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Tastes of Talk: Qualia and the moral flavor of signs

Susan Gal
Anthropological Theory 2013 13: 31
DOI: 10.1177/1463499613483396
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Article

Tastes of Talk: Qualia and

the moral flavor of signs

Anthropological Theory
13(1/2) 3148
! The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1463499613483396
ant.sagepub.com

Susan Gal
University of Chicago, USA

Abstract
This essay explores the semiotic processes by which speakers attribute sensuous qualities e.g. lightness, dryness, straightness and others to speech registers. Language
ideologies create indexical relations linking linguistic forms to typical personae, activities
and values in social life; they also construct other semiotic relations that enable speakers to attribute taste, texture, smell, sound, or shape to speech. Such extended,
cross-modal, sensuous metaphors are taken up as lived experience, as part of larger
frameworks of cultural value. By extending several Peircean concepts, the essay shows
how speakers become persuaded that such sensuous properties of speech are existentially real. Two pedagogical genres from 19th and 20th century Hungary illustrate how
properties of speech are reproduced, either via explicit instruction or as displayed in
the parallelism of narrative. Both genres construct speech qualia as constitutive moves
in moral and political projects that become more persuasive through the display of
valued qualia.
Keywords
Linguistic register, sensuous qualities, sites of ideology, politics of narration, Germans,
Hungarians, European bilingualism

Introduction1
Sensuous qualities are often attributed to linguistic varieties by those who use
them. Indeed, linguistic forms are frequently identied and objectied that is,
construed as separable units on the basis of qualitative contrasts that they conventionally display for some group of people. This is clearest when metapragmatic
labels for speech forms are drawn from a lexicon of qualities: Hard words among
Corresponding author:
Susan Gal, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago,
IL 60637, USA.
Email: s-gal@uchicago.edu

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Anthropological Theory 13(1/2)

the Kaluli, plain speaking in American politics, talking straight among Jewish
Israelis. Such terms always occur in contrast sets: Kaluli contrast hard with
unhard; American plain speaking excludes what is deemed orid. Contrastive lexicons of quality may distinguish dierent versions of entire languages: Catalan
light and Catalan heavy in Barcelona, narrow vs. embroidered Bergamasco in
northern Italy, sweet Hindi in a Fijian Indian community, upside-down Walbiri
or Tamil that is Jasmine-scented. These are characterizations from the perspective
of those who use the speech forms. Qualities may also be projected onto speech by
outsider perspectives: English speakers say they hear Italian as soft, German as
harsh. For intellectual men in 19th-century Japan, schoolgirls speech was sugary,
shallow and bouncing; Beijingers identify some of their own Mandarin as oily in
contrast to southern speech, while the speech of trendy young people in Dublin
sounds at to other Dubliners.2
In these and many similar examples, linguistic forms seem to partake of abstract
qualities associated with sense modalities including sound, texture, taste, smell,
shape and spatial orientation. These are imputed to quite various aspects of difference in speech and practice: sounds, discourse markers, rhetorical form, grammar, lexicon, and others. Conversely, abstract properties that are said to
characterize forms of speech are seen as typical attributes of objects and experiences in other media, ones that are recognized to have dierent physical properties
than speech. Kaluli admire adult speech as hard. Mature teeth and bones are also
valued for their hardness. Unhardness is devalued; it is characteristic of things that
are immature or overly mature and decaying (Feld and Schieelin 1982). As Nancy
Munn (1986) has argued, contrasts in qualities of sense experience, enacted across
many modalities and in diverse media, are key to wide-ranging systems of cultural
value. Clearly, linguistic forms are often swept up in such systems. It is less obvious
how contrasts in taste, smell, texture or shape are made palpable and persuasive to
speakers as qualities of speech, or how speech comes to be experienced as similar
to, say, food, cloth, and other objects or built forms.
My goal in this essay is to explore some of the semiotic processes by which such
sensuous metaphors qualitative similarities across modalities and media that are
derived from or extended to linguistic practices are created and made existentially
real to speakers. I draw on three of Peirces (1940) intersecting semiotic trichotomies to analyze the cultural construction of such similarities: First, his distinctions among icon, index, and symbol dierentiate the way signs are related to the
objects they represent, always within some uptake or ideological framework. As a
second distinction, Peirce proposed that a sign relation may be represented as
iconic rather than indexical (or both), depending on presuppositions in the discursive framework (interpretant) through which it is interpreted. Finally, in a third
trichotomy, he considered signs to dier in their degree of reality. In Peirces
usage, qualities (Firsts) are abstract potentialities that can be experienced only
when embodied in material occurrences and objects (Seconds). Real-time instantiations of abstract qualities are necessarily shaped by conventions (Thirds), that is,
by cultural categories. The embodied, conventional and hence experience-able

