The way things are said

by Christopher Hütmannsberger

There is a joke among linguists that the only distinction to hold any water between a language and a dialect is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

In Western Europe, this has proven true for the construction of the nation-state to a very large extent. While language has been an essential tool in the formation of community, the way that people speak a language has also long been used as a method through which society pigeon-holes people and enforces class systems. This can be seen through the importance of questions like, ‘how do they pronounce their Ts?’; ‘how do they pronounce their Rs?’; ‘what is the level of vocabulary that a person approaches others with?’. This happens to the point where there have even been plays written about how the use of language can trick others into thinking that people are of a class that they are not.

This does beg the question: why are they not?, as this aspect could lead to the conclusion that a choice of words becomes the most important distinguishing factor between classes. This entire concept is based on the idea that there is a proper way to speak the single language associated with a nation-state. The weight language has in terms of enforcing a class system becomes particularly apparent in the play Pygmalion (1913) by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, in which the emphasis is not only on becoming part of a higher social class by adopting a different style of speech, but goes so far as that the idea is to ‘fix’ a person by ‘fixing’ their language. However, when the linguistic diversity of a nation-state is confronted with what is considered by society to be not a different dialect of the nationally associated language, but a different language entirely, this situation takes on a very different shape.

Language has always been a monumental factor in the building of nation-states, and so any perceived deviation from the established norm poses a great threat to the supposed national identity and is thus always countered by considerable push-back. Yet the idea that language can represent a monolith within a nation-state is utterly absurd. The claim that one linguistic variation is a language, while others are described as mere dialects of that same language, holds incredible political weight and is very much a political decision. However, it is important to remember that it is by far not a decision that is based on the linguistic variation itself.

A popular belief is the idea that the difference between a language and a dialect lies within mutual intelligibility, but as soon as you take a closer look at this claim, it becomes equally absurd. If this were true, then the entire Arab world would be able to communicate with each other without a problem, seeing as everyone from Morocco to Iraq speaks Arabic; yet a Swede and a Norwegian would not. Nor could a Serb, a Croatian, and a Bosnian person understand what the other is saying, yet someone from Cornwall and someone from Aberdeen would never run into a problem.

All this is to say that language, as it is spoken or written by a population, does not equal a national conception of language. In particular, it does not equal the language as it is presented by an authority. In the German-speaking world, there is a centralised dictionary that took on the role to standardise the German language within the nation-state of Germany in the 1890s. This was then later expanded to include the German variations spoken in regions that function differently. The way German is spoken in Austria actually goes so far that it does not use some grammatical features of the German language that are commonly used in Germany. An example for this is the use of the Präteritum, a way of formulating the past tense that has fallen entirely out of use in the southern German-speaking world, in particular in Austria and Switzerland. Yet Austrian students are all forced to learn these features in school, only to be confused by them because they never come up outside of a set body of literature.

Likewise, it has become a meme that counting in French is ever so complicated because of things like the French word for the number 90 being literally ‘4 times 20 plus 10’ [quatre-vingts-dix]. However, that construction only exists today because of the Académie Française, a body that was founded in 1635 and prescribes how French is supposed to be spoken in France. In much of the Francophone world outside of France – even as close as Belgium or Switzerland – it simply is not necessarily the case that 90 is 4 times 20 plus 10 because there is a single word for the number 90 [nonante]. Yet nonante is described as a dialectal variation because a council of 40 members (who are nominated for life and are known as les immortals) say that it is so. As French language education is mostly based on the way that French is spoken in France, the French variation is learned and anything that deviates from it is considered to be funny at best and wrong at worst.

It is a distinctly colonial mindset that prescribes that any deviation from the norm has to be suppressed in order to claim a national identity, barring that it can be integrated into the national identity. The dialect of German spoken in Upper Austria may be hard to understand for a person from the nation-state of Germany, but because of the power of code-switching and regional power dynamics, it is still considered to be part of the German-speaking world. The German that is spoken in the west of Austria, and particularly in Switzerland, fully embraced a major linguistic shift within the development of the German language that other variations did not to the same extent (the precise extent and spread is still a matter of debate). This can even be traced back to an entirely different variation of German before it was standardised to be spoken and written the way we know it today. However, because in those regions people learn from a very early age to switch between their variation of German and what is now the standard form, what is spoken there is still considered to be dialect rather than a language in its own right.

This is exactly where the aspects of colonialism and nationalism come into play. Though there is a great variety of languages spoken on the Iberian peninsula or in what is now Italy, over the years of fascist rule the powers-that-be made a very concerted effort to exterminate anything that deviated from the standard variation of the official language. In areas that were conquered by European powers, a very strong attempt was made to exterminate the languages spoken there in order to assert dominance over the local population, as becomes obvious when looking at Celtic languages spoken in the areas conquered by Britain and France, or American indigenous languages. Not to mention the fact that so many nations on the continent of Africa still have Western European languages as official government languages. Language itself becomes one of the first factors in a principle of ‘assimilate or die’, as this comes down to the fact that language is such a primal force for creating community. Therefore, when a power that seeks authority over others cannot control how community is formed, it invariably must do its utmost to curtail any capacity of building a community outside of itself and thus the potential for resistance. While it is possible that in situations when a language cannot be entirely destroyed, that language may be accepted as a ‘minority language’, it is important that is only referred to as such.

While it is vital to be conscious of all of this, it is equally important to keep in mind that the standardisation of a language is not necessarily a negative thing in itself. Really it is quite the opposite in many cases, as a certain standardisation invariably means that a greater potential for communication can exist. Without a degree of standardisation there would be no connection between people outside of a highly contained geographic area. The problem however lies within an anachronistic understanding of standardisation that essentially boils down to a colonial understanding of language. This understanding is based on a centralised standardisation that is prescribed by a power that comes from above to determine how linguistic communication functions. It is precisely this train of thought that tries to carve language into stone, thus utterly ignoring the fact that language is always a fluid process and cannot ever be pinned down as something that is everlasting. It stays fixed only through its fossilisation as a dead language, although some, like Latin, are paradoxically still in use.

