 And this session is entitled Multilingualism Invented. We have three distinguished speakers, three presentations of 25 minutes. After those, the presenters will have the opportunities to comment and ask each other questions before we open up the discussion to the public. It's a great pleasure to introduce our first speaker, Thomas Paul Bonfilio. He is a William Judge and Gaines Professor of Comparative Literature and Linguistics at the University of Richmond. And the title of his presentation is The Invention of the Native Speaker. Thank you, Peter. And again, repeated, repeated thanks to Chantel and David for organizing this fabulous symposium. And bonjour, chéri. And also thank you as well for giving me 15 hours difference from Claire Kramsch, an act impossible to follow. And I appreciate the time. On Thursday, July 12, 1990, the Singapore newspaper The Straits Times listed the following advertisement. Established private school urgently requires native speaking expatriate English teachers for foreign students. By Saturday, July 14, the advertisement had been changed to read, established private school urgently requires native speaking Caucasian teachers for foreign students. It does not require great powers of speculation to imagine the discussions at The Straits Times on that Friday the 13th. And an auspicious day for the Anglophone applicants who didn't look like they spoke English properly. This example belies the ostensible innocence and neutrality of the Locution Native Speaker, which is used to indicate someone possessing natural authority in language. It shows that the semantic field of the term native clearly contains notions of race and ethnicity. The ethnic ownership of language is supported by the divisive image of the authority of the native speaker, an authority that is configured as an infallible birthright and innate sense of the acceptable utterance. Recent research, however, beginning with Thomas Pike Day's The Native Speaker is Dead, 1985, has illuminated the prejudicial gestures of power and hegemony in the image of the native speaker. Although scholarship has succeeded in problematizing the issue, the concept of native speaker itself has never been historicized. My work historicizes the metaphors of nativity and maternality found in the Locution's native speaker, mother tongue, long maternel, locaternative, motashpracha, lingua materna, modarspraca, and so on, and illuminates the ethnolinguistic prejudices that generate the apparently innocent kinship metaphors employed to describe the authority of the L1 speaker. The object of criticism is native speaker, the neutral term is L1, okay, because it gets rid of notions of nativity. These Locutions arose with the nation states they didn't exist before in the early modern era as gestures of ethnolinguistic nationalism. In its prejudicial form, our native language, our mother tongue, which is our birthright, is seen as endangered by the presence of an other who is perceived as a biological contaminant and thus a threat to the matrix of nation, ethnicity, and language. The genetic myths of mother tongue and native language, especially in the service of exclusionary nationalism, were not present in antiquity, those metaphors were not there. While the Romans and Greeks had clear standards of proper Roman Latin and Attic Greek, they did not articulate these standards in ethnic contexts. The Greek term for proper speech was Glossa Attike, if we see up there, Attic speech, which denoted speaking within the established tradition. Although language purism was widespread among the Greeks, there was no evidence that the performance of Glossa Attike was connected to ethnicity or nativity. The collective identity of the Greek elite tended to be articulated through culture and language rather than race. The Roman discourse of language also had little in common with the current Western notions of native speaker and mother tongue. The Roman term for proper speech was Sermo Patrios. This location is regularly mistranslated as native language, although those roots are not there. In spite of the absence of images of nativity in the original Latin, the term Sermo refers to discourse in general, and Patrios indicates speaking in the proper tradition of the forefathers. The massive digital library, Perseus, offers no examples of Sermo in combination with derivatives of Mater or Natus. It's not present in antiquity. Ancient Greece and Rome were by no means exempt from racism, but ideologies of race and ethnicity were not present in the discourse of language at that time. One can apply some of the theories of Benedict Anderson's imagined communities, could we go down a bit, yeah, to the historicization of the native speaker. The hegemony of Latin in the Roman Empire had made that language the monolithic medium of law education and culture in general. The same was true of the Latin middle ages. From the Roman Empire, Christianity inherited in Toto a massive infrastructural network and administrative monopoly that only needed rededication in religious terms. All texts