Guys with Swords Control the French Language

0:00Last month, Donald Trump issued executive order 144222, directing the Secretary of the Interior in coordination with the US Board on geographic names to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. In effect, directing the federal agency in charge of maps to update their records with that name revision. Google Maps keys off of official government naming sources, so it's either Lake America or Lake Canada, depending on which country you find yourself in. Raising the question, did Trump actually rename the Lake? Can he? Does New York State have to reprint its maps? If I go out on a boat, do I have to say it's Lake America? In short, when someone changes a name, when someone changes language, who owns that language, who controls it, when can a government make a sweeping change to usage? That's what we're going to figure out today, right here on

1:01the Political Orphanage. Hello, and welcome to the Political Orphanage, a home for curious, thinking people that are going to learn a lot about linguistic history today, spanning from France to Norway to Turkey, and finally, the United States and Canada. But let's begin with this. It's extremely difficult to rename a river. Territories can be conquered. Populations can be subdued or migrate. Istanbul was once Constantinople. Ceylon became Sri Lanka, but rivers. If you ever conquer some heathen nation, don't bother trying to rename their river. Hydranums, where the names of bodies of water are notoriously sticky, because rivers are aquatic highways. They always have them. They connect all matter of towns and travelers and tongues. An url can march an army into a field and climate for himself.

2:03And eventually, it'll be Bob's field. He can name a mountain after his favorite saint, St. Mungo. But hydranums are more practical than they are symbolic, because everybody uses the river, and they need to be able to reference it in trade routes without getting sucked into stupid political arguments. So you try renaming that river. And next year, a bunch of merchants from Scythia are gonna come in, and they're gonna use the old river's name, and you're gonna have to expand. No, actually, okay, from now on, we're calling it St. Mungo's river from now on. And eventually, the aspiring conqueror will just get sick of it and sign and go, yeah, it's the Thames. Yeah, you know what? You're right, it's the Thames. We're gonna go with the Thames. Actually, let's go with the Thames for a moment, shall we? The Romans didn't bother trying to rename the gurgling waters of the Thames when they conquered it from the Celts. It is Latinized it a little bit, calling it Tameesus or Tamsus. And quite likely, the Celts who they'd conquered

3:05had not named it themselves. They had inherited that name from the Neolithic farmers that they had conquered, absorbed, displaced, or genocide it. And those ancient Britons that had come before them, they had probably been the ones to name the Thames, using a name quite like that, Thames, Thames, something like that, meaning the dark water and the archaic tongue of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. So the Thames as a moniker is quite likely, older than Stonehenge, named by an extinct people going back thousands of years. And that river empties into the English Channel, which is a very large moat separating Britain from France. Although the French don't call it the English Channel, do they? They call it Lemanche, or the sleeve, owing to the shape of that particular sea. Now in that instance, the names are parallel nomenclature. When you and I visit Paris and we parlay France, say, we will call the English Channel Lemanche.

4:05And conversely, when French people speak English, as they should, they will say the English Channel. It's not that we disagree on what to call it. It's that we agree it has different names, depending on the language in which it is invoked. Although often, when some body of water or island has totally different names, it does signify a political dispute. Are those grassy clumps near Argentina, the Falkland Islands, or the Malvenas? Will any upstanding red-blooded Brit will tell you that it's the Falklands, even when speaking in Spanish? Maybe they'll meet them halfway and say, El Falkland. If you and I play poker with Javier Malle, however, he's gonna call the Malvenas, even if he's speaking English, which he should, the word choice, we use signifies the political framework we champion. And this is where we are with the lake formerly known as Ontario and the Gulf of America, Né Mexico, a linguistic line in the sand or waves as it were,

5:08whose word choice determines which side of a political dispute you are on. If you're on Team Canada, you say Ontario. And you say Lake America, if you own truck nuts. Ah, you ask. But who gets to name the thing for their respective sides? Let's say Javier Malle really sticks it to Prime Minister Andy Burnhamy, beats him in the poker game, and the United Kingdom has to capitulate on the Falklands. It's the Malvenas now. Who's in charge of making everybody say Malvenas? Who pushes the big red button? Does the Prime Minister scope over to Buckingham Palace and point a gun at the king and go, si Malvenas Goddamn it? And then Chuck mutters, Malvenas, Lee's Malvenas. And the English language has officially changed? That's a good question. What is the actual government role on an official language? To answer that, we need to cross Lemonsh and go to France.