Keeping all of this in mind, the modern conception of the nation-state is increasingly confronted with a substantial rise in migration from former (and current) colonial states due to poverty, wars and climate change. As long as migration exists that does not only include members of the same language group who all conform to the same prescriptivist conception of a nation’s language, then the self-identification of that nation-state can be called into question. It is exactly at this point where classism once again comes into play, and combines its power with that of racism. A person who is read as Western in Austria, speaks English or French fluently and in the best case also speaks broken German, will be by far more welcomed by the authorities than a person who speaks fluent German but has a Serbian surname, no matter what either of those people bring to the table otherwise.

A common experience in Austria is that second generation immigrants will often find it easier to understand and use functions of the German language that are not common in Austria (such as the example of the Präteritum mentioned above). However, rather than this being praised, this is then used to further cement the deeply racist idea that these people are ‘not natural speakers of the language, because this shows that they do not speak German as a first language’. Whether this is the case or not is irrelevant, and thus what should be considered as an advantage is used to differentiate second generation immigrants further.

All this results in a nationalist solution to multilingualism within a monolinguistic hegemony in the form of a hierarchy of language. This can be traced back to the authoritarian need to classify populations according to their deviation from, or proximity to, a standard that underpinned ideas of nationhood; this process was then expanded through the colonial ventures of Western Europe. These linguistic echoes of Western colonialism then go on to supersede even cultural/geographic proximity, as cultural exchange is only regarded as something of a benefit for a nation so long as the nation-state that is on the receiving end of that migration is enriched by something that it deems to be a benefit within neoliberal capitalism.

Therefore, though a region such as Eastern Austria may be much more within the cultural proximity of places such as Hungary or the former Yugoslavian states, the perceived benefits garnered from a nation-state such as the USA or France are regarded as being much more valuable, and thus, speaking English or French is worth so much more than speaking an Eastern European language, while utterly disregarding the sociological make up of society in this area. This therefore results in a further hierarchy within languages, as not only are languages in their standard forms put into categories of worth, but hierarchies of accents are created. A person speaking German with a French accent will be considered attractive, while a person speaking German with a Slavic accent is looked down upon.

This can be very clearly seen as even the cultural implications of a language are also adopted to some extent when learning or speaking a language that is not the national language. In Austria, a US-American accent is deemed as the standard of people speaking English simply because of the majority of media that is consumed is in that form of English. So when speaking in an accent that is not the perceived US-American accent, the person speaking in what is then considered to be a non-standard deviation suddenly becomes regarded as being positively exotic in situations in which the perceived accent is of a high cultural value (such as a perceived British or any other Western European accent), or looked down upon when not (such as a perceived Caribbean accent, or speaking a broken form of English that is different than the one within Austria itself).

The fact that this phenomenon exists within the nation-state of Austria, even though there are many other languages that are far more widely spoken but have nowhere near the same cultural capital, is a very clear indicator of how language politics go hand in hand with neoliberal capitalism. An example for how central linguistic hegemony is to the self-image of the nation state can be found in the Ortstafelstreit in Carintha, a situation in which the act of setting up bilingual place-name signs in areas of Austria that do not solely speak German has been a cause for controversy and at times outright physical violence for over 100 years. What is particularly telling in this case, is that the language in question here is Slovenian. However, at the same time it is never even given a second thought that an Austrian state institution should refer to the name of the city of Wien as Vienna, even though there is a much larger community of people who actually live in the city who refer to it as Beč (the name for Vienna in many South Western Slavic languages).

Of course there are arguments to be made in terms of tourism and the hegemonic position of the English language on an international scale, but when taking a closer look at them, they really only boil down to the same thing. Capitalism has not adopted multilingualism, but has created a hierarchy of languages that is utterly disparate from how languages are spoken, no matter whether this happens within a very specific area or on a much larger scale. A perverse combination of economic and cultural capital have made us believe that languages are scalable in worth, which then results in such grotesque situations that in Austria, a person who speaks English and German fluently is considered to be interesting, while a person who speaks German and Turkish fluently is considered to be integrated at best, depending on their accent.

On an anecdotal note, I had a wonderful conversation with a colleague of mine in which we were talking about our linguistic upbringing. I mentioned that I did not speak German until I started kindergarten, upon which she remarked that I speak German very well considering that. We both laughed at this exchange, because we both knew and understood that this was a situation that she was confronted with far too often, while I was not. Although we both grew up in Austria, the difference between the two of us is that she grew up speaking Turkish, and I grew up speaking English.The inherent racism connected to the language spoken during our upbringing means that I was always taken seriously when speaking German, especially as a white man with an Upper Austrian accent, while at the same time the Turkish woman who grew up in Vienna only could have learned it later. It does not matter if this was the case or not, because that was the image we were taught and anything else would go against the hierarchies that we were indoctrinated with. Even more absurdly, this utterly ignores the fact that she is one of the most successful German language Spoken Word poets in the country as of this writing.

Language remains one of the strongest arguments against the sheer existence of nation-states, simply because human communication cannot be as neatly defined as a world map with arbitrary lines would like us to believe it is. If there can be no nation-state without a clearly defined ‘national’ language, then there can be no nation without suppression of and violence against anything that defies that. Human language will always stand in opposition to those arbitrary clear-cut lines.

Christopher Hütmannsberger is a writer, musician, and translator based in Austria.