It has long been established in the field of sociolinguistics that language has often been a tool to reinforce social standing, establish one's superiority over others of lower social standing, show respect (or lack thereof) to members of a higher perceived social status, or show solidarity among members of one's own social group. But while the field of sociolinguistics is relatively young, authors, playwrights, and media magnates have long since been aware of the connection between language varieties and perceived social status, and have deftly and deliberately used specific languages, dialects, and variations to achieve a variety of sociological effects within their works – many of which have long since broken out of the world of fiction and inspired, or at the very least, influenced, society. Sociolinguistic studies in have clearly and irrefutably marked a correlation between language use and social standing, but art has been imitating life long before even the first study.
Pearl (2006) explored the use of languages in various novels, focusing on fictional, constructed languages, which she dubbed “conlangs.” She says that authors have used conlangs “to give their stories depth and intellectually stimulating plot twists and to address mature themes.” The existence of and interactions within and among social classes would certain qualify as one of the mature themes which can be brought to light through the careful and deliberate use of language.
Wardhaugh (2010) posited that certain languages or varieties of languages are more powerful, and consequently, more valuable, than others. This perception extends to the people who use such language, as well as those situations and circumstances in which the “more powerful” language or variation is used, as opposed to the “lesser” one. Wardhaugh adds to this by stating, “we cannot escape such issues of power in considering language and social relationships.” It is through a small sampling of various uses in language in classical and popular fiction that we can see how literary artists, far from escaping such issues, have embraced them to add to the literary and social impact of their works.
One literary great who used language as a tool to achieve cultural change was Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). A Florentine poet during the Middle ages, Dante broke with the literary traditions of his time by writing his work, including his magnum opus, La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy), not in Latin, the lingua franca for literary and scholarly works of the time, but in his own regional Italian dialect of the common people. Dante's deliberate choice of language, breaking with tradition, was part of his effort to spread the them of his Commedia to as broad an audience as possible. As Nostoro (2003) put it, “Dante was the first major poet in the Middle Ages to write on a serious topic in the “low” Italian language instead of Latin, which was the norm for writings on theology at the time. Dante’s main motive for writing ‘The Divine Comedy’ was to communicate that everyone needs spiritual renewal by God in order to be saved and spend eternity in heaven.”
So Dante, rather than appease the intellectual and theological elite (two classes which, during the medieval period, would've practically been one and the same), directs his greatest work towards the common folk, in their own language. The result of this is not only the most widely popular work of medieval literature, but the formation and standardization of the Italian language itself, as Nostoto explains: “Possibly Dante’s greatest contribution was his opposition to the popular belief that Latin was the only suitable language for literature. He advocated the use of Italian with spoken dialect, and his works are the basis for modern Italian.”
Glover (1997), also acknowledges Dante's contribution to modern Italian. saying that “at the beginning of the 14th century, Latin was the foremost language of literature; and it is the orderliness and comprehensibility of Latin that gives strength to the new literary language of Italian that Dante created almost single-handedly,” but continues the praise for Dante's invention and use of Italian, saying, “What is amazing about Dante's language is the fluency, the plainness, the simplicity – the sheer approachability – of his words. . .Try reading the opening of The Inferno in any parallel-text edition. Listen to the words on tape as you follow them with your eye. The Italian – both the vocabulary and the way in which the words are pronounced – seems invitingly close to the Italian of today. That could never be said of Chaucer and his English contemporaries.”
In other words, the popularity of Dante's work not only helped create standard Italian, but firmly established it as a literary language on equal social and intellectual footing with Latin itself. In his poetry, Dante consolidated the dialects into a standard language of the people and elevated it out of vulgar parlance into into a new level of respectability. The tradition of Latin being the language of the elite, however, was not about to go away any time soon, but neither were those men who chose to challenge it, such as the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who originally wrote his scientific publications in Latin, but switched to Italian as the importance of his discoveries, and thus, his desire to share them, grew. Says Adams (2000), “As Galileo's telescope continued to reveal more surprises--sunspots, for example, and the phases of Venus – he sought an ever-wider audience. Flouting tradition, he began writing in Italian so that his fellow citizens, who had not been educated in universities, could learn of the new science for themselves. `I want them to realize,' Galileo explained, `that just as nature has given to them, as well as philosophers, eyes with which to see her works, so she has also given them brains capable of penetrating and understanding them.'”
