Louis-Jean Calvet, Language Wars and Linguistic Politics.  Translated by Michel Petheram.  Oxford University Press, xvi + 212 pp., 1998.  Cloth, ISBN 0-19-823598-4, £75.  Paperback, ISBN 0-19-870021-0, £28.

 

Reviewed by: 

Geoffrey Sampson, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex.

 

 

 

It is not very easy to say what this book is about.  It is not about wars.  Despite what the slightly lurid dust-jacket might lead readers to expect, the topic of warfare (in the sense of men shooting or dropping bombs on enemies) is scarcely mentioned.  Perhaps a fair summary of Calvet’s argument would be that the spread of some languages at the expense of other languages, and replacement of local dialects by standard languages, are processes which always have a political dimension; and he intersperses analysis of a series of case-studies with left-wing and “politically correct” remarks about State language planning being inherently anti-democratic and racist (although it seems to me that Calvet’s  factual examples often fail to support the political morals he draws).

 

The book (first published in French in 1987) begins by criticizing the entire discipline of linguistics as “built on a refusal ... to take into account the problems raised by the origins of language”.  Calvet points out, repeatedly, that conflicts between languages “would not have occurred in a world with only one language”, which is undeniable.  Unfortunately, his chapter 1, which investigates the ultimate origins of language diversity, commits an astonishing gaffe.  Calvet postulates a direct relationship between technological and linguistic development in the dawn of human history, so that advances in flint-working would have corresponded to “a ‘chopper’ language, a ‘biface’ language, etc.”; this sounds extremely speculative, but few readers will wish to pursue the matter once they realize that Calvet identifies the earliest known stage of human evolution as “Piltdown man”, whom he describes in detail.  The phrase “Piltdown man” refers to an alleged “missing link” between ape and man which aroused great interest when its discovery was announced in 1912, but which was shown in 1953 to be a hoax, commonly described as among the most notorious frauds in the history of scholarship.  (Someone had treated a mixture of recent human and orang-utan bones to make them look ancient.)  Since 1953, the phrase “Piltdown man” has served only as a jocular allusion to the gullibility of academic experts.  It is remarkable to find the term used seriously at the end of the century.

 

There is value in some of the factual material in Calvet’s case-studies of diglossia and State language policy in various South American and Francophone African countries, China, India, Norway, Turkey, and elsewhere – though these would be more valuable if Calvet inspired more confidence in his factual reliability.  (On p. 48 Calvet quotes, as accurate, a 1794 statement that only three million inhabitants of France at that date spoke French; on p. 177 he gives the population of France at the first census, seven years later, as 27½ million.  Even taking into account the existence of infants and minority languages such as Breton and ProvenÁal, I find it virtually incredible that only one in nine spoke French, unless “speaking French” was defined as speaking without any regional dialect features – a few pages later Calvet stresses that there is no good reason to count mutually-intelligible dialects as separate languages.)  But, for Calvet, the purpose of the case-studies is to provide ammunition for his political arguments.  These arguments frequently seem neither sensible in themselves nor consistent with the facts cited in their support.

 

For instance, Calvet is hostile to State language planning, seeing it as inconsistent with scientific linguistics, which is concerned with description rather than prescription.  But the fact that scientists’ task is to describe the world does not make it illogical for other people to change the world, if change is called for.  It may be misguided to do so: Calvet points out that the English-speaking nations have managed very well without State language policies.  But that could be because of fortunate circumstances.  If one found oneself governing a newly independent, economically backward African state whose population used many unwritten languages and dialects, it might seem at least worth considering promotion of a lingua franca in order to facilitate the economic development which virtually everyone wants.  For Calvet, such moves are necessarily oppressive: “language officials, like all officials, risk becoming servants of the state” (p. 203).  (I thought an “official” was by definition a servant of the state: what else does the word mean?)  Calvet claims that possessors of State power share an “impulse ... towards monolingualism: to impose one’s own language on those under one’s administration” (p. 136).  Yet this claim comes just after a six-page account of language planning in Guinea which suggests the opposite.  After independence from France, the Guinea government tried to implement a policy under which eight indigenous languages were promoted from vernacular status to media of education and written communication; but this policy eventually foundered, partly because of lack of necessary infrastructure (e.g. printing shops) and partly because pupils’ parents saw French as the language which would give their children access to social and economic advancement.  In this case, evidently, the monolingual impulse came from “below” rather than “above”.  Calvet rarely seems aware of such contradictions in his arguments.

 

For a book about linguistics, this volume takes a sadly hit-or-miss approach to quoting forms from foreign languages (which may be the fault of translator and/or publisher rather than author).  When a book in English needs to quote the odd phrase from a language whose script is non-roman, this is usually done by transliterating, normally quite a satisfactory solution.  This book quotes Russian words in their original script, but it is obvious that no-one involved in the production could read Russian, so that similar-looking Cyrillic letters are repeatedly confused.  However, that is nothing compared to the treatment of Chinese.  China forms one of Calvet’s leading case-studies, and he quotes numerous Chinese words and phrases.  In each case, these are represented by random sequences of roman “special characters” (e.g. the percent sign, the pilcrow) set in a bold sans fount to create a sort of pastiche of the unfamiliar appearance of Chinese writing.  (Romanization is often added, though not always correctly.)  From an average publisher this would be embarrassing.  From Oxford University Press, it is unspeakable.