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Contributions to the Sociology o/ Language54
The Politics ofLanguage Purism
EditorJoshua A. Fishman Edited byB TT T Idjorn ti. Jernud
Michael J . Shapiro
Mouton de GruyterBerlin . New York Mouton de .GruyterBerlin . New York 1989
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vi ContentsLanguage purisrn as a type of language correction1. V. Neustupn y 211The linguistic and social dimensions of purismE. A nnamalai 22 5Subject index 23 3
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2 Bjorn H. Jernudd
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A concrete example of purism is Ihe Editorial Comrnent in News-rev ff w June 4, 1983, reproduced from The Korea Herald and titled"Linguistic MiJieu":Language is the soul of the nation as the crystalization of itsinherited culture and living modus. SO WP. can feel the breath ofother people through verbal contacto ... This compels the con-temporary generation to further refine our lingual assetj ... nineassociations of Korean linguists and writer s have jointly recorn-mended that the govemment se! up a 'National Korean LanguageResearch Institute' (to engage in) comprehensive research on ortho-graphic rules, standard language, loanwords and Romanization ofKorean personal and place names, among others. These are required,to purify our language (of] ... words that betray the cause ofpuri ty and decency' in our I inguistic expression. We are not inclinedto be chauvinistic at all .... The job of purifying our language doesnot belong to linguists aloner We, all using it, must be participantsin the work.
Korea presents a case of contemporary purism (for details, see Park,this volume: 113) but purism in talk and action can be seen to occurat different times in history. For example, since the early spread ofIslam in the last miJIennium with its overwhclming impact on society,Iran has sought to regulate the amount of Arabie borrowing into thePersian language, just as Iran in modem times seeks to harness thebest of European and American technology and thought through thesystematic correction of the Persian language (see Karimi-Hakkak,this volume:8 1). Or when a seculnriz ing Turkey modernized in the1920s, Ataturk embarked on a massive state-led campaign to replacewhat was Arabic and Persian in Turkish in order to rid Turkey ofwhat he regarded as undesirab.y traditional and therefore an imped-ment to secularization and Westernization. lronically, this task provedto be so massive and potentially clisruptive of communication thatafter a first surge to purge the lexicon and to introduce the Latinalphabet and therefore I1CW spelling, he eventually had to endorsea point of view that allowed lirnitless openness to, and therefore in-corpora tion of, words frorn Arabic as we 1\ as other languages into theTurkish language. Atatrk and his language managers justified this"new policy of moclera tion" both by ernpirical clairns and by theformulation of new theory: they declared Turk ish to be the sourceof all languagcs (Heyd 1954:33-4).
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