Bavarian – Language on the Move

Portrait of a linguistic shirker

Ingrid Piller — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 10:19:57 +0000

I recently pointed out that the widespread belief that migrants refuse to learn the language of their new country does not stack up against the realities of adult language learning. I summarized the research that shows that adult language learning is complex and difficult and rarely an all-out success; to blame migrants for their failure to learn a new language (well) is adding insult to injury.

The German-language club (“Stammtisch”) in New York founded by Graf met until 2015 (Source: derstandard.at)

These well-established facts do not mean that individual migrants may not actively choose not to learn a new language. Unfortunately, we know surprisingly little about people who refuse to learn a new language. Partly, this is a problem of methods: how would one collect data about language refusal? While many non-migrants in Western societies believe themselves surrounded by language shirkers, it seems unlikely that advertising for research participants “who are refusing to learn the national language” would produce too many volunteers. Not only because, as I have shown, unadulterated language refusal is rare but also because migrants who actually might refuse to learn the language of their new society are, of course, in a double bind that would make it difficult to admit to language shirking.

Does that mean we are stuck between believing either those who see themselves surrounded by language shirkers or those who doubt their existence – depending on whether we are inclined to take a pessimistic or an optimistic view of our fellow humans? Not quite.

Let me introduce an unabashed language shirker, the German-language author Oskar Maria Graf, who spent almost half of his life in New York but was quite open about the fact that he had little interest in even trying to learn English.

Oskar Maria Graf (1894-1967) was a Bavarian “provincial author” (as he called himself) with an anarchist bent. As a committed socialist and pacifist, and an active participant in the socialist Munich revolution of 1919, which had established a short-lived Soviet republic in Bavaria, Graf fled Germany immediately after Hitler came to power in early 1933. He spent time in neighbouring Austria and Czechoslovakia but, as European countries of exile became increasingly precarious, Graf, like all German refugees, had to look for a safe haven further afield. In 1938 he and his wife were granted a US visa. They arrived in New York in September 1938 and continued to live there until their deaths.

Oskar Maria Graf, 1927, painting by Georg Schrimpf (Source: Wikipedia)

Back home, Graf had been a successful author during the interwar period. An autodidact (he left school when he was twelve years old and was apprenticed as a baker), Graf specialized in social realism with a focus on local Bavarian themes. After he had to leave his native country, the whole basis of his literary work – based as it was in the German language and the close observation of the mundane lives of Bavarian peasants – disappeared. He continued to write in German and his best-known book, Das Leben meiner Mutter (“The life of my mother”), was, in fact, written in exile but the success of his Munich years eluded him. Between 1933 and 1945, his opportunities to publish in German were severely limited; and he never returned to live in Germany even after the war despite the fact that his career was tied to German-language publishing.

Having been forced from home and wanting to retain the lost home are themes that, for Graf, are deeply connected to linguistic questions of maintaining the German language and not learning the English language. Let’s now examine what Graf’s language refusal looked like.

Graf almost celebrated the fact that he did not know how to speak English; it is a topic that comes up again and again in his later writing. A good example comes from his 1959 novel Die Flucht ins Mittelmäßige (“Taking refuge in mediocrity”), which is concerned with a group of German emigrants in New York. One of the main characters, Martin Ling, is commonly taken to be Graf’s alter ego, and Ling’s English language proficiency is introduced early in the novel as follows:

Ling had been living in New York for almost twenty years and up to now understood little more than a few indispensable English phrases. He made no efforts to improve his language skills, either; he had adopted nothing ‘American’ apart from what seemed automatically and mechanically comfortable to him. As a result, of course, he had made no progress and never got anywhere.

Ling lebte schon fast zwanzig Jahre in New York und verstand bis jetzt immer noch kaum mehr als einige notwendige englische Redewendungen. Er gab sich auch gar keine Mühe, seine Sprachkenntnisse zu vervollständigen, und ausser demjenigen, was ihm gewissermaßen automatisch-mechanisch komfortabel erschien hatte er auch sonst noch nichts ‘Amerikanisches’ angenommen. Dadurch kam er natürlich nie vorwärts und weiter. (Flucht ins Mittelmäßige, p. 8)

That his lack of English language proficiency was not only coy self-effacement has been confirmed by the observations of many others who knew him in New York. Lisa Hoffman, for instance, who was his lover in the 1950s, described in a 2010 newspaper interview how his English was just enough to order beer – an essential for the heavy drinker: whenever his glass was empty, Graf would shout, “Bring me noch a little beer.” – mostly a word-for-word translation of the German phrase, with the particle ‘noch’ simply stuck in in German.

