by Ivan Illich
The mere per capita expenditure on the language of a group of speakers would, of course, not tell us enough. Taught language comes in a vast range of qualities. The poor, for instance, are much more blared at than the rich, who can buy tutoring and, what is more precious, silence. Each paid word that is addressed to the rich costs, per capita, much more than each word addressed to the poor. Watts are more democratic than words. Yet, even without the more detailed language-economics on which I would like to draw, I can estimate that the dollars spent for fuel imports to the United States pale before those that are now expended on American speech. The language of rich nations is incredibly spongy and absorbs huge investments. Rising expenditures for tax collection, administration, theater, and other forms of costly language have always been a mark of high civilization, especially in urban life. But these fluctuations in expenditures for language (or fuel) were traditionally of a different kind, incomparable with the capitalization of language today. Even today, in poor countries, people still speak to each other, though their language has never been capitalized except, perhaps, among a tiny élite. What is the difference between the everyday speech groups whose language has received — absorbed? resisted? reacted to? suffered? enjoyed? — huge investments and the speech of people whose language has remained outside the market? I want to compare these two worlds of language, but focus my curiosity on just one issue that arises in this context: does the structure of the language itself change with the rate of investment? If so, are these changes such that all languages that absorb funds would show changes that go in the same direction? In my introductory discussion of the subject I may not be able to give you enough arguments to make both claims appear very probable and to convince you that structurally oriented language economics are worth exploring.
Taught everyday language is without precedent in pre-industrial cultures. The current dependence on paid teachers and on models of ordinary speech is just as much a unique characteristic of industrial economies as is our dependence on fossil fuels. Both language and energy have only in our generation been recognized as worldwide needs that — for all people — must be satisfied by planned, programmed intervention. Traditional cultures subsisted on sunshine that was captured mostly through agriculture: the hoe, the ditch, the yoke were common; large sails or waterwheels were known but rare. Cultures that lived mostly on the sun subsisted basically on vernacular language that was absorbed by each group through its own roots. Just as power was drawn from nature mostly by tools that increased the skill of fingers and the power of arms and legs, so language was drawn from the cultural environment through the encounter with people, each of whom one could smell and touch, love and hate. Taught tongues were rare, like sails and mills. In most cultures we know, speech overcame man.
The majority in poor countries, even today, learn to speak without any paid tutorship; and they learn to speak in a way that in no way compares with the self-conscious, self-important, colorless mumbling that, after a long stay in villages of South America and Southeast Asia, surprised me again during my last visit to American campuses. For people who cannot hear the difference, I feel only contempt that I try hard to transform into sorrow for their tone-deafness. But what else shall I expect from people who are not brought up on mother’s breast but on formulas: Nestlé if they are from poor families, and a formula prepared under the nose of Ralph Nader if they are born among the enlightened rich, or if they are foundlings whom the élite tutor in its institutions. For people trained to choose among packaged formulas, mother’s breast appears as one more option. In the same way, for people who learned every language they know from somebody they believe to be their teacher, untutored vernacular seems just like another less-developed model among many.
But this is simply not so: language that is exempt from rational tutorship is a different kind of social phenomenon than language that is taught. Where untutored language is the predominant marker of a shared world, a sense of shared power within the group exists that cannot be duplicated by language that is delivered. One of the first ways this difference shows is in a sense of power over language itself — over its acquisition. The poor in non-industrial countries all over the world, even today, are polyglot. My friend the goldsmith of Timbuktu speaks Songhay at home, listens to Banbara on the radio, devotedly and with some understanding says his prayers five times a day in Arabic, gets along in two trade languages on the souk, converses in passable French that he has picked up in the army — and none of those languages was formally taught him. Communities in which monolingual people prevail are rare except in three kinds of settings: in tribal communities that have not really experienced the late neolithic period, in communities that have experienced certain intense forms of discrimination, and among the citizens of nation-states that for several generations have enjoyed the benefits of compulsory schooling. To take it for granted that most people are monolingual is typical of the members of the middle class. Admiration for the polyglot unfailingly exposes the social climber.