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33

forms of abstract qualities he termed qualia (Peirce 1998 [1903]). These can
become signs. These are what I called attributed qualities in the earlier examples.
This last set of distinctions provides clues to how qualities are experienced, but has
not been much explored in studies of linguistic variation.
In the next section, I discuss ways that the three sets of distinctions do dierent
yet intersecting analytical work. Then I turn to two brief examples of this intersection that suggest how perceived sensuous qualities of linguistic forms are identied and put to social uses. Qualities of speech, projected onto social categories,
emerge from and are harnessed to political projects. The justication or explanation for those projects their ability to motivate action hinges in part on the
taken-for-granted, self-evident experience of contrasting qualities and the values
that such qualities signify.
The rst example takes up the writings of a late 19th-century Hungarian publicist who gave his readers precise instructions on how to experience the Magyar
language as dierent in qualities from other European languages. He pointed to
specic aspects of linguistic form that he claimed were also palpable in other areas
of life. The second example is the analysis of a brief conversation I recorded in the
1990s in a German-Magyar bilingual town of southern Hungary. In retrospect, this
too was a genre of instruction. An elderly woman showed me how to hear a
qualitative dierence between two registers of German. Signicantly, language
was not the topic of our talk; the interaction was part of her moral project, explaining villagers actions during the Second World War. Yet, the textual parallelisms
evident in her narrative revealed, through contrast, the conventional qualia of food
which were also considered characteristic of the two linguistic varieties. Hence my
title: tastes of talk. The juxtaposition of these two cases highlights dierent sites at
which ideological frameworks are evident: Qualia may be named in metapragmatic
discourse. In addition, conventionalized qualities (qualia) can be displayed and
made palpable in the poetics of interaction even if they are not labeled nor
widely discussed.

Icons, rhemes, qualia

That linguistic forms are endowed by speakers with sensuous qualities typical of
other media than speech is, of course, not news. Yet, the ubiquity and frequency
of this phenomenon would not have been so obvious in the past, when my list of
examples would have been divided into separate categories of variation such as
standard languages, geographical and social dialects, ritual and political registers,
accents and styles. The phenomenon becomes striking when, for purposes of analysis, all these t within the broad concept of register (Irvine 1990). Recent work on
enregisterment has focused on indexical aspects of the process. Combinations of
signs, linguistic and otherwise, are unied by a metasign (e.g. a metapragmatic
label) and function as a register when their distinction from other such combinations is typied and recognized by a population of language users as indexical of
particular categories of space, time, and personae, along with their imputed

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characterological attributes (Agha 2007). Registers are reexive models that are
invoked in interaction, so that social types are not only performed but also troped
upon, via creative indexes, in real-time speech activity (Silverstein 2003).
In addition to this key focus on indexicality, the sign relation of iconicity has
also been important in conceptualizing registers. Icons are signs that represent by
being taken as in some way similar to their objects. So the question is: How are
registers similar to the speakers they index and hence represent? Like indexes, icons
too must be picked out, formulated and conventionalized within metapragmatic,
language ideological, frameworks. As philosophers have long argued, similarity
(iconicity) never simply inheres in objects, whether the objects are linguistic, cultural or more broadly material (Goodman 1971). Phenomena are similar to each
other within or by virtue of some frame of relevance. Speech and speech forms, like
other materialities, have innumerable potentially noticeable properties. In any
actual, sociohistorical case, some potential material qualities are ignored or
denied while others become the focus of individual, circumstantial or cultural
attention. Some properties come to be recognized, elaborated, and sometimes conventionalized within a particular framework or perspective.3
Put another way: It takes an active ideological, hence semiotic, process to create
a similarity, and the necessary concomitant of similarity: dierentiation. Judith T.
Irvine and I have emphasized that similarities (iconic relations) are construed in the
context of dierentiations. Registers are the products of contrast, of dierentiation.
Two (or more) sets of personae (and times, places, events), each indexed by a
linguistic form, are perceived as parallel indexicalities. Two or more such indexicalities are similar in that they have the same relations among their parts. They
constitute a diagrammatic icon. As Irvine and I have argued, in construing diagrammatic icons, a semiotic process characteristic of language ideologies makes
linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them. . . picking out qualities supposedly shared by the social image
and the linguistic image (Irvine and Gal 2000: 37). We have dubbed this process
rhematization (Gal 2005), drawing on the second set of Peircean distinctions mentioned earlier, in which a rheme is a Sign which, for its interpretant, is a Sign of
qualitative possibility, that is, is understood as representing such and such a kind of
possible Object (Peirce 1940: 103). Parmentier claries: rhemes are signs whose
interpretants represent them as being icons (1994: 17). In short, the relation of sign
and object is taken to be not (only) indexical but (also) a similarity. The concept of
rhematization captures the way registers that are taken up as indexes of social
personae from one ideological perspective can also be construed as icons, or can
be construed as icons in another ideological frame.
For example, Western Europeans considered a variety of linguistic practices in
the early 20th century to be indexical of (pointing to) Macedonians, in contrast to
their own conventional image of themselves as (ideally) monolingual. Western
observers also took a further step: Presuming their own forms of monolingualism
to be the natural practice, Westerners perceived Macedonian linguistic practices as
chaotically heterogeneous and assumed this reected a similar disorderliness in

