| The most notorious use of language as a weapon of mass destruction is recorded in Judges, in the Bible. After Gilead defeated the tribe of Ephraim, some Ephraimites attempted to sneak into Gilead for safety. A mispronounced word allowed the Gileadites identify the disguised Ephraimites: “…The men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.”
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| In Hebrew, “shibboleth” meant merely “a torrent of water”. In modern English, “shibboleth” refers to a practice or language usage that identifies a member of a group as an outsider. As many language scholars have observed, the Dominican dictator Trujillo offered a grim parallel to the Biblical story, with “parsley” replacing “shibboleth”.
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| In October 1937, Trujillo told his men he had a solution to the Haitian problem. In order to identify Haitians massed at the Dominican border, Trujillo’s troops asked them to identify sprigs of parsley. Haitians could not pronounce the trilled ‘R’ in “perejil”, the Spanish word for parsley; 20,000 of them were cut down by machetes that night.
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| More recent language wars have been less bloody, but no less fierce—and many recent conflicts have arisen in reaction to the spread of English. Japan has fought a polite, and losing, administrative war against the infiltration of the Japanese language with English words. Words like “aisu kuriimu” are all right, since “ice cream” has no equivalent in Japanese, and “ekusukyuzu” (excuse) is countenanced, but new coinages like “akauntabiriti” (accountability) are viewed with dismay.
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| West Bengal has waged an intermittent war on behalf of Bengali, asking for signages to be only in Bengali. I don’t know whether the government would be pleased to know that it has company—in Shanghai, which recently waged a war against English-only signs. And not so long ago, the Tamil Protection Movement announced that Tamil films with English titles would be picketed.
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| The most bitter language wars, though, are fought over what will be taught in schools and spoken on the streets. Karnataka has been grappling with this issue. The state government’s recent decision to derecognise schools unless they teach students in Kannada rather than English has huge implications. It tells us a great deal about the despair that speakers of “local” languages feel when it seems that the local tongue is effectively silenced. But similar experiments with schools in West Bengal were unsuccessful. The middle class in India sees English as an avenue to better educational opportunities and a wider world “outside”.
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| Karnataka’s politicians are reacting to what they see as the hegemony of English, a language that a Gujarati poet once told me was like a banyan tree—”it lets nothing else grow in its shade”. Karnataka’s citizens, conversely, are reacting to what they see as the narrowing of options for their children, a deliberately stunted, insular future.
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| Look elsewhere for parallels, and you find the clash between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings in an area around Brussels. The Flemings insist on the use of Dutch in Flanders; the Walloons have responded with civil disobedience, asserting their right to speak French. The issue is still unresolved, and still inflammatory.
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| More recently in Spain, a Cameroon-born football star who is part of Barcelona’s soccer team spoke Spanish in Spain’s Catalunya region. Controversy erupted over what was seen as the “insult” by Eto’o. Catalunya might be officially part of Spain, but it resists the hegemony of Spanish and deeply resents the better access, better jobs and better opportunities have in a world where Spanish is becoming a global language.
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| This should sound familiar to Karnataka’s lawmakers. Their concern over the local language is understandable, but forcing a language down the throats of the people, or denying them access to the language they really want, has never worked. Unless you’re a Gileadite prepared to smite anyone who pronounces “shibboleth” with a sibilant ‘s’.
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