Politics, Language, and Thought (1977) by David Laitin: the Somali script and how language shapes politics

The book

Politics, Language, and Thought: The Somali Experience is by David D. Laitin, an American political scientist who later taught at the University of Chicago and Stanford University. The University of Chicago Press published it in 1977, with 268 pages (Swarthmore College; American Political Science Review). Laitin served in the Peace Corps in Somalia in the 1960s, and those years shaped both his doctoral thesis and this book; the papers he collected there, now at the Hoover Institution, were a main source for it (Wikipedia; Hoover Institution).

Part one: the script question

When Somalia became independent in 1960, Somali was a spoken language with a large body of oral poetry but no agreed way of writing it. The government chose three foreign languages for official use, and rival proposals for a Somali script, in Latin letters, in Arabic letters or in a new alphabet, divided opinion. The first part of the book tries to explain why the elected parliamentary governments of the 1960s could not decide, and weighs the social and political effects of years without a decision. It ends with the military government, which in 1972 made Somali the official language, written in Latin letters (Language Log). The story is told on Somali written, 1972 and the decade on The civilian era, 1960 to 1969.

Part two: does language change political thinking?

The second part links language to political thought. Laitin wrote that during his Peace Corps service he noticed a different "social dynamic" when people spoke English rather than Somali, and wondered whether a language could act as a social institution with effects of its own. In 1972 he tested this in schools in Waajeer (Wajir), a Somali-speaking area of north-eastern Kenya. Sixty-four secondary students took part in interviews and role-playing, half in English and half in Somali, and younger pupils filled in sentences in one language or the other (Language Log). Somali life in that region is described on Northern Frontier District 1962 to 1967.

Some results differed sharply by language. Asked in English whether they preferred home or school, 68 percent chose home; asked in Somali, 75 percent chose school. Laitin offered several explanations, including the history of the Somali word dugsi (school), which once meant a Quran school, and the fact that students sat about three to a desk and may have agreed answers among themselves (Language Log). See Islam in Somalia.

How it was received

It was reviewed in the American Political Science Review and, by the Somali scholar Abdi Sheik-Abdi, in the Journal of Modern African Studies (Journal of Modern African Studies; American Political Science Review). Decades later the linguist Mark Liberman described its language-choice findings as a large, understudied effect that comes from the cultural and emotional associations of each language rather than from grammar, and recent studies of language and politics still cite the experiment as an early one of its kind (Language Log).

Where to read it

The book is out of print but held by many university libraries. Laitin later wrote Somalia: Nation in Search of a State (1987) with the historian Said S. Samatar; both books are listed on Books about Somalis, 1960 to 1990.