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35

Macedonian society and psyches, again in contrast to their own (Irvine and Gal
2000: 645). In other words: starting with a set of established indexicalities,
Western observers picked out a perceived contrast in the qualia of the signs
(here: chaos/heterogeneity in Macedonian linguistic practice vs. orderliness in
Western practice) and looked for qualitatively similar objects for each such sign
(here: discovering that object as a supposed chaos in Macedonian society and
psyche, in contrast to Western orderliness). Peirces emphasis on possibility highlights the speculative aspect of this process: From the Macedonian perspective, the
iconic signs object attributed to them chaos in mind or society was not a
property of Macedonians at all but an ideological projection by others. Yet it was
experienced by Westerners as a reality and shaped Western policy in the Balkans.
In the creation of such sign-object similarities, a further semiotic step deserves
more attention: What exactly counted as chaos in speech and psyche? How do
some features of linguistic and social phenomena come to count as exemplars of
some abstract quality, for some speakers?4 Actually existing events or objects are
identied as instantiations of the shared abstract quality, and thus are taken as
iconic signs of each other. The third Peircean distinction conceptualizes how
abstract qualities are linked to experience-able, conventionalized qualia. Cultural
stories about resemblances are important, but not enough. Systematic and institutionalized forms of instruction also provide guidance that allows social actors to
pick out and perceive some acts or practices as real-time instances of a quality, and
thus to be able to enact and possibly contest and transform them. Observers can
document how participants learn what aspect of practices instantiate or embody
the same quality in diverse media. Several forms of such instruction, which demonstrate how abstract categories can be recognized in multi-media experiences, are
illustrated in my two examples. In each case a further question is raised, to which I
shall return: why do these speakers care at all about the qualia of speech?

Qualia of Magyar in Europe

Perhaps the most popular journalist of Hungary at the end of the 19th century was
Rakosi Jeno00 (18481929), also poet, editor, and playwright. It was during his lifetime that those who struggled to make multilingualism the norm in multi-ethnic,
multilingual Hungary were denitively defeated and the hegemony of Magyar was
assured. Budapest became largely Magyar-speaking for the rst time, and Rakosi
was part of this process. He was born into a German-speaking family and educated
in German until he encountered Magyar linguistic nationalism as an adolescent in
the 1860s (Sajo 1930). During that decade, after the failed revolution of 1848
against Austria, the Hungarian political class and their erstwhile enemies in
Vienna reached a power-sharing agreement known as the Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy. As a result, Viennese suppression of cultural production in Hungary
ceased and intellectual life in Hungary opened up again for those who embraced a
Magyar-centered yet moderate nationalist line, perhaps especially if they hailed
from non-Magyar-speaking families. In journalism, Rakosi took up many topics,

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but arguably his favorite was the Magyar language, for which he advocated
tirelessly.
Writing in Magyar, as an amateur linguist, he addressed educated readers,
elaborating and popularizing widespread views. In an 1882 magazine piece,
A nyelv kultusza [The worship/cult of the language], Rakosi claimed Magyar to
be superior to two highly prestigious languages of Europe: German and Italian. He
judged Magyar to be more nyugodt [calm], logikus [logical], and egyszeru00 [simple].
To do this, he reminded his readers that German and Italian have stress patterns
jumping every which way, with swallowed and bitten o syllables. Magyar, he
wrote, is not fancy [cifra] with diverse stress patterns, but rather hits the rst word
hard and lines up the rest in a dignied tempo [meltosagos tempoban]. Unlike the
despair-inducing variations in German and Italian vowels and their unbelievably
ground down consonants, Magyar vowels are clear, matched within words, high
with high, low with low. The consonants, when they occur together, are also
matched to each other, lined up in order, according to place of articulation.
Inectional patterns also show Magyars calmness and logic. While the verbs of
German and Italian are twisty and turny [csavarodott], and the root word is
broken into [tori at] and bent [hajlitjak they bend it, inect it], Magyar retains
the wholeness of words, attaching one sux after the other to the main verb.
These dierences but without the qualitative valuations were noted by language experts at the time and continue to be recognized by linguists as features of
Magyar. The organization of suxes described by Rakosi makes Magyar an agglutinative language, the phonological ordering he alludes to is usually called vowel
harmony, the prosody relies on a regular, initial-syllable stress pattern. In these
ways Magyar is recognized to dier from most other European languages, including German and Italian.
In addition to linguistic features, Rakosi described the kinds of houses in which,
by stereotype, German and Italian were spoken. The imagined houses and languages were typied; abstract qualities were said to be shared by each pair of
language + house type. Analytically we can see that the contrasting pairings of a
language as index of a house-type (and vice versa) formed a diagrammatical icon.
In that conguration, a rhematizing move recast each such pair of language + house type as in contiguity and sharing some similar quality, thus iconic
of each other. Rakosi constructed that similarity. In a further step, he made the
constructed similarity palpable and persuasive as experience by guiding his readers
to qualia they could locate for themselves in visual and aural modalities, in the
media of speech and housing.
Thus, calmness, order and simplicity were not only attributed to Magyar in
contrast to German and Italian; readers were instructed in how to nd these
qualities in actually occurring speech and in visible or recallable houses. Ignoring
features that would fail to distinguish Magyar from German and Italian, Rakosi
focused on grammatical and architectural details that did contrast and that could
be construed or constructed as instantiations of the abstract qualities. Just as the
verbs of Italian and German are twisty and turny, he wrote, and their stress