It is as though both Dante and Galileo realized that through acquiring knowledge, one can increase their social standing and power in society, and that the traditions in place at the time seemed designed to prevent this from occurring. So both men fought the tradition, and in so doing, chipped away at Latin's exalted status as the only language suitable for serious discussion.
Up until this time, while Latin enjoyed its status as the language of educated work, “spoken” languages, such as Dante's Tuscan dialect, were relegated to an inferior status. Indeed, Wardhaugh has this to say about vernaculars:
Linguists use the term vernacular to refer to the language a person grows up with and uses in everyday life in ordinary, commonplace, social interactions. We should note that this variety may meet with social disapproval from others who favor another variety, sometimes one heavily influenced by the written form of the language. Therefore, vernacular often has pejorative associations when used in public discourse.
In other words, vernacular language is often looked down upon in a society because the spoken form of a language is commonly seen as inferior to the written form. But what happens when the written form is the spoken form? What happens when a literary author, in putting the “inferior” vernacular to print, writes one of the greatest novels in American literature? The novelist is Mark Twain (1835-1910), and the novel is the American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Over a century after its first publication, Huckleberry Finn remains one of the most controversial, challenged, and banned books in America today. Sullivan (2001) sums up the controversy thus:
From the start, the book was greeted with an odd mixture of praise and hostility. Most complaints were about the language. Twain had taken the innovative step of writing entirely in the vernacular of his characters, but refined critics thought his words were far too vulgar and lewd. The Concord Public Library banned the book, declaring it "trash of the veriest sort" and full of language fit only for the slums.
Twain, in the name of accuracy, took great pains to recreate the vernacular of the era as authentically as he could, which in part led to the Concord Library's above claim of it containing “language fit only for the slums.” More than anything else, the word nigger is at the heart of the firestorm surrounding the book, the word itself appearing approximately two hundred times throughout the text, mostly spoken by Huck, who serves as both protagonist and narrator. Again,Twain, writing during America's Reconstruction period a novel which took place in the Antebellum South, sacrificed political correctness for authenticity, incurring the wrath of critics then and now.
While Huck's own language, as transcribed by Twain, is tricky, but readable with some effort: “I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is taking considerable many resks, though I ain't had no experience, and can't say for certain, but it looks so to me, anyway,” it's the language of Jim, the runaway slave who Huck agrees to smuggle to freedom, which is nearly incomprehensible: “Well, one night I creeps to de do', pooty late, en de do' warn't quite shet, en I hear ole missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans.”
While many critics have decried Twain's use of language as racist, using Jim's language to portray him as stupid or inferior, Twain's supporters, including Twain himself, insist that the text is a measure of the authenticity of the characters' speech. Every edition of Huckleberry Finn published includes an explanatory note written by Twain himself, which reads as follows:
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap- hazard fashion, or by guess-work, but pains-takenly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
If we accept Twain's explanation, then we are also forced to realize that the notion of Jim being judged as somehow deficient because of his dialect is hardly limited to Antebellum society. Indeed, prejudices against African-American dialects persist to this day, as Wardhaugh acknowledges in his discussion of African American English (AAE): “Many educators regarded its various distinguishing characteristics as deficiencies: black children were deficient in language ability because their language did not have certain features of the standard, and the consequence of that deficiency was cognitive deficiency.” Wardhaugh explains this as the Deficit Hypothesis, and why he, and most sociolinguists, reject it, he cannot deny that its acceptance has led to an uphill struggle among poor blacks in our educational system: “AAE may not limit its users cognitively but it does limit them socially. . . This is the traditional attitude that educators have toward nonstandard dialects.” And so, the prejudice marches on.
