blip : Being Lonely In Paradise :

After a summer in California, I am back in NC for my third and final year at Duke Divinity School. I always have so many thoughts running through my head and need to work them out by posting on them, and hope for some response, the beginning of a conversation. But my problem is school. I have so much reading that it is hard to find time to work through stuff here. So, instead of more blogging silence, I thought I’d try to share quotes whenever something from my various thoughts strike me as interesting and worth sharing.

The following quote has to do with my ongoing interest in the power of language.

In Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763, Henry Kamen shows how Spain emerged as the first world superpower. At the beginning of the book (p. 3), Kamen recounts the story of Antonio de Nebrija’s presentation of his Grammar of the Castilian Language to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. The King and Queen responded with a curious But Why?. A grammar of a language they all communicated with quite well seemed frivolous. The royal priest, Hernando de Talanera, came to de Nebrija’s defense. He explained the importance of Antonio’s project as follows:

“After your Highness has subjected barbarous people and nations of varied tongues, with conquest will come the need for them to accept the laws that the conqueror imposes on the conquered, and among them will be our language.”

What is so interesting about this defense is the way imperial control is linked to linguistic domination—the imposition of the Empire’s language. It seems like the bounds of soveriegnty include communication, along with all those other imposed laws a conquered people must obey. There seems to be a self-declared link between the way a society controls the language of those who find themselves within their boundaries—through conquest or maybe immigration. Language, the communicative symbols that mediate encounters, is not value-free. There is no such thing as a pure language, ways of communication that don’t tend to exert power over another. There is never any neutral perception that escapes a given or formed conceptual framework—modes of encountering others that assimilate their difference in order to keep the established ways of being safe from disruptions.

The grammars that set the rules for communication are already doing ideological work—that is, the words we use to speak participate in power-relations that usually drop below our conscious recognition. Languages (with their words and grammars) have a history, and sometimes that history is violent. All this makes me wonder about the language I use. Do my words serve an imperial agenda unknown to me? What might this mean to our modes of communication? What sort of linguistic sensitivity is called for when we consider immigration and assimilation?

In his preface, Nebrija proudly discerns a haughting possibility: “I have found one conclusion to be very true, that language always accompanies empire, both have always commenced, grown and flourished together.”