Written Language & Literacy - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2015

This introductory article to the special issue on the historical sociolinguistics of spelling sketches an overview of the current interest in the field for the sociopolitical nature of the written language. Spelling is understood as a powerful tool for sociopolitical mobilization and thus becomes a recurrent source of conflict. Orthographic debates are the object of study chosen by the authors in this special issue to analyze the non-linguistic dimension of language matters. Approaching them as language ideological debates allows us to carry out a deeper examination of the political projects, social structures, identity issues and cultural practices that are at stake when an orthographic conflict emerges. Adopting such theoretical approach to the study of spelling, the editors of this volume have gathered works that look at the past and present of a number of European languages (Dutch, German, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Portuguese and Spanish) since the Early Modern period until recent times.

This paper discusses three processes relating to the social meaning of scripts and orthographies, all of which are potentially mediated by the role of script-as-image. One of these processes, iconisation, was introduced to the field by Irvine and Gal (2000) and is widely known. Attribution is a process which precedes iconisation, whereby a group of people associate a linguistic feature or language-related practice with a group of people who (supposedly) use that feature or engage in that practice. Orthographic branding involves a specific visual/graphical element of written language such as an alphabetic character. Through ‘branding,’ this element becomes an emblem of a group of people who use the element in question in their writing practices. Branding may involve iconisation, but the processes are distinct. This paper describes and distinguishes the three processes and provides examples from different languages and user communities.

The collapse of the Spanish Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century prompted a need to reorganize the former colonial space in independent countries by creating territorial, political and identity boundaries in Spanish-speaking America. The imposition of a national language – the officialization of grammatical and orthographic norms and their promotion through emerging public education systems – was a key instrument in the nation-building processes developed in Spain and the newly independent American republics. In this socio-political context resistance to official norms and their implementation was frequent. This article studies three language ideological debates over Spanish orthography, occurring in the central decades of the century: the resistance to the officialization of the Royal Spanish Academy’s orthography in Spain (1844), the opposition to Sarmiento’s simplification proposal in Chile (1844) and the reception of the Chilean orthography in Spain (1846). The significance of spelling as an identity marker and a political tool is emphasized.

In Late Medieval and Early Modern times, the modernization of printing and the increasing proficiency of related crafts had an impact on spelling. The challenges of microtypography, especially of text alignment, led to a bundle of new spelling variants that annoyed early grammatography. Nevertheless, the conflict-ridden working conditions in the printing shops and the needs of the market appear to be the decisive factors, initiating novel spelling strategies that were aimed at accessing new consumer groups. A development was set in motion that supported unskilled readers, applying noun capitalization, punctuation, and syllabic spellings to assist in the process of decoding.

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a distinct Southern Dutch linguistic identity emerged in the region now known as Flanders, and spelling features are at the heart of this developing linguistic autonomy. By analyzing eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century normative and metalinguistic comments about three highly salient spelling variables (the spelling of the long vowels a and u in closed syllables, the ending 〈-n〉 or 〈-ø〉 in masculine adnominals, and the orthographic representation of etymologically different e and o sounds), we will show how seemingly insignificant features increasingly came to be portrayed as representing an unbridgeable linguistic gap between the Northern and Southern Low Countries. At the time of the political reunion of both parts of the Dutch speaking territories (1815–1830), this perceived gap then gave rise to different voices rejecting or embracing these shibboleths of linguistic ‘Southernness’, indicating how spelling features came to represent conflicting identities.

The process of adopting an official orthography for the Portuguese language was completed very late in history, only in the twentieth century, and it was independently triggered by the Brazilian Letters Academy (in 1907) and the Portuguese sciences academy (in 1911). The diplomatic negotiations between the nations involved were countless ones along the following decades, and also included, in due time, other former Portuguese colonies. Since 2006, all countries are gradually ratifying a unified orthography decided in 1990, but the process is much debated in the public space. The root of the disagreement has to do with the fact that both the Portuguese and the Brazilian sets of graphematic norms, although aiming at phonological segments, include transcription rules for variant matter: different phonetic realizations that are triggered by phonological processes.

The standardization of the Macedonian language and controversies surrounding it have been described in detail by many scholars. This paper seeks to contribute to this discussion in several ways. First, I will provide a brief summary of debates concerning selection of an orthography in the period 1944–1945. Significantly, I will expand that discussion through inclusion of important archival materials from the Koneski archive at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences. Second, I will briefly discuss debates that have arisen with suggestions for orthographic reform since the 1940s. In the final section of the paper I will examine the use of Cyrillic and new debates surrounding the use of different systems of transliteration in the Latin alphabet that compete in the linguistic landscape as well as in on-line fora leading to new proposals for orthographic reform.

After the 1863 uprising, in order to diminish Polish influence over Lithuanians, the authorities of the Russian Empire banned the use of Latin letters for Lithuanian texts and implemented the Cyrillic script. The article discusses the linguistic ideologies that underlay this orthographic reform for Lithuanian. The study provides a discursive analysis of opposing accounts expressed in contemporary administrative and media discourses by the key supporters and opponents of the reform. Competing discourses regarding the use of Cyrillic vs. Latin for Lithuanian contested, shaped, and defined the ideological meanings of these scripts: Cyrillic was symbolically linked to Russification, Russianness, Orthodoxy, and Imperial authority, while the Latin script was associated with Polonization, Polishness, the Catholic Church, and anti-imperial resistance. The competing discourses regarding the alphabet change for Lithuanian, via its differentiation from the imposed Cyrillic as well as from the Latin-Polish writing tradition, helped to shape and define the notion of a modern Lithuanian alphabet.