Blessings of Babel

Contributions to the Sociology of Language

46

Editor
Joshua A. Fishman

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York · Amsterdam
Blessings of Babel
Bilingualism and
Language Planning
Problems and Pleasures

by
Einar Haugen

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York · Amsterdam 1987
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Haugen, Einar Ingvald, 1906 -

Blessings of Babel.
(Contributions to the sociology of language ; 46)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Bilingualism. 2. Sociolinguistics. 3. Language planning.
I. Title. II. Series.
P115.H38 1987 404'.2 87-7882
ISBN 0-89925-226-5 (alk. paper)

CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek

Haugen, Einar:
Blessings of Babel: bilingualism and language planning :
problems and pleasures / by Einar Haugen. - Berlin ; New York ;
Amsterdam : Mouton de Gruyter, 1987.
(Contributions to the sociology of language ; 46)
ISBN 3-11-011080-6
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To My Favorite Bilingual

Eva Lund Haugen

Preface

Bilingualism is a topic that has been receiving renewed attention in the

United States during recent years. The interest has been sparked by the influx
of new waves of immigrants from countries that once remained outside the
stream of American immigration. In the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries most immigrants were Europeans speaking languages at least
remotely related to English. Even the African immigrants, brought in largely
as slaves, were in some degree, if forcibly, integrated into the English-speaking
population. Those who are now concerned about the latest immigrants are
often not aware of the fact that the problem has been with us since the
founding of the Republic. They see bilingualism as something new and
threatening, not realizing that its problems and pleasures are the familiar
experience of millions of their fellow citizens and their immediate ancestors.
Americans of English extraction have done their best to suppress information
about the linguistic melting pot that has long boiled in our country.
It is the thesis of this book that bilingualism is a long-standing and fascina-
ting aspect of the American experience. Even when it is transitional, as it
has mostly been, it can be enriching for its participants. It has furnished
shelter and comfort for millions while they gradually became rooted in an
American environment. Instead of being looked on as a handicap, we shall
here consider it as an asset. That is the meaning of my title, the "Blessings
of Babel," as will be explained in the first chapter. Basing myself on the
biblical tale that purports to explain the origin of the world's diversity
of languages as a curse laid upon men by the Lord, I turn the story around
and see the tower of Babel as a symbol of the unity of mankind. It is an
ideal — perhaps worth achieving - but having, also, like all human life, its
quite considerable problems. I intend to furnish such evidence as I can
towards convincing the reader of the preponderance of its blessings.
In doing so I will peek into various corners of the world, beginning with
my own experience as a confirmed and intractable bilingual. As one exposed
to two languages — and two dialects of each from childhood, I feel I can speak
from experience. In a succession of essays, each relating to one aspect of
bilingualism, I take up many aspects of the problem. These were not
originally conceived as parts of a coherent book, but were written and
delivered to various forums as part of a lifetime commitment to the topic.
Other essays and books have preceded these, but on closer consideration, I
have found that in my more mature years my contributions have circled
around certain common topics that called for more attention. So I gathered
viii Preface

the essays into reasonable sequences and bundles, suppressing redundancies

and giving continuity to the whole.
After introducing the topic in chapter one, I proceed to a brief sketch
of my own bilingualism and the general lessons that can be drawn from
my experience. I distinguish between a "horizontal" variety, like that of
Switzerland, and the "vertical" variety, in which one group dominates
another. In chapter three I discuss the various definitions of bilingualism
and its actual significance in some countries around the world. I also suggest
models to clarify the relationship, and introduce some of the writers on
the subject.
From there I go on to discuss concepts that have been introduced to
explain the backgrounds of bilingualism, e.g. "ethnicity" in chapter four
and "ecology" in chapter five. Here we also make acquaintance with a variety
of useful terms, such as "sociolinguistics" and the "sociology of language",
"acrolect" and "basilect" etc. Here I also discuss issues relating to a Swedish
novelist's use of immigrant language, leading to a Swedish-American farmer's
diary and its interesting contents. This brings us to the distinction I make
between a "rhetorical norm" and a "communicative norm", which can be
illustrated by a vehement quarrel between two Norwegian-American writers.
I also make reference to similar problems in India and in the England of
the Normans. These arise as part of a social integration that is the topic of
chapter seven, where we discuss the choices that face the immigrant. Shall
he/she integrate or remain separate? Most have chosen to do both, all at once.
Various examples are given of prominent men who illustrate the problem.
This takes us into the world of sociolinguistics, topic of chapter eight, a kind
of linguistics that has won not only a name but great prominence in recent
years.
From the immigrant group we turn to the problems of whole nations,
especially those which face major diversity, e.g. Nigeria. Most nations actually
have minority problems that are part of their identity and that inhibit their
unity. Chapter nine discusses the problem and leads up to language planning,
which is treated in greater detail in chapter ten. Here a model is suggested
and refined upon, a perspective that places such terms as "language cultiva-
tion" and "purification" into their proper places. In chapter eleven I take up
some problems of the implementation of language planning, including the
spelling of English meter/metre, sexism in language, and the like. The
Scandinavian languages beautifully illustrate the fragmentation of a relatively
small language area thanks to the language planning of separate but relatively
understandable national units. I introduce the term "semicommunication"
to describe the situation, which is also known from other parts of the world.
At present the greatest influence here is from English, in the direction of
"modernization," as suggested in chapter fourteen. In chapter fifteen we
 Preface ix

concentrate our attention on a little island community that wishes to be

a nation, the Faroes, and their language Faroese. From here we turn to the
closely related Icelandic, a much larger island community that is in fact
a nation, fiercely proud in its isolation and its contact with the rest of the
world.
In the next section we turn to closer consideration of Norwegian: forms
of address in seventeen, sexism in eighteen (as illustrated for example in
Ibsen's dramas), emigrants in chapter nineteen, in relation to their neighbors
the Swedes in chapter twenty.
A more general topic is broached in chapter twenty-one, that of Whorfs
"linguistic relativity," with some discussion of an American Indian example,
which is continued in the next chapter's discussion of bilingual judgments:
what is indeed the relation between language and thinking? Finally, we
consider in chapter twentythree the reasons offered for language choice.
Why do bilinguals choose to use one language rather than another? Bilinguals
are seen as persons who make full use of the opportunity offered them of
membership in more than one language community.
A complete bibliography of textual references and an index of topics
give the reader access to the sources and the contents of the book.
Contents

Preface vii

1. Babel 1
2. On Growing Up Bilingual 7
3. Bilingual Competence 13
4. The Ethnic Imperative 21
5. An Ecological Model 27
6. The Communicative Norm 35
7. Social Integration 41
8. Sociolinguistics: A Challenge 47
9. Pluralism: A National Goal? 53
10. Language Planning 59
11. Implementation 65
12. Semicommunication 71
13. Interlanguage 77
14. English: Modernization 83
15. Faroese: Ecology 91
16. Icelandic: Pronominal Address 97
17. Norwegian: Forms of Address 103
18. Norwegian: Sexism 109
19. Norwegian: A Frontier 117
20. Ethnicity: Swedes and Norwegians 125
21. Relativity 131
22. Bilingual Judgments 137

23. Language Choice 143

Bibliography 149

Index 165
Chapter 1

Babel

In Genesis there is an intriguing tale that explains the origin of language

diversity, well-known as the Tower of Babel story. We are told, as the King
James version puts it, that "the whole earth was of one language, and of one
speech." But pride filled the hearts of men, and they were misled into trying
to build "a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven." The Lord
Jehovah found this project to be a presumption, being perhaps concerned
that men might usurp His omnipotence, for "now nothing will be restrained
from them, which they have imagined to do." In His infinite wisdom He
proceeded to "confound their language, that they may not understand one
another's speech." They were no longer able to cooperate in the building
of their tower, and were "scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth."
(Genesis II: 1-9).
Similar stories are known from other cultures. But among the Hebrews
the story was associated with the name of Babylon, which, by a false
etymology, was understood to derive from a verb bàlal meaning "to confuse."
In the eyes of the predominantly rural and severely religious Hebrews,
Babylon, as the capital of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, was a big
and sinful city. The story not only explained why the towers of Babylon had
crumbled, but it answered a question that thoughtful men and women must
have asked everywhere: why is it that all peoples have languages, but all so
different? In the multilingual Near East the natural answer was: the diversity
was a curse visited upon men for their sinful pride.
Those of us who love languages, especially if we have devoted our lives
to learning or teaching them, find it hard to put ourselves in the right frame
of mind to understand the concept of language diversity as a curse. We see
in language a source of novel delights and subtle experience, a blessing. But
we need only find ourselves in a country, say Hungary, where every sign
looks like an abracadabra and speakers shrug their shoulders at our efforts
to communicate, to sense some of the terror that underlies the Hebrew
view. As linguists we are entitled to offer a basic correction to the Hebrew
tale: men were not scattered abroad because they could not understand one
another. They diversified their languages because they were scattered. In
the story cause and effect have been reversed. When men are separated by
barriers of time and distance, their languages deviate in regular, if sometimes
astonishing, ways.
2 Blessings of Babel

The reason is clear, even if the results are unpredictable. As the most
distinctive and significant type of human social behavior, language is learned
anew by each child in every generation. The child not only can, he must
learn whatever language is spoken around him. But he never learns it exactly
like those from whom he heard it. What we may call his "creative imitation"
is not identical with its model, since it is a piece of human craftmanship,
not turned out in a factory. The gift of language is no doubt innate and
instinctive, but human speech differs, e.g. from the music of birds, by being
diverse and relatively idiosyncratic. It is kept from being totally idiosyncratic
because communicators are forced to monitor each act of communication
by the response of their intelocutors, the ones they are trying to reach. When
a group ceases to communicate with another, their speech drifts apart and
they develop peculiarities, creating what linguists call "idiolects". As these
accumulate, they grow into different dialects, or languages, or language
families.
This process has often been obscured by a certain parallel that has been
observed between linguistic and biological inheritance. Races and languages
have been confounded to the detriment of both, leading to a type of lingui-
stic racism. Linguists, at least scientific linguists, know better, but they
are not without fault in having developed a terminology that speaks of
"language families" and "mother tongues", the "generation of dialects"
and the "descent of words." These are all metaphors that can be drastically
misleading, for there is nothing at all in language that is identical with bio-
logical descent. There are no genes in language, beyond the universal human
gift of tongues. When we say that English or German are "descended" from
Germanic and Germanic from Indo-European, we are only suggesting that
there has been an unbroken transmission of speech habits all the way back
to that tribe of Aryan conquerors who issued from the Caucasus or wherever,
some five or six thousand years ago, and who succeeded in gradually imposing
their language on most of Europe, on much of western Asia, and eventually
on the Americas, Australia, and other parts of the world. At every step of
the way there were children who learned the language of their elders in their
own way, and there were adults who learned or unlearned their languages
to meet the demands put upon them by social and political necessity. There
are no genes; there is only learning.
That learning is the key to every language problem is so obvious as to be
almost a truism. Its implications are being worked out in diligent research.
We have still to take account of the informal cross-fire of mutual criticism
and correction that shapes the process of learning. As children, and even as
adults, we have all felt the taunts that were directed at us or our partners
when we deviated from the usual norms of speech. Children are often cruel
in showering laughter and ridicule on those who speak "differently." As
 Babel 3

they grow older, they discover differences that stigmatize some degree of
social distance. They learn of differences between upper and lower class,
the significance of belonging on this or that "side of the tracks," and the
speech mannerisms of their peer-group hero. As adults they register auto-
matically, not just that differences exist, but that a speaker is "vulgar,"
or "stuck-up," or "foreign," and behave toward him on the basis of these
identifications. If they lead to antagonisms or prejudice, to the denigration
of individuals, or to the exclusion of outsiders, we may feel that these are
examples of the curse of Babel.
For the most part we may therefore assume that the gradual drifting apart
of dialects and languages is a natural and almost inevitable consequence of
the drifting apart of mankind. We cannot be certain, but there is much
evidence to support the assumption that all men were once of "one language
and of one speech." The fundamental similarities of all known languages
almost require some such hypothesis. Insofar as mankind is one, and language
is man's chief distinction from animals, it is hard to imagine its origin as
polygenetic. If we cannot yet find an ultimate point at which the so-called
"families" or proto-languages diverged, this is presumably due to the enorm-
ous length of time that has elapsed. We may therefore accept the tower of
Babel as a profound symbol for man's ultimate unity and for his common
descent as a talking animal. The tower is a hypothetical point at which all
the converging threads of today's and yesterday's languages meet, and which
is best expressed in symbolic terms.
In their efforts to mollify God's curse, people have resorted to various
policies. These range from neighorly tolerance to rigid isolation, and from
eager acceptance of a new language to brutal suppression of its speakers.
Out of this crucible of language contact has come a class of speakers who
can manage more than one language, the multilinguals or polyglots. To
simplify our expression we shall call them all bilinguals, defining them as
"users of more than one language." This does not necessarily entail a mastery
of all its skills or its entire range; it may be enough to understand it when
spoken, or to read it when written. In the widest sense even the students
in language classes are bilinguals, though one is tempted to call most of
them "semi-lingual."
Today there is a vigorous flurry of interest in our country in bilinguals
and bilingualism. Some of us would say: about time! The United States
has had bilingual problems since its inception, but has always taken it for
granted that with time they would go away. The current interest is triggered
by many factors: recent Hispano-American immigration, unrest among
blacks, sensitivity to minority problems, a touching faith in the power of
education to overcome internal discord. Sociologists, educators, and linguists
have been mobilized to implement "bilingual programs." These are often
4 Blessings of Babel

spurred by the congressional Bilingual Education Act of 1968, which re-

cognized for the first time in official American policy that "the use of a
child's mother tongue can have a beneficial effect upon his education."
Linguists have discovered Black English and Chicano Spanish as valid and
highly productive subjects of study. Ethnic groups have been urged to main-
tain their identity by teaching the native tongue to their children. In com-
munities with a large number of non-English speakers schools with bilingual
programs have been established. Some training in these languages has been
introduced in the early grades in the hope of reducing their sense of aliena-
tion in an all-English world. Goals may involve no more than a "transitional
bilingualism," to ease the child's integration into the Anglo community.
There is no deep change in the official policy of Anglo conformity, only
a passing toleration of "linguistic pluralism." Even this is a step forward and
well worth encouraging.
We are hardly unique in the world in having such problems. What is
unique is that in our time a great many populations that speak minority
languages are refusing to accept the status of second-class citizens in the
countries they inhabit. Such refusal was unthinkable so long as most peoples
were locally bound as hewers of wood and drawers of water. Language
problems rarely arose in the Ancient World or the Middle Ages. Only when
governments instituted universal school systems, beginning in the eighteenth
century, did language become an explosive issue. The schools brought into
age-old local communities a force that aimed to homogenize the population,
encasing it in a countrywide mold created by a previously tolerant or indif-
ferent government. The school became an instrument for "mobilizing"
the population, in Karl Deutsch's happy phrase. (Deutsch 1953) The mobil-
ization was to plug the people into a network of communication that would
function fast and efficiently, which would only be possible if one rather
than many languages were spoken. Translation is slow and costly, and inter-
ference between codes results in loss of information. The obvious solution
was to insist on one language for each government.
As an illustration we can instance the case of the Swedish province of
Norrbotten, on the Baltic Sea at the border to Finland. Here lives a popula-
tion of minorities: the Lapps or Sami (as they are now known), whose
status is not unlike that of our Indians, say the Hopi, a people driven back
from their original territory by invaders and assigned to land so infertile
that no one else desires it. (Hansegàrd 1968: 131). Then there are the Finns,
who like Hispanic speakers in our Southwest, have found themselves on
the wrong side of a border, and are being gradually de-ethnicized, while
they play the role of proletariat in the new nation. (Jaakkola 1971) Finally,
there are the Swedish dialect speakers, roughly like our West Virginia moun-
taineers, who are gradually being forced into urbanization and are discri-
 Babel 5

minated against unless they change their speech. Until recently the Swedish
school system disregarded all of these varieties (Österberg 1961).
Language is not a problem unless it is used as a basis for discrimination,
as it has been used, and especially in modern times. The trend is clearly
toward a language shift, a process that not only deprives the minorities of
their group identity, but also of their human dignity. The fact that their
language is not considered valid in the larger society may make them feel
that they are not personally adequate.
What are the solutions? The economic disadvantages of having more
than one language in a country (or in the world) are patent and apparently
irresistible arguments for assimilation. Groups that refuse to assimilate
must be either repatriated or segregated, in the view of many administrators.
There are two humanistic solutions that suggest themselves immediately to
men of good will: deliberately to inculcate and to promote through education
a spirit of understanding of and interest in minority peoples, and to en-
courage a bilingual policy, so that they are given a sense of being understood
by their neighbors.
In principle, this policy is being followed in modern Sweden, according
to a law from 1962, which states that the Sami have the right to instruction
that is equal to, but not necessarily identical with that which other Swedes
get. They are entitled to "an orientation that does not merely communicate
knowledge, but also awakens respect for and piety towards the heritage from
earlier generations and a feeling of solidarity with their own people." (Ruong
1969) The same spirit has led to a Massachusetts statute that provides for
teaching "both in a child's native language and in English." (Kobrick 1972).
The first step in applying our best scientific knowledge to language pro-
blems is to become aware that no one's speech is inferior, only different.
Neither American Indian nor Samish have been used for atomic science, but
their subtleties of expression for their original users are beyond our imagina-
tion. Like Finnish in Sweden, Chicano Spanish may be the idiom of a popula-
tion lost in an alien land, but in its home it is a language of the highest
literary and scientific cultivation. Norbotten Swedish may sound odd in
Stockholm, as backwoods or ghetto English does in Boston, but their internal
laws permit their users to express anything they need to say. Our problem
is how to teach tolerance of difference, and the acceptance of a man or
woman for what they are, not for how they talk.
So we are led back to bilingualism, not as the curse, but as the blessing of
Babel. Bilinguals have been under a cloud, distrusted by monolingual neigh-
bors, viewed as mentally handicapped by some psychologists. But in many
situations in our world, bilingualism offers the only humane and ultimately
helpful way of bridging gaps in communication and of alleviating the curse
of Babel.
6 Blessings of Babel

We shall now proceed to examine some of the known characteristics

of bilingualism in detail, beginning with my own path to bilingualism.
(Haugen 1972b)
Chapter 2

On Growing Up Bilingual

My interest in bilingualism originated as an intensely personal concern. Born

as I was in the state of Iowa of Norwegian immigrant parents, my earliest
recollections are of the problems I encountered in keeping apart the
Norwegian spoken at home by my parents and their friends and the English
spoken on the streets by my playmates and at school by my classmates and
teachers. The setting was urban and wholly American, with no immediately
surrounding neighborhood to support my "foreign" language, contrary to
the situation of many rural communities in the Middle West and the
Northwest.
Thanks to my parents' adamant insistence on my speaking their native
tongue at home, the threshold of the home became the cue to a code switch.
As an only child I lacked the potential support of siblings to defy the will
of my parents. When coming in from a lively period of play, I blundered
many a time in violation of Norwegian idiom. My parents showed consider-
able tolerance in this respect. My mother, to be sure, being trained as a
school teacher in Norway, tried to keep up standards of purity. For the
most part, my errors, which I would now call "interferences," were not
noted and corrected (Weinreich 1953:1). The Norwegian spoken by my
parents in this setting was not only partly dialectal, but had also diverged
considerably in the direction of English by adopting English words and
phrases in a Norwegianized form.
We never used any other word for a "broom" than the English word,
pronounced brumm in terms of Norwegian spelling. I recall the amusement
and momentary consternation it caused when a visitor from Norway used
the Norwegian word kost to describe it. We never hesitated to say that we
would krosse striten instead of gà over gata when we intended to cross
the street. As travelers we might say sette sutkeisen pà saidvàka for "putting
the suitcase on the sidewalk", instead of sette kofferten pa fortauget, as
our urban contemporaries in Norway would have done. My parents made
some efforts to avoid such terms in speaking to well-educated or recent
arrivals from Norway. But the words were so common in the usage of the
people with whom they associated that they no longer excited any remark,
aside from an occasional wry witticism. Historically, the English words
were "interferences," or even well-established "loans." In our usage they
were part of a new code, a partially merged language, an "interlanguage"
if you will, a strictly American Norwegian.
8 Blessings of Babel

At the age of eight I had the unusual experience of being conveyed by

my parents to Oppdal, the rural community in Norway from which they
had sprung. (Haugen 1982). In view of the American urban neighborhood
where I had lived so far, it was a traumatic experience. My parents were
genuinely hopeful that they could "go back home," only to be disillusioned
after two and a half years. This period coincided with the first two years
of World War I. In this Norwegian interlude I had my first brush with dialect
diglossia.
Even though I could communicate with the children of neighboring
farms, who were my new agemates, my American Norwegian was not ade-
quate. Not only did they use words and forms that I did not know, but
they were baffled by my Americanisms. I had to unlearn the interlanguage
of my American environment, not just "relexify" it by replacing its English
loans with Norwegian terms, but also by adopting a stricter grammatical
form of the dialect itself. I recall being bemused by the word for "tickle,"
pronounced as kjàttà /çot:o/ in the dialect, where standard Norwegian had
kite / ç i : l a / .
The pressure for linguistic conformity expressed itself in the usual way,
through laughter and the unthinking cruelty of children to one another.
They sometimes asked me t o talk English, out of curiosity to hear what
it sounded like (this was long before English had become a regular subject
in the schools). But I refused from sheer fear of ridicule. In those years
I hardly used English at all, except perhaps in solitary monologues. On our
return it was noticed that I had acquired a perceptible Norwegian accent
in my English. So once more I went through the process of overcoming
deviations in language and bringing my English back to midwestern standards.
Once these problems were overcome, I had in fact internalized two codes
for production:, a relatively pure Norwegian dialect, and a relatively pure
American dialect. I say "relatively" only because " p u r e " implies a perfection
which I would be far from claiming. Perhaps I should say, "natively accept-
able." These two were constantly reinforced by opportunities for use with
native speakers. Among my parents' friends, and including particularly my
father, I could count on an opportunity to show off my new Norwegian
dialect. And of course, my English was quickly reestablished to the level
of my agemates in the grammar school.
From my eleventh year forward life proceeded along two rather different
tracks: on the one hand home and family, with friends and fellows in the
Norwegian Lutheran Church to which we belonged and in which we were
active; on the other hand, the American public school and friends I made
there, along with such activities as scouting, which I shared with them.
But my parents were now pursuing their goal (especially my mother's)
of enabling me to use also standard Norwegian, i.e. the literary language.
 On Growing Up Bilingual 9

Technically, this meant the Dano-Norwegian which has become the modern
"Book Language" (bokmâl) of Norway. (Haugen 1966a) In school I got
no support for this endeavor, of course. My mastery of Norwegian was
overlooked and if anything discouraged, at least until I got into high school.
I can say with assurance that it did not hold me back in acquiring standard
written and spoken English. I recall occasional interferences which had to
be corrected in my writing, as when I wrote "on Iceland" (Norwegian pa
Island) instead of "in Iceland." In speech there were certain "hard words"
that had to be mastered, as when I pronounced "horizon" /horîzan/ instead
of /horai'zan/. But this was no worse than the illiteracies of most of my
schoolmates, whose scholastic shortcomings could not be attributed to any
"foreign" background. I took to English language and literature, even to
grammar, with great avidity thanks to my realization of the linguistic
possibilities that my Norwegian experience had implanted in me.
By the time of the generally recognized crucial threshold of puberty, I
had in effect acquired six codes: a high and low register of American English,
the literate and the vulgate; a local Norwegian dialect in two varieties, the
native and the Americanized contact dialect; and an approximation to
standard Norwegian: speech and writing. It is hard at this point to say to
what extent each of them was productive or receptive. In any case I was
clearly conscious of their existence and the problem of keeping them apart.
My reason for recounting this personal background is to illustrate the
correlation of one's learning with the social experience of group living.
American English grew out of my experience with playmates and teachers in
an urban American setting. Dialect Norwegian came from immigrant parents
and Norwegian playmates. Standard Norwegian stemmed from my parents
and their friends as representatives of the community of cultivated
Norwegians in America. In each of these settings I found satisfaction in
performing functions that earned me acceptance and praise. Somewhere in
this experience lies the key to the worries that many people have about
making their children bilingual. No harm can result if the contexts are satis-
fying and supportive. In that case the problems of integrating two cultures
and two languages are not overwhelming to the child. A satisfaction should
result which, at least in my case, has never been equaled by the various
languages I have learned later in life, mostly in school.
Of course there were problems. How could one be both a Norwegian
and an American and identify with both countries? How could one be both
a dialect and a standard speaker, identifying with a rural as well as an urban
environment? Linguistically and culturally it involved a kind of tight-rope
walking, a struggle against interference to achieve the norms of each social
group. One remembers mostly the defeats, the lapses that tickled the funny
bones of one's listeners. I once tried to explain to some contemporary
10 Blessings of Babel

Norwegian newcomers the difference between "soft" and "hard" water.

I made up the word hàrdvann for "hard water", which to the unbridled
amusement of my listeners coincided in pronunciation with hârvann "hair
tonic". After World War II, when I was Cultural Officer for the American
Embassy in Oslo, I astonished a Norwegian committee by suggesting that
a certain person "sit on" the committee (sitte pa) instead of the correct
"sit in" (sitte i). The phrase suggested that he would weigh the committee
down with his physical presence. Such problems are part of being bilingual.
But the reward of being accepted in two cultures outweighs the problems.
Having put in so much effort at learning these various codes, I was
naturally drawn to the profession of language teaching, and on to linguistics,
and eventually to a special concentration on bilingualism. (Haugen 1953a,
1956). Many had already written about this problem, especially in Europe,
but the delimitation of it as a field of study was novel when I did my
research, in the 1940's and 1950's. The problems and the rewards here
sketched from my personal biography proved to have been shared by a multi-
tude of people around the world. The problems were not peculiar either to
me or to my contemporaries. There has nearly always been a conflict of
interest between members of different language communities. Hence bilingua-
lism is ultimately a political and social problem, made manifest in the minds
and hearts of the persons who constitute these communities.
In thinking about the problem, it is important to keep the individual and
the social aspects distinct. As we shall see later, one can locate individuals
on a two-dimensional chart. On one parameter the various degrees of skill,
from zero to native command, and on the other the language distance, from
virtual identity to maximum difference. Both dimensions offer interesting
themes of definition and research, and they give us some kind of a model
to keep in mind.
The pressures exerted by society are of quite a different order. Here
it is a question of the power differential between groups. We can think
of a situation like that of Switzerland and describe it as "horizontal", a
bilingualism without domination by one group over the other. The federalism
and the loose-jointed relation of the cantons makes each one a monolingual
unit, so that multilingualism becomes a problem only at the official, legisla-
tive level. Yet most Swiss speakers are not bilingual, at least not in the
languages of their own country. A more explosive situation is the usual one,
that we may call "vertical" bilingualism. Here one language group dominates
the other in terms of access to power and the benefits that flow from such
access. Here we may speak of a dominant and a dominated group. As social
planners we would like to bring the dominant and the dominated together
on a plane of equality.
The problem for the community is that of creating an atmosphere favor-
 On Growing Up Bilingual 11

able to bilingual education both in the dominant and the dominated popula-
tion. In our Southwest this means the Anglo and the Hispanic communites;
in Canada it means the English and the French. Lambert has made the point
that "priority for early schooling should be given to the language or languages
least likely to be developed otherwise." (Lambert 1974) He has in fact
advocated a system of language immersion by the dominant group in the
language of the dominated. The situation in our Southwest is just the
opposite: the dominated are immersed in the language of the dominant.
What we need is immersion programs in Spanish for American children.
To convince those who oppose such programs we need to show them that
they are beneficial and in no way harmful to the children. We have to prove
that such proposals are not un-American or unpatriotic, and that they make
the United States a better place to live. Let us see this as a problem of social
ecology: keeping alive the variety and fascination of our country, diverting
the trend toward steamrollering everything and everyone into a single, flat
uniformity.
To put such plans into effect we need more abundant materials at every
level of education. Immersion calls for something more than just sampling
a language for a few hours a week. Immersion requires living and thinking,
even loving and feeling in the new language. It is like learning to swim: as
long as one still thinks one will sink, one has not learned to swim. Swimming
in a new language requires the provision of opportunity and the ability
to communicate successfully with one's own as well the other group.
Now that laws for bilingual education have been passed by Congress and
by the legislatures of many states, I can only say that this is an astonishing
reversal for one who has experienced the hysteria against non-English teach-
ing after World War Γ. Now even some ethnic groups that have been weakened
with age, like the Germans and the Scandinavians, have awakened to their
heritage and are making efforts to keep alive something of what their
ancestors brought with them to this country.
What can we hope for as results from bilingual teaching? All depends on
giving the dominated, weaker group an education that is equal in value to
that of the stronger. In his article on the immersion programs of Canada,
Lambert alludes to some of the problems, many of the same I have described
above as occurring in my experience. He has noted something he calls an
"immersion class French," an iriterlanguage in which literal caiques on
English appear, such as Q'est-ce que c'est pour? for "What's that for?" We
need not take such lapses too seriously. Among other bilinguals such gaffes
will be understood, even if they sound amusing. They will generally be
ironed out when two populations have learned to speak to one another,
just as my un-Norwegian or un-English idioms were counteracted by my
further social experience. (Haugen 1978, 1980).
12 Blessings of Babel

Actually, it is the interlanguage of daily life, of the market place, that we

want them to learn, not necessarily the languages of Racine or Shakespeare.
Test scores are no ultimate proof of the success of a bilingual program.
We look for a livelier, more vigorous group life, reduced discrimination,
richer experience, and hopefully a more open society than the one we have.
Chapter 3

Bilingual Competence

It is no simple task to define the limits of what we call "bilingualism." There

are undeveloped societies, e.g. in New Guinea, where neighboring tribes
speak totally different and unrelated languages, but still communicate easily
because everyone is brought up to understand his neighbor's language. On
the other hand, there is scarcely a single modern nation in which there are
not minority groups who are required to learn someone else's language as
soon as they leave their birthplace. In nations like Switzerland, Belgium,
Finland, India, or Yugoslavia more than one language is officially recognized
in the administration of the country.
The problems of bilingualism are of such dimensions that they even appear
from time to time in our daily press. We read of Flemish students rioting
in Brussels and Louvain against the dominance of the French, while in Canada
French students protest the domination of English. In India there is rioting
against the imposition of Hindi on the speakers of other languages. The many
new nations of Africa are under a necessity of getting along with the language
of their former colonial masters, French or English, because their population
is split into dozens or even hundreds of languages and dialects. We do not
so often hear of the problems in such nations as Greece or Norway, with their
dual traditions of writing. The fact is that some degree of bilingualism is now
and has always been a part of the experience of most human beings who
have not remained rooted to the spot of their birth. It is a social and political
problem of some dimensions, and for many it will also be a personal problem.
In this generation the problem has caught the fancy of scholars in several
different disciplines. Linguists like the late Uriel Weinreich (1953) and
myself (Haugen 1953a, 1956) have concentrated on the problem of keeping
separate codes apart. Others have studied the initiation of bilingualism in
children; the classical study is by Werner Leopold (1939-1949). Educators
like Arsenian (1957) and Macnamara (1966) probed the effect on their
schooling. There are important studies from Wales, Ireland, and the United
States on this subject. From Europe have come several carefully documented
cases of the experience of particular groups and individuals: German children
in Estonia (Weiss 1959), a self-report by a German-Italian-English bilingual
(Elwert 1960), Latvian children in Sweden (Ruke-Draviija 1967), an
American child in France (Valette 1964), the interaction of Finnish and
Samish (Hansegàrd 1967), of Finnish and German (Wieczerkowski 1963),
14 Blessings of Babel

Standard and Dialect Swedish(Österberg 1961), Czech and German (Vildomec

1963), to name a few. In the United States and Canada psychologists
like Wallace Lambert (1961 etc.) and Susan Ervin-Tripp (1967 etc.) have
explored the reactions of bilinguals to various kinds of psychological
stimuli, with the object of finding out whether they think differently from
monolinguals. Kolers (1968) has explored just how bilinguals store two codes
in the mind. Numerous anthropologists have reported on the structure of
societies where bilingualism is a part of daily experience, e.g. Diebold (1961),
Fishman (1967 etc.), Gumperz (1967 etc.), and Lieberson (1969). From
more recent years one may mention Susan Gal (1979) on the experience
of Hungarians living in Austria and Nancy Dorian (1981) on Gaelic speakers
in eastern Scotland. Political scientists like Deutsch (1953) have provided
analyses of the forces involved in language conflict in various countries.
In Canada the tensions between French and English in Quebec led to
the appointment of a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturism
in 1963. Its preliminary report appeared in 1965, and the first volume of a
voluminous series in 1968. Seminars on bilingualism were held in Canada
(Moncton, New Brunswick 1967; see Kelly 1969), Wales (1960), Belgium,
and Luxembourg. Under the leadership of Wiliam Mackey an International
Centre for Bilingualism was established (Mackey 1965 etc.).
Just what is this bilingualism that is being studied? There are two opposed
schools of thought in this matter: those who adopt a narrow definition, and
those who adopt a wide one. The narrow definition may be exemplified in
the work of Braun (1937:115): "Active, completely equal mastery of two
or more languages." Bloomfield (1933:56) relaxed the requirements by
asking only for "native-like control of two or more languages." Let me
rephrase these as native competence in more than one language. But this is
only an ideal, theoretical model: few if any actually achieve this. Most later
students have adopted a wide definition, e.g. Hall (1952:14) admitted as a
bilingual one who had "at least some knowledge and control of the gram-
matical structure of the second language." I tried at one time to establish
a cut-off "at the point where the speaker can produce complete meaningful
utterances in the other language" (Haugen 1953:7). Then Diebold (1961)
extended it to include even Indian (Huave) speakers in Mexico who were
only passively familiar with Spanish (which he called "incipient bilingual-
ism").
In its strictest interpretation the narrow definition reduces the number
of perfect bilinguals to zero. But the wide definition expands it to infinity,
since it can include all human beings who have met or associated with
speakers of other languages or dialects. This makes its scope so catholic that
it is virtually meaningless.
We must find criteria for narrowing the wide definition or for expanding
 Bilingual Competence 15

the narrow one until we have a field of genuine interest. We see between
native competence and zero competence a gradient without obvious lines
of division from a purely stylistic difference to a dialectal and linguistic
one. We can establish arbitrary levels within these two continua. Educators
are accustomed to testing students in language proficiency, whether speaking
or listening, reading or writing. Linguists are accustomed to describing langu-
age varieties, calling some of them styles, others dialects, and still others,
languages. Languages are more or less distant from one another, and there
is still much doubt about how one can devise a usable scale of language
distance. But we can set up a theoretical chart to show the complexity of
the problem. In two dimensions we are dealing with continua that can only
arbitrarily be segmented (Fig. 1):

(•Fluent
Productive·^
^Halting
Competence
/•Full
Receptive<
Fragmen-
tary 0
Style Register Cognate Non-
cognate
ν „ / - /
Dialect Language
Distance

Fig. 1.