Graf did make some half-hearted attempts to learn English; when he had been in New York for almost five years, he wrote in a 1943 letter to Kurt Kersten, a fellow refugee, who, at the time, was in Martinique:

I’ve been learning English for weeks now but do you think I’m making any progress? Impossible. I don’t think I’ll ever get it. One of the reasons for that is that I didn’t learn Latin terms such as “verb,” “adverb” and “masculine” and God knows what in our village school. But it is also due to the fact that I’m interacting too little with Americans; and finally the third reason is that I simply remain imprisoned in the German language.

Ich lerne jetzt wochenlang Englisch, aber glaubst Du, ich komme weiter? Ausgeschlossen. Ich glaube, daß ichs nie kapiere. Das kommt auch davon, weil ich all diese lateinischen Ausdrücke wie “Verb”, “Adverb” und Maskulinum und was weiß ich, nicht in unserer Dorfschule gelernt habe. Es wird aber auch daher kommen, weil ich zu wenig unter Amerikaner komme und zum dritten endlich – weil ich einfach in der Gefangenschaft der deutschen Sprache bleibe. (Briefe, p. 173)

The first two reasons that Graf identifies for his inability to learn English are familiar to any applied linguist: limited formal education makes (formal) language learning more difficult; and limited interactional opportunities in the target language are an obstacle to practice and hence progress.

The third reason – “I simply remain imprisoned in the German language” – is less obvious, and reminds us that language learning is not only about the target language but also the first language. Learning a new language means not only adding a new language but it also means modifying the first language. It is this modification of the mother tongue that Graf objects to, rather than learning a new language per se.

German is both a prison for Graf and, at the same time, his inalienable home. In a TV interview from the 1960s he explained how he saw that relationship between language and home:

The first thing I want to say is that I have never felt myself to be an emigrant. Because I am a German writer and the German language is absolutely my home. I will never diverge from this language. And anyways, I can’t learn another language because I’m too stupid.

Ich möchte gleich sagen, dass ich mich niemals als Emigrant empfunden hab. Weil ich ein deutscher Schriftsteller bin. Und die deutsche Sprache absolut meine Heimat ist. Ich werde niemals von dieser Sprache abweichen. Und eine andere kann ich schon nicht lernen, weil ich viel zu bled bin, ned? (Dahoam in Amerika, 1:44-2:10)

Bert Brecht and Oskar Maria Graf, New York, 1944 (Source: oskarmariagraf.de)

Our contemporary stereotype of the linguistic shirker paints migrants who fail to learn the language of their new country as lazy, as lacking responsibility, as taking advantage, as taking the path of least resistance. Graf’s example would suggest that language refusal entails precisely the opposite: refusing to let go of the mother tongue was the more difficult path to pursue.

Graf was a stroppy character and had extensive experience with the cost of refusal, linguistic and otherwise: as a conscript in World War I he had consistently refused to follow orders and never learnt to shoot. He narrowly escaped being court-martialled and was declared insane instead; his autobiography Wir sind Gefangene (“We are prisoners”), first published in 1927, tells the story of his experiences as a conscientious objector. Graf knew about the costs of refusing to conform from an early age.

Another misconception related to language refusal is the idea that failing to learn a new language is a sign of hostility towards the new society and its speakers. As a refugee, Graf certainly had more problems with his country of origin than with his adopted country. In fact, he never felt welcome in Germany again, even after the war. By contrast, it was New York where he ultimately felt at home.

For Graf, it was one of the beauties of New York that he could, in fact, hang on to German and go about his life without having to assimilate to English, something, as we have seen, he felt incapable of doing. He expressed that gratitude, coupled with the assertion that failing to learn a new language must not be confused with cultural narrowmindedness, in a lecture he delivered in 1944 at Princeton University – in German:

It is a great pleasure for me, the emigrant who does not speak English, to be allowed to speak to you in my mother tongue; because it is the language in which I grew up. I owe my literary existence to this language; it is my inalienable home. In its spirit I try to understand the borderless world in its diversity. To understand the other, the seemingly alien, does not only mean to live in peace with the other; it also means to let oneself continuously be enriched by it and, simultaneously, to give one’s best to the foreign, to the other.

