Adamantios Korais and the Identity That Ancestry Couldn't Supply

Every constructed thing bears the marks of its construction, and few artefacts of the nineteenth century bear them more legibly than katharevousa, the “purifying” language of the modern Greek state. Its very name is a confession. Languages that grow from continuous use do not need to be purified; only a language conscripted into a historical argument does. And the argument katharevousa was built to make was the central argument of modern Greek nationalism: that the people who would form the new state were the direct continuation of the ancient Hellenes. Ancestry could not carry that argument on its own — too many centuries, too many migrations, too many languages spoken in the villages of the Morea and Rumeli stood in the way. So the argument was moved to ground where it could be engineered. If the nation could not be demonstrated in the blood, it would be manufactured in the grammar. The chief engineer was Adamantios Korais, and understanding what he actually did — and what his most careful modern readers say he did — dissolves one of the founding illusions of the national narrative.

The compromise

Korais, the Paris-based classicist and the intellectual patriarch of the Greek Enlightenment’s linguistic programme, faced a genuine dilemma. The spoken Romaic of the Orthodox populations was a living, workable tongue — but it was saturated with the history it had actually lived through, including centuries of Ottoman rule. Ancient Greek carried the prestige the national project needed, but nobody spoke it, and resurrecting it wholesale was a fantasy. His solution was neither, and both. Gregory Jusdanis describes it exactly:

“Korais’s compromise was a language based on popular speech, “purified” of Turkish loan words and foreign dialect features”

— Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, p. 45

The scare quotes around “purified” are Jusdanis’s own, and they are doing honest work. What was being removed from the popular language was not corruption in any linguistic sense — loanwords are how all living languages metabolise their history — but evidence. Turkish words testified to the Ottoman centuries; dialect features testified to the mixed, regional, unclassical texture of actual speech. A language scrubbed of these testimonies could stand in court, as it were, on behalf of continuity.

The educational sociologist Anna Frangoudaki, quoted by Peter Mackridge, called Korais’s solution an “ingenious compromise,” and her account of what it achieved is precise: it

“made it possible for the newly formed Greek state to opt for the living, spoken language, even if in purified form, instead of Ancient Greek”

— Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, p. 165

Ingenious is the right word, and it should be read without irony. Korais spared Greece the full absurdity of an archaising restoration while still delivering what the national project required: an idiom that looked backwards while being usable in the present. But an ingenious compromise between a living language and a dead one is, by definition, a designed object. Nobody’s mother spoke katharevousa. It was drafted, the way constitutions and street plans are drafted.

Correction as nation-making

It would be a mistake, however, to file Korais’s project under language policy, as though the nation existed first and merely needed an official register. The deeper insight — and the reason Korais matters so much to the historiography of nationalism — is that the linguistic operation and the national operation were the same operation. Stathis Gourgouris, in his study of the imagining of modern Greece, draws attention to

“the implication (immediate but no less implicit) of the energies of neology and linguistic correction in the formation of national identity”

— Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, p. 128

On this reading, “correction” was never a neutral, technical matter of tidying up a language. To correct the people’s speech was to correct the people — to act on the conviction that regenerating words regenerates a nation, and that a population brought into conformity with a restored grammar would thereby be brought into conformity with a restored identity. The middle way between Romaic and Attic was not philology; it was nation-building conducted in grammar. Each emended word-form was a small annexation of the classical past; each expelled Turkish loanword was a small act of historical revision. The lexicon became the terrain on which the continuity thesis could be made true by fiat, one entry at a time.

This is why the language question convulsed Greek public life for a century and a half after Korais, in a way that mere questions of style never could. What was at stake in every skirmish between purists and demoticists was not elegance but the mechanism of national identity itself. The state had adopted a language whose entire rationale was to certify an ancestry; to challenge the language was to challenge the certificate.

A designed language for a designed nation

Seen from this angle, katharevousa is less an oddity of Greek history than its most candid document. The national narrative asserted that modern Greeks simply were the ancient Hellenes, continued without interruption. Yet the narrative’s own architects behaved, in the one domain they could fully control, as if the continuity had to be built. They did not find an unbroken language; they assembled one, by compromise, subtraction, and decree. The purification was systematic, the neologising deliberate, the whole enterprise documented in prefaces and polemics by men who knew precisely what they were doing.

None of this convicts Korais of bad faith — he was, by the standards of his era, unusually lucid about his methods, and his compromise was arguably the most humane available. Nor does it diminish the remarkable culture that the modern Greek state and its language went on to produce. What it does is fix the direction of causation. The language did not flow from an already-existing eternal nation; the nation was, in significant part, precipitated out of the language. Where ancestry could not supply an identity — across the gap of Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman centuries, over populations that spoke Albanian, Vlach, Slavic, and Turkish as readily as Romaic — grammar was made to supply it instead. A designed language for a designed nation: that is not a slur against modern Greece, but the sober description its own founding texts provide. The construction was brilliant. It was also, unmistakably, a construction.