Spelling and Society: The Culture and Politics of Orthography Around the World

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Spelling and society

Spelling matters to people. In America and Britain, every day members of the public write to the media on spelling issues, and take part in spelling contests. In Germany, a reform of the spelling system has provoked a constitutional crisis; in Galicia, a ‘war of orthographies’ parallels an intense public debate on national identity; on walls, bridges and trains globally, PUNX and ANARKISTS proclaim their identities orthographically. The way we spell often represents an attempt to identify with, or dissociate from, other languages (as in the spelling of some languages of previously colonised peoples), or other groups of speakers of our own language (as in the spelling of young people and subcultural groups). In Spelling and society, Mark Sebba explores why matters of orthography are of real concern to so many groups as a reflection of culture, history and social practices, and as a powerful symbol of national or local identity. mark sebba Reader in Sociolinguistics and Language Contact in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University.

Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009


Spelling and society The culture and politics of orthography around the world Mark Sebba


CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521848459 © Mark Sebba 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 OCeISBN

ISBN-13

978-0-511-48673-9

ISBN-13 ISBN-10

978-0-521-84845-9 hardback 0-521-84845-8 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.


For Charlotte Li-Zhe and Matthew Sing



Contents

Illustrations Maps Diagrams Tables Acknowledgements Note on transcription Introduction: society and orthography

page viii ix x xi xii xiii 1

1 Approaching orthography

10

2 Orthography as social practice

26

3 Language contact, linguists and the emergence of orthographies

58

4 ‘Postcolonial’ Orthographies

81

5 Between language and dialect: orthography in unstandardised and standardising vernaculars

102

6 Reform or revolution: where angels fear to tread

132

7 Why do we spell?

157

Glossary References General index Index of language names Index of surnames

168 172 183 186 188

vii


Illustrations

0.1 0.2 0.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 4.1 5.1

Bus shelter, Lancaster, 1997 Telephone booth in Manchester, 1996 Wall in Ripoll, Spain (1997) Graffiti at a Dublin bus stop (1999) Graffiti on a wall in Lancaster (1999) Graffiti from a bench in York (2003) Graffiti on a wall near a beach in North Wales (2002) Graffiti ‘‘Wedding Fayre’’ ‘‘Mature Tymes’’ – an archaic spelling of Times used to suggest age Graffiti from Hong Kong (2001) Photo: Sally Johnson Graffiti from Guangzhou, China (2001): ‘I love you Jia X’ Graffiti from Girona, Spain (1997) – note for standard The Moldovan Language Festival, 1990 German dialect sign in Bavaria ‘‘When you are inside, shut the door. ¼ PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR’’

viii


page 1 2 4 35 35 36 36 39 39 41 42 49 82 107

Maps

1 Map showing location of languages in Europe mentioned in this book page xviii 2 Map showing location of languages outside Europe mentioned in this book xix

ix


Diagrams

2.1 The ‘Zone of social meaning’ 2.2 Regulation in the ‘orthographic space’

x


page 34 43

Tables

1

2 2.1 3.1 4.1 5.1 5.2

Table of International Phonetic Alphabet consonant symbols and some typical orthographic representations of their sounds page xiv Table of International Phonetic Alphabet vowel symbols used in this book xvii Orthographic regimes for different types of text 47 Manx conventions which derive from English 62 Selected Roman orthographies for Malay, 1901–1972 94 Comparison of Dutch (etymological spelling) with Afrikaans (phonemic spelling) 117 Comparison of Galician orthographic practices (extracted from Herrero Valeiro (1993: 187), adapted) 128

xi


Acknowledgements

So many people have helped me in the writing of this book, with hints, snippets of data, pointers to the right place at the right time and moral support, that I cannot name them all. Many thanks to all of you. Three people in particular deserve a mention for the intellectual support they have given to this project over the seven or so years of its gestation. They are Jannis Androutsopoulos, Alexandra Jaffe and Sally Johnson – the ones who knew what a ‘social approach to orthography’ meant. Of course, they are not responsible for any errors or infelicities in this book. To my colleagues at Lancaster, in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, and the Centre for Language in Social Life: thank you. You have been wonderfully understanding and supportive. And of course, to my long-suffering family, which has doubled in size since the book began – thank you for your patience and support. But I won’t promise never to write another book! MS

xii


Note on transcription

By convention, phonetic, phonemic and orthographic representations are distinguished in this book by enclosing them in different types of brackets, as follows: 1. Phonetic: [ ], for example [chaet]; 2. Phonemic / /, for example /kaet/; 3. Orthographic , for example .

xiii


Table of International Phonetic Alphabet consonant symbols and some typical orthographic representations of their sounds

Place of articulation

IPA symbol

Voiced /voiceless

p t k

voiceless

bilabial alveolar velar

b d g

voiced

bilabial alveolar velar

m n N

(voiced)

bilabial alveolar palatal

n f h s S

Manner of articulation

Plosive

labio dental dental

Typical spellings (see Note 3 below)

pin tin cat, oak, lack bin din gap

p t k, c, ck

nasal

map nap anõ (Spanish) sing

m n n˜, ny (Catalan), nh (Portuguese) ng

fricative

fin thin

f, ff (Welsh) th, c (Spanish), þ (Icelandic) s, sz (Hungarian) sh, si, sj (Dutch), sch (German), sz (Polish), s (Czech), s (Hungarian), x (Portuguese)

velar voiceless

Example from English

alveolar postalveolar


sin shin

b d g

ç

palatal

labiodental

ich (German) Loch (German) van

x

velar

ð

dental

then

z z


zing measure

v

voiced

affricate

its chin

ch, x, h, • ch, x, h, • v, w (German), f (Welsh) th, d, ð (Icelandic) z, s (German) s, j (French, Portuguese) zˇ (Czech), zs (Hungarian)

ts tS

voiceless


dz

voiced

postalveolar

r, r, etc.

voiced

alveolar

approximant (various types of articulation)

run

ts, tz, z, c ch, tsch (German), tsh (Zulu), cz (Polish), cˇ (Czech), cs (Hung- arian), c (Malay/ Indonesian, Italian) j, g, dj, dzs (Hungarian) r, rr

l

alveolar

lateral approximant

lack

l

y

palatal

figlio

gl, lh (Portuguese), ll, hl (Zulu)

l

alveolar

llan (Welsh)

ll (Spanish), lj (Croatian)

edge

lateral fricative


Table (Cont.)

IPA symbol w j

Voiced /voiceless

Place of articulation labial-velar palatal

Manner of articulation approximant

Example from English well yell

Typical spellings (see Note 3 below) w, ou (French) j, y, i

Notes: 1. This table does not contain all International Phonetic Alphabet consonant symbols, only a selection. 2. The words given in the fifth column are only intended to give the reader a general idea of how the IPA symbol is pronounced. Examples are from English where possible, and from other European languages in a few cases. 3. The letters and digraphs in the sixth column are examples and relate only to languages which use the Roman alphabet. Other conventions may be used to represent these sounds in some languages. Where languages are named (in brackets), this does not mean that other languages do not have the same convention. The letters and digraphs in this column are merely intended to give an indication of the range of symbols which may be used for a particular sound.


Table of International Phonetic Alphabet vowel symbols used in the book

Front

Back

i

u

meet

I

sit Close-mid

Ω

Close

Central

e

o e ε

mat Open

caught

æ a

a

met

letter cut

c v

Open-mid

moot put

cot

Notes: 1. This table does not contain all International Phonetic Alphabet vowel symbols, only a selection including those used in this book. 2. The vowels are superimposed on a diagram schematically representing the space of the oral cavity. The diagram is based on that used by the International Phonetic Association. 3. English words are shown adjacent to the vowels in the diagram to illustrate the pronunciation of the vowel in English.

xvii


1. Map showing location of languages in Europe mentioned in this book Note: English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic are not shown on these maps because of their wide geographical spread.

Key 1. Albanian 2. Alsatian 3. Basque 4. Breton 5. Catalan 6. Corsican 7. Croatian 8. Czech 9. Danish 10. Dutch 11. Estonian 12. Finnish 13. Gaelic (Irish) 14. Gaelic (Scottish) 15. Galician 16. German

17. Greek 18. Italian 19. Latvian 20. Manx 21. Moldovan 22. Norwegian 23. Polish 24. Portuguese 25. Romanian 26. Russian 27. Scots 28. Serbian 29. Slovak 30. Swedish 31. Ukranian 32. Welsh

xviii


2. Map showing location of languages outside Europe mentioned in this book * indicates a Turkic language (see Chapter 3 and 6)

Key 33. Afrikaans 34. Azerbaijani* 35. Bahasa Malaysia (Malay) 36. Bamileke 37. Haitian Creole 38. Hebrew 39. Hindi 40. Indonesian 41. Jamaican Creole 42. Japanese 43. Karakalpak* 44. Kazakh* 45. Lakota 46. Malayalam

47. Quechua 48. St Lucia Creole (Kwéyòl) 49. Shinzwani 50. Sranan 51. Swahili (Kiswahili) 52. Tatar* 53. Turkmen* 54. Turkish* 55. Urdu 56. Uzbek* 57. Venda 58. Xhosa 59. Zulu

xix



Introduction: society and orthography

Some questions about spelling On a suburban bus shelter in Lancaster during 1997 the following graffiti could be seen (Figure 0.1):

Figure 0.1 Bus shelter, Lancaster, 1997

The names CHRIS and KRIS are among the most prominent written there. Chris is the standard short form of a very common English name, either male or female. Kris, on the other hand, is unusual in England. It is not a usual spelling of the name Chris nor is it a distinct name in its own right. Passing this spot on a daily basis and seeing these names together, I would speculate: Who, or rather, why, is Kris? Are Chris and Kris the same person, or are they two 1


2


Figure 0.2 Telephone booth in Manchester, 1996

people, both called Chris, who differentiate themselves by one of them adopting an idiosyncratic spelling for his/her name? Whatever the answer, there is an interesting issue: Kris, being a highly unconventional spelling, is much more striking than Chris. Both sets of letters represent the same sounds, approximately [kh is],1 and apparently represent the same word, the name Chris; nevertheless, these representations are not equivalent. There is some symbolism that attaches itself to Kris but not to Chris; the K is significant, it is ‘other’. As it happens, in this book, we shall come across many examples of a symbolic significance attaching to this particular letter. So the first of many orthographic questions which this book will ask is this: how can we give an account for the apparently intentionally ‘deviant’ or unconventional spelling of this person’s name? In a busy street in the inner city of Manchester, England, in 1995 the graffiti below could be seen on the outside of a phonebox (Figure 0.2): r

K. O. ov B/w2 woz ere livin’ ina 1

2

By convention, square brackets are used around phonetic transcriptions, diagonals // around phonemic representations and angle brackets around spellings, thus: [chæt], /kæt/ . K. O. may be the initials of a person or a group; B/w could be ‘Black and White’ but is also a common abbreviation for the Beswick area of Manchester.


Introduction

3

dredd3 time runnin’ tings as usual like di original Rude Gal does!

From the vocabulary and some of the spellings, as well as the content and the location of this text, it is safe to say that it is not intended as a representation of Standard English, but of a British variety of English-lexicon Creole, similar to Jamaican Creole.4 Certain typically Creole pronunciations, such as /ti n/ for thing, are represented in the spelling by deviating from the conventional Standard English spellings; thus, . This is easily explained as the writer’s attempt to represent ‘Creole’ pronunciations more accurately by using ‘phonetic spelling’. But what of , <woz>, <ere> and for , <was>, and ? These spellings do not represent pronunciations which are in any way significantly different in Creole and in Manchester English. The writer has chosen to spell these words ‘phonetically’ even though they would be sounded out just the same way if they were spelt according to the conventions of Standard English spelling. The motivation cannot be simply to represent the Creole pronunciation as the standard spellings would do this equally well; therefore there must be other, social or cultural, reasons for choosing to use these spellings. Hence my second question: how can we give an account for this writer’s decision to use ‘phonetic’ spellings for words which would be read aloud in exactly the same way if they were conventionally spelt? My third example, also graffiti, comes from further afield. The photograph (Figure 0.3) was taken in Ripoll, a mountain town in Catalonia (the language of the graffiti is Spanish (Castilian), not Catalan). The word ( in standard Spanish orthography) here means that the building has been subject to ‘occupation’, that is squatted. Again, a functions as a symbol of ‘otherness’, of resistance to convention; but in this case, arguably, not just to orthographic conventions, but to social conventions more generally. According to Castilla (1997), a journalist writing in the newspaper El Paı´s, ‘in the last decade [] has turned itself into the favourite letter of okupas [‘occupations’], war resisters, bakalaeros [adherents of a type of techno music, also associated (in stereotype at least) 3

4

Dread () in this language variety is a positive evaluation, and could be glossed as ‘very good’. See, for example, Sebba 1993.


4


Figure 0.3 Wall in Ripoll, Spain (1997)

with recreational drugs], a´kratas [‘anarchists’, university students and high school teenagers who are anti-establishment] and gay movements’.5 Indeed it seems that among those who engage in or sympathise with these activities, the spelling with is almost obligatory, not only in graffiti but in all writing: to use the prescribed standard spelling produces a contradiction as it shows a compliant, rather than resistant, attitude to the status quo. What each of these examples shows is that writers may choose to deviate from established conventions of spelling. In so doing, they create forms which are (usually) just as easy to read as the conventional ones, but are less familiar to the reader who has learnt the standard forms at school. These unconventional forms have, or may have, a symbolic significance which the conventional forms do not. This leads to two questions: firstly, what lies behind the choice of these particular forms – for example, why rather than ? Secondly, how precisely does the chosen form derive this symbolism or symbolic power in the given context? The answers cannot lie solely in phonetics or phonology or in the history of the orthography, though these may well be relevant. But in addition, there must be some social account for what is going on.

5

I am grateful to Melissa Moyer and Maria Carme Torras i Calvo for their explanations of, and comments on, these terms. The Standard Castilian spellings of these words are , and .


Introduction

5

While my examples are all taken, as it happens, from graffiti, it is not satisfactory to dismiss these phenomena as the activities of marginal or antisocial groups. Each of the examples finds its counterpart in more widespread or ‘mainstream’ practices. Though ‘Kris’ may be an individual youth trying to display an anti-establishment attitude to society or just draw attention to himself or herself, Carney (1994) points out that in English, generally, and in other languages, names, especially surnames ‘are the totem-poles of language. The pressure of distinctive function puts a value on different and even bizarre spellings’; witness the English surnames normally spelt Featherstonehaugh / R fæn :/, Woolfardsworthy /w lz ri/ and Beaulieu /‘bju:li / (1994: 449). While the writer of K. O. ov B/w woz ere may be making up his or her own conventions for writing Creole, research has shown that professional writers writing in English-lexicon Creole tend to use un-English conventions in order to distance the variety they are representing from Standard English (Sebba 1998).6 In Haiti, a major (and acrimonious) national debate has taken place over whether or not to adopt an orthography which would make Haitian Creole look more similar to its lexifier, French (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994).7 And while the preference for writing Spanish words with instead of or may be characteristic of youth subculture and anarchist groups in Spain, it has wider resonances, as Catalan, Basque and (in some written varieties) Galician have chosen to adopt standard conventions which differentiate those languages from the official national language of the Spanish state.8 In looking for a social explanation for these things, it is not enough to treat them merely as behavioural oddities of adolescents or particular social groups. So where shall we look for the answers to my questions? At the moment, there is no academic field which can provide them. A framework for accounting for orthographic choices in their social context – at the individual, group, societal and national level – is missing from the literature on orthography so far. Certainly, these issues are discussed – but mainly in isolation from each other. There is no ‘field’ of orthographic sociolinguistics and no theoretical framework for understanding these phenomena. To begin to create such a field – a sociolinguistics of orthography – and develop such a theoretical framework is one aim of this book. e

X

c

Orthography: whose concern? In linguistics, orthography has certainly had its niche for a long time, but it is just that – a niche, a small preserve. Some standard linguistic reference works 6 8

See Chapter 5. 7 See Chapter 4. ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Herrero Valeiro 1996: 148–9. See Chapter 5. A


6


have no entry for it at all; in others it receives scant attention. The main textbooks in the field neglect it comprehensively. Yet orthography, as the above examples show, is a topic of great interest not least because it is a point where issues of language as a formal object and of language as a social and cultural phenomenon intersect. It touches on matters of social identity, national identity, cultural politics, representation and voice. It foregrounds familiar linguistic issues of dialect and standard, of ‘norm’ and ‘variation’. It affects, and is affected by, technology and economics. In the words of one commentator, it is an area of extremely interesting problems, in which the concerns of pure linguistics combined with social, pedagogical, literary, cultural, economic, governmental, national and finally emotional considerations, each fastened to the question of orthography by some kind of invisible hook. 9

Orthography has always been a topic of some interest to linguists. However, it is fair to say that many linguists have overlooked what could be the most interesting aspects of orthography – the social and cultural ones. This is very likely a consequence of the recent history of linguistics, in which emphasis has been on studying spoken language. In mainstream twentieth-century linguistics, orthography was seen as closely related to phonology, with the ideal orthography being close to, if not identical to, a standardised phonemic transcription of a selected variety of a language. This is the view put forward by, for example, Kenneth Pike (1938: 87) in his writings on developing alphabets for unwritten languages of Central America: ‘the ideal alphabet should have one letter, and one letter only for each phoneme, or the learning process will be retarded’.10 The same view informs Pike’s influential textbook, Phonemics: A technique for reducing languages to writing (1947). Thus orthography became a branch of descriptive linguistics, with technological ‘efficiency’ the main criterion for success. In the worst case, the concerns of the users of the language, even where recognised, have been dismissed, as in the following exhortation by Tauli (1968: 131):11 In new literary languages there may be various social, political, psychological, typographical and economic conditions in conflict with the phonemic principle. Nevertheless, they should not be overestimated. They often depend on prejudices which should be combated, instead of yielding to them . . . It would be scarcely wise to yield to such pressure and introduce such absurdities in a new orthography. Instead one should try to explain to the natives that their orthography is superior to that of French and Spanish. 9

10

The writer and translator Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski, on the Polish orthographic reforms of the 1930s, quoted by Rothstein, 1977: 234. Quoted by Barros 1995: 283. 11 Quoted by Buttner 1991: 62.


Introduction

7

So distant have social and ideological issues seemed from the business of orthography that linguists who have come up against them have often reacted with surprise. Witness Paul Garvin, working on developing a unified orthography for Ponapean in the 1940s: The problem of devising an acceptable spelling system, which initially might have appeared purely, or at least primarily, a linguistic matter, upon closer inspection thus turned out to be a language and culture problem par excellence. (Garvin, 1954: 129)

For want of discussion and debate, for lack of challenge to the tenets of Pike and others, and above all for want of a theory of the social and cultural aspects of orthography, successive generations of linguists have had to rediscover what Garvin found out for himself in the field. Almost forty years later, in connection with developing an orthography for the Slovene dialect Selsq, Tom Priestly had cause to remark: ‘it is clear that the ‘‘linguist’s dream’’ of having a hand in devising a new orthography may prove to be more of a nightmare if the linguist involved in this exercise is not aware of potential psychological, sociological and political factors’. This book takes the opposite starting point from the ‘traditional’ linguistic orthographers. Orthography is par excellence a matter of language and culture. It is a matter of linguistics too, of course, but one where the classic principle of sociolinguistics comes into play: the signs carry not only linguistic meaning, but also social meaning at the same time. In English today, vulcanising a tyre is not exactly the same as vulcanizing a tire; in written German, a Kuß is not quite just a Kuss;12 and in Galician, dia is distinct in its connotations, though not in its reference, from dıá.13 Outside the world of linguistics, it is clear that orthography matters to people. In Britain and America, every day members of the public write to the media on spelling issues, and take part in spelling contests.14 In Germany, orthographic reform has provoked a constitutional crisis;15 in Galicia, a ‘war of orthographies’ parallels an intense public debate on national identity;16 on walls, bridges and trains globally, PUNX and ANARKISTS proclaim their identities orthographically.17 Orthography is a professional concern for many groups of people. Educators in most countries are concerned with spelling. One role of schools in many societies is to teach ‘correct spelling’ (even where this is recognised to present great difficulties); indeed, in some school systems a great deal of time and effort is expended on this because the consequences of failure to learn to spell properly are quite severe. In some languages – again English is an example – there may be a feeling that the spelling system hinders learning to 12 15

See Johnson 1999:162. 13 See Herrero Valeiro 1993. See Chapter 6. 16 See Chapter 5. 17 See Chapter 2.

14

See Chapter 7.


8


read, at least for some learners. Teachers are concerned to find pedagogical methods which will enable their students to succeed as readers and writers. Here another branch of linguistics has become involved, as a research paradigm has developed within psycholinguistics which studies the relationship between spelling, phonology and the cognitive processes involved in reading and writing. Thus some studies of cognitive aspects of spelling present themselves as contributions to the theory and practice of learning to read and write. Educational interests are also a motivation for two other groups; those developing new orthographies for previously unwritten languages and those proposing to reform an existing one. The former are mainly trained linguists; the latter are more diverse, depending to some extent on whether they have been appointed to the task by an academy or government department, or are extra-governmental campaigners hoping to bring about spelling reform. In both cases, there is a concern that orthography should facilitate learning to read and write, or at least should present the minimum of obstacles to a learner. Professional writers are concerned about orthography. This may only become apparent when (as in German-speaking countries at the moment) they are faced with changes. While educators are concerned with young (would-be) readers, writers tend to be concerned with established readers – their public, who are already familiar with an orthography. Professional writers are therefore likely to be conservatives in matters of orthographic reform. Writers who use ‘dialect’ or non-standardised varieties of language have a particular concern with orthography. They may develop their own system, or use systems which have been developed by other writers which have not been codified. Publishers are concerned with orthography. Historically, printers and publishers have played a role in the development of standard orthographies for many languages. Having set a standard for a particular language, publishers tend to police it rigidly, imposing it on all writers who wish their work to appear in print. Publishers of dictionaries and similar reference works have a very specific interest in orthography, sometimes in maintaining the status quo, sometimes in seeing it overturned (as this may create a market for new dictionaries). Similarly, publishers may have vested interests in maintaining existing spellings (so they will not have to revise their standards) or in seeing them changed (so they will be able to sell new editions of existing books). For the general public in many countries, orthography is certainly a concern. Individuals want to be able to spell correctly, in other words to have the necessary knowledge or skills not to make ‘spelling mistakes’ in everyday writing. There is also a general concern, strongly manifest in English-speaking countries, that ‘spelling standards’ should be upheld and not allowed to slip. The ceaseless flow of letters to newspapers and other media on this topic, year in and year out, confirms that it is indeed a matter of importance to a part of the


Introduction

9

population. At the same time, other individuals take up an oppositional attitude towards spelling norms, and choose to break the rules in various ways. About this book This book will focus on the social symbolic meaning of orthography. It will attempt both to document and to theorise this neglected aspect of written language, by developing new ways of looking at and thinking about orthography. Along the way, it will provide a critique of the existing approaches to orthography within linguistics. The book is divided into chapters, each of which discusses orthography from a particular viewpoint. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the topic of orthography and discusses different ways in which the subject may be approached: it argues the case for seeing orthography as social practice, a view which draws on the theoretical tradition of the New Literacy Studies, and distinguishes two models of orthography, an autonomous model and a sociocultural model, along the lines of Street’s (1984) two models of literacy. Chapter 2 further elaborates the idea of orthography as social practice, drawing both on studies of ‘national’ orthographies and of in-group (e.g. adolescent peer group) writing. Chapter 3 discusses orthography as language contact: since the introduction of a writing system for a previously unwritten language always involves a class of literate bilinguals, I take a perspective which sees orthographies as the product of bilingualism. Case studies include Manx and Sranan Tongo (Surinamese Creole). Chapter 4, ‘Postcolonial’ orthographies, is about the power of orthography to symbolise political allegiances and changes. It includes case studies of Haitian, Sranan Tongo and Malay/Indonesian. Chapter 5 deals with orthography in unstandardised vernaculars, languages which experience particular problems with orthography choice, often reflecting problems at a sociopolitical level. The main case studies are of Caribbean English-lexicon Creole and Galician. Chapter 6 deals with orthographic reforms and reform movements, looking at ‘conflicting discourses’ surrounding reforms. Finally, Chapter 7 is the conclusion.


1

Approaching orthography

1.

Orthography and spelling

Spelling, says Gunther Kress in his book Early Spelling, ‘is knowing how to write words correctly’ (2000: 1) and few would disagree. The idea that there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ way to write words, although by no means a logical necessity, is one which is very deeply ingrained in many cultures. Indeed ‘writing correctly’ is exactly what is implied by the term used for spelling in many languages, – for example, German (Rechtschreibung, ‘correct writing’), Greek (Orthographia, ‘correct writing’), and the French, German and Spanish terms which derive from the Greek. The notion of ‘correctness’ implies a norm, hence we might define spelling as ‘writing of words of a language according to the norms or conventions of that language’. We would have to add ‘usually’, however, since it is not a contradiction in terms to talk of ‘deviant’ or ‘unusual’ spellings – in fact such terms will be used many times in this book. Then what exactly is ‘orthography’ or ‘an orthography’ and how does it differ from ‘writing systems,’ ‘scripts’ and ‘spelling’? Philip Baker (1997: 93) makes a useful distinction between writing system and orthography by describing a writing system as ‘any means of representing graphically any language or group of languages’, whereas ‘orthography is employed more narrowly to mean a writing system specifically intended for a particular language and which is either already in regular use among a significant proportion of that language’s native speakers, or which is or was proposed for such use’. It would thus make sense to speak of the ‘Roman writing system’ or ‘Cyrillic writing system’ but not the ‘Roman orthography’ or ‘Cyrillic orthography’, except with reference to a particular language. Particular languages or language varieties have, or can develop, their own orthographies, based on a specific writing system such as the Roman or Cyrillic alphabet or the Chinese character system, but adapted in various ways to fit the particular language. Script is usually taken to be a synonym of ‘writing system’. In languages like English, therefore, which make the distinction between orthography and spelling, the former may be seen as the set of conventions for 10



11

writing words of the language, while the latter is the application of those conventions to write actual words. Hence I can truthfully write now, ‘I am spelling the words of this sentence according to the orthography of English using the Roman writing system (or script)’. The academic study of orthography touches a number of different areas of the study of language. Putting it another way, it sits uneasily on the boundary between several fields of scholarship. Within linguistics, a few scholars – for example, Venezky,1 Haas,2 Albrow3 and Carney4 – have treated it as a subject in its own right, mainly focussing on the relationship between sound, grammar and writing; researchers in this tradition have, therefore, discussed orthographic systems in relation to the phonology, morphology and lexicon of a language. Elsewhere in linguistics, orthography has mainly been seen as concerned with the representation in writing of the sounds of a spoken language, and so related almost exclusively to phonology or ‘phonemics’, though with some attention to the morphological level. This approach has informed a number of classic texts, such as that of Pike (1947), and underlies much of the work concerned with developing orthographies for languages without a written tradition. It is closely connected with another fundamental activity of descriptive linguists, namely transcription. Scholars of language history have also taken an interest in orthography, either as a study in its own right (e.g. Scragg 1974) or for the light it sheds on phonological change. Since written records are the only evidence for any varieties of language which are no longer spoken, students of historical phonology may be concerned with reconstructing the sound-to-character correspondences which will allow them to determine how the written words were pronounced at the time of writing. For these researchers as well, orthography is mainly interesting as a (presumed) transcription of spoken language. Some scholars, however, have gone beyond this to draw conclusions about the social context in which orthographic changes took place – for example, Toon (1983). Psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists with an interest in reading and writing have been obliged to take an interest in orthography too. For researchers in this area, the interest lies in the relationship between the form of the written word and the cognitive processes involved in reading and writing.5 In alphabetic writing systems, such as those used for the European languages, there is (typically) a complex relationship between orthography and phonology. Controversy continues over the question of whether a phonemic orthography (on the principle ‘one sound one symbol’) is necessary, beneficial or 1 4 5

For example 1970. 2 For example 1970. 3 For example 1972. For example 1994. See, for example, the collection edited by Downing, Lima and Noonan (1992).


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simply irrelevant to learners and/or mature readers. Research in this area contributes to practice both in education, for example the teaching of reading and writing, and in speech therapy. From the above survey, it will be clear that orthographic questions are of interest to researchers in a number of different areas. However, orthography is not central to any of these. Furthermore, insofar as there is a body of theory concerned with orthography, it relates to the relationship between the phonology, morphology and lexicon of a language and the orthographic system; it does not engage with the social and cultural aspects of orthography except in passing. It would be quite wrong, however, to suggest that there is no body of literature relating to these social and cultural issues. The long list of references in this book will testify to that. Nevertheless, we can truthfully say two things: 1. Social and/or cultural aspects of orthography are not currently the main focus of any area of linguistics. Sociolinguistics, a discipline which pays special attention to these social matters, has never taken an interest in orthography: there are few papers by sociolinguists on orthographic topics, and the main textbooks in the field overlook it completely.6 Most linguists who have studied orthography in depth have not been primarily interested in its social aspects. 2. There has been no serious attempt to produce a theoretical framework which addresses the social/cultural aspects of orthography. Although there are numerous articles and papers which discuss and problematise these issues, they tend to have been written in isolation, to ‘reinvent the wheel’, and to suffer from the lack of a theoretical base. It is these aspects, neglected so far in theories of orthography, which are to be the focus of this book, examined through a framework which will be described in the next section. 2.

Orthography as literacy

Orthography has its niche within linguistics, but the scholarly approaches mentioned above have paid little or no attention to its social and cultural aspects. In seeking to make social issues the central theme of a new area of linguistics, I have chosen to take an altogether different approach, treating orthography as one aspect of literacy. Since orthography of some sort is fundamental to reading and writing, the connection with ‘literacy’ – which 6

There have been a few specialist volumes devoted to the societal aspects of orthography, for example, Fishman (ed.) 1977.



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(however you define it) is somehow also to do with reading and writing – is self-evident. In fact, some researchers in the area of literacy have already paid attention to orthographic issues. These mainly fall under the headings of providing orthographies for previously unwritten languages and literacy education programmes. These studies occasionally engage with social and cultural issues, but when they do, they typically do not do so in any very theoretical way. They tend to treat the issues as practical ones of getting an orthography ‘accepted’ by its potential users. There is thus no substantial existing body of theory relating to social and cultural aspects of orthography within the research literature on literacy either. Nevertheless, the area of ‘Literacy Studies’ (Barton 1994: 22) seems a promising home for the study of these social aspects of orthography. This is because recent developments in the theory of literacy make it possible to understand orthography, like literacy itself, in terms of social practice. In the period since 1980, an approach to literacy has developed which has acquired the name ‘The New Literacy Studies’ (Gee 1990). Barton (1994: 22–23) describes how the concept of ‘literacy’ developed rapidly over this period, emerging as ‘a code-word across a range of disciplines for new views of reading and writing’. Fundamental to this view of literacy is that reading and writing are seen as situated within a social context. Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole were among the first to develop a practice account of literacy, viewing literacy as a set of social and cultural practices. They conclude their early, important contribution to this field as follows (1981: 236): Instead of focusing exclusively on the technology of a writing system and its reputed consequences . . . we approach literacy as a set of socially organized practices which make use of a symbol system and a technology for producing and disseminating it. Literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use.

The connection with orthography is apparent from the quotation above: orthography is part of the ‘technology of a writing system’ but that writing system is itself a symbolic system embedded in a culture, shaping and yet also shaped by a set of cultural practices to which it gives, and by which it is given, meaning. While ‘orthography’ and ‘literacy’ are by no means synonymous, orthography is a fundamental element of written language; therefore, orthography too is situated in social practice. Orthography, too, needs and deserves a ‘practice account’. In this book, the notion of orthography as social practice will be elaborated and many examples will be given from different situations around the world.


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3.

‘Autonomous’ and ‘ideological’ models of literacy

The concept of ‘autonomous’ and ‘ideological’ models of literacy originated with Brian Street (1984). Street was reacting against models of literacy which treated it as an independent variable, isolated from other social and cultural factors, which was either ‘present’ or ‘absent’ in a society. According to him, the ‘autonomous’ model is based ‘on the assumption that [literacy] is a neutral technology that can be detached from specific social contexts’ (Street 1984: 1). Researchers working with this model claim to be able to study specific consequences of literacy – effects on a society as it changes from ‘pre-literate’ to ‘literate’ – ‘classically represented in terms of economic ‘‘take off’’ or in terms of cognitive skills’ (Street 1984: 2).7 In contrast, an ideological model of literacy according to Street focusses on the ‘specific social practices of reading and writing’, recognising ‘the ideological and therefore culturally embedded nature of these practices (Street 1984: 1). Paradoxically, as Street shows, claims made by proponents of the autonomous model, ‘as well as the literacy practices they purport to describe, in fact derive from specific ideologies which, in much of the literature, are not made explicit’ (Street 1984: 1). Given this observation by Street, that the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy is in fact just as ideological as the social practice model, it seems appropriate to treat all models of orthography as fundamentally ideological. Nevertheless, the same broad distinction that Street made for literacy can be made for orthography as well. We will call autonomous models those that treat orthography as a ‘neutral technology that can be detached from specific social contexts’. Sociocultural models are those that recognise the cultural nature of orthographic practice. Both models are ‘ideological’ in that they are based on (possibly implicit) theories about the nature of society and how it should be (see Gee 1990, Chapter 1 for more detailed discussion). ‘Autonomous’ models, however, are much less likely than sociocultural models to make this ideology explicit. In much of the linguistics literature, an autonomous model of orthography is taken for granted. This book will take the opposite view: that any explanatory account of orthography-as-practice must be sociocultural in nature.

7

An example, taken in this case from the literature on orthography (Sjoberg 1966: 261):‘To promote modernisation and industrialisation, governmental leaders are finding it mandatory to absorb the surviving pre-literates into the overall administrative and cultural system. Essentially, the goal is for all groups within modern nation-state systems to become literate. In many cases, particularly in Africa, the new nation-states include within their boundaries diverse language groups having little or no acquaintance with a written heritage. Uniting these divergent elements into some semblance of a national society wherein industrialisation can proceed requires improved communication and, above all, widespread literacy.’



4.

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The autonomous model of orthography: phonemics as science

Street’s identification of ‘autonomous’ models of literacy is useful in studying orthography because it enables us to see how it has come about that sociocultural accounts of orthography have been so rare within linguistics. The autonomous view of literacy has predominated within linguistics, and with it an autonomous model of orthography. In this section we will look in more detail at that model and its consequences for the study of orthography during the twentieth century. Let us start by examining the views on orthography of the proponents of autonomous views of literacy. Among these, all writing systems are not seen as equally good. Instead, there is a clear preference for phonemic systems. In the locus classicus of the ‘autonomous’ approach to literacy, Goody and Watt (1968) go so far as to specify the cognitive benefits of a ‘phonetic’8 writing system. According to them, pictographic and logographic systems are alike in their tendency to reify the objects of the natural and social order; by doing so they register, record, make permanent the existing social and ideological picture.

However, phonetic writing, by imitating human discourse, is in fact symbolizing, not the objects of the social and natural order, but the very process of human interaction in speech: the verb is as easy to express as the noun . . . Phonetic systems are therefore adapted to expressing every nuance of individual thought . . . [while logographic writing records] only those items in the cultural repertoire which the literate specialists have selected for written expression; and it tends to express the collective attitude towards them. (Goody and Watt 1968: 37–38, my emphasis)

One assumption typical of such accounts of writing systems is that there is an evolutionary progression of writing systems, roughly, from pictographic, through logographic, to syllabic and finally alphabetic systems. Syllabic and alphabetic systems would represent the sort described above by Goody and Watt as ‘phonetic systems’ and, as they make clear above, represent a superior state of development. Such evolutionary views of writing have recently drawn criticism from Barton, who argues (1995: 30) that development is not ‘natural’; rather it involves individuals in social settings making decisions. Development is not ‘linear’; it also includes little understood mechanisms of 8

This term could be taken to include various types of alphabetic, consonantal and syllabic scripts, in contrast to logographic scripts which represent words rather than sounds.


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contact. There is not a ‘best’ system; different writing systems suit different languages and there are broad and conflicting demands on writing systems.

It could also be argued that Goody and Watt show little awareness of the innovative and productive capabilities of logographic systems, or of the fuzzy dividing line between those and phonetically based writing systems.9 Chinese, for example, although often cited as a clear example of an ‘ideographic’10 or ‘logographic’ writing system, involves a substantial proportion of phonetic elements. On the other hand, the written forms of ‘alphabetic’ languages like English are not simply transcriptions of sounds; in many cases the phonetic forms of words are virtually irrecoverable from the spelling, so the system is logographic at least to some extent. Furthermore, more recent scholars like Sampson and DeFrancis have vigorously opposed the idea that Chinese script ‘is a primitive or intrinsically inferior vehicle for intellectual communication by comparison with alphabetic European writing’ (Sampson 1994: 118). Thus the claims by Goody and Watt for the superiority and neutrality of phonetic scripts seem to rest on shaky assumptions. They are, however, in accordance with the mainstream approach within European scholarship, then and now. Taking to task the ‘profound ethnocentricity of Western perceptions of writing’ Roy Harris writes: The assumed supremacy of the alphabet underlies virtually all modern classifications of writing systems. European scholars closeted in their libraries and irritated by the sheer proliferation of marks on paper constructed for themselves the theoretical fantasy of a ‘perfect alphabet’, in which each letter would unambiguously represent one sound and no other. (Harris 2000: 31)

While perhaps it did not happen quite like that, there is no doubt that ethnocentricity played a role here. It is surely not a coincidence that the very scholars and scientists who ‘discovered’ the superiority of phonemic writing systems are virtually all speakers of languages which use alphabetic (i.e. quasiphonemic) scripts. Such beliefs, though no doubt older than the beginning of 9

10

Recent scholarship is divided on the issue of whether or not these are two fundamentally distinct types. Sampson, for example, argues that there is a fundamental difference between phonographic and logographic writing systems, but this view is contested by DeFrancis (1989) as well as others. Sampson (1994: 117), while disagreeing with DeFrancis, concedes that ‘the clear consensus is that DeFrancis has successfully made his case for the universality of a phonetic principle in writing systems’. In an ‘ideographic’ system each symbol or character conveys an idea. DeFrancis and Unger regard the notion that Chinese and Japanese are ‘ideographic’ as a ‘misconception’ which has had a ‘pernicious influence’ on, inter alia, theories of reading (1994: 553). The consensus among scholars of these languages is that they are logographic, that is, each character represents a specific word of the language.



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the twentieth century, could be justified by reference to the structuralist view of phonology associated with Saussure. Within the structuralist paradigm the phonology of a language was viewed as a self-contained system with a fixed number of contrasting elements. This could be interpreted to mean that the optimum writing system was one which had written symbols in a one-to-one relationship with sounds (phonemes), and this is precisely how many linguists of that school did interpret it. Indeed, any other kind of relationship between phonemes and symbols would not reflect the elegant symmetry of the phonological system, and could only confuse and hamper the user of the writing system. An early example of such thinking is found in Daniel Jones’s introduction to a Sechuana Reader co-authored with Sol Plaatje (Jones and Plaatje 1916: xi–xii). In our opinion, no system of writing can be considered adequate which allows two words which are pronounced differently to be written the same. . . . The introduction of some new letters enables us to write any language on the ‘one sound one letter’ principle. A system based on this principle is necessarily easier than any other for natives to learn, and is at the same time the most accurate guide for pronunciation for the foreign learner.

Much of the linguistic work carried out during the first part of the 20th Century was among indigenous peoples of the Americas in the context of Bible translation and literacy teaching. The most important of the organisations devoted to this kind of work was the Summer Institute of Linguistics, whose own members were among the leading proponents of the phonemic principle of writing. According to Barros (1995: 282) The idea that every language has a limited set of sounds with intuitive value for native speakers led to the position that an alphabet could only be ‘natural’ and ‘efficient’ (Swadesh, 1940a, p. 273) if it reproduced this psychological level of language, that is, its phonology (Swadesh 1940b). The linguistic principle, ‘for each phoneme only one symbol’, became the basic rule of the indigenous alphabet. (Swadesh 1940c: 289)

It is not coincidental that this orthodoxy was so much in keeping with the principles of American structuralism, for many of the most influential American linguists (for example, Pike and Gleason) were also associates of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Furthermore, as Barros points out (1995: 285), the evangelical model of indigenous education in Central America (as put forward by the SIL) became secularised by means of linguistic arguments which allowed it to be seen as ‘scientific’: since the phonemes of the language had psychological reality, a phonemic orthography (and hence ‘literacy skills’) could be acquired easily by the speaker of an indigenous language. ‘Thus, linguistics was used in support of the thesis of the naturalness of the literacy process in a non-written culture, since it considered the transformation of an oral community into a literate one as a neutral cultural process,


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depending exclusively on the existence of a phonological orthography’ (Barros 1995: 285). We can see here the essentially ideological nature of the process whereby the phonemic principle came to be accepted widely both within linguistics and outside (for example, in the fields of education and literacy) as the only truly scientific answer to the problem of ‘reducing a language to writing’. It is indeed remarkable that other ancient and historically successful writing systems such as those of China, Japan and Korea were completely ignored in this process. This was easy to justify if conventional wisdom saw them as ‘less evolved’ than alphabetic systems. At the same time, even well-established alphabetic systems such as those of English or French could come to be seen as ‘unscientific’ because they deviated from the phonemic principle, providing an additional argument for spelling reform. 5.

The learnability issue

While presenting alphabetic phonemic writing systems as ideologically neutral and ‘good for everyone’, their proponents have always claimed a very specific advantage for them over all other types of writing systems: such systems are easiest to learn for native speakers. A system based on this principle [‘one sound one letter’] is necessarily easier than any other for natives to learn. (Jones and Plaatje 1916: xii) The ideal alphabet should have one letter, and one letter only for each phoneme, or the learning process will be retarded. (Pike 1938: 87, quoted by Barros 1995)

In spite of these assertions, the relationship between phonemic representations and reading remains the subject of much research, controversy and speculation. Richard Venezky, for example, takes a view opposed to the two just cited: It may be true that children who learn to read with highly phonemic orthographies, like Finnish, learn to relate specific letters to specific sounds quite quickly, but this is not in itself reading. When attempts are made to compare reading abilities across cultures, one of the few valid observations that can be made is that regardless of the phonemic regularity of the orthography, a significant percentage of children in all countries will be classed as remedial readers, and within this group most will come from lower socioeconomic environments. It has been observed in practice, furthermore, that certain deviations from a one-letter, one-sound system do not have a significant effect upon learning to read. (Venezky 1977: 47)

But Valter Tauli (1977: 35 (fn. 67)) disagrees with Venezky: ‘a reading problem such as some have with English or French is unknown with Finnish or



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Estonian’. Tauli considers that ‘the most efficient orthography is phonemic. It is essential to stress this simple BASIC, phonemic principle of orthography, in spite of practical difficulties in applying it in many languages’ (1977: 24). Reading and spelling research has been largely the preserve of psycholinguists. Within the psycholinguistic research paradigm, there is relatively little focus on writing, much more on reading and the process of learning to read. The terms ‘deep orthography’ and ‘shallow orthography’ (Klima 1972) are used to distinguish types of orthographic system. A shallow orthography is one where the relationship between sounds and characters is close to one-to-one, so that the written word closely corresponds to the pronunciation of the word in the context where it occurs. Fully phonemic orthographies are therefore shallow. A deep orthography is one where the relationship between sounds and letters is more complex. In deep orthographies words may sound the same but be spelt differently (soul and sole) or sound different but have the same spelling (row, lead ). English and Hebrew are often cited as examples of languages with deep orthographies, and Spanish, Italian and Finnish as examples of languages with shallow ones. The claim that phonemic writing systems are easiest to learn has been recast in terms of the orthographic depth hypothesis (Katz and Frost 1992), which states that in languages with shallow orthography the learner reader will rely mainly on phonemic cues, obtained directly from the graphemes (letters) to recognise words. In a deep orthography, word recognition will rely more (though not exclusively) on recognising the orthographic form of the word, its visual ‘shape’. From this, we could predict that learning to read a ‘shallow’ language requires less time than learning to read a ‘deep’ language, since the learner only needs to learn a fairly small set of regular sound-grapheme correspondences. Much of the research which has been carried out by psycholinguists has attempted to establish to what extent the process of reading, or learning to read, is dependent on various types of phonological awareness in the learner (usually a child). Phonological awareness includes an ability to recognise and manipulate sounds at various levels: in particular, syllables, onsets (the first sound of a word), rhymes or rimes (the rest of the word) and phonemes. In a recent review of research in this area, Castles and Coltheart (2004: 91) observe that there is equivocal evidence that an awareness of the larger units – syllables, onsets and rhymes – has a positive effect on the learning of reading, but that there is much stronger evidence that awareness of the ‘small units’ – phonemic awareness – makes ‘a significant unique contribution to subsequent reading or spelling’. They conclude that ‘if phonological awareness indeed plays a causal role in reading and spelling acquisition, the nature of that awareness is most likely to be the ability to perceive and manipulate phonemes’.