Es ist mir, dem Emigranten, der kein Englisch spricht, eine besondere Freude, vor Ihnen in meiner Muttersprache sprechen zu dürfen, denn in dieser Sprache bin ich aufgewachsen, ihr verdanke ich meine schriftstellerische Existenz, sie ist meine unverlierbare Heimat. In ihrem Geist suche ich die grenzenlose Welt in ihrer Lebensvielfalt zu begreifen. Das andere, das scheinbar Fremde zu begreifen heißt nicht nur, mit ihm in Frieden zu leben, es bedeutet vielmehr sich von ihm beständig bereichern zu lassen und zugleich diesem Fremden, anderen sein Bestes zu geben. (An manchen Tagen, p. 45)

Graf was closely associated with the New York based German-language newspaper “Aufbau”, where his wife Mirjam Sachs was an editor (Source: machtvonunten.de)

There is a twofold lesson in this portrait of a linguistic shirker for us today: first, it is a reminder of the complexities of adult language learning and the complex ways in which language is tied to identity, memory and loss, particularly in the life stories of refugees. Second, institutional and societal tolerance of linguistic difference can forge a viable path to secure the loyalty of those who have been forcibly displaced and provide them with a new sense of home.

References

Bauer, G., & Pfanner, H. F. (Eds.). (1984). Oskar Maria Graf in seinen Briefen. Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag.

Graf, O. M. (1983 [1959]). Die Flucht ins Mittelmäßige: Ein New Yorker Roman. Munich: dtv.

Graf, O. M. (1994 [1961]). An manchen Tagen: Reden, Gedanken und Zeitbetrachtungen. Munich: List Verlag.

[Few of Graf’s writings have been translated into English. All translations here are mine.]

Further Reading

For in-depth explorations of Graf’s relationship with English, German and Bavarian, and his views on language learning, language maintenance and language loss in migration, see:
Azuélos, D. (2008). L’exil dans l’exil Les stratégies linguistiques contradictoires des exilés aux États-Unis (Thomas Mann, Klaus Mann, Hans Sahl, Oskar Maria Graf) Études Germaniques, 252 (4) DOI: 10.3917/eger.252.0723

Ferguson, S. (1997). Language Assimilation and Crosslinguistic Influence: A Study of German Exile Writers. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

Stockhammer, R. (1991). Heimatliteratur im Exil: Oskar Maria Graf. Exil, 2, 71-80.

Stockhammer, R. (2012). “Lesen Sie before the Letter:” Oskar Maria Graf in New York. In E. Goebel & S. Weigel (Eds.), ‘Escape to Life’. German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile after 1933 (pp. 182-194). Berlin: De Gruyter.

#yallaCSU

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 06:38:06 +0000

This tweet says: “CSU issues correction: its proposal was translated into German incorrectly”

Germany is currently witnessing a delightful language ideological farce. It all started when the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) party proposed last Friday that migrants needed to speak German not only in public but also at home. By way of background: the conservative CSU only operates in the southern state of Bavaria, where it has been the sole party in government for most of the time since 1945. On the federal level, the CSU is in a permanent coalition with its sister party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The CSU thus currently forms the Bavarian state government and is a member of the coalition that forms the current federal government. Generally, the national perception is that of these two conservative parties, the CSU is the one that is more conservative, more provincial, more parochial and less modern.

One immediate reaction to the CSU proposal that migrants should speak German at home was that the language of the home is clearly none of the business of the state. The Secretary General of the CDU, for instance, tweeted: whether people speak Latin, Klingon or Hessian at home is no one’s business but their own.

Ich finde ja, es geht die Politik nichts an, ob ich zu Hause lateinisch, klingonisch oder hessisch rede.

— Peter Tauber (@petertauber) December 5, 2014

By choosing a dead language, an invented language, and a dialect as examples, Peter Tauber draws attention to a far more complex linguistic situation than the CSU must have had in mind. One of these complexities that immediately hit the comments and responses on social media is related to the fact that Bavarian identity is strongly connected to the Bavarian dialect, which is well-maintained and not always easy to understand by other Germans. Being a dialect speaker has typically been a prerequisite for a successful political career in Bavaria (i.e. in the CSU). Consequently, many social media commentators have been drawing attention to the fact that CSU politicians and the citizens they represent are unlikely to speak German at home. In a typical example, a tweeter asks whether Bavarian can even be considered German:

The party of the only part of Germany where people don't speak German wants to force Immigrants to do so at home! http://t.co/Fp8DtWRni4

— Dirk Matten (@dirkmatten) December 7, 2014

The social media debate has also been used as an opportunity to tweet in Bavarian. In the following example a tweeter writes in Bavarian and asks in a pretend-stupid manner (a characteristic of Bavarian humour) whether he still has permission to speak Bavarian:

