism economy: this restaurant menu sports entries in 10 languages. And, no, this particular dish doesn’t sound appealling in any of them …

The reform was “a catastrophic success,” as the Turkologist Geoffrey Lewis has called it. As a result, most contemporary Turkish speakers are cut off from their linguistic and cultural heritage predating the 1930s. A famous – and also ironic – example of the monolingualization of Turkish is the fact that a major 1927 speech by Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, has had to be ‘translated’ repeatedly into contemporary Turkish so as to remain comprehensible to contemporary Turks.

In Istanbul, as elsewhere, contemporary examples of ‘super-diversity’ – the Russian ‘Sale’ signs in the shop windows, the tourist communications in all the languages of countries with strong currencies, the handwritten Arabic ‘for rent’ signs, the Kurdish music stalls – are impossible to ignore. By contrast, the fact that super-diversity has been a characteristic of Istanbul-Constantinople-Byzantium since time immemorial is easy to overlook.

Monolingualism and the Turkish language – just as all other standardized languages – are invented traditions. Diversity is, in fact, the normal human experience, as the anthropologist Ward Goodenough, who passed away last weekend, pointed out back in 1976. A research agenda that takes linguistic diversity as the basis of sociolinguistic inquiry must also include the hidden histories of linguistic diversity and modernity’s attempts to erase diversity.

Jan Blommaert, & Ben Rampton (2011). Language and superdiversity Diversities, 13 (2)
Goodenough, W. (1976). MULTICULTURALISM AS THE NORMAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE Council on Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 7 (4), 4-7 DOI: 10.1525/aeq.1976.7.4.05x1652n

Ernst Reuter, West Berlin’s post-war Mayor, was Professor of Urban Studies in Ankara from 1938 to 1946 (Source: turkishpress.de)

While the internationalization of higher education is a hot topic at the moment and is widely seen as unique to the present, internationalization of higher education is not new. The politics of internationalization at Istanbul University in the early years of the Turkish republic provide a fascinating case study (Ergin, 2009).

In the 1930s 38 out of 65 chair professors at Istanbul University were German. If university rankings had been around then, Istanbul University would obviously have done fantastically well on the ‘internationalization’ criterion. Two events in 1933 were responsible for this amazing level of internationalization: Hitler’s ascent to power meant that Germany’s Jewish and/or Socialist intellectual elite started to leave the country. Simultaneously, the Turkish republic undertook a major reform of higher education, which was to be a radical break from the Ottoman past.

In its efforts to modernize and Westernize, Turkey employed a large number of Western academics in the early years of the Republic (1923-1950), many of them refugees from Nazi Germany. The irony of employing the victims of Western modernity to achieve Western modernity was not lost on many of those academics who inhabited this paradoxical world.

The Turkish reformers largely accepted the Orientalist and racist world view of the time but wanted to switch sides. They accepted that ‘the West’ was superior to ‘the East’ but contested the idea that they were part of ‘the East.’ The humanities and social sciences of the reformed universities were expected to demonstrate exactly that: that historically, linguistically and racially Turkey was on par, if not superior, to Western modernity and civilization, conceived as an essential trait of culture and race. Specifically, academics were mobilized to demonstrate the ‘Europeanness’ of Turks and their membership in ‘the white race;’ to establish the ancient and enduring character of ‘Turkishness;’ and to show that the Turkish language was the source of Western languages.

In effect, refugees from Nazi Germany, which was ideologically built on exactly the same universalist conceptions of history, language and race (localized, of course, to “Germanness” rather than “Turkishness”), became the local personifications of Turkey’s modernization project. How did they live their paradoxical situation?

Ergin (2009) explores this paradox with reference to the work of Wolfram Eberhard, who was Professor of Chinese at Ankara University from 1937 to 1948. Eberhard, who was widely seen as one of the most talented sinologists of his generation, left Germany because he was under pressure to become a member of the Nazi Party in order to advance his academic career. His approach to language and culture did not fit in with the nationalistic and racial ideologies of the time (neither in Germany nor in Turkey) and his work thus provides an interesting case of intercultural communication in research.

Specifically, Eberhard sought to reject the then-prevailing idea of Chinese as an autonomous civilization and to demonstrate that Chinese language and civilization were as much a product of linguistic and cultural contact and exchange as any other. In one article, he identified five major influences on ancient Chinese, including a ‘Western’ influence “whose possessors were of Turkish stock” (quoted in Ergin, 2009, p. 117). While intended to contest notions of national and racial purity, this academic article was reinterpreted by Turkish academics and in the Turkish media as evidence that many achievements of Chinese civilization occurred because of Turkish influence. Eberhard’s anti-nationalistic and anti-essentialist argument thus came to be read as its exact opposite.

However, it would be wrong to assume that Turkey’s German academics only participated in the Turkish nationalist project inadvertently and through being misinterpreted, as in this example. They also had their careers and the interests of their employer – the Turkish state – to consider. Like many others, Eberhard, too, on occasion explicitly located his research agenda in Turkish nationalistic and racial positions. The tension between producing universalistic research for local purposes was continuously present.

While finding themselves welcomed and admired as ‘Western intellectuals’ these émigré scholars also found themselves resented and envied by their Turkish colleagues. One terrain where resentment against ‘Westerners’ could be openly expressed was language: most of the German academics taught in English, French or German and their contracts stipulated that, after three years, they would switch to Turkish. The assumption was that they would help to enrich and develop the Turkish language by lecturing and publishing in Turkish. In practice, unsurprisingly, only a relatively small number was able to achieve sufficient proficiency in Turkish to be able to teach in Turkish. For most, the contractually stipulated linguistic transition period went by and they quietly continued to teach in English, French or German.

Internationalizing Turkish academia in the early years of the republic was a creative response by the Turkish modernizers to turn Western academic Orientalism to their advantage. They tried to establish the Turkish origins of Western civilization with the help of Western knowledge and Western academics. Ergin’s article is a fascinating account of the entanglements in global and local power struggles that internationalizing discourses and international academics can find themselves in – then as today.

Ergin, M. (2009). Cultural encounters in the social sciences and humanities: western emigre scholars in Turkey History of the Human Sciences, 22 (1), 105-130 DOI: 10.1177/0952695108099137