of the church were produced in Latin, which was the language of instruction for all university students as well. All were second language learners, all were L2 learners, and none could claim native language property rights. Hans Korn holds that in the middle ages, people looked upon everything as not from the point of view of their nationality or race, but from the point of view of religion. Mankind was divided not into Germans and French and Slavs and Italians, but into Christians and infidels, and within Christianity, into the faithful sons of the church and heretics. The nascent of the mother tongue was to await the secular catalytic influences of the early modern period. The birth of the nation states and the need to justify writing in the national vernaculars, Italian, French, German, Spanish, et cetera, instead of in Latin. In 1304, Dante Alighieri wrote De vulgari e loquentia, in which he characterized the difference between the vernacular and Italian as such. I declare that vernacular language is that which we learn without any formal instruction by imitating our wet nurses, nutricem. There also exists another kind of language, which the Romans called Grammatica. Few, however, achieve complete fluency in it. Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular because it was the language originally used by humans and because it is natural to us while the other is, in contrast, artificial. Dante thus situates the Italian vernacular as natural and Latin as artificial. The notion of a maternal connection is implicit in the word nutrix, which in the plural also stands as a trope for the breasts. Dante muses over the origin of language and is confronted with a problem. If we learn the first language from our wet nurses, from whom did Adam learn his first language? Since he must have been a man without mother or milk, we are sine matre, we are sine latte. Here are the figures of the mother and of maternality become explicit. In the next paragraph Dante uses for the first time the phrase mother tongue, maternam locutio nem. The observations of Dante on the superiority of Italian vis-a-vis Latin are indicative of a Copernican revolution in the configuration and representation of language. The understanding of language in terms of metaphors of nativity and maternality was to become the dominant linguistic episteme thereafter. It persists to the present day. Not only in popular, but also in academic discourse. Can we drop down a bit? Man without mother, yes please, let's see if we can get this. Whoop, whoop, whoop, sorry. Can we go back up a bit? Yeah, great, right there, thank you. You can stand, stand, you don't have to. Okay, go ahead. The observations of Dante on the superior, whoop, whoop, whoop, I just said that, yes, okay. The Italian Renaissance scholar Pietro Bembo, who authored Le prose della volga lingua, said that we drink the vernacular with the milk of our wet nurses, latte dalle nutrici. The question remains, how do we explain the shift from sermo patrios to lingua materna? The sudden appearance of maternal images in the discourse of language in the late Middle Ages is not at all gratuitous or coincidental. It arose from the larger cultural religious and political milieu of the time. It is important to remember that the intellectual discourse of the European Middle Ages was largely produced and consumed by ecclesiastics. The most important figure in medieval Catholicism was clearly Jesus. Also of great importance was the figure of Mary the mother of God, who functioned as a mediatrix and to whom one directed prayers. Mary's role was to intercede in the presence of her son on behalf of the petitioner. The maternity of Mary was a pivotal image in medieval painting and sculpture. She has often represented nursing the baby Jesus, which served to sanctify the acts of lactation and nursing themselves. Interestingly, the maternal corporeality of Mary also acted in combination with that of Jesus himself as he who provided his body and blood in the right of the Eucharist. The two corporeal images functioned in symbiosis. The medieval scholar Carolyn Bynum has written extensively on the figure of Mary in the Middle Ages. Bynum observes that women's bodies in the acts of lactation and giving birth were analogous to both ordinary food and the body of Christ as it died on the cross and gave birth to salvation. She adds, through lactation, woman is the essential food provider and preparer. Bynum holds that the cult of the virgin's milk was one of the most extensive in late medieval Europe. It was so powerful that it became extended to Jesus and the church as well. This cult generated some odd permutations among which are found depictions of a lactating Jesus. And let's see how we're doing here. Good. The first image is by Curizia da Morano, and this is from the Galleria dell'Academia Venezia. We can see what has happened here. Now that was the wound in Christ's side, right? You push it up to the breast. He's dispensing communion, right? The image of the virgin in the Middle Ages was so powerful that it