Minority groups repurpose writing systems as boundary markers when threatened

Evidence

Because Western Europe has, by and large, had a history in which one religion (Christianity) and one set of high cultural references (Classical antiquity) expressed itself through one alphabet, the Latin alphabet, we have seen little of what I may term “planned divergence.” On the eastern fringes of Western Christendom we have had, in recent years, bloody fighting over the alphabet to be used to write what is basically the same South Slav language. In the former Yugoslavia cultural loyalties, not linguistic difference, determine the script to be used. A slightly different example of divergence was furnished by German. It long clung to distinctive letterforms (black-letter Gothic) that were already archaic in the sixteenth century when they came to be used by printers. In the twentieth century, Gothic script was, for a time, associated with the more extreme manifestations of German nationalism. It was a way of asserting identity. In the other direction, on Europe’s furthest western fringe, efforts have been made, mainly in the twentieth century, to use a distinctive alphabet as a marker of Irish identity—although the archaizing script in question, being yet another Latin one, has to work very hard in order to manage to stay impenetrable to the outsider. In Europe in general, and with these few exceptions, the written manifestations of our high cultures tend to bring us together. There are many more tokens in common between written English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, among others, than there are between our spoken languages. But with minority languages the opposite may be the case: aljam´ıa and Ladino (and Irish) show how in some circumstances the written manifestations of cultures can have the intention of marking boundaries, of creating a space within which the members of the minority can feel less threatened. A minority that experiences a threat to its continued existence tends to use whatever means it has available to defend itself. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 659

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the chapter and book’s core theme but also connects to sociolinguistic work on script as identity (e.g., script choice/script wars in Soviet Turkic republics, Hebrew alphabet revival). — connects to: Children’s mission columns encoded different kinship frames for white and black authors — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 555
• QUESTION: The claim that written languages converge more than spoken ones (‘many more tokens in common’) deserves checking against actual comparative lexicostatistics across Romance/Germanic scripts.
• ADDENDUM: Could feed the ‘Grafting & Growth’ infrastructure theme only loosely, but more directly suits a future piece on writing systems as political infrastructure.