Derf i jetz dahoam noh bairisch redn oda wos? #csu #weltfremd

— The Jöcker (@chrisjoecker) December 8, 2014

Irrespective of whether politicians speak dialect or the standard, they frequently can be caught saying things that make no sense whatsoever and links to videos of CSU politicians stumbling through speeches that seem to lack all grammar, coherence or sense have also been making the rounds:

Jetzt mit Hashtag: Man hatte es schon fast vergessen, das exzellente Deutsch der CSU. #YallaCSU. https://t.co/bTeIV19KV3

— Deniz Yücel (@Besser_Deniz) December 7, 2014

Another layer of absurdity is added by the fact that the CSU sees itself as being representative not only of Bavaria but also of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, who have settled in Bavaria since 1945 and are sometimes referred to by CSU politicians as “the fourth Bavarian tribe.” The claim of these ethnic Germans to German citizenship rests on the fact that they have maintained the German language and culture outside the German-speaking countries, often in the face of adversity, over centuries. So, obviously, when it comes to ethnic Germans, speaking a language other than the national language at home has been considered a good thing.

The modern complexities of a diverse globalized society are even more striking. Commentators have been pointing to these in all kinds of ways; for instance, by drawing attention to hipster Berlin families who speak English at home in order to raise their children bilingually:

Prenzlauer-Berg-Eltern in Aufregung: Dürfen sie mit ihren Kindern zuhause kein Englisch mehr sprechen? #YallaCSU

— Philip Meinhold (@Philip_Meinhold) December 6, 2014

Others have raised the practice of watching foreign-language movies on TV as one that would be inconsistent with the proposal:

Kommt schon mal vor dass ich fremdsprachige filme gucke usw, hoffentlich bekommt die csu davon nichts mit! #YallaCSU

— Laura (@awwwkid) December 9, 2014

The complexity of what it means to “be German” and to “speak German” today is best expressed by the Twitter hashtag #yallaCSU. The hybrid based on Arabic yalla (“let’s go!”) has been trending on German Twitter:

"Trending Germany:05:26 AM CET"
1. #halligalli
2. #DagiVSTimo
3. #askBrudis
4. #Bibibeitaff
5. #YallaCSU
6. Weihnachten

— TrendieDE – Trends (@TrendieDE) December 9, 2014

#yallaCSU brings together tweets that are critical of the CSU proposal and most express their views in an ironic fashion. The overall point is that Germany is a modern multicultural society where it is not linguistic diversity that is out of place but old-fashioned ideas about linguistic and ethnic uniformity such as those expressed by the CSU:

Danke CSU! Wir haben wirklich ein Integrationsproblem: aber wie integrieren wir Euch nur in unser modernes, buntes Deutschland?!? #YallaCSU

— Karimatun (@KarimaELO) December 9, 2014

By now the CSU proposal has hit the international media – it has been covered by the New York Times, the BBC, the Lebanese An Nahar and others. What has drawn this attention is not so much the retrograde proposal of a relatively obscure and – in the global scheme of things – minor political party but the response of a mature multilingual and multicultural society. I found following the #yallaCSU tweets not only immensely entertaining and informative about language ideologies in contemporary Germany but, above all, heartening: in Germany, at least, monolingualism and monoculturalism are fighting a rear-guard battle.

Language shift and phone sex

Ingrid Piller — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:23:13 +0000

Ever since I left my native village in the Bavarian Forest more than 25 years ago, I have been returning for regular, even if infrequent, visits. Over the years, there have been many changes and two of them have been particularly noticeable to me:

(1) Language shift: When I left, I knew how to read and write German but I couldn’t speak the national language. In that I would have been a typical representative of my generation. This has changed dramatically since then and most people I meet are now bilingual and switch between German and Bavarian with various degrees of comfort. Additionally, there are now young parents who have made German the language of the home and speak only German to their children (again, with various levels of proficiency). In sum, this rural and relatively remote area of South-East Germany has experienced rapid and extensive language shift over the past quarter of a century.

(2) Commercial sex: When I left, the availability of commercial sex was invisible. For all I know, it didn’t exist. Now, as you travel east from Munich on the autobahn, there are numerous billboards signaling the presence of the sex industry, including a huge structure saying “Sex shop” somewhere close to Landshut that is visible from miles away. With the commercials in the papers and the fliers advertising for the sex industry, the semiotic landscape is similar to the one I described for Switzerland in this article. Furthermore, tales of the exploits of men who visit prostitutes just behind the border in the Czech Republic and the marriages that have fallen apart as a result of all this are now a ubiquitous part of village gossip.

