Sociolinguistic approaches to writing systems research

Sociolinguistic approaches to writing systems research Mark Sebba Department of Linguistics, Lancaster University

Abstract

Correspondence: Mark Sebba, Department of Linguistics, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT. E-mail: [email protected]

Writing systems have attracted relatively little attention from sociolinguists, in spite of obvious connections with subjects of great sociolinguistic interest, such as ethnicity and identity. In fact, the literature contains a substantial amount of research on writing systems from a sociolinguistic perspective, but there is no recognised ‘sociolinguistics of writing systems’ within which different case studies can be researched and compared from a social and cultural point of view. This article will discuss and review research in the sociolinguistics of both writing systems and orthographies, taking a perspective drawn from literacy studies which treats writing systems as social practice. The paper will focus on stages of writing system development where social and cultural considerations typically play a role: the initial choice of script, the period when the orthography and/or script is developed, and once it is an established system in regular use. There is also a discussion of how social and cultural factors are involved in, and often stand in the way of, writing system reform.

1 Introduction Within the field of sociolinguistics, writing systems have attracted relatively little attention. This is surprising, since writing systems have obvious connections with subjects of great sociolinguistic interest, like identity and ethnicity. Indeed, only one volume exists which takes a strictly social perspective on writing systems: Fishman’s edited collection Advances in the Creation and Revision of Writing Systems (1977). While this book certainly merits, by virtue of its scope, authority, and quality, the description ‘classic’, it is surely not the final word on the subject. Yet, though many broadly sociolinguistic case studies of particular writing systems and orthographies have appeared over the years, there has been no successor volume to Fishman’s, and writing systems rarely feature as an area of study in textbooks on sociolinguistics.

However, as this article will show, there has been in fact a substantial amount of research on writing systems from a sociolinguistic perspective. What we have not had, to date, is a recognized ‘sociolinguistics of writing systems’ within which different case studies can be researched and compared from a social and cultural point of view. This article will discuss the sociolinguistics of both writing systems and orthographies, using a distinction articulated by Baker (1997, p. 93): ‘writing systems’ are graphic systems for representing a language or group of languages, while ‘orthographies’ are particular applications of writing systems in order to represent a specific language, and which are either already used or proposed to be used for that purpose. Thus, for the orthography of a particular language, a script must be chosen (or devised, or developed) and then applied to the writing of that language by determining a set of conventional

Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009. © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/wsr/wsp002

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correspondences between the characters provided by the script and the words, sounds or syllables of the language. This may involve modifications and variations of the script itself which are unique to that language (for example, diacritics). An orthography for a particular language may be standardized, but it does not have to be, and even if there is a standard orthography for a language, variation may be present, either officially legitimated or not. Social and cultural considerations may be (and, I would argue, nearly always are) involved at the stage of the initial choice of script, during the period when the orthography becomes established and once it is in regular use. Furthermore, if there are proposals or attempts to reform the orthography, or to change the script altogether, social and cultural factors are likely to play an important part in the outcome. In Sections 4, 5 and 6, we will look at the sociolinguistic issues that arise at each of these stages. What exactly does ‘sociolinguistic’ mean in this context? ‘Sociolinguistic’ can be taken as a broad term covering a range of social, cultural, and historical aspects of language and an equally varied range of methodologies for studying them. For example, the ‘sociology of language’ paradigm has its focus on ‘the social organisation of language behaviour’ (Fishman, 1972), while the ‘language variation and change’ paradigm emphasizes socially motivated variation among linguistic forms. Both potentially have something to say about the choices that have to be made at different times, and with different degrees of freedom and constraint, by the users of written language with respect to their writing systems. Therefore, in this article, we will consider sociolinguistic approaches to writing systems research in the broadest sense. This article is organized as follows: Section 2 is a discussion of writing systems in the context of literacies and literacy practices. Section 3 discusses how writing systems can function as markers of difference and belonging, and be involved in the creation of identities at different levels of social organization. Section 4 deals with sociolinguistic issues in the development of new writing systems, while Section 5 is about the sociolinguistics of already established ones. Section 6 is on the topic of sociolinguistic approaches to script and spelling reform. Section 7 is for concluding remarks. 36

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2 Writing Systems, Literacies, and Practices 2.1 Writing systems and literacy Literacy, by (almost) any definition, involves writing, and therefore there is a link between literacy and writing systems. Exactly what this link is, however, is not a straightforward matter. For a long period the dominant view among scholars was that literacy was a skill based on a technology —writing—and that being ‘literate’ and being ‘illiterate’ were distinct cognitive states, with many benefits accruing to the former. All of these claims can be, and have been, challenged, in particular within the approach to literacy now known as the New Literacy Studies (Street, 1984; Barton, 2006). The New Literacy Studies is relevant here because of its emphasis on the social and cultural context of literacy, and its foregrounding of practices of literacy, in other words an emphasis on literacy as a thing, or rather a collection of things, that people do rather than a cognitive condition or a skill. In an important study of literacy, Scribner and Cole (1981) studied the cognitive effects of literacy on speakers of the Vai language in Liberia. Among the Vai, three scripts exist, each linked to a different kind of literacy: the Roman, associated with formal schooling through the medium of English; the Arabic script, used for some Islamic religious functions; and an indigenous syllabic script, used mainly for record keeping and commercial transactions. As individuals differed in which of these scripts they knew, Scribner and Cole were able to investigate independently the relationship between each script, the cognitive functions of their users, and ‘literacy’ in general. Their findings did not support the notion that literacy was responsible for the development of higher order cognitive skills; to the extent that these were in evidence, they were associated with individuals who were literate in English: in other words, just those who had exposure to formal schooling. These cognitive effects were not found in Vai speakers who were literate only in Arabic or the Vai syllabic script. Gee (2008, p. 80) summarizes the importance of their work as follows: The research by Scribner and Cole clearly indicates that what matters is not literacy as