One man's dialect is another man's language. Skills are generally propor-
tionate to the needs and compulsion that are exerted on the individual. Many
of the same phenomena of switching, interference, and code convergence
take place whenever languages or dialects are in contact.
The dimensions of competence and distance each have a breaking point
which may be used to bisect the continuum. Competence may be predo-
minantly passive, a characteristic that we will name as receptive. Reading
competence, often used as a minimum ideal of foreign language learning,
is a receptive skill. Children will often listen for months to a language spoken
around them before they attempt to use it. Some adults, like the Huave
mentioned above, never go beyond reception and are content not to become
productive. Production requires the internalization of rules of grammar and
social behavior that one is spared if learning only to understand. Even so,
the dichotomy is less than clean. Since the speaker can control production,
16 Blessings of Babel

he may even learn to speak without fully understanding all the answers.
They may be spoken at a speed beyond his competence. This will certainly
be true if he has learned the language by reading only. But in general, pro-
duction is the higher skill and presupposes a basis of receptive competence.
The breaking point of language distance is that of mutual intelligibility.
In Germany Bavarian and Saxon are considered dialects, while Dutch is a
separate language. Yet there may be less intelligibility between the two dia-
lects than between some varieties of (Low) German and Dutch. Intelligi-
bility is a highly subjective criterion. It may depend on the listener's intel-
ligence, but it may also be obscured by his attitudes to the other language.
At the University of Wisconsin students complained that they had trouble
understanding two history professors because they sounded foreign: one
was an emigre from Russia, the other was a native Texan! Norwegian and
Danish are clearly cognate languages, but speakers have learning problems
when listening to each other. Children have often not acquired the com-
petence to understand the other, while adults with any breadth of experi-
ence have.
The reference above to "attitudes" involves a further dimension that we
may call the functions of the language. Bilingualism may separate as well as
join social groups. Bernard Shaw is reported to have said that the English
and the Americans were separated by speaking the same language. Yet their
relationship is to some extent what we may call a "horizontal" relation,
like that of the cantons in Switzerland. (See Fig. 2)

Vertical ' bilingualism

Dominant
variety

Dominated
variety

Fig. 2

In most countries where languages abut, there is a marked inequality

between the language communities: one is socially, economically, or poli-
tically dominated by the other. This is usually the result either of conquest
 Bilingual Competence 17

or of migration. In the Americas English and Spanish are dominant not only
in relation to the aboriginal Indians whom they conquered, but also to all
other European immigrants who settled among them after their rule was
securely established. In such cases the functions are gradually shifted from
a horizontal to a vertical dimenstion. Mediation goes one way only, from
the dominant to the dominated, and the bilinguals are to be found chiefly
among the dominated. To put it bluntly: the rulers find it unnecessary
to learn the language of their subjects. In Canada 30 per cent of the French
speakers know English, but less than 5 per cent of the English speakers know
French. The trend is often one of making the entire dominated community
bilingual; when that day has come, the original language becomes superfluous
and the dominated group may give it up entirely. This is the case of "language
death," a term invented by Dorian (1981).
If the dominated group does not give up its language, but continues to
use it in daily life, in the home and among friends, the language may acquire
a regular function in the community as a mark of informality. If we think
of the ideal relationship between groups as being horizontal, i.e. of roughly
equal status, any tipping of the line will represent inequality. If they are
hierarchically arranged, with layers upon one another in an ascending range
of power and status, they may even end up in a vertical relationship. One
idiom may be more or less permanently tagged as appropriate for private or
homely discourse, another as approrpiate for public or formal discourse. In
a seminal essay by Charles Ferguson (1959) some examples of this were
isolated and described under the name of "diglossia." His examples were
Arabic, Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian. In each case he saw two closely
related language varieties, one playing a role in education and writing, another
in speech and daily living. The former he labeled as H for High, the latter as
L for Low.
Fishman (1967) adopted the word diglossia also, but extended its meaning
to unrelated languages that fulfill a similar function, e.g. Hebrew and Yiddish
in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, or Spanish and Guarani in
Paraguay. While Fishman's extension is understandable from a purely func-
tional point of view, it leaves the definition open to further widening. E.g.,
one can say that the learning of written/literary English is a diglossie experi-
ence for most children. The same would be true of the learning of Latin or
other foreign languages in school. In this sense all educated persons are more
or less diglossie.
Let us now reconsider our definition of bilingualism. In the narrow sense
it is productive, language-oriented, and horizontal; in the wider sense it may
also be receptive, dialect-oriented, and vertical. In practise the narrow defini-
tion is more like the popular conception and the more central in our study
of bilingualism. The wide definition is interesting as forming either the
18 Blessings of Babel

(inceptive) beginning or the (residual) end of bilingualism. To the narrow

definition we may also add the perspective of biculturism, in which ethnicity
plays a major role. Only when the bilingual is also bicultural do the problems
arise that really challenge the student of language and society. We shall
consider this aspect in later sections.
There are terms that appear in the literature of bilingualism for which
I have been unable to find any room in my definition. One is the distinction
some make between compound and coordinate bilingualism. Coordinate
bilinguals are those who have two clearly distinct systems, compound bil-
inguals those who have more or less merged them. Elaborate experiments
have been devised for testing the distinction in an effort to identify psycho-
logical differences in the method of storage. Basing themselves on definitions
by Weinreich, psychologists like Osgood, Ervin-Tripp, and Lambert have
explored the potentialities of this contrast. (Weinreich 1953: 9-10; Osgood
1954: 139-145; Lambert 1961 etc.). The results have been disappointing;
as pointed out by Diller (1967), they reveal chiefly a lack of proficiency,
i.e. that the compound bilinguals are simply bad bilinguals. What we really
need to explain is the many phenomena that result from convergence
between codes. The closer codes are, the harder they are to keep apart.
Bilinguals are the true architects of convergence.
The pressure to maintain separation is greatest among the users of prestige
forms of a standard language. For example, a French-English bilingual who is
a writer or a professor will feel a greater urge to keep each of his or her
languages "pure". In a relation of dominant/dominated, i.e. vertical bilingual-
ism, the pressure for separation will be greatest in the dominant language.
In the everyday give-and-take of ordinary life the pressure will rather be for
convergence. As I wrote in my study of Norwegian-American: "His
Norwegian approaches his English because both are required to function
within the same environments and the same minds." (Haugen 1953a: 72)
Gumperz has presented an example from India in which the unrelated
Kannada and Marathi are practically caiques, i.e. word-for-word translatable.
(Gumperz 1967).
Any learning of a language for "tool" purpose should be excluded from
the concept of bilingualism. Only if the language becomes a medium for the
user's own personality in relation to other members of the community can
he be said to enter into a truly bilingual relationship.
The fever of interest that bilingualism has aroused in recent years cannot
be treated here. But one should at least mention three works that have a
bearing on the theme of this chapter: (1) Aspects of Bilingualism, a collec-
tion of articles, edited by Michel Paradis (1978), and written by a variety of
younger and older scholars; (2) Tvàspràkighet, by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas
(1981), written in Swedish and now translated into English, a deeply com-
 Bilingual Competence 19

mitted statement by a lifelong bilingual (Finnish and Swedish); (3) Life with
Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism by Francois Grosjean, a
psychologist and psycholinguist, who has produced a most attractive text-
book, with numerous examples and self-reports by bilinguals. (1982).
Chapter 4

The Ethnic Imperative

Now the question no longer is how shall

we learn English so that we may take
part in the social life of America and
partake of her benefits. The big question
is: how can we preserve the language of
our ancestors here, in a foreign environ-
ment, and pass on to our descendants
the treasures which it contains?
Thrond Bothne, Norwegian-
American professor, editor (1898:828)

The meaning of the term ethnicity vacillates uncertainly between the two
poles of kinship and nationalism, and is a part of the continuum that con-
nects the two. At one end are the ties that hold the family together, whether
nuclear or extended, the kind of bond that makes some people go in for
extensive genealogical research. At the other end is the ideology that main-
tains a nation and its culture, to which every citizen is expected to give
his loyalty. Ethnicity shares with both a sense of loyalty to one's group,
which is larger than kinship but lesser than nationalism. We may call ethnicity
an extended kinship and a diluted nationalism.
Ethnicity is therefore a subjective phenomenon, and it cannot be predicted
from a person's birthplace, ancestry, or other objective data. The most
enthusiastically ethnic Norwegian I have known was a man without a drop
of Norwegian blood or background. He is the primus motor and most active
member of the Sons of Norway lodge in his Connecticut town. He goes to
Norway every summer and makes friends wherever he goes. He knows more
about Norwegian literature than most of his lodge mates, and even makes
stabs at translating books into English. On the other hand there are all too
many immigrants from Norway who have avoided all contact with other
Norwegians. They have lost their language, have married Americans and
joined American organizations, allowing themselves to be swallowed up in
American life, with little if any thought of their homeland and its culture.
These are extreme examples, and most people fall somewhere on the
continuum between them. They arrive on these shores with ethnicity intact,
a national loyalty. But as the years go by, they gradually move into the new
nation, retaining only as much of their ethnicity as does not bring them into
open conflict with the new. In the end they are left with little more than
22 Blessings of Babel

the childhood memories of their ancestry, and perhaps sporting a "foreign"

name (Isaacs 1975).
What role does language play in relation to ethnicity? First we must
clarify just what is meant by the term itself. In a book on ethnicity, Nathan
Glazer and Daniel Moynihan pointed out that it was a relatively new word
(1975). With the help of the editors of the G. and C. Merriam Company
I have been able to trace it just a bit farther back than Glazer and Moynihan.
The first use seems to be a pair of articles in the American Sociological
Review for 1950, where it figures as a synonym for the census term "national
origin" (McGuire 1950: 199; Hollingshead 1950: 624).
Launched as a bit of sociological jargon, it has spread to the general
public and has taken on a wider sense, thanks to the real life events that have
intervened since 1950. A term was needed to describe the loyalty of certain
marked groups, above all Blacks and Jews, who could not be covered by
the term "national origin," let alone the native American Indians. All of
these groups have joined their aspirations for recognition with those that
older immigrant groups have long asserted for political and social acceptance
(Glazer and Moynihan 1963a).
The topic of ethnicity is of special interest when we speak of the ideo-
logical commitment to a particular group. This is certainly the case when
the ideology involves active work on behalf of the group and the maintenance
of its identity. We must keep in mind that this was true also of the original
English settlers of the United States and Canada. They had their ethnicity,
which they were able to impose on later comers thanks to their position
as first settlers and organizers of government.
We like to think of the United States not just as a new nation, but as
a new kind of nation, founded on the eighteenth century ideology laid down
in the Declaration of Independence. This involved a commitment to the
protection of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But when it came
to organizing social life and the institutions that would govern the nation,
the identity imposed was English. Non-English-speaking immigrants had
to yield to this ethnic language if they were to be accepted at all. English
ethnicity had little use for anything that was not white, Anglo-Saxon, and
protestant (WASP).
The term "ethnicity" has therefore come to be a "minority" nationalism,
in the sense of politically dominated. An "ethnic encyclopedia" planned
for the United States included all manner of immigrants from Europe and
Asia, not to speak of Africa; it also included American Indians, religious
groups like the Mennonites, and linguistic groups like the Basques, which
lack a homeland of their own. But the English are missing.
When I wrote my major study of the Norwegian Language in America
(1953a), the term had not yet become popular. But I devoted two chapters
 The Ethnic Imperative 23

to the struggle of many Norwegians to maintain their language in their

churches, schools, communities, and homes. When the first boatload arrived,
in 1825, it was taken for granted that they would soon be absorbed into the
American nation. As their numbers grew, and they succeeded in establishing
large and solid communities in the Midwest and Canada, but also in such
cities as Brooklyn, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Seattle, they created a Little
Norway in which their language and their ethnicity could flourish for a
hundred years.
Their churches were almost wholly Norwegian-speaking down to World
War I (1914). Higher schools like Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, used
Norwegian as the language of instruction well into the twentieth century.
Societies and lodges of all kinds were conducted in Norwegian. Newspapers,
as the cement that bound them together, flouished in the years down to
mid-century.
Popularly the ethnic community was known as Det norske Amerika (The
Norwegian America), or by more romantic souls as Vesterheimen (The
Western Home), in imitation of the Icelandic Vestur-ísland (West Iceland)
about the Icelandic communities in America. In this ethnic world Norskdom
(Norwegianness) was cultivated as a unifying force that also set the members
off from their fellow citizens of other ethnic origins.
Most of its members were also busy learning English, as they worked in
an American or Canadian community. They pridefully participated in the
novel political and commercial system, which gave them freedom and often
even prosperity. Toward the beginning of the century, in my boyhood,
Det norske Amerika was fully alive and enjoying its greatest flowering. My
parents initiated me into it, conferring on me that dual ethnicity discussed
above, which I have enjoyed ever since.
This world lasted from the founding of Norwegian churches and news-
papers in the 1840's and well into our century. Norwegian services came to
a virtual end in the 1950's. The major newspapers died along with their
subscribers: Minneapolis Tidende in 1935, Skandinaven in Chicago in 1941,
Decorah-Posten in Decorah, Iowa, in 1972. Down to 1924 the community
was fed by new immigration, at the same time as it was depleted by the
loss of many younger members, especially in urban areas.
The change-over from Norwegian to English did not occur without con-
flict, often between generations. Many a battle was fought on the floor of
church meetings and in the bosom of the family between the immigrant
generation and their offspring. In rural communities the transition was
more gradual, for here the pre-World War I contact with American life could
be quite minimal. In the cities life was more open, since Norwegians seldom
isolated themselves in ghettolike areas, and did not meet color lines in moving
out of the poorer sections as their prosperity grew.
24 Blessings of Babel

The loss of the mother tongue in home and church could be a bitter
experience. It is well known that a second language learned in later life
often fails to convey the cultural, emotional, or religous power of the first
language, the mother tongue. Even with my entire schooling in English, my
Norwegian background somehow makes a Norwegian poem or quotation
warmer and more deeply moving than its English equivalent.
In working out my Norwegian Language in America (1953a), I resorted
(among other sources) to the United States census. However inadequate, it
confirmed my expectation that Norwegians were slightly more retentive of
their language than the Swedes and a good deal more than the Danes. The
much better Canadian statistic of 1931 made it possible to include also
the Icelanders. While only 14.2% of the Icelanders had lost their Icelandic
utterly, twice as many Danes or 29% had lost their Danish. Of the Swedes
23.7% had lost their Swedish, while 24.9% of the Norwegians had lost
Norwegian - not a great difference. One can assume that the Danes were
more urbanized than the Swedes and the Norwegians, while the Icelanders
have a special loyalty to their language. This kind of study has been extended
to other ethnic groups, especially by Joshua Fishman in his classic book
Language Loyalty in the United States (1966a). He went on to show in
detail how ethnic loyalty is associated with language loyalty.
In the typical bilingual community, however, it is often not a question
of a black and white confrontation between the languages. When languages
are in contact, they tend to develop in parallel directions and even to merge.
For Icelandic this has been treated by Haraldur Bessason (1967, 1971) and
much earlier by the illustrious explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (Stefansson
1903). Speakers who maintain the ethnic language will inevitably, often
unconsciously, make concessions to English. It will be quite normal for a
dialect-speaking Norwegian to say: Koltan jompa over fense ut i fila (The
colts jumped over the fence out into the field) where a corresponding farmer
in Norway would say: Folan hoppa over gjerde ut i âkeren. The grammar is
exactly the same, but the significant words have been replaced by English.
Words like "colt," "jump,", "fence', and "field', have become a part of his
everyday vocabulary, pronounced and inflected in Norwegian (colt is
masculine, fence is neuter, field is feminine).
Whatever rhetorical purists may think of this development, it is no more
peculiar than the fact that English distinguishes between the Anglo-Saxon
calf and the French veal, which is the calf when it is butchered and cooked.
The American immigrant dialect served the ethnic community admirably.
It brought them a step nearer to the new culture and its language, forming
a kind of bridge to save them from plunging into icy waters. The language
serves as a valuable shelter for ethnic development. Before they realize it,
their thinking has moved word by word out of their ancestral world into
 The Ethnic Imperative 25

the new one. They have shaped a new instrument out of the old tongue.
Before I began working on the problem, very little had been written.
But I found in the literature available so many parallels to my experience
of the Norwegian-American development that I decided to collect all the
studies I could find. This became my book on Bilingualism in the Americas
(1956, continued in 1973a). Throughout the Americas one could identify
similar developments. Wherever one language was politically and socially
dominant, e.g. Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America or English in the
United States and Canada, other ethnic groups, including Indians, Blacks,
Eskimos, and other Europeans tended to accept the majority language.
Even if they did not at the same time abandon their own, they began speak-
ing it in a way that suited the new culture of their country. This was true
even of the French speakers in Canada. Among the Norwegians even cultured
speakers could fall into bilingual traps. The great writer O.E. Rölvaag had to
have his manuscripts checked when they were to be published in Norway.
We are inevitably led to the conclusion that it is very difficult to maintain
an ethnic language in the shadow of another, dominant language. One
recourse is to practice a degree of social segregation, as do for example the
Mennonites. Here language is a powerful supportive factor in keeping the
elect apart from the worldly. For one thing, it precludes intermarriage by
supporting endogamy. Otherwise it means a special effort on the part of
parents in creating a native-speaking environment in the home, the school,
or the church, or best of all, by immersing their children in the old homeland
for a time.
Whatever the problems, the experience is not a mental handicap. It is an
extension of experience, a window into another world, and an aid in keeping
alive a sense of identity with the past and their kin.
In 1953 I dedicated my book to my parents, "who first introduced me to
the pleasures and problems of bilingualism." My personal experience has
been that the pleasures far outweigh the problems. But the very fact that
bilingualism in our dynamic society appears to be generally unstable and
evanescent suggests that many have found that the problems outweighed
the pleasures. Many adults have sadly expressed regret at not having learned
their parents' language. To them I can only answer: That was either because
you resisted when they tried, or because they mistakenly thought that the
learning of their language would be a handicap.
There is no doubt that many have considered bilingualism a handicap,
especially since the witch hunt of 1918. Intelligence tests seemed to prove
that Mexican Americans were handicapped, overlooking that their economic
status often kept them from having adequate access to English. During World
War II it appeared that foreign languages were in short supply, leading to an
emphasis on learning them. New waves of immigration have encouraged
26 Blessings of Babel

the setting up of bilingual schools. It is doubtful that these will promote

language retention by minority groups. But it may contribute to giving
some ethnic speakers a new pride in their own identity, which will make
them better citizens of a pluralistic America.
Chapter 5

An Ecological Model

It has long been a passion on my part to see language in relation to its human
environment, for which I adopted the term "ecology of language" in 1971.
Among those who helped inspire this view was Kenneth Pike, according to
whose "unified theory of the structure of human behavior," language and
society are seen as sharing "many kinds of characteristics." (Pike 1967: 641)
In his chapter on "the context of behavior" he observes that a society, like
a language, may have unity and variation at the same time. There may be
subgroupings and interlocking groups "where various individuals are simul-
taneously members of different groups with different functions" (Ibid.:
643). While such views are the essence of sociolinguistics, I have found it
fruitful to adopt the widely used term "ecology" and to apply it to the
variation of language.
In recent years linguists have increasingly concentrated themselves about
the uniformity of language in a monodialectal community. In such a world
speakers agree substantially in phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and any
other feature of language. Deviations are a matter of individual performance,
following a famous distinction between langue and parole launched by
the French linguist Saussure. This line has been pursued by Noam Chomsky
and his followers, who have largely rejected parole in favor of "a completely
homogeneous speech-community" (Chomsky 1965: 3). This is of course
a purely theoretical community, hardly a real one (not even found at M. I. T.).
One can imagine an approach to it in a tightly knit elite or professional
group, or perhaps an isolated tribal community, though I have only hearsay
evidence for this statement. To me it is more congenial to replace this homo-
geneous model with a heterogeneous one, developed out of the cooperation
of linguists with social scientists. The model is an old one, growing from the
discipline known as dialectology, and now usually comprised under the term
sociolinguistics (among linguists) or sociology of language (among socio-
logists). I cut the gordian knot by calling it language ecology.
An important attempt to correlate social structures with linguistic re-
pertoires was made by John Gumperz in an article entitled "Types of
Linguistic Communities." (Gumperz 1962) It is tempting to develop the ideas
there presented into a model representing my personal observations and
including also the kind of styles observed by Labov (1972) and going all the
way to the use of wholly unrelated languages as studied by Fishman (1971).
28 Blessings of Babel
 An Ecological Model 29

We may begin with the acquisition of a child's first language, the normal,
casual language of its immediate environment, the family and the playmates.
If we take this as the base line for all later language learning, we may call
it the child's basilect (a term from Wm. Stewart 1964). This may of course
be multiple, but at the moment we are interested only in its contrast, the
acrolect, a variety that is imposed on the learner from above, either by
school, by older peer-groups, or by adults.
At the level of the basilect all languages are equal: there is no difference
between societies. But by the time the child has attained his acrolect, a
complexity has been imposed that corresponds to the complexity of society
itself. Gumperz sees a division into three types: the tribal, which is at the
hunting and gathering stage; the intermediate, with a complex system of
social castes and classes; and the urbanized, in which class distinctions have
changed into professional specializations combined with a less stratified,
more democratic organization. We may call these, respectively, societies A,
B, and C, and represent them graphically in two ways: either as Fig. 1:
"Codes with societies," as lines reflecting language distance, or Fig. 2:
"Societies with codes," societies split in various ways: the former reflects
the linguist's view, the latter the sociologist's.
Even in A-l, the simplest of societies, as in the Great American Basin,
anthropological linguists like Voegelin have shown that there may be differ-
ences between what he calls casual and non-casual registers. The latter often
uses antiquated words and forms in special ceremonies preserved by the
medicine men (Voegelin 1960). In what may be called semi-tribal life (A-2),
there is a learning of trade languages for dealing with out-groups, as in the
case of Swahili in East Africa.
In the stratified B-societies we can distinguish at least three types: B-l,
with a High style used for special purposes, such a formal lectures, church
rituals, or legal documents, roughly what Ferguson (1959) has called
diglossia. With Ferguson we assume a considerable language distance, but
still within the same language, in what we have called the wide definition
of bilingualism. In B-2 there are states that represent the narrow definition,
which we may regard as true bilingualism. An example may be England
after the Norman invasion, where the acrolect was different and mutually
incomprehensible to speakers of the basilect, i.e. Norman French vs. Anglo-
Saxon. Here the social relation is one of dominant vs. dominated.
In B-3 the distance is reduced to a point where we can speak of two
dialects, one standardized and the other oral. One former dialect has been
promoted at the expense of the others. So the Francian dialect of the Île-de-
France advanced to become French, leaving Norman and Gascon as dialects,
or even, with the disappearance of their writing traditions, as mere patois
(in the French conception). If a name is needed for this situation, one can
30 Blessings of Babel
 An Ecological Model 31

call it bilexia in reference to speaking of two lects, one dominant and the
other dominated.
If we now consider the C-societies, we meet a situation that develops
out of Β into one where the mass of the people is for the first time given
the schooling that makes it literate in the standard. In societies like the
American, where social stratification is fluid, and upward as well as sideward
mobility is great, the trend will be toward distinctions based on professional
training and specializations. Jargons arise for disciplines like medicine, for
crafts like automobile repairing, for specialties like linguistics, in which
members will recognize each other by their respective jargons. The final
state (C-2) suggests a distinction based largely on education: elaborated vs.
non-elaborated (Bernstein 1962).
Such either-or categorizations raise questions that have been widely
discussed. A problem that is relevant here is whether such societies can be
described as having norms. The fact that two languages/dialects exist within
the same society means that the norm is under constant pressure, so that
it loses much of its stability. We must probably assume not only interference,
i.e. the overlapping of two codes, but also code switching, the use of two
codes successively, and finally borrowing, i.e. the incorporation of novel
elements into the norm.
The tape recorder has made it possible to fix informal speech and to
analyze it as we might the texts of written languages. The development
of sociolinguistic theory, above all by William Labov (1970 etc.) has made
it possible to handle what was once called "free variation" and find its
social correlates. Even so, the possibilities for individual and creative variation
go well beyond any present theory. We can only use experience and common
sense (now often called "intuition") to guide us in our understanding. The
ease with which natural bilinguals may reshape the norms of their respective
languages is still unexplored and may require a radical revision in our
thinking.
A stimulus to such rethinking can be found in the writings of various
students of Scandinavian immigrant language in America by Folke Hedblom
(1975 etc.), Nils Hasselmo (1974), Sture Ureland (1975), Iver Kjaer and M.
Baumann Larsen (1973, 1974). One may also look to studies of Estonian
by Els Oksaar (1979) and of Hispano-American by Donald Lance (1969),
Douglas Shaffer (1975), and Guadalupe Valdes-Fallis (1976). I have been
privileged to study some of the American-Swedish material in the Uppsala
archives of the Swedish Dialect and Folklore Institute.
Immigrant society is highly dynamic. Immigrants who are not dispersed
tend to cluster with fellow countrymen. In the rural Midwest, long the
goal of many Scandinavian immigrants, they formed settlements clustering
around a Lutheran church, where their own language was preached and
32 Blessings of Babel

taught. Here they could maintain their language and learn only as much
English as they needed for economic and political contacts. But their children
and children's children were exposed to the English-language school and an
ever more mobile society. As long ago as 1950 I set up a model for the
transitional ecology of such communities. Speakers with full command of
the immigrant language were designated as A, and masters of English were
B. Intermediate speakers, i.e. bilinguals, were either A-dominant (Ab),
balanced (AB), or B-dominant (aB). The differences constitute a continuum:
we may find modified Α-speakers (A') or B-speakers (B'). In an immigrant
community the trend will historically be from A to B, but as long as there
are speakers still using A, all the varieties can be found in synchronic
togetherness (Haugen 1953a: 370).
In my field work I was most interested in second-generation bilinguals,
who shifted codes readily and had no great hesitation about introducing
loanwords from English. Although they might be somewhat deficient in
both languages, they were remarkably consistent. They were proud of their
bilingualism and often showed normative feelings by commenting on their
own inadequacies. They sometimes remarked unfavorably on persons who
adopted an excessive number of English words (engelsksprengt), while those
who tried to speak a pure Norwegian were felt to be "stuck-up."
Certain views which I advanced on this topic some years ago have been
under discussion more recently. In 1960 I was visiting Sweden. I had just
been reading the last volume of Vilhelm Moberg's tetralogy about Swedish
emigration and settlement in Minnesota (Moberg 1956). These novels have
since been translated into English, and they were condensed into two mag-
nificent films, titled The Emigrants and Unto a Good Land. These were
widely seen and highly praised in this country. What can not appear either
in the English translations or the films is Moberg's idiosyncratic use of
American-Swedish dialog in the volumes that deal with the settlement in
Chisago County, north of Minneapolis, in the 1850's.
While in Sweden, I read a critique of Moberg's use of English words by a
Swedish scholar (Mjöberg 1960). He objected on aesthetic grounds, basing
himself on what we may call a Swedish rhetorical norm. My own impression
was rather a number of cases where Moberg seemed to me to depart from
realism, the more peculiar in view of Moberg's self-proclaimed realism.
The result was that I published an article in the Swedish press, perhaps
rashly attacking his American Swedish as "unrealistic and improbable." It
reminded me of the many deliberately concocted humorous samples. The
article stirred up a hornet's nest and provoked Moberg (who was then still
very much alive) into angry replies in defense of his practice. He cited the
many letters and diaries he had read, written by American Swedes. He re-
ferred above all to the diary of one Andrew Peterson, a farmer in Minnesota.
 An Ecological Model 33

Peterson had kept a diary from 1854 to his death in the 1890's. He gleefully
pointed out that this diary, unknown to me at the time, was available at the
Minnesota Historical Society.
On my return to Wisconsin I made a special pilgrimage to St. Paul to study
the Peterson diary. My suspicions were verified: Peterson wrote as one might
expect. A number of Moberg's examples were due to misreading of his hand-
writing, possibly by inattentive librarians. Only one of the words to which
I had objected proved to be confirmed. Peterson did indeed use a word that
Moberg adopted for frequent use: speak meeting. This expression, unfamiliar
to me as English, and not listed in any American dictionary, appears to have
been peculiar to the Baptist sect to which Peterson belonged. They seem to
have called what I would describe as "testimonial meetings" by this very
special word. It is, accordingly, a legitimate word, though more limited in
its appropriateness than the usual miting from "meeting."
One of my criticisms of Moberg concerned the fact that he had made no
use of the only scholarly study made of the Swedish of Chisago County.
This was by Professor Walter Johnson of the University of Washington,
a native of the community who was thoroughly familiar with its dialect
(Johnson 1942). Moberg brushed aside the criticism, alleging that he had no
use for scholarship, having made his own observations (but not in the com-
munity). In a later article Johnson pointed out that the study of diaries and
letters is a poor substitute for listening to the living speech of the present-
day community. (Johnson 1971) He supported my contention, writing that
the speech of the pioneers "was not a hodgepodge, an indiscriminate mixing
of American and smàlândska phonetic and structural patterns." He showed
in some detail how many of Moberg's anglicisms were not part of general
usage in the community.
Among the principles that I saw as entering into the bilingual norm was
the fact that form words are seldom borrowed, e.g. "how" or "as" (cf.
Moberg's how manga for "how many", as du forstar for "as you under-
stand"). (Moberg 1956: 32-34) Also that close cognates are often replaced
by native equivalents (cf. Moberg's Och nu vi go for "And now we go.")
Compounds are usually either borrowed as units or retained (cf. Moberg's
statekörkan and svenskmakad for "state church" and "Swedish made").
(Moberg 1956: 53)
One can apply to Moberg the remarks by the very able Swedish-American
writer Ernst Skarstedt, written in 1914. He said that only two writers of
fiction had succeeded in "writing American Swedish absolutely correctly,
i.e. get in just those English words with just those distortions that are really
used by the common man." He criticised writers who had created sentences
like Jag tror inte, hon regretted it ("I don't think she regretted it") or Om
vi inte ràkas nu har on earth ("If we don't meet now here on earth").
(Hasse Imo 1974: 101).
34 Blessings of Babel

Hasselmo developed a theory of borrowing called "ordered selection."

(Hasselmo 1974) He granted that in principle any English word could be
borrowed. But in performance there are five levels of choice: whole words
as the most likely, then derivative suffixes, then morphological suffixes,
then form words, and finally, prosody. Thus a speaker who wishes to say
"the tough guys" may decide to use a Swedish plural: de tough-α guy-ar-na,
or an English plural: de tough-α guy-s-en. But he is not likely to say the
tough-α guys. In studying Swedish speech in Moberg's own community,
he found a high degree of elasticity in the borrowed lexicon, but not com-
plete chaos.
We may call this elastic norm a communicative norm, and we shall look
more closely at it in the next chapter.
Chapter 6

The Communicative Norm

In reference to language the idea of "norm" is both ambiguous and slippery.

It may refer to a standardized language like French, codified in grammars
and sanctified by an Academy, taught in schools, and written by authors -
but spoken by no one, except under duress. Deviations from such a norm
are deemed to reveal one's lack of a proper education, and if it is uninten-
tional, is regarded as a barbarism. If it is intentional, it may be acceptable
as a stylistic variation, either as a mockery of the "lower classes" or as a
relaxation of standards, a kind of "old shoe." I have earlier called this a
rhetorical norm, since it has been the ideal of rhetoricians and their gram-
matical henchmen for lo these many centuries. Scientific linguists have
often rejected it, at least in theory, and have proclaimed that it is their task
to describe linguistic norms and not to prescribe them (Haugen 1966b: 51).
In bilingual communities there are nearly always educated writers who
express scorn for the deviations of daily speech from the rhetorical norms
of their language. An interesting example can be drawn from a journalistic
dispute in the Norwegian-American group in the year 1881.
Two rival editors of Norwegian-language newspapers in Minneapolis fell
into a rather vitriolic discussion about language. They were both university-
trained men of well-known urban families, immigrants from Norway within
the decadé, still in their thirties, and editing secular weeklies for their
countrymen. One of them was Professor Sven Oftedal (1844-1911), a
clergyman, who edited Folkebladet ("The People's Paper"). The other was
Luth Jaeger (1851-1925), editor of Budstikken ("The Messenger"). Jaeger
was anticlerical, so they had other things than language to feud about. But
over some months of the year 1881 this was their topic.
Interestingly, the anticlerical editor was the one who upheld the rhetorical
norm. He severely castigated his clerical rival for "bad" Norwegian. He was
especially critical of his practice of interlarding his Norwegian with English
terms, more or less assimilated. Oftedal replied that he wrote as he did in
order to be understood by his readers. To this Jaeger retorted that as a pastor
and a professor of theology he had a responsibility to the growing generations
to give them models of the "best possible Norwegian." As an editor he was
also a teacher, "with the duty of maintaining the mother tongue and thereby
also the desire to remain in touch with what is going on at home in the father-
land." With a touch of irony he continued that "it would be a different
36 Blessings of Babel

matter if Professor Oftedal could not help mixing and mistreating the
language, as he so often does in his paper, but his position as a professor
forbids our believing t h a t . . . . So it must be because he either does not
wish to bother translating various English words and terms into Norwegian,
does not have the time, does not want to, or thinks it is impressive to orna-
ment his paper with these borrowed feathers, in order to show that he knows
a little more than his catechism, as the expression goes. We cannot know,
of course, what the professor's real motivation is, but it must be one of these
or all of them together." (Budstikken, Feb. 8, 1881)
If we consider his collection of incriminating examples, however, we are
likely to find, as I did, that many if not all of the English terms are such
as do not easily lend themselves to translation. They include words and
expressions highly characteristic of American political and economic life,
such as "deadline," "pay as you go," "dark horse," "figures do not lie,"
"drawbacks," "a perjured villain," "common sense," "party vote," "logrol-
ling," and "filibustering." These are difficult to handle in any language except
as loanwords. In the good pastor's text they are variously treated as inte-
grated loans, or more often as switches, shown by being set off by Roman
type in an otherwise Gothic text or by quotation marks. Some of the abusive
terms quoted from American politicians he has left in English, he writes,
"for decency's sake."
His critic maintained that he could easily have replaced them by
Norwegian words. But it is clear that our theologian had the feeling that most
of his readers had learned about these things since immigration and would
therefore understand them best if one used the precise English words instead
of some approximate equivalent in the mother tongue. He did so, of course,
in full awareness of the patchwork result and the violation it constituted of
the homeland rhetorical norm. That he still did it is especially interesting,
since pastors were usually norm models for the standard language among the
immigrants.
We need go no further into this particular historical incident. It illustrates
my main theme, the question of how and whether one can speak of a norm
in a bilingual community. For every immigrant group one can document
endlessly the often futile and partly misguided attempts to maintain the
rhetorical norm of the homelands. The ability to maintain any norms what-
ever of one's mother tongue in an environment where one nearly always
hears and reads another requires continual vigilance, a vigilance I have
described as "linguistic backbone."
It also requires that one keep in constant touch with home base, i.e.,
that one have a chance to test one's competence against the developing
and ever-changing norms of the homeland. For immigrants this would have
required either frequent travel to Norway, laborious and expensive in the
 The Communicative Norm 37

age of steamships, or extensive reading of its current literature, for which

only a few had the taste or inclination. At the very least it required that the
speaker be in touch with a large body of monolinguals among his country-
men, who would normally be exposed to the same influences as he.
Situations like these compel us to abandon the concept of a rhetorical
norm in favor of one that may be called a communicative norm. This takes
into account the special situation of the bilingual speaker (or writer). It is
more like a spectrum, embracing the wide variation of situations in which
a bilingual finds himself. Our Norwegian cleric implicitly acknowleged the
fact that his readers were also familiar with English, though perhaps imper-
fectly, since they still preferred to read their news in Norwegian. He was
therefore in all likelihood closer to his readers than our more academic
editor.
The communicative norm with which I am most familiar is one that
assumes a relatively, if not absolutely, stable bilingual community. Such
are less common among American immigrants than in some other parts of the
world. Our country has promoted a rapid tempo of assimilation through
the public school, and through the relatively mild segregation that immi-
grant groups have been permitted to maintain. One need only turn to India
to find communities where different linguistic groups have been in contact
for centuries without assimilating or giving up their distinct languages. A
significant factor has here been the caste system, which prevented crossing
over through exogamy and personal friendships.
Nadkarni (1975) reports on a dialect of the Konkani language as spoken
in the Indian state of Karnataki. This is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by
a relatively small, but self-important group living among a population of
Kannada-speaking Dravidians. Though they are fluent in Kannada, the
Konkani refuse to accept it as their own. But clearly without knowing it,
they have adopted the relative clause structure of Dravidian. Their Konkani
has become a contact dialect by incorporating features from other dialects
or languages. In a similar way the English spoken during the Norman-French
domination of England no doubt grew to be a contact dialect of Anglo-
Saxon, a Franco-English that it might be appropriate, in modern jargon, to
call "Franglish."
Those who cling categorically to the rhetorical norm either deride or
deplore contact dialects and will flatly deny that there is any norm whatever
in their usage. Like our normative editor, they hold that such infringements
on the rhetorical norm are due, either to laziness, moral deficiency, or ignor-
ance, i.e. an intellectual defect, or to snobbery, a social defect. A visitor
from Norway undertook to criticize Midwestern American speakers: "Strictly
speaking, it is no language whatever, but a gruesome mixture of Norwegian
and English, and often one does not know whether to take it humorously
38 Blessings of Babel

or seriously" (cit. Haugen 1953a: 57). Nils Hasselmo, in his volume on

American Swedish (1974), provides us with a rich flora of similar comments
by Swedish observers of their countrymen in the period of active immigra-
tion. A favorite word to describe their language was "rotv'álska", a term
used in Sweden about a creolized gypsy language. In English we might sub-
stitute the word "mishmash."
But Hasselmo also found Swedish commentators who recognized the
need and justification for a wider spectrum of usage in an American bilingual
community (Hasselmo 1974: 86). To this I can add the judgment of a
Norwegian-American pastor (not the one cited above), who wrote in his
memoirs that "mixing was not done to be affected, but came so naturally
that one simply does not notice it. Even we pastors and others who might
regard ourselves as 'cultured' often fall into this sin of 'mixing'." He added,
"When one lives among these people and learns to understand the circum-
stances under which they live, one will forgive them." (S. Sondresen, cit.
Haugen 1953a: 58)
There is something familiar, perhaps even universal, about this situation
and this conflict of views. On the one hand are those who either in the name
of the cultural "Great Tradition" (as Fishman has called it) or in defense
of language uniformity condemn any deviation from the rhetorical norm
as a barbarous deviation. On the other hand are those who defend deviation
or cultural differences in language as rooted in specific circumstances of
communication, a relativistic rather than a normative or absolutist view.
When Labov (1969) defends the "logic of non-standard English," he is
taking the same position vis-a-vis a deviant variety of English as did the
Swedish-American writer G. N. Malm when he asserted and defended the
existence and validity of a "Swedish-American" language. In 1919 he
advocated its use in literature and demonstrated by his own writings how
"important it is, in describing Swedish-American types, to permit them in
their dialogs to use their own, uncorrupted, often unjustly ridiculed everyday
language" (Malm 1919, cit. Hasselmo 1974: 91). One may look similarly at
Black English, a contact dialect with substratum elements of African. Like
the speaking of immigrant dialects, it gains one no power in the general
community, being associated with low-status groups. Once we recognize that
much of what passes as humor is a screen for antagonism and unjust dis-
crimination, we will sympathize not only with the anti-defamation league of
the B'nai B'rith, but also with the American Polish League that is trying to
stop the thoughtless use of Polish jokes.
Criticism of Hasselmo's (and by implication my) views of the bilingual
norm was offered by Ureland, who did field work among residual speakers
of Swedish in Texas (Ureland 1971 etc.) In a review he rejected Hasselmo's
theoretical model of "ordered selection," discussed above: "To the present
 The Communicative Norm 39

writer such normative statements regarding the acceptability or gramma-

tically of certain structures should not be the task of a bilingual study.
The sociolinguistic situation of American Swedish is not of such a nature
that it allows for categorical rule statements" (Ureland 1975: 10).
A somewhat similar critique was offered by two Danish scholars, Iver
Kjaer and M. Baumann Larsen (1973, 1974). There is especially one text
with forms that are so extraordinary that it serves as a paradigm example.
This is part of a conversation by a Danish woman aged 82, who had not been
back to Denmark since she emigrated at the age of 28. When the interviewer
asked her if she had taught her son Danish, she replied: "Ja, he kan tale det,
and he forstàr alt, hvad jeg siger. And even my datter-Zavv, she er born engelsk,
you know, men she sitter og listener til os, sâ sagde: ja I kan ikke tale om
mig anyhow, for jeg kan guesse mig til, hvad det er, I siger." (Yes, he can
speak it, and he understands everything I say. And even my daughter-in-law,
she is born English, you know, but she sits listening to us, then said: well,
you can't speak about me anyhow, for I can guess what it is you're saying.)
The most conspicuous feature of this text is the introduction of the
pronouns he, she, and my. The use of discourse markers like you know and
anyhow is common enough, since they are not as closely tied to the structure.
One is struck by her use of and and the rather uncommon loanwords guess
and listen, to be sure imbedded in Danish constructions. Throughout the
whole text she quite unselfconsciously shifts from language to language.
One can hardly be surprised that her daughter-in-law understood her
"Danish."
Only one of my 250 informants came close to this kind of mixture, and
she was also a person who emigrated in her maturity into an immigrant com-
munity. They have failed to establish adequate separation of the languages.
Perhaps one should class them as a new category, in my old classification
as ab or "disadvantaged learners." Hansegàrd has suggested "semilingual"
(halvsprâkigj for such persons (1968). But they are such only in relation to
the outside world: in their bilingual environment their two "half languages"
add up to a whole. Like our Danish woman they may say I levede or I will
never care for at have sâ much land ("I lived", "I will never care to have so
much land") (Kjaer/Baumann-Larsen 1974: 425).
If one is to make a theory out of these examples, it would be that they
have not disproved the hypothesis of bilingual norms, but that by their
conspicuous deviation they have confirmed it. If we conceive of bilingual
competence as a set of co-occurrence rules, it may simply be that the bonds
of co-occurrence have been weakened by constant exposure to conflicting
norms. If the features have been psychologically "tagged" for one or the
other language, we may suggest that for such speakers the tags have fallen
off. The situation is reminiscent of some developments in pidgin languages,
40 Blessings of Babel

but our informant has not created a true pidgin. She picks an uneasy path,
wavering from one language to the other, uncertain of which to select. Such
informants are precious, though this one unfortunately is beyond our reach.
One would wish to know more of her life and mentality.
As far back as 1970 Nemser made me aware of what he called "approxima-
tive norms" (Nemser 1969). In 1972 I granted that "in the world of the
bilingual anything is possible, from virtually complete separation of the two
codes to their virtual coalescence." (Haugen 1972) But in any given com-
munity a norm grows up which we may well describe as a bilingual com-
municative norm.
Chapter 7

Social Integration

Under the label of "bilingual education" the problems of immigrant and

minority speakers have become matters of some concern. Many Americans
have felt a certain alienation with their country. Ethnic identification has
persisted in spite of the loss of ethnic languages. Resistance to the leveling
trends of American life has emerged.
Studies have therefore been initiated by agencies of the United States
and Canadian governments tackling the very problems that have long been
thought insignificant. Injustices, segregation, and discrimination are topics
of national inquiry. Laws for bilingual education have been passed and are
being implemented with varying success, chiefly aimed at Blacks, Chícanos,
Puerto Ricans, and Indians. (Andersson and Boyer 1970; Saville and Troike
1971; Paulston 1974; Fishman 1974b) While these are labeled "bilingual
programs," they are much more than that. They are attempts to right wrongs
that may be basically social, but that manifest themselves as language barriers
and learning problems.
Will in fact the knowledge patiently accumulated by scholars be brought
to bear on these practical problems? Or has once again a huge boondoggling
project been initiated without direction, a new pork barrel for the benefit
of a few? Without trying to solve these questions, I can only point to the
need for answering them. We may recall that France has never taken a linguis-
tic census, in spite of the fact that there are large and persistent communities
where such native languages are spoken as Basque, Breton, Alsatian, and
Provençal, the last a kind of French that deserves to be considered a separate
language. In asking just how language functions as a socially integrating or
disintegrating factor in America, we are also asking just how it feels to speak
Welsh in England, Sorbían in Germany, Frisian in the Netherlands, Green-
landic in Denmark, or Samish in the rest of Scandinavia. We are even referring
to the meaning of being a Gastarbeiter in Switzerland or Germany, for that
is just what most immigrants were in the Americas.
In referring to immigrants here, I am using the term synonymously with
"minority group member." Much has been written on minority group theory.
What used to be called "the marginal man" has now come to be "the ethnic,"
reflecting a new attitude. "The foreigner in our midst," once perceived as
a vague threat to American institutions, has come to be seen as an enrichment
of American life, a man or woman with an "ethnic heritage." (Fishman
1965b)
42 Blessings of Babel

On his entry into a new society the immigrant is faced with three succes-
sive choices.
(1) He or she must decide whether to learn the language of the new
society, if (as we assume) it is different from his own. We may call it the
problem of language acquisition, now the fashionable term for language
learning in a natural situation.
(2) He or she must decide whether the old, native language is to be
maintained. This is the problem of language maintenance, which brings up
many questions: how, on which occasions, and for how long?
(3) The third choice grows out of the second: if he or she chooses to
maintain it, how will it be used in practice? Will he keep it separate from
the first, or will he switch back and forth and possibly let one of them
"contaminate" the other? We may call this the problem of language separa-
tion. Here we may also discuss questions of switching and borrowing and
the development of the language under these conditions.
Each of these choices has what Dell Hymes has called "social meaning"
in his "ethnography of speaking." (Hymes 1962). A positive answer to
questions of acquisition, maintenance, and separation gives us an entirely
different profile of social adaptation and integration than does one that
is predominantly negative.
The problem of language acquisition is fittingly introduced by the words
of a Norwegian immigrant of a century ago. One Syver Holland (from the
farm of Hâland) composed a ballad entitled Wisconsinvisa ("the Wisconsin
ballad"), which won a certain popularity among the immigrants (Haugen
1949). It gives a both humorous and poignant expression to the bafflement
of the average immigrant:
Jau — i Fyrsten dae gjek lit paa skakka,
Daa me landa paa framande J or,
Av dae Maalet, som folket her snakka,
Skjyna me 'kje eit einaste Ord.
Laera Spraaket va nokot, som leitte,
Ofte stod me mae skamfulle Fjaes:
Naar ein Yankee deg sporde, ka du heitte,
Raakte jamt, at du svara honom: Yaes!
(Well — in the start we were certainly troubled,
As we stepped on this far-away Strand;
Of the language that people here babbled
Not one word could we understand.
Learning English was a struggle and strain,
Many times we just stood there, red in the face:
When a Yankee would ask for your name,
All you could answer was often just "Yas!")
 Social Integration 43