Throughout history, untutored language was prevalent, but it was hardly ever the only kind of language known. Just as, in traditional cultures, some energy was captured through windmills and canals, and those who had large boats or those who had cornered the right spot on the brook could use their tool for a net transfer of power to their own advantage, so some people have always used a taught language to corner some privilege. But such additional codes remained either rare and special, or served very narrow purposes. The ordinary language, the vernacular, but also the trade idiom, the language of prayer, the craft jargon, and the language of basic accounts, was learned on the side, as part of everyday life. Of course, Latin or Sanskrit were sometimes formally taught to the priest; a court language, such as Frankish, Persian, or Turkish, was taught to him who wanted to become a scribe; neophites were formally initiated into the language of astronomy, alchemy, or late masonry. And, of course, the knowledge of such formally taught language raised a man above others, like the saddle of a horse. Quite frequently, in fact, the process of formal initiation did not teach a new language skill, but exempted the initiate from the taboo that forbade others to use certain words. Male initiation into the languages of the hunt and of ritual intercourse is probably the most widespread example of such a ritual of selective language ‘de-tabooing.’ But, no matter how much or how little language was taught, the taught language rarely rubbed off on vernacular speech. Neither the existence of some language teaching at all times nor the spread of some language through professional preachers or comedians weakens my key point: outside of those societies that we now call ‘modern European,’ no attempt was made to impose on entire populations an everyday language that would be subject to the control of paid teachers or announcers. Everyday language, until recently, was nowhere the product of design, it was nowhere paid for and delivered like a commodity. And while every historian who deals with the origin of nation-states pays attention to commodities, economists generally overlook language.
I want to contrast taught colloquial and vernacular speech, costly language and that which comes at no cost. I call the first ‘taught colloquial’ because, as we shall see, ‘mother tongue’ is fraught with tricky implications. ‘Everyday language’ might do, but is less precise, and most other terms that I shall occasionally use caricature one of the aspects of tutored language. For the opposite, I use the term ‘vernacular’ because I have nothing better. Vernacular comes from an Indo-Germanic root that implies ‘rootedness’ or ‘abode.’ It is a Latin word used in classical times for whatever was homebred, homespun, homegrown, homemade — be it a slave or a child, food or dress, animal, opinion, or a joke. The term was picked up by Varro to designate a distinction in language. Varro picked ‘vernacular’ to designate language that is grown on the speaker’s own grounds as opposed to that which is planted there by others. Varro was a learned man, the most learned Roman according to the great teacher Quintillian, librarian to Caesar and then to Augustus, with considerable influence on the
Middle Ages. So ‘vernacular’ came into English in just that one, restricted sense in which Varro had adopted it. I would now like to resuscitate some of its old breath. Just now we need a simple, straightforward word to designate the fruit of activities in which people engage when they are not motivated by considerations of exchange, a word that would designate non-market-related activities by which people do things and make do — wants to which, in the process of satisfying them, they also give concrete shape. ‘Vernacular’ seems a good old word that might be acceptable to many contemporaries for this usage. I know that there are technical words available to designate the satisfaction of those needs that economists do not or cannot measure: ‘social production’ as opposed to ‘economic production’; the generation of ‘use values’ or ‘mere use values,’ as opposed to the production of ‘commodities’; ‘household economics’ as opposed to the economics of the ‘market.’ But these terms are all specialized, tainted with some ideological prejudice, and they often limp. We need a simple adjective to designate those values that we want to defend from measurement and manipulation by Chicago boys or socialist commissars, and that adjective ought to be broad enough to fit food and language, childbirth and infant-rearing, without implying a ‘private’ activity or a backward procedure. By speaking about vernacular language I am trying to bring into discussion the existence of a vernacular mode of being and doing that extends to all aspects of life.