Sociolinguistics of writing systems

some decontextualised ‘ability’ to write or read, but the social practices into which people are apprenticed as part of a social group, whether as students in school, letter writers in a local community, or members of a religious group. The importance of this finding for the present discussion is that ‘cognitive consequences’ taken to be associated with literacy have been linked by some researchers to writing systems themselves. Furthermore, they are linked to certain types of writing systems rather than others. This is particularly clear in the work of Jack Goody and Ian Watt, two leading proponents of the idea that there is a ‘great divide’ between literate and non-literate cultures. According to Goody and Watt (1968, pp. 37–8), pictographic and logographic writing systems are inferior to phonetic ones, since they tend ‘to reify the objects of the natural and social order’, giving undue weight to the dominant ideologies and norms. On the other hand, phonetic writing ‘imitates human discourse’ and is ‘therefore adapted to expressing every nuance of individual thought’. Goody and Watt’s claim regarding pictographic systems is not really relevant to us here, since few if any existing languages have pictographic writing systems. However, their claim that logographic systems are inferior to phonetic systems (which I take to include syllabic, consonantal, and full alphabetic systems) is very significant, since a large proportion of the world’s literates use logographic systems. It is part of an approach to writing systems (first articulated by Gelb (1963) and Diringer (1968)—see Barton (2006, p. 122) for a discussion) which sees writing systems as having ‘evolved’ from logographic, through syllabic, to alphabetic. Furthermore, this claim has been taken up by others, who have used it to build a case against particular scripts. A recent example is Hannas (2003, pp. 6–7) who argues that: The basic difference between Western alphabetic and East Asian syllabic writing acts on several levels to promote or inhibit creativity, particularly that associated with breakthroughs in science […] syllabic literacy entails a diminished propensity for abstract and analytical thought […] Certain Asian characteristics credited with blocking creativity,

such as conservative political and social institutions and group-oriented behaviour, derive in part from effects that the orthography has had on the minds of individuals. This line of thought can be traced directly to the claims of Goody and Watt (1968; cited as a source by Hannas). The claims made by Hannas and others rely on a causal chain: orthography → cognition → social behaviour; thus although their theory itself is arguably not a social theory, it certainly brings us into the realm of the social, where we might want to look at socially oriented alternative theories to explain the observed phenomena such as ‘lack of abstract and analytical thought’ (though the correctness of these observations may be equally contested). For such a socially oriented alternative we may return to the work of Scribner and Cole, which first called into question the ‘cognitive effects’ of literacy. Scribner and Cole concluded from their research that the best approach to literacy was a ‘practice’ account: Instead of focusing exclusively on the technology of a writing system and its reputed consequences […] we approach literacy as a set of socially organized practices which make use of a symbol system and a technology for producing and disseminating it. Literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use. (Scribner and Cole, 1981, p. 236) I would argue that, just as a practice account of literacy is needed in order to understand literacy within its social and cultural context, so a practice account of writing systems is necessary in order to be able to understand how writing systems develop and function within their social context.

2.2 Writing systems as social practice Writing systems involve conventional relationships at multiple levels. This is why they can be seen as social practices: entire communities of users, subgroups and even individual users first have to establish these conventional relationships and then, later on, to decide whether to follow or deviate from the established conventions. This choosing between Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009

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options, whether conscious or unconscious, constitutes the ‘practice’ of writing system use; and sticking diligently to the prescribed standard is no less a practice than pointedly deviating from it, though the former is more likely to go unmarked. Some choices may be interpreted in a particular social context as neutral in terms of their social meaning, but others may be socially charged, depending on particular social and historical circumstances. To see the kinds of choices involved, we can look at the range of conventional relationships involved in scripts and orthographies (Sebba, 2007, pp. 27–30). 2.2.1 The script or writing system itself The decision to use a particular script is in some cases, but not usually, that of the individual user. However, the use of a particular script for a specific language (for instance, Roman script for English) is a conventional one and subject to change. Some languages, e.g. Japanese, use several scripts as a norm, with users having a certain amount of flexibility in choosing between them; this choice may have social meaning (Tranter, 2008). Where several scripts are in regular use for similar functions (for example, around the time of a script reform) then users must make a choice, and that choice will nearly always have social meaning of some kind. 2.2.2 The correspondences between characters of the writing system and words or sounds This again is by convention, and is part of the establishment of an orthography for a particular language or language variety. Thus represents /tʃ/ in Spanish and English, /ʃ/ in Portuguese and French and /x/ in German, Dutch, and Polish. These basic correspondences are established along with the orthography of a particular language, and once established are difficult to change either at a language community level or at the level of the individual user. However, many languages incorporate the potential for variation at this level by having more than one character to represent a particular word or sound, e.g. English /z/ which may be written either as or in certain environments, giving rise to variant suffix spellings and . 38


