The First Last Speaker: Affective Authority and the Institutional Life of Language

Prof James Costa, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle & Institut Universitaire de France

Why do people act on behalf of minority languages, documenting, defending, funding and promoting them, even when, and perhaps especially when, those languages are no longer spoken, or spoken on a daily basis? In this presentation I argue that such action cannot be explained by reference to communicative need or the quest for meaning, and definitely not by identity. What needs to be accounted for is a specific form of authority, which I propose to call affective authority, one grounded neither in coercion, legitimacy, charisma, nor interest, through which a language comes to be encountered as the kind of thing one is obliged to act for.

I develop the argument through the case of Cornish, and specifically through the figure of Dolly Pentreath (d. 1777), the first person ever to be named a “last speaker” of a language. Drawing on Frédéric Lordon’s Spinozan account of institutions as devices that capture and redistribute affects, I trace how a concatenation of encounters spanning roughly 150 years, including antiquarian visits, engravings, newspaper controversies, and a monument erected by a nephew of Napoleon, kept the Cornish language question alive, culminating in Henry Jenner’s 1904 Handbook of the Cornish Language. Over this period, it became possible to transform Cornish from an object of loss and mourning into a cause worthy of collective mobilisation.

The Cornish case matters because there was no community of speakers left, however small. The collective that eventually sustained the revival was itself produced through affects circulating around the absence of the language, through print, stories, commemoration, and antiquarian networks, long before face-to-face practice was again possible. The engine of this process, I argue, is an ongoing oscillation, what Spinoza calls fluctuatio animi, which translates into a double axis: the language is both dead and alive, Pentreath both is, and is not, the last speaker. Here, affective authority accumulates through conflict and irresolution rather than through consensus.

For linguistic anthropology, the stakes are twofold. First, the argument repositions debates on language endangerment and revival away from identity, heritage, and resistance, and toward the question of how so-called “minority languages” come to occupy a specific institutional position in modernity. Second, it opens a comparative programme asking how languages, big or small, became institutions in their own right, and why collective political existence so often comes to be claimed through them.

Bio: James Costa is professor of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology at Sorbonne Nouvelle. His work asks how and why languages became institutions of modernity capable of moving and mobilising bodies and organising collectives.