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Proponents of the hypothesis that phonemic awareness promotes learning to read ‘propose that acquiring an alphabetic orthography primarily requires gaining access to and awareness of a phonemic level of speech representation. That is, learning to read involves developing the understanding that letters (or graphemes) represent the most basic sounds in speech . . . Once this alphabetic principle is understood, a child can then use it as a basis for sounding out words and ultimately for acquiring lexical knowledge’ (Castles and Coltheart 2004: 91). However, although studies have established some relationship between phonemic awareness and reading, it is not so clear what that relationship is. As Castles and Coltheart (2004: 92) put it, although there is support . . . for the hypothesis that phonemic awareness enables, or at least assists, literacy acquisition, there is also considerable support for the proposal that the causality flows in the reverse direction . . . . At the very least, there would clearly seem to be a complex reciprocal relationship between the two sets of skills.

Even if we accept that phoneme recognition does play an important role in learning to read, this does not mean that a phonemic or ‘shallow’ orthography is necessarily the best type for all languages. In an overview of the arguments for ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ orthographies, Bird (1999b: 25) writes: In favour of a shallow orthography, the following argument could be advanced. Clearly, our task in designing an orthography is to invent a visual stimulus which cues a word in the mind of a reader. So a visual input serves as an index into the ‘mental lexicon’. Now native speakers already possess an indexing structure for accessing the mental lexicon from speech. So it would be maximally efficient if the orthography indicates the speech form as directly as possible.

Thus ‘a shallow orthography makes reading and writing into low-level decoding and transcription tasks’. On the other hand, Moving towards a deep orthography allows homophones to be distinguished while words whose pronunciation varies in context can be given a fixed representation. This latter notion has been referred to using the terms ‘unity of visual impression’ (Nida 1964: 25f ) and ‘fixed word-images’ (Voorhoeve 1964: 130). Maintaining a fixed word image supports readers in developing a sight vocabulary, a set of frequently occurring words that can be recognised as a single unit without being broken down into their component letters. (Bird 1999b: 25)

In a recent paper on the design of orthographies for tonal languages, Bird (1999a) produces experimental evidence to show that marking tones (using diacritic marks above letter characters in a phonemic script) in one language, Dschang, actually decreases reading fluency. Bird attributes the difficulty for



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readers to the fact that Dschang has a ‘shallow orthography’, which represents the surface contrasts rather than underlying phonological and morphological unities, coupled with a ‘deep tone system’ – where ‘the possible tonal forms of a morpheme are sufficiently diverse that morphophonological representations are distant from the surface forms’ (1999a: 102). This combination ‘makes it impossible to have the fixed word images which are so important for fluent reading’ (1999a: 103).11 Putting this another way: the Dschang orthography is too much like a transcription. It is good for linguists, not for readers or learners. Bird concludes that ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ orthographies have benefits for different kinds of readers. Readers who have ‘phonological maturity’ – a grasp of the relationship between written and spoken forms – can take advantage of a deep orthography which maintains fixed word images.12 ‘An orthography requiring greater phonological maturity is harder to learn but may facilitate greater fluency’ (Bird 1999b: 26). He suggests that orthography designers should consider the conditions under which literacy will be learnt, in particular the educational context: The amount of phonological maturity we can expect readers to achieve depends on how steep a learning curve the speakers will tolerate and on the pedagogical resources at our disposal. Our expectations will depend less on linguistic analysis and more on sociological factors. In some settings, the average person might have very limited opportunities for study. New readers may not persevere with a deep orthography long enough to gain enough phonological maturity to make sense of it. So the reward of being able to read may not come early enough to justify the effort. A shallow orthography may be preferable here, since the handicap for a few advanced readers might be outweighed by the needs of the wider community. However, if the pedagogical setting is more favourable, we can opt for a deeper orthography that supports mature users and helps them learn about their language. (Bird 1999b: 27)

As mentioned above, until recently researchers have tended to focus on the process of learning to read. While the consensus within psycholinguistic research may be that ‘regularly spelt’ or ‘shallow’ languages present fewer 11

12

However, the importance of fixed word-images is itself unclear. Experimental evidence indicates that mixing case (capital and lower case letters) substantially slows down reading though the exact reason for this effect is not clear (see Mayall et al. 1997, for a review of the research). This suggests that the word-image is important. However, other research (Rawlinson 1976) showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This suggests that while the specific letters may be important, their arrangement within the word may be varied somewhat without detracting from readability. But in fact, Bird says (1999b: 27), following Liberman et al. (1980: 148), this is only an issue for languages with relatively complex morphology, where words may change form in different grammatical contexts or functions. Where the morphology is simple, the form of a word (and hence its visual appearance) will remain constant in a shallow orthography anyway.


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problems to learner readers, the same languages may not be so easy to learn to spell. Alcock and Ngorosho (2003) studied the spelling of primary school children in Tanzania, who were learning to write Kiswahili. Kiswahili spelling is largely phonemic, although a small amount of grammatical knowledge is helpful for spelling certain words correctly. The children spelled about 80 per cent of words correctly in two experiments. Alcock and Ngorosho concluded that ‘multiple facets of language knowledge are simultaneously necessary to achieve good spelling in even this regularly spelled language with a relatively simple syllabic structure’ (2003: 657). Hence the title of their paper: ‘Learning to spell a regularly spelled language is not a trivial task’. All this suggests that the structuralist insistence on ‘perfect’ phonemic orthographies was at best unnecessary, at worst bad science in its claim to deliver ‘learnability’. Even if phonemic orthographies benefit learners at the early stages, mature readers may derive benefits from orthographies which have greater depth. Claims about learnability of orthographies continue to be made, however, without research to substantiate them. For example, Baker (1997: 134) writes that in addition to the extra costs of printing di- and trigraphs, Another disadvantage of extensive use of di- and trigraphs, though so far as we are aware it has not been studied, is that they complicate literacy teaching in that learners must identify clusters of letters as well as individual letters.

Yet clearly, if there is a reduction in di- and trigraphs, there must be an increased load on the single letter.13 In a passage quoted by Walker (1969) Janheinz Jahn laments (p. 188), What expense, what trouble, how many auxiliary marks are necessary in order even to write a name such as Laýı`ko Oroku´la´b˛e b˛e ja. We can see from the orthography how inadequate an alphabetic script is for rendering this language. [Yoruba]

What can we conclude from all this? The ‘learnability’ question is controversial and not easily resolved because hypotheses are difficult to test: the subjects are usually children, and multiple social and cognitive factors may be involved (for example, children have different levels of reading and phonological knowledge when they arrive at school or preschool, in practice the earliest environments where testing can be carried out). To compare ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ orthographies requires a comparison between learners of different languages, usually in different countries. 13

Or additional letters in the inventory. Venezky (1977: 43) notes that ‘it may be more difficult to learn to discriminate a totally new symbol from an existing repertoire than it is to learn that a sequence of two existing symbols has a special significance.’



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There is a consensus that phonological, in particular phonemic, awareness is beneficial to learning to read, and that shallow orthographies, which make most use of that awareness, are helpful to the learner at an early stage. On the other hand, many, probably most, of the world’s readers use ‘deep’ orthographies where the sound and the letter composition of words are indirectly related or even unrelated. From this it is clear that having a writing system with a oneto-one mapping from phonemes to letters is not a precondition for learning to read successfully. Phonemic or ‘shallow’ orthographies may have advantages for learners at an early stage, but they may also have disadvantages, as morphological changes required by the grammar may result in a lack of ‘fixed word-images’ which help the full-fledged reader. In addition, it seems that phonemically written languages are not necessarily particularly easy to spell. To conclude, we can quote Venezky (1977: 42, also cited by Bird 1999b: 27): For the beginner, the orthography is needed as an indicator for the sounds of words (inter alia), but for the advanced reader, meanings, not sounds, are needed. This conflict between the needs of beginning and advanced readers forces certain compromises upon the design of a practical writing system, depending upon the intended function of the system.

6.

Orthography for what?

This last point about ‘intended function’ raises an important issue, one which is consistently avoided by ‘autonomous’ models of orthography but which is central to any sociocultural model. What kinds of literacy practice will the orthography support? What social purpose will it serve? What kinds of cultural activities will it be part of? An autonomous model presupposes that the first concern is to find the ‘best’ orthography for the language. Once that matter is settled, it can be put to various uses, independently of how it is designed. For a sociocultural model of orthography, the practices involving literacy in which a community engages are inevitably related to the type of orthography which will emerge as one of the technologies underpinning those practices. In other chapters of this book, I will take this question much further, showing through case studies how the social contexts of use have influenced the precise forms which orthography has taken in particular settings. At this stage, I will simply make the point that within autonomous models of orthography, the relevance of the literacy practices which are supported by an orthography is often unacknowledged. This is particularly significant because so much orthography development takes place in colonial and neocolonial contexts, and often under the auspices of religious organisations. Under such circumstances it is often the case, whether intended or not, that the orthography in question is


24


designed to be used in a very restricted set of literacy practices. This is bound to have consequences for the nature of the orthography. If, for example, the main or only function of the texts produced in the orthography is to be read out in church by a preacher – who happens to be literate already in some other language – the kind of orthography which is appropriate will be different from the case where reading is a mass activity, carried out by monolinguals/monoliterates. Where texts are produced by a small group for large-scale consumption, the orthography may be different from the case where all ‘literates’ are expected to engage in writing as well as reading. Where an orthography is ‘designed for’ a language, rather than developing organically over a long period, assumptions about the function of texts in the language will have an effect on the orthography itself. A good example of this comes from the work of Barros (1995) on the controversies between linguists and missionaries concerning appropriate orthographies for indigenous Mexican languages in the 1930s. The ‘indigenists’, linguists in an anthropological tradition who opposed the involvement of missionaries in the education of indigenous peoples, favoured using mural texts – wall-newspapers on topical issues – as a way of spreading literacy. They invoked ‘a model of public reading which preserves features of orality through its collective use’ (Barros 1995: 282). They favoured the use of a writing system ‘completely moulded by the phonetic alphabets’ without such practices as using capital letters: something close, in other words, to a phonemic transcription. The missionaries, members of the SIL, wanted the indigenous languages to be written using an alphabet based as much as possible on the Spanish orthography (Pike 1938: 87). Their model of reading, however, was a different one: ‘the reading material of the missionary was the book, associated with solitary reading, in accordance with the religious model of the Reformation’ (Barros 1995: 282). Here we can see that different ideologies led to the promotion of different literacy practices, each supported by a different type of orthography. According to Barros, ‘Each group tried to convince the Mexicans that its own alphabet style would accomplish more effectively the Mexican goal of unifying the Nation-State, one [the missionaries] by the use of the national language orthography, the other [the indigenists] by employing the same phonetic symbols for all indigenous languages’ (1995: 282). The key to understanding the origins of orthography and the role that it plays in society is, I would argue, to see it as a practice which is bound up with other practices to do with literacy, which are themselves embedded in the social and cultural practices of a society or group. The nature of orthographic practice is determined, at the outset, by the kinds of literacy practice for which it is designed. Once an orthography has been established, variation and change are possible; what may happen is related (among other things) to the societal



25

attitudes towards the literacy practices for which the orthography is used. These societal attitudes are themselves the product of language ideologies – beliefs about what language is, should be, and should be used for. Writing practices which are ‘legitimated’, for example, will by and large be expected to adhere to the accepted norms, while practices which are ‘illegimate’ (like graffiti writing) or ‘marginal’ (like text messages and online chatroom ‘talk’) have greater freedom to deviate from the norm. These issues will be explored more in Chapter 2. 7.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have introduced the idea of two distinct models of orthography, which I have called the autonomous model and the sociocultural model. I have argued that the autonomous model does not adequately recognise the social nature of orthography, and has tried to define orthography as a culturally neutral technology, in the same way that literacy itself has been characterised as ‘neutral’ and ‘detached from specific social contexts’ (Street 1984: 1). The autonomous model of orthography has furthermore promoted a single type of orthography, alphabetic phonemic writing, as the ‘ideal’ to the exclusion of others, with the supposed advantage that it is easiest to learn. In succeeding chapters, I shall explore the sociocultural model of orthography in more detail, beginning with the notion of ‘orthography as practice’ in Chapter 2.


2

Orthography as social practice

1.

A social practice?

In the last chapter, I introduced the idea that orthography, alongside literacy, required a social practice account. It is easy to see, once one has been introduced to the notion of a ‘social practice’, how a phenomenon like literacy can be studied in these terms. After all, taking part in the literate world involves doing things: signing a cheque, reading a bed-time story or collectively reading a wall newspaper. In the terminology of the New Literacy Studies, these are examples of literacy events which form, or form part of, literacy practices when carried out on a repeated basis within a particular setting and cultural framework. According to David Barton (1994: 37), literacy practices can be viewed as the ‘social practices associated with the written word’. It is less easy to see orthography as a ‘social practice’. While clearly writing something – anything at all – involves using an orthography, is it not the act of writing, rather than the orthography, which is the social practice? The answer is yes and no: yes, writing is certainly a social practice, but no, it is not the case that orthography is merely a technology or instrument which is the means to engaging in that practice. In this chapter I shall explain why I view orthography itself as amenable to a social practice account. There is in fact already a well-established sense of the term ‘orthographic practice’. This is used to refer to the practices of writers or printers who adopt a particular orthography or set of orthographic conventions: for example, by adopting the (American) spelling or the (British) in a word like magnetise, or writing <ss> or its alternative in German. It can also refer to the preferred spellings of scribes and printers in earlier historical periods. These are described as ‘practices’ because they represent reasonably coherent and consistent choices made by writers and printers in respect of how to write words. I would certainly want to include such practices under the heading of ‘orthography as social practice’ – since these choices are made in particular social, historical and cultural contexts – but they are by no means the whole of what I mean by ‘orthography as social practice’. 26



27

Another term frequently used in connection with orthography is convention. For example, the relationship between letters of the alphabet and the sounds they represent is often said to be conventional. But conventions are themselves the products of social practice. In order to understand how orthography can be conceived of as social practice it is helpful to look at the different types of conventional relationship which an orthography encompasses. 1. The script or writing system itself: Within a ‘literate’ community by definition there are one or more scripts which are involved in its various literacy practices. The use of particular scripts for particular languages – such as Roman script for English – is certainly a convention, though mostly too obvious to warrant mention. Script selection often takes place at the point where a community begins to practice literacy in its own language, but typically the script adopted is one that is already in use to write another language which up to that point has been the main or only language of literacy. In multilingual societies it is normal for several scripts to be in use for writing different languages, and in some communities, the same language may be written in several different scripts. Only rarely does an already literate community have the opportunity to choose between scripts. Eira (1998) documents one such case, in a minority language where several competing orthographies are in use, some using the Roman alphabet and one using an indigenous writing system. An altogether different example comes from the former USSR and its neighbours. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, a number of language communities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have chosen to abandon the Cyrillic alphabet in favour of an alternative. Thus Mongolia has opted for a return to its traditional writing system (Grivelet 2001), while many of the Turkic language communities have chosen to introduce the Roman alphabet (which was briefly in use for most of these languages in the 1920s). Since changes of this magnitude cannot be introduced in an all-or-nothing fashion, two or even more scripts will be found to be in use in these places for a period. Some writing systems, for example Japanese, incorporate more than one type of script and a set of conventions for deciding which one to use to write a particular word or for a particular type of text. Writers of Japanese must decide at the moment of writing which of three, or possibly four, available scripts to use: Kanji (Chinese characters), the katakana syllabary (used for foreign words, emphasis and some other purposes), the hiragana syllabary (used for Japanese words and affixes for which no Chinese character is available), or in some cases, ro¯maji (the Roman alphabet). Some languages are relatively open to incorporating scripts normally associated with other languages, for example to write individual words of foreign origin. Such written ‘borrowing’ or codeswitching can be found in Hong Kong Chinese and in Greek, for example,


28


which are open to incorporating foreign words using the Roman alphabet in certain genres. 2. The correspondences between characters of the writing system and words or sounds: These are what I shall refer to as sound-letter or sound-character correspondences. A writing system provides a set of symbols which roughly match a spoken language, but the exact correspondence between the written symbols (characters or letters) and the linguistic signs (words or sounds) is usually only partially predetermined. In theory, each language could assign sounds to letters of an alphabetic system on an arbitrary basis, so that two languages which both used the same alphabet would write an identical-sounding word completely differently. In practice, a widely used alphabet like the Roman or Cyrillic has a core of letters which represent roughly the same sound in all the languages which use the script. Thus someone who could read Kiswahili would have no problem sounding out the English words let, man, ship just on the basis of the soundletter correspondences of Kiswahili. However, in the Roman alphabet, there are also a number of consonant symbols which have variable sound values from language to language: , <j>, <x> and . For example, <j> represents /j/ in German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, but / Z / in French and Portuguese, / x / in Spanish and /D/ in English. Likewise different languages use different combinations of symbols (di- and trigraphs) and the sound values of these may differ from language to language. Thus is usually sounded /x/ or /ç/ (with variation depending on adjacent vowels) in German, Dutch and Polish, /tS/ in Spanish and English and /S/ in Portuguese and French, while <sh> occurs in only a few languages, but always represents the sound /S/ or similar sounds. Within a single orthographic system for a particular standardised language, there may be an almost unique (one-to-one) relationship between letters (or letter combinations) and sounds – this is the phonemic model of orthography development which most linguists favour (see Chapter 1) – or there may be a many-to-one or many-to-many relationship. The latter kind of relationship is more likely to be found in standardised languages which have long written histories, where sound changes have affected the pronunciations (without leading to corresponding changes in spelling) and where loanwords have been incorporated unchanged into the language. English is a good example of such a language. For example, in English the sound /u:/ may be represented in a number of ways, including , , , , <ew>, (to, shoe, blue, too, flew, group); the letter on the other hand may be pronounced /s/ or / k / depending on the context, with the possibility of /tS/ as well in a few words like ciabatta and cello. 3. The representation of particular sounds in specific positions in a word: For example, and <ss> are common representations of / k / and



29

/s/ respectively in syllable-final position in English, but do not occur syllableinitially. is also found syllable-finally in some other languages, such as Swedish, but in Norwegian, cognate words would have ; for example, Swedish nyckel, Norw. (Bokma˚l) nøkkel ‘key’. Similarly /D/ may be <j> syllable-initially in English, but syllable-finally it is normally : cf. <jab>, . 4. The association of specific letter sequences with specific words: for example, the conventional sound-symbol correspondences of English would allow the word /sku:l/ to be written in either of the following ways: 1. <skool> (cf. skid, cool ); 2. <scool> (cf. scope, tool ). but in fact, the only ‘correct’, standard or conventional spelling of the the word is <school>. Likewise <sole> and <soul>, although homophones in English are not interchangeable because each is assigned, by convention, to a separate meaning. In a language where the relationship between the sounds and letters/characters is completely consistent and predictable, rules of this type are (at least in theory) redundant, since the written shape of the word should be completely predictable from the rules. In practice, most languages do not have completely consistent and predictable relationships between their sounds and letters. Even where this might once have been the case, the incorporation of loanwords without respelling and the retention of etymological spellings or spellings which represent older pronunciations make it likely that there will be some cases where the spelling of a word falls outside the normal rules. English spelling, because of historical factors including the incorporation of several different orthographic traditions and loan words from many languages, offers a particularly rich variety of representations for the same sound, but it is by no means the only language where the spelling of a word is not entirely predictable from its sound. 5. The means by which such features as vowel length are indicated: For example, long vowels in German may be indicated by following the vowel, as in Hahn ‘cock, tap’; in Dutch long vowels may be written by doubling the vowel letter – for example, haan ‘cock’; in Ma¯ori and Latvian long vowels are indicated by a horizontal line or bar above the letter – for example, Latvian <Ja¯nis >, ‘John’. 6. The use of diacritics and similar marks: For example, accents to indicate vowel height or length, diacritics to indicate tone, the ‘cedilla’ to differentiate (¼/s/) from (¼/ k / ) before in French, the use of for /l:/ in Catalan, for example cel·la ‘cell’, the use of marks like to indicate the fricatives and affricates in Czech (, and ).


30


7. Language-specific equivalences of specific characters or character sequences: For example, in German is treated as identical to , in Dutch ¼ , in Norwegian ¼ . The foregoing examples are not word-specific but apply to any word in the language concerned; however, there may also be more restricted equivalences, as in Swedish, where is the official spelling (since 1906) of archaic <w>, which is now used only in loan-words (and some surnames). Where it occurs <w> will be pronounced as if it were . (Carney 1994:450). 8. Miscellaneous other conventions: For example, may be used to indicate or in the contested name of the territory, ¼ Kosovo (Serbian) or Kosova (Albanian), in order to maintain neutrality. A strategy involving the @ sign has also been used for gender-inclusive reference in Spanish, for example by Ana Celia Zentella, who uses Latin@ to represent both Latino and Latina, the Spanish masculine and feminine forms (Zentella 2003). In German a different convention has developed for gender-inclusive reference: the use of (with capital I) as a suffix as in ‘listeners of any gender’ (¼Ho¨rer (‘male listeners’) / Ho¨rerinnen (‘female listeners’)). Each of these aspects involves conventionalisation of some kind. However, the conventions are not always equally strong. The convention by which English is written using Roman script is virtually unbreakable, largely because I would fail to reach most of my readers 4L 3 HD4e* H@ JFe EZD4::48 at the moment. Cyrillic is – by convention – not used for writing English. At the other end of the spectrum, the conventions listed in (8) above, and some of the others, may be in use by a minority or a subculture, and thus marginal to the standardised language. While the conventions governing orthography can be very strong, it can also be seen that there is some potential for variation. This potential can arise either 1. because the conventional norms allow for a choice (as in the case of whether to write or in Dutch, <judgment> or <judgement> in English, leading to ‘legitimate’ or licensed variation; or 2. because the conventions themselves can be broken in a way that allows the original meaning to be conveyed, along with additional social meaning which derives from defying the conventions: I shall refer to this as unlicensed variation. Some examples will make this second case clearer. As mentioned above, conventional English orthographic practice accepts only <school> as a valid spelling for school. Alternatives, such as <skool> or <scool>, which would be equally valid realisations on the basis of existing sound-to-spelling conventions, are simply not acceptable. Hence the spelling <skool> (as in the



31

humorous work Down with skool (Willans 1953)) has the merit of being recognisable as a representation of the word ‘school’, but at the same time defiantly refusing to conform to the standard spelling norm for this word.1 Similarly, the graffitist who engraved this on a university library desk: You’d have thort stewdentz wood no beter than too ryt on deskz!

was using conventional sound-to-spelling rules of English – for example, [ :] , , , as in thought, caught, sort, paw; [U] , , as in full, wood, could; [u:] , , , , <ew> as in moo, shoe, prudent, true, brew. c

but has deliberately chosen the wrong ones for the words concerned, that is, instead of using the sequence for [ :] in thought, s/he has chosen the sequence , which has the same sound in most varieties of English spoken in England. The effect is to produce a multiple paradox: a ‘student’ who is both too ignorant to know how to spell correctly and too ill-mannered or uncultured to know that desks are not legitimate surfaces to write on. The subversiveness of the message (written on a forbidden surface) is mirrored by the illegitimacy of its spelling. However, both the cases above rely for their noticeability (or intended humour) on the existence of conventional sound-spelling correspondences.2 A completely idiosyncratic spelling like for school, though it might be recognisable – just – in context, seems odd or weird rather than subversive. A text in cipher like , though equivalent to <school> in communication-theoretic terms, is incomprehensible to a reader who does not have the key (a ¼ b, b ¼ c etc.). Thus, while a degree of deviation is possible within English orthography, even unlicensed deviation is constrained to a large extent by the conventional norms. This possibility of variation and deviation (licensed or unlicensed) from the conventional norms makes it reasonable to think of orthography as a social practice – a widespread and recurrent activity which involves members of a community in making meaningful choices, albeit from a constrained set of possibilities. In the rest of this chapter we will explore this idea in more c

1

2

The joke is, of course, that school is where you are supposed to learn to spell correctly, and the spelling <skool> looks like the most basic error resulting from ignorance. Chapman (1984: 33, cited in Davies 1987: 47) puts it this way: ‘deviant spelling will not be effective until a norm is honoured’.


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detail, beginning with a study of how social meaning can be created through orthographic choices. 2.

The creation of social meaning through orthographic choices

2.1.

Variation and social meaning

We start from the premise that the possibility of variation is a prerequisite for social meaning; in other words, where there are no possible alternatives for expressing something, the expression representing that thing does not carry social meaning (though its referent may). Conversely, where there is variation, there is in practice always social meaning. According to this premise, if orthography is to carry social meaning, then there must be scope for variation. Yet in a language like English, orthography is highly standardised. Writers such as the Milroys and Kress are agreed that orthography is the area of language where, for English, the lid is most tightly screwed down: Standardisation of the written language is easiest to demonstrate with reference to orthography: spelling is the most uniform level of language use, and contrasts in this respect with the variability of its counterpart in speech – pronunciation . . . Twentieth century English spelling is almost absolutely invariant. (Milroy and Milroy 1991: 67) Spelling is that bit of linguistic practice where issues of authority, of control, of conformity can be most sharply focused. Spelling is the domain par excellence – no matter how tiny it may seem – where the politics of conformity can be sheeted home. (Kress 2000: x)3

Yet, as we saw above, there is scope for variation, both licensed and unlicensed. But we also saw that even unlicensed variation from the norms is constrained to a large extent by them. This is inherent in the nature of the symbolic system we are dealing with, because to be meaningful, the deviation from the norm still has to be close enough to the norm to be recognisable to other members of the language community. We can thus identify a relatively narrow zone of social meaning sandwiched between two extremes, one in which there is complete adherence to a set of norms (absolutely no deviation possible) and the other where there is complete licence. 3

Michael Stubbs disagrees: ‘There is much more variation in the system than is generally realised . . . . One stereotype of English spelling is that it is highly standardized, has been that way since the mid-1700s, and is now highly stable. In fact, some aspects are undergoing rapid change’ (Stubbs 1992: 221).



33

An example may make this clearer. If spelling is absolutely fixed, so that there is one and only one way to spell any given word, then any kind of meaningful deviation is impossible, because it is not possible to produce a form that is identifiable as a deviation from something else. For example, in English there is no alternative sequence of letters which would recognisably represent the word damp. Changing the vowel will produce a different word or nonword, and no credible alternatives are available for the consonant sounds.4 No meaningful variation is possible. In English, it is not easy to find words in this category, but in some languages with almost completely phonemic orthographies, it may be that variation in spelling is practically impossible. On the other hand, we could imagine a situation where spelling norms specify a set of sound-letter correspondences but allow a free choice where alternatives exist. In such a case, our ‘stewdent,’ or anyone else, would be free to write , , or without any of them being felt to be better than any other. In such a case, while variation is possible it will have little or no social meaning, since everyone is free to spell as they choose. Probably no standardised language has such a liberal regime at the moment; however, in the history of English, spellings in print were not standardised until around 1650: according to Brengelman (1980: 334) ‘during the middle half of the seventeenth century, English spelling evolved from near anarchy to almost complete predictability’. Spellings in private writing did not become standardised until a century or so later (Strang 1970: 107). Before that, variation in spelling was normal. The idea of a ‘wrong’ spelling is thus only two centuries or so old and developed following the publication of authoritative dictionaries (Johnson’s in England, Webster’s in North America) (Strang 1970: 107). 2.2.

Strategies for variation

For a spelling to have ‘social meaning’, then, there must be the possibility of variation, but such variation can occur only within fairly tight parameters. The variant spelling must be recognisable to readers as a variant spelling of a particular word; otherwise it is incomprehensible (the word cannot be recognised) and/or unable to bear social meaning (because it cannot be seen to be deviating from anything specific). At the same time it has to be the case that the variation is either unlicensed – allowing the variant form to have social meaning through its opposition to the conventionally licensed form – or, if 4

It is just about conceivable that we might write da¨mp, ddamp, dammp or dampp for some kind of specific effect, or just to draw readers’ attention. Spellings like this are sometimes found in adolescent graffiti. Also since the sequence is found word-initially in Welsh, it is possible to imagine a playful use of it in a bilingual context: ‘It’s ddamp in Llanddewi’ but this example is just hypothetical, not attested. See also Section 2.2.5.


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Spelling and society Complete standardisation

No standardisation

Invariant spellings

Freely varying spellings No social meaning

No social meaning

Zone of social meaning

Diagram 2.1 The ‘Zone of social meaning’

licensed, to have extralinguistic associations (such as regional or ideological ones) which prevent it from being treated as an entirely neutral ‘free variant’. Diagram 2.1 is a schematic representation of this relationship. Thus although the means are available to create social meaning through orthography, they are limited (and vary from language to language). Here are some of the most frequently used strategies, with examples: 2.2.1.

Using sound-symbol correspondences which are conventional for the language, but are the ‘wrong’ ones for the particular word An example for this is for . This strategy has been used by the writer of the Creole graffiti mentioned in the Introduction, as a way of signalling that the language being written is not English, but Creole (see Chapter 5 for more details), in this case by using the spellings , <woz>, <ere> and for , <was>, and . In this category we find numerous examples of the ‘classic’ graffiti, X WAS HERE (where X is someone’s name or initials) with an optional date (see Blume 1985: 141). Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 provide further examples where the word WAS is respelled in different ways as <woz> or <waz>. It is a kind of convention, a ‘running joke’ of this style of graffiti (in Britain at least) that the two very common words was and here are always respelt – though the respelling of here may reflect pronunciation (see Section 2.2.2). In fact I have only once seen was here spelt conventionally in graffiti in Britain – on the lift of a London hotel which was frequented by foreign teenagers, who were perhaps unaware of the joke. Androutsopoulos (2000: 522) calls these grapheme substitutions ‘i.e. replacing a graph (or graph sequence) by another graph (or graph sequence), as in for in English phat, for <s> in German Jungz (‘guys’, cf. boyz), and for in French disk or rubrik’. In his typology, these



35

Figure 2.1 Graffiti at a Dublin bus stop (1999)

Figure 2.2 Graffiti on a wall in Lancaster (1999)

are a subset of homophone spellings, his term for ‘graphic alterations which do not correspond to phonic alterations’, that is, phonetically unmotivated respellings. He points out that this type of respelling is popular with Italian hiphop writers (Romiti 1998) as well as German fanzine writers, but is also a preferred strategy in trade names, as documented by Davies (1987) – see Section 3.1. A further subcategory of spellings under this heading is what Androutsopoulos (2000: 521) calls interlingual spellings (phonetic spellings of loanwords


36


Figure 2.3 Graffiti from a bench in York (2003)

Figure 2.4 Graffiti on a wall near a beach in North Wales (2002)

according to native orthographic rules). He gives a German example: to represent English action. Androutsopoulos points out that this spelling type is also documented in Italian and French youth media. However, it seems to be rare in English, probably because English has already incorporated spelling conventions from its main ‘donor’ languages anyway.



37

2.2.2.

Using spellings which represent non-standard pronunciations – for example, colloquial, local or regional pronunciations These include pronunciations which are regarded within the speech community as too informal or substandard to be used in writing (Figure 2.1): I waz ERE Smoken Gear Drinken bear in the year 19995 (Dublin bus stop Graffiti)

The respelling of as <ere> or <eya> is almost universal in graffiti of the type X was here in Britain, as mentioned earlier. Both spellings reflect the h-less pronunciation of informal speech. The spelling <eya>, which can be seen in the north of England (Figure 2.3 is from a picnic bench in York) seems to represent a local disyllabic and h-less pronunciation). Another example of this kind of strategy can be found in the Creole graffiti text in the Introduction: , and for , and . Androutsopoulos (1999: 35) finds ‘spelled-out features of colloquial German’, which he calls orality markers, among ‘the most impressive linguistic features of fanzines’ (subcultural music magazines produced mainly by amateurs). He gives the example Ne Pladde ham se auch gemacht (n plad ham z aUx g maxt) for standard German Eine Platte haben sie auch gemacht ([ain plat hab n zi aUx g maxt]) (‘they also made a record’). Androutsopoulos (2000: 521) has a more detailed typology of non-standard spellings found in German adolescent media texts, of which the following are relevant here: phonetic spellings (representations of standard pronunciation not covered by standard orthography, ‘as in the case of English ‘‘wuz’’ for ‘‘was’’; colloquial spellings (‘a cover term for the representation of reduction phenomena typical of colloquial speech, including so-called weak forms); regiolectal spellings (representations of features typical of a regional variety of German); and prosodic spellings (representations of prosodic patterns, for example ‘the simulation of word stress by the use of capitals and hyphens or the representation of vowel lengthening’).

e

e

e

e

e

e

e

e

2.2.3.

Using single letters of the alphabet or non-alphabetic symbols, especially numbers, as substitutions for letter sequences Although still not acceptable in ‘mainstream’ texts, this has become commonplace in SMS text-messaging6 and (to a lesser degree) e-mail and other computermediated communication – for example, for , for /eit / (as in 5 6

‘I was here smoking gear drinking beer. . .’ See Thurlow (2003) and Shortis (forthcoming) for a discussion of text-messaging practices.


38


<m8> for mate>), for to and for for. This practice is not confined to English; similar substitutions can be found in German such as (N þ acht ¼ Nacht ‘night’) (Jannis Androutsopoulos, personal communication) and even in Greek text-messaging (students, personal communication), where can subsitute for the Greek word for ‘for’ (), although the Greek preposition does not sound like either the English word or the Greek equivalent (4 ¼ [tesera], ‘for’ ¼ / gia / ). Androutsopoulos (2000: 521) calls these lexical substitutions, ‘whereby a graph, a combination of two graphs or a number replaces a homophone word or word part’. Before they became widespread in text-messaging, these practices probably were well established in adolescent graffiti and other marginal writing practices, in Britain at least. There are several examples in Figure 2.2, which was photographed in a northern English city in 1999: 1. 9T9 ¼ ‘99’ – the represents the of ninety and is redundant, but a favourite in graffiti of this style, which was very common in the 1990s; 2. <every1> ¼ ‘everyone’; 3. ¼ ‘forever’ – also extremely common. The spelling <eva> reflects the lack of postvocalic /r/ in the local English, but is otherwise counterintuitive as a representation of the sound (one would expect *<evva> perhaps, but this never occurs). Figure 2.4 shows graffiti remarkably similar to Figure 2.2, though it was photographed in North Wales (some hundreds of kilometres from Figure 2.2) in 2002 (2K1 ¼ ‘2001’). Romiti (1998: 292) reports similar examples from Italian graffiti: CRIS 6 FIGO ‘Cris you are cool’. (6 ¼ sei in Italian, also meaning you are.) Similar practices exist among speakers of Chinese, for example 88 is used to mean ‘bye-bye’ in Hong Kong-based chatrooms because the Chinese for eight [Mandarin ba¯, Cantonese baat] sounds similar to bye. 2.2.4. Using archaic or pseudo-archaic spellings This practice is widespread in English, especially for commercial purposes (see Figures 2.5 and 2.6) but is also found in other languages, such as Swedish. According to Carney (1994: 450), the official replacement of archaic <w> by (since 1906) ‘allows <w> to be exploited unofficially for [its] antiquarian value. Hotels often carry the sign Wa¨rdshus instead of the normal Va¨rdshus’ while ‘the majority of family names with initial /v/ are still spelt with <w> (e.g. Wallin)’. Carney points out (p. 449) that in English too there is a premium on names which use archaic spelling conventions. ‘A spelling which looks old and is out of step with present-day spelling conventions shows that the family is ‘old’, in the sense of having a long recorded history . . . Particularly prestigious are



39

Figure 2.5 Graffiti ‘‘Wedding Fayre’’

Figure 2.6 ‘‘Mature Tymes’’ – an archaic spellling of Times used to suggest age

names that present Norman-French spellings which diverge considerably from the present pronunciation, such as Beaulieu /’bju:li /, since these are both old and aristocratic’. The idea of a ‘link with history’ provides a rationale for the fact, remarked on by Brengelman (1980: 348), that while new spelling rules were adopted for the general vocabulary during the seventeenth century, the spelling of proper names remained almost unaffected. 2.2.5. Language-external symbolism While the strategies described in 2.2.1 – 2.2.4 draw on language users’ knowledge of the conventions of their own language, there are many examples of writers making symbolic use of orthographic conventions from other languages. Such uses may have ironic or parodic force associated with them. For this strategy to communicate with the reader it relies on a level of knowledge of the conventions of other languages, or at least knowledge of some stereotypes. Language-external symbolism is common, and conventionalised to some extent, in the German fanzines studied by Androutsopoulos (1999, 2000). For example, <x> and ‘were probably introduced into German fanzines through exposure to (American) English media, and occur to a great extent in English loanwords’ (Androutsopoulos 2000: 527). However, the great majority of occurrences of <x> in Androutsopoulos’s fanzine data are in


40


native German words, not loanwords. He points out that ‘<x> is not a native German grapheme, and is always pronounced /ts/ in German, so the /z/ pronunciation which is relevant here is imported from English’. He continues: The distribution of <x> includes six different segments: it replaces the segments , and in both English and German items, e.g. Punx (‘punks’), Thanx (‘thanks’), Marx (Marks) for ; Trax (‘tracks’), Stu¨x (Stu¨cks ‘tracks’), zwex (zwecks ‘for the purpose of ’) for ; and Zeux (Zeugs ‘stuff’), Sonx (Songs ‘songs’), lunx (lungs ‘guys’) for ; it also replaces in English loanwords, as in Lyrix (‘lyrics’), Comix (‘comics’); finally, <x> replaces the segment in German words such as Abwexlung (Abwechslung ‘change’) and demna¨xt (demna¨chst ‘soon’), and the segment , pronounced /kts/, in the word Redaxion (Redaktion ‘editorial staff’).

According to Androutsopoulos, these deviant spellings are indicators of subcultural identity. Their main motivation ‘is not phonetic representation, but their indexical or symbolic value as cues of subcultural positioning. In other words. they act as an instruction to interpret the discourse as ‘subculturally engaged’ or ‘hip’’ (Androutsopoulos 2000: 527). Furthermore, the more oppositional or anti-mainstream media have a greater frequency of deviant spellings. Thus ‘the more subculturally oriented a fanzine, the more nonstandard spellings it can be expected to contain’ (Androutsopoulos 2000: 524). In a somewhat similar way, respellings are occasionally used (particularly in advertising or newspapers’ headlines) to parody the conventions of other languages which may be salient or stereotypical enough to be recognisable to readers. English examples might be eau neau! (¼ oh no spelled in a ‘French’ way), ba¨d lu¨ck (¼ bad luck ‘Germanised’).7 In an episode of The Simpsons cartoon, the family visit a store in the ‘Danish super chain’ SHØP. For its humour, this relies on viewers being able to associate the character with Danish (or at least with some Scandinavian language). Somewhat different uses of English ‘borrowings’ can be found in Roman graffiti, described by Romiti (1998). The digraph <sh> is occasionally found, representing the sound /S/ in Italian words which ‘are pronounced in Rome with a palatal sibilant [S], to emphasise [that they are meant as an] insult’ (Romiti 1998: 284), for example, SHTUPIDI ‘stupid’. This alternates with a more ‘native’ orthographic representation, <sc>. The use of <sh> in this context is almost certain to be of English origin, as Romiti describes widespread use of English words in Roman graffiti. A different kind of symbolism is exemplified by the use of the number in Roman graffiti. Unlike the number mentioned earlier, which is read sei 7

These are invented examples, not attested.



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Figure 2.7 Graffiti from Hong Kong (2001) Photo: Sally Johnson

‘is/are’ (i.e. has an Italian reading), in certain graffiti must be given an English reading, based on its English spelling, but pronounced as if written in Italian. Thus NAS1 is read as if written , in Italian, [nazone], ‘one with a big nose’ (Romiti 1998: 290). This ‘joke’ as Romiti calls it relies on several levels of metalinguistic knowledge, including a rudimentary knowledge of English. Some symbolism has effectively been internationalised (for example, the heart symbol “, read in English as ‘loves’) making possible truly post-modern graffiti like Figure 2.7 (on a lamppost in Hong Kong, photographed in 2002 by Sally Johnson) and Figure 2.8 (carved on a tree in Guangzhou (People’s Republic of China), photographed by the author in 2001). 3.

Regulated spaces

3.1.

Orthographic regimes

It is no coincidence that the examples in the previous section are largely drawn from ‘marginal’ literacies such as graffiti, computer-mediated communication and SMS text-messaging, and that many of them are produced by adolescents. If we were to stick to looking at everyday published texts – books, newspapers, mainstream magazines, official documents and printed ephemera, we would find it easy to agree with the Milroys that ‘spelling is almost absolutely invariant’. Orthographic standardisation in English is imposed in print to a high degree, and policed by printers, editors, proofreaders, dictionaries and spellcheckers. Some other languages, like French, also have academies to supervise some of this policing activity.


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Figure 2.8 Graffiti from Guangzhou, China (2001): ‘I love you Jia X’



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Diagram 2.2 Regulation in the ‘orthographic space’

We can conceive of the world of written texts8 as a space divided into fuzzy-boundaried subspaces in which orthography is policed or regulated to varying degrees, depending largely on the institution within or for which the text is produced. We can talk of different orthographic regimes of regulation which hold sway within these spaces. Diagram 2.2 is an attempt to illustrate this. At the core, and closest to the regulatory and standardising forces, lies what we may call the fully regulated space. This is the largest space, at least for English. In practice, any text which is prepared for publication (unless it is clearly marked as intentionally deviant, e.g. as dialect writing, or as subcultural) will have standard spelling imposed on it. Many texts not for publication also lie within this space. One important subtype of these is writings produced by learners in schools. These almost always have standard norms imposed; indeed, ensuring that these are known and adhered to is seen as one of the functions of school as an institution.

8

For this purpose, ‘text’ can mean a complex, coventionalised text type or ‘genre’ such as prose or poetry; a more vaguely defined text type such as ‘advertising’; or a category which forms a component of texts such as ‘personal names’.


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Furthest from the core, at the margins of the imaginary orthographic space, we find an unregulated space, where writers may disregard the conventions, though within the constraints mentioned above. As the quotes from the Milroys and Kress in Section 2.1 suggest, this space is a small one within the world of English-language texts: it occupies the margins, orthographically and socially. Purely private writings, such as personal letters and private diaries, lie within this space, although they probably only rarely make use of their licence to deviate from the standard norms. Non-mainstream printed texts such as fanzines also lie here (Androutsopoulos 1999, 2000) and indeed derive some of their special oppositional character from this failure to comply with the authorised norms. Graffiti, a type of text which is not printed but is nevertheless very public, is in the unregulated space and by its very nature (the use of nonlegitimated surfaces for writing) is beyond control of the usual authorities (see Blume 1985). Between the extremes of the fully regulated and the unregulated spaces, there exist ‘partially regulated’ spaces, in which some but not all of the constraints of standard spelling are observed. Some types of literary writing (dialect novels and others which make use of deliberately concocted spellings, for example) make use of their licence as ‘literature’ to bend the normal rules, even though they are actually subject to editorial control. The language of new communication technologies within private or non-institutional settings such as chat rooms, text-messaging (SMS) and personal e-mail also lies within this space. Two categories of language deserve special mention for their ability to incorporate deviant spelling practices while at the same time remaining part of the mainstream: these are personal names and product names. Personal names and product names permit unconventional spelling practices even within the standard written language. As pointed out by Carney (1994: 443), ‘names have a wider range of spelling correspondences’: in other words, the standard norms apply less stringently in the case of names. Since names (and surnames especially) are a kind of property, their owners may spell them as they please. This is clearly true in the case of proprietary names for products, where the names are literally the property of the owners; and there is also the motivation to use unconventional spellings, as there is a premium on distinctiveness. In the field of personal names, surnames ‘are the totem-poles of language. The pressure of distinctive function puts a value on different and even bizarre spellings’ (Carney 1994: 449). First names, Carney points out, are ‘common property’ and thus more likely to have standard spellings; even so, more variation is tolerated than in non-names. This seems particularly so among adolescents and young adults, who (lacking any control over the family name) may opt for unusual spellings of their first names: for example: <Sioux>, <Jayd>, <Jacen>, and for <Sue>, <Jade>,



45

<Jason>, and . Personal names thus occupy a special place in the world of written texts as they may present spellings which deviate from the standard norms, even within a text which is otherwise completely standard.9 Eirlys Davies (1987) examines in detail the use of non-standard spellings in trade names with some attention to ‘related material such as slogans and advertisements’. According to Davies (1987: 48), the ‘frequency with which innovative spelling is used in trade names can be related to some of the most obvious goals of advertisers . . . . Like many of the manipulations of language used by advertisers, innovative spelling may serve to attract the readers’ attention, simply by virtue of its being different and unexpected’. She goes on to note, however, that ‘it seems important to recognise that innovative spelling in trade names is at present so widespread that many instances of it may hardly strike the reader at all. Indeed, the use of certain types of unconventional spelling has become almost a convention in itself, its function seeming to be simply to signal that the item concerned is in fact a trade name’ (Davies 1987: 48). This being the case, she identifies some other goals of advertisers which may be served by unusual spellings: (1) to ensure that the name of the advertised product is easily memorised and (2) to ensure the distinctiveness of a name which might otherwise be identical or very similar to other, already established trade names (Davies 1987: 49). Regarding (1), Davies makes a similar point to Carney, that in principle ‘the more unusual the spelling is, the more memorable the name will be’. But in contrast to what Carney says about personal names, that ‘the pressure of distinctive function puts a value on different and even bizarre spellings’ (1994: 449), Davies thinks that in trade names ‘an extremely bizarre spelling might have the opposite effect, making the name difficult to process and retain’. While generally the text of advertisements is subject to the same restraints as other published text, and conforms to the standard conventions, there is some leeway for unusual spellings connected with the products being advertised to enter the associated slogans or advertising copy: a famous British example being the slogan Beanz Meanz Heinz (though Heinz is not actually a deviant spelling, just an obviously foreign one).