The ballad, of which I include only two of its many stanzas, reflects the
view of the average uneducated, but not illiterate immigrant, who felt himself
to be handicapped by his initial language deficiency. Even so we must re-
cognize that he brought with him all the varieties of expression pertaining
to his social status and educational background in the homeland. There
were religious differences living comfortably within the Lutheran state church
that erupted in America into fierce factional battles and resulted in the
formation of numerous warring church bodies. We may compare with Fish-
man's observation that Hungarian immigrants from the time of the Russian
invasion, mostly young students and intellectuals, found little to identify
with among the older Hungarian emigrants with agricultural and laboring
background. (Fishman 1966b)
Among the Norwegian immigrants there grew up an active American-
inspired Sons of Norway organization, but it was too secular for the taste
of many church people: they played cards, danced, and were even reputed
to indulge in alcohol! Among the rural immigrants, on the other hand, there
arose a so-called bygdelag movement, a kind of old-home organization for
social get-togethers. (Lovoll 1975). But even among these there were differ-
ences: some fiddled and danced (e.g. those from Telemark and Setesdal),
while others prayed for their souls (e.g. those from Stavanger and Rogaland).
Individuals reacted differently. An enlightening example was Peder
Anderson (1810-1874), who emigrated from Bergen in 1830. He settled
in Massachusetts, where his sister, who had married an American, was already
living. (E.L. Haugen and I. Semmingsen 1973; E.L. Haugen 1974) He was
a gifted young man with a good schooling, and he found work as a book-
keeper in Lowell's growing wool industry. He married an American woman
and rose to affluence. He early devoted himself to intense work on the
English language and showed a vivid interest in American life and institutions.
But he also maintained a close epistolary contact with his relatives back
home and even helped some of them to emigrate. He twice returned to
Bergen and did much to increase understanding between the two countries.
There is no evidence that he used Norwegian in America.
In later years he wrote a short autobiography while on a visit to Norway.
Although he could still write Norwegian, his style shows interesting errors
in syntax, though no borrowings of English vocabulary. He often turns the
order of words around, e.g. I begyndelsen dette var langsomt (In the begin-
ning this was lonesome) where Norwegian requires the order var dette.
An even more notable example is the author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen,
who emigrated at the age of 21 in 1869 (d. 1895). Although he started out
in the Middle West, his ambition was to become a writer. To do this he
left for Boston and took lessons from an elocutionist to get rid of his
Norwegian accent. He wrote his first novel Gunnar (1874) in English and
44 Blessings of Babel

succeeded in getting it published through contacts he made in the Harvard

Library (e.g. the ballad scholar Francis Child and William Dean Howells,
editor of the Atlantic Monthly). His successful début led him on to the
literary world of New York and a professorship at Columbia. He looked
with some distaste on his hard-working countrymen in the Middle West,
married an American woman and became a guru of the literary scene. But
the themes of his most successful books, whether fictional or critical, remain-
ed Norwegian. It was as a purveyor of romantic literary themes from Norway
that he made his mark. (Glasrud 1963).
A third example might be Thorstein Veblen, born in a Norwegian-speaking
community in Wisconsin. Typically, he did not go to St. Olaf College, where
Norwegian was strong, but to its non-Norwegian and non-Lutheran rival
across the river, Carleton College. He did make some use of his Norwegian
background by translating the Old Norse/Icelandic Laxdale Saga into
American English, though with the ulterior purpose of demonstrating a
historical parallel to the boss rule of American cities. But his claim to fame
consists of works not only written in English, but a particularly abstruse
English. One of his critics has attributed his doctrines of "conspicuous
waste" and of the "leisure class" to his Norwegian origin, but it was also an
American pioneer view, equally attributable to Thoreau. (Dorfman 1934)
For those immigrants who settled among their peers and fellow ethnics
maintenance was no problem. Most immigrants shied away from personal
isolation and the giving up of their national identity. In most instances the
very decision to emigrate was what could be called a "network" decision.
They sought the support of kin or friends, coming (like the first boatload
of 1825) in groups drawn together by the hope or promise of a common
fate. Early comers could offer later ones tickets or employment. These
factors led to the rise of a mother-tongue minority group in the new land.
Minority groups have been intensively studied by recent social scientists,
e.g. R. A. Schermerhorn (1964). He called his model of minority-majority
group relations a case of "power group theory." The group encounter causes
a configuration of power relations that functions as an independent variable.
Incorporation, or assimilation, depends on the orientation of the respective
populations. The dominant group may show traits of racism, social distance,
or active prejudice, and it may also be eager to assimilate the weaker group.
But this group may be militant or segregative, or it may be eager to be assimil-
ated. If the dominant group restricts access by denying the "social rewards",
the dominated group may adopt "forms of closure", at least in the first
stages of confrontation (Schermerhorn 1964: 246).
Such study reinforces the obvious: that immigrant society is one in which
the immigrant can function most easily. Here in his own churches, societies,
occasions, and daily encounters he can use his own language as he wishes,
 Social Integration 45

in ways that are not controlled either by homeland standards or by

"foreigners." It is like an old shoe, comfortable if not always beautiful. To
establish his membership it is not necessary even to speak the native tongue
all the time, or in any particular way, so long as he is understood and his
speech is acceptable to those for whom it is intended.
The first function of immigrant society is to postpone the immigrant's
assimilation by a process of gradual acculturation. (Teske and Nelson 1974).
The difference is that acculturation does not require an immediate change
of values or of reference group or of individual psychology. Assimilation is
a one-way street, but acculturation gives the immigrant a new home instead
of making him homeless. The Norwegian author and pastor Kristofer Janson
wrote in his memoirs from America that in the Minnesota of 1880 he would
have been startled in the Norwegian settlements if he had met a man who
did not address him on the road in Norwegian. English was in fact a dead
language. (Janson 1913, cit. Haugen 1953a: 39). Teachers had to threaten
children with punishment to get them to speak English in the schoolyard.
As we have seen above (Chap. 6), there could be considerable variation
in the degree of confusion of languages that became normal in such bilingual
communities, depending on such factors as age, education, language talent,
and motivation.
Writers with an inclination to humor or satire have often been known
to lampoon the language of their countrymen for its deviations from the
rhetorical norm. An American Finn from Michigan purports to write in what
he calls "Finglish." Two samples show that he is really representing English
in Finnish pronunciation: Las senssi kerit kas ("Last chance get-it gas");
lits kai kaaru panning or ket paunit ("Each guy got to pounding or get
pounded"). (F. Karttunen and K. Moore 1974).
An American named James Kirk produced a book of "Scandinavian
dialect verses" entitled The Norsk Nightingale (Kirk 1905, 17. ed. 1929!)
One sample will do: "Dar ban a little faller,/ Ay tenk his name ban Yim,/
And nearly every morning / Ay used to seeing him." While I have never
heard a Scandinavian use "ban" for all forms of the verb to be, the poem
does illustrate some typical problems: d or / for th, y for j, confusion of a
and e, etc.
An important aspect of the bilingual's function is the switching from
one language to the other. Michael Clyne has specially investigated the
switching of Germans in Australia (Clyne 1967, 1972 etc.). This is evidence
of the bilingual's dual mastery and reflects his complete social integration
into the new society. The switches normally take place at breaks in the
sentence pattern, and the speaker displays his confidence that the listener
is with him. Acquisition, maintenance, and separation are all demonstrated.
Only in recent years, through the rise of a new discipline called socio-
46 Blessings of Babel

linguistics, has it become respectable for a scholar to pay attention to such

curious phenomena. We shall take a closer look at this discipline in the next
chapter.
Chapter 8

Sociolinguistics: A Challenge

Since bilingualism involves an interaction of language and society, it has come

to be included under the umbrella of sociolinguistics, now recognized as a
new interdisciplinary field. The term aligns it as a kind of linguistics, so that
some scholars prefer to call it sociology of language, which makes it a part
of sociology. This term is probably a rendition of the German Sprachsozio-
logie, which has long been established in Germany. In America the term
"Sociology of Language" was used as long ago as 1953 (Hertzler 1965), and
in France there was a "Sociologie du langage" (Cohen 1956). The term
Sociolinguistics first appeared as a heading in the international Linguistic
Bibliography in 1967.
The word appears to have been coined by Haver C. Currie, then a teacher
of English at Houston University in Texas (Currie 1952). It was first launched
among American linguists by William Bright (and A. K. Ramanujan) in 1962
(Bright and Ramanujan 1964). Bright also organized the first conference on
the topic in 1964 (Bright 1966). Among those participating was Charles A.
Ferguson, then director of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington,
D. C. The flood of writings that followed these occasions is too voluminous
to report on here. It is no coincidence that 1964 also saw the launching
of Noam Chomsky's theoretical reorientation of linguistics at the summer
Linguistio Institute (Chomsky 1965). The ensuing split in linguistic interests
was profound and enduring.
Among the many issues that one can suggest as of interest in sociolinguis-
tics I shall discuss the following: (1) What is the focus of sociolinguistics?
(2) What are its units? (3) How can sociologists and linguists cooperate?
(4) How can societies be characterized for their language use? (5) What
meanings can we attach to the distinction between bilingualism and diglossia?
(6) How can one identify and perhaps predict a language shift? (7) What
roles do conscious attitudes and overt language planning play in such shifts?
(8) What are the uses of sociolinguistics?
(1) As the focus of sociolinguistics Wm. Bright has claimed that "linguis-
tic diversity is precisely the subject matter of sociolinguistics." (Bright 1966:
11) Specifically, he would limit it to "the systematic covariance of linguistic
structure and social structure." To this I would add the minimal diversity,
a relative uniformity, within a small and tightly knit community. In the
effortless communication of an in-group there is social pressure for uni-
48 Blessings of Babel

formity. Beyond this there is the partial understanding which I have called
"semicommunication" (e.g. within Scandinavian, cf. Haugen 1966c) and a
range that includes the total incomprehension of unrelated languages.
Diversity and uniformity are therefore not exclusive, only complementary
aspects of the major problem of sociolinguistics: the formation of language
norms in the hot crucible of social interaction. Norms are not necessarily
either homogeneous or consciously formulated, but do involve such re-
latively uniform minimal codes as we may call sociolects. A sociolect and
its formation is identifiable as the central focus of sociolinguistics. It is
an abstract of the sames in the idiolects, or personal norms, including only
those features that mark a speaker as belonging to a given speech community.
(2) The units that distinguish one sociolect from another are much
like those isoglosses that dialectologists have long employed. In America we
often identify Australians by their pronunciation of the diphthong /ey/ as
/ay/. An Australian who in Boston tried to buy a spade was met by a baffled
sales clerk until she pointed one out for him. Having had a similar experience
with pail, she reported to a friend: "You Americans talk funny: you say a
'pile and a shovel' when you mean a 'bucket and a spide.' " In a Norwegian
rural dialect that I have studied, Old Norse ganga 'go' is apocopated and
circumflected to /gang/ ; but one family conspicuously has reduced the same
form to /gang/. So a single isogloss can distinguish anything from a continent
to a family. Presumably, the larger the group and the greater the language
distance, the greater the number of such isoglosses.
The special problem of sociolinguistics involves also taking into account
class, not just regional dialects. As noted above, these may be vertical, in-
volving power differentials. In this field William Labov's studies of Martha's
Vineyard and the lower East Side of New York have already become classics.
(Labov 1965, 1966). His methodology has been widely emulated. By limiting
himself to a small number of phonological isoglosses or criteria, he succeeded
in showing a high statistical covariation between the criteria and the major
socio-economic levels, the lower, working, lower middle, and upper middle
classes. While these are not precisely "classes" in the Marxian or old European
sense, we need not quibble about the word. But one may very well ask
whether one can really speak of four different sociolects here. I suspect that
we have a basic New York City sociolect or even dialect, what Stewart has
called a "basilect," which children learn and many adults retain as their
informal language.
But those who by accident of birth or by educational achievement have
succeeded in escaping from the "lower" and "working" classes, have acquired
an ever more active command of the prestigious "acrolect," which is at least
a passive part of the language competence of most New Yorkers. The ability
to use it on being asked to perform such formal tasks as reading aloud or even
 Sociolinguistics: A Challenge 49

reading lists of words is a function of one's upward mobility.

(3) The solidity of Labov's results are in part due to the fact that he
could build on a Columbia University sociological study of New York's lower
East Side. From a population of 100,000 this study had pinpointed a
sampling pool of 988 individuals who were identified for their social status.
Labov could then select with confidence from this pool. My own experience
in doing field work on Norwegian-Americans in the Middle West included
being challenged by a sociological friend. He found my methods too informal.
But his methods involved a technique which I had neither the resources nor
the know-how to perform. I went around the community and asked my way
until I found those who would and could talk to me. It has taken computers
and tape recorders, not to speak of foundation grants, to reach Labov's
level.
As one trained in the more informal methods of dialectology I can see
another major difference. By reducing the number of his criteria, he ends
up with very little general information about the sociolects he is studying.
He has sacrificed depth for the sake of breadth of coverage. Even if one could
teach his lower-class informants to pronounce his five criteria in the upper-
class way, they would still sound lower-class. Grammar, syntax, and word
choice would still be a dead give-away. The dialectologist may require inter-
views that last for hours, or even days and months, to probe deeply into the
informant's dialect. We cannot exclude either method from the arsenal of
sociolinguistics. The wide-ranging identification of socially relevant criteria
needs to be supplemented by the burrowing exposure of the individual's
total communicative competence, from sound to sense.
(4) In their effort to find ways of characterizing whole societies for
their ways of speaking, sociolinguists have made various suggestions. Hymes
has called for an "ethnography of speaking", a study of the speech activity
of a community as a system that varies cross-culturally and may include
a multiplicity of codes within one community. (Hymes 1962) Gumperz
has suggested "verbal repertoire" as a cover term for "the totality of linguistic
forms regularly employed in the course of socially significant interaction"
(Gumperz 1964: 137; 1965). Goffman wishes to analyze linguistic behavior
as giving individuals statuses having certain rights and obligations. They
engage in social routines for various occasions down to the individual en-
counter and its speech event. (Goffman 1963).
One of the most extensive projects is Fishman's study of "language domin-
ance" among the Puerto Ricans in Jersey City (Fishman et al., 1968). He
concentrated on the question of "who speaks what language to whom and
when", to use the title of one of his articles (1965a). In theoretical discus-
sions Fishman faulted both psychologists and linguists - the first for treating
bilingualism as a problem in educational achievement, the linguists for treat-
50 Blessings of Babel

ing it as a problem in interference. Fishman found that context is disregarded

in both cases and proposed that codes be studied in relation to people's
identification with the community and its language-related values. He suggest-
ed a form of microanalysis distinguishing appropriate domains involving
networks of communication, with individuals playing various roles in each
situation.
An interesting proposal of a typology for sociolinguistic classification is
that of William Stewart (1968). His criteria were standardization, autonomy,
historicity, and vitality, each treated as a binary feature. By combining
these he got a classification into standard (positive for all four), classical
(minus vitality), artificial (also minus historicity), vernacular (minus standard-
ization), dialect (minus standardization, autonomy), creole (only vitality)
and pidgin (minus all four). While these features are not always binary, nor
are they always independent of one another, the system offers a useful
outline.
In all this work there remains some of the conflict between linguists,
who prefer to study a few informants intensively, and sociologists, who prefer
to take many informants superficially. I have suggested (1972) that socio-
linguists should adapt the concepts of ecology to these situations. Like
animal or human species, the forms of given languages are shaped to the
needs of their environment. When a society no longer needs a particular
language, it dies and another takes its place. Against this concept one can
consider movements for language maintenance and reform as ecological
efforts to control the linguistic environment. It is a pleasure to see a German
publication entitled Studies in Language Ecology (Enninger and Haynes
1984).
(5) Beside the traditional term bilingualism, Charles Ferguson has intro-
duced into sociolinguistic discussion the term diglossia, actually an English
variant of the French word diglossie, a word for bilingualism. (Ferguson
1959) Under this term he pinpointed a particular form of bilingualism found
in certain countries. He observed in four widely separated areas the rivalry
of two varieties of the same language, one of which he called "high" (H),
the other "low" (L). In Arabic countries the H is Classical Arabic, the L
the daily spoken tongue in each Arabic country. In Greece the H is the
Katharevousa of the Orthodox Church, while the L is the Dimothike of
common usage. In Switzerland the H is standard German, used in writing
and some official ceremonies, while the L is Swiss German (Schwitzerdiitsch)
in its various dialects. In Haiti the H is standard French, while L is Haitian
Creole, the popular form of French used in that country. The distinction
was between a formal, even ritualized language, used for restricted purposes
and an informal, everyday language used for everything else.
While one might discuss and quarrel with some of these identifications,
 Sociolinguistics: A Challenge 51

especially in the case of Greek, Fishman proceeded to adopt the terminology,

while extending its significance. He dropped the linguist's requirement that
the two languages be related varieties, concentrating instead on the societal
relationship. He instanced the Jewish communities, in which the unrelated
Hebrew and Yiddish perform similar sacred/secular functions, a comple-
mentarity. One can then describe the situation in Israel as the elimination of
Jewish diglossia by extending L-functions to Hebrew.
Neither Ferguson nor Fishman have included in their definition of
diglossia the innumerable cleavages within European and other nations
between standardized and dialectal varieties. This is actually one of the most
widespread forms of bilingualism or bidialectalism. The standards, as we
shall see later, are spread by schools, governments, and media, performing
all the functions of an Η-language. At the same time the population continues
in some degree to speak a dialect, universally regarded as an L-language. I
have ventured to suggest schizoglossia, in analogy with schizophrenia
(Haugen 1962), since all of these situations have all the earmarks of diglossia,
a clear H/L dichotomy which involves many speakers who vacillate uncertain-
ly between the two.
(6) Language shifts may be either dramatic or gradual, often depending
on one's point of view. What may appear as a dramatic shift, e.g. of second-
generation immigrants in the United States, may actually be a long-time
phenomenon for the individual. The results are often seen in the opposed
factors of language spread and language death. A well-known case of spread
is that of the Indo-European family from somewhere in eastern Europe
(in or near the Caucasus) to much of western Asia and most of Europe,
with its colonies overseas. In that same area many languages have suffered
death or near-death during the time of spread. We are poorly informed
about the earlier phases of such language shifts.
It is therefore apparent that only by studying shifts in the present can
we hope to recapture the social mechanisms that underlie them. It is not
so much that the languages spread as that changing social circumstances lead
the users of the languages to shift orientation. No population shifts its langu-
age simultaneously or in all domains and situations. At the very least a
language takes a generation to learn and another to forget the old. This will
be a period of bilingualism, which functions as a necessary maintenance
of social continuity. Yet, as we have shown earlier, each generation moves
imperceptibly out of its childhood into an adult usage, a minor shift which
may turn into a major shift if it is required to learn a new language.
(7) The study of folk attitudes to language may conveniently be called
ethnolinguistics and must be recognized as at least a factor in language choice
and planning. It appears most blatantly in folk etymologies and may in fact
be designated as folklore. My own field work has uncovered admiration for
52 Blessings of Babel

"book language", but did not usually lead to actual imitation of "educated"
speech. In Labov's words, "New Yorkers hear themselves not as they actually
sound, but rather in accordance with the norms they acknowledge." (Labov
1966:474)
An interesting series of experiments by Lambert, known as "matched
guises", have been used to elicit attitudes. The same speaker holds forth
alternately in two languages, and listeners are asked to judge his character
etc. in each. Lambert found that in Canada both French and English listeners
rated the English voices higher than the French. He also found good correla-
tion between favorable attitudes to the French and success in learning
French. (Lambert et al. 1960 etc.)
The success of modem standard languages like French, English, and
German as instruments of national policy has led to the common realization
that such a language is a necessary instrument of unity. In smaller countries
like Iceland the national language is identified with national survival. Nine-
teenth century Norway and twentieth century Israel are examples of coun-
tries struggling to create unity through language. We shall consider these
problems in a later chapter.
(8) The uses of sociolinguistics offered by Bright (1966) are its value "as
a diagnostic index of social structure," "the explanation of historical
change," and "the language planner of policy."
Social structure as seen by the sociolinguist is broken up into a complex
picture of networks of communication among the holders of certain social
positions playing a variety of roles in each domain of social life. An example
is the study of pronominal uses in America and Europe by Brown, Gilman,
and Ford (1961) and in Russia by Friedrich (1966). I have offered a short
survey of Norwegian pronominal usage (see below).
Historical change is ultimately due to the social transmission of language
to every new child. The changes in conditions of learning as the child matures
will also bring changes in language.
Language planning and its policies are a topic of concern in the analysis
of society and its efforts to find a common medium of communication.
Problems involving the role of language minorities call for wise planning.
American efforts since 1968 to create bilingual programs may be inadequate,
but they are still valuable in their attempts to right old wrongs.
Chapter 9

Pluralism: A National Goal?

Language pluralism is not precisely the same as language diversity. The latter
is an objective fact of life to be measured by census takers and sociologists
(e.g. Lieberson et al. 1974, 1975a,b). It is a fact, for example, that in Nigeria,
a former British protectorate, more than two hundred different native
languages and dialects are spoken. That is language diversity with a vengeance,
and it is hardly a desirable goal for any country that is to have a viable
government or a successful school system. When we speak of "pluralism,"
we imply not a state of affairs, but a goal that may make it possible for
diverse language groups to live together. It is a more subjective term, implying
a policy of deliberate planning and official action. The very suffix of the
word, "-ism," implies that it is a doctrine, a theory, in short a goal that some
desire and others deplore. (Berry 1974).
Most people take for granted the language into which they are born, the
one spoken in their home and by their playmates. They learn it as a matter
of course, and it appears to be of no more consequence to them than the
air they breathe. Yet without either one they could not grow up to be human
beings. Lack of air would kill their bodies, but lack of language would kill
their minds. The language or languages we speak are the result of a long
history involving not only ourselves and our ancestors, but our ethnic group
and our nation. One part of this history is a set of policies and decisions
made far away and long ago without our knowledge and certainly without
our consent. Similarly, we who are alive today may by our decisions and our
policies be able to influence the Uves of those who come after us.
The issue as it is presented to us today is one of centralism and assimila-
tion versus coexistence and pluralism. On every hand the steamroller of
uniformation is wiping out ethnic groups and their languages through the
spread of national and international languages by radio and TV. But we
also see new nations coming into being, struggling to create or preserve their
own national languages. They are following the example of the old nations
that threw off the yoke of Latin, the world language of western Europe
until the sixteenth century (and later).
Today we see within nation after nation a struggle on the part of minori-
ties to assert their linguistic rights: the Catalonians in Spain, the Basques in
Spain and France, the Welsh in England, the Lapps (Sami) in Scandinavia,
the Chinese in Malaysia, even the Quechua Indians in Paraguay (Rubin 1968).
54 Blessings of Babel

This struggle between dominated and dominant groups is part of the ecology
of language (Haugen 1972). The preservation of language is a part of human
ecology.
Although the study of language is the special province of linguists, the
ecological struggle involves also a psychological, social, and political problem.
Just as we now have a biophysics and a social anthropology, so we have a
psycholinguistics and (as we have seen above) a sociolinguistics. There is
even a society of "Geolinguistics," the title of a new journal where I found
an inspiring article on "linguistic imperialism" by Allen Walker Read (Read
1974).
We shall discuss the problem of how language diversity arose, what policies
nations have adopted to meet the problem, and whether a policy of linguistic
pluralism can be implemented to solve it.
First the origin of diversity. We must face the fact that most nations have
been established by military conquest (or defense) and without regard for
the language of their masses. When President Wilson tried after World War
I to implement a policy of linguistic self-determination in Europe, it may
have been the first time in history that statesmen were called on to pay atten-
tion to the wishes of their subjects in such matters. As it turned out, it was
largely implemented to break up the Austro-Hungarian empire and to detach
the Baltic countries f r o m Russia. But in World War II most of the plan came
unstuck. Except for Finland the Baltic countries reverted, and the successor
countries to the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires, such as Hungary,
Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czecho-Slovakia still turned out to be multilingual.
Today it would be hard to name a single European country — except
perhaps Iceland — that does not have a minority problem, i.e. a population
speaking some language that is more than a dialect of the national tongue.
Nations strong enough to extend their power into overseas lands have not
hesitated to incorporate populations of different languages and ethnicities.
The results are rampant today in the form of internal conflicts at home
and colonial collapse abroad. The policy of ethnic incorporation is of course
not limited to modern Europe. China, Mongolia, Japan followed it in the
Far East, India in South Asia, the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Assyrians,
anyone you can mention in the Middle and Near East, the Incas and the
Aztecs in the Americas, and of course the prehistoric Indo-Europeans. In
historical time all major European powers have carried on the Great Tradition
of encircling and enslaving racial and lingustic minorities wherever they had
the power to do so. Even the small and now pacific Scandinavian nations
have a considerable record of linguistic and cultural suppression (on which
see below).
Recent years have seen a growing awareness of these problems among
social scientists, who previously were either disinterested or hostile. They
 Pluralism: A National Goal? 55

held minorities to be obstacles to national unity, or in Marxist terms, "a

survival of barbarism." In a generally objective study of "ethnic stratifica-
tion" from 1965, the authors could say that "most Americans who profess
humanitarian ideals favor assimilation." (Shibutani and Kwan 1965: 533)
They pointed out as an ironic fact that even liberal Americans who con-
demned "separate but equal" facilities for Blacks and Whites often favored
pluralism for European nations. Yet two noted scholars had already published
Beyond the Melting Pot, in which they had claimed that "the ethnic group
in American society" had become "not a survival from the age of mass
immigration but a new social form." (Glazer and Moynihan 1963a: 16).
The same scholars, in a book entitled Ethnicity, maintained that ethnicity
is "no mere survival but intimately and organically bound up with major
trends of modern societies" (Glazer and Moynihan 1963b: 39; idem, 1975).
Other social theorists have suggested reasons for the survival of minorities
in modern societies. Schermerhorn (1964: 238) has suggested the two dimen-
sions of "cultural distinctiveness" and "some form of subjection." This is
one way of saying that a minority group need not be a minority: it is really
a euphemism for a dominated group. As Blalock (1967: 111) points out,
even such a group has its resources of power, if it wishes to achieve certain
goals.
One of the resources available either to the elite or the minority is
language, both as symbol and as instrument. One form of social planning
is what I have chosen to call language planning. There has been an element
of that in the Europe of yesterday as in the Africa and Asia of today. We
shall look at the theory of language planning in a later chapter. Here we
may suggest that it can be either overt or covert, official or private. In reading
about the development of English one often gets the impression that like
Topsy, it "just grew." But this is an illusion. Guidance may have been covert
and private, and still rigidly enforced.
To look at some actual examples, let us begin with Spain, which was not
only one of the first great colonizing powers, but also one that had a clear
and firm policy about language. The first grammar of a modern language
was Nebrija's codification of Castilian, presented to Queen Isabella by her
biographer in 1492, the very year in which Columbus discovered America.
It was billed as an "instrument of empire," and it established the language
of her court as the elite language, at the expense of such other Spanish
dialects as those of León and Navarra, as well as the more deviant Galician
and Catalonian. Isabella unhesitatingly imposed Castilian on all her subjects,
including the Moors. In 1536 Emperor Charles V even ventured to address
the Pope in Castilian instead of Latin. The day of Latin was passing and like
the Romans the Spaniards were about to make their language the language
of their empire (Heath 1972, 1974: 16).
56 Blessings of Babel

The conquistadores got their instructions in the Laws of Burgos (1512)

which required them to train the Indians in the Catholic faith and the
Castilian tongue. Eventually this task proved too burdensome for these men
of affairs and they turned it over to the friars, with varying effect. But the
empires which Spain destroyed, those of the Aztecs in Mexico and the
Incas in Peru, had already established and spread their own languages,
Nahuatl and Quechua respectively, so the friars often found it simpler to learn
these languages and teach Christianity to the natives in their own tongues.
By the time of independence in the early nineteenth century, the Latin-
American nations had established the supremacy of Spanish without having
taught it to all their Indian subjects. Spanish (and in Brazil Portuguese) was
the language of the elite, and not until the late 1930's did Mexico begin to
institute bilingual education programs as a measure against illiteracy.
The English policy in North America was not basically different from the
Spanish, although the attitudes were rather different. In the words of Shirley
Brice Heath, "The English viewed language as the mark of an individual's
reward of a proper birth or successful educational and social achievements
mixed with a careful consciousness about language." (Heath 1974: 9) A
little less respectfully: to an Englishman his language was a badge of status.
The great turning point for English came with the defeat of the Spanish
Armada in 1588, which gave England undisputed mastery of the seas. The
language policy was covert and private: language was a personal issue. You
were either born to it or you achieved it, and it was not the government's
business to prescribe it.
In the eighteenth century distinguished English men of letters, such as
Defoe and Swift, urged the foundation of an English academy after the
model of the French. The idea was denounced as a tyranny unworthy of
Englishmen by none other than Samuel Johnson, who then turned around
and made his own dictionary in 1755. This proved to have the same effect
as the French Academy, as an enduring force for the uniformity of the
language. In the course of the nineteenth century English virtually replaced
Gaelic and Erse in Scotland and Ireland and met resistance only in Wales,
where language became a non-conformist weapon. Similarly in the United
States, revolutionary defiance of English superiority found its advocate in
Noah Webster, whose mild reforms were embodied in his dictionary. Private
enterprise won the day.
While the English may have lacked a stated language policy, their attitudes
were tinged with moral overtones for the elite dialect. "Proper" English is
associated with proper morals, "correct" language with correct behavior, and
words like "good" and "bad" are equally applicable to a person's language
and his moral character. One might not exactly be thrown in jail for either
aspect; one could be and often was frozen out of good society, with con-
 Pluralism: A National Goal? 57

sequent loss of jobs and restriction of opportunity. Shaw's Pygmalion was

not just a comedy, but an Irishman's biting satire on the English attitude to
language.
In South America the Castillans simply incorporated the well-organized
Indians into their own hierarchy, but in North America the largely hunting
and gathering Indians were pushed aside and either destroyed or gathered into
reservations. There was no government policy to convert the Indians; this
was left to missionary organizatons set up by the churches themselves.
The North American Indians proved unwilling to perform hard manual
labor for the colonizers, so that when labor was needed, it was obtained
either by trading for slaves from Africa or by enticing European immigrants
to fill the vast open spaces of the temperate and subarctic zones of the
continent. So long as these immigrants did their work, they were left severely
alone to speak as they wished. The Blacks were segregated by color, even
after the Civil War, and by that time their original languages had practically
been lost and English, albeit in more or less creolized form, had become their
language.
The white immigrants were admissible to English society in America as
soon as they had seen the light and had given up their own tongues. The
major instrument in this process was the universal public school, where the
much maligned schoolmarm provided models of "correct" speaking. She not
only taught a heterogeneous population the three R's, but also served as a
cultural and linguistic missionary among the "barbarian" hordes from
Germany, Poland, Norway, Italy, or Russia, who became the backbone of
the American labor force. (Leibowitz 1974)
It is undeniable that there are great practical advantages in having only
one code in governing a country. From this purely practical point of view we
might as well have only one language in the whole world, a solution that
has had plenty of advocates. To my mind this is a purely bureaucratic solu-
tion, worthy of an efficiency expert, but not of a human being. It fails to
take into account the fact that in a lifetime most people have no need to
communicate with the whole world. Most people live circumscribed, com-
fortable lives, where the things that matter take place within their homes,
among their friends, and at their jobs. The imposition of another language
merely for its national or international advantage is disruptive of the life
pattern, leaving peple uprooted, lonely, aggressive, and unsocial.
The solution would rather seem to be a thoughtfully and selectively
planned bilingualism, which leaves each of us with a native, homely, familiar
everyday language in which we can live and love. Then those of us who need
it can learn a language of wider communication that will enable us to travel
to the ends of the world if occasion arises. (Haugen 1973b). When it is rightly
introduced and taught, and is made to seem desirable by the larger society in
58 Blessings of Babel

which we also live^ it is not only not harmful, but mind-expanding and
infinitely rewarding.
Any problems in bilingual education must not be sought primarily in the
schoolroom. We must look back at the ultimate policies, overt or covert,
public or private, of the society itself. It is no problem to immerse English-
speaking Canadians in French; they will learn English anyhow. But if parents
are opposed or if they are indifferent, bilingualism is bound to fail. Among
Latin-American and Indian speakers in the United States we may have not an
"additive" bilingualism, but a subtractive one.
Switzerland is a country where no one is trying to homogenize the
languages of the population. Each canton has its own language, and the
country can survive while maintaining three official (and a fourth "national")
language, and its German population has its own Swiss German. It is a truly
pluralistic country, because each group is left to live its own life.
Perhaps the moral to all this is that real pluralism requires a degree of
segregation, of "separate but equal" facilities. But the cement that holds
it all together is the body of bilinguals, who can transcend their own group
without denying it.
Chapter 10
Language Planning

A good place to begin is Joshua Fishman's survey in his introduction to

Advances in Language Planning (1974). He holds that the "major dimensions
of language planning" are still those that I proposed in my article "Linguistics
and Language Planning™ (1966b) and my book Language Conflict and
Language Planning (1966a). He is referring to a four-fold model which I first
put into matrix form in 1964 (Haugen 1966). The model consists of (1)
selection of norm; (2) codification of norm; (3) implementation; and (4)
elaboration. Numbers (1) and (3) are the responsibility of society, while (2)
and (4) are accomplished by linguists and writers. This produces the following
matrix:
Norm Function
Society (1) Selection (3) Implementation
Language (2) Codification (4) Elaboration
Fishman further notes that the model "has been slightly revised and
refined" by Neustupny (1970) by the addition of "cultivation" (Fishman
1974a: 16). Fishman has provided harmonization of my model with
Neustupny's (1974a: 79). I agree that they lend themselves to harmonization,
and I welcome the opportunity to provide my own. I believe that the pro-
cedures suggested by Neustupny, as well as those of Rubin ( 1971 : "Evalua-
tion") are provided for and to some extent foreseen within my original
scheme. Let me explain that the numbering of my four steps does not mean
that they are necessarily successive; they may be simultaneous and even
cyclical.
(1) Selection or choice is called for only when someone has identified
what Neustupny has quite rightly called a language problem. Most problems
can be identified as the presence of conflicting norms, whose relative status
needs to be assigned. This can also be called an allocation of norms. It can
include a decision to replace English with Irish in Eire; or Yiddish with
Hebrew in Israel. The selection may be preceded by lengthy wrangling in
public or private, and it may be arrived at by some kind of majority decision.
But it may also be decreed by an omnipotent ruler, as when Ataturk in 1924
changed Turkish spelling from Arabic to Roman. It may be resisted, as when
Hassidic Jews persist in using Yiddish even in Israel.
Over time a selection may be reversed, as English won out over Norman
French. The common feature is that it is performed by society, acting
60 Blessings of Babel

through its leaders. It is a form of policy planning, which establishes that a

given language norm, be it a single item or a whole language, shall enjoy
(or lose) a given status in a society. While official government agencies are
often involved, we must not limit the term "planning" to such action, as I
understand a proposal by Jernudd and Das Gupta (1971). Individuals also
make their selections, and they may be followed by voluntary groups, whose
practice may become normative for a church, a political party, a province, or
even a whole country.
(2) Codification may be the work of a single person, who more or less
informally and knowledgeably decides to give explicit, usually written, form
to the norm he has chosen. It need not be his own: many languages have been
codified by outsiders, from missionaries to masters. Graphization (Ferguson
1968: 29) is often a first step. In areas where the concept of an alphabet, a
syllabary, or a system of ideograms exists, a writing tradition can arise simply
by the adaptation of a known system to the new language. In the early
centuries of our era the Japanese began writing their language with the
ideographic kanji of Chinese. In the eighteenth century the Faroese writer
Svabo wrote his language for the first time, using the Danish form of the
Latin alphabet. Even the simplest graphization requires many decisions and
should in principle be done by a competent linguist.
Historically, most linguists came in after the fact. To some degree
linguistics owes its existence to the practical services linguists could offer as
codifiers of language. They learned to extract and formulate the rules of
grammar, a process we may call grammatication. From Panini to the present
grammars have been prescriptive, certainly the ones used in most schools.
Whether they are also scientific depends on the skill of the linguist and the
philosophy of the times. Beyond grammatication comes lexication, the
selection of an appropriate lexicon. This may also involve the assignment of
styles and spheres of usage for the words of the language. The typical product
of codification has been a prescriptive orthography, grammar, and dictionary.
What the French knew as a grammaire or dictionnaire raisonnèe was not
an exact description of a real language, but of an ideal language that one was
supposed to learn for admission to the world of learning. It could therefore
become an instrument of national policy, a language code corresponding to
the civil and religious code. Like these it was of course regularly violated, and
the degree of punishment depended on the kind of sanctions enforced by
society. The grammarian was a lawgiver, and it was natural that his subject
should become an important part of the basic education, the trivium. It is
significant that grammatical deviations are still popularly known by terms
of moral opprobrium: they are "bad," "wrong," "incorrect,", "ugly," or
"vulgar." Acceptable forms are "good," "right," "correct," "beautiful," or
"cultivated." However meaningless such terms may seem to the scientific
 Language Planning 61

linguist, he is just as constrained in his usage of the language by the norms

implied in these terms as any other user.
Selection and codification appear in the same column because they both
involve decisions on form and are part of what may be called policy planning.
They correspond closely to the happy distinction introduced by Kloss (1969:
81-83) between status planning (which includes selection) and corpus
planning (which includes codification).
(3) Implementation implies the activity of a writer, an institution, or a
government in adopting and attempting to spread the language form that
has been selected and codified. Dealing, as we are for the most part, with
written language, this is done by producing books, pamphlets, newspapers,
and textbooks in the language. Those who have authority over schools or
over mass media like newspapers, radio, or television introduce it as a medium
of instruction and entertainment or at least as a subject to be taught. Laws
and regulations are promulgated to encourage (or discourage) its use.
As long as a small, elite group has a monopoly on education, it is relatively
simple to implement a given norm. But the spread of schooling to entire
populations in modern times has made the implementation of norms a major
educational issue. Nation-states are not necessarily created linguistically
homogeneous (though attempts in this direction were made at the 1919
Treaty of Versailles and more recently in India). The range of heterogeneity
from a simple Iceland to a complex Nigeria is vast and disturbing. Each nation
faces problems of its own.
(4) Elaboration is in some ways just a continued implementation of a
norm to meet the functions of a modern world. The major languages of
Europe have set the standard here by their amazing inventiveness since the
time of the Renaissance, when they undertook to replace the functions of
Latin. Elaboration is a useful English equivalent of Kloss's German term
Ausbau (1969); it has been used for a somewhat similar concept by Bernstein
(e.g. 1971). A modern language of high culture needs a terminology for all
the intellectual and humanistic disciplines, including the sciences, and not to
forget the cultural underworld that runs from low to popular.
As far as I can see, the term fully includes whatever is meant by
Neustupny's cultivation approach (1970: 39; in revised form 1978: 258-
268). He suggests that it is either opposed to or added to "language planning"
and quite rightly indicates that it is more characteristic of developed than of
developing nations. He points out that terms for cultivation are a normal
part of the terminology in this field in many European nations where it is
desired to describe what academies and other guardians of the language claim
to be doing.
In creating my model I was of course not unaware of this terminology,
which is also well established in the Scandinavian languages: in Swedish
62 Blessings of Babel

(spráJc)várd, in Norwegian (mâÎ)r0kt, Danish (sprog)r0gt, meaning "care,

cultivation", metaphorically drawn from the care of animals and plants, and
corresponding to the German (Sprach)pflege. I included this idea in my term
elaboration, rejecting cultivation as a somewhat elitist view of "culture"
and "cultivation". Also, it was not an established or neutral term in English
in reference to language. I wished to have a wider term like language planning
to cover the whole area of language treatment, both for the developing and
the developed nations.
Here it may be illuminating to ask what the Swedish Language Committee
(Svenska sprâknâmnden) actually does in its quarterly publication Spràkvârd
(Language Cultivation). It has published a special series of brochures on
spelling rules, pronunciation, place names, "right and wrong in language,"
a guide to the dictionary of the Swedish Academy, word formation, inter-
Scandinavian problems, transliterating Russian, the language of the mass
media, bureaucratic gobbledygook, technical language, family names, medical
terms, and descriptions of several urban idalects. In the periodical there are
special articles on these and similar topics, as well as question-and-answer
columns on problems of correctness or language history. In short, Swedish
as a well-established standard language has a continuing problem of im-
plementation (informing the public) and elaboration (making decisions on
novel problem, e.g. what should "plastics" be called?) I suggest that their
cultivation is that process of continued planning, here summed up as im-
plementation and elaboration, that goes on in every language once the basic
form has been established.
Neustupny has proposed language treatment as an overall name for the
process. This metaphor to me smacks of the sickroom, a metaphor that is
in itself too vague. Once we begin with the identification of a language
problem, the natural solution is to make plans. Hence I continue to prefer
language planning. The term is well established: we have a Language Planning
Newsletter, a periodical entitled Language Problems and Language Planning,
and a hefty volume entitled Advances in Language Planning (Fishman 1974a),
as well as a volume of References for Students of Language Planning (Rubin
and Jernudd, 1977).
Two other suggested terms may be regarded as valuable supplements to
the model and can easily find their places within it. Neustupny's remarks on
the need for correction procedures are well taken. Some of them are part of
the function of parents and agemates in the acquisition of language by the
child. They are more consciously applied in school by teachers and through
textbooks; eventually they may become self-administered through reading
and general social acculturation. The need for evaluation procedures (Rubin
1971) is also clear. If we set out to reintroduce Gaelic in Eire, one would
hope that we should not forget to provide some way of evaluating the success
 Language Planning 63

of our program. All of this is part of any good program of implementation,

leading to successful listening and reading, or better still, speaking and writing.
For further detail in the discussion of theory I refer to Karam (1974) and
the above-mentioned bibliography. The time has come to present a revised
model for language planning. In the revision shown below I have incorporated
the most important insights of my colleagues without altering the basic
outline of my original plan.
Even with this revision I cannot claim that it is a complete theory of
language planning (LP). It provides a description of what language planners
have done, without identifying precisely why they have done it, nor what
goals they have hoped to attain. For some discussion I refer to my 1966
article (Haugen 1966a: 60-64). Prague School theorists (as Garvin has re-
peatedly told us, cf. Garvin 1973) once proposed as criteria of a standard
language that it should be "stable" but also "flexible." This was done in
opposition to rhetoricians who saw the ideal as just stable. As he has granted,
these properties are really a description of all living languages (Fishman
1974a: 73 note).
The problem is how to build these qualities into a formal standard
language. It is like asking a disciplinarian to be both Arm and gentle, or telling
a mother to spank her children lovingly! How stable and how flexible?
Other writers have set up certain ideals for language, e.g. Ray (1963) with
his "economy," "rationality," and "commonalty," or Tauli (1968, 1977)
who emphasizes "instrumental efficiency." These do not seem to have played
much role in the creation of standard languages, though they are fine ideals
for language planners to keep in mind (Haugen 1971). The problem is how to
apply or define them in such a way that they will convince language planners.
Or why do we "practical" Americans use four syllables to say elevator, while
the "impractical" English do it in one with lift?
For the moment our discipline remains largely descriptive and hypo-
thetical, not having reached a stage of "explanatory adequacy." Perhaps it is
bound to remain so until we know more about the reasons for unplanned
change in language. Fishman has called for a theory of language planning,
without clarifying just how he thinks such a theory should look. It would
surely have to be one that takes a stand on difficult value judgments. We
are aware of various ways of writing a language; but it may be difficult to say
that one way is better than another. Could we even reach agreement on
whether it is better to write alphabetically, syllabically, or ideographically?
If alphabetically, should we write phonetically, phonemically, or morpho-
phonemically, and how much weight should we give to tradition and
etymology? Where norms conflict, shall we plan for unity or for diversity,
for shift or maintenance? Do we like "little" languages, used by small groups,
and if so, what are we doing to save them? If we are in favor of "great"
64 Blessings of Babel

languages, which one shall we promote? Or shall we choose one of the several
hundred Esperanto-type artificial languages? If ours is a species of cultivation,
what species shall we cultivate? If we would cure linguistic ills, what are our
remedies?

