(because it has only an ideal existence). Contrariwise, English, which is the
only thing we care about, is multiple; situated (it is of the world and in the
world: a set of historical, political, social and material phenomena); total (its
study excludes no phenomena – not gestural communication, not so-called
supra-segmental phenomena, not pragmatic interactions); chaotic (there is
no grammatical ‘rule’ that is not defeasible and defeated in at least one of
the dialects: exception, exploitation, or expression); in a state of continuous
variation (there is no stability in a linguistic formation, which is a temporary
and transient equilibrium of tensions and contradictions: the ever-contested
result of a series of power relations); changing (it sediments the history of
peoples and cultures and accommodates, by anticipatory effect, the event that
is going to change them dramatically); real (it exists in our everyday reality
rather than in the grammars and is spoken in its diversity by the vast majority
of speakers); and, finally, to be practised rather than taught. And it is clear
that ‘English’ is only in the singular because of the abstraction-fetishisation
that makes it possible to think it, at the cost of betraying it. That is why I
return briefly to the multiplicity of the linguistic formation called ‘English’:
it is made up of regional dialects, social dialects, generational dialects, languages
in the process of being formed, professional registers, group languages (argots
and jargons), speech genres (the term belongs to Bakhtin, but we find similar
terms in Foucault – discursive formations – or Wittgenstein – language games),
collective styles, and individual styles.
Minority
The concept of minor language or dialect, as opposed to major or standard
language or dialect, belongs to Deleuze and Guattari. We likewise, and
doubtless more appropriately, refer to minor usages of language. The concept
is explained in their book on Kafka in particular.^11 A minor language has three
characteristics: it is collective, it is directly political, and it is de-territorialising.
Thus, Kafka, a Czech Jewish writer writing in German – the major language
of the Austro-Hungarian empire – de-territorialises the language he writes
in by confronting it with the minor languages that he does not write, but
which he speaks or which are spoken around him. In so doing, he performs
Contrasting Short Glossaries of Philosophy of Language • 211(^11) See Deleuze and Guattari 1986.