9

This practice is not confined to England. Romiti (1998: 290) reports on a group of graffiti writers in contemporary Rome, collectively known as ‘the writers’ who are influenced by hiphop culture. Their graffiti consists of continually reproducing their signatures, ‘paying enormous attention to aesthetic and formal aspects’. According to Romiti, ‘they prefer to use letters which are not frequent in Italian (h, w, k, y, j). One boy signs his name PHID; this word doesn’t exist in English, but it ‘‘looks/sounds’’ English, because of and because it ends with a consonant (those features are not present in Italian)’.


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3.2.

Focussed norms and standards

From many examples in this chapter we can see that although spellings in the unregulated orthographic space may be deviant, they are not necessarily unsystematic. While by definition because they are ‘deviant’ they do not conform to the standard norm, they may nevertheless conform to some norm. The concept of focussing developed by Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) is useful as a way of understanding how spelling can be at once norm-related and yet non-standard. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller give the following account of what they mean by ‘focussing’: Language . . . is the instrument through which, by means of individual adjustments in response to feedback, both ‘languages’ and ‘groups’ may become more highly focussed in the sense that the behaviour of members of a group may become more alike . . . ‘Focussing’ will imply greater regularity in the linguistic code, less variability; ‘diffusion’ the converse. (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985: 115–116)).

A ‘focussed’ system is one relatively lacking in variability, but it is not necessarily a standardised system. Milroy (1980) showed the existence of focussed vernacular norms in the spoken language of the speech communities she studied, which were different from (and had different social value from) the standard norms. Thus focussing without standardisation is perfectly possible. So we should be prepared to find, within the unregulated space of spelling, examples of focussed but non-standard orthographic norms. This is the orthographic analogy of the ‘vernacular norms’ studied by Milroy, and we can sometimes relate the presence of such non-standard norms to the nature and strength of social networks, for example in the case of adolescent graffiti, where the anti-standard nature of the spelling is reinforced by peer group pressure. Table 2.1 is an attempt to show the relationship between different common types of text in English and the orthographic regimes which affect them. It takes account as well of the institutional nature of the writing – for example school or home – and the readership (strangers, colleagues, in-group etc.). Column 1 indicates whether the particular type of text lies at the more or the less regulated end of the orthographic spectrum (close to or further away from the centre, in terms of Diagram 2.2). Column 5 gives an indication of whether or not the orthography of the relevant text type is focussed, and if so, on what. Note that orthography may be focussed at both the most highly regulated and the least regulated ends of the scale, but the foci are different. In the first case, orthography is focussed on the standardised form of the language, that is, on the conventional forms, while in the case of the least regulated texts, orthography is focussed on an anti-standard, a deliberate flouting of the conventions.


Table 2.1. Orthographic regimes for different types of text Regime

Writing Types (examples)

Institutional order

Readership

Orthography

Most highly regulated

Texts for publication Texts for circulation (memos, business letters, work e-mail etc.)

Publishing, journalism etc. Business, employment

General public Colleagues/competitors

Focussed on Standard

#

‘school’ writing Poetry, ‘literary’ writing

School Publishing

Teachers Identified readership

Personal letters Private diaries Personal memos (notes, lists) Electronic media (personal e-mail, chat rooms) SMS text-messaging fanzines, ‘samizdat’

Not institutional Not institutional Not institutional

Self/intimates Self/intimates Self/associates

Not institutional

Self/in-group

Oppositional

In-group

Focussed on anti-

Graffiti

Oppositional

In-group/general public

standard

# #

Least regulated


Usually focussed, not always on standard Least focussed zone

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We will end this chapter with two case studies of orthography as social practice, one relating to practices in Spain, and the other relating to computermediated communication. 4.

Case study 1: the Spanish

The version of the Roman alphabet currently in use internationally has, for historical reasons, two letters which are associated with the phoneme /k/. In Latin and represented the same sound but was reserved in Classical Latin texts for words of Greek origin. The languages of Europe, developing into standardised languages on the model of Latin, have ended up sometimes using only one of these, sometimes both, to represent the /k/ sound (which occurs in all of them). For the languages most directly related to Latin, like Spanish, is usually the preferred option, with being used in certain environments: thus we have ‘colour’, ‘cheese’. Other languages, especially those of northern Europe, have a strong preference for ; in Norwegian only a handful of words, all of foreign origin, begin with , and in none of them is it pronounced /k/. Other languages, like English and German, use both, but in different, and to some extent predictable, contexts. The near-exclusion of from some languages – meaning that in practice it occurs only in words of foreign origin – provides it with a special symbolism for literate users of those languages. In Spanish (Castilian), only a very small number of words, all of foreign origin, are spelt using in the standard orthography. Thus while the phonemic value of (the sound it represents) is familiar to literate speakers of Spanish, the letter itself is rare and ‘other’. Some subcultural groups in Spain have begun to make use of the ‘otherness’ of for their own symbolic purposes. Hence we find graffiti like that shown in the Introduction, Figure 0.3, where replaces the standard orthographic . The anarchist A in a circle is often a part of it, sometimes representing or in the text, sometimes supplementing the text, sometimes (as in this case) doing both. Figure 2.9 (this chapter), where is used instead of the standard orthographic in the word ¿Que? is not hard to find on the streets.10 As mentioned in the Introduction, this substitution of for other letters is associated with squatters, war resisters, gay activists, anarchists and other counter-cultural groups (Sebba 2003a).

10

The substitution of for is also found in Italian graffiti, according to personal communications from some of my students.



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Figure 2.9 Graffiti from Girona, Spain (1997) – note for standard

While the rarity of in conventional Spanish orthography makes it a suitable icon for ‘otherness’, there is actually rather more to it than that, given the complex politics of the Spanish state. The orthography of Basque, a language unrelated to Spanish but spoken within the boundaries of Spain, has opted for rather than to represent the /k/ phoneme, creating a salient point of difference between the orthographies of the two languages (see the ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Herrero Valeiro (1996) in Section 4 of comment by A Chapter 5 of this book). This fact enables young Basques to engage in a practice of ‘parodic spellings of Spanish words’ (Urla 2003: 219). The most common forms this takes is the use of Basque letters, K and TX, in otherwise Castilian words. Both of these forms are found in Basque orthography, but not in Castilian. They appear in Spanish phrases like ke txorrada for que chorrada (what a foolish or stupid thing) or la martxa for la marcha (the rhythm, the movement) . . . In the case of one program title, called Mierkoles Merkatu (Wednesday Market), the use of the letter ‘k’ makes it ambiguous as to whether we should classify this phrase as colloquial Basque or local Spanish. Such usages play on misrecognition, blurred language boundaries, and a feigned illiteracy in Spanish.


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Urla adds that her ‘sense is that within radical youth culture, these parodic hybrid spellings create a kind of symbolic allegiance with Basque oppositionality which allows youth to simultaneously use Spanish while distancing themselves from any associations it has with state hegemony’ (Urla 2003: 219–220). Whether these parodic practices began in the Basque country, based on the orthographic preference for in Basque, and spread to the counterculture in the rest of Spain, or were invented independently by the resistant Basque youth and the Spanish counterculture, there is clearly a connection: both use as a form of symbolic resistance to mainstream Spanish culture. The subcultural use of provides a nice example of how a single point of choice within an orthographic system can acquire a symbolism unrelated to its linguistic properties. It also shows how focussing can exist independently of standardisation: using where the authorised orthography has or is a focussed subcultural norm which is deliberately opposed to the standard. Furthermore, the / dichotomy has a cross-linguistic, one might even say, global dimension; it is the prevalence of in Basque (itself a result of the conscious creation of symbolic distance between Castilian and Basque) and its rarity in Castilian which allows it to have the oppositional social meaning which it has acquired for users of Castilian. Further afield, the strong preference for either or but not both in certain languages enables those letters to take on a cultural symbolism which has nothing at all to do with their linguistic function: for example in Haiti, the / opposition has come to be seen as symbolic of different allegiances (in this case, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ vs. ‘Francophone’) in a debate about the appropriate orthography for Haitian Creole (see Chapter 4), and is used to symbolise the distinctness of Creole from English (see Chapter 5). We turn now to a very different kind of case study.

5.

Case study 2: the language of Ali G websites

The Internet is a breeding ground for all kinds of non-standard orthographies and marginal language practices. To try to describe all of these would be beyond the scope of this book. Where orthography is concerned, many of the practices fall into categories already mentioned in Section 2.2 of this chapter. Different computer-mediated practices such as message boards, chatrooms and websites devoted to specific topics have developed their own linguistic subcultures, which sometimes involve orthographic deviation from the standard and which may play a role in building the identities of their users. In this case



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study we look at the language of one such group of Internet sites, the websites devoted to ‘Ali G’. ‘Ali G’ is a comedy character who attained wide popularity on British television about 1999. The performer, Sacha Baron Cohen, is white, a graduate, Jewish and from an unremarkable town in the London commuter belt. ‘Ali G’ presents himself as a person of ambiguous11 ethnicity, a stereotyped gang leader, a man who lives dangerously in a ghetto world of hard drugs, violent crime and sex. His followers are grouped together in a local ‘massive’ (gang) based in the town of Staines. The joke, of course, is that ‘Ali G’ is not black, that his talk of sex and drugs is all bravado, and that Staines (a real place west of London) is, if a ghetto at all, then a middle-class ghetto where gang warfare is unknown. Ali G’s act originally consisted largely of interviewing real-life celebrities and politicians and trapping them into revealing their ignorance, insularity and self-importance through apparently naı¨ve questioning.12 ‘Ali G’ has been controversial from the start, attracting strong criticism from some people as being a racist parody (Sebba 2003b). Others, including some black people, have defended him. Undoubtedly he is very popular and his popularity is not confined to white viewers. Language is an essential part of Ali G’s act. He draws on a vocabulary which is largely influenced by Creole, especially Jamaican Creole. His grammar and pronunciation includes forms typically associated with Creole users, but is also rich in stigmatised pronunciations and grammatical structures associated with non-standard South-Eastern British English. It is immediately recognisable to his public as the ‘street language’ associated with the type of character he portrays. Ali G’s own language is interesting as a manifestation of a variety which is becoming familiar in urban England (see Sebba 2003b for further discussion) but I will not discuss it further here, as it occurs mainly in his performances, in spoken form only. However, Ali G is the focus of numerous websites and message boards used by his fans and occasional detractors, all of which involve computer-mediated, and therefore written, communication. Many of these have guestbooks where visitors can leave one-off messages. Others are message boards where discussions can be

11

12

He never uses ‘black’ make-up, but adopts an exaggerated stereotypical style of dress associated with the type of character he portrays. Since by now almost everyone is wise to the joke, ‘entrapment’ of British celebrities and public figures is no longer possible, so the act has had to change.


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carried on over a long period. Though contributors to these sites often use pseudonyms and it can never be ascertained with certainty whether a contributor is ‘white’ or ‘black’ (even when they lay claim to a particular racial identity, as some do), it is certain that most of them are not of Caribbean or African extraction. A characteristic of all these sites is that they have their own vernacular: there is an unwritten rule that contributors should use a version of Ali G’s language, at least for part of their text. The target language is a mix of Creole and Southern British English forms (especially stigmatised ones). Grammatical and lexical features of this language include the use of non-standard pronoun forms (especially me for the first person subject and possessive) and non-standard agreements (me is, etc.); and the use of taboo lexis, including a number of terms which have become widely understood as a result of the Ali G show, in spite of being too obscene to be broadcast in the Caribbean – for example, punani (female genitalia), battyman (homosexual). Unconventional orthography has an important role in creating and sustaining the fantasy that contributors to these sites are using the language of Ali G. Since non-standard pronunciations (including gestures in the direction of both Creole and non-standard Southern British English) are one of the most salient characteristics of the speech of Ali G, the website language must reflect this; but the only way of doing so in writing is by respelling words. Typical contributions to these sites would involve some examples of the following orthographic practices: 1. respellings typical of adolescent message board users generally – for example, for , for , for /eit/, and for ; 2. non-standard ‘eye dialect’ respellings (i.e. ones which do not represent real differences in pronunciation but are intended to signal ‘difference’ from the conventional norm); 3. respellings which are designed to reflect non-standard pronunciations – for example, and for RP D and /h/ (Creole-like pronunciations) or for RP /h/ (stigmatised Southern British English pronunciation), in imitation of Ali G’s language variety. The postings below (taken from the ‘Ali G. Dreambook’, a guestbook where fans can sign in and leave a short message for Ali G (http://books.dreambook. com/rtevans/alig.html) are fairly typical. Text in bold face is provided by the ‘dreambook’.



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Example 113 Me main man: Massive: Wot is you bangin’ on about?: Give a big shout out to . . . :

CHiKADEE (aka liz) Chigwell i is wantin 2 big up ALI G 4 da wikd work e is doin fank u! moosey . . . u no ou u r girl!

Example 2 Me main man: Massive: Wot is you bangin’ on about?:

Give a big shout out to . . . :

Tom [Surname] Fradley Massive Yo Ali!! U is da man, easy now, and i fink dat u is needin massiv repect, and all dis crap about u not doin anover series, it ad better not be tru coz me is well up for a ruck, and i know u is if dose nobs at da tele place as stopped ur show, so all come togever and say Ali G BOOYAKASHA BO BO BO! Danny P.

Example 1 is rich in instances of (1), typically adolescent respellings like for , already familiar from our discussion of graffiti. It also contains examples of (2), in <no> for , and (3), as (for ) reflects the (supposed) Creole pronunciation of the,14 while <e> for he and for thank reflect ‘substandard’ pronunciations from the London area. Example 2 similarly has examples of all three types: 1. for you, for your; 2. <massiv>, <tru>; 3. for the, <dose> for those, (Creole pronunciations); for think, for together (London area pronunciations); for had (potentially either, though grammatically more British English than Creole).

13

Rough translation: My supporter: CHiKADEE (also known as liz) Local Gang (name of place): Chigwell Why are you writing: I want to praise ALI G for the fantastic work he is doing thank you! Give a big shout out to . . . : moosey . . . you know you are our girl!

14

The respelling of as seems to be widespread in hip-hop culture and may be becoming common practice in SMS messaging among adolescents.


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In these examples, characteristic lexis like big up and booyakasha, and quasi-Creole pronoun and verb forms as in i is wantin and me is well up play an important role in creating the Ali G language. They can be found in a large number of postings (See Sebba 2003b for more details). In each case, spellings are only part of what gives the language of the texts its unconventional and unlegitimated character. However, these unconventional spellings are an essential part of the language which sustains the Web-based Ali G fantasy. Even where contributors probably lack enough experience of Creole to produce anything genuinely Creole-like, as in the case of this Norwegian contributor, some gesture in that direction is typically included: Example 3 Thank ya man, u are now on norwegian television and I love your show!

In some cases, the need to signal difference from Standard English norms leads to wholesale respellings of words where there is no phonological motivation for it, for example: Example 4 15 me iz frum da yookay but me iz in da states an me wonna woch sum ali g. Me gotsa problum mefinks. Bring yoo hairy batty over to dis side ov de worter.

From this we can see that respellings are not just an attempt to mimic the nonstandard pronunciations of Ali G; they are an essential part of identity creation for the users of these sites. There are few postings without at least an orthographic gesture in the direction of ‘Ali G language’ and it is clear that this is part of what gives these Internet users their sense of belonging to an online community. Yet at the same time, ‘deviant’ language on these sites performs another function: it acts as a contextualisation cue to mark parts of the discourse as belonging to the ‘Ali G mode of speaking’ and thus having the associations of irony and parody that go with it. A contextualisation cue (Gumperz 1982) is a feature of language which signals to the hearer (or reader) how the content of the utterance (or text) is to be interpreted. For example, a sentence spoken loudly may be interpreted differently from the same one spoken in a whisper; in this case the loudness of the utterance is a contextualisation cue. According to Gumperz (1982: 131) ‘any feature of linguistic form that contributes to the signalling of contextual presuppositions’ can be a contextualisation cue, whose 15

Translation: I am from the UK but I am in the States and I want to watch some Ali G. I have a problem methinks. Bring your hairy butt over to this side of the water.



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value depends on ‘the participants’ tacit awareness of their meaningfulness’. This meaningfulness will derive at least partially from the speakers’ associations with the feature which acts as a cue. For example, for speakers who use two languages, A and B, a switch from language A to language B may provide a cue to the hearer that what is said in B must be interpreted in a particular way – for example, as deadly earnest, or as a joke, depending on the associations of languages A and B within the speech community. In the message boards, ‘Ali G language’ is used largely to contextualise contributions that are intended to be funny, inconsequential, non-threatening, parodic. The use of Standard English, especially for long stretches, characterises messages which are on topics which contributors are treating as serious, like racism. Contributions which are solely in (relatively) standardised English may either be seen as extremely serious (having the maximum gravitas by virtue of the absence of ‘Ali G language’) or as hostile to the whole Ali G culture, refusing to ‘play the game’ by engaging with the language of Ali G. Examples 5 and 6 show the distinction.16 In Example 5, a response to a posting saying that Ali G was not funny, the potentially threatening ‘I think we should get the posse (gang) out to do some rumbling (beating up)’ is made harmless, contextualised as non-serious by the use of Ali G language17 parodying something that might actually be said by a member of a gang. On the other hand, Example 6 is meant as a serious rebuttal to a person who has (apparently) posted an overtly racist message. It is entirely in Standard English, though it is flagged as an in-group communication by the use of an Ali G catchword, batty (from battyman ‘homosexual’, here used as a term of abuse) in the subject line. Example 5 Re: The recent criticism of Ali G’s style of humour Yeah, dat is well rank ma man. I mean why is de fat cats cussin’ me main man like dis? Me tinks we should get da posse out to do some rumblin’. Example 6 Batty racists If you want to make comedy into a political issue that many of us would like to think we were past then fine, but if white people were to unite as you suggest black and Asian should they would be deemed Nazi’s. Therefore that makes you Nazi scum.

16 17

See Sebba 2003b for more detailed discussion. Of course the threat is meaningless anyway, in a ‘virtual ghetto’ where no one reveals their real address.


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Thus the deviant ‘Ali G’ language, characterised inter alia by respellings, not only serves the purpose of creating an online community of Ali G fans, but also, through its association with the irony and iconoclasm of Ali G, contextualises the messages which it is used to convey. We could argue that the Spanish Anarchists’ use of works in a very similar way; it may be seen as part of a social strategy for creating an identity which is opposed to the mainstream, legitimated view of certain issues; at the same time, this variant spelling contextualises the texts where it is used as oppositional or (as Urla has shown for Basque/Spanish) ironic or parodic. Likewise, the unconventional spellings in German fanzines studied by Androutsopoulos help both to create a subcultural identity for their users and to contextualise the messages themselves. 6.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued for a view of ‘orthography as social practice’. While, superficially, orthography of most standardised languages is highly regimented and inflexible, in practice there are many spaces where users, legitimately or illegitimately, can ‘do their own thing’. These spaces range from the illegitimate surfaces containing the simple texts of graffiti, through the domain of advertising and trade names, to the legal and relatively unpatrolled wide open spaces of the Internet. In these spaces, where variation occurs (in the form of deviation from the standard), it can fulfil either or both of two roles: 1. It may play a more or less central part in identity construction/creation, including demarcating group boundaries and showing an oppositional stance with respect to the mainstream. 2. Through associations with particular identities, it may provide a way of contextualising the text (or parts of it) on the basis of whether it uses, or fails to use, possible variant spellings. We have seen that where variation does occur, it is constrained by having to be different from, but also recognisable as a variant of, some existing element of the system. In arguing for a social practice account of orthography in this chapter, I have relied largely on examples at a subcultural level. In other words, we have been looking mainly at variant practices which occur within a single, already standardised language. Within the kind of social structure which supports and demands language standardisation, these practices tend to be marginalised and associated with subcultures. But clearly, if orthography is to be characterised as a social practice, it must be shown to have this character not just in a



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subcultural context, but also much more widely, in the development and use of orthographies generally. In the remainder of this book we will look at the role of social factors in the development, standardisation and reform of orthographic systems; and while in this chapter we have been concerned largely with subcultural groups, in the next we shall be more concerned with the role of elite groups, such as literate bilinguals and linguistic ‘experts’, in the creation of orthographies.


3

Language contact, linguists and the emergence of orthographies

1.

The r ole of bilinguals in the development of orthographies

Estonian is a Uralic language, closely related to Finnish, which today has around one million speakers (www.ethnologue.com) and an extensive literature including a wide range of different genres. Estonian has been a written language since the thirteenth century, if we count the earliest fragmentary data. By the end of the eighteenth century, according to Kurman (1968) the literature of Estonia included songs, poems, dialogues, stories, riddles, a medical handbook, a Bible and numerous texts of a religious nature. It comes then as something of a shock to read, in the third chapter of Kurman’s history of written Estonian, that the Estonian ‘writer, clergyman and linguist’ O. W. Masing (1763–1832), was ‘the first literate who also had a thorough mastery of the Estonian language’ (Kurman 1968: 21).1 The first six centuries of the development of written Estonian had, it turns out, been in the hands of individuals who lacked ‘a thorough mastery’ of the language. ‘Estonians’ they may have been (though in some cases they were not); but for the most part they were German by education and literacy. This certainly left its mark on the language: indeed, Kurman (1968: 9) remarks that ‘the written Estonian of 1690 might be thought of as a language which was poured into the mold of German’ with respect to syntax, lexis and orthography. Orthographic changes to Estonian since then have eliminated many of the German characteristics of the spelling. However, over a long period, Estonian orthography drew heavily on conventions derived from German, and some of

1

Kurman mentions this in the context of the very strong Germanisation of Estonia. ‘Up to about 1830, every native Estonian who succeeded in gaining a higher education received it with a German orientation and German sympathies . . . For example, O. W. Masing stoutly maintained throughout his adult life that he was a German, although he appears to have been of Swedish and Estonian origin. Nevertheless, Masing was the first literate who also had a thorough mastery of the Estonian language’ (Kurman 1968: 21). Earlier Kurman writes (p. 3) that from its ‘beginnings up to the nineteenth century, the writing of Estonian was to be in the hands of foreigners who never mastered the language’.

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Language contact, linguists, emergence of orthographies

59

these remain, for example the ‘umlaut-bearing’ vowel symbols , and . This example serves as a useful reminder that only rarely in the history of literacy has a language community developed its own indigenous writing system independently of other systems already in existence. Much more commonly, writing – and with it, an orthographic system – is introduced through contact with another culture which already has a written tradition (Fishman 1977: xiv). Bilinguals play an important role in this process. Although the introduction of writing is not the same thing as standardising a language, there is a parallel here with the process of standardisation of a vernacular. This, according to Joseph (1987), invariably involves modelling the new standard language on an already existing standard. Normally the language which provides this model is the language which already fulfils the functions of a ‘high’ language (Ferguson 1959) in the community. Standardisation is thus usually a process which involves a bilingual elite, who are able to transfer the conventions of the old standard to the new one. This appears to be what happened in the case of Estonian, which was ‘poured into the mold of German’, orthography and all. The modern English orthography is equally, if not more so, the outcome of the orthographic practices of bilinguals and biliterates. The Norman conquest of England led to Anglo-Norman – a local variety of French – becoming the written vernacular of England in the period following 1066. Literacy was by no means something new to England: a number of well-developed scribal traditions already existed for writing regional varieties of English, and these were now put to use in the writing of Anglo-Norman. According to Scragg (1974: 48), because Anglo-Norman was recorded in England before continental French orthography was stabilised, its spelling was greatly influenced in its early days by the West Saxon scribal tradition. Throughout the three centuries of its existence, Anglo-Norman orthography remained very irregular, and many of the Old English conventions survived in it, alongside French ones.

Thus Anglo-Norman retained many of the orthographic conventions of Anglo-Saxon, for example, using <ea> to represent /e:/ in a word like reason (raison in modern French) (Scragg 1974: 48). But after a few centuries the tables turned: English became the language of official documentation as the chancery vernacular changed from Anglo-Norman to English in about 1430. Again, scribal practice transferred many of the existing conventions – the mixture of French and Anglo-Saxon conventions which made up the


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contemporary Anglo-Norman orthography – into the new written variety. Scragg continues: Consequently some of the graphemes which became popular in chancery English in the fifteenth century were English in origin, though they reached what was to become the standard spelling system via Anglo-Norman rather than direct descent from Old English. (Scragg 1974: 48)

Thus <ea>, introduced to Anglo-Norman from twelfth-century English to represent /e:/, ‘was returned to English in the fifteenth century (Scragg 1974: 48), at first in words (like reason) which were common to both Anglo-Norman and English, but later extended to other words, some of which have the regular reflex of the Middle English /e:/, such as <deal>, <meat> and others which now have other vowels – for example, , . In the case of English, we can see how language contact has played an important role in the development of orthography. The mediators of orthography in this case were a scribal class who transferred existing conventions from one language to another. This in itself is a common occurrence and is the way many vernacular orthographies have developed. What makes the case of English a little more interesting is the fact that the transfer of conventions happened twice, so that some of the sound – symbol correspondences were ‘returned’ to the later form of the original language. This chapter will look at the development of orthographies, bearing in mind the importance of bilinguals as mediators. I shall argue that the nature of bilingualism in the language community is one important factor in the emergence of orthographies for new written traditions. Other factors which are important are the types of literacy practices which the orthography supports or is intended to support, and the prevailing language ideologies concerning those practices and the language varieties involved in them. We will now turn to look in more detail at two cases where language contact has profoundly influenced the orthography of a language. In the first case, that of Manx, a language closely related to Scottish and Irish Gaelic came to be written using orthographic conventions derived from English. In the second case, Sranan Tongo, a Creole language ultimately deriving its lexicon from English, came to be written using first German, and then Dutch orthographic conventions. What each case has in common is that the development of the orthography was mediated by a bilingual class who introduced a set of conventions already familiar to them for writing another language. The precise mechanism of this, and the outcome, is dependent on the social, cultural, historical and ideological context of each case.



2.

The ‘abominable’ Manx orthography

2.1.

The origins of the written Manx tradition

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Manx Gaelic was the vernacular of the Isle of Man, a semi-independent state located in the Irish Sea.2 Its last first-language speaker died in 1974, leaving an English-speaking island where Manx has mainly a symbolic and ceremonial role, although there is a movement to revive it. Though related to Scottish and Irish Gaelic, Manx has an orthography that is notably different from the orthographic traditions of both these close relatives, and incorporates a number of English conventions. This ‘historical abomination’ (Fargher 1979: vi) or ‘encumbrance’ (O’Rahilly 1976: 120–121) remains one of the most striking, and most controversial, aspects of Manx. Manx has a written tradition dating back at least to the early seventeenth century. In the past, though some scholarly attention has been given to Manx literature, there has been little mention of Manx orthography,3 except for the fact, widely noted, that Manx orthography is strikingly different from that of Manx’s closest relatives, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. The written tradition in Manx, as far as can be definitely ascertained, dates back only to the seventeenth century, though Manx must have been used in writing before that, if only for place names. The orthography of the earliest known book in Manx was largely the invention of John Phillips, who was Bishop of Sodor and Mann 1605–1633. According to Thomson (1969: 178), Phillips, together with at least one other person, translated the Book of Common Prayer into Manx, probably between 1605 and 1610. Phillips, who was probably a native of North Wales, would have known the Welsh orthography of the time, though he and his co-writer ‘adopted for the consonants a system fairly close to that of contemporary English’ (Thomson 1969: 181), while relying more on Welsh, Latin, Italian or Spanish for the vowel symbols. Phillips’s orthography marks the phonemic contrasts of Manx where English orthography provides the means for doing so, but ‘ignores those distinctions which English has no need to make’ (Thomson 1969: 181). Phillips’s translation of the Book of Common Prayer was not published in his lifetime, and a single manuscript copy survived from which an edition was finally produced in 1894. Following Phillips, Thomas Wilson (Bishop 1698–1755) set about having the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible translated into Manx. ‘Principles 2

3

The island’s population is about 70,000. It has its own parliament and control of internal affairs including finances, and is not part of the United Kingdom or the European Union, although it is a Crown Dependency of the United Kingdom. The main exception is Thomson (1969).


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Table 3.1. Manx conventions which derive from English

Manx spelling and example

Sound

Other languages with this convention

Doolish ‘Douglas’ <ee> skeet ‘news’ (syllable final) casherick ‘holy’ <sh> Doolish

/u:/ /i:/ /k/ /S/

English English English, German, Swedish, Dutch English, Swahili, Zulu etc.

and Duties of Christianity’ (Coyrle Sodjeh) appeared in Manx and English in 1707. According to Thomson 1969: 184, ‘in this work the spelling of the Manx text, though not fully developed into the near uniformity of the second half of the century, is already clearly the same system as that in use later and as clearly marks a break with the Phillipsian type except in that both are non-Gaelic.’4 Like the orthographic tradition of Phillips, the modern Manx orthography, based on that of Wilson, shows many conventions which derive from English, and moreover are identifiably ‘English’ as they are not widely found with these values in the orthographies of other languages. Table 3.1 gives some examples of these. As an example of how the Manx conventions correspond to English ones, here is part of a ‘specimen text’ in Manx (in capitals) from Thomson and Pilgrim (n.d., p. 10), accompanied by their ‘approximate pronunciation using the English spelling system as a basis’ (with stressed syllables underlined), and a gloss: AYR AIN T’AYNS NIAU, Airine tunss n-yow, father at-us [who] is in heaven CASHERICK DY ROW DT’ENNYM; cahsherick the row th’ennem hallowed be thy name DY JIG DIY REERIAGHT; the jig the ree-reeacht come thy kingdom DI’AIGNEY DY ROW JEANT ER Y TALLOO h’ahgnier the row jint erra tolloo thy will be done MYR T’EH AYNS NIAU. mer teh unss n-yow as is it in heaven 4

Thomson quotes Bishop Wilson’s introduction: ‘They that have had the Trouble of Writing it, are very Sensible that the Liberty which every Man takes of Writing after his own Way, will expose them to some censure’. In other words, orthography was only partly standardised and most likely based on perceived phonetic similarities between Manx and English.



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Thomson and Pilgrim stress that their ‘transcription’ of the Manx is ‘only a very rough approximation of the English sounds, and is in no way scientifically accurate’. It is meant to show the English reader with no prior knowledge of Manx or its orthography the approximate sound of the words. Yet it is remarkable how the conventions of the ‘transcription’ parallel the standard Manx orthography. It is almost as though the conventional Manx orthography served a similar purpose to Thomson and Pilgrim’s ‘transcription’, namely to help a reader familiar with the English spelling conventions to sound the Manx words. In contrast, both Scots and Irish Gaelic have numerous conventions which are not found in English, and likewise have no role in Manx orthography. A look at the first few lines of the Lord’s Prayer in standard Scottish and Irish Gaelic shows how different from Manx those languages look when written down:

Gaelg (Manx)

Gaìdhlig (Scottish)

Gaeilge (Irish)

Ayr ain t’ayns niau,

Ar n-Athair a tha air neàmh:

´ r n-athair, ata´ ar neamh: A

casherick dy row t’ennym.

gu naomhaichear d’ainm. Thigeadh do rıòghachd.

go naofar d’ainm.

Dy jig dty reeriaght. Dt’algney dy row jeant er y thalloo

Deàntar do thoil air an talamh,

myr t’eh ayns niau.

mar a nithear air neàmh.

Go dtaga do riocht Go ndeántar do thoil ar an talamh, mar dheántar ar neamh.

In this example, both the Scottish and Irish Gaelic orthographies use grapheme sequences like and <mh> which are not found in Manx. Both use diacritic marks (accents) on vowels, where Manx has <ee> and where Manx has . Manx makes widespread use of , which does not occur in the other two; and none of the Manx conventions listed in Table 3.1 occurs in Scottish or Irish Gaelic. It is clear that the modern Manx orthography, like that of Philips’s before it, is strongly influenced by the conventions of English spelling. Here we can see the importance of bilinguals in determining the form a nascent orthography will take. As Thomson points out (Thomson 1969: 193) in respect of the translation of religious works into Manx which went on apace in the second half of the eighteenth century: nothing of all this translation work could be carried out by monoglot Manxmen . . . the clergy who undertook this work were locally educated, it is true, but through


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English and in the classics, only informally and occasionally through or in Manx, and for some of them, depending on their upbringing, it must have been a second rather than a first language in terms of status if not always in terms of order of acquisition.

Thus the Manx orthographic conventions which have come down to the present can be seen to be the work of bilinguals and, in particular, bilingual clergy whose first language of literacy was English. Indeed, as Thomson notes, for some of the translators Manx may not even have been a first language; and certainly, they were far more used to reading and writing English, and perhaps even Latin and Greek, than Manx. 2.2.

The role of literacy practices in the development of the Manx orthography

In Chapter 1, I argued that the practices involving literacy in which a community engages are inevitably related to the type of orthography which will emerge as one of the technologies which supports those practices. The history of Manx orthography illustrates this. Even following Phillips’s work on the Book of Common Prayer, Manx was essentially an unwritten language, and in the eighteenth century, ‘most Manxmen were illiterate in their own language and even those who could write did not write in Manx’ (Thomson 1969: 179). This was inevitable, given that ‘all attempts at elementary education took it for granted that a knowledge of English reading and writing was the goal to be aimed at’ (Thomson 1969: 180). Some idea of what ‘literacy’ in English may have meant for many people may be gained from the following, from a letter from Bishop Hildesley to the Archbishop of York, 1762: The Manks people . . . would be, I am confident, extremely fond of perusing the scriptures, if they had them, and were taught to read them, in their own tongue, as they are the English Bibles; which latter, numbers can do very roundly, whilst they scarce understand the meaning of a single sentence; nay, I might say, I believe, of some, a single word! (Butler 1799: 422).

In other words, some of those who could ‘read’ could sound the English letters, but had little idea of the language they represented. At least until the Bible and other religious material became widely available in Manx in printed form in the 1760s (largely through the work of Hildesley himself) the main use of written Manx seems to have been by clergy literate in English, who used Manx religious material for reading in church or in their pastoral work with Manx monolinguals. The majority of literate lay people had little or no access



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to anything written in Manx at least until the second half of the eighteenth century. We can see how in the Manx society in the eighteenth century, literacy in Manx and literacy in English had different social meanings and were embedded in different social practices. While literacy in English may have been seen as a desirable goal in itself, leading to social and economic advancement, literacy in Manx served mainly to support religious activities. The available evidence suggests that the reading of Manx was largely the preserve of those who already could read English to some degree.5 From 1769, after the appearance of the Bible in Manx, it was possible for ‘masters of families, and others, who are well disposed, [to] read to the ignorant and illiterate the Sacred Oracles in their own language’ (Butler 1799: 227). Very likely some of these ‘masters of families’ were the same people who some years previously could read the English Bible ‘very roundly’, in Hildesley’s words, but understanding little or nothing of what they read. This also gives an indication of how the social practices surrounding reading and writing in Manx related to the nature of the Manx orthography which was being developed at that time largely for the purposes of Bible translation. For both the clergy and lay people Manx would be mainly a read and spoken, rather than a written, language. For both groups Manx literacy was secondary to English literacy in terms of both order and status. For both groups, written Manx would have a strong identification with the Church, whereas written English was seen to have a wider range of uses. Thus the transfer of conventions from English orthography to Manx served the purposes of both the clergy, who were already fully literate in English, and the lay people, for most of whom their limited literacy derived from schooling in English. Under these circumstances, it was almost inevitable that a Manx orthography would develop that would resemble that of English6 in some respects. The case of Manx shows clearly how orthographies are shaped by social and cultural factors in the contexts where they develop. Some of the most important of these factors will be the nature of bilingualism among the literate part of the population; literacy practices within the community as a whole; and ideological beliefs concerning languages and their speakers, both inside and 5

6

According to Stowell and O’ Breaslaín (1996: 8–9), Hildesley in the 1750s found only three parishes where Manx was used as a medium of instruction. His response was ‘to make available teaching material in Manx and to limit the use of English’, and to encourage teachers who could teach in Manx. For a time, Manx became established as teaching medium in nearly all parishes, only to go into a decline again soon after Hildesley’s death in 1772. See also Thompson (1969: 180).


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outside the community. All three factors have played a role in the development of Manx orthography. The result has been a Gaelic language which orthographically does not resemble its close relatives. This fact may have helped pave the way for transitional bilingualism and the loss of Manx as a spoken language, but it may also have helped to preserve Manx as an independent language when it could have been constructed as a dialect of Scottish or Irish Gaelic.7 We will turn now to another case study, in a very different kind of setting. We shall see some similar themes, however; the mediation of a bilingual elite, the role of literacy practices of particular kinds, and the importance of language ideologies. 3.

The development of spelling in Sranan Tongo 8

3.1.

Introduction

Sranan Tongo or simply Sranan is an English-lexicon creole spoken by a majority of the population in Surinam (South America), which also has many speakers in the Netherlands.9 Sranan orthography is an interesting subject for a social practice account because the language has been largely uncodified for most of its history, and yet (unlike many creoles) has a long written tradition in which it is treated as an independent language. Sranan both in Surinam and the Netherlands exists in a diglossic relationship with Dutch, which is used for all official purposes, but Sranan is so unlike Dutch that there is no possibility of it being treated as a Dutch dialect. Likewise, while Sranan derives much of its lexicon from English, its phonology and grammar are so distinct from those of English that the connection is difficult to perceive unless one knows the history of the language. Very few Sranan words closely resemble their English etymons; most have undergone substantial phonological changes. Furthermore, Sranan has been in contact with Dutch, not English, for most of its 350-year history and no ‘post-creole continuum’10 has developed. Sranan therefore, unlike other creoles with English lexicon, can only with great difficulty be characterised as a ‘dialect of English’ and has therefore largely escaped the treatment received by other Caribbean English-lexicon creoles, which are thought of by many of their speakers (and others) as substandard forms of English. Here are the first four 7 8

9

10

´ hIfearnaín (in press) for a dissenting view on this point. ‘See O I am grateful to the late Jacques Arends for his comments and assistance with obtaining materials referred to in this section. For an introductory account of Sranan, see Arends, J., Muysken, P. and Smith, N. (eds.) (1994): Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction. Amsterdam, John Benjamins. The term is due to De Camp (1971).



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lines of the Surinamese national anthem, written in the most recent (1986) official orthography (see the appendix of Sebba 2000 for the same text in a variety of orthographies). Sranankondre, diri kondre Yu wi lobi nomru wan Eri libi te na dede Wi sa singi fu Sranan11

Many written texts exist in Sranan, covering a period of about 300 years up to the present. In spite of that, and the fact that there have been several widely used orthographies in that period, there is no universally used orthography for Sranan. Rather, there are a range of orthographic practices, some more and some less in line with the official orthographies of recent times. Donicie (1951) gives an overview of no less than fourteen different orthographies used to write Sranan at different stages between 1718 and 1951. Since then there have been several more. In the next section, I will give an overview of the history of Sranan orthography, in which the relevance of such factors as bilingualism, ideology and literacy practices will become apparent. 3.2.

A short history of Sranan spelling

Although there are texts in Sranan dating back to the early eighteenth century, the introduction of a written form for Sranan was largely the work of the German-speaking Moravian Missionaries who were active in Surinam from 1735 (Holm 1988: 17). By this time, Dutch was well established as the language of literacy of the plantation owners and colonial administration. Nevertheless, one of the earliest Sranan orthographies, that of the Moravian missionary Schumann (1783), was based on the spelling system of German. This was because he was not writing for his congregation, but ‘in the first instance for his fellow missionaries, to give them a usable dictionary and Bible translation’ (Donicie 1951: 159). These missionaries were all literate in German. Later orthographies, as will be discussed later, have been designed for readers and writers who already know Dutch. The Schumann orthography, based as it was on German conventions, was used by the Moravians until the 1820s, and may be called the first Sranan orthographic tradition. But by 1824, the missionaries’ writings began to show Dutch orthographic influences in addition to the German. The missionaries

11

English translation: Sranan country, dear country / You we love number one / Whole life until death / We shall sing of Surinam.


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now had an eye on their congregants, who if literate at all, were likely to be literate in Dutch. The second orthographic tradition in Sranan, which dates from this period, is distinguished by use of mainly Dutch spelling conventions, together with a concern for etymology and homonym avoidance. Spellings tended to reflect pronunciations (following Dutch sound–letter correspondences) but also tried to maintain a connection with the Dutch or English source-word, in many cases, thus the word for ‘help’ is written though pronounced [ jepi] with no trace of / l /. This orthography became fixed by its use in the Sranan version of the New Testament, Da Njoe Testament vo wi Masra en helpiman Jezus Kristus, published in 1829 (Donicie 1951). A debate in Britain which followed the publication of the New Testament in ‘Negro-English’ gives some insight into how language ideologies may affect orthography. The publication of the Sranan New Testament was cricitised in a journal, the Edinburgh Christian Instructor, on the grounds that its language was nothing but broken English . . . a tongue of which no pains have been taken to give them the correct meaning and pronunciation . . . altogether inconsistent with that decorous and seemly garb in which the Word of God should be presented to the public . . . To give the Negroes the Bible in such a form as that in which the Brethren have given it to the outcasts of Surinam, is to put upon them an additional mockery, and another badge of humiliation, and a stronger fetter still to bind them down to their unhappy fate. (Greenfield 1830)

Defending the British and Foreign Bible Society’s decision to publish the Moravians’ Sranan Bible, William Greenfield (1830) pointed out that employed by the Moravian missionaries for nearly a century, as only intelligible mode of communication to the minds of the Negroes, [Sranan] had been rendered the efficient mean for the conversion of many souls unto God. If then, it was not inefficient or improper in conveying the Word of God orally, upon what plea could it be deemed improper as the vehicle of the same Word when written? (Greenfield 1830)

Yet we may guess that Greenfield, and the Moravian brethren before him, still had an eye on the ‘decorous and seemly garb in which the Word of God should be presented’. This could account for the fact that while treating Sranan as a language distinct both from English and Dutch, the Moravian method of writing Sranan relied on etymological spellings, keeping Sranan in touch with more ‘seemly’ languages.12 12

This can be seen as a version of the Creole standardisation problem (see Chapter 5) discussed by Joseph (1987): a Creole attempting to standardise is caught between trying to establish independent conventions on the one hand, and modelling itself on the prestigious language of



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Here we see a twofold effect of language ideology; firstly, in a decision to treat a linguistic system as ‘a language’ and therefore entitled to an orthography of its own (a ‘dialect’ is most likely to be written using a modified version of the orthography of the ‘language’ of which it is presumed to be a sub-type13); secondly, in the decision that the spelling should follow the European origins of the words rather than their sounds, where there is a conflict between the two. This second Sranan orthographic tradition endured with little change for a century (Donicie 1951: 173). As the orthography used for many religious publications, it was bound to have been influential on some sections of the population. It was the orthography of not only the Sranan New Testament, but also a dictionary and the Sranan grammar published by the Moravian brethren. By the time the dictionary appeared in 1856, its author, H. R. Wullschla¨gel, could declare that ‘now that the Negroes are used to it’ the orthography ‘could not be further changed’ (Wullschla¨gel 1856: viii; my translation). It is difficult to gauge how widespread literacy in Sranan has been at any stage. Voorhoeve and Lichtveld (1975: 6) note that before 1800, missionaries could not in practice reach the slaves, but ‘after 1800 they gradually received permission from individual plantation directors to give religious instruction on the plantations’. In 1844, missionaries were allowed to teach slave children to read in Creole, but until 1856, they were not allowed to teach writing. Up to the time of emancipation in 1863, all instruction of slave children was in Creole. However, in 1856 the Governor of Surinam complained of the use of Creole as a language of instruction and demanded that the mission schools use Dutch instead. Although this caused problems for the mission schools, whose teaching material was in Sranan, from 1877 Dutch became the sole medium of instruction (Voorhoeve and Lichtveld 1975: 8). From that time Sranan ceased to have any role in schools, at least officially. We may assume that from then on, for most of those who could read Sranan, literacy in Sranan was a secondary literacy: their first written language was Dutch, even when their first spoken language was Sranan. Outside of church publications, written Sranan seems to have had a marginal role until the middle of the twentieth century. During this period the New Testament orthographic tradition continued to be used in the Church, but not outside it. Secular writers

13

its community, which is normally its own lexifier, on the other. The Creole must thus simultaneously move closer to, and further away from, the lexifier (Joseph 1987: 55). This seems to be the point of view of Greenfield’s adversary in the Edinburgh Christian Instructor according to whom the Moravian missionaries ‘ought to have taught the Negroes that language which they could most easily learn [and] that language, from the dialect with which they were already familiar, was evidently English’ (Greenfield 1830).


