LANGUAGE OF TOTALITARIANISM: NATIONAL LINGUISTIC POLICY IN FASCIST ITALY AND MILITARIST JAPAN

Abstract

When it comes to creating a notorious ideology, in the hands of those in power, language becomes a tool for consolidating a nation. Fascist Italy and militarist Japan are prime examples of the use of language as a means of uniting people in the name of proclaimed “new” values and ideals. In the present article the authors provide a detailed analysis of language policy in both countries: from the initial desire to unite the inhabitants of the country with the proclaimed order under the aegis of a single nation by means of language, to open hostility to any manifestations of heterogeneity, in particular to regional dialects or dialectal variants of the literary national language, to an open struggle against loan words, even those that had already been firmly established or consolidated in the domestic language. The study attempts to trace what changes happened to Italian and Japanese languages when intransigent parties had come to power with their ideologies; to analyze to what extent the language policies of Italy and Japan in the 1st half of the 20th century are similar and to what extent they differ; and we also summarise the results of such restrictive language policies after the World War II resulted in the said politicians’ defeat.