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37

irregular, so it is well-known that the houses in which their speakers live have
turrets, juttings out, rambling compartments, combined any which way. The regularity of Magyar stress and the linear order of Magyar agglutination, he asserted,
are matched by the Magyar peasant house, where he rightly pointed out the
ordering of functional spaces is (ideally) always the same. As everyone has seen,
he wrote, the living quarters in Magyar farm houses are on the street and behind
these, always in this order, are the stable, the pigsty, the chicken coop, the
doghouse.5
A familiar European theory of national types in language and culture inspired
Rakosis writings. Human characteristics calm Magyars vs. excitable Italians
unied his model. As Rakosi went on to explicate, the properties of national linguistic forms are stamped on the minds of speakers and hence on all they create. In
this way, the theory seemed to explain the similarities that it enabled Rakosi to pick
out and thus nd.
One must ask why the qualities of calm, logic and simplicity seemed apt to
Rakosi when, during his period, as in earlier eras, Magyars were widely thought
by many to be ery and likely to die by the sword (Stanzel 1999). Clearly, at the
end of the 19th century, the qualities typical of Magyars were matters of dispute
and politically signicant. One would want to know what political stances were
supported by each image, and I will return to this question below. But whatever the
dynamics of the political scene, an understanding of the role of linguistic stereotypes implies, as prerequisite, the analysis in focus here: how discussions of linguistic forms and their properties can prepare speakers to nd specic qualia in their
own speech, their artifacts and selves, and thereby make one rather than another
set of political actions and positions more congruent and comprehensible
experientially.

German registers in Boly, Hungary

The conventions for construing qualia of speech need not be the topic of discourse,
as in Rakosis didacticism. In my second example, evidence of instruction is found
at another site of ideology. Qualia of food, speech and personae were arrayed as
parallel during a brief interaction recorded in the 1990s. It is through the interaction that they were displayed as similar in quality. The incident was part of my
education, as much in local politics as in local linguistic stereotypes.
The ancestors of current residents in the town of Boly/Bohl migrated to southern Hungary from German-speaking territories in the mid-18th century. Currently,
about half of the 5000 people of Boly are descendants of those original migrants.
This part of the population is bilingual in German and Magyar, although younger
people are more uent in Magyar, the national language. For the elders born
before 1925 their sense of linguistic dierence is focused not on German and
Magyar but on what they call their two German languages (M: nyelv, G: sproch),
named after stereotypical speakers: farmers speech (M: paraszti, G: schwawisch,
bauerisch), as opposed to artisans speech (M: iparos, G: handwerkerisch).6

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Although all migrants are considered descendants of the same early settlers, these
two complementary social types were seen to be vastly dierent on the basis of their
values, type of work and consequent way of life. From the 1870s to the 1950s, when
the system was destroyed by communist rule, the two metapragmatic linguistic
labels organized a moiety-like model of society that typied and institutionalized
distinctions among personae, activities and forms of expression. The exemplars of
the distinction were rich artisans and rich farmers, whose leadership was justied
by their embodiment of contrasting, admired values (Kovacs 1990; Gal 1992).
In the model, artisans valued knowledge of the wider world gained by traveling
for apprenticeships across Austria-Hungary. Farmers valued land and the restraint
in consumption that would allow its accumulation. For farmers, talking contrasted
with real (farm) work, while for artisans, speaking with a wide array of customers
and other skilled craftsmen was a crucial part of their expertise and hence of work
itself. The frugality of farmers and what we might call the connoisseurship of
artisans were legendary. Creating and inhabiting these stereotypes, during the
heyday of the system in the 1920s and 1930s, rich farmers ate amply but their
food varied little, and the women wore dark, distinctively local dresses and kerchiefs; for celebrations they always hired brass bands playing German folk music.
Rich artisans, by contrast, delighted in exploring novel styles and varying their
housing, clothing, and food. They extended their entertainment to Gypsy musicians and jazz bands. Neither perspective accepted the judgments of the other. The
existence of the poor those lacking land and workshops who made up most of the
town was ignored or neglected (erased) in the focus on the dominant model that
contrasted artisans and farmers.
Registers of German Bauerisch and Handwerkerisch also seemed to display
these co-constitutive cultural principles. Neither variety was primary; both were
stigmatized in the schools, which taught in Magyar. Everyone understood both
registers and could, on occasion, speak at least a bit in both registers, voicing,
troping on, sending up or merely quoting roles they did not claim to inhabit.
The two registers diered in lexicon and in frequency of phonological, lexical
and syntactic features, as described by linguists for other settlements (Wild
2003). In the Handwerkerisch of Boly, a wider variety of address pronouns,
titles, and degrees of politeness were in use than in Bauerisch; and it was said
that when Magyar was new to Boly, at the end of the 19th century, artisans
were more likely to learn it and borrow from it. In short, the two registers indexed
not only dierent personae but dierent times (past/future) and places.7 Values like
expressive restraint (sticking to the old) and elaboration (liking variety and the
new) had their linguistic counterparts, many of which together created cultural
images of personae. Artisans and their speech were most frequently characterized
by all as G: nowl (fancy), while farmers were said to be echt (genuine, real), or
echt schwawisch (real Swabian). As an articulate and observant old farmer said:
The farmers have tradition, the old customs; the artisans always want the new,
they want to be better than us. His ironic tone made it clear: No farmer would
credit the artisans claim.

