“The Tosa dialect is fun!!” Notebook with characters representing the grammar of Tosaben, the dialect of the Kōchi prefecture in Shikoku. The cover also features popular landmarks of the prefecture.

Japan is often erroneously perceived as a monolingual country. This is not true and Japan is a multilingual and multicultural country where varied languages and traditions coexist.

This post explores Japan’s linguistic ecology by exploring the relationship between center and periphery. On our journey, we will see how linguistic resources change value, function and ownership as they move through an ideologically stratified system where the norms and criteria of appropriateness that emanate from the center influence those of peripheral and liminal territories.

Center

Our journey starts from the capital Tōkyō, the city that hosts the majority of the financial and political institutions of the country. Given its importance, it is not surprising that the city has had a central role in issues related to language as well.

Tōkyō has had a decisive impact on the ‘movement for the unification of the written and spoken language’ 言文一致運動 genbun itchi undō. Its goal was to replace older forms of the Japanese language with the vernacular variety of the time to facilitate literacy.

To achieve that, the Tōkyō variety (or “Edo”, as Tōkyō was called until the late 19^th century) was chosen as the base to envision a ‘national language’ 国語 kokugo.

150 years on and the political efforts that have been made to establish a common language can be considered largely successful. Communications in Japan have indeed been standardized, and Japan’s literacy rate is as high as 99%, one of the highest in the world.

Periphery

Standardization implies deviation. Therefore, all the other ways of speaking throughout the Japanese archipelago were categorized as dialects. Other varieties saw their usage severely curtailed, starting in schools which tried to stamp out anything other than Tōkyō Japanese.

Discouraged in official communication, dialects have become an expression of locality, part of the cultural identity associated with a specific place. This role has been embraced by prefectures and individuals alike. Institutional bodies such as museums and tourism boards use dialects as a means to promote local culture.

Sometimes grammar rules and words are turned into anthropomorphic characters and appear on souvenirs and merchandise like the notebook I have received at the University of Kōchi during my time there as an exchange student. The linguistic and cultural distance between center and periphery has been turned into a marketable commodity. Dialects are also used to portray characters in media for their ability to convey the stereotypes associated to them.

In real life, too, dialects enable people who do not wish to fit within mainstream language practices to inhabit a different ‘voice’, performing what has been called ‘dialect cosplay’ as an act of linguistic transgression.

Dialects may seem to assume playful roles in many occasions. However, it is not all fun and games as the necessity to confront the demands of standard language remains, and most young Japanese students know this well. The dreaded ‘exam hell’, a series of standardized examinations that Japanese students must take during their entire school lives, require mastery of the standard language as well as being able to produce it as part of an appropriate repertoire. The stakes are high and students, already under immense pressure, can afford little to no space for linguistic deviations.

Liminality

The more we head towards the borders of the country, the greater diversity we find, including a number of endangered languages. The languages of the Ainu people from the northernmost island of Hokkaidō, for instance, are on the verge of extinction. The same is true of languages spoken on the islands that dot Okinawa prefecture to the South and those of the Izu islands, an archipelago that stretches far into the Pacific Ocean east of Tōkyō.

In these areas, the demographic crisis is taking a heavy toll on the number of speakers, as young people leave rural areas in search of opportunities otherwise unavailable to them.

The center cannot hold

Meanwhile, Tōkyō has become super-diverse linguistically. It is no longer only the center of Japan but also a global city. Japanese is today used alongside English and a host of migrant languages. Against these, struggling peripheries are trying to find new ways to express their local identities through “authentic” language. They follow the center’s norms but occasionally playfully transcend and violate those norms.

Overall, Japan’s linguistic ecology is deeply rooted in the center-periphery dichotomy but the center and the peripheries are themselves changing.

Reference

Heinrich, Patrick. (2018). Dialect cosplay: Language use by the young generation. In Patrick Heinrich & Christian Galan (Eds.), Being Young in Super-Aging Japan: Formative Events and Cultural Reactions (pp. 166-182). London: Routledge.

Murakami’s Yesterday – a short story that forms one of the seven stories collected in a book titled Men without Women – constitutes a case in point. The story amused me as much as it took me back to some of my recent academic reading: “novelists and journalists constitute a cadre of producers or senders of metadiscursive messages about speech and accent in public space” (Agha, 2007, p. 302).