2.2.3 The representation of particular sounds in specific positions in a word For example, occurs syllable-finally in English representing /k/, but does not occur syllable-initially. Many languages have specific conventions for using certain characters or variants initially, medially, and/ or finally. 2.2.4 The association of specific letter sequences with specific words Thus, by convention in present-day English, and are different words although they have the same sound; so does as it would be read in accordance with the conventions, only it is not a word. On the other hand, and are variant forms of the same word (the first is archaic) but and are different words, differently pronounced. 2.2.5 The means by which such features as vowel length are indicated For example, by diacritics, macrons, vowel doubling, following by (as in German). 2.2.6 The use of diacritics and similar marks For example, accents (, ), diaeresis (, ), tilde (), caron (há ek) (, , < >). These in particular often become iconic of particular orthographies due to their distinctiveness, as in the case of the German umlaut (see Section 3). 2.2.7 Language-specific equivalences of specific characters or character sequence For example, in German, is treated as identical to , in Dutch = , in Norwegian = , in all words where they occur. This list of conventional relationships is not necessarily exhaustive. It can be seen that, although the conventions may be well entrenched in many cases, there is also potential for variation at many different levels. This may be, on the one hand, because the conventions actually allow a choice (e.g. in Dutch, the word for ‘ice’ can be written or ; and are both considered correct in British English), leading to legitimate or licensed variation. On the other hand, the conventions may be


set up in such a way as to allow them to be broken in a way that does not affect meaning at the linguistic level. For example, if ‘blue’ is deliberately respelt as this maintains a conventional soundcharacter correspondence (see subsection 2.2.2) but without using the particular sound-character correspondence prescribed for that word (see subsection 2.2.4). This can be termed unlicensed variation and when it occurs is likely to have meaning at the social level (Sebba, 2007, p. 30). The possibilities for variation are further multiplied by the possibility of mixing languages and/or scripts, a phenomenon which is by no means new but has had a recent resurgence on the internet. From this potential for variation (licensed or unlicensed) comes the notion of writing systems as social practice: a recurrent activity involving meaningful choices (Sebba, 2007). At first this notion may seem paradoxical, when so much to do with writing is standardized and constrained; but as I have shown above, there are in fact many points within writing systems where variation can occur, and where there is variation, there is in practice always social meaning. In the case of both scripts and orthographies, research has shown that social meaning most commonly has to do with identities: thus, writing systems can help to create a common identity, reject an identity, or construct boundaries and divisions. Furthermore, this potential exists at all levels of social groupings, from entire language communities (e.g. ‘users of English’) to subcultural groups (‘German heavy metal fans’). This is the subject of the next section.

3 Writing Systems and Identities: Markers of Difference and Belonging Writing systems are potent symbols of the languages they encode, to the extent that, in the public mind, a language and its writing are often the same thing. Script may even be the main or only characteristic which differentiates two ‘languages’ (see Coulmas, 2003: p. 232ff. for examples). Scripts are particularly powerful identity markers, as they often have associations

with particular secular and—especially—religious cultures, and this may evoke strong positive or negative reactions. For example, King has written (1998, p. 84): The power of language as icon must never be underestimated. Like it or not, the Urdu script means Muslim, the Devanagari script means Hindu. The Urdu script as seen by an angry, inflamed Hindu mob summons up talismanic images from the present and the past […] And vice-versa.1 Scripts can function to differentiate social groups at different levels of social organization. Unseth (2005, p. 22) lists ‘factors that can affect how people want to distance or identify themselves by script’ as clan identity, ethnic identity, national identity, political movements, prestige, and religion, and he provides examples for all of these. Iconic power is not reserved just for complete scripts. Within a single script system, such as the Roman one, there exist many possibilities for iconizing particular font styles, characters, and diacritics. For example, with respect to style, Spitzmüller (to appear) points out that black letter (‘gothic’) typeface has long been used as an index for ‘Germanness’ in German writing addressed to a German readership. Individual letters also may have iconic power within a language community: for example, the letter is archaic in Swedish, confined to loanwords and surnames (which sometimes retain their old spellings, and sometimes have been modernized). This allows it, according to Carney (1994, p. 450) to be ‘exploited unofficially for [its] antiquarian value’, for example in the spelling wärdshus ‘hotel’ in hotel names, for the standard värdshus (an English equivalent might be Ye Olde Inne). Awareness of different orthographic traditions may be sufficient to allow particular characters, character combinations or diacritics to be iconified from the perspective of other groups who do not normally use the items in question. For example, when Vuk Karadži reformed the Cyrillic orthography of Serbian by adding (among others) the letter , he ‘drew criticism from the Orthodox clergy who regarded it as a “Catholic letter” ’ (Magner, 2001, p. 18) because of its associations with related languages that used the Latin alphabet Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009

