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TheAcadémie Française inFrance is charged with maintaining the linguistic purism of theFrench language. This is the first page of the 6th edition of their dictionary (1835).
Linguistic purism orlinguisticprotectionism is a concept with two common meanings: one with respect to foreign languages and the other with respect to the internal variants of a language (dialects).The first meaning is the historicaltrend of the users of alanguage desiring to conserve intact the language's lexical structure ofword families, in opposition to foreign influence which are considered 'impure'. The second meaning is theprescriptive[1] practice of determining and recognizing one linguisticvariety (dialect) as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other related varieties.
The perceived or actual decline identified by the purists may take the form of a change of vocabulary,syncretism ofgrammatical elements, orloanwords.[citation needed] The unwanted similarity is often with a neighboring language the speakers of which are culturally or politically dominant.[citation needed] The ideal may invoke logic, clarity, or the grammar of classic languages. It is often presented as a conservative measure, as a protection of a language from the encroachment of other languages or of the conservation of thenationalVolksgeist, but is often innovative in defining a new standard. It is sometimes part of governmentallanguage policy that is enforced in various ways.
Historically, in the first meaning, linguistic purism was institutionalized inItaly throughlanguage academies (of which the 1572Accademia della Crusca set as a model example in Europe), and their decisions often having the force of law.[2]
Purism in Italy until the 19th century stemmed from the doctrine, developed in the 16th century mainly byPietro Bembo andLionardo Salviati and supported by dictionaries and grammars, that literary usage should imitate 14th-centuryFlorentine. This view was contested by theEnlightenment, and the termspurismo andpurista (first recorded 1758–9 but not used in print until 1838) were introduced to denote linguistic affectation or archaism. The 19th-century purism of Antonio Cesari and others was based both on veneration for the 14th century and on distaste forneologisms and foreign borrowings, especially fromFrench. Purism in the 20th century resisted unassimilated borrowings from French and later fromEnglish and was at its height during the second half of theFascist period. Theneopurismo promoted byBruno Migliorini from the late 1930s sought a compromise between the needs of Italian to evolve and to maintain its structures.
In one common case, two closely related languages or language varieties are in direct competition, one weaker, the other stronger. Speakers of the stronger language may characterize the weaker language as a "dialect" of the strong language, with the implication that it has no independent existence. In response, defenders of the other language will go to great lengths to prove that their language is equally autonomous.
In this context,Yiddish andDutch have in the past sometimes been considered dialects ofGerman. In the case ofLow German, spoken in eastern Netherlands and northernGermany, the debate is still current, as it could be considered a dialect of Dutch or German or a language of its own. An example of a related language that has only recently attained the status of an official national language isLuxembourgish. Since linguistic science offers no scholarly definition of a dialect, and linguists regard the distinction with scepticism – seeA language is a dialect with an army and navy – the argument is really about subjective questions ofidentity politics, and at times it can invoke extreme emotions from the participants.
TheSerbian andCroatian literary standards differ mainly in using theCyrillic and Latin scripts. They exhibit a high degree of mutual intelligibility as they are based on essentially the same dialect, a stylized form ofNeoštokavian (Štokavian being the one dialect common to both Serbian and Croatian).
Various scholars have devised classifications of purism. These classifications take different criteria as their starting point and are therefore partly independent of each other.
Ethnographic purism: This form is based on an idealization of the countryside, folk stories and dialects. Examples:Nynorsk (New Norwegian), some versions ofDemotic Greek.
Elitist purism: Associated with a highly formal variety linked to anelite, for example the language spoken at the court.
Playful purism: Intended as a joke, e.g.,Philipp von Zesen's coinageGesichtsvorsprung lit. 'facial projection' to mean 'nose'.
Xenophobic purism: involves the elimination or exclusion of foreign elements. Examples includeHigh Norwegian,Korean andAnglish. ManyEnglish writers of the 19th and 20th centuries extolled the virtues of "strong"Anglo-Saxon words such asforeword over the "weak"Romance wordpreface.French,German,Greek andLatvian are known for their preference forcoining words using native roots (oftencalques) over borrowing foreign words; some are more successful than others.
Democratic purism: Aims at safeguarding the intelligibility of (modern) concepts for a larger group of language users through enforcing their expression by the means of common, every-day words or expressions (for example, "back[ing] up" instead of "sustain[ment]")
Unificatory purism: Aims at better uniting the overall user group of a language by reducing certain regional or professional linguistic peculiarities which could separate varying aspects of life, or even obstruct interconnectivity, between individuals or sub-groups of different regional provenience or professional background.
Defensive purism: Aims at defending a language from external threats. Mostly, these are to be understood as influx of foreign ideas which a given language group (or its political system) disdains or has overthrown, or influx of foreign words or expressions which tend to substitute innate vocabulary, thus diminishing and/or endangering supra-regional or inter-generational intelligibility within a language area or between its present speakers and the literary remnants of their venerated ancestors, i. e., some kind of "classical" heritage (as e. g. Shakespeare's usage is already no more widely understood amongst many of today's English speakers[citation needed][dubious –discuss]).
Prestige purism: Aims at varying prestige functions.
Delimiting purism: Aims at establishing some kind of separating functions.
Marginal purism: Purism never becomes at any stage a value-feature of the speech community. On the contrary, there is a certain openness to all sources of enrichment, at the same time characterized by a lack among the language elite of intellectual digestion of foreign influxes, or by a lack of such an elite as a whole. Examples:English,Russian,Polish,Japanese,Ancient Greek.
Moderate, discontinuous purism: A moderate attitude is discernible over a long period of time. Examples:Spanish,Portuguese,French andItalian.
Evolutionary purism: Purism is seen early in the development of a written language. There are no radical changes or orientation. During the standardising process, purism gains momentum after which it slows down. Examples:Hungarian,Finnish,Estonian,Hebrew,Latvian,Croatian andSlovene.
Oscillatory purism: Involves repeated swings between intense purism and a more inclusive attitude. Examples:German,Czech andYiddish.
Stable, consistent purism: No interruption or fluctuation in intensity is seen. Purism is a constant value-feature of the speech community. Examples:Arabic,Tamil andIcelandic.
Revolutionary purism: An abrupt change from the previously mentioned patterns to another. Examples:Turkish.
Lexical purism: directed at the lexicon, first of all against direct lexical loans, often combined with the development of loan translations (such as inNorwegian:hand out >støtteark andsnowboard >snøbrett orArabictilifūn >hātif andkumbyūtir >ḥāsūb.
Orthographic purism: directed against foreign orthographic elements (such as in Norwegian:genre >sjanger, in Spanish:football >fútbol). Note that there is also reverse orthographic purism. Some Spanish speakers prefer the English spelling "blue jean"[5] and object to the spellingbluyín.[6]
Morphological purism: directed against foreign inflection and declension (such as the resistance to plural -s in noun endings in Scandinavian languages).
Syntactic purism: directed at syntactic features from other languages (such as the stylistic resistance in Nynorsk against some passive constructions and some constructions with the genitive).
Phonetic purism: directed at foreign phonemes and phonematical combinations (such asgánster[7] orchampú[8] in Spanish). There is a reverse phonetic purism, which insists in the original pronunciation, such as pronouncinggángster andshampú in Spanish.
Regressive purism: The eradication of very old loan-words. It is one of the main features of ultrapurism.
Ultrapurism: The extreme upper limit of purism. In this pattern, everything expressed by human speech can become a target for puristic intervention, even geographical names, proper names, etc. (The attitude – in itself "puristic" and associated with increased education and foreign language competency – opposed to the translation or adaptation of toponyms, or even personal names, is historically quite recent, as names are not considered fixed or unchanging in most cultures; and there are many exceptions even in English, especially the names of historical personages, Native Americans, and even contemporary royalty. Historically, names were part of the lexicon of a language just as every other word, and it was common to have different names associated with different language communities. Seeexonym and endonym. The longer established the tradition of a name or term, the more likely are strong differences.) Two recorded examples of this areHigh Icelandic (Háfrónska), and the usage of the German renaissance humanistJohann GeorgTurmair who even translated the name of the ancient Roman generalFabius Cunctator intoZauderer Bohnenmaier (i. e. literally "Laggard Bean-Mayor"). While not ultra-purism per se,phono-semantic matching is commonly used in a number of languages, notably for translating proper names into Chinese.
^Veisbergs, Andrejs (2010). "Development of the Latvian Language, Purism and Prescriptivism".Linguistic Studies in Latvia(PDF). Vol. 18. University of Latvia. p. 15.