6:12To the year 1635, and the man who dominated it, Cardinal Richelieu, the principal advisor and power behind the throne to King Louis XIII. Richelieu is one of those rare dudes in history who is simultaneously well-positioned, supremely competent, and he actually sees the nature of the game. He's a churchman, of course, Cardinal, but he recognized that Christians go to heaven, nation-states just die, and when they die they die, which is why, as a prelate of the Roman Catholic Church, he nonetheless allied with German Protestants against his fellow Catholics in Germany. Because the state is mortal, temporary. And if those squabbling German princes ever somehow got their shit together and unified as a country, that would be a big problem for France and Europe. So Richelieu put an end to the bloody three centuries of Catholic and Protestant sectarian conflict in favor of real politics, of balancing nation-states

7:12against each other in order to do whatever was needed, to ensure that France was supreme and everyone else was divided. And that also meant, at home, strengthening the French state domestically, and ensuring that it had supremacy over all other institutions in France. A century before Richelieu, King Francis I had issued the ordinance of the a cotere, side note, I have no idea how to speak French. I'm doing great as a guy from Oklahoma, but I'm completely winging it, so apologies. Anyway, King Francis had issued the ordinance of Ville Coderay, declaring that the official language of royal, judicial, and administrative records was French from now on, rather than Latin as it had been. By the time Richelieu is the paramount political authority of his day, what constituted French was a little up in the air. The law was that the records of the realm were in French, but what exactly was French? The fast-talking Parisian street merchant,

8:13that guy speaks French, the cool hipster teenager with his baffling slang, he's speaking French, isn't he? The King speaks French, so whose French is the real French? The King's obviously the King, I don't even know why I bothered asking you that, Le Bon du Sanger, the good usage, but even then, they remained courtly disputes over what constitutes the most elegant French grammar, the proper rhetoric, the sorts of hyper-specific and often nonsensical rules that Rich people, the world over, love to promulgate in order to show you that they're better than you. Now, back in 1635, we all love the King, long live King Louis XIII, whatever he says goes, of course, of course. But suppose his magnificence had a question about what constituted proper diction, proper grammar, what would we tell him? How would his advisors solve what was real French? So in 1635, under Richelieu's sponsorship,

9:13Louis XIII issued royal letters of patents establishing the Academy François and charging that institution with a mission to labor with all the care and diligence possible to give exact rules to our language, to render it capable of treating the arts and sciences. In other words, Richelieu and the King had created a committee in charge of the official French language. Today, the Academy François is composed of 36 members called the immortals who are in charge of French. And these arch-Gramarians are the governmental imprint, the official authority on what constitutes proper normative franceux. The immortals wear long black coats and black feathered bicorns, which is one of those weird old, tiny French hats, not the full Napoleon. Don't think Napoleon, okay, now you got that? Right now lower it a little bit, right? Where it's like a little bit shorter. Okay, that's a bicorn, you got it.

10:15And unless they're a member of the clergy, they carry a ceremonial sword. Like, did you mean anybody that you might have described as a grammar nazi when you were in college or high school? Imagine that guy or that gal was given a sword in order to enforce the rules of the language. What do they use their swords for, you ask? To fight English, to fight the slow creep of English into their language with swords. The French Academy has been defending the purity of the French tongue from our stubby English perversion since at least the year 1700. And the Academy again, the official body in charge of the French language worries a lot about this kind of thing, worries about Anglicanisms creeping into the language. Now some of them are permissible. Some of them are useful and after a formal vetting process, are given permission to immigrate into the French language

11:17by the immortals. For example, the French word, confortebe, comes from the English word comfortable. Because somehow the French language did not have a word for comfy. There was just no word in that entire velvety language for comfy. So the French immortals looked at confortebe when people started saying it when we, that is a word we need. Most English, however, is a linguistic illegal alien to that language, invasive English, like pythons and florida. For example, sometimes French people will borrow an English word, but they won't quite translate it correctly, and that will create confusion. Neidai, bring up the word, definitive mon. That word, of course, as you know, in French, means finally, permanently, once and for all, definitive. But under English influence, like a verbal python slipping through the jungle,

12:20speakers are increasingly using it to mean, certainly. Well, now, those are completely different uses. Certainly means confident, certain, sure. Final means chronologically last. So French people here have these hot, sluddy English words, and they get all confused, and then it warps, warps, the proper French usage. The academy specifically cites the modern and perverse usage of definitive mon as quote, furtive anglicanism. Also, loan words, very concerned about loan words. Lot of long nights at the French Academy stressing over loan words. You see, if we're gonna speak proper French, and I assure you, this is the goal of the French Academy, it's not appropriate to take English words into our language and re-microwave them. We have to translate every bit of them. So for example, in the 1990s, I don't wanna brag, but in the 1990s, I owned a Walkman cassette player.

