Purism as language policy.

As we can see, devotion to linguistic purism is a kind of language policy--there is an attempt to control where vocabulary comes from, what sources (external or internal) it will draw from, what syntactic and derivational process it will utilize. Central to all of this is a belief system, consisting of some or all of the following:

• A belief that there exists somewhere, perhaps in the past, or in a particular textual tradition, a state of `purity' that the language can aspire to, or return to;
• A belief that there are people with special knowledge, capable of making decisions about what is pure and what is not;
• A belief that purity is a good thing, capable of renewing or strengthening the moral fiber of the language, its linguistic culture, or its speakers; purity/purism, therefore is salvific.
• There may also be a belief that purity is associated with a religious state, i.e. by keeping the language pure we keep religion pure, which helps keep the world from disintegrating.
• Purism may be associated with religious fundamentalism and fundamentalist movements, with political movements, nationalism, national integration, millennialism, and many other kinds of social, political and cultural phenomena.

Puristic movements in linguistic cultures come and go, they wax and wane. As Annamalai points out, they are often associated with changes in the social order or when power-relations are being redefined. They are often very unscientific, relying on dubious ideas about what is native and what is not, and as a result many aspects of the movement get `fudged' because of ignorance of the history of various words, or because it becomes too complicated to remain consistent.