Novelists not only spread the indexical stereotypes of speech further among the public but also play with and suspend such indexical typification. Let me illustrate how Murakami achieves this via his story Yesterday (for a synopsis see here).

In the story, two young men change their accents to take on different social persona yet in different directions with divergent results. Tanimura, a native of Kansai picked up the standard Japanese language in Tokyo within the first month of his arrival at Waseda University. Clearly, he falls within the group of ‘normal’ people who switch to the standard Japanese in Tokyo.

By contrast, Kitaru, a Tokyo-born-and-bred high school graduate permanently metamorphoses himself into a Kansai dialect speaker. As you can guess, Tanimura fits well with his surroundings and happily starts his university life in cosmopolitan Tokyo without betraying any traces of his Kansai origin.

It is Kitaru with his new Kansai dialect who causes problems for people around him. His dialect use adds an air of eccentricity to his otherwise relatively unremarkable person. He is even described as weird and not normal by his girlfriend Erika, in response to which Kitaru retorts, pointing at Tanimura: “this guy’s pretty weird too, he’s from Ashiya [Kansai dialect area] but only speaks the Tokyo dialect”. Exasperated, Erika said: “that’s much more common, at least more common than the opposite”.

At this point it is helpful to take a short detour to look at how the Kansai dialect spoken mainly in Osaka and its adjacent areas is enregistered. A survey conducted by Södergren (2014) has shown that Kansai dialect was regarded as ‘straightforward’, ‘frank’, ‘expressive’ as well as ‘warm’ and the flipside of which equally applies as it is also seen as ‘rude/over-familiar’, ‘vulgar’, ‘sloppy’ and ‘too intense and too aggressive’. The researcher goes on to note the link between Kansai dialect and comedy. This is related to the boom of manzai, where a comic duo entertain their audience through a comic dialogue in Kansai dialect.

Conversely, the standard Japanese linked with Tokyo conjures up images of ‘new Japan’, advancement, internationalization, politeness and so forth. Clearly, such juxtapositions over-simplify the complexity and nuances of language use and attitudes since they are freely-floating decontextualized stereotypes. However, it is exactly these stereotypical indexicals of accents that are presupposed and reworked in the story Yesterday.

Kitaru, a somewhat idiosyncratic young man who has failed college entrance exams and has ended up in cram schools while his girlfriend enjoys all the freshness a university life can offer, defies his Tokyo identity by uttering everything in Kansai dialect completely disregarding the consequences of such non-congruent linguistic practice in Tokyo. Tanimura aptly describes this strangeness caused by Kitaru’s Kansai dialect as:

Kitaru wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was pleasant looking enough. He wasn’t tall but he was slim, and his hair and clothes were simple and stylish. As long as he didn’t say anything you’d assume he was a sensitive, well-brought-up city boy. He and his girlfriend made a great-looking couple. His only possible defect was that his face, a bit too slender and delicate, could give the impression that he was lacking in personality or was wishy-washy. But the moment he opened his mouth, this overall positive effect collapsed like a sand castle under an exuberant Labrador retriever. People were dismayed by his Kansai dialect, which he delivered fluently, as if that weren’t enough, in a slightly piercing, high-pitched voice. The mismatch with his looks was overwhelming (p. 51).

What is animated here is the image of a language rather than a person. The object of representation is Kansai dialect through which the novelistic figure Kitaru is represented. This technique of foregrounding the image of dialect runs through the whole story and acts as a key motif to the extent that we can even argue that Kitaru is animated and created through the objectification of his accent.

Even more crucial for the portrayal of Kitaru are the mismatches in his identity: his looks, his hair, his place of origin do not match with his language. This mismatch is what makes him a misfit, despite its effectiveness in setting him free from the ‘shackles’ of his undesirable Tokyo life.

The discomfort and dismay caused by Kitaru’s incongruent semiotic practices challenges the default perception of an essentialized link between language and identity. Most importantly, his actions subvert the norm and lay bare the contested nature of the authoritative and near-universal use of the standard language in the nation’s capital.

In the process, Kitaru engages in the resignification of the social field, to borrow from Butler (1992). Multiplying the voices in a delimited and centripetal place is not without consequences.

Novelists are indeed the senders and producers of metadiscursive messages about accents. Yet, they also reveal the discursive processes through which we build and solidify our own sand castles to avoid communicational mishaps and social castigation.