13:25The French Academy spent a good deal of effort trying to repudiate this loan word that had furtively crept into the French language in favor of a proper French word, but I do. French for one who goes on a walk. A loan word is lazy. You just pronounce the English with a French accent. Know what you want is a cowk when you translate a word's components into French, like Grapecile or Scrape's Sky, as opposed to saying skyscraper. You see, if you say Walkman and skyscraper, you are technically not speaking French. You're speaking French with bits of English that have snuck in. To be proper official French, you must use French words. Belégeux and Grapecile. Or a neologism, which is when we come up with a whole new word entirely. Take a computer. If we say Computeau in French, we are seating cultural sovereignty, which is why in 1955, IBM France commissioned

14:25the phlogist Jacques Perret to come up with a new French word for a computer using French. And he came up with Odinatier. The Academy doesn't so much mind when English phrases enter the French language so long as those phrases mind their manners as linguistic immigrants and learn their proper goddamn French. So man on the street, fine as an expression, provided that you say, Frenchmen should not say e-sports when there is a perfectly good French cow already available, which is of course, j'ai vide de compétition. Nor is streamer good French. The cow is joyer animataires undirect, worst though. And I hate to even bring this up. Is when French people use English, not just because they're too lazy to translate car sharing to COVID-to-orange. I mean, we would never condone loan words, but you can understand how a man might give into a loan word in a moment of weakness, maybe,

15:26at a conference after a few drinks. You wouldn't say it's okay, but you could see how it would happen, right? But no, the worst thing is when Frenchmen use an English word, when there's a totally acceptable, perfectly good French word that already exists so they can sound cool. For example, the word cool. The French language, an arguably its entire cultural mission, is hyperfixated on appearing to not give a shit. The French national animal is a bored man in a beret, smoking a cigarette while purposefully not looking at you. So French has plenty of words to express being detached. And now Shalotte, Kome, Dick and Tracto. So why? You goddamned linguistic trader. Would you sell your beautiful language by invoking the barbarian word cool, which doesn't even make any sense, because it's literally about temperature? What are you trying to fit in in a startup? You sicken us.

16:27The French Academy has spoken cool. It's not a word, not a French word, anyway. Not officially, according to the official body of French normative language. Now for the most part, the Academy only has formal and advisory powers over the French language. They can clarify what French officially is, but they can't make you speak it. They have no legal authority to change how you pronounce things, whether you're doing it correctly or not. Although it would be really funny if they could. I would love it if the French immortals were legally allowed to attack people with their swords if they said something incorrect. For example, saying podcasting instead of the proper bellowed Odithusion. I would be totally in favor of those guys having powers over life and death via grammar, because that would be very funny. Yay, sword dorks. But for now, the bulk of their power consists in clarification of words and rules in the official dictionary of the French language, which they publish.

17:28There is an official French. It is recorded in the official dictionary and they are the ones who write it. Conversationally, they can't do anything. You're legally allowed to say biofuel in French instead of the proper bio-cabrong. However, there are restrictions on commercial language in French. Warranties, signage, and advertising have to be in French. Let's say that you open up a computer repair shop in Marseille. Peers, vaguely apathetic computer repair shop and cigarette bakery, Angerie. You can even call it that precisely in English because it is a brand name and that's protected. But the signage explaining these services you offer must be in French. It must contain French. You can't have a big ass sign out front saying computer reparation. Even though everybody calls it a computer in your friend group because we invented computers and most other people just say computers. The Germans do that. Probably all of your friends say computers. But you can't say that on the signage. You have to say ordinateur because that's the law.

