Scripts, Spelling, and Identities
Mark Sebba
In Memoriam Alexandra (“Misty”) Jaffe, 1960–2018
Writing as Image: Orthography and Script
The written word is pervasive in the contemporary world—probably the most important method of conveying information, conducting social relations, and regulating behavior. But writing is much more than that. Writing, and what we do with it, is fundamentally bound up with our identities. As individuals, we 7 are identified partly by what kinds of literacy we engage in, the kinds of writing we do, how we learn to do it, and the purposes for which it is done. What is true for individuals is also true for larger social groupings, such as nation-states, which are strongly identified with the specific languages—and, in particular, the written languages—they use. While the relevance of written language to identity may be obvious, the role of orthography is less so. In fact, scripts and spellings play a crucial role in identity creation by making choices available at different levels of language structure and different levels of social organization, as this article will show. A well-established principle of sociolinguistics is “where there is choice, there is social meaning.” The choices that people make when they write are part of the process of constructing an identity, both for themselves and for their readers. Unlike spoken language, the written mode always depends on some set of symbols. By definition, there can be no “written language” which does not
Mark Sebba works at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Lancaster. His current research focuses on written bilingual and multilingual texts. He co-edited Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse and his book Spelling and Society: The culture and politics of orthography around the worldwas published in 2009 (Cambridge University Press).
Copyright © 2018 by the Brown Journal of World Affairs
Fall/Winter 2018 • volume xxv, issue i Mark Sebba have physical form. The choice of those symbols, and the variations in their use, provide one of the key links between written language and identity. A set of symbols (characters) used systematically to represent one or more languages is known as a script or writing system. The set of rules for adapting a script to write a specific language is called an orthography. For example, the Roman script, which was originally developed for the purpose of writing Latin, is currently used to write a large number of languages, each with its own set of orthographic rules which regulate spelling. In English, the symbol
the brown journal of world affairs Scripts, Spelling, and Identities I will be considering how orthography is relevant to identity construction at different levels of social organization, in particular individuals, nation-states, and ethnic groups.
Scripts and Orthographies as Choices
Users of written language have choices at several levels of society. Some of these choices are made at the group level and establish conventions that affect all users; for instance, users of the Greek language use the Greek alphabet, while users of Russian use the Cyrillic alphabet. Individual users have no say in this decision and in most cases are not offered an option. However, it is possible to act collectively to choose an alternative, as when some users of Greek write Greek in Roman script. Originally people needed to do this in order to write email or SMS messages as the early technology provided Roman but not Greek characters on the keyboard. More recently, Greek characters are readily available but users may still make a conscious choice to compose in Roman characters, exploiting its symbolic value as the “code of the internet.”1 On a larger scale, some languages have completely changed their writing systems, as in the case of Turkish, which will be discussed later. Other choices are more individual. Although conventional English spell- 9 ing is restrictive, there is still some possibility of variation: for example, one may write “grey” or “gray,” “jail” or “gaol.” As in the aforementioned Japanese case, these variants spell the same word, but they do not necessarily have the same meaning for writers: “gray” is the official American spelling while “grey” is preferred in Britain, though not exclusively; “gaol,” at one time used more frequently in Britain than the United States, is now obsolescent and suggests a deliberate attempt to evoke an older style.2 These variants convey social information about the writer: British or American, contemporary or archaic. In this sense, orthographic choices—like other linguistic choices—have social meaning. Furthermore, as the links between sound and symbol are conventional, we have some leeway to flout those conven- tions. For example, I can choose to write that my pet is a “kat” even though I know that the conventional English spelling is “cat.” Doing this may be a way of showing I am quirky or independent, or it may be a claim to membership in a like-minded group of people who have chosen, for whatever reason, to do the same. The rule-abiding majority of society may simply view it as a sign of ignorance, but they may also recognize it as a form of defiance or a badge of membership. In any case, they will have no difficulty understanding what word
Fall/Winter 2018 • volume xxv, issue i Mark Sebba I have written, and they will know that I have broken the rules. To summarize, writing systems and orthographies allow choices at several different linguistic levels, relating to several different levels of social organiza- tion. Linguistically, choices may be made between scripts (Greek or Roman), different sets of correspondences between sounds and symbols (e.g., whether to write “cat” as in English or kat as in Dutch), or between different conventional variants (e.g., “labor” or “labour”). All of these choices are markers of identity and have the potential to increase or decrease the perceived difference between languages or language varieties.
