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In:The Loss of Primordial Language and the Future of National Languages
Edited by Irene Capdevila and Francesc Feliu
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 47] 2026
► pp. 25–43

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What (and how) is an authentic language?

 | University of California, San DiegoSan Diego
Published online: 23 March 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.47.03woo
Abstract
The invocation and defense of primordial language raises several directions for inquiry beyond the temporal. Some concern the history and prediction of language change, and they are open to relatively objective empirical evaluation. Others lie in the realm of linguistic ideologies and values, and they necessitate a different analytic frame. This article considers the complex of valued traits, particularly authenticity, often associated with primordiality in folk and professional ideologies and set against modernity, anonymity, and cosmopolitanism. It brings empirical evidence as well as theoretical perspectives from linguistic anthropology to bear on questions of linguistic authenticity and of change, loss, and maintenance. A processual view of language is taken, seeing it less as a heritage of words than as goal-directed social and communicative action in a community of practice. Examples from the global anthropological literature allow consideration of the possibilities and limits of alternative bases of authenticity, the continuing centrifugal as well as centripetal forces at work in contemporary languages, and the enduring social relevance of linguistic differentiation and variation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What is the primordial?
  • 3.Words as key elements of language
  • 4.Is the rural the reservoir of authenticity?
  • 5.Is linguistic homogeneity inevitable?
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (37)
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