18:29The signage must include French. You can have the other things too. Computer reparation, but you must have reparation de ordinateurs. You can put up other languages if you want, but it must include French. And the logic is you were doing business with the French public. Therefore, the French public has a right to receive the essential terms of that business in French. Basically, three things at once from what I can tell. Consumer protection. If we are discussing legal agreements, those agreements should be in French, which I can see makes sense. Standardizing contract language that seems pretty straightforward. But also civic equality. A French citizen shouldn't need competence and a foreign language to fully participate in ordinary public and commercial life. Imagine going to a restaurant, French word, and not being able to read the menu. It's in Vietnamese or something unacceptable. And finally, cultural sovereignty, which is a big part of countries that have an official language and a governmental body that determines what is in it. Fear of linguistic erosion or subversion,

19:31cultural sovereignty. If the French economy does not protect the French language from pervert words, like blacklist, instead of the much better figure-on-sur-une list and noir, the language will become second-fiddler to barbarian heave in English, or presumably in about 10 years Mandarin. Logically, if the government does not uphold and require, that language and government and commerce alike is the same, then the economy won't have any power at all. It would just be a bunch of silly old guys with swords arguing that they should say, poor les sacs, and a secutave instead of back-to-back, like a bunch of asshats. Language and cultural sovereignty go way back in France. Cardinal Richelieu solved the vertical problem of what is French, but he did not solve the horizontal problem of how to get everybody to speak it. The century and a half after Cardinal Richelieu, during the height of the French Revolution, the Catholic priest and Republican politician, Abe Grégoire, presented a survey about language

20:31to the national convention in 1794 and citizen Robes Pier in charge of it. Shockingly, Grégoire found that only 10% of France's population spoke French. This is in 1794, mind you, and only 10% of French people spoke French, proper French. Roughly a quarter, according to his survey spoke no French at all, and another quarter could barely contain a sustained conversation in it. At this time, France was mostly regional languages, pockets of Basque, Breton, Alsacian, Corsican, Ossetan, Arpetan, Catalan, little feudal holdovers with their own cultures and languages. In other areas, sort of spoke French, but not Le Bon Yussage. No, Pâtois, that was so distinct as to be debatable as to whether or not you were speaking a French dialect or a separate distinct French language. And if you're curious as to what constitutes the difference between a dialect and a language, the answer is an army.

21:32For example, the Ibonics of inner-city Chicago have a coherent rule-based speaking system, where you take people that speak Ibonics and give them a moon base or put them in an independent country and they had stamps and a navy, they would just be speaking Ibonics. But right now, because they're inside of Chicago, it is not a language, it is a dialect, it is an urban pâtois. In revolutionary France, though, can you imagine the shock of finding this out that most people in France don't speak French? Here you are. You just killed the king, guillotine hundreds of people in the interest of the French Revolution, you're the process of replacing 24 hour clocks with weird decimal time, redesigning the calendar, all to throw off the vestiges of feudalism. And then it turns out pretty much all the yokals, 100 miles from Paris don't even speak French, those regional dialects. And they're starting to sound suspicious, aren't they? Maybe even feudal touch monarchical. Increasingly, the French Revolution viewed linguistic diversity as a threat to republican unity.

22:33So revolutionary France attempted to universalize the French language amongst the French people, not just standardize French and official government documents, that was already pretty clear, but demonize regional dialects, suppress them as suspiciously foreign and disloyal to the national experiment. And it was slow moving. It would take another century before standard French would become predominant in France. And it wouldn't come through any sort of government fiat or law that controlled the language, it would come through school. Once universal public schooling became a thing, then you could teach obligatory le bon usage French finally and massively across the country, promulgating it throughout L'Apatrie. Education, in fact, probably is the most powerful lever of authority that a government actually can exercise, really in the research and reading that I've done for this particular episode. It's very difficult for any government to declare itself

23:34in charge of a language and then actually change usage in it, but if they can get a hold of the schools, they can eventually change that stuff. So that's France. This is France is in my mind the model of a country with an official appendage in charge of the language. 40 old dudes with swords in charge of official definitive in the English sense of the word, falsé. Now in case you're curious, English has gotten none of this nonsense. We don't even pretend to care about borrowing loan words from other languages. We'll steal the shit out of your words if we like them. We're not gonna bother translating them into calcs using English conversion components because we have better things to do with our time. It's emoji, not picture character. Thank you, Japan. Also thank you for the delightful word karaoke, which I say without the slightest bit of shame