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39

The semiotic form of this folk model is familiar: two registers each indexed a
range of cultural objects, images and activities. Two sets of indexical relations in
contrast formed a diagrammatic icon: the parts of one analogous to the parts of the
other. Rhematization occurs in the context of such conventionalized diagrammatic
icons so that in some aspect of each indexical relation, participants can nd not
only a contiguity but also an imagistic similarity. Ideological frameworks, explanatory stories, narratives of origin guide participants in how to pick out and construct
such similarities, thereby creating iconic relations. In Boly, the values of elaboration and restraint were instantiated in linguistic qualia, for instance, as I have
suggested, in the relatively greater number of variants in certain practices of
Handwerkerisch. But I also expected sensuous contrasts such as those instanced
in the examples that opened this paper. Over many months of eldwork I asked
and listened in vain for these.
This is where a segment of talk with a woman of about 70 and her 50-ish
daughter proved revealing. In the summer of 1997, sitting in the kitchen of the
elderly Kati neni,8 matriarch of a formerly wealthy farming family, I was asking
her about land inheritance. Even though there had not been land or other property
to inherit for over 50 years all land holdings and workshops were lost under
communism this and other features of the interwar years were a hot topic in the
1990s, in Boly, as in the national press. The fall of communism provided a chance
to discuss the earlier era more openly, especially the positive role of the German
national group in Hungarys 18th and 19th century history, contrasting with a
quite troubled, more recent past in the 20th century.
After the Second World War, German-speakers in Hungary had been accused of
war crimes and deported/expelled in large numbers, without trial. Roughly half of
Boly was forcibly resettled in east or west Germany. During the war, many people
in Boly had joined the Volksbund, a Nazi organization that recruited among
Germans in Hungary as part of the war-time alliance between Nazi Germany
and Hungary. But there were also many German speakers in Boly who refused
these eorts, claiming loyalty to Hungary. After the war, amidst ocial government condemnations and recriminations all designed to distance post-war communist Hungary from its own brutal wartime past the issue of the expulsions, and
of who had joined the Volksbund and why, had remained a lively if hidden topic in
Boly and other German settlements. Finally, in the late 1980s and 90s the stories
could be retold even to outsiders in ways previously suppressed by fear of ocial
censure.
Therefore, it should not have come as a surprise to me that in talking about
inheritance in the interwar period (in German) Kati neni needed no transition as
she launched into a story (partly in Magyar) about the expulsions and an impoverished woman who had joined the Volksbund. Her daughter saw the connection
between these two topics immediately. She muttered a kind of caption for her
mothers story: Hitler szeditette o00 ket (Hitler hoodwinked them [the poor]). Kati
nenis own summary of her point came later: mert o00 nem azert volt volksbund mer o00
a Hitlert eltette hanem o00 valami jobbat, hogy o00 is hogy, hogy jobban eljenek, ugy

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Anthropological Theory 13(1/2)

gondoltak hogy konnyebb lesz az eletuk (because she [the poor woman] did not
become a Volksbund [member] to support Hitler, but for something better, to
live better, they thought their lives would be easier). This explanation was a commonplace in Boly. The daughter had certainly heard the story before. The narratives action-clauses consisted entirely of reported speech in German: the
impoverished womans hysterical announcement that they were all going to be
expelled, forcibly resettled, followed by Kati nenis shocked incredulity.
More revealing for our purposes than the action-clauses is the orientation that
begins the story and which divides into two parts. The orientation is transcribed
and glossed in the following extract. The analysis of such a text segment would
usually start with attempts to interpret the codeswitching between Magyar and
German forms. But I propose that we consider rst how the signicance of those
variants is made evident through the poetics of the text. I have therefore organized
the transcript unconventionally to display the parallelisms that underpin the story
and, I argue, ultimately undermine the narrators explicit version of its import. In
the center of the page and underlined are the chronotopic labels types of persons,
key activities, times, and locations that are made parallel and juxtaposed by the
narrative itself. These are thus easy to locate as one scans down the transcript.
The rst part of the orientation introduces a time, the expulsion and the
characters: these people, the Volkbund, the day-wagers. These latter are landless people doing farm work for daily wages. All these terms are parallel and in
contrast with farmers for whom they work and on whom they rely for free services. One might expect that a cultural system that assigns values according to
forms of work might well align farmworkers with farmers. Hence the signicance
of the further information that this poor family, like other such poor nobodies,
later worked not only for farmers but also for rich artisans. Farm activities are
named in Magyar, artisanal work in German, perhaps highlighting that they are
very dierent kinds of work. The narrative has only two categories of highly valued
people: farmers and rich artisans. The poor (nobodies) who are pointedly
shown doing both kinds of work, are not said to be working at all, but scraping
together a house. They belong in neither category of what is presented here.
Rather, they are pointedly excluded, here as everywhere, from the towns major
axis of dierentiation, the farmer/artisan distinction. Despite the ostensible focus
on a poor woman and her family, the story itself accomplishes their social irrelevance, their erasure.
The second part of the orientation follows after the daughters interjection, in
which she provides the caption for the story. This second part is where the scene is
set spatially, and the narrator also appears as a gure rich farmwife who lives at
the top of a hill, while the poorer woman lives at the bottom and brings the terrible