Scripts and Orthographies as Markers of National Identity and Ethnicity
Scripts themselves can be powerful indicators of nation. Though in theory the Greek script could be used for many languages, in practice it is strongly associated with Greek. Likewise, the Chinese script is strongly associated with Chinese, although “Chinese” is actually a collection of mutually unintelligible languages or dialects; it is only the script that identifies it as “one language.”3 In many cases, the preference for one script over another for the same language is a dividing line between two nationalities or ethnicities. For example, Serbian and Croatian 10 are very similar languages and were known officially as Serbo-Croatian when Serbia and Croatia formed two of the constituent states of Yugoslavia. Both the Latin and the Cyrillic script are suitable for writing either language. At the mo- ment, however, Serbian is mainly written using the Cyrillic alphabet like other languages spoken by groups who traditionally practice Orthodox Christianity, while Croatian is normally written using the Roman alphabet, which is more associated with Western Christianity and, in this case, Catholicism.4 Hindi and Urdu are likewise mutually intelligible spoken languages of northern India and were once collectively known as Hindustani. However, their scripts distinguish them, as Hindi is linked through its script to the Sanskrit Hindu scriptures, and Urdu to Islam through the Perso-Arabic script.5 In both these cases, script is linked to religion as an ethnic marker. It is not a coincidence that what was once regarded as one language (Serbo– Croatian, Hindustani) spoken in one country (Yugoslavia, British India) now forms separate languages (Serbian and Croatian, Hindi and Urdu) spoken in separate countries (Serbia and Croatia, India and Pakistan). Distinct scripts provide powerful and ubiquitous symbols of divergence and can be useful to nationalists and separatists arguing their case. For example, in nineteenth-century India, Hindu nationalists denounced Urdu as “foreign” and “fraudulent,” at the
the brown journal of world affairs Scripts, Spelling, and Identities same time constructing Hindi as “indigenous” and hence worthier of being a national language.6 The Turkic languages provide an illustration of the contemporary relevance of script choices. These very similar languages are widely spoken across Central Asia, as well as in Turkey itself. As part of fundamental political and social re- forms, Kemal Atatürk “modernized” Turkish by changing its script from Arabic to Roman in 1929.7 Similar changes were made for the other Turkic languages, most of which were spoken within what was then the relatively new Soviet Union. Because the spoken languages sounded similar and had now adopted similar orthographies, a unified linguistic zone was created. Distinct scripts provide powerful and Within a decade, however, ubiquitous symbols of divergence the Soviet government de- and can be useful to nationalists cided that Turkic languages must be provided with new and separatists arguing their case. orthographies based on the Cyrillic script.8 These distinguished the Soviet Turkic languages from Turkish in Turkey and from each other since, each language had somewhat different char- acters and sound-symbol correspondences. Thus, a large linguistically unified area that might have posed an ideological threat to the USSR was divided into 11 distinct linguistic zones with a common spoken, but not written, language.9 This political tactic highlights the role of writing for administration and the communication of ideologies: the different Turkic peoples could still speak to each other if they came into contact, but written communications, no matter whether they were official or subversive, would now be limited to particular geographical areas designated “Uzbek,” “Kazakh,” “Turkmen,” et cetera. This situation remained stable until the dissolution of the USSR, after which most of the now-independent Turkic-speaking countries initiated a change from Cyrillic to Roman script, symbolically taking them out of the Rus- sian linguistic sphere and into the Western one.10 The changes have been slow to complete, and continue in some parts, including Kazakhstan, at the time of writing. In the early 2000s, the issue reappeared within Russia itself, when the government of the Republic of Tatarstan (a part of the Russian Federation) decided to adopt the Roman script in place of Cyrillic in its Turkic language, Tatar.11 The central government of Russia opposed this strongly and blocked the change, claiming the need to preserve a “unified educational space” where Cyrillic script was in use.12 Once again, the linguistic unity of Turkic-speaking peoples was felt to be threatening to Russia, and thus the languages were kept