References

Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, J. P. (1992). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the questions of “postmodernism”. In J. P. Butler & J. W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge.
Södergren, S. (2014). “Metcha suki ya nen”: A sociolinguistic attitude survey concerning the Kansai dialect. BA thesis. Uppsala Uppsala University.

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.

Actress Noemí Busquets as the wise yet naughty Esperanceta Gassia at the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Àneu during the theatrical night visit to the ethnographic museum of Esterri d’ Àneu in Pallarès

When thinking of promoting tourism in a mountainous area of the Catalan Pyrenees it might seem as if using Pallarès, the local dialect of the Western Catalan type, with very specific vocabulary that visitors from other Catalan-speaking areas are not familiar with and which has been traditionally linked to rural and traditional lifestyles, would make little sense.

Nevertheless, much is to be gained by resorting to this local variety of the Catalan language in touristic activities in the area of Pallars Sobirà… why is that? Well, surprisingly, globalization is the answer.

One of the things that happen in the globalized touristic use of languages, according to authors such as Jaworski and Thurlow (2011) is the “commodification” and “recontextualization” of language. That means, language becomes a commodity in tourism … Aloha in Hawaii and Namaste in Nepal add authenticity to cultural visits, which is always a key asset in tourism. Beyond greetings and occasional language-learning through touristic “grazing” and “gazing”, though, tourism naturally creates new contexts for cultural phenomena and it currently values (oral) intangible heritage greatly. In fact, intangible heritage becomes visible precisely thanks to tourism. Pallarès is, in this sense, an intangible heritage of great value due to its connection to the authentic culture and territory of the Pyrenees.

According to dialectologists (Veny, 1993), Pallarès displays the marks of languages that were spoken before Catalan in the Pyrenees; mainly Basque, which vanished around the 8^th century AD due to the Romanization process, but which endured in “isolated” mountain valleys of the Pallars until the 10^th century, leaving a strong imprint on place names specially.

Mountain regions are ambivalent: either mountains and valleys “isolate”, or they “link” populations, villages, and cultures. So, when researching in order to assess the potential value of Pallarès in the promotion of the rich touristic offer of the Pallars Sobirà region (a land with prime adventure sports environment and unique cultural offers from Romanesque art to gastronomy) I asked cultural anthropologist and director of the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Àneu Jordi Abella about this. Mr. Abella told me that “the villages of the Pyrenees in the 19^th century were already connected to European capital cities such as Madrid, Paris and Barcelona” and that too long a “good savage myth à la Rousseau had lived on to give a false romantic image of the Pyrenees” based on cultural purity due to isolation.

In a way, both isolation and globalization are forces at play here: isolation is evidenced by the fact that Basque lived on for 200 years in the Pallars; and globalization is evidenced by the fact that people changed to a common language – Catalan – which they could use at fairs and for trading.

Poster of the theater and dance festival “Esbaiola’t” in Esterri d’Àneu. The verb “esbaiolar-se” is unknown in other varieties of Catalan and means “to clear one’s mind” as well as “to clear up the mists (weather)”

Catalonia as a whole is going through what some have called a “thirst for history” (Toledano Gonzàlez, 2004). Catalans are more inclined to consume and discover more about their own culture at the current history-defining moment in which a Catalan vote for self-determination is being discussed. This creates a context that naturally invites greater use of Pallarès as Actress Noemí Busquets (who plays the role of a Pallarès-speaking witch-like wise and wacky lady that confronts local and global values during the night visits to the Eco Museum of the village of Esterri d’Àneu) emphasises: “now I feel that it (Pallarès) is better appreciated by visitors”.  And the fact is that 63% of the visitors coming to the Pallars region are from Catalonia (Boyra & Fusté, 2013), and mostly from the metropolitan area of Barcelona. What is it that Pallarès can offer them?

When in 1913, the philologist Pompeu Fabra wrote the Orthographic Rules of Catalan and later on the General Dictionary of Catalan Language (1931), he based them on the Eastern Catalan dialect – the one spoken in Barcelona – and left aside most vocabulary of other dialects and almost completely ignored Pallarès. Now, as a consequence of this, people coming to the Pallars get surprised by Pallarès. While queuing up at a grocery shop in the beautiful village of Esterri d’Àneu, a spontaneous conversation on dialectology started: a woman shared that when she got married to her Pallarès husband and moved to his village, her mother-in-law once asked her to fetch the “llosa”. “Llosa” in Catalan means “stone slab”; so, she continued “I was hoping that the stone slab wouldn’t be too heavy”. To her relief she later found out that “llosa” in Pallarès means “ladle”.

