One King, one law, one language

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteen centuries “purists” battled with “mixturists” about language. Purists believed that languages should be purged of foreign influence and, politically, that the people of a realm should speak a single language. Mixturists reveled in the hubbub of languages within languages.

As Peter Burke shows in his Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (The Wiles Lectures) , the purists won the day in the latter part of the eighteenth century: “From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, the links between language and nation become increasingly close and we find more and more examples of the idea that ‘one language’ should join the traditional trinity of ‘one king, one faith, one law’ ( une roi, une foi, une loi ). In 1768, King Carlos III of Spain decreed that there should be one language and one currency in his kingdom . . . . In France, Antoine Rivarol’s discussion of the genius of a specific language reformulated the humanist discourse on empire and language to declare that ‘languages are like nations’, rising and falling with them . . . . In Italy, Melchiorre Cesarotti declared that ‘the language belongs to the nation’ ( La lingua appartiene alla nazione ), while Gianfrancesco Galeani Napione claimed that ‘Language is one of the strongest ties binding us to our native country’ ( La lingua `e uno dei pi`u forti vincoli che stringe alla patria ) . . . . In the course of the French Revolution, the ‘politics of language’ came to the fore, especially in 1793, when fear of counter-revolution was widespread. Bertrand Bar’ere, a member of the Committee for Public Safety, called for a revolution in language, in order to combat ‘federalism and superstition’ in Brittany and Languedoc . . . . In the Portugal of the Marquis of Pombal, a decree of 1757 made Portuguese the official language of Brazil and ordered the Indians to be taught it” (163-6).