Fall/Winter 2018 • volume xxv, issue i Mark Sebba separate through their scripts. Even where languages employ the same script, differences in orthographic conventions can be used to put symbolic distance between two languages that are otherwise very similar, like Swedish and Danish. The Danish characters <æ> and <ø> have Swedish counterparts <ä> and <ö> (e.g., Danish læs and Swedish läs, both meaning “read”). The distinct conventions for these vowels resulted from hostility between the two countries around the time of their separation in the early sixteenth century, just when the written languages were being standard- ized in print. The different vowel writing conventions still serve as an identity marker distinguishing Swedish from Danish.13 Similarly, variation in orthographic conventions helps to create symbolic difference between the closely related, neighboring Czech and Polish languages. Polish draws on an old tradition, once shared with Czech, for writing palatal consonants (for example, the initial sound of “chat”) using a combination of consonant letters: for example, czas (time).14 In the early fifteenth century, Czech orthography was reformed through works attributed to the Protestant reformer Jan Hus; as a result, in Czech the word for “time” is now written čas, using a háček (wedge) over the
the brown journal of world affairs Scripts, Spelling, and Identities Orthography in Colonial and Postcolonial Societies
For much of the twentieth century, political world maps used color-coding to show which European colonial empire or sphere of influence a country belonged to. The way a few key sounds were represented in the orthographies of local indigenous languages, however, could be almost as reliable for showing which European power was in control. Where Germany or the Netherlands held sway,
Fall/Winter 2018 • volume xxv, issue i Mark Sebba language was to be used for this purpose, it would need its own orthography distinct from French, but there was great disagreement over what form this or- thography should take. Some stakeholders contended it should use conventions from French orthography, for example
Spelling Reform
While orthography is always more than just a way of writing down the sounds of words, it is nevertheless true that over time languages change and traditional spellings may start to cause problems for writers. As a result, language users often call for reforms, and many countries have tried to change the orthographies of languages spoken within their borders.24 This is more likely to take place when
the brown journal of world affairs Scripts, Spelling, and Identities there is central control, for example, if there is a national language board, lan- guage academy, or education authority which can determine the orthographic standard. This kind of centralization is a feature of some modern societies but was not there when most European national languages were standardized. In a very small number of countries, Norway being the prime example, spelling is kept under regular review by a central authority and changes are introduced by updating dictionaries and school textbooks when necessary.25 For most languages, however, spelling reform is introduced sporadically through government agen- cies when they have become convinced that there is a pressing need for reform. When orthography reform is proposed, it is always met with strong op- position. The arguments on both sides are fairly predictable. Proponents of the reform say it will make it easier for children to learn to read and write, reduce adult illiteracy, improve educational outcomes, remove archaic and redundant practices, and introduce consistency, also helping foreign learners. Opponents say that it will destroy the link to the past because future generations will be unable to read material published in the old orthography; that it will destroy time-honored traditions of the language; that it will look simple or childish; that it will hinder communication between the generations; and that it will be costly and pointless. In some cases, they also argue that it will make the lan- guage look too much like some other language, echoing the arguments used in 15 postcolonial contexts. Both sides tend to be ardent about their positions, but the arguments are often exaggerated. Orthography is neither the cause, nor the cure, of problems learning to read and write, even if it is relatively difficult to learn to spell correctly in some languages such as English. The stigma around poor spelling, like that around some negatively valued accents, is social in origin. For some opponents of reform, the fact that spelling is difficult is actually a bonus, as it prevents unworthy members of the population from claiming to be well-educated and forces a special kind of discipline on those who want to be seen as fully literate. When spelling reforms were proposed for French in the 1990s, some argued against simplifying spelling and punctuation because it would make French “too easy,” though others saw this reform as a way to democratize education and improve access to advanced study.26 Apart from these arguments, which (like the debates about Haitian Creole orthography) are often really about identity and social position, there are other factors that impact orthography reform in contemporary society. One of these is commercial. Language-based industries are connected with most major lan- guages, often with a small number of very powerful players, such as publishers
