CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Suzanne Wertheim (Northwestern): "Linguistic reflections of nationalist ideologies," March 10, 2004.

Even when a language is being used as a symbol in a nationalist project, it can be better analyzed as a part of a dynamic process rather than as a (peripheral) reified object. In this talk, I will use the specific case of Tatar in post-Soviet Tatarstan to show how linguistic practice and language ideologies at the individual, micro-social and macro-social levels can affect both the meaning and structure of a minority language. These ideologies inform social practice, and link structure and agency; language use in Tatarstan can be seen as both expressive of and creating social change in addition to being a trope used to express national identity. The "discourse of purity" that is the most prominent of the language ideologies found among Tatars with a strong cultural or nationalist orientation is a counter-hegemonic discourse, in part an attempt by the Tatar intelligentsia to make Tatar ideologies of Tatar language and culture, rather than Russian ideologies of Tatar language and culture, the norm. The "purification" of the Tatar language, based, as in many other post-colonial situations, upon an oppositional identity, is expressed in a variety of ways: in this talk I will examine Tatars' purification of what I call "sounds and nouns" and relate this purification to ongoing and highly controversial orthographic reform and the semiotics of symbolic alphabets.