Language, Ethnicity, and Racism

Language, Ethnicity, and Racism Bonfiglio

Race is a folkish notion created a priori by a desire to identify a majority within a nation as essentially in natural possession of national character, as well as to identify a minority as an other, as naturally different, and then to exclude that minority as foreign to the configuration of national character.

Anderson holds that the representation of the modern nation- state as a community is made possible by the vehicle of language. He bases this on the primordial imagined community, which he sees as “imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and a written script” (Anderson 1991:13)

-> The press allowed numerous, competing, imagined communities 

-> Tower of Babel, “prejudicial ethnolinguistic consciousness"

The Romans, however, were “good cultivators (agricoltori)” of Latin and “transplanted it from its wild place to a domestic one; then, in order that it grow the fattest, most beautiful, and most precocious fruits, pruned off the first useless shoots and grafted in their place several branches […] there thus appeared in that language flowers and fruits of such colorful eloquence” (183). Speroni adds that “someone not born Tuscan could learn good Tuscan”, and he speaks of “usage, which in the course of time converts itself practically into nature” (26).

grafted onto the trunk “natural and domestic branches magisterially drawn from the Greek language” (Du Bellay 1972 [1549]: 28). The Romans performed this grafting so well, that the branches no longer appeared adapted but natural. 

(Compare to derogatory use of term ‘folkish’)

Pentecost, sanctifying language

“Germans do not seek their language from books, but take it instead from im- planted nature (aus der eingepjlanzten Natur), do not study it from masters, but instead learn it from nurses, do not receive it in schools from the mouths of teachers, but instead suck it, in the cradle, from the breasts of mothers” (Mey- fahrt as quoted in Huber 1984: 144). This passage sets up a correspondence among nature, home, mothers, and the family. The German language is actually implanted in nature and exists as well in mother’s milk. This not only reinforces the private ownership of German by Germans, but also acts to render it inaccess- ible to foreigners, to those not born into the matrix of physical German nature and nurture by German mothers.

 Leibniz asserts “the common origin of all nations and in a primitive root-language […] the Teutonic seems to have better preserved that which is natural” (Schmarsow 1877: 218). In this language, “there is some- thing natural in the origin of words - something that reveals a relationship be- tween things and the sounds and motions of the organs of speech” (220).

“that it greets the ear, after long absence, with a kind of sudden magic and awakens nostalgia when far away”. Humboldt was among the first to represent language in the form of a tree diagram, which acts to configure it genealogically. It is a family tree remapped onto language and planted in the ethno-national soil, where its ownership becomes exclusive (all quotations in this paragraph from Humboldt 1836: Part 9).      — heredity, purity of source

“the contemporary language of America[…] is in the act of changing its skin” (1914: 248)