29.4397, Review: Philosophy of Language; Sociolinguistics: Weth, Juffermans (2018)

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Subject: 29.4397, Review: Philosophy of Language; Sociolinguistics: Weth, Juffermans (2018)

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Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2018 17:01:42
From: Katharina Tyran [katharina.tyran at univie.ac.at]
Subject: The Tyranny of Writing

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-476.html

EDITOR: Constanze  Weth
EDITOR: Kasper  Juffermans
TITLE: The Tyranny of Writing
SUBTITLE: Ideologies of the Written Word
SERIES TITLE: Bloomsbury Advances in Sociolinguistics
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Katharina Klara Tyran

SUMMARY

The edited volume “The tyranny of writing. Ideologies of the written word”
brings together 12 researchers exploring written language forms in diverse
temporal, regional and, of course, tyrannical settings. The book title
obviously is inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure’s well known, often cited but
also increasingly critically examined and contradicted argument of ‘la
tyrannie de la lettre’, determining the dichotomy of literacy and orality,
clearly giving priority to the latter and setting it as a focal point in
modern linguistics .

In their introduction Constanze Weth and Kasper Juffermans discuss the “The
Tyranny of Writing in Language and Society”, examining the metaphor expressed
in the title in sociolinguistics as well as the potentials and risks of
writing. The authors therefore present various arguments on writing,
orthography,  and literacy in modern linguistics. Furthermore, they highlight
visual and social aspects of writing systems, written language, and literacy,
importantly identifying them as always being embedded in historical, social
and cultural contexts and practices, of course not operating autonomously, but
ideologically. With the following contributions in this book, the editors’
interest “(…) is with the indexicalities of writing, in particular social and
political contexts and with questioning the circumstances under which writing
can be tyrannical.” (p. 8)

In Chapter 1, Florian Coulmas is “Revisiting the ‘Tyranny of Writing’” and
starts with Saussure’s critique on writing and orthography, pointing out the
relevance of discussing this argument in the context of linguistics as well as
the importance of the contradiction inherent in Saussure’s elaborations, that
we actually cannot do linguistics without writing. Coulmas argues, that
Saussure’s repression of writing actually is grounded in the alphabetic
western tradition. Here, letters are considered nothing more than mere
substitutes for sounds, whereas a perspective beyond alphabetocentrism offers
explanations for writing opening up new modes of human communication besides
speech. Importantly, Coulmas questions the stance of writing being only a
secondary system, a supplement for speech, as well as being tyrannical in
Saussure’s means. 

Daniel Bunčić guides us in Chapter 2 back to medieval times, tracing
vernacular orthographies and biscriptality in the ancient Rus’. The article
“How to Write a Birch-Bark Letter: Vernacular Orthography in Medieval
Novgorod” examines orthographic characteristics of the famous archeological
find dated back to the mid-eleventh to mid-fifteenth centuries, namely strips
of birch bark as a medium for written mundane messages. Interestingly, most of
those letters were written with specific spelling peculiarities besides the
standard orthography used in monasteries and chancelleries. The author argues
that this development of a vernacular orthography, although a result of
incomplete spelling instructions, gained the status of an in-group writing in
opposition to the ruling standard, which is identified as the tyrannical
momentum in this case study. 

The following section (Chapter 3) offers a summary article of Joop van der
Horst’s book “Het Einde van de Standaardtaal”, published in 2008 in Dutch.
Here, the title is translated into  “The End of the Standard Language: The
Rise and Fall of a European Language Culture”. The text is dealing with the
all-European phenomenon of these days, namely concerns about standard language
culture with a focus on spelling and orthography. Van der Horst emphasizes the
‘created-ness’ of language norms, with standardization processes not
describing an existing reality, but creating a new reality. In opposition to a
considerable number of scholars  highlighting the nineteenth century as the
crucial time scoop for the rising of national standard languages, van der
Horst traces this process even back to the Renaissance, when vernaculars
became written languages and gained rules and norms. As for the future, the
author sees language culture moving away from this concept of national
standard languages turning to variation, multiplicity and continuum, entailing
a loosening of the tyranny of language purism and correctness. 

Manuela Böhm examines in Chapter 4 the linguistic homogenization of
multilingual France in the nineteenth century. Already the articles title
reveals the tyrannical element of focus, namely “The Tyranny of Orthography:
Multilingualism and Frenchification at Primary Schools in
Late-Nineteenth-Century France”. Analyzing the correlation of alphabetization
in written French and nation building processes the article shows that the
Frenchification of linguistically heterogeneous territories in France was not
only a story of success but also problematic and complicated. Therefore, the
author argues for an additional multilingual perspective in the supposedly
successful story of Francophonie and Francographie, exemplifying the argument
with a case study from Brittany, a territory of typical diglossia with French
as the written and high variety and Breton as the spoken and low variety.