Pallarès brings back to Catalan-speaking visitors, a richness of vocabulary that they would otherwise ignore. When I asked Yolanda Mas, tourism specialist of the city hall of Sort (the capital of the Pallars Sobirà) what she thought of promoting Pallarès through tourism, she said that “it is an endangered resource that we should definitely invest in”. Nowadays, the visitors to the Pallars Sobirà are very diverse; from French and English to Spanish, Israeli and Russians; so the linguascape of the Pallars might become even more complex soon, and while offering touristic activities in Hebrew or Russian may respond to the economic need of the moment, offering activities in Pallarès Catalan in addition to activities in Standard Catalan and other languages, will be proof that “identity sells” while being at the same time a necessary expression of authentic identity.

References
Boyra, J. & Fusté, F. (2013). Anàlisi dels instruments d’ordenació i dels recursos territorials i l’activitat turística a la comarca del Pallars Sobirà GREPAT/ Escola Universitària Formatic Barna, Barcelona

Fabra, P. (1913). Normes ortogràfiques. Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona.

Fabra, P. (1931). Diccionari general de la llengua catalana. Llibreria Catalònia, Barcelona.

Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2010). Language and the Globalizing Habitus of Tourism: Towards a sociolingüístics of Fleeting Relationships (From: Handbook of Language and Globalization, edited by Coupland, N.) Wiley- Blackwell Publishing ltd. West Sussex, UK.

Toledano Gonzàlez, L. (2004). Atles del Turisme a Catalunya mapa nacional dels recursos turísitics intangibles. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona- Grup de Recerca Consolidat Manuscrits / Generalitat de Catalunya.

Torrents, A. (2014). La variant dialectal pallaresa com a bé immaterial de la marca de turisme cultural “Pallars”. Creació i comercialització de productes turístics. Quaderns de recerca Escola Universitària Formatic Barna, Barcelona.

Veny, J. (1993). Els parlars catalans (Síntesi de dialectologia) Editorial Moll, Mallorca.

Excerpt from “The Haunted Lotus” by Australian-Hazara artist Khadim Ali (Source: Milani Gallery)

An objection that is commonly raised against Esperanto and other auxiliary languages is that they are “invented.” Somehow, being “invented” is assumed to give Esperanto a shady character: it’s just not natural. The problem with this view is that – in being invented – Esperanto is not unique. And I don’t just mean that there is also Klingon and Volapük. In fact, each and every language with a name is an invention. We may not always be able to identify the inventors – in fact the trick of the inventors of English, Chinese, German, Spanish and all the others – has been not to let themselves be identified as language inventors. Instead, they pose as teachers, priests, bureaucrats, academics, poets or scientists. The invention of major national languages such as these gets obscured by time (although Standard German with its origins in the 19^th century is not much older than Esperanto), and it is a rare opportunity to see a language invented before our own eyes.

Such an opportunity currently unfolds in Australia with the invention of the Hazaragi language. Late last year I was invited to attend the 2013 NSW Fair Trading Think Smart Multicultural Conference. Among the many important things I learnt at that conference was the discovery of a multilingual resource for renters in New South Wales. The video “Renting a home: a tenant’s guide to rights and responsibilities” is an excellent educational resource and it is available not only in English but, additionally, in 17 other community languages. What struck me was that three of these 17 languages were the same, as far as I am concerned: there is “Dari,” “Farsi” and “Hazaragi.” Isn’t it all Persian, I thought? I was aware that “Farsi” is often used for “Iranian Persian” and “Dari” for “Afghan Persian” but I had never encountered “Hazaragi” listed as a separate language before; it is usually treated as the Persian dialect spoken by the Hazara of Afghanistan. The Hazara are Shia Muslims of Mongol ancestry whose traditional homeland are the high mountains of central Afghanistan (Farr 2007).

So, I did some research and discovered that Hazaragi is a language that is currently being invented in Australia and linguists from around the world might wish to pay close attention how this process unfolds.