24:36because fuck you, France, we're not gonna say empty orchestra like a bunch of dickheads. Shoudn Freude, Zeitgeist. Good words, we're gonna steal those. Same with film noir, jihad, and soon doku, which is Japanese for when you let a bunch of books pile up without reading them. That's a thing, right? A lot of good Japanese words. We need to get on this guys. We need to steal some of these. Shinran Yoko means forest bathing. And you walk around a forest. I like that, I'm gonna steal that. You know the word pundit? That's Sanskrit. We stole that from Sanskrit. It used to be pundit, meant learned man or scholar and British colonial's rocked up to India and went, oh lovely, pundit you say? Yes, we're taking that and all of the spies. Half the time, we don't even bother getting the word right if we think it sounds cool. We'll just take the vows we like and fuck right off. See you when we need oil. If a Mexican is wearing a particularly stylish one with fake gallant hat, it's tangulan. In Texas went, got it,

25:38pin gallant hat, moochess grassiest ami go, because a tin gallant hat would be literally insane. An average adult has a little over one gallon of blood, maybe two in Missouri, a tin gallant hat would be like wearing a felt bathtub. No, that's because Texans thought it sounded cool and didn't want to bother even learning what it was. Good job, Texas. But let's pick on England for a minute. How about the word admiral? Admiral is Arabic. It comes to us via Sicily, back when the Arabs were in charge. Their chief naval lord on that island was the Emir Omar, the lord of the sea. And English people heard that and went, who I like that? I rather like that. In there, what was it? In there, Del. Admiral, I shall say I'm an admiral. I'm an admiral from now on. Very good. English is open source, baby. It's Mad Max. It's a complete shit show. But it almost wasn't. If history had gone a little differently,

26:39there would be, like in France, an American Academy of Language in command of the English-speaking world or purporting to be. Where one would assume? We would have old guys in capes with ceremonial handguns chastising Texas for saying 10 gallon hat. More on that in a moment. But first. You should give me money. Go to www.jointheorf.com to support the show. That's www.jointheorph.com, where you can sign up on Patreon or Substag. Take your pick. When you do, you get access to cool bonus episodes. Last month on the note of linguistics, I did an episode on immigration in Spain. On their little holdout territory in Africa. And I got very sidetracked. I went off on a tangent about how our alphabet is actually very old carthaginian hieroglyphs. For example, when you see the letter A is in Andrew,

27:40A used to be an aliph, which was a symbol for a cow. If you flip it over, what are now the legs used to be horns? Used to be a picture of a cow. Just like the letter M was a symbol for water. And that's why it looks like a wave. You've been using ancient hieroglyphics this entire time and you did not know. That was a former bonus episode. This week's bonus episode's going to compliment today's show very well. Why American English is different than, and superior to, British English? Why do we sound different? Why do we spell things different? When did that happen? Why did that happen? Why do we American spell aluminum without an extra hue like the British? Why do we pronounce our ours like we mean them? Where is the British hide theirs? Or how about this? What mainstream English words actually developed in America and then backwashed into Britain? Oftentimes the British don't know this. They like to talk about how our languages, all barbaric and heathen and all of that. And then they import our words and they forget that we invented them. I'm gonna tell you some of those. That is all in this week's bonus episode.

28:41More language stuff. Sign up, become a patron, go to www.jointheorf.com. That's www.jointheorf.com. Thanks. In 1780, while on a diplomatic mission to Amsterdam, future president John Adams wrote a message to Congress formally advising them to create an American academy, explicitly modeled after the mission and language of the Academy from say. Adams rightly predicted that English was poised to become the predominant language of the globe. It had formerly been French and Latin before that, but now with the vigorous American experiment looking to the west. And an entire continent and the new world. While the British Empire was extending colonies and trade from Belize to India, English he predicted was on the up and up. And if you think about it, mused Adams, America should be steering that ship.

29:44Adams believed that under republicanism, min advance and rank through persuasion and eloquence rather than through bullying or through inheritance. And so the Republican system naturally will produce superior speakers. And eventually, those speakers will produce a more complex, thoughtful and beautiful language compared to the more rustic, broke, suited to monarchical societies. Like mold-ring old England with its vestigial feudalism and dark age hierarchies. England, according to Adams, whose learned men had for centuries proposed similar authoritative institutes of language, like France, had never got around to it. That nation which bore the name England had never got around to setting up an official authority for the English language. Spain had done it, Italy had done it, and of course France, they all had language academies, yet England had abrogated its duties. Well, who better than America to pick up the ball? Perhaps the United States could become

