Language

(De)racialising linguistics

DEBORAH CAMERON

This year a book was published which takes as its subject the relationship oflinguistics to ideas and events that many would define as among the mostsignificant ± and the most horrifying ± of the twentieth century. The book,Christopher Hutton's Linguistics and the Third Reich,1 aims to disturb thecomplacent assumptions of present-day linguistic science. It certainlysucceeded in disturbing me.

It is often assumed that the Nazi era in Germany can be bracketed asan aberrant interlude, an unfortunate but mercifully brief interruption tothe general narrative of post-enlightenment scientific progress. During thatinterlude, the story goes, intellectual culture (what remained of it afterthe purges of the early 1930s) became infected with bizarre obsessionsabout race and nation, and all kinds of scholarship were harnessed to aspurious and repugnant `race science'. Christopher Hutton thinks this is acomplacent fiction. If we are going to talk in terms of `harnessing', he says,linguistics was the horse rather than the cart: Nazi racial ideology couldnot have taken the form it did without the contribution of linguistics.`Ideas about an Indo-European (Indo-Germanic, Aryan) people (or race, ortribe) derive from linguistics; race science took its lead from the study oflanguage'.2

The branch of language study that bequeathed to the Nazis the `Aryanrace' that loomed so large in their mythology was comparative philology ± adiscipline in which German scholars were prominent, but which did notbelong to them alone. Indeed, its inspiration is usually credited to theEnglishman Sir William Jones, who had remarked in 1786 on the extra-ordinary resemblance of Sanskrit to Latin and Greek, and suggested thatthese three ancient languages must share an even more ancient commonancestor. This inaugurated a flurry of scholarly activity whose upshot wasthe construction of a genealogy for what are now known as the `Indo-European' languages, and the reconstruction of the putative parentlanguage, `proto-Indo-European'. `Aryan' was a common alternative name

for the same language family, until the taint of its association with Nazismrendered it unusable in respectable scholarly discourse.

Hutton takes issue with the idea that the Nazis racialised philology: heargues that they did not need to, because it had always been inextricablybound up with the study of race. The historical-comparative method forreconstructing linguistic genealogy was also seen as a method for recon-structing the otherwise inaccessible narratives of racial groups. Indeed, forthat purpose it was considered both more reliable and more illuminatingthan physical anthropology and the archaeological study of materialremains. Whereas pottery fragments and human bones were mute,requiring interpretive leaps on the part of the investigator to tell theirstories, linguistic evidence `spoke' directly, shedding light not only on thematerial landscape but also on the conceptual universe inhabited byancestral peoples.

In using linguistic evidence to write the history of races ± their origins,migrations, contacts and conquests ± scholars were projecting into remoteprehistory assumptions about language that derived from the tradition ofmodern European thought, and particularly from the nineteenth centurynationalist tradition. According to that tradition, it is both the norm andthe ideal for individuals to acquire as their `mother tongue' the singlevernacular language which defines the group they belong to anddistinguishes it from other groups. The group's language, transmitted overmany generations, becomes a privileged repository for its culture, imbuedwith its whole history and its distinctive character. Hence the European(and Nazi) nationalist rallying-cry of `one folk, one language'.

This slogan however does not begin to account for the variety ofarrangements we find in speech communities around the world. In manycommunities it is normal to acquire more than one language, or to takea language other than your mother tongue (a pidgin or other lingua franca,say, or a superordinate religious language such as Arabic) as a marker ofidentity. Identifying with a language that is not your `ancestral' language ±whether or not you acquired it natively ± is also very common (this is,for example, the situation of most Britons of Celtic descent, and mostAmericans of all ethnicities).

One group to whom the Nazi linguistic ideal plainly did not apply in the1930s was the Jews in Europe, and their linguistic `deviance' was arecurring theme in anti-semitic literature. The Jews were suspect becausethey recognised no organic connection between language, land and blood,and lacked the loyalty to a mother-tongue which the Nazis considered`natural'. Jews' linguistic loyalties were to a `father tongue', the languageof the Hebrew scriptures. Otherwise they spoke the language of the

Language: (De)racialising linguistics 53

surrounding community, or in the case of many in Eastern Europe, Yiddish,a hybrid made up of Germanic, Slavonic and Semitic elements. Hitler, inMein Kampf, took particular exception to the existence of assimilated Jewswhose German was indistinguishable from anyone else's. Speakers whowere linguistically but not racially German threatened the integrity of thelanguage by severing its grammar from its geist or spirit: a Jew might masterthe former but never the latter.