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and were spoken by Catholics. Spitzmüller (2007, p. 403) points out how the umlaut has been used by Heavy Metal Bands with names such as Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, ZnöWhite, Beowülf, Blöödhag, Infernäl Mäjesty, Infernö to index the musical genre as well as the notion of ‘Gothic’ more generally. The main point here is not that it is possible to iconify diacritics, characters or whole script systems, but that groups of language users who seek to create solidarity among themselves, or to distance themselves from others, invariably do identify such features of language, at whatever level is most available or appropriate, and use them in this way. In addition to the case of in Serbian, for example, we have the example of , , and in the proposed phonemic orthography proposed for Haitian Creole by McConnell and Laubach. These letters were denounced by opponents as ‘AngloSaxon’ imports, and their proposers (one of whom was a Protestant missionary) were viewed by some as agents of American imperialism, preparing the way for English (with its ‘Anglo-Saxon’ consonants) to replace French in Haiti, and Protestantism to replace Catholicism (Schieffelin and Doucet, 1994, p. 191). In contexts like the Haitian one, standardization remains contentious in the face of competing ideologies of language. In Haiti, the issue was whether written Haitian should resemble, and thus be, a variety of French, or a language distinct from French. Similar considerations exist in the case of writing Galician (a language spoken in Spain, which is close to Portuguese but has been in prolonged contact with Spanish). Although there is an official norm, there is at the moment no standardized way of writing Galician. Rather, there is a whole continuum of norms; these are not randomly distributed, but reflect an ideological stance on the part of the user, as to whether Galician is a kind of Portuguese, or a language different from Portuguese. Celso Álvarez-Cáccamo and Mário J. Herrero Valeiro (1996, pp. 148–9) describe how the tipping point ‘between what is symbolically “Galician” (galego) and what is symbolically “Portuguese” can be located in the presence of ç, of ss or even in the nasal tilde on ã, õ’. All of these are conventions associated with Portuguese, but not Spanish, orthography and hence become symbols of the ‘Portugueseness’ of Galician in contrast with 40


other conventions (shared with Spanish) which symbolize ‘non-Portugueseness’. The Galician example shows how even very small graphical details of a script can be iconfied. Bird (2001, p. 148) gives another example from the Bamileke group of Bantu languages in Cameroon: the ethnic significance of one of the orthographic symbols is quite striking. A ubiquitous orthographic trait of the Bamileke languages is the barred-u symbol < ʉ>. Bamilekes who are literate in their mother tongue strongly identify with this symbol, which iconifies the strong cultural unity of the group with respect to the languages outside the group. These other languages, most notably the nonBamileke Grassfields languages, also have this high central vowel but they write it with ɨ. To summarize, while from a linguistic point of view, scripts, orthographic conventions, and diacritics are often seen as socially neutral items which can be evaluated, if they are evaluated at all, in terms of their efficiency in providing a system of notation, this is not how their users typically see them. On the contrary, they are an integral part of a culture, endowed with a powerful symbolism of identity. This is well portrayed in Christopher Wyrod’s paper on the development and spread of N’ko, an indigenous script of West Africa: The N’ko script transcribes not only sounds and words, but also the social narrative of Mande people. A functional analysis of N’ko relying on traditional orthography cannot adequately explain script preferences among its users. The social relevance of the script, and how its orthography codes not only faithful transcriptions of Mande words but also of Mande culture, is essential to understanding its popularity among Mande communities. Likewise, the relevance of its social orthography among Mande communities explains why nonMande linguistic and ethnic groups in West Africa are reluctant to embrace N’ko […] (Wyrod, 2008, p. 39) In the next three sections, I shall look at sociolinguistic issues which arise at three stages of script


and orthography development. In Section 4, I shall look at the development of new writing systems; in Section 5, at writing systems which are already established and in regular use, and in Section 6 at script and orthography reform.

4 Sociolinguistic Issues in the Development of New Writing Systems Scripts and orthographies must either develop indigenously, within a culture or language community, or be introduced into a language community from outside. Historically, both of these possibilities have occurred many times (sometimes within the same community), but the second one—introduction from outside—has probably been much more common. In the last century or two, the development of new, truly indigenous scripts has become rare. Most previously unwritten languages which now use writing have been equipped with writing systems either similar or identical to existing ones already used to write other languages.2 The introduction of a writing system from outside invariably involves intermediaries who are familiar with other, already written, languages. These individuals are thus usually bilingual. These script mediators or orthography mediators occasionally devise completely new systems (as apparently was done for Cree by the missionary James Evans (Coulmas, 1999, p. 94)) but much more commonly, they adapt a writing system with which they are already familiar. Thus, for example, numerous languages have orthographies based on the Roman alphabet, rather fewer use the Cyrillic alphabet, and a number of languages use or have used versions of the Chinese writing system. Following the publication of a ‘Standard Alphabet’ by Karl Richard Lepsius in 1855 (Lepsius 1981) and the International Phonetic Alphabet in 1888, the majority of newly written languages have used an alphabetic script based on the Roman, though with adaptations. In some cases, communities have the possibility of choosing among scripts or orthographies. This may be because of partially implemented script or orthographic reform which leaves two writing systems in

use (see Section 6); it may be as a result of migration (where diasporic communities come into contact with new writing systems or introduce changes to an existing one); or a new class of mediators (for example, missionaries or colonizers) may introduce a new writing system, leading to competition between an old and a new one. Eira (1998, p. 174) takes the notion of ‘competing discourses’ as basic for understanding orthography selection: for her it is ‘fundamentally a question of the location of authority, which is in turn a function of the prevailing discourse’ (p. 172). Within her framework, disagreement over orthographies and imposed change ‘can be explained in terms of conflict within or between discourses; choices which appear inexpedient according to the framework of one discourse become comprehensible from the perspective of the discourse that motivates them’ (1998, p. 171). Eira identifies six discourse fields ‘that impinge on orthography issues’: scientific, political, religious, technological, historical, and pedagogical while Stebbins (2001, p. 189) adds a seventh, ‘community discourse’. According to Eira, ‘differences of opinion at all levels reflect the underlying discourse in which they are framed’ so that an argument which is perfectly coherent within the frame of one type of discourse may be completely incoherent within another: the parties involved simply cannot understand each others’ points of view, leading to ‘problems in mutual understanding and respect’ (1998, p. 174). Eira’s case study, of competing scripts (both Roman and indigenous) for Hmong in a diasporic Hmong community, is one of relatively few detailed sociolinguistic studies of script selection. The prevalence of writing systems based on the Roman alphabet is not coincidental, nor is it because of some inherent superiority. The majority of the world’s written languages have scripts which reflect the main language of literacy of the script mediators who originally introduced the script to that language; furthermore, the orthographic conventions within the script (see Section 2) are usually also based on those of the script mediator’s preferred language. Thus the Roman alphabet-using world can be divided up between languages where [j]-like sounds are represented (mostly North European countries and their former colonies) and those where [j]-like Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009