To begin with, it’s imperative to identify speaker numbers because you can’t have a “natural” language without a community of speakers – and remember I’m talking about concealed invention; not something as straightforward as Ludwik Zamenhof saying “an international auxiliary language is a great idea and I’m going to create one.” In order to achieve speaker numbers, the categories of the Australian national census had to be adapted a bit over the years, as a comparison of the category for “Persian” over five consecutive censuses shows: the 1991 Census had no category for Persian nor related varieties and they were all subsumed under “Asian Languages, not elsewhere included.” Reflecting growing immigration from Iran, by the next census in 1996, “Persian” had its own category, which remained unchanged in 2001. The 2006 Census saw a significant change to the category when the language label was changed to “Iranic languages” with three distinct subcategories: “Persian (excluding Dari),” “Dari” and “Other.” “Other” was defined to comprise “Iranic, not further defined,” “Kurdish,” “Pashto,” “Balochi” and “Iranic, not elsewhere classified.” (There is no need to write in and ask what the difference between “Iranic, not further defined” and “Iranic, not elsewhere classified” might be. I don’t know.) It was not until the 2011 Census that “Hazaragi” made its debut, when it was included in the “Iranic Languages, Other” category for the first time. The table visualizes the changes in category.

Another important aspect of instituting Hazaragi as a language in Australia is through the credentialing of interpreters. NAATI, the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters, credentials Hazaragi paraprofessional interpreters through testing. On inquiry, I have learnt that NAATI decisions about recognizing a variety as a language are based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data (see above) and “voices from the community about the designations that they use for themselves.” In fact, it seems quite impossible to find out how the decision to accord language status to Hazaragi was made. Even so, NAATI has clear guidelines as to what is correct and incorrect Hazaragi in a testing situation:

NAATI acknowledges that there are regional variations/dialects of the Hazaragi language. However, due to strong cultural and identity connections there is a high level of mutual understandability between these regional dialects.

For the purposes of NAATI testing, a candidate will not be penalised for the dialect spoken as long as what is being said would be understood by an average Hazara person living in Hazaristan.

Candidates need to be aware that the Hazaragi language spoken by Hazaras in some locations, including the major cities in Afghanistan, has been heavily influenced by other languages of those cities and areas. Any use of ‘none’ [sic] Hazargai’ [sic] words when interpreting would be penalised. (NAATI Information Booklet)

This statement is a crucial step in the invention of the Hazaragi language. After the language has been given a name, it is being codified. Again, the process of invention is dissimulated: the language spoken in the mythical place of origin, Hazaristan (incidentally, there is also a little identity war going on over whether that region should be called “Hazarajat” or “Hazaristan,” the latter supposedly being “more modern”) is normalised whereas language use that shows traces of the influence by other locations, particularly cities, is penalized, presumably because someone got it into their head that such influence is “incorrect.”

This particular invention – Hazaragi as the language of rural Hazaristan – is rather baffling: from an Australian perspective, the language spoken by “an average Hazara person living in Hazaristan” is entirely irrelevant because even if such persons were to exist in Afghanistan, they do not in Australia. The past three decades or more have been an unmitigated disaster for Afghanistan and have produced the world’s largest refugee population. Contemporary Hazara society is characterised by constant migration:

Like most Afghan groups, the Hazāras fled in large numbers after the coup of April 1978 and the Soviet intervention in 1979. Most of them went to one of the neighboring countries of Afghanistan. Migrants and refugees have thus come to overlap and can hardly be distinguished from each other. Their movements follow various patterns: thousands of farmers from the Hazārajāt migrate every winter to work in coal mines near Quetta for a few months, while young men migrate for longer periods to Iran to take on menial jobs. During the last two decades, the Hazāras have formed very efficient migratory and economic networks, based on the dispersion of relatives in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. (Encyclopaedia Iranica)

Hazaragi has always been a contact variety – its main claim to distinction from Persian is the relatively higher number of Mongol loan words – and, in all likelihood, will continue to be a contact variety for a long time to come. It’s hard to see how inventing boundaries and a standard for this variety will do any good to anyone. Peter Mühlhäusler (2000) has an apt term for this kind of linguistics: segregational linguistics.

Farr, Grant. (2007). The Hazaras of Central Afghanistan. In B. Brower & B. R. Johnston (Eds.), Disappearing Peoples?: Indigenous Groups and Ethnic Minorities in South and Central Asia (pp. 153-168). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Mühlhäusler, Peter (2000). Language Planning and Language Ecology Current issues in language planning, 1 (3), 306-362 DOI: 10.1080/14664200008668011