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in the middle part of the twentieth century, and up to the present, have used their own orthographies to a large extent. By the 1950s, a number of competing orthographies were in use for Sranan. That of the Moravian Brethren has already been discussed. The Roman Catholic Church also had its own orthography. Another system, used ‘in scientific publications’ (Voorhoeve 1964: 68), was that of Peé, Hellinga and Donicie (1953). The Sranan cultural movement Wie Eegie Sanie (‘Our Own Things’) also had its own orthography, used in particular by the writer who was the movement’s main inspiration, J. A. G. Koenders.14 In the mid-1950s the Netherlands Bible Society decided it was time to produce a Sranan translation of the Bible which would be ‘accessible to everybody who wants to read it’ (Voorhoeve 1964: 60). A Dutch linguist, Jan Voorhoeve (later Professor of African Languages at the University of Leiden), was sent to Surinam by the Society as a ‘language representative’ with the task of facilitating the work (Meel 1997: 43). He found several systems in use, each preferred by a particular group and with little mutual intelligibility. Furthermore, ‘many Surinamese, even though they could speak and understand Dutch only with difficulty, could read Dutch better than Sranan’15 (Voorhoeve 1956: 467). Voorhoeve convened a committee of the interested parties in 1957 and put forward a unified spelling proposal which involved each group accepting certain changes and compromises. The new spelling retained certain specifically Dutch conventions like representing /u/ by and /j/ by <j>, but completely did away with the etymological spelling which characterised the system used by the Moravian and Roman Catholic churches. It was phonemic in principle, and Voorhoeve believed it could be learnt in half the time it would take to learn the old Moravian spelling (Voorhoeve 1958: 540). The proposal was tested by sending round two ‘test sermons’ in the new spelling (Voorhoeve 1958: 532). One of the objections raised was that it was too different from the pulpit language. The pulpit language had come to ‘rest on spelling pronunciation and [was] an artificially formed language unconnected with the spoken language . . . resulting from wrong (European) pronunciations in the mouths of foreign missionaries, . . . excessive concern with etymology [and] an unsatisfactory reading technique’ (Voorhoeve 1958: 537). Although it was difficult for hearers to understand, it had prestige as an elevated form; and for the preachers themselves, it would be difficult to ‘translate’ from an orthography that represented the everyday language into the pulpit language. 14 15

Koenders’s booklet Fo memre wi afo (1943) is his proposal for a standard orthography. ‘Vele Surinamers, ook al spreken en begrijpen zij moeizaam Nederlands, kunnen beter Nederlands lezen dan Sranan’.



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In this development we can see another demonstration of orthography as social practice. As written Sranan was excluded from schools and became confined to religious functions, the orthography acquired a power which actually created a kind of diglossia between the pulpit language, with its heavy dependence on etymological spellings and pronunciations, and everyday Sranan. An ideological decision – whether written Sranan should remain the language of sermons, or should have a wider range of functions and a more general readership – would determine the future form of the orthography. Voorhoeve argued strongly that the Church should update its approach by accepting the new orthography and sermons in ordinary Sranan. Now the Surinam (colonial) administration became involved. It had hitherto refrained from attempting to regulate Sranan, as its policy was to promote Dutch only (Voorhoeve 1964: 60). But in 1960 a government commission approved an official orthography for Sranan16 which was reasonably close to Voorhoeve’s proposal. This orthography remained official until after Surinam’s independence in 1975. By the 1980s new factors had come into play which meant that another government commission, the Kramp Commission, was set up to look into spelling. This led to a another set of proposals and, in 1986, a new official orthography. We will look at the history of this more recent set of events in the next chapter. 3.3.

Orthography as practice in Sranan today

Sranan has around three centuries of written tradition, and at least four widely used orthographies, including two officially authorised ones since 1960. Yet the majority of Surinamese people, whether in Surinam or the Netherlands, are relatively unaffected by this, for the simple reason that written Sranan exists only marginally for them. Sranan is not a school subject either in Surinam or in the Netherlands (though recently there have been plans to introduce some Sranan in Dutch schools) and only a small number of publications are mainly or wholly in Sranan. People who write extensively in daily life – for example, for professional purposes – will be constrained to write mainly in Dutch. If their use of written language is mainly for reading – whether documents, books or periodicals – again the language they read will most likely be Dutch. In fact, written Sranan is all around, but mainly in small chunks – in names of people, places and products, in short phrases embedded in Dutch texts, in advertisements and slogans. Many such uses of Sranan lie outside the ‘official’ space, beyond the kind of highly regulated

16

This can be found reproduced in Woordenlijst 1961/1980: f15


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regime where the official orthographies might be enforced by strict editorial control. Printed publications from the post-independence period (roughly 1975– 1985) show a high degree of conformity to the 1960 official norms, though some texts published by their authors or by small organisations do not conform fully. More recently, editors have attempted to bring their publications into line with the 1986 orthography, with varying degrees of success. More diverse are the spellings we find outside the relatively regulated space of edited publications. In the world of names, slogans, folk sayings (known in Sranan as odo from English word) and ephemera, there is little regard for the official norms. In fact, while the popular usage often coincides with official spellings, there are also many competing ‘unofficial’ spellings, for example, for /i/ ( in both official orthographies, e.g. ‘love,’ official spelling: ) and for final nasalised vowels ( in both official orthographies, e.g. ‘come,’ official spelling: ). Sometimes two norms are even used alongside each other. This is nicely illustrated by an advertisement in De Surinaamse Krant for a timber merchant offering the following varieties of softwood: ‘wana – sumaruba – pisi – krappa – soemaroeba’. The appearance of sumaruba twice, once in its 1960 form and once in its 1986 incarnation, is probably a mistake, but was perhaps made more likely by the different spellings. In the absence of a single long-standing orthographic tradition, with little or no school-based teaching of writing in Sranan, and with not just one but two recent official orthographies in use, it is inevitable that writers of Sranan will differ – from the official norms and from each other – in their orthographic practices. What the unofficial spellings have in common is that they use conventions which are found in Dutch, and sometimes reflect the Dutch spelling of a word which is of Dutch origin. They reflect the fact that literacy, for Sranan speakers, is first and foremost in Dutch and that, for many, writing Sranan is still an ad hoc process. Sranan is certainly a part of some Surinamese literacy practices but the fact that these remain dominated by Dutch has an inevitable impact on the orthography. The case studies of Manx and Sranan orthography have shown the importance of bilinguals in the development of orthographic practices. They have also shown the relevance of literacy practices and ideologies of language. In both Surinam and the Isle of Man, the bilinguals who initially developed the orthography were clergy rather than professional linguists (though it could be argued that they were linguists of a kind, since translation was one of their main concerns). In the next section we will look at the role played by a different kind of bilinguals in the development of orthographies more recently: professional linguists.



4.

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Linguists as mediators in orthography development

The previous sections of this chapter have shown how, historically, it is typically literate bilinguals who transfer the orthographic conventions of one language to another, previously unwritten one. We have seen how the bilinguals concerned used orthography from time to time in pursuit of quite specific goals – for example, to serve the purposes of clergy, who needed to be able to read out texts in church, or to build on pre-existing literacies of their congregations. In recent times the spread of literacy has become the objective of national and supra-national organisations: governments, missionary organisations and UNESCO. At the same time, the development of linguistics as a recognised discipline has provided a corps of ‘experts’ ready and waiting to undertake the work of orthography development. According to one linguist, ‘our knowledge of linguistics and pedagogy today permits us to develop an adequate, easy writing system for any language, and to accompany it by an adequate literacy program for the dissemination of such a system’ (Wiesemann 1996: 15). Thus while numerous languages have developed successful orthographies in the past without the aid of a class of professional linguists, it appears that in the future few will do so. The autonomous model of literacy has indeed embraced the idea of linguists as language planners, with orthography high on the agenda for languages without a written tradition (and in some cases, even for languages with a written tradition, but an exclusively indigenous one). According to Sjoberg (1966: 262), devising efficient orthographies for unwritten languages is a task that requires the services of specialists – of linguists trained to analyze a language into its essential components and to select a minimum set of symbols that will mark all significant contrasts, yet satisfy the demands of practicality in the socio-cultural realm. Only in rare instances has an individual lacking knowledge of these special techniques been able to create a relatively simple and consistent orthography for his language.

We might well question just how ‘rare’ such instances are, if we count together all the indigenously developed alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts. Setting aside that issue for the moment, it seems that linguists have been successful in creating a market for their services in recent history. Moreover, while clearly not all linguists have this attitude, some believe that ‘expert knows best’ when it comes to designing orthographies In new literary languages there may be various social, political, psychological, typographical and economic conditions in conflict with the phonemic principle. Nevertheless they should not be overestimated. They often depend on prejudices which should be combated, instead of yielding to them. E. A. Nida tells that in Spanish-speaking Latin


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America Indians often insist that the k-like phoneme should be written c before a, o, u, and qu before i, e, because this makes their language more like Spanish. Likewise in the French-speaking part of Africa many persons prefer to write ou instead of u for it seems more like French . . . It would be scarcely wise to yield to such pressure and introduce such absurdities in a new orthography. Instead one should try to explain to the natives that their orthography is superior to that of French and Spanish. (Tauli 1968: 131)

Such an attitude of de haut en bas could be almost guaranteed to make the ‘natives’ reject their new ‘gift’ of a writing system. Fortunately others such as Pike had a more humane and pragmatic approach: It needs to be emphasised that the science of forming an orthography should by no means be considered limited to the science of linguistics. Rather it must be emphasised again and again that the social sciences and psychology must play their part, else an orthography may result which will be vehemently repudiated by the people. (Pike, contributor to UNESCO 1951)

In Chapter 1, we saw how the phonemic principle came to be widely accepted as the correct way to a ‘scientific’ orthography. For the foreseeable future, it is likely that new writing systems which are developed will be phonemic as far as possible. This principle on its own determines much of the character of a writing system; it ensures, for example, that there will be a smallish number of characters (mostly in the range 20 to 40, say) and that both vowels and consonants will be written. However, it does not specify the precise phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence. This turns out to be the point where phonemicists have been forced to confront social and cultural issues, in order, in Sjoberg’s words, to ‘satisfy the demands of practicality in the socio-cultural realm’. It is worth remembering at this point that within an autonomous model of orthography, there is no requirement to consider literacy practices (or indeed social practice more widely). The linguistic theories applied to literacy development in Mexico, according to Barros (1995: 285), treated ‘the transformation of an oral community into a literate one as a neutral cultural process, depending exclusively on the existence of a phonological orthography’. However, in allocating particular symbols to particular sounds, it is necessary to work on some principle. In theory, this can be entirely arbitrary; in a language system where, in the Saussurean tradition, what counts is contrast rather than absolute, there is nothing to stop me assigning the letter to a low front unrounded vowel, to a voiceless alveolar plosive and to a voiceless velar plosive: thus <dog> phonemically spells /kæt/. However, out of pragmatic considerations which no one is likely to quibble with, it is very likely that in most languages the low front vowel will be given the symbol and the voiceless alveolar plosive, . Whether the voiceless velar plosive



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should be written or : or , however, is a more complex issue, which cannot be decided on the basis of linguistics alone. Many phonemicists would, it seems, prefer to solve the question of phoneme–symbol correspondences by drawing on a universal set of symbols similar to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Thus one set of linguists working in Mexico in the 1930s, the ‘indigenists,’ according to Barros (1995: 282) wanted to use a script which was based on the IPA and had divested itself even of such European conventions as capital letters. This was not a new idea: it is the basis of Jones and Plaatje’s Sechuana Reader (1916), which is described on the title page as ‘in International Phonetic orthography’. Its history goes back at least to the works of Richard Lepsius and his Standard Alphabet for reducing unwritten languages and foreign graphic systems to a uniform orthography in European letters. (Lepsius 1981, originally 1863.) Unsurprisingly – or, perhaps, surprising only to those advocates of this solution who rigidly refuse to acknowledge any kind of ‘end user’ – this particular solution is not always well received. Sjoberg (1966: 268) notes that In Africa the leaders of the new nations react against attempts by linguists to introduce special signs so as to write a language in the simplest, most consistent manner – for, as indicated above, the native speaker does not want his language to ‘look different from’ English (in the former British colonies) or French (in the former French colonies).

Given the prestige of the former colonial languages in fairly classic diglossic situations, this outcome might be predicted by employing only a modest amount of sociolinguistic knowledge. However, in the next chapter we shall see some cases of ‘users’ rejecting orthographies on the very same grounds – similarity to the language of the former colonial administration. The relevant point here is that the acceptance or rejection of the orthography rests on social factors, not on its ‘efficiency’ as an orthography. Faced with decisions to make about phoneme–grapheme correspondences, phonemicists have had to confront these social factors to some extent. Without, in general, examining in detail the kinds of literacy practices which the orthography might support, they have nevertheless had to look at the functions of literacy in the language for which the orthography is being developed. There has been a tendency to treat literacy in the indigenous language, and hence the use of the orthography, as transitional: while initial literacy will be in the indigenous language, ‘full’ literacy will follow later in the national/regional/ official/ language. Thus, the most practical choice of phoneme–grapheme correspondences is the one which is most similar to the language in which ‘full’ literacy will be acquired. This is the solution which was favoured by the missionary linguists in Mexico in the 1930s (Barros 1995: 282) and is


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mentioned explicitly by many writers on the subject, for example Willard Walker: while writing systems should be reasonably efficient and systematic, they should also provide (and many do indeed provide) for maximal transference with the spelling conventions in use by the larger society: that is to say that a popular orthography for Navajo, let us say, should insofar as possible, be consistent with that of the second language to be learned (English) and with the expectations of those Navajos who have already become literate in English. (Walker 1969: 155)

This is echoed by Coulmas twenty years later: Given that [transitional literacy] is a major objective of designing an orthography for a hitherto unwritten language, it is highly desirable that the new orthography differ as little as possible from that language of wider communication which is of greatest functional value for the speech community in question. (Coulmas 1989: 233)

Again we see orthography being designed with a goal in mind, though it is not clear whether this is really the goal of the end users or is simply what experts have decided is good for them. Be that as it may, we can see that modelling the ‘new’ orthography on that of the local language of prestige serves the purposes both of those who advocate transitional literacy and of those who feel that their language gains in status by ‘looking like’ the colonial language. It does not, however, suit the objectives of those who want to distance their language from the colonial past – and this is the source of some disputes which we shall explore in the next chapter. 5.

‘Transitional orthography’

The decision to prepare a language community orthographically for transitional literacy is, of course, an ideological one, though it may be presented as purely a pragmatic matter. It is one aspect of language planning; as such, it may be a product of policy-making bodies and handed down by central government, it may grow from a local decision-making process involving the users of the language, or it may be in practice the work of individuals or a small group working independently. Whoever is responsible for the decisions, they are ultimately ideological in character. Nevertheless, it is only occasionally that the ideological basis of such a literacy project is made explicit. In the case of Manx, we have some interesting evidence from the later writings of John Kelly, a Manxman who as a young man was involved in Bible translation work in the service of Bishop Hildesley. Kelly thus had a key role in the production of the Manx Bible and hence in the development of literacy in Manx. In later life Kelly produced a grammar and two dictionaries of Manx



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(Thomson 1969: 186). In the introduction to his ‘Triglott Dictionary’ (English/ Scottish/Irish/Manx Gaelic), dated 1805, Kelly writes approvingly of the way French was promoted by France as a ‘universal’ language (this was the era of the Napoleonic wars). For Kelly, the real aim of the Manx literacy project, it turns out, was imperial and religious – and in particular, the eradication of Catholicism. Kelly continues: By the publication of Gaelic books, and more particularly by the clergy being obliged to understand, and to use the Gaelic tongue, the Roman Catholic faith was entirely superseded in Man . . . The same wisdom exercised by the rulers of the Church of Scotland, has produced similar effects in the Highlands.

Though regrettably, he says, the opportunity was missed in Ireland: Had books been printed in [Irish] Gaelic, and Gaelic schools established in those parts of Ireland where Gaelic is the vulgar tongue, the people would have acquired learning by using the English alphabet, – they would have read English before they could read Irish, by reading Irish through an English medium . . . .

Literacy in Gaelic, Kelly implies, can provide the crucial transitional step to literacy in English; and once literacy in English has been attained, there is no need for any other kind. The consequence, according to Kelly, is necessarily the loss of Gaelic: it is true that in process of time this cultivation of the Gaelic language will destroy the language itself, as a living language; but it will have produced the knowledge of a better, and will descend to posterity by means of the press in a more perfect state.

It will, in other words, become a ‘dead’ language like Latin; but nobly so. Kelly clearly believed that the spread of publications in Manx would be the mechanism of a (wholly desirable) language shift to English. It is interesting that he saw the use of ‘the English alphabet’ as an important factor. It would of course be over-simple to suggest that this was the main driving force of language shift from Manx to English, but the fact that an English-like orthography gave more direct access to English may well have been significant. In any event Kelly’s programme of language planning was certainly successful, since by 1975 no first-language speakers of Manx remained. As a final case study, we may take the development of orthographies for the Turkic languages of Central Asia during the Tsarist and Soviet periods in Russia. N. I. Il’minskii, an expert on Turkic languages and sometime professor of linguistics, was also head of the Translation Commission of the Orthodox Missionary Society in Kazan’in what is now Tatarstan. Il’minskii believed that


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the Russification and Orthodox education of indigenous minorities would be facilitated ‘if local languages were employed as useful and accessible tools of instruction’ (Reznik 2001). According to Paksoy (1989 chapter 2, pp. 2–3) ‘the Il’minskii method was originally based on an attempt to separate Tatar and Kazakh (then called ‘Kirghiz’) dialects and establish for the latter a Cyrillic alphabet. Il’minskii strove to emphasise tribe-specific and regional vocabulary, using Cyrillic characters to stress differentiation visually and codify variations in pronunciation, however minor’. Il’minskii was thus able to establish separate ‘languages’ in spite of the similarity of these varieties. Following on from Il’minskii’s work, another Russian Orthodox missionary and graduate of the Kazan Academy, Mikola Ostroumov, tried to develop a language he called ‘Sart’ for the settled population which used the Tashkent dialect and to differentiate it from Tatar and Kazakh using Il’minskii’s techniques. According to Paksoy (1989 chapter 2, p. 3), ‘thus distorting the phonological aspects of local usages constituted a step toward the later Soviet policy . . . of recording such differences in subsets of [first] Latin, then [later] Cyrillic orthography, and dubbing each product a ‘separate language’. This policy was pursued most vigorously under the Soviet regime in the 1930s, when ‘a language policy was implemented in Central Asia which strove to establish the various dialects as separate languages’. Each of the Turkic languages converted from the Roman alphabet to Cyrillic, but without any common set of sound equivalences. The exploitation of phonetic differences between the local dialects was the startingpoint. Therefore when the different pronunciations are written down with the aid of deliberately differentiated subsets of Cyrillic, the foundations of ‘independent’ languages are established. In essence, this practice amounts to no more than changing the spelling rules and calling the final product a ‘language’ (Paksoy 1989 chapter 2, p. 7).

According to Paksoy, this process has produced ‘the current Uzbek, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Turkmen and other Central Asian ‘‘languages’’’(ibid p. 7). Borovkov, a Soviet linguist writing in 1956, called attention to how these orthographic variations in effect produced different languages: While in addition to the normal Cyrillic alphabet, the Kirghiz language employs three supplemental letters, Uzbek uses four, Kazakh nine, and Uigur as written in Kazakhstan eight; the revised Karakalpak alphabet required six additional letters . . . The phonetically extremely similar Karakalpak and Kazakh languages . . . are completely different in writing: The alphabets in both languages are different; the orthographic solution of identical features is accomplished in different ways. (cited by Henze 1977: 388–389).

Interventions by linguists, especially missionaries, with their own agendas for establishing boundaries between groups by creating separate ‘languages’



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are not uncommon. This example is interesting because it relies particularly on the use of orthography, both in the choice of script (Cyrillic replaced Roman) and in the conventions for sound–symbol correspondences. 6.

Conclusions: ‘colonial orthography?’

The introduction of new written practices, whether by a scribal class (as in the newly Norman England), a group of clergy (as in the Isle of Man and Surinam) or by professional linguists, represents an intervention in the existing cultural practices of a language community. As I have tried to show in this chapter, such interventions are often the work of bilinguals working with ideological goals which are not always explicit. Although what is at issue here is the whole range of literacies within the community, orthography has an important role as the technology which supports literacy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were many such cultural interventions, mainly by Europeans affecting subject non-Europeans (as in Surinam, Central America and parts of Asia) but also sometimes by Europeans on other, less-powerful Europeans (as in the Isle of Man). During that period the mediators of literacy were often clergy, sometimes with specific linguistic training, but often not. In the twentieth century the cultural intervention has been on a massive scale, and largely carried out by professional linguists. It is interesting to consider how readily their ‘expert advice’ has been adopted as practice in the Third World, in contrast to the public outrage caused by even the most tentative and innocuous attempts at spelling reform of European languages like German (see Chapter 6). The exact goals of the interventions have not always been clear, but in many cases the results have been disastrous for the languages concerned. Although Kelly regarded the disappearance of Manx as a spoken language as an inevitable, and not altogether lamentable, outcome of its contact with English, many who develop orthographies for previously unwritten languages seem to do so in the hope that this will have the effect of preserving both language and culture. Unfortunately, the introduction of writing is no prophylactic against language endangerment, shift or death. Peter Mu¨hlhaüsler goes so far as to take the view that vernacular literacy is the direct route to language shift and the consequent loss of traditional culture. In a chapter entitled ‘Reducing Pacific languages to writings’17 he concludes: . . . if the aim is that of preserving cultures, then the entire enterprise of literacy will have to be rethought . . . Literacy has in the past promoted numerous invisible-hand 17

The title ironically recalls Pike’s (1947) classic textbook Phonemics: A technique for reducing languages to writing.


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processes of culture and language change . . . Vernacular literacy involves much more than merely devising the optimal orthography for a given language as many linguists would have us believe. (Mu¨hlhaüsler 1990: 205)

In this chapter, we have seen how orthographies can be shaped by the bilingual literates who collectively create them, and by the particular literacies for which they are designed and which they support. In the next chapter, we shall explore the notion of ‘post-colonial’ orthographies, which represent a reaction against the orthographic conventions associated with former colonisers and ‘old regimes’.


4

‘Postcolonial’ Orthographies

1.

Nationalism ‘aided by a pyre’ Amongst the Albanians there was an extraordinary struggle of alphabets. Albanian used to be written in three different scripts: the Greek, by members of the Orthodox Church and by many Mohammedans influenced by Greek culture; the Arabic, by particularly loyal subjects of the Porte; finally the Latin was adopted by the modern nationalist movement. The Latin carried all before it, aided in 1913, by a pyre which disposed of Albanian books in the Arabic script. (Kolarz 1946: 21–22)

In August 1990, a two-day festival was held in Chi¸s inau, capital of what is now the independent republic of Moldova, but was then still (barely) the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia. The festival, called Limba Noastra, ‘Our Language’, celebrated the first anniversary of the reintroduction of the Roman alphabet to the Moldovan language, which until that time had been written using the Cyrillic alphabet. In changing scripts, written Moldovan simultaneously became ‘reunited’ with the Romanian language, with which it is mutually intelligible. In Romania, the Cyrillic script was used until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when ‘the ideology of their Latin origin led to adoption of the Latin alphabet, though it was incapable of conveying all the sounds in the Rumanian language’ (Kolarz 1946: 22); the use of Cyrillic was actually forbidden in Romania after 1863. From the 1920s, Romanian in Moldova was also written using Roman characters, but from 1941, after the incorporation of Moldavia into the USSR, ‘Moldavian’ was once again written using the Cyrillic alphabet.1 While the reintroduction of the Roman script to Moldovan in 1989 would have usefully extended the available range of reading matter for Moldovans (and for Romanians), the significance of the event clearly went much further than that. No one could doubt, seeing the triumphal arch in a city park flanked 1

At the same time linguists were encouraged to produce arguments that Moldavian was actually a separate language from Romanian. The orthographic separation could conveniently serve as both evidence for, and natural consequence of, this assertion.

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Figure 4.1 The Moldovan Language Festival, 1990

by giant Roman letters, that what was being celebrated in 1990 was not simply an orthographic renaissance (Figure 4.1). It was no less than the symbolic rejection of the Soviet state, represented by the alphabet which had become its icon. Moldova declared its independence from the USSR the following year. Scripts have functioned in different times and places as potent symbols of both nation and religion. Kolarz mentions a number of Eastern European examples. ‘When in 1863 the Tsar decreed that the Lithuanians should adopt the Cyrillic alphabet’, he states (1946: 21), ‘the people preferred to forego all literary activity rather than use the symbol of the Orthodox Church’. It was not only Cyrillic which had symbolic power, however: ‘The Latvians and Estonians rejected the Gothic alphabet imported by the German Balts because it was the symbol of the foreign overlords’. It is easy to see how scripts, with long histories and strong national, regional, religious and cultural associations could have symbolic power of this kind. However, it is not just scripts per se, but orthographies to which we can attribute these properties. Orthographies, with their distinctive sets of sound– letter correspondences, are easily distinguishable for their users and quickly become associated with particular groups. A useful concept in this regard is iconicity, a concept which is developed in the work of Judith Irvine and Susan Gal (e.g. 2000). Iconisation, according to Irvine and Gal, is a process which ‘involves a transformation of the sign relationship between linguistic features (or varieties) and the social images with which they are linked. Linguistic



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features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them, as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group’s inherent nature or essence’ (Irvine and Gal 2000: 37). Though the linkage may be ‘only historical, contingent or conventional’ it has, to those who have this interpretation, the appearance of being inherent. Thus the ‘deviant’ of the Spanish anarchists (replacing the standard or ) may become, both for its users and for the ‘mainstream’ population of Spain, an icon of the anarchists’ rejection not just of spelling rules, but of rules more generally. Even small differences in orthographic practice can evoke strong sentiments by association. A perennial source of dispute and division in Breton, for example, is the letter combination which characterises an orthography introduced in 1941 during the period of the Nazi occupation of France. This orthography, which has come to be known in French as le ze´dach, ‘the ZH’, has been reviled in some quarters since its introduction – irrespective of any linguistic merits it may have – as the work of collaborators and anti-French ‘autonomists’ (McDonald 1989: 131–132). According to McDonald (1989: 131), ‘the argument over orthography has never, at any time, been simply technical, but the ‘‘unified Breton’’ (brezhoneg peurunvan) of the ‘ZH’ has been a particularly powerful source of upset and outrage.’ Orthographies and the conventions which they embody, as well as the means by which they are imposed, may come to symbolise colonial power relationships which currently or formerly subject peoples are determined to reject. This is a point made by Powers (1990: 497), defending himself against a review of his book Sacred Language: the Nature of Supernatural Discourse in Lakota in which he was criticised for his choice of orthography: The [University of Colorado] orthography, despite its ability to distinguish between phonemes, is seen to be too similar to English, and therefore confusing . . . Equally cumbersome is the diacritically overloaded orthography used in early linguistic anthropology . . . These orthographies also are regarded as products of White, academic linguistics frequently classified as a subset of White, academic anthropology. In this battle over correct orthography, the Lakota scholar still prefers ‘missionary’ orthography over others, and I believe that Lakota speakers should be entitled to choose whatever orthography suits them, even when it doesn’t correspond to the orthographic programs proffered by linguists.

If particular orthographic practices can be iconic of nations and ideologies, then getting rid of those orthographic practices may come to be seen as a part of rejecting colonialism and unwanted or imposed ideologies. In this chapter we shall see a number of cases where orthography has become bound up with group and national identity and views of the world in post-colonial situations. We shall see how, more generally, the selection of orthographic


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conventions can be used to reject old colonial associations and to build new alliances. We shall now move on to look at some more detailed case studies. In each, we shall find that social and cultural issues, and in particular issues of nationalism and internationalism, ultimately outweigh linguistic ones in the selection of orthographic practices. 2.

The Haitian orthographic debates

Haitian Creole (Kreyo`l in some orthographies) is a French-lexicon creole and the native language of the overwhelming majority of Haitians. Indeed, at least 90 per cent are monolingual in Creole, with 5–10 per cent also able to speak the local variety of Standard French. In 1984 only 20 per cent of the population was estimated to be able to read and write in any language (Holm 1989: 385). The earliest attempts to write Haitian Creole used the ‘etymological’ approach, treating Haitian as a dialect of French and using Standard French orthography with modifications. For example, Georges Sylvain (1929/1971) produced a free translation of LaFontaine’s fables in Haitian Creole using a Gallicising (French etymological) orthography, demonstrating that Creole could be used for literary purposes. However, Creole remained essentially a spoken language only until Creole-based literacy campaigns began in Haiti about 1940. At this point, an orthography for Haitian Creole was urgently needed. An Irish Protestant missionary, Ormonde McConnell, proposed a phonemic orthography which used symbols such as and <w>. This was revised somewhat in 1943 on the advice of an American literacy expert, Frank Laubach. The resulting McConnell–Laubach orthography was adopted by the Haitian government of Elie Lescot in its literacy campaign and used in a number of publications, including a weekly paper (Burns 1953: 81). The McConnell–Laubach orthography was based on sound linguistic principles and had the advantage of being the first, and almost the only one, in the field. Nevertheless, by 1953, the main literacy organisations in the country had abandoned it (Burns 1953: 81). Burns summarises what happened: ‘The linguistic accuracy of this orthography has never been seriously in question but opposition on non-linguistic grounds has been encountered from a surprisingly wide range of sources’ (1953: 85). According to Burns (1953: 82), As public opinion became aware of the broader issues which might be at stake in the choice of an orthography, support for or against a phonetic orthography acquired rapidly a political connotation. While the protagonists of a phonetic spelling felt they were the apostles of reason and progress the supporters of a gallicized version became convinced that they were defending a tradition and a nationality. In particular, they took exception



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to the fact that the most prominent supporters of a phonetic orthography were both foreigners (McConnell and Laubach) and that several features of this phonetic alphabet conflicted with French usage.

As Burns explains, the educated Haitian elite at the time – including 100 per cent of literates – saw Haitian as insufficiently developed as a language in its own right. The ultimate goal of ‘literacy’ was therefore French. Under those circumstances, ‘it is understandable that the vernacular should be considered as no more than a bridge to French and should be accepted as a medium of instruction on this condition alone’ (Burns 1953: 81). It was widely believed that this goal was best served by an orthography modelled on that of French. This was certainly the view of employers, who withheld their support for the adult literacy classes which used the McConnell–Laubach system. A revision of the McConnell–Laubach orthography was proposed by C. F. Pressoir. This involved replacing the circumflex accent (indicating a nasalised vowel) with n, and other characters with alternatives which brought the Haitian orthography somewhat closer to that of French. This was adopted in adult literacy classes by the Department of Education and, according to reports, led to a rapid increase in attendance. Overall, however, literacy rates in Haitian Creole remained low. During the 1970s, changes were introduced to make education more widely accessible to the mass of the population; these included the use of Haitian in schools. This signalled a change in the presumed purpose of literacy in kreyo`l. There was no longer to be a presumption that literacy in kreyo`l was targeted on adults: children were now to learn to read and write in their mother tongue and kreyo`l was to become the medium of instruction. In 1979, Haitian Creole, under the name kreyo`l, was introduced by law into Haitian schools, bringing with it yet another orthography. This official orthography was designed by Haitian linguists in collaboration with French linguists (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994: 185). In their ethnographic account of the orthographic debates, which were particularly intense in the decades before the introduction of the latest official orthography, Schieffelin and Doucet describe the positions taken by concerned Haitians as mainly either pro-phonemicist or pro-etymological. Pro-phonemicists want the creole to be written in a coherent, systematic, logical way. They are concerned that the orthography should be easy to learn for monolingual creole speakers, so it is important that it should represent the actual sounds of their speech. The main supporters of this view are to be found in the Ministry of Education, the Catholic Church and Literacy agencies. Some linguists also share these views. The pro-etymologists believe that the Creole must stay as close as possible to the French orthographic system. They believe that this will facilitate


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learning of Standard French – which they believe should be the ultimate goal of the education system – and reflect the French origins of the Creole. In this camp we find mainly literati, members of the intelligentsia, teachers and the middle classes – members of the elite who want to distance themselves from creole. There is also an ‘intermediate position’, which states that the orthography should be phonemic, but should use the conventions of French orthography to represent sounds which are common to both languages. There are certainly some practical issues which may influence one in favour of one or another of these orthographies. For example, the McConnell–Laubach orthography might be regarded as having too many diacritics (accents and symbols written above characters), particularly the circumflex (^) which was used to indicate a nasal vowel. These are said to slow down writing and typing. However, as Schieffelin and Doucet demonstrate, the real arguments concerning which orthography to adopt are much more to do with principles and ideologies. The question of the status of kreyo`l and the orthographic debates are deeply tied to issues of representation both at the national and international levels. Orthographic debates when situated within the broader framework of language ideology – the cultural beliefs that underlie the language practices, choices and attitudes of a people – can be seen as articulating historically grounded tensions between groups that do not hold equal shares in the social and political system. Often, these inequalities developed during colonial encounters and were maintained after the original colonists were no longer present . . . (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994: 187)

The inequalities they refer to are both social ones which separate the Haitian elite from the masses in one of the most densely populated and poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, where income distribution is highly skewed and poverty is widespread (World Bank Haiti Country Brief, http://www. worldbank.org/ht accessed November 2006.), and the linguistic ones which derive from the colonial ideology of the superiority of French over all other languages – an ideology perpetuated in Haiti through the school system ‘which until recently remained exclusively in the hands of the French clergy’ (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994: 188) and an indigenous ruling class, the descendents of African slaves, who paradoxically both hated and emulated France. Hence: . . . if we look carefully, we will see that the debate is not only about how to write kreyo`l, that is, how to represent graphically the sounds of kreyo`l. It is about the conception of kreyo`l itself as a language and as an element of Haitian national identity, about how Haitians situate themselves through languages at the national and international levels, and about the notions of Haitianness, authenticity, nationalism, and legitimacy. (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994: 188)

Schieffelin and Doucet describe how the look of kreyo`l when it is written down has become a source of contestation. The letters w, k and y are seen by the



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pro-etymologists as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ imports. McConnell and Laubach, who used these letters on the basis that they were part of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), were viewed by some as agents of American imperialism, preparing the way for English (with its ‘Anglo-Saxon’ consonants) to replace French in Haiti, and Protestantism to replace Catholicism (recall that McConnell was a Protestant missionary). The pro-etymologists focus on the French (lexical) origins of Haitian, stressing that Haiti must keep its place in the francophonie, the French-speaking world. Moreover, the ‘orthographic system of the language must be linked to a literate culture, to a literary tradition’ (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994: 191) in particular, that of French. Standard French will always be an important language for Haiti, and the besteducated Haitians will always know French. ‘French’ letters and digraphs like and or representing /w/ and /k/ will serve these purposes better than the <w> and of the McConnell–Laubach and 1979 orthographies, in the pro-etymologist view. In contrast, the pro-phonemicists do not see orthographic symbols such as <w>, and as associated with, or symbolic of, any particular nationality or religion. An orthography is just an arbitrary and conventional system, and from a linguistic point of view, a writing system should be neutral (De´jean 1980) . . . from their perspective, the choice of a phonemic system is scientifically justified; it is the more rational and simpler way of writing kreyo`l, which should avoid the errors and aberrations of the French orthography. (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994: 191)

The pro-phonemicist stance is in the tradition of phonemicists elsewhere: an insistence on the ‘neutrality’ of orthographies and an appeal to ‘scientific’ justification, even in the face of massive evidence that social and cultural factors are crucial to the acceptance of the orthography. The debates reveal some of the underlying ambiguities which Creole speakers feel toward their language. Pro-etymologists want to see Haitian Creole as ‘part of’ French, even if the cost is the creation of unnecessary educational difficulties for the majority of the population. Pro-phonemicists, meanwhile, can be seen as wanting linguistic ‘independence’ for Haitian, even at the cost of separation from la francophonie. At a deep level, the debate about w and k is a debate about ‘who we, Haitians, are.’ 3.

Rejecting colonial orthographies: new developments in Sranan spelling

In Chapter 3, we looked in some detail at the history of Sranan orthography up to the introduction of the first official orthography in 1960. However, we did


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not quite reach the end of the story. A second official orthography replaced the first in 1986. This second orthography was not just a reform of the first, a ‘tinkering at the edges’: it involved some radical changes in sound–letter correspondences which had been present in most of the earlier widely used orthographies. At a superficial level, the changes which were brought in could be seen simply as altering Sranan orthography so that it conformed more to conventions which were widely used in the rest of the world. However, the thinking which led to the introduction of the new spelling is fairly well documented, and shows that an ideology of anti-colonialism and internationalism informed the proposals for reform.

Official 1960

Official 1986

Sranankondre, diri kondre Joe wi lobi nomroe wan

Sranankondre, diri kondre Yu wi lobi nomru wan

Eri libi te na dede Wi sa singi foe Sranan

Eri libi te na dede Wi sa singi fu Sranan

Our starting point here is the 1960 official orthography, which retained a number of conventions which were characteristically Dutch. This orthography was widely used, though by no means universally. According to Defares (1982: 49), it was ‘experienced as unsatisfactory’ (als onbevredigend ervaren). Orthographic questions exercised the minds of some Sranan scholars during the period following the 1960 official proposals, perhaps especially in the wake of the independence of Surinam in 1975. In all, there were four published proposals for changes in the 1970s and 1980s. Among the issues was the by now familiar one of the purpose of literacy in Sranan. According to Defares (1982: 49), There are two views in Surinam regarding the spelling of Sranan: . . . The first group start from the position that Dutch remains the official language of Surinam. Therefore, the spelling systems of the national languages should deviate as little as possible from that of Dutch . . . A child that learns to spell the Sranan equivalent of jaar ‘‘year’’ as yari will have a problem writing the Dutch words jongen, juist, jaar, etc. . . . Another group believes that the spelling must be international; when the rules are set up Dutch should not be the main consideration. The chance of interference is minimal (footnote omitted; my translation).

In the first group mentioned by Defares, we might count the linguists of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), whose publications in Sranan (such as a



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set of basic readers, Leisi boekoe na ini Sranan Tongo) display some differences from the 1960 standard, in the direction of Dutch.2 This practice would be in keeping with the historical position of the SIL in Central America (Barros 1995; see Chapters 1 and 3). The ‘internationalist’ camp included some influential linguists. Although he did not take a public stand on the issue, Jan Voorhoeve, ‘midwife’ of the 1960 orthography, paved the way for changes by using a new orthography for an important collection of Sranan literature which he co-edited with Ursy Lichtveld, Creole Drum. Their brief note on orthography (1975: 285) says only that it is ‘an ad hoc orthography that makes [the texts] easier for an English or American public to read’; however, it is noteworthy that this orthography does away with many of the spelling conventions most closely associated with Dutch, for example writing to represent /u/. A Dutch linguist, Pieter Seuren, who held the chair of Linguistic Philosophy at the University of Nijmegen, had been doing research on Sranan grammar and the lexicon of Sranan. He became interested in orthographic issues largely as a result of his lexicographical work. In 1982 and 1983 he published his new spelling proposal in Oso, the Nijmegen-based journal of IBS, the Instituut ter Bevordering van de Surinamistiek (Institute for Advancement of Surinamistics). Seuren takes an explicitly ideological position in his argument in favour of removing the associations with Dutch: In the spelling proposed here we start from the position that the historical association between the Dutch spelling and the sound values it represents should now be broken. This is not something which should be defended just on functional grounds: Dutch spelling is different on this point from what is usual elsewhere in the world. It is also appropriate in the context of recent historical and cutural development: the connections with the old colonising mother country are currently subject to radical revision. This leads immediately to an orthographic consequence: We will therefore use u and not oe for the high round velar vowel /u/ and y for the yod. (Seuren 1983: 67)

Seuren made the same point in the abstract of his manuscript version of the same proposal: A noteworthy feature of this spelling proposal is the deviation from the old colonial habit of using Dutch sound symbols (e.g. oe for /u/, j for /y/) instead of the much more current international ones. In this proposal an effort has been made to stay as close as possible to internationally accepted sound values for letters. (Seuren 1982: abstract)

2

Specifically, the diphthong /ei/ is written <ei> as in Dutch (e.g. leisi ‘read’) where the 1961 orthography would have <e´> (le´si).


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These proposals fed directly into the deliberations of the Sranan Spelling Commission (the Kramp Commission) set up by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Surinam, who delivered their report in 1984. The commission opted unanimously for the sign U for the sound in buku. Internationally the sign U is used most for this sound. The sign OE furthermore gives a false impression that we are dealing here with a diphthong. (Kramp Commission: 10)

Likewise the Commission rejected <j> in favour of : The commission opted for the sign Y and not for the J because internationally the sign Y is used most for this sound. (Kramp Commission: 10)

In this they echoed Seuren’s assertion (1983: 67) that ‘in most languages the letter y is used for this sound’.3 The Kramp Commission seems to have been convinced that (in spite of the long tradition of using Dutch-based orthographic conventions) Sranan spelling should be brought in line with ‘international’ practice. The particular sound– letter correspondences singled out for re-assignment, /j/ ¼ <j> and /u/ ¼ , have particular significance because both are relatively unusual outside of Dutch. In the case of , among languages in Europe, it is uniquely Dutch, and indeed its sound value cannot be inferred from its individual parts even in Dutch.4 It thus stands out as the most specifically Dutch orthographic convention, rather like English for /u:/, <ee> for /i:/ and <sh> for /S/, which are also found in Manx (see Chapter 3). Rejecting can thus be seen as a symbolic rejection of Dutch colonial mastery, the point made by Seuren when he writes that ‘connections with the old colonising mother country are currently subject to radical revision’ (Seuren 1983: 67). Although the report of the Kramp Commission is a terse document with a minimum of discussion or explanation for choices made, it is clear from the

3

4

This could well be true, though hard to demonstrate without checking the conventions of every language which has phonemic /j/. Among European languages which use the Roman alphabet, Finnish, Estonian, the Slavic languages and all the Germanic languages other than English seem to use <j> for the semivowel, while most of the rest use or . Outside Europe, seems to predominate, perhaps for two reasons: (1) the <j> countries had relatively few colonies, and (2) was, and still is, the symbol preferred by linguists. While the preference of Lepsius (1863) for may have been significant for linguists developing new orthographies, he attributes his choice of symbol to the precedents of English and French, and ‘the use generally adopted in linguistic books’ (1981:63) which suggests that was favoured even before him. The convention ¼ /u/ is also currently used in Afrikaans and was used in Indonesian (see below). In both cases Dutch is clearly the origin of this convention.



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wording that their decision in favour of and was motivated by a wish to choose representations for these sounds which were ‘international’ rather than ‘Dutch’. The decision to adopt these as part of the official orthography could thus be seen as an ideological act of anti-colonialism. However, in the current context of globally expanding English, it could also be seen as bringing Sranan into line with another major world language – Sranan’s original lexifier, English – and one which may in time be more valuable to Sranan speakers as a second language than Dutch. 4.