engendered a re-gendering of the figure of Jesus. Can I have the next image, please? I'm sorry, next picture, yes. I've never felt, I've never had this much power before. Fiat pictura poesis. The second image, which is Christus und Caritas from the Rheinisches Bildarchiv in Köln, also shows the same image where the breast is, Jesus is dispensing his sanctifying blood into a cell. Let's see the next image, please. This one is quite interesting. It's Conrad Witz, Christus und der Ungleibige Thomas, und Christus und Maria für bitten vor Gott Vater. And this is from Basel. And we can see here that what Mary is doing is she's praying for those poor little kids there. And she's displaying her breast. Jesus is pointing to his wound breast and there's the nice blonde God, the father, listening to them. And then Thomas is over on the side sticking his finger into the wounds of Christ. Next image, please. This is from the Pulpito del Duomo de Pisa by Giovanni Pisano. And it's something that's called ecclesia lactans, the lactating church. We can see that this bi-gendered figure is basically a neutrifying, if you will, the parishioners. And the next image, please. This is wonderful. This is from the Domplatz in Nürnberg. It's der Tugenprudin, the Fountain of Virtues. And there's a statue, a allegorical statue of each virtue dispensing water from the breasts. Let's have the next picture, which is a close-up. And we can see that the virtues are literally coming out of their breasts. And a wonderful picture, imagine these little kids standing there lapping up the water. We'll hold on to that. Now, when I discovered this, of course, I would engage my own cultural heritage. And the first thing I said was, Maronami, that was my reaction. I wasn't the first. I found out that Leo Spitzer, the wonderful comparator, Leo Spitzer, had said the same thing in 1948 in an article that just got lost in the absence of a sociolinguistic culture studies in 1948. It was a good 40, 50 years ahead of its time in the article Muttersprache und Mutter Erziehung. Okay, something else is going on as well. One of the most influential images in the generation of ethnolinguistic prejudice is that of the Tower of Babel, which serves as a conventional point of reference for claims of linguistic primordiality and sanctity. There are only three known representations of the Tower before the end of the 11th century, but there are 140 representations between 1550 and the early 17th century. An appearance that correlates with the anxieties of the emerging nation state. Could I have the next image, please? We have two types of images of the Tower of Babel. This is a very, not a very common one, one that goes straight up, okay? Why not? Well, number one, it's architecturally unsound because it's gonna fall over, right? But there's another reason, please advance. This is, these are much more common, okay? And this is, could I have the, yeah, can you scroll down a bit? I'm sorry, yeah, the first one, I forgot to give you the, I'll just go back. We need to go back up again. Yeah, the, this is the, the Babel Tower. That was the narrow one by the Meister der Welt in König. Not a wonderful name, wouldn't you? I'd love to be called the Meister der Welt in König. The second one is Lukas von Faischenbosch, Toren von Babel. And this is a much more common image. Now let's think about this. What you have are a whole bunch of entrances at the bottom. The polyphonic entrances that become less and less as one approaches an original language. So this is a fantasy of returning to an original language. The image of the Tower of Babel is symptomatic of the birth trauma of nation and national language. Europe is first born as a mosaic of linguistic orphanages of languages bereft of the medium that had united their speakers in a super regional whole. Umberto Eco observes, before this confusion there was no European culture and hence no Europe. What is Europe anyway? It is a continent barely distinguishable from Asia, existing before people had invented a name for it. Europe was an entity that had to wait for the fall of the Roman Empire and the birth of the, of the Romano-Germanic kingdoms before it could be born. I love that term Romano-Germanic kingdoms. Students could form a campus organization, the Romano-Germanic kingdom. How are we going to establish the date when the history of Europe begins? The dates of great political events and battles will not do. The dates of linguistic events must serve in their stead. Europe first appears as a babble of new languages. Only afterwards was it a mosaic of nations. Europe was thus born from its vulgar tongues. Vernacular language is at the heart of nation forming and thus at the heart of nationalism and the ethnic ownership of language. It was nationalist ideologies that generated the first instances of the combination of mother and language or tongue as follows. Icelandic Modormal, 1350, Swedish Modormale, 1370, English Modertumge, 1380, Low German Moda Sprach, 1424, High German Muttersprache used by who, can you guess? 