We Won't Let Language Evolve

By Antonio Silveira

Illustration by Jean-Michel Valat De Cordova

(PORTUGAL) -- In the second week of October 1990 in Lisbon, 24 representatives of every Portuguese-speaking country, except East Timor (which at the time was under Indonesian occupation), would decide the future of the Portuguese language. After a week of negotiation, together they would sign the Portuguese-Language Orthographic Agreement. This agreement, agreed upon by just 24 individuals, would completely redefine how the language of nearly 300 million people worldwide was written. Billions would be spent on changing signs, redefining education systems, printing new dictionaries, and transliterating all prior laws, all done for the sake of unity.

This search for “unity” was protested as needless and, at times, dehumanizing by its critics. The Portuguese Academic Helena Carvalhão Buescu argued that it was simply an attempt at “neocolonialism” from the Portuguese government and linguistic academy, arguing that it was a desperate grasp for soft power. This was easily seen by seeing the number of representatives that were Portuguese, with Portugal having 11 seats in such a meeting, while Brazil simply had 2, and the other 6 countries had a cumulative 11. Portugal’s guiding hand upon this accord was obvious, and its influence was seen. Brazil lost much of the orthography that reflected its cultural quirks in favour of a more homogeneous, cleaner system, one that favoured the global Portuguese-speaking community while representing no one.

To somebody who speaks English, this might all seem absurd. English-speaking countries don’t regulate their language; in fact, words are added to dictionaries every year. Oxford and Merriam-Webster are private institutions that just add words as long as they’ve been commonly spoken, and many different dialects co-exist with hundreds of ways of spelling the same words. English, unlike Portuguese, sits at the very opposite end of the debate of linguistic prescriptivism.

Linguistic Prescription is a policy adopted by many states throughout world history. It was popularized during the creation of the nation-state as a way to further unify the population that resided within one’s state. It was typically initiated from the dialect of the state’s cultural capital, which would become the “standard dialect”, then imposed throughout the state either by force, education, or mere economics. French was once Parisian, Italian was once Tuscan, and German was once Saxon. These dialects were often enforced by Academies, think Oxford Dictionary, but sponsored by the State, controlling how you write, speak, and communicate overall. These Academies have full control over a country's educational programs, grammatical rules, orthographical rules, and even at times the language of the media.

Linguistic Prescription is, at its core, an ideal based upon nationalism, looking for linguistic purism. Many see the fight for prescriptivism as a fight for the culture of one’s country. I feel it deprives a country of its culture. English has become an international language partly because there is no singular body that controls it. English can adapt to any occasion, be it British, African-American, Indian, or Australian; they’re all still English. English has some of the most diverse vocabularies in the world, because it has adapted, it has changed, and it has nobody controlling what goes inside the language or not. If both parties understand each other, it is English.

Before the Nation-State, this wasn’t weird; it was the norm. France had thousands of dialects of French, some of Occitan, even some of Bretonian here and there, and sure, this was inconvenient at times, but it also signalled the unique identities of the individuals that lived there. Nowadays, the French Academy censors the media’s ability to use loan words, forcing them to use terms like “joueur-animateur en direct” instead of “stremeur”, because it’s too close to English, and it sacrifices their linguistic cultural integrity. In Portugal, one can be frowned upon for using “archaic” verbal forms, because it’s not how people in the capital speak. Slowl,y these academies erode our ability to express our culture in the way that we speak, seeking only to favour the clean, central dialect of the economic center. 

At the same time, English revels in its ability to connect cultures, words get imported all the time, be it the addition of Matcha to the dictionary or the creation of our own meanings for words like Brainrot without the intervention of an almighty Academy. English adapts to its people, and everyone who speaks it has their own quality to it. It is one of those few languages where I can say “I had a deja vu while drinking a chai latte in the bungalow”, and no one will bat an eye.