A perfect (re)marriage: Malay and Indonesian

The spelling of /u/ was also an issue, some decades earlier, in another Dutch colony: Indonesia. In Indonesia, however, there was not merely an issue of orthographic reform, but of language reunification: differing colonial policies in Malaya and Indonesia had led to the Malay language, of which mutually intelligible varieties were used in both countries, becoming split into two written standards. In this section we will give a brief account of how this came about, and of the long process of orthographic de´tente which led finally to the joint adoption in 1972 of ‘perfected spelling’ for Malay (‘Bahasa Malaysia’ or ‘Bahasa Melayu’) and Indonesian (‘Bahasa Indonesia’). Most of the information in this section comes from Vikør’s detailed and authoritative account (1988). Until the end of the nineteenth century, and for some purposes long after that, Malay was written using the Arabic script, known in this case as Jawi, although some Europeans (for example, missionaries) developed the practice of writing Malay using Roman letters in an ad hoc way. This had become relatively common by the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the colonial administrations in both Indonesia (a Dutch colony since the seventeenth Century) and Malaya (a British colony since the early nineteenth Century) started to expand the education system for the indigenous inhabitants. In both countries, a need was felt for standardising the Roman orthography for Malay (Vikør 1988: 11–13). In Indonesia the Dutch colonial government appointed an inspector of schools, Van Ophuijsen, to standardise the spelling. His word list appeared in 1901. The spelling was generally accepted: the only aspect which attracted some comment was the use of for /u/ as in Dutch. This spelling was widely used until, as Indonesia moved towards independence, some reforms were promulgated by the Republican Minister of Education and Culture, Soewandi, in 1947. These included use of for /u/. According to Vikør, ‘Of these changes, the transition from to was the most spectacular, as it seemed to be inspired by nationalistic and anti-Dutch sentiments. It met with unfavourable reactions both in Dutch circles and in Dutch-oriented Indonesian


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circles’ (Vikør 1988: 16). However, because of its ‘obvious scientific and practical advantages’ this change was generally accepted by 1948 when Indonesia attained sovereign independence. In Malaya the Inspector of Malay Schools, R. J. Wilkinson was mainly responsible for the production of a spelling system, with a word list published in 1904 (Vikør 1988: 17). The degree of standardisation was not as great as in Indonesia, nor was the Romanised orthography as widely used as in Indonesia. With small changes made in the 1920s, this orthography was used in schools, although elsewhere there was a lot of variation. The different Romanised spelling standards in Malaya and Indonesia had the effect of dividing the language into two (there were of course other differences, to do with different regional traditions and loan vocabulary). In Malaya the Arabic script was still the most used in the 1950s among the Malays (Vikør 1988: 22). During this period there were debates between traditionalists, who wanted to retain the Arabic script, and ‘modernisers’, who favoured Romanised (Rumi) orthography, arguing inter alia that this would strengthen contact with Indonesia. In Indonesia, there was dissatisfaction with the Soewandi orthography, especially from teachers who actually had to use it in the classroom (Vikør 1988: 19). In 1954 an Indonesian academic, Prijono, put forward a new spelling proposal, which used IPA characters like for Soewandi’s , and for . Although it was not adopted in Indonesia, a version of this spelling, ‘Ejaan Kongres’, was used by cultural activists in Malaya; but in practice, the letters , and could not be used owing to lack of type to print them with. Meanwhile the Indonesian government appointed a spelling commission, with Prijono as Chairman; shortly afterwards, he became the Minister of Education and Culture. The independence of Malaya in 1959 gave new impetus to the movement for cultural links between Malaya and Indonesia. The Prijono orthography formed the basis for a spelling proposal agreed in 1960 between the Indonesian and Malaysian governments, the so-called MELINDO orthography. At this point international relations between Malaysia and Indonesia began to deteriorate – for ideological reasons unrelated to orthography – and became openly confrontational by 1963. According to Vikør (1988: 24), ‘the Melindo spelling disappeared quietly into the government archives of Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur.’ Although the political situation was the main reason for the suppression of the MELINDO orthography, the spelling was also very unpractical. It required a number of new letters, including for and < > (a letter not used in the IPA or in any existing orthography) for /N/. According to Asmah Haji Omar (1975: 66, quoted by Vikør) it was ‘linguistically speaking so good that it could not be prescribed at all to the public’.



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After the installation of the Suharto regime in Indonesia in 1966, cooperation between the regimes was reinstated. Indonesia instituted a spelling commission to provide a new proposal which could form the basis for negotiations with Malaysia. The resulting orthography was studied by a Malaysian spelling commission, and joint discussions were held (Vikør 1988: 25). A draft was agreed between the Malaysians and Indonesians in 1967. This orthography received the name ‘Ejaan Baru’. According to Vikør, this orthography marked a turning point: A major shift in orientation had by now taken place: relatively more stress was to be put on the practical and economic aspects, relatively less on purely linguistic considerations. Therefore, the principle of one letter for one sound had to yield to another principle: no new and alien letters and no diacritical signs should be introduced. Another new development was that the resistance against foreign elements (the phonemes /f/, /v/, /z/, /x/, /C/ and certain consonant clusters) was given up. Thus the language was consciously made more receptive to loan-words.5 (Vikør 1988: 25)

In Malaysia the proposal was generally welcomed: it was felt that it might strengthen the position of Malay in relation to English and Chinese. In Brunei, there were protests that other Malay-speaking countries – Brunei and Singapore – had not been consulted (Vikør 1988: 25). It was in Indonesia – originator of the proposal – that there were ‘vehement and widespread’ protests (Vikør 1988: 25). Some of the arguments against the orthography were that it was an ‘imitation of the Malaysian system’; that it ‘resembled the English spelling’ and that it would cause problems because texts printed in earlier orthographies would have to be replaced. In spite of protests from teachers and high school students in Indonesia, the official spelling commission and professional linguists continued to defend the reform (Vikør 1988: 26). Meanwhile in Malaysia people grew impatient and some individuals and institutions (such as the University of Malaya) began to use new, provisional proposals. ‘Evidently, the feeling that lay behind these moves was that the spelling agreement with Indonesia seemed to be impracticable even now, and that the Malaysians would have to put an end to their spelling confusion by finally introducing a single standard system of their own’ (Vikør 1988: 26). However, in 1972 an agreement was reached between the two governments and the new spelling was proclaimed simultaneously by them, under the name Ejaan Yang Disempurnakan (EYD) ‘The Perfected Spelling’ in Indonesia and Ejaan Rumi Baru Bahasa Malaysia ‘The New Roman Spelling of Bahasa Malaysia’ in Malaysia. 5

See also Section 5 for issues concerning loanwords.


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Table 4.1. Selected Roman orthographies for Malay, 1901–1972 (Adapted from Vikør 1988: 62) IPA

tS

D

C

j

N

n

u

Colonial

Van Ophuijsen Wilkinson

1901 1904

Dutch Indonesia British Malaya

tj ch

dj j

sj sh

j y

nj ny

ng ng

oe u

Post-colonial

Soewandi Ejaan Kongres Melindo EYD (‘perfected spelling’)

1947 1954 1960 1972

Indonesian Indonesian Joint Joint

tj c c c

dj j j j

(sj) s – sy

j y y y

nj n˜

ng n n ng

u u u u

ny

Table 4.1 shows how over time, the sounds whose corresponding letters were in dispute came to be written more and more in conformity with ‘international’ conventions. These coincidentally also brought the spelling of Malay closer to the conventions of English, with one or two exceptions. Comparing some of the contentious elements of the two colonial orthographies with the EYD ‘perfected spelling’ we can see that , , <j>, <sj>, and of the Dutch–Indonesian orthography have given way to , <j>, , <sy>, and in EYD; of these, all were already in the colonial Malay orthography of Wilkinson except for and <sy>. The Wilkinson orthography has lost only and <sh>, two digraphs which are very characteristically English. The debates over the representation of the palatal fricative C in the negotiations over ‘perfected spelling’ are very enlightening. This sound had the symbol in the Wilkinson orthography and in the van Ophuijsen and Soewandi spellings. The 1954 orthography proposed changing it to . According to Vikør (1988: 44), the Indonesians were particularly resistant to . ‘In the spelling controversies of the late sixties and early seventies the became a particular object of popular aggression, and the mockery phrase ‘‘tjotja-tjola’’ (from ‘‘coca cola’’) became in many quarters a sort of symbol of the new spelling’. At the final seminar to decide the spelling reform, arguments were given for both and to represent C. Arguments for choosing rather than included the following (Djajanto and Lake 1972: 232–233, quoted by Vikør): 1. is more international; 2. makes it easier for Indonesians to understand the pronunciation of foreign languages; 3. in general symbolizes <s> or more often than .



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Arguments for choosing rather than were as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

is more economical – one letter not two; is international in Linguistics (IPA); is an Indonesian idea that has been accepted by Malaysia; in the ‘international languages’ also represents more than one sound.

The seminar left this issue for the Government to decide. The Government chose with the Minister of Education and Culture, Mashuri, giving several arguments for this: ‘these arguments show that adjustment to current international practice was the most important consideration for the government’ (Vikør 1988: 44). The story of the achievement of ‘perfected spelling’ is interesting because it reiterates a number of themes that we have seen elsewhere. Arguments to do with modernisation and internationalism led to the abandonment of the Jawi (Arabic) script for Malay. At an early stage after independence, Indonesia rejected the symbol for /u/ because of its colonial associations with Dutch. Later, an appeal to ‘science’ led to the introduction of characters based on the IPA – which could not be used in practice because printers and typewriters did not have them. Asmah Haji Omar’s comment that it was ‘linguistically speaking so good that it could not be prescribed at all to the public’ encapsulates arguments given in Chapter 1 about the dangers of making an orthography too much like a transcription. Later, some of the proposed conventions were rejected in Indonesia on the grounds that they were ‘Malaysian’ or ‘English’; thus there was an issue about national identity and ownership of the orthography as well as an internationalist argument. Finally, considerations of economics and arguments about ‘adjustment to international practice’ won the day, just as they did a decade or so later, in Surinam. 5.

Loanwords: Trojan horse or window on the world?

Loanwords or ‘borrowings’ present special orthographic problems which may have important implications for the language as a whole. These problems are especially marked in – though not exclusive to – post-colonial contexts and contexts where orthographic reforms are contemplated. The writing of loanwords was a significant issue in the debates over the appropriate script for Malay/Indonesian. As mentioned in Section 4, this language was originally written using Arabic script, known as Jawi. According to Vikør (1988: 47), ‘The Classical Malay written language, as we know it, was to a large extent the product of an Islamic culture inspired by


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medieval Arabic civilization . . .’ Arabic loanwords permeated this Austronesian language, bringing the sounds of Arabic with them: of the 28 consonant phonemes in Classical Arabic, 14 did not appear in Malay before the Arabic influence (Vikør 1988: 47). Clearly, writing Malay in the Arabic script made it easy to incorporate these loanwords, simply by writing them as they would be written in Arabic. When incorporated into Malay written in Jawi script they could be pronounced to a greater or lesser degree as in Arabic, depending on how well the speaker knew the Arabic pronunciation. Because they shared the same script as Malay they were not obviously positioned as ‘foreign’ words. The writing of these loanwords became an issue in the debates over the romanisation of Malay. The fact that Jawi could represent Arabic sounds like /y/, / h/, /D/, / —/ and /–/ was put forward as one argument during the 1950s for retaining the Jawi script rather than adopting the Roman characters (Vikør 1988: 22). It is easy to see why such arguments would be favoured by traditionalists wanting to preserve the Islamic character of Malay. Converting to Roman script would mean having to find transliterations for Arabic words, thereby positioning them as ‘foreign’. By the following decade, when the tide had turned decisively in favour of using Roman script and negotiations on unifying the spelling system had begun between the states of Malaysia and Indonesia, loanwords again came up as an issue. Now the Roman alphabet could be seen as a sort of Trojan horse, allowing foreign loans easy access into Malay/Indonesian. Internationalist considerations won the day. By 1966 these objections had been dropped. According to Vikør (1988: 25), ‘the resistance against foreign elements (the phonemes /f/, /v/, /z/, /x/, /C / and certain consonant clusters) was given up. Thus the language was consciously made more receptive to loan-words.’ Acceptance of loan vocabulary is arguably at the heart of ‘colonial’ relationships between powerful and less-powerful languages. The large-scale importation of vocabulary can amount to the transmission of a culture, and script can have – or at least is perceived to have – a significant role in facilitating vocabulary transfer. Central Asia, where the Turkic languages traditionally used the Perso-Arabic script, provides another example. Using the Perso-Arabic script ‘facilitated the introduction of Persian and Arabic words and the diffusion of Persian and Arabic cultural influence throughout Central Asia’ (Henze 1977: 373). Following the Bolshevik revolution, these languages adopted a unified Roman alphabet in the late 1920s. When the same languages were reluctantly converted to Cyrillic script a decade later, it was understood that one effect of this would be to make it easier to assimilate Russian words. ‘The rule was soon established that all words taken from the Russian must be spelled exactly as in Russian’ even where some phonological adaptation would



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be expected (Henze 1977: 383). This paved the way for the mass importation of Russian vocabulary, unadapted, into the Turkic languages. At the time, this was portrayed as beneficial, an aid to modernising and Sovietising the languages concerned. In fact, because the languages each adapted differently to the Cyrillic alphabet, the Russian vocabulary became the ‘common core’ of these languages, as Turkic cognates would be written differently even in closely related languages. More recently, as one of the languages concerned, Tatar, attempts to change from Cyrillic to Roman script (see Chapter 6), Cyrillic has been condemned on various grounds by proponents of the script change. One complaint is that, through loanwords which children learn to pronounce in the Russian way, Cyrillic is the source of ‘Russified’ pronunciations in Tatar itself (see Sebba 2006: 114). Loanwords can be problematic even where there is no question of changing from one script to another. Where two languages both use Roman characters, for example, there are nevertheless likely to be differences in terms of orthographic conventions. A familiar example is the preference of Germanic languages for where the Romance languages prefer . French and Latin loanwords in Dutch thus present a problem: or , <cultuur> or ? The first is the ‘etymological’ spelling, the second conforms to the standard orthographic conventions of Dutch. According to Lamuela (1991: 68), words borrowed from another language in general keep the original spelling, at least temporarily.6 Such words will bring their orthographic conventions with them, enabling them to be positioned as foreign loans. Alternatively, some languages may allow, or even require, that they be respelt according to conventions considered native to the receptor language. Positioning a word orthographically as ‘foreign’ may serve a number of purposes. It can be used, in a climate of purism, to ensure that ‘alien’ and ‘native’ vocabulary are kept apart. It can also be used in a display of erudition, to show that the user is aware of foreign languages, thus creating a differential social meaning between a spelling using foreign conventions and one using native conventions: There is ‘‘something coarse’’ in such spellings as koncert or konsert instead of concert and filozoof instead of philosoof ‘‘which shocks the civilized and the literary man, as long as his eye has not got used to such tasteless ways of writing’’. (Te Winkel 1865, quoted by Geerts et al. 1977: 188)

6

One good reason for this is that until a word is assimilated and has a fairly standard pronunciation, there may not even be a way of representing it using the normal conventions of the receptor language.


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More recently, in the context of his spelling proposals for Sranan, Seuren has remarked on the same phenomenon: . . . in the Netherlands, those who write kommunikasie, ekstreem, finansieël, rather than communicatie, extreem, financieël, show themselves as belonging to a particular group who are aware of modernism. Those who write kommunikatie (like me) want to be seen as not too old-fashioned, but also not too modern: the c symbolises conservatism. Hence a spelling like communicasie is internally contradictory: it symbolises a conservative and an ultra-modernistic position at one and the same time. (Seuren 1982: 77–78)

In the German spelling reform of the 1990s, the issue of whether to nativise or keep the original spelling of foreign words, could not be resolved. It was agreed to allow equal validity to both the original and germanicised variant, for example: 1. spaghetti! <Spagetti> / <Spaghetti>; 2. portemonnaie! / ; 3. chicoreé ! <Schikoree> / (Johnson 1999: 162). Opponents of the reform have raised the concern that ‘such legitimised variation might generate a social stratification of spelling’. Friedrich Denk, one of the leading anti-reform campaigners, fears that one form may come to be seen as more ‘educated’ than another, implying that those who use the other form are less erudite (Johnson 2000: 113). If modern Germany can be compared to the Netherlands of the mid-nineteenth century, he may have a point; it may well be that ‘civilised and literary’ Germans will choose to see ‘something coarse’ in spellings such as and <Schikoree>. Languages such as English which have hybrid orthographic conventions and complex sets of sound–letter correspondences seem to have a strong preference for retaining the original spelling of a foreign word: since the conventions used within English are very diverse, the word will not always ‘appear’ foreign and there will remain the option of pronouncing it in an ‘English’ way or a ‘foreign’ way, as for example , , , and (to mention just a few from the semantic field of gastronomy). Other words will have clearly un-English conventions which will signal the possibility of a pronunciation which does not use the normal sound–symbol correspondences: , and . Other languages, like Latvian, appear to adapt all foreign words to their own orthographic conventions, even including personal names: hence , , <Sˇuberts>, (Wagner, Bach, Schubert; the -s is required by the grammar of Latvian). In effect, all foreign words are re-transcribed according



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to the phonemic principles of Latvian orthography; loanwords are automatically ‘Latvianised’. In practice this amounts to the transcription of most foreign words into the Latvian orthography.7 According to Lamuela (1991: 68), loanwords in general are more likely to be adapted to the host language orthography when transliteration from another script is involved. This makes sense at one level, as there is no need to stick to foreign conventions which cannot be implemented in a different script anyway. Nevertheless, some languages find ways of signalling that such words are foreign. For example, in Catalan Russian words are spelt with , for example (Lamuela 1991: 68), although / k / does not occur in native Catalan words, and a spelling such as would not break any of the spelling rules of Catalan. A third possibility occurs with languages which have a strict set of sound– symbol correspondences, but do not apply them to loanwords, at least until they are fully nativised, so that loanwords retain their original spellings. In this case, foreign words will tend to be obviously foreign as many will contain conventions which clash with those of the host language. Thus the earlier examples from German: <Spaghetti>, and . The most recent debates in Germany over the spelling of loanwords are in effect to do with whether German should be a language of the second type – one which assimilates loans to its own spelling system – or of the third, one which tends to mark them out as foreign by not adapting them. Although such questions may appear to be purely technical and of importance to the orthography only, in fact they reflect deeper issues which touch on nationalism and cultural ownership of a language. Returning to the ‘post-colonial’ situation, it is clear that when a language uses spelling conventions which are close to those of the former colonial language or language of wider communication, assimilating words from that language orthographically will be relatively automatic; little or no adaptation may be needed. Where the language uses a clearly different set of conventions from the former colonial language, there is more of a problem. Adapting the spelling of these words helps to ‘nativise’ them but also, as in the German and Dutch cases above, may be looked down on by the elite who are educated in the donor language. Keeping the original spelling ensures that they are positioned as ‘foreign’ words, which may serve the purposes of some sections of the society but not others.

7

Some Latvian dictionaries even have lists of foreign personal names and how they should be spelt in Latvian.


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6.

Conclusion

Can we justify the notion of ‘post-colonial orthography’? I think we can. If we look at the many orthographic upheavals which have taken place postindependence in the Third World, as well as in the former Soviet Union, and even following the break-up of older structures like the Ottoman and Tsarist Russian empires, we can identify a number of common themes: 1. A rejection of scripts and/or spelling conventions which are too closely identified with the former dominant country (Albanian, Moldovan, Sranan, Indonesian). 2. A desire to put in place orthographies which are more ‘scientific’ than hitherto (Haitian, Malay/Indonesian, Sranan, many others). As was apparent in the case of Haiti, it is likely that all sides in a debate will claim that ‘science’ is on their side. However, as Schieffelin and Doucet (1994: 191) remark, ‘the two most extreme camps, the pro-phonemic and the proetymologists, advocate the authority and neutrality of ‘‘science’’. But we have seen that there are no neutral positions, only ideological stances.’ We saw also in Chapter 3 how the claims of phonemicists that their orthographies were ‘scientific’ enabled them to gain acceptance for their work without having to take the social context of literacy into account. 3. A desire for orthographies which are ‘neutral’ and/or ‘international’ (Turkic languages of the USSR, Malay/Indonesian, Surinam). Interestingly, the Roman alphabet is often perceived as more neutral than other scripts, perhaps because it is so widely used that it does not have strong associations with any particular country or religion.8 International Phonetic Alphabet symbols – though largely identical with those of the Roman alphabet and, hence, with those of many European languages, are also often presented as ‘neutral’ because they are ‘scientific’ and therefore, it is implied, free from social values. 4. A desire to bring the orthography into harmony with that of the language(s) with the most educational and/or economic importance for its users – this can amount to using the orthography for ‘transitional’ literacy but may also mean, for example, preferring conventions found in English because it is more ‘international’ (Malay and Indonesian, possibly Sranan). In some cases (1) and (4) are felt to be in conflict: in other words, there is a desire both to reject the coloniser’s language, and a perceived need to tap 8

This may not be equally true everywhere in the world, however; in the former Yugoslavia, for example, the Roman script was associated more with Croatian (and Catholicism) and the Cyrillic with Serbian (and Eastern orthodoxy).



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into the prestige and/or the literary tradition of that language by using its conventions. This is what has happened in Haiti. It will result in a debate which, even if superficially is about orthography, will at a deeper level be over language ideology. The end result will depend on the relative strength of the protagonists more than the merit of their arguments. The problem is most acute in Creole languages, which we will examine in the next chapter.


5

Between language and dialect: orthography in unstandardised and standardising vernaculars

1.

Introduction

So far in this book we have looked mainly at two kinds of languages: languages which already had established orthographies, and languages where new orthographies were being developed as part of a planned, or partially planned, process of standardisation. There is certainly an important link between writing and language standardisation (see e.g. Milroy and Milroy 1991 and Joseph 1987), but a language does not have to be standardised before it can be written. There are many contemporary examples of writing in unstandardised language varieties, and many historical examples of writing vernaculars and ‘dialects’, some of which have later become standard languages. However, the writing of language varieties which do not have, or do not yet have, a standard presents particular orthographic problems. In this chapter we will look at some of these problems from a social and cultural perspective. For our purposes, such varieties will be taken to include the following: 1. vernaculars, in the conventional sense of ‘dialects’ of an identified standard language; 2. contact varieties and intermediate varieties which are characteristic of situations where creole languages are in contact with their (standard) lexifier languages, for example Jamaican Creole (Patois) in Jamaica and in Britain; 3. other situations where closely related language varieties exist with a continuum between them, for example in Galicia (Spain) where Galician can potentially be viewed as a variety of Portuguese or as a separate language, and is also close to Spanish. In the next section, we look at five problematic areas associated with the orthography of unstandardised (or not-yet-standardised) language varieties, namely representation, transcription, invariance and optionality, standardisation and dialect differentiation and the abstand-ausbau paradox. 102


Between language and dialect

2.

Five problems for the orthography of unstandardised languages

2.1.

Problem 1: Representation of ‘voices’

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The representation of ‘folk voices’ is in fact a long-standing problem for nonlinguistic ethnographers, including folklorists. A paper by Kate Moore criticises oral historians for ‘airbrushing’ the oral features from the language of their interviewees: ‘oral history transcribers often eliminate . . . nonlinguistic and nonstandard aspects of the interviews . . . the resultant touch-up not only reduces, but distorts the speakers’ original messages.’ (Moore 1999: 347)

Yet this overlooks some relevant social facts. Standard languages, almost by definition, carry higher overt prestige than unstandardised varieties. Therefore, even well-meaning attempts to represent a vernacular in writing may have the reverse of the desired effect. Dennis Preston (1982) criticised the (usually) well-intentioned respellings of folklorists trying to convey authentic voices. He concluded that ‘almost all respellings . . . have as their primary effect on the reader a demotion of opinion of the speaker represented’ (1982: 323). Preston (1985) considers that ‘dialect’ and ‘eye-dialect’ respellings ‘serve mainly to denigrate the speaker . . . by making him or her appear boorish, uneducated, rustic, gangsterish and so on’ (1985: 328) and goes on to show that even written representations of allegro speech (not necessarily nonstandard speech) would be judged as produced by a person of lower socioeconomic status than the equivalent written in normal orthography. Preston’s finding that respellings attract stigmatisation has been confirmed and elaborated by Alexandra Jaffe and Shana Walton (2000). They found that linguistically untrained subjects asked to read respelled texts ‘readily . . . went from one small part of a text (orthography) to a complex whole (a ‘voice’)’. Furthermore, they found that ‘degrees of non-standardness in texts are transformed into degrees of projected stigma’, in other words, the more ‘deviant’ the text from the standard, the more socially marginalised its imagined speaker will be perceived to be (2000: 580). They conclude that ‘it is almost impossible to avoid stigma in the non-standard orthographic representation of others’ lowstatus speech’ (2000: 582). Both Preston and Jaffe and Walton observe the effect that Jaffe and Walton call ‘orthographic metonymy’ (2000: 582): ‘the striking leap from part to whole . . . on the basis of a text’s orthography. Our readers’ sociolinguistic judgments show the extent to which they took for granted that orthography could authentically represent social voices and identities’. Preston remarks


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(1985: 335) that ‘NO respondents were apparently ever troubled by the fact that speech was being evaluated from writing’. Where the development of standard orthographies is concerned, the problem of representation involves making a choice about what sociolects or registers may be represented within the standard orthography. English has a well used convention for representing certain contractions (I’m, we’re) which are acceptable in some written registers (though not in the most formal written register). The same or a similar convention may be extended to other wordforms (such as ‘bout for about, talkin’ for talking) but these forms will then be interpreted as representations of informal or allegro speech and are likely to carry the kind of implications about the speaker which Preston noted. Thus, while in a personal letter to a friend I might write (1), and would probably not write (2) because it seems too formal, (3) could only be interpreted as a representation of someone, possibly me, speaking informally: 1. I’m going to see a film about Picasso tomorrow; 2. I am going to see a film about Picasso tomorrow; 3. I’m goin’ to see a film ‘bout Picasso t’morra. Furthermore, if (3) were used to represent my informal speech, say in a published interview, it would certainly not have the effect of dignifying my language or conveying it as prestigious but would cause it to be stigmatised. Among those wishing to provide orthographies for non-standardised varieties or ‘dialects’ the problems outlined above are sometimes recognised and sometimes not. The case of folklorists has already been mentioned, and has been addressed in detail in the work of Preston. Journalists keen to ‘give voice’ to their subjects by representing authentic speech are very likely to fall into the trap and instead make them sound inferior, quaint, or simply odd; for example, this exchange between a middle-aged white English shop assistant in Yorkshire and a young Muslim customer, which appeared in a British weekly current affairs magazine, was meant as a cheerful illustration of ‘how diverse Britain has become’ but could be argued to lower the status of the speakers in the eyes of the reader: ‘‘Awright lurve, that be wun poun fifteh,’ she said. ‘Awright, there yer go. Thanks lurve,’ said the young man with the beard and skullcap’.1 In fact such representations of ‘popular speech’ in English tend not to use respellings to any large extent, but instead selectively transcribe non-standard grammatical features, with occasional apostrophes as markers of informal speech, as in this example: ‘I were about eight or nine when me mum and dad split up and then me mum went to live with my nanna and me dad were living with me auntie Tracey for about a year. I were 1

‘Rays of hope that the media do not see’, by Rageh Omaar, New Statesman, 16th October 2006, p. 24.



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upset at the time but then when me mum started drinking an’ that I thought, well, it’d be better for me dad because they’d been together ten years and they were always arguing.’ (‘Darrel’, an eleven-year-old boy from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, quoted in New Statesman, 23 January 1998, p. 20)

For some languages, and certainly for English, the problem of ‘voices’ seems to have been resolved by limiting the representation of ‘dialect’ to a small subset of written genres, especially humour or humorous poetry. Once it has been contextualised as ‘humour’, it is possible to represent non-standard language using inter alia, variant spellings, without denigrating the speakers directly (though they will still be positioned as being from a particular, usually lower, socio-economic class and/or rural). Thus in many parts of England it is possible to buy small books of ‘local humour’ written in a representation of the local variety of English, such as A Load of Old Bristle: Krek Waiter’s Peak Bristle2 ‘a hilariously funny glossary of dialect words and phrases used by many people in the Bristol area’, Oall Rite Me Ansum! ‘a celebration of Cornish Dialect with a humorous glossary of words and phrases’ and Sloightly on th’ Huh! ‘an amusing introduction to the Suffolk dialect and language which captures some of the warmth and humour to be found among those who live in the region’.3 The use of such representations of dialect for ‘serious’ purposes, is, in contrast, extremely rare in England.4 The restriction of ‘dialectal’ varieties to humorous genres, though it may provide an opportunity to ‘celebrate’ their ‘warmth’ and ‘humour’, does little if anything to raise their status or move them in the direction of standardisation, and may well have the opposite effect. 2.2.

Problem 2: transcription

In writing vernaculars there is a tendency to focus on phonetic detail in a way that is unnecessary, and in fact counterproductive, in orthographies of standard languages. Texts may become ‘transcriptions’, usually in accordance with the existing conventions of a related language. A good example of the problems this causes comes from an article by Marthe Philipp (1986) concerning systems for writing Alsatian, a Germanic 2 3

4

‘A load of old Bristol: the correct way to speak Bristol’. Haylock, Charlie 2004. Sloightly on th’ Huh! Merton, Les 2003. Oall Rite Me Ansum! Robinson, Derek and Vic Wiltshire 2002. A Load of Old Bristle. All are published by Countryside Books, Newbury, Berkshire. The descriptions are taken from the publisher’s online catalogue. An exception would be the newspaper (The Rachde Kronikul un Workin Mon’s Lantrun, ‘the Rochdale Chronicle and Working Man’s Lantern’) produced by the Rochdale Co-operative Society written in Rochdale dialect (Rochdale is a city close to Manchester) during the midnineteenth Century. Unfortunately, although I have a reproduction copy of the newspaper dated October 1852, I cannot find out any more information about it.


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dialect. There is no ‘colloquial German’ in Alsace, just local dialects.5 Alsatian orthography has a long tradition, from Early High German onwards. Contemporary writings mainly consist of volumes of poetry, short occasional humorous newspaper articles, plays, collections of humour and so on, and print runs of 1000 sell out readily, indicating that there is a readership for ‘dialect’ writing. However, each writer writing in Alsatian has his own graphemic system. These ad hoc systems have to account for more phonemes than those that exist in German. Nevertheless, the systems which have been developed are ‘heavily dependent’ on the German. In spite of the adherence to German orthographic conventions, readers have to ‘sound out’ each word because they are not familiar with the word-shapes. There are readers, but the average Alsatian has to make a big effort to read our poets, the more so because he now has to know not only the German but also the French writing system, and then he also has to read ‘phonetically’, preferably aloud, which of course he doesn’t need to do when reading a French or German text. One can also easily say that in this particular case the graphemic system cannot (or cannot any longer) function independently of the phonological system.6 (Philipp 1986: 125)

In other words, Alsatian orthographies are all designed for readers whose first language of literacy is German and/or French. Such readers have the necessary knowledge of the spelling conventions to be able to decode the dialect spellings, but have to ‘sound out’ the words because they do not have recognisable (or conventional) fixed word-shapes. Figure 5.1 shows a hand-lettered sign in another German dialect, that of Bavaria (with a non-literal translation into High German presumably for visitors to the restaurant from outside the region). To summarise, although vernacular writers may see the representation of the phonetic details which separate their varieties from others as important for marking their variety as distinctive, such attention to detail may be counterproductive from the point of view of the readers. A similar point was made by Bird (1999a) in his study of Dschang orthography, where the marking of phonemic tones actually leads to a decrease in readability (see Chapter 1).

5

6

Alsace is also a language contact area, lying within the French state. French is official and fluency and literacy in French are universal. ‘Leser gibt es, aber der Durchschnittselsa¨sser muß sich sehr anstrengen, wenn er unsere Dichter lesen will, um so mehr er heutzutage nicht nur das deutsche, sondern auch das franzo¨sische Schreibsystem kennen muß, und dann muß er noch ‘‘phonetisch’’, am besten laut lesen, was er natu¨rlich bei deutschen und franzo¨sischen Texten nicht zu tun braucht. Man kann also ruhig sagen, daß das graphematische System in diesem besonderen Fall nicht (oder noch nicht) unabha¨ngig vom phonologischen System funktionieren kann.’



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Figure 5.1 German dialect sign in Bavaria ‘‘When you are inside, shut the door. ¼ PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR’’

2.3.

Problem 3: Invariance and Optionality

Discussions about standardising orthography tend to assume that rules should be invariant, and to leave few options for variation. This assumption is also widely held concerning the already standardised languages. In the case of English, Milroy and Milroy write (1991: 67): ‘Twentieth century English spelling is almost absolutely invariant. . . . particular spellings of words are now regarded as uniquely acceptable, other possible spellings being rejected as ‘‘errors’’’. This situation has evolved historically from a situation where much more variation was allowed (see Chapter 2), and even now the invariance is not absolute; Stubbs points out (1992: 221) that ‘there is much more variation in the system than is generally realised’. However, it seems that invariance (even if it is more perceived than real), is seen as satisfactory or even essential by users of the orthography. Complaints from the public and pedagogues always seem to be about deviation from the prescribed norm, rather than taking the form of appeals for more diversity. In fact where orthographies allow writers to choose between alternatives, the language users often find this problematic. In the case of the 1990 Portuguese–Brazilian Orthographic Accord (Garcez 1995), which permits certain words to have two spellings depending on whether the Portuguese or Brazilian norm is being followed, this optionality has caused much debate and concern. According to Garcez, critics of the accord say it will produce a chaotic situation. But, says Garcez (1995: 172),


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The real point of this argument seems to be that the predicted optionality issue raises doubts about what an orthography is (Mira Mateus 1993: 33). If an orthography is a set of rules, and if the problem that the Accord tries to solve is the double official orthographic standard [one for Brazil and one for Portugal], producing rules stating optional spellings is a serious internal contradiction.

The introduction of optionality into a standardising orthography seems to be problematic for just that reason: what users are led to want and expect is a ‘set of rules’, not a licence to choose among different forms.7 Furthermore, this need for rules is likely to be more, not less, strongly felt by users of language varieties which lack status and a prestigious literary tradition. As Alexandra Jaffe puts it (Jaffe 2000: 506), As a linguistic boundary-marking device, orthography both differentiates a code from other codes, and displays the internal coherence and unity (sameness) of that code. In this respect, orthography is one of the key symbols of language unity and status itself. From this vantage point, it is not only important to ‘have’ an orthography, but it is also critical for that orthography to have prescriptive power – to be standardised and authoritative, like the orthographies of dominant languages. Let me return briefly to the Corsican case to illustrate this point. Two well-known language activists wrote a newspaper column in which they criticised inconsistencies in different authors’ spelling of Corsican. After reviewing some examples, they ended their column with the following statement (emphasis in original text): ‘Toute langue a ses re`gles, le corse est une langue. Ceux qui se font le devoir d’ećrire correctement en français doivent avoir la meˆme rigeur lorsqu’il s’agit du corse’ [‘Every language has its rules, Corsican is a language. Those who oblige themselves to write correctly in French should apply the same rigor to Corsican’] (Perfettini and Agostini 1994). In other words, they identify orthography as one of the public symbolic spaces in which language identity, unity and legitimacy is displayed. We can see that even though the subject of the column was a particular rule, what was really at issue was rules themselves.

Though there may be a near-consensus that optionality is not what is wanted in an orthography, attitudes towards this issue are a function of attitudes towards language use and standardisation more generally and are therefore sociocultural in nature. One language which allows optional variants, inter alia in spelling, is Norwegian. Historically, the tolerance of variation in Norwegian derives from the fact that there are two elaborated varieties, ‘Nynorsk’ (codified by Ivar Aasen in the nineteenth century on the basis of local dialects, 7

This may account for why, for example, one radical aspect of Seuren’s spelling proposal for Sranan (Chapter 3) was not adopted by the official spelling commission. Seuren proposed two alternative spellings, a formal and an informal one. ‘Both spellings are intended as correct. Thus one should not regard one spelling as more ‘correct’ than the other . . . the choice is free by its nature’ (Seuren n.d.:13). The Kramp commission’s report makes no mention of such an idea.



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and mainly used in rural areas) and ‘Bokma˚l’, the modern descendent of the Dano-Norwegian which was once the literary language of the urban elite in Norway. According to Geirr Wiggen, the standardising bodies have maximised public acceptance of changes by allowing traditional forms alongside newly official but ‘formerly substandard’ forms. Writers have been allowed to choose freely between the two. Since 1938 this liberal formal variation within each standard has been arranged in a system of a) main forms (Norw. ‘hovedformer’/‘hovudformer’) and additional forms (Norw. ‘sideformer’), the latter set in brackets in the dictionaries, and b) parallel, equivalent forms (i.e., two or more ways of writing a word either on the main form level or on the additional form level) . . . Pupils and students and, of course, the public at large, are allowed to choose whichever variant they prefer to use. Only in school textbooks and in departmental publications is the variation limited to parallel forms on the main form level. (Wiggen 1986: 401–402)

From the standpoint of English, this looks very liberal indeed; however, we should note that in fact the variation is carefully regulated. Official publications are limited to choosing among ‘parallel forms on the main form level’; users at large are allowed to choose among ‘main’ ‘additional’ and ‘parallel’ forms, but these are still prescribed in dictionaries, with their status clearly noted. Although all the forms in the dictionary may be officially acceptable, they are not all equally prestigious. As noted by Tove Bull (1993), there are ‘conflicting ideologies’ in contemporary Norwegian language planning which are apparent at the orthographic as well as other levels. Bull writes: Norwegian language planners have not automatically and without any questioning accepted the right of the social elite, the bourgeoisie, to establish their own linguistic norms as the ‘right’ or the ‘best’ language, the national language, the standard, or whatever euphemistic term is considered most appropriate . . . up to the 1960s, official policy was characterized by a wish to fight linguistic repression and to secure as much linguistic freedom and democracy as can be maintained within standardized languages. On the other hand, no one in fact questioned the need for standardized written norms. (Bull (1993: 34), my emphasis)

We can conclude that even in the best case, where there is explicit ‘democracy’ and an attempt to be inclusive of different variants, as in Norway, there are problems associated with selecting which variant forms may be licensed by a standard orthography. Nor does it seem possible, even with the most liberal of approaches, to get away from the idea that standardised norms are necessary. To suggest otherwise seems to be to ‘think the unthinkable’, to unleash orthographic chaos.


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The issue of variation and invariance also relates to the next problem we will consider, that of representing dialect differences. 2.4.

Problem 4: Standardisation and dialect differentiation

There are few, if any, languages which have no dialectal variation. When developing a written standard, one possibility is simply to select one variety as the basis for the written standard; users of other varieties must then do the best they can, either working out the equivalences with their own dialects or learning the standard as a new variety. An alternative is to look for a system of representation which is suited to as wide a range of speakers as possible. In general, there is an inverse relationship between the amount of phonemic or phonetic detail in an orthography and the ‘coverage’ of the orthography, defined as the range of dialects or varieties of the language for which the orthography is reasonably well suited. Thus with a completely logographic writing system, Chinese is able to encompass a range of ‘dialects’ sufficiently diverse to be called distinct and mutually unintelligible languages, while standard written English, which with the passage of time has ‘reverted to a partially logographic state’ (Joseph 1987: 66) is able to represent varieties which, in extreme cases, are also mutually unintelligible. This is because English words have distinctive shapes (sequences of letters) but are not transcriptions: the individual letters which make up a word do not necessarily tell the reader how that word is pronounced, in any accent. In other cases, emphasising phonetic differences may be a way of creating separate languages, as in the case of the Central Asian Turkic languages. In this case ‘the exploitation of phonetic differences between the local dialects was the starting-point’ for establishing the Turkic dialects as separate languages (Paksoy 1989, chapter 2, p. 7) with differentiated phonemic orthographies based on Cyrillic (See Chapter 3). Allerton (1982) deals with these issues on a practical basis, addressing the question in his title: ‘Othography and dialect: how can different regional pronunciations be accommodated in a single orthography?’ His general approach is to recommend representing ‘the maximal number of distinctions, even though no one dialect has all of them’ (1982:63). For example, where neutralisation of phonemic differences has led to some dialects having more distinctions than others, his solution would be ‘maximal differentiation’ meaning that all potential distinctions are represented in the orthography, even though they are not present in all dialects. Thus speakers of some dialects will find themselves required to represent in writing a distinction which they do not make in speech.



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A second proposal of Allerton’s is that where words differ between dialects in their actual phonemic forms or word-shapes, ‘we can allow each dialect to represent the actual phoneme it uses in each word’(1982: 64–65). So, to give an example different from Allerton’s, a speaker of North American English, who pronounces postvocalic /r/, would write <part> while a speaker from England might write <paat> ‘in accordance with his own pronunciation’. According to Allerton, ‘this practice would surely be the simplest for the writer; and the reader, once used to it, would find it no more difficult than regarding honor and honour or shown and shewn as variant spellings of the same words’ (1982: 64–65). The dialectally diverse Andean language Quechua8 is an interesting test site for Allerton’s proposals. The official orthography in use for Quechua in Bolivia allows the language to be written either with three or with five vowels. ‘Three vowels or five?’ is an ideological issue in Quechuan linguistics, as noted by Hornberger (1995: 198): The Peruvian linguists’ defense of Quechua includes vigilance for its purity from the influence of Spanish. They argue that writing Quechua with five vowels imposes Spanish conventions on Quechua and makes Quechua subservient to Spanish, which they view as another form of colonialism.

However, the decision to allow writers a choice of representing three or five vowels, ‘far from contributing to the normalisation of the language, actually amounts to evading the problem, creating a chaos in the writing system’, according to Rodolfo Cerroń-Palomino (1991: 35). We saw earlier that optionality was problematic also in the Portuguese/Brazilian case. Allerton’s other proposal – the principal of ‘maximal differentiation’ – is also potentially problematic. Cerroń-Palomino notes that for Quechua, the ‘extreme fluctuation’ of the laryngeal consonants – which appear in some dialectal varieties but not others – ‘should make us think whether it is worthwhile representing them in the writing system’, as insisted on by the proponents of what he calls ‘minimal pair orthography’. He suggests that the best solution to this dialectal diversity is to select a conservative variety to represent in orthography, producing a ‘hypodifferentiated’ standard from which speakers can derive their own forms (1991: 36). In fact such a solution had already been tried successfully centuries ago, Cerroń-Palomino says, of which the proof is ‘the thousands of pages of the literary monuments in Quechua (and Aimara) produced within the span of 50 years (1584–1649)’. However, this practice – ‘directed towards the 8

Wo¨lck (1991: 46–47) expresses doubts about this claimed diversity, believing that the basis exists for the ‘elaboration of a real General Quechua’.


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re-unification of Quechua’ – ‘was hindered by the creole and mestizo Quechuists, mainly from Cuzco [a major cultural centre for Peruvian Quechua], who endorsed the wrong idea that orthography must reflect the actual pronunciation of the language’. Both Wolfgang Wo¨lck and Rodolfo Cerroń-Palomino complain that this notion is still present among Quechuists. Wo¨lck denounces the ‘alphabet craze’ and the ‘phonemicist myth, the assumption that a writing system has to be phonemic’ (1991: 48). CerrońPalomino is critical of ‘transcriptive tendencies’ which ‘seek to calque pronunciation, neglecting the fact that codification presupposes the development of alternative registers for the language, aside from or parallel to the oral system’. As a result, ‘consciously or unconsciously, what is being proposed is a notational system for the foreigner or for the Spanish-speaker, both of them ignorant of the languages being codified . . . what we must ask at this point is for whom the writing system is being proposed’ (1991: 34). This last point – ‘for whom the writing system is being proposed’ – turned out to be crucial in the case of both Manx and Sranan, as we saw in Chapter 3). In fact the apparently ‘neutral’ question of how best to accommodate different varieties within a single orthography leads directly to issues of power and authority on the one hand (whose variety/ies shall be selected), and questions of what constitutes ‘legitimate’ literacy on the other (what kinds of practices should the orthography be designed to support). 2.5.

Problem 5: symbolic distance and the abstand-ausbau paradox

We have already seen through many examples that establishing symbolic difference from, or (less frequently) closeness to, or, other languages and varieties is a function which is recurrently assigned to orthography by its users, whether at subcultural level (Spanish anarchists and German fanzine writers), national level (Haiti) or even supra-national level (the Turkic languages of Central Asia). The German term abstand (‘distance’) was introduced by the linguist Heinz Kloss (1967, 1978) to describe the linguistic ‘distance’ (difference) of a language from other, similar languages. As part of a more general theory of language differentiation and development, he coined this and the related term Ausbau (‘development’). Ausbau refers to the elaboration of a written language for specific ‘high’ functions. An abstand language, according to Kloss, is ‘a linguistic unit which a linguist would have to call a language even if not a single word had ever been written in it’. In other words, abstand languages are distinct from each other before they even develop written standards and there is sufficient ‘distance’ between them and others for them not to be seen as ‘dialects’ of anything else. Among Ausbau languages, on the other hand, we find ‘dialects whose speakers would certainly be reported by linguists as constituting a single



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linguistic community if they were at a preliterate stage’ (Kloss 1967), but which nevertheless follow different paths of elaboration to become two or more separate literary standards, thus becoming recognised as ‘different languages.’ Kloss (1967: 29) describes an Ausbausprache as being ‘called a language by virtue of having been reshaped’. Kloss gives as examples Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic, Gallego (Galician) and Portuguese, Danish and Swedish, Czech and Slovak. All of these are easily recognised as ‘closely related’ languages, mutually intelligible to a large degree in their spoken forms, though with significantly different written forms. For example, the warnings below (‘The toy is not suitable for children under three years. They could swallow or inhale small parts’) show the extent of the differences between written Czech (1) and written Slovak (2), two ‘languages by Ausbau’: 1. Hracˇka neni vhodna´ pro deˇti do 3 let. Mohly by spolknout nebo vdechnout male´ cˇasti; 2. Hracˇka nie je vhodna´ pre deti do 3 rokov. Drobne´ cˇasti by mohly prehltnut’ alebo vdychnut’.9 ‘Languages’ may be languages by abstand only, Ausbau only, or by both. Kloss describes English, French and German as ‘both abstand and ausbau languages’ by virtue both of being reshaped and of intrinsic difference from other languages (Kloss 1967: 29). Where intrinsic abstand cannot be taken for granted, for example in the case of a ‘dialect’ which is developing toward independence from its associated standard, it will be necessary for it to be elaborated in such a way that it can support ‘high’ functions (ausbau) and to establish itself as different from its ‘neighbours’ including the Standard itself (abstand ). The concept of abstand is useful to us here because it can be taken either as a measure of linguistic difference in an autonomous, formal sense (the amount of shared/cognate vocabulary, extent of similarity of the phonological system, grammatical structures etc.) or as a construct, something which users of the language concerned ‘bring about’ through conscious or partly conscious choices. For example, the selection of different lexical items, different sources for loanwords (as in the case of Hindi and Urdu, where the latter prefers Persian and Arabic borrowings, and the former Sanskrit) and variant word orders could all be used to construct abstand. Taking this a step further, abstand can be constructed symbolically, by giving importance to certain markers of 9

Specifically, in this example, there are differences of word order, vocabulary (let vs. rokov) and morphology, but some of the differences could be treated either as phonological or as a matter of orthography: pre vs. pro, vdechnout vs. vdychnut’.