In spite of this, the end result is that Mark Twain, through Huckleberry Finn and other works, gave vernacular speech, particularly black vernacular speech, unmistakable credibility in the literary community, and opened the doors for later writers to use vernacular language, including fictitious “conlangs” such as Nadsat, the Russian/Cockney English hybrid used by Alex, the narrator/protagonist of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, which Pearl claimed gave the novel more depth by “allowing the violent world of Alex and his droogs to unfold, literally, in their own words.” Wardhaugh remarks, “I have said that there may be a certain solidarity to be found in the use of AAE and also that Bernstein has argued that the characteristic language of the lower working class successfully perpetuates itself.” If we extend Wardhaugh's comment to include all vernacular speech, as opposed to just AAE (and there's no reason not to), then we could conclude that both Twain's and Burgess' use of a vernacular-speaking first-person narrator is an attempt to foster solidarity between protagonist and reader – by the end of the novel, they are both, quite literally, speaking the same language.
Fishkin (1996), acknowledged Twain's use of vernacular as a contribution to black literature by saying,
Slave narratives had rarely employed dialect, seeking to demonstrate instead, through well-crafted, standard-English prose, the ex-slave's claim to a place at the table of humanity. And most of Twain's black contemporaries (with one or two exceptions) had steered clear of using the vernacular in their work as well, preferring the measured tones of the educated middle class. It was certainly plausible that Twain had been an important influence on writers such as Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison.
Fishkin also noted that she had “found compelling evidence that black speakers had played a central role in the genesis not only of Twain's black characters but of his most famous white one: Huckleberry Finn.” In her 1993 book, Was Huck Black?, Fishkin claims that “compelling evidence indicates that the model for Huck Finn's speech was a black child instead of a white one and that this child sparked in Twain a sense of the possibilities of a vernacular narrator.” The idea of Huck not only speaking black, but also being black, was explored by novelist John Clinch in his 2007 novel Finn, a prequel featuring Huck's abusive father, “Pap” Finn, in which Clinch writes that Huck's mother was, in fact, a black woman.
Whether or not Huck was a mulatto child, it's certainly reasonable that Twain would use similarities in speech to form a bond between the story's two protagonists: Huck and Jim. As the homeless delinquent son of the town drunkard, Huck occupies one of the lowest places in Southern society, valuable only because of the large sum of money he discovered at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It is Jim's status as a slave, and a runaway slave at that, that makes him possibly the only person lower than Huck on the social scale. And yet Huck is not Jim's superior – not at first. One of the dominant themes in Huckleberry Finn is how Huck comes to realize that Jim is a human being worthy of the same consideration and respect as any other, and not a piece of property, as society claimed he was. And while the black vernacular as written by Twain is difficult for the reader to translate, Huck seems to understand Jim without any trouble. Many times throughout the novel, Huck and Jim find themselves alone on the raft, floating down the Mississippi River, discussing folksy topics such as local superstitions. It is this communication, more so than the journey itself, that I believe engenders solidarity between these two characters, as emphasized in their distinct but common dialects. It was the use of vernacular which, according to Fishkin, gave Huckleberry Finn the impetus to become the literary classic it is today:
Huckleberry Finn allowed a different kind of writing to happen: a clean, crisp, no- nonsense, earthy, vernacular kind of writing that jumped off the printed page with unprecedented immediacy and energy; it was a book that talked. I now realized that, despite the fact that they had been largely ignored by white critics for the last hundred years, African-American speakers, language, and rhetorical traditions had played a crucial role in making that novel what it was.
Wardhaugh makes extensive use of research by Labov, Trudgill, and Cheshire to demonstrate the connections between nonstandard language variants and social class. In every case, use of the “standard” dialect was more prevalent among upper classes... but only in formal circumstances. In more informal situations, where the need to maintain social standing was not as great, speakers lapsed into more nonstandard varieties. The conclusion is that those varieties of language which deviate from the “standard” are associated with the lower classes, and nominally shunned by the upper classes in public. Away from prying eyes, prejudices slowly disappear
McNally's (1995) article, “Language, History, and Class Struggle,” can offer a few insights as to the nature of the oppressed and exploited (as both Huck and Jim surely are), and the common theme McNally notes, the way “they invert the experience of exploitation. At the heart of exploitation, after all, is the sense of theft, that one has been robbed. Inverting that relationship, robbing the robber. . . is a constant theme of popular culture.” So it is in Huckleberry Finn, where the concept of Jim “escaping” is almost never verbalized. Instead, Huck often describes the scenario as his own work to “steal” Jim out of slavery. Of course, we as readers know that Jim really cannot be “stolen” against his will, and that his escape began even before he met up with Huck on Jackson's Island. But it is the act of theft – Huck stealing Jim, Jim stealing himself – and the terrible consequences which both characters face should they be caught which unites them against their oppressors, and it is the word “steal” that Huck continually uses which shows the degree to which the ruling class of Southern Society have manipulated the language.
