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"A language is a dialect with an army and Navy," attributed to Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich
"In Belgium, Canada, Spain, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, language has been il the most important factor in ethnic conflict" wrote Safran (2010, p. 58) concerning violent clashes in these multilingual countries; he could have added, inter alia, the fierce Urdu-Bangla battles that followed India's independence in 1947. But in the Language Wars I speak of no one fires bullets, cannon balls, or other material missiles at the enemy-the combatants use as ammunition the very words about which they fight.1 On one side of the barricades we find the "defenders of our language,"2 adherents to linguistic purism and prescriptivism who tend to label linguistic changes as corruption or bastardization. Opposed to them stand the champions of linguistic descriptivism; they concur with Horace: language will change "if it be the will of custom, in the power of whose judgment is the law and the standard of language" (aka Norma Loquendi, in Liberman, 2004).
In the following, I shall bring a sample of the missives launched by the brave soldiers of each camp against their enemies. Instead of listing thoughtful, well established arguments in favor of one position or the other, I have selected a few emotionally laden ones. By focusing on the affective, rather than the cognitive components of their sources' attitudes, I hope to enrich our understanding of the combatants and to provide us with an insight into their motivation.
First, the prescriptivists.3
In 1797, the English journalist William Cobbett attacked Noah Webster for "grammatical inaccuracy" and called him "illiterate booby," "inflated self-sufficient pedant," "very great hypocrite," and "something of a traitor" (Liberman, 2005).
George Orwell (2006) felt that "the English language is in a bad way ... It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." He went on, illustrating his complaints with such metaphors as "mental vices" and "the decay of language."
Urbanczyk, a Polish communist linguist (in Janicki, 2006) wrote about the "... linguistic skill and correctness without which it is difficult to think logically and creatively and impossible to convey thoughts to others."
While the previous description of the corruptors...