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announcement. The narrator describes what she herself, a character in the story,
was doing at the moment she heard the news. The elderly narrators aside (marked
by arrows in the transcript) about what she was cooking, makes the story vivid.
It shows the intrusion of a brutal, now historical event into an everyday domestic
one. But for the purposes of my analysis, and I suggest perhaps for the narrator
as well, its signicance lies in two other features. First, as I will show, it once
again brings the farmer/artisan distinction into central place. Second, it introduces
a set of contrasting qualia in both food and speech that instantiate the otherwise rarely discussed sensuous dierences between the categories of farmer
and artisan.
Palacsinta segment: (1997 5A) Kati neni, her daughter R + SG.
K: Ht, wie die kitelepits woa, ht ezek,
a Volksbundok,
ezek nem voltak rossz emberek, h mindenki a jobbat kereste.
Ezek is napszmosok voltak,
s mentek rendletlenl a napszmba s tudtak sszekaparni egy kis hzat, kell?
s akkor a parasztok akikhoz mentek, meg az utcba voltak,
ht azokat megkrtk, hogy ht fuvart legalbb,
ami kell ht tglt hozni,
meg vizet hordani, meg ht
Ht azt megcsinltak nekik ingyen.
s sszekuportak egy ilyen kis hzat, ht azzal hogy
minden nap mentek napszmba, ugye? s akkor ksbb mikor mr regek
voltak, akkor az apsnl ktttek.
In de werkstatt ham sie laibl kstrickt,
ham patschke kstrickt [] ht az apsa
gazdag iparos volt,
a tbbi iparos, tie woarn wider so
orma Troger, so wie so woarn, un,
R: Hitler szditette ket.
K: Ja, ht ezt akartam ezzel kihozni.
De ez a szegny asszony, ht ez sokat jtt,
akkor mi ilyen dombon flfel laktunk,
k alul s akkor aszongya: hot ihr schon ghert, s ezt
soha nem felejtem el, pont palacsintt stttem
nemol palacsinta ksocht,
pfannakucha
wal palacsinta ho mir nema khaani gemocht,
tes wor jo zu noowl
pfannakocha
Ez csak igy be lett ntve, srbb mint a palacsinta, es akkor igy meglett stve mint a palacsinta
csak vastagabb volt. s akkor kentnk r legvrt vagy dit, vagy mit
s akkor igy lett ez, s pont ezt stttem, na komm sie, soch host scho khert

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Anthropological Theory 13(1/2)

Palacsinta segment (English gloss)

K: Well, the way the expulsion was well these, these
Volksbunds, these were
not bad people everybody was looking for
something better these were day wagerers
and they went steadfastly for day waging and could scrape together a little
house, no? and then the farmers they worked for, on the same street,
well they would ask those, well, to at least carry freight for them
what is needed, well to bring bricks
and carry water
and they did those things for them for free and so they
scraped together a little house with
day waging, right? And then later when they
were already old then they knitted at her [the daughters] father-in-laws
In the workshop they knitted vest/shirts
they knitted slippers [..]
he was a rich artisan
the rest of the artisans
they were also such poor nobodies, such they were
R: Hitler hoodwinked them
K: Yes, well that is what I wanted to bring out with this
But this poor woman she came[to us] a lot,
at that time we lived up the hill and
they lived at the bottom and then she says have you all heard yet and I will
never forget this I was just making palacsinta [pancakes]
never palacsinta
pfannakucha [is] said
because we could never make palacsinta it was way too fancy
pfannakucha that was just poured in
denser than palacsinta and then it was cooked
like palacsinta only it was thicker and then we spread jam or
walnuts on it or something and thats how it was and I was just cooking that
then she comes, says have you heard yet

The transcript segment marked with arrows focuses on reexive commentary

about a Magyar term palacsinta used also in Handwerkerisch. It names a food
delicacy made of eggs, our, milk and water, ideally paper-light, much like the
French crepe, which it resembles. It is usually lled with sweets, and has long been
famous all over Austria-Hungary and further aeld, where artisans are said to have
traveled to expand their horizons and increase their craft knowledge. There is no
distinctive term for this dish in Bauerisch. Pfannakucha is a farmers term for a
somewhat similar dish best glossed as pancake, thought by German speakers in
Boly to originate in western Germany, like the settlers themselves. In this segment,
then, contrast in food-type and lexicon indexes and invokes contrasts in typied
personae and space.
The utterance of the Magyar term, palacsinta, is immediately followed by a
striking self-repair. This consists of several simultaneous shifts: a switch to
German, increase in speech volume, change in prosody, and a command.

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43

These changes produce the eect of another and imperious voice ordering the
narrator to use a dierent term: (Never palacsinta, pfannkucha is said!) The
next line continues in German to explain why palacsinta was neither said nor
cooked. The explanation has a high concentration of Bauerisch features, including
a verb form that is a shibboleth of Bolys Bauerisch register [kann ge + V-t]: We
could never have made palacsinta it was way too fancy. And ends with another
command: Pfannkucha! The descriptive term used here, nowl (fancy), is the most
common characterization of the artisan category. The voice in Bauerisch the
typied voice of the rich farmers commands rejection of the making/saying of
palacsinta as fanciness. Obedience to the voice gurates or enacts the farmers
rejection of (fancy) artisan values, thus exercising its own central value of restraint.
The close co-occurrence and hence indexical linkage among speech registers,
person-types, foods and even space-time are displayed not denoted by the
parallelisms of the story. They are available for uptake by those with the requisite
cultural framework, who understand the towns moiety system.
Fanciness as an abstract quality was one way of talking about the general
stylistic elaboration that was thought typical of artisans. How is this turned into
more clearly sensuous experience? What counts as its instantiation? In this storysegment, the qualia of palacsinta are presumed to be generally known, those of
pfannakucha are described by the narrator for the outsider. The two dishes are
made of the same ingredients, cooked and lled the same way. Yet they are said to
dier in qualia: pfannakucha are denser and thicker than palacsinta. Note the parallels: Just as the two types of people are understood to be of the same origin or
stock, so the foods are made of the same ingredients. Yet the two categories of
foods, like the matching categories of people, dier in crucial ways. And these
dierences are presented in lexical, phonological and syntactic forms that are themselves contrasted: identied as Bauerisch on the one hand and Handwerkerisch/
Magyar on the other.
The diagrammatic icon formed by the simultaneous contrast of people types,
linguistic forms, and food types allows for rhematization. Listeners instructed to
experience pfannakucha as denser and thicker are also implicitly invited by the
force of analogy to pick out the same contrasts of qualia in the similarly contrasting speech forms used to describe the scene and its personae. In the case of speech,
Bauerisch palatalizes sibilants where Handwerkerisch does not, in preconsonantal
or morph-nal positions, as in erst vs erscht (rst), anders vs andersch (other). It
typically lowers medial vowels where Handwerkerisch does not: B: steck, H: stick
(piece). Such dierences could well be heard as thickness and denseness, or taught
to be construed in that way. As I have noted, these descriptive terms translated
here as dense, thick were never used to characterize people, though the analogy
in this narrative clearly makes that attribution. I suspect that today these terms are
not attering, and may be avoided in earshot of outsiders. In the interwar period
they doubtless had the positive connotations of strength and endurance.9
My observations so far concern the parallelisms created in the narrative,
through the events recounted. If we turn now from story told to the story-telling