Table 1. A Revised Model of Language Planning

Form (policy planning) Function (cultivation)

Society 1) Selection (decision 3) Implementation

(Status planning) procedures) (educational spread)
a) Identification of a) Correction procedures
problem
b) Allocation of b) Evaluation
norms

Language 2) Codification (stan- 4) Elaboration (function-

(Corpus planning) dardization procedures) al development)
a) Graphization a) Terminological
modernization
b) Grammatication b) Stylistic develop-
c) Lexication ment
Chapter 11
Implementation

Language planning has many pitfalls, and one of the most menacing is the
difficulty of actually implementing even the most desirable changes,
especially in a modern society. In this chapter we shall take up two cases
of interest to me and see how they have worked out.
Case 1. Metrication. This relates to the trivial but irritating differences
between British and American spelling, mostly established by Noah Webster
in a burst of nationalistic separation and rationalistic reform. The problem
has surfaced in connection with the proposed introduction into the United
States of the metric system. The discussion reported below relates to the
spelling of the central word: American meter or British metre?
Most Americans have probably met with the metric system for the first
time in a science class. Devised at the time of the French Revolution, it has
by this time won acceptance throughout the world, except in the English-
speaking countries. Until recently these clung to their feet and inches, quarts
and gallons, pounds and miles. It took a world war and its aftermath to
lead Britain down the metric path. In 1968 the Congress authorized a survey
to study its effects. Three years later an official committee recommended
"that the United States change to the International Metric System through
a coordinated national program over a period of ten y e a r s . . . " (De Simone
1971: 85). The report was appropriately subtitled: "A Decision Whose Time
has Come."
In 1975 the Congress adopted a Metric Conversion Act calling for
voluntary conversion to the metric system (Public Law 94-168). Some effects
began appearing in the form of occasional metric signs on our roads, designa-
tions on our products, and temperatures in our weather programs. Just how
or when the conversion will actually take place is unclear. Not surprisingly,
it is slow: I note that in France it took 45 years (1795-1840) before it was
fully accepted. Against a background of our need to buy and sell abroad it
seems inevitable.
In 1971 the National Bureau of Standards in Washington issued an official
translation of a French document on the international units of the system
(NBS Special Publication 330). This document presents the units adopted
at a conference in Paris in 1960. The English translation came in separate
versions for Britain and the United States, the latter being edited by Chester
H. Page of the NBS. It showed the basic unit as metre (and presumably
66 Blessings of Babel

litre)·, it was understood that a "gentleman's agreement" had been made

whereby the U.S. would accept -re in metre as a quid pro quo for Britain's
giving up the -me on kilogramme.
I do not know whether Dr. Page was aware of the hornet's nest he would
stir up, but several American scientists at once spotted the deviation from
the traditional American spelling. Here was indeed a "conflict of norms"
that called for "corpus planning": a novel codification had been selected.
At least two of the English spellings that Webster rejected have crept into
limited American usage: theatre and glamour (for glamor). The former
is used in many theaters, the latter in perfume ads. The snob appeal of
these spellings consists in equal parts of anglo- and francophile sentiment.
But in the case of metre and litre we are dealing with an area of hard-headed,
scientific practice, as well as one that will affect the daily lives of every
American who buys a liter of milk or a meter of cloth. All available American
dictionaries designate the spellings with -re as "chiefly British."
One scientist who leaped into action was Dr. John Howard, editor of
Applied Optics, journal of the Optical Society of America. In an editorial
in his issue for August 1971 he reported that at a meeting of the Publication
Board of the American Institute for Physics "the editors of all the physics
journals vote overwhelmingly not to yield the phonetic spelling of meter,
liter, diopter in any such compromise with evil." He was frank to say that
the British spellings "rankled" and caused hackles to rise. "Our gram, meter,
and ton are all more phonetic and logical than gramme, metre, and tonne,
and we should not retreat from any phonetic spellings just because the
British have multiple errors." Dr. Howard continued to beat the drum in
his editorials for at least four years - I have ten of them down to 1975, but
there may be more.
I should add that Dr. Howard, although an optical engineer, admits to
having taken college courses in the older Germanic languages, including
Old and Middle English and Old High German (personal communication,
June 20, 1974). Another active opponent of the British spellings came from
Canada, rather surprisingly in view of Canada's having adopted -re. Albert
Mettler, secretary of the Canadian Metric Association, put up a strong argu-
ment for -er in a Metric Fact Sheet of 1974.
My connection with the problem came through a former student of mine,
Susan P. Bryant, who worked for Dr. Bruce Barrow, then of Waltham,
Massachusetts. He was a member of the Standards Committee of the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which had set up an American
National Metric Council with offices in Washington, which in turn had a
Metric Practice Committee. In the fall of 1973 Dr. Barrow was made
chairman of a Task Force on Spelling and Pronunciation which brought in
a preliminary draft presenting arguments on both sides of the spelling con-
 Implementation 67

troversy. In a poll of American scientists the vote was three to one in favor
of the American spellings.
Dr. Barrow decided to consult professional linguists and Ms. Bryant
suggested that he turn to me. I first heard of it in a letter of January 21,
1974, to which I replied, supporting his view in favor of the American spel-
lings. I argued on the grounds of (1) usage (-re would confuse learners and
bring resistance to metrication); (2) national unity (we might risk a splitting
whereby the scientific community would write -re and the average layman
-er); (3) phonology (syllabic r is spelled er in both British and American usage
in the overwhelming majority of words); (4) morphology (derivatives in a
consonant followed by -r- usually have bases in -er, e.g. fibrous from fiber,
diametrical from diameter, disastrous from disaster, hungry from hunger
etc. For the attainment of a unified spelling in English, it would make better
sense for the less numerous community (Great Britain) to adopt the more
rational spelling than for the more numerous one to adopt a less rational
spelling.
Rather than depend on my (possibly biased) views alone, however, I
recommended consultation with leading authorities on American English,
specifically Frederic Cassidy of the University of Wisconsin, Albert
Marckwardt of the University of Michigan, and Rudolph Troike of the Center
for Applied Linguistics. Troike brought in other linguists, including Professor
Randolph Quirk from England. The opinion was absolutely unanimous in
favor of -er. We learned that in 1926 the old guardian of the Queen's English,
H. W. Fowler, had admitted that "the American usage i s . . . more consistent
. . . But we prefer in England to break with our illogicalities slowly" (Fowler
1926). In Sir Ernest Gower's revision of Fowler (1965) it is admitted that
words like hexameter, diameter, and perimeter are regularly written -er and
that kilometer is so written more often than not.
A revised draft (dated September 5, 1974) was written, incorporating the
opinions of the linguists and the poll of the scientists. This led the Board
of Directors of the Metric Council to change its policy (March 20, 1975).
Shortly after this the Department of Commerce issued notices advising all
government agencies to write -er. In 1977 a new version of NBS Special
Paper 330 was issued, changing -re to -er.
This is not quite the end of the story. The editor of the Newsletter of the
United States Metric Association, one Louis Sokol of Boulder, Colorado,
issued a spirited attack on the advocates of -er in 1975. He followed it up
with a brochure entitled Statement on the Spelling of Metre ( 1978).
Mr. Sokol accused the advocates of -er as taking "a chauvistinic attitude"
and trying to "impose their will on the English-speaking world" after the
fashion of the "ugly American" (1978: 6-8). He was liberal in his use of
pejorative adjectives, describing his opponents as "vociferous" and "retro-
68 Blessings of Babel

gressive." The linguists are said to have violated "one of the principal ethics
of a linguist" which is "a linguist does not prescribe a language, he describes
it" (1978: 7). Nevertheless, he brings in his own linguists, Allan R. Taylor
of the University of Colorado, a specialist on American Indian languages,
and Morris Halle of M.I.T. The former declared that the problem is trivial,
that both spellings are phonetically adequate, that any literate person will
recognize both, and that the question is purely political and sociological,
hence pragmatic and nonlinguistic. Neither linguist has ever shown any
interest in language planning, but of course there is merit in their argument.
We will not pursue the problem further. As language planners we may
well be perplexed: shall our selection be national or international? Shall
English codification follow the Germanic principle of writing -er (which in
this case is also Latin and Greek) or shall it preserve a French spelling for
historical and sentimental reasons? Shall the implementation be imposed
by a private scientific organization or by a department of the United States
government? Is all this purely political, as Taylor claims, or do linguists
have a contribution to make?
Case 2. Editing Out Sexism. A body of functionaries who exert an
enormous and probably growing influence on the shape of American exposi-
tory prose is the editorial staffs employed by American publishers. Most
of them are women, well trained in the arts of rhetoric, and personally
delightful. However painless they try to make the process, having one's
manuscript edited by one of them is like nothing so much as going to the
dentist.
For English language planning it would be a most interesting and signi-
ficant research project to study just exactly what they do in implementing
what they understand to be the codification of standard English. It must of
course be realized that they are slaves to whatever style manual is adopted
by their organization, whether it be the University of Chicago Style Manual
or that of the Modern Language Association, which I understand has grown
from a slim pamphlet to a big book. We are happy as long as they limit
themselves to appropriate punctuation, to catching slips in spelling and
grammatical coherence, and to eliminating anacolutha. Having been an
English major myself and having some experience in writing, I dream of
some day writing a book in which the editors will find no elementary errors
to correct. But when I write "epochmaking" in one word, I get it back
hyphenated; if I hyphenate "step-sister," it comes back solid. Numbers
below hundred must be written out, but this does not apply to percentages.
If I write "that" as a relative pronoun, it gets changed to "which" and vice
versa. While my pronouns seem crystal clear to me, they are often replaced
by nauseatingly repetitive nouns. Editors replace my conjunction "while"
with "though" because there is a rule that "while" should be temporal
 Implementation 69

(although the dictionary records both). My sentence adverbs are forever

being shifted around, especially "only" and "here."
But their special bête noir is my attempt to keep my style colloquial. If
I write that someone "decides to stick it out" or that two writers "were
running neck and neck," these phrases are slashed or questioned.
My latest experience in the field brought me up short before a solid wall
of feminism. I was of course aware of the flurries over "chairperson" and the
sexist gender system of Indo-European, but I had not realized that there
is already a set of guidelines adopted as a policy by some of our presses.
Maija Blaubergs of the University of Georgia, an educational psychologist,
has kindly enlightened me and furnished me with two of her papers (1978a,
1978b).
I have been struck by the interest of this movement for students of
language planning. In her earlier article she lists some of the recommended
devices for avoiding sexist terms: circumlocutions, indefinite and plural
pronouns, sex-neutral nouns and affixes, creating new terms, and avoiding
such common idioms as "man overboard," "good will to men," and "man's
best friend." In her later article she reports on some "misconstructions"
placed on sex-neutral language planning, including cases of ridiculous over-
extension. I think my favorites of this type are the replacements of
"hysterectomy" by "herterectomy" and of "hernia" with "hisnia."
To return to my own experience: I had thought of myself as quite un-
chauvinistic and had provided liberally for "his and her" in my text. But
to my shame I had written of "a poet who tries to reach his audience";
the "his" had to go for "an" audience. I had said that he wrote "for all
mankind"; but when this was systematically changed to "humankind,"
I boggled and adopted "humanity" instead. Without intending to write a
religious tract, I had said that "Jesus proclaimed that all men were sinful."
Even sin we men cannot have to ourselves: I had to make it sex-neutral, I
suppose "people" or "persons."
My embarrassment was the greater since the book dealt with the dramatist
who wrote the drama of women's liberation a century ago, Ibsen's A Doll's
House {Haugen 1979). As will appear in a later chapter, I had recently publish-
ed a squib on "sexism" in the Norwegian language (Haugen 1977), reporting
on the fact that even so, Norwegian women are (like American women)
rebelling against the built-in chauvinisms of their language. My view there
was that social discrimination may be reflected in language, but is neither
caused by it nor seriously influenced by changes in it. Norwegian nurses have
adopted the masculine form of their professional title (sykepleier, rejecting
the traditional sykepleierske). But Swedish nurses have gone the opposite
way, retaining the feminine (sjuksköterska), apparently because the masculine
(sjukskötare) would lower their status to that of an attendant in a mental
70 Blessings of Babel

institution (Andersson 1976). A news dispatch reported that the Wives

Coalition of the Pacific Coast Fishermen vigorously protested the U.S.
Commerce Department's change of their husbands from "fisherman" to
"fisher." (Fleming 1979)
No one can doubt that a social and generational change is taking place
here and in other Western countries in the position of women. The important
thing is to eliminate all forms of negative discrimination against women.
I am in favor of discrimination so long as it is positive. In any case we are
clearly in the midst of a process of language planning. Women have identified
a language problem, namely that traditional language conflicts with their
desired role in society. So they wish to make a new selection and codifica-
tion, and some of them are actually implementing and elaborating it. As
with all innovations, many of the proposals will disappear as fashions change.
Hopefully only the best will remain.
Chapter 12

Semicommunicatíon

The fragmentation of Scandinavia is a reflection of its political history. One

is tempted to say that Scandinavia is more balkanized than the Balkans. It
is a miniature Europe, with all the minority problems that beset other parts
of the world. The problems as well as the solutions may be more transparent
in a smaller sample.
An American headline recently described Scandinavia as "five nations
in search of a mother tongue." Except for the fact that they are not really
in search of it, this is an apt observation. The fragmentation exists within
an overall cultural unity in which language plays a major role. What Scandi-
navians call Norden - the North - consists of five sovereign nations, three
central (Denmark, Norway, Sweden), two marginal (Iceland, Finland).
Between them they have six official standard languages of Germanic origin
(from west to east: Icelandic, Faroese, Nynorsk-Norwegian, Bokmàl-
Norwegian, Danish, Swedish) and one of Finno-Ugric origin (Finnish).
The four central languages are mutually intelligible (with a little good
will) and in practice they function as dialects of a common Scandinavian
"language" (Braunmüller 1979). They are Ausbau languages in Kloss's
terminology (1978), i.e. languages by virtue of separate standardizations.
Finnish is clearly an Abstand language, while Faroese and Icelandic are
somewhere between, being akin to the others, but in general unintelligible.
Within the central area there are also mutually unintelligible dialects, which
may even share features with other languages than their own. The national
borders are determined by past historical conflicts, in which military power
was more significant than linguistic self-determination. (For surveys see
Haugen 1976a, Sigurd ed. 1977, Bandle 1979).
Scandinavians are no doubt more aware than the citizens of larger coun-
tries of their vulnerable position. The well-known linguist Hans Vogt, address-
ing a congress of linguists in Reykjavik, reminded them that the Nordic
countries are "small language societies which, in a world that is constantly
being more and more internationalized and standardized, are exposed to
increasing pressure from the outside world, from the great languages of
culture" (Vogt 1970).
We shall consider the influence of English in a later chapter; it is a matter
of deep concern to many (Sutton 1979). The first foreign language intro-
duced was Latin. Christian missionaries of the tenth and eleventh centuries
72 Blessings of Babel

accomplished what Roman legions had failed to do. The first schools were
Latin schools, in which clerics not only trained new clerics, but also budding
bureaucrats for the royal chanceries. In so doing, they brought Scandinavia
within the orbit of European culture, at the same time depriving the verna-
culars of part of their natural domain. They set up a functional diglossia,
with Latin as the "high" (H) language and the vernaculars as the "low" (L)
languages. (Ferguson 1959)
Even so, the Scandinavian languages were written in Roman letters on
parchment by these same missionaries and clerics, less so in the East than in
the West, where Christianity was introduced from the British Isles. It is
characteristic that the Danish Saxo Grammaticus (fl. c. 1200) wrote his
history of Denmark in Latin, while his Icelandic contemporary, Snorri
Sturluson (1178-1241) wrote his history of Norway in the vernacular. Latin
was more than a link with Europe. In the words of Sigmund Skard: "In
certain areas of life the use of Latin soon became a matter of course" (Skard
1980: 29)
The Reformation may be regarded as the first minority revolt against the
dominance of Latin. By rejecting the authority of the Roman Church and
introducing the vernacular into the service, the Germanic nations at one
blow eliminated one of the major domains of Latin. In the sixteenth century,
after the model of Luther, the Nordic nations not only established national
churches, but also translated the Bible into the vernaculars: primarily Swedish
(1541) and Danish (1550), secondarily Icelandic (1584) and Finnish (New
Testament 1548).
Even after the Reformation Latin remained a window to the world.
Humanism established Latin as the language of learning. As Skard once
more puts it: "Latin became a mark of social standing, the insurmountable
barrier between the cultured and others." (Skard 1980: 57) The gradual
restriction of Latin began in the Middle Ages: Queen Margaret of Denmark
issued her first law in Danish in 1396. (Tengström 1973; Wennàs (1966).
By this time another language was threatening Scandinavian autonomy,
the Low German of northern Germany. This language was spread by the
powerful Hanseatic League, by the involvement of the Danish and Swedish
courts with German rulers and noblemen, and by the influx of thousands
of German craftsmen and merchants to the cities of the North. According
to Skautrup, historian of Danish, between 1325 and 1425 Denmark was
well on its way to becoming bilingual in German and Danish (Skautrup 2.31).
At one time the kingdom of Denmark embraced so many speakers of
German that they constituted one third of its entire population (Brems
1979: 428). In 1864 Germany retrieved most of the German population as
well as some Danes, who were returned to Denmark after World War I (1920).
The border is ragged and there are still small minorities on both sides of it
(S^ndergârd 1978, 1980).
 Semicommunication 73

Around 1700 the linguistic situation was such that a later Danish writer,
Wilster, could describe it as follows:
Each man who went deep into learning
On paper wrote nothing but Latin,
Spoke French to his ladies, German to dogs,
And Danish only to servants.
By 1700 the new standards for Danish and Swedish had been firmly
established, i.e. codified and implemented. Their complete victory with full
elaboration would not come until the nineteenth century, when universal
school systems were established for the teaching of the native languages.
These norms were strikingly different from the written norms of the Middle
Ages. At that time Scandinavia was briefly united under Danish hegemony
and Danish had a fleeting chance to become the standard language of all
Scandinavia (as it did in fact in Norway). But the Swedish secession of 1523
under king Gustavus Vasa meant that Danish supremacy found a formidable
rival. As late as 1506 prominent Swedes could humbly acknowledge that
they and the Danes were "all of one language," but by 1554 they had dis-
covered that the Danes "do not trouble to speak like other people, but force
their words out as if they wish to cough." (Haugen 1976a: 326).
When the Swedes in the sixteenth century established their official norm,
they made it as different as possible from Danish. After 1658 they instituted
a policy euphemistically known as uniformiteten (the uniformity) in the
formerly Danish and Norwegian provinces of western and southern Sweden.
In one generation they turned the written language of these provinces from
Danish to Swedish, without much effect on the local speech (Ingers 1974,
Ohlsson 1978-9).
The most striking feature of the new Danish and Swedish norms alike
(and of Norwegian dialects) was their formal departure from the norms of
the old languages. Having ridden out the threat of Latin and Low German,
they ended by absorbing many of their features. They were flooded by
thousands of Low German and Latin loanwords. The old synthetic grammat-
ical structure with many suffixes and relatively free word order had changed
into an analytical morphology with few suffixes and relatively rigid word
order. The leap was similar to that from Old to New English, and it is not
fanciful to attribute the change in part to foreign influence: in Scandinavia
Low German, in England French. What the Norman Conquest did for English,
the Hanseatic dominance did for Scandinavian. Only in Iceland has the old
structure and much of the old lexicon survived; it is as if an Anglo-Saxon-
speaking community had survived in England.
Once these new norms had been established by the combined forces of
government and church, with the schools and the printing press as new and
powerful instruments, it was only a matter of time until they had become the
74 Blessings of Babel

chief means of unification within their respective realms. The process was
completed in the nineteenth century, when the entire population was gradual-
ly mobilized into more or less active participation in the lives of the nations.
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars created new political
alignments that shook the established positions of Danish and Swedish.
In 1809 Finland was lost to Sweden; in 1814 Norway was lost to Denmark.
Movements for linguistic autonomy arose in Finland and Norway, partly
influenced by the ideology of the Romantic Movement. By the middle of
the century similar movements gathered force in Iceland and the Faroes,
eventually bringing independence for Iceland (1918, 1944) and home rule
for the Faroes (1948). In the modern period we also observe the establish-
ment of active organs for language cultivation, the best known being the
Swedish Academy of 1786. Its purpose was declared to be to work for "the
purity, strength, and sublimity" of Swedish, but it is not clear just how much
it actually contributed to these laudable goals. By the end of the nineteenth
century, at least, the maintenance and cultivation of the norms were actually
in the hands of the ministries of education of the respective nations, under
advice from ad hoc committees of linguistic and pedagogical specialists.
(a) Finland: In the Swedish kingdom Finnish was a minority language,
demographically and functionally. The tables were turned in 1809 when
Finland became a Grand Duchy under Russia, with considerable autonomy.
The national epic, the Kalevala, pieced together by Elias Lönnrot (1835),
became a symbol of nationality. Elaboration followed as Finnish was en-
couraged to take over new functions. Although Swedish Finns continued
to exist and were the old elite, their proportions and their influence diminish-
ed. The administration became bilingual, but by 1980 the core population
of Swedish speakers was no more than 6.4 per cent of the total population.
Across the border in northern Sweden, in the valley of Tornedalen, a popula-
tion of Finns found themselves on the wrong side of the border. Until re-
cently the Swedish government either ignored them or tried to assimilate
them. After more than a century of melting-pot treatment, the people of
Tornedalen are enjoying a belated taste of schooling in the language many
of them still use in daily life. (Hansegard 1968; Wande 1977).
(b) Iceland: In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Ice-
landic was recodified from the half-Danicised language of the 1584 Bible by
reference to the classic models from Old Icelandic. It was the good fortune
of the Icelanders to have maintained a strong literary tradition, and to live
remote from the mainland, and to lack urban centers of linguistic influence.
The enthusiasm of Nordic and German scholars stimulated the Icelanders
to undertake a program of corpus planning that would save them from the
leveling out of the mainland languages. Icelandic became a model and an
inspiration for others, especially in the Faroes and in Norway.
 Semicommunication 75

(c) The Faroes: While Icelandic only needed to be rediscovered, Faroese

had to be created out of the spoken dialects of the islands. The first language
planner was the fabulous but neglected J.C. Svabo, who used a Danish-based
orthography to transcribe its vast treasure of dance ballads (1773 ff.). But
it acquired a truly national orthography from V. U. Hammershaimb (1846),
who codified the language to make it resemble Icelandic as much as possible.
The result has been an enduring but phonetically frustrating norm. It can
be said that it is no one's speech, but everyone's language. We shall return to
Faroese below.
(d) Norway: No new Norwegian standard was created while Norway was
united with Denmark; the post-Reformation writers learned to write an
acceptable Danish. In the course of time a new Norwegian speech norm arose,
in part dependent on written Danish. Its existence as "cultivated daily
speech" in the urban and bureaucratic classes was not recognized until the
1840's, when it was identified and advocated as the basis of a reformed
orthography by Knud Knudsen.
Also in the 1840's an alternative norm was proposed by Ivar Aasen, more
along the lines of Hammershaimb's Faroese. As Norway's first dialectologist,
he collected information from field work throughout the country. On the
basis of his findings he compiled a grammar and a dictionary of a language
he envisaged as the future Norwegian. It was a masterpiece of language
planning, establishing a norm that was recognizable as genuinely Norwegian,
yet not a return to Old Norwegian.
Aasen's language came to be known as Landsmaal ("Countrywide
Language") and is now called Nynorsk ("New Norwegian"). Knudsen's
language came to be known as Riksmaal ("State Language") and is now called
Bokrrnl ("Book Language") or by some Riksmal. Under nationalistic influ-
ence inspired by opposition to the Swedish union, both Norwegian languages
were recognized in 1885 and left to fight it out. Today they have grown
closer together, but the Dano-Norwegian (Bokmal) is still dominant over the
New Norwegian, which has only about 16 per cent of the school districts.
It is even questionable whether they should now be recognized as distinct
languages; they function more as dialects.
(e) Marginal Minorities. In their zeal to establish norms, the Scandinavians
of the nineteenth century showed little concern for the marginal or semi-
colonial speech groups. Greenland housed an Eskimo population which
became a part of the Danish kingdom. Hans Egede became a missionary for
their conversion; his son Paul wrote the first grammar in 1760 and translated
the New Testament in 1766. The modern orthography is the work of a
German, Samuel Kleinschmidt (1814-1886). Only recently, with the home
rule act of 1979, have the Greenlanders begun to develop a fully functional
language.
76 Blessings of Babel

The Lapps, or Sami, as they now wish to be known, occupy the northern
provinces of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Soviet Russia. They have been
treated as children of nature, much like our Indians, picturesque but pri-
mitive. The language problem is exacerbated by the splitting among nations
and by its own dialectization. Since 1956 there has been a Nordic Sami
Council, active in creating textbooks and other tools for the preservation
of the language.
The Romany or Gypsy population tends to be peripatetic, and for the
most part they ask only to be left alone. The old Indie tribe, which has been
in Scandinavia at least since 1500, still speak Romany, but often in a debased
form as a secret vocabulary within the framework of the local idiom.
( f ) Immigrants. The most recent and probably the most acute minority
problem is the one created here as elsewhere by the immigration of exiles
and laborers. Children with home languages f r o m Italy and Spain to Turkey
and Pakistan are faced with school systems that are geared t o teach only
Scandinavian. Special research projects have been set u p t o study the pro-
blem, and books as well as periodicals have appeared to resolve them.
(g) Dialects. In later years there have been rumblings of discontent over
the enforcement of national standards in school to the detriment of local
dialects. As long ago as 1961 Tore Osterberg, a teacher in northern Sweden,
wrote a dissertation on the problems faced by his pupils. He advocated that
they be given materials to read composed in their own dialect. A movement
in this direction has been strongest in Norway, where the New Norwegian
movement has especially encouraged it.
So far I have deliberately stressed the centrifugal trends: one minority
after another is knocking on the doors of the language. But there are also
movements in favor of Nordic unity. In 1978 a Nordic Language Board was
established, including even Greenlandic and Sami representatives, as well
as all the standards so far discussed. Special efforts of teaching and publica-
tion are being encouraged to prevent the central languages from drifting
apart and to keep the marginal languages alive.
Chapter 13

Interlanguage

The problem of Scandinavian intercommunication is of interest since it is

typical of a number of similar situations in various parts of the world. My
own concern with it arose from personal experience since boyhood with
meeting occasional Danes and Swedes among the friends of my Norwegian
family. Visits to Scandinavia in my adult years as professor of Scandinavian
whetted my interest. In Copenhagen I once sought out Professor Sven
Clausen, not a linguist but a professor of jurisprudence, because of his in-
teresting campaign on behalf of greater understanding among Scandinavians.
From 1937 to 1948 he agitated on behalf of changes in Danish that might
keep the language in closer touch with Swedish and Norwegian. He was
serious in his intentions, but could be quite amusing in his methods, being
also a successful playwright. The scenario he developed for "cleansing"
Danish was a regular program of language planning. On the occasion of my
visit he had concluded his campaign and generously gave me whatever I
wanted of his literature on the subject. (Clausen 1938ff.)
One result was that I undertook what turned out to be a pioneer investiga-
tion of Scandinavian opinion on the topic by means of written question-
naires. With the assistance of the society Norden I mailed out 300 ques-
tionnaires to addressees in each of the three central Scandinavian countries,
randomly chosen from the national telephone catalogs.
The questions to which I sought answers were of the following types:
How great is the actual contact between the Nordic peoples? Which social
classes are especially interested in Nordic cooperation? What are the most
common misunderstandings and difficulties arising between Scandinavians?
How great is the interest in these problems in each country? What is being
done to overcome the obstacles that exist and how effective are these efforts?
What more can be done that is not being done today?
The results from the 28 per cent of replies actually received were interest-
ing and significant. One can read my conclusions in various published
articles (Haugen 1953b, 1966c). Briefly stated, they were that Nordic co-
operation was largely of interest to the academic and upper middle class;
that Danes show the greatest interest and Swedes the least; that conscious
efforts to modify the languages have been largely unsuccessful; that indivi-
duals are torn between loyalty to their particular language and a desire to
encourage inter-Scandinavian cooperation; that further research is imperative.
78 Blessings of Babel

It should not be overlooked that in response to Clausen's agitation the

Danish government did adopt some minor changes in Danish spelling. These
immediately made the language more easily accessible, at least for Norwegian
readers. The originally German practice of capitalizing nouns was abandoned
and the writing of a for aa was adopted. On the other hand, the public use of
slang has tended to obscure understanding.
It took a new generation of Scandinavian linguists to pick up my challenge
and add new materials to the study of inter-Nordic relations. In the mean-
while each country had created its own language commission, with Nordic
cooperation as one of its declared goals. For an account of their early history
see the Swedish commission's ten-year jubilee issue, Sprhkvard (1954).
In 1976 0ivind Maurud published a study of mutual intelligibility among
the Nordic languages, followed by an essay by Stig Ôrjan Ohlsson (1979).
Both were published under the auspices of the Nordic Council, an inter-
Scandinavian parliamentary organization. Maurud calls my investigation
"a praiseworthy e f f o r t " and regrets that it was not followed up. Ohlson
calls it "a pioneering w o r k , " though methodologically inadequate.
Maurud's study improves greatly on my statistics. He bases his work on
tests given to an equal number of recruits in each of the three countries
(84). As a well-trained educational psychologist he operates with indices of
reliability and validity. He also distinguished sharply between oral and written
competence (in understanding). He found that Norwegians understood
Danish and Swedish better than Danes and Swedes understood each other or
Norwegian. Also that written text was better understood than spoken. Finally
that Norwegians understood Swedish better than Danish. There are various
weaknesses in his test, e.g. that most of the recruits proved to be from areas
around the national capitals, so that for example more Norwegians could
hear Swedish TV than vice versa.
While Maurud is a Norwegian, Ohlsson is a Swede. He gave a historical
survey, including a discussion of the role of the media, such as a proposed
transmission of programs b y satellite. In 1977 the Nordic Council was moved
t o take a further step:it proposed the creation of a Nordic Language Secretar-
iat. Its function would be t o coordinate all the Scandinavian language com-
missions and work to protect and strengthen Nordic solidarity and promote
Nordic intelligibility. (Nordiskt spraksekretariat 1977). The secretariat was
established in 1978 in Oslo, with Stale L0land, a Norwegian, as its secretary
and Bertil Molde of Sweden as its president. Under its auspices a conference
on Internordic Intelligibility (sprakforstâelse) was held in Umeâ, Sweden,
in 1981 (Elert 1981). The first publication of the Secretariat was a book
surveying the languages of Scandinavia, which now had risen to eight - the
Indo-European Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish; the
Eskimo Greenlandic; and the Finno-Ugric Finnish and Samish. (Molde and
 Interlanguage 79

Karker 1983). The Secretariat also took over the publication of Sprhk/
Sprog i Norden 1983, which had been appearing in one form or another since
WW II. New prospects of Nordic cooperation were being opened up at the
highest level.
While Scandinavians like to think of their situation, which I have called
"semicommunication", as quite unique, it is not difficult to find parallels
elsewhere. The relation between Czech and Slovak in Czecho-Slovakia,
between Serbian and Croatian in Yugoslavia, or Macedonian and Bulgarian
can be instanced. In the Arab world there are parallels, and of course in
India between Hindi and Urdu.
Such problems have occupied previous linguists. Bloomfield, for example,
made intelligibility the criterion for distinguishing between dialects and
languages (1933). The first attempts to measure inteligibility were made by
American Indianists, headed by C. Voegelin and Z. Harris (1950) and carried
into effect by Hickerson and Turner on the Iroquois languages and Pierce
on Algonquin (1952). The method was to play taped texts to Indians with
similar languages and quantify the transmission of information. Their per-
centages ran from zero to 75 per cent comprehension, which was held to be
a very good understanding. These early experiments suffered from various
weaknesses, e.g. that the informants had to know enough Spanish and English
to translate into these languages. Also that the translation skill varies greatly
among individuals.
It was quickly discovered that other factors than the purely linguistic
one played an important part. In a study of two South American tribes by
Olmsted (1954), he found that the Achumawis did not understand the
Atsuwegis, but the latter did understand the former. Olmsted called this
"non-reciprocal intelligibility" and accounted for it by observing that tribe
one looked down on tribe two and refused to learn anything from them.
Others who have considered such problems are Ferguson and Gumperz
in a monograph (1960) on language varieties in South Asia. They found
that there was often a low correlation between linguistic criteria and mutual
understanding. They pointed out that extralinguistic factors accounted for
the discrepancey. So the use of language features is not enough to distinguish
between dialects and standards. Just the very fact that a standard exists is
enough to distort the relationship between dialects.
A scholar who long has taken an interest in this kind of situation is the
German Heinz Kloss. He began with a survey of the development of Germanic
"languages of culture" in 1952, a book that was revised and greatly expanded
in an edition of 1978. In these he set up a contrast between what he called
Abstandssprache and Ausbausprache, the former languages that were so far
apart as to be obviously unintelligible, while the latter were related languages
that were separately developed into standard languages. In Scandinavia
80 Blessings of Babel

Finnish, Samish, and Greenlandic are obvious examples of the first, while
the leading Germanic languages are examples of the second. Actually,
Icelandic and Faroese would today have to be reckoned as having developed
a good deal of distance. Kloss cites a passage from Bright's experience with
the Navahos. When he played one of his tapes for them, they declared that
they knew these texts were close to them, but they couldn't quite translate;
they were on the verge of understanding. I am sure that this is much the same
as other Scandinavians feel about Icelandic and Faroese, or in some cases
even about Danish.
Such empirical testing has been carried on for some time in Mexico by the
Summer Institute for Linguistics, as reported by Kirk (1970) and Casad
(1974). The goal here has been to find out which dialects are similar enough
to be comprised under a single standard orthography. These students have
wide experience and master statistical methods. Casad has proposed a theory
of intelligibility, in which the independent variables are the historical con-
ditions and the socio-economic relations between the groups. He admits that
the mathematics is not yet adequate to dispense with informant testing.
Karam (1975) has also developed hypotheses to account for such relation-
ships. The blocking of closely related dialects may be due to the sound
systems, the grammar, and the lexicon, or it may be due to language atti-
tudes. In West Africa, according to Hockett (1958: 326-7), they speak of
a "two-day" dialect and a "one-week" dialect, according to how long it
takes to unravel the system of another dialect. I should describe the relation
of Norwegian to Danish as a "two-week" dialect, which was about the time
it took for me to communicate easily with the Danes of Copenhagen.
While there is no language called "Scandinavian," there are cases of mutual
adjustment of the type that in some parts of the world lead to koine's, lingua
francas, or even creole-pidgin. One can certainly speak of cases of "inter-
language." Maurud recognizes that Norwegians yield to Swedes and freely
adopt Swedish expressions in contact siutations.(p. 141) Icelanders have
a long tradition of learning Danish as their Nordic contact language. But
if you ask an Icelander if he speaks Danish, he will reply that he speaks
"Scandinavian." What we hear is Danish with an Icelandic pronunciation,
which is not unlike a West Norwegian speaking Bokrnal Norwegian. In an
attempt to confirm my impression I studied the speech of two Icelanders
now living in Boston. Both of these learned Danish in school and came to
Denmark at the age of twenty. Their speech lacks the Danish glottal catch
and is uncertain about stress placement: either they follow Icelandic practice
by placing all stresses on the primary syllable or they hypercorrect: /fy'sik/
for /fysik'/, /pasta'/ for /pâ'stà/. The indistinct shwa for e is replaced by a
clear e: • hçine is /h^'ne/. One of them has learned to use throat-/·, but con-
stantly forgets and uses his tongue. Intervocalic geminates are pronounced
 Interlanguage 81

long: kunne /kun:e/. In ng the g is pronounced: overtrening(k).