Chapter 5 by Ulrich Mehlem, “Ideologies of Language and Literacy in the German
Educational Reform Movement at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century”, is
also focusing on the nexus of language teaching and national ideology,
focusing on the concept of reform pedagogy in Germany at the end of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. This education approach
labelled written standard language, orthography and grammar and also classical
languages as violent and suppressive, thus tyrannical. Protagonists of reform
pedagogy, such as Rudolf Hildebrant and Berthold Otto  advocated for spoken
varieties to be allowed and used in school, arguing in favor of a primacy of
oral language. This reformist discourse though went hand in hand with national
and even nationalistic movements, accepting only spoken varieties of German
but not minority languages. Therefore, pedagogical reformers prepared the
ground for the harsh tyranny of speech community based on orality and national
community. 

The following joint Chapter 6 by Ashraf Abdelhay, Busi Makoni and Sinfree
Makoni takes us to writing in a colonial context. In “When God is a Linguist:
Missionary Orthographies as a Site of Social Differentiation and the
Technology of Location”, the authors focus on the Rejaf (South Sudan) Language
Conference of 1928 as a key colonial language-making event, of course also
debating script use. With their Eurocentric approach, a number of conference
participants suggested unified orthographies for African languages based on
the Roman alphabets, also opting in favor of the usage of this writing system
for the teaching of Arabic. What languages counted as worth writing, though,
was strongly influenced by the work of missionaries and their practice of
‘discovering languages’, despite actually inventing them. In this chapter, the
authors also highlight how script and orthography choice function as
statements and constructing elements of spatial and cultural identities, and
therefore are socio-politically driven. 

The following article, Harshana Rambukwella’s Chapter 7 “Standard English,
Cricket, Nationalism and Tyrannies of Writing in Sri Lanka” brings us to
present times in a post-colonial setting. The author investigates the public
speeches of two popular cricket players with differing educational and
societal background, also expressed in their linguistic performance and
language use, as well corresponding reactions. While one used a quite
elaborated formal register of English, the other switched from English to
Sinhala, which was perceived as a weakness. The case study is based on the
dichotomy of English as a marker of social, cultural and economic privilege,
cosmopolitan lifestyle, versus Sinhala and Tamil being marginalized by these
elite discourses as well as the bifurcation of Standard Sri Lankan English and
non-Standard Sri Lankan English. Therefore, the author follows the argument
that codified standard written language forms can impress tyrannically even
upon the spoken word.

Friederike Lüpke explores in Chapter 8 multilingual and multigraphic practices
in southern Senegal. In the article “Escaping the Tyranny of Writing: West
African Regimes of Writing as a Model for Multilingual Literacy”, the author
argues that standard language culture and corresponding ideologies are an
European approach not satisfying  the linguistic diversity in West Africa. In
this context we may rather see how local writing practices do not follow
principles of standardized orthographies, rejecting strict spelling rules. If
anything, these standard concepts prove not to be applicable in multilingual
settings with no strict language boundaries. Furthermore, Lüpke highlights how
foreign actors and agencies misinterpreted the interaction of language and
script usage, thus using in posters or leaflets for example either the wrong
language or the wrong script, undermining successful communication. 

David C. S. Li addresses in “Writing Chinese: A Challenge for Cantonese-L1 and
South Asian Hongkongers” (Chapter 9) language acquisition and literacy in
standard written Chinese. The author follows the argument that Chinese with
its hanzi characters being non-alphabetic and morphosyllabic needs more effort
for gaining reading and writing skills in comparison with alphabetic languages
respectively orthographies. The study, thus presenting the writing system
itself as tyrannical, is based on questionnaires and interviews with South
Asian Hongkongers aged 17 – 19, and explores the very nature of standard
written Chinese being of a non-alphabetic system as a primary source of
learning difficulties. Therefore, the majority of respondents even resisted
learning SWC. 