30:47the premier authority of the English-speaking world. And even if that didn't happen, we would still need domestic standards that we could appeal to. We don't have regional measurements. There cannot be a Philadelphia foot and a Boston inch. So in the same manner, we're gonna need a standard coherent language. And, according to Adams, it is the natural prerogative of Congress to create a body entrusted with that mission. Hence, a call for the American Academy, which Congress could entrust with the prestige and intellectual authority necessary to codify and improve American English. English, he thought, has to have somebody in charge of it, doesn't it? You can't have a big complex system without some sort of authority to guide it, obviously. And Congress said, hey, thanks, John, that is a neat suggestion. We're definitely gonna take that under consideration. Have fun in Amsterdam, but not too much one, and then they drop the matter forever. Never came, no one ever seriously debated it,

31:48but it was called for by John Adams. He would have liked to do that. 40 years later, former President Jefferson, now once again friends with President Adams after a rocky period, brought up in a letter, a contrary theory of language. Jefferson did not think like Adams that we should have an American Academy in charge of the official language. He took the position that language is bottom up rather than top down. And legitimacy of language in Jefferson's view is not conferred, it is recognized. In the same way that the census does not create a population that simply counts what already exists, and lets everybody know. Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage, said Jefferson. Society is the workshop in which new ones are elaborated. In other words, according to Jefferson, we don't need anybody to be in charge of English, because it is an emergent phenomenon and has no leader. And if it had one, that guy would probably gum things up.

32:52Why? Think of all the neat scientific wonders happening around us here in the modern 1820s. Imagine if Benjamin Franklin had to explain what electricity was using words only available from the time of King Alfred the Great. It makes sense for somebody to make up the word magnetism. Now that scientists are studying how magnets work, it needs to be able to experiment and percolate and adapt without having a committee approve everything. Jefferson, that said, was not in favor of linguistic free-for-all. He had strong opinions about grammar and etymology and how to create new vocabulary. He believed that words could be well-formed or ill-formed. But whether or not words or conventions were good or bad, he thought was determined primarily through usage and experimentation, and ultimately, by common adoption. Usage, rather than authority, is what confers legitimacy. An American academy, if Congress were silly enough to fund one, could only do one of two things. It could acknowledge what people had already worked out

33:53for themselves, or it could fight against what the people had decided to do. But if most of the people had already adopted some sort of usage, by definition, isn't that the real language? If most people today decided, you know what? I actually feel pretty good with ending a sentence with a preposition if I feel like it. Doesn't really bother me. Not going to talk to my priest about it. If we all do it, at that point, wouldn't the widespread convention be the actual language? If language is about communicating ideas, how can the majority of a population actually be wrong? They can't. They can only change the rules, but they can't be wrong about what they're saying. Take Norway. Danish and Norwegian are pretty similar languages. In Forcenshri's Norway was a northern province of Denmark. Remember, difference between a language and a dialect is an army. So until it's independence in 1814, Norwegian was sort of hillbilly Danish.

34:54All educated Norwegians learned to read and write using proper Danish words and style and spelling. Meanwhile, rural peasantry wrote in home spun Norwegian words and spelling invocabulary. And I'm being very reductive here. If you are a Norwegian linguist, please don't kill me with the sword. I'm being reductive. But imagine if the American language had had a big fork in its expression, an urbanite used proper British spelling inserting a lot of unnecessary use into words. Whereas farmers, for two or three hundred years, had been writing things phonetically. They've been spelling the word laugh as L-A-F-F and subtle as S-U-T-T-L-E. It's kind of like that. After independence, Norway found itself with two different languages, Bokmao, the proper Danish-leaning version, and Norsk, built largely from rural Norwegian dialects. The government responded by trying to fuse these two variants

35:55and with single compromise language called Sam Norsk and people hated it. In the 1950s, parents would go through their children's government schoolbooks and cross out Sam Norsk spelling. An anti-Sam Norsk petition gathered more than 400,000 signatures out of a population of three million people rather famous for not wanting to rock the boat. About 12% of the population, it was a big deal. And eventually, the Norwegian government just gave up and the state now acknowledges both separately. Students are taught both standards with one or the other writing variant as their primary. Unicipalities can declare themselves for Bokmao or Norsk or neutral for administrative purposes. And national governmental bodies have obligations to use both in public communication. Today, most Norwegian speak local dialects, sometimes quite different from either written language, although most everybody can write in Bokmao. So the government can propose a language, it can standardize it, can even teach it, and print it in every textbook, but if the population hates it enough,

