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linguistic purism
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opposition to foreign influence on a language
Linguistic purism is the belief that a language should be protected from foreign words and influences, with purists preferring to use only native or traditional forms. It matters because debates over linguistic purism reflect broader concerns about cultural identity and the way languages naturally change over time.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
In the Vinony graph
Within Vinony's link graph, linguistic purism is referenced by 141 other articles, and connects out to Arabic, Urdu and Yiddish.
It is catalogued under topics including Concepts in language policy and Linguistic purism.
Its subject is documented across 56 Wikipedia language editions.
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- language ideology
- Subclass of
- linguistic prescription
- Image
- DictionaryFrenchAcademy1835.jpg
Show 5 more facts
- topic's main category
- Category:Linguistic purism
- Commons category
- Linguistic purism
- facet of
- sociolinguistics
- studied by
- sociolinguistics
- different from
- purism
Sources (2)
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Encyclopedic overview
The Académie Française in France is charged with maintaining the linguistic purism of the French language. This is the first page of the 6th edition of their dictionary (1835).
Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is a concept with two common meanings: one with respect to foreign languages and the other with respect to the internal variants of a language (dialects). The first meaning is the historical trend of the users of a language desiring to conserve intact the language's lexical structure of word families, in opposition to foreign influence which are considered 'impure'. The second meaning is the prescriptive practice of determining and recognizing one linguistic variety (dialect) as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other related varieties.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “linguistic purism” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.