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Anthropological Theory 13(1/2)

event, we can see the continuing yet changing signicance of these co-occurring
contrasts. The use of Magyar suggests this is a species of pedagogical event. Kati
neni herself was educated in Magyar only; her daughter was also educated entirely
in Magyar; she is speaking to younger people, who are stereotypically expected to
know Magyar better. With my presence, the story was surely expected to circulate
further in Hungary. Rather than answering my questions about inheritance, Kati
neni sketched the interwar stereotypes and enacted through that domineering and
intrusive voice of self-repair the experience of living under the discipline of the
farmer/artisan contrast. To be sure, the striking change in prosody and volume of
that command, Pfannakucha!, suggest double voicing. She was representing but
also somewhat parodying farmers of the past for policing each other about trivialities. Yet, in the story, by representing her own enactment of the strict rules, she is
shown to be an obedient instantiation of the system, dierent than the day-waging
woman who was neither farmer nor artisan.
Listeners are invited to infer from the details of this narrative that it was not only
poverty that made the day-wager susceptible to what is now seen as the dubious
morality of Nazism. It was also, decisively, her social marginality. In Hungary,
starting in the 1990s, a public discourse supported a revisionist narrative of the
Second World War and a revalorization of the previously stigmatized German
minority in Hungary. Implied in Kati nenis story was a parallel, local revisionism:
Only those outside the towns discipline succumbed to the temptations of the
Volksbund. Projecting the interwar farmer/artisan model as an image not only of
social order but also of moral discipline and orderliness, this elderly narrator echoed
the national discourse of the 1990s. As an interactional move, the story instructs the
ethnographer to see the narrator as iconic of that old moral order, so that she and
her proper, moiety-sustaining, town must have been against the Nazis.10

Conclusion
Scholars of linguistic variation have been notably successful in showing how registers are created when language ideologies construct indexical sign relations linking
typied linguistic forms to typical personae. Indeed, whole models of social life
linked to speech styles can be picked out as diering within such a contrast set.
I have emphasized how these indexical relations also enable speakers attribution of
sensuous qualities to their own and others speech practices. Qualities drawn from
diverse modalities taste, texture, smell, sound, shape are projected onto speech
varieties and matched with other cultural objects and media such as food and built
form. All three of Peirces semiotic trichotomies help us understand precisely how
such extended sensuous metaphors are created and taken up as lived experience.
Diverse instructional genres guide speakers to recognize qualia of speech, and to
perceive them as existentially real and thus to make them powerful motivators of
action.
Dening the properties of speech is an endeavor that always partakes of speakers broadly moral projects. Sometimes the imputation of qualities can be analyzed,

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following Nancy Munns classic work, as a cultural system in which the impetus to
increase one quality over another explains the logic of multiple activities and practices. But my examples show that such cultural frames are reproduced as they are
called upon by speakers in realtime interactions or writings for use in frankly
political, time-sensitive and often adversarial projects.
Rakosi, the publicist, was conscious of participating in a battle not only for the
hegemony of Magyar in Hungary but also for the denition of its qualities. These
could justify a place for the Magyar-led state within the monarchy and in Europe.
And, as noted above, there was no unanimity about its qualia. Calmness and
orderliness, presented as signs of high value, were in direct contrast with the
images of Magyar oered by Austrian elites who feared further revolutions.
Ironically, the Austrian image of Magyars as poised to ght and easily aroused
matched the qualia preferred by those Magyar elites who would have participated
gladly in another uprising. The contrast, therefore, was not only Magyar as against
German and Italian as languages but also, at the same time, a more subtle conict
about the Magyar language waged among Magyar elites. One could explore these
rivalries and their politico-military-administrative consequences through the representations of the Monarchys ethnic groups in newspapers, encyclopedias and
ethnographic writings.11 The semiotic processes by which qualia were projected
onto cultural activities would have to underpin any such eort.
A more complex process is instanced in my second example. For Kati neni, the
display of artisan and farmer qualia as speech, food, and character was reproduced from a distant past for current use, in the process of staking a position in the
politics of the moment. Kati nenis story is a self-justifying claim, valorizing not
any linguistic registers but rather an entire moiety-system. Through that evoked
model, stereotypes of good and bad Germans, as dened in the mass media of
the 1990s, could be implied and made present, yet remain unnamed. They are
enacted on the local scene and made evident within the storytelling event.
Projects that instruct about qualia occur in elderly farm womens discourse, just
as in that of nationally famous intellectuals. Both require us to attend to the justication, explanation and motivation of action through semiotic processes that
reproduce frameworks for nding qualia, thereby bestowing value on everyday
material objects, including speech.
Notes
1. My thanks to Nicholas Harkness and Lily Chumley for organizing the stimulating conference at which an earlier version of this paper was presented. It seems a fitting tribute to
our distinguished honoree, Nancy Munn, to follow her example in closely analyzing
ethnographic detail. Many thanks to Judith T. Irvine for ongoing conversations,
during our joint work, about matters related to this paper.
2. The sources that document these cases of imputed qualities are: Kaluli (Feld and
Schieffelin 1982), US English (Cmiel 1990), Israeli Hebrew (Katriel 1986), Catalan
(Woolard 1998), Bergamasco (Cavanaugh 2009), Hindi (Brenneis 1984), Walbiri (Hale
1971), Tamil (Bate 2009), Japanese (Inoue 2003), Mandarin (Zhang 2008) and