Before I can go on in my argument, I will have to clarify one more distinction. When I oppose taught language to the vernacular, I draw a line of demarcation somewhere else than linguists do when they distinguish between the high language of an élite and the dialect spoken in lower classes; somewhere else than that other frontier that allows us to distinguish between regional and supra-regional language; and, again, somewhere else than the demarcation line between the language of the illiterate and that of the literate. No matter how restricted within geographic boundaries, no matter how distinctive for a social level, no matter how specialized for one sex role or one caste, language can be either ‘vernacular’ (in the sense in which I use the term) or ‘taught.’ Elite language, second language, trade language, and local language are nothing new, but for each the taught variety that comes as a commodity is entirely new. I am not speaking now in detail about varieties of taught language, but I am focusing on taught everyday language, taught colloquial — which usually is taught standard colloquial. In all of recorded history, one among several mutually understandable dialects has tended towards predominance in a given region. This kind of predominant dialect was often accepted as the standard form, that form which was written — and that form which, earlier than others, was taught. This dialect generally predominated because of the prestige of its speakers. Most of the time it did not spread because it was taught; it diffused by a much more complex and subtle process. Midland English became the second, common style in which people born into any English dialect could also speak their own language, just as Bahasa Malayu became the national tongue of Indonesia. Since both those language-diffusions took place in rather modern times, we might suspect that intentional teaching had something to do with the process. For Urdu, which the Moghul soldiery spread over the Indian subcontinent, teaching has hardly anything to do with the sudden spread.
No doubt, the dominant position of élite or standard language varieties everywhere was bolstered by writing, and even more by printing. Printing enormously enhanced the colonizing power of élite language. But to say that because printing has been invented, élite language is destined to supplant all vernacular varieties is to put the cart before the horse; it’s like saying that after the invention of the atom bomb, only superpowers shall be sovereign. In fact, the editing, printing, publishing, and distribution of printed matter incorporated increasingly those technical procedures that favor centralization and the colonization of vernacular forms by the printed standard. But this monopoly of centralized procedures over technical innovations is no argument that printing technique could not increasingly be used to give written expression a new vitality and new literary opportunities to thousands of vernacular forms. The fact that printing was used for the imposition of standard colloquials does not mean that written language will always be a taught form.
Vernacular spreads by practical use; it is learned from people who mean what they say and who say what they mean to the person for whom what they say is meant. This is not so in taught language. In the case of taught language, the key model is not a person that I care for or dislike, but a professional speaker. Taught colloquial is modeled by somebody who does not say what he means, but who recites what others have contrived. Taught colloquial is the language of the announcer who follows the script that an editor was told by a publicist that a committee had decided should be said. Taught language is the dead, impersonal rhetoric of people paid to declaim with phony conviction texts composed by others. People who speak taught language imitate the announcer of news, the actor of gags, the instructor who follows the textbooks, the songster of engineered rhymes, or the ghost-written president. This language is not meant to be used when I say something to your face. The language of the media always seeks the appropriate audience-profile that has been chosen by the boss of the program. While the vernacular is engendered in the learner by his presence at the intercourse between people who say something to each other face to face, taught language is learned from speakers whose assigned job is gab.
Of course, language would be totally inhuman if it were totally taught. That is what Humboldt meant when he said that real language is that speech which can only be fostered, never taught like mathematics. Only machines can communicate without any reference to vernacular roots. Their chatter in New York now takes up almost three quarters of the lines that the telephone company operates under a franchise that guarantees free intercourse to people. This is an obvious perversion of a public channel. But even more embarrassing than this abuse of a forum of free speech by robots is the incidence of robot-like stock phrases in the remaining part in which people address each other. A growing percentage of personal utterances has become predictable, not only in content but also in style. Language is degraded to ‘communication’ as if it were nothing but the human variety of an exchange that also goes on between bees, whales and computers. No doubt, a vernacular component always survives; all I say is that it withers. The American colloquial has become a composite made up of two kinds of language: a commodity-like, taught uniquack, and an impoverished vernacular that tries to survive. Modern French and German have gone the same way, though with one difference: they have absorbed English terms to the point that certain standard exchanges in French or German that I have overheard in European drugstores and offices have all the formal characteristics of pidgin.