Until my most recent visit for the 2011 Christmas holidays, it had never dawned on me that the language shift and the sexualization I had been observing were in any way connected. That changed when my mother and sister took me to the cinema to watch Eine ganz heisse Nummer, a German blockbuster that was released in October 2011 and that has attracted the kinds of viewer numbers usually reserved for Hollywood movies. The title translates as “A really hot number” and features the story of three women in a small Bavarian village who run the village grocery store. Facing bankruptcy because of competition from the supermarket chains in the nearby market town and cities and because of the overall economic crisis besetting the region, they decide to become phone sex providers to turn their fortunes around.

The economic crisis depicted in the movie is real enough and has entailed a fundamental change from an agricultural and industrial production economy to a mixed service-welfare economy. In the 1970s and 1980s most people in the village were peasant farmers living on 40-50 smallhold farms and in multi-generation households, with the male head of the household supplementing the family income with some seasonal factory work, as my father did. Additionally, the village supported an elementary school, a church with a parish priest, three saw mills, two general stores, two butchers, a communally-owned slaughterhouse, a baker, two banks, two mechanics/car dealers, a black smith/hardware store, a carpenter, two or three builders, three inns and a few other businesses. That’s all a thing of the past: now there are only 3 farms operating; there are so few children that the school has closed and the remaining ones are bused elsewhere; the last parish priest has passed away and the Catholic Church has decided that the parish is too small to import a priest from Poland or India, as has happened in nearby larger villages; the businesses except one saw mill, two inns, the baker and one car dealer have disappeared. The only new businesses that have been operating successfully for any length of time are a small recycling operation, a hair salon and a massage parlor.

So, how do people support themselves? Farming and factory work have become minority occupations although a few men (and even fewer women) do hold production jobs within a 100-km radius. They thus commute along with the somewhat larger number of service workers in the retail and tourism sectors that still call the village home. Many more people have moved away, as I have, and most of those who have stayed, particularly the elderly, depend heavily on pensions, welfare payments and other state subsidies.

The change in the economic base directly relates to language shift. The locally integrated village in which I grew up had relatively weak ties to the national level and even weaker ties to the transnational world (the Czech border is only a few kilometers away but was closed off by the Iron Curtain back then). Speaking the local language was closely tied to this locally integrated economy. People have always been emigrating from the region, and emigration is part of the cultural imagery of the Bavarian Forest (e.g., songs such as this one) but language shift did not facilitate traditional emigration because emigration ‘only’ led to farming and production jobs elsewhere. Language was not a necessary skill enabling those moves: a passive competence in German was enough to work as a farm hand, bricklayer or logger in other parts of Germany and possibly even further afield, including the US (as, for instance, Lucht, Frey & Salmons (2011) show).

With the disappearance of a locally integrated village economy based on agriculture and industrial production, Bavarian has now become a drag on people’s ability to support themselves. They now operate in a service economy that is almost exclusively based outside the local and where economic participation is explicitly based on linguistic performance: in order to engage in trans-local service work (and that’s not only phone sex services …), it’s essential to speak in ways that are trans-locally recognizable.

Lucht, F., Frey, B., & Salmons, J. (2011). A Tale of Three Cities: Urban-Rural Asymmetries in Language Shift? Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 23 (04), 347-374 DOI: 10.1017/S1470542711000195
Piller, I. (2010). Sex in the city: on making space and identity in travel spaces. Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow. London, Continuum: 123-136.

Languages of the heart

Ingrid Piller — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:58:01 +0000

While my Christmas post was of the gloomy kind, most blogs I follow had more heart-warming stories. Sociolingo Africa picked up a press release coming out of Orlando, Florida issued by who-I-don’t-know, about new translations of the Christmas story becoming available just in time for this year’s event. According to the press release, the Wycliffe Bible Translators completed translations of the biblical Christmas story in nine new languages of Tanzania’s Mara region.

The translations, published this month, bring the story of Christ’s birth to the heart languages of two million people, and cap a strong year for bible translation. Wycliffe staff contributed to the completion of two Bibles, 25 New Testaments and 26 New Testament revisions, affecting some 10 million people. […] Languages in the Mara Cluster Project are part of the Bantu family of about 500 languages, spoken by approximately 200 million people, in an area stretching from the equator to South Africa, and from Cameroon to Kenya. Only about half of these languages have translated Scriptures.