Chapter 10 stays in the context of writing Chinese, although in a quite
different setting. In the article “Fangyan and The Linguistic Landscapes of
Authenticity: Normativity and Innovativity of Writing in Globalizing China”
Xuan Wang approaches writing as a set of social practices, tracing
sociolinguistic conditions reframing the regime of writing Chinese. Within the
theoretical background of linguistic landscaping studies, the author traces
public signage in Enshi Tuija written in ‘fangyan’, local speech or dialect.
Here, non-standard writing practices are used in the context of heritage
tourism in order to create a tradition of authenticity and local identity.
Although products of these processes are not always intelligible or
meaningful, it is rather their visuality that is as important as indexical and
symbolic, simultaneously resisting the centralized standard Chinese language
policy with its national discourses and marginalizing linguistic forms such as
‘fangyan’. 

With the focus returning to Europe, Chapter 11 by Jos Swanenberg addresses
“Dialect Authenticity Upside Down: Brabantish Writing Practices of a Black
Comedian on Twitter”. Here, the author examines modern digital writing
practices such as writing in dialect on social media by Braboneger, a Black
comedian from Tilburg. This case study is thus questioning and challenging the
tyranny of traditional dichotomies such as orality versus literacy as well as
dialect versus standard language. The author argues that new digital media
changes writing and language generally, opening up now modes of expressions
for vernaculars and dialects, which came to the fore in recent times as
markers for local cultural identity gaining a higher importance in times of
globalization. Furthermore, it shows how the comedian Braboneger is employing
and undermining racial stereotypes tied to language use in his written
performance.   

In the last Chapter 12, Lucas Duane examines “Salty Politics and Linguistics
in the Balearic Islands: Tracing a Non-Standard Iconization in Metalinguistic
Facebook Communities”. The author traces a discourse of particularization, as
we may not only explore language-ideological debates concerning Castilian and
Catalan in the described setting, but also the emergence of a linguistic label
of ‘Balearic’ for local varieties, respectively Majorcan, Minorcan, Eivissan
and Formenteran vernaculars. Within these discourses, it is the attention to a
small iconic feature, namely the use of the s-article (article salat, salty
article), in claiming and marking a specific regional linguistic identity
against Catalan. The tyranny of standard and standardization processes may be
reproduced endlessly, as shown in this case study, where setting boundaries
between closely related linguistic forms is highly linked with the semiotic
process of iconization of certain linguistic features. In this context, public
space orthography became highly indexical.

EVALUATION

This edited volume covers a wide scope with regard to time, place, and focus,
offering interesting case studies and taking its readers from medieval Russia
to nineteenth century Western Europe and further to present settings in
Africa, Asia and Europe. The connecting link, though, is a the engagement of
the “metaphor of tyranny as a heuristic for ideologies of language and
literacy in society, exploring practices and ideologies of writing that
exercise, are affected by, or escape from an exercise of power or authority of
writing.” (p. 10) Tyranny is, already in the introduction, alluded to in many
contexts and theories of various scholars, not only concerning writing and
orthography: the tyranny of nature, the tyranny of the present, the tyranny of
the author, and even writing as a tool against tyranny. 

As for the contributions in the book we may identify various ‘tyrannical’
features, that may be connected with writing and literacy: tyrannical standard
language ideology entailing purism and correctness, often associated with
written language forms and struggles over orthography, preceding
standardization processes and tyrannical settings against multilingualism
striving for linguistically and further nationally homogenous entities,
tyrannous implementations of western ideologies concerning (written) language,
and, last but not least, the tyranny of Saussure’s dichotomy inconsistently
opposing orality and literacy. Consequently, the question remains, why
linguistics is still stuck in this established, but old dichotomy of written
and spoken language, of oral and literate as two separated linguistic systems,
either one supposedly ruling the other or being primary, thus determining
writing as tyrannical. Following this argument, it is not writing,
orthography, literacy, standard language itself that is tyrannical, but the
ideologies referring to these aspects of language and especially people and
societies acting according to such ideologies and deploying them. 

This edited volume is an interesting and valuable publication for researchers
and scholars dealing with (standard) language ideologies especially in bi- or
multilingual settings as well as researchers interested in language
standardization processes and the power of writing and writing systems within
this context. The case studies collected in this book may deal with quite
diverse settings; nevertheless they all offer approaches to “questioning the
circumstances under which writing can be tyrannical” (p.8). Here, the term
‘writing’ is used in a broad sense covering a wide scope, not only referring
to letters and graphemes, and  therefore going beyond Saussure’s critique of
the tyranny of writing.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Katharina Tyran is a university assistant at the Institute for Slavic Studies
at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include script
linguistics, minority languages, language history, standardization processes,
Linguistic Landscape research and Border studies with a focus on South Slavic
languages.





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