Linguistic purism is the opposition to any changes of a given language, or the desire to undo some changes the language has undergone in the past.

There are various kinds of purism (cf. Thomas (1991)):

Based on the approach

• Archaizing purism: This occurs when a speech community tries to resuscitate the language of a golden age of literature. Examples: Arabic, Icelandic, Katharevousa Greek. See also Language revival.

• Ethnographic purism: This form is based on an idealization of the countryside, folk stories and dialects. Examples: Nynorsk (New Norwegian), some versions of Demotic Greek.

• Élitist purism: Associated with the language spoken at the court.

• Reformist purism: The main feature here is to break the bonds with the past. An example of this is the removal of Persian and Arabic words during Turkish language reform under Atatürk in order to break with the Persian- and Arabic- influenced Ottoman Turkish language. Other examples are the purist efforts in languages like Hausa, Swahili and Hindi to break with the colonial past. In addition, language policies may seek to decrease similarities between mutually intelligible languages for ethno-political reasons, as has been the case with Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian), Dano-Norwegian, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu) and Malay/Indonesian.

• Playful purism: This form existed early in the 20th century and is aimed at making a mockery of purism or merely for the sake of amusement or literary aesthetism.

• Xenophobic or patriotic purism: involves the elimination or exclusion of foreign elements. An extreme case is High Norwegian, but it is common worldwide. Many English writers of the 19th and 20th centuries extolled the virtues of 'strong' Anglo-Saxon words such as 'foreword', which was coined to replace the 'weak' Romance word 'preface'. France is known for its preference for coining words to borrowing English words. German and Greek often prefer to coin calques to avoid using foreign words, although Germany was unable to prevent a major influx of informal English vocabulary in recent years.

• Anti-purism: A puristic reaction to a manifestation of purism, directed at the removal of neologisms originating from a puristic intervention.

Based on the goals

• Unificatory purism: Tries to satisfy the solidarity criterion of standard languages.

• Prestige purism: Tries to satisfy the prestige function.

• Defensive purism: Tries to deal with the concerns about the threat a language faces.

• Delimiting purism: Tries to satisfy the separating function

Based on the intensity

• Marginal purism: In this pattern purism never becomes at any stage a value-feature of the speech community. On the contrary, there's openness to all sources of enrichment. Examples: English, Russian, Polish, Japanese.

• Moderate, discontinuous purism: In this pattern, a moderate attitude is discernible over a long period of time. Examples: Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian.

• Trimming purism. A reactive correction to a potentially dangerous trend in the development of a standard language. Examples: Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Slovak.

• Evolutionary purism: In this pattern purism is seen early in the development of a written language. There are no radical changes or orientation. During the standardisation process, the purism gains momentum after which it slows down. Examples: Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Hebrew, Croatian and Slovene.

• Oscillatory purism: Involves repeated swings between intense purism and a more tolerant attitude. Examples: German, Czech and Yiddish.

• Stable, consistent purism: In this pattern no interruption or fluctuation in intensity is seen. Purism is a constant value-feature of the speech community. Examples: Arabic, Tamil and Icelandic.

• Revolutionary purism: An abrupt and violent change from the previously mentioned patterns to another. Examples: Turkish.

Other forms (not mentioned by George Thomas)

• Regressive purism. The eradication of very old loan-words. It is one of the main features of ultrapurism.

• Ultrapurism: The mathematical upper limit of purism. In this pattern everything that can be expressed by human speech is a target for puristic intervention, even geographical names, names of organic chemicals and proper names. The only existing example of this is High Icelandic (Háfrónska).

Bibliography

• George Thomas, Linguistic Purism (Studies in Language and Linguistics), Longman, 1991, ISBN 0582037425.

See also

• Language policy
• Linguistic protectionism
• Linguistic imperialism
• Linguistic separatism
• Prescription and description

Sprachpurismus | Lingva purismo | Taalpurisme | Пуризм | Puryzm (językoznawstwo) | Пуризм