A resistance that sometimes becomes as strong as a sacred taboo guards the recognition of the difference with which we are dealing here: the difference between capitalized language and vernaculars that come at no economically measurable cost. It is the same kind of inhibition that makes it difficult for those who are brought up within the industrial system to sense the fundamental distinction between nurturing at the breast and feeding by bottle; or the difference between the pupil and the autodidact; or the difference between a mile moved on my own and a passenger mile; or the difference between housing as an activity and housing as a commodity — all things about which I have spoken in the past. While anyone would probably admit that there is a huge difference in taste, meaning, and value between a homecooked meal and a TV dinner, the discussion of this difference among people like us can be easily blocked. The people present at a meeting like this are all people who are committed to equal rights, equity, the service of the poor. They know how many mothers have no milk in their breasts, how many children in the South Bronx suffer protein deficiencies, how many Mexicans are crippled by lack of basic foods. As soon as I raise the distinction between vernacular values and those that can be economically measured and therefore administered, some
protector of the poor will jump up and tell me that I am avoiding the critical issue by giving importance to niceties. I distinguish between transportation and transit by metabolic power, between vernacular and taught colloquial, between homemade food and packaged nutrition. Now, are not the distances covered on foot and by wheel, the terms used in learned and in taught language, and the calories ingested in the two kinds of food the same? No doubt they are, but this makes each of the two activities comparable only in a narrow, non-social sense. The difference between the vernacular movement, word or food and that which is overwhelmingly a commodity goes much deeper: the value of the vernacular is to a large measure determined by him who engenders it; the need for the commodity is determined and shaped for the consumer by the producer who defines its value. What makes the world modern is a replacement of vernacular values by commodities, which — to be attractive — must deny the essential value of the aspect that, in this process, is lost.
People who feel like modern men experience basic needs that correlate to commodities rather than to vernacular activities. Technologies that fit into this kind of world are those that apply scientific progress to commodity production rather than to the enlargement of vernacular competence. The use of writing and printing at the service of the standard colloquial in preference to its use for the expansion of the vernacular reflects this deeply ingrained prejudice. What makes the work process modern is the increased intensity with which human activity is managed and planned, and the decreased significance that those activities can claim for themselves, rather than for exchange on the market. In his essay ‘The Limits to Satisfaction,’ William Leiss argues this point. I will incorporate here some of his argument, because later I would like to show how the process he describes has affected language since the rise of Europe as an ideal. Leiss argues that the radical transformation of individual wants in the process of industrialization is the hidden complement of the attempt to dominate nature. This attempt to dominate nature has, since the seventeenth century, progressively shaped and branded every aspect of public pursuits in Western societies. Nature was increasingly interpreted as the source from which a social production process is fed: an enterprise that is undertaken for people rather than by them. ‘Needs’ designated, increasingly, rights to the output of this process rather than claims for the freedom and competence to survive. As the environment (which formerly was called ‘nature’) became ruthlessly exploited as a resource and as a trash can for those commodities that were being produced for the purpose of satisfying needs, human nature (which today is called human psychology) avenged itself. Man became needy. Today, the individual’s feelings about his own needs are first associated with an increasing feeling of impotence: in a commodity-dominated environment, needs can no longer be satisfied without recourse to a store, a market. Each satisfaction that commodity-determined man experiences implies a component of frustrated self-reliance. It also implies an experience of isolation and a sense of disappointment about the persons that are close. The person that I can touch and cherish cannot give me what I need, cannot teach me how to make it, cannot show me how to do without it. Every satisfaction of a commodity-shaped need thus undermines further the experiences of self-reliance and of trust in others that are the warp and woof of any traditional culture. Leiss analyzes what happens when the number and the variety of goods and services grow, each of which is offered to the individual, each interpreted as a need, and each symbolically constituting a utility. The individual is forced to relearn how to need. His wants crumble into progressively smaller components. His wants lose their subjective coherence. The individual loses the ability to fit his need-fragments into a whole that would be meaningful to him. Needs are transformed from drives that orient creative action into disorienting lacks that call for professional service to synthesize demand. In this high-commodity setting, the adequate response to any commodity-determined need ceases to imply the satisfaction of the person. The person is understood as forever ‘in need’ of something. As needs become limitless, people become increasingly needy. Paradoxically, the more time and resources are expended on generating commodities for the supposed satisfaction of needs, the more shallow becomes each individual want, and the more indifferent to the specific form in which it shall be met. Beyond a very low threshold, through the replacement of vernacular forms of subsistence by commodity-shaped needs and the goods or services that fit them, the person becomes increasingly needy, teachable, and frustrated.