Fall/Winter 2018 • volume xxv, issue i Mark Sebba of dictionaries and school textbooks. The switch to a reformed orthography, even if the changes are small, has the potential to disrupt the status quo, with benefits for some and disadvantages for others. A spelling reform—like those introduced in France and Germany in the 1990s—may make all existing dic- tionaries redundant. This offers lucrative opportunities for new sales, but also allows newcomers to break the existing monopolies.27 A reform like the one proposed for Portuguese in the 1990s had the potential to bring Brazilian and European/African Portuguese spellings into alignment and create a large unified market for textbooks. Again, those already entrenched in the market had an incentive to oppose the reform.28 The nature of linguistic change almost always means that revisions to reflect pronunciation more accurately in spelling (often argued to be desirable, especially by educators) can only be done at the expense of increasing the number of vari- ant spellings or regional language varieties. This is the case in Portuguese, for example, where following the spellings agreed on internationally in the 1990s, the word for “reception” may be spelled receção in European Portuguese but recepção in Brazilian.29 The Brazilian spelling reflects both the historical form and the current Brazilian pronunciation with a “p” sound, while the European Portuguese form reflects the fact that that consonant has been lost in the Euro- 16 pean Portuguese variant of the word. Here, the unity which would result if the silent consonant continued to be written in Portugal is lost in favor of spellings which reflect the local pronunciations. The potential for the “spelling must reflect pronunciation” principle to damage the linguistic unity of a language like English, with its many hundreds of variant accents, is a strong argument against reform. A further obstacle to reform is that changes in spelling have to be agreed upon internationally for many languages, including global ones like English. For example, the Portuguese agreement involved eight countries, took 10 years to negotiate, and around 25 to implement.30 To conclude, spelling reform is always controversial because of its potential to disrupt existing continuities and hierarchies. It is unpopular with governments because of the likelihood that it will upset influential parts of the establishment, while at the same time being of limited importance to national security and the economy. Even when proposals are put forward, inertia favors retaining the status quo or making minimal tweaks only to the most glaring anomalies.
Globalization and Orthographic Branding
The Roman alphabet is often associated with modernization—for example, when
the brown journal of world affairs Scripts, Spelling, and Identities it replaced Arabic script in Turkic-speaking countries—and, in the present day, globalization. Making a language more compatible with the global economy (in particular, the internet) is often cited as a reason for adopting Roman script instead of others, especially Cyrillic.31 One way in which this works is that the majority of keyboards on computers and digital devices use Roman characters and so reforms make these easier to input in most parts of the world. Familiar- ity with the Roman script is also necessary for learning several global languages including English. Even for languages which already use the Roman script, globalization may be relevant to orthographic choices. Take the example of Danish: this language has a number of additional characters which are not part of the standard 26-char- acter Roman alphabet. These include <æ> and <ø>, mentioned above, as well as <å>, with the capital form <Å>. The letter <å> is regarded as the equivalent of
Fall/Winter 2018 • volume xxv, issue i Mark Sebba recognition among non-Danish people to work as an icon of Danishness in the global marketplace. It is difficult to know how English speakers came to associate Scandinavian languages with the letter <Ø>, given that those languages are not widely used abroad, but it surely has something to do with the “uniqueness” of the letter. Another Nordic product (birch water) has recently been marketed as “Tåpped” in Britain, suggesting that “unusual” characters can indeed serve to brand regional products.
