No mother tongue

Romanes eunt domus?!

Ivan Illich grew up in a polyglot family and community. By his own account, he had no mother tongue. He was born in Vienna in 1926, to a father from the Dalmatian coast and a mother from a German-speaking family. Italian, French, and German were the languages of his childhood, and he learned his grandfather’s Serbo-Croatian later, followed by many more. That history is behind one of his least-read arguments, about the difference between a language people pick up and a language they are given.

Vernacular

The argument is in “Vernacular Values,” an essay of 1980 that became part of Shadow Work. Illich took the word vernacular from ancient Rome, where, he wrote, it named anything “homebred, homemade, derived from the commons,” as opposed to what was bought and sold. A vernacular tongue is one a person absorbs from the people around them, the way they learn to walk. Through most of history, Illich argued, that was how nearly everyone learned to speak, and many people learned several tongues this way: one for the household, one for the market, one for prayer.

The taught mother tongue

Against this he set the taught mother tongue. His marker for its arrival is 1492, when Antonio de Nebrija offered Queen Isabella a grammar of Castilian and argued that the Crown should fix the people’s speech by rule and teach it to them. Illich read the proposal as a new kind of dependence. Speech, which had cost nothing, became something professionals supply. The same year, Nebrija noted, was a year of conquest, and a standard language would be needed for ruling the conquered. The record for Literacy follows that thread.

Illich did not think the taught language was simply worse. He thought it was a different thing, sold under the same name. A person who speaks three tongues badly, for three uses of their own, has something that a person schooled in one correct language does not.

The island

He had seen the change in one place. His father’s family came from the island of Brač, off Split. When Illich was taken there as a baby in 1926, the island was part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which had been Austrian until 1918 and was renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. It is in Croatia today. In a 1982 talk, “Silence is a Commons,” he said that the boat that brought him also brought the island’s first loudspeaker.

“Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified.”

Ivan Illich, “Silence is a Commons” (1982)

Two Latin lessons

Some of my favourite YouTube videos make my points faster in a funnier way. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), Brian is a comic Jewish contemporary of Jesus. He paints a slogan against Jerusalem’s Roman occupiers on a wall, in bad Latin. A centurion, played by John Cleese, catches him by the ear. He does not arrest him — instead he corrects Brian’s grammar and makes him write the line out a hundred times. That is taught standard literacy as a tool of domination in one scene: the empire’s language, drilled into a subject by the empire’s officer, at sword point — and also a comic nod to the way English schooling replicated the Roman imperial model in the form of pedagogical child abuse.

In another video, Luke Ranieri of the channel polýMATHY breaks down Cleese’s Latin lesson. Ranieri is best known for his own original videos where he speaks with modern Athensians in classical and koiné Greek, or tries to talk to modern Romans in classical Latin. In one video he walks around the Vatican looking for people to speak medieval church Latin with. He finds three priests, from Nigeria, Hungary, and Mexico, who are glad to oblige him. In all of Ranieri’s videos, nobody is interrogated or treated as inferior or subordinate. They work together to communicate in a convivial spirit, which probably says more about the importance of intention and attention than any mutual intelligibility between living and dead languages. A “dead” language learned from books is being used the vernacular way: out loud, between people who have no other tongue in common, for a purpose of their own, without official policing. (This is how the Romance languages came to be.)

The Latin language appears in both videos. What differs is who can use it, how they use it, and whether speech serves the text or the text serves speech. That is also the line Walter Ong drew between orality and literacy, which we take up in our recorded evaluation of Literacy as a tool.

What it suggests

Illich’s later work with Barry Sanders, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), extends the point from speech to writing. Literacy, too, comes in a vernacular form and a taught form. Our catalogue’s score for literacy, and for the schooling that certifies it, describes the taught kind: one standard, certified by school, and long used to govern.

That leaves a question we cannot yet answer. A society of many overlapping tongues and literacies, each tied to a place and a use, may carry its strains and stressors differently from a state administered in one standard language. The costs may be spread more thinly and be harder to turn into a tool for domination. Or it may only be harder to see. The scale our catalogue uses records how far a tool has gone past its limits. It does not record where the harm falls. We have listed that among the open questions in the catalogue schema.