The Wycliffe Bible Translators are a Christian organization devoted to making the Bible available “to all people in the language of their heart.” The language of the heart? Only a monolingual could have come up with the idea that there is only one of them. I have many languages of the heart and I’m not even sure I can identify them.

The story reminds me of one Christmas, many years ago, when I was still in elementary school, when our German teacher decided to read the Christmas story to us in what he supposed was our heart language. The language of that school was standard German and, as 10-year-olds in Catholic Bavaria, we had all heard the Christmas story a hundred times in Standard German. As a special treat for the last lesson before the Christmas holidays, our teacher decided to change the game and read the Christmas story to us in dialect, presumably so that the experience would be more moving. I vividly remember a moving experience but not the way it was intended: the experience was excruciatingly embarrassing and ended in a cacophony of thirty 10-year-olds giggling because they didn’t know how else to react. In picking a dialect version of the biblical story, our teacher, who did not share our native Bavarian dialect but was a native speaker of a dialect group from another region of Bavaria, had chosen a variety of Bavarian that it is spoken somewhere in the Munich area or maybe somewhere else – I don’t remember or never knew. What I do remember is that is wasn’t our variety and what was supposed to be a specially moving experience in our heart language just sounded weird, fake and disingenuous. It wasn’t only that the pronunciation was off and that there were some words and grammatical structures we didn’t use; the reason the biblical story in dialect sounded fake and giggle-embarrassing was that we had been trained all our lives in a language ideology that assigns different values to different languages. For us kids, both the dialect and the standard language were languages of the heart, just in different ways: the dialect touches the heart through the close relationships that are formed through oral exchange and the standard touches the heart through the written texts of high literature, poetry, and scripture.

Some dialect poetry aside, the Bavarian dialects have never been written and have thus successfully escaped standardization. The translation of certain master texts such as the bible produces standard languages, and the existence of standard languages sets up boundaries between languages where linguistic continua used to exist. ِCodifying languages takes away from connections of the heart as much as it gives. As 10-year-olds we reacted to this intrusion into our privacy with giggles. I wonder how the people of the “nine language clusters” of the Mara region reacted and what it will mean for their communities that they now have a new heart language? Beyond the gushing press release, there is a potential PhD project there: how are people, their communities and languages affected by a bible translation becoming available in a heart language that is inevitably an invention?

The invention of languages by Christian missionaries is not new. In his book Linguistics in a Colonial World, Errington provides a number of examples such as the one of the invention of Thonga, another Bantu language in a region not too far away from Tanzania (Errington 2008, 113-116). In 1872, Paul Berthoud and Ernest Creux, two Swiss missionaries, sponsored by the Paris Missionary Society, arrived in the Transvaal to proselytize in Sotho, a language they had learnt during their previous work in neighboring areas. As it turned out, no one in the Transvaal spoke Sotho, and so Berthoud and Creux took it upon themselves to learn “the local language” in order to spread the faith in the local language. It did not take them long to realize that in fact a number of different – even mutually unintelligible languages – were spoken in the area they took to be their own. However, they had practical reasons not to admit that fact. To begin with, they could not attempt to learn and describe more than one language and they did not have the funds to print religious-instructional materials in more than one language. Second, they needed the Transvaal to be one unit in order to strengthen their claim to the region and to defend if from the incursions of rivaling missionaries who were operating in surrounding areas. So, they set about their work partly describing and partly inventing Thonga, “the local language of the Transvaal.” If they were our contemporaries, they probably would have termed Thonga “the heart-language” of the people of the Transvaal:

With hindsight, the Berthoud brothers can be seen to have worked against the grain of historical and linguistic reality to create written Thonga and its history. But they succeeded in making them social facts among their literate converts. Once they had some intellectual purchase on local conditions and linguistic cultural difference, they could teach Thonga literacy and so also the Thonga language itself. (p. 116)

Not only did missionaries create the Thonga language, they also monopolized its literate forms and uses, thus establishing their version of what it means “to be Thonga.” They were so successful that a later missionary quoted by Errington (p. 116) described the language as “one of the most trustworthy and complete manifestations of [the Thonga nation’s] mind” and “the oldest element in the life of the tribe … the great bond which bound the Thonga clans together in past centuries.” Translate the bible, invent a language and colonize the heart!

Errington, Joseph (2008). Linguistics in a colonial world: a story of language, meaning, and power Blackwell Publishing