Abstract
Research into linguistic purism often reflects a critical, if not contemptuous attitude towards its subject of inquiry. The reasons for this are purists’ prescriptivist stance, as well as their frequent association with ethno-linguistic nationalism, an ideology in moral disrepute. We argue that this approach of purism produces blind spots. Following Pratt’s suggestion, we reconsider linguistic purism in this article as the effect of a utopian discourse and show how a desire for (linguistic) purity is at the very heart of the project of modernity. We apply our theoretical framework to the history of purism in modern Flanders (nineteenth to twenty-first century).
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a grant for Jürgen Jaspers from The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). The authors wish to thank Marlou de Bont for her editorial help.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Beware of the weeds
- Standardization and the myth of neutrality in language history
- Bildts as a mixed language
- Language maintenance and shift under pressure: Three generations of the Turkish immigrant community in the Netherlands
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Beware of the weeds
- Standardization and the myth of neutrality in language history
- Bildts as a mixed language
- Language maintenance and shift under pressure: Three generations of the Turkish immigrant community in the Netherlands
- Ethnic minority linguistic ambivalence and the problem of methodological assessment of language shift among the Ogu in Ogun State, Nigeria
- Modeling social factors in language shift
- Global repertoires and urban fluidity: youth languages in Africa
- Linguistic landscaping in Tabriz, Iran: a discursive transformation of a bilingual space into a monolingual place
- The idea of a Kosovan language in Yugoslavia’s language politics
- Multilingualism and social cohesion: insights from South African students (1998, 2010, 2015)
- Reviewers for the International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2016