These men assured me that no attempt was made in Icelandic schools
to teach Danish pronunciation; their teachers consciously taught them a
"Scandinavian" pronunciation so they would be understood throughout
Scandinavia. Both of them were shocked to come to Denmark and discover
how difficult it was to communicate with Danes.
In the Faroes, which has remained under Danish suzerainty, there is a
kind of Danish known as götudanskt "street Danish", with Faroese pronun-
ciation and a partly Danish vocabulary. Patriotic Faroe islanders try to
suppress Danish elements in writing. Hagström has written an article studying
the Faroese rendition of Danish (1977; see also Clausén 1978).
It is clear that the dominant Norwegian standard, Bokmäl-Norwegian,
arose in much the same way, as a Norwegian version of Danish. Four cen-
turies of Danish writing and teaching in school led to the rise of an urban
standard that passed from being a pidgin to becoming a creole. The ortho-
graphic reforms from 1907 to 1938 allowed this language to assume an
outwardly Norwegian form and left it open to further nativization. A result
is that the loss of Danish role models has left this language as the most
"Scandinavian" of the Nordic idioms. Tests have shown it is the most easily
understood by Danes and Swedes. From time to time voices have been raised
to make of it a kind of Scandinavian norm.
Danes have generally speaking shown the most enthusiasm for "Nordic"
movements; at least in theory they have the most to gain. I have noted
marked differences in the intelligibility of Danes, e.g. people from Arhus
(in Jutland) are easier to understand than Copenhageners. A Danish linguist
said to me humorously: "We Danes can easily talk so that you will under-
stand us, but it sounds awful." Actors with precise diction are easier to
understand. One friend of mine spoke of a brand of Danish he called "travel
guide Danish" or "mid-Sound Danish", a mixture of Danish and Swedish.
Swedes are the ones who show the least interest in adapting their speech
to fellow Scandinavians. For a goodly period they have now been the
dominant Scandinavian people and as such feel they have little to learn from
their neighbors. They take the usual "big-brother" attitude, well-known
on the European mainland from the French. Swedes need ear training in
relation to Danish and lexical instruction in relation to Norwegian. In spite
of all good will on the part of academic Swedes and of Swedish institutions,
there is relatively little of genuinely Scandinavian spirit.
The alternative for Scandinavians is to turn to an outside language, former-
ly German, now English, in their mutual contacts. One regrets this necessity,
if that is what it is. In the long run it would mean the death of all the Nordic
languages and of the culture they represent.
Chapter 14

English: Modernization

Loanwords have been called mileposts of

linguistics, because we can with their help
date language changes. But they are also
mileposts of general history, especially
cultural history, as they show us the course
of history and often tell us more about
contacts between peoples than the dry
accounts in old annals.
Otto Jespersen (1902)

The Scandinavian peoples are well on the way to becoming bilingual, with
English as a second language used in all forms of international communication.
One consequence of this language learning has been a rapid growth in the use
of English terms and turns of phrase in the Scandinavian languages themselves.
After World War II the invasion became so overwhelming that Scandinavian
thinkers became alarmed. Some efforts have been made to stem the tide, to
put one's fìnger in the dike. An unhappy disaster in the North Sea oil fields
off Norway thrust a new word into the Norwegian language: blow-out. A
headline in Aftenposten (Oslo) ran: "Eksperter d r i f t e r blow-out bak lukkede
d0rer" (Experts discuss blowout behind closed doors) (May 24, 1977). In
the text, however, a Norwegian equivalent was used, utblàsning, previously
used only for the exhaust phase of a gasoline motor. The headline writer
clearly preferred the shorter and more precise English term, and by this
time his readers were no doubt only too familiar with its meaning.
The example illustrates in an almost frightening way the Scandinavian
dilemma. An industry financed by American capital and employing a
technology developed in English establishes itself off the Scandinavian coast,
where any undertaking is of vital interest to the future of these countries.
It is only the latest in a chain of historical events that have turned English
into an absolutely necessary resource language for Scandinavia. In 1902
Otto Jespersen could list some seventy loanwords that had filtered into
Scandinavian in the nineteenth century. He characterized them as merely
technical terms for "concepts and things that we have learned from the
English." (Jespersen 1902)
They were public institutions like jury, budget, club; industrial phenomena
like strike, lockout, boycott; high life terms like gentleman, dandy, snob;
clothing like shawl, plaid, smoking (jacket) " t u x e d o " ; sports terms like start,
84 Blessings of Babel

handicap, odds', the names of sports like football, tennis, boxing', games and
inventions like whist, bicycle, tourist', railroad words like tender, wagon,
tunnel', seamen's terms like dock, cut, schooner, literary forms like essay,
humor, interview, and miscellaneous phenomena of modern life like clown,
humbug, and reporter.
Today one cannot walk the streets of a sizable Scandinavian town or open
a newspaper without seeing more or less disguised English words. Flickshopen
is a store in Stockholm, Daddy's Dance Hall a nightspot in Copenhagen,
East Side a clothing store in Oslo (which advertises that it sells in-wear,
including matchende jeans) Reading random issues for every word in leading
Scandinavian newspapers I was struck less by the number of English words
than by their conspicuousness. They were often spelled in English and
identified objects or ideas being promoted as novel and fascinating. In the
lists of "new words" published between 1955 and 1969 the ratio of English-
derived words outnumbered those from French and German by twenty to
one. In 1956 the Swedish linguist Ljunggren noted that "English has succeed-
ed Latin, German and French as the pattern of [Scandinavian] language
and style." He also pointed out that the words borrowed were much the same
in the three major languages. (Ljunggren 1956).
More than a half century ago the Swedish writer Louis de Geer attacked
the dominance of English, referring to it as "engelska sjukan" (the English
sickness, usually meaning "rickets"). In 1962 Dahlstedt wrote that "a world
language - the American and European English - is on the point of bursting
the dams of the old course of Swedish." In 1960 the Norwegian linguist
Hellevik considered the problem of English words of such importance that
he called on the Language Commission of Norway to put it on their agenda.
Here, he suggested, was a problem on which both Norwegian languages could
cooperate. In 1962 the Swedish linguist Stähle called for Swedes to make use
of native resources and to sift carefully the new material. (Dahlstedt et al.
1962: 65-73). More drastically and pessimistically, the Norwegian critic and
publisher Groth wrote in 1960: "The small language groups are today in
danger of being absorbed by the great. In ten years English may have won
hegemony in Iceland, in thirty years in Norway, in fifty years in Sweden."
(Dagbladet, Aug. 3, 1960). It seems that Scandinavians are looking for
someone to cap the apparently irresistible blow-out of English words, a
"br0nndreper" (well-killer) to cite the Anglo-inspired word.
In view of the importance of the problem, one wonders that relatively
little research has been done on it in Scandinavia. Before one can adopt
measures to regulate the flow, one needs to know from what sources it stems,
and to recognize that the problem is European and global. It has been given
close and continuing attention in France and Germany, but in Scandinavia
the only book-length monograph is Stene's English Loan-Words in Modem
 English: Modernization 85

Norwegian, completed in 1939, but delayed by the war from publication

until 1945. She called it "a snapshot of a thing in motion" and prophesied
that English influence would grow. She called for whoever should describe
the new phase of English influence to start work immediately.
So far no one has picked up the gauntlet. Articles and unpublished theses
have been written, but have only nibbled at the problem. The very idea of
language in motion has not appealed to most linguists, who either wish to
study past languages available in texts or present languages that are stan-
dardized. Only in recent years have some discovered (or rediscovered)
language variation as a challenging problem (Weinreich, Herzog, Labov
1968). It is a central theme in the new discipline of sociolinguistics.
To fill this gap in the literature we will need a comprehensive collection of
the English loans and influences in current speech and writing as well as an
excerpting of earlier writings. But the job of collecting is a task for Sisyphos
and can never be completed, since new words are constantly appearing in
response to current needs. It will be necessary to include also the subtler
influences on vocabulary and phraseology, on syntax and semantics, even
the thought patterns. For we are here dealing with more than the adoption
of English words: we are dealing with the adoption of English and American
ideas. This involves the entire function of English in modern life. Why do
Scandinavians need to know English?
The basic reason is that English is the chief instrument of modernization
in the western (and westernized) world. Modernization is a term of wide use,
generally favorable or even prestigious in its connotation. Modernizing a
house means to improve its plumbing, rearrange its rooms for more com-
fortable living, redecorating it according to the latest fashions. There is great
emphasis in our culture on being up to the moment, in ideas, art, music,
politics, food, clothing, and entertainment. Advertisers lay stress on being
"modern," no doubt reflecting in their own interest a common ambition
among their customers. Unfortunately it is a fleeting achievement, for what
is modern today is old hat tomorrow. To stay "modern" a language has to
remain in constant flux. Ferguson has defined modernization in language
as making it fully translatable for the terminology of technological, social,
artistic, and intellectual endeavor in our time (Ferguson 1971). A fully
developed language must have words for "atom" and "nuclear power," as
well as for "social security," "proletariat,""birth control," "rock and roll
music", and "existentialism." Such terms must have precise equivalents, so
that books, articles, radio and TV programs may be transferable from one
language to another without loss of information. At the same time each
language must maintain its own native tradition of creative writing, which
may resist modernization by virtue of the emotional values associated with
traditional life. Poetry and artistic prose are notoriously difficult to translate,
86 Blessings of Babel

and any attempt to make this part of the language translatable would
threaten it with sterility and loss of intimacy.
A century ago Scandinavians did not feel compelled to learn English,
aside from sailors and merchants. Ibsen, Strindberg, and Kierkegaard knew
little or no English. Only in 1850 and 1857 did Danish and Norwegian higher
schools, respectively, introduce the teaching of English, and similar dates no
doubt apply in Sweden (Bang 1962: 31; Stene 1945; 143). Today English is
the most widely taught language in Scandinavia. It is the chief window to
the innovations of the modern world, the language "of wider communication",
which permits the free exchange of information in an increasingly complex
and interrelated world. (Haugen 1976a: 63-72)
It is a truism of bilingual research, as observed earlier in this book, that
when any considerable number of persons become bilingual, they find
difficulty in keeping their two languages apart. A reason is quite simply that
each language is an arbitrary and only partly motivated set of signs. It is a
purely historical accident that the English verb to stick has a different range
of meanings from its Scandinavian cognate sticka/stikke. The bilingual who
naturally identifies two so similar words will be misled into saying "I have
to stick" when s/he means "I have to leave" (one of its Scandinavian meanings).
Conversely, s/he can be misled into saying in Scandinavian "jag mäste sticka
till det/jeg mà stikke til det" when s/he means "I have to stick to it," this not
being one of its Scandinavian meanings. Such overlappings, sometimes known
as "false friends" (after French faux amis), are only part of the problem.
In learning another language, the learner always discovers gaps in his own.
Each language is like a map of the reality its users perceive, and just as
different maps of the same terrain may convey different information, so
different languages draw a different set of distinctions in the real world. Each
new word learned identifies one of the guideposts in the world of its speakers,
as we shall see in a later chapter. Along with the word come new associations
that bring it readily to mind, and the learner finds it useful to adopt the word
in order to enrich his/her thinking.
An ideal bilingual would keep the two maps of reality apart, but this re-
quires an almost schizophrenic living in two worlds: I have called it a case
of schizoglossia. The effects of bilingual merger are well-known among
immigrants in the United States. Under the pressure of the dominant
English they have to learn, it becomes natural and normal for them to
adopt numerous English words, even beyond what is by some considered
"necessary." They adopt words like "field," "street," and "fence," even
though they had words at home for all of these. English becomes their new
source for innovation in language, because its words fit the map of reality
within whose framework they now live. Intellectual leaders among the
emigrants have labored without avail to keep the old mother tongue pure.
 English: Modernization 87

When they discover that their countrymen back "home" are undergoing a
similar influence, they may become discouraged and resentful. A Norwegian-
American editor I knew expressed annoyance at reading in Norwegian
newspapers that an airplane had "krasjet" (crashed) instead of "styrtet ned"
(fallen down).
One can take either a puristic or a pragmatic attitude to such innovations.
Purism is closely connected with national feeling and has blossomed in
periods of patriotic fervor. In the nineteenth century the Swedish author
Viktor Rydberg and the Norwegian pedagogue Knud Knudsen proclaimed the
need of purifying their languages of "foreign" slag. Pragmatic thinking is
more likely to prevail under the pressures of communication. Speakers who
are conversing with other bilinguals do not wish to interrupt their train of
thought to find a different word for some foreign concept. Journalists who
have to meet deadlines will take the word they find in their sources rather
than search their minds for a native substitute. Loanwords like tape and
teenager may be replaced by loan creations like Ijudband/lydband or
tonàring/tenàring, but they tend to persist; the result in either case is a
borrowing.
The decision on how to clothe the new idea is an internal matter for each
language. As is well-known, Icelandic, partly followed by Faroese, has insisted
on maintaining a puristic tradition in the hope of staving off the kind of
structural alterations that the mainland languages underwent in the Middle
Ages.
English is itself a striking instance of language pragmatism: like the English
people it is a complex mixture of disparate elements that have been at least
in part harmonized into a functional whole. The Germanic base brought to
England by the Anglo-Saxons has been reduced to an almost creolized set of
form words in a more analytic than synthetic grammar. The lexicon reflects
the successive ruling elites of England from the Romans and Celts to the
Vikings and the Normans. By natural selection it has achieved a form that
meets the needs of an international language better than any of its artifical
rivals like Esperanto.
The translators of English are often troubled by the English freedom to
draw both on the underworld of slang and popular entertainment and on the
classical Latin and Greek vocabulary. They tend to adopt the popular words
whole and to unduly latinize the academic style, as shown in the following
excerpt from a newspaper article on psychiatry:
"Nettverksterapi, forebyggende arbeid, konsultasjon, familieterapi, po-
liklinisk behandling osv. er in - milj0terapi med vekt pâ trygghet, struktur
og grensesetting innenfor rammen av en institusjonsavdeling er ikke in."
(Network therapy, preventative effort, consultation, family therapy, poly-
clinical treatment etc. is in — environmental therapy with emphasis on
88 Blessings of Babel

security, structure, and borderlines within the frame of an institutional

division is not in.) (Dagbladet June 11,1976).
This mixture of slang ("in") and technical jargon is also characteristic of
Swedish. Tingbjörn reports some of the Anglo-Latinisms found among sports
writers: sitt dubiösa anseende "his dubious reputation", notoriskt svag
"notoriously weak." (Tingbjörn 1976). English has here tended to create
pedagogical problems in the ongoing trend toward democratizing the
Scandinavian languages, as discussed by Molde (1976).
At the same time English has added nuances to the languages. Service
corresponds to tjänst/tjeneste, and it is borrowed only in the sense of service
offered by such modern institutions as oil stations, repair shops, and hotels.
Sex means the same as k0n/kj0nn/k0n, but is borrowed primarily in reference
to its commercialized and pornographic forms. Juice translates Scandinavian
saft, but with the development of refrigeration and commercially prepared
juices, the word is now normal for the latter: eplesaft is now canned apple
juice, while eplejuice is raw apple juice. Weekends were formerly known as
helg 'holiday', but with the secular weekend one can hardly use it, e.g. litt
l0ssluppen weekend-stemning (a bit of merry weekend mood). A bag is larger
and roomier than a handvâska/hândveske/hàndtaske and it is more suitable
for modern shopping at the shopping center (or butikcentrum/kj0pesenter,
as they are coming to be known)
Once English words have been borrowed and thoroughly adapted, they
go on to live their lives as Scandinavian citizens, albeit naturalized. Old loans
like job, mob, and snob have spawned verbs with new meanings: jobba/jobbe
"work", mobba/mobbe "bully", snobba/snobbe "put down".
English has also become a prolific source of clichés and standing phrases,
often for humorous or nonchalant effects: "mennesker som fightet for at
vi skulle fä friheten igjen" (people who fought so that we should get our
freedom back, Dagbladet May 14, 1977, p. 4), "Is-prinsessen herself' (the
ice-princess herself, Dagbladet Nov. 18, 1960). These seem to be more than
instrumental loans: they border on integrative motivation, i.e. a desire to
identify oneself with the international scene.
The problem of orthographic adaptation is still a topic of animated
discussion. Old loans have generally been adapted, e.g. gäng/gjeng "gang",
klubb "club", kutta/kutte "cut", while recent loans vacillate, e.g. tape is now
tejp in Swedish, teip/tape in Norwegian, tape in Danish (following a typical
pattern). A happy innovation was the launching in Swedish by linguist Ture
Johannisson of plast as a word for "plastics"; this has spread throughout
Scandinavia.
There is some awareness of the French and German discussion of these
problems, but one difference is that for them it is a matter of stylistic purity.
But in Scandinavia one also encounters fears that English may lead to ex-
 English: Modernization 89

tinction of the native languages. It is my conviction that this is unlikely;

we know of no such example. But it would be well if the Scandinavians
showed more pride and less resignation in the face of English influences on
the mass media. English brings great advances, but modernity can be bought
at too high a price. The words of the thirteenth century author of the King's
Mirror are still valid: Learn foreign languages, but do not neglect your own!
Chapter 15

Faroese: Ecology

One of the smallest language communities in the world is located in the

North Atlantic, about three hundred miles north of Scotland's Shetland
Islands and midway between Iceland and the west coast of Norway. Here,
on eighteen habitable islands, buffeted by winter storms, the Faroe Islanders
have lived continuously for more than a thousand years, ever since their
ancestors sailed out from Norway and occupied the islands. On land their
chief occupation is raising sheep, after which the islands are (presumably)
named, as well as birding on the incredible bird cliffs. But mostly they
make their living from the sea, fishing and whaling. They live in small sea-
coast villages, each one tightly knit, and often isolated from its neighbors
much of the year. According to the census of 1969 they number only about
38,000, of whom some 10,000 live in the capital, Tórshavn.
They are one remnant of what was once Norway's North Atlantic empire,
including the islands off the Scottish coast, Iceland, Greenland, and parts
of Ireland and Scotland. Today they are under the rule of Denmark, as they
have been since Norway and Denmark were united in the late fourteenth
century. But in 1948 they achieved home rule under the Danish king. The
Danes mostly take it for granted that they are Danish and speak a peculiar
kind of Danish. In some handbooks one will find it stated that they speak
a dialect of Icelandic. Both of these opinions are mistaken, as any Faroe
Islander will be glad to inform you. My own private inclination is to regard
their language as a kind of Norwegian! But even this turns out to be wrong.
What do they speak and write, and what are the problems that face them
in their social and literary life? How can their problems of communication
tell us something about the life of a language and illustrate some general
principles of what I have found it useful to call language ecology?
Ecology, according to Webster, "is concerned with the interrelationship
of organisms and their environments." If we substitute "languages" for
environments in this definition, we get a very acceptable definition of
language ecology. Languages have in common with organisms their persist-
ence through time and their more or less gradual change, but they are not
inherited biologically. While organisms pass their features on through the
genes, languages pass them on through the brain. A language lives only as
long as someone learns it and uses it and teaches it to someone else. Language
is not part of man's biological heritage, though the capacity for language
92 Blessings of Babel

certainly is. But individual languages are part of his societal heritage.
Language ecology is therefore societal, and should form a significant part
of a complete science of sociology.
The model that most people have in mind when thinking about language
and society is the uniform or monodialectal community. In such a com-
munity everyone speaks the same dialect, though of course with individual
variations. But these do not identify the speaker as belonging to any other
group. This comes closest to N. Chomsky's much cited definition of "a
completely homogeneous speech-community." (Chomsky 1965) In a pure
form no such community exists, and the definition is useful only for a
mathematical-logical theory of language.
In most real communities there are people who at least passively know
some other dialect or variety of the common language. There is one kind
of what we may call "bidialectalism" that has been identified by socio-
linguists as diglossia, first defined by Ferguson and developed by Fishman.
Ferguson identified as his best examples the situation in Greece, with its
formal, religious or official writing known as Katharevousa, which contrasts
with its popular, literary form known as Demotike. He called the former
"high" (H), the latter "low" (L), and identified similar situations in Arabic,
with Classical vs. Popular; in German Switzerland, with High German vs.
Swiss German; in Haiti, with standard French vs. Haitian Creole. While
Ferguson limited his cases to closely related languages, Fishman extended
diglossia to include cases in which two languages performed distinct functions
in the same society, e.g. Hebrew and Yiddish in Israel (or better: in pre-war
Russia).
A third ecological situation is that of a truly bilingual society. In its pure
form this would be one in which two distinct but nationally united groups
each maintained its language and communicated through bilingual inter-
preters. Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland spring to mind as examples. The
number of bilinguals will depend on the degree of interaction between the
groups. Shopkeepers in Montreal have a keen eye for the appearance of their
customers and can often tell which language to use before the speaker even
opens his mouth. The distinction between the languages is more one of
speech partners than it is of functions.
We may call our three types of societies homogeneous, diglossie, and
bilingual, or more economically, A, B, and C.
These differences condition different processes of acquisition, develop-
ment, and maintenance. In A everyone learns virtually the same language and
passes it on to his descendants. In Β everyone learns the L language while
some also learn the Η language, creating status differences within the group.
In C children learn both languages and can communicate to both groups, or
they learn only one and form a monolingual group within the whole.
 Farnese: Ecology 93

In A changes will occur as they are needed. In Β a gradual osmosis may

occur between the Η and L language, mostly from Η to L, but possibly also
the other way. These will appear as "interferences", often called loans, which
may or may not become a permanent part of both. In C the amount of inter-
ference will be determined by the relative status and the amount of inter-
action between the languages.
Maintenance is no problem in A: as long as the population remains, its
language will go on. In Β there may also be great stability, but elements of
change are present. If roles in the elite are opened to everyone, as when
a universal school system is established, either the Η or the L language will
win out (as English did over French). Society C may result, with various
groups claiming new rights for their own languages. C is often an unstable
society, resulting from migrations, dislocations, wars, or revolutions. One
can predict that Β will become C or attempt to return to A.
This progression from A through Β to C has raised many problems, among
them some especially acute ones in the formerly colonial nations now emerg-
ing in Africa and Asia. One measure that nations have found helpful at
certain stages is to enter upon a program of language planning. This amounts
to a deliberate interference with the ecology on behalf of the group involved.
The goal is to create a standardized form of the language, which will then be
taught to the growing members of the community.
In its early centuries the Faroe Islands were a typical community A, in
which its native dialects developed away from Old Norse and gradually split
apart. The lack of a written tradition permitted speakers to deviate uncon-
sciously from the old.
But with the establishment of the Lutheran church and a trade monopoly
from Denmark, the writing of Danish was introduced and a small number of
Danish speakers formed an economic and social elite. In this respect the
Faroes were treated no differently from Norway, Iceland, or provincial
Denmark itself. All folk speech was a low prestige language, with Danish in
a diglossie relation that gave it high prestige. Among the population Faroese
continued to be spoken, but a creolized Danish (known as götu-dönsk "street
Danish") was used in communicating with the Danish officials, who rarely
bothered to learn the local speech. In the course of time some of this
creolized Danish influenced the Faroese of the natives, giving it a heavy
infusion of Danish words and constructions. There was imminent danger of
the complete death of Faroese, like that of the Irish, and this might indeed
have happened if access to Denmark had been as easy for the Faroese as
England was for the Irish. But remoteness gave the Faroese time to develop
a countermovement on behalf of their language before it was too late
(Haugen 1968).
The first preserved attempt to write modern Faroese was made in 1773
94 Blessings of Babel

by a 27-year old student at the University of Copenhagen, a native of the

Faroes named Jens Christian Svabo. Svabo's life story is the pathetic one
of a swallow who never made a summer. But he did a fantastic job, which
was recognized only long after his death. He rescued for posterity the texts
of numerous medieval dance ballads which are the chief glory of traditional
Faroese literature. He wrote a remarkable ethnographic study of the islands,
and he collected many thousands of Faroese words which form the basis
of its modern dictionary. It is hard to conceive that anyone could have tried
to make a standard language of Faroese without his work. But he himself
did not have any such ambitions. He recognized the possibility, and he
pointed the way, by noting (in 1773) that if anyone should want to restore
it as a language, he would have to bring it back to "its pristine purity" by
restoring the lost Old Norse words, eradicating the new and "corrupted"
Danish words, and giving the language, "if not a new pronunciation, in any
case a new orthography." In the terms of his time, this was in fact a program
of language planning.
But in spite of his love of the language, he was too much of an eighteenth-
century rationalist to propose anything so impractical and arduous. Instead
he suggested that it would be much more sensible to work for introducing
Danish and teaching everyone to use it correctly (Djupedal 1964).
This was certainly the policy of the Danish government. Faroese young-
sters like Svabo, who showed promise, were educated in Danish. But at
home they continued to talk Faroese and to sing (and dance) their ballads
in that language. During the early years of the nineteenth century a new
nationalistic wind blew through Europe, as we have seen, and a few Danish
and Faroese students of language began to cultivate the writing of Faroese.
The famous Danish linguist Rasmus Rask wrote its first scientific grammar
in 1811. In 1823 a Faroese pastor translated the Gospel according to St.
Matthew, and in 1832 the Old Icelandic saga of the Faroe Islands.
But the crucial threshold was passed in 1846 when Svabo's nephew, the
Reverend V. U. Hammershaimb, devised a new etymologizing orthography,
just what Svabo had said would be needed if Faroese were to be brought
back to its "pristine purity." This spelling saddled the children of the Faroes
for all time with a learning problem similar to that faced by English and
American children. The spelling does not reflect the pronunciation directly,
as Svabo's had done, but through the intermediary of its history and its
grammar.
The effect is to keep the written images of words and morphemes con-
stant, even when the pronunciation changes. Just as we in English spell the
plural suffix -s whether it is pronounced /s/ or /z/, so in Faroese the Old
Norse letter S (which was pronounced as th in this) is now spoken as /j/ or
/v/ or not at all. This makes it possible to spell the language so that it looks
 Faroese: Ecology 95

like a "dialect" of Icelandic, although they are actually very far apart and
hardly intelligible when spoken. The written form is therefore easy to read,
but hard to write. It covers over the discrepancies of its dialects, and it is
dignified and traditional, as an orthography probably should be.
After a century of efforts to develop Faroese into a standard language, it
did become the main language taught in the public schools when home rule
was granted in 1948. In slow motion it had gone through the four steps
I have named above as part of the planning process: selection, codification
(by Hammershaimb), implementation, and elaboration.
We may well ask: was it worth it? On this there may well be differing
opinions, just as people can differ on problems of natural ecology. The
existence of a Faroese language with a burgeoning literature is today a fact.
But a population of less than forty thousand islanders is at the mercy of a
world in which they cannot live without contact with other languages.
Danish continues to be the chief foreign language taught and is for many
Faroese still the most natural language to write. Spoken Faroese is far from
having given up the Danish words the islanders are taught to avoid in writing.
The islanders have deliberately moved themselves into a society C in their
efforts to become a society A. In official work they are often confused and
uncertain as to which language to use and exactly how to handle it. Formerly,
as in any society B, the prestige was clearly on the side of the high-status
language, here Danish, but few could speak it. Today Faroese competes with
Danish and often comes off badly because of inadequate resources. Danish
is rejected as a symbol of domination, but has become much better known
because of the rapid urbanization of life through modern communications.
It is typical that while there is a not inconsiderable literature in Faroese,
the best (and best-known) Faroese writer, William Heinesen, writes in Danish.
If we estalbish status and intimacy as the two dimensions of the roles
played by competing languages in a community, the low-status language in
a diglossie situation is usually also a high-intimacy language. In medieval
France Latin was high in status but low in intimacy, while French was the
reverse; in Norman England, English had low status, but high intimacy.
When a traditional society gives way to one with high mobility, as in modern
life, the roles are upset. In the Faroes the Danish environment has shrunk
to insignificance, but the role of Danish as a medium of contact with outside
culture has not been reduced. As a student of mine who has worked in the
Faroes once wrote me: the young people no longer think Danish is elegant,
only that it is more exciting. "In an ecological sense, the influence of Danish
here is felt at a more basic level." There is a good deal of irritation about
expressions that are used in written Faroese and are felt to be "invented"
and "unnatural," usually imitations of Icelandic words.
Most people still think of Faroese as something you talk, and they don't
96 Blessings of Babel

like it if they have to look up a word in the dictionary. The movement to

purify the language has made people conscious of Danicisms in their speech,
but has not caused them to eliminate them if they still feel them as natural.
This is obviously a problem in the creation of a literary style. The most
successful written Faroese is that which deals directly with Faroese condi-
tions or similar ones elsewhere. The general knowledge of Danish weakens
the motivation for developing the literary language beyond this traditional
base.
A few words to sum up the "balance sheet" of language ecology. It is
impossible to answer with any assurance the question of whether it is "worth-
while." Americans are impatient with groups that claim rights for their own
language. But the steamroller approach to small languages has much in
common with the superhighway that flattens and destroys our landscape.
What is group cohesion and ethnic pride worth? How can one measure in
money the values that are lost when a group gives up its language in favor
of another?
The Faroese are fond of pointing out to visitors that since 1900 their
population has doubled and their standard of living has multiplied. The
neighboring English-speaking Shetland Islands have lost half their population
and are being wiped out economically. They are more than willing to let you
think that their fierce insistence on being themselves has had something to
do with it. They may be right. It needs to be considered when we study the
ecology of language.
Chapter 16

Icelandic: Pronominal Address

It is refreshing now and then to be reminded that even Icelandic has changed
from that Norwegian which the settlers brought with them in the ninth
century, and that it is not, in the words of one writer, "eine versteinerte
Sprachform" (an ossified language form) (Décsy 1973: 48). One striking
change involving phonological, morphological, syntactic, and sociolinguistic
problems is that of the dual and plural pronouns of the first and second
persons. Succinctly stated: ON vit "we" dual and frit "you" dual have be-
come viS "we" plural and friS "you" plural, while ON vèr "we" plural and
frér "you" plural have become "we" and "you" honorific.
This change was the theme of a doctoral dissertation at the University of
Reykjavik in 1972 by Helgi Gu9mundsson. He assigned the Icelandic change
to the 17th century and attributed the loss of the dual to the rise of the
honorific.
To some the problem may seem a small one, but I believe it illustrates in
microcosm some of the major interests of linguistics in the past hundred and
fifty years, and that it is worthy of attention.
In his "Introduction" the author has set himself the task of providing a
theoretical background for the use of the dual. Like so much else in lingustics,
the study of the dual goes back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in 1827
became the first to call attention to its extraordinary linguistic interest
(Humboldt 1963). From having been thought of as an oddity of Greek or at
best Indo-European grammar, it was now realized that the dual is or has been
a category in the most diverse languages around the world.
To most of us the dual is a puzzling category, since we think of "two"
as merely a digit between "one" and "three." But as Humboldt pointed
out, the dual reflects a dualistic world view "in dem Satz und Gegensatz"
(Humboldt 1963: 137). Hammerich, writing about Eskimo, pointed out that
it was not so much "Zweizahl als Paarzahl". His Eskimos were not so much
interested in how many there were, but rather whether they occurred in
pairs (Hammerich 1959: 17). The dual has two chief roots in human ex-
perience: (1) the symmetry of the human body and its limbs; (2) the duality
of many human (and animal) relationships, including that of speaker and
hearer.
Brugmann (1911: 446) made the additional observation that the dual
applied to pairing as such, while the plural left it unspecified. In Prague
98 Blessings of Babel

School terminology, the plural is unmarked in relation to the dual (Jakobson

1964; Greenberg 1966: 76). Hence the plural may be used for the dual when
the two merge or overlap and is likely to be more frequent.
The question of whether the dual is a "primitive" feature may be an idle
will-o'-the-wisp, as Gu9mundsson maintains (p. 94), but it may be worth
considering, since many distinguished linguists have used it to explain the
disappearance of the dual. Now that Watkins (1969) has shown that it was
probably not an Indo-European category, we should rather ask why it has
apparently been revived from time to time. If Germanic *wit and *jut (> *jit)
have their t from the word for "two," then these are simply pronominal
phrases that have been worn down to monosyllables. Tesnière (1925: 262)
found that Slovenian and Lithuanian reinforced the old duals by adding
"two". If the dual is indeed a marked form of the plural, then the loss of
the dual is rather just a change from an obligatory to an optional category.
Contrary to Jespersen (1924: 206), Humboldt admired and appreciated
the dual as he knew it in Greek, because it "promoted the philosophical
elaboration of understanding." (Humboldt 1963: 143) But a more pragmatic
writer like Pater Schmidt associated it with nomadic cattle-raising cultures
(Schmidt 1926: 326). Wackernagel (1950-7: 1.77) attributed its loss in Greek
to the rapid cultural development of the Greeks in Asia Minor. These con-
tradictory and obviously subjective views have only this core in common:
that the absorption of the dual by the plural occurred first among peoples
who were in lively contact with their neighbors through trade and conquest.
That Iceland was one of the last countries in Europe to give up the dual is
therefore not so much a mark of inferior civilization, as of the lack of urban
centers in the Middle Ages. Tesnière went to Slovenia to study the dual
because he had learned from Meillet and Cuny that it was "strikingly ana-
chronistic to see an intelligent and civilized people employing in the full
twentieth century a category that passes as an index of a retarded civiliza-
tion." (Tesnière 1925: ix). He did find that the Slovenes were often quite
confused about the use of the dual. Hammerich also found that Eskimos in
contact with Europeans had reduced their use of the dual (1959: 16).
In fact, the dual is not lost. It has just been transformed, at least in Indo-
European, from being an obligatory morphological category in nouns (and
by congruence in verbs) to paradigmatic status in the pronouns and then to
a completely lexical status in modern Germanic. We still distinguish "one —
both - all". We cannot say "all his eyes are blue" nor "all his brothers are
older" without implying that there are more than two. There are a number of
such words, including pair, couple, deuce, parents, twins, which have dual
meaning. There are conjunctions like either and whether, as well as the com-
parative of the adjective, which imply two members. In Icelandic there are
words like feSgar "father and son" and maeSgur "mother and daughter."
 Icelandic: Pronominal Address 99

There is no such thing as an indispensible morphological category: even

such forms as tense, gender, number, or person can be expressed otherwise
than by suffixes. The Indo-European languages show a trend towards the
replacement of suffixes by form words, but it is neither inevitable nor
irreversible, as is shown by the growth of such forms as the suffixed definite
article and reflexive verbs in Scandinavian. To say that the loss of the dual is
a transition from "concrete" to "asbstract" thinking is hardly adequate
(Gauthiot 1912). As the system of numbers became more important in a
trading culture, one may suppose that the dual as marker of coupling lost
significance.
In his chapter 3 GuSmundsson embarks on a fullscale study of the
semantic category of number in the pronouns. He commendably keeps the
entire system before us and shows it changing as a whole. He sets up a series
of six stages as models to account for the entire development. Even in the
earliest datable texts we have, the skaldic poems, there are instances of the
use of the plural to refer to single persons. While our author is inclined to be
dubious about the origins of this usage, whether it is early poetic style or due
to outside influence, I am inclined to suspect the latter.
The appeal to the individual of making use of the plural is in part due to
its ambiguity: it is not really a plural unless he is speaking on behalf of a
collectivity. It may involve anything from modesty and evasion of responsi-
bility to self-assertion and assumption of responsibility. The fact that we are
not offered any examples from Eddie poetry or from Old English or Old High
German poetry makes the idea of a native poetic tradition questionable.
From the time of King Olafr there was French influence at the court, and
the development of French courtoisie is fulfilled at the court of Hákon
Hákonsson, where the King's Mirror was written.
The study of honorific pronouns has a long history. If I miss anything in
Gudmundsson's account, it is a greater perception of the social dimension.
He is familiar with Brown and Gilman's study of "The Pronouns of Power
and Solidarity" (Brown and Gilman 1960: 253). In a later study they have
replaced these terms with "status" and "intimacy" (Brown and Ford 1961).
The seventeenth century was a period of economic and political hardship in
Iceland. Danish rule was particularly harsh. A hierarchical society was es-
tablished that corresponded to that which the rest of Europe had developed
by the end of the Middle Ages. In 1655 Thomas Fuller, court chaplain to
King Charles II, condemned Quaker usage as "clownishness." (Finkenstaedt
1963: 203)
A puzzling aspect of usage in Gudmundsson's stage 3 (the sagas) is the
apparently unmotivated shifting between singular and plural. Subjects
speaking to kings switch from frér to βύ even within one sentence. It seems
that once the addressee's status has been established, the speaker is free
100 Blessings of Babel

to revert to the unmarked pronoun. Maintenance of a marked pronoun is

a redundancy that requires severe social training, which is possible only in a
class-divided society.
The author presents an impressive array of texts from the period he
regards as crucial for the change, i.e. 1525-1733. Just as there must have
been periods and communities where the phonetic realizations of neighboring
phonemes overlapped, so he tries to show that in the seventeenth century the
honorific and dual meanings coexisted. He finds that the change, beginning
in the South around 1600 with the nominative of the first person (vid),
spread over three generations until it was completed around 1700.
Gu9mundsson tackles the problem of causation by referring to the
ambiguity that resulted. I doubt that this is adequate, since pronominal
ambiguity is widespread, cf. English you, French vous, German Sie, and
Dano-Norwegian De. Recent work by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968)
has shown that important factors are the rise of random variation and the
ordering of social selection. There must have been something special about
the Iceland of the seventeenth century to make vèr and frér inappropriate as
plurals except in honorific usage. This was the first century in which
Icelanders also became literate in Danish. The Danish vi and I would seem
more dignified and elevated because they were used by and to the rulers of
the country, and the practice could easily be transferred to native usage by
a simple semantic shift. The Icelanders were already prepared for it by the
old courtly usage of the plural, leaving the already ambiguous dual forms
to develop into plurals.
There is nothing surprising in such a development, since the whole custom
of honorific usage is known to have spread via bilinguals from Rome north-
wards. Finkenstaedt (1963) has shown how the honorific use of you in
English arose among bilingual Anglo-Normans, who simply transferred their
own use of vous into the dominated language. The new rule that entered
Icelandic in this century was a kind of concord that required the use of
honorifics consistently to certain persons, even when they were not exercising
their power.
Gujfmundsson extends his net to include parallels to the Icelandic develop-
ment from the spoken dialects of German, Swedish, Norwegian, and Faroese.
In each of these the advancing honorific caught up with the dying dual in
time to keep it alive as a plural. The six cases adduced are earlier than
Icelandic, and the demonstration of similar results make them almost a
Q. E. D. for the author.
The practices described in his Stages 1-3 were also Norwegian, exported
to Iceland at the time of the settlement. But by 1350 Norwegian had not
only added a f> from the verb endings of the second persons (it, ér> frit, />er),
but an m in the first person (mit, mér), reflected in the widespread me of
 Icelandic: Pronominal Address 101

today. This fourteenth-century system included a dual which took over plural
meanings by 1400, which could then be used as honorifics. The system
showed its sensitivity to social influence by accepting after 1400 the fashion-
able forms vi and / from Danish and Swedish (Tylden 1944). Rather than
directly borrowed from written Danish, as Tylden thinks, their present-day
domain points rather to urban influence issuing from centers like Oslo,
Bergen, and Trondheim into the surrounding countryside. The fourteenth
century in Norway was a period when (as Edvard Bull put it), the feudal
lords "constantly gain greater power upwards, in relation to the king, and
downwards, in relation to the people". A new urban middle class, "the lower
nobility", came into being (Bull 1968: 116). For the Norwegian people it
was also a period of economic disaster following the Black Death, the entry
of the Hanseatic League, and preparation for absorption by the Swedish
and eventually the Danish kingdom.
In summing up the results of our investigation of Helgi Guömundsson's
research, I have found the topic of great value as a parade example of linguistic
change. In spite of a few critical remarks, I have learned a great deal in
working my way through his thesis. He has shown distinct mastery of his
material and close familiarity with the linguistic problems involved. He has
not done full justice to the sociological and historical settings of the change
he has described. Given the gradual disappearance of the dual in an advanced,
sophisticated society, he has shown good reason for the particular solution
adopted in Icelandic and other Germanic dialects. The overlap of the receding
dual with the advancing honorific, influenced by the intrusion of Danish,
resulted in the assignment of a new meaning to the dual and the isolation of
the honorific.
Chapter 17

Norwegian: Forms of Address

Two provocative articles by Roger Brown and asociates(1960, 1961) showed

that forms of address in Europe and America reflected social determinants
which they summed up under the two dimensions of solidarity ("intimacy")
vs. status ("power").
In continental European languages these found expression in the choice
of pronouns, informal tu ( t ) vs. formal vous (ν), while in America (the formal
pronoun having displaced thou) a similar distinction is expressed by first
name (F) vs. title (T) plus last name (L). Brown and Gilman pointed out that
in modern usage the formal address variants generally reflected non-solidarity
(i.e. social distance) rather than power relations.
In modern Norwegian (as in Swedish; cf. Paulston 1975) the younger
generation has gone even farther by abandoing the v-pronoun entirely, to the
dismay of the older generation. This change in the social meaning of the
f-pronoun reflects populistic and democratic thinking, which rejects even
that mild form of social inequality by which polite society has set itself off
from the common man through its use of the v-pronoun. The new trend is
reflected and even encouraged by the state TV system, which has established
the /-pronoun as normal in all interviews, from the prime minister down (but
not including the king) (Dagbladet March 12, 1977).
In Norwegian the informal f-pronoun is du, objective deg, possessive din
(ditt, dine). The formal v-pronoun is De (pronounced /di/), objective Dem,
possessive Deres (identical except for capitalization with de "they", dem
"them", deres "their(s)").
The Norwegian author Johan Borgen (b. 1902) is a sensitive observer of
the social scene, acutely conscious of the psychological value of words. He is
a speaker and writer of the elite form of Bokmal-Norwegian known in his
language as riksmal. In a novel entitled Min arm min tarm 1972 ("My arm
my guts") he has furnished vivid dialogue that is virtually a textbook example
of the human relations expressed in forms of address. Borgen is a-member of
the upper bourgeoisie, but an intellectual rebel against many of its values. He
is in an excellent position to show the intertwining of status and solidarity
in the life of a Norwegian intellectual. We shall recount the major experiences
of his hero in the first twenty pages of the novel and then analyze the role
relations involved and their significance for the hero.
Frank Vegàrdshei is a lektor (teacher) at an Oslo gymnasium (junior
104 Blessings of Babel

college). He is a graduate of the Sorbonne and a specialist on French grammar.

