“Your language sounds wrong”: the nationalist stupidity that many people have assumed

There are many people who do not consider themselves nationalists but who have unconsciously adopted nationalist dogmas.

Place names in Spanish in Galicia, Hispanophobia, and trash journalism
The racist and hispanophobic phrases of Sabino Arana, founder of the Basque Nationalist Party

This is frequently observed in linguistic debates, and specifically in debates about place names on social media. Many people disparage Spanish place names, claiming they sound bad or ridiculing them for their sounds. Generally, these ridicules focus (though not exclusively) on the aspirated sound of the letters G and J in Spanish, as if that sound were something ugly or required effort by the speaker.

The paradox is that many of those who criticize the aspirated sound of the letters G and J in place names also normally use words with those sounds, since they speak Spanish without any problems, and this language is riddled with words with aspirated sounds. In other words, these people are actually ridiculing their own language, since many of them have Spanish as their mother tongue.

What could possibly lead a person to do something like this? The answer is simple: nationalism. Ridiculing the sounds of a language to justify eliminating place names in that language is a very common nationalist argument, and a pretty stupid one at that, but one that some people have ended up repeating without question after having read or heard it many times. This is, without a doubt, an example of the extent to which some people allow themselves to be brainwashed by the most ridiculous arguments of nationalism by mere repetition, for fear of contradicting a dominant discourse or simply to avoid being mocked by nationalists.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened. In Ireland, the English invaders ridiculed the Gaelic language in a similar way, disparaging its pronunciation and mocking its speakers. This ridicule was a way of justifying the banning of a language. Recall that the English Parliament outlawed Irish in the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366, claiming that "many English of the said land, forsaking the English language, manners, mode of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners, fashion, and language of the Irish enemies."

Likewise, something similar happened with Polish in the Kingdom of Prussia after the third and final partition of Poland (1795), which left part of that country in Prussian hands. Once again, ridiculing a language was a way of justifying its prohibition and the process of forced Germanization to which several generations of Poles were subjected until 1918, when Poland regained its independence. Echoes of Prussian contempt for the Polish language reached Nazism, leading to the prohibition of teaching in that language during the German occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945.

Sometimes, the ridicule of a language is related to a situation of diglossia, which is a form of bilingualism in which one of the two languages enjoys social prestige and the other is discredited. This happened for a long time with Galician, which was unfairly seen by many as a language of peasants and uneducated people, and it also happens today with Spanish in Catalonia, where nationalism has adopted the worst contempt for the language of Cervantes, including racist statements against its speakers.

These claims are not new. Let us remember the Basque nationalist Sabino Arana's arguments against the Spanish, whom he despised with a mixture of racism and class elitism, or the racist rants of the Galician nationalist Castelao, who called Andalusians a "nomadic race that is not well-suited to work" and He called Castilians and Extremadurans "a mixed race of Galicians and Moors." Ultimately, exclusionary nationalism is a detestable ideology that is incapable of claiming what is its own without scorning what is foreign. The separatist nationalisms in Spain are a clear example of this.

Of course, believing a language sounds bad is a purely subjective matter. Having the habit of speaking a language on a daily basis, or simply hearing it frequently, contributes to making its sound familiar. I have a large collection of music in many languages, even in some with pronunciations that are certainly strange to any Spanish speaker who doesn't know those languages, such as Finnish, Polish, Ukrainian, Hebrew, or Yiddish. Of course, I speak Spanish and Galician, and a large part of my collection is precisely traditional Galician music.

Listening to music in other languages (I admit that one of my favorites is Italian) helps you detoxify from nationalist nonsense and makes you realize that you can say beautiful words with very varied pronunciations, in the same way that some people can say the biggest nonsense believing that the language they speak in is better than the others, simply because it is their own.

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Photo: Mark Rasmuson.