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sounds are represented —most of the rest. These resemblances may go unremarked, or may be contentious at the time of writing system establishment, as in the case of Haitian Creole mentioned in Section 3. They may also become an issue later, when orthography reform is discussed, particularly as part of a postcolonial agenda. This is particularly true when the convention is seen to be rather idiosyncratic and particular to the colonizer’s language: thus, both Indonesian (Vikør, 1988) and Sranan (Sebba, 2000) rejected the Dutch digraph (for /u/) following the independence of Indonesia and Surinam, respectively, replacing it with in new official orthographies. The establishment of a script, as we have seen, can be a powerful symbol of group membership, identifying the users as belonging to or differing from other groups using the same or different scripts. Unseth (2005, p. 25) considers that ‘inventing a script is an extreme way for a community to distance itself from all others’ but goes on to list nine cases where this has been done. He goes on to point out that ‘even inventing of scripts is done with degrees of distanciation from their dominant neighbors’ (Unseth, 2005, p. 26); for example, Cherokee ‘borrowed certain letter shapes from English, though using them to represent totally different sounds in Cherokee’, while Vai script does not resemble the neighbouring Arabic or Roman scripts at all. Although less dramatic than at the level of a complete script, similar considerations of creating distance have led to choices of orthographic conventions which set languages apart from their neighbours. Thus, in the sixteenth century, Polish distinguished itself from Czech (both using the Roman alphabet) by using digraphs rather than diacritics (Rothstein, 1977, p. 225), while in the nineteenth century Lithuanian distanced itself from Polish by adopting Czech conventions. Also in the nineteenth century, as part of a project of constructing a separate national identity for the Faroe Islands, Faroese orthography was developed in such a way as to make it look as different as possible from Danish, which had been the language of literacy up to then (Lindqvist, 2003).3 Álvarez-Cáccamo and Herrero Valeiro (1996) discuss what they call ‘visible points of inflexion’ that separate Spanish orthographically from other 42


neighbouring (and formerly dominated) languages. For example, Basque differentiates itself by using where Spanish has , and by using the digraphs , , and for affricates (1996, p. 149, fn.11). Furthermore, young Basques use exactly these points of difference between Spanish and Basque to engage in ‘parodic spellings’ of Spanish—writing Spanish words according to Basque conventions (Urla, 2003, p. 219), showing that the distinction is understood and is socially meaningful. Creating distance is important particularly for unstandardized language varieties and dialects that need to establish what they are not: in other words, to demonstrate that they are different from the very thing that they might generally be taken to be, the dominant language. Priestly (1992) showed this experimentally when he invited speakers of the Slovene dialect Selsq (which has about 1000 speakers) to a meeting in a village hall, where he gave them the opportunity to vote for different proposed orthographies for their dialect. In fact, only a few decisions needed to be taken as most Selsq phonemes could simply be written using the symbol for the cognate Slovene phoneme. However, the villagers voted overwhelmingly to use the symbol to represent /ʔ/, the local reflex of Slovene /k/, although the difference was purely a phonetic one and would have been equally suitable. In this case, choosing would make Selsq look ‘more like’ Slovene while choosing (not used in Slovene) would have the opposite effect. Priestly considered that ‘the appeal to the “distinctive” character of the village and of the dialect was decisive’ (Priestly, 1992, p. 308). In a study of writing in British Creole (the British form of Jamaican Creole, an English-lexicon Creole variety), Sebba (1998) found that writers showed a tendency to respell some common words of English origin, even though there were no substantial differences in pronunciation reflected by the spelling. Amidst great variation, we find spellings like , for you, , for do, and numerous respellings of as , for example: , , < Jamaka>, , . In this way, in spite of over 80% of words being spelt in exactly the same way as in Standard English, writers are able to construct ‘Creole’ as a different written language from English.


This case of an uncodified variety which is somewhere between a language and a dialect leads us to the next section, which concerns sociolinguistic issues in already established orthographic systems.