He comes of a lower-class family and is highly conscious of his own success in
transcending its social barriers. But he has remained socially and psy-
chologically insecure. He is self-centered, resentful, easily roused to vengeance
for minor slights, indecisive, and more concerned with words than with things.
We meet him in a circumscribed setting, a hospital ward, where he is cast
in the role of a patient. He is just coming out of a coma after an ulcer opera-
tion when the novel opens. We observe him interacting with the nurse, then
with the doctor, then with two fellow patients, and continually with his own
inner self, which reminisces about earlier social encounters.
The nurse begins by addressing him by first name and v-pronoun: "Frank!
Frank! De mâ vàkne nâ!" (Frank, Frank, you must wake up now!). As he
begins to come out of the coma, she uses the formal title herr and Z,(ast
name): "Herr Vegârdshei?" (Mr. V.?). A moment later she addresses him by
v-pronoun and L alone; then she alternates between F and L, calling him
"Frank" while introducing herself with Τ and F as "s0ster Else" (sister
Else). In her efforts to rouse him she shows complete confusion by treating
him alternately as a child and an adult: "Du er ikke ute og kj^rer nâ, Frank.
H0rer De?" (You're not out driving now, Frank. Do you hear?).
In the doctor's presence she adopts the polite forms ν and L, but the
doctor advises her to use t and F: "Bruk fornavn, si d u " (Use the first name,
say "du"). On occasion both nurse and doctor address Frank in the first
person plural (η ρ for nous plural, "we"): "Fint Frank, kom nâ sâ vâkner vi"
(Fine, Frank, come now, let's awake); "Nâ, Vegârdshei, har vi sloppet lüften?"
(Well, V., have we let the air out?). By including themselves in the address,
they have expressed a touch of sympathy, in a style reminiscent of the
nursery.
In Frank's first state of confusion he takes her for the doctor and uses v;
when she corrects his error, he adopts t and becomes loving: "Du har reddet
mitt liv, jeg elsker deg" (You have saved my life, I love you). He seems to
think she is his estranged wife, Kamma.
When the doctor comes, Frank takes him to be his colonel from his life
as a recruit and greets him with his professional title, prefaced by the formal
herr·. "Herr oberst" (Mr. Colonel). He reports with his identification number
and L\ "86 18 02 Vegârdshei." As his confusion clears, he returns to the
socially correct distance marker, ν L to the doctor, ν T2 F to the nurses.
But in moments of stress he reverts to markers of his lower-class origin,
protesting to the nurse that "hele magan kommer til â dette ut pâ meg"
(the whole tummy is going to fall out on me). The nurse pretends to be
shocked to hear such forms as magan for correct maven and gently chides
him, reminding him of his social status: "Hvordan er det De snakker,
Vegârdshei, lektor og alt og sâ magan." (How are you talking, V., teacher
and all, and then 'magan').
 Norwegian: Forms of Address 105

Meanwhile we have shared some of his internal dialog, beginning with a

nightmare of French grammatical forms, "endless columns of subjunctives,
all kinds of cases," "storming soundlessly toward him without mercy."
Painful episodes recall his linguistic problems at the French lycée in Rouen
and the Sorbonne in Paris. His name was held to be unpronounceable, coming
out something like Vegaei, and his first name was confusingly like that of
"the coin they all have too little of." Flashbacks occur from an old collision
with a Swedish car, a collision that led to his unhappy marriage.
Once he is ambulatory, he becomes aware of his companions, in beds
number 1 and 2. He decides, thinking of himself as "en godlynt person
bak alle sine stengsler" (a well-meaning person behind all his barriers), to
introduce himself to them in "full utrustning" (full panoply). This means F L
plus age, title, and illness: "Frank Vegârdshei, 32, lektor, magesàr" (F. V., 32,
teacher, ulcer). The replies reveal their social status as members of the folk.
No. 1 merely gives L, age, and illness: "Aslaksen, 77, prostata". No. 2 gives
no age, only L and T: "Olsen her, stuert, leverà" (Olsen here, steward, the
liver).
After no. 1 Frank is uncomfortable at his use of title, fearing that he has
sounded snobbish. But no. 2 proves to be a hearty, unselfconscious son of
the people, who speaks lower-class Oslo (leverà, bena "the liver, the feet")
and expresses his wish for a bottle of wine (which his liver condition strictly
prevents). He naturally uses t and later develops a friendly nickname (N),
a shortening (Vegâr) based on Frank's L. When Frank responds with t L,
Olsen asks him to use F: "Kali meg Tom".
Frank finds it difficult to establish such immediate intimacy, especially as
it involves him in Tom's plot to secure that forbidden bottle of wine. Frank
reacts with a combination of repulsion and fascination at Tom's "vulgarity."
Tom does not hesitate to use a word like "pisse," where Frank even in his
thoughts uses the euphemistic term "vannlating" (letting of water). He thinks,
"Hvorfor ikke si pisse nâr det heter pisse, hvorfor ikke iallfall tenke pisse"
(Why not say 'piss,' when it is called 'piss', why not at least think 'piss').
It occurs to him that he is beginning to think with Tom's head, even using
the folk form for "head," hue instead of his normal hode. Ironically he
thinks: "Lektor Vegârdshei ligger og er folkelig til husbruk." (Lektor V. is
being folksy for medicinal purposes). To which the author comments: "Frank
Vegârdshei liker visst ikke seg selv i aften." (F. V. apparently doesn't like
himself this evening).
Frank's encounter with Tom and their uneasy intimacy returns him to
childhood. His acquired polish and education break down in this enforced
self-assessment. It is the beginning of a schizophrenic breakdown which con-
stitutes the novel. His mental collapse has its roots in the accident, his
marriage, and the ulcer. But the insecurity of his personality is brought to
106 Blessings of Babel

a focus by his encounter with the uncomplicated, socially integrated man of

the people, Tom Olsen, stuert.
The forms of address are skilfully manipulated to reveal the contrasting
social roles of patient (regression to childhood), nurse (mother and lover),
doctor (father and authority), companion (regression to lower social status).
He reflects the educated man's vacillation between present and childhood
status. The man's psychological insecurity is seen against the background
of two sets of social rules, one basic and characteristic of the child and the
folk, the other a superstructure acquired by the adult who enters into elite
society. The rejection by more recent Norwegian youth of the formal pro-
nouns must be seen as a rejection of the rules of elite society and the social
dichotomy implied by them. A widespread academic trend toward stubbornly
retaining one's folk dialect (or even acquiring one for the nonce) is also part
of this rejection. Frank Vegàrshei accepts Tom Olsen's rules.
Linguistically the choices involved may be described as a series of choices
between unmarked and marked alternatives. The f-pronoun is unmarked, the
v-pronoun marked [+ distance], a social meaning that is absent from the
worlds of the child and the folk. To be sure, Tom Olsen vacillates between
calling the nurse du and dere, the plural. This is an old second-person plural,
going back to saga times and retained only among the folk (ON frér "ye").
The upper class long since adopted the Danish De "they" (after German
Sie) as its formal pronoun. Dere is structurally equivalent to French vous,
from which its function is derived (if not from Latin vos), but it reflects
deference rather than distance.
Deference being an outmoded concept, the form is occasional and irregular
in its use. Pronoun choice is of course obligatory, since sentences require
subjects and objects. It can be avoided only by circumlocutions, as in
traditional Swedish usage. But our text provides a special wheedling replace-
ment of t by the plural vi "we", which we may call "sympathetic."
It is used with children (and patients) in persuading them to do something
they are reluctant to do. The plural pronoun can here be glossed "you and I,"
meaning that the speaker includes her/himself in the proposed action. Adults
exchange the t with children, but have to choose t or ν when they become
adults. Here the nurse's role begins with an adult-child situation and pro-
gresses to normal adult-adult relation as the patient improves.
Pronominal usage eventually has to give way to name and/or title, if only
to gain attention. The base form, historically and ontologically, is F. Its
antiquity is reflected in the fact that kings have no other name. At the
same time the king's position calls for the deference of complete suppression
of the pronoun in favor of the third person address: Deres majestet ("Your
majesty"). A similar usage for other titles is virtually obsolete and does not
appear in our text. It could· have been used to the doctor, e.g. "Hva vil
 Norwegian: Forms of Address 107

doktoren ha?" (What does the doctor wish?) Instead, titles are used for high
status professions ( d o k t o r , oberst, professor), supplementing the pronouns.
These may be preceded by the formal title herr or fru (Mr., Mrs.). A distinc-
tion is sometimes made between a wife who receives her husband's title
(fru professor H.) and one who has a title of her own (professor fru H.).
The non-intimate situation requires a choice between L and Τ L as
vocatives. The nurse settles down to calling Frank by his last name alone, as
does the doctor. Frank starts by calling Tom so, but is jovially corrected by
Tom, who rejects the distance that is natural for Frank. The use of last name
alone is a common Norwegian practice and may even be combined with the
/-pronoun to mark an intermediate stage: familiarity rather than intimacy.
Other alternatives of TL are F L, as when Frank addresses his compansion
as "Tom Olsen", or T2 and even Tl T2 in the case of the professions:
" d o k t o r " and "herr doktor," never the German triple-barreled "Herr
Professor Doktor". In referring to our hero the author himself subtly varies
between F, F L, and Τ L, the first as regular, the last to underline his role
as educated person and professional teacher, with a hint of irony, the F L
to suggest his total personality.
We may now sum up the rules that govern the use of address forms. A
flow chart will represent the available choices and the features of social
behavior that govern them. We shall call the speakers X1 as members of the
folk (children, workers, farmers etc.), X 2 if they choose to associate them-
selves with the elite (officials, educated persons, urban bourgeoisie). Each
choice is a node, and movement is from left to right. Features that determine
choice are listed under each branch, omitting unmarked features. Essentially
there are three choices: pronoun, title, and name, in that order. The pro-
nouns are ν for vous (De), η ρ for nous plural (vi), ? for tu (du) and t ρ for
tu plural (dere). The titles are Tl for the formal Mr. (herr), Mrs. (fru), and
Miss (fr0ken), abbr. hr., fru, frk. T2 stands for professional names used in
address like doktor, oberst etc. F i s first n a m e , / , last name, and TV nickname.
The chart does not provide for sex differences or for the limitations on the
use of formal titles. At the end of each line the possibilities of usage are in-
dicated, with examples. Broken lines represent less usual alternatives.
108 Blessings of Babel
Chapter 18

Norwegian: Sexism

Costom drepr qvenna caria ofriki. (The

tyranny of men destroys the chances of
women)
Poetic Edda, ed. Bugge p. 304
Nora: Jeg tror at jeg er f0rst og fremst et
menneske, jeg, ligesävel som du, - eller
ialfald, at jeg skal fors0ge pâ at bli'e det.
(Nora: I believe that I am first and foremost
a human being, I, just as well as you, - or
at any rate, that I shall try to become one.)
Ibsen, Samlede Vœrker 1899,6.333

A millenium or more separates the GuSrun of Atlamdl hin gr0nlenzku from

the Nora of Ibsen's A Doll's House, yet they are both concerned with
women's lack of power in relation to men, the problem of women's liberation.
Guírun's words ring out with proverbial force. As the widow of Sigurd the
Dragonslayer, she was not exactly a clinging vine. Her words were the mock-
submissive prelude to her mass revenge on husband Atli for the slaying of her
brothers. She proceeded to serve up their children to her husband as a festive
meal, whereupon she murdered him in his bed.
Nora behaves in a more civilized way, but her words, too, are classic. By
declaring that she has not been a menneske, she admits to a lower status than
that of her husband. (It is at least amusing, if not significant, that the first
translator, a Danish schoolteacher, rendered her words: "I think that I am
first and foremost a man, like you.") But when Nora separates herself, it is
a rejection that in modern terms is a kind of psychic murder.
Both women are capable of dissembling in order to manipulate their men,
and in the showdown they are capable of coming out in the open and
asserting their personalities. They typify what many have come to think of as
the strong, Scandinavian woman, who is believed to have greater social
freedom and economic power than other women of the west European world,
on a par with and perhaps in advance of American women.
It may therefore come as a surprise to some that the Norwegian press of
today, and certain parts of the academic world, are ringing with renewed
calls for the assertion of women's rights. This nyfeminisme (neo-feminism),
as it is often called, sounds like the echo of a battle that is being waged on
many fronts in our own country as well. Norwegian women who have
belonged to the older women's rights organizations are somewhat bewildered
110 Blessings of Babel

by the slogans of the new movement, uncertain whether it is indeed a con-

tinuation of the old women's movement or something entirely novel.
A woman's magazine which sounds like a Norwegian version of Ms has
begun appearing under the ambitious name of Sirene. The word sirene, like
its English and French counterparts, has the dual and hence ambiguous
meanings of (1) "a beautiful, but false and dangerous woman" and (2)
"a powerful sound-signaling apparatus whose tone resounds when steam or
compressed air stream against a rotating disc with a series of holes." (Norsk
Riksmâlsordbok) This very punnish title, which embraces both the glamorous
and the ominous aspects of womanhood, may serve as an example of how this
new movement has begun to affect the Norwegian language.
My interest in the topic and my reason for bringing it to the attention of
linguists is that both in Scandinavia and the United States militant women
(and their male supporters) have put the finger on language as a factor in male
dominance. To the extent that this is true, it becomes a question of socio-
linguistics and involves sex as a factor in linguistic variation.
There is of course nothing new in the idea that men and women speak
differently. A recent Norwegian study is by the linguist Magne Oftedal,
"Notes on Language and Sex." (1973). He not only cites instances from
various parts of the world, but also summarizes briefly the differences
observed in his own local dialect of Norwegian from the south coastal town
of Sandnes. Besides listing specific male/female differences on each linguistic
level, he sums up the more general difference as one of greater "carefulness"
on the part of women. He attributes this to their being liable to more severe
judgments, especially on their "moral" behavior, but a number of his ex-
amples also point to women as spearheads of "refinement," a tendency to
adopt urban expressions in preference to rural ones. He finds them "usually
about one generation ahead of men in linguistic development."
Similar observations were made by another Norwegian dialectologist,
Anders Steinsholt (1964), whose study and restudy of the rural dialect in an
urbanizing neighborhood to Larvik is an outstanding sociolinguistic con-
tribution. He writes: "I have spoken with several women in the transitional
area (brytingsomradet) who use a more modern language [i.e. more urban]
than their sons, and it is almost a rule that the members of a family divide
into three groups linguistically: the father in one, the sons in one, and the
mother and daughters in a third." (Steinsholt 1964: 31). He finds that men
stop changing their language by age 30, while women are likely to go on
adapting. He attributes this to the greater demands made on proper female
behavior.
Amund B. Larsen, dean of modern Norwegian dialectologists, made a
similar observation as long ago as 1912 in reference to nineteenth century
dialect in Bergen: "Among the factors which now more than before con-
 Norwegian: Sexism 111

tribute to preserving a careful (omhyggelig) language one must certainly

mention the women of the cultivated classes." (Larsen and Stoltz 1912: 268).
In 1935 Sommerfelt discussed the differences in male and female language,
using examples from the plays of Ibsen. As the excellent sociolinguist he was,
he rejected a biological explanation in favor of a social one: "Many things
suggest that men and women were far more similar in physique in earlier
ages, and the feminine charm and gentleness is not especially noticeable
among many primitive peoples. It is conceivable that the difference will
again be erased as the two sexes become more and more equal in modern
society. Sports have already led many young girls of our day to use words
and expressions that have previously been regarded as male and which their
grandmothers would not have dreamt of using" (Sommerfelt 1936: 22).
Similar views are found in early studies from Denmark and France. Anker
Jensen reported in 1898 on linguistic innovations in an urbanizing rural
community near Arhus in Denmark: the women were well in advance of men.
In French Switzerland Gauchat found the same in his famous study of the
"unité phonétique dans le patois d'une commune" at Charmey in 1905.
Otto Jespersen summed up the evidence from that time in a classic study
first published in 1906 entitled "Mands Sprog og Kvindes Tale" (Man's
Language and Woman's Speech), later revised into a chapter in his book
Language (1922: 237-254). His data were inadequate, and his views sound
sexist to today's feminists; but he caught one significant generalization:
that many of the differences were due to the division of labor between men
and women in most societies. He wrote: "Many fundamental changes have
occurred in our time with respect to the division of labor, and therefore also
in education, so that one can predict that the relationship of the two sexes to
linguistic activity will undergo extensive changes." (Jespersen 1906: 592).
Many of these old discoveries are being made anew, as often in linguistics.
We find in a study of speech variation in the American Piedmont by Levine
and Crockett (1966) that women are among those spearheading the
"community's march toward the national norm." (1966: 97) Labov has also
commented on women's "sensitivity to prestige forms": "the correct
generalization then is not that women lead in linguistic change, but rather
that the sexual differentiation of speech often plays a major role in the
mechanism of linguistic evolution. ...We are dealing with some positive factor
here, operating upon a subtle set of conventional social values." He speculates
that this factor may be "an expressive posture which is socially more
appropriate for one sex or the other." (Labov 1972: 304).
While the linguists so far cited have limited themselves to observing the
social roles of the sexes, a young Norwegian social psychologist, Rolf M.
Blakar, at the University of Oslo, has taken up the cudgels in behalf of
women. He sees their linguistic roles as one expression of the ways in which
112 Blessings of Babel

language determines and conserves the inequities of society. He has embodied

his views in a small textbook, Spräk er makt "Language is power", (1973)
and several articles, which have caused a bit of a stir.
Blakar finds that the Norwegian language is essentially sexist in the sense
that it sees the entire world in male terms and assigns to women an inferior,
dependent position. Not content to accept this as the way things are, he
envisages a revolution in the social conventions that regulate the relations of
the sexes. In fairness to Blakar I note that he is not so naive as to think that
social realities can be changed merely by relabeling them (p. 63). Sexism is
only one of several causes he uncovers through an analysis of the power
relations expressed in language. He is aware of similar biases in the treatment
of differences in class, age, and region. And he is peculiarly sensitive to the
discrimination he finds in the treatment of Norway's national minority
language, the Nynorsk-Norwegian in which he writes.
The examples Blakar presents to bolster his claims are amusing enough to
make his arguments at least readable, though their clear agitatorial purpose
may tum some readers off. He offers evidence from (a) the use of titles of
address, (b) the descriptors of occupation, (c) the synonyms for "man"
and "woman," (d) word association tests, and (e) the listing of husbands
and wives in official registers.
A professor's wife is liable to be introduced as fru professor Hansen,
but what if she is a professor in her own right? And in that case, why should
not her husband be called herr professor Hansen even if he has no right to
such a title? What we in English call a "working woman" is known in
Norwegian as an yrkeskvinne\ why is there not a word yrkesmann? In English
we have "career women"; why not also "career men." Synonyms, he finds,
are not only more numerous for women, but also quite a bit less com-
plimentary than for men. An intellectual woman, for example, is a "blue-
stocking"; an intellectual man is apparently just intellectual.
In a sampling of one thousand Norwegian men and women, responses to
the stimulus word "man" included such words as "work," "worker," and
"career," while "woman" elicited such words as "sex," "bed," and "mother."
In the 1972 official register of marriages every husband-to-be is listed by
name and title, while every wife-to-be is listed by name only. Blakar contends
that these and other practices of a similar nature determine the views of the
new generations as they learn the language and are gradually socialized. These
biases help to channel the activities of children and determine the goals they
set for themselves in growing up to adulthood.
On the basis of this analysis Blakar proceeds to offer countermeasures to
neutralize the discrimination revealed by these ways of speaking. His first
proposal is what has come to be called "consciousness raising" in this
country: to make users of the language aware of the ways in which their
 Norwegian : Sexism 113

habits of speaking reveal traditional and mostly unconscious discrimination.

This is true not only of such obvious occupational discriminations as
stortingsmann ("congressman") vs. vaskekone ("washer woaman"). It applies
also to such apparently neutral occupational terms as doctor, judge, or pastor
for which "he" is the standard pronoun, while terms like nurse, gossip, or
virgin are associated with "she".
He proposes a technique of reversal by which one will speak of a "male
judge" or even "a male chairman" to emphasize the implicit discrimination in
the usual term. In a series of prose poems he exemplifies his technique
(pp. 80-83); I include one example:
FRIDAGEN DAY OFF
Han hadde fri i gâr He had the day off yesterday
— yrkesmannen. — the career man.
Derfor gjekk han som sladremann So he went around as a gossip man
frâ hus til hus from house to house
og hygga seg saman med alle dei andre and had a cozy time with all the
skravlemennnene og kaffemennene other chatterbox men and the
coffee drinkers
i bygda. in the community.
While my translation is obviously inadequate because of the lack of certain
expressions in English, the idea will be clear, and anyone can supply examples
from English.
The concept underlying Blakar's argument, that "language is power," is
of course not new. It was formulated by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking
Glass, when Alice protested at Humpty-Dumpty's contention that he could
make a word mean just what he chose it to mean. "The question is," said
Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The
question is," said Humpty-Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all."
In his book Black Power (1967), Stokely Carmichael quoted this passage
and went on to apply it to black liberation: "We shall have to struggle for the
right to create our own terms through which to define ourselves and our
relationship to the society and to have these terms recognized." "Those who
have the right to define are masters of the situation." (Carmichael and
Hamilton 1967: 37). The replacement of "Negro" by "Black" is a para-
digmatic example of such a redefinition. But the slogan "Black is beautiful"
would hardly have won such resonance if it had not been for the Supreme
Court decision on desegregation in 1954 and the freedom marches led by
Martin Luther King. Even the relabeling involved has not solved the race
problem; many have not accepted it, as Rafky (1970) found in studying "the
semantics of negritude" at an integrated American university. The use of such
terms as "black" or "Afro-American" expressed attitudes that were regarded
as either "liberal," "alienated," or "militant."
114 Blessings of Babel

Stimulated by the advances of Black Power, the feminist movement in

our country has adopted the attack on sexist language as one of its strategies.
In some cases they have gone deeper than the lexicon and attacked such basic
parts of the language as the pronominal system, which in Indo-European
languages forces us to mark sex in the third person. It is no doubt too facile
to reply that women can hardly be said to have a higher position in societies
where languages like Japanese, Chinese, Eskimo, or Tamil are spoken.
Linguists have offered a weightier objection, which turns on the concept
of "markedness," as proposed by Jakobson and others of the Prague School.
In the opposition man/woman the noun "man" and the pronoun "he" are
the unmarked members of the opposition and can therefore be used generical-
ly whenever the contrast is neutralized.
I am not sure whether it is any comfort to women to know that they are
the "marked" member of this pair, since it quite simply means that they are
set off from men by virtue of a single feature, which we can only describe as
[+sexuality]. Because this feature is ultimately biological in its base, it cannot
be eliminated. But its effects need not have spread throughout our social
Ufe in the pervasive way it does. One may say with the French, "Vive la
différence," but only so long as the difference does not obscure the common
humanity of men and women.
My own comment on the arguments advanced by Blakar and others is
that even though some of them are one-sided, unreasonable, and unrealistic,
they deal with a real and an important problem. We have such well-written
articles as Robin Lakoffs "Language and Woman's Place" (1973), which goes
no farther than to urge teachers of language to be aware of the discrimina-
tions implicit in language. Her article is also notable in representing one of the
few realizations by current linguists that sentences may be "acceptable" or
"unacceptable" for reasons entirely outside the grammar. (Lakoff 1973: 77).
Interesting also is a thoughtful survey of recent research presented by
Virginia Clark, as well as an excellent annotated bibliography by Thorne and
Henley (1975). Much of it reminds me of the General Semanticists of the
1930's and 1940's, headed by Korzybski, Hayakawa, and Stuart Chase. Their
concern with "the tyranny of words" was not balanced by an understanding
of "the freedom of words." There is much that reminds one of the doctrines
of linguistic relativity, of which more below. Blakar's view that "language
reflects and conserves social realities" is in line with this idea, which over-
looks our vast potential for linguistic innovation and creativeness.
My feeling is that Blakar's claim about language as a conserver of social
realities is either a truism or a trick. Most of the discrimination of which
women complain today involves that they are typed in certain occupations
and virtually excluded from others. But when women are assigned roles as
home-makers and men the role of career-makers, it is not because language
 Norwegian : Sexism 115

puts it that way. The language expresses, if somewhat conservatively, the

realities as the vast number of men and women have seen it down to our day.
As long as this is true, it is good that language should tell us so. When it
changes, as it may and should, the language will respond, as it already has.
Language as the preserver of tradition is not bad until we begin to discover
that the tradition it preserves is bad.
That this one has bad aspects can hardly be denied, and I should be the
last to do so. In a perceptive note to Lakoffs article, Hymes writes that the
stereotypes of sex roles may have been as much of a detriment to men as to
women: "The association of male creativity in the arts with effeminacy is
a well-known instance" (Lakoff 1973: 79). To this one can add that teaching
is not entirely free from the same problem. Anyone who has come up
through the American public school system can testify that to grow up with
bookish interests is to qualify for epithets like "sissy" and "teacher's pet."
So it is true that language can reflect prejudice and contempt; but it can
equally express admiration and support, not so speak of affection and human
warmth.
When Blakar and others therefore speak of language as an instrument of
power, it seems to me that they are thinking too exclusively of political and
economic achievement. This no doubt says something about our western
standards of success. But the "power" that goes with being "male" in the
linguistic stereotypes brings anxieties and responsibilities that many men
would be glad to escape. The "powerlessness" that goes with being "female"
in the same stereotypes has been turned to account by women since the
dawn of time. Perhaps there are some advantages is being the "marked
member" after all; I suspect that the distinction is complementary rather
than contrastive.
I began with a quotation from the Edda and A Doll's House. I wish to
close with one from that well-known Swedish lover and hater of women,
August Strindberg. In Miss Julie (1888) the strong-willed heroine tells about
her mother: "She was brought up in the doctrines of her time about equality,
the liberation of women and all that sort of thing, and she had a definite
aversion to marriage. ...And on the estate men were ordered to do women's
work, and the women to do men's work, — with the result that the property
was about to go under, and we became the laughing stock of the community."
Miss Julie's mother was ahead of her time; but will her time ever come?
Chapter 19

Norwegian: A Frontier

When the first Norwegians arrived in South Dakota, the area was still a
battleground between the Sioux Indians and the United States Govern-
ment. A treaty of 1859 had opened the land to white settlers, and in 1861
Dakota Territory was created by Congress. The bloody Sioux War of 1862
in Minnesota led to the removal of the Minnesota Sioux to the Missouri
River in 1863. Beginning in 1855, the government had established a series of
forts on the Missouri. These performed the dual function of protecting white
settlers and of feeding the displaced Indians.
The accompanying map shows where the major forts were located in
relation to the cities which eventually grew up in the area (Haugen 1931).
Through 1872 Sioux City, Iowa was the terminus of the railroad. It was little
more than a collection of stores and homes on the river bottoms near the
confluence of the Sioux River with the Missouri.
118 Blessings of Babel

Its growth coincided with the coming to America of large numbers of

Norwegian immigrants, who found that land was already taken in the older
settlements in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. (Qualey 1938:
130-148) So they wended their way out to the open prairies of the new
Dakota Territory. Many of them found employment in Sioux City and
formed the nucleus of a long-enduring urban community in that city. I should
perhaps explain that this town was the place of my birth and for many years
the home of my parents.
Many Norwegians spread into the nearby area in what became South
Dakota, made their land claims and developed solidly Norwegian rural
communities in the eastern strip, especially in the southeastern corner of the
state. By 1900 they amounted to 12.8 per cent of the total population of
South Dakota. But before they could build proper homes and become the
prosperous farmers of a later age, most of them needed to earn the cash they
could get by manual labor for American employers. In the 1870's the chief
employer in this wilderness was the United States Government, which needed
blacksmiths, lumberjacks, and carpenters, as well as just plain common labor
to sustain the forts.
This was the area in which it became my good fortune to do my first
field work on the Norwegian language in America. This work was entirely
incidental to the historical research of my mother, Kristine Haugen ( 1879-
1956). She was then editor of an annual publication known as Opdalslagets
aarbok. This annual, which she edited from 1928 to 1935, was the organ of
Opdalslaget, one of the many organizations with ties to the homeland that
were formed among American Norwegians, collectively known as bygdelag
(Lovoll 1975). The members consisted of immigrants (and some of their
children) from the community of Oppdal (as it is written today) in the
county of South Tröndelag.
Group emigration from this secluded inland mountain valley began in
the 1860's, as part of the post-Civil War migration wave. The first known
group to arrive came to Sioux City on May 16, 1869, and duly combined a
celebration of their safe arrival with a commemoration of Norway's Con-
stitution Day on May 17. Many of them spread out into Dakota Territory
and in a few years one could speak of an Oppdal community in the farming
area between Yankton and Sioux Falls, particularly by the small towns of
Volin and Irene that sprang up later. The community stretched northwards
to Viborg, where it met a settlement of Danes from Jutland (Haugen 1976b:
42-49).
The contents of the annual published by Opdalslaget were, in my mother's
time, primarily of a historical-biographical nature. By letter and by personal
interviews she gathered data on people from Oppdal, chiefly the living early
settlers. The results were written up and printed in standard Norwegian
 Norwegian: A Frontier 119

(jBokmât) in the form of biographies or obituaries of the grand old men and
women of the community.
My share in this, aside from acting as chauffeur on these totally un-
subsidized safaris, was to record as best I could the words that fell from the
lips of these ancient narrators. The experience was enthralling to a young
man who had already discovered the study of Scandinavian dialects and
languages as the main ambition of his life.
The language I heard was a wholly unselfconscious example of a local
Norwegian dialect (which was also my own), laced with bits and pieces of
book Norwegian plus the remarkably distorted English words picked up by
these people in their contacts with Americans. In many cases the form
showed that they were learned at a time when the Norwegian pioneers had
not yet mastered any form of English. Fort Sully (as I later learned that it
was spelled) was regularly pronounced /fort Sale/ as if it were "Fort Charley."
The government, their employer, was /guwament-en/, reflecting the common
American "guvament", with the Norwegian masculine definite article hooked
on the end.
While there may have been recording devices available in 1929, the
summer when I did most of my scribal work, I had no access to them and
jotted down from dictation the narratives which my mother would use.
She needed only to get the content and would then rewrite it into proper
Norwegian for publication. But I had already had a year of graduate work
and had done a good deal of reading in phonetics, so I did my best to render
the words as I heard them.
The result was hardly adequate for a true phonetic transcription, but my
jottings reflect in a broad way the variations from dialect to standard
Norwegian to the English of our speakers. The interviews were conducted in
Norwegian by my mother, for this was still the dominant language in the
community. I had already visited the area, spending summers there with
cousins, who formed our base of operations. There were also the annaul
summer meetings of the society itself, usually held in the assembly hall of
Augustana Academy in Canton, later to be merged with Augustana College
in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The young people of my own age were mostly
quite bilingual, speaking Norwegian (dialect) at home and English at school
and to outsiders. We were not outsiders.
The results of our joint expedition were eventually published in Op-
dalslagets Aarbok 1933. As Haugen 1931 they are only in part available in
English for the benefit of the descendants of those whose lives are here por-
trayed. While the contents are often humdrum, the early settlers had much
to tell about the inhumanly harsh conditions, particularly before there were
roads or adequate means of either transportation or living. It was rough
country, dominated by cowboys and soldiers, often in conflict with Indians
120 Blessings of Babel

and entrepreneurs of the saloonkeeper type, who made their living by provid-
ing for the social needs of men on the edge of the wilderness.
The preceding is by way of prelude to some notes and comments on the
American-Norwegian contact dialect that I recorded in that summer of 1929.
While I still have my original notes, they could hardly be published as
authentic linguistic texts in view of their imperfections. I have since published
a volume in Norway on the Oppdal dialect, to which I refer the interested
reader (Haugen 1982).
The Norwegian-American material that will here be presented is from the
narration of Halvor O. Aune (1846-1932), who emigrated to America in
1869, followed by his brother Ole Lie in 1870. (Obituaries in Opdalslagets
Aarbok 1936-38: 59). I have it in two versions, evidently told on two
different occasions. I shall present them exactly as recorded and discuss the
differences. They throw light on problems of language contact, while provid-
ing a key to the sociocultural landscape in which these Norwegian farm
youths had to orient themselves.
The two brothers had difficulty in finding work in Sioux City, so together
with a number of other Norwegians they made their way into the wilderness
of Dakota and found employment at one or another of the government
forts. Aune dictated a very long narrative (it took some ten hours to get it
all down), full of lively anecdotes, amusing but occasionally less than
plausible. The following text is one short sample. As Text 1 it is part of the
long, dicated narrative. As Text 2 it is told freely, in a form much closer to
his natural speech. Loanwords are italicized, loanshifts are starred.

Text 1
[Halvor and his brother Ole returned from Fort Sully to Yankton in the
spring of 1871, out of work.] Sa fikk vi brev fra basen at vi skulle komo opp
igjen, men kun e og Ola, oss villa'n ha. Sä skulle vi spare penger, vi skulle
gä tri hundrede mil* te foss. Og sä ble vi sàrf0tte. Sä kom vi te et rensj en
aften, en fransmann som ha ei skva. Hann ha salon, o de kosta fem o tjug sent
glase, du mâtt betal f0r du fekk fengra i glase, de va itt no kreditt à fo der.
SI màtt vi stoppe over natten* der. Sä si franskmann, vask deres fodder godt,
her er sape, skur dem godt. Da vi var faerdi med de, kom hann me en stor
vaskebolle*, hann to vist en par gallona, full me viski. No ska du vask f0tn me
de derre. Sa sa e te Ole, de bli en kostbar vask. De ikke non ann rà, de far
berre skure, vi ma rfinne resken. Vi vaska oss, vi lag der og kvilte godt og bena
blev all rait. Sâ sier je te Ola, gad vite om hann slo vekk den viskien. Vi sâ
efter, og hann slo den ikke vekk. Hann fyllte den vist i flasken igjen, og nogen
fekk dyrt betale vasken vor. Vi betalte om morgenen for brœkfest og seng og
s0ppel, en daler* og en halv pâ kvar. Sà spurte jeg hva viskien skull kost.
Inginteng, sa'n. (See version in Haugen 1939; 119; 1975: 111)
 Norwegian: A Frontier 121

(Then we got a letter from the boss that we should come back up, but
only Ole and I, he wanted to have us. So we were going to save money, we
would walk three hundred miles* on foot. And then we got sore feet. So we
came to a ranch one evening, a Frenchman who had a squaw. He had a saloon,
and it cost twenty-five cents a glass, you had to pay before you got your
fingers on the glass, there was no credit to be had there. So we had to stop
over night* there. Then the Frenchman says, "Wash your feet well, here's
soap, scour them well." When we were through with that, he brought a big
wash bowl*, it took at least a couple of gallons, full of whisky. "Now you
wash your feet in this here." Then I said to Ole, "This is going to be an ex-
pensive washing. But there's no other way, it'll have to do, we have to run the
risk. We washed, we slept there and rested well, and our feet were all right.
Then I said to Ole, "I wonder if he poured that whisky out." We watched,
and he did not pour it out. He probably filled it back in the bottle, and some-
one had to pay through the nose for our washing. In the morning we paid for
breakfast and bed and supper, a dollar* and a half each. Then I asked what
the whisky would cost. "Nothing," he said.)
Text 2
Hann Ola bror min o e, oss gjekk fir honnder mil.* Sâ va de en dag
oss vart sä sârfytt, oss ha vel kjippe sko, au. Sâ kom oss ât en rench. Den
rancAmanden* ha ord for ikke à vaere mors beste barn. Hann ha no ei skva,
kanske fier. Sà sa'n oss skull ta tà oss sko'n, og sâ fann η ti et tà sae sto'r kvi't
vaskarfatom som dem enno bruke og fyllt med viski. Sä sa'n oss skull vask
f0tn ti di. Minn da vesst oss itt ka oss skull gjârrâ. Dae kjem te â kost oss nâ,
ditte her, Ola, sa e. For ett lite glas kosta fem og tjug sent, og de gjekk mange
slike glas ti di fate. Da oss ha vaska oss, t0mt han det pà ei krokk, og sia saelt
hann det vist. Om morgon skull oss beta'l for oss. De var femti sent for losji
og femti sent for mat. Men kva skull viskien kost, spurt oss. Inginn teng,
svara'n. Menn da t«tkt e de tok oss rekti godt.... Og bena vart go. Sia ha e godt
for den mann, sj0l om hann ha ord for itt à vârâ tâ di bœ'st.
(My brother Ola and I, we walked four hundred miles* Then it happened
one day that our feet got very sore, I suppose we had cheap shoes, too. Then
we came to a ranch. The rancher there had the reputation of not being of
the best kind. He had a squaw, perhaps several. Then he told us to take off
our shoes, and he brought out one of those big white washbowls that they
still use and filled it with whisky. Then he told us to wash our feet in it. But
then we didn't know what we should do. "This is going to cost us something,
this here, Ola," I said. For one little glass cost twenty-five cents, and it took
many glasses to fill that bowl. When we had washed, he poured it back into
a jug, and later on I guess he sold it. In the morning we went to pay up. It
was fifty cents for lodging and fifty cents for food. But what did the whisky
cost, we asked. "Nothing," he replied. But then I felt real good about it [...]
122 Blessings of Babel

And our feet were healed. After that I had a good feeling about this man,
even though he had the reputation of not being of the best sort.)
Neither transcription shows such phonetic details as the palatalization of
II, nn, tt, or the retroflex flapped / (used once in supper, written Î). With
editing, Text 1 could pass as nineteenth century Dano-Norwegian, with some
bookish forms, e.g. deres fodder "your feet" (for fütterte), kun "only" (for
bare), morgenen "the morning" (for morneri), nogen "someone" (for noeti)
etc. But the dialect substratum also shows through, e.g. komo "come" (for
komme), tri "three" (for tre), te foss "on f o o t " (for til fots), ha "had" (for
hadde, kosta "cost" (for kostet), apocope in matt betaI "had to pay" for
matte betale) and skull kost "should cost" (for skulle koste). There are
alternations between dialect and standard, e.g. fekk/fikk "got", skull/skulle
"should", Ole/Ola, itt/ikke "not", e/jeg " I " etc. Our speaker has 13 instances
of apocopated -e but drops it in 6. Weak preterites keep dialect -a (villa,
vaska), but only some nouns do (fengra "the fingers", berta "the feet" vs.
natten "the night", flasken "the bottle".) Consistently non-dialectal are the
use of vi "we" (for oss) and suppression of the dative.
Aside from the loanwords the text is unmistakably Norwegian, intended
to be literary standard. As he dictated, he was in effect reading from memory,
in a form appropriate to a written account (which he is known to have com-
posed). But his modest schooling and his life as a manual laborer made his
diglossia imperfect.
Text 2 gives an entirely different picture. Here the oss for vi and the dative
are not suppressed. Apocope is regular and the circumflex is here marked
with an apostrophe (sto'r kvi't "(the) big white" for store kvite). The minor
deviations from the dialect are in the direction of literary style: men "but"
(for minn), var "was" for va, ta "take" for ta, spurt "asked" (for spor),
mors beste barn "mother's best child" (a literary quotation).
The English loans are of virtually the same order in both texts. They
show some minor variation in form (rench/rensh/ranch-, skva/skva (possibly
due to transcription). Note also en vs. et ranch, usually the former.
Norwegians had trouble distinguishing ranch from wrench. Other phonetic
adaptations are evident in rfinne "run" and sfippei "supper", resken "the
risk". Salon "saloon" and gallona "gallons" have stress on the first syllable
and a long o, i.e. spelling pronunciations. Consonants are geminated after
short vowels in gallona, rfinne, sfippel and kjippe. Grammatical adaptation
is complete in r0nne resken "(to) run the risk", kjippe "cheap" plural,
gallona "gallons". Squaw is correctly feminine.
Only the more obvious loanshifts are noted: the Norwegian daler was
inevitable for American "dollar", mil the American mile. Loanshifts are over
natten "over night" (for natten over)·, vaskebolle "wash bowl" (in Text 2
he uses the correct vaskarfaf, ranchmanden "the ranch man", i.e. rancher.
 Norwegian: A Frontier 123

