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Purism as language policy.

As we can see, devotion to linguistic purism is a kind of language policy--there is an attempt to control where vocabulary comes from, what sources (external or internal) it will draw from, what syntactic and derivational process it will utilize. Central to all of this is a belief system, consisting of some or all of the following:

Puristic movements in linguistic cultures come and go, they wax and wane. As Annamalai points out, they are often associated with changes in the social order or when power-relations are being redefined. They are often very unscientific, relying on dubious ideas about what is native and what is not, and as a result many aspects of the movement get `fudged' because of ignorance of the history of various words, or because it becomes too complicated to remain consistent.


next up previous
Next: Loan Translation Up: Who are the Primordialists? Previous: Linguistic Purism
Harold Schiffman
12/3/1998