5 The Sociolinguistics of Established Writing Systems Once established, writing systems tend to be conservative. Change is possible and, in the case of alphabetic systems, may be the result of language contact. English, for example, has at various times enlarged its range of sound-grapheme correspondences by incorporating conventions from other written traditions (especially French, Latin, and Greek); Russian loanwords have had an impact on the spellings of other languages which use Cyrillic characters, and Arabic loans have influenced languages like Malay which are, or were, written using the Arabic script. Recently, English has exerted an influence on the orthography of numerous languages (see Nedashkivska, 2006, for a study of Ukrainian). Writing systems depend on conventional relationships of various types, as discussed in Section 2. These conventions are difficult to change, and by their nature cannot be changed without the agreement of the users of the conventions, or some sub-group of them. However, the fact that the conventions have been established does not necessarily mean that there is no flexibility within which to create some social meaning. As we saw in Section 2, in some languages the nature of the conventional relationships is such that there is the possibility for either licensed or unlicensed variation. Either of these may have social meaning. So, for example, in Dutch even though variant spellings are considered acceptable (licensed) for certain words, the reader may draw social conclusions from the writer’s choice. In the Netherlands, the choice of variants indexes modernity or conservatism: […], those who write kommunikasie, ekstreem, finansiëel, rather than communicatie, extreem, financiëel, show themselves as belonging to a particular group who are aware of modernism. Those who write kommunikatie (like me) want

to be seen as not too old-fashioned, but also not too modern: the c symbolises conservatism. (Seuren, 1982, pp. 77–8) Meanwhile in Belgium, similar options exist but their social meaning is interpreted in terms of a different set of local preoccupations: Geerts et al. (1977, p. 234) note ‘the desire of many Dutch speaking Belgians to write k and not c in words such as kultuur because c is too similar to French’. However, it is in the area of unlicensed variation that social meaning is mostly made. The practice of young Basques using ‘parodic spellings’ of Spanish words was mentioned in Section 4. A (possibly related) practice among young speakers of Spanish is likewise to replace Spanish or with . This practice was associated with the Spanish counterculture: anarchists, war resisters and related groups, and widespread in Spanish graffiti (but also found on the Internet) during the late 1990s (see Sebba, 2007). Subsequently, it has become a part of mainstream text messaging practice for some people. The special significance of for Spanish is (a) that it does not occur in native Spanish words according to conventional spelling and (b) that it does occur in neighbouring languages like Basque and (further afield) English and German, a fact likely to be known to users of Spanish. As the above examples show, there is scope for creative variation of orthography within subcultural groups; this often draws on both the users’ understanding of the conventions of their own orthography, and their knowledge of other languages and their orthographies. Androutsopoulos (2000) reports on a study of subcultural media texts, namely German fanzines (music magazines largely produced by amateurs). These were a rich site of alternative spellings, which were used to contextualize the magazines as ‘subculturally engaged’ or ‘hip’ (Androutsopoulos, 2000, p. 527), and the stronger the subcultural orientation the greater the frequency of deviant spellings (Androutsopoulos, 2000, p. 524). One common feature was what Androutsopoulos calls ‘languageexternal symbolism’, the use of letters or soundletter correspondences which are drawn from another language (usually English in this case). For example, commonly occurs in English loanwords in Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009

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German, but in the fanzines it was often used in respellings of German words, e.g. Stüx (Stücks ‘tracks’), zwex (zwecks ‘for the purpose of’), Abwexlung (Abwechslung ‘change’). In a somewhat similar way, Sebba (2003) is a study of an online community where respellings were used to construct a language—a version of Jamaican Creole, a language which probably none of the participants used in everyday life. Community members would use this in alternation with English, as a symbol of group identity. Clearly, the potential for spellings to have social meaning by contrast to the established norms exists only where there is a prescribed norm which everyone recognizes. What if no norms exist, or if the norms are so relaxed as to allow a lot of variation? One of the findings which emerges from orthography research is that optionality is unpopular: in other words, language users apparently prefer spellings to be prescribed. This emerges from studies of the Polish orthography reforms of the 1930s (Rothstein, 1977) where one author declared: ‘I want to obey, to conform absolutely to the Academy’s rules’; the Dutch spelling reforms of the 1950s (Geerts et al. 1977, p. 216) and the problematic PortugueseBrazilian spelling accord of 1990 (Garcez, 1995, p. 172). In each case, an attempt by the authorities to licence optional variants led to criticism. On the other hand, historically, spelling variation was normal— in English at least—in earlier times, with English spelling fully standardized only by the end of the eighteenth century. The perception of a need for prescription thus seems to be a product of relatively recent, but fairly widespread, language ideologies. Some insight into this is provided by a study of Corsican (a not fully standardized language spoken on the French island of Corsica) carried out by Alexandra Jaffe (2000). Jaffe notes that local language activists were critical of inconsistent spellings, and insisted that because Corsican was a language like French, its spelling should abide by rules. Jaffe concludes (2000, p. 506), ‘it is not only important to “have” an orthography, but it is also critical for that orthography to have prescriptive power—to be standardized and authoritative, like the orthographies of dominant languages’. This suggests that authority and prescription go together, 44


providing a sociocultural basis for the perception that spelling should be invariant. At the same time, this invariance provides an opportunity for groups and individuals to construct distinctive identities by flouting the rules.