36:58the population still gets a vote. Now, this doesn't mean that governments are unable to decide to enforce changes in language. Universal public education, as I said, is the most powerful linguistic tool ever devised. In Canada and America, government policy for years was to teach Native American children in English and to punish them if they spoke or wrote in their indigenous language, which was highly effective at linguistic conversion. A lot of empires have done that. I think they were doing that with a Welsh up until pretty recently. Universal education is very good for compelling wide swathes of people to adopt, or disown a particular language. But even then, modifying what that language is, that is much harder to do. And while a government can institute sweeping linguistic changes, there is a catch. The more democratic and responsive the government, the less potency it has to enforce top-down language changes. The more government wants to impose changes in language, the more autocratic and less democratic

37:58has to be to enforce them. Norway was simply too nice to push reform hard enough to stick and get one hybrid language. Conversely, Turkey was able to pull this off, but only because reforms instituted there were done by a one-party state. Mustafa Kamal, out of Turkey, came to power in Turkey in 1923, sweeping aside the old Sultanate and Caliphate, and embarking on an aggressive modernizing campaign. Political life in Turkey was dominated by his Republican People's Party, which only allowed for sporadic and brief episodes of opposition. And a part of his immense modernizing efforts were to abolish the old Ottoman-Turkish Arabic alphabet and replace it with a newly designed Latin alphabet. The old script was a hodgepodge of Arabic and Persian, which Adeturk thought was ill-quipped to the Turkish language and therefore confusing to commoners and efforts to make the nation literate. Whereas a Latin alphabet would be easier for everybody

39:00to read and therefore improve literacy as well as affecting a pivot away from the old Islamic world towards modern secular Europe. So Adeturk banned usage of the old alphabet in government offices, companies, associations, private institutions, signs, advertisements, newspapers, magazines, and books in favor of the new Turkish alphabet. Schools were forbidden to teach from books using the old script and nation schools were established for adults to get them on board. Within the single generation, younger Turks had fully adopted the new Turkish alphabet, even though Adeturk himself could not personally write on it. And it worked. Everybody in Turkey today uses the shiny new Latin alphabet, normal typewriters and everything, or close to them. Adeturk was coercive. I don't think anybody today would look at that and say that it was liberal, easy, democracy kind of stuff, but it wasn't Draconian. Nobody was getting sent to gulags for using old, timey letters.

40:00At the same time, though, it's doubtful that his government could have instituted those sweeping reforms if it had required votes in the process or if it had done so within a competitive democracy. And while that effort was broadly successful, there was a wrinkle. Turkey's spiffy new alphabet was custom designed for Turkish, which meant it simply left out letters that were unused in that language, notably the letters Q, W, and X. Empty calories as far as Turkish pronunciation is concerned. Unfortunately, however, the several million people constituting Turkey's Kurdish ethnic minority do need those letters. So the modernizing effort doubled as an attempt not just to increase literacy and Latinize the alphabet, but to stamp out the Kurdish language and transform them into culturally absorbed mountain turks. Kurdish parents found themselves unable to officially register children under perfectly ordinary Kurdish names because those names contained letters that did not legally exist. Kurdish political materials could trigger legal trouble

41:02if they used forbidden illegal letters. The humble letters of Q, W, and X became touchstones for political separatism. In 2003, a parliamentary candidate was sentenced to six months in prison for making campaign speeches in Kurdish instead of Turkish. And the criminal prohibition was not relaxed on the use of those letters until 2014. So if you visit Turkey, you can now freely type and Anatolia, you type away. In the United States, Thomas Jefferson's understanding of language as a bottom-up emergent phenomenon one out. Congress would not institute an American Academy of Language. In fact, the founding fathers never even declared English the official language of the country. That is not in the Constitution. America has no official language. The prevailing attitude of the time seems to have been that English was obviously useful as the common national language, but that regulating the language itself, that was not proper federal function.

