How hard-right populists use language as a political tool to target immigrants
The language has become as symbolic as flying the flag among the newly rising far right.
When the likes of Pauline Hanson and her soul sisters gather for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC Britain) next week’s big prankfest in London, there will certainly be plenty of disapproval of non-English speakers in Australia and the UK.
You can imagine the particularly pursed lip display of those who speak different languages at home.
In fact, we all seem to speak different languages these days.
Academically educated people communicate at such a high level and complexity that it is as if their speech is designed to confuse the rest of us.
Bureaucrats and technocrats exclude outsiders by scattering abbreviations and incomprehensible jargon into almost every sentence.
Everywhere, for example, those who accept the science of climate change cannot begin to understand those who condemn it as a hoax, and vice versa. The former may speak Norwegian, the latter Swahili.
Yet the Pauline Hansons and Nigel Farages oversimplify the issue by exaggerating the impact and number of immigrants they condemn for failing to grasp the English language.
They might be well advised to avoid discussing the events immediately after 1066, when the language we know as English was transformed into what we know today by a French-speaking ruler and his nobles.
My family (vegetarians should look away) had roast pork for dinner the other night. Turning the mind to 1066 while suppressing the crunch was strangely distracting.
This was the year that William the Conqueror and Norman troops from northern France defeated and killed the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings.
William was crowned king at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day that year.
The Normans, descendants of the Vikings, ruled for the next 90 years, but the English language and culture were permanently changed.
This brings us to the pork issue.
William’s Norman nobles continued to speak French in England, and although William became King of England, he never learned to speak English.
Anglo-Saxon peasants found themselves raising animals that were cooked for the tables of Norman nobles. Peasants continued to use old Germanic Anglo-Saxon terms for the animals they raised but were too poor to eat.
The words they used for pig were picq, cow was cu, sheep was sceap, and calf was cealf. They were not allowed to eat, let alone hunt, deer (deor) in the forest.
The neo-Norman elite disdained Anglo-Saxon terms introduced by Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) who migrated to Britain from mainland Europe following the collapse of Roman rule in the fifth century.
The Normans feasted luxuriously on pork, but they called it pork (from Old French porc). The cow on the plate became beef (boeuf), the sheep became mutton (moton), the veal became veal (veal in Old French), and the deer became venison (venesoun).
And so a permanent class distinction emerged from language; this was formalized by the separation of the Anglo-Saxons, who worked in the mud of animal pens, and the Normans across the Channel, who enjoyed wealth, social status and good food, and used a language derived from Old French.
Over time, many words from the language of the nobility came to be adopted by those seeking upward social mobility, that is, by almost everyone down to our English speakers today.
Winston Churchill set a brave example for the old British when he gave his famous “we will fight on the beaches” rally speech during World War II.
He was determined to mobilize his people with evocative, vernacular language. Almost every word in the speech’s famous conclusion bears a plain Anglo-Saxon influence.
The last word, “surrender”, comes, perhaps mischievously, from the French root (“We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the landing grounds, we will fight in the fields and streets, we will fight in the hills; we will never surrender.”)
Nine hundred and sixty years after William the Conqueror invaded England and brought its language with him, far-right populists in Britain and around the world are gaining political capital by belittling those from across the sea, bringing their language with them.
Hanson made this the centerpiece of his speech to the National Press Club a few weeks ago.
“The 2021 census showed that one in four people, 23 per cent, speak a language other than English at home, with Mandarin and Arabic the most common,” he said, as if speaking another language at home in Australia was a crime. not a good thing.
He neglected to mention that the vast majority of these people spoke English when they were not at home.
“How can you create social harmony if people can’t speak the language?” he asked.
“In the same census, 872,000 people reported speaking English as ‘not good’ or ‘not at all’.”
It sounds contradictory, until a quick calculation reveals that it’s only 3.3 percent of the 26 million population in 2021; this rate has not changed much since the postwar immigration influx of non-English speakers in the 1950s and 1960s.
Hanson’s determination to demonize people who dare to speak their native language resonates with Britain’s rising anti-immigration populist, Nigel Farage, who is all too committed to portraying multilingualism as a threat to British culture.
He used the claim that too many people living in the UK do not speak “sufficient” English as an argument for stricter language requirements for immigrants.
Late last year Farage took his anger to Scotland, saying one in three pupils in Glasgow schools spoke English as a second language. He said it was the “cultural disintegration of Glasgow”.
Hanson and Farage were due to meet when Hanson flew to London this week.
Given that Farage this week quit his seat in the British parliament in anger over scrutiny of billionaires’ donations, he would have plenty of notes to compare.
In Anglo-Saxon you would assume it is.
Tony Wright is associate editor and feature writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
