Authoritative Discourse in Language Columns: Linguistic, Ideological and Social issues

The Holoptic Eye and the Future of Romance

This book makes me believe in the future of Romance! (No pun intended) I know this will sound polemical, but, for decades now, Romance linguistics has been living a fragile, aimless existence; preserved by fewer and fewer university curricula either as a noble concession to an equally noble antiquarian desire or (much less romantically) as the sad outcome of institutional inertia. A sad story, of course, for those who thrive in the analysis of its fascinating historical emergence in nineteenth-century academic circles. The “Romance languages” and the “Romance world” were, of course, historical construals involved in social processes and the legitimization of cultural hierarchies; but also a CORPUS that lent itself to experimentation in the development of a modern comparative epistemology. Systematic comparison of linguistic structures along diachronic and synchronic, diatopic and syntopic axes was the key hermeneutic exercise for the development of truly explanatory theories of language change. Once made to lay sideways by Saussure, they yielded geometrically balanced theories of language. Of language, period.

However, for sociolinguists, by definition, there is never a period after (or before) language. Language is always already social, embedded in people’s lives as it is created and as it is in turn projected on to the community from which it emerges. Within this social paradigm of language study, the extraordinary importance of the immediacy of verbal communication pushed researchers to place their energy at the service of the pursuit of contextual detail. Truth be told, comparison has always been an interest of sociolinguists; however, perhaps due to the material demands of the associated research methods, focus on the syntopic dimension became central.

The CIRCULA group offers a refreshing project to bring comparison to the forefront. Not as a nostalgic return to a bygone era, but as a contemporary necessity of scholarship that aims at both local and global relevance. The present book, in particular, offers an exploratory raid into the comparative analysis of the public sphere through two of its central constituents: language and the press. The authors focus on a specific genre, linguistic columnism, and offer us, firstly, a CORPUS that lends itself to the exploration of new pathways for comparison. Secondly, they draw a series of thematic lines and draft a conceptual ←7 | 8→landscape through which to understand language as both an instrument and an object with which and on which social struggles are waged.

Preface

This volume Authoritative Discourse in Language Columns: Linguistic, Ideological and Social Issues brings together seven papers plus a theoretical introduction written by members of the international research group CIRCULA. This group, formed in 2013 in Augsburg, Germany, and led by Sabine Schwarze, aims to study the transmission of linguistic ideologies through the press. Since its foundation, the Circula research group has held four editions of the biannual ILPE Conference (Idéologies linguistiques dans la press romane, founding conference 2013 in Augsburg, Germany), created the open-access journal CIRCULA on linguistic ideologies (11 issues between 2013 and 2020), participated in many conferences and research projects, and produced numerous publications – four collective volumes: Marimón Llorca/Santamaría 2019, Remysen/Schwarze 2019, Marimón Llorca/Remysen/Rossi 2021, and Pano Alamán/ Ruggiano/Walsh 2021. In this volume, the Circula research group addresses a topic of paramount importance in understanding the relationship between language and society: the representation of authority in metalinguistic discourse, specifically the discourse found in newspaper language columns, a journalistic genre with a long tradition in which opinions about language are accepted or rejected according to criteria based on some type of authority, for example, institutional, political, academic, or personal authority. Language columns have been somewhat neglected in academic research until recent years; their study, however, is essential to understand the course of ideas about language in linguistic and social communities. The pan-Romance scope of the language columns included here – ranging from Latin America (Argentina, Chile and Colombia) to Canada (Quebec) to Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Italy) – and the wide range of dates from the 19th and 20th centuries, which cover the entire period of the genre – allows for a contrastive, diatopic and diachronic approach to the study of the relationship between language and power in this particular type of metalinguistic discourse in the press. It is, in any case, a starting point, the ultimate objective of which is to make available to the research community a corpus of Romance language columns that enables and encourages the (comparative) study of this type of text.←9 | 10→

While each chapter focuses on the relationship between language and authority in a particular language and location, numerous commonalities between the different works examined are apparent. The representation in these documents of norms vs. usage, institutionalism vs. individualism, the “elite” vs. “the common people”, liberal vs. conservative orientation, prescriptivism (or even purism) vs. descriptivism, fixity vs. variation, nationalism, etc., form a type of conceptual capital which is replicated throughout these works, and identifies them as one of the epicenters of public debate on language and linguistic thought in the 19th and 20th centuries across many different linguistic and social communities. As Florian Columas points out, ideologies serve to “organize thoughts, feelings, and one’s position in the world. Language ideologies are an obvious example of this”. ¹ Some of the questions that the seven chapters that make up this volume seek to answer include the means by which public figures of authority are constructed, the linguistic resources used to create authority, and the political and social implications of language debates.

The first chapter written by Wim Remysen, Discussing Language, Asserting Authority: Standard Language Ideology in Montreal Le Pays (1852–1871), analyses the language-related articles published in the Le Pays newspaper. Remysen draws attention to over 100 extracts which demonstrate that, for the newspaper’s editors, arguing over language was a means of cementing their authority “while weakening that of others” (p. 27). Remysen uses numerous examples to shows the extent to which discussion about the standard language or the “correct” use of French in mid-19th-century Québec was politically instrumentalized. The language debate thus becomes an excuse and a battlefield in which left-wing and conservative political positions – represented by Le Pays – face each other, whose medium of expression was the newspaper La Minerve, all in the midst of the emergence of a Quebec bourgeoisie in dispute for power and for being the holder of the voice of authority.

The 19th century is also the focus of Juan Ennis’ chapter on Language, Politics and Secularization: Language-Ideological Debates in the Latin American Press in the 1870s, which analyzes three moments of public language debate during the 1870s in three Latin American countries. These include the debates in the language columns of Juan de Arona, in La Estrella de Chile; Miguel Antonio Caro, in El Tradicionista, which he founded in Bogotá; and Gutiérrez in La Libertad, a liberal Buenos Aires newspaper. In all three cases, the language ←10 | 11→debate is almost always intertwined with political-ideological debates and has less to do with prescribing “good” or discouraging “bad” usage than with the question of who has the authority to intervene in the management of language. It is in the notion of authority that Ennis can observe a confluence of language-ideological debates, political disputes, and the incipient expansion and institutionalization of modern, scientific forms of discourse on language. Indeed, in both Remysen’s and Ennis’s work, the link between language and politics seems to lie precisely in the foundation of authority in language and in society.