By even suggesting that Jim can be “stolen,” the slave-owning society of the South has managed to pass along the idea that Jim, as a slave, is no more than a piece of property or chattel. This is exactly what McNally would expect in a world where “speech involves both meanings and themes. Themes have to do with the accents and emphases that members of specific social groups try to give words in order to transmit their experiences.” The Southern rules have managed to transmit their experience of slavery in the term “stolen” as opposed to “escaped,” and emphasize the theme of Jim as a piece of property, not a human being.
Just as language can bring people together in real or seemingly real bonds of solidarity, even across social classes, it can also be manipulated to artificially drive them apart. While we have touched upon that theme in Huckleberry Finn, a far better example exists in George Orwell's (1903-1950) 1984. 1984 depicted a totalitarian state where the very thoughts of the people were subject to government control. To that end, citizens even suspected of harboring anti-government thoughts were vanished without a trace, children turned in their parents for muttering anti-government sentiments in their sleep, and, in an ultimate act of control, the language used by the people is rewritten into “Newspeak,” a bland English variety deliberately devoid of any means of creativity or expressing imagination.
Orwell wrote an appendix to 1984 where he explains, “the purpose of Newspeak is not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the government of Great Britain, where the novel takes place], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak [Standard English] forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”
By controlling the language, The Party could manipulate the way its people thought, and keep the Proles (the lower class of Ingsoc society; approximately 85% of its population) from even conceptualizing revolution, much less carrying one out. Here we see another of McNally's examples of the dominant social group attaching the theme it wanted to specific language, for, as Orwell writes in his appendix: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used such statements as, 'the dog is free from lice,' or 'This field is free from weeds.' It could not be used in its old sense of 'politically free' or 'intellectually free,' since political or intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.” Thus we see the ultimate use of language as a tool of social control – by removing, or at least attempting to remove, the very concepts that would cause social upheaval or dissention among the classes, for how can anyone aspire to freedom if they cannot even verbalize it? A similar theme of language being used to control the masses can be found in Ayn Rand's Anthem, also about a dystopian futuristic society so focused on collectivism that it is reflected in the language itself, which forbids any reference to individuality: All characters refer to themselves in the first person plural, and the very utterance of the word “ego” is punishable by death.
The deft and deliberate use of language is every author's stock and trade, and they are well aware of the impact their words have on their readers. We have seen a small sampling of authors who were aware of the connection between language and social standing, both in the real world and the fictional worlds in their pages. Our own study of sociolinguistics is only beginning to officially quantify and classify the truths these great authors were aware of as they put pen to paper and transported us to worlds vastly different, yet eerily similar to our own.
Adams, N. (n.d). Profile: Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. All Things Considered (NPR), Retrieved from Newspaper Source database.
Cook, V. (1999, Summer). Going Beyond the Native Speaker in Language Teaching.
TESOL Quarterly 33(2), 185-209.
Fishkin, S. (1996). Huck's black voice. Wilson Quarterly, 20(4), 81. Retrieved from Literary Reference Center database.
Fishkin, S. (1993) Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices. Retrieved from http://books.google.com
Glover, M. (1997, June 13). The Poet who Created a Language. New Statesman, p. 47. Retrieved from Literary Reference Center database.
McNally, D. (1995, July/August). Language, History, and Class Struggle. Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine 47(3) 13-31. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier Database.
Nostoro, R. (2003). Dante Alighieri. Retrieved from http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/bios/b2dante.htm
Orwell, G. (1984). 1984. New York: Signet Classic.
Pearl, N., & Boozer, D. (2006). Speaking in Tongues: Literary Languages. Library Journal, 131(15), 101. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.
Sullivan, J. (2001, Nov. 4). The Literary Adventures of Huck Finn. The Sunday Age, p. 10. Retrieved from Newspaper Source Plus database.
Twain, M. (1994). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Dover
Wardhaugh, R. (2010). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
No comments:
Post a Comment