The idea of linguistic purism, or of resisting the excessive encroachment of foreign words in local languages, is often immediately disparaged as ignorant nationalism and stultifying to change. Yet in this piece, Welsh Philosopher and Lecturer Rhianwen Daniel defends the concept as being intrinsically misunderstood. Linguistic purism actually helps cultures preserve themselves against colonialism and speakers feel more at home in their language, among other benefits described here.

In the mid-19^th century, the Grimm Brothers began assembling the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary of the German language, eventually spanning 32 volumes. So forensic was the brothers’ tracing of word etymology, history, and usage, that they died before its completion.

Even more painstaking, however, was their austere purging of French loan words, which they believed to be tainting the purity of the German language. This process of elimination may in fact have taken more time and effort than compiling the lexicon itself. Together with their Household Tales, whose folktales also underwent extensive puristic rearrangement, the Wörterbuch helped fashion a more unified German cultural-linguistic identity, thereby paving the way for the dissemination of the Volksgeist (or national spirit) in the subsequent political manifestations of nationalism.

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This tendency to resist excessive translingual borrowing, particularly loan words and loan translations, is known in contemporary linguistics as “linguistic purism”. In practical terms, purism involves grassroots campaigns to remove foreign loanwords from everyday speech, or centralized direction from lexicographers and language academies such as L’Académie Française, where new and emerging concepts are coined, monitored, and regulated according to established linguistic standards. Nonetheless, purism continues to be caricatured and dismissed by a majority of sociolinguists as irrational and reactionary. This brief piece, in contrast, will defend a purist approach to language against several objections.

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Purism concerns the optimal rate of change, rather than resisting it altogether and thereby stultifying language's growth

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The objections

While parts of the Grimm brothers’ legacy may all too easily be associated in hindsight with the atrocities of the Third Reich, it would be a mistake to conclude that there is any inevitable connection between linguistic purism and national chauvinism. To the contrary: purism is most commonly found among cultural-linguistic populations facing endangerment or imperial threat, where national chauvinism is actually being resisted rather than perpetuated. This protective function is particularly urgent today, as more languages than ever face extinction.

So why, given its anticolonial functions, has linguistic purism acquired such an unfavorable reputation? One commonly-cited objection is that linguistic purism is stultifying to language's growth, preventing it from moving with the times and meeting present needs. To this end, even L’Académie Française is viewed by many as “trying officiously and pointlessly to hold back the inescapable evolution of the French language.”

But this objection fails to distinguish between necessary neologisms and lexical borrowings, and the indiscriminate adoption of endless loan transfers, regardless of whether they serve any additional use or enhance value. It is only the latter approach to translingual borrowing that is opposed by purists; as such, it does not follow that their desired effect on language is stultifying.

The objection that purism stultifies language’s growth also implies that purism demands a near-literal freezing of language, preventing any loan transfers from entering an otherwise pure vernacular. But such absolute purity has never been postulated, since it is common knowledge that every known language has undergone significant historical change via contact with other languages.

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