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46

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.
10.

Anthropological Theory 13(1/2)

Dublin English (Moore 2011). Harkness (this issue) describes how a single sound gained
its qualie. American speakers impressions about German have lately been lampooned
by the humorist David Sedaris in The New Yorker (11 and 18 July 2011, p. 42). I have
omitted examples of the most common contrasts: e.g. fast/slow and smooth/rough.
Even the most apparently self-evident material qualities of speech such as the character
of sounds are filtered through cultural frameworks. See Silverstein (1994) for a discussion of how sound symbolism, far from being universal, is mediated for native
speakers by a particular languages phonological structure as well as cultural principles
of discourse practice. Although in the US most speakers of all regions experience southern accents as being somehow slower than northern ones, linguists counts of speed in
articulation rarely show such differences. Other features and their ideological construal
explain the effect. On the other hand, Irvine (1990) shows that when stereotypes are
enacted, the resulting performances can produce effects that are measurable even by
those outside the cultural system.
My examples all involve speech or linguistic practice in some way, but as Munn (1986)
makes clear practices need not be linguistic to be semiotically meaningful as exemplars
of culturally-defined qualities, whether valued or disvalued.
Just as Rakosi ignored the many features that the Magyar language shares with German
and Italian, so he ignored the shared features of house norms and stereotypes. His
architectural parallels may sound humorous today, but Rakosi was entirely serious.
In further examples italics signal Magyar and bold italics all kinds of German, with
English glosses in parentheses, if these are necessary. The transcription of Magyar is in
standard spelling. For German transcription I have adopted the partly conventionalized
system most often used for writing what the relevant scholars call Ungarndeutsch (i.e.
the non-standard German forms spoken in Hungary). It deliberately allows for easy
reading by non-specialists by relying on some standard German spelling rules, and is
quickly learned by native speakers of the local forms, who were my transcribers.
Distinctions between the farmers and the artisans registers are most often matters of
frequency and degree and are discussed but not specially marked in the transcription.
I have not detailed the spatial aspect, which is certainly present: German in Hungary is
called schwawisch, on the basis of the mythical source of the migrants from Swabia in
the German lands. Historical evidence shows that they came from many different
regions, very few from Swabia, but the story lives on. There is a further conceit, supported by many intellectuals and some linguists, that the speech of artisans originates
from their travels in Austria and thus has a different source, despite the shared origin of
the speakers themselves. The most detailed linguistic work rejects this hypothesis
(Hutterer 1991).
Neni Magyar honorific address and reference term for elderly women, literally aunt.
Used also in Handwerkerisch but not usually in Bauerisch. The lexical item hat in the
first line of the transcript is a much older borrowing (no longer heard as such) from
Magyar into both forms of German. Kitelepites (expulsion) is a more recent borrowing,
now conventionally used in both forms of German.
Note that, though negative, these forms do not carry connotations of stupidity that the
English glosses (thick and dense) invoke when applied to language or mind.
It seems worth adding that, according to historical reconstruction and surviving membership lists, no local social category had a monopoly of the Volksbund: there were
many farmers as well as artisans, rich as well as poor among those who joined.

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11. For example, Rakosi was not alone in popularizing the calm image. Beothy Zsolt
(1896), another cultural nationalist of the period, opened his best-selling textbook of
Magyar literature with a vision of the original Magyar horseman invading Europe. To
describe this fantasy figure, Beothy used the term calm three times in the books first
paragraph. By contrast, the Osterreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild, a
government supported encyclopedia of geography and ethnography in 22 volumes
(18861902), described each national group in terms of national character. In the
Magyar version, the Magyars first attribute was harczi modor [readiness to fight],
another is konnyen felindul [easily aroused] (vol. 1, pp. 290, 296), all based, in part,
on (different) linguistic evidence.

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Susan Gal is Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor at the
University of Chicago. She is the author of Language Shift, and co-author of
The Politics of Gender after Socialism. As co-editor of Languages and Publics:
The Making of Authority, and in numerous articles, she has written about the
political economy of language, the semiotics of sociocultural dierentiation and
the circulation of discourses. Her continuing ethnographic work in Europe explores
the relationship between linguistic practices, semiotic processes and the construction of social life.

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