42:02Language is too intimate and important for the government to own or control it. Although a couple of centuries later, in 1981, Senator Hayakawa, a Japanese Canadian board semanticsist and Republican Senator from California, proposed an amendment to the US Constitution declaring English the nation's official language, predominantly on grounds of assimilation. Hayakawa insisted that a shared language is necessary for an ethnically diverse pluralistic society to function as a common people. If the government supported bilingualism, that could create ethnic enclaves. And then the civic project of the United States would be imperiled. He authored a resolution declaring English the official language of the United States, which was overwhelmingly adopted by the Senate. And that fell apart in the house due to unrelated things involving immigration. And the formal amendment to that end never really picked up steam. There have been multiple and increasing attempts since that time

43:03to legally declare English the official language of our country, but so far, to no avail. Now, if we were having a conversation about that in 1789, the whole thing would be very philosophical and grand and thinking. One side would make the argument that for a republic to function, it must be able to communicate. And that means an agreed upon standard tongue. And the other would thunder about the specter of tyranny. And if you give the government a vowel, it'll take an or well. These days, I think the counterarguments actually fairly boring. It basically goes like this. Look, that's a good point about the nation needing a common language to function. Agree with you there, but we have gone 200 years where we just defaulted on a common language out of practical necessity rather than by fiat, as worked out fine. Right now, 97% of the country speaks English. Schools teach English, federal documents there in English. We have a greater degree of English usage as our common language than a lot of countries that have an official language do with theirs. So, Senator, you're solving for a problem that's not actually a problem.

44:07And the Constitution is big and important enough that we don't think it should be amended to solve a problem, that's not a problem. Now, that being said, in March of last year, President Trump issued an executive order declaring English the official language of the United States. I actually missed that whole thing. I vaguely remember reading a headline about it, but I didn't really get into that. Although I gather, it was quite the due among the linguistic society of America. They issued some statements, boy, howdy. And I would imagine for a lot of nationalists within the Trump coalition, that was a day to be celebrated finally after 250 years, we declared English the official language, thank God. Now, executive orders aren't laws. They are directives to subordinate federal agencies. So, the president has no authority to declare anything the official language of the United States. What Trump did effectively was he ordered that the official language of the federal government, bureaucracy under his leadership, that is English,

45:08the government's official language is English, which, okay, fine, you know what? I'm happy to let you guys have this one. I wasn't particularly worried that the Social Security Administration was going to start doing paperwork and Portuguese, where the department of the interior was going to publish memorandums in Esperanto, but we're definitely safe from any of that now. Federal government now officially uses English as the official language, as opposed to the previous 250 years where it did the exact same thing unofficially. From what I can tell, the only actual policy change that occurred from that executive order is the Trump reversed a Clinton era executive order directing federal agencies to proactively provide language access to non-English speakers. Whereas the new Trump memorandum basically told agencies, you can provide forms and other languages to people, but you don't have to. We're freeing you up to use your own discretion. So, okay, honestly, I'm not really bothered by that either way,

46:10whether or not to codify English as our official language, if it becomes a fight again in my guesses, it will, there'll be some slow news week and so Congress will do that. I don't really want to get sucked into it. I'll do whatever you want if you'd read a some basic zoning reform. I don't think it's really a big deal. America can have a predominant unofficial language as we currently do and have had for the last 250 years, but if it makes you feel better, you can declare English the official language. Because in the context of a responsive democracy with a robust First Amendment, all that really means is that government forms which were already to be printed in English out of practical and susty will henceforth be printed in English out of legal compulsion. It will be exactly the same, but now it's the law. It's kind of like declaring the Gregorian calendar, the official calendar of the United States or declaring that Arabic numerals are now the official numbers of the United States. Thanks, Lads, got it. I will, I'm not gonna use Roman numerals on my forms.

47:11Good to know. Anyway, it'll be end of the day, I think Jefferson was right. Languages is a social construct. It's just what we say to each other. There is no tongue pulp. There is no cosmic linguistic dogma, which is handed down from on a high, which we must adhere to where laps and drew grammatical heresy. Remember freedom fries? Congress didn't rename French fries across America because Congress didn't have the authority to tell us what we could call fried potatoes. By God, we didn't fight King George III just for Congress to tell us what to call fried potatoes. What Congress did was rename French fries to freedom fries in the congressional cafeteria of the Capitol, which they quietly tiptoed back from in 2006. All of that is to say, Lake Ontario is Lake Ontario if most of us think it is. It could become Lake America if everybody starts calling it that in mass, but it's really just whatever organically happens.

48:15But I think if the Romans couldn't rename the Tim's or the Anglo-Saxons or the Normans, I have limited faith in the prowess of the geographic names information system, a body that I only heard of this morning. They don't even have swords. That's the show. Thanks for listening. Thank you, patrons, for making the whole thing possible. Until next time, I've been Andrew Heap. And so have you. ā