Any sustained engagement with the extraordinary virulence of Nazi anti-semitism is disturbing, but that is not the only thing that makes Linguisticsand the Third Reich a challenging text for a linguist to read. On the contrary:it is hard to imagine a reader coming to this book unprepared for therevelation that the Nazis were anti-semites and racists, but many readersmight come to it with the idea that the Nazis were exceptional in theirbeliefs about language and race. Hutton's analysis makes that ideaimpossible to maintain. Linguistically, Nazism followed an orthodox linefrom which few scholars anywhere dissented.

Contemporary linguists might respond that even if the study of languageas practised in the Third Reich was not, in its time, exceptional, that time isnow over, and we have put fascism's legacy behind us. But Hutton suggeststhat this too is an illusion. He points out that many views which areconsidered politically progressive among professional linguists todayare indistinguishable in substance from the views propounded by Nazilinguists in the 1930s. For example, linguists and their professional organis-ations tend to support mother-tongue maintenance and oppose assimi-lation. (An example is the opposition of linguists to the US `English Only'movement, which seeks to curtail the rights of minority speakers. Notdissimilarly, Nazi linguists were prominent critics of the suppression ofCeltic languages in Britain and France.) Efforts by indigenous minorities orsubordinated nations (such as Australian aborigines and native Americans)to preserve endangered languages or revive `dead' ones are generallyconsidered laudable, while language shift and language death are regardedas tragic (the Nazis felt the same way about traditional Germanic dialects).As the examples I have cited suggest, preservationism and advocacy ofmother-tongue rights are strongly associated, nowadays, with anti-racism,anti-imperialism and green politics. Should it matter to us now that theywere once associated with fascism?

Christopher Hutton thinks it should. Of course, the issues are complex:we choose our positions in particular struggles on the basis of our assess-ment of the interests at stake at a given historical moment, and undeniably,the moment of the late 1990s differs from that of the 1930s. Clearly it wouldbe both inaccurate and offensive to charge linguists who currently advocate

54 Critical Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4

mother-tongue rights or language preservation with fascist sympathies. Butthe more abstract theoretical issue raised by Christopher Hutton is whetherthe `progressive' language politics of today, no less than the fascistlanguage politics of the recent past, depend on constantly recycling andrenaturalising the connection between language and race (or its shadow,ethnicity, which Hutton considers little more than a euphemism for race).When we defend the right of the X people to be educated in X language, orurge the Y people to revive the Y language which was `killed' by somecolonial language a hundred years ago, does not the moral force of theargument come largely from the unspoken proposition that X or Y `belongsto' the people in question, is what they should `naturally' speak becausetheir ancestors spoke it? We still do not have a similarly compelling rhetoricin which to defend the proposition that, for instance, Jews have a right tospeak German (or English, or French) rather than or in addition to Hebrew.

It would be foolish to claim that traditional ethnolinguistic nationalismhas had its day, but increasingly other tendencies are visible. Ours is an ageof migration and diaspora, of fusion, syncretism, cultural hybridity ± allof which have linguistic reflexes too. Linguists are beginning to engagewith these developments, but they are given voice most powerfully inimaginative literature, in the work for instance of those African, Asian andCaribbean writers who deny that English belongs only to its nativespeakers, let alone exclusively to the descendants of the Anglo-Saxons. Intheir practice we see the unravelling of the old connections betweenlanguage, race and nation (though not, of course, between language andculture). The same unravelling needs to happen in linguists' theory; thelinguistics and politics of the twenty-first century cannot be done using thetools of the nineteenth.

Notes

1 Christopher M. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother Tongue Fascism,Race and the Science of Language, Routledge Studies in the History of Linguistics(London: Routledge, 1999).

2 Hutton, p. 3.

Language: (De)racialising linguistics 55