Conclusion
The examples above show how scripts and orthographies may function as identity markers and branding for languages, subcultures, and groups at various levels of social organization. This is possible because, like the spoken mode, the visual, written mode of language offers choices—alternative ways of representing the same thing. These choices constitute part of the identities of the people who make them. Alternative forms acquire different social meanings and these can become markers of identity for certain groups. One traditional view of orthographies and scripts is that they are a kind of neutral technology, simply a way of encoding language. That is not the view 18 presented here. Orthographies and scripts are a necessary part of enabling lan- guage to be written down, but they are much more than that. They are a part of literate culture closely linked to the way the writer identifies with different social groupings. This link between scripts, orthographies, and their users ac- counts for the power of written language as a marker of group membership. It allows groups to create symbolic unity at the same time as putting symbolic distance between themselves and other groups by making different orthographic W choices. A
Notes
1. Jannis Androutsopoulos, “‘Greeklish’: Transliteration Practice and Discourse in the Context of Computer-Mediated Digraphia,” in Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power, ed. Alexandra Jaffe et al. (Boston/Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2012), 359–392. 2. See Oxford English Dictionary entry “grey | gray”; According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the form “gaol” “still remains as a written form....but this is obsolete in the spoken language.” A search using Google Ngram shows a strong preference for “jail” emerging in the corpus of American English as early as 1820. A similar preference does not appear in the British English corpus until 1940. 3. See: Ping Chen, Modern Chinese: History and sociolinguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 204–05. 4. Thomas S. Magner, “Digraphia in the territories of the Croats and Serbs,”International Journal of the Sociology of Language 150 (2001): 11–26. 5. Rizwan Ahmad, “Hindi is perfect, Urdu is messy: the discourse of delegitimation of Urdu in India,”
the brown journal of world affairs Scripts, Spelling, and Identities in Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power, ed. Alexandra Jaffe et al. (Boston/ Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2012), 103–34. 6. Ibid., 103. 7. P. B. Henze, “Politics and Alphabets in Inner Asia,” in Advances in the Creation and Revision of Writing Systems, ed. J. A. Fishman (The Hague: Mouton, 1977), 371–420. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. See also T. G. Winner, “Problems of alphabetic reform among the Turkic peoples of Soviet Central Asia, 1920–41,” Slavonic and East European Review 31, no. 76 (1952): 133–47. 11. Mark Sebba, “Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR,” Language Problems and Language Planning 30, no. 2 (2006): 99–125. 12. Ibid., 110. 13. Lars S. Vikør, “Northern Europe: Languages as Prime Markers of Ethnic and National Identity,” in Language and Nationalism in Europe, ed. S. Barbour and C. Carmichael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 105–29. 14. R. A. Rothstein, “Spelling and Society: the Polish Orthographic Controversy of the 1930’s,” in Papers in Slavic Philology I, ed. B.A. Stolz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1977), 225–36. 15. Tilman Berger, “Religion and diacritics: The case of Czech orthography,” in Orthographies in Early Modern Europe, ed. Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). 16. R. A. Rothstein, “Spelling and Society: the Polish Orthographic Controversy of the 1930’s,” in Papers in Slavic Philology I, ed. B.A. Stolz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1977), 225–36. 17. Mark Sebba, “Postcolonial orthographies,” in Spelling and Society: The Culture and Politics of Or- thography Around the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 18. Robert A. Hall Jr., Pidgin and Creole Languages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 131. 19. D. Burns, “Social and political implications in the choice of an orthography,” Fundamental and Adult Education 5, no. 2 (1953): 80–85. 19 20. Bambi B. Schieffelin and Rachelle Charlier Doucet, “The ‘Real’ Haitian Creole: Ideology, Metalin- guistics and Orthographic Choice,” American Ethnologist 20, no. 1 (1994): 176–200. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 188. 23. Jacqueline Urla, “Outlaw Language: Creating Alternative Public Spheres in Basque Free Radio,” in The Language, Ethnicity, and Race Reader, ed. Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton (London: Routledge, 2003), 211–24. 24. Mark Sebba, Spelling and Society: The Culture and Politics of Orthography Around the World (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Chapter 6. 25. Geirr Wiggen, “The role of the affective filter on the level of orthography,” Newin trends in gra- phemics and orthography, ed. Gerhardt Augst (Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 1986), 395–412. 26. Harold F. Schiffman,Linguistic Culture and Language Policy (London: Routledge, 1996). 27. Sally Johnson, ‘The Cultural Politics of the 1998 Reform of German Orthography,”German Life and Letters 53, no. 1 (2003): 106–25. 28. Pedro M. Garcez, “The Debatable 1990 Luso-Brazilian Orthographic Accord,”Language Problems and Language Planning 19, no. 2 (1995): 151–78. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. See Mark Sebba, “Ideology and Alphabets in the former USSR,” Language Problems and Language Planning 30, no. 2 (2006): 99–125. Also see reference in endnote 1. 32. Mark Sebba, “Iconisation, attribution and branding in orthography,” Written Language & Literacy 18, no. 2 (2015): 208–27. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid.
Fall/Winter 2018 • volume xxv, issue i