Most of the loans are key terms in the new landscape: land measured in
miles, liquids in gallons, payment in dollars and cents, meals known as break-
fast and supper, ranches with Frenchmen who had squaws and ran saloons.
It was a perilous country where you ran risks and hoped it would be all right.
Poor immigrants could get only cheap shoes. Words like boss and whiskey
were known back home, but were clearly reinforced in America.
The narrative quality also differs: Text 1 is more circumstantial and
probably more accurate, but Text 2 is superior as a narrative. It establishes
the saloon keeper as a diamond in the rough, and the footbath becomes a
vignette in character study.
These small samples show that Norwegians did their part in the winning
of the West. They also offer illuminating evidence of how radically the speech
situation can alter a speaker's language, inducing a virtual inhibition when
the narrator believes he must elevate his language. They show how the
language is reshaped to meet new situations and how speakers follow norms
for bilingual behavior.
Chapter 20

Ethnicity: Swedes and Norwegians

To most Americans it is impossible to distinguish the emigrants from the

two countries that occupy the Scandinavian peninsula. I am often asked:
"Are Norwegians on the east or the west?" Among some there is a lingering
memory of squabbles long since past, but this has become a topic for stale
jokes. But it is actually a topic of some interest, and we shall here present
a survey.
The closeness of the two groups is reflected in the existence of popular
songs that appear in double versions, one Norwegian and one Swedish.
One of the most widely known (and sung) is a sentimental ballad that begins
with the following verse:
Farwäl du moder Swea, nu reser jag fran dig
Och tackar dig af hjertat, för det du fostrat mig.
Mig bröd du gaf sa ringa, det ofta ej förslog,
Fast mángen af den waran, du gifwit mer an nog. (Jonsson 1974)
According to the ballad scholar Bengt R. Jonsson, it appeared in broadside
form at least nineteen times between 1892 and 1900. But it also appeared
in a Norwegian version, which was no less popular, with appropriate modifica-
tions:
Farvel du Moder Norge, nu reiser jeg fra dig,
og siger dig saa mange Tak fordi du fostret mig.
Du blev for knap i Kosten imod din Arbeidsflok,
men dine laerde S0nner du giver mer end nok. (Amundsen and Kvideland
1975)
(Farewell, oh mother Sweden/Norway, I leave you now/and give you
hearty thanks because you fostered me./You gave me little bread, it did often
not suffice,/but others you gave plenty, more than you gave me. The
Norwegian version deviates in the last two lines: You were stingy in providing
for your working men/but to your learned sons you give more than enough.)
According to the Norwegian ballad scholars Amundsen and Kvideland it
is impossible to say whether the ballad is originally Norwegian or Swedish,
or who has composed it. But no one can doubt that it is the same ballad.
It illustrates plainly both the similarity that existed between Swedish and
Norwegian emigration and the difference that made it necessary to translate
it from one language to the other.
More examples could be found, the most striking example being the
ballad well-known both in Norwegian and Swedish, with the refrain "Skade
126 Blessings of Babel

at Amerika ligge skal sä langt herfra." (A shame that America should lie so
far away). But this song turns out t o have a well-known author, the Danish
Hans Christian Andersen!
The great migration f r o m Scandinavia to America has been a topic of
some interest in recent years and has occasioned great jubilees, e.g. the
celebration of America's bicentennial as well as the hundred and fifty years
since the beginning of Norwegian emigration. It has also been stimulated by
Vilhelm Moberg's epic treatment of Swedish emigration from Smâland to
Minnesota in a four-volume novel, and by the two brilliant films by Jan
Troell built upon the novel. (Moberg 1949-1959).
A Swedish Emigration Institute has been created in Växsjö and there are
similar institutions in Norway and Denmark. Nordic historians have shown
an intense, if belated interest in the emigrants. Professor Folke Hedblom
of Uppsala University has undertaken a series of recording expeditions to
save the last remnants of American Swedish.
But we must not overlook that the emigrants themselves began writing
their own history a century ago, and that American scholars of Nordic
ancestry have done yeoman work. My main point here, however, is that it
has nearly always been Norwegian-Americans who have done research in
Norwegian immigration and Swedish-Americans who have studied Swedish
immigration. Only in the rarest cases has anyone tried t o see it from a general
Scandinavian point of view. We lack a Nordic perspective. No one has written
the history of Scandinavianism in America.
The first problem is that of "nationalism," which in America has made
its appearance under the name of "ethnicity." It is my hypothesis that the
nationalism which Norwegians and Swedes bore with them on arrival had to
be weakened to ethnicity under the pressure of American opinion before
they could begin t o feel like Scandinavians.
The inability of Americans to distinguish them has been a factor of irrita-
tion: they are known as "Swedes," even as " d u m b Swedes." In a Norwegian-
American story a girl is insulted when an Irishman calls her "a nice Swedish
flicka." "Nothing irritated her more than being called Swedish." (Skaardal
1974: 102) The special traits of each nationality are held to be childish and
even comical. It is part of American folklore that Norwegians and Swedes
are implacable enemies, a topic for witticisms of the type, "What's a Swede/
a Norwegian?" "A Norwegian/a Swede with his brains knocked o u t . " Or
the visitor f r o m Sweden who is shown Indians and observes that they have
them in Sweden, too, only there they're called Norskies. Or a popular verse
about " t e n thousand Swedes ran through the weeds, chased by one
Norwegian."
Such "witticisms" were no doubt an echo of the actual unpleasantness
that arose during the years when the Swedo-Norwegian union broke up, f r o m
 Ethnicity: Swedes and Norwegians 127

1890 to 1905. But they did not come from Scandinavia and were not created
by Scandinavians. They are an American product that stems from a general
contempt for the various European nationalities. If anything they have tend-
ed to bring Scandinavians closer together.
One cannot deny that Scandinavians resemble each other biologically,
that they have closely related languages, that they have a common religious
development from belief in the Norse gods to Catholicism to Lutheranism,
and that they have grown out of an authoritarian into a democratic way of
life, from bureaucratic rule to social democracy, from poverty and ignorance
to affluence and education.
What is it then that actually separates them? First and foremost a national-
ism that builds in part on the political development from the time of Danish
Christian II and Swedish Gustavus Vasa. From loyalty to the king has grown
a national feeling, pride in one's own tradition, ill will or ignorance about the
others'. Nationalism in the modern sense is really something new, that hardly
goes very far behind the French Revolution. It is far from a natural given,
as the Romantics believed. It came with popular education, brainwashing if
you will, to which we are all exposed in school and in all the organs that
the state controls.
It has been maintained that the emigrants to a great extent lacked national
feeling when they left. They abandoned family and friends, a local society
that they well might love and miss abroad, but they only became nationalists
when they got to America (Lindmark 1971: 37). It was the contact with
other nationalities that made them ethnically self-conscious. The very pattern
of settlement was local, determined by the occupational opportunities they
found, often guided by a desire to live near relatives and friends. (Cf. "the
stock effect" discussed by Carlsson in Runblom and Norman 1976: 138).
Therefore it turned out not only that Norwegians and Swedes lived apart,
but also local fellow citizens from the rural (or urban) districts.
The so-called "settlements" were often built up by families or clans,
much like the society we see mirrored in the Icelandic sagas. Family cohesion
is at one end of the continuum that has nationalism at the other. Between
them lies that whole area of modern thinking about loyalty and group
solidarity that has been called "ethnicity."
The word builds on the Greek word for "people," ethnos, but as a
technical term it was launched in 1950, as a synonym of "national origin."
(McGuire 1950; Hollingshead 1950). In recent years it has won popularity
as a term that replaces "race" or "nationality," which are no longer applic-
able. (Glazer and Moynihan 1975). It may express itself in loyalty to one's
kin, extending no farther than genealogical research. Or it may search out
contacts with the spiritual heritage of one's old homeland and reawaken
interest in the language and literature that was lost. This is what has been
128 Blessings of Babel

called "the revival of ethnicity," a feature of modern American life. The

interest has even extended to the homeland itself (Lindmark 1971).
I may illustrate the problems involved by reference to my childhood home
in Sioux City, Iowa. My parents and I were not enthusiastic about trends
that in 1918 would deny us the right to maintain our ancestral heritage. We
belonged to a church that still had a Norwegian service each Sunday and a
Norwegian-born pastor who not only had confirmed me but also lent us
books from his well-stocked library. My mother, a teacher from Norway and
a warm-hearted patriot, entered me in a Norwegian young people's society
where recent immigrants from Norway were welcomed.
Our church belonged to the United Norwegian Lutheran Church. A block
away lay the rival church that belonged to Hauge's Synod. And down the
street lay the imposing Swedish Augustana Synod church, not very far from
the more modest Swedish Mission Church which became the Swedish
Covenant Church. In this little area, within sight, lay four different Lutheran
choices, all built by Scandinavian Lutherans, but sharply separated by
national and doctrinal differences. I can count on the fingers of one hand
the number of times we went to the Swedish churches.
Other contacts, however, brought us together with Swedes, especially
cross marriages. I read my first Swedish books in the local library. But the
churches stood there as a defiant reminder of the cleavages in Scandinavian
nationality and doctrine. I can say with assurance that no Norwegian or
Swedish is now preached and that the synods involved either are or will
soon be united in an American Lutheran Church.
If we turn from my microcosm to the macrocosm that is constituted
by the whole Scandinavian immigrant society in America, we see the same
splinterings. In her book The Divided Heart (1974) Dorothy Skaardal has
boldly treated Scandinavian-American literature together. But she is aware
of the special homeland loyalty: "Immigrants of the three nationalities felt
special kinship and sympathy with each other, but not a sense of cultural
union. They shared parallel fates, but each group stood or fell alone."
(Skaardal 1974: 88)
That their fates have been parallel is clear if one considers Helge Nelson's
map of Swedish settlement in America (1943, vol. 2). If one compares it
with Qualey's of Norwegian settlement, one notes at once the remarkable
concentration on the prairies of the Midwest, with Minnesota as its center.
(Qualey 1938). The Norwegian historian Svalestuen has prepared a Nordic
Emigration Atlas (1971), which suggests a similar set of causes of emigration.
It was a movement of small farmers and impoverished craftsmen who were
needed to cultivate the newly acquired expanses of the Middle West. Other
factors, such as religious distempers, played in, but mainly it was America's
cheap soil and good wages.
 Ethnicity: Swedes and Norwegians 129

Norwegian emigration is earlier than Swedish because Norway faced

the Atlantic and had less soil than Sweden. Not until 1880 did the Swedes
surpass the Norwegians in number. Emigration culminated in both countries
in 1882, and by 1910 there were about fifty per cent more first-generation
Swedes than Norwegians in the United States. One result is that while Nor-
wegians "dominate" in Wisconsin, they are less numerous in Minnesota. The
map also shows that Swedes have spread more widely. While Norwegians
led in states like North and South Dakota, Montana, and Oregon, and
approached the Swedes in Washington, the Swedes had leadership in a more
southerly belt covering Illinois, Nebraska and Kansas. They are also well
represented in New England, and in cities where there are few Norwegians,
like Boston, Rockford, St. Paul, Jamestown, Worcester, and Detroit. In 1900
there were twice as many Swedish industrial workers and only one half
as many in agriculture as the Norwegians. In 1910 65 per cent of all Nor-
wegians lived in the Middle West, but only 45 per cent of the Swedes (Run-
blom and Norman 1976: 246-7).
The history of Scandinavian institutions shows many examples of coopera-
tion, including marriage patterns: Swedes and Norwegians married each other
oftener than any other nationalities.
But it is clear that the languages, in spite of their modest differences,
were an essential barrier. The key was such words as norskdom and svenskhet,
which could no more be mixed than oil and water.
Both languages struggled against the overwhelming influence of English,
which not only drove them out of entrenched positions, but actually colored
them while they were still in use. A Swedish poet described what he called
"the new mother tongue":
I starei tar hon allting pà 'krita', In the store she takes all on credit,
Hon är för god att en menska chita. Too good to cheat any person.
Hon gâr til mitingen, vâr Fredrika, She goes to the meeting, our Fredrika,
Der Vangelistar' sa fromma skrika. Where vangelists piously shriek.
Hon lefver lyckligt. Man henne prisar She lives happily, they praise her
For hennes ögon, — tvâ fina pisar; For her eyes, - two fine pieces;
Men jag mest prisar den nya svenska, But I will praise the new Swedish,
som är sà olik den fosterländska. Which is so unlike the old country's.
(Skarstedt 1890).
The transition to English, which follows precisely the same course in both
groups, becomes to some extent a unifying factor. This first became possible
in politics, which was English from the start. Studies of elections in Min-
nesota and Wisconsin show that Norwegians and Swedes voted together
(Carlsson 1970; Norman 1974). A Swedish observer in 1910 claimed that
the Norwegians were more active in politics than the Swedes (Koch 1910:
363). But it is clear that the Norwegian Knute Nelson would never have
130 Blessings of Babel

become senator without Swedish votes, nor w o u l d the Swedish John Lind
have become governor o f Minnesota without the Norwegians. In battling the
Irish and the Anglo-Saxons they found a c o m m o n cause.
The specifically national qualities o f Norwegians and Swedes prevented
them f r o m forming a united front until their linguistic differences had ceased
to matter. The social features are the ones that disappear first: language,
manners, tradition, politics, literature. What they could take with them into
American life was their physique, their diligence, their reliability, their
religion, and to some extent their onomastic tradition. The ethnicity that
remains is strongly diluted, even if it may include a sense of family, but it
is more likely t o be Nordic than national.
Chapter 21

Relativity

A perennial topic of discussion among American students of language has

been the theory described by Benjamin Whorf as "linguistic relativity," also
known as the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis." It might rather be called "linguistic
determinism," since it maintains in effect that people's thinking is determined
by their language.
The theory has been subjected to severe criticism and is at present less
popular than one that stresses universalism. This view emphasizes the features
common to all languages and is less interested in the peculiarities of individual
languages.
There is much to be said for each of these complementary views, but a
one-sidedness that claims truth for only one of them is misleading and intel-
lectually dangerous. In this essay I am interested in analyzing some of Whorfs
insights and suggesting why they went wrong. They may be out of favor
now, but they are certain to reappear in one guise or another.
Whorf was an insurance adjuster who came under the influence of linguist
Edward Sapir. He made a name for himself by relating the grammatical and
lexical structures of certain American Indian languages (chiefly Hopi and
Navaho) to the supposed modes of thinking of their speakers. He contrasted
these with the structures of English and other European languages, which he
lumped together as Standard Average European (SAE), and the thinking
manifested by these.
In 1954 a special conference was organized under the direction of Harry
Hoijer to discuss Whorfs ideas (Hoijer 1954). At this meeting leading linguists
found themselves thrusting in thin air, as anyone can see by reading the
lengthy discussion (and Weinreich's perceptive review 1955). Whorfs works
were diligently quoted in the writings of the disciples of Korzybski, founder
of the "General Semantics" movement, e.g. S. I. Hayakawa and Dorothy Lee.
A major test of these ideas was launched by John Carroll, with inconclusive
results (Hymes and Bittle 1967).
It was Whorfs merit to take ideas that had been part of many linguists'
stock-in-trade and try them out on the languages of the American Southwest.
His eloquence and enthusiasm were infectious enough to excite a number
of linguists with anthropological interests, as well as a wide circle of laymen.
In this paper we shall examine some of the pitfalls of Whorfs thesis, sketch-
ing in some of his motivation and background.
132 Blessings of Babel

In a comparative study of Shawnee and English, Whorf (1941, reprinted

in ed. by Carroll 1956) provides two English sentences which (he claims)
have nothing in common but the present tense and the subject pronoun "I":
(a) I pull the branch aside
(b) I have an extra toe on my foot
Then he produces Shawnee translations of these and finds that they are
"closely similar; in fact, they differ only at the tail end":
(c) ni-l'0awa-'ko-n-a
(d) ni-l'0awa-'ko-0ite
"Shawnee logicians and observers would class the two phenomena as intrin-
sically similar." Whorf offers no informant's word for this statement, and he
presumably found no logicians to discuss it with. The opinion is based purely
on the surface similarity of the two sentences. We are justified in asking
just how valid his analysis is.
Basing our inquiry only on the information Whorf provides, the sentences
can be analysed morpheme-by-morpheme as:
(e) I-fork-tree-by hand-cause
(f) I-fork-tree-on toes-[have]
Sentence (c) is transitive, with "fork-tree" as the object of a movement
by the hand as instrument. Sentence (d) is possessive, with "fork-tree"
attributed to the toes as locative. Actually, the only common element in the
two Shawnee sentences is the phrase I'dawa-lco. Whorf claims that I'dawa
is a common term denoting "a forked outline" and that - 'ko may be a form
of a word denoting "tree, bush, tree part, branch, or anything of that general
shape." Whatever analysis one may make of its parts, the meaning of the
sentences offered shows that I'dawa-"ko need mean nothing more than
"branch," used in sentence (c) in a concrete sense and in sentence (d) in a
figurative sense.
Their similarity is somewhat less remarkable if we translate (c) as "I move
a branch with my hand," and (d) as "I have a branch on my foot." The
probability is infinitesimal that any considerable number of Shawnee had
extra toes on their feet. It is clear that sentence (d) was made up either to
illustrate Whorfs point or as a nonce and humorous way of referring to a
highly occasional deformity. It is no more than an illustration of the way
human imagination can and does see similarities between otherwise different
situations. It is no more surprising or expressive of any special quality of
Shawnee or the Shawnee mind than the fact that English "branch" can refer
to rivers, pipes, roads, antlers, families, languages, academic fields of study,
the houses of Congress, or business establishments, to mention only a few.
The striking difference between (a) and (b) is no more than an artifact of
his translation-interpretation.
Another of Whorfs examples in the same article illustrates the opposite
 Relativity 133

situation, close similarity in English corresponding to startling dissimilarity

in an Indian language, this time Nootka. Here sentences (a) and (b) are:
(a) The boat is grounded on the beach
(b) The boat is manned by picked men
Whorf analyzes these grammatically as "The boat is xed preposition y,"
and hence linguistically and logically identical. Today it would be seen that
there is a great difference in the deep structure between these sentences.
Even then it should have been evident that the two prepositional phrases
stood in wholly different relationships to the verbs. "On the beach" is a
locative with a participial adjective, while "by picked m e n " is the logical
subject of a passive verb.
The Nootka equivalents provided are:
(c) Tlih-is-ma
(d) Lash-tskwiq-ista-ma
Here the only common element means "third person indicative." W h o r f s
main point is that neither sentence contains a word for "boat". But there
is in each of them a word that suggests activity connected with a boat (or
rather, a canoe). In (c) this is tlih-, glossed as "moving pointwise," i.e.
"traveling in or as a canoe." No evidence is given to show that the highly
abstract gloss "moving pointwise" is a valid meaning; one naturally asks
from what actual situations this has been abstracted.
Whorf compares the word to a "vector in physics" rather than a "thing."
But the movement of a boat is not a "thing" in English either, and since the
modifier -is- means "on the beach," the meaning here can hardly be one
of pure motion. In English we have a phrase " t o be headed" (in a certain
direction), which could also be glossed as "moving pointwise"; but here
the metaphor is based on the human head as a director of motion and hence
the leading part, for instance of a boat. We can therefore gloss the morphemes
of sentence (c) as "boat headed-on the beach-[there] is," with more likeli-
hood of having identified the correct analysis underlying the interpretation
"the boat is grounded on the beach."
In sentence (d) the morpheme implying the presence of a boat is -ista-,
glossed as "in a canoe as crew." The form may be a locative adverbial, as
suggested by the gloss, but its analysis of reality is not very different from
our phrase "boat crew." It is modified by lash-tskwiq-, which is glossed as
"selected" (literally "select, pick" plus "remainder, result"). The whole
sentence may then be glossed as "select-ed-boat crew-[there] is," which is
a step earlier in the translation process than either of W h o r f s literal inter-
pretations, "they are in the boat as a crew of picked m e n " and "the boat has
a crew of picked men." And it is quite different from his free interpretation,
which makes use of the peculiarly English verb " t o man": "The boat is
manned by picked men."
134 Blessings of Babel

At best these sentences confirm the well-established fact that different

cultures talk about different things in nature and have applied different
analogies in expanding their vocabularies from the concrete to the abstract
(or vice versa). These are interesting and important features in the relation
of man to his culture and to his use of language within that culture. But they
do not justify any judgments concerning a qualitative difference in the way
men think. Similar discrepancies between the way languages partition nature
are not limited to such major gaps as those between Hopi and what Whorf
somewhat patronizingly called "Standard Average European." Such differ-
ences have been studied for French and German in attempts to derive some
kind of "soul" characterization of the respective peoples. Anyone who works
with the translation of texts from one language to another knows how often
even closely related languages require fudging.
WhorPs strongest claims relate to the influence of the categories of
grammar, i.e. the least conscious parts of the language. For English (and
SAE) these include such categories as number, gender, and tense. The very
fact that these are obligatory categories deprives them of any great informa-
tional value (Weinreich 1955). The speaker has no choice but to observe them
as conventions implanted in the language. If they reflect any view concerning
reality, it is at best one that was held by our presumably "primitive" Indo-
European-speaking ancestors.
Only an incredible naivete could suggest that the use of plurals has re-
quired us to develop or to function in a world of numbers and measurement,
that the use of the tense forms has led us to keep records and develop what
Whorf calls "historicity," or that the Hopi system of noun classification
(which is analogical to our gender) required the Hopi to pay more attention
to form and shape than other people. In the Southwest Project Hopi and
American children were tested for their classification of objects by shape.
The experiment failed, no doubt because the capacity of distinguishing and
classifying objects by form is surely universally human. (Maclay 1958).
The real test comes when abstracts that have no shape or form are classi-
fied. Gender classification is simple in dealing with animate sex-marked
beings. But when this is extended to inanimate and nonmaterial concepts,
there is nothing compelling about it. In Latin the sun is masculine, the
moon femine; in Scandinavian it is the other way around. English speakers,
who have a gender system only in the pronouns, would be hard put to
establish the probable gender in languages that retain gender distinctions.
Whorf makes much of the fact that the plural has a different range of
application in Hopi and English, especially in relation to mass nouns (1939,
in Carroll 1956: 140-141). But there are similar problems in SAE languages.
Whorf writes of Hopi that "water" does not mean "the substance water",
but one certain mass or quantity of water. In Norwegian vann/vatn means
 Relativity 135

"water," but et vann/vatn means "a lake." Similarly et brpd is "a loaf of
bread," etc. Such data do not compel a philosophic distinction between
"form" and "content."
Grammatical plurality only tells us that there is a difference between
one and more than one (or two, in languages with a dual), hardly enough
to make an important mathematical distinction. In Indo-European it is an
obligatory distinction that clarifies the relation between subject and verb,
nothing more.
Whorf is even more concerned with differences in the tense systems
(1939, in Carroll 1956: 143-145). The "three-tense system" of past, present,
and future "colors all our thinking about time." In fact, English has no
simple future tense; perhaps he confuses tense with time. These are lexical
devices, and future events are as often in the present ("I'm eating at six this
evening") or the past ("If I told h e r . . . " ) . A simplistic view lays out the
tenses in a straight line from left to right, but a phrase like "he laughed"
only tells us that the action took place before the moment of speaking -
a second or a million years ago.
A language may very well need adverbs to express such ideas, but one
can hardly imagine a language that does not somehow convey the idea of
past or futurity. According to Whorf, Hopi does not objectify time: "Nothing
is suggested about time except the perpetual 'getting later' of it" (1941,
in Carroll 1956: 143). More specific time indicators surely exist in Hopi, as
they do in English. In Old Norse there are verbs like sumra "to become
summer" etc.
Even if we sum up all the marked differences in grammatical structure
between Hopi and English, they scarcely support his contention that "they
point toward possible new types of logic and possible cosmical pictures"
(1941, in Carroll 1956: 241). The idea that bipartite Greek logic arose from
the bipartite Greek sentence has often enough been asserted. But the formali-
zation of logic and mathematics is rather a rejection of the often illogical,
if convenient, formulations of natural language. Mathematics may be seen
as an attempt to overcome the inadequacies of natural language for the pur-
pose of exact and elegant statement.
It therefore seems absurd when Whorf maintains that "modern Chinese
or Turkish scientists . . . have taken over bodily the entire Western system
of rationalizations" instead of corroborating it "from their native posts
of observation." (1940, in Carroll 1956: 214). But there is nothing in English
as such that enables us to talk about relativity or atomic energy or the double
helix. In comparison with mathematics even the English terminology requires
some distortion of the ideas involved.
When he maintains that the "formulation of ideas" is not strictly rational,
"but is part of a particular grammar," he is guilty of begging the question.
136 Blessings of Babel

We do not know, except by introspection (which is faulty) and by specula-

tion (which is airy) just how ideas are formulated. He may be right in attack-
ing a "rational" formulation, for ideas do come in extralinguistic form,
as images, patterns, relationships, flashes of illumination. But language is
eventually involved, for they are not communicable until they are formulated
in a particular language and organized into the proper syntactic, lexical,
and phonological patterns imposed by that language.
In Whorf s statement the "grammar" stands for the whole language, but
many meanings that we wish to convey are not conveyed by the grammar
at all. If my shepherd comes running to tell me that a wolf has eaten my
sheep, there are three basic facts to be conveyed, which require a common
vocabulary and a common grammar: "wolf', "eat," and "sheep." If he
has the time, he may fit them into an empty scheme: NPj (actor) - V
(action) - NP 2 (goal). But he need only cry "wolf!"
Divergent languages have different ways of expressing such sets of data,
but all languages have ways of marking the basic relations, even if they differ
widely in the way they apply them to reality. I therefore contend that the
grammatical system as such has only a minimal connection with any formula-
tion of ideas. The obligatory forms, like present - past or singular - plural
or indefinite — definite, are mostly redundant, and they can be expressed
lexically in languages where they are optional.
We shall look at possible approaches in our next chapter.
Chapter 22

Bilingual Judgments

Whorf s one-sided view of the language-thought relationship was not original

with him. The general disregard of European linguistic thought by many
American linguists in the 1940's kept them from realizing that these views
had been debated by European linguists for some two centuries.
Roger Brown (1967) found that the men of the Enlightenment were
inclined to think of reason as prior to language, making language a mere
vehicle of thought. Their mutual dependence was suggested by a prize topic
announced in 1757 by the Berlin Academy: "The influence of opinions on
the language and of language on opinions" (Christmann 1967: 463). The
essay that won the prize in 1759 by David Michaelis treated both sides of
the problem in detail, especially the latter part of it, in terms that proved
to have the greatest influence.
Coincident with and as a part of the development of literary Romanticism,
the emphasis shifted towards the priority of language over thinking. Wilhelm
von Humboldt went so far as to set up language as the independent variable:
"Language is the formative organ of thought." "Every language sets certain
limits to the spirit of those who speak it; it assumes a certain direction and,
by doing so, excludes many others" (Brown 1967: 68, 84).
The idea was most forcefully expressed by Vico in Italy. He was followed
by such Germans as Hamann, Herder, Fichte, and von Humboldt (Christmann
1967). These were countries that were divided and whose languages were
oppressed. The thesis of linguistic determinism became, in effect, a weapon
in the hands of nationalistic self-assertion. Herder proclaimed that "every
nation has its own treasury of such ideas as have become symbols, ideas
which are its national language: a treasury to which the nation has contribut-
ed for c e n t u r i e s . . . the intellectual treasury of an entire people" (Christmann
1967: 467).
Hamann declared that "every language requires a mode of thought that is
peculiar to it". Von Humboldt carried the idea to the point of declaring:
". . . So there lies in every language a particular world view (Weltansicht).
(Christmann 1967: 445). This idea was particularly welcome as an ideological
base for the teaching and cultivation of the native language and the throwing
off of classical and French influence. In modern times the idea was picked
up and endlessly varied by the German scholar Leo Weisgerber, whose
writings were influential in implanting in German textbooks the idea that
138 Blessings of Babel

"man comprehends and organizes physical and spiritual reality through his
mother tongue" (Basilius 1952, Note 18 speaks of his "cultish" terminology).
By contrast, the Swedish linguist, Esaias Tegnér, presented a more
balanced view in his Spràkets makt över tanken (1880) (The power of langu-
age over thought). After discussing numerous examples from his native
language of the kind of intellectual confusions that could be induced by
natural languages, Tegnér rejected all attempts to correlate "national psycho-
logy" with features of the grammatical structure, e.g. Lepsius' contention
that languages with a gender distinction reflected a more elevated moral
conception of sex roles in family life! He did not deny that "grammatical
features might exist that exerted an influence on the conceptualization of
speakers" (Tegnér 1922: 242). But he exemplified this with the elaborate
Swedish forms of address, which are rather lexical than grammatical: They
have caused "many, not just social occasions, but also social affairs in a wider
sense, to develop differently than they otherwise could and should have
done." (Ibid. 264-265).
The line of descent from the German cult of linguistic relativity practised
by von Humboldt and his followers, especially Max Müller, to the work of
Whorf is clear and unbroken (Christmann 1967). Boas was German by birth
and training and was familiar with this line of thinking. In his well-known
introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911), he
devoted some lines to the problem: "It is commonly assumed that the lingui-
stic expression is a secondary reflex of the customs of the people; but the
question is quite open in how far the one phenomenon is the primary one and
the other the secondary one, and whether the customs of the people have
not rather developed from the unconsciously developed terminology" (Boas
1966: 69). While he denied that "a certain state of culture is conditioned by
morphological traits of the language," he was willing to believe that the meta-
phorical use of certain terms might have led to the rise of certain views or
customs. These ideas were well calculated to lead up to his emphasis on
language study "as one of the most important branches of ethnological
study," not just for its practical value, but also because "the peculiar char-
acteristics of languages are clearly reflected in the views and customs of the
peoples of the world."
Sapir, a student of Boas', is often credited with formulating the relativity
hypothesis, but Sapir vacillated on this point, as Hymes has pointed out
(1964: 118-119, 128). In Language (1921: 234) he denied any correlation
between language form and cultural content: "When it comes to linguistic
form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the
head-hunting savage of Assam." But in a later article he was concerned with
demonstrating the value of linguistics "as a science," and he formulated the
power of language over thought: "The fact of the matter is that the 'real
 Bilingual Judgments 139

world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of

the group" (1929: 209). His examples are all lexical and leave it open to
question just what he meant by "language habits". But it should not be
overlooked that these phrases were part of a special plea for the importance
of linguistics.
Whorf s views, at least partly shaped by Sapir, bear a similar impress of
enthusiastic advocacy. In a study of the tenses of Chichewa, an East African
language, Whorf concluded: "It may be that these primitive folk are equipped
with a language which, if they were to become philosophers or mathematic-
ians, could make them our foremost thinkers .upon time" (1942, in Carroll
1956: 266). The fact that Hopi discriminates three kinds of conjunctions
all translated "that" in English convinced him that the "formal systematiza-
tion of ideas" in English, German, French, or Italian was "poor and jejune"
compared with that of Hopi: "English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon
compared to a rapier" (Carroll 1956: 85).
In his articles printed in the M. I. T. Technology Review, Whorf made it
a point to rehabilitate "the province of the despised grammarian" (1940,
in Carroll 1956: 211). He wanted to show his natural scientist readers "the
incredible degree of diversity of linguistic systems that ranges over the globe"
and so "foster that humility which accompanies the true scientific spirit."
The study of Hopi and other Indian languages would prevent us from regard-
ing "a few recent dialects of the Indo-European family, and the rationalizing
techniques elaborated from their patterns, as the apex of the evolution of
the human mind." (1940, in Carroll 1956: 218).
One is reminded that Whorf came to linguistics with a mystic point of view
which colors even his most scientific work. In Carroll's biographical sketch
we learn that Whorf studied Hebrew because he believed that "fundamental
human and philosophical problems could be solved by taking a new sounding
of the semantics of the Bible" (but see Barr 1961). An early enthusiasm for
the French linguistic mystic Fabre d'Olivet was replaced by Sapir's teachings
after 1928. But the study of Hopi that followed was inspired by a conviction
that "the Hopi actually have a language better equipped to deal w i t h . . .
vibratile phenomena than is our latest scientific terminology" (1936, in
Carroll 1956: 55).
Whorf s last major article and many minor ones appeared in a theosophical
journal published at Madras, India. In one of these he called for an apprecia-
tion of "the types of logical thinking which are reflected in truly Eastern
forms of scientific thought or analysis of nature. This requires linguistic
research into the logics of native languages and realization that they have
equal scientific validity with our thinking habits" (Carroll 1956: 21). In
"Language, Mind, and Reality" (1941) he found in "the scientific under-
standing of very diverse languages . . . a lesson in brotherhood which is
140 Blessings of Babel

brotherhood in the universal human principle" (1941, in Carroll 1956: 263).

He went on: "The Algonkian languages are spoken by very simple people,
hunting and fishing Indians, but they are marvels of analysis and synthesis."
For him linguistic research became part of the path to Yoga, with a "thera-
peutic value" to free patients from "the compulsive working over and over
of word systems".
We may find Whorf s goals sympathetic, but his immersion in these ideas
left many of his results in the state of being little more than cultish hypo-
theses. Much of the interest that his advocacy of the relativity hypothesis
aroused was a result of an emotional commitment on the part of anthropo-
logical linguists. They were all in the position of needing to justify the effort
expended on the study of American Indian languages. They needed better
grounds than the mere accumulation of knowledge. They had to contend that
language was not just a mirror, but also an essential factor in shaping human
culture. Whorf offered linguists the exciting prospect of making their dis-
cipline an "exact science," the title of one of his essays.
In discussing the theory of linguistic relativity we have hopefully succeed-
ed in showing that it is most congenial to the romantic thinker, while univer-
salism appeals most to the rationalist thinker. But we have not thereby
established a truth value for either.
It is worth considering that bilinguals might be the best resource for the
study of this problem. They alone can personally testify to the differential
effect of the "world view" imposed by different languages since they have
experience with monolingual speakers of each language. On this point there
is some limited evidence.
The anthropologist Robert H. Lowie recounted his experience as an
Austrian immigrant to the United States at the age of ten (Lowie 1945;
258). He tried to maintain his German as he learned English, noting both
the difficulties and the insights that resulted. "The popular impression that
a man alters his personality when speaking another tongue is far from ill-
grounded. When I speak German to Germans, I automatically shift my
orientation as a social being. I spontaneously adapt myself to the atmosphere
characteristic of their status, outlook, prejudices. The very use of the
customary formulae of politeness injects a distinct flavor into the conversa-
tion, coloring attitudes and behavior. Some of these modes of expression,
to be sure, are merely meaningless formulae, but by no means all." He refers
to the use of titles which contrasts with the "free and easy" American way of
dropping them. "Language is so intimately interwoven with the whole of
social behavior that a bilingual, for better or worse, is bound to differ from
the monoglot."
The French-born American writer, Julian Green, wrote about the problems
involved in writing books in two languages. He found that it was impossible
 Bilingual Judgments 141

for him to translate one of his books from French into English. He had to
sit down and write an entirely new book: "It was as if, writing in English,
I had become another person." (Green 1941: 402).
The German-Italian bilingual linguist Theodor W. Elwert explored in detail
his own problems of social and personal adjustment to a succession of early
language-learning experiences. He rejected Lowie's formulation: "On chang-
ing languages, we do not change our character [Wesen], but our attitude
[Verhalten] . . . In principle, the process is the same as in changing from
one setting [Milieu] to another of the same language.... We do not change
our behavior (and even less our personality) because we change language, but
we change language because we have to change our behavior in a new setting
. . . Language is only a part of a larger behavioral complex" (Elwert 1960:
344, fn. 1).
It becomes evident from these and other accounts that the learning of a
second language requires adjustment to the ways of speaking and behaving
that are customary in the new group. This adjustment leaves the bilingual
with a keen sense of the difficulty in keeping two languages and the cor-
responding cultures apart. Lowie gives many valuable examples of his own
problems in maintaining equal adequacy in both languages.
Because none of the three people here mentioned discusses possible
experiences with non-Indo-European languages (though Lowie knew Crow,
as Ives Goddard has pointed out to me), their observations may be con-
sidered inadequate, in view of the claims made by Whorf. But there is no
reason to believe that other memoirs or self-reports would reveal anything
different. Thinking in one language is different from thinking in another,
but it is reasonably clear that this is largely a matter of vocabulary. One
thinks most readily in each language about those topics that one has learned
the vocabulary for in that language. Most bilinguals whom I have consulted
on this problem have denied that they felt like a "different person" in speak-
ing their other language.
From my own experience I can confirm the views of Elwert. One does
not become a different person or think differently in another language that
one feels as an intimate part of one's experience. One is glad to act as a fully
accepted member of the speech community, and as such one does adopt a
different set of expectations. In formulating some ideas one may feel that
one language facilitates the formulation while another forces a rather
different formulation. Each language has its shortcuts and its circumlocu-
tions. These have little to do with the grammar in the usual sense: phonology,
morphology, syntax.
Norwegian morphology requires that the definite article be suffixed on
nouns, but preposed before adjectives: huset "the house", det hvite "the
white" (one). If the phrase includes both adjective and noun, there is a
142 Blessings of Babel

choice. In daily life one uses both: det hvite huset "the white house." But
in formal (and old-fashioned) style the second article can be deleted: Det
hvite hits "the White House". This complex rule of Norwegian style contrasts
with the simple English "the." A rule of syntax governs the use of the article
to replace possessives: han mistet hatten "he lost the [i.e. his] hat." A
lexical rule requires the article with abstracts (which is rare in English but
known from French and German): kjœrligheten "[the] love", kunsten
"[the] art." These (and a host of more detailed rules) require learning and
can produce interferences for bilingual speakers.
So one has a more than adequate basis for paraphrasing Whorf s statement
about the Hopi plural: the definite article is not the same in Norwegian as in
English, whether phonologically, morphologically, or semantically. But there
is no warrant for claiming that for this reason Norwegians "think" differently
from Americans. The definite article is not a philosophical concept, however
difficult grammarians may find it to formulate rules for its precise use in one
or several languages. Among other things, it is a mechanical device for mark-
ing identity of reference in a sequence of noun phrases. It is especially useful
in languages like English and Norwegian, which lack case endings. For one's
"world view" it has as much significance as does the mortar that joins the
bricks in a wall for the thinking of those who live within.
Macnamara has reduced the cognitive problem to absurdity by describing
the bilingual's dilemma if Whorf s idea should be true (Macnamara 1970:
25-40). Either he uses Language) or Language2 and is unable to understand
the other, or he uses both and is unable to communicate with himself!
The answer to this is, of course, that every speaker can interpret systems
different from his own even if he cannot produce them. A bilingual simply
interprets Lj and L 2 for their intended meanings, and in many cases even
forgets which language he learned them in. This suggests that there must be
a store of knowledge in the mind that is relatively language-free. This may
turn out to be the answer to Whorf s problem as well.
Chapter 23

Language Choice

"...There are, perhaps, two main reasons

why one should learn the language of
another man: in order to trade with him,
or to have power over him, religious or
political."
(W. Whiteley 1969: 55)

