In defense of languages as places of identity.  

The lesson of polyglot and Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti: its relevance in an age of linguistic genocide.

 One of Elias Canetti's works that deeply moved me was the first part of his autobiography, "Die gerettete Zunge" ("The Saved Language"). A particularly timely work by this polyglot writer, whose birth in Bulgaria marks the 120th anniversary today, in a city where "seven or eight languages could be heard in a single day." Canetti, however, always identified with German as his true native language, having learned it not as a child but as a teenager from his mother, using a method that would make modern linguists frown, but which proved so effective that it paved the way for him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature with his first novel in German, "Die Blendung" ("Auto da Fe," the title of both the English and Italian editions).

 The episode that gave rise to the title has to do with language in an anatomical sense: his governess's lover threatened Elias, then an infant, with his tongue cut out if he revealed her love affair. But this occasional meaning merely marks the beginning of a reflection that would lead Canetti to consider the close connection between identity and language. We know that he refused to use the English he mastered for his literary works, remaining faithful instead to German, which for him was a language acquired through painstaking, voluntary learning and great passion, not acquired as a child, as had been the case with Ladin and Bulgarian.

 His defense of German became even more forceful when, fleeing Hitler's barbarism, he considered it his duty and a point of honor to defend and distinguish German as a language of culture from its image as the language of the Hitler regime. This is the correct way to identify cultural and traditional values in languages, beyond and independently of the political use of given eras: not because during the Hitler era, for example, there was much talk of "Kriegstüchtigkeit," a concept that today recurs daily in the speeches of current German leaders (1), did the German language have to be abhorred: that is, the distinction between instrument and use applies. Canetti would have much to teach the EU today regarding respect for languages. 

While it is well known that all fascist regimes have always had as their primary coercive measure the linguistic domination of a single national language, suppressing all minority languages (as was the case with Sorbian in Germany during the Hitler era, Catalan and Basque in Spain during the Franco era), Mussolini also attempted to do by mimicking Hitler and Franco (even changing place names to French or Slavic) and, even more ridiculously, the names of artists (Louis Armstrong was to be called "Braccioforte"). 

But in the case of the EU, the contradiction is even more perfidious on the one hand and ridiculous and senseless on the other. A European directive, for example, establishes incentives and funding for languages at risk of extinction or otherwise considered minority languages. For example, in Piedmont, courses in the Occitan language are funded, the language we also find in a famous Dante tercet and which was one of the oldest literary languages before the papal crusades against the "heretics." Albigensian and Cathar languages, which fortunately were not erased despite repeated massacres. 

The same is true of many other minority languages, rightly protected: but with ever less commitment and enthusiasm. For example, the Spanish government's request to include both Catalan and Basque among the EU's official languages was rejected by the EU Commission, citing the costs it would entail, estimated at €132 million annually for interpreters and translators. This may seem like a significant sum, but it pales in comparison to the €81 billion taken from the EU budget and sent to the Ukrainian government, which, in the first law enacted after the US coup in 2014, abolished the use of Russian, spoken by all Ukrainians (including the now deposed president!). 

Therefore, just as Basque and Catalan, spoken by approximately 10 million inhabitants, do not deserve to be recognized as official languages of the EU. However, the languages of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Malta, which do not reach a total of €132 million, do. The 8.5 million. But the funds missing for Basque and Catalan are instead being used to finance the victory of a government like the Ukrainian one, which aims to erase the Russian language, spoken by over 8 million citizens as their first language (but virtually used by everyone until it was banned).

 

The EU's hypocrisy is thus at its height, since, for example, in 2022 it invested €81 billion to eliminate Russian but refuses to invest 0.16% of this sum to grant Basque and Catalan official status. But returning to Canetti's conception of the function of languages, here is a seemingly contradictory opinion for a writer whose only instrument is language: "I have understood that people speak to each other but do not understand each other; that their words are impulses that bounce off the words of others; that there is no greater illusion than the belief that language is a means of communication between people. One speaks to the other, but in such a way as not to understand himself... Like balls, exclamations bounce back and forth, deliver their impulses and fall to the ground."(2)

 But the contradiction is only apparent and can be explained by the other linguistic function, that of identity: speakers are themselves distinct individuals precisely because of their personal use of the language with which they identify. But even here, paradoxically, as theorized in the aforementioned novel (Die Blendung), Canetti describes an anti-communicative function of language, what he calls the "acoustic mask," that is, the choice of an individual language style aimed at covering and masking one's true identity by distinguishing oneself and dissolving into the crowd. 

We know that Canetti used to spend a lot of time listening to conversations in public places or with people he knew, trying to collect and catalog their peculiarities, something similar to what Leoš Janáček did when he transcribed into musical notation the melodic and rhythmic traits of conversations he overheard in the most disparate everyday situations (3). 

In this era of not only genocide but also of linguisticcide, we see the central value of human language reconfirmed, in its infinite variations of languages, styles, and idiosyncratic uses, as a construction of identity and therefore ultimately as an essential human trait. Depriving a nation or an ethnic group, even a single person, of their language is a crime and, as in the Ukrainian example, is also the source of irreconcilable conflicts. In the 1990s, Finnish linguist Tove Skuttnab-Kangas (who passed away in 2023, and whom I had the honor of meeting in person) coined the term "Linguicide" to describe destructive attacks on minority languages, particularly those of immigrants.

 In the German case in particular, she provocatively argued that it was not Turkish dictatorships in Germany that were more effective in eradicating Kurdish, but rather German teachers who advised parents who had immigrated from Turkey not to speak Kurdish to their children, but only German. 

Now, whether due to teachers' ignorance of learning dynamics or to repression by authorities, all languages are constantly endangered, not only by a ban on their use but also by their disintegration imposed by the media, which dictates what can be said and continually coin terms aimed at hiding the facts and preventing citizens from logically discovering the contradictions of progressive censorship. In other words, the closure of areas that can be questioned to channel thought in the direction desired by those in power, whether they are the true holders of power or mere puppets in the service of other, higher powers that manipulate them. 

Therefore, free languages in a free state and resistance against every form of enclosure and suppression of opinions.

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(1) "Kriegstüchtigkeit" is a term composed of two words: Krieg = "war" and Tüchtigkeit = "ability", "competence". Therefore, the translation "war capacity" is an oxymoron because it combines two opposing concepts, one negative, war, the other positive, capacity. The term was already in use during the Prussian era (Prussia was not "a state defended by an army" but an "army maintained by a state"). The use of this term later served to justify the rearmament of the German Reich as a great power in Central Europe, and after the defeat in the First World War, it was revived in Nazi propaganda. The fusion of war capacity and defensive capacity returns today with an even more aggressive function, since the aggressive dimension predominates (the strategic defeat of Russia). 

(2) In: Manfred Durzak, Gespräch über den Roman. 1976, S. 90

 (3) See Otakar Nováček, Leoš Janáček a jeho theories nápěvků mluvy, 1941 (L.J. and his theory of speech melodies).