1522, who used it? Minigamanist, yep. Luther, who was the first person to use it? In a document where he said that communion works better in German than in Latin. It comes, you can give communion better in German because it's closer to the Greek. And the French long maternel, 1538. The word nation in the modern sense appears at the same time. The location of language in body and kinship does not however fully account for its naturalization nor for its nationalization. Another ideology played a crucial role in the emergence of language as an implement of ethnic prejudice, the understanding of language by reference to local organic nature. This also begins in Italy in the work of the Renaissance rhetorician Sperone Sperone. And a wonderful name, sounds like ice cream, doesn't it? Who is a principal member of the Accademia degli Infiamazzi and the author in 1542 of a polemic advocating publication in the Italian vernaculars. Sperone speaks of our mother tongue, La lingua nostra materna, which is today our own and belongs to no one. It was created by our ancestors who imitated our mother nature, La madre nostra natura. Thereupon follow numerous organic metaphors. Italian is still a short little branch that has yet to fully bloom and produce the fruits that it is capable of bearing. Because Latin was dominant, Italians did not sufficiently cultivate it, but as with a wild plant, left it to age and almost die in the same desert in which it had been born without ever watering it nor pruning it, nor protecting it from the brambles that overshadowed it. So here we have the entry into the discourse of language of organic metaphors from folkloric origin. Sperone's organism of language found significant reception in the work of his French contemporary Joachim Dubellé. Dubellé was a member of La Pleiade, the literary society that sought to ameliorate the French language. Dubellé's manifesto de France, illustration de la langue Françoise, constitutes the first instance of organic metaphors in the validation of French, such as images of herbs, roots, and trees. Metaphors that he lifted, however, wholesale from Sperone. He observes that Latin bore fruit, but French has yet to flower or fructify because it was a wild plant that was not watered, pruned, or protected from brambles and thorns. The first advocates of writing in the vernacular found themselves in a kind of linguistic orphanage. Latin and Greek had uncontestable literary and philosophical traditions. The new runaway vernaculars must by definition have none. The answer to this dilemma lay in the invention of attributes that were outside of the intellectual tradition received from antiquity. And these attributes had to be local, for one had to differentiate one's own nation and national language from others, as well as from the tradition of antiquity. National language and character thus became co-determined by the invention of their origin in the mother's body and in local organic nature in our bodies and our land. This is the beginning of the biologizing of language. Very dangerous, very dangerous movement. The work of the French political theorist, Jean Baudin. Do we have him up there? Yeah, good. In his L'Asie Livre de la République views national characteristics as a product of climate and geography. Baudin divides countries into three groups. Those within 30 degrees of the equator, the burning regions. Those between 30 and 60 degrees, the intermediate peoples and temperate regions, and those above 60 degrees, the excessively cold regions. The peoples of the middle regions have the characteristics most conducive to governing. The peoples of the North are strong, but not all that bright. Those of the South are intelligent, but lack physical force. The former have produced good armies, the latter good philosophy, those of the middle regions, however, combine the best of both worlds. They excelled in government, have established the greatest empires, example Greeks and the Romans. Guess who Baudin places right in the middle? Of course, the French. And he chooses to emphasize the image of the French as natural mediators in the middle, right? Once he's in Baudin, the construction of a certain kind of nature, a psychogeography in the service of nationalist interests. Baudin's theories suppose a national character, naturalize it in local physical nature and thus render it the organic, personal property of the French people. German is the same thing. The year 1492, and this is Marie-Louise also mentioned this, witnessed the appearance of the first vernacular grammar in any language, the grammatica de la lengua castellana of Antonio de Nebria. Nebria dedicates his grammar to Queen Isabella and characterizes it as a compañero del imperio. Excuse my Italian accent in Spanish. He claims that language has always been a companion of empire as Latin was for Rome and says that empires like languages grow, flourish, bloom and wilt. Now is the time for the Spanish empire in the Castilian language and his grammar will secure imperial power for Isabella. Thus, the very first vernacular grammar configures language as organic and imperial at the same time. These ideologies subsequently spread to Northern Europe. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, vernacular speakers began to claim their vernacular is the best of all living languages, if not the perfect language. In 1569, Jan van Gogh asserted that the Dutch language in Antwerp was the only one that displayed a perfect representational relationship between words and things. According to Gorp, Antwerp had been colonized by the descendants of the sons of Jappeth, the son of Noah, who were not present at the Tower of Babel. Thus, Dutch was not confused by the dispersion of tongues. The Swedish physician and alchemist, Antares Kempe, conjectured that Swedish was the oldest language in the world. In 1638, he wrote the Sprachen des Paradises in which God speaks Swedish. Adam and Eve speak Danish, an imperfect copy, and guess what the serpent speaks? French, huh? But French are gonna seduce us, all right, just ask. In the 17th century, a good, that's fine. In the 17th century, the nationalist organizing of language generated an ideology of a primordial connection between national language and nature itself. In 1641, the German Baroque poet, Georg Philipp Haasdorfer, claimed that the German language speaks in the languages of nature, quite perceptibly expressing all its sounds. I need some water before this. This was held to translate. Okay, what does German do? It rears like the lion, loes like the oxen, snarls like the bear, bells like the stag, glitz like the sheep, grunts like the pig, barks like the dog, whenies like the horse, who can rap this? Hisses like the snake, meows like the cat, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, we get it. Nature speaks in our own German tongue. Adam would not have been able to name the birds and all the other beasts of the fields in anything but our words. Now, the major influential nutcase here is Justus Georgiotelius, okay? Discussing the Tower of Babel, he asks, what name was it then, which the scattered humans wanted to indicate the true God? It is the name from which we Germans have our name, Toit, which is thus the name of the true God himself, itself, so that German, Toitisch, more or less means godly or godlike. It is difficult to imagine an assertion more chauvinistic than the name of one's language is the original word for God. I think that about does it. Justus Georgiotelius then invokes images of a tree of language, the Sprachbaum. This is where our trees of language come from, guys, folkloric and racial origins. We gotta stop using them. Excuse me. Okay. Chartelius then evokes the image of the tree of language in a confused and quite baroque, morass of entangled analogies. Language possesses, oh, I don't, yeah, okay, it's not there, good. Okay. Language possesses word stems that like juice-rich roots hydrate the whole language tree whose sprouts and twigs abounding in branches and veins spread high and wide in the most beautiful purity, steady certainty, unimaginable variety. The artful growth of our main language is comparable to an impressive fertile tree that has extended its juice-rich roots deep far and wide into the earth. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. We get the message. One sees here the extremes to which the anxiety of vernacular authority can motivate the philology of nationalism. One, it arrives at a co-determining intertwining of the trees of nature and the trees of language. This is the birth of the arboreal models of language that we are familiar with. How does this play out subsequently? The discourse becomes more abstract but never leaves its folkloric ethnocentric origins. Chartelius was read extensively by Leibniz. This is where Leibniz got it from. Who developed the philosophy of organicism, Leibniz influenced Rousseau, and his Essay sur l'origine des langues applies Baudin's theories of climatology to language. Rousseau, of course, influenced Herda, relates language and nation to climate. In the 19th century, the philologist Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Franz Bopp developed the distinction between analytic and synthetic languages and view the synthetic ones, the European ones, as organic and superior. The other ones, the analytic ones, are static. They introduced diagrams for language, tree diagrams for language, which act to configure it genealogically. August Schleicher applied biology to the study of language and saw languages as species and dialects as races. And Schleicher, if I could have the next image, please. Schleicher was one of the first to have a treat. This starts looking like what we're familiar with, right, into European tree diagrams. The Swiss scholar Adolf Pikte from Geneva created the field of linguistic paleontology, in which he views the words of a language the way a paleontologist views fossils as incomplete records of older forms that one can use to reconstruct common ancestors. He concentrates on lexical terms in an attempt to ascertain the original natural environment of the Aryan race, our