Bilinguals are by definition persons who have a choice between dialects or

languages. In practice it is not uncommon that they choose to use one rather
than the other. What are the reasons? Is there a rationale that one can
identify? The topic is closely connected with the problems of minority
languages and of what has come to be called "language death."
To my knowledge the first to suggest the importance of studying the fate
of dying languages was Morris Swadesh, whose research on Native American
languages had given him abundant opportunity to observe languages with
only one or a few speakers. In an article on "obsolescent" languages he noted
that "many of the circumstances described are similar to those found in the
languages of some immigrant groups..." (Swadesh 1938, pubi. 1948: 226;
see also Elmendorf 1981). An early student of language choice was Simon
R. Herman (1961), who described the vacillation of immigrants to Israel
between English and Hebrew, due to differential reception. These observa-
tions could be amplified by my studies of American immigrant groups (Haugen
1953 etc.).
On looking back at my own choices, as they were outlined above (chapter
2), I realize that I was in some ways deviant, downright un-American. The
home atmosphefe of ethnic loyalty was basic, reinforced by my two happy
years as a boy in Norway. Norwegian became an ethnic imperative, re-
enforced by a variety of rewards. An observer might conclude that I was
enabled to play the role of a big frog in a little pond. It has therefore puzzled
me in later years to meet countrymen who refused to speak their mother
tongue with me. I have asked myself: how can people become so anglicized
that they reject what ought to be a welcome opportunity?
During my field work in Wisconsin and Minnesota I often asked the
question and got some forthright answers. A woman who preferred Norwegian
to English sermons added: "As things are in this country, people marry into
other nationalities, and the children don't get taught Norwegian. So I suppose
144 Blessings of Babel

it's best that it's losing out, but I'll be sorry to see it go entirely." "I think
it has to go that way," said one man: "we're in America, English is the
language of the land..." Several commented on the influence of the public
school. As one man put it, "When my boy was small, he spoke only
Norwegian, but after starting school, he changed right over." (Haugen 1953a:
273).
The picture that emerged was one of a large number of individual choices,
gradually turning whole communities over from one language to the other.
In horse-and-buggy days the individual farm was more of a self-contained
unit, with less American contact than later. What is often called "language
loyalty" may in some cases be more like cultural isolation. This is certainly
the explanation of the survival of German in Pennsylvania, of French in
Quebec, and of the constantly immigrating Hispanics today.
In a spirit of resignation I was led to accept the idea of regarding the
learning of languages as a transaction of commodities. In an immigrant
community the mother tongue is a precious commodity as long as it preserves
the individual's identity and offers a perspective of future well-being.
Learning of language exacts its price from the learner, and he or she will
resist paying the price unless the benefits it brings are commensurate with
the cost. (Haugen 1983)
Any language has its market value, which like those of all other com-
modities, fluctuates with the market. The market in question may be called
a language market, which determines the values that an individual or a society
attaches to each language. Happily the market value is not only or even
necessarily monetary, although that is surely important. In an immigrant
group where most members are dependent on the majority society for jobs,
facility in the majority language is essential.
It need not be an immigrant community. Nancy C. Dorian (1981) has
chronicled the story of the decline of Gaelic in east Sutherland in northern
Scotland. In part the tale goes back to a desire by landowners to introduce
sheepgrazing in order to gain greater profits from the Scottish highland. The
crofters who had their homes there were evicted and removed to the coast.
Here they were expected to learn fishing, a trade for which they were quite
unprepared. They became a fishing proletariat in the coastal villages, purveyors
of cheap food, looked down upon and socially segregated.
These fishermen proved to be the most retentive of Gaelic, since they were
isolated from their fellow townsmen during the general turn-over of the
Scottish people from Gaelic to (Scots) English. Dorian does not dignify it
by calling it "language loyalty"; she terms it "linguistic lag."
She notes that in 1500 Gaelic speech was virtually universal in Scotland.
But thanks to a small anglified upper class, the language that had been
Scotland's, was gradually stigmatized. It became "lower class," and as it
 Language Choice 145

retreated into the Highlands, the language of a wild, barbarous people. Dorian
is sympathetic to the plight of her informants and denies that the result is
inevitable (p. 72, 111). But her careful and lively account brings to light
social trends and human weaknesses that come as close as possible to making
"language death" inevitable.
Anyone who did not wish to participate in the cycle from Gaelic to
English was isolated, "queer," or even obstreperous, as we see from the
punishments meted out to Gaelic-speaking children. This barbarous form of
education was also known in American schools in immigrant communities.
Even where the stick has been hidden behind the schoolroom door, the carrot
that replaced it has had the same effect. The larger society has a plethora
of inducements for the bright boy or girl, provided they are not linguistically
deviant. Gaelic speech is a remediable "defect," a part of group identity that
can be shed.
From Scotland we turn even farther afield, to East Africa. We are well
instructed by Carol Scotton in her book on "choosing a Lingua Franca" in
Kampala, the capital of Uganda (1972). Here the choice is three-way,
between one of a multitude of local vernaculars; Swahili, the East African
lingua franca; and English, the language of the former rulers. English is the
only official language, contrary to neighboring Tanzania, where Swahili is
official. A reason for the difference is that Uganda is predominantly Christian,
while Swahili is traditionally associated with Mohammedanism.
Swahili has nevertheless had phenomenal success in spreading among the
people, even in Uganda, as the language one uses to members of other tribes
than one's own. Being a Bantu language, it is not hard to learn; Kampala even
has a dialect of its own. Educated speakers are contemptuous, calling it the
language of "prostitutes and swindlers." English is the language of the
educated, since it is learned only in school, where it is the medium of
secondary instruction. Within Uganda it "characterizes the everyday public
dealings of the educated and successful African." (p. 26). But to use it with
fellow workers is offensive, except as a switching technique.
The image of Swahili as a neutral language that implies nothing about
one's ethnic or socioeconomic status was confirmed by Scotton's studies in
Kenya (and of Pidgin English in Nigeria) (1976). These situations show that
"neutral" ethnicity is a quality that adheres to these languages by contrast
with the local vernaculars. The educated have the further option of using
English as well, in some situations as a device of status-raising, in others
of varying the social distance.
The trilingual situation in East Africa is not unlike my own situation.
I have a three-way choice, arranged as two double dichotomies, and the
African system can be similarly diagrammed:
146 Blessings of Babel

In speaking to a member of my own Norwegian dialect community I will

use that dialect; it is the vernacular of my childhood and of my contacts
with its speakers. Just so a Ugandan will speak his vernacular to members of
his own tribe. To other Norwegians I will use standard (Dano-) Norwegian,
i.e. Bokmâl as a neutral language, but also to Swedes and Danes (as Ugandans
communicate in Swahili with Tanzanians and Kenyans). There is even an
interesting historical parallel in that my Norwegian has Danish as one of its
ancestors, just as Swahili is imported from the coast into Uganda.
Among Norwegians in America, however, the choice between vernacular
and standard existed only as long as sermons and parochial schools were
held in Norwegian. Then and later the major choice was between an American-
Norwegian vernacular and American English, corresponding to the African
choice between Swahili and English and the Scottish one between Gaelic and
English.
We should emphasize that in none of the situations of language choice
are we speaking of an absolute either-or. Wherever possible there is a
continuum, within which each speaker places him- or herself in relation to
other speakers. In east Sutherland Dorian explicitly points to the constant
switching of codes as well as extensive borrowing (transfers), chiefly from the
more prestigious language into the lesser one. She has made a special study
of so-called "semi-speakers" of Gaelic. They represent that fringe of passive
bilinguals whose memories retain much of the grammar and lexicon, but not
enough to qualify as proper speakers. Scotton also notes the frequency of
switching from Swahili to English and the tendency of Swahili speakers to
borrow from English.
In short, the situations described by these scholars correspond very closely
with those that are well-known in American immigrant languages, as Swadesh
foresaw. My dual bilingualism appears to have its parallels wherever languages
meet under conditions of unequal extension or prestige. Minorities are
dominated by elites, and languages are means by which elites maintain their
dominion. They make the minorities uncertain of their own values, and they
press or encourage them to reject their old ethnicities, without necessarily
granting them admission to or status in the new society.
Scotton and Dorian are in a sense looking at language choice from
opposite ends of the spectrum. Dorian is studying "language death," while
Scotton may be said to be studying "language birth." Scotton has recorded
 Language Choice 147

the trend toward the adoption of what is essentially a foreign, though easily
learned language, Swahili. Except where the population has been decimated,
the "last" speaker is also a "first" speaker; what they have in common is
language shift. The vernaculars could be threatened if English or Swahili
should become, singly or jointly, permanent lingua francas in Uganda.
Dorian shows how the social isolation of the fisher folk is a factor in the
maintenance of Gaelic (p. 102). Scotton shows how breakdown of isolation
leads to shift. Both have found that innovations are emotionally charged:
anyone who deviates by adopting the dominant language will "be viewed as
something of a traitor to his original group" (Dorian, p. 103). In eastern
Sutherland such people are described as "proud." One of Scotton's informants
used the identical term: "People prefer using Swahili to avoid the suspicion
that they use English because they are proud." (Scotton p. 120). The
Norwegian-American terms for people who "anglify" are pejorative: they are
either engelsksprengt ("English-bloated") or ("Yankee-bloated").
(Haugen 1953: 476).
Both Dorian and Scotton account for some of their findings in terms of
value. Dorian writes that "parents and children agreed on the positive value
of English and the negative value of Gaelic for the rising generation" (p. 105).
Scotton accepts Homans' theory of social behavior as an exchange (1958),
harking back to Mauss' essay on the gift (1925). Thibaut and Kelley (1959)
saw human relations "in terms of a balancing of costs and reward" (p. 102).
Extending this to language, Scotton sees the choices made by weighing the
relative costs and rewards (1972: 109; 1976).
In sum, there is a consensus that language choices leading either to the
birth or death of languages are significant social decisions. They are based on
the speakers' view of the respective values of the languages or dialects on the
language market. These values, which ultimately involve the speaker's oppor-
tunities for living a good life as an accepted member of a community, will
shift over time. In a relatively isolated community linguistic cohesion may
lead to a loyalty that will prevent language shift.
Isolation may be either geographical or social. To the extent that a com-
munity is economically or politically dependent on the goodwill of another
community with a different language, the value of its own language will
fall. Those who are upwardly mobile will be tempted if not forced to change
languages. Learning and maintaining a second language is costly in time and
mental energy. But its values far exceed the cost if it broadens one's ex-
perience and enriches one's life.
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Index

Aasen, Ivar, 75 A tlamâl hin grdnlenzka, 109

Abstand, 71 Atlantic Monthly, 44
Abstandsprache, 79 Atsuwegis, 79
academy, 33 attitudes, 51
acculturation, 45 Augustana Academy, 119
Achumawi, 79 College, 119
acquisition, 29, 42 Synod, 128
acrolect, 29 Aune, Halvor O., 120
Africa, 13 Ausbau, 61, 71
slaves, 57 Ausbausprache, 79
Algonquin, 79 Australian English, 48
Alkonkian, 140 Austria, 14
allocation of norms, 59, 64 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 54
Alsatian, 41 autonomy, 50
American, 21 Aztecs, 54, 56
English, 9
Finnish, 45 Babel, 1
Indian, 5, 22, 57, 68 Babylon, 1
Institute of Physics, 66 Baltic Countries, 54
Lutheran Church, 128 Bandle, Oskar, 71
National Metric Association, 66 Bang, Jorgen, 86
Polish, 38 Baptist, 33
public school, 8 Barr, James, 139
spelling, 65 Barrow, Bruce, 66, 67
Swedish, 31, 32, 37, 39 basilect, 29
Americans, 16 Basilius, Harold, 138
Amundsen, S.S., 125 Basque, 22, 41, 53
Andersen, Hans Christian, 126 Baumann Larsen,"M., 31, 39
Anderson, Peder, 43 Bavarian, 16
Andersson, Theodore, 41 Belgium, 13, 14
Andersson, Thorsten, 70 Bergen, 43
Anglo conformity, 4 dialect, 110
Anglo-Saxon, 22, 37, 73 Bernstein, Basil, 31, 61
Anker Jensen, 111 Berry, J.W., 53
approximative norms, 4 0 Bessason, Haraldur, 24
Arabic, 17, 50 bibliography, 149-163
spelling, 59 biculturism, 18
Ârhus, 111 bidialectalism, 51, 92
Arsenian, Seth, 13 bilexia, 31
artificial language, 50 bilexic, 28
Aryan,2 bilingual, 7, 28
assimilation, 5, 45, 53, 55 education, 1 1 , 4 1
Assyrians, 54 Education Act, 4
Ataturk, dictator, 59 judgments, 137
166 Index

policy, 5 Canada, 11, 13, 14, 17, 52, 58

programs, 3 Canadian Metric Association, 66
societies, 92 Carleton College, 44
bilingualism, 13 Carlsson, Sten, 127, 129
compound, 18 Carmichael, Stokely, 113
coordinate, 18 Carroll, John, 131-9
incipient, 14, 18 Carroll, Lewis, 113
narrow definition, 14, 17 Casad, Eugene H., 80
residual, 18 Cassidy, Frederic, 67
wide definition, 14, 17 caste system, 37
bilinguals, 3, S Castilian, 55, 56
Bittie, William E., 131 casual, 28, 29
Black, 113 register, 29
Death, 101 Catalonian, 53, 55
English, 4, 38 Catholic faith, 56
Power, 114 Catholicism, 127
Blacks, 22, 25, 41, 57 Caucasus, 51
Blakar, Rolf M., I l l , 112, 114 Celts, 87
Blalock, Hubert M„ 55 Center for Applied Linguistics, 47, 67
Blaubergs, Maija, 69 centralism, 5 3
blessing of Babel, 5 Chaldeans, 54
Bloomfield, Leonard, 14, 79 Charles V, emperor, 55
blow-out, 83 Chase, Stuart, 114
B'nai B'rith, 38 Chicago, 23
Boas, Franz, 138 Chicano Spanish, 4, 5
o
Bokmal, 75 Chícanos, 41
Norwegian, 71, 81, 103 Chichewa, 139
Borgen, Johan, 103 Child, Francis, 44
borrowing, 31 China, 54
Boston, 43, 129 Chinese, 53, 114, 135
Bothne, Thrond, 21 Chisago County, Minnesota, 32
Boyer, Mildred, 41 choice, 59
Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, 43 Chomsky, Noam, 27, 47, 92
Braun, Maximilian, 14 Christian II, king, 127
Braunmüller, Kurt, 71 Christmann, H.H., 137
Brazil, 56 Clark, Virginia, 114
Brems, Hans, 72 class dialects, 48
Breton, 41 classical language, 50
Bright, William, 47, 52, 80 Clausen, Sven, 77, 78
British spelling, 65 Clausen, Ulla, 81
Brooklyn, 23 Clyne, Michael, 45
Brown, Roger, 52, 99, 103, 137 code, 8, 9
Brugmann, Karl, 97 switch, 7, 31
Bryant, Susan P., 66, 67 codification, 59-64
Budstikken, 35, 36 coexistence, 53
Bulgarian, 79 cognate, 15, 33
Bull, Edvard, 101 languages, 16
Burgos, Laws of, 56 Cohen, Marcel, 47
bygdelag, 43, 118 Columbia University, 44, 49
 Index

Columbus, SS Detroit, 129

communicative norm, 33-37 Deutsch, Karl, 4, 14
competence, bilingual, 13ff. dialect, 2, IS, 28, 50, 76
native, 15 Norwegian, 9
receptive, 15 dialectology, 27
zero, IS dictionary, 60
conformity, 8 dictionnaire raisonné, 60
Congress, 6 S Diebold, Richard, 14
conspicuous waste, 44 diglossia, 17, 29, 50, 72, 92
contact, Nordic, 77 diglossie, 28
dialect, 37 societies, 92
language, 80 Diller, Karl, 18
convergence, 18 Dimothike, 50
co-occurrence rules, 39 discourse markers, 39
corpus planning, 61, 64 discrimination, 5, 112
correction procedures, 62, 64 Djupedal, Reidar, 94
covert language planning, SS d'Olivet, Fabre, 139
creative imitation, 2 Doll's House, 115
creole, SO domain, 50
creolized (English), 57 dominant, 16, 18, 28, 29
Crockett, Harr J., Jr., I l l group, 10
Crow, 141 dominated, 16, 18, 29
cultivation, 59, 61, 62, 64 group, 10
approach, 61 Dorfman, Joseph, 44
Cuny, 98 Dorian, Nancy, 14, 17, 144, 145-7
Currie, Haver C., 47 Dravidians, 37
curse of Babel, 3 dual pronouns, 97
Czech, 14 Dutch, 16
Czecho-Slovakia, S4, 79
East Africa, 145
Dahlstedt, Karl-Hampus, 84 ecological model, 27
Dakota Territory, 117, 118 ecology, 50
Danes, 24, 80, 81, 118 social, 11
Danish, 16, 24, 39, 60, 71-3, 81 of language, 27
in Faroes, 96 Edda, 115
changes in, 77, 78 Egede, Hans, 75
kingdom, 101 Egyptians, 54
Dano-Norwegian, see bokmal, 9, 122 Eire, 59, 62
Das Gupta, J., 60 elaborated, 28, 31
decision procedures, 64 elaboration, 59, 61, 64
Declaration of Independence, 22 Elert, Claes, 78
Decorah, Iowa, 23 elite forms, 107
Decorah-Posten, 23 Elmendorf, William W., 143
Decsy, G„ 97 El wert, W. Theodor, 13, 141
Defoe, Daniel, 56 encounter, 49
De Geer, Louis, 84 engelsksprengt, 32, 147
Denmark, 81 English, 2, 16, 17, 43, 58
rulers of Faroes, 91 academy, 56
De Simone, Daniel, 6S as alternative language, 81
Det norske Amerika, 23 as second language, 83
168 Index

in Canada, 11 forms, 107

influence, 85 Folkebladet, 35
language school, 32 Ford, Marguerite, 52, 99
modernization, 83 foreign, 3
nuances, 88 form, 64
settlers, 22 formal, 108
written, 17 forms of address, 106
Enninger, Werner, SO Norwegian, 103
Erse, 56 Fort Sully, South Dakota, 119
Ervin-Tripp, Susan, 14, 18 Fowler, H.W., 67
Eskimo, 75, 97, 114 France, 13, 41, 65
Eskimos, 25, 98 Francian dialect, 29
Esperanto, 64, 87 Franco-English, 37
Estonia, 13 "Franglish", 37
Estonian, 31 free variation, 31
ethnic, 41 French, 14, 17, 35, 50, 52, 58
encyclopedia, 22 Academy, 56
heritage, 41 grammar, 104, 105
imperative, 21 in Canada, 11, 25, 144
pride, 96 Revolution, 65, 74, 127
stratification, 55 Frenchmen, 123
ethnicity, 18, 21, 55, 125, 127, 128 Friedrich, Paul, 52
Scandinavian, 126 friendly, 108
ethnography of speaking, 42, 49 Frisian, 41
ethnolinguistics, 51 frontier Norwegian, 117
evaluation, 59, 64 Fuller, Thomas, 99
procedures, 62 function, 64
explanatory adequacy, 63
Gaelic, 14, 56, 62, 144
"false friends", 86 Gal, Susan, 14
familiar, 108 Galicien, 55
Faroe islanders, 91 Garvin, Paul, 63
Faroes, 74, 81 Gascon, 29
Faroese, 60, 71, 75, 80, 87, 93, 100 Gastarbeiter, 41
ecology, 9Iff. Gauchat, L., 111
feminism, 69 Gauthiot, R., 99
Ferguson, Charles, 17, 29, 47, 50, 51 gender, 134
60, 72, 79, 85, 92 genes, 2
Fichte, J. G., 137 Genesis, 1
"Finglish", 45 geolinguistics, 54
Finkenstaedt, T., 99, 100 German, 2, 13, 14, 100, 140, 144
Finland, 4, 13, 74 influence, 72
Finn, 45 Germanic, 2, 98
Finnish, 5, 13, 18, 71, 72, 74, 80 languages, 79
Finns, 4 Germans in Australia, 45
Fishman, Joshua Α., 14, 17, 24, 27, 38, Germany, 57
41, 43, 49, 51, 59, 62, 63, 92 Gilman, Albert, 52, 99, 103
Fleming, Patricia, 70 Glasrud, Clarence Α., 44
Flemish, 13 Glazer, Nathan, 22, 55, 127
folk etymologies, 51 Goddard, Ives, 141
 Index 169

Goffman, Ervin, 49 Hebrews, 1

götudönsk, 81, 93 Hedblom, Folke, 31, 126
Gower, Ernest, 67 Heinesen, William, 95
grammaire raisonné, 60 Hellevik, Alf, 84
grammar, 60 Henley, Nancy, 114
grammatication, 60, 64 Herder, J.G., 137
graphization, 60, 64 Herman, Simon R., 143
Greece, 13 Hertzler, Joyce, 47
diglossia, 92 Herzog, George, 85, 100
Greek, 17, 87, 97, 98 heterogeneous, 27
Green, Julian, 140, 141 Hickerson, H. and N.P., 79
Greenberg, Joseph, 98 high language, 72
Greenlanders, 75 style, 28, 29, 50
Greenlandic, 41, 80 variety, 17
Grosjean, François, 19 Highlands, 145
Groth, Henrik, 84 Hindi, 13, 79
GuaranC 17 Hispanic, 144
Gudmundsson, Helgi, 97-100 communities, 11
Gumperz, John, 14, 18, 27, 29, 49, 79 speakers, 4
Gustavus Vasa, 73, 127 Hispano—American, 31
gymnasium, 103 immigration, 3
gypsy, 38; see Romany, 76 historicity, 50
H-language, 51
Hagström, Björn, 81 Hockett, Charles Α., 80
Haiti, SO Hoijer, Harry, 131
Haitian, 17 Holland, Syver, 42
Creole, 50 Hollingshead, August B., 22, 127
Hákon Hákonsson, 99 home rule (Faroes), 91
Hall, Robert Α., 14 homogeneous, 27
Halle, Morris, 68 society, 92
Hamann, Johann Georg, 137 Hopi, 4, 134
Hamilton, Charles V., 113 horizontal bilingualism, 10, 16, 17
Hammershaimb, V.U., 75, 94, 95 Houston University, 47
Hammerich, L.L., 97, 98 Howard, John, 66
Hanseatic, 73 Howells, William Dean, 44
League, 72, 101 Huave, 14
Hansegárd, Nils Erik, 4, 13, 39, 74 Humanism, 72
"hard water", 10 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 97, 98, 137
Harris, Zellig, 79 Hungarian, 43
Harvard Library, 44 Hungarians, 14
Hasselmo, Nils, 31, 33, 34, 38 Hungary, 54
Hassidic, 59 Hymes, Dell, 42, 49, 131, 138
Haugen, Einar, 6, 8 et passim hysteria (1918),11
Haugen, Eva Lund, 43
Haugen, Kristine 7, 118 Ibsen, Henrik, 69, 86, 109, 111
Hauge's Synod, 128 Iceland, 52, 54, 73, 74, 98
Hayakawa, S. Ichie, 114, 131 Icelanders, 24, 80
Haynes, Lilith, 50 Icelandic, 23, 24, 71, 72, 80
Heath, Shirley Brice, 55, 56 like Faroese, 91, 95
Hebrew, 17, 51, 59, 139 Bible, 74
170 Index

pronominal address, 97 Jews, 22

purism, 87 Johannisson, Ture, 88
sagas, 127 Johnson, Walter, 33
identity, 44 Jonsson, Bengt R., 125
ideological commitment, 22 Jutland, 118
idiolect, 2, 4 8
Illinois, 129 Kalevala, 74
immersion programs, 11 Kampala, 145
immigrants, 76 kanji, 60
implementation, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65 Kannada, 18, 37
Inca, 54, 56 Kansas, 129
India, 13, 18, 54, 61 Karam, Francis, 63, 80
Indians, 1 7 , 2 5 , 4 1 , 76; see also American Karker, Allan, 79
Indians Karnataki, 37
individual aspects, 10 Karttunen, Frances, 45
Indo-European, 2,51, 5 4 , 6 9 , 9 8 , 1 1 4 , 1 3 4 Katharevousa, 50
grammar, 97 Kelley, Harold, 147
Ingers, Ingemar, 73 Kelly, L.G., 14
ingroup, 28 Kenya, 145, 146
instrument, 55 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 86
intelligibility, 79 King, Martin Luther, 113
intercommunication, 77 King's Mirror, 89, 99
interference, 7, 9, 31 kinship, 21
interlanguage, 12, 77, 80 Kirk, James, 45
intermediate societies, 29, 30 Kirk, Paul L., 80
Kjaer, Iver, 31, 39
internalize, 8
Kleinschmidt, Samuel, 75
International Centre for Bilingualism, 14
Kloss, Heinz, 61, 71, 79
intimacy, 95
Knudsen, Knud, 75, 87
intimate, 108
Kobrick, Stanley, 5
Iowa, 7
Koch, G.H. von, 129
Ireland, 13, 56;see Eire
Kolers, Paul Α., 14
Irene, South Dakota, 118
Konkani, 37
Isaacs, Harold, 22
Isabella, Queen, 55 Korzybski, A.H., 114, 131
isoglosses, 4 8 Kvideland, Reimund, 125
Israel, 59, 92 Kwan, Kian M., 55
Italy, 57
Labov, William, 31, 38, 48, 49, 52, 85,
laakkola, Magdalene, 4 100, 1 1 1
Jaeger, Luth, 35 Lakoff, Robin, 114
Jakobson, Roman, 98, 114 Lambert, Wallace, 11, 14, 18, 52
Jamestown, 129 Lance, Donald, 31
Janson, Kristofer, 45 Landsmaal, 75; see nynorsk
Japan, 54 language, 2, 15
Japanese, 60, 114 attitudes, 16
jargon, 28, 31 choice, 51, 143
Jernudd, Björn, 60, 62 Commission of Norway, 84
Jespersen, Otto, 83, 98, 111 contact, 3
Jewish, 51 death, 17, 51
communities, 17 distance, 15
 Index

diversity, 1, 53 low language, 72

dominance, 49 low variety, 17
ecology, 27 low style, 28, 50
ecology,definition, 91, 92 Lowell, Massachusetts, 4 3
family, 2 Lowie, Robert H„ 140, 141
functions, 16 Luther College, 23
loyalty, 144 Luther, Martin, 72
market, 144 Lutheran, 31, 43, 93, 128
planning, 51, 55, 59, 93 Lutheranism, 127
problem, 59 Luxembourg, 14
spread, 51
treatment, 62 Macedonian, 79
languages, 28 Mackey, William, 14
Lapps, see Sami, 4 Maclay, Howard S., 134
Larsen, Amund B. 110, 111 Macnamara, John, 13, 142
Latin, 17, 53, 55, 72, 73, 87 maintenance, 42, 44
status, 95 Malaysia, 53
Latin America, 25 Malm, G.N., 38
Latvian, 13 malr0kt, 62
Laxdale Saga, 44 Marathi, 19
learning, 2 Marckwardt, Albert, 67
lect, 31 Margaret, Queen, 72
Lee, Dorothy, 131 marginal man, 41
Leibowitz, Arnold H„ 57 marked, 100, 114
lektor, 103 pronouns, 106
Leon, Spanish dialect, 55 market value, 144
Leopold, Werner, 13 Massachusetts, 5, 43
Lepsius, Karl R., 138 mathematics, 135
Levine, Lewis, 111 Maurud, 0ivind, .78, 80
lexication, 60, 64 Mauss, Marcel, 147
Lie, Ole, 120 McGuire, Carson, 22, 127
Lieberson, Stanley, 14, 53 Meillet, J. 98
Lind, John, 130 Mennonites, 22, 25
Lindmark, Sture, 127, 128 Merriam, G. and C„ 22
linguistic backbone, 36 Metric Conversion Act, 65
diversity, 47 system, 65
imperialism, 54 metrication, 65
pluralism, 4 Mettler, Albert, 66
Lithuanian, 98 Mexican Americans, 25
"little Norway", 23 Mexico, 14, 56, 80
Ljunggren, K.G., 84 Michaelis, David, 137
L-language, 51 Michigan, 45
loans in American Norwegian, 7 Middle Ages, 73, 87, 98
loanshifts, 122 Middle West, 49
loanwords, 39, 83, 122 Midwest, 31
logic, 135 Midwestern-American, 37
L01and, Stale, 78 Minneapolis, 23, 32
Lönnrot, Elias, 74 Minneapolis Tidende, 23
Lovoll, Odd, 4 3 , 1 1 8 Minnesota, 45, 129, 143
Low German, 16, 72, 73 Historical Society, 33
172 Index

minority : Sami Council, 76

group member, 41 Norman, 29
languages, 4 Conquest, 73
nationalism, 22 England, 95
problems, 3 French, 59
Miss Julie, 115 invasion, 29
Mjöberg, Jöran, 32 Norman, Hans, 127, 129
Moberg, Vilhelm, 32, 126 norms, 9, 31, 35, 48
mobilizing the population, 4 Norrbotten, 4
modernization, 85 Swedish, 5
Mohammedanism, 145 Norsk Riksmalsordbok, 110
Molde, BertU, 78, 88 norskdom, 23
Mongolia, 54 North Dakota, 129
Montana, 129 Norway, 13, 21, 36, 57, 75, 91;
Montreal, 92 nineteenth century, 52
Moore, Kate, 45 Norwegian, 16, 21, 23, 37, 44, 100
Moors, 55 forms of address, 103
Moynihan, Daniel, 22, 55, 127 immigration, 118
MuUer, Max, 138 in America, 118
mutual intelligibility, 16 services, 128
American, 18, 25, 35
Nadkarni, 37 Lutheran Church, 8
Nahuatl, 56 Norwegians, 24, 125
National Bureau of Standards, 65 in America, 146
national origin, 127 nyfeminisme, 109
nationalism, 21, 127 nynorsk, 75
natively acceptable, 8 Nynorsk-Norwegian, 71, 112
Navaho, 80
NavarTa, Spanish dialect, 55 obligations, 49
Nebraska, 129 obsolescent languages, 143
Nebrija, Antonio de, 55 official language planning, 5 5
Nelson, Bardin H., 45 Oftedal, Magne, 110
Nelson, Helge, 128 Oftedal, Sven, 3S, 36
Nelson, Knute, 129 Ohlsson, Stig Örjan, 73, 78
Nemser, William, 40 oil industry, 83
networks of communication, 50, 52 Oksaar, Els, 31
Neustupny, J., 59, 61, 62 Ólafr, king, 99
New Brunswick, 14 Old English, 73; see also Anglo-Saxon
New England, 129 Old Norse, 48
New Guinea, 13 Olmsted, D.L., 79
New Norwegian, 76; see nynorsk one (world) language, 57
new words, 84 Opdalslaget, 118
Nigeria, S3, 14S Oppdal, 8
non-elaborated, 31 ordered selection, 33
Nootka, 133 Oregon, 129
Norden, 71 origin of language diversity, 1
Norden society, 77 orthographic adaptation, 88
Nordic Council, 78 orthography, 60
Language Board, 76 Osgood, Charles, 18
Language Secretariat, 78 Österberg, Tore, 5, 14, 76
 Index 173

overt language planning, 55 register, 9, 15, 28

relativity, linguistic, 131
Page, Chester H„ 65, 66 relexify, 8
Pacini, 60 Renaissance, 61
Paradis, Michel, 18 Reykjavik, 97
Paraguay, 17, 53 rhetorical norm, 35, 36
Paulston, Christina Bratt, 41, 103 rights, 49
Peru, 56 riksmal, 75; see also boknwl
Peterson, Andrew, 32, 33 Rockford, Illinois, 129
pidgin, 39, 50 Rogaland, 43
English, 145 roles, 50
Piedmont, U.S.A., 111 Rölvaag, Ole E., 25
Pierce, Joe E., 79 Roman writing, 59
Pike, Kenneth, 27 Romania, 54
pluralism, 53 Romantic Movement, 74
pluralistic, 26 Romanticism, 137
Poetic Edda, 109 Romany, 76
Poland, 57 "rotvälska", 38
policy planning, 60, 61, 64 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and
Pope, the, 55 Biculturalism, 14
Portuguese, 25, 56 Rubin, Joan, 53, 59, 62
power differential, 10 Rüke-Dravina, Velta, 13
pragmatic attitude, 87 Runblom, Harald, 127, 129
Prague School, 63, 97, 98, 114 Ruong, Israel, 5
prescriptive, 60 Russia, 16, 52, 54, 57
prestige forms, 1.8 Russian, 62
private language planning, 55 Rydberg, Viktor, 87
professional, 28, 108
Provençal, 41 Saint Olaf College, 44
psycholinguistics, 54 Saint Paul, Minnesota, 129
puberty threshold, 9 Sami, 5, 53, 76
public school, 57 Samish, 5, 13, 41, 80; see also Lapp
Puerto Ricans, 41, 49 Sapir, Edward, 131, 138, 139
puristic attitude, 87 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 131
Saussure de, Ferdinand, 27
Qualey, Carlton C., 128 Saville, Muriel, 41
Quebec, 14 Saxo Grammaticus, 72
Quechua, 56 Saxon, 16
Indians, 53 Scandinavia, 71
Quirk, Randolph, 67 Scandinavian, 80, 81
languages, 78
race,2 nations, 54
Rafky, David M„ 113 Scandinavians, 77
Ramanujan, A.K., 47 Schermerhorn, R.A., 44, 55
Rask, Rasmus, 94 schizoglossia, 86
Ray, Punya Sloka, 63 Schmidt, W„ 98
Read, Allen Walker, 54 Scotland, 56, 144
Reformation, 72 Scots English, 144
regional dialects, 48 Scotton, Carol, 145-7
regions, 28 Seattle, 23
174 Index

segregation, 58 Sommerfelt, Alf, 111

selection, 59, 61, 64 S0nderg!rd, Bent, 72
semicommunication, 48, 71 Sondresen, S., 38
semilingual, 3, 39 Sons of Norway, 21, 43
semi-speakers, 146 Sorbían, 41
semi-tribal, 28 South Asian languages, 79
society, 29 South Dakota, 117, 118, 129
Semmingsen, Ingrid, 43 Southwest, 11
separation, 42 Spain, 55
Setesdal, 43 Spanish, 14, 17, 25, 56
settlements, 127 Armada, 56
sex, 110 speak meeting, 33
roles, 115 specialized, 28
sexism, 68 speech event, 49
Norwegian, 109 sphere of usage, 60
sexist, 69 Sprachpflege, 62
sexuality, 114 Sprachsoziologie, 47
Shaffer, Douglas, 31 sprakvàrd, 62, 78
Shaw, Bernard, 16, 57 sprogrfigt, 62
Shawnee, 132 Stähle, Carl-Ivar, 84
Shetland Islands, 96 standard, 28, 50
Shibutani, Tamotsu, 55 Average European, 131, 134
Sigurd, Bengt, 71 standardization, 50
Sioux City, Iowa, 118, 120 standardized, 93
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 118, 119 Stene, Asta, 84, 86
Sioux Indians, 117 status, 49, 60, 95, 103
War, 117 planning, 61, 64
Sirene, 110 Stavanger, 43
Skaardal, Dorothy Burton, 126, 128 Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 24
Skandinaven, 23 Steinsholt, Anders, 110
Skard, Sigmund, 72 Stewart, William, 29, 50
Skarstedt, Ernst, 33, 129 Stoltz, Gerhard, 111
Skautrup, Peter, 72 Strindberg, August, 86, 115
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove, 18 stuck-up, 3
Slovenian, 98 style, 15, 60
Snorri Sturluson, 72 stylistic development, 64
social : Summer Institute for Linguistics, 80
aspects, 10 Sutherland, 144
distance, 3 Sutton, Geoffrey, 71
ecology, 11 Svabo, J.C., 60, 75, 94
group, 9 Svalestuen, Andres Α., 128
integration, 41 Swadesh, Morris, 143
meaning, 42 Swahili, 29, 145
roles, 106 Sweden, 5, 24, 32, 125
rules, 106 Swedes, emigration, 127, 128
sociolects, 48 Swedish, 14, 18, 24, 31, 33, 38, 61, 69,
sociolinguistics, 27, 47, 54 71, 72, 73, 81, 100
sociology of language, 27, 47 slang, 88
Sokol, Louis, 67, 68 Academy, 62, 74
solidarity, 103 American, 38
 Index 175

Covenant Church, 128 Uganda, 145, 146

dialects, 4 uniformiteten, 73
Emigration Institute, 126 United Norwegian Lutheran Church, 128
Finns, 74 United States, 13, 41, 56
Language Committee, 62 Government, 118
Mission Church, 128 universal school system, 4
school system, 5 universalism, 131
Swift, Jonathan, 56 University of Wisconsin, 16
Swiss German, 17, 50, 58 unmarked, 98, 100, 106 (pronouns), 114
switching, 45; see also code shift unplanned change, 63
Switzerland, 10, 13, 41, 50, 58 Uppsala, 31
symbol, 55 urbanized, 28
syntax, 43 societies, 29, 30
Urdu, 79
Tamil, 114 Ureland, Sture, 31, 38
Tanzania, 145, 146 uses of sociolinguistics, 52
Tauli, Valter, 63
Taylor, Allan R„ 68 Valdes-Fallís, Guadelupe, 31
Tegnér, Esaias, 138 Valette, Rebecca M„ 13
Telemark, 43 Veblan, Thorstein, 44
Tengström, Emil, 72 vernacular, 50
tense, 135 vertical bilingualism, 10, 16, 17
terminological modernization, 64 Vesterheimen, 23
Teske, Raymond H. C., 45 Vestur-fsland, 23
Tesnière, Lucien, 98 Vico, Giovanni, 137
Texan,16 Vikings, 87
Texas, 38 Vildomec, V., 14
theory of the leisure class, 44 vitality, 50
Thibaut, John, 147 Voegelin, Carl, 29, 79
Thoreau, Henry D., 44 Vogt, Hans, 71
Thorne, Barrie, 114 Volin, South Dakota, 118
Tingbjörn, Gunnar, 88 vulgar, 3
titles, 108
Tornedalen, 74 Wackernagel, J., 98
Tórshavn, 91 Wales, 13, 14, 56
Tower of Babel, 1, 3 Wände, Erling, 74
transitional bilingualism, 4 Washington (state), 129
translation, 134 Watkins, Calvert, 98
Treaty of Versailles, 61 ways of speaking, 49
tribal, 28 Webster, Noah, 56, 65, 66
societies, 29, 30 Weinreich, Uriel, 13, 18, 85, 100, 131,
trivium, 60 134
Troell, Jan, 126 Weisgerber, Leo, 137
Troike, Rudolph, 67 Weiss, Andreas von, 13
tu-vous, 97 Welsh, 41, 53
Norwegian, 103 Weltansicht, 137
Turkish, 59, 135 Wennls, Olof, 72
Turner, G.D., 79 West Africa, 80
Tylden, Per, 101 Whiteley, W„ 143
typology, 50 Whorf, Benjamin, 131-3, 135
176 Index

Wieczerkowski, Wilhelm, 13 World War I, 11, 23, 54

Wilson, Woodrow, 54 World War II, 25, 54, 83
Wilster (Danish writer), 73 writing tradition, 60
Wisconsin, 44, 129, 143
Wisconsinvisa, 42 Yankton, South Dakota, 118
witch hunt of 1918, 25 Yiddish, 17, 51, 59
Worcester, Massachusetts, 129 Yoga, 140
world view, 140, 142 Yugoslavia, 13, 54, 79
MULTILINGUA
Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication

Callfor Papers
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m Joshua A. Fishman, Andrée Tabouret-Keller,
Michael Clyne, Bh. Krishnamurti and
m
M. Abdulaziz (Eds.)

m The Fergusonian Impact

m In Honor of Charles A. Ferguson on the

Occasion of his 65th Birthday, 2 Volumes

m 1986.14,8x22,8 cm. Vol. 1: XII, 598 pages; Vol. 2: XII, 545 pages.
Hardback volumes 1 and 2: DM 435,-; approx. US $229.00
ISBN 311010487 3

m (Contributions to the Sociology of Language 42)

The two-volume Fergusonian Impact contains 81 articles, bringing

m together 85 anthropologists, linguists, psycholinguists and sociolinguists

from literally all corners of the world. This vast undertaking reflects the
truly international scope of Professor Ferguson's influence.

m Volume 1: From Phonology to Society

I. Linguistics, child language and language and the child - II. Arabic
and languages of Africa - III. Applied linguistics.
m Volume 2: Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of Language
IV. Microsociolinguistics: acts, actors and events - V. Sociolinguistic
m situation and bilingual variation - VI. Language planning: corpus and
status - VII. Diglossia: particular cases and general reexamination -
VIII. Language contact, spread, maintenance and death - IX. Charles A.
m Ferguson bibliography, 1945-1985.

A Special Issue of The International Journal of the Sociology

m of Language (62,1986) complements The Fergusonian Impact with
articles by colleagues, admirers and former students of Professor
Ferguson, bringing the year of the "Fergiefest" to a conclusion.

m (160 pages; DM 54,- or US $22.00 plus postage.)

Prices are subject to change without notice

m
mouton de gniyter
m Berlin · New York · Amsterdam