6 Sociolinguistic Approaches to Writing System Reform Reforming an existing script or orthography is a different enterprise from developing one ab initio. It is almost inevitably fraught with problems, due to the many groups and individuals with vested interests in keeping the existing system unchanged: what Fishman calls ‘the gatekeepers of written tradition, the poets, priests, principals and professors [and] the institutions and symbols that they create and serve’ (Fishman 1977, p. XVI). Fishman points out that the greater and weightier the literate tradition, the less likely it is that a reform will be accepted. In contrast with other aspects of writing systems, spelling reform and script reform have received extensive treatment from researchers from a social perspective, though often this has taken the form of accounting, after the event, for the failure of the reform. The 1990s were a period when several European languages (apparently quite independently of each other in most cases) attempted to introduce spelling reforms, while several former parts of the Soviet Union opted for script changes from Roman to Cyrillic. These processes have been documented to varying extents (and with varying amounts of emphasis on the sociocultural aspects), for example: spelling reforms for French (Catach, 1991; Ager, 1996; Schiffman, 1996), Dutch (Jacobs, 1997), Czech (Bermel, 2007), Portuguese-Brazilian (Garcez, 1995), and German (Johnson, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2005); script changes in Tatar (Sebba, 2006) and elsewhere in Central Asia (Schlyter, 2001; Clement, 2008; Hatcher, 2008). One attempt to provide a detailed account of factors involved in spelling reform is the chapter by Geerts et al. in Fishman’s volume (1977). Geertz et al. studied the debates surrounding Dutch spelling


reform in the period 1946–54 and again in the late 1960s. Their paper deals specifically with spelling reform from a Dutch point of view, but has been used as a model by later researchers (e.g. Garcez, 1995 on Portuguese/Brazilian) because of the care the authors take to set out in detail the types of argument used by reformers and their adversaries. One set of arguments Geerts et al. (1977, pp. 202–3) call ‘more emotional’. All of these are arguments against reform. For example, opponents of the reforms may claim that proposed changes make the spelling ugly, that they corrupt and impoverish the language, or that they encourage laziness and are the result of permissive thinking. Some argue that changing the spelling frequently ‘makes fools of us’, while others are simply against all change, on the grounds that ‘any change is worse than none’. On the other hand, the ‘more objective Arguments’ (Geerts et al., 1977, pp. 203–6) can be divided into those that are used to resist reform and those that usually favour it, although in fact some of these arguments can be adapted to argue either way. Conservative arguments, against reform, include arguments that spelling reform breaks the links with older culture, as younger readers will not be able to read older literature; that spelling reform will increase the number of homographs and lead to more misunderstandings; and that spelling reforms will remove traces of the etymology from words, breaking the link with their history. There are also arguments that spelling reform is too expensive, requiring reprinting many books, and that by using standard pronunciations as the basis for spelling, dialect speakers are disadvantaged. Some of the arguments used in favour of reform are social; for example, that teaching spelling takes up valuable school time which could be used for better things; and that spelling is used for social discrimination, so simpler spelling is desirable to eliminate intolerance and bring about a more equal society. A more linguistic argument is the ‘word image’ argument, that ‘language is something quite different from spelling. Spelling is only a code to represent sounds’. Geerts et al. (1977, p. 206) also usefully expand Fishman’s lists of ‘poets, priests, principals and

professors’ to include seven groups of people who are likely to take a stand in a debate over spelling reform: (1) the government agencies involved (education, culture, and science); (2) educational associations (teachers unions etc.); (3) writers and journalists and their associations; (4) authoritative academies; (5) mass media (written press, television, and radio); (6) other specific groups: industry, commerce, librarians, publishers, etc.; and (7) public opinion in general. Would-be writing system reformers thus have to contend with a range of entrenched interests, from individual authors who fear that their work will be lost to posterity, through to publishers who fear the costs of producing new editions of all their books or losing their monopolies on dictionary publishing (see Sebba, 2007, Ch. 6 for a fuller discussion). Geerts et al. (1977, p. 233) conclude that it is difficult to identify the most important factors which determine the success or failure of reforms, but they note that ‘the influence of non-linguistic factors, namely political ones, seems to be strong’. One of the common arguments in favour of reform is that simpler and more consistent orthography will benefit users, especially learners. But among users themselves, the notion of ‘simplification’ is often rejected. Ager (1996), in a discussion of resistance to spelling reforms in France around 1990, observes that ‘the idea that the strength and quality of a language resides in the very fact that it has difficulties, and that only through mastering these does it become possible to say that one is intelligent at all, lies behind much [anti-reform] discourse’. Or, as one person put it more bluntly in a comment to the Times about spelling reform in English, ‘Why should I change the way I learn my language, and write it so that some lazy chav4 kids can spell easier?’ In writing system reform, linguistic arguments are often deployed, but sometimes in a narrow way which overlooks the social and cultural context. For example, in the case of recent script reforms in Tatarstan (a part of the Russian Federation), linguistic arguments have been used to justify the replacement of Cyrillic by the Roman alphabet. The main Writing Systems Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009

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point in this regard made by reformers is that the Cyrillic alphabet has insufficient characters to represent Tatar. This is said to create conditions where Tatars mispronounce their own language, while native speakers of Russian (which is the regionally dominant language) are misled by the similarities in the alphabet into mispronouncing Tatar (Khasanova, 1997). In fact, the accusations against the Cyrillic script can be seen as part of a discourse which seeks to make Cyrillic responsible for problems which fundamentally are to do with language contact, second language learning and language shift in a context where Russian has been a dominant language for several generations. The dominance of Russian has led (among other things) to massive lexical borrowing, facilitated by both languages using the Cyrillic script; most likely it has also led to a situation where many Tatar speakers actually have Russian as a first language. This is a more likely cause of the ‘distortions’ which are blamed on Cyrillic (Sebba, 2006). To conclude, in debates about writing system reform, sociolinguistic issues loom large. In addition, what are presented as linguistic arguments, whether for or against reform, may in fact be problems which have a sociolinguistic origin (such as language shift).