language, our soil. Can I have the next image, please? Now what Pikte does, he goes through Indo-European roots and locates the organic things that they correspond to in the Indo-European homeland, and he has lists of them, this is from the index, lists and lists. Could I have the next image, please? And we can see what he puts up there, right? Whoops, it's on the other side, excuse me. I can't read it from here, but we can see that he devotes a page to, or even more, to each little urban animal. Now what's he doing here? He is locating our Ursprache, our Adamic language, in nature and again in our bodies. Back and forth, the reader's going to read this. He or she is going to go back and forth between language, body, and organic nature. Knit one, purl two, knit one, purl two, until they become unified. The French religious historian Ernest Reynard used philology to formulate a theory of the superiority of the Aryans over Jews based on a matrix of language, ethnicity, and environment. For Renan, the ancient Jews were nonetheless rooted in a desert civilization that was not only primitive and crude, but incapable of evolution. Ernst Hecker, the famous 19th century biologist, published The History of Creation in 1868. Could I have, we need to advance now. There's more stuff from, please keep on going, because there's more stuff there from, yeah, that's what we need right there. I did it in English, because it comes across better in English. The German is die Naturliche Schüpfungsgeschichte, but I like, I'm writing the history of creation. I like the resonances better. The work begins with single-celled organisms, proceeds to the vegetable and animal kingdoms, then to mammals, finally culminating with the study of humans. One chapter is entitled Migration and Distribution of Mankind, Human Species and Human Races, and contains only one large diagram. It is entailed pedigree of the Indo-Garmani and is situated on two opposing pages. The left side depicts the Semites, in the same way that the language tree diagrams are depicted. The right side is, could I have the next image, please. The Indo-Garmani. The organization of this diagram is quite revealing. The opposing pages visually separate the two human families and affect an othering of the Semitic race. This is an example of language as race and racism. Okay, to conclude, in the early modern period, the notion of language as a botanical entity entered into the cultural habitus. The habitual understanding of language as such aided in its enracination and configuration within the matrix of race and ethnicity. The nursery that gave rise to the arboretum of language progressively generated intellectual sublimations of the arboreal model into organist theories of language that intermingled with the images of matronality and lactation. The botanical configuration of language became more and more abstract, but the generalizing gestures always recovered and reinforced language-specific ethnic ideologies. We Aryans have a natural, primeval, organic language. They have something else. The genealogical model of language families was used to sketch broad, ecolinguistic distinctions between Semitic and Aryan, and to separate Christians from Jews. This generated Ernest Lennon's curious statement that organic languages cannot grow in the desert. Can I have the next image, please? Has this ended? Near 2000, we have the Italian biologist, the famous Italian biologist whose name escapes me. I'm having a mental block here. Cavalli Sforza, whom I had to communicate with to get this model. And what's he doing here? Oh, sure, we can't make genetic arguments for language, but let's try anyway. Meanwhile, we can't, but let's try anyway, and we can see what he's doing here. He's trying to coordinate genetic distributions of populations with linguistic families and even gets into this odd, nystratic thing. I don't wanna offend anybody into nystratics. I tell my students, I think these guys did too much weed in college, is what I tell them. Okay, nationalism itself was born in the early modern period of and in language and articulated in the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of maternality and nativity, as well as in the ideology of a natural connection between national character and national geography. Organic metaphors were thus taken from body and nature to construct the myths of imagined congenital communities that still persist today. The nationalist adhesives that fuse self and nation are fabricated from myriad ideologies of ownership and exclusive possession. The notion of the linguistic birthright of the native speaker, communicated in material and maternal and organic metaphors of nativity is but one of the contributory ideologies. It is, however, in its prejudicial aspects among the least perceptible and most embedded forms of nationalism. It is dissolved into the discourse of quotidian life and letters to the point where it is taken for granted as self-evident and neutrally descriptive. Invoked reflexively, its performance remains transparent. Thank you very much.