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difference while overlooking more numerous points of similarity. Thus certain features of the language may be treated as the ones which ‘set it apart’ from others; they become iconic of the difference between it and the rest (see Chapter 4). Bird (2001: 148) gives a striking example of how an orthographic feature can be used to symbolise linguistic unity and distance in this iconic way, in the Bamileke group of Bantu languages in Cameroon: While a single Bamileke alphabet has not been achieved, the ethnic significance of one of the orthographic symbols is quite striking. A ubiquitous orthographic trait of the Bamileke languages is the barred-u symbol . Bamilekes who are literate in their mother tongue strongly identify with this symbol, which iconifies the strong cultural unity of the group with respect to the languages outside the group. These other languages, most notably the non-Bamileke Grassfields languages, also have this high central vowel but they write it with i.

Where ausbau is concerned, John Joseph (1987) points out that historically nearly all languages have developed a literary standard on the basis of an existing model. The relevant model is invariably the established ‘high’ language of the community, that is, the variety which already has a tradition of being used as a standard literary language. A lower-status unwritten language in the community may encroach on the domains of the high-status language as it develops and may eventually replace it, but at the same time it inevitably uses it as a model. This is for reasons similar to those mentioned by Jaffe (2000) in the extract above: dominant languages are ‘standardised and authoritative’, and to move into domains which are the preserve of such a language, a less prestigious language must appropriate some of the features, both linguistic and institutional, that the dominant language possesses. One aspect of the developing ausbau language which is likely to be modelled on the high-status language (though for a variety of reasons) is the orthography: we have already seen a number of examples of this, including Manx (modelled on English), Sranan (Dutch) and Haitian Creole (French). Joseph (1987) articulates what he calls the ‘creole standardisation problem’, though it does not apply only to Creoles. In order to develop a ‘high’ form (in particular, a literary standard), a vernacular must model itself on a ‘high’ language which is already in use locally. In the case of creole, this is usually (but not always) its lexifier.10 But in order to be

10

Lexifier is a term used by Creolists to denote the language which is the source of the majority of the lexicon (vocabulary) of a pidgin or Creole, for example English in the case of Creole Englishes such as those of the Caribbean.



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recognised as a separate language, creole must distance itself from the lexifier. Hence, when a creole grows in Ausbau, developing in the direction of its superposed model, it must simultaneously shrink in Abstand, since that H model is the same ‘target’ language from which it needs to establish its independent validity. (Joseph 1987: 55)

The poor Creole cannot win: distancing itself too much from the lexifier will deprive it of the most readily available model for standardisation, but modelling itself too closely on the lexifier ‘risks undercutting the creole’s Abstand and whatever prestige it may have’ (Joseph 1987: 56). The ‘creole standardisation problem’ as described by Joseph actually has wider application. It can be seen to apply to other vernaculars which, while trying to establish an independent set of norms, are nevertheless drawn back towards their ‘standard’ as they struggle to develop registers suitable for ‘high’ functions and to convince their speakers that they are the equals of the existing standard language. Similar considerations would apply to dialects of English or French (or ‘cognate languages’ such as Scottish or Provençal respectively), for example, attempting to standardise and gain authority in the shadow of a wellestablished ‘high’ language. Alexandra Jaffe (1996) has demonstrated another paradox which comes about when users of a minority language try to give it authority (which is associated with ausbau) by reproducing its use in institutions associated with a dominant language. She explains how a broadcast spelling competition in Corsica – a ‘dramatic, public display of the value of Corsican literacy’ (Jaffe 1996: 816) – which might have been expected to elevate the status of Corsican and confirm its equality with French in terms of status and legitimacy, in fact failed to do so. The values of ‘intimacy and egalitarianism associated with Corsican’ were in conflict with the requirements for prescriptiveness and invariance which were associated with French, and were therefore (within a diglossic model which the competition reinforced rather than undermined) required of Corsican as well. The desire to give authority to Corsican by showing that it, too, could have ‘correct spelling’ like French was in conflict with the very values which had allowed Corsican to resist domination and enjoy a partial resurgence. Of course, languages are not monolithic; they consist of various subsystems all of which are used by the speakers of those languages as part of their everyday linguistic and cultural practices, though not all are equally salient or ‘visible’. Thus it may be that a language will try to establish abstand from a ‘high’ language at one level while continuing to model itself closely on that language at other levels.


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Because of its pervasiveness and high visibility, orthography is a useful level at which to establish abstand. By changing your orthographic conventions (or in extreme cases, the script) you can make your language look very different while leaving the structure unchanged.11 In Chapter 3, we saw an example of ‘orthographic engineering’ of this type applied to the Turkic languages of Central Asia, where a focus on regional dialect forms was coupled with differences in orthography to maximise the abstand between quite similar language varieties to create distinct ‘languages’. In the case of Haitian Creole, Schieffelin and Doucet 1994 (see Chapter 4) emphasise the importance of the ‘look’ of the language and how this has been one element of the orthographic debates in Haiti. An example of a language which seems to have successfully created abstand in its literary standard largely by means of orthography is Afrikaans. Afrikaans is a language of South Africa, which is variously described as a Creole, a partially creolised language, or a somewhat deviant variety of Dutch (see Sebba 1997 for overviews, Roberge 1993 for more detailed discussion). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the independence of Afrikaans as a language from Dutch was by no means well established, and Dutch still functioned as the local ‘high’ language for Afrikaans speakers. Since then, Afrikaans has succeeded in establishing itself as a separate standard language with high prestige in South Africa.12 Standard written Afrikaans remains closely modelled on written Dutch, with a high degree of mutual intelligibility. Ausbau, in the sense of the development of a literary style, has meant a limitation of abstand. At the orthographic level, however, Afrikaans has succeeded in creating distance between itself and Dutch, by selecting a number of orthographic conventions which distance it from Dutch. The following Table 5.1 shows how Afrikaans spelling differs from Dutch on certain points, while remaining similar to Dutch in other ways which are specific to Dutch orthography. The spelling of Afrikaans may be characterised as more consistent than that of Dutch (/k/¼ and /s/¼<s> (with rare exceptions like the scriptural word Christus)) as well as more phonemic, in that it pays less attention to etymology (cf. the words for ‘culture’ and ‘chocolate’). The appearance of

11

12

Readers are clearly sensitive to the ‘look’ of their written language in various ways. There is wide agreement that ‘word shapes’ have importance in word recognition for reading purposes (see Chapter 1). In German, the term Schriftbild is used to describe the ‘outward appearance of writing’ (Digitales Wo¨rterbuch der Deutschen Sprache des 20. Jahrhunderts www.dwds.de) and changes in Schriftbild have been a major bone of contention in the debates over the recent orthographic reforms (see Chapter 6) because, according to the major dictionary publisher Duden, ‘the majority of readers do not seem to be ready for them’ (www.duden.de). Afrikaans was co-official language with English in South Africa from 1925 to 1994. It remains one of 11 official languages according to the 1994 constitution.



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Table 5.1. Comparison of Dutch (etymological spelling) with Afrikaans (phonemic spelling) (1) Points of orthographic difference

Dutch Dutch Dutch Dutch Dutch

¼ /x/ R ¼ Afr. ¼ / / ¼ Afr. <sj> ¼ /k/ ¼ Afr. ¼ /s/ ¼ Afr. <s> ¼ /k, s/ ¼ Afr.

Dutch

Afrikaans

English gloss

achter /axtr/ chocolade cultuur centrum concert

agter sjokolade kultuur sentrum konsert

behind chocolate culture centre concert

(2) Points of orthographic similarity

Dutch

Afrikaans

English gloss

Other languages with this convention

Dutch ¼ /k/¼ Afr.

Christus

Christus

Christ

Dutch ¼ /k/¼ Afr. Dutch ¼ /u/

kantoor moed /mut/

kantoor moed

office courage

Dutch ¼ /x/ Dutch ¼ /f/

gaan /xa:n/ volk /fOlk/

gaan volk

go people

Common in this lexical item of cultural significance Numerous Sranan, Indonesian (See Chapter 4) ?none German

written standard Afrikaans thus is different from Dutch in a number of subtle but easily noticed ways.13 In fact many of the spellings which in Afrikaans are standard and fixed are also available as variants in Dutch; but where there is variation, there is social meaning, and as we saw in Chapter 4, Section 5, more phonemic, less etymological spellings in Dutch were treated with disdain in the nineteenth century and have become symbolic of liberal or ‘modern’ attitudes to language in more recent times. The standard spelling of Afrikaans thus serves the purpose of creating abstand – making Afrikaans look somewhat different from Dutch – while not impeding ausbau based on the model of standard literary Dutch.

13

This should not be taken to imply that the difference between Afrikaans and Dutch is purely a matter of orthography. The grammatical differences are relatively small in number but highly salient, and a number of very common lexical items are different.


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The abstand/ausbau issue recurs in many cases of orthography development (and sometimes orthography reform). It has some similarity to subcultural orthographic variation (discussed in Chapter 2) which is constrained by having to be both different (or ‘deviant’) from the standardised norm, but sufficiently close to it to allow it to be interpreted by readers who are familiar with the conventional spelling system. In this section, we have looked at some of the problems which surround developing orthographies for unstandardised languages. In the remainder of this chapter, we will look at two case studies, both of unstandardised languages but in very different contexts. Jamaican Creole is a language with low overt prestige and no established written tradition, though there is a growing body of writing in it. It is almost unaffected by language planning or attempts to standardise it, because almost all official efforts are focussed on Standard English. In this context, writers are effectively free to develop their own spelling practices. In contrast, Galician has an official norm and other several competing norms, and is subject of a vigorous and highly politicised debate about its status as a language. In these debates, orthography plays a crucial role. 3.

Between Ausbau and Abstand: orthographic problems and solutions for Jamaican Creole

We have seen how orthography has been the subject of heated debate in ‘Francophone’ Haiti. In the ‘Anglophone’ Caribbean, where English-lexicon Creoles are the first languages of the majority of the population, there are neither standard nor official orthographies for these languages at the moment. Undoubtedly, an important factor in this is the relationship between the Creoles themselves and their lexifier, English. This can be superficially described as a classic diglossia, with the Creole in each case functioning as the Low language and Standard English the High. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that historical and social factors have led to the existence of numerous intermediate varieties, neither Creole nor Standard English. Following De Camp (1971) this complex has been modelled (nowadays somewhat controversially) as a continuum of varieties or ‘lects’ spanning the gap between the ‘broadest’ Creole (the ‘basilect’) and the local Standard English (the ‘acrolect’). This is often referred to by linguists as the Caribbean post-Creole continuum. Until very recently the education systems in the countries concerned have insisted on focussing on Standard English to the almost complete exclusion of Creole varieties. Proposals to standardise Creole, and its orthography in particular, have come almost exclusively from academics. This is not to say that the English-lexicon creoles of the Caribbean remain unwritten; rather, writers have found their own solutions to the lack of a standard orthography,



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developing what Faraclas et al. call ‘organic orthographies’: orthographies which ‘evolve through the efforts of individual writers to express themselves in a language that has no widely accepted formal orthography’ (to appear). In fact, there is a large body of published writing in English-lexicon creoles, in a range of genres: poetry, song lyrics, plays, newspaper columns, short stories and novels (though in the last two, the creole is usually confined to dialogue, unless the narrator has a ‘creole’ voice). There is also private writing such as personal letters, though in some cases the writer’s target may have been Standard English rather than Creole. In academic circles, Cassidy’s orthography, originally used by Cassidy and Le Page in the Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967/1980), has become the prototype for phonemic orthographies for other Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles. Yet in spite of its use in a number of dictionaries and many linguistic texts, it has scarcely been used in any publications for a general readership.14 In some ways, it is not surprising that the phonemic orthography has not been taken up by writers, since it requires a conscious effort to learn and is unfamiliar to most potential readers, whose first language of literacy will inevitably be Standard English. On the other hand – equally unsurprisingly – linguists favour a phonemic orthography. The arguments put forward are all in favour of creating a system as distinct as possible from the standard lexifier language. Cassidy, for example, writes (1993: 136): The more the creole differs phonemically from the lexicalizing language (English, French, Dutch – whatever), the more it must differ in its orthography. It should be taught and learned as a system of its own. There is no learning advantage in having it reveal its etymological relationship to the European or other lexifier. Paramount should be a phonemically accurate, consistent, autonomous system.

As in the case of Haiti, interested parties take up ideological positions. Devonish (who argues (1986a, 1986b) for Creole to be made an official language in the Caribbean) and Hellinger (1986) are both strongly in favour of a phonemic orthography. Hellinger summarises the benefits of the latter: A genuinely creole orthography will strengthen the structural and psychological identity of the creole; it may in fact initiate or support a recreolization process; it will provide a source for higher prestige and may therefore facilitate native speakers’ identification with the creole language and culture. (Hellinger 1986: 67)

On the other hand, she says, a creole orthography based on English conventions would have many negative effects. It would promote the perception 14

A noteworthy exception being a newspaper column by Caroline Cooper, which had parallel texts in ‘Cassidy’ and modified English orthography.


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(widely held, if less so than in the past) that creole is an inferior variety of English. It would ‘obscure and eventually help to eradicate much of the creole’s linguistic (phonemic) authenticity’; it would discourage the Creole from developing its internal resources (e.g.word formation); it would accelerate the process of decreolisation, whereby the Creole is moving closer over time to its more prestigious lexifier. Seen in the light of Joseph’s discussion of the creole standardisation problem, we could interpret the arguments of Cassidy, Devonish and Hellinger for phonemic orthographies as attempts to put distance (Abstand ) between the creole and its lexifier. Whether at the same time the creole can elaborate a literary standard without modelling itself on the lexifier, thus growing simultaneously in terms of Ausbau and Abstand ( pace Joseph), is an empirical question – one which cannot be answered unless some serious attempt is made to introduce a standard variety for at least one of the English-lexicon creoles. Jamaican Creole, also called Patois or Patwa, is a first language for most Jamaicans but is also used by many people living in Britain and other countries. Patwa in Britain is, first and foremost, a language of adolescence and youth, and its speakers tend to be young and Caribbean, African, or of mixed heritage, though some are white.15 It is closely associated with Black youth culture and its music – in particular with the Reggae music of the 1970s and 1980s and its successors – and with Rastafarian culture. Patois, as an in-group language and a non-legitimated language variety, carries covert (and, increasingly, overt) prestige among urban British adolescents of all ethnic groups (see Chapter 2). Standard English, of course, is the only language taught or legitimated in the school system in England,16 and is the first language of literacy in practice for all of the Patwa speakers in Britain. However, in Britain as in the Caribbean, there is a tradition of using creole in written form, especially by young professional or semi-professional poets and lyricists in the British context. We can find recent examples of Creole writing in Britain in all of the following genres: poetry, dub poetry17 and song lyrics, dialogue in fiction and stage plays, personal letters and, as we saw in the Introduction, graffiti.18 The amount of published written Creole has increased significantly in Britain since about 1990. More Creole dialogue is being written (and thus, 15

16

17 18

In other words, the British variety of Jamaican Creole is not confined to second-generation Jamaicans but is used by second and subsequent generation Caribbeans in general, as well as some adolescents from other cultural backgrounds for peer-group interaction. See Gilroy 1987, Sebba 1993 and Rampton 1995. In Wales, Welsh is recognised and promoted within the school system, while in Scotland, Gaelic is legitimated in some areas. Dub poetry is poetry performed to a musical background by a ‘dub artist’. Creole is also now used for computer-mediated communication in Jamaica and elsewhere (Hinrichs 2004). In the current discussion, we will exclude the Internet ‘Creole’ used by fans of Ali G which was discussed in Chapter 2.



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perhaps, becoming more familiar to the general reading public) as a result of the growth in publication of popular fiction (largely crime novels) by black writers featuring Caribbean and British–Caribbean themes. Much of what is written in Creole actually has its origins in spoken language: either in an oral performance (in the case of dub poetry and some other poetry) or in conversations (possibly fictional ones in novels). This is not the case for personal letters – a category of data which is almost impossible to obtain, unfortunately – or for graffiti, a category which is fairly rare. Because there is no ‘authorised’ standard way of writing any particular Creole word, writers are in effect working in an ‘unregulated’ spelling space (See Chapter 2). They can spell words however they please, whether or not those words have a conventional Standard English spelling associated with them already. They are constrained, however, by the fact that their readers are already familiar with the spelling conventions of Standard English – and usually, unfamiliar with any other writing conventions. The result is a wide range of variation, especially in – but not at all confined to – words which lack a Standard English equivalent. The variability is well illustrated by extracts from two printed versions of a well-known poem by Linton Kwesi Johnson, Sonny’s lettah (originally a dub backed by music, recorded on the Forces of Victory album (1979)). These texts are especially interesting to compare because they supposedly represent the same spoken lyrics. Version A is the printed version which appears in the book of collected poems, Inglan is a bitch (Johnson 1980). Version B appears (apparently hand-lettered) on the cover of a twelve-inch disco version of the record (i.e. a one-sided record containing only this poem, and intended for use in a disco rather than for general sales). SONNY’S LETTAH by Linton Kwesi Johnson (extract) Version A:

Version B:

Standard English gloss

Mama, Ah jus’ could‘n’ stan-up deh an’ noh dhu not‘n’: soh mi jook one in him eye an’ him started to cry; mi t’ump one in him mout’ an’ him started to shout mi kick one pan him shin an’ him started to spin mi t’ump him pan him chin an’ him drap pan a bin an de’d.

Mama, a jus couldn’t stan up an no dhu notin so mi juk one ina im eye an him started to cry mi tump one ina him mouth an him started to shout mi kick one pon him shin an him started to spin mi tump him pon him chin an him drop pon a bin an crash an DEAD.

Mama I just couldn’t stand up there and not do nothing so I poked one in his eye an he started to cry I thumped one in his mouth and he started to shout I kicked one on his shin and he started to spin I thumped him on his chin and he dropped on a bin and crashed and died.


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In both versions, there are numerous non-standard spellings to signal pronunciations different from (most) British varieties of English. However, Version A is much more liberal in its use of apostrophes to signal letters omitted (A: t’ump, mout’; B: tump, mout), and also uses other unconventional spellings like grung (B: groun’) and murdah (B: murder). In addition, both versions use a number of unusual spellings which do not, apparently, reflect Creole pronunciations substantially different from British English ones: for example, dhu, tuff, y’u. For the purpose of examining writers’ spelling practices, we can identify four categories of words in texts like these: 1. Words which have no apparent cognate or source word in Standard English – words for which there is no Standard English model which writers can follow. These are relatively rare, but understandably show a great deal of variation in spelling. Example: unuh, oonoo, unnu, unna, unu, ouno, (‘you-plural’ /unu/). 2. Words which apparently derive from English sources but which have a distinct grammatical function in Creole. Speakers of Creole may or may not identify these words with a similar word of Standard English. The fact that they are frequently respelt suggests that they are felt to be distinct words unrelated to any Standard English word. Examples:

/de/ /fi/ /ina/ /no þ a/ /se/

deh, dey (locative marker, possibly cognate with ‘there’) fi, fa, fah, fe (preposition/infinitive marker ‘for’, ‘to’) inna, ina, eena, een (preposition ‘in’) naah, nah, naw, nar (negative þ continuous aspect marker) seh, sey, sae (complementiser, possibly cognate with ‘say’)

3. Words which have British English equivalents but are different from them at the phonemic level. Some words in this category show a wide range of variation in spelling, with the spelling normally changed from Standard English to signal the phonemic difference. Examples:

/kyaan/ ‘can‘t’ /notin/ ‘nothing’ /tru:/ ‘through’ /migl/, /likl/ ‘middle, little’

cyan, cyaan, cyaant, caan, kean, kaan notten, notin, nutting, nutin, nutten, not‘n’, notin’ troo, thru miggle, likkle, lickle



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4. Words which have British English equivalents but are sometimes spelt in non-standard ways in Creole, although they do not differ from the British English equivalents at the phonemic level. These words are different from British English at most at the phonetic level. Examples:

enough/tough (RP /K/, JC /`) you do

’nuff, enuff, tuff yuh, yu, y’u du, dhu, duh

Trudgill (1986) develops a model of dialect accommodation to account for the order in which speakers acquire, or fail to acquire, accent features in a new dialect (of the same language). Speakers will find some aspects of the new accent more salient than others, and will adjust to these first (or sometimes, reject adjusting to them for social reasons). Of the factors which make a feature salient, the most important (Trudgill 1986: 37) are surface phonemic contrast and the degree of phonetic difference, in that order. In other words, the most salient features will be those involving a phonemic contrast – for example, the presence or absence of postvocalic /r/: soar and saw are homophones for most speakers of British English but contrast in most North American pronunciations. Of lesser importance will be points of pronunciation where the systems themselves are not different, but the sounds representing a particular phoneme are substantially different, for example the vowel of long which differs in quality for most British and American speakers. This is in accordance with Allerton’s model for representing different accents in a single orthography. According to Allerton (1982: 59): The phonetic differences which are really significant for the alphabet-maker are those which affect the number of phonemic distinctions a speaker makes or which relate to the actual words in which he uses each of his phonemes. The precise phonetic value he gives his phonemes (or, better, his allophones) in each of the various phonetic contexts in which they occur is only of minor importance.

In fact, he says: ‘A purely phonetic difference presents no problems’ (1982: 62). If Trudgill’s model represents speakers’ level of awareness of differences between two related phonological systems, then we would expect the orthographic practices of writers using an alphabetic system to write an unstandardised language (Creole) on the basis of a standardised one (English) to reflect a similar hierarchy of salience. In other words, we would expect them


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first to draw attention to ‘surface phonemic contrasts’ in their respelling of Standard English words (category (3) above). This certainly accounts for a large proportion of non-standard spellings used by Creole writers. However, the most interesting category is the fourth one. For words in this category the pronunciation differs from British English pronunciation very slightly if at all. In Trudgill’s (spoken language) model, these differences are less salient to speakers than those involving a difference in phonological structure. In Allerton’s model, they are of ‘minor importance’ and do not need to be signalled orthographically. Yet this is just what writers are doing with words in this category. For example, there is no substantial difference between the British English and Creole pronunciation of /u:/ in do and you; although the Creole vowel is ‘firmly monophthongal, without the diphthongal allophones commonly found in the accents of the United States or England’ (Wells 1982: 571) it is, nevertheless, striking that writers have found the distinction salient enough to warrant flagging it through non-standard spellings such as yuh, yu, dhu, duh.19 Even more strikingly, while the spelling tuff for tough may be more logical than the conventional spelling, it does not mark any real difference in pronunciation of the final consonant /f/.20 It is thus possible to say that in addition to signalling differences between Creole and English at the phonemic level, most writers pay attention to some salient phonetic differences between British English and Creole and try to signal these in some way (for a list of these, see Sebba 1998). However, very few writers mark any one of these phonetic differences consistently. The one most consistently marked is probably /d, t/ for orthographic th (cf. <deh>, in Sonny’s Lettah), but even within one text this may sometimes be marked and sometimes not. Other phonetic differences from British English tend to be marked very unevenly, with writers marking an idiosyncratic selection of features, and then not always consistently. This is generally in accordance with the findings of Hellinger (1986: 62) for texts in Creole produced in the Caribbean. It is also, of course, in accordance with the variable pronunciation of the items in question, which may have, at different

19

20

These differences seem to be of an order comparable with the different pronunciations of a Standard English word in different parts of England, for example the vowel sound of grey as pronounced in the accent of Manchester (/ e:/ ) as opposed to London (/ai/) (Allerton 1982: 61). There is, however, a difference in the vowel of the British English and Creole pronunciations of this word, which is [v] in Southern British English but [O¨ ] in Creole. This difference rarely seems to be flagged by non-conventional spellings and is also one which apparently is not salient for speakers wanting to produce adaptations of London English to make it sound like Creole; cf. (Sebba 1993: 53).



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times, a ‘Creole’ pronunciation, a ‘Standard’ pronunciation and a local British (e.g. London) pronunciation in the speech of the same person (see Sebba 1993). Why do writers mark specific phonetic features of Creole? Standard English is spoken with a large variety of accents, and the existing spelling system of Standard English is ‘broad’ enough to cope with them for reasons already discussed. Many British and some North American accents share features of phonology with Jamaican Creole but do not indicate these by distinctions in orthography. In fact, the degree of phonetic detail to which Creole writers pay attention can be considerable. For example, in the following description of a ‘battle of sounds’ (discos) written in a London school by a boy from a Caribbean family, the writer has used the apostrophe three times to indicate the presence of a glottal stop (allophone of /t/, and characteristic of London speech rather than Creole.) Dem soon start to warm up, tes’ing mikes and mekking sure dat all speaker an’ ting was connect up an’ working good. Meanwhile some o’ de older de rudy was buil’ing up dem splif an’ de smaller bwoy child dem try to capture off even if i’s only a likkle draw. Everybody full up wid excitement and plenty people was arguing wid each aneddur ’bout who would win (McLeod 1982: 436, emphasis mine).

At the same time, we find writers are respelling words which differ from British English only at the phonetic level, and even then, only minimally. Common strategies involve using in positions where the standard orthography has , and replacing sequences involving with alternatives which are licensed by the standard orthography, but not in that particular word. Two extracts of poetry below show these strategies in use by different writers: It ah get tuh de point, Weh wi mite haffe kommit, Some dreadful krime Because dis ah perilous time. (Jahn 1985). Time Gawn man an man use to flash ratchet wid wite moon grin fi a camera nite an bus wid laugh wen im bredda shape wid a bamboo cane. (Breeze 1988)


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These strategies on the part of writers – on the one hand, to annotate subphonemic phonetic differences from the standard pronunciation, and on the other, to use non-standard respellings of words where there are no pronunciation differences – amount, I would argue, to an ‘informal ideology’ of language creation. Spellings like y’u, dhu, ’hole and tuff can be seen as wholly or partly conscious attempts by some writers to subvert and challenge Standard English spelling. Among the various components that make up the written language, orthography is one that affects both the visual aspect of the text and the phonetic interpretation which the reader will give to the words. It is thus potentially symbolic on both these levels. For these writers, spelling is one means of putting symbolic distance – abstand – between Creole and Standard English, while continuing to make use of the ausbau of the Standard English orthographic system. Significantly, however, the writers themselves do not show much awareness that that is what they are doing. When asked to reflect on their spelling practices (Sebba 1998) writers tended to say that they tried to reflect the sound of Creole or, in some cases, to write ‘phonetically’. Only one writer out of seven implicitly referred to difference by saying that they used non-Standard spelling ‘so that words cannot be confused with Standard English’. We have to conclude that the ‘informal ideology’ is also implicit and below the level of awareness for most writers. In the next section we will look at another case study, that of Galicia, where, arguably, another kind of continuum exists, in this case linking two fully standardised languages. In Galicia, in contrast to the Anglophone Caribbean, the issue of orthography is highly ideologised and politicised, as we shall see. 4.

The Galician ‘war of orthographies’

Galicia is a semi-autonomous part of Spain where an indigenous local language, Gallego (Galician), is widely spoken and is recognised as co-official with Castilian (Spanish) under the Spanish constitution. It is more or less common ground among linguists that from a structural linguistic point of view, Galician is part of a complex which includes Portuguese, Galician and Brazilian. Gallego is structurally closer to Portuguese than to Spanish, though of course Portuguese and Spanish are closely related anyway. According to Herrero Valeiro (1993), from whose work the following summary is drawn, there are two fundamentally distinct viewpoints on the relationship of autonomy or dependence between Galician and Portuguese: Differentialism holds that at the moment Galician is a language independent of Portuguese. Differentialist discourse holds that (in Kloss’s terms) Galician–Portuguese is actually a bi-elaborated language with two



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successfully elaborated dialects, Portuguese and Galician. This is the official view of the regional government (the Xunta de Galicia) and certain linguists. Reintegrationism holds that there are no adequate structural linguistic criteria for calling Galician an independent language from Portuguese. Some of the Galician intelligentsia support this view, in either of two forms: Strong reintegrationism (Lusism) is associated with a pro-Portuguese cultural and political perspective and considers that there is just one modern language, ‘Galician–Portuguese’. Moderate reintegrationism is associated with Galician nationalism and its main supporters are secondary and university teachers and the nationalist bloc. The strong reintegrationist position, according to Herrero Valeiro (1993), is based on a theory of ‘diglossia by dislocation’ (Gil Hernańdez and Rabunhal Corgo 1989). This rejects the notion of classical diglossia involving Spanish and Galician in Galicia. Rather, because the linguistic territory of Portuguese– Galician lies within two states, we have ‘diglossia by dislocation’. Galician lies within the Spanish national territory, where Castilian is official, and Castilian has assumed the role of High variety, displacing Galician. In this view, the normalisation of Galician must involve ‘replacing’ the Galician-speaking community within the community of Portuguese speakers. The moderate reintegrationist critics of this position see the central problem of ‘normalising’ Galician to be a different one, namely the reintegration of Castilian speakers into using Galician. There have been five centuries of contact between Castilian and Galician, with many Galician forms having been replaced by Castilian ones, and Galician has been under constant pressure from Castilian. They feel their goals are best served by (in Kloss’s terminology) creating a moderate degree of abstand from Castilian by establishing a norm which is not Hispanising but also not too different from the Castilian norm. What is interesting from our point of view is that these different political and cultural perspectives are each associated with a different set of orthographic choices and practices, playing on the similarities and differences between the established orthographies of Spanish and Portuguese – two closely related languages with a largely overlapping vocabulary, but distinct orthographic traditions. According to Herrero Valeiro (1993: 202), ‘Where language is concerned, the different lines of discourse present irreconcilable alternatives, and these divergences reach their peak when dealing with orthography. At this point we can talk of a war of orthographies’. Differentialism underlies the official orthographic norms, which date back to 1983. These distance Galician from Portuguese and bring it closer to Castilian. According to Herrero Valeiro, the sociolinguistic arguments to justify this state of affairs were only developed after the current norms were made official, and are not based on sound sociolinguistic research.


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Table 5.2. Comparison of Galician orthographic practices (extracted from Herrero Valeiro (1993: 187), adapted) Galician

Portuguese

Reintegrationist (strong)

Reintegrationist (weak)

Differentialist

Spanish

English gloss

um naçaõ escrever dia Corunha uma falhar gente

um naçom escrever dia Corunha umha falhar gente

un nacioń, nazoń escreber dia Corunã unha fallar xente

un nacioń escribir dıá Corunã unha fallar xente

un nacioń escribir dıá Corunã una fallar gente

a, one nation write day (City name) a, one to fail people

Moderate reintegrationism is characterised by an orthographic choice which maintains usage of certain graphemes which are similar to those of Castilian but not Portuguese, for example and , as a ‘transitional’ measure on the way to adopting the ‘historical’ forms and which are used in Portuguese. These orthographic choices can be seen as a way of ‘reintegrating’ Galician speakers who are literate in Castilian. Strong reintegrationism uses ‘historical–etymological’ orthography or normative Portuguese orthography, in accordance with the view that Galician and Portuguese are one language, and as a counter to ‘divergent Galician norms modelled on Spanish’. Table 5.2 shows a sample of the orthographic practices adopted by each faction. We can see that even so much as a diacritic may be enough to indicate a Galician writer’s alignment. Thus writing dıá ‘day’ with an accent on the middle character would indicate a differentialist disposition while writing dia without an accent indicates alignment with the ‘reintegrationists’. ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Ma´rio J. Herrero Valeiro (1996: 148) see the Celso A linguistic situation in Galicia as comparable in some respects with that in the Caribbean: in particular, they see a continuum of ‘geographical, social and contextual varieties’ in Galicia spanning the space between ‘Portuguese’ and ‘Spanish’. Their research has identified four ‘well-differentiated orthographic norms’ in use for Galician; but on closer inspection, they say, there are actually ten ‘sufficiently coherent’ different norms. ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Herrero Valeiro (1996: 148–149) point out the A significance of the fact that the systematic varieties of these continua are actually recognisable only through certain small relevant symbolic features. In this sense, linguistic ideologies play a crucial role



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when it comes to grouping the examples from the continua into discrete systems according to their differential features . . . In the case of writing in Galicia, the ‘point of inflexion’21 between what is symbolically ‘Galician’ (galego) and what is symbolically ‘Portuguese’ can be located in the presence of ç, of ss or even in the nasal tilde on a~, o~. . . However, what is really significant is that each of the above three points of inflexion between ‘Galician’ and ‘Portuguese’ also coincides with the symbolic boundary between ‘Spanish’ and ‘Portuguese’.

´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Herrero Valeiro mention other ‘visible points of A inflexion’ which separate Spanish orthographically from other languages used within the Spanish state. They write (1996: 149, fn.11): a visible point of inflexion separating Spanish from Catalan, more than the digraph ny (which actually is found in Spanish, e.g. in inyectar), is the idiosyncratic use of the raised point · for the geminate consonant /ll/ (paral·lel), which hyperdifferentiates Catalan from all the other languages of the planet. In the case of Euskara (Basque) a point of inflexion is the dropping of c in favour of k and the use of the groups tz, ts and tx to represent the affricates.

These are some of the very same graphemes that we have already encountered as being ‘at issue’ in Spain in various ways. We saw in the Introduction how replacing standard Spanish or has become an identity marker for various subcultural groups with Spain, while in Chapter 2 we saw how young Basques made use of these points of difference between Spanish and Basque to engage in ‘parodic spellings’ of Spanish (Urla 2003). Thus these salient points of difference, the ‘points of ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Herrero Valeiro’s terms, can be seen to inflexion’ in A have become iconic of, and for, particular groups within the Spanish state. In Galicia, each of the main norms, with one exception, has a unique marker. Only Spanish uses , only the differentialist norm uses , only the strong reintegrationist norm uses <mh> and only Portuguese uses . The more variable ‘moderate reintegrationist’ systems do not have any isolated ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Herrero Valeiro and specific identity markers like this (A ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Herrero Valeiro point out that, as Schief1996: 153). A felin and Doucet concluded from their study of Haitian orthography (See Chapter 4), orthographic systems are ‘indices of identity’, and ‘to the extent that these identities exist in a social space, the orthographies which indexically mark them will be resistant to change and extinction’. Thus circumstances of society and history will determine how many people use each norm, and each 21

‘Ponto de inflexa~o’ in the original. The term point of inflexion in mathematics refers to a point where the graph of a function changes from being convex to concave or vice versa.


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norm will maintain its symbolic value, by virtue of its difference from the others. In their conclusion, (1996: 154–155) they draw attention to the practice of writing as a ‘fundamental instrument’ for drawing symbolic boundaries between languages. They go on: In this regard writers, educators and other literate elites have a responsibility to reflect on the possible long term implications and costs of their practices, which consist not only of creating imaginary worlds (or in transmitting them), but also in contributing to the formation of a sustainable identity by means of collective recognition in the written language.

In other words, orthographies do not merely reflect identities; they help in creating them by forming ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991) based around particular sets of practices. 5.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have looked at some of the orthographic problems which are associated with representing unstandardised languages. Our two main case studies, though both can be modelled as continua, present some interesting contrasts. Jamaican Creole is scarcely recognised as a ‘writable’, let alone a literary language, but in fact many people do write Jamaican Creole for various purposes. When they do so, they are faced with making orthographic choices, in the absence of any established norms or official prescriptions. While the relative status and roles of Standard English and Creole are the subject of debate in the Caribbean, it would be wrong to say that orthography is a hotly contested matter in the Anglophone states, in contrast to Haiti (for example). In fact writers’ orthographic practices for English-lexicon Creole are developed in a context where government and language-planning authorities have little or no interest. I argued that writers’ choices in Creole represent an ‘informal ideology’ of language creation, where spellings are chosen to emphasise difference from Standard English even where the difference is insignificant or non-existent in phonetic terms. In contrast, in Galicia, debates about language are suffused with politics and ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Herrero Valeiro show, ideological positioning. As A points of minimal difference between the main norms carry an enormous symbolic load. ‘Portuguese’ and ‘Galician’ may be kept apart symbolically by no more than a ‘ç . . . ss or even . . . the nasal tilde on a~, o~’. Extending this ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Herrero insight to other languages within Spain enables A Valeiro to identify ‘visible points of inflexion’ which symbolically separate Spanish from Catalan and Basque, languages which compete with Spanish on



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their respective territories but are not joined to it by a continuum in the normal sense. Going beyond the boundaries of Spain we can take this approach further, to see the preference of some Creole writers for respellings like and as bearing the symbolic load of establishing a boundary between ‘Creole’ and ‘English’, the use of rather than as drawing the symbolic line between ‘American’ and ‘British’ written English, and the writing of postvocalic (but silent)
in the word recepça~o as delimiting ‘Portuguese’ from ‘Brazilian’ (where the norm for writing the same word would be receça~o). A further dramatic example is provided by the Bamileke language group of Cameroon, where the barred-u symbol ‘iconifies the strong cultural unity of the group’ at the same time as differentiating it from all other related languages (Bird 2001: 148). In conclusion, we can say that although representation, invariance, transcription and dialect differentiation are all issues of some importance for vernaculars developing orthographies, it is the desire for abstand – often with the accompanying iconisation of specific characters or diacritic marks which, for writers of the language, come to symbolise their language as opposed to all others – which drives the development of vernacular orthographies in many cases. In many cases the drive is to put abstand between the vernacular and the ‘high’ language which dominates it, but in some cases (Bamileke, for example) the desire is to differentiate similar varieties which do not necessarily involve relationships of unequal power or prestige. At the same time these icons of difference contribute to the collective ‘sustainable identities’ of their users as ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and Herrero Valeiro. This drive for difference described by A coupled with the creation of a distinctive group identity is also a recognisable theme in the subcultural spellings which we looked at in Chapter 2. Having spent several chapters looking at orthography development in the context of language standardisation and elaboration, in the next chapter, we turn to the subject of spelling reform in languages with established orthographies.


6

Reform or revolution: where angels fear to tread

[The new orthography] would be a significant move in the direction of further trivializing our pronunciation, in the direction of wasting the energy invested by our ancient forefathers in our difficult and rough, but richly and variously woven . . . language. (Polish literary critic Karol Ludwik Konin´ski, quoted by Rothstein (1977: 230)

on the 14 October 1996 the title-page of Der Spiegel famously implored its readers: ‘Rettet die Deutsche Sprache!’1 . . . The discursive drift which had characterised much of the debate was now seemingly complete. No longer was this a dispute about orthography. It was not even a question of the written language. What was clearly at stake here was the German language in all its force as a signifier of cultural and national identity. [Johnson 2000: 120] Traditions will be destroyed, new textbooks will have to be printed, new teaching methods developed, books translated, teachers retrained. Huge funds will have to be spent on all of this . . . It will cause a split in our society. It will be difficult for people to learn how to read and write anew . . . The link between generations will be broken. (Petition against script reform to the Tatarstan parliament, September 2001)2

1.

An intractable problem

1.1.

Introduction

‘Many can squabble over a single letter as though the well-being of Europe depended on it.’ So said the eighteenth-century Dutch writer Z. H. Alewijn (1742–1788).3 If we look at the history of orthographic reforms and attempted reforms, we can see the truth of this. In spite of Christina Eira’s 1 2 3

‘Save the German language!’. Jamestown Foundation Monitor, 25 September 2001, citing Interfax and Polit.ru as sources. Quoted by Geerts et al. 1977: 183. In the original, ‘Velen kunnen over een enkele letter redekavalen alsof er het welzijn van gantsch Euroop aan hinge’.

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Reform or revolution

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remark (1998: 174) that ‘people are unlikely to risk their lives for a practical concern such as whether or not to underline a retroflex [ ]’, it will be clear from some of the cases described in the preceding chapters that orthographic wars are often fought letter by letter, diacritic by diacritic, taking no prisoners. Chapters 3 and 5 of this book deal in the main with the earlier stages of development of orthographies, and Chapter 4 deals with later developments; this chapter is devoted to the process of spelling reform, which presupposes the existence of some already established norm. Once established, orthographies are extremely difficult to change, as a variety of conservative forces come into play to resist any tampering with the norm, let alone large-scale reform. As Fishman has said, r

Orthographic change represents the abandonment of written tradition and as such it must cope with the gatekeepers of written tradition, the poets, priests, principals and professors, with the institutions and symbols that they create and serve, or be destined to oblivion. Indeed, the greater and grander the tradition of literacy, literature and liturgy in an orthographic community, the less likely that even minor systematic orthographic change will be freely accepted and the less likely that any orthographic change will be considered minor. (Fishman 1977: XVI)

Although often the discourse of resistance to change draws on claims of antiquity and ancient heritage, the fact is that once a norm has been established, it will be resistant to change even if it has a very short history. Rothstein (1977: 232) gives an example of a change introduced to Polish in the 1930s, which provided a simple rule for deciding whether to write or <j> to represent the glide /j/ after a consonant, replacing a complex set of etymologically motivated rules introduced in 1918. Even this change was not accepted without dissent, in spite of the ‘tradition’ being less than twenty years old. The quantity of resistance is also not proportional to the amount of change. Although the proposals for German orthographic reform in the 1990s only affected an estimated 0.5 per cent of the lexicon (Johnson 2000: 116) or 0.05 percent of all words in running text (Institut fu¨r deutsche Sprache, Mannheim) they resulted in a public uproar and a constitutional ‘crisis’ in Germany itself, when the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein decided not to implement the proposal (See Johnson 1999, 2000, 2002, 2005 for discussion). Likewise, a modest set of proposals to adjust French orthography in 1990 (the Druon reforms) caused uproar, despite the fact that according to the authors of the reform, none of the 500 most frequently used words would be modified, and altogether exactly 2383 words were affected according to the Robert dictionary (Chollet 1992: 76, Ager 1996: 121).4 4

Or alternatively, ‘one or two words per page of Proust’ according to Muller (1992), cited by Ager (1996: 121).


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The aptness of Fishman’s reference to ‘poets, priests, principals and professors’ is shown by the recent attempts at orthographic reform for Dutch (Jacobs 1997). From 1989 to 1994, a government-appointed committee of scholars worked to establish a better and more consistent orthography, ‘with due account being taken of ‘‘societal acceptability’’’ (Jacobs 1997: 107). Because of an awareness of how the public might react, all work was carried out in secret until the recommendations were ready. At a critical moment in 1994, the proposals were leaked to the press, resulting in a tirade of negative publicity, much of it based on incorrect or misleading information about the new spellings. The politicians whose responsibility it was to make the decision, and who had appointed the committee in the first place, then immediately rejected the proposals. After this the wider discussion about spelling reform began in earnest. Dutch-speaking writers opposed the committee’s proposals en bloc. In general, the authors talked about an all-pervading love of ease (‘illiterate readers’, ‘provincialization’), and they questioned the linguists’ authority on language (‘nonsense’, ‘artificial ageing’, ‘aberration’, ‘addiction to Social-Realist rule’, ‘an effort to justify itself’ . . . . (Jacobs 1997: 111–112)

Jacobs’s finding is that linguists acting alone or with politicians cannot hope to bring about successful orthographic reform: Because of a short but acrimonious controversy in the press, the ministers yielded to the pressure of an elite of professional language users that appeared to be very effective in denouncing the authority of linguists in matters of orthography. Successful spelling reforms, therefore, seem possible only when these groups of intellectuals also are mobilized in support of particular proposals for language reform. (Jacobs 1997: 116)

This leads Jacobs to much the same conclusion as Fishman: Hence, probably in every attempt at spelling reform, considerable inertia can be expected since professional language users have a clear stake in leaving orthography untouched.

Similarly in the case of the orthographic reforms proposed for Czech in 1993, writers and intellectuals were in the forefront of protest (Dreserova´ 2004). In Germany, a ‘declaration’ against the already-agreed orthographic reforms in 1996 was signed by some of Germany’s most eminent writers and intellectuals, while the news magazine Der Spiegel proclaimed ‘the Poets’ Revolt’ with an illustration showing ‘a group of writers armed for battle, amidst a pile of books, one of which was the Duden spelling dictionary impaled on a bayonet. Towering above the scene as a whole stood a resolute Gunter Grass, proudly bearing the German national flag’ (Johnson 2000: 120).



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In spite of this deep-seated inertia, change is possible when there is a clear politically (or ideologically) driven agenda. This may account for why in recent times, alphabet reform – a complete change from one script to another – has taken place in a number of countries in spite of the complexity and scope of the change being much greater than that of, say, the German or French reforms. In the former Soviet Union, for example, alphabet reform has been brought in in a number of the newly independent states and (in the face of determined opposition from the Moscow government, which has legislated against it) in Tatarstan, a constituent republic of the Russian Federation (Schlyter (2001), Alpatov (2002), Sebba (2006)). The same language communities had already experienced script changes in the 1920s, from Arabic to Roman, and in the 1930s, from Roman to Cyrillic (Winner 1952; Henze 1977). The kinds of ideological agendas which led to these changes have been discussed earlier in this book. Undoubtedly such changes can be made more easily by states where power is held centrally and public consensus is not a prerequisite for introducing far-reaching reforms. 1.2.

An approach to description: Geerts et al. (1977)

Various scholars have tried to understand and account for the intensity of feeling which surrounds orthographic reform, and its apparently almost inevitable failure or very limited success. Geerts5 et al. (1977), in a paper on Dutch spelling reform which has provided a model for later researchers (e.g. Garcez 1995 on Portuguese/Brazilian), list a range of arguments which were employed in the debates, under two headings: (a) ‘More Emotional Arguments’ and (b) ‘More Objective Arguments’. The arguments can be briefly summarised as follows (omitting a small number which are specific to the Dutch/Belgian situation): ‘More Emotional Arguments’ (Geerts et al., 1977: 202–203): these are all conservative and against reform. Habituation argument: against any change whatever. ‘Any change is worse than none’. Aesthetic argument: ‘proposed changes make the spelling ugly’. Corruption argument: ‘proposed changes corrupt and impoverish the language’. Laziness argument: ‘changing the spelling is an expression of current permissive thinking’.

5

Geerts later (1989–1994) chaired the orthographic committee for Dutch whose work came to the sad end described in the previous section (Jacobs 1997).


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Frequent Change argument: ‘we are making fools of ourselves by changing our spelling so often’. ‘More Objective Arguments’ (Geerts et al., 1977: 203–206) These can be divided into those that are against reform and those that favour it. The first six are conservative: Older Culture argument: ‘a new spelling breaks the links with our own culture of the past. We will not be able to read our own literature any more’. Homograph argument: ‘Spelling reform increases the number of homographs and hence misunderstandings’. Financial argument: ‘each spelling reform requires respelling and reprinting of many books and this is too expensive’. Etymological argument: ‘the present spelling makes the history of the words clear’. Dialect argument: ‘simplified spelling based on the pronunciation of the standard language would favour users who speak the standard natively. Dialect speakers will be disadvantaged’. The four arguments below are in favour of reform: Word Image argument: ‘language is something quite different from spelling. Spelling is only a code to represent sounds’. Instruction argument: ‘spelling demands too much time in schools. If spelling were simpler, teachers could get on with teaching more important things’. Social argument: ‘spelling simplification is a social necessity. It is especially important that people of lower status be able to spell correctly because spelling is used as a means of social discrimination’. Revolution argument: ‘if one wants to eliminate intolerance and discrimination, one must change our society completely’. Geerts et al. show that for many of these arguments there is a corresponding argument which supports the contrary position: for example, against the homograph argument one can argue that there are already many homographs in the language and they do not present problems for speakers; against the argument that the current spelling shows etymology, one can argue that ‘there are already many words whose etymology cannot be recognized and this causes no troubles at all’ (p. 204). The instruction argument has been countered as follows: ‘a difficult spelling is educationally and pedagogically justified . . . difficult spelling strengthens analytical thinking’.



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Geerts et al. also identify seven ‘target groups’ which might nowadays be described as ‘stakeholders’ in the orthographic discussions (p. 206): 1. the government agencies involved (education, culture and science); 2. educational associations (teachers unions, primary school teachers organizations etc.); 3. writers and journalists and their associations; 4. authoritative academies; 5. mass media (written press, television and radio); 6. other specific groups: industry, commerce, librarians, publishers and so on; 7. public opinion in general. The categories of argument which Geerts et al. identify are not unique to Dutch, and can easily be found in the discussions surrounding most orthographic reforms. Well-documented debates like those around the Polish reforms of the 1930s (Rothstein 1977), the Portuguese–Brazilian Orthographic Accord of 1990 (Garcez 1995), the French spelling reforms (the Druon reform) of 1990 (Catach 1991, Chollet 1992, Schiffman 1996, Ager 1996), the aborted Dutch reform of 1994 (Jacobs 1997), the Tatar script change from Roman to Cyrillic (Sebba 2006) and the German reform of the 1990s (Johnson 1999, 2000, 2002, 2005) provide numerous examples. Likewise the same stakeholders, identified by Geerts et al., appear in almost every debate, often grinding the same axes. However, the listing of arguments and players in itself does not provide a theoretical framework for understanding the social complexity and sensitivity of orthographic reform: Geerts et al. (1977: 233) note that It is difficult to isolate the most important factors of success or failure. Moreover, the scientific literature about the revision of orthographies in general is still in its infancy and lacks the concepts, the technical data collection methods, and the analysis skills needed to inquire into the intensity, extensity, or continuity of either the change forces and processes or the counterchange factors (Fishman 1971: 363).

They conclude: All in all, the influence of non-linguistic factors, namely political ones, seems to be strong . . . But these sociological factors are generally not taken into account by spelling reformers. (Burns 1953) 6

We need to look for a theory which will help in explaining the intermittent success and frequent failure of attempts at orthographic reform, and the passion of the debates surrounding it. 6

Burns was writing about Haitian Creole orthography. See Chapter 4.


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1.3.

Competing discourses of reform: Eira (1998)

Eira (1998) takes the notion of ‘competing discourses’ as basic to understanding choices and disputes over orthography, arguing that ‘the basis for orthography selection is fundamentally a question of the location of authority, which is in turn a function of the prevailing discourse’ (1998: 172). She writes: At base, the authority which directs this process reflects a configuration of cultural discourses. Disagreement and imposed change can be explained in terms of conflict within or between discourses; choices which appear inexpedient according to the framework of one discourse become comprehensible from the perspective of the discourse that motivates them. (1998: 171)

Eira’s framework is useful in understanding orthographic reform, because it addresses itself in particular to disagreements over orthography choice: ‘differences of opinion at all levels reflect the underlying discourse in which they are framed . . . an argument framed in terms of one Discourse is incoherent against an argument framed within another’. A mismatch of discourses may lead to ‘problems in mutual understanding and respect’ (1998: 174). Eira mentions six ‘discourse fields that impinge on orthography issues’: scientific, political, religious, technological, historical, and pedagogical.7 In practice, these are not easy to separate; for example, ‘scientific’ and ‘technological’ discourses may easily overlap, likewise ‘historical’ and ‘religious’. According to Eira, ‘In practice, discourses do not occur as predictable and neatly separable bases of opinion, but are interwoven in ways peculiar to each culture’. In this chapter, rather than discuss the arguments pro and contra orthographic reform which are predictably given an outing whenever orthographic reform is discussed, I want to examine the discourses of orthographic reform, exploring what they tell us about how orthography has been conceptualised and deployed for symbolic purposes in the debates over reform. 2.

Discourses of reform

In this section we will look at how some discourses of reform have been part of orthography reform debates in different parts of the world. Some of the examples used will relate to script reform, which though usually more farreaching than spelling reform is the subject of very similar discourses.

7

Stebbins (2001: 189) adds the category of ‘community discourse’.



2.1.

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Modernisation, globalisation and technology

Because orthographic reform involves change and disruption, its proponents almost always have to find a modernising discourse to which they can link their proposals – though at times they may have to play this down. Modernising discourse often is linked with a discourse of technological advancement and economic success – just as with the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy described by Street (1984: 2). For example, in the Tatar orthography dispute (Sebba 2006), Romanisation was discoursally linked to the modernising of technology and a ‘breakthrough’ in access to the Internet. The Roman alphabet was represented as being more suited to computers and the Internet.8 This is further bound up with a discourse of commodification surrounding the Roman alphabet: for example, Khasanova (1997) claimed that the change to Roman script would allow Tatar computer science specialists to exploit their existing advantage in this area where there is a skills shortage ‘and become leaders among the Turkic peoples in the area of information technology’. The script change was thus explicitly linked not just to greater efficiency in terms of accessing the Internet and information technology, but to a more entrepreneurial desire to ‘race ahead’, to steal a march on users of other languages who have poorer training facilities and/or less Internet-friendly scripts. In the case of campaigns for the spelling reform of English, the discourse of modernisation usually takes the form of arguments in favour of a phonemic orthography, as for example in the following, from a leaflet called Modernizing English spelling: principles & practicalities, published in England by the Simplified Spelling Society: Like all human systems, the way languages are spelt needs modernizing from time to time. For optimum literacy, their spelling must show how words are spoken and their pronunciation must show how words are spelt. But over centuries as pronunciation changes and words are borrowed from other languages, this correspondence between letters and sounds is undermined. Without modernization, spelling becomes ever more confused and literacy harder to acquire, and all education suffers. Most languages with a long alphabetic history have modernized their spelling in the 20th century, because it is understood that, just as a neglected garden degenerates into a wilderness, so the spelling of a language clogs up with orthographic weeds if left untended. (Simplified Spelling Society n.d.(a)).

8

For example, the director of the Ibrahimov Institute, Mirfatykh Zakiyev, was quoted as saying: ‘The Turkic peoples who have attained some degree of independence are gradually entering into the global information system. But this is simpler to do on the basis of the Latin alphabet than the Cyrillic. Furthermore, the Tatars can accomplish a changeover of this type considerably more easily than, for example, the Russians or Chinese, for whom the cost of changing scripts will be excessively high’ (Ivashko 2002).


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This adherence to the phonemic principle is made explicit in another leaflet called Six axioms on English spelling, also published by the Simplified Spelling Society (n.d.(b)): 1. The letters of the alphabet were designed to represent speech sounds; that is the alphabetic principle. 2. The alphabetic principle makes literacy easy, allowing the reader to pronounce words from their spelling, and the writer to spell them from their sounds. 3. As pronunciation changes through the ages, the alphabetic principle tends to be corrupted; the spelling of words then needs to be adapted to show the new sounds. 4. Unlike other languages, English has not systematically modernised its spelling for nearly 1,000 years, and today it only haphazardly observes the alphabetic principle. 5. Neglect of the alphabetic principle now makes literacy unnecessarily difficult in English, and all education suffers. 6. Procedures are needed to manage improvements to English spelling for the future.

This enthusiasm for the phonemic principle is not confined to British spelling reformers. The following comes from a US Internet site, the NuSpel website.9 In recent times, advances in linguistic science have led to the creation of alphabets around the world for hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of languages for which no writing system had ever existed. One of the greatest in this field, if not the all-time great, was my professor Kenneth L. Pike at the University of Michigan. Through his system and his efforts, innumerable so-called ‘primitive’ or ‘third-world’ people now have alphabets far, far superior to our own . . . Today, despite the problem posed by the expectations of speakers of different regional and social dialects of our language, proposed reforms can be virtually ‘perfect’ – altogether so when compared with the incredibly archaic non-system that we have inherited. . . . So contributions, large and small, from young and old, toward erasing the disgrace of seeing our country fall behind Third-World countries in terms of literacy will not be employed to lobby government, starting figuratively at the top, but to connect up with the bold, adventurous, pioneering spirits who will be the first in history, against all odds, inertia and opposition, to bring about such an unparalled [sic], incredible, formidable, awesome, invaluable change. (‘English spelling reform’ by Wendell H. Hall)

Typically, phonemicist discourse like this connects spelling with both literacy and ease of learning. This can be seen in the last example, as in the

9

http://www.nuspel.org/phonicslb.html, accessed 24th November 2006.



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next, which is taken from another leaflet of the Simplified Spelling Society, Introducing the simplified spelling society (n.d.(c)): Success in the modern world depends on literacy, but English spelling is so chaotic that after 10 or more years of education many people still have only a shaky command of it, and millions are functionally illiterate. Even in the hands of professional writers it is an uncertain and clumsy system. As a medium of world communication, English is learnt by hundreds of millions of non-native speakers, yet their access to the language is likewise obstructed by the mismatch between speech and writing, which arouses anger, ridicule and frustration. Native and non-native users alike would gain from simpler, more regular, more predictable spelling.

In this discourse, the failings of non-phonemic spelling are emphasised and magnified, with unreferenced research being called on for support, as in the following from a section entitled ‘the price of chaos’ in Modernizing English spelling: principles and practicalities (Simplified Spelling Society n.d.(a)): Literacy is consequently far harder to acquire in English than in most languages. . . . Perhaps most serious of all, there is evidence that irregular spelling may harm the development of children’s logical thinking generally.

Or this, from a recent book by Masha Bell, herself a member of the Simplified Spelling Society: ‘The most serious drawback of English spelling, however, is undoubtedly that it dooms around 20 % of all learners to guaranteed failure. For about 1/5 of all school children it is quite simply too difficult. When a system is too difficult, large numbers of people inevitably fail to cope with it . . . The US and the UK both jail a relatively high percentage of their populations. The UK’s rate is by far the highest in Europe. English spelling may well be at least partly responsible for this difference.’ (Bell 2004: 117)

What is interesting to note here is the particular notions of ‘literacy’ with which the writers of these polemics are working. They lie squarely within Street’s category of autonomous models of literacy (See Chapter 1) based ‘on the assumption that [literacy] is a neutral technology that can be detached from specific social contexts’ (Street 1984: 1). They make, or imply, the claims typically associated with those models, that adopting a phonemic orthography will produce concrete benefits in terms of ‘improved literacy’ leading to cognitive benefits for the individual and/or economic improvements for the society as a whole. From this perspective, many English spelling reformers can be seen as having a narrow perspective on literacy, one which provides a rationale for their enthusiasm for reform. At the same time, it goes some way to explaining their failure, as the social nature of literacy is denied or sidelined: ‘Anxiety


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[about spelling reform] may arise from fear of being unable to cope with change; but spelling reform is a far gentler process than reforming currency or weights and measures which many nations have taken in their stride’ (From: Modernizing English spelling: principles and practicalities). 2.2.

Discourses of belonging, unity and separation

Scripts have always had strong associations with religions and the literacy practices connected with those religions.10 For example, in Central Asia, there were powerful associations between Russian Orthodoxy and Cyrillic on the one hand, and Islam and Arabic script on the other. The associations of the Roman script were more neutral, allowing it to be introduced to replace the Arabic script for the Turkic languages in the 1920s, at a time when the connection of Cyrillic with the Church made its introduction impossible among these Islamic peoples (Winner 1952). Elsewhere, in the former Yugoslavia, the associations of the Roman script are less neutral, as the contrast between the Roman and Cyrillic scripts both produces and symbolises the contrast between Croatian, whose speakers are mainly Catholics, and Serbian, whose speakers are mainly Orthodox. In the modern discourses of orthography, it is plain that the associations of script with nationhood and international relationships are much more important than the associations with religion. Because of these strong associations, script reforms often evoke a discourse of membership, belonging and unity. The script provides a symbolic link with others who share the same religion or supposed cultural origins, even where they do not share the same language. In the case of the Russian Federation, the Cyrillic script was one of the few icons shared by all the component states (Alpatov 2002: 124, quoting the French Russianist He´le`ne Carre`re d’Encausse); this goes a long way in accounting for the very hostile reaction from Moscow when Tatarstan proposed to replace Cyrillic with the Roman alphabet. We have seen a number of cases where specific elements of an orthography powerfully symbolise a group with which the orthography is associated. For example, the ‘barred u’ in Bamileke ‘iconifies the strong cultural unity of the group’ (Bird 2001: 148), while using to represent / k / in Basque ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and creates a symbolic separation from Spanish (Urla 1995, A Herrero Valeiro 1996). Unlike script reforms, spelling reforms rarely propose changing such iconic elements except perhaps on an occasional or ad hoc basis, for example for certain loanwords. This may be because recent orthographic reforms for standardised literary languages have been relatively smallscale anyway (mainly adjusting marginal elements such as loanwords or 10

Cf. Kolarz (1946: 21) on Eastern Europe and the Balkans: ‘Almost every alphabet was identified with a particular creed; consequently a change of alphabet was sometimes regarded as abandoning a creed’.



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hyphenation) or it may be because the authorities realise the cultural importance of these iconic elements and would not dare to propose any changes, knowing how they would be resisted. In the recent German spelling reforms, for example, one symbolically significant change which could have been made, and which would have brought German into line with almost every other language using the Roman script – the ending of the convention of writing all nouns with a capital letter – was not part of the proposals. German orthography was thus allowed to retain its most salient characteristic, which separates it not only from most other languages but even from other closely related languages such as Dutch and Danish.11 In contrast, as we saw in Chapter 4, the removal of such iconic items, symbolic of the orthography of the former colonial power, is a favoured strategy in ‘post-colonial’ orthographies. 2.3.

Cultural heritage: creation myths, history, permanence and decline

If modernising discourses are usually mobilised in support of orthographic change, historical discourse is usually used to argue for maintaining the status quo. A discourse about maintenance and loss of cultural heritage is a predictable part of every dispute over orthographic change, whether it affects the script itself or just the spelling of certain words. The opponents of change draw on a discourse of cultural loss: ‘A new spelling breaks the links with our own culture of the past. We will not be able to read our own literature anymore. And even if older books remain accessible, they will still be considered oldfashioned because of their old spelling’ as Geerts et al. (1977: 203) summarise the argument. They call this the older culture argument. Slightly more emotive expressions were used in a petition objecting to the alphabet reform in Tatarstan in 2001: ‘traditions will be destroyed, new textbooks will have to be printed . . . It will cause a split in our society . . . The link between generations will be broken’ (Jamestown Foundation Monitor 25 September 2001, citing Interfax and Polit. ru as sources). In the German reforms of the 1990s, just the same argument was used, in spite of the considerably less dramatic changes being proposed: ‘The new German orthography leads to a culture break. People will no longer be able to read old texts. If many writers want, as a result, to be published in the old orthography, it will lead to chaos in school books’ (Institut fu¨r Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim).12 11

12

Geerts et al. (1977: 203) point out that the converse was used as an argument against reform in the Dutch spelling debates of the 1950s/1960s: ‘By making our spelling more Dutch and hence more different from the spelling of [English, French and German], we increase the probability of losing contact with these three cultures’. They call this the surrounding cultures argument. Press release on the spelling reform: Die Gegner der Neuregelung behaupten – Richtig ist . . . Accessed at www.ids-mannheim.de/reform/richtig.html, 2 November 1998.


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In Tatarstan, there was a political twist to this argument. It was reported that ‘the change has been bitterly opposed . . . by some members of the older generation, especially those members of the Tatar intelligentsia whose life’s work is written in the Cyrillic script and who fear, with some justification, that it will be lost to future generations if the alphabet changes’ (Jamestown Foundation Monitor, 25 September 2001). According to Khasanova (1997), this argument is often put forward by Communists, who fear that the script change will be used to erase the history and culture of the Soviet period.13 The fact that all the Turkic republics used the Roman alphabet during the 1920s has paradoxically allowed proponents of the change from Cyrillic to adopt a discourse of permanence: since the Roman script was already adopted in 1927 in Tatarstan, the present-day script change is not really a change at all. Rather, the Cyrillic period is talked about as a sort of temporary detour.14 From this perspective, Tatar is not making a ‘culture break’ but returning, after an interval, to a (modernising) past. Opposing the script change, the leader of the Islamic community of Russia, the supreme mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin, was quoted as claiming, like many others, that ‘the introduction of the Roman script could destroy the integrity of the Tatar nation and cause other nations in Russia to oppose Tatars’. But Talgat Tadzhuddin added that he was ‘proud of the fact that Cyril and Methodius, the founders of the Cyrillic script, were Bulgars, and [that Tatars] share historical roots with them’.15 This allusion to the quasi-historical origins of Cyrillic script on the one hand, and of the supposed common origins of the Bulgars and Tatars, implied an ancient connection between the Tatar language and the Cyrillic script, which might lead to disaster if broken. Such allusions to historic origins are frequently used to legitimate maintaining archaic spellings and/or preserving the orthographic status quo. Indeed, the only way to persuade the public to accept a change, however small, may be to wrap up the news of change in a thick blanket of talk about constancy and permanence. The 1990 (minor) French spelling reforms were introduced thus

13

14

15

In the case of the Czech orthographic reform of 1993, many writers argued that the reform would lead to the loss of the national traditions, and future generations would not be able to read the national literature (Dreserova´ 2004: 13). In this case, however, it was not the former Communists who objected most vociferously. Rather, ‘the majority of the writers who expressed their annoyance with the new orthographic reform were those who could not officially express their opinion on public issues before 1989 and their work had been therefore limited to the samizdat or exile publishing’ (Dreserova´ 2004: 14). So, for example, according to the ethnologist Damir Iskhakov, since the use of Roman script was already agreed in 1927, ‘although this can look like a change, in actual fact it is just about a return to the line of development chosen by Tatar society in the 1920s’ (Knox 2002). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Daily Review from Tatarstan, 23 July 2002. Accessed June 2006 at www.rferl.org/reports/tb-daily-report/2002/07/0–230702.asp



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by Maurice Druon, permanent secretary of the Academie française, and president of the working group on spelling reform (Schiffman 1996: 116–117): I only wanted to underline that [something of ] permanence appears and imposes itself as soon as one undertakes to act on the structures of French, and that this permanence expresses itself in such words as certitude, clarity, precision, purity, all qualities that make our language supreme in the domains of ethics, of law, of [international diplomatic] agreements and negotiations and, more generally, in the art of exposition and of definition.

Despite this attempt to forestall criticism, the proposals evoked a ‘storm of protest’, to the extent that even a group of researchers studying the impact of the reforms found themselves under attack (Schiffman 1996: 118 and fn. 74). The Belgian philologist Andre´ Goose points out that it is a widespread fallacy in France that the present version of the French orthography is unchanging. Although most people have a vague notion that their language, and therefore the spelling, have undergone some transformations in the course of time, very few are aware of the real extent of orthographic changes in French over the centuries, and few realise ‘that all the classic writers whose works are read today: for example, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Molie`re, have been rewritten into modern French’ (Chollet 1992: 61). Goose (1990, cited by Chollet) mentions the case of the famous grammarian M. Grevisse invoking Voltaire in the defence of a rule which the latter did not apply. Thus the illusory ‘permanence’ of French spelling provides an immediate ground for rebuttal of any proposal to change it.16 Creation myths loom especially large in the case of French, according to Schiffman (1996: 115): Many notions that the French have about their language, especially its orthography, are based on myths that appear to have arisen in the nineteenth century, and concern the legal status of the orthography and the role of the Academie française in setting rules. That is, there seems to be a popular understanding in France that language policy was set in stone sometime in the nineteenth century, or during the Revolution [footnote omitted].

One of these myths, says Schiffman (1996: 115–116), has the following form: There were laws passed in about 1835 (opinions vary) that required schools to teach the kind of French defined (in some vague manner) according to whatever principles the

16

Exactly this point can be, and has been made about English spelling; cf. Stubbs 1992 (see Chapter 2), Bell (2004: 104).


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Academie française uses. French orthography is the language, warts and all: though it may sometimes be illogical, that is its beauty, and to learn its rules imparts a kind of discipline that is good for people.

Catach (1991, cited by Schiffman 1996: 119) discusses an element of this mythology, the ‘imaginary decree of 1832’. ‘When many of the opponents of reform want to defend their opposition to reform, they invoke this decret, which has supposedly never been abrogated, and which supposedly authorized the spelling norms of the Academie française as a ‘state orthography’ (p. 115), which alone is valid’. However, Catach points out, there is no evidence that such a decree was ever issued, nor was it ever mentioned explicitly before about 1970. However, it received many mentions (and its existence was never called into question) during the debates about French orthography reform in the late 1980s. The appeal to the past is particularly strong in the discourse of some French opponents of spelling reform. According to Chollet (1992: 63), ‘Raymond Jacquenod goes as far as to compare the French spelling system to a cathedral: ‘‘. . . in which the most different periods combine . . . whose ‘cohabitation’ eventually achieved harmony, . . . which the archaelogist must be wary not to ruin in an impossible attempt at uniformity and unity . . . the correct use of orthography . . . is a question of good manners . . . towards the ancients who passed it on to us, and towards those to whom we address ourselves’’ (Jacquenod, 1991)’. The theme of language decline linked to spoken language is a common one, familiar to all Western linguists. In the case of French, Schiffman (1996: 116) summarises this discourse as follows: Phoneticism, or writing things the way they ‘sound’ is tantamount to chaos, disorder, le deluge, and will bring forth anarchy, riots, the breakdown of society, morals, and the end of civilization. Not one change must be allowed in this direction.

This complaint is by no means an exclusively French one. Jacobs (1997: 112) mentions how Dutch authors attacked the new orthography proposals on the grounds of an ‘all-pervading love of ease’ just as in a previous round of spelling reform the poet P. C. Boutens had attacked ‘the laziness spelling’ (Geerts et al. 1977: 195). Rothstein (1977: 230) shows that very similar arguments were used in Poland in the 1930s: the literary critic Karol Ludwik Konin´ski argued that the new orthography that was allegedly being proposed would be a significant move in the direction of further trivializing our pronunciation, in the direction of wasting the energy invested by our ancient forefathers in our difficult and rough, but richly and variously woven . . . language . . . In the course of centuries,



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language deteriorates with respect to its energy, i.e., people talk more and more carelessly, but those ancient, expressive sounds, full of phonetic energy, attesting as it were to a kind of general vigor of the tribe that spoke in that way, have remained in historical spelling as a glorious reminder of ancient strength and riches.

According to Rothstein (1977: 230) Konin´ski applied the physical concept of entropy17 to orthography to defend the historical principle in spelling. ‘An historical orthography,’ he wrote, ‘is an energetic orthography . . . an orthography that phoneticises on the model of everyday [speech] is an orthography of entropy and therefore a destructive and sad orthography’. Almost the same discourse was used by the Dutch author M. van der Plas to inveigh against the spelling reforms of the 1970s: ‘I am against a world of least resistance. I am against a world which only considers the current moment important. Against a world in which roots are eradicated, origins made unrecognizable, traditions thrown away as useless rubbish. I am against the spelling reform proposals of the Pee-Wesselings Commission’ (Craeybeckx 1972: 88, cited by Geerts et al. 1977: 223). The objection to ‘lazy spellings’ may also express itself as a distaste for ‘downward levelling’ which has ideological implications beyond the bounds of linguistics. In the case of French, Chollet (1992) points to discourse such as ‘the collapse of the main lines of our culture . . . eventually lead to the progressive creolisation of our language’ (Sallenave, 1990) as having, in the context of French society of the period, xenophobic undertones. ‘Rightly or wrongly, some people see in the Druon reform, a threat to the purity of their language, and by extension to their identity as Frenchmen/women. ‘‘Our culture’’ means the French culture [as] opposed to the North-African and African cultures, an idea which is reinforced – or so it seems to me – by the choice of the word ‘‘creolisation’’’ (1992: 64–65). The discourse of reformers about ‘simplifying’ or ‘regularising’ or ‘modernising’ spelling thus to some extent plays into the hands of their opponents, whose discourse associates such notions with language ‘decline’ or ‘decay’. This discourse of decline is of course strongly linked to ‘creation myths’ about language and culture too. Thus according to Dreserova´ (2004: 13) a preference for spelling the suffix ismus/izmus with <s> among Czech writers and intellectuals was associated with a sense of returning to ‘western culture built on the grounds of Greek and Latin heritage’ (Kostlań 1993: 11). The new spelling was associated with ‘communist interference in personal affairs’ even though many linguists pointed out that the progressive form with 17

Entropy seems to have been a popular scientific concept at the time, for example the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s essay ‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and other matters’ appeared in 1923.


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had already been allowed in some items since 1913 and that the majority of the speech communities in Europe adapted these words as well (Sgall, 1994). 2.4.

Economic discourses

Discourses of orthography reform often revolve around money. This can be at a very fundamental level, relating to the cost of ink, paper and labour. Some of these issues date back to the period even before printing. Scragg notes (1974: 52) that in the Middle Ages French scribes preferred etymological spellings like pauvre, for earlier povre in imitation of Latin pauper, especially in legal language, ‘because lawyers’ clerks were paid for writing by the inch and superfluous letters provided a useful source of income’. He adds that the same practice ‘seems to have survived in England at least to the end of the sixteenth century’. In more recent times, cost-efficiency has been used as an argument for spelling reform which would do away with superfluous letters or simplify di- and trigraphs into single characters. Philip Baker makes this point with respect to some modern African languages: In extreme cases such as Xhosa and Venda,18 one-segment per-phoneme orthographies could produce economies of space in excess of 30 per cent. It seems likely that the saving in typing, typesetting, printing and paper costs would very quickly far outweigh the costs of providing the equipment to cope with diacritics and special characters. 19

Rothstein (1977: 227) recounts that during the 1930s in Poland, The Polish Society of Book Publishers proposed a revised orthography along Czech lines, i.e. with diacritics instead of digraphs. They argued that this would lead to cheaper books (by virtue of a 6 per cent saving on ink and paper) and to greater sales of Polish books among other Slavs.20

18

19

20

These are both languages of South Africa, belonging to the Bantu language subfamily. Xhosa uses di- and trigraphs to represent fricatives and affricates and for its series of click consonants which can be simple, nasalised, aspirated, voiced or nasalised and voiced, thus: <x> (lateral click), <xh>, , and . While eliminating the di- and trigraphs which are common in these languages would undoubtedly produce a reduction in the length of texts and hence a reduction in ink, overall savings would probably amount to much less than thirty per cent when white margins, blank pages and illustrations which make up a large part of modern publications are taken into account. The implication seems to be that making the orthographies more similar will increase the mutual intelligibility of Polish and Czech, Slovak, Slovene and soon, and create a common ‘print language’ (Anderson 1991).



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The official reform of that period had an amusing and unforeseen consequence, as it was resolved that certain compounds of preposition plus noun which had previously been written as one word should be spelled as two words. As a result, ‘quarrels and disturbances erupted at post offices as postal patrons discovered that they would have to pay more for their telegrams because some single words had now become two words or more’ (Rothstein 1977: 231). However, the real stakes can be very much higher than this. Where large numbers of publications will require reissuing in a new orthography, the costs can be very substantial, both to publishers (who find their stocks in print unsaleable) and authors (who find their work unreadable). The argument that large-scale revising and reprinting of texts would be damagingly expensive (especially for an economically weak country) was used against script change in Tatarstan, and as an argument against the Luso-Brazilian spelling proposals by some Portuguese-language publishers (Garcez 1995: 168), who added that it might jeopardise the publication of important current titles. Authors in Tatarstan and in Germany complained that their works would become inaccessible to the younger generation. Publishers themselves have been active lobbyists in some of the fiercest orthographic controversies. In the case of the recent German orthographic reforms, publishers were affected to different extents. According to the newspaper Tageszeitung (2 July 1996, p. 4) the educational authorities planned the changeover of schoolbooks to be ‘cost-neutral’; the main problems would be for publishers of books for children and young people. They would have to republish all their titles and remainder of any unsold books in the old orthography. One large publisher claimed that the spelling reform would cost it up to six million marks, incurred in reissuing its list of 19,000 titles. According to its head, the reform offered an opportunity for small publishers, which could more easily adapt their more limited lists (Tageszeitung 3 July 1996, p. 7). Dictionary publishers stand particularly to gain or to lose from orthographic change. The publishers of the German Duden dictionary, which since 1955 had had a ‘de facto status as the arbiter in all orthography-related matters’ (Johnson 2000: 109) lost their ‘quasi-official’ position as language guardians to a 12-person commission of experts from Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Tageszeitung 2 July 1996, p. 4). In Brazil, the scholar and diplomat Antoˆnio Houaiss, a former Minister of Culture, was one of the strongest proponents of the spelling reforms. He was accused by journalists of being interested in turning his own dictionary, then in preparation, into a best-seller (Garcez 1995: 168). A factor in the Portuguese–Brazilian spelling accord was the hope that spelling reform could create a single market for Portuguese-language texts, by


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making the same text accessible to readers in any Portuguese-speaking country.21 As in the German case, this would not be equally advantageous to everyone. According to Garcez (1995: 166) this argument in support of harmonising the orthography mainly seems to come from the Brazilian side, as the Brazilian publishing houses are interested in expanding their markets both into Portugal and into the ‘potentially lucrative PALOP (African Lusophone) school textbook business’ (although the fact that the accord allows for optional alternative spellings could make this problematic). Writing about the recent Tatarstan alphabet reform, which replaced Cyrillic with the Roman script, Alpatov (2002: 119) observes that in general ‘economic factors are conservative and help preserve the existing system of writing’ but they are not all-important. The relative poverty of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, he says, did not prevent several changes of alphabet in its component republics ‘with no thought given to the financial side’.22 This is not to suggest that the changes were uncontroversial at the time (see Winner 1952; Henze 1977; Sebba 2006); rather it demonstrates that where the political will is strong enough, reforms can be put in place, even in the face of public opposition. 2.5.

Pedagogical discourses The road to literacy is paved with spelling mistakes . . . Spelling errors have social penalties. If you cannot spell you are thought to be uneducated and, by a further savage twist, unintelligent. (Carney 1994: 79)

The impetus for reform is often pedagogic and educational. Where difficulties arise in teaching and learning spelling, these often provide an impetus for reform. Reforming discourse typically claims that difficult or ‘illogical’ spellings are demotivating for learners and place unnecessary barriers in the way of early literacy; furthermore, much school time is wasted learning spelling, which could be better spent on more interesting and important subjects: in the words of the 21

22

Garcez (1995: 167) cites Cooper (1989: 137): ‘variability in written forms also imposes a problem upon printers and publishers, who seek as broad a market as possible for their texts. The larger the population that shares a linguistic norm, the larger the publisher’s market’. This is not quite true. In the debates over alphabet reform for the Turkic languages which took place at the the First Turkology Congress in 1926 at Baku in Azerbaijan, the topic of cost was certainly raised. See ‘Arabic or Latin? Reform for the Price of a Battleship. Debates at the First Turkology Congress hosted by Baku in 1926’. Azerbaijan International 8.1, 2000, accessed online at www.azeri.org/Azeri/az_english/81_folder/81_articles/ 81_turkology_ congress.html. According to this, a delegate suggested that ‘the reprinting of the entire literary heritage of the near East would cost the same amount as the construction of a battleship’. Other alphabet changes which were more centrally imposed by Moscow later may have been carried out with little concern for the cost.



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Simplified Spelling Society, ‘learners spend years at public expense trying to crack an erratic code, when they could be acquiring useful knowledge’ (From: Modernizing English spelling: principles and practicalities). This theme recurs in reform debates concerning many languages; for example, in the case of French the reformers felt that simplifying and regularising the system would put a stop to ‘the torture of lengthy and tricky grammar and dictation drills’ and prevent candidates from being unfairly disqualified in competitive examinations. (Guillermou 1991 cited by Chollet 1992: 70). Claims for the educational benefits of ‘simplifying’ spelling are frequently made but are hard to substantiate. Since there is a lack of agreement in principle over the benefits of a phonemic orthography (see Chapter 1) it cannot be certain that even the most thorough overhaul of, say, English or French in accordance with the phonemic principle will actually produce the dramatic educational benefits which are sometimes claimed. Recent reforms such as the German one of the 1990s include simplifying the rules concerning punctuation, hyphenation and capitalisation, which typically seem to be the source of problems for learners and even mature users. This may make more of a difference than enforcing the phonemic principle. The educational discourse is often linked to a discourse of social reform. Johnson reports that in Germany there were concerns that orthography was being used ‘as an inappropriate means for processes of educational, and ultimately social, selection’ during the 1960s and 1970s (Johnson 2005: 36–37) which provided one motivation for the spelling reform of the 1990s. In Poland in the 1930s there was an argument that spelling reform was necessary to make ‘the art of reading and writing’ accessible to ‘the broadest masses’. The simplification of spelling would make more time available in school for more useful subjects. Several writers claimed that those who opposed reform were snobs who wanted to keep spelling as a kind of social test (Rothstein 1977: 228). This last point represents the other side of the argument within the educational discourse. Difficult spelling is, according to some, a discipline which is beneficial in itself. Life in general, and learning in particular, should not be too easy: the ‘all-pervading love of ease’ which Dutch authors objected to in the proposed new orthography (Jacobs 1997: 111–112) can go hand in hand with moral degeneration.23 Schiffman summarises this attitude in the case of French orthography: though it may sometimes be illogical, that is its beauty, and to learn its rules imparts a kind of discipline that is good for people. One submits oneself to it for the greater glory of France. (Schiffman 1996: 115–116) 23

In an earlier Dutch spelling reform, an Amsterdam professor declared the new spelling ‘incompatible in its maxims and aims with Christian theology’ (Geerts et al. 1977: 195).


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As pointed out by Chollet (1992: 68), some people within the teaching profession in France hold this kind of view: ‘an equation is drawn between the simplification of the spelling system and a lowering of the intellectual or academic performance demanded of students’. She cites a magazine interview at the time of the spelling reform proposals where Jacques Cels, a teacher of French, is quoted as saying: ‘why this downward levelling, this defence of the law of the least effort’? and is supported by many of his students, who say for example: ‘The French language will lose some of its charm’. ‘The characteristic feature of the French language is precisely that it is a difficult language. This (reform) is going to ruin it’. The pragmatic basis of this kind of objection is that simplifying the spelling removes one of the hurdles on the way to higher education, ‘lowering standards’ and allowing more people to enter university. One student is reported as saying: ‘[spelling] is a selective criterion [for progression in education] which is going to disappear, it is not fair’. Opponents of the reforms tried to turn this into a moral argument: You don’t fight illiteracy by abolishing the alphabet. You don’t motivate young people by getting rid of all the effort necessary to secure Progress. You don’t make Knowledge more brilliant by simplifying its content. (Blua et al., 1990: 10 cited by Ager 1996: 124)

The discourse of democratising spelling by making it easy for everyone to learn is thus opposed by a conservative discourse which sees difficult spelling as a desirable method of gatekeeping, of ‘maintaining standards’ and, many would suspect, maintaining social exclusion at the same time. For example, in the Czech orthographic reform of 1993, some writers saw the reforms as a continuation of the ‘communist’ tradition of adapting the spelling for the benefit of the less-educated classes, or, as they saw it, the practice of ‘lowering the standards of the national culture’ [or designing] ‘orthography for semiliterate people’. According to Dreserova´, ‘the social argument for the simplification of the orthography was considered very negatively [in] the political climate of the Czech society in the early 90’s, where after forty years of the left-wing Communist government who privileged the working class in many aspects, the intellectual circles were very close to extreme conservative ideas’ (Dreserova´ 2004: 12). 2.6.

Prescription and optionality: the discourse of conformity

Optionality of spellings comes up as an issue in a number of recent spelling reforms. Although optionality is recommended by Allerton (see Chapter 5) as a practical solution to standardisation in the face of dialect differences, it



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is clear that the public perceive optionality as highly problematic. What people seem to want is not choice, but consistency. We are reminded of what Kress says (2000: x): ‘Spelling is the domain par excellence – no matter how tiny it may seem – where the politics of conformity can be sheeted home’. Geerts et al. (1977: 216), emphasise the unpopularity of choice in the Dutch spelling reforms of the 1950s. ‘The most striking conclusion to be derived from all reactions is that moderation does not pay . . . All stated that the possibility of choice must be dropped’. In the Polish reform of the 1930s, attempts to allow for choice were criticised. According to Rothstein (1977), Zygmunt Nowakowski, a jounalist, author and sometime member of the Orthographic Committee, complained about the expression ‘one could’ in the proposed rules: ‘I do not ask what one could [do]. I want to obey, to conform absolutely to the Academy’s rules. And they say ‘one could.’ Just who decides? If we are going to reason in this way, absolute chaos will reign’ (Rothstein 1977: 231). We saw in Chapter 5 how optionality of spelling was problematic for a developing orthography like that of Quechua. In the case of a language with a long-established tradition of literacy like Portuguese, it is no less so. The Portuguese/Brazilian Orthographic Accord of 1990 allows words to have optional variant spellings in Brazil or Portugal. Most of these words either have ‘silent consonants’ or can have <e´> or <eˆ>, or depending on whether the pronunciation is Portuguese or Brazilian. This is a major point of criticism of the Orthographic Accord; as we saw in Chapter 5, Garcez concludes that ‘producing rules stating optional spellings is a serious internal contradiction’(1995: 172). As Jaffe points out (2000: 506), ‘it is not only important to ‘have’ an orthography, but it is also critical for that orthography to have prescriptive power – to be standardised and authoritative, like the orthographies of dominant languages’. Invariance (or, putting it another way, intolerance of alternatives) is seen by users as one source of authority. A somewhat different type of optionality discourse emerged in the debate over the German spelling reforms of the 1990s. When the State of Schleswig-Holstein decided not to implement the reforms, making itself an orthographic ‘island’ within the German-speaking countries and precipitating a constitutional crisis, according to Johnson (1999: 170–171) ‘the cultural relativity of orthographic norms was particularly exposed’ to school pupils living in border areas, whose peers might be attending schools in neighbouring La¨nder where the new spellings were in force. ‘Whilst this might be an apposite illustration of a fact emphasized by linguists throughout the reform debate – namely that orthography has always been subject to variation across time and space – some feared that the situation might well lead to a broader sense of educational disillusionment amongst


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pupils, whereby: ‘‘Wenn nichts richtig richtig und nicbts richtig falsch ist – wozu noch lernen’’?24 [Der Spiegel, 5 October 1998]’. In conclusion, it seems that few points are to be won in orthographic reforms, by being ‘liberal’ and offering more than one way of spelling particular words. In this case, prescription is much more popular than choice; people want to be told the correct way to spell. This is no doubt bound up on the one hand, with views of what it means for a language to have authority (Jaffe 2000: 506) and on the other, with popular beliefs about what language is. The descriptive linguist’s creed of relativism, in this case as elsewhere, cuts little ice with the general public. 3.

Conclusion

In a chapter on ‘ethnocultural issues in the creation, substitution and revision of writing systems’ Joshua Fishman (1988) discusses three ‘stages of ethnocultural involvement’ in the development of writing systems; (1) when the first writing system is introduced into a culture, (2) when a previously established writing system is a candidate for total replacement by a new one and (3) when partial modifications of a current writing system (CWS) are on the agenda (Fishman 1988: 273). In Fishman’s view, Modifying a current writing system (CWS) without attempting to replace it by a totally different system is, by all odds, the least difficult of the three types of popular ethnocultural concern for writing systems. Of the three, it is the one most likely to be endonormative in inspiration and enforcement and, accordingly, least likely to arouse fears of disloyalty and inauthenticity. It is also the one that is least disruptive of established authority systems, established symbolic linkages and established roles and statuses. (Fishman, 1988: 280)

However, as we have seen in numerous cases, even slight modification of an existing orthography can lead to an enormous outcry, entirely out of proportion to the actual disruption it may cause. It is indeed the ‘established symbolic linkages’ which are probably most to blame, as small points of spelling and punctuation can be taken as iconic of a heroic past or of educational and social decline, as the case may be. Returning to the notion of ‘competing discourses’ we see that there is a great deal of complexity possible. For example, although as Eira says (1998: 175), the historical discourse field often manifests itself as a conservative force ‘to maintain a notion of cultural continuity by the visible medium of orthography’, it can, under some circumstances, be on the side of reform; thus in the Tatar 24

‘When nothing is really right, and nothing is really wrong, why learn any more’?



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alphabet dispute, the fact that Tatar was briefly written using the Roman alphabet in the 1930s enables the script change to be presented both as historical (preserving a tradition) and modernising. Likewise, pedagogical discourses are most often about producing a simpler, more ‘rational’ spelling for the benefit of learners, and therefore in favour of reform, but it is also possible to have a pedagogical discourse which is conservative, arguing that spelling is a desirable hurdle which keeps education selective. Equally to be held to account for the failures of orthographic reform is the failure of the discourses of ‘experts’ (mostly linguists in the case of orthography) to speak to the rest of humanity, which includes not only the general public but also ‘the poets, priests, principals and professors’ mentioned by Fishman – and, indeed, the judges. This uncomprehending debate between two incompatible discourses was, according to Johnson (2005: 142), what underlay the dispute over German orthography: at the heart of the dispute over the reform, were the differing views of orthography held by the linguists, on the one hand, and the complainants, on the other. Here we encounter an epistemological conflict according to which the linguists were explicitly motivated by a desire for generalisability, systematicity and objectivity of orthography at a structural level (with instrumental–functional outcomes) that was diametrically opposed to the specificity, contingency and subjectivity underpinning the complainants’ implicit notion of orthographic competence (with its emphasis on the integrative function of orthography/language as a link to the social group/community).

To sum up, it seems that successful reforms of orthographies, whether marginal modifications or total replacements, are rare. Conservatism is almost always the most attractive option for the majority of language users, who will be already-literate adults. The exception to this is where changes are motivated by a desire for symbolic renewal, as in the case of the script change from Cyrillic to Roman in Moldova and parts of Central Asia. Here, the reform could be presented as a part of being reborn as a new nation, looking West instead of East (or North) towards Russia. By contrast, the attempts to reform orthography in the newly reunited Germany found a public already tired of reform, unreceptive to further ‘rebirthing’: Orthography appeared to have become embroiled in a wave of more general anti-reform sentiment. For this was only one of a number of reforms undergoing extensive, controversial and frequently inconsequential discussion at the time. (Johnson 2000: 123)

Ultimately, of course, authorities which have the power to impose orthographic reform will be able to do so, even in the face of popular resistance. This is the case with strong centralised states which have control over education and publishing (as for example, the former USSR which imposed script change on


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Central Asian languages) but arguably is also true of some non-governmental agencies such as religious missions, which could have a monopoly of schools and presses for the speakers of a particular language. Where lively public debate is possible, where education is decentralised and where the economic interests of publishers (especially large ones) are involved, the chances of successful orthographic reform are slim indeed.


7

Why do we spell?

Teenager spells out UK word win A 13-year-old girl has beaten 100,000 hopefuls to become the best young speller in the UK. Gayathri Kumar, from Lancashire, correctly spelt words including troglodyte and disequilibrium to win the BBC’s Hard Spell competition. The final, shown on BBC One on Sunday night, saw Gayathri go headto-head with the other finalist, Nisha Thomas. Gayathri, from Ormskirk, took the title when she correctly spelt Chihuahua and Nisha stumbled over dachshund. Five finalists were whittled down from more than 100,000 spellers who took part in school competitions . . . Gayathri kept a file of spellings which she carried with her at all times, for quick revision. (BBC News (UK edition) 6 December 2004) Message in a bottle for the god of words I would dare to suggest before this wise audience that we simplify the grammar before the grammar finishes simplifying us . . . Let us pension off spelling, terror of humankind from the cradle onwards: let us bury the stoneage h’s, sign a boundary agreement between g and j, and put more reason into the writing of accents. (Gabriel Garcıá Ma´rquez, La Jornada, Mexico, 8 April 19971)

1.

Hard spelling

Orthography had a high profile during 2004. In Britain, two books about spelling were published for the general public, taking almost opposite positions. Understanding English Spelling by Masha Bell appeared in March. It took the view that English spelling was a sad case, responsible for many 1

In the original: . . . me atreverıá a sugerir ante esta sabia audiencia que simplifiquemos la grama´tica antes de que la grama´tica termine por simplificarnos a nosotros . . . Jubilemos la ortografıá, terror del ser humano desde la cuna: enterremos las haches rupestres, firmemos un tratado de lı´mites entre la ge y jota, y pongamos ma´s uso de razoń en los acentos escritos, que al fin y al cabo nadie ha de leer lagrima donde diga la´grima ni confundira´ revolver con revo´lver. (Gabriel Garcıá Ma´rquez, Botella al mar para el dios de las palabras. La Jornada, Mexico, 8 April 1997)

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societal ills, including, perhaps, the excessive size of the prison population in Britain and the United States.2 Bell attacked the English spelling system for, among other things, its ‘fiendish difficulty’ (2004: 117) and irregularity. The other book, Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary, or Why Can’t Anybody Spell? appeared in September. According to its author, Vivian Cook, the book celebrates spelling as the ‘rich and fertile creation of those who use English’ (Cook 2004: viii). Cook, though also applying the word ‘fiendish’ to English spelling, enjoys its idiosyncrasy, resourcefulness, flexibility and attachment to history. In March, a report by a British business communications consultancy, Aziz Corporation, found that most employers felt that email and text-messaging had led to a decline in the standards of written English at work. Concern that the use of abbreviations in text-messaging was damaging the abilities of children to spell correctly seemed to be coming close to a moral panic.3 In the autumn, the BBC offered ‘a nail-biting new national event . . . a national, televised spelling bee, inspired by the American documentary Spellbound, that will reach out to schools across the UK to find Britain’s best young speller’. Hard Spell would, it said, combine ‘an accessible learning initiative with an engaging TV event that will inspire, educate and entertain’.4 In December, when Gayathri Kumar, a thirteen-year-old from Lancashire, won the final of the competition, it provided an opportunity for some national soul-searching. Most British reports tactfully avoided mentioning that both the winner and the girl she defeated, Nisha Thomas, were of Indian extraction (the Indian media were not so hesitant). However, it was widely noted that Gayathri’s first language was not English and she had arrived from Kerala only eight years previously, speaking only Malayalam (and according to some reports, ‘broken English’). Eamonn Holmes (presenter of the show) said in the Sunday newspaper The People: ‘It speaks volumes about the determination and true grit of some families who are determined to make the most of a better way of life here. They fully appreciate their opportunity and work hard to achieve their success. That’s a valuable lesson we could ALL learn from them’ (12 December 2004). Apparently, not all the contestants had a good time. A number of commentators objected to the way the competitors were plunged into darkness when they were eliminated, teased by the presenter that they would not get the 2

3

4

‘According to a recent audit by the UK’s Youth Justice Board, half of all young men in custody in the UK have a reading age of eleven or below. The US and the UK both jail a relatively high percentage of their populations. The UK’s rate is by far the highest in Europe. English spelling may well be at least partly responsible for this difference’ (Bell 2004: 117). See, for example, ‘BOSSES SPELL OUT DANGER; TXT IS BAD 4U’, by Marianna Partasides. Daily Star 8 March 2004, p. 29. BBC1 press release dated 5 April 2004.


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holiday (the big prize) and shown in close-up crying or suppressing tears.5 Nisha Thomas remarked that the way the presenter had pronounced the word which eliminated her had put her off. The word in question was dachshund, a loan word from German which is unusual not only in that it can be pronounced in a number of ways in English but also in that it is most often pronounced as though it were spelt daschund, although it would never be spelt (or pronounced) this way in German.6 Fiendish. Orthographically speaking, things were happening in Germany as well. In August 2004 the giant Axel Springer and Spiegel publishing companies announced that they planned to revert to the old pre-reform spelling ‘as quickly as possible’ in their print and online publications and called on other German media organisations to do so as well. Several did. The new rules were ‘lacking acceptance and Germans were increasingly uncertain about writing in their own language,’ Springer and Spiegel were reported as saying.7 Amid all the celebration, denunciation and contestation of spelling that went on, no-one seemed to be asking the most basic question of all: why do we need to have a fixed spelling for words? The idea that spelling need not be standardised in print (as in English, it was not before 1650), or that personal spelling systems could be used in private communication (as in English, they were before 1750) did not seem to feature at all. Well, perhaps there was one dissenting voice. It was reported in September that the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcıá Ma´rquez had been barred from the International Congress of the Spanish Language because, according to reports, he had ‘suggested spelling ought to be scrapped’.8 Marquez had said at a previous Congress, in 1997, ‘let us pension off spelling’ but as he went on to say ‘let us sign a boundary agreement between g and j, and put more reason into the writing of accents’ it seems that he may not in fact have been calling for spelling to be retired altogether, but simply replaced with a leaner, younger model. Thus the most basic question went unasked, and unanswered. What is the purpose of spelling? Putting it another way, what is the compulsion to have a

6

See, for example, ‘T is for Traumatic Television’, by John Preston, Sunday Telegraph (London) 5 December 2004, p. 10; ‘Cool Head Crowned Spelling Queen’ by Stephen Lucas, The Times Educational Supplement, 10 December 2004, p. 3. The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 9th edition, gives only /dakshUnd/ and /daksh nd/ as variant pronunciations, but /dæS nd/ is very common. This pronunciation has led to a variant English spelling. A Google search on the spelling on 2 June 2005 produced 34,000 hits, while one on the spelling produced 849,000 hits. Thus the ‘minority spelling’ accounts for roughly 4 per cent of the total in this rather unscientific poll. A similar search using AltaVista produced a figure of 4.8 per cent. ‘Major German Media Reject Spelling Reform’, Deutsche Welle 7 August 2004 accessed on 24th November 2006 at http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1290470,00.html. ‘Silenced Garcia Marquez barred from language conference’, by Giles Tremlett, The Guardian (London), 18 September 2004, p. 15. e

5

e

7

8


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standardised, almost invariant system of orthography, with all the regulatory apparatus that that entails? Within an autonomous model of orthography, one might argue that invariance is necessary because it is beneficial to ‘literacy’, which in turn leads to ‘economic success’ for individuals and societies. You might argue that having a single prescribed form for each word helps learners, who will otherwise be ‘confused’ and, bearing in mind the points made by Steven Bird in Chapter 1 about the value of fixed word-images, you might argue that even mature readers will benefit from this. Furthermore, you might argue, the searching of electronic data would be much harder if words did not have just one (or occasionally two) fixed spellings. In short, our society will function much better for having one fixed spelling for each word, and it is sensible for us to organise it that way. You might argue these things, or you might not even think about them, as it might seem too obvious to need discussing at all. None of these arguments is very persuasive. Learners use specially prepared material anyway, and once they move beyond that stage, they will come across all types of variation – in font styles as well as spellings – and must (and do) learn to cope with it. Fixed word-images may be useful even to advanced readers, but it has not been shown that they are necessary for fluent reading. Searching tools get smarter all the time and surely can be devised to deal with variant spellings (some are already available). From the perspective of a sociocultural model of orthography, we would look for a different set of answers. We could say: we spell because orthography is part of the elaboration of our culture; because there is a natural tendency for all human activities which involve choice to take on social meaning; because literacy itself is embedded in and important to our culture and social actions, and orthography is essentially bound up with literacy. Since this book argues for a sociocultural approach to orthography, this is of course the position I would take. The answer to the question, then, is to be found in the various themes that have emerged with respect to orthography in this book. Among these, four in particular seem to be of special importance in that they recur regularly in cases where orthography development and reform are at issue, and so I shall discuss them in a little more detail in the next section. These are identity, iconicity, interlinguality and authority. 2.

Some salient themes

2.1.

Identity

The tendency of orthography to become a marker of identity is beyond question. It is apparent in situations as diverse as the Spanish anarchists


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(Chapter 1), German fanzine contributors (Chapter 2), Haitian debates over an official orthography (Chapter 4), and the Tatarstan alphabet dispute (Chapter 6). As Schieffelin and Doucet say, ‘contested orthographies should be viewed as sites of contested identities’ (1992: 427), but even uncontested orthographies may carry a giant symbolic load which only becomes apparent when some challenge (for example, a proposal for reform) comes along. The fact that orthographies can take on a role as identity markers is in keeping with other aspects of language which lie above the level of awareness – for example, pronunciations (accents), vocabulary, grammatical structures and, of course, the language as a whole (French as a marker of ‘French’ identity, etc.). This tendency to mark identity is no doubt strengthened both by the pervasiveness of writing in ‘highly literate’ societies and by its prestige and high visibility, even (or even more) in societies where literacy is less pervasive. It is also strongly linked to another property of orthography, the tendency to iconicity. 2.2.

Iconicity

In Chapter 4, I introduced the concept of iconicity (Irvine and Gal 2000). The tendency for elements of orthography to become iconic, both for their users and for ‘outsiders’, is remarkable. All levels of the system are, or contain, potential icons. In the case of Russia, the script as a whole has iconic power; it represents not simply a language but a ‘nation’, to the extent that an attempt to ‘secede’ from the script, as in the case of Tatar (Chapter 6), has been forbidden by law. We have seen that in many cases individual letters and combinations become iconic; thus becomes symbolic of ‘Anglo-Saxon-ness’ and of ‘French-ness’ in Haiti, while symbolised Dutch-ness in Indonesia and was thrown out in favour of at the time of independence (Chapter 4). Even diacritic marks can take on this iconic role, like the barred-u symbol for the Bamileke (Bird 2001: 148), or the nasal tilde on and which ´ lvarez-Caćcamo and symbolically separates ‘Portuguese’ and ‘Galician’ (A Herrero Valeiro 1996:148–149) (Chapter 5). The above examples involve orthographic elements which act as icons of group identity – for example, at the national or ethnic level – but it is possible to find orthographic symbols which iconify other categories. Using the archaic letter <w> in your surname in Sweden shows that your family is old and well established (Carney 1994: 450). A superfluous final <e> in English words is also supposed to show great age, as in The Olde Shoppe. Though it may be mainly aimed at tourists, they well understand its function. The orthographic elements which take on an iconic role are typically those which uniquely distinguish the orthography or set of orthographic practices of a particular group. So for the sound [u] is uniquely Dutch – not shared


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with any other orthography in Europe – although Dutch orthography has many other graphemes which are shared with, for example, English or German. Similarly, in the controversial ze´dach orthography of Breton (Chapter 4) and in the spelling practice of the Spanish counterculture are opposed, in a classic structuralist fashion, to some other grapheme which could be used, but is not used, to represent the sound in question. Thus contrasts with which is used in other languages but not Dutch, corresponds to and in other Breton orthographies, <w> has been superseded by (with the same pronunciation) in Swedish except in some family names, and so on. 2.3.

Interlinguality

The fact that could come to iconify Dutch by virtue of being opposed to its more widely used alternative, , is of some significance. It shows that in the modern world, languages and their associated orthographies do not exist in isolation. Their users know something – a little or a lot – about other languages or language varieties which use orthographies different from theirs, and are able to make use of this knowledge in various ways. This is what I mean by the ‘interlinguality’ of orthography. There are several ways in which interlinguality comes about. Most orthographies are developed by bilingual literate elites (Chapter 3), who model the orthography on one already in use or some other language. As a result of this shared history, for example, there is enough Latin in English for me to be able to read some Latin, and there is enough English in Manx for me to be able to make at least an honourable attempt to read some Manx, though without understanding what I read in either case. Thus, even orthographies which are designed to establish distance between two languages actually have something, and often a great deal, in common. Furthermore, a complete or partial diglossic relationship often still remains between the languages concerned, which could lead to certain salient elements of the orthography having associations with prestige or, under certain historical circumstances, oppression. A second route to interlinguality is through a more general kind of language contact. For example, other languages permeate the consciousness of English-speakers in a mixture of ways, through loanwords, brand names, surnames (of celebrities if no-one else) and place names, even if we cannot speak or read any other language. A consequence of this is that we are able to recognise elements of other orthographies to some extent, and to stereotype and iconise them in various ways. While relatively few people who speak English also know Danish, there are many people who have a vague idea that the Danes use the letter . It is this that enables The Simpsons cartoon to


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derive some humour from inventing a ‘Danish super chain’ called ‘SHØP’. Similarly, various businesses in the English-speaking world trade on the associations of the Cyrillic ‘backwards R’ character with Russia, though probably few of their patrons would know that the letter is pronounced [ja]. Just as these non-English orthographies are ‘present’ in some sense for users of English, so other orthographies – and that of English more than most – are present in the consciousness of users of other languages. The global expansion of English has given rise to a range of ‘interlingual’ phenomena. Practices connected with computer-mediated communication and text-messaging are so global that some practices which were developed in English, and only really make sense for English, have been taken up in other languages. In Chapter 2 we saw how German adolescents make use of unconventional spellings, some of them based on English. Androutsopoulos (2000: 521) calls these interlingual spellings and points out that they are also found in Italian and French youth media. The sense that certain elements are ‘foreign’ may also affect mainstream practice in certain ways; for example, Lamuela (1991: 68) notes that in Catalan, Russian words are spelt with (e.g. troika). is not used in native Catalan words though it is present within Catalan, through foreign loans from languages which use the Roman alphabet. However, would do equally well for loans from Russian, which must be transliterated from Cyrillic into Roman anyway. Thus, at the same time as representing the sound / k /, indexes the ‘foreignness’ of Russian words in Catalan, as any word with must be foreign. Interlinguality, though it may appear to affect only the marginal uses of orthography (emails, graffiti, loanwords) in well-established languages, is actually very important. We have seen over and over again how users’ concerns over orthography are outward-looking (‘Americans write , British write ’) and how individual elements of orthography can take on social meaning related to their associations with specific ‘outsiders’ (‘shall we write like the ‘‘Anglo-Saxons’’ or like the French?’). In an age of global marketing and the Internet, such considerations are present for everyone, even (or especially?) those whose previously unwritten languages are currently being ‘reduced to writing’. 2.4.

Authority

As Jaffe points out (2000: 506), ‘it is not only important to ‘‘have’’ an orthography, but it is also critical for that orthography to have prescriptive power – to be standardized and authoritative, like the orthographies of dominant languages’. This desire for authority is expressed on the one hand through


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the insistence on regularity and invariance, and a dislike (which we have seen many times in this book) for ‘optionality’, but also potentially through the need to model orthography, and the practices that come with it, directly on those of a dominant language. Hence the idea, for example, that Corsican should have its own spelling contest, whereby the status and legitimacy of Corsican could be held to be equal to those of French – in spite of the fact that the contest was in conflict with ‘everyday linguistic practices and cultural values’ associated with Corsican for its speakers (Jaffe 1996: 816). As in the case of Corsican, the desire for ‘authority’ in orthography may often conflict with the need for orthography to be ‘authentic’ and embedded in existing cultural and literacy practices. The need for authority may also surface as a desire for ‘elaboration’ (ausbau), both stylistic and orthographic. The users of Sranan, as we saw in Chapter 3, went so far as to develop a ‘pulpit language’ based on the pronunciation of the words as written in the etymologising orthography used by the Moravian missionaries. According to Voorhoeve (1958: 537), although it was ‘unconnected with the spoken language’ and difficult to understand, ‘it had prestige as an elevated form’. In this case the orthography was awarded sufficient authority by its speakers to create a separate, prestigious, form of the spoken language. The same desire emerges as a wish for ‘elegance’ in remarks reported to have been made by Derek Walcott, the winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for literature. Walcott was born in St Lucia, where a French-lexicon creole ( in the official phonemic, non-etymological 1982 orthography) is in use: I have a thing about Kweýo´l which has to do with the orthography. I do not like the spelling that is used. I think as a writer, actually writing a word out. I do not want to write like a child – phonetic philology infuriates me because there is an elegance in letters, not only in words and creole is an elegant language. I do not think the orthography does justice to the elegance of Kweýo´l. (Fanis (1993: 14) cited by Nwenmely (1999: 275)

The desire for ‘authority’, ‘elaboration’ or ‘elevation’, of course, does not come in a vacuum: it is bound up with interlinguality, and the awareness of other orthographies, some of which support prestigious literacy practices in prestigious languages. Recall Te Winkel’s observation (Chapter 4) that there is ‘something coarse’ in such spellings as koncert or konsert (for concert) or filozoof for philosoof in Dutch. The notion that only children write ‘phonetically’ can only come about in contrast to the idea that ‘adults’ have orthographies which are ‘elegant’, unphonetic, etymological (probably) and difficult (quite possibly). Like French perhaps.


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In this section I have discussed four recurrent themes which have been found in previous chapters of this book. We can see that although each is independent of the others, all are connected. ‘Identity’ is closely bound up with ‘iconicity’; ‘iconicity’ with ‘interlinguality’; and ‘authority’ with the other three. In the next section, I will return to the question of the role of linguists in the development of orthographies. 3.

The role of linguists

Though one may well share Alewijn’s annoyance that ‘many can squabble over a single letter as though the well-being of Europe depended on it’ (see Chapter 6), there may nevertheless be a lot at stake in some situations where orthography is concerned. Harriet Ottenheimer, for example, describes how orthography is politically charged in the small independent state of the Comoros in the Indian Ocean, where distinct but related language varieties are used on different islands. For some years she has been developing an orthography and dictionary for Shinzwani (the language of Nzwani island). In 1997, Nzwani attempted to secede from the Republic, which was dominated by the island of Ngazidja. The Republic broke up and a new government was not formed until 2002. Ottenheimer describes the dilemma the linguist now faces: Clearly, with the current political situation in the Comoros, much more is at stake than a simple spelling choice . . . If, for example, I follow contemporary Nzwani preference (and Ahmed-Chamanga 1986), then the Shinzwani-English dictionary will help to emphasize the underlying differences between Shinzwani and Shingazidja. If, on the other hand, I follow Ahmed-Chamanga 1992 (and ignore contemporary practice), then the dictionary could help to emphasize the underlying similarities between the language varieties known as Comorian. (Ottenheimer 2001: 26)

The act of codification – creating a dictionary – will lend authority in future to any claim that Shinzwani is ‘a variety of Shingazidja’ or ‘a language separate from Shingazidja’, claims which may well be taken up very forcefully by the different sides in the political dispute. In view of the similarity (lack of abstand) between the varieties, orthography will play an important role in making Shinzwani and Shingazidja ‘look’ different or similar to their users. Thus, orthographic similarity or difference may become the basis for a claim of cultural and ethnic similarity or difference which will be used to support demands for political unity or separation. Ottenheimer’s conclusion (2001: 27) that ‘orthographic representation must go beyond linguistic analysis to take a much wider set of concerns into account – including history, cultural concerns and the politics of national and ethnic


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identity’ echoes Garvin’s conclusion from nearly fifty years previously that ‘the problem of devising an acceptable spelling system, which initially might have appeared purely, or at least primarily, a linguistic matter, upon closer inspection thus turned out to be a language and culture problem par excellence’ (Garvin 1954: 129). Ottenheimer goes on, ‘responsible linguists and linguistic anthropologists must fully understand these variables and their potential role in the process’. Yet it is clear, from the way orthographic issues have sometimes been handled by linguists, that even if the sociocultural issues have been understood, they have often not been taken into consideration. In Eira’s terms, there has been a mismatch between the discourses of linguists and the discourses of language users as a whole. This point is well demonstrated by Johnson (2005: 142) in her discussion of the German reforms: Objections to the reform need, then, to be interpreted in terms of the complainants’ implicit perception of orthography as a form of competence that draws not only on psycholinguistic, but also cultural and communicative, dimensions. It is particularly striking, therefore, that such perspectives appear to have been precisely those that were excluded from the linguistic–theoretical model of orthography underpinning the reform . . . the linguists were explicitly motivated by a desire for generalisability, systematicity and objectivity of orthography at a structural level (with instrumental–functional outcomes) that was diametrically opposed to the specificity, contingency and subjectivity underpinning the complainants’ implicit notion of orthographic competence (with its emphasis on the integrative function of orthography/language as a link to the social group/community).

It behoves linguists to take ‘history, cultural concerns and the politics of national and ethnic identity’ (inter alia) into careful consideration for two reasons: firstly, because not to do so would be to take a condescending and patronising attitude towards the users of orthography – an attitude which has been taken in the past through ignorance, but for which there is no longer any excuse; secondly, because if there is a practical project in hand such as developing or reforming an orthography, it will certainly meet with popular resistance if it does not harmonise with existing culture and practices, and the linguist’s work is likely to be wasted. Linguists will thus in many cases find themselves faced with a dilemma – fortunately not always one so difficult as the one Ottenheimer found herself facing. Proposals which from the ‘strictly linguistic’ viewpoint may seem sensible, reasoned, proportionate and unchallenging may seem unreasonable, destructive, divisive or just ridiculous from the viewpoint of users (or some group of users). Discourses will quickly emerge in support of any possible position. I hope that one function of this book will be to enable linguists to understand a little better the complexity and


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depth of the issues surrounding orthography. Nevertheless, sensible advice would be: tread warily.9 4.

So wot . . .?

For those who want to know the message of this book, it is this. Orthographies are not simply remarkable technological achievements, though they are that. They are also complex social and cultural achievements, best viewed as sets of practices – some highly conventionalised and others relatively unconstrained. They are ‘not socially neutral exteriors of written language, but integrated parts of value clusters or systems’ (Wiggen 1986: 410). They are microcosms of language itself, where the issues of history, identity, ethnicity, culture and politics which pervade language are also prominent. For those who are concerned about ‘standards’ and ‘standardisation’ in the face of the new technological developments like email and text-messaging, I would also emphasise that orthography, like language itself, is creative. Gunther Kress has written in his book on children’s spelling (2000: 14) that in the economy of the near future ‘the identities and personal dispositions that will be most highly valued, and most essential, will be those of flexibility, creativity and innovation’. Just as we – readers, writers, speakers and scholars – celebrate the creativity of language as a whole, let us embrace the creativity, adaptability and cosmopolitan nature of orthography. 9

Linguists such as Deborah Cameron have been calling for some time for linguists to make greater efforts to ‘acknowledge people’s genuine concerns about language . . . and try to work with them, not against them’ (Cameron 1995: 236). Orthography is of course only one area where such efforts are desirable.


Glossary

Abstand: (‘distance’ in German): a term coined by Heinz Kloss to refer to the extent of linguistic difference between two languages or language varieties. An ‘abstand language’ is one which is sufficiently different from all others, even in its spoken form, to warrant being treated as a separate language. See ausbau. Allophone: see phoneme below. Alphabetic: alphabetic writing systems (for example, the Roman, Cyrillic or Greek) use a small number of symbols (typically less than fifty) or ‘letters of the alphabet’ in combination to write linguistic units (morphemes or words). Strictly ‘alphabetic’ systems have symbols for both consonants and vowels; ‘consonantal’ systems (see below) do not write the vowels, though the principle is otherwise similar. American Structuralism: a school of North American linguistics, centrally concerned with the description of indigenous languages. The American Structuralists regarded each language as having a unique grammar which could be discovered by applying a set of ‘discovery procedures’ to a sufficient volume of data elicited from informants. Hence Pike’s notion of phonemics (1947), ‘a technique for reducing languages to writing’ whereby the phonology of a previously unwritten language could be determined through fieldwork and used as the basis for a phonemic alphabet. Ausbau: (‘development’ in German): a term coined by Heinz Kloss to refer to the elaboration of written varieties of languages/dialects. Cognate: cognate words are words of different languages which are recognisably similar in form and meaning and can be assumed to have a shared origin, for example, English milk, German milch and Czech mleko, all meaning ‘milk’. Consonantal: consonantal writing systems (for example, Hebrew and Arabic) like alphabetic writing systems use a small number of symbols in combination to write linguistic units, but unlike alphabetic systems only the consonants are written. Vowels, if they are written at all, have the form of optional diacritic marks. 168


Glossary

169

Creole: a language which comes into existence through a process of creolisation which involves contact between preexisting languages. Creoles usually derive much of their vocabulary from one lexifier (see below) but their grammar will be substantially different from that of the lexifier. Many contemporary creoles have their origins in the plantation slavery system. Diglossia: a linguistic situation where two languages or two varieties of the same language are used within the same society but with a sharp difference of status (one prestigious or ‘high’ (H), the other ‘low’ (L)) and distinct, non-overlapping contexts for their use. Digraphia: a situation where two different scripts (or, possibly, significantly different orthographies using the same script) are in use within a language community to write what is, or but for the different scripts could be, the same language. As in the case of diglossia (above), there may be differences of function, prestige and identity attached to the different scripts. Eye-dialect: a way of respelling (see below) quoted words in such a way as to give an impression that the speaker is speaking colloquially or in a non-standard variety. The term is sometimes used specifically to refer to cases where the respelt words do not actually sound different from the words spelt in a standard way; for example, Wot woz it yoo sed? Focussing: a term coined by Le Page to refer to the process whereby a community of speakers ‘focus’ on a linguistic norm or set of norms. A language which has highly focussed norms is one where the range of variation tolerated by speakers is relatively narrow. Grapheme: the smallest independent unit of the writing system – for example, a letter of the alphabet or a character in Chinese. Digraphs and trigraphs are combinations of two and three graphemes respectively which are pronounced as aR single sound, for example (¼ / f / ) in English or <sch> (¼ / / ) in German. Lexifier: the language which is the source of the majority of the lexicon (vocabulary) of a pidgin or creole, for example English in the case of Jamaican Creole and French in the case of Haitian Creole. The lexifier contributes the vocabulary, but not necessarily the grammar. Lexicon or lexis: the word-stock or vocabulary of a language. Literacy practices: practices (recurrent, culturally conditioned activities) of everyday life which involve reading and/or writing – for example, reading the paper, writing a shopping list, reading a bedtime story. Loanwords: words which are part of the vocabulary of a language but which have been introduced from some other language, for example the word pasta in English (from Italian) or the word shopping in French.


170

Glossary

Logographic: in a logographic writing system, the written symbols (characters) represent complete words or morphemes (meaningful units). Chinese is the classic example. Logographic systems are not the same as ideographic systems, where symbols represent meanings or ideas directly (i.e. they do not necessarily correspond to a particular word). Morphology: the linguistic study of word structure, for example the combinations of basic forms and affixes within a word, the functions these serve and the changes in word-form which they bring about in combination. Thus the relationship between the words sleep and slept is morphological (inflectional or grammar-related morphology), and so is the relationship between sign and signal (derivational or wordbuilding morphology). New Literacy Studies: an approach to studying literacy (or ‘literacies’) which lays emphasis on the social and cultural practices in which literacy is involved, rather than seeing ‘literacy’ as an individual accomplishment. Orthography: a writing system, as adapted and designed in order to write a particular language. An orthography makes use of a particular script to write a specific language – for example, Russian orthography makes use of the Cyrillic script (alphabet). Phoneme, phonemic: a phoneme is the smallest distinctive unit of sound in a particular language. Thus the sounds /l/ and /r/ are phonemes of English, but in some languages they are not heard as different by native speakers of the language, and cannot be used to distinguish words. In such languages they are not separate phonemes but would be called (if they are both used in the language) allophones (alternate pronunciations) of the same phoneme. Phonemic is used to describe sounds which have the status of phonemes but also has a specialised meaning in orthography: a phonemic orthography is one where there is a one-to-one relationship between symbols (letters) and phonemes of the language. Phonemics: the study of the sound system (phonemes) of a language, hence a possible synonym for phonology (see below). However, phonemics also has a more specialised meaning; see under American Structuralism above. Phonetics, phonetic: relating to the sounds used in speech (the sounds themselves, rather than the sound system, which is the phonology of a language). A ‘phonetic transcription’ is one which shows details of which speakers themselves would not normally be aware. In the study of writing systems, the term phonetic may be applied to a type of writing system which conveys the sound of words, for example the


Glossary

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International Phonetic Alphabet (a linguists’ tool), alphabetic scripts (which to a greater or lesser extent are phonemic) and syllabic scripts (which represent syllables). Note that an orthography like that of English is ‘phonetic’ in one sense (it represents sounds, up to a point) but not in another sense (it does not accurately represent sounds, like the International Phonetic Alphabet). Phonics: a method of teaching reading which emphasises the relationship between letters and the sounds of the spoken language, rather than the connection between the ‘whole word’ on the page and the word of the spoken language. Phonology: the sound system of a language (the phoneme system), or the study of such systems. Reform: changes to an orthography which fall short of a complete replacement of one system with another. Respelling: substitution of a different spelling for the conventional spelling of a word, for a number of possible purposes. Used as a neutral term in preference to ‘misspelling’ which carries a value judgement. Script: see writing system. Sound–letter correspondences: (also sound–grapheme, sound–character or sound–symbol correspondences): the system of correspondences between the phonemes of a language and the graphemes of the orthographic system; the mapping of sounds to letters, characters or other symbols used in writing. Syllabic: syllabic writing systems (of which Japanese is the best known contemporary example) use symbols to represent syllables of the language, which in combination make up words. Transcription: a written representation of a spoken utterance or body of utterances. Transcriptions prepared for linguistic purposes may be of many types, but generally fall into two categories, orthographic (using the usual writing system for the language concerned, if there is one) and phonetic (using a special script such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to allow for representation of minute phonetic detail.) Phonetic transcription has long been regarded as one of the basic tools of descriptive linguistics, and the first step in ‘reducing a language to writing’ (see American Structuralism). Transcription is itself not a neutral process, but depends on having a theory of language (Ochs 1979). Writing system: a general term for a system for writing a language or languages (usually synonymous with script). Thus Chinese characters and the Cyrillic alphabet are both writing systems or scripts, which are used to write (amongst others) Chinese and Japanese in the case of the former and Russian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian in the case of the latter.


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General Index

abstand 112–18, 126, 127, 165 see also ausbau symbolic construction of 113 Ali G. 50–6 American Structuralism 17 anarchists 48, 56 anti-colonialism see colonialism archaisms, in names 38 ausbau 112–18, 126, 164 see also abstand authority, of standard 108, 114, 115 autonomous model of literacy 14, 73 autonomous model of orthography 15–18, 25, 160

decreolisation 120 ‘deviant’ spellings 2–3, 10, 30, 31 diacritic 29, 148, 161 dialect differentiation 110–12 ‘dialect writing’ 105 dictionaries 41, 67, 69, 109, 119, 149 Differentialism (Galicia) 126, 127 diglossia 66, 71, 75, 118, 127, 162 digraph 28, 87, 148 see also trigraphs

Bible 70 bi-elaborated 126 bilinguals role in English orthography 59 role in Manx orthography 63–4 role in orthography development 58–60, 64, 66, 80, 72, 79, 162

fanzines 44 focussing, focussed norms 46

À and , symbolism of 2, 3–4, 48–50, 56, 74, 97, 161 Central Asia 77 clergy, role in orthography development 64, 65, 66, 80, 72, 79 see also missionaries colonialism 83, 88, 89, 91, 95, 96 commodification 139 Comoros, Republic of 165–6 computer-mediated communication 37, 44, 120, 158, 163 contest, see spelling contest contextualisation cue 54–5, 56 convention 27, 99 conventional relationships between sounds and symbols, types of 27–30 ‘creation myths’ 144–6 cultural heritage/loss in spelling reform 143–8, 144, 155

email see computer-mediated communication

gender, orthographic means for neutralising 30 graffiti 1–4, 31, 33, 34, 38, 40–1, 53 grapheme substitutions 34 homophone spellings 35 humour, genre 105 iconicity, iconic symbols 82–3, 131, 161–2 in spelling reform 24–5, 154 identity 40, 54, 56, 118, 160–1 construction 56 indices of 129 ideological approach to literacy 14 ideology see language ideologies, ideological approach to literacy interlinguality 39–41, 162–3 interlingual spellings 35 Internationalism, in symbol choice 87, 95, 96 International Phonetic Alphabet 75, 87, 92, 95 invariance 107–9, 115

183


184

General Index

Jawi (Malay) script 91, 96 and , symbolism of see À and , symbolism of language contact 162 language-external symbolism 39–41 language ideologies 24–5, 69, 71, 72, 76–9, 79, 86, 88, 135 ‘informal’ ideologies 126, 130–1 language of instruction 69 language policy (Russia/USSR) 77, 82 language shift, language death 64, 66, 79, 80 learnability of spelling 18–23, 140–2 see also word-images legitimacy 108, 115 letters, personal 44 linguists, role in orthography development 73–6, 155, 165 literacy autonomous model 14, 73 ideological model 14 and orthography 12–13, 140–1 practices 13, 23–4, 26, 60, 64–6, 72, 88–9 transitional 75–7 literacy campaign 84 loanwords 93, 96–100 logographic writing system 15–16, 110 missionaries see also clergy, role in orthography development Moravian 67 Russian Orthodox 78 Names personal 38, 44–5 trade 35, 44, 45 nationalism 81, 86, 95 New Literacy Studies 26 non-alphabetic symbols (substitution for letters) 37 (Dutch /u/) 89–91 optionality in spelling 107–9, 152–4 orthographic depth hypothesis 19–22 orthography see also spelling academic study of 11–12 autonomous model of 15–18, 25, 160 ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ 19–22 definition 10–11 and literacy 12–13 phonetic 84

regimes of 41–4 relation to phonology 6–7, 11, 15–18, 24, 28 social meaning 32–41, 98, 117, 163 as (social) practice 13, 24–5, 31, 70, 130 sociocultural model of 6–7, 12, 13, 23, 25, 160 standardisation 32, 41 whose concern 5–6, 7–9 orthography reform 132–5 see also script reform arguments for/against 135–7 and commodification 139 competing discourses of 138, 154–6 cultural heritage and loss 143–8, 144, 155 economics 148–50, 150 in English 139–42 see also Simplified Spelling Society modernisation discourse 139–42 pedagogical issues 136, 150–2, 153 resistance to 133–4 social reasons for 151 pedagogical issues 136, 150–2, 153 personal letters 44 personal names 38, 44–5 phoneme-grapheme correspondences see sound-letter correspondences phonemicists 16, 18, 74, 75 phonemic orthography, arguments for/against 119–20 see also phonemicists, pro-phonemicists, Simplified Spelling Society) phonemic principle 18, 74 phonetic writing system 15–16 phonology, relation to orthography 6–7, 11, 15–18, 24, 28 ‘postcolonial’ orthographies 83–4, 99, 100–1 post-creole continuum 66, 118 prestige (elevated form) 70 private writing 33 product names see trade names pro-etymologists (Haiti) 84, 85, 87 pro-phonemicists (Haiti) 84, 85, 87 publishers 149–50, 159 reform see script reform regimes of orthography 41–4 ‘regulated space’ 41–8, 43, 72 reintegrationism (Galicia) 127 representation of ‘voices’ respelling 3, 34, 35, 52, 53, 126 as parody 40 and social marginalisation 103, 104


General Index Roman alphabet 81, 100, 135 Romanisation 81, 92, 96, 97, 139 scribal practices 26 in English 59–60, 79 script, definition of 10 script reform 81, 97, 135, 142 see also orthography reform) Sechuana Reader (Jones and Plaatje) 17, 75 shallow orthography 19–22 Simplified Spelling Society 139–42, 150 slavery 69 SMS messaging see text-messaging social meaning, zone of 32, 56 sociocultural model of orthography 6–7, 12, 13, 23, 25, 160 sociolinguistics of orthography, need for 5 sound-letter correspondences (sound-spelling correspondences, sound-to-character correspondences) 28, 30–1, 33, 34–6, 75, 76–9, 82, 88, 99 spelling see also orthography archaic, pseudo-archaic 38–9 definition 10–11 and educational standards 151–2 etymological 29, 68, 84, 116 phonemic 116, 119, 139–40, 151 ‘phonetic’ 37, 106 reflecting regional pronunciations 37, 105 unconventional (‘deviant’) 2–3, 10, 30 spelling contest 115, 164 spelling reform see orthography reform

185 spelling variation 30–41, 56, 107, 108–10 in Jamaican Creole 121–2 ‘licensed’, ‘unlicensed’ 30, 32 in Sranan Tongo 72 standardisation 102, 108, 110–12, 114 of vernacular 59 standard language see standardisation Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) 17, 89 syllabic script 27 symbolic load 130–1 symbols, non-alphabetic 37 text-messaging (SMS messaging) 37, 53, 158, 163 trade names 35, 44, 45 transcription 11, 105–6, 112 transliteration 99 trigraphs 28 see also digraphs Tsarist language policy 77 ‘unregulated space’ 44 USSR, language policy in 77, 82 variation see spelling variation ‘war of orthographies’ 127 word-images 20, 21, 116, 160 see also learnability of spelling) writing systems (scripts), definition 10 zone of social meaning, 32, 56


lndex of language names

Afrikaans 116–17 Albanian 30, 81, 100 Alsatian 105–6 Anglo-Norman 39, 59–60, 148 Arabic 96–7 Bahasa Malaysia see Malay Bamileke 114, 131, 142 Basque 5, 49–50, 129, 131, 142 Breton 83 Catalan 3, 5, 29, 99, 129, 130, 163 Chinese 27, 110 Creole 2–3, 34, 51, 53–4, 66 see also Jamaican Creole Corsican 108, 115, 164 Croatian 30 Czech 29, 113, 134, 144, 147–8, 152 Danish 28, 113, 143 Dschang 20–1 106–10 Dutch 28, 29, 30–3, 66–72, 88–91, 116–17, 117, 134, 135–7, 143, 146, 147, 151, 153 English 7, 10–11, 16, 18, 19, 27, 28–9, 30–3, 46, 59–60, 98–9, 104–5, 107, 113, 139–40, 141, 157–9, 110 archaisms in 38–9 orthography reform 139–42 role of bilinguals in orthography development, 59 scribal practices 59–60, 79 Estonian 58–9 Finnish 18, 19 French 6, 18, 28, 29, 113, 133, 137, 144–6, 147, 151–2, 164 Gaelic 61–6, 77, 113 Galician, Galician-Portuguese 5, 7, 102, 113, 120, 126–30

German 7, 10, 26, 28, 29, 30, 34–8, 39–40, 79, 98, 99, 113, 116, 132, 133, 134, 137, 143, 149, 151, 153–4, 155, 159 Greek 10, 27, 38 Haitian Creole 84–7, 100, 112, 116, 130 Hebrew 19 Hindi 113 Indonesian 90, 91–6, 100 see also Malay Italian 19, 35–6, 38, 40–1 Jamaican Creole 3, 51, 102, 118–26, 120, 126–30 in Britain 120–1 phonemic orthography for 119–20 writers’ practices in 122–6 Japanese 16, 27 Kazakh 78 Kiswahili 22, 28 Lakota 83 Latin 48, 99 Latvian 29, 99 Malay 91–6, 100–1 see also Indonesian Manx 61–6 Moldovan 81, 100 Norman French see Anglo-Norman Norwegian 28, 29, 30, 48, 108–10 Patois, Patwa see Jamaican Creole Patwa see Jamaican Creole Polish 6, 28, 120, 132, 137, 148, 153 Portuguese 28, 107–8, 113, 126–9, 131, 135, 137, 149–50, 153 Brazilian 107–8, 131, 135, 137, 149–50, 153

186


lndex of language names Quechua 111–12 Romanian 81 Russian 99, 163 Scots 115 Serbian 30 Shinzwani 165 Slovak 113 Spanish 3, 6, 19, 24, 28, 48–50, 127–9, 130, 159 Sranan 61, 66–72, 87–91, 100–1 St Lucia Creole (Kweýo`l) 164 Swahili (Kiswahili) 22, 28 Swedish 28, 29, 30, 38, 113

187 Tatar 78, 97, 137, 139, 144, 149, 150, 154–5, 161 Turkic (language group) 27, 77–9, 96–7, 100, 110, 112, 116, 150 Urdu 113 Venda 148 Welsh 61, 66–72, 120 Xhosa 148 Yoruba 22


Index of surnames

Allerton, David J. 110–12, 120–3, 152 ´ lvarez-Caćcamo, Celso 128–31, 142, 161 A Anderson, Benedict 130 Androutsopoulos, Jannis 34–8, 39–40, 163 Baker, Philip 10, 20, 22, 148 Barros, Maria Candida Drumond Mendes 17, 18, 24, 74–5 Barton, David 13, 15, 26 Bird, Steven 20–1, 23, 106, 114, 142, 160, 161 Carney, Edward 5, 11, 38–9, 44–5, 150, 161 Cassidy, Frederic G. 119 Catach, Nina 137, 146 Cole, Michael 13 Coltheart, Max 19–20 Coulmas, Florian 76

Jaffe, Alexandra 103–4, 108, 114–15, 153, 154, 163–4 Johnson, Sally 98, 132, 133, 134, 137, 151, 153–4, 155, 166 Joseph, John Earl 59, 114–15, 120–3, 149 Kloss, Heinz 112–13 Kress, Gunther 10, 32, 153, 167 Kurman, George 58 Le Page, Robert B. 46, 119 Lepsius, Richard 75, 90 Milroy, James 32, 107 Milroy, Lesley 32, 46, 107 Nida, Eugene A 20, 22

Davies, Eirlys E. 45 Devonish, Hubert 119 Doucet, Rachelle 5, 85–7, 100, 116, 161

Ottenheimer, Harriet J. 165–6

Eira, Christina 27, 132, 138, 154, 166

Pike, Kenneth L. 6–7, 11, 17, 18, 24, 74, 140, 80 Powers, William K. 83 Preston, Dennis R. 103–4

Ferguson, Charles A. 59 Fishman, Joshua A. 12, 133, 154, 155 Garcez, Pedro M 107–8, 135, 137, 149–50, 153 Garvin, Paul L. 7, 166 Geerts, G. 135–7, 143, 146, 147 Goody, Jack 15–16 Gumperz, John 54–5 Harris, Roy 16 Henze, Paul B 135, 150 Herrero Valeiro, Ma´rio J. 126–31, 142, 161 Hornberger, Nancy 111

Rothstein, Robert A. 132, 133, 137, 146–7, 148–9, 151, 153 Sampson, Geoffrey 16 Schieffelin, Bambi B. 5, 85–7, 100, 116, 161 Schiffman, Harold F. 137, 145–6, 151–2 Scragg, D. G. 11, 59–60, 148 Scribner, Sylvia 13 Seuren, Pieter A. M. 89–91, 98, 108 Street, Brian 9, 14, 15, 25, 139, 141 Stubbs, Michael 32, 107 Swadesh, Morris 17

188


Index of surnames Tabouret-Keller, Andreé 46 Tauli, Valter 6, 18–19 Thomson, Robert L. 61–4 Urla, Jacqueline 49–50, 142 Venezky, Richard L. 11, 18–19, 20–3, 22 Vikør, Lars S. 95–6,

189 Voorhoeve, Jan 20–3, 69–71, 89, 164 Walcott, Derek 164 Watt, Ian 15–16 Wells, John C. 124 Wiggen, Geirr 109 Winner, Thomas G. 135, 142, 150


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