7 Concluding Remarks The above survey shows that there are many areas of the study of writing systems where a sociolinguistic approach is relevant. While no doubt the primary work of writing systems is to provide a written medium for linguistic messages, in virtually every case, sociolinguistic work is done as well. Frequently, this sociolinguistic work has to do with the construction of identities. I would like to conclude this article with some sociolinguistic questions which might benefit from insights from other linguistic disciplines. One question which has never been satisfactorily answered is why a standardized, invariant orthography is necessary. But not only has this question not been answered, it has hardly been asked: the assumption is always that there ‘should be’ a standard, 46


though who is responsible for providing it is clearer for some languages than for others. Furthermore, as was mentioned in Section 5, optionality is unpopular with users: the prevalent language ideology, at least in European languages, seems to favour prescription. Yet, historically, it seems, variability in spelling was not seen as a problem. One conclusion might be that there is simply no linguistic reason why orthography should be standardized. According to this line of reasoning, the emphasis on standardization and prescription is a purely social and cultural phenomenon. However, there is at least an alternative possibility: historically, literacy (at least in the sense of ‘ability to read and write’) has become more pervasive, and the need for individuals to read and write has increased, at least in industrialized countries and contexts. So could standardization offer a benefit in terms of efficiency, either for readers or writers? Are unstandardized language varieties, where the same word could appear in many different forms, actually less easy to read (or to write) than languages where each word has only one form? Is there some sense in which invariance really is linguistically desirable, rather than just preferred by the dominant linguistic culture? This is a question which could be answered experimentally from outside of sociolinguistics, and the answer would contribute to an understanding of the relationship between literacy and writing systems.

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Hannas, W. C. (2003). The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hatcher, L. (2008). Script change in Azerbaijan: acts of identity. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 192: 105–16. Jacobs, D. (1997). Alliance and betrayal in the Dutch orthography debate. Language Problems and Language Planning, 21(2): 103–18. Jaffe, A. (2000). Introduction: non-standard orthography and non-standard speech. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(4): 497–513. Johnson, S. (1999). After Schleswig-Holstein: implications of the ‘No’ vote on the 1998 reform of German orthography. Debatte, 7(2): 158–74. Johnson, S. (2000). The cultural politics of the 1998 reform of German orthography. German Life and Letters, 53(1): 106–25. Johnson, S. (2002). On the origin of linguistic norms: orthography, ideology and the first constitutional challenge to the 1996 reform of German. Language in Society, 31: 549–76. Johnson, S. (2005). Spelling Trouble? Language, Ideology and the Reform of German Orthography. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Khasanova, G. (1997). Language and sovereignty: the politics of switching to the Latin alphabet in Tatarstan. Prism (publication of the Jamestown Foundation), 3(16). King, R. D. (1998). Nehru and the Language Politics of India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lepsius, K. R. (1981). Standard Alphabet for Reducing Unwritten Languages and Foreign Graphic Systems to a Uniform Orthography in European Letters. 2nd revd edn. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Unseth, P. (2005). Sociolinguistic parallels between choosing scripts and languages. Written Language and Literacy, 8(1): 19–42. Unseth, P. (2008). The sociolinguistics of script choice: an introduction. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 192: 1–4. Urla, J. (2003). Outlaw language: creating alternative public spheres in Basque free radio. In: Harris, R. and Rampton, B. (eds.), The Language, Ethnicity, and Race Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 211–24. Originally published in Pragmatics, 5(2): 245–61 (1995). Vikør, L. S. (1988). Perfecting Spelling. Spelling Discussions and Reforms in Indonesia and Malaysia 1900–1972. Dordrecht: Foris. Wyrod, C. (2008). A social orthography of identity: the N’ko literacy movement in West Africa. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 192: 28–44.

Notes 1 In a case like this, the iconic power of the script exists even for those who cannot read it at all: it is the script as ‘image’, as ‘shape’, which acts as icon. Scripts, despite some similarities, generally differ from each other on a number of dimensions: thus Hindi (Devanagari) and Urdu scripts can easily be told apart even by someone who knows neither. Many examples show that character shapes and/or styles in themselves are able to carry this kind of social meaning to some extent: witness the phenomenon of ‘faux fonts’, which apply some of the more salient, recognizable and distinctive graphic features of a foreign script to a familiar one, making English, say, ‘look like’ Hebrew, Russian, or Chinese. One website which markets such fonts states that they can ‘impart a specific exotic graphic flavor to a document for readers of Western languages’ (http://vershen.com/simfonts.html). While the main use of such faux fonts may be commercial, the fact that they exist indicates the extent to which the graphic features of the script itself may be taken by outsiders as symbols of the culture associated with it. 2 In some cases, indigenous and introduced scripts coexist; in such cases there is likely to be specialization, with different social meanings attaching to each script and


contextualizing the messages they convey. This is the case, for example, in Vai (mentioned above) as well as a number of cases discussed in ‘The Sociolinguistics of Script Choice’ issue of International Journal of the Sociology of Language (Unseth, 2008), for example Cherokee (Bender, 2008). 3 I am grateful to Jürgen Spitzmüller for drawing this to my attention.

4 Reader comment on ‘Let pupils abandon spelling rules, says academic’, 8 September 2008, http://www .timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/ article4698949.ece (accessed 3 April 2009). The use of the word chav here (a recent colloquialism, a pejorative term for